ADEVARUL ADEVARAT

[cerbu]

The Cold War’s Strangest Bedfellows

A review of The Ransom of the Jews: The Story of The Extraordinary Secret Bargain Between Romania and Israel
By Radu Ioanid, Ivan R. Dee, 254 pages, $26.

By Gal Beckerman

Surely the Cold War never produced stranger bedfellows than Shaike Dan and General Gheorghe Marcu. Dan, a Jew from Bessarabia, parachuted into Romania at the close of World War II to help smuggle Jews into Palestine, eventually becoming an adviser to Israeli prime ministers and a critical Secret Service operative in Eastern Europe. Marcu was a life-long Romanian Communist and a high-ranking member in the Securitate, Romania’s much-feared secret service. Throughout the 1970s, these two men met monthly at Romanian embassies in Austria and Switzerland — not dressed in trench coats on foggy evenings, but situated in offices, chatting with the familiar banter of old business partners. Dan always carried a suitcase (Samsonite was the preferred brand) filled with tens of thousands of dollars. Marcu came with a list of names.

Romania was selling its Jews, and Israel was buying.

As Radu Ioanid describes it in his new book, “The Ransom of the Jews,” Dan and Marcu were at the fulcrum of a bizarre arrangement that lasted through most of the Cold War, wherein Israel propped up Romania’s loopy totalitarian regime with a steady stream of needed cash in exchange for exit visas (about $3,000 a head) to secure the emigration of its Jewish population. A highly secretive operation run entirely between the countries’ two intelligence agencies, it existed on a subterranean track beneath the normal diplomatic niceties of state visits and economic cooperation.

Slightly little more than 350,000 Jews lived in Romania at the close of World War II — the second-largest surviving Jewish population in Europe after the 3 million Jews inhabiting the Soviet Union. In the immediate postwar period, a few thousand escaped to Palestine on illegal boats arranged by Dan. But by the end of the 1940s, the Romanian Communists started seeing dollar signs when they thought about their Jews. These were valuable hostages now that a Jewish state might be willing to pay a price for their emigration. And, indeed, by the end of the 1940s, Israel was supplying the ailing Romanian oil industry with American drills and pipes in exchange for 100,000 exit visas.

This type of bartering was also the preferred method of Henry Jacober, a Jewish businessman based in London who, in the 1950s and early 1960s, acted as a middleman between Romanian Jews’ relatives — who had the money to pay for exit visas — and Marcu, who would take down their names and make sure they got out. Instead of using cash, the Romanians and Jacober preferred a proxy and settled on livestock. Cows and pigs. Soon Shaike Dan learned of these dealings and took over the operation (after getting a thumbs-up from Ben-Gurion). By 1965, the Jewish state, working through Jacober (who took his own cut), was funding many projects inside of Romania — chicken farms, turkey farms and pig farms, turning out tens of thousands of animals every year, and even a factory making Kellogg’s Corn Flakes — all in exchange for Jewish families. The export of these products — including, I should add, bacon and pork — produced $8 to $10 million annually for Romania, much needed money for its cash-starved economy.

In the years after Nicolae Ceausescu came to power in 1965, he stopped the trade in deference to his defeated Arab allies and the post-Six Day War anti-Israel backlash (though, unlike the leaders of every other Warsaw pact country, he did not cut diplomatic ties with Israel or sign on to the United Nations resolution equaling Zionism with racism). By 1969, though, Ceausescu decided to restart the trade in Jews. He desired economic independence from a Moscow determined to turn Romania into a simple backwater supplier of raw material. For this he needed a steady flow of outside cash and a good relationship with the West, as an alternative trading partner. Israel was key on both these fronts. But he ordered the Romanian intelligence agency to, as Ioanid writes, “shift gears from the ‘ancient age of barter’ to ‘modern foreign trade.’ He wanted ‘cold dollars.’”

Dan and Marcu then drew up what amounted to an unsigned gentleman’s agreement that detailed the terms of the trade (which was renewed in 1972 and then every five years thereafter until Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were executed by a firing squad on Christmas Day 1989). Bucharest would receive a certain amount of cash per head depending on the age, education, profession, employment and family status of each prospective émigré. Ceausescu didn’t want a mass exodus; the Jews were too valuable a commodity. So he would let them out at a trickle, about 1,500 every year. Between 1968 and 1989, according to Ioanid’s rough calculation, “Ceausescu sold 40,577 Jews to Israel for $112,498,800, at a price of $2,500 and later at $3,300 per head.” And the money wasn’t the only way the Jewish state helped Romania. Israel secured loans for Ceausescu and paid off the interest itself. Military equipment was procured for the Romanian army, including a Centurion tank. Ariel Sharon, while defense minister in 1982, made a secret visit to Romania with experts from the Israeli military and aircraft industries in order to offer technological cooperation.

