Israel-related animal conspiracy theories

Zoological conspiracy theories involving Israel are occasionally found in the media or on the internet, typically in Muslim majority countries, alleging use of animals by Israel to attack civilians or to conduct espionage. These conspiracies are often reported as evidence of a Zionist or Israeli plot.

Examples include the December 2010 shark attacks in Egypt and the 2011 capture in Saudi Arabia of a Griffon Vulture carrying an Israeli satellite tracking device.

Shark attacks

An oceanic whitetip shark, one of the two species implicated in the attacks

In December 2010, several shark attacks occurred off the South Sinai resort of Sharm El-Sheikh. In an interview on an Egyptian TV program Egypt Today, Captain Mustafa Ismail, introduced as "a famous diver", claimed that no oceanic whitetip sharks lived in the Red Sea off Egypt. When asked how the sharks got there, Ismail responded: "No, it's who let them in?" He described a conversation with an Israeli diver who told him that an oceanic whitetip was captured off Eilat, an Israeli town also on the Red Sea coast, and that it had a GPS navigation device attached to it. Though this is a common method of monitoring shark migrations, Ismail became suspicious and theorised, "the sharks were monitored to attack in Egypt's waters only". He alleged that the GPS tracking device was in fact a "guiding device".

Prompted in a TV interview for comments, the governor of South Sinai, Mohammad Abdul Fadhil Shousha noted: "What is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark [in the sea] to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question. But it needs time to confirm." Shousha later directly dismissed the event as being connected to Israel.

Describing the conspiracy connection to Israel as "sad", Professor Mahmoud Hanafy, a marine biologist at Suez Canal University, pointed out that GPS devices are used by marine biologists to track sharks, not to remote-control them. Egyptian officials suggested that the attacks were due to overfishing, illegal feeding, the dumping overboard of sheep carcasses, or unusually high water temperatures.

Birds carrying Israeli tracking devices and tags

Saudi vulture

In 2011, a griffon vulture with a wingspan of about 8 feet (2.4 m) was caught by a hunter near Ha'il, Saudi Arabia wearing a GPS device and a "Tel Aviv University" leg tag. Rumors spread among locals, repeated in some Saudi newspapers, that the bird was sent by Israel to spy on the country.

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then Secretary General of the Saudi National Security Council and appointed head of the country's intelligence agency in 2012 dismissed the rumors, said the equipment on the bird was simply there for scientific study, and that the bird would be quickly released. Saudi wildlife authorities agreed that the equipment was for solely scientific purposes "Some Saudi journalists rushed in carrying the news of this bird for the sake of getting a scoop without checking the information... they should have asked the competent authorities about the bird before publishing such news," Bandar said at the time. Israeli officials described the rumor as "ludicrous" and said they were "stunned."

A spokesman for Israel's Park and Nature Authority told the Israeli daily Ma'ariv that Israeli scientists use GPS devices to track migration routes. "The device does nothing more than receive and store basic data about the bird's whereabouts," he said. The Israeli ornithologist Yossi Leshem of Tel Aviv University said that this was the third such detention of a bird tracked by Israeli scientists in 3 decades.

Bee-eater

In May 2012 a dead European Bee-eater with an Israeli leg-band, used by naturalists to track migratory birds, was found by villagers near the south-eastern Turkish city of Gaziantep. The villagers worried that the bird may have carried a micro-chip from Israeli intelligence to spy on the area and alerted local officials. At one point, a counter-terrorism unit became involved. Turkey's agriculture ministry examined the corpse of the bee-eater and assured villagers that it is common to equip migratory birds with rings in order to track their movements. The BBC correspondent, Jonathan Head, ascribed the event to his view that "wildly implausible conspiracy theories take root easily in Turkey, with alleged Israeli plots among the most widely believed."

Commentary on patterns

Writing in The Times of London, James Hider linked the responses to the shark incident with those to the vulture incident and ascribed the reactions in Arab countries to "paranoia among Israel's enemies and its nominal friends", adding that "evidence of Mossad using animals is scant." Jackson Diehl, writing in his Washington Post blog, also linked the two events: "So Arab media and officials who rave about spying vultures and Mossad sharks deserve to be mocked. On the other hand, they can cite the paranoid's defense -- just because they believe the Mossad is staging wild covert operations against them doesn't mean it's not true."

Gil Yaron wrote in the The Toronto Star that "Many animals undoubtedly serve in Israel’s army and security services: dogs sniff out bombs and alpaca help mountaineers carry their loads. [...] But tales about the use of sharks, birds, rodents or, as has also been claimed, insects in the service of the military are more the fruit of imagination than hard fact."

See also

• Animals used in espionage
• Animal-borne bomb attacks
• Man-eating badger
• Media coverage of the Arab–Israeli conflict
• Military dolphin

External links

• Hunter lured Israeli vulture with “dead sheep”
• Video: Israel’s Latest Secret Weapon: The Death-Defying Rodent
• Bewitched Animals and the Muslim Media