Friday, January 24, 2020

923. Prof. Kees van der Pijl. Hij durft te weten.




Academic Corruption, 
the Israel Lobby, 
and 9/11

or,

Why I have resigned from my emeritus status at the University of Sussex

by Kees van der Pijl

March 2019

On 3 November 2018, in reply to a Twitter message summing up a series of crimes
ascribed to ‘Saudis’, beginning with their alleged responsibility for bringing down the
Twin Towers, I posted, ‘Not Saudis, Israelis brought down the Twin Towers with help
from Zionists in US Govt’. This was picked up by self-professed Jewish and pro-Israel
organizations denouncing it as ‘anti-Semitic’. The accusation was accompanied by the
identical demand of practically all complainants to strip me of my status as professor
emeritus of the University of Sussex. The comments were duly reported in the Daily
Mail, the Independent, and Russian Sputnik, and possibly others. No mention was
made of the many supporting reactions, often accompanied by new documentary
evidence and by the important enjoinder that the university should investigate, if
anything, the claim being made, not the person making it.
Of course there is no denying that anti-Semites are roaming social media too,
making it even more unattractive to investigate in depth any issue that involves the
state of Israel and the Zionist networks supporting it. The anti-Semitism taboo on
investigating the crimes of the Israeli state and in particular, its role in 9/11 and the
War on Terror is in fact reinforced by these ‘fellow-travellers’. Yet however
unpleasant their company, the global catastrophe unfolding before our eyes makes it
mandatory to investigate its causes and driving forces. 18 years of widening war,
around six million dead,1 and more and more countries thrown into chaos, should be
enough to raise the question, Who was/is behind all this, beginning with the 9/11
attacks themselves? And who are more entitled than academics to provide an answer?
However, universities in Great Britain are no exception to the general trend of
corruption that is turning the majority of academics into ‘embedded’ intellectuals, who
like their colleagues in the media, travel with the troops on regime change expeditions

1 Calculated by mortality rates, see Nicolas J.S. Davies, ‘Die Blutspur der US-geführten Kriege seit
9/11: Afghanistan, Jemen, Libyen, Irak, Pakistan, Somalia, Syrien’, in Ulrich Mies, ed. Der tiefe Staat
schlägt zu. Wie die westliche Welt Krisen erzeugt und Kriege vorbereitet. Vienna: ProMedia, 2019.
1
and provide intelligence and propaganda.2 Staff members are disciplined by precarity,
reductions in pay and conditions, ‘peer review’, and dependence on funding, but
university managements are kept in line by rewards. As one university newspaper
reported during the February 2018 lecturers’ strike over new pension cuts, Vice-
Chancellors’ salaries were increasing. It noted that ‘stand out figures …included
Sussex's VC who has a total salary over half a million pounds’.3
When I was appointed at the University of Sussex in 2000 I was complimented by
many with having landed in an institution famous for the space it offered to heterodox
scholars. In the appointment procedure I expressed my criticism at the illegal NATO
intervention in Yugoslavia then underway in the strongest terms and there was no
objection to that, on the contrary. My first research publication at Sussex was a piece
placing this intervention in historical perspective.4 When I retired, on the other hand, a
top NATO official, Jamie Shea, spokesman of the alliance at the time of the Kosovo
intervention and meanwhile deputy assistant Secretary-General, had been appointed
visiting lecturer. Following controversy among staff and students, his title was merely
changed to ‘visiting practitioner’ (Shea later became ‘External Advisor, Post-graduate
curriculum development’, at Sussex).
The growing role of the Israel lobby is even more pronounced. In February 2012, a
few months before I retired, an Israel chair was instituted at Sussex (and at a number
of other UK universities). Named, in this case, after Yossi Harel, the captain of the
ship bringing Jewish settlers to Palestine in 1947, and financed by a group of Israel
supporters in the UK, this chair was contested as well. Thus one informed comment on
the Sussex website considered it ‘highly inappropriate and unethical to create this
subject at Sussex which will undoubtedly be taught in an indoctrinating and biased
fashion. Most of the donors, including Ronald Cohen, Gerald Ronson, Lord

2 I have developed this at length in my Discipline of Western Supremacy, vol. III of Modes of
Foreign Relations and Political Economy. London: Pluto Press 2014.
3 ‘New figures show one Vice-Chancellor is earning £800k’, The Cardiff Tab, 22 February 2018.
https://thetab.com/uk/cardiff/2018/02/22/new-figures-show-one-vice-chancellor-is-earning-800k-seewhere-
yours-ranks-33685 (last accessed 25 March 2019). See also The Guardian and The Telegraph,
both of 12 February 2019, for further details. The Guardian also notes in another report that ‘nearly 25%
of British universities [were] in deficit last year'.
4 ‘From Gorbachev to Kosovo. Atlantic rivalries and the re-incorporation of Eastern Europe’ Review
of International Political Economy, 8 (2) 2001, 275-310.

Weidenfeld and Leonard Blavatnik all have pro-Israel ties, and a few of them sit on
Zionist thinktank boards. How can an impartial study of this area be conducted, which
takes into account the plight of the Palestinian people, when all the funding comes
from Zionists?’
More followed. On 13 March 2019, the Weidenfeld Institute for Jewish Studies at
the University of Sussex was inaugurated at the German embassy in London.
Launched in memory of the late Lord Weidenfeld, ‘a long-term supporter of the
University of Sussex’s renowned work in German-Jewish studies and founding
supporter of its more recently established Chair in Modern Israel studies’, the Vice-
Chancellor, Adam Tickell, noted that ‘enlightening the current and the next generation
to the dangers of ignoring the lessons of the past’ (in matters of anti-Semitism) was
again urgent.5
Since it is hard to imagine socio-economic and political conditions in the
contemporary West that would endanger people for just being labelled Jewish (like
those existing in central and eastern Europe in the 1930s), today the accusation of
anti-Semitism has largely become a way of discrediting anti-Zionism and criticism of
the current Israeli regime. That is certainly how the Israeli government sees it. Since
2007, a ‘Hasbara’ forum reporting directly to the Israeli prime minister is entrusted
with propagating the ‘positive side’ of the country’s policies, which in many cases
have descended into outright criminality, notably in the occupied territories and
towards neighbouring states. One specific task of the Hasbara forum (the term means
’enlightenment’) is to denounce university professors and lecturers criticising Israel as
anti-Semites.6
In the period between 5 February 2019, when I was notified of the procedure
against me (which then had been underway for more than two months without
notification) and March the first, when I travelled to Sussex to defend myself against
this accusation, I further studied the subject, only to find again that the statement I
made is a statement of fact. There is no way that my right to speak out on this matter
can be suspended. For the average university management team today, this is an
entirely different matter. Unless they came in on other qualifications, they have

5 ‘Latest staff news: Sussex Weidenfeld Institute for Jewish Studies launches at London event’.
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/staff/newsandevents/?id=48112 (last accessed 25 March 2019).
6 Annette Groth, ‘Der Antisemitismusvorwurf als Disciplinierunginstrument und Diskurstotschläger’,
in Mies, Der tiefe Staat schlägt zu, pp. 97-8.

3
exchanged their role as scholars for the trajectory that if all goes well, ends with a
position as Vice-Chancellor and the remuneration that comes with it. Their concern is
not academic freedom, but funding, and at Sussex, the Israel chair and now also the
Weidenfeld Institute as a result rule out having anyone criticising Israel, even when
retired, associated with the University.
On 12 March I received a letter listing the following sanctions:
… You are asked to make a public apology on social media, acknowledging the hurt that your
actions have caused and distancing yourself formally from anti-Semitism in any form. The wording
of this apology must be agreed with the University prior to publication, and may be used by the
University for its own purposes.
It was noted that the tweet remains in the public domain and continues to cause offence to some
people and bring the University into disrepute; consequently, you are asked to remove the tweet
made on 3 November 2018.
You are reminded of the required standards of behaviour for academic title holders, including
Emeritus Professors, and advised that should you not comply... by 29 March 2019 then the matter
will be referred back to consider whether further action should be taken... In the event of failure to
comply, the on-going presence of the tweet in the public domain and your failure to comply with the
decision of the Committee could form the basis of a fresh complaint against you, with all possible
sanctions being available to the Committee (including removal of the right to use the title of
Emeritus Professor).
You are reminded that even in the event that [the measures listed] are complied with in line with the
required timescale, this will not prevent the Committee investigating any future complaints about
your conduct in line with the Code.
On 14 March, one day after the inauguration of the Weidenfeld Insitute, I resigned
from my emeritus status in protest, with the following letter to the Vice-Chancellor.
Dear Professor Tickell
I have received the letter dated 12 March 2019 in which I am instructed to make a public apology for
the grief I have caused by my Twitter reply on 3 November 2018 that ‘Israelis blew up the Twin
Towers with help from Zionists in US govt’, retract it, and remove the message itself. It is also
announced in the letter that henceforth I will be monitored in case new complaints might arise.
I can only conclude that neither my written representation dated 14 February 2019, nor the extensive
oral representation I made in the presence of my wife on 1 March, to what I take was the Senior
Management Group, have made any impact in the judgement of what I now understand was/is the
[Academic Promotion, Advancement and Titles Committee].
As I have tried to make clear in the two representations, the University has conducted a procedure of
which I was only informed after almost three months, in which various officers of the University
were involved and a vote was taken among the members of the Department. Not unexpectedly after
that vote, news of the procedure against me was making the rounds well beyond Sussex.
The vote was taken in December without a regulation being available, and the regulation on which
the decision of the committee is now based, was written after the fact and applied retrospectively. I
will not mention again that for seven years now I have been active in the fight against the Far Right
and the racism on which it thrives, and the insult that the accusation of anti-Semitism means for me
personally.


4
I conceded in the oral representation that my comment may have been shocking for those who
believe that ‘9/11’ was the work of Osama bin Laden and 19 Arab hijackers. I also made clear that
had the University asked me right away to clarify I would have done that without further delay.
However, as I have studied the matter closely and in context, on the basis of an extensive list of
sources, I cannot retract it. As a scholar I must stand by the facts I discover in the course of my work.
Never in my time as a researcher in Amsterdam or Sussex have I been forced to change any
conclusions of scholarly work, and I will not now accept any restrictions on my academic freedom
either.
Since in the APATC letter, there is no further mention of the University values listed in the
December 2018 Code of Practice, such as 10 (e), promising support for those having the courage to
change and be bold, and 14, the right to present ‘unpopular points of view’, I must conclude that
from now on, should I retain the emeritus title, I would not be free to conduct my research in
freedom, as article 14 claims to guarantee.
Therefore I resign from my emeritus status. I do so in protest over the treatment by a University that
I have always felt a deep loyalty to, but which in this case has brought me into disrepute by a serious
accusation which I reject as unfounded but against which it is difficult if not impossible to defend
oneself nevertheless.
As to the appeals procedure, the two solicitors who are advising me on this issue have come to the
conclusion that if these are the standards the University adheres to, there is no point in appealing.
Therefore I will not appeal, other than by defending my reputation publicly.
(details about acknowledgement and confidentiality)
With this letter I gave up the emeritus status and said goodbye, this time
definitively, to a University where I spent some of my best years. Of course it was not
necessarily very smart to post as a one-liner on Twitter a statement that was bound to
be controversial and reference it to a web encyclopedia that collates all that exists on
a given topic, ripe and green. However, the key question is not one of form but whether
Israelis blew up the Twin Towers or not. This I turn to next.


