The Library of Congress has recently digitalized a collection of over 10,000 photographs, taken by the “American Colony” in Jerusalem, a group of Christian utopians who lived in Jerusalem between 1881 and the 1940s. The photographers returned to the US, and bequeathed their massive collection to the Library of Congress in 1978. The collection includes Winston Churchill’s visit to Jerusalem, Jewish expulsions from the Old City during Arab riots, and the building of Tel Aviv.

The Golden Gate (Sha’ar Harachamim, Gate of Mercy) of Jerusalem’s Old City wall has special significance on Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement.) If the gate were opened, it would lead directly onto the Temple Plaza. The outside of the gate would open to the Kidron Valley and the Mount of Olives beyond. In Talmudic literature the gate was also known as the Shushan Gate because of its eastern direction (toward the Persian city of Shushan) and perhaps because of the role played by the Persian leader Cyrus in the Jews’ return to Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile. 

According to Jewish tradition, on Yom Kippur a messenger (usually a priest) took the sacrificial lamb from the Temple through the gate to the desert. The Red Heifer purification ceremony also involved taking the sacrifice through the eastern gate to the Mount of Olives.

Unlike most of Jerusalem’s other gates, the Golden Gate was originally built at least a millennium before Suleiman the Magnificent rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem in 1540.  Indeed, some archeologists believe that the original gate, dating back to Herod’s construction or even Nehemiah’s period (440 BCE), still exists beneath the current gate. Perhaps because of the great religious significance of the gate to Jews and Christians as the Messiah’s route into Jerusalem, it is believed Suleiman sealed the gate and permitted the construction of a Muslim cemetery in front of the gate.

Hebrew writing on the internal walls of the gate’s chamber is believed to have been left by Jewish pilgrims at least 1,000 years ago.

The theory of an ancient gate received support in 1969 when an archeological student named James Fleming was inspecting the current gate. Suddenly the rain-soaked ground beneath him opened and he found himself in a pit of bones looking at the top of another gate eight feet beneath the surface.  Fleming photographed his discovery. When he returned the next day, the tomb had been sealed with a cement slab by the Islamic custodians of the cemetery.

More photos can be viewed at www.israeldailypicture.com

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s critics, and they are legion – both here and abroad – charge he has no strategy, neither a long term strategy vis-à-vis the Palestinians, nor a short term one regarding how to withstand Friday’s predicted UN “earthquake” that will trigger a diplomatic “tsunami.”

But they’re wrong. He does have a strategy, it’s just not of the I’m-going-to-pull-a-peace-initiative-out-of-the-hat variety that will knock everyone’s socks off and revolutionize the Middle East. His strategy is much less spectacular, more plodding, even dull. It’s not the razzle-dazzle of ice hockey; but rather the boredom of curling.

Netanyahu’s strategy is to explain. Explain, explain, explain. He is a man of words. He loves to read, and to speak – some less charitable would say he loves to lecture. And he believes in the power of words, of oratory, of rhetoric.

So when the prime minister left Israel for the UN late Tuesday night he did not carry in his computer a Power Point presentation with a list of Israeli initiatives that he intends to unfurl at the UN or in meetings with US President Barack Obama, or –perhaps – with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Rather he is carrying a speech to explain to the world what he feels much of it fails to see: that the Middle East has changed; changed radically, and changed fundamentally.

At Sunday’s cabinet meeting Netanyahu explained why he decided, after weeks of deliberation, to go to the UN himself and combat the Palestinian Authority’s statehood recognition move.

“My UN trip will have a double goal,” he said  “The first goal is to ensure that this move to bypass negotiations does not succeed and is stopped in the Security Council.”

The second goal, he said, is to present the truth about “our desire for peace” and Israel’s historic rights to the country that go back “only 4,000 years.”

And then he cut to the chase: “I will also speak about our intention to achieve peace with our neighbors while ensuring our security.  If this was clear and necessary in the past, then today it is even more important. Especially now, when the Middle East is undergoing a great upheaval, from Tunisia to Yemen, from Libya to Egypt, Syria and throughout the region; when we don’t know what tomorrow will bring, or how things will turn out.”

Netanyahu’s strategy is to explain to the world that the pre-February 11 Middle East, the one that existed before Hosni Mubarak was brought down in Egypt, is as different from the post February Middle East as the Ottoman Middle East was different from the one that emerged after the re-shaping of the region following World War I.

He will explain that since everything has changed, and is continuing to change, past assumptions about what is and what is not possible must be re-examined.  He will explain that while the Arab revolution has shown what the Arabs are against – corruption, bad government, dysfunctional regimes – it hasn’t revealed yet what they are for, nor what will emerge.

He will explain the need for caution, for not rushing head-long into anything, because who knows what tomorrow will bring.

In his speech to the US State Department on May 19, Obama said of the Israeli-Palestinians issue that the world was looking at a conflict that has “grinded on for decades, and sees a stalemate. Indeed, there are those who argue that with all the change and uncertainty in the region, it is simply not possible to move forward.

I disagree. At a time when the people of the Middle East and North Africa are casting off the burdens of the past, the drive for a lasting peace that ends the conflict and resolves all claims is more urgent than ever.”

Among those arguing at the time that it was impossible to move swiftly forward was Netanyahu.  And that was then, four months ago, when for so many the Arab Spring still held out such great promise.

In the interim, the revolution has lost much of its early bloom, and – as Netanyahu cautioned in the early days – it is apparent that its guiding lights are not necessarily the descendants of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Netanyahu will argue to anyone who will listen that what he said then — about the need to see where the dust settles, who will gain control , what new alliances emerge — is truer now that the nasty side of the revolution is starting to emerge.

