Locked up in a cell in Madrid since his arrest on July 10, 2026, the well-known left-wing philanthropist Fergie Chambers is waiting to learn whether Spain will hand him to Washington. According to a US indictment, his crime was moving $7.5 million â money he raised, his family says, after selling his stake in Cox Enterprises and walking away from a quarter-billion-dollar inheritance â some of which funded legal defense for activists and humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza. He has been denied bail and, his supporters say, denied contact with the outside world. Stella Schnabel, his partner, has said he faces âpolitical persecution,â telling the Irish Times: âFergie is being jailed because he uses his wealth to support Palestine and those suffering genocide in Gaza.â Ghassan Abu-Sittah, the British-Palestinian surgeon who now serves as rector of the University of Glasgow, has said Chambersâ funding was vital to the care of wounded children in Gaza.
Six days later, on July 16, 2026, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood before representatives of more than 60 governments and gave the arrangement a name: a coordinated push against what he called âfar-left political terrorism,â with intelligence sharing at its center, backed by border controls he defended as public safety and financial disruption dressed as counterterrorism.
This machinery, of course, is nothing new. In 1969, Switzerland, Britain, France and West Germany were among the founding members of a secret intelligence-liaison forum called the Club de Berne, joined eventually by the United States and Israel. By 1971 a daily communications channel had been set up between the member states, code-named Kilowatt. Aviva Guttmannâs research into declassified Swiss archives shows what became of this secret channel.
Mossadâs European Murder Spree
Mossadâs infamous campaign of assassinations began after the killing of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympics by the Palestinian Black September group. Teams of killers were sent across Europe after anyone linked, rightly or wrongly, to the attack. Zwaiter, Hamshari, and Boudia were among them.
Palestinian Wael Zwaiter had no proven link at all to the Munich attack when he was shot dead in the stairwell of his Rome apartment in October 1972 â indeed the PLOâs deputy chief at the time said that he was âenergeticallyâ against terrorism. Two months later, a bomb concealed inside Mahmoud Hamshariâs telephone blew up and killed him in his Paris apartment; the evidence for his personal involvement, historians now note, came almost entirely from Mossadâs own dubious assessments. The following June, Mohammed Boudia â an Algerian theater director whom Western intelligence cables described as an active militant â was blown up in his car, an assassination Le Monde reported the same day, June 29, 1973, while openly questioning what French authorities had known.
Whether the three men were guilty of wrongdoing or not â and it seems two of them were probably innocent â none were ever charged, tried, or given the chance to answer the allegations against them. They were killed on the strength of intelligence assessments that were, by the researchersâ own account, sometimes wrong and never tested in open court. These assassinations were state-sanctioned murder â and in each case, the assassins were aided and abetted directly by Western intelligence.
These three were not the only ones. Mossadâs Operation Wrath of God consisted of 10 missions in total, eight of them carried out in Europe, most using intelligence its Kilowatt partners supplied. None of the men killed were ever tried in a court. They were found, and then killed.
A continent turned into a hunting ground, with no right of appeal.
According to Aviva Guttmann, Kilowatt was set up to fix a gap: Mossad needed European intelligence to identify, track, and locate its targets in the first place. So in October 1971, Israel suggested opening a dedicated encrypted channel to share intelligence on Palestinian activity in Europe, and Western agencies agreed. The arrangement ran both ways. Mossad fed disinformation to its European partners about its own operations, leading French, Italian and other states to dismiss assassinations on their own soil as unsolved rather than face the reality of what an allied service had done in their backyards.
In a display of their political bias, Western agencies, however, continued to supply intelligence to Mossad long after press reporting had made clear exactly who was behind the killings. As Guttmann says, the assassination campaign would likely not have been possible without their continued cooperation.
Guttmannâs own research records that Golda Meirâs instruction remained that no innocent bystanders were to be hurt â the explosive charge for each hit calibrated carefully enough that a target could be killed while the blast stayed contained to his room. Compare that caution to Palestine today, where a single strike on Salah Shehadeâs Gaza City home in 2002 killed at least 11 civilians alongside him, including eight children â a ratio of collateral death that would have been unthinkable in the 1970s, when the target was living on a street in Rome or Paris.
