Shin Bet, the Israel Security Agency, recently charge three Arabs living in northern Israel with spying for Syria, & plotting to kidnap a man they thought was a Syrian pilot who defected to Israel. The names of the arrested are Fada Sha’ar, Majd Sha’ar, and Mahmoud Masarwah. The website Tikun Olam charges the arrests are just attempts by the Shin Bet to punish someone who embarassed them in the past, & to undercut peace overtures from Syria.
Mahmoud Masarwah is 62 years old, & has spent 20 years or so in Israeli prisons. He was arrested as a teenager for trying to walk across the border into Gaza when it still was Egyptian territory. When he was released from prison, he joined the Red Front, a Trotskyite group trying to form a Jewish-Arab anti-Zionist movement. He was sent back to prison during a crackdown.
But his claim to fame was his role in exposing the Shin Bet's true role in the Bus 300 affair, when a Tel Aviv bus was hijacked & driven into Gaza before the Israelis stopped them. Masarwah was working as a security guard at a recycling center, & discovered unshredded Shin Bet documents that revealed an agent had bashed in the brains of two militants captured alive on the orders of the head of the Shin Bet. He sent the documents to a British newspaper run by the militant wing of the Labor party. The scandal reached Israel, which led to the Shin Bet head resigning (he & four other Shin Bet agents were pardoned by Pres. Chaim Herzog) which caused the government of Israel to set up the Landau Commission. Masarwah was arrested for spying & spent 7 years in prison. He received prison time for other political activities after his release.
Fada Sha’ar and Majd Sha’ar are Druzes & father and son. Majd is a well known social activist in the Golan Heights. His son Fada is a graduate student in music who was living & studying in France. He received his BA in music while studying in Syria with the permission of Israeli officials.
Richard Silverstein has this to say about the case:
So there you have it. Another likely Shin Bet frame-up, inelegantly and unartfully contrived by the bullies-in-charge of Israel’s security. One suspect is old, seriously ill and guilty of morally embarrassing the agency decades ago. The other is a traditional Arab musician guilty of nothing worse than pursuing graduate studies in a country considered an enemy by the secret police, and coming home during the summer to visit his family.
The Shabak’s purpose in all this: to warn young Druze in the Golan not to travel to, visit or study in Syria; and to further pay back a pain in the secret police’s neck. As I’ve written here, these guys’ memories are long, as are the grudges. You never pay your debt to them. Once you finish paying one debt by jail time they’re plotting the next time they can get you. Further, this prosecution is an implicit swipe at Syria and its president, who has been unsuccessfully pursuing a peace offensive which Israel has studiously ignored. It’s no accident that Syria’s foreign minister took the unusual step of directly denouncing the prosecution since he’s aware of the tendentious political agenda that lies behind it.