The Arrest of Naama Issachar Is a Lesson in Russian Malfeasance and Israeli Naïveté

Oct. 23 2019

Six months ago, an Israeli backpacker named Naama Issachar—en route home from India— was arrested during a layover in Moscow for possession of a small amount of marijuana. Last week, a Russian court sentenced her to seven-and-a-half years in prison despite pleas from the Israeli president and prime minister. Ruthie Blum comments:

The assumption in Jerusalem is that Issachar’s detention and disproportionate punishment, even by Russian standards, constitute a form of leverage on the Israeli government to deny extradition to the United States of the Russian credit-card cyber-criminal Alexei Borkov, who was arrested during a trip to Israel in 2015 as a result of an Interpol alert. For the past four years, Borkov has been in an Israeli jail awaiting an Israeli Supreme Court decision on the legality of extradition in his case. The affirmative decision finally handed down appears to have coincided with Issachar’s arrest.

What Moscow wants is for Israel to “extradite” Borkov to Russia—reportedly a euphemism for having the hacker back home where Putin can put him to proper use in underhanded dark-web endeavors. . . .

In response to the incident, the Israeli immigration minister Ze’ev Elkin warned travelers to avoid Russia. But Blum suggests the story has an additional moral:

Issachar [claims] that she had forgotten to clean out her suitcase before leaving India, which is why the small amount of weed remained at the bottom of her bag. . . . Herein lies a crucial point about Israeli sojourners in general and Issachar in particular. Cannabis possession is illegal in many places in the world, including in India, where she had been purchasing and smoking it. That she wasn’t caught was merely due to luck.

As well-traveled as they are, Israeli millennials like Issachar are so conditioned by the freedoms they enjoy at home—and so enamored of cultures other than their own—that they frequently miscalculate the consequences of their actions abroad.

Read more at JNS

More about: Drugs, Israeli society, Russia, Vladimir Putin

American Middle East Policy Should Focus Less on Stability and More on Weakening Enemies

Feb. 10 2025

To Elliott Abrams, Donald Trump’s plan to remove the entire population of Gaza while the Strip is rebuilt is “unworkable,” at least “as a concrete proposal.” But it is welcome insofar as “its sheer iconoclasm might lead to a healthy rethinking of U.S. strategy and perhaps of Arab and Israeli policies as well.” The U.S., writes Abrams, must not only move beyond the failed approach to Gaza, but also must reject other assumptions that have failed time and again. One is the commitment to an illusory stability:

For two decades, what American policymakers have called “stability” has meant the preservation of the situation in which Gaza was entirely under Hamas control, Hizballah dominated Lebanon, and Iran’s nuclear program advanced. A better term for that situation would have been “erosion,” as U.S. influence steadily slipped away and Washington’s allies became less secure. Now, the United States has a chance to stop that process and aim instead for “reinforcement”: bolstering its interests and allies and actively weakening its adversaries. The result would be a region where threats diminish and U.S. alliances grow stronger.

Such an approach must be applied above all to the greatest threat in today’s Middle East, that of a nuclear Iran:

Trump clearly remains open to the possibility (however small) that an aging [Iranian supreme leader Ali] Khamenei, after witnessing the collapse of [his regional proxies], mulling the possibility of brutal economic sanctions, and being fully aware of the restiveness of his own population, would accept an agreement that stops the nuclear-weapons program and halts payments and arms shipments to Iran’s proxies. But Trump should be equally aware of the trap Khamenei might be setting for him: a phony new negotiation meant to ensnare Washington in talks for years, with Tehran’s negotiators leading Trump on with the mirage of a successful deal and a Nobel Peace Prize at the end of the road while the Iranian nuclear-weapons program grows in the shadows.

Read more at Foreign Affairs

More about: Iran, Middle East, U.S. Foreign policy