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 on JNS: https://www.jns.org/opinion/a-cautionary-cannabis-tale-for-globe-trotting-israelis/