The South Caucasus News - SouthCaucasusNews.comThe Chechen-Palestinian Parallel: Following the outbreak of the Second Chechen War in 1999 and a wave of terrorist bombings in Russia, Russian leaders explicitly linked Chechen rebels to Middle Eastern extremist networks. Israeli officials drew parallels between these groups and Palestinian militant organizations. [5]
Intelligence Exchange: Mossad and Russian intelligence secretly shared operational data regarding financial pipelines, training camps, and the movement of foreign fighters traveling between the Middle East and the North Caucasus. [2, 5]
2. Monitoring Iran’s Weapons Programs
A major point of friction, but also engagement, was Russia’s relationship with Iran, particularly concerning the transfer of military and nuclear technology. [3, 6]
Direct Consultative Mechanisms: In March 1999, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov (himself a former chief of the SVR) to establish a direct, bilateral channel to address technology leaks to Iran. [6]
Mossad’s Role: Under Halevy, monitoring Iran’s nuclear program was Mossad’s top priority. Mossad frequently provided the SVR and FSB with actionable intelligence showing how Russian entities or scientists were being actively targeted or co-opted by Iranian procurement agents, prompting Moscow to tighten export controls. [3]
3. Managing Post-Soviet Transnational Organized Crime
The massive wave of over one million Soviet-Jewish immigrants arriving in Israel throughout the 1990s created an intrinsic domestic security link between Moscow and Tel Aviv. [2, 7]
The “Russian Mafia” Threat: The porous boundaries of the post-Soviet landscape allowed transnational Eurasian organized crime syndicates to expand their footprints into Israel. [2]
FSB-Mossad Cooperation: To counter money laundering, narcotics trafficking, and cybercrime, Mossad worked alongside Israel’s Shin Bet to establish joint informational networks with Russia’s FSB to track high-profile criminal figures moving assets across international lines. [2]
4. Defense Industry Collaboration
The era also laid the groundwork for robust military-technical intelligence agreements. Under a framework initialized in 1995, Israeli and Russian defense industries collaborated on upgrading older Soviet-era hardware (such as MiG fighter jets and tanks) for third-party export. [8]
This intelligence and technological proximity culminated in October 2003, when Israel and Russia finalized a landmark tripartite deal to supply India with specialized airborne early warning and control radar systems (PHALCON) integrated onto Russian aircraft bodies. [8]
Summary of the Dynamic
While both agencies maintained deep skepticism of one another—and actively monitored each other for domestic espionage—the 1998–2003 era proved that Mossad and Russian intelligence could compartments their geopolitical differences (such as Russia’s historic ties to Arab states) to exploit overlapping security interests in counterterrorism and global tracking. [2, 4]
[1] foreignpolicy.org.tr
[2] thegeopolitics.com
[3] mossad.gov.il
[4] youtube.com
[5] fdd.org
[6] jamestown.org
[7] youtube.com
[8] files.ethz.ch
Mossad and Russian Intelligence services: 1998 – 2003 – Google Search google.com/search?q=Mossad+a…
The Prime Minister: Ariel Sharon of the right-wing Likud party took office in March 2001, replacing Ehud Barak after the collapse of the 2000 Camp David peace summit. [1, 4, 5, 6]
The Second Intifada: By September 2001, the Palestinian uprising had been raging for a year. Israel was experiencing severe security challenges, with frequent attacks on civilians in cities like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. [2, 3]
Immediate Reaction to 9/11
Official Solidarity: Prime Minister Sharon immediately condemned the attacks, declared a national day of mourning, and offered to send specialized Israeli search-and-rescue teams to New York City. [7]
Public Outpouring: On September 12, thousands of Israelis lined up to donate blood for American victims. Years later, Israel built the 9/11 Living Memorial Plaza in Jerusalem, which remains the only memorial outside the United States to list the names of all 2,977 victims. [3, 7]
Strategic Security Actions: Fearing a broader global conflict or coordinated attacks, Israel immediately increased military alerts, closed its land borders, and temporarily grounded civilian airspace. [8]
Geopolitical Shifts and Diplomatic Tension
Framing Terrorism: Figures like Sharon and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that the attacks proved the U.S. and Israel shared a “bond of spilled blood” and faced a common extremist enemy. Over the long term, 9/11 shifted American foreign policy toward a global “War on Terror,” which ultimately aligned U.S. counterterrorism strategies closely with Israeli military tactics.
