A young mother of seven, living in poverty, is planning to sue the GSS (Shabak) for having destroyed nearly two decades of her life.
The woman agrees to reveal only her first initial - H - in order to protect her children. She accuses her husband of deceiving her and marrying her - at the behest of the Shabak - only so that she, and the family they would raise, would provide a cover for his GSS work in the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria. It should be noted that there was great enmity and mutual suspicion between the Jewish public in Yesha and the GSS at the time (see below).
H told Arutz-7 her story:
"We were married in 1987. He was a newly observant Jew, someone who studied and said he wanted to build a religious Jewish home in Yesha, and everything appeared to be fine. I remember that shortly before the wedding, he asked me out of the blue if I would marry a GSS agent, and I of course told him no; for us, that was something that could not even be mentioned - as the GSS [Jewish Section] was known to be working against Jews in the settlements, maligning them and always ready to take legal action against them. I quickly forgot about [this question].
"But for the next three years, there were many strange events in the house. I hardly saw him; he had all sorts of excuses, such as that he had to study in order to grow religiously, and that he had to work - but in fact we had very little money, and our children began to be born, and he wasn't around, and people began to raise suspicions. My father asked that if he works so hard, how is it that we have no money? I was busy with diapers and babies, but despite this I began to raise questions myself. When I finally confronted him with the suspicions I had, he brought me to a very surprising meeting in a hotel, where I was informed for the first time - by his GSS handlers themselves - that I was married to a GSS agent!
"They told me that he was not being unfaithful to me, nor was he an informer or an agent-provocateur, but was rather helping our own public by making sure that extremists would not do bad things. They told me that he was a good person who was doing this merely because of his love for Israel, and that he receives only small sums, if anything. I tried not to get too deeply involved in the matter, because for me it was simply a major blow. For three years, my whole life was a deception. I grew up in a religious-Zionist home, and suddenly, after three years and with three babies, I find that I'm married to someone who - OK, he doesn't have horns or a tail, but someone who stands against everything that I believe in."
Yesha leader Noam Arnon of Hevron verbalized the feeling of distrust after Yesha-resident Avishai Raviv was found to be an agent-provocateur for the GSS and whose actions may have indirectly led to Yitzchak Rabin's assassination:
"This affair, in which the government sends a public agent to create provocations and to endanger lives of Jews and to cause an entire camp to become identified with such actions, is one of the most severe in the history of the State... Those responsible for agent Raviv must be tried and held accountable... [A while ago, GSS-head] Carmi Gillon blackened the name of the religious camp and warned how dangerous it was, etc. - and then he goes and uses his public powers to send an agent to carry out exactly those actions he warned against. He used this method to frame the Kahalani brothers, when a GSS agent spurred them on, gave them weapons that didn't work, and then was able to catch them supposedly 'red-handed.'"
Back to H: She said that the revelation of his GSS work led their marriage along a very rocky path. The Shabak tried to help maintain family tranquility - "very humanely," she says with biting sarcasm - and the couple was provided with the counseling services of an IDF psychologist.
The situation deteriorated after she asked him to leave the Shabak, when he said he would not do so unless she agreed to move with him from their comfortable home in a large Yesha town to a small hilltop community. This, she says, was merely so that he could continue his work as a Shabak agent from a new location. "But I fell for it; I was in no position to do anything else. Where would I go, with three babies?"
"When you look back," H was asked, "do you feel that your wedding itself was part of his cover story, a way of his getting into the Yesha towns and life?" Her response:
"I can't prove it with documents, but I am 100% sure that yes. I had a girlfriend at the time whom I now know he would have married just as well; it didn't matter to him, as long as he had the right person at the right time who belonged to the right group, so that this could be his ticket to entering this public... This is total deception on his part and on the part of the GSS. There were many hints and suspicions over the years, but I was in no position to carefully analyze them."
"To a certain extent, I cannot say all that I know, because I fear for my safety and my children's safety. It's not that I have received threats, but... you should know that police files were opened against him for violence, [including] for violence within the family - and they were automatically closed. It's not that I knew all this at the time; later I found this all out. At the time, I tried not to know and not to feel. Nothing would stick against him, just like with Avishai Raviv..."
