Rafi Eitan lent support to the AfD’s battle against Muslim migrants in Europe, but later walked back his support.

By: AP and World Israel News Staff

The legendary former Mossad agent who led the operation to capture Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann has expressed surprising support for the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

The 91-year-old Rafi Eitan said in a video statement on his Facebook page Saturday that Israel appreciates the party’s “attitude toward Judaism” and looks for them to also “become an alternative to Europe.”

The party, AfD, won 12.6 percent of the vote in Germany’s September election to win seats in parliament for the first time and become the country’s third-biggest party.

Its leaders have expressed anti-Semitic statements and played down the crimes of the Nazi regime.

AfD co-leaders Alexander Gauland recently said that Germans could be “proud” of their soldiers who fought in World War II

Eitan, a former Israeli Cabinet minister, appeared to endorse the party’s hard-line toward Muslim immigrants.

Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Jeremy Issacharoff, condemned Eitan’s statement as “sad and shameful.”

“It is hard to believe how the person who captured Eichmann … is able to praise German right-wingers who so admire the Nazi past and wish on us that they become the alternative of Europe! Sad and shameful,” he said in a tweet.

In an interview with IDF Radio on Sunday, Eitan explained that migrants from Muslim countries brought with them a new form of anti-Semitism to Europe.

“We sat and asked who can deal with this? We came to the conclusion that it was specifically the right wing parties in Europe that could,” he said.

Eitan’s wife interrupted the interview and said that “he [Eitan] has made a mistake this time, leave him alone.”

However, in a later interview with Maariv radio, Eitan said he felt he had made a mistake. “This is a certain concept that I thought was correct, but in light of the reactions I’m backing off it,” he said. “Thank you, I don’t want to deal with it.”

The post Former Mossad agent lauds German nationalists, later backtracks appeared first on World Israel News.

For the first time since Eichmann was captured and flown from Buenos Aires to Tel Aviv on El Al, Israel’s national carrier will offer flights between the two cities.

A final agreement was signed Friday between Argentinian carrier Aerolineas Argentinas and Israel’s El Al to begin flights between the two countries, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported.

“We celebrate the historic event, which means that more Argentineans can travel to visit Israel and also we are happy to see the Argentinean flag in the Israeli sky soon,” Ariel Cohen Sabban, head of Argentina’s Jewish political umbrella, stated in an interview with JTA.

The agreement, the Argentinian Foreign Ministry said on its web page, “was made possible by the excellent relations that exist between aeronautical authorities, in addition to the historical bonds between both countries. It will be supplemented by the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding which will enable the immediate operation of scheduled flights by the designated airlines,” JTA said.

In May 1960, notorious Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was captured by the Mossad and taken on an El Al plane to Israel to stand trial. It was the only time that Israel implemented the death penalty.

Relations between Argentina and the Jewish state have been rocky over the decades. As explained by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA), “the two deadliest terror attacks in Argentinian history were targeted directly against the Israeli/Jewish communities. The first attack was a March 1992 suicide bombing of the Israeli Embassy building in Buenos Aires. Two years later, in July 1994, another suicide bomb attack hit Buenos Aires’ Jewish community headquarters.”

“The previous presidential administration of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007-2015) supported relations with Iran including direct talks and negotiations with terrorists who masterminded the two most lethal acts of terrorism in the history of Argentina,” JCPA adds. “These conspicuous negotiations ultimately led to the signing of the 2013 Memorandum of Understanding between Argentina and the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Netanyahu to Meet President Macri in Buenos Aires

With the electoral victory of Argentinian President Mauricio Macri in 2015, relations with Israel and the Jewish community have been improving.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to visit Mexico and Argentina next month before continuing on to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly.

The visit to Argentina would be the first by a sitting Israeli prime minister to that country, and, if confirmed, the Israeli leader may get there via the first flight from Tel Aviv to Buenos Aires on an Israeli or Argentinian national airline, as per the agreement.

By: World Israel News Staff

The post 57 years after bringing Eichmann to Israel, EL AL to begin flights to Argentina appeared first on World Israel News.

Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage has opened a unique exhibit recreating the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem. 

Half a century after Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was convicted and hanged in Israel for engineering the deaths of millions of Jews, the bulletproof glass booth where he sat facing justice has come to New York for a multimedia, ‘you-are-there’ recreation of the courtroom.

It’s part of an exhibit at Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage that opens Sunday, created by a former agent of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service that captured Eichmann a decade after he fled to Argentina.

Surrounding Eichmann’s actual booth are screens with original video footage — seven minutes culled from 350 courtroom hours — that makes visitors feel like they’re spectators at the 1961 proceedings. They hear the voices of survivors who testified against the SS lieutenant-colonel, as well as the prosecutor and the defense attorney.

The balding, 55-year-old German who once planned the routes of cattle-car trains that brought Jews to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and other camps sits stone-faced in footage rolling on a screen right behind the original booth. To the right is another screen beaming the traumatic, tear-drenched testimonies, with one man collapsing to the floor in exhaustion after he speaks.

“Here with me stand 6 million prosecutors,” chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner intones in Hebrew, with a subtitled English translation. “Their blood cries to heaven, but their voices cannot be heard.”

Operation Finale

The trial was held in a Jerusalem theater converted into a courtroom — an appropriate setting for the last act of what unfolds like a sensational cloak-and-dagger story, starring the organizer of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

The details drew Avner Avraham, who left the Mossad two years ago to collect materials for the exhibit, which takes its title “Operation Finale” from the code name of the undercover Eichmann mission led by Israel’s still-budding intelligence force in the 1950s. Its agents fanned out across Europe and Argentina, assembling the pieces of a puzzle that ended with Eichmann’s hanging.

Avraham said the proof they had the right man came down to his left ear.

Eichmann was abducted by the Mossad in 1960 as he got off a bus while heading home from work at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Buenos Aires. They confirmed it was him by comparing his ear to a photo of Eichmann in a pre-World War II German army file.

In 1957, Avraham said, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion “ordered the Mossad: ‘I want you to bring one big imported Nazi for one big, huge trial — a live Nazi.'”

Eichmann was drugged for the trip to the airport “because he could start screaming, saying, ‘Hey, they take me to Israel. I’m an Argentinian citizen!'” the former Mossad agent said. “I mean, today, you cannot get to the plane with a small bottle of perfume, so you want to bring a Nazi?”

Once in Israel, Avraham said, authorities had Eichmann under constant medical watch and made sure he was well fed so he could stay healthy for the trial.

Characters who populate the 4,000-square-foot exhibit include cardboard figures of the 11 key Mossad agents, including one woman, who closed in on Eichmann after tracking him for months. He was taken to Israel aboard an El Al plane, camouflaged as a cabin attendant in the airline uniform.

By: AP

The post New York museum recreates scene of famous Nazi war criminal’s trial appeared first on World Israel News.