Early Diplomatic Friction: In the immediate weeks following 9/11, temporary friction arose between Washington and Jerusalem. President George W. Bush’s administration sought to build a broad international coalition against Al-Qaeda that included Arab nations like Saudi Arabia and Syria. Fearing that the U.S. might make diplomatic concessions to Arab states at Israel’s expense, Sharon publicly stated that Israel would not “pay the price” to stabilize the region for Washington’s coalition. [8, 9, 10, 11]
Impact on the Palestinian Authority
PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat publicly deplored the 9/11 attacks and was filmed donating blood to American victims. However, scattered television broadcasts showing small groups of Palestinians celebrating the attacks in East Jerusalem and Nablus damaged global sympathy. Arafat quickly recognized that the Western perception of political violence had fundamentally changed, leading him to heavily suppress those celebrations and order armed groups to temporarily halt operations to avoid having the Palestinian movement branded as synonymous with Al-Qaeda. [2, 8]
[1] en.wikipedia.org
[2] npr.org
[3] facebook.com
[4] ebsco.com
[5] britannica.com
[6] gov.il
[7] en.wikipedia.org
[8] nytimes.com
[9] washingtoninstitute.org
[10] aljazeera.com
[11] theguardian.com
– Google Search google.com/search?q=Israel+a…
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Michael_Novakhov shared this story from  Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.
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For me, the New York City skyline was close to home. Quite literally. I grew up just across the Hudson River, with the famed skyline of America’s biggest city visible from my bedroom window. Being a Palestinian American living just outside of the world’s most famous city meant that I spent part of my summers as a tour guide for family visiting us from the Middle East, who, like so many people around the world, wanted to see the Big Apple that the movies and live broadcasts from Times Square on New Year’s Eve had made so famous.
I took visitors to the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Central Park and the World Trade Center. My last tour was in the final days of August 2001. We went to the observation deck of the World Trade Center known as “Top of the World”. Little did I know that two weeks later that deck, where we had stood looking out at the amazing metropolis below, would come crashing down along with the entire World Trade Center, killing thousands and instantly changing the world as we had known it.
By the time of the September 11 attacks, I was back in my dormitory at university in New England and huddled around a 10-inch television screen with floormates watching ABC’s Peter Jennings cover the horrific news as it was unfolding that Tuesday morning. Among the early reactions was one from Benjamin Netanyahu, then a former prime minister of Israel. Asked by The New York Times what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Netanyahu replied, “It’s very good.” Then he edited himself: “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy,” adding that the attack would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples”. This was his response while ground zero was still smouldering after an attack that had killed nearly 3,000 people.
It immediately hit me that not only was the world about to change, but my life in the US as a Palestinian American was about to become far, far more complicated. The US was about to embark on military engagement in the Middle East, and Netanyahu was excited by the opportunity this presented Israel.
To better understand the impact this moment had on US-Israel relations, it is crucial to consider the preceding context. I have argued elsewhere that the period between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 was a complicated one for US-Israel relations. For most of the history of the US-Israel relationship, the Cold War was the defining paradigm in international relations. For Israel, this was an easy paradigm to navigate. It billed itself to Americans as a like-minded, US-aligned democracy confronting Soviet-backed satellite states in the Arab world.
But as the Cold War ended, the political landscape shifted. The Berlin Wall fell, democratisation swept Eastern Europe, and apartheid ended in South Africa, while Israel was brutally repressing the first Palestinian Intifada. Suddenly, Israel did not fit so comfortably in this new world order. It was during this period that the US made its greatest investments in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, however flawed, and used some leverage to press the Israeli government on settlement building.
September 11 and the ensuing global “war on terror” changed all of this. With the second Palestinian Intifada under way, the September 11 attacks on the US provided an opportunity to once again put Israel and the US on the same side of a new defining global divide. Instead of communism, the new global bad guy was radical Islam.