In the course of the 1990's, H says, her husband again lied to her, saying that he had quit the GSS - when in fact he not only continued working for the organization, but also received a high salary, which he did not pass on to his family. "This is the most difficult part," she says. "When I began the divorce proceedings in 1999, I was living with our seven children in very difficult economic conditions, and I found that he had been employed by the GSS - and received hundreds of thousands of shekels. I was about to faint, but I still managed to ask one simple question: How could a person do this to his children? How could he let them live the way we were living and not support them?"
"Jews believe that there are three partners in the creation of every person: the parents and G-d. In the case of our marriage, there were three partners - my husband, myself, and the Shabak. They used me and deceived me, and enlisted me in the 'fight for the security of the State of Israel' - without my knowledge, and at the expense of my marriage and my children."
The divorce was finalized earlier this year, but, H says, her ex-husband has not paid his share of child support. Represented by Atty. Naftali Wurtzberger, she plans to sue the Shabak - but is not yet sure for how much. "It is very hard to measure the precise economic value of all these lost years of deception and poverty," her lawyer says. In the meantime, she continues to live with her seven children in destitution, in a broken-down caravan [mobile home without wheels] in a moshav [cooperative community] in the Kiryat Gat area. "Most of the children have their own issues and problems," says someone close to the case, "as they never quite had a normal home life." H can support them only with various house-cleaning jobs, though she is now actively pursuing the idea of becoming a van driver.
Asked why she is publicizing her story, the above source said, "For one thing, this is one of the ways in which the GSS harasses the Jewish public in Yesha. Do the ends of 'maintaining national security' justify cynically taking and ruining a young girl's life? This cruelty must be stopped."
H was asked by a television interviewer if she doesn't think that her husband's GSS work was justified in that it could have prevented Baruch Goldstein from doing what he did. [Goldstein was found by a public commission to have killed 29 Arabs in the Machpelah Cave in Hevron ten years ago, the day after an Arab proclamation had been spread throughout Hevron that a major attack against the Jews was being planned for "one or two days from now," and shortly after then-Maj.-Gen. Sha'ul Mofaz called an urgent meeting with Jewish leaders to inform them of the suspicions.] The irony of the question, noted a source close to the case, is that H's husband in fact knew Goldstein - and yet did not prevent the killings.
"The Shabak's mission is to maintain national security in the face of threats by our enemies," said a leading rabbi familiar with the case, "and not to take action against citizens. That is the job of the police. But given that the Shabak does the police's work, this doesn't justify ruining a woman's life!"
The woman agrees to reveal only her first initial - H - in order to protect her children. She accuses her husband of deceiving her and marrying her - at the behest of the Shabak - only so that she, and the family they would raise, would provide a cover for his GSS work in the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria. It should be noted that there was great enmity and mutual suspicion between the Jewish public in Yesha and the GSS at the time (see below).
H told Arutz-7 her story:
"We were married in 1987. He was a newly observant Jew, someone who studied and said he wanted to build a religious Jewish home in Yesha, and everything appeared to be fine. I remember that shortly before the wedding, he asked me out of the blue if I would marry a GSS agent, and I of course told him no; for us, that was something that could not even be mentioned - as the GSS [Jewish Section] was known to be working against Jews in the settlements, maligning them and always ready to take legal action against them. I quickly forgot about [this question].
"But for the next three years, there were many strange events in the house. I hardly saw him; he had all sorts of excuses, such as that he had to study in order to grow religiously, and that he had to work - but in fact we had very little money, and our children began to be born, and he wasn't around, and people began to raise suspicions. My father asked that if he works so hard, how is it that we have no money? I was busy with diapers and babies, but despite this I began to raise questions myself. When I finally confronted him with the suspicions I had, he brought me to a very surprising meeting in a hotel, where I was informed for the first time - by his GSS handlers themselves - that I was married to a GSS agent!
"They told me that he was not being unfaithful to me, nor was he an informer or an agent-provocateur, but was rather helping our own public by making sure that extremists would not do bad things. They told me that he was a good person who was doing this merely because of his love for Israel, and that he receives only small sums, if anything. I tried not to get too deeply involved in the matter, because for me it was simply a major blow. For three years, my whole life was a deception. I grew up in a religious-Zionist home, and suddenly, after three years and with three babies, I find that I'm married to someone who - OK, he doesn't have horns or a tail, but someone who stands against everything that I believe in."