Ioanid doesn’t shy away from telling us who Ceausescu really was — a ruthless dictator, in fact a “comrade,” by his own estimation, with the likes of Qaddafi and Arafat, a crusher of his own people, who maintained a strange neo-Stalinist cult-of-personality ideology he tried to implement under the nearly unpronounceable name Ceausism. There were deep moral consequences to this relationship. Not only was Israel shaking hands with this devil, but it also was giving him coal to keep his fires burning. Was the price of propping up a totalitarian regime really worth it? Ioanid doesn’t really tackle this question, but it is one that cuts to the heart of Israel’s awkward position during the Cold War.

For Americans, and especially the cold warriors among them, moral divisions during those years were fairly clear. Communist regimes banished poets to frozen wastelands, censored books and viewed their citizens as little more than raw material. One didn’t negotiate with these dictators or seriously engage their ideologies. A defender of human rights pointed out their hypocrisies, shamed them into change and championed their dissidents.

But Israel couldn’t afford to have such principled thoughts. Many Jews still lived beyond the Iron Curtain. And Israel was constantly vacillating between the best tactics for getting them out. What was more effective, quiet diplomacy or encouraging a loud, vociferous public outcry? In 1972, when the Soviet Union tried to implement a diploma tax that, like the Romanian one, would demand an exorbitant price for the head of every departing Jew, Israel worked behind the scenes to get a legislative ball rolling in the American Congress that led to the Jackson-Vanik amendment — a powerful piece of moral legislation that demanded communist countries improve emigration conditions in order to attain Most Favored Nation trading status with the United States. This was a slap in the face to the Soviets, and quite a contrary strategy to the one the Israelis were engaged in clandestinely with the Romanians.

So what made Romania a country worth dealing with at this lower frequency, with suitcases bulging with dollars, and the Soviet Union approachable only with a hammer or a bat? The smaller size of Romania’s Jewish population, perhaps, made it easier to envision emigration. But more likely it had to do with the nature of the two regimes. Borderlands were few in the landscape of the Cold War (most were peopled with guerilla armies shooting guns at each other). But Romania was a unique case of a country within the orbit of the Soviet Union, run by a cruel Communist dictator, but not completely closed. Ioanid does a good job explaining this context. Ceausescu needed Israel much more than Israel needed him (the Romanian dictator, apparently, even had a role in leading the way to the Israel-Egypt peace talks). The money he was receiving was too precious. And the points he earned in the West by allowing Jews to leave were too important to him. He also seems to have been a less ideologically committed Communist than the Russians. The Soviets couldn’t bear the thought of Jews leaving, because it undermined the fiction of the Soviet Union as a workers’ paradise that no one in their right mind would abandon. Ceausescu was more concerned with achieving a racially pure Romania, and the slow disappearance of its Jewish population only helped him reach that goal.

Can quiet diplomacy be justified, even if it helped prolong this evil? Dan and Marcu’s relations, although morally dubious, did open up opportunities, allowing many Jews to leave a stultifying environment. Ioanid doesn’t want to make an objective judgment about whether or not the sum total of this arrangement was an ultimate good, but one senses from his narrative that, in this case, redemption was worth the price.

Gal Beckerman is a freelance writer currently composing a history of the movement to free Jews from the Soviet Union, to be published by Houghton Mifflin.
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shalom

[mura]

din seria "Rudele sunt de doua feluri, rude bune si rudele sotiei":

Soacra isi invita ginerele la masa. Ginerele foarte suspicios, accepta invitatia.
Pe masa, diferite salate, preparate din carne de pui, porc,cartofi vreo 3 feluri, deserturi, bere rece, vin, ...
La un moment dat, soacra iese la bucatarie.
Ginerele apuca o bucatica de carne si i-o da pisicii.
Asta dupa 2, 3 crampe cade inerta sub masa.
Nervos tare, apuca o cratita goala si cand intra soacra ii trage una de o lasa lata pe jos.
La care pisica de sub masa:
- YEESSSSSSS!!!!!!
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http://azuramura.wordpress.com/

[mura]

DATING RITUALS (cultural awareness is good)

WHITE WOMEN

First date: You get to kiss her goodnight. Second date: You get to grope all over and make out. Third date: You get to have sex, but only in the missionary position.


IRISH WOMEN

First Date: You both get blind drunk and have sex. Second Date: You both get blind drunk and have sex. 20th Anniversary: You both get blind drunk and have sex.




ITALIAN WOMEN

First Date: You take her to a play and an expensive restaurant. Second Date: You meet her parents and her Mom makes spaghetti and meatballs. Third Date: You have sex, she wants to marry you and insists on a 3-carat ring. 5th Anniversary: You already have 5 kids together and hate the thought of having sex. 6th Anniversary: You find yourself a girlfriend.