5
General. Background and Sources
The 9/11 attacks have been interpreted by several commentators, including former
Reagan administration official Barbara Honegger,7 as the 21st-century equivalent of
the 1933 Reichstag Fire, by which the Nazis imposed their dictatorship after Hitler had
been appointed Chancellor by president Hindenburg. Whilst there are similarities in
terms of the rolling back of civil rights and the launching of wars, the shift in world
politics that followed 9/11 was different. The current transformation is from the Cold
War stand-off to a neoconservative, Anglo-Zionist condominium, with war against
Iran, Russia and China looming. Unlike the pre-1991 situation in which the West,
organised around an Anglophone Atlantic bloc, was reined in the Soviet bloc, the
decolonising Third World and at home, by organised labour, in the new configuration
no such countervailing forces are recognised. Yet the tide of economic rivalry is going
against the capitalist heartland and the impetus to war, which in the 1930s came from
contender states challenging Western pre-eminence, in the current configuration of
forces emanates from the West.
It is my argument that 9/11 inaugurated the new world-political condominium, a
dramatic seizure of power under the auspices of neoconservatives in the United States,
Britain, and Israel. In a speech in 2007, the former NATO commander and presidential
hopeful, general Wesley Clark, declared that on 9/11 there was ‘a policy coup in this
country’. ‘Some hard-nosed people took over the direction of American policy and
they never bothered to inform the rest of us.’8
Since then, terrorist scares and actual outrages have become a key regulating
mechanism of our society, which due to the directive role of speculative capital, no
longer rests on a broad social contract. ‘7/7’ in Britain, the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan
massacres in France, and other incidents are examples. The question then arises who
the ‘regulators’ are, assuming these can be identified as conscious agencies in the
larger process.
77 Barbara Honegger, Behind the Smoke Curtain. What Happened at the Pentagon on 9/11 and What
Didn’t and Why it Matters, 2nd edition. Video by Mark Snyder. Seattle: Seattle 9/11 Truth, 2015 (2013)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXBk8JqwFlw (last accessed 25 May 2018).
8 Cited in Christopher Bollyn, The War on Terror. The Plot to Rule the Middle East [foreword, A.
Sabrosky]. n.p.: www.bollyn.com 2017, p. 4.


6
9/11 was a conspiracy, not a simplistic one executed by 19 Arab hijackers in four
planes as the official and mainstream media account has it, but one evolving through a
long, intricate process of preparations, with its own successes and drawbacks on the
way. From the materials I have studied I draw the conclusion, not just that ‘the Twin
Towers were brought down by Israelis with help from Zionists in the US government’,
as I put it in my Twitter post of 3 November 2018, but that 9/11 as a whole represents
the coming together of neoconservative forces in Anglo-America and Israel. It was
planned and executed by extremist elements, but due to the fifteen military and
intelligence exercises conducted on that day, thousands of others participated
unwittingly; others may have had partial advance knowledge they decided not to
divulge, or just fell in line after the event.
As the former Director of Studies of the U.S. Army War College and emeritus
research chair at that institution, Dr Alan Sabrosky, concludes, 9/11 was a ‘Mossadorchestrated
operation’. However,
Mossad did not do it alone. They needed local help within America (and perhaps
elsewhere) and they had it, principally from some alumni of PNAC (the misnamed
Project for a New American Century) and their affiliates within and outside of the
US Government who in the 9/11 attacks got the “catalytic event” they needed and
craved to take the US to war on Israel’s behalf. 9
In 2007, Francesco Cossiga, former president of Italy and the ultimate insider of the
actions of what is called the ‘deep state’, viz., the world of intelligence agencies and
undercover operations, said as much in an interview to the Corriere della Sera.
Cossiga was interior minister at the time of the most spectacular false flag operation in
post-war Europe, the abduction and assassination by the ‘Red Brigades’, of his own
Christian Democratic party chairman, Aldo Moro, in 1978.10 As Cossiga put it,

9 Alan Sabrosky, ‘Demystifying 9/11: Israel and the Tactics of Mistake’, 2013.
https://zulfahmed.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/alan-sabrosky-demystifying-911-israel-and-the-tactics-ofmistake/
(last accessed 10 August 2018) , emphasis added. I will not add qualifications such as ‘himself
Jewish’, because such a label, if it means anything at all, does not alter the status of an opinion.
10 See Philip Willan, Puppet Masters. The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy. London: Constable,
1991.

7
All of the democratic circles of America and of Europe …now know well that the
disastrous [9/11] attack was planned and realized by the American CIA and
Mossad with the help of the Zionist world to put under accusation the Arabic
countries and to persuade the Western powers to intervene in Iraq and
Afghanistan.11
My claim about the Twin Towers is not more than a footnote to these statements,
and it too can be documented in detail. Not so much with published academic research,
for regarding 9/11 and the War on Terror as a strategic project which the attacks in the
United States were intended to kick-start, the funded and peer-reviewed universe of
mainstream academia has largely folded in on itself. As far as international studies go,
‘the response to September 11 has been comparatively muted’, William Brenner noted
five years after the attacks. ‘It has received little sustained attention, experienced no
fervent debate, and has been largely excluded from any central focus that might have
been anticipated.’12
Few authors openly questioning the official account of the attacks have been able to
get their work published by mainstream journals or established academic houses,
perhaps with Peter Dale Scott the sole exception.13 Others have been published by
smaller, critical publishers. The most important revelations by whistle-blowers all have
been self-published. No trespassers will be tolerated, as made clear when former CIA
director and Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, in his capacity as president of Texas A
& M University, censured a professor emeritus, Morgan Reynolds, for raising doubts
about 9/11, since ‘to suggest any kind of government conspiracy in the events of that
day goes beyond the pale’.14 That critical thinkers and publications likewise take the
11 History Commons, ‘Complete 9/11 timeline—geopolitics and 9/11—Israel’.
http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?
timeline=complete_911_timeline&geopolitics_and_9/11=israel (last accessed 8 March 2019), citing
Corriere della Sera , 30/11//2007. Except in ‘9/11’ all dates have been written dd/mm/yy.
12 William J. Brenner, ‘In Search of Monsters: Realism and Progress in International Relations
Theory after September 11’. Security Studies. 15 (3). 2006, p. 497.
13 Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11. Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. Berkeley, Cal.:
University of California Press, 2007.
14 Cited in Morgan Reynolds, ‘9/11, Texas A & M University, and Heresy’. In David Ray Griffin and
Peter Dale Scott, eds. 9/11 and American Empire. Intellectuals Speak Out. Northampton, Mass.: Olive
Branch Press, 2007, p. 103, cf. 112–13.


8
US government’s conspiracy theory of 9/11 as given and will even attack those
hesitating to accept it, underscores that in this domain, discipline, the core organising
principle of academia, is truly hegemonic.
This leaves the so-called ‘9/11 Truth movement’, such as Architects & Engineers
for 9/11 Truth, Lawyers for 9/11 Truth, and the like. But not only has 'truth' become an
invective to denounce those investigating 9/11, authors with inside information have
been repressed in various ways. Sibel Edmonds, who revealed advance knowledge by
the FBI, lives under a gagging order;15 Susan Lindauer, who did the same for the CIA,
was locked up incommunicado in a US maximum security complex.16 Philip Marshall,
the pilot who exposed details of the involvement of the Iran-Contra network (with
which he formerly had been associated himself), was assassinated in 2013.17
Writers investigating the role of Israel and Israeli agents are treated with the routine
accusation of anti-Semitism or worse. Ha’aretz newspaper, often a reliable source,
tried to make the investigative journalism of Christopher Bollyn suspect by reporting
that he ‘attended conferences with Holocaust deniers’. Yet Bollyn’s three books and its
source materials on the web are indispensable. The same for the writings of former
flight attendant Rebekah Roth, who decided to hide behind a curtain of fiction to reveal
some of the most spectacular details in four novels. Other unorthodox channels include
the theatre production of the Dutch actor-director, George van Houts.
However, now that a New York Grand Jury has admitted for scrutiny evidence on
9/11 contrary to the official account,18 things may be beginning to shift. With the new
book by David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth, 9/11 Unmasked, a catalogue of
the issues on which a panel of 23 experts from various backgrounds could agree
(several of them are associated with the submission of the Grand Jury case) the quality
15 Sibel Edmonds, Classified Woman. The Sibel Edmonds Story. Alexandria, Virginia: Sibel
Edmonds, 2012.
16 Susan Lindauer, Extreme Prejudice. The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of
9/11 and Iraq—The Ultimate Conspiracy to Silence Truth. Charleston, S.C.: Create Space, 2010.
17 Philip Marshall, The Big Bamboozle. n.p., https://thebigbamboozle.com 2012.
18 Manchester Gazette, ‘Legal Breakthrough in Special Grand Jury Petition for Sept. 11 Attacks’. (2
December 2018). https://manchestergazette.co.uk/9-11-grand-jury-investigation-launches/1857 (last
accessed 24 February 2019).