Last September, during those few days when Netanyahu and Abbas did speak for a few hours, the Prime Minister told Abbas that Israel would need a military presence along the Jordan River for a long period of time. When Abbas asked Netanyahu why, the prime minister replied that one never knows what could happen, and that a presence on the Jordan River – to protect against any untoward developments from the east – was a necessity. And that was before the fall of Hosni Mubarak, the chaos in Syria, the uncertainty in Jordan, and the rift with Turkey.

How much truer is it now, he will argue, how much more caution is needed now, than in the past, because who really knows what will develop.  If Fatah can lose control of Gaza to Hamas in a matter of weeks, if the Egyptians leadership can now talk about re-visiting and perhaps trashing a 30-year peace treaty, then previous assumptions and strategies and ways of doing business need to be re-thought. Netanyahu will not advocate thinking out of the box, he will advocate destroying the box completely because it is no longer relevant, and that what is needed is to build a new box altogether.

Netanyahu’s strategy is to explain this to the world, over and over and over again, be it from the plenum of his home turf in the Knesset, to the rostrum in the friendly US Congress, or at the podium of the unfriendly UN. That’s his strategy for the short term at the UN – to explain why recognition of a Palestinian state would only serve to destabilize an already reeling region – and for the long term, why Israel should not be expected, or pressed, to take any giant steps at a time when the Middle East’s tectonic plates are shifting.

Israel must step ever so lightly, he will say, or risk falling through the emerging cracks and into the abyss. That’s his strategy, and that will be his message.
Whether it’s enough, however, is a different question entirely.

The killing of senior al-Qaida propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen represents a significant blow to the organization’s indoctrination capabilities and media dissemination efforts, though the extensive jihadi online presence will likely continue to pose a major security risk in the near future.

Awlaki, a charismatic Yemenite-American cleric who ran a mosque in Virginia before fleeing to Yemen and becoming a high-profile member of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), was instrumental in shaping a model for continued al-Qaida recruitment and relevancy in a post-Bin Laden era.

He believed that by ensuring the flow of rhetoric through the pipelines of the Internet and promoting al-Qaida’s deadly narrative to the world, the jihadi network could ensure its survival for decades to come.

Awlaki, who survived a similar air strike in May, founded the slickly designed English-language Inspire magazine, which is aimed at recruiting Western Muslims to al-Qaida’s ranks by presenting the terror network as the only authentic Muslim movement.

Inspire encouraged its readers to plan mass killings of civilians, and provided doctrines to justify the actions, as well as operational tips on creating explosives and handling weapons. It also provided instructions to readers on how to send in questions, and offered answers in subsequent online issues.

It was used by US and British counter-terrorism officials to gain information on AQAP and its plans to strike Western cities.

Awlaki’s message, as well as that of al-Qaida in general, often compared al-Qaida’s global attacks with battles fought by Islam’s prophet, Muhammad, against Arab pagans in seventh century Arabia.

The message is predicated on presenting the US as a fundamentally anti-Muslim global power, and labeling Arab-Muslim governments as American stooges.

This week, days before Awlaki’s assassination, Inspire released its seventh issue, made available by the Washington DC-based Middle East Media Research Institute, which included past comments by Alwaki regarding the “duty of killing those who insult our Prophet Muhammad.” The latest issue of Inspire also contained an article by US-born jihadi Samir Khan – who was killed alongside Awlaki, according to reports – on the importance of the “media conflict.” In it, Khan boasted of the global jihadi movement’s propaganda efforts, writing, “Something that was produced thousands of feet above in the mountains of Afghanistan was found distributed in the streets of London and California. Ideas that disseminated from the lips of the mujahidin’s leaders were carried out Madrid and Times Square.”

After fleeing the US in 2002, Awlaki flew to Britain from Yemen, where he gave firebrand pro-jihad sermons to followers, who proceeded to record the talks and distribute them on the Internet.

Awlaki returned to Yemen in 2004, and became involved in operational planning of attacks, according to counter-terrorism officials. He has been linked to at least three international terror plots: The failed 2009 ‘underwear bomber’ attempt to blow up an airliner over Detroit (Awlaki helped recruit the Nigerian bomber, Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab), the 2009 Fort Hood shooting (Alwaki was in email communications with the gunman, Nidal Hassan) and the 2010 cargo flight explosives plot.

Awlaki’s assassination is the latest in a series of devastating strikes against al-Qaida that have severely weakened the network.

The coming months and years will reveal how successful the assassinations will be in preventing al-Qaida from poisoning minds and disrupting future attacks.

With his triumphant tour of the countries of the Arab Spring this month, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has managed to set up Turkey on the international stage as a role model for a secular democracy in a Muslim country — as, in his words, “a secular state where all religions are equal.”

The only trouble is that he has yet to make that happen for Turkey.

The relationship between religion and the state, ever the sore spot of Turkish identity, is one of the most explosive issues of the debate on the new constitution that Mr. Erdogan has pledged to give the country in the new legislative term that opens Saturday.

That debate will have to deal with the elephant in the room: the total control that the state exerts over Islam through its Religious Affairs Department, and the lack of a legal status for all other religions in a predominantly Sunni Muslim society.

“Turkey may look like a secular state on paper, but in terms of international law it is actually a Sunni Islamic state,” Izzettin Dogan, a leader of the country’s Alevi minority, charged at a joint press conference with leaders of several other minority faiths last week in Istanbul.