Netanyahu and his allies understood this very well, just as he made clear to The New York Times 25 years ago this week. A wounded America was primed for Islamophobic narratives, and pro-Israel voices were often happy to provide them, as they understood that an America obsessed with “counterterrorism” would have to stay close to Israel.
There are numerous areas where we see the impact of this over time: enhanced US-Israel intelligence collaboration, growing US financial support for Israel and legislative initiatives supported by Israel’s backers in the US that used broadened anti-terror authorities to crack down on Palestinians, to name a few.
The narratives that helped support these outcomes also went beyond simply linking Israel and the US through a common “terrorist threat”. Palestinians were also more easily turned into a “security problem” to American audiences. Instead of asking why Palestinians were resisting oppression, American audiences were pushed to see Israeli repression as self-defence similar to US behaviour. Muslims were often cast as one of two types in American discourse: moderate or extremist, and those criticising Israel were routinely placed in the latter category, which led to stigma and a chilling effect.
Israeli military practices could be cast as useful for America as well. Surveillance, counterinsurgency, targeted killings and other tactics Israel had used in the West Bank and Gaza, which had occasionally been criticised by Washington, were used by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and thus increasingly legitimised before American audiences.
Some of the greatest purveyors of the Islamophobic narratives that characterised much of the post-9/11 period in the United States included David Horowitz, who consistently sought to connect Palestinians with terrorism and called for profiling to make Palestinian identity itself a security concern; Daniel Pipes, who often characterised Muslim organisations as potentially or secretly militant, casting suspicion on Muslim advocacy; Steven Emerson, who sought to popularise infiltration narratives to try to turn mainstream Muslim organisations into security subjects; Brigitte Gabriel, who regularly framed Islamism as a civilisational threat, thus casting Israel as a front-line defender of the West; and David Yerushalmi, who sought to expand the threat narrative to Sharia law and Muslim political influence, thus casting Muslim political participation as potentially subversive.
The general logic of these narratives was that terrorism was effectively synonymous with all things Palestinian/Arab/Muslim and thus Israel’s security model should be seen as legitimate, if not ideal, by Americans.
It is important 25 years later to reflect on the dangerous political opportunism that spewed hate into American discourse to cast Israel and Israeli policy in a favourable light. A quarter-century later, the US is once again embroiled in a seemingly intractable quagmire, this time in Iran, a losing effort that has already cost Americans more than $100bn through higher petrol and diesel prices. Given all of this, Americans today should be quick to question Islamophobic narratives, the dangerous paths they lead down and the real motives of those who spread them.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
At the time of the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, Israel was governed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and was deeply embroiled in the Second Intifada, a period of intense and violent conflict with Palestinians marked by frequent suicide bombings and military operations. [1, 2, 3]
Political Leadership and Domestic Context
The Prime Minister: Ariel Sharon of the right-wing Likud party took office in March 2001, replacing Ehud Barak after the collapse of the 2000 Camp David peace summit. [1, 4, 5, 6]
The Second Intifada: By September 2001, the Palestinian uprising had been raging for a year. Israel was experiencing severe security challenges, with frequent attacks on civilians in cities like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. [2, 3]
Immediate Reaction to 9/11
Official Solidarity: Prime Minister Sharon immediately condemned the attacks, declared a national day of mourning, and offered to send specialized Israeli search-and-rescue teams to New York City. [7]
Public Outpouring: On September 12, thousands of Israelis lined up to donate blood for American victims. Years later, Israel built the 9/11 Living Memorial Plaza in Jerusalem, which remains the only memorial outside the United States to list the names of all 2,977 victims. [3, 7]
Strategic Security Actions: Fearing a broader global conflict or coordinated attacks, Israel immediately increased military alerts, closed its land borders, and temporarily grounded civilian airspace. [8]
Geopolitical Shifts and Diplomatic Tension
Framing Terrorism: Figures like Sharon and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that the attacks proved the U.S. and Israel shared a “bond of spilled blood” and faced a common extremist enemy. Over the long term, 9/11 shifted American foreign policy toward a global “War on Terror,” which ultimately aligned U.S. counterterrorism strategies closely with Israeli military tactics.