9
and reliability of ‘alternative’ material has been raised a notch further, although that
book does not discuss perpetrators or even the cui bono question.19
Historical Context: A Neoconservative Alliance to Balkanise the Middle East
Although I confine myself in this piece to the question of Israelis and the Twin
Towers, it is necessary to provide some historical context in order to make clear that
this was not just a forensic accident.20 To properly assess the forces that would
eventually unleash the War on Terror we have to investigate two fields of force which
blended into each other in the process. One was the control by Britain and the United
States of the Middle East, where the world’s largest and easiest accessible fossil energy
sources are located; the other, Israel’s contested presence as a militarised Western
outpost in an overwhelmingly Arab and/or Muslim region.
As to the first, Peter Dale Scott speaks of a ‘dark quadrant of unaccountable power’,
which provides a
roof of inscrutable governmental, financial, and corporate relationships between
the United States and Saudi Arabia. There is a “black hole” at the centre…. in
which the interests of government, petrodollar banks, intelligence agencies, and
multinational oil companies, are all inscrutably mixed.21
After the backing of the US dollar in gold was abandoned in 1971, it was
exchanged, informally, for a backing by Middle East energy sources (on the basis of an
agreement that trade in oil and gas would continue to be conducted in US dollars).
Following the first oil price hike in response to post-1971 dollar inflation, the Middle
East market also evolved into a key life support for the US and Western armsindustrial
complex. As Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler have demonstrated,
actual wars sucking in even more arms compensated for slack oil profits as if in a
balancing mechanism; whilst maintaining the petrodollar is an essential precondition
19 David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth, 9/11 Unmasked. An International Review Panel
Investigation. Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2018.
20 This has also been the method in my Flight MH17, Ukraine and the new Cold War. Prism of
Disaster. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.
21 Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State. Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S.
Democracy. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, p. 79.


10
for maintaining US primacy and the financing of the deficits by which rising military
expenditure is covered.22
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States and Britain no
longer had to take this powerful contender into account and were able to respond
aggressively to any sign of economic independence in the region with impunity. ‘This
explains the US wars in the Middle East, … and also the goal of US neoconservatives
to realise their Greater Middle East project,’ writes Mohsen Massarat. That project's
aim, he notes, was to break down the region's strong states into many different. smaller
oil-producing states, ‘which will not be able to defend themselves against US dictates
in the decades to come.’23
As to the second field of force, Israel’s presence in the Middle East, its strategy of
destroying strong states coincides seamlessly with the Anglo-American need to control
the region's energy resources and the requirements of maintaining dollar hegemony.
The Israeli policy to ‘balkanise’ the region has its origins in geostrategic considerations
although these too have recently come to include an energy dimension.24 Israel
therefore constitutes one further component of the ‘black hole’ at the centre. The
relationship between the state of Israel and its supporters in Anglo-America, whom I
term Anglo-Zionists, in fact is far more fundamental also in terms of the deeper
religious and civilisational background, than the link with the Muslim Arabs. This
latter link is strategic, but not organic as the one with Israel.
Even if the arrangement between the US and Saudi Arabia to ensure that all OPEC
oil deliveries remain denominated in dollars is a lifeline for US power in the world,
there is no way the Saudis or any of the other Gulf monarchies can determine US and
Western policy, whereas Israel can. In addition, there is a complex relationship that
turns support for Israel into an article of faith even apart from the Israel lobby. Besides
a pervasive affinity that arises from shared frontier experience including the violent
encounter with natives, there is also the specific Jewish-Zionist connection. Guilt
complexes having their origin in not living in Israel but comfortably in North America,
feed a sometimes aggressive loyalty to the ‘chosen people’ facing a hostile
22 Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, The Global Political Economy of Israel. London: Pluto
Press, 2002, chapter 5.
23 Mohsen Massarat, ‘Die weltweite US-Kriegspolitik: Wettrüsten, Chaos im Nahen und Mittleren
Osten, Iran-Atomkonflikt und Dollarimperialsmus’. In Mies, Der tiefe Staat schlägt zu, p. 260.
24 Clément Nguyen, ‘Israël et sa géopolitique des hydrocarbures au XXIème siècle’. Perspectives
Libres, no. 19, 2016, 115-150.


11
environment in the Middle East. As Yuri Slezkine puts it in his classic study, The
Jewish Century: for American Jews, ‘Jewishness and possibly Americanness …
depend on Israel’s continued chosenness.’25 However, as the actions of Far Right
Israeli governments grow bolder, Jewish people elsewhere face painful conflicts of
allegiance. Indeed in February 2005, Avi Shlaim, the renowned Israeli historian, wrote
that ‘Israel is increasingly perceived as a rogue state,’ wondering whether Zionism had
not become the outright enemy of the Jews, as evidenced by the resurgence of anti-
Semitism.26
This is a reminder that there are Zionist and non- or anti-Zionist Jews, just as there
are non-Jewish Zionists; all attempts to conflate anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and
criticism of Israeli policies will run aground on this inescapable reality. One only has
to think of the fact that concerning the war in Iraq, the majority of American citizens
considering themselves Jews disagreed with the Israel lobby in the US, led by
neoconservative Anglo-Zionists and dual nationals such as Richard Perle, Paul
Wolfowitz, and others.27
Because my aim here is to document that Israelis blew up the Twin Towers with
help from US Zionists (not only those in government), I will concentrate on the Israeli
leg of the alliance to break up the Middle East, for which the War on Terror would
provide the strategic umbrella. If as a result, the role of figures like vice-president Dick
Cheney, or national security adviser and later, Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice,
and others primarily representing the energy bloc, will be underplayed, the fact that in
9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror two strategies came together will be the
presupposition throughout.
In fact neoconservatism, as a militant, Messianic Western supremacism committed
to subduing the least sign of resistance, itself was the expression of how the two
strands blended into one. After the Six Days’ War of 1967, Israel became the target of
Third World wrath on account of its continued occupation of Arab lands. The Jewish
state shifted to enhanced militarization in the late 1960s, partly to offset the feared
25 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004, p.
365.
26 Cited in Christopher Bollyn, Solving 9/11. The Deception That Changed the World [foreword, G.
Stanish]. n.p.: www.bollyn.com, , p. 189.
27 John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York:
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007, p. 243.


12
contraction of US involvement, partly in response to the growing strength of the Israeli
Left. Between 1967 and ’73, defence expenditure ran as high as 23 per cent of GDP,
attracting big private conglomerates into the armaments sector alongside the state’s
own holding companies.28 This contributed to preparing the ground for a further
confrontation with the Arab neighbours by broadening the bloc of interests committed
to military solutions. The OPEC oil cartel and the New International Economic Order
drive meanwhile worked to isolate the country, culminating in the condemnation of
Zionism as racism by the UN General Assembly in 1975. Israel as a result moved
closer to some of the less savoury Third World regimes, such as South Africa and
Central American dictatorships like Guatemala and El Salvador. In many cases Israel
became the caretaker of US interests which Congress hesitated to defend even under
Reagan. 29
In the Middle East, Israel dug in by holding on to the occupied territories, turning
the conflict with the Palestinians and the wider Arab and Islamic worlds into a
quagmire from which it would not be able to extricate itself. As a result, ‘rather than
representing a permanent escape from the ghetto, Israel became the ghetto’s mirror
image—an armed camp’.30 True, this allowed Israeli society to solve a foreign conflict
within its own body, the relation between the European Jews, the Ashkenazi, who
dominate the country’s ruling class; and the Sephardim, non-European Jews brought in
from North Africa and elsewhere to maintain preponderance in the demographic
balance with the remaining Palestinians. By letting the economically disadvantaged
Sephardim settle in the occupied territories, the Israeli state gave free rein to a
pervasive belief that the conquest of the West Bank (‘Judea and Samaria’) and East
Jerusalem was a fulfilment of a biblical promise—a belief that chimes with the views
of Zionist sympathisers in the United States. It also enabled a reconciliation between a
rightwing, ‘Revisionist’ Zionism (who claim the title to the entire biblical Palestine)
and a neo-orthodox, ‘national’ Judaism.31
28 Nitzan and Bichler, Global Political Economy of Israel, pp. 128-91.
29 See my Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq. London: Pluto Press and New Delhi: Sage
Vistaar, 2006, pp. 126, 205-6, 215.
30 Slezkine, Jewish Century, p. 365.
31 I have developed this at length in my Foreign Encounter in Myth and Religion, vol. II of Modes of
Foreign Relations and Political Economy. London: Pluto Press, 2010, pp. 189-204 & passim.
13
Revisionist Zionism
The roots of the current Israeli regime are in Revisionist Zionism, with its tradition of
forcing the West into supporting Israel, if need be by terrorism. Zionism as such
emerged in the late nineteenth century, in the context of a chauvinist nationalism,
fuelled by imperialism, which often turned against minorities such as Jews. At the
dawn of the 20th century and to the extent they had not assimilated into the
surrounding societies, the mass of European Jewry (5.2 out of 8.7 million) lived in the
Russian empire.32 Although many Jews by then were aware of Zionism, the actual
adherents of the idea represented less than one percent of all European Jews; in the
west, the assimilation ideal still prevailed, whilst in Russia, the large majority of
Jewish youth was revolution-minded, socialist, not Zionist.33 Even Marxist Zionists
had little influence.34
The rumblings of the Russian Revolution during World War I provided the impetus
for synchronising Western imperialism and Zionism. For a variety of reasons (to keep
Russia in the war, the Suez Canal lifeline, and others), the Balfour Declaration of 1917
granted the Jews the right of ‘return’ to Palestine, the core myth of Zionism. Lord
Rothschild had asked for this statement, but the Rhodes-Milner Group, the imperialist
core of the British ruling class of which he was a member, was ambivalent; overall
British policy was pro-Arab, and in India it was pro-Muslim. As the trustee of the
League mandate over Palestine following the collapse of the Ottoman empire, Britain
envisaged the Jews as an economically active element that would energise an Arab
federation there. As Lord Milner himself stated in a speech to the House of Lords in
1923, there was no question of giving in to the demands of the ‘extreme Zionists’.35
The Zionists themselves on the other hand thought in terms of taking full possession
of Palestine, knowing this would entail violence and war. In 1922 David Ben-Gurion,
the leader of secular Zionism and future prime minister for the Mapai party, explained
32 Slezkine, Jewish Century, p. 159.
33 Slezkine, p. 149; cf. Melvin I. Urofsky, American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust. New
York: Anchor Books, 1976, p. 31.
34 Ber Borochov, Nationalism and the Class Struggle. A Marxian Approach to the Jewish Problem.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press , 1972 [1937, written 1905-‘16].
35 Cited in Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment. From Rhodes to Cliveden. New
York: Books in Focus, 1981 [1949], p. 172.