Mr. Dogan is honorary president of the Federation of Alevi Foundations, which represents many of what it claims are up to 30 million adherents of the Alevi faith, an Anatolian religion close to Sufi Islam but separate and distinct in its beliefs and practices.

“The state collects taxes from all of us and spends billions on Sunni Islam alone, while millions of Alevis as well as Christians, Jews and other faiths don’t receive a penny,” Mr. Dogan said, referring to the $1.5 billion budget of the Religious Affairs Department. “What kind of secularism is that?”

A bureaucratic juggernaut with its own news service and a dedicated trade union, the Religious Affairs Department employs more than 106,000 civil servants, according to its latest annual report, including 60,000 imams and 10,000 muezzins, all of them trained, hired and fired by the state.

At the institution’s ministry-size headquarters in Ankara, state-employed astronomers calculate prayer times around the world, while state-educated theologians pore over the hadiths of the Prophet Muhammad in the library and issue the religious rulings known as fatwas.

The department writes the sermons for Friday Prayer in mosques across the country as well as the textbooks for the religious instruction that is mandatory in schools. It publishes books and periodicals in languages including Tatar, Mongol and Uygur, and issues an iPhone app featuring Koranic verses and a prayertime alarm. The department has a monopoly on Koran courses in the country, and it organizes the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, right down to the vaccination of pilgrims.

So centralized is the department’s control that its new president, Mehmet Gormez, is considered innovative for announcing his intention to train preachers to deliver sermons in person, instead of having them piped into the mosque from the department over a public-address system.

“In Turkey, Islam does not determine politics, but politics determine Islam,” Gunter Seufert, a sociologist, concluded in a 2004 study of the department entitled “State and Islam in Turkey.”

“Run by a state agency, religion serves the nation state for the purpose of unifying the nation and Westernizing its Muslims,” he added.

With historical roots in the Ottoman Empire, where state and Islam were linked in the union of sultanate and caliphate, the Religious Affairs Department was founded early in the Turkish Republic, in March 1924, on the day the caliphate was abolished.

Charged by law with managing Islam, the department has been enshrined in the Constitution ever since the country’s first military coup in 1961, with the present Constitution, a relic of the 1982 coup, explicitly charging it with the task of furthering national unity.

Ministering to Sunni Islam of the Hanafi school, the department does not recognize non-Sunni communities like the Alevis or Caferis as distinct religious faiths, subsuming them under the common label of “Muslim,” the basis for the depiction of Turkey as a religiously homogenous country that describes its population as “99 percent Muslim.”

While the distribution of believers among the faiths encompassed by that term is contested, a 2007 survey by the Konda institute, a public opinion research company in Turkey, found that 82 percent of Turks describe themselves as Hanafi Sunni Muslims.

The new constitution, Mr. Dogan of the Alevi federation demanded, must do away with their privileged status. “The state must be impartial and treat all religious communities equally and maintain equal distance to all of them,” he said. “These definitions must be written into the new constitution verbatim.”

Mr. Dogan was speaking at the presentation of a report on the “Shared Problems and Demands of Turkey’s Religious Communities,” prepared by Ozge Genc and Ayhan Kaya, political scientists at Istanbul Bilgi University.

The report is based on research in the Apostolic, Catholic and Protestant Armenian communities, the Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches as well as the Jewish community and Bahai, Yezidi, Shiite, Alevi, Mevlevi, Caferi and other groups.

As the report underlines, these communities all suffer from lack of legal status in Turkey, which renders it difficult for them to conduct even the most basic affairs and forces them into a shadowy existence at the mercy of political fashions and whims.

The 1,700-year-old Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople, for example, has come to the brink of extinction since its seminary in Istanbul was closed down 40 years ago, drying up its source of clergymen. The Patriarchate hopes that the new constitution will “create the conditions for a reopening of the seminary,” its spokesman, Pater Dositheos Anagnostopoulos, said by e-mail this week.

This will require a redefinition of the concept of secularism in Turkey, or simply a definition of the term in the Turkish constitution, as Mustafa Akyol, author of “Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty,” points out.

“The present constitution states that Turkey is laic, secular, but does not define the term,” Mr. Akyol said by telephone this week. The interpretation has been left up to the constitutional court, he said, which has traditionally defined secularism as the complete absence of religion from the public sphere, as seen in its ban on head scarves for university students. It was that ban, among other things, that triggered the current secularism debate in Islamist circles, Mr. Akyol said.

“They began to see nuances in Western secularism. They saw that religious freedoms not available to them in Turkey, like the head scarf or the freedom to join Muslim orders, were available in America and many European countries, excepting France,” he said. “They began to criticize the self-styled Turkish secularism, and to call for a redefinition of secularism.”

While the debate still rages in Turkish society, “I think Erdogan made it clear that he is sincere” in his call for secularism, Mr. Akyol said. “That is how we would like to have it defined in the new constitution,” he added, referring to Mr. Erdogan’s remark that all religions should be equal.

But the Religious Affairs Department may not be so easy to sideline. While most of the proposals for the constitution prepared by nongovernmental organizations for the debate agree that the department cannot continue in its present form, none suggests abolishing it.

Even Tesev, an independent research institute in Istanbul, argues that “dissolving the Religious Affairs Department is not considered possible under present conditions.” It suggests that other religious groups should be given equal status and privileges instead.

Other constitutional proposals suggest that the department’s reach should be extended to include other faiths, an idea unlikely to sit well with all communities.

