By Mohammad Mazhari
TEHRAN - An anti-racist activist from Scotland says Israel and most Persian Gulf Arab states have clandestine relations.
“Naturally most of these relations between Israel and the (Persian) Gulf monarchies take place in the dark and so it’s difficult to gauge their extent,” Mick Napier tells the Tehran Times.
“We know however that the UAE hired an Israeli American mercenary company, Spear Operations, to carry out a program of killing political figures, members of the Al Islah Party in Yemen who were opposed to the UAE military presence in the country,” adds Napier.
Nobody doubts that Persian Gulf Arab countries are competing to earn modern technologies of espionage. It is safe to say that they may have gained access to Israel’s technological skills, including Pegasus, to spy on their foes and dissidents.
“NSO's Pegasus spyware has been shown to have infected the phones of nine activists in Bahrain”
“Knowing that Israel and the UAE cooperated on an assassination program against political figures in Yemen we can safely conclude that their collaboration on matters of repression and illegal surveillance goes much further,” the Scottish activist notes.
Napier says, “Just on the last few days, NSO's Pegasus spyware has been shown to have infected the phones of nine activists in Bahrain opposed to the Royal dictatorship.”
“There is no doubt that Israel will continue not only to repress and kill Palestinians but also to profit worldwide from the sale of the skills and technology they have developed to do so,” he argues.
Actually, spyware is used to collect information about journalists and rights activists, especially in Arab monarchies that have normalized their ties with Israel.
“Internationally, Israel has monetized its mass killings and repression of Palestinians by selling surveillance products through companies such as NSO whose Pegasus software is the means of repression of choice for dictatorships worldwide,” the activist says.
He adds, “It’s natural that they should learn from the masters.”
Some political commentators keep saying that most of the countries that bought the Pegasus program are countries ruled by authoritarians in which freedom is heavily suppressed.
Historical facts show how Israel has spied on its friends as much as it did on its foes, but Pegasus was a new tool for Israel’s widespread spying activities.
As a powerful hacking tool, Pegasus has been sold to governments around the world by the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group.
It has been used to mainly spy on journalists, human rights activists, and political leaders by some Arab monarchies that have black records in their human rights records.
According to Haaretz, Rafi Eitan, the head of Israel’s main spy agency Mossad, Israel was not only right to spy on allies but that it has always done so systematically.
“Industrial espionage including theft was necessary for Israel to produce its secret nuclear weapons arsenal in the face of U.S. opposition at the time,” Napier points out.
Apparently, the tradition of industrial espionage and theft of technology from the U.S. has been continuing up until the present day.
“Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard stole industrial quantities of sensitive documents on behalf of Israel, caught and served 30 years in American prisons before being released in 2015 and allowed to immigrate to Israel last year,” he says.
“Now Israel is by no means alone in conducting industrial and economic espionage against the U.S., and is not even the only U.S. ally to do so,” Napier concludes.
“But it is the only country to spy on the U.S. systematically while receiving vast amounts of aid from the same country it targets.”
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