14
that ‘we are not yeshiva students debating the finer points of self-improvement, we are
conquerors of the land.’36
The Revisionists were the more radical representatives of this point of view. Their
leader, Vladimir ‘Zeev’ Jabotinsky, in his ‘Iron Wall’ article of 1923 argued that in a
future Jewish state, there had to be a sharp divide from the remaining Palestinian
Arabs. 37 The Revisionists had their own paramilitary force, the Betar (of which the
future Likud leader, 16-year-old Menachem Begin in Poland would become a member
in 1929) and in 1924 they attended the world fascist conference in Rome. Italian
fascism was not anti-Semitic and Betar fighters were even trained by blackshirts until
Mussolini yielded to pressure from Hitler in 1936 and ‘37 and the Betar training camp
was closed down.38 When Jabotinsky distanced himself from dealing with fascists,
Avraham Stern and the later Likud prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, continued to make
proposals both to Mussolini and to Hitler about an anti-British military alliance in
Palestine. The World Zionist Organization too negotiated with Hitler’s representatives
on how the expulsion of Jews could be turned into a conquest of the Holy Land.39
Back in 1931, Jabotinsky’s faction defected from Haganah, the military arm of the
mainstream Zionists. Irgun as an underground terrorist organisation was set up to
compensate for the unreliable Stern gang (Lehi). Jabotinsky was not a fascist himself
(many of his followers were) but he had no qualms about sacrificing the safety of non-
Zionist Jews for the greater good, as exemplified by his contacts with the notorious
Ukrainian anti-Semite, Petliura; another sign of things to come once the Revisionists
took over in Israel in 1977.40
The key difference between mainstream Zionism and the Revisionists was the size
of a future Israel. Jabotinsky’s faction left the World Zionist Organisation in 1935 over
36 Cited in Slezkine, Jewish Century, p. 212. Yeshivas are faith schools, the Judaic equivalent of
Muslim madrassas.
37 Cited in Alastair Crooke, ‘Quand Israël et l’Iran s’alliaient discrètement.’ Le Monde Diplomatique,
February 2009, pp. 1, 13.
38 Lenni Brenner, ‘Zionist-Revisionism: The Years of Fascism and Terror’. Journal of Palestine
Studies, 13 (1) 1983, p. 69.
39 Jeff Halper, War Against the People. Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification. London:
Pluto Press, 2015, p. 186; Brenner, ’Zionist Revisionism’, pp. 79-81, 87-8.
40 Hilton Obenzinger. ‘Jabotinsky’s Legacy Continues’. Journal of Palestine Studies, 14 (1) 1984, p.
137.


15
the planned creation of a separate state of Jordan out of the British mandate.41 For them
a Jewish state would have to include the area that according to Israeli writer Israel
Shahak, had been determined by rabbinical authorities. It comprised, besides Palestine,
1. all of the Sinai and a part of Egypt up to the environs of Cairo;
2. all of Jordan and a large chunk of Saudi Arabia, all of Kuwait and a part of
Iraq south of the Euphrates’
3. all of Lebanon and all of Syria plus a large part of Turkey up to Lake Van;
4. Cyprus.42
Of course this would only be achieved by way of major wars with Israel’s powerful
regional adversaries. When the prospect of holding on to the occupied territories
darkened after the much more closely fought war between the Jewish state and its
neighbours in 1973, the Revisionists therefore began to hatch ideas about making the
United States shoulder the burden. This strategy was reciprocated in the US by the
Anglo-Zionist/cold warrior coalition eventually organised in the Project for a New
American Century, PNAC, concerned also about maintaining control over Middle East
oil to sustain the global reserve role for the dollar.
Mobilising the West Against the Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims
As noted, Menachem Begin would be the first Likud leader and prime minister. Shamir
was his successor, whilst Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, was Jabotinsky’s
secretary. There was never any doubt about the nature of this current. As the head of
Irgun, Begin ordered the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed
the British Secretariat and military command of Palestine, in July 1946. Disguised as
Arabs, Irgun and Haganah terrorists placed bombs hidden in milk cans in the cellar of
the hotel, killing 91 people.43 Hence, when Begin founded the Herut party in 1948, a
group of prominent Americans of Jewish background, including Albert Einstein and
Hannah Arendt, signed an op-ed letter to the New York Times in which they criticised
41 Ian S. Lustick, For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. New York: Council
on Foreign Relations, 1988, p. 38.
42 Cited by Glen Stanish in Bollyn, Solving 9/11, p. xxii.
43 Bollyn, Solving 9/11, pp. 53-7.


16
Herut as a party close to fascism. They warned that given Begin’s credentials, this
party, once in power, might resort to terrorist policies.44
Israel was born in a war against the Palestinian population and the Arab neighbours.
At the start 650,000 Jews faced a Palestinian population three times as large and
owning 93 per cent of the land, but armed gangs of Zionists and Red Army veterans
were militarily superior. In the foundational war they destroyed nearly 400 Arab towns
and villages and drove out 700 thousand Palestinians. By 1962, the ratio of land
ownership had been exactly reversed.45 Yet there was no way the Israelis could rest on
their laurels and the Azhkenazi founders of the state actually saw war with the Arabs as
a necessary condition to integrate the Sephardim brought in from North Africa and the
Middle East. Only thus would they be kept from fraternising with Arab neighbours
with whom they had lived, mostly peacefully, for so long, and become part of the
fighting nation. Without war, the mainstream leadership around Ben-Gurion argued,
the necessary moral tension would be lacking.46
In 1956 Britain and France launched their attack on Egypt to recapture control of
the Suez Canal nationalised by Nasser. Israel attacked through the Sinai. Bomb attacks
on US and UK targets in Cairo, attributed to Arabs but in fact organized by the Israeli
military under defence minister Pinas Lavon, had exacerbated Western animosity
towards the Egyptian leadership.47 The issue of Israel’s size also came up: on the third
day of the campaign, Ben-Gurion announced in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, that
the real war goal was ‘the restoration of the Kingdom of David and Solomon’.48
However, the Suez operation ended in a debacle, since the United States was in no
mood to drive the non-aligned countries into the arms of the Soviet bloc by supporting
Anglo-French gunboat policies. For Israel the consolation prize came when one of the
last prime ministers of the IVth Republic in France, Guy Mollet, not only decided to
develop a French military nuclear capacity, but also to supply Israel with a nuclear
reactor and blueprints for an enrichment facility.49 This eventually would turn the
44 Todd E. Pierce, ‘Neocons : The Echo of German Fascism’. Consortium News, 27 March 2015.
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/27/neocons-the-echo-of-german-fascism/ (accessed 28 March
2015).
45 Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, pp. 92, 96.
46 Cited in Nitzan and Bichler, Global Political Economy of Israel, p. 102.
47 Bollyn, Solving 9/11, p. 59, details on p. 74.
48 Israel Shahak cited by Stanish, in Bolllyn, Solving 9/11, p. xxi.
49 Claude Serfati, Le militaire. Une histoire française. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam. 2017, p. 57.


17
Jewish state into a nuclear-armed regional power, an enduring obstacle to the UN
project of a nuclear-free Middle East.
The Six Days’ War then brought the long-desired extension of territory. It also
reinforced the militarist, ultra-nationalist current in Israeli politics. Two years earlier
the ruling Mapai party had split and a more aggressive faction, led by Ben-Gurion,
future president Shimon Peres, and Moshe Dayan, the victorious defence minister,
broadened the Revisionist bloc committed to holding to the occupied territories and if
need be, terrorise the West into supporting it. During the fighting, the US Navy signals
ship, USS Liberty, was attacked by Israeli jets, killing 34 US sailors and wounding
more than one hundred others. The intent to sink the ship was not in doubt, but whether
the Israeli high command’s fear was that it was monitoring the seizure of the Golan
Heights and other territorial operations, or whether it wanted to conceal that 1,000
Egyptian prisoners of war had been massacred in the Sinai, is uncertain.50
After victory, militant Zionists wanted active colonisation of the West Bank, the
Gaza strip and the Golan. The concept of the West Bank as biblical ‘Judea and
Samaria’ combined territorial aspirations with the imaginary of the religious Jews.
Gush Emunim (‘Bloc of the Faithful’) was formed when Orthodox scholars spent the
spring 1968 Passover at an Arab hotel in Hebron. A manifesto of the Movement for the
Whole Land of Israel reiterated the Zionist claim that colonisation was the return of a
biblical ethnos driven from its original territory two millennia before.51 The
Palestinians now turned to plane hijacks to call attention to their plight and a radical
wing, ‘Black September’, massacred the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972. In
the ensuing hunt for perpetrators, serious frictions between the CIA and the Mossad
played out as both intelligence agencies operated different double agents, a sign of
things to come in the events surrounding 9/11. 52
With oil becoming more important, Israel now faced growing challenges to
maintain its privileged if precarious position as the spearhead of the Western thrust into
the Middle East. However, US pressure on the Soviet Union to facilitate emigration (as
50 Bollyn, Solving 9/11, pp. 60, 64
51 Gabriel Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion. The Rise of
Fundamentalisms Around the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Pres, 2003, p. 141; Lustick, For
the Land and the Lord, p. 43.
52 Ola Tunander, ‘The War on Terror and the Pax Americana’. In Griffin and Scott, 9/11 and
American Empire, pp. 152-5.


18
a price for arms control agreements) resulted in a sharp upturn of Jews leaving the
USSR; it also fed resurgent Zionist fervour in Israel even though the vast majority of
Soviet Jews used their exit visas to settle in the United States.53
Likud Revisionists at the Helm
After the election of Menachem Begin in 1977, the colonisation of the occupied
territories, which hitherto had been a matter of ‘civic’ initiatives, became government
policy. Ariel Sharon, the popular tough-talking general, in his capacity as Likud
minister of land administration, assumed office with a plan to settle one million Jews
on the West Bank in the next decades. By now there was little distance left between the
Revisionists and the former mainstream: one year before the Likud takeover it was
prime minister Yitzhak Rabin who brought his colleague from Apartheid South Africa,
Vorster, to Israel. He also began the arming of the fascist Phalange in Lebanon.54 In
combination with Israeli support for murderous Far Right regimes in Central America,
these connections brought out the racist principles on which the enlarged state of Israel
now had become dependent for its survival and that would eventually culminate in the
Basic Law of July 2018.55 In the words of Jan Nederveen Pieterse,
Israel’s connection with Third World fascism stems from the same roots as
Zionism’s connection with fascism. It is a consequence of the alliance with
imperialism: an alliance that came naturally to an upper stratum of Jews, but that
came to the majority of Jews only at a time when there was practically no other
choice. The alternative was social revolution 56
Concern over the Far Right credentials and policies of the Likud government
meanwhile prompted a campaign to have the Israeli school system adopt a definition of
53 Slezkine, Jewish Century, p. 358.
54 Obenzinger, ‘Jabotinsky’s Legacy’, p. 139.
55 Chana Roberts, ‘Israel’s Nationality Law: What, exactly, does it say?’ Israeli National News, 29
July 2018. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/249673 (last accessed 13 February
2019).
56 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, ‘Israel’s role in the Third World: Exporting West Bank expertise’, Race &
Class, 26 (3) 1985, p. 27.