The Patriarchate of Constantinople, while declining to comment on the proposal, has strenuously resisted previous proposals to incorporate its seminary into the theological faculty of a state university, arguing that it cannot relinquish control over its training.

While the Religious Affairs Department may face change, it is unlikely to be abolished, Mr. Akyol said. “Society is so used to it, so many people work for it,” he said. “I don’t expect it to change with the new constitution.”

In the emerging post-Qaddafi Libya, the most influential politician may well be Ali Sallabi, who has no formal title but commands broad respect as an Islamic scholar and populist orator who was instrumental in leading the mass uprising.

The most powerful military leader is now Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the former leader of a hard-line group once believed to be aligned with Al Qaeda.

The growing influence of Islamists in Libya raises hard questions about the ultimate character of the government and society that will rise in place of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s autocracy. The United States and Libya’s new leaders say the Islamists, a well-organized group in a mostly moderate country, are sending signals that they are dedicated to democratic pluralism. They say there is no reason to doubt the Islamists’ sincerity.

But as in Egypt and Tunisia, the latest upheaval of the Arab Spring deposed a dictator who had suppressed hard-core Islamists, and there are some worrisome signs about what kind of government will follow. It is far from clear where Libya will end up on a spectrum of possibilities that range from the Turkish model of democratic pluralism to the muddle of Egypt to, in the worst case, the theocracy of Shiite Iran or Sunni models like the Taliban or even Al Qaeda.

Islamist militias in Libya receive weapons and financing directly from foreign benefactors like Qatar; a Muslim Brotherhood figure, Abel al-Rajazk Abu Hajar, leads the Tripoli Municipal Governing Council, where Islamists are reportedly in the majority; in eastern Libya, there has been no resolution of the assassination in July of the leader of the rebel military, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, suspected by some to be the work of Islamists.

Mr. Belhaj has become so much an insider lately that he is seeking to unseat Mahmoud Jibril, the American-trained economist who is the nominal prime minister of the interim government, after Mr. Jibril obliquely criticized the Islamists.

For an uprising that presented a liberal, Westernized face to the world, the growing sway of Islamists — activists with fundamentalist Islamic views, who want a society governed by Islamic principles — is being followed closely by the United States and its NATO allies.

“I think it’s something that everybody is watching,” said Jeffrey D. Feltman, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, visiting here on Wednesday. “First of all the Libyan people themselves are talking about this.” The highest-ranking American official to visit Libya since Colonel Qaddafi’s fall, Mr. Feltman was optimistic that Libya would take a moderate path.

“Based on our discussions with Libyans so far,” he said, “we aren’t concerned that one group is going to be able to dominate the aftermath of what has been a shared struggle by the Libyan people.”

Mr. Sallabi, in an interview, made it clear that he and his followers wanted to build a political party based on Islamic principles that would come to power through democratic elections. But if the party failed to attract widespread support, he said, so be it.

“It is the people’s revolution, and all the people are Muslims, Islamists,” Mr. Sallabi said. Secularists “are our brothers and they are Libyans.”

“They have the right to offer their proposals and programs,” he said, “and if the Libyan people choose them I have no problem. We believe in democracy and the peaceful exchange of power.”

Many Libyans say they are not worried. “The Islamists are organized so they seem more influential than their real weight,” said Usama Endar, a management consultant who was among the wealthy Tripolitans who helped finance the revolution. “They don’t have wide support, and when the dust settles, only those with large-scale appeal, without the tunnel vision of the Islamists, will win.”

Yet an anti-Islamist, anti-Sallabi rally in Martyrs’ Square on Wednesday drew only a few dozen demonstrators.

Many, like Aref Nayed, coordinator of the Transitional National Council’s stabilization team and a prominent religious scholar, say that the revolution had proved that Libyans would not accept anything but a democratic society, and that the Islamists would have to adapt to that.

“There will be attempts by people to take over, but none of them will succeed because the young people will go out on the streets and bring them down,” Mr. Nayed said.

Some are concerned that the Islamists are already wielding too much power, particularly in relation to their support in Libyan society, where most people, while devout, practice a moderate form of Islam in which individual liberties are respected.

Mr. Sallabi dismissed those fears, saying Islamists would not impose their traditionalist views on others. “If people choose a woman to lead, as president, we have no problem with that. Women can dress the way they like; they are free.”

Adel al-Hadi al-Mishrogi, a prominent businessman who began raising money for the anti-Qaddafi insurgents early in the revolution, is not convinced by the Islamists’ declarations of fealty to democratic principles. He pointed to a well-organized Islamist umbrella group, Etilaf, which he said had pushed aside more secular groupings.

“Most Libyans are not strongly Islamic, but the Islamists are strongly organized, and that’s the problem,” Mr. Mishrogi said. “Our meetings go on for hours without decisions. Their meetings are disciplined and right to the point. They’re not very popular, but they’re organized.”

He complains that Etilaf and Mr. Sallabi are the ones who are really running things in Libya now. Others say the picture is much more diverse and chaotic than Mr. Mishrogi suggests, although it is true that Etilaf, with no fixed address and still apparently operating underground, continues to issue decrees of all sorts as if it were some sort of revolutionary guide.

“All offices here must make sure that they are headed by an acceptable person within seven days of this notice,” read a leaflet pasted to the doors of offices throughout Tripoli Central Hospital, dated Sept. 3 and signed, simply, Etilaf.

“They are behind everything,” Mr. Mishrogi said.

Youssef M. Sherif, a prominent Libyan writer and intellectual, said: “Every day the Islamists grow stronger. When there is a parliament, the Islamists will get the majority.”