Where the Machine Leads Now
Rubioâs summit wasnât just reviving an old method of killing. It was formalizing a newer one: silencing the people who object to it.
In October 2024 the Heritage Foundation published Project Esther, drafted by Victoria Coates, a former Trump national security adviser, Robert Greenway, and Daniel Flesch, a Heritage policy analyst and IDF veteran who also served as an adviser to Israelâs UN mission. The document named a so-called âHamas Support Networkâ inside the United States and laid out a plan to dismantle pro-Palestinian advocacy via coordinated public and private pressure â its authors hoping it would become government policy once âa willing administrationâ took office. The second Trump administration, the New York Times has since reported, adopted several policies the document recommended.
Palestine Action was proscribed in Britain as a terrorist organization in July 2025, days after members broke into RAF Brize Norton and sprayed paint into the engines of two military aircraft â though internal government documents later revealed the decision had effectively been made months earlier, and the break-in was âthe trigger but not the cause.â More than 3,000 people have been arrested since then for supporting the group. A High Court ruling that the proscription was unlawful was overturned by the Court of Appeal in June 2026 â but just yesterday, on July 30, the UK Supreme Court granted Palestine Actionâs co-founder Huda Ammori permission to appeal, setting up a final legal battle with the Home Office this autumn.
At the July 2026 State Department summit, Rubio proclaimed that it was time âto crush this evil forever.â He didnât name a specific plot. Instead he talked about 60 governments agreeing to pool intelligence and go after the money. In Fergie Chambersâ case, that money went to fund, among other things, a bakery, a desalination plant, a free medical clinic, and mental health support for orphaned children, all in Gaza.
What the Machine Hides
The Europeans who supplied Mossad the intelligence that led to the murders of Zwaiter, Hamshari, and Boudia have never been held to account for it. Secretary of State Rubio talking today about âintelligence sharingâ isnât describing something new. Itâs the same machinery that let Mossad kill without trial in the 1970s, repurposed to get Fergie Chambers extradited from Spain on money-laundering charges for funding aid to Gaza, and to ban Palestine Action as terrorists in Britain for opposing the arms trade that supplies Israelâs genocide. Meanwhile Israel keeps killing, and the governments that once helped hunt down its enemies in Europe now spend their summits chattering about how to silence the people trying to stop it.
Richard Edain is a teacher and writer based in the UK and Vietnam who covers history, politics, and current affairs on his Substack, the Ulysses Files. His work traces todayâs global headlines back to their historical roots. Contact: edainrichard@gmail.com.
https://original.antiwar.com/richard_edain/2026/08/02/the-machine-that-hunted-palestinians-in-the-1970s-is-hunting-their-allies-today/
The Strait of Hormuz deal Iran can't accept
On paper, it sounds like a compromise: Iran controls ships entering the Persian Gulf, while Oman controls ships leaving.
Everyone gets half... except they don't, because in the Strait of Hormuz, the exit lane is where the real power lies.
The tankers leaving the Gulf are loaded with the energy that keeps the global economy running.
Threaten those ships, and oil prices can surge overnight.
Threaten empty tankers sailing in, and the impact is slower, weaker, and far less certain.
That's why Tehran has consistently pushed for authority over both directions of traffic.
An inbound-only arrangement would strip away its most powerful bargaining chip.
Also, loaded vessels already inside the Gulf could continue sailing under an open outbound lane.
Export terminals could keep operating using ships already in the system.
Only weeks later, when empty tankers failed to return, would exports begin to slow.
Markets don't panic over delays; they panic over immediate supply shocks.
Iran understands that, so do traders and governments.
There's another problem: Iran also exports its own oil.
Handing effective control of the outbound lane to Oman would leave Tehran relying on a neighbor whose security relationships are far closer to Washington and the Gulf monarchies than to Iran.
For a country that views control of Hormuz as a pillar of national security, that's a strategic concession few leaders could justify.
This isn't simply about collecting transit fees or conducting inspections; it's about leverage.
Control over outbound traffic gives Iran the ability to influence global energy markets, raise shipping costs, pressure foreign governments, and strengthen its negotiating position during crises.
Inbound-only control transforms that leverage from an immediate weapon into a delayed inconvenience.
That is a trade Tehran has little incentive to make.
Writer: Ian