JEWISH WOMEN


First Date: You get dynamite head.Second Date: You get more great head. Third Date: You tell her you'll marry her and never get head again.



CHINESE WOMEN

First date: You get to buy her an expensive dinner, but nothing happens. Second date: You buy her an even more expensive dinner. Nothing happens again. Third date: You don't even get to the third date and you already realized nothing is going to happen.


INDIAN WOMEN

First date: Meet her parents. Second date: Set the date of the wedding. Third date: Wedding night.


BLACK WOMEN

First Date: You get to buy her a real expensive dinner. Second Date: You get to buy her and her girlfriends a real expensive dinner. Third Date: You get to pay her rent. Tenth Date: She's pregnant by someone other than you.



MEXICAN WOMEN

First Date: You buy her an expensive dinner, get drunk on Tequila, and have sex in the back of her car. Second Date: She's pregnant. Third Date: She moves in. One week later ~ her mother, father, his girlfriend, her two sisters, her brother, all of their kids, her grandma, her father's girlfriend's mother, her two cousins, her sister's boyfriend and his three kids move in and you live on rice and beans for the rest of your life in your home that used to be nice, but now looks like a home along the Rio Grande.



The POINT? DON'T YOU JUST LOVE IRISH WOMEN?
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http://azuramura.wordpress.com/

[mura]

The kiss of deaf -
Chinese man ruptures girlfriend's eardrum

BEIJING (Reuters) - A young woman in southern China has partially lost her hearing after her boyfriend ruptured her eardrum during an excessively passionate kiss, local media reported Monday.
The 20-something girl from Zhuhai, in southern Guangdong province, went to hospital completely deaf in her left ear, the China Daily said, citing a report in a local newspaper.

"The kiss reduced pressure in the mouth, pulled the eardrum out and caused the breakdown of the ear," the paper quoted a doctor surnamed Li from the hospital as saying.

The woman's hearing would likely return to normal after about two months, Li said.

"While kissing is normally very safe, doctors advise people to proceed with caution," the paper said.

(Reporting by Ian Ransom; Editing by Nick Macfie)

http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSTRE4B75EO20081208?
feedType=RSS&feedName=oddlyEnoughNews&rpc=69
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http://azuramura.wordpress.com/

[cerbu]

OARE STI DESPRE CE ESTE ARTICOLUL DE MAI SUS ?????
_________________
shalom

[desan]

http://www.evz.ro/articole/detalii-articol/832668/Ultimul-tun-al-Internelor/
ceva proaspat pt colectia ta cerbule!!!!! fi atent in special la comentarii de la sfarsitul articolului..

[cerbu]

de data asta, este clar ignoranta celor care comenteaza. lista companiilor israeliene, este o lista de excelenta in materie de securitate de tot felul.
iai (israel air industry), odata numita "bedek", este o companie care vinde sisteme in toata lumea. ei au vandut armatei canadiene avioane fara pilot, sa fie intrebuintate in afganistan, si nimeni nu a facut remarci de asa natura, ca la romani. canadieni inteleg ca cumperi cei mai bun pe piata, si in cazul asta produsele israeliene sant cele mai bune.
de remarcat ca si bombardier, companie canadiana fabrica avioane fara pilot, dar nu au aparate care pot ataca dusmanul, sau care stau in aer 10 ore.
cat despre birocratia romana, sistemul lor de a da contracte, etc, o sa remarc ca canada a platit pe sub masa un milion de dollari americani, ca ulei de uns ,pentru a fi capabila sa vinda indiei o centrala atomica. intr-o comisie parlamentara canadiana, sa explicat ca in anumite tari, asta este singura forma posibila de a vinde, chiar daca practica este ilegala dupa legea canadiana.si astazi, asta este realitatea romaneasca.
dar cu toate ca sistemul roman este corumput, ei nu au ales prost, alegant ce este mai bun si inaitat in lume in acest domeniu.
_________________
shalom

[brudi]

[brudi]

[missU]

cerbule, nu te pune cu americanii !
pe vremea cand matale te plimbai in picioare pe sub pat
ei deja inventasera sistemul drone, avion de recunoastere,
de mare inaltime ,invizibil la radar si fara pilot...
prima data a fost folosit in 1991,
in irak, cand au putut vedea toate miscarile diviziilor de tancuri irakiene.
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prefer sa mi se faca rau decat sa-mi para rau

[mela]

[mela]

[desan]

niciodata nu am gasit un articol atat de amanuntit si atat de cercetat subiectul!!! au facut pana si harta cu reteaua firmelor colegate!!! ma intreb..daca ar fi o alta firma si nu israeliana , daca ar fi atat de harnici jurnalistii

[cactus]

[desan]

hai ma cactuse!!! uite ce frumushel!!! ciucalata de craciun