“Abdel Hakim Belhaj is in effect the governor of Tripoli just because he was elected by an Islamist militia,” Mr. Sherif said. Echoing debates in Egypt, Mr. Sherif argued for a longer transition to elections than the planned eight months, to give liberals a better chance to organize.

The growing influence of the Islamists is reflected in their increased willingness to play a political role. Until recently the Islamists have kept a low profile, and even many secular Libyan officials have expressed a reluctance to criticize them, saying they should focus instead on the common enemy while Colonel Qaddafi remains on the loose.

That seems to be changing. After the interim government’s acting prime minister, Mr. Jibril, appeared recently in Tripoli and indirectly criticized politicking by the Islamists as premature with a war still in progress, Mr. Belhaj and Mr. Sallabi began agitating for his replacement.

“Jibril will be gone soon,” one aide to Mr. Belhaj said.

And Mr. Sallabi said that Mr. Jibril, along with the American-educated finance and oil minister, Ali Tarhouni, were ushering in a “new era of tyranny and dictatorship,” Al Jazeera reported.

During the 42 years of Colonel Qaddafi’s rule, underground organizations like Mr. Belhaj’s Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and the Muslim Brotherhood were the only opposition. Although outlawed and persecuted, they had a network through mosques that secular opponents of the government could not match.

That has also given them a head start in political organizing now, and they appear to be wasting no time.

“There will be attempts by some parties to take over; it’s only natural,” said one prominent official with the Transitional National Council, who spoke anonymously so as not to alienate Islamists. “And definitely Etilaf is trying to increase its influence. And we’re hearing much more from the Islamists in the media because they are more organized and they are more articulate.”

Mr. Nayed conceded that might be true, but was unconcerned. “My answer to anyone who complains about that: You must be as articulate as they are and as organized as they are,” he said. “And I think we’re starting to see that among various youth groups.”

Fathi Ben Issa, a former Etilaf member who became an early representative on the Tripoli council, said he quit his position after learning that the Muslim Brotherhood members who dominate that body wanted to ban theater, cinema and arts like sculpture of the human form. “They were like the Taliban,” he said. “We didn’t get rid of Qaddafi to replace him with such people.” The final straw, he said, came when Etilaf began circulating a proposed fatwa, or decree, to bar women from driving.

Most Libyans are quick to bristle at suggestions that their own Islamists might one day go the way of Iran, where after the fall of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini stomped out a short-lived liberal government by denouncing democracy as un-Islamic.

Mr. Sallabi said he hoped Libyans could find a leader on the model of George Washington, whom he had been reading about lately. “After his struggle he went back to his farm even though the American people wanted him to be president,” Mr. Sallabi said. “He is a great man.”

Referring to Mr. Sallabi, Mr. Ben Issa, who said he has received death threats since breaking with the Islamists, retorted: “He is just hiding his intentions. He says one thing to the BBC and another to Al Jazeera. If you believe him, then you don’t know the Muslim Brothers.”

In July of 2004, members of the National Commission established to look into the September 11 attacks were facing immense pressure. The target date for submitting the report the whole of America was waiting for had passed, and commission members were given a 60-day extension that was also about to expire. However, eight days before the final submission date, some commission members received word of new information; a real intelligence time bomb.

Commission members didn’t know what to do. On one hand, a whole new lead emerged; yet on the other hand, nobody could process this huge amount of information within days. At the end of the day, the commission chose a solution that turned out to be the worst of all: It crammed some of the information into three pages (pp. 240-242 in the report) written hectically, ignored most of the information, and in fact left the big question open.

As it turned out, the prominent building housing the National Security Agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade includes a particularly interesting room. In this room, the NSA accumulated tens of thousands of conversation records pertaining to one subject: The ties between Iran’s intelligence service and al-Qaeda from the 1990s to the eve of the 9/11 attacks. The piles of information included 75 intelligence documents characterized as critical to understanding the relationship between Tehran and al-Qaeda.

At the end of the day, the commission noted in its report that the issue deserves further scrutiny by the US Administration. However, such examination was not undertaken and may have never materialized. Indeed, this entire affair may have remained buried in the three abovementioned pages, had it not been for one brave woman: Ellen Saracini.

Saracini is not an intelligence analyst or counter-terrorism expert. She is the widow of pilot victor Saracini, the captain of the Boeing jet that took off from Boston aboard United flight 175, which was crashed into the southern tower. However, Ellen was unwilling to see the death of her husband and father of her two daughters end with yet another line in the commission’s report; she decided to seek justice on her own.

Saracini approached attorney Thomas Mellon, who specializes in lawsuits against large corporations. Mellon’s team members launched an investigation. They met potential witnesses, interviewed intelligence officials, CIA agents, Iranian defectors, a French judge and others. They even reached Israel in their search (in the interest of full disclosure, the writer of this article was also summoned to testify in the trial, as one of nine expert witnesses.)

The investigation kept progressing, diving deep into the dark corners of the global world of intelligence and terrorism. Ten years later, Mellon and his team are convinced that they possess the “smoking gun” that will tie Iran to the September 11 attacks.

The legal team drafted a huge lawsuit, recently submitted to the Manhattan District Court. What hides inside it is far from being routine. The lawsuit is premised on a dramatic charge: The responsibility for the 9/11 attacks lies not only with al-Qaeda, but also with Iran and Hezbollah, based on what attorneys say is clear, unequivocal evidence.