19
fascism not confined to anti-Semitism.57 Abroad, Arthur Koestler in The Thirteenth
Tribe demolished the Zionist myth of a ‘return’ of an ethnically Jewish people to the
Holy Land, since in fact, the largest single accretion to ‘diaspora’ Jewry were converts
to Judaism in the mediaeval Khazar empire in Ukraine and southern Russia.58
The Revisionist Zionists in power had other priorities. They began to explore how
the United States could be mobilised to join the fight against Israel’s enemies. In 1979,
the first head of Mossad, Isser Harel, in an interview stated that the United States had
developed an alliance with two countries, Israel and Saudi Arabia, but that ‘the alliance
with Saudi Arabia was dangerous and would develop a tolerance for terror among
Americans… If the tolerance continued Islamic fundamentalists would ultimately
strike America’.59 Prime minister Begin was meanwhile cultivating key contacts in the
United States, both among Protestant fundamentalists and among neoconservative
Anglo-Zionists (both Jewish and non-Jewish). Among his interlocutors were the New
York Jewish intelligentsia, men like Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, who in
the late 1970s abandoned their traditional left liberal position for the hard-line Cold
War stance and unconditional support for Israel that gave the name to
neoconservatism.
Israeli-US Preparations for a War on Terror
‘That Jews were numerous, wealthy, and powerful in America was an obvious reason
for the commitment to Israel, but not the only one,’ writes Franz Schurmann. There
was also, notably in the Democratic Party, the idea that here was a progressive,
socialistic, non-communist nation-building experiment that deserved support.
However, ‘In the early 1970s, that special United States-Israel ideological relationship
was transformed into a simple political-military tie.’60 As the US took the place of
57 Amnon Kapeliouk, ‘Exaltation nationaliste, négation de la démocratie. L’agressivité de l’extrême
droite israélienne’. Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1979. Archives 1954-2012 [CD-Rom ed]..
58 Arhur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe. The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage. New York: Random
House 1976. This theme was later expanded by Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People [trans.
Y. Lotan]. London: Verso, 2009.
59 Cited in Bollyn, Solving 9/11, pp. 70-71.
60 Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power. An Inquiry into the Origins, Currents and
Contradictions of World Politics. New York: Pantheon, 1974, p. 534.


20
France as Israel’s major foreign source of support, it began providing Israel with
military technology at a level no other ally enjoyed. As a result the country would turn
from an arms importer to a top-10 exporter of advanced weapon systems within a
decade. In turn, the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, coinciding with the second oil price
hike, worked to upgrade Israel as a US partner in many respects, among them the right
to compete for US weapons orders. In the framework of the line-up of the second Cold
War, the Reagan administration would come to view Israel as a strategic partner in the
region against Soviet influence.61
I already referred to the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the 1973 trade bill that tied
commercial equality for the USSR to acquiescence in Jewish emigration to Israel,
mortgaging détente on the Zionist project. This was the moment the traditional US
militarists (Henry Jackson’s nickname was the ‘Senator from Boeing’) teamed up with
the Anglo-Zionists such as the investment banker and veteran Cold War diplomat, Paul
Nitze, to campaign for the deployment of an Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) system and
restore nuclear superiority over the USSR. Richard Perle acted as a liaison between
Jackson and the ABM group and later became Nitze’s assistant in the Pentagon.62
To set the agenda for the Anglo-Zionist neoconservative alliance, the Likud
leadership organised a conference in Jerusalem in July 1979, devoted to developing a
comprehensive response to ‘terrorism’, read: national liberation as represented by the
PLO. To get the American military-industrial complex on board, Soviet support for
international terrorism was made the focus of attention. Following the opening of the
event by prime minister Begin, Benzion Netanyahu, the founding chairman of the
Jonathan Institute (named after his other son, killed in the Entebbe raid on a hijacked
Israeli passenger jet), argued that the event ‘was called to serve as the beginning of a
new process—the purpose of rallying the democracies of the world to a struggle
against terrorism.’63 This was the first explicit articulation of the War on Terror
project.
There were two US delegations at the Jerusalem event: the Democratic one was led
by Henry Jackson, the Republican one by George H.W. Bush, former CIA director and
then still a presidential hopeful before becoming Reagan’s vice-president in 1981. The
61 Halper, War Against the People, p. 41.
62 Ronald Brownstein and Nina Easton, Reagan’s Ruling Class. Portraits of the President’s Top One
Hundred Officials, 2nd ed. New York: Pantheon, 1983 [1982], p. 500.
63 Cited in Bollyn, War on Terror, p. 57, emphasis added.



21
conference’s key theses were that a ‘war on terror’ had to be waged through preemptive
attacks on states supporting terrorism; that a dedicated intelligence
infrastructure be established; and that civil liberties had to be rolled back for those
suspected of terrorism, and possibilities for preventive detention without charge as well
as torture, widened. Simultaneously the ‘terrorists’ should be dehumanized in the eyes
of the public. As Ian Black wrote in the Jerusalem Post on the first day of the
conference, ‘The conference organizers expect the event to initiate a major antiterrorist
offensive’.64
Identifying ‘Moscow’ as the hub of ‘international terrorism’, something we today
would call ‘fake news’, was taken up by Reagan’s first Secretary of State, Vietnam
veteran and former NATO commander Alexander Haig, Jr. He based himself on the
proofs of Claire Sterling’s Terror Network, which aimed to expose a world-wide terror
operation managed by the KGB but in fact relied on CIA disinformation trying to link
the Italian Red Brigades to Moscow.65 Sterling, herself a participant in the Jerusalem
conference, in a follow-up article sought to link the attempt at the life of Pope John
Paul II in Rome in May 1981 to Soviet anger over the pontiff’s role in supporting the
anti-communist trade union Solidarnosc in Poland, but that story too was a hoax.66
Around that time an Israeli official, Oded Yinon, came up with the plan to try and
break up Israel’s neighbours along ethnic and religious/sectarian lines, beginning with
Lebanon. Officially titled ‘A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties’, the Yinon
Plan appeared first in February 1982 in the journal of the information department of
the World Zionist Organization in Jerusalem, Kivunim, before being translated into
English by an Israeli critic. The Lebanese scenario of which Yinon spoke, would
involve that country’s ‘total dissolution into five provinces’; this in turn should serve
‘as a precedent for the entire Arab world including, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian
Peninsula.’67
After the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the massacre of Palestinians in
two large refugee camps that it entailed, weapons captured there were passed on to the
64 Cited in Bollyn, Solving 9/11, p. 41. Cf. Diana Ralph, ‘Islamophobia and the “War on Terror”: The
Continuing Pretext for U.S. Imperial Conquest’, in Paul Zarembka, ed. The Hidden History of 9-11, 2nd
ed. New York: Seven Stories Press 2008 [2006], p. 265.
65 Bob Woodward, Veil. The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-87. London: Headline, 1988, pp. 139-40.
66 Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent. The Political Economy of the
Mass Media. London: Vintage Books, 1994 [1988], pp. 144-6, 152
67 Cited in Bollyn, Solving 9/11, p. 24.


22
mujahedeen in Afghanistan, already supported by the CIA and Saudi Arabia. This is
how Israeli military intelligence (AMAN), under the command of future prime
minister Ehud Barak, became involved in the network of Osama bin Laden. The
latter’s trainer, Ali Mohamed, was a Hebrew-speaking Egyptian working for Israeli
intelligence and also a US Army special forces reserve officer. He would be directly
involved in the bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi that killed 250 people, yet
somehow this seems not to have affected his links to the CIA.68
Other instances of double agent and false flag operations followed when the Reagan
administration dispatched US Marines to Beirut International Airport in the hope of
containing the fighting. In October 1983 241 of them perished in a suicide attack; a
subsequent attack on a French military contingent killed 56 soldiers. V. Ostrovsky, a
former Mossad officer, maintains in a book that Israel had at least advance knowledge
but that Sharon did not want US and French forces there. The attacks were also
intended to mobilise the Americans against the Arab world on the side of Israel.69 For
the State Department this needed no further argument. Haig had been convinced of the
‘terror’ narrative by reading Claire Sterling's book, but George Shultz, his successor as
Secretary of State, was transformed by the US losses in Lebanon. In April 1984 he
spoke about a more active response to terrorism including pre-emptive strikes.70 Soon
after, he got a chance to further reflect on this in a follow-up terrorism conference of
the Jonathan Institute, this time in Washington.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s UN ambassador at the time, convened the conference
and also edited the proceedings. He defined the ‘two main antagonists of democracy in
the postwar world’, communist totalitarianism and Islamic radicalism, as together
constituting a ‘worldwide network of terror’. What was needed in the West was a
‘realignment of attitudes’. Marxism and Islam had combined in giving terrorism its
impetus, and the United Nations had justified it by calling terrorism a struggle for
national liberation.71 The conference was a high-level gathering: on the US side,
besides Shultz, Attorney General Ed Meese, FBI Director William Webster, UN
ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, members of Congress and a host of academics and
journalists all participated.
68 Tunander, ‘The War on Terror and the Pax Americana’, p. 155; cf. Bollyn, War on Terror, p. 44.
69 Bollyn, Solving 9/11, p. 66.
70 Woodward, Veil. Secret Wars of the CIA, pp. 442, 444.
71 Benjamin Netanyahu, , ed. Terrorism. How the West Can Win. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1986, pp. 3, xi, 12


23
The three main lines of the strategy formulated at the 1984 conference were, first,
the idea of a forward defence against terrorism; secondly, getting the media to avoid
any investigation into the possible motives of terrorists; and finally, the need for a
Pearl Harbor-like event to shock people out of their complacency. On this theme,
Netanyahu himself led the discussion. Violence, he argued, was already so endemic in
the international system that people’s sensibilities had been numbed. However,
Terrorism follows an inexorable, built-in escalation. To be effective, it must
continually horrify and stupefy. Yet once we have become accustomed to a
particular level of violence, a new outrage is required to shock our sensibilities. It
used to be enough for terrorists to hijack a plane to attract international attention;
next it became necessary to kill a few hostages; in the future, more violence will
be required.
Only if there would be one mighty blow, and then ‘a successful war on terrorism…
not just erratic responses to individual terrorist acts’, the United States would be able to
build ‘an anti-terrorist alliance … with two or three or possibly more countries.’ This
committed group of states would be in a position to ‘credibly threaten the offenders,
and [it] alone can impel the neutrals to shed their neutrality’. But this required that the
blow would be big enough; only then would the ‘citizens in a democracy’, united in
fear and seeing themselves as ‘soldiers in a common battle’, would be ‘prepared to
endure sacrifice and even… immeasurable pain’. 72
Whether Desert Storm, the operation to drive out Saddam Hussein’s army from
Kuwait in 1991, and especially, the encouragement of Kurdish and Shi’ite uprising of
against the Sunni leadership in Baghdad, were also part of the Dark Quadrant
balkanization strategy, would take us too far. There is no doubt however that the
collapse of the Soviet Union made it possible to openly contemplate this option. In
1992, Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, a highly influential neoconservative ideologue
who participated in the Washington conference of 1984, wrote an article in Foreign
Affairs entitled ‘Rethinking the Middle East’ that harked back to the Yinon Plan of a
decade earlier. From the 1950s Lewis had supported the Israeli Far Right and
advocated the idea of a clash of civilizations between the West and Islam; key
72 Netanyahu, Terrorism, pp. 218, 225-6..