Yesha leader Noam Arnon of Hevron verbalized the feeling of distrust after Yesha-resident Avishai Raviv was found to be an agent-provocateur for the GSS and whose actions may have indirectly led to Yitzchak Rabin's assassination:
"This affair, in which the government sends a public agent to create provocations and to endanger lives of Jews and to cause an entire camp to become identified with such actions, is one of the most severe in the history of the State... Those responsible for agent Raviv must be tried and held accountable... [A while ago, GSS-head] Carmi Gillon blackened the name of the religious camp and warned how dangerous it was, etc. - and then he goes and uses his public powers to send an agent to carry out exactly those actions he warned against. He used this method to frame the Kahalani brothers, when a GSS agent spurred them on, gave them weapons that didn't work, and then was able to catch them supposedly 'red-handed.'"
Back to H: She said that the revelation of his GSS work led their marriage along a very rocky path. The Shabak tried to help maintain family tranquility - "very humanely," she says with biting sarcasm - and the couple was provided with the counseling services of an IDF psychologist.
The situation deteriorated after she asked him to leave the Shabak, when he said he would not do so unless she agreed to move with him from their comfortable home in a large Yesha town to a small hilltop community. This, she says, was merely so that he could continue his work as a Shabak agent from a new location. "But I fell for it; I was in no position to do anything else. Where would I go, with three babies?"
"When you look back," H was asked, "do you feel that your wedding itself was part of his cover story, a way of his getting into the Yesha towns and life?" Her response:
"I can't prove it with documents, but I am 100% sure that yes. I had a girlfriend at the time whom I now know he would have married just as well; it didn't matter to him, as long as he had the right person at the right time who belonged to the right group, so that this could be his ticket to entering this public... This is total deception on his part and on the part of the GSS. There were many hints and suspicions over the years, but I was in no position to carefully analyze them."
"To a certain extent, I cannot say all that I know, because I fear for my safety and my children's safety. It's not that I have received threats, but... you should know that police files were opened against him for violence, [including] for violence within the family - and they were automatically closed. It's not that I knew all this at the time; later I found this all out. At the time, I tried not to know and not to feel. Nothing would stick against him, just like with Avishai Raviv..."
In the course of the 1990's, H says, her husband again lied to her, saying that he had quit the GSS - when in fact he not only continued working for the organization, but also received a high salary, which he did not pass on to his family. "This is the most difficult part," she says. "When I began the divorce proceedings in 1999, I was living with our seven children in very difficult economic conditions, and I found that he had been employed by the GSS - and received hundreds of thousands of shekels. I was about to faint, but I still managed to ask one simple question: How could a person do this to his children? How could he let them live the way we were living and not support them?"
"Jews believe that there are three partners in the creation of every person: the parents and G-d. In the case of our marriage, there were three partners - my husband, myself, and the Shabak. They used me and deceived me, and enlisted me in the 'fight for the security of the State of Israel' - without my knowledge, and at the expense of my marriage and my children."
The divorce was finalized earlier this year, but, H says, her ex-husband has not paid his share of child support. Represented by Atty. Naftali Wurtzberger, she plans to sue the Shabak - but is not yet sure for how much. "It is very hard to measure the precise economic value of all these lost years of deception and poverty," her lawyer says. In the meantime, she continues to live with her seven children in destitution, in a broken-down caravan [mobile home without wheels] in a moshav [cooperative community] in the Kiryat Gat area. "Most of the children have their own issues and problems," says someone close to the case, "as they never quite had a normal home life." H can support them only with various house-cleaning jobs, though she is now actively pursuing the idea of becoming a van driver.
Asked why she is publicizing her story, the above source said, "For one thing, this is one of the ways in which the GSS harasses the Jewish public in Yesha. Do the ends of 'maintaining national security' justify cynically taking and ruining a young girl's life? This cruelty must be stopped."
H was asked by a television interviewer if she doesn't think that her husband's GSS work was justified in that it could have prevented Baruch Goldstein from doing what he did. [Goldstein was found by a public commission to have killed 29 Arabs in the Machpelah Cave in Hevron ten years ago, the day after an Arab proclamation had been spread throughout Hevron that a major attack against the Jews was being planned for "one or two days from now," and shortly after then-Maj.-Gen. Sha'ul Mofaz called an urgent meeting with Jewish leaders to inform them of the suspicions.] The irony of the question, noted a source close to the case, is that H's husband in fact knew Goldstein - and yet did not prevent the killings.
"The Shabak's mission is to maintain national security in the face of threats by our enemies," said a leading rabbi familiar with the case, "and not to take action against citizens. That is the job of the police. But given that the Shabak does the police's work, this doesn't justify ruining a woman's life!"