The case has far-reaching implications, which explain why the US government is not eager to look into the conversation records in the abovementioned NSA room. A ruling that Iran is linked to the attacks would pose a tough test to Administration officials: On the one hand, they would not be able to ignore such verdict. Yet on the other hand, what exactly will they do with it? Will they attack Iran, just as they invaded Afghanistan and Iraq?

The Sudan connection

The huge amount of evidence included in the lawsuit comes together to form a fascinating charge: Starting in the 1990s, Iran and Hezbollah helped Osama Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri create a new terror organization from scratch, to be headed by Afghanistan veterans and members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Iran trained group members, equipped them with advanced technological means, enabled them to move freely and provided them with plenty of terror-related expertise and experience accumulated by Hezbollah in its operations against Israel and the United States.

Later, according to the lawsuit, Iran assisted in the preparations ahead of September 11. Should Mellon and his team prove all of the above, everything we thought we knew about the terror offensive will change forever.

According to the lawsuit, the relationship between Iran and al-Qaeda was initiated in the early 1990s in Sudan. At the time, Sudan turned into the world’s second state, after Iran, to be ruled by radical Islam.

According to the testimonies of senior CIA officials, Iran’s President Rafsanjani, Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahian and Revolutionary Guards Chief Mohsen Rezai visited Sudan. They were accompanied by a figure well-known to Israel’s intelligence services: Imad Mugniyah, the head of Hezbollah’s military wing (Mugniyah was assassinated in February of 2008 in an operation attributed to Israel.) All participants in the meeting pledged to assist the Sudanese regime and join forces with it in supporting other jihadist movements in the Middle East.

When it turned out that Sudan was emerging as a new terrorism theater, Israel’s intelligence agencies started to deploy human and electronic resources there. The file on developments in Sudan until 1996 is known in Israel as “Blue Smurfs” and contains a treasure trove of information about the seed that later became Global Jihad.

When Saracini’s attorneys sought the Israeli government’s assistance in receiving the Blue Smurfs file, they were told the information was acquired in cooperation with a foreign party, and that this information can only be shared with this party’s approval. Such authorization has not been given to this day.

What we are allowed to reveal here is that Israel’s intelligence officials identified at the time tight relations between radical Islamic terrorists in Egypt and Department 15 in Iran’s Intelligence Ministry. Notably, Department 15 is tasked with exporting the Islamic revolution to other Arab states.

Israel was also able to identify a prominent terror leader in Sudan. His name was Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian jihadist who served a prison term for his role in President Anwar Sadat’s assassination. Year later, Zawahiri’s name became known worldwide; he turned into al-Qaeda’s chief strategist, Bin Laden’s deputy and successor, and a man with a $25 million price tag on his head, courtesy of the FBI.

In April of 1991, Zawahiri secretly visited Iran and sought Iranian assistance for a Cairo revolution. The parties agreed on Iranian support for Zawahiri’s organization in the form of money and training. The terror leader sent many of his men to train in Iranian camps, mostly under the guidance of Lebanese Hezbollah members led by Imad Mugniyah.

During his visit to Iran, al-Zawahiri was convinced of the immense power of a suicide attack as an effective modus operandi. Years later he realized that if a suicide bomber is effective, a terrorist who crashes a Boeing aircraft into a tower would be much more effective.

Discovering Osama

Following further efforts, it turned out that an even bigger group of Muslim radicals was operating in Sudan alongside Zawahiri and his men. Some of them were veterans of the guerilla war initiated by America in Afghanistan against the Russian invasion in the 1980s.

Yet who was the leader of these Afghanistan veterans? How did he operate? Where was he getting his funding? Israel’s intelligence effort continued, and the name of a Saudi contractor who was expelled from his country started to surface, with his real estate work being used as cover for secret terror activity. The contractor’s name started to appear in intelligence reports: Osama Bin Laden. One of his construction companies was known as al-Qaeda (“The Base” in Arabic.)

Israel’s intelligence services discovered that Bin Laden joined forces with Zawahiri. During this period, the two grew much closer, with Zawahiri (a surgeon by training) also becoming Bin Laden’s personal physician. The new friendship prompted Bin Laden to send some of his senior aides for training in Tehran and in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon. The infrastructure for al-Qaeda’s establishment was now ready.

In 1998, an Egyptian-born US Marine called Ali Mohammed was detained on suspicion of involvement in blowing up America’s embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. In his testimony he confessed that in 1989 he traveled to Afghanistan and joined Islamic Jihad and Bin Laden. Mohammed said he trained al-Qaeda terrorists on using explosives as well as on intelligence-gathering techniques to be used in attacks on US targets.

Mohammed also testified that he personally handled security arrangements for a Sudan meeting between Hezbollah’s Mugniyah and Bin Laden. Following these meetings, Hezbollah provided al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad with explosives training. Iran also used Hezbollah in order to provide explosive materials designed to resemble rocks. Israeli veterans of the Lebanon wars are well familiar with these bombs.

Mohammed testified that many of the training sessions were held in an Iranian camp run by the Intelligence Ministry. Based on information from the Blue Smurfs file, which was discovered in the NSA basement, the National Commission ruled that senior al-Qaeda members received training and advice from Hezbollah while in Sudan. These are important testimonies for Ellen Saracini. If Hezbollah equals Iran, and Bin Laden’s men were trained by Hezbollah, there is a basis to the charge about an Iran-al-Qaeda link.