Early Diplomatic Friction: In the immediate weeks following 9/11, temporary friction arose between Washington and Jerusalem. President George W. Bush’s administration sought to build a broad international coalition against Al-Qaeda that included Arab nations like Saudi Arabia and Syria. Fearing that the U.S. might make diplomatic concessions to Arab states at Israel’s expense, Sharon publicly stated that Israel would not “pay the price” to stabilize the region for Washington’s coalition. [8, 9, 10, 11]
Impact on the Palestinian Authority
PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat publicly deplored the 9/11 attacks and was filmed donating blood to American victims. However, scattered television broadcasts showing small groups of Palestinians celebrating the attacks in East Jerusalem and Nablus damaged global sympathy. Arafat quickly recognized that the Western perception of political violence had fundamentally changed, leading him to heavily suppress those celebrations and order armed groups to temporarily halt operations to avoid having the Palestinian movement branded as synonymous with Al-Qaeda. [2, 8]
[1] en.wikipedia.org
[2] npr.org
[3] facebook.com
[4] ebsco.com
[5] britannica.com
[6] gov.il
[7] en.wikipedia.org
[8] nytimes.com
[9] washingtoninstitute.org
[10] aljazeera.com
[11] theguardian.com
Google Search google.com/search?q=Israel+a…
The Prime Minister: Ariel Sharon of the right-wing Likud party took office in March 2001, replacing Ehud Barak after the collapse of the 2000 Camp David peace summit. [1, 4, 5, 6]
The Second Intifada: By September 2001, the Palestinian uprising had been raging for a year. Israel was experiencing severe security challenges, with frequent attacks on civilians in cities like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. [2, 3]
Immediate Reaction to 9/11
Official Solidarity: Prime Minister Sharon immediately condemned the attacks, declared a national day of mourning, and offered to send specialized Israeli search-and-rescue teams to New York City. [7]
Public Outpouring: On September 12, thousands of Israelis lined up to donate blood for American victims. Years later, Israel built the 9/11 Living Memorial Plaza in Jerusalem, which remains the only memorial outside the United States to list the names of all 2,977 victims. [3, 7]
Strategic Security Actions: Fearing a broader global conflict or coordinated attacks, Israel immediately increased military alerts, closed its land borders, and temporarily grounded civilian airspace. [8]
Geopolitical Shifts and Diplomatic Tension
Framing Terrorism: Figures like Sharon and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that the attacks proved the U.S. and Israel shared a “bond of spilled blood” and faced a common extremist enemy. Over the long term, 9/11 shifted American foreign policy toward a global “War on Terror,” which ultimately aligned U.S. counterterrorism strategies closely with Israeli military tactics.
Early Diplomatic Friction: In the immediate weeks following 9/11, temporary friction arose between Washington and Jerusalem. President George W. Bush’s administration sought to build a broad international coalition against Al-Qaeda that included Arab nations like Saudi Arabia and Syria. Fearing that the U.S. might make diplomatic concessions to Arab states at Israel’s expense, Sharon publicly stated that Israel would not “pay the price” to stabilize the region for Washington’s coalition. [8, 9, 10, 11]
Impact on the Palestinian Authority
PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat publicly deplored the 9/11 attacks and was filmed donating blood to American victims. However, scattered television broadcasts showing small groups of Palestinians celebrating the attacks in East Jerusalem and Nablus damaged global sympathy. Arafat quickly recognized that the Western perception of political violence had fundamentally changed, leading him to heavily suppress those celebrations and order armed groups to temporarily halt operations to avoid having the Palestinian movement branded as synonymous with Al-Qaeda. [2, 8]
[1] en.wikipedia.org
[2] npr.org
[3] facebook.com
[4] ebsco.com
[5] britannica.com
[6] gov.il
[7] en.wikipedia.org
[8] nytimes.com
[9] washingtoninstitute.org
[10] aljazeera.com
[11] theguardian.com
– Google Search google.com/search?q=Israel+a…