24
neoconservatives such as Richard Perle considered him their mentor. In the article
Lewis added his voice to calls for a ‘Lebanonization’ of the region.
A possibility, which could even be precipitated by [Islamic] fundamentalism, is
what has of late been fashionable to call ‘Lebanonization.’ Most of the states of
the Middle East—Egypt is an obvious exception—are of recent and artificial
construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is
sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no
real sense of common identity.… The state then disintegrates—as happened in
Lebanon—into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions, and
parties.73
Clearly the United States would only be able to play a role in this process if it
avoided a post-Cold War demobilisation, and this was taken up by the Anglo-Zionist
bloc with the Defence Planning Guidance, FY 1994-1999.74 In this document,
commissioned by deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, the neoconservative
doctrine of global military supremacy for the United States was laid out with all its
implications. These included the breaking up of the existing Middle East. As General
Wesley Clark reported later, right in 1991 Wolfowitz told him that the US could now
use military power in the Middle East without the Soviets stopping them; there would
be an interval of five to ten years to clean out Soviet client regimes in the Middle East
before the next major contender state would arise.75
The problem that there might be no credible enemy any longer was solved by
Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ argument, first in a Foreign Affairs piece
in 1993 and subsequently in the book of 1998. In hindsight the ‘Clash of Civilisations’
thesis can be seen as a bridge between the original Netanyahu project of a War on
Terror and its revival following 9/11. Terrorism according to Huntington has its roots
73 Bernard Lewis,‘Rethinking the Middle East’. Foreign Affairs 71 (4), 1992, pp. 116-7; cf. History
Commons, ‘Geopolitics and 9/11—Israel’ referring to the Lewis article.
74 Defence Planning: Guidance FY 1994-1999 (16 April 1992, declassified 2008).
https://www.archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2008-003-docs1-12.pdf (last accessed 16
December 2018).
75 Scott, American Deep State, p. 84.


25
in a ‘demographic explosion in Muslim societies’, which turned ‘large numbers of
often unemployed males’ into a ‘natural source of instability and violence’.76
This was corroborated in Israel and the occupied territories when roughly one
million Russian-speaking people migrated to Israel in the 1990s, raising their share in
the country’s population to over 18 percent. They took the place of Palestinian
workers, who as a result became superfluous. In 1993, the year of the Oslo agreements
on a two-state solution, Israel began to close the transit points for Palestinian labour.
Russian-speakers and other less favoured Jewish Israeli’s now moved to the
proliferating settlements in the occupied territories in force.77 As successive Likud
governments no longer hid their unwillingness to abide by the Oslo principles,
impatience as to the envisaged US role in a ‘War on Terror’ mounted. In 1995
Netanyahu even predicted that ‘if the West doesn’t wake up to the suicidal nature of
militant Islam, the next thing you will see is militant Islam bringing down the World
Trade Center.’78
In 1996, a group of dual nationals led by Richard Perle published A Clean Break for
the incoming Netanyahu government. The report deplored the strategic and economic
paralysis that a combination of quasi-socialist Zionism and the ‘peace process’ had led
the country into. It recommended that Zionism be reconstituted on a new intellectual
foundation: not only market-oriented, but also ‘one that restores strategic initiative’.
Besides a more aggressive approach to the Palestinians (including the right of ‘hot
pursuit’), the report claimed that ‘a new basis for relations with the United States’
should be forged, ‘furthering values inherent to the West.’ Israel’s new agenda must
‘reestablish the principle of pre-emption, rather than retaliation alone’, and cease ‘to
absorb blows to the nation without response’.79 Israel should aggressively confront
Lebanon, Syria and Iran, and ‘focus upon removing Saddam Hussein from power in
Iraq’. Replacing him with a restored Hashemite monarchy would allow weaning the
76 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. London:
Touchstone, 1998, p. 265.
77 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
2007, pp. 430-32.
78 Cited in Laurent Guyénot, ‘9/11 Was an Israeli Job. How America was neoconned into World War
IV’. Unz Review, 10 September 2018. https://www.unz.com/article/911-was-an-israeli-job/ (last
accessed 9 February 2019). Also on video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QMLO558gec
79 Richard Perle et al., A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. Jerusalem and
Washington: The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, 1996, pp. 5-6.

26
Shia there and in Lebanon from Hezbollah, Iran and Syria. Echoing the Lewis
‘Lebanonization’ project (or the Yinon Plan for that matter), the Report further
advocates supporting Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions against Syria and secure ‘tribal
alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory’. 80
One year on, several of the Clean Break authors would join the notorious Project for
a New American Century (PNAC). Its study, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, repeated
the mantra’s of Wolfowitz’s Defence Planning Guidance. It conceded that establishing
US global supremacy by way of a revolution in military affairs would require time,
‘absent some catastrophic and catalysing event—like a new Pearl Harbor’. The PNAC
group would move into key positions in the Bush Jr. administration and according to
Jeremy Scahill were busily engaged in planning a global war that ‘would extent to the
home front with warrantless wiretapping, mass arrests of Arabs, Pakistanis, and
Muslim immigrants and a prodigious rollback of the civil liberties of American
citizens’.81 That would be the long-awaited War on Terror, which rages on today.
Blowing Up the Twin Towers
I now have to narrow down the account to the one issue I want to document, the
question of the perpetrators of the demolitions of World Trade Centre 1 and 2 (7,
which also was demolished, I will mostly leave aside). This means skipping evidence
of advance knowledge in the US government, the details of the alleged plane hijacks
and whether they ever flew into any buildings at all, the issue of what happened at the
Pentagon and why, and so on and so forth. Also the crucial issue of the 15 large
exercises which caused so much confusion, and the very real possibility that Ptech
software installed in practically all relevant US government computer systems, in
combination with the exercises effectively grounded US air defence systems.
Here then are the bare facts immediately connected to the demolition of the Twin
Towers, for which I have been sanctioned by the University of Sussex following
complaints over alleged anti-Semitism.
80 Perle et al., A Clean Break, pp. 2-3 and passim.
81 Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars. The World is a Battlefield. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013, p. 15. I have
documented how Philip Zelikow and others were theorising the consequences of a new Pearl Harbor in
advamce of 9/11 in The Discipline of Wsterm Supremacy, pp. 222-5.


27
Israeli Agents in the Sights of US Law Enforcement
I begin with the Israeli ‘art students’, on whom the first reports date from April 2000
and whose exploits have been the subject of different interpretations. The art works
were offered for sale at workplaces and even private homes of intelligence and law
enforcement officers on the basis of detailed foreknowledge, e.g. addresses not in the
public domain. ‘In January 2001, the security branch of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Agency began to receive a number of peculiar reports from DEA field offices across
the country.’ In March, the DEA gave out a National Security Alert that this was a
spying operation given the art students’ obvious interest in the lay-out of federal law
enforcement and defence facilities.82
The DEA was central in this investigation because phone numbers obtained from
some of the art students corresponded with numbers gathered in an ongoing ecstasy
investigation, a drug of which the international trade is dominated by Israeli organised
crime (production is concentrated in the Netherlands).83 In March 2001, the National
Counter-intelligence Executive (NCIX), a branch of the CIA, confirmed the DEA’s
National Security Alert and some 140 Israeli nationals were detained or arrested
between March and 11 September 2001. In a 60-page internal DEA memo names and
details are listed of the detainees, several of whom turned out demolition specialists.
One, a platoon leader from the Israeli army, ‘acknowledged he could blow up
buildings, bridges, cars and anything else he needed to… [He] asked agents not to
divulge this information … because it would lead to his immediate arrest in Israel'.84
The FBI also tracked down a second man, whom the platoon leader claimed to have
met in a pub. This man too was a demolition expert. None of the arrested were art
students, and their military background was not just a matter of having been through
Israeli compulsory military service either: ‘many… had served in the military
intelligence services or in electronic or communications units of the Israeli army’.85
82 Christopher Ketcham. ‘The Israeli “art student” mystery’. Salon.com, 7 May 2002.
https://www.salon.com/2002/05/07/students/ (last accessed 15 February 2019); History
Commons,‘Profile: “Israeli art students”. http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?
entity=_israeli_art_students_ (last accessed 15 February 2019).
83 Drugs Enforcement Agency, Suspicious Activities Involving Israeli Art Students at DEA Facilities.
(June 2001), p. 1; Bollyn, Solving 9/11, pp. 38-9.
84 DEA, Suspicious Activities, p. 31.


28
More than 30 out of the 140 art students lived in Hollywood, Florida, a city of
140,000 inhabitants, not far from where fifteen of the nineteen alleged 9/11 hijackers
lived—nine in the city itself, six in the vicinity.86 Also in Florida were warehouses of a
beach store chain, owned by Shaul and Meir Levy, with headquarters in Miami
doubling as an art distribution centre. Not only were these warehouses far too large for
the line of business they were supposedly supplying; on the eve of 9/11, Ehud Olmert,
then mayor of Jerusalem, was on a secret visit to New York City where he met the
Levy brothers .87 There was a second headquarter-like concentration of suspected
Mossad operatives in Bergen and Hudson Counties, New Jersey, but the Arabs they
‘monitored’ included the hijackers of the plane that allegedly hit the Pentagon.88
To answer the question whether the spies in Florida and New Jersey were
monitoring the Arabs to expose them or for other reasons, one must know Israeli
intelligence routinely operates Palestinian and other Arab agents; two cousins of
alleged 9/11 hijacker Zaid Jarrah were for instance working for Israel in Lebanon.89
Also, the fact that the DEA was being targeted suggests the operation was at least
partly intended to counteract a previous DEA investigation of an ecstasy ring.90
In August, Mossad, after initial denials, unexpectedly conceded the existence of the
spying operation but claimed it had been to expose an Arab terrorist network. The
intelligence service used German media to convey that it had supplied to the CIA the
details of ‘19 terrorists living in the US’, including four who eventually would also be
on the list of the 9/11 hijackers: Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar, Marwan
Alshehhi, and Mohamed Atta.91 To be able to establish one month in advance that the
85 Gerald Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers and FBI Suspects in the September 11
Attacks and Their Failure to Give Us Adequate Warning: The Need for a Public Inquiry. Memorandum
to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, the Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (pdf, 15 September 2004), pp. 6-
7.
86 Guyénot, ‘9/11 Was an Israeli Job’; Ketcham, ‘The Israeli “art student” mystery’.
87 Bollyn, Solving 9/11, pp. 2012: 128-9, 131, 138-42.
88 Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, 00. 26-31.
89 History Commons, ‘Geopolitics and 9/11—Israel’, citing Jerusalem Post, 3/11/2008 ; London
Times, 9/11/2008; Independent, 13/11/2008; New York Times, 19/2/2009.
90 Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, pp. 10-11.
91 History Commons, ’Israeli art students’, citing Die Zeit 1/10/2002; Der Spiegel, 1/10/2002; BBC,
2/ 10/2002; Ha'aretz , 3/10/2002.


