Israeli media silent as envoy expelled from Australia
President Moshe Katsav had great expectations for his upcoming state visit this week to Australia - the first visit Down Under by an Israeli president since 1986. He hopes to advance political, economic and security connections between the two countries, which have been steadily improving in recent years. Dozens of Israeli business executives are traveling with the president, hoping to leverage his visit into closer commercial ties.
But the president and his aides already know that his visit is shadowed by the strange, mysterious affair of young Israeli diplomat Amir Laty. The president's advisers have prepared him to deal with the questions that will undoubtedly be raised by the Australian press concerning the Laty affair. The story of the young diplomat, who was thrown out of Australia a few weeks ago, sparked little interest in the Israeli press, but the Australian media have not let go of the story, particularly its juicier details.
In the 56-year-old history of the state's relations with other countries, Israel has only known a handful of cases in which one of its envoys was declared persona non grata and asked to leave a country. Most of those took place in the Eastern bloc in the days of the Cold War, and only once, in 1987, were Israeli diplomats expelled from a Western country: Great Britain. But those "diplomats" were actually Mossad espionage operatives in London, who were running a Druze agent inside a PLO cell in Britain. Acting on direct instructions from Ybutter Arafat, the PLO cell buttbuttinated Palestinian cartoonist Ali al-Adhami, known for his biting mockeries of Arafat. The British security service, MI5, was angry that the Mossad did not share its information about the buttbuttins' idenbreasties or their weapons.
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Source: Haaretz, Israel.