The jihadist group identified in Sudan maintained close ties with Afghanistan veterans worldwide and tirelessly worked to form global networks and connections. “We felt that something very big was brewing there; something very different than anything we’ve seen before,” an Israeli intelligence official said. “This was not about a state dispatching terrorists, but rather, about an organization that seemingly created itself.” A short while later, a special intelligence desk was formed in Israel to deal with the subject. Indeed, the IDF Intelligence Branch and Mossad were the first to recognize the danger.

First burning tower

June 25, 1996. Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. A huge explosion shakes the Khobar Towers in this important oil city. Nineteen US troops are killed and some 500 are wounded. Perhaps this is where the 9/11 terrorists learned about the major effect of blowing up a tower. Officially, the perpetrators of this attack have not been identified to this day.

Yet the current trial includes testimony by then-FBI Director Louis Freeh, who asserts that the attack was an Iranian initiative carried out by Hezbollah in conjunction with al-Qaeda. Senior CIA officials said that the NSA possesses intercepted Bin Laden conversations that prove a direct link to the attack. Attorneys will be using this evidence in the trial to show that Iran was in the picture at the early stages of establishing al-Qaeda.

Mellon’s team elicited thousands of documents showing how Iran assisted al-Qaeda in becoming an effective, lethal terror group throughout the 1990s. According to US law, this would be enough to find Iranian authorities culpable and there would be no need to prove direct involvement in 9/11. However, Mellon’s team decided not to take any risks and to present the court with evidence which they say proves Tehran’s direct involvement in the terror attacks.

Early in the 9/11 commission’s work, it turned out that the issue of traveling and visas was a major component in the affair. According to the documents submitted to the court, an immense operation was managed prior to September 11 in order to facilitate the many trips required by the operation.

The reason is clear: Only a well-oiled arrangement of flights and secret border crossings could have enabled the terrorists to enter and exit the US and go to Afghanistan. Anyone who ever tried to get a US visa knows this is no simple matter. A passport stamp of a state on America’s list of terror-sponsors immediately turns one into a suspect.

So how did the 19 terrorists manage to enter the US after all? How could it be that US immigration officials in Germany and Saudi Arabia suspected nothing? The answer to these questions remained unknown, until the treasure trove was discovered at the NSA basement. As it turned out, many of the terrorists headed from Afghanistan to Iran, with Iranian officials ordering border control officers not to stamp these passports. The other terrorists passed through Beirut in their many trips, where Hezbollah officials similarly cared for them.

Mellon’s team hopes that this is where the “smoking gun” can be found, proving a direct link between Iran and 9/11. If Iran did not know about the attacks and was not involved in them, why did it keep its stamps off the terrorists’ passports?

Yet that’s not all. The intelligence information submitted to the court includes yet another “smoking gun”: In some of the flights, the terrorists were accompanied by figures whose names were identical to the aliases used by former Hezbollah “army chief” Imad Mugniyah and some of his close aides. This would be hard to dismiss as an “odd coincidence.”

The Iranian defectors

The materials gathered for the trial include three rare testimonies by three Iranian intelligence establishment defectors. They have been marked as witnesses X, Y and Z. Their videotaped testimonies offer a profound peek into the depths of the kingdom of evil. For long hours they recount their childhood and adolescence in Tehran and how they were hired for the prestigious posts in Iran’s spy agencies. Then, they start talking about the ties between Iran, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda.

Witness X testifies about Iran’s advance knowledge of the plan to crash passenger airliners into strategic targets in Washington and New York. He testifies that he was present at training facilities for Sunni terrorists in Iran and adds many details about the way Iran’s intelligence service utilizes legitimate Iranian organizations such as its airline and shipping company for terror aims.

Witness Y testifies about Imad Mugniyah’s personal involvement in training the September 11 hijackers and the shelter granted by Iran to al-Qaeda’s men after the attacks. Meanwhile, witness Z says that he was present in a series of meetings in Tehran involving senior al-Qaeda men, local intelligence officials and Mugniyah’s men in the months before the 9/11 attacks.

Following the attacks, many senior al-Qaeda men found shelter in Iran. Tehran denied their presence for some time and later admitted that hundreds of al-Qaeda members are in the country and are under “house arrest.” For the time being, Iranian authorities have not responded to the lawsuit, and as happened in many cases, the judges may hand down their decision in the presence of one side only. The court could order compensation funds to be taken from frozen Iranian accounts.

This month, Ellen Saracini marks the 10th anniversary of the 9/11attacks. Saracini, who is closely accompanied by two lawyers who invested a special effort in the investigation, Tom Mellon and Timothy Fleming, is working days and nights in promoting the lawsuit against Iran and in commemorating the 9/11 victims. She says that the families who filed the lawsuit have one objective in mind: “Preventing these barbarians from committing further attacks against the United States and further attacks against humanity.”

The day the Twin Towers collapsed in Manhattan, September 11, 2001, IDF submarine “Leviathan” of the advanced Dolphin model was on a training sail somewhere at sea – the exact location of Israel’s submarines will always remain classified, even dozens of years after the fact.

At one point, the submarine rose to the surface to take a break. The sub’s commander, then-Lt. Colonel Oded, looked through the periscope and saw a calm, blue sea. However, one crew member soon informed him that he just saw the New York towers collapsing on television. Oded’s first reaction was laughter: What kind of movie are you watching there? How could the Twin Towers collapse? Yet soon after, the official announcement arrived from Israel.

The training session ended abruptly. Orders started to pour in from Navy headquarters. The submarine went into high alert and sank into the water for a lengthy period of several weeks. “In such case,” Oded says, “nobody knows where you are except for your crew and your direct commanders. Even your family doesn’t know. They don’t know what you’re doing or when you’ll be back. They know nothing.”