29
number of terrorists would be nineteen was obviously a remarkable intelligence feat,
because the official count of the number of hijackers would also be 19, including the
four named.92 However, five days after the attacks, Mossad let it be known it had
warned their US counterparts in August that some 200 Arab terrorists linked to Osama
bin Laden in Afghanistan had been preparing a major onslaught on the mainland US.93
Mossad also warned of ‘suspected Iraqi involvement’, which Shea dismisses but which
Susan Lindauer had been instructed by her CIA supervisors to find proof for at the UN
throughout 2001, with the focus on the WTC from June on.94
Art Students and Demolition Fuses in the World Trade Centre
Why the Florida-centred spying operation was not actively pursued by the CIA may
have been because, as one US government source cited by Ketcham suspected, it may
have served as a cover for something else. The spies may even have been ‘meant to be
caught and connected to DEA surveillance so that a smaller number of spies also
posing as art students could complete other missions.’95
This gets us to the World Trade Center in New York. From at least March 2000 a
Vienna-based group calling itself ‘Gelatin’ had been allowed to take up residence on
the 91st floor of WTC 1 (the North Tower), supposedly to prepare a conceptual art
performance, called ‘The B-Thing’, the installation of a wooden balcony on the outside
of a window. The New York Times in August 2001 ran a report on the book in which
the project was documented, and which contained photos of the balcony taken from a
helicopter by one Josh Harris, an Internet entrepreneur specialising in virtual reality,
who had rented the helicopter for a flight round the towers. He also rented a top-floor
suite in the Millennium Hilton hotel, across the street from the Gelatin studio, to
publicise the performance.96 Why Harris was so keen on showing to the NYT all the
92 History Commons, ‘Israeli art students’ citing Forward 15/3/2002.
93 Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, pp. 32-3, citing Daily Telegraph 16/9/2001 and
Los Angeles Times, 20/92001.
94 Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, p. 35; Lindauer, Extreme Prejudice, pp. 21, 86-
7.
95 Cited in Ketcham, ‘The Israeli “art student” mystery’, emphasis added. History Commons, 'Israeli
art students’ citing Salon.com, 7 May 2002. Cf. Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, p. 12.
96 Shaila K. Dewan, ‘Balcony Scene (or Unseen) Atop the World; Episode at Trade Center Assumes
Mythical Qualities.’ The New York Times, 18 August 2001.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/18/nyregion/balcony-scene-unseen-atop-world-episode-trade-center-


30
expenses he incurred for the Gelatin balcony stunt and whether the helicopter flight
may also have served to prepare for further virtual reality events falls outside the scope
of his piece.
The Gelatin team was Vienna-based and consisted of four members but there were
also 14 others in residence on the same floor. Gelatin removed all traces of their long
stay on the 91st floor almost immediately and ‘by prior agreement, the group
confiscated all film and video of the project taken by invited witnesses’. 97 However,
the B-Thing book includes a two-page photograph of the artists, one of whom wears a
climbing harness. Ceiling tiles have been removed, exposing the steel girders between
the 91st and 92nd floors. Also, the harnessed ‘balcony artist’ in the foreground is
standing between stacks of cardboard boxes which the team told the NYT was their
‘clubhouse’. On closer look, it can be seen the boxes are marked ‘BB-18’.
Rebekah Roth, the former flight attendant turned author, tracked down the BB-18
code to a type of remote controlled demolition fuse (other sources speak of a
demolition fuse accessory) marketed by a company named Littelfuse in Chicago.
assumes-mythic-qualities.html (last accessed 16 February 2019). As late as 2016, Harris still believed he
was under FBI surveillance over his involvement in the Gelatin art installation, Wikipedia, ‘Josh Harris’.
97 Dewan, ‘Balcony Scene (or Unseen) Atop the World 2001’.


31
Littelfuse markets a BB-series of such fuses, of which one is the BB-18 type.98 Via a
bankruptcy of the parent company Tracor and subsequent mergers (at one point
involving former CIA director Bobby Ray Inman as a company director), the successor
companies of Tracor became a subsidiary of Kelloggs/Halliburton, where Dick Cheney
had been CEO before he became vice-president in 2001.99 These latter connections
need not be unexpected in corporate histories in the military-industrial complex; what
counts is that Gelatin, sharing the floor with 14 other ‘artists’ were surrounded by vast
stacks of demolition fuses.
As to the nationality of Gelatin and the 14 others, we cannot be entirely certain. The
NYT report speaks of Austrians, but refers only to the four team members; Eastman
speaks of 14 Israelis, but I found this inconclusive.100 The question how anyone,
assuming it was not a coincidence that the boxes used for the ‘clubhouse’ were filled
with remote control demolition fuses, would get round WTC security to install them
can be answered with much more certainty.
Getting Round the Security of the Towers
As Alan Sabrosky writes, the question of security is crucial: ‘one does not casually cut
open walls, implant explosives, run cables and wire everything together in buildings
with state-of-the-art electronic surveillance and 24/7 on-site security’.101 The New York
Times asked, ‘how did a balcony escape the notice of one of the most securityconscious
office towers in the world? An examination of the security system revealed
that it was focused on the ground floor and basement… There's no surveillance on the
facade itself.’102 Gelatin and the 14 others also had construction IDs for the entire WTC
complex, although they obviously were not electricians or the like.103
98 Rebekah Roth, ‘9/11 from Cheney to Mossad’. SGT Report, 11 September 2015.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg7Qt4bV0B8l (last acccessed 13 February 2019), at 4.21-5.38.
99 Roth, ‘9/11 from Cheney to Mossad’, at 5.50-6.53 and 2.09.
100Dick Eastman, ‘The 14 Israeli “art students” were inside the WTC towers camping with
construction passes.’, Bilbiotheca Pleyades, 2009.
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_911_125.htm (last accessed 15 February
2019)
101 Sabrosky, ‘Demystifying 9/11’.
102 Dewan, ‘Balcony Scene (or Unseen) Atop the World’.


32
After the first bomb attack on the North Tower in 1993, a complete revamp and
upgrade of security of the WTC complex was undertaken (also of the elevator systems,
cf. below). For this task, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the
freeholder of the WTC complex, hired Kroll Associates, the firm of Jules B. Kroll.
Another security contractor was Securicom, of which Bush cousin Wirt Walker III was
CEO until January 2002 and the president’s brother Marvin, a director until 2000,104
but the Kroll contract hides more relevant connections. In 1992, Kroll hired Abe
Shalom, the former head of Israel’s secret service GSS, or Shin Bet. Shalom initially
had tried to get the contract for WTC security with his own Tel Aviv firm in 1987, but
this was cancelled when the Port Authority found out he had been fired from Shin Bet
for a grave war crime. Now he was back in the WTC as a Kroll employee.105
Right in 1993, the insurance giant AIG took a 20 percent participation in Kroll.
Jeremy Kroll, the son of Jules, was managing director of Marsh Kroll, the security firm
that is a subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan, which is headed by Maurice Greenberg,
son of ‘Hank’ Greenberg, the CEO of AIG. Jerome M. Hauer, the managing director of
Kroll. as director of Mayor Giuliani’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) had
previously arranged that its command bunker be built in WTC 7.106 The Kroll and
Greenberg families are deeply immersed in the Israel support network. Jules Kroll’s
wife is vice chair for New York of the biggest private US fundraising operation for
Israel, the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), the organisation of which Larry Silverstein,
who acquired the lease of the Twin Towers on 24 July 2001, had been national
chairman.107
Why Silverstein would take this step, knowing that the Twin Towers were white
elephants of which the cleanup for asbestos, postponed since the 1980s, alone was
estimated at almost $1 billion in 1989, can only be guessed. When he bought the lease
(he owned WTC 7 already for a number of years), it was insured by Greenberg’s AIG.
103 Roth, ‘9/11 from Cheney to Mossad’, at 2.02 -2.23. One anonymous source in a message to Dick
Eastman stated that the 14 were separate from Gelatin and that security of the towers should be focused
on. Eastman, ‘The 14 Israeli “art students”‘. A photocopy of one Gelatin team member’s construction
ID dated 1 May 2000 is in Rebekah Roth, Methodical Deception, n.p. KTYS Media, 2015, p. 265.
104 David Ray Griffin,. ‘9/11, the American Empire, and Common Moral Norms’. In Griffin and
Scott, p. 12.
105 Ths story and further connections of Shalom’s are in Bollyn, Solving 9/11, pp. 167-9.
106 Bolyn, Solving 9/11, pp. 163-5, 175-6.
107 Bollyn, Solving 9/11, pp. 177-9.


33
Right on the 24th ‘they took the precaution of having the contract reinsured by
competitors’.108 Silverstein paid 14 million of his own money (in addition to his
partners share in the purchase), but immediately renegotiated the insurance contracts to
cover terrorist attacks, doubling the coverage to $3.5 billion, and stipulated the right to
rebuild should the towers come down.109
Whatever the questions that the Twin Towers’ purchase may give rise to, there was
no doubt about Silverstein’s Zionist connections. The head of the New York Port
Authority, who granted the lease to Silverstein and Frank Lowy, his partner in the
purchase, was Lewis Eisenberg, another UJA member and former vice-president of
AIPAC, the prime Israel lobby group in the US. As Ha’aretz reported on 21 November
2001, Silverstein was also close to Netanyahu ever since the latter’s days as UN
ambassador, and called him every Sunday.110 That Silverstein breakfasted every
morning in the ‘Windows on the World’ restaurant high up in the North Tower, except
on 9/11, when he had an appointment with his dermatologist, or that his children, who
both worked in the Twin Towers, that morning were late for work,111 I leave for others
to speculate on.
Repairs and Elevator Maintenance After the 1993 WTC Attack
Preparing the Twin Towers for demolition may have have been helped by the fact that
the blueprints of the buildings were also in the possession of the company that headed
the investigation of the 1993 bomb attack, a subsidiary of Systems Planning
Corporation (SPC) of which Dov Zakheim was CEO. Zakheim was a neoconservative
and actually wrote a paper for PNAC about orchestrating a catastrophic event to force
the US into the Middle East to assist Israel.112 Ha’aretz characterised him as ‘a
religious, kippa-wearing Jew who is thought to be in favour of settlements in the
[occupied] territories’.113 During the 2000 election, Zakheim served as a foreign policy
adviser to candidate Bush, as a member of the group led by Condoleezza Rice. He
108 Guyénot, ‘9/11 Was an Israeli Job’.
109 Coen Vermeeren, 9/11 is gewoon een complot. N.p.: Obelisk, 2016, p. 157, and Guyénot.
110 All details from Guyénot , ‘9/11 Was an Israeli Job’.
111 History Commons, ‘Complete 9/11 timeline and day of 9/11’
http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&day_of_9/11=dayof911
(last accessed 8 March 2019), citing New York Observer, 17/3/2003; New York Magazine, 18/4/2005.
112 Honegger, Behind the Smoke Curtain, at 46.49.


