 |
Barry Chamish is most recently the author of "Save Israel!", and also "Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin", "Israel Betrayed" and "The Last Days Of Israel." His website is .
|
|
|
|
By Barry Chamish
January 28, 2003
Of my previous bulletin, a reader notes: "Nothing new in what you wrote: it is public knowledge that Dov Weisglass was Rashid's lawyer - so all you need to do is put two and two together."
My reaction: if it is public knowledge that Sharon's Bureau Manager Dov Weisglass is attorney for Muhammad Rashid, who ran the $300 million plus bank account opened by Yossi Ginossar to hide money Yasser Arafat stole from the Palestinian people's Treasury, then why hasn't the public put two and two together? The Sharon connection to the Ginossar scandal has remained buried deep. Let's exhume it for our masochistic pleasure.
We begin with the great idea of opening a casino in Jericho to launder Arafat's pilfered treasure. The best plot of land in town was already owned, so Yasser decided to expropriate it by force:
Mahmoud Hamdouni had bought a few dozen acres of land in the desert outside Jericho. He built a gas station and planned a housing development. Then the reality of Yasser Arafat's rule hit Hamdouni. Accused of the capital crime of treason, he was freed from jail only after he signed over his land to the Palestinian Authority.
Within months, the Scotsman and other publications report, an Arafat front company took a secret 28 per cent stake in a casino built on what had been Hamdouni's land. The casino now makes $9 million in monthly profits, but Hamdouni sits at home, chain-smoking and lamenting the destruction of all his hopes.
"Who can help me when my land is taken by the 40 thieves? I mean, Arafat is Ali Baba," laments Hamdouni, who says he lost millions on the petrol station and land. "We are under Palestinian economic occupation." According to Hamdouni, reports the Scotsman, the Palestinian Authority "has all the trappings of independence, from uniformed police to postage stamps, but it is run as a fiefdom by a mafia of corrupt officials."
The Oasis was the crown of the fiefdom or, shall we say, thiefdom. The dream of Jewish/Arab cooperation in money-laundering for Arafat was almost derailed by Israeli Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein. He determined that Israelis, the casino's prime source of customers, should be barred from gambling there, citing a regulation that authorizes local courts to try Israeli citizens for offenses committed in the Palestinian self-rule areas. Gambling is illegal in Israel.
Dov Weisglass was reportedly furious. The lawyer, representing millionaire Martin Schlaff, principal of the Austrian state-run firm that built and operates the casino, said he hoped the attorney general would reverse his decision in light of what he called, playing on the casino's name, the "oasis of peace and friendship" operating in the West Bank town. "The attorney general has the authority not to enforce the letter of the law" when it is considered in the public interest to do so, Weisglass told Israel Radio. "I hope he will use his judgment to let this (remain) a place of peace, cooperation and friendliness."
Unfortunately, Arafat had a different idea of cooperation. He murdered too many Jews for the Sharon government to ignore, and Jericho was blockaded, and the casino shelled. Shimon Peres didn't like that one bit and, the Jerusalem Post reported on April 25, 2001, he got the blockade lifted after a good talk with Muhammad Rashid, whom Arafat had appointed to safeguard the Ginossar account in Switzerland.
Peres, after his discussion with Rashid, said that lifting the Jericho blockade was part of a policy to let Palestinians lead normal lives despite the violence. "In the Jericho area, $700 million was invested in different industries... this plus the tourism... Everything has been paralyzed," Peres told Israel Radio. "Our position is to allow for a normal lifestyle unconditionally and without receiving anything in return... We don't want to harm innocent people."
Palestinian officials welcomed Peres's statements. Unfortunately, not all Palestinians shared the Labor leader's professed desire to avoid harming innocent people, and the casino got itself shut down in October.
At this point Ariel Sharon involved himself personally. Sharon met with Weisglass, his son Omri and Ginossar. The subject of the meeting had to have been how to reopen their gold mine, terrorism or not. To Sharon's credit, his position was opposed to reopening the gambling joint until Arafat's murders stopped.
But the pressure on Sharon was apparently too heavy to bear. The Prime Minister later sent three envoys to Vienna for private contacts with a top Palestinian official and an Austrian-based businessman. Sharon's three envoys were his son and election campaign manager Omri, lawyer Dov Weisglass, and ex-foreign ministry general secretary Eytan Bentzur.
