A chance meeting with a Rothschild

For his involvement with the Autonomous Jewish Authority, assistance to a Jewish settlement invited by the mayor, security chief and rabbi, ongoing writings opposed to a Palestinian State in Judea-Samaria and a chance meeting with an heir to the Rothschild family fortune, ben Yoseif has been persecuted by Israeli security officials. They deem him and his message about the Return of the House of Joseph as a threat to Israeli national security.

I guess the trouble all started when Rothschild asked me my opinion about a "West Bank Infrastructure Development Corporation," which he had been approached to fund. He told me the U.S. State Department had issued the invitation.  With my sources in Jerusalem I put a few things together to conclude that this was a slush fund to buy off opposition to a Palestinian state in Judea-Samaria in the media, in the Knesset and other "opinion leaders" in Israeli society. It sounded too much like the scheme of Shimon Peres to push through this suicidal Palestinian state.  I became an enemy of Peres and the special arm of the Shin-Bet (Shabach) who did his political dirty work."

ben Yoseif was arrested and strip-searched upon re-entering Israel with his family in September 2000, about a week before the start of the Al Aksa intifada. He was arrested again the day after the 3 million man protest against dividing Jerusalem in which he was unwittingly cast into the limelight and again the morning after addressing Yair Davidy's Brit-Am organization at a meeting in the Jerusalem Hilton, which was apparently attended by a Shabach informant. None of his arrests were ever accompanied by charges against him and in fact he was totally exonerated by former Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai despite what a second attorney who had to be hired for security clearance called a "file cabinet" of alleged accusations.

'Jews and Jerusalem:  Heart and Soul"

"At the 3 million man demonstration, I was walking through the standing room only crowd outside the Jaffa Gate when a man asked me to hold his sign while he went to the restroom. He never came back. The sign read, "Jews and Jerusalem:  Heart and soul." I suppose I was caught up in the Klezmer music and my payess were flying or I was waving the sign too wildly, but I was on the front page of newspapers around the world and in video clips of all of the networks, including CNN.  Ehud Barak was prime minister and he had placed his political future on a divided Jerusalem.