34
already held office in the Reagan administration and after Bush was made president,
was appointed Under Secretary of Defence (Comptroller). Zakheim served as
Comproller until 2004, tasked with tracking down trillions of dollars missing from its
accounts.114 A key technology marketed by SPC was the remote controlling of planes,
called the Flight Termination System. This technology in case of a hijack could
literally hijack the hijackers and land the plane safely wherever it wanted, not just one,
but eight planes at a time.115
Since this can only be satisfactorily discussed as part of the entire 9/11 scenario, let
us concentrate on the Towers’ blueprints, which also will have been of interest to the
new elevator maintenance company contracted after the attack of 1993. Until then, the
World Trade Centre had been under contract with one of the oldest and largest elevator
companies in the United States, Otis. In the 1993 attack, Otis mechanics behaved in an
exemplary way, leading the rescue of some 500 people trapped in elevators; others
were dropped by helicopter on the roofs of the towers, and so on. Therefore it came as
a great surprise that after the disaster the contract for the elevator maintenance was
given to an unknown Florida company, ACE Elevator Co. From 1994 to 2001 ACE
was in charge of the elevators, working alongside another unknown company, LVI
Services, entrusted with the asbestos removal.116 Why ACE was chosen or why it went
bankrupt in 2006 (a new, unrelated ACE company reappeared later) after winning the
largest elevator maintenance contract in history and in spite of the massive insurance
payout to Silverstein Properties after 9/11 we don’t know. There is no doubt however
that the elevator shafts, being right next to the bearing columns of the Twin Towers,
according to a former employee of Controlled Demolition Inc., Tom Sullivan, would
have been an ideal location for pre-placed explosives.117
113 Dalia Karpel, 'What's Wrong with this Picture?' Ha’aretz, 7 August 2002.
https://www.haaretz.com/1.5036858 (last accessed 16 February 2019).
114 Wikipedia, ‘Dov S. Zakheim’.
115 Jerry Mazza, ‘Recherche des trillions perdu’. Deep Politics Forum, 20 July 2006.
https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?4765-Dov-Zakheim#.XGfvO7go-M8 (last
accessed 16 February 2019).
116 Rick Shaddock, ‘ACE Elevator Company. 9/11 Questions and Research. How could explosives be
planted in the WTC?’ ANETA.org. n.d. http://aneta.org/911experiments_com/AceElevator/ (last
accessed 12 March 2019).
117 Cited in AE911truth.org ,‘Security Alerts, Disabled Fire Alarms, and Unused Elevators:
Suspicious Events at the World Trade Center Before 9/11’. Architects & Engineers 911truth.org (7


35
So we have ‘artists’ occupying a floor filled with demolition fuses who had
construction IDs giving them access to the buildings since early 2000, and ACE
elevator mechanics working in the shafts since 1994, with 83 of them present on 9/11
(they were all sent home before the towers came down).118 Because of the ACE
contract, there was nothing unusual in the fact that the elevators were frequently out of
order for repairs in the period prior to 9/11119 In the North Tower one of the two
elevators that went straight all the way up the building was out of operation for five or
six weeks prior to the 9/11 attack, whilst in the South Tower there were also two
elevators that went all from the base of the tower to in this case, the 78th floor; both
were out of service.120
In addition, in the two weeks prior to 9/11, security was heightened in and around
the towers, allowing unusual movement by unknown people to go unquestioned. There
was an increase in security at the World Trade Center in the two weeks before 9/11, for
reasons that are unclear, but which ended the day before the attacks. Finally, in the
week prior to 9/11, the fire alarm system of WTC 7 was placed in test condition, so
that it would not go off or as the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST, a branch of the Department of Commerce) pointed out, ‘any alarms received
from the system were considered the result of ... maintenance or testing and were
ignored.’121
Israelis Arrested on 9/11
The Twin Towers did not so much ‘collapse’, they exploded, beginning with
explosions at the basement level; the dust revealed traces of thermite and particles that
can only be formed by extremely high temperatures far in excess of burning kerosene.
WTC 7 on the other hand was a straight collapse as a result of controlled demolition.122
The unlikely ownership and insurance changes, the ‘artists’ in climbing harnesses, the
September, originally Shoestring 9/11, June 2018). https://www.ae911truth.org/news/479-securityalerts-
disabled-fire-alarms-and-unused-elevators-suspicious-events-at-the-world-trade-center-before-9-
11 (last accessed 12 March 2019).
118 Shaddock, ‘ACE Elevator Company. 9/11 Questions’.
119 AE911truth.org ‘Security Alerts’, citing ABC News correspondent Don Dahler.
120 AE911truth.org, ‘Security Alerts’.
121 AE911truth.org, ‘Security Alerts,’ citing NIST.
122 Griffin and Woodworth, 9/11 Unmasked, pp. 1-66.


36
demolition fuses on the floor they occupied, their access to the towers on account of
their construction IDs, possibly using the building plans of the SPC subsidiary and/or
working with ACE elevator mechanics, it all points in the direction of ‘Israelis with
help of Zionists’ but still leaves many questions open. Was the Israeli art students’
spying operation, in which several demolition experts took part, a diversion to allow
the Gelatin group to do their ‘B-thing’? Who were the 14 other ‘artists’ sharing the
91st floor of the North Tower with them?
Here the New Jersey group of Israelis must be taken into account. On the day itself,
five men were caught by the FBI who had been filming the exploding towers from
across the Hudson from a white van. Bomb-sniffing dogs reacted as if they had
detected explosives, but officers were unable to find anything.123 A 579-page FBI
report on the matter (partially declassified in 2005), found that the five worked for
removal company linked to another firm called Classic International Movers, at which
other Israelis worked, five of whom were also arrested on account of having been in
touch the nineteen presumed suicide hijackers.124 Another van was stopped on one of
the bridges connecting New York to New Jersey. As CBS’s Dan Rather reported live,
this van was filled with enough explosives ‘to do great damage to the George
Washington Bridge’.125 In all, 60 more Israelis (on top of the 140 arrested prior to the
attacks) were arrested in the United States on or immediately after 9/11.126 The owner
of the New Jersey moving company was interrogated by the FBI but then fled to Israel
with his family; a New York newspaper reported later that this moving business had
been an Israeli front operation.127
The Cover-Up
In December 2001, Fox News broadcast a four-part documentary on the Israeli ‘art
students’, citing a highly-placed investigator that ‘the Israeli [DEA Groups] may have
gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. …there are tie-
123 Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, p. 27. They were named Sivan and Paul
Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari, and Yaron Schmuel. The last three would later appear in an
Israeli TV talk show to confirm thery had been there ‘to document the event’. Bollyn, Solving 9/11, pp.
4, 6.
124 Guyénot , ‘9/11 Was an Israeli Job’.
125 Cited in Sabrosky, ‘Demystifying 9/11’.
126 Bollyn, Solving 9/11, p. 8.
127 Bollyn, Solving 9/11, p. 5.


37
ins.’ However, ‘evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified’.128 The official
9/11 Commission, as in so many other instances of potentially great importance,
‘make[s] no mention of any Israeli warnings’.129
It is the same for the Israelis arrested on or after 9/11. As Alan Sabrosky notes,
What is fascinating is how little impact [the account of the Israelis arrested on
9/11] has had on public awareness of the details of 9/11, much less official US
policy based on it. A “cloak of silence” had descended over any official or
mainstream media discussions of 9/11 that did not conform to the official
interpretation, thereby keeping such dissonance from the general public.130
Clearly the threat of being accused of anti-Semitism is a powerful silencer. As Carl
Cameron, the maker of the Fox documentary on the Israeli art students, reported,
‘Investigators within the DEA, INS, and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue or
even suggest Israeli spying is considered career suicide.’131
Why the CIA was pushing for extraditing the original art students arrested in the
DEA operation, instead of pursuing the investigation in depth (if need be through the
FBI, given the limits of the CIA’s operational possibilities in the US itself) has
remained a mystery. ‘Why the Israeli government decided not to share with us all the
critical information they had, and the extent of that information’, and the possible
condoning of the spying operation by the CIA, also remains unanswered.132
One reason was certainly the aggressive response of Jewish and pro-Israel
organisations to any hint of a departure from the ‘Muslim radicals’ narrative that they
successfully floated immediately prior and after the attacks. Fox withdrew its four-part
documentary under pressure from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
(JINSA), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL, the anti-Semitism watchdog), and other
pro-Israel organisations. As the ADL put it, posting this information amounted to
‘sinister dangerous innuendo which fuels anti-Semitism’. The Washington Post
followed up with an explicit denial by Bush administration officials that the art
128 Cited in Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, p. 25.
129 Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, p. 37.
130 Sabrosky ‘Demystifying 9/11’.
131 Cited in Eastman, ‘The 14 Israeli “art students”’.
132 Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, pp.46-7 citing Yedioth Ahronoth, 2/10/2002 on
the CIA push for extradition; and p. 4.


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students had been spies (never mind Mossad itself had acknowledged they were), and
the New York Times never covered the story in the first place.133
Did ‘Israelis blew up the Twin Towers with help of Zionists in the US
government’? On the basis of the above, I think this is highly likely. Therefore I will
not accept the humiliating sanctions imposed on me on 12 March last, which I consider
a violation of my freedom of speech, and more specifically, of my academic freedom
as a scholar. That is why I resigned from my emeritus status at the University of
Sussex per 14 March.
133 History Commons, ‘“Israeli art students”. citing Washington Post, 6/3/2002


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