What does a terror attack at the World Trade Center have to do with an Israeli submarine going on high alert? This question shall remain unanswered as well. We can only guess: When the US experiences an unprecedented terror event whose implications are still unclear, nobody knows how the superpower would respond and what will happen in the Middle East as result. At such moments of uncertainty, Israel’s first walls of defense are its long-range strategic arms – the most secretive one is the submarine fleet.

Israel’s enemies must be made to understand that should they dare use any weapon of mass destruction, their own fate will be sealed. According to foreign reports, Israel’s Dolphin fleet plays a crucial role in the game of deterrence with its second strike capability.

Virtual passport

Just like Israel’s submarine fleet is secretive, so are its commanders. Colonel Oded, 44, has recently completed his tenure as the fleet’s commander, ending a chapter of more than 20 years where he performed almost every command post in the fleet. “If a layman would see submarine troops from the side, he would not understand how we can withstand it,” Oded says in a rare interview. “It’s a group of people who perform missions at very certain locations and feel like home there. People wake up for their shifts, eat breakfast and follow a routine in the least trivial locations one can imagine.”

When I ask Oded whether his troops’ passports would be filled with stamps, had they theoretically stamped them at border control, he smiles and says nothing. Indeed, we can imagine that these virtual passports would have been full of stamps. The Navy’s submarines, as opposed to other vessels, never dock at foreign ports, including friendly ones. This is the nature of the service: The submarines only dock in Israel.

Exceptional soldiers

In order to serve on a submarine, one needs more than to excel at school and accumulate more and more knowledge. Such soldiers need a specific mental makeup that enables them to be isolated for lengthy periods of time from their natural environment, while living with 40 other people under crowded conditions and an intensive, tense operational atmosphere.

“People who cannot withstand the pressure drop out in the screening process and during the courses,” Oded says. “There is only one way to minimize the fear and improve the ability to function during emergencies: Sisyphean training. For that reason we constantly engage in simulating extreme scenarios, so when things happen in real life the soldiers are trained and already experienced those things during training sessions.”

“When you arrive at the sub after the course, you feel that nobody is better than you, but very quickly you realize that you have much to learn from the people around you,” Oded says. “The veteran non-commissioned officer is much more professional than you in his area of expertise. The secret of the submarine’s power is the accumulated knowledge of everyone on board. Each soldier is an expert, so you learn to appreciate and trust them…you learn very quickly that the quality of the soldiers is so high that you cannot just issue orders.”

Not like in the movies

So what happens to a young man who one day becomes privy to the State of Israel’s deepest secrets? “If we developed the right person, and his ego is at a healthy place, not much happens,” Oded says. “The heavy responsibility and significance of the work merely increase the need for modesty. Even though it’s quite surprising and fascinating to discover what this country can do, we don’t tell our parents or anyone else. Never. Everything stays within the submarine. This is one of the reasons why the friendships formed between the soldiers and officers don’t exist elsewhere. We develop a culture where secrecy means life or death.

In the movies we often see a submarine commander receiving a mysterious message, walking over to the safe, pulling out an envelope and discovering a dramatic mission for the first time. Yet when Oded is asked whether this happens in real life, he bursts into laughter. “This happens in the movies. These are precisely the things that are not done in real life, because the sub commander works completely independently, and at times has no contact whatsoever with his superiors. Hence, he must have all the information available to him and be familiar with the mission’s big picture, so he can make the right decisions.

Having fun in the shower

At the end of the 1980s, Oded completed a degree in electrical engineering and physics at the Technion. Upon graduation, he was appointed as commander of a missile boat that specializes in anti-submarine warfare (the Navy ensures that future sub commanders serve on such boats first, as there is no better way to learn how they behave when confronting a submarine.) After two years, Oded embarked on a submarine commander’s course – an intensive eight-month track with a personal mentor. In 1999 he was assigned to command the old-model submarine “Gal.” The only thing he is willing to say about that period is: “It was a very operational year, with plenty of counter-terror activity.” In 2001, he was appointed as the second commander of “Leviathan,” a new model Dolphin sub.

When asked how it feels to command “Leviathan,” a submarine that is three-times larger than the previous sub he led, Oded first speaks about the improved shower experience. “When you are sailing for weeks and your only way to take a shower is to use the air-conditioner’s water, yet suddenly you have a shower, only then you understand the meaning of this,” he says.

“Suddenly there is a convenient space for service, in submarine terms of course. Suddenly your sub has more than one floor. There are also more arms and more advanced sonar systems. There is also a leap in atomization and in command and control capabilities. It’s like flying into space. Moreover, it’s a very quiet submarine that can perform its mission with greater secrecy.

Doubling the fleet

At this time the Navy is preparing to double Israel’s submarine fleet from three to six in the next five years, making it one of the region’s largest and most advanced fleets. As result of this process, Oded was not only required to double the submarine fleet’s manpower, but also to create a larger cadre career officers for a lengthy service term, as the need for professional expertise will only be growing. Hence, the Navy realized it must offer these soldiers the army’s best service terms. For example, sub troops can study almost anything they want, as long as they stay in the force. Notably, a sub officer is required to serve nine years at least.

Oded says that doubling the fleet’s size is “not only a challenge for the army; it’s a challenge for the State.” When asked whether Israel needs such large fleet, especially in an era of cutbacks, Oded has no hesitation: “I have no doubt we need it. A large submarine fleet gives us much more than a multiplier effect in strategic and security terms.”