According to the Israeli radio and TV reports, the envoys were to meet Arafat's economic advisor, Rashid, and Martin Schlaff, who owned a large share of the Oasis casino. In Israel, Sharon's press spokesman Ra'anan Gissin claimed that the aim of the mission was to take up contact with an influential personality close to Arafat, and thus show that Sharon was open to a dialogue with the Palestinians. The envoys, however, were there in an attempt to open the casino for big business.
Weisglass represented Schlaff's business interests in the region. He was reportedly threatening to sue the State of Israel for the forced closure of the casino, and for damage to the building caused by gun battles. And Weisglass was Sharon's personal envoy and later the manager of his bureau. No conflict of interest here! One is reminded of the scene from Casablanca, when the corrupt if ultimately lovable Captain Renault shuts down Rick's Café.
Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here! [A croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much. [aloud] Everybody out at once!
Fast-forward to last month's revelation, in Ma'ariv, of the scandal in which Ginossar was accused, even while in service to then Prime Minister Ehud Barak, of pocketing millions in fees and commissions for "managing the money" of the Palestinian People, reportedly moving it offshore on behalf of Rashid and his boss Arafat.
Sharon awakened simply shocked, shocked, that Ginossar might have used offshore bank accounts for illicit purposes. "Shortly after the story about the Ginossar scandal was published in Ma'ariv, Sharon instructed the Mossad to check whether the Swiss accounts were used to finance terrorism. Naomi Blumenthal, deputy minister of infrastructure from Sharon's Likud Party, demanded the establishment of a state inquiry commission that would examine not just the Ginossar affair but "all those who took part in the negotiations with the Palestinians."
One suspects that Blumenthal may know too much about the financial dealings of Ariel Sharon, his son Omri, Dov Weisglass and their ties to Ginossar. She may know how deep is the tangled web in which policy formulation was tainted by the need to launder funds. So she had to go. She had to be silenced.
Blumenthal is now under indictment, reportedly for the dreadful crime of putting up campaign workers for a night at a hotel. Sharon fired her immediately for maintaining her right of silence during the police investigation. One wonders what she, and a few others, could tell about what went on around the Oasis in Jericho, where Israeli and Palestinians played for far higher stakes and pocketed the winnings, wrapping it all in the noble guise of the peace process and economic cooperation, as they all got filthy rich.
Last week, with reports of the mysterious loan to Sharon, purportedly from his old friend and army buddy Cyril Kern, the revolving door of Ginossar may have come full circle. On January 10, Ha'aretz reported the mysterious routing of the funds: "It is not clear why $1.5 million were transferred from South Africa to somewhere else, to a bank in Austria via a bank in New York, until they finally landed in a branch of Discount Bank in Tel Aviv. Why this circuitous route?"
Ha'aretz even began to put two and two together. "What is known, however, is that Omri Sharon and attorney Dov Weisglass (the director of the Prime Minister's Bureau) visited both Austria and the United States together this past year. Austria is the domicile of Martin Schlaff, one of the owners of the casino in Jericho and a partner in the Bank of Austria. Schlaff is a client of attorney Weisglass."
Ginossar and his gambling buddies, with their ill-gotten gains from the treasury of the Palestinian People and the coffers of the Oasis casino, may have finally come home to roost in the center of Sharon's office.
No wonder Ariel Sharon, his son, and some of his closest advisers appear in no hurry to expose that scandal. No one appears shocked, shocked. Nothing they haven't seen before. Been there, done that. Two plus two equals four.
It goes without saying that the alleged crimes of Sharon and his colleagues -- relative to Peres, Barak and their Labor cronies -- don't amount, as Rick/Bogart would say, to "a hill of beans."
Perhaps we are resigned to hear the voice of a tired croupier, or a tired lawyer, as the casino -- er, the Prime Minister's Office -- is closing, as do the Israel's polls: "You're winning, sir."
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
|
|
|
|
Click on the blue headline to read a Talkback comment and respond to it. Click on the  icon to send a private email to the talkback writer. The icon appears only if the writer has decided to be contacted. If no popup window appears, please make sure your popup blocker allows israelinsider.com.
|
|
| |
|
|
