* Parkeer *
‘ Is Israël als a morally “failed state” aan te merken? Enkele van de jongelui hebben Anthony Loewensteins boek gelezen en tja …. “Is Israël eigenlijk niet gewoon een mafia-staat?” Met als directe disclaimer: “Kún je in die regio als fatsoenlijke staat overleven, aan de hand van the rule of law, de mensenrechten en de verdere reutemeteut?” Doen wij het hier – in Nederland – veel beter? Wij kunnen misschien beter veinzen. En toen? Kijk alleen naar onze politici. Waarom “kiezen” wij lieden van een dergelijk allooi als volksvertegenwoordigers? Waarom hervormen we ons politieke systeem niet? Zijn wij politiek-masochistisch?’
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Citaat uit Misha Glenny (2009:118-119) McMafia: a journey through the global criminal underworld. (ISBN-13: 978-1-4000-9512-4) (vet toegevoegd)
% citaat % : “The indigenous Israeli crime syndicates are different from the Russians,” explained Menachem Amir, the country’s leading criminologist.
“The Russians were very careful. And were able to impose discipline because they were based on an organization. The Israeli crime groups were families.” This meant that in structure they were much more like the Sicilian Mafia than the Russians were. “When you have crime based on families, then issues such as honor and vendettas come into play,” Professor Amir continued. The existence of family feuds may result in the occasional innocent victim, as in the Rosenstein case, but in another respect they assist police. The bloodletting enables intelligence officers to monitor what is going on in the crime community, “which means that the Russians and similar organizations are more effective and more dangerous.”
Gambling had been the traditional industry around which the Israeli crime syndicates gathered and thrived. After the Oslo Peace Accords, the Israelis permitted the Palestinians to open a casino in Jericho to complement the floating casinos in the Red Sea that hovered just outside Israel’s territorial waters. The Rosensteins and Abergils were alleged to have controlled much of the payoffs from these, as well as the profits from organized gambling trips for Israelis to Turkey.
But in the 1990s, the Israeli syndicates branched out and moved into an even more lucrative area. The families, “perhaps thanks to their long-standing ties in Antwerp,” the DEA reported, “continue to be the major elements in the transfer of large shipments of Ecstasy from Belgium [to the United States].” Those ties referred to one of the five key commodities from which organized crime groups around the world make their largest profits: diamonds. The other four are arms, narcotics, energy products, and cigarettes.
Ecstasy was one of the few drugs with which the American market was not yet supersaturated. Europe is the top manufacturing base for this synthetic narcotic that stimulates a feeling of well-being and in particular a sense of goodwill to one’s fellow humans (so clearly there are worse drugs in terms of social impact). The main West European center is Amsterdam, although industrial-scale busts have been made since the turn of the millennium in Serbia and Bulgaria as well.
In 2003, the State Department issued a report claiming that Israel is the hub of global ecstasy trafficking, having branched out from Europe to the United States. “Israeli drug-trafficking organizations are the main source of distribution of the drug to groups in the U.S., using express mail services, commercial airlines, and recently also using air cargo services,” the report states. For a country as dependent on American financial, political, and military support, this was acutely embarrassing to Israel. ‘ %% einde citaat %%