Many readers ask why I wrote Kelilah. Here are three reasons.

The first is my fascination with Mossad. The mysterious continues to intrigue. The invincible too. Israel fought three defensive wars and won all three, in part because of important work by Mossad.

Second, I am very interested in Israel and its history. I visited the country five years ago and it left a beautiful and lasting memory.

Finally, and that is also stated in the afterword of Kelilah: deadly embrace, the history of Israel is also the history of the Mossad, as said by Ronan Bergman in his book on Mossad Rise and Kill First. It is a story about stopping fleeing and starting to fight back, about the eternal war against injustice and the protection of life. 

One of the biggest problems is that this history is still not properly taught in European countries.

Decades of negative news, in which the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in my opinion was falsely portrayed as the giant (Israel) versus the dwarf (The Palestinians), determined the often negative perception of this beautiful country. European intellectuals are still debating Israel's right to exist, but they keep forgetting one thing. They forget the fact that after the First World War, and thus after the implosion of the Ottoman Empire, the various Arab peoples eventually gained twenty states and the Jews only that one, tiny, bone-dry strip of land on the Mediterranean. While the English, who emerged victorious from the battle with the Ottomans, promised the Jews a much larger land (including present-day Jordan).

So the Arabs could not and still cannot complain about what they got after the Ottoman Empire imploded.

How wonderful it is that to this day Israel is still the only democratic country in the Middle East, where the civil rights of Jews, Arabs, Druze, Armenians and Bedouins are protected and also feel like an inhabitant of Israel, where women and men are completely equal and where freedom of expression and freedom of religion go hand in hand? Many Arab and even Western European countries could learn something from this.

At first sight, the new diplomatic relations with a number of Arab countries, made under the Trump administration, looked very promising. Under the new Biden administration, things seem to turn in a negative direction. Only recently, Saudi Arabia announced to seek good relations with Iran, as they see the United States turning their strategy toward Israel's number one enemy.

As long as Iran continues to threaten Israel with nuclear armageddon and as long as many terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood continue to call for violence against Jews and Israel, Mossad will remain vigilant to prevent future wars.