Israel played the holocaust card for passport

I used to think that Israel's playing of the holocaust card was all about emotion but there's money to be had as Norman Finkelstein points out in the Holocaust Industry and now it turns out there are passports to be had. While the world's attention has been diverted by the flotilla and the World Cup, the case of the murder of Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai has rumbled on with one country after another expelling this or that Israeli diplomat/Mossad agent.

Well in Germany events have taken a twist given the way in which the German authorities believe the Israelis acquired a German passport. Here's Der Spiegel:

The day the Mossad operation on German soil began was a clear, sunny Sunday in late March 2009. Alexander Verin, who holds an Israeli passport, had an appointment with an attorney in Cologne to discuss naturalization. Verin was accompanied by a man named Michael Bodenheimer, who claimed that he was an Israeli of German descent. Bodenheimer wanted to apply for a German passport, but Verin, who had made the appointment, was doing most of the talking.

The two men explained that Bodenheimer's father Hans had emigrated to Israel to escape Nazi persecution. As proof, the Israelis showed the attorney what they claimed was the parents' marriage certificate, as well as a passport. In such cases, which number around 3,000 a year, Article 116 of Germany's constitution provides for a relatively straightforward naturalization procedure.
The two Israelis were staying in a Cologne hotel. Bodenheimer would later rent an apartment on a run-down street in Cologne's Eigelstein neighborhood, in a nondescript, sand-colored apartment building with a pizza takeout restaurant on the ground floor, near the railroad station. It was the perfect, cheap apartment for someone who didn't want to be noticed.

On June 16, 2009, the attorney submitted the naturalization application to a registry office in Cologne. A German passport was issued in the name of Michael Bodenheimer two days later. It looked like a routine procedure.

But it was everything but routine when the passport was used in January in connection with the murder of Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai.

I remember thinking at the time of the killing of al-Mabhouh that the Israelis were happy to implicate so many of their allies in the killing and nothing would come of it. In fact, I thought that the elements of the job that looked botched were as deliberate as the killing itself but now Poland has made an arrest that could be deeply embarrassing for Israel:

on June 4, 2010, Polish police arrested a man at Warsaw airport who German investigators believed was Alexander Verin. He now goes by the name Uri Brodsky, at least according to the passport he was carrying. German federal prosecutors had issued an arrest warrant for the man, who they believe is an agent, on the basis of suspected involvement in intelligence activities on German soil and helping to obtain documents illegally. It is possible that his real name is neither Verin nor Brodsky.

What is clear, however, is that the arrest has triggered a crisis in Israel that has sparked questions within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet, cast a shadow on German-Israeli relations and could in fact turn into a serious political test of the relationship between the two countries. It is the first arrest worldwide that is directly related to the Dubai murder. German officials in Berlin are outraged that the Mossad apparently obtained a genuine German passport under false pretenses that involved -- of all things -- a fake story of Nazi persecution.

If the Polish government extradites the Israeli to Germany, he could face up to five years in prison. It would deal a major blow to German-Israeli relations if a German court, under the eyes of the world's media, sent a Jewish agent to prison because he worked for the Mossad.

And now there will all sorts of wrangling with senior Israeli politicians going on record to say how their man must be sprung from Polish or German authorities but:

German law forbids foreign intelligence services from conducting unauthorized operations on German soil, and it does not provide an exception for the Mossad. The Israelis did not request German permission to conduct the operation in question, because the Germans would never have permitted the use of a passport to facilitate a murder. And once a case has been opened in a constitutional democracy like Germany, the wheels of justice start turning.

I don't think the sheer arrogance of Israel's operations in the international arena can be divorced from their zionist ideology but they seem to be getting more accident prone lately and their allies are losing patience with them.