So too with the America’s drone industry. The Israeli influence is not visible but it is real, documented and extremely relevant to the future of drones in America. If you want to know how drones may change American airspace in coming years, just look to Israel, where the unmanned aerial vehicle market is thriving and drones are considered a reliable instrument of “homeland security.”

“There are three explanations for Israel’s success in becoming a world leader in development and production of UAVs,” a top Israeli official explained to the Jerusalem Post last year. “We have unbelievable people and innovation, combat experience that helps us understand what we need and immediate operational use since we are always in a conflict which allows us to perfect our systems.”

Israel’s drone expertise goes back to at least 1970, according to the UAV page of the Israeli Air Force. Mark Daly, an expert on unmanned aircraft at Jane’s Defense in London, notes the Israelis were the first to make widespread use of drones in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, when the aircraft were used to monitor troop movements.

Now, as the Arab media and Western reporters such as Scott Wilson of the Washington Post have reported, the Israeli Defense Force uses fleets of constantly hovering drones to intimidate and control the Arab population in the Gaza Strip.  (The residents call these drones “zenana,” which both sounds like the aircraft’s distinctive buzz and is Arabic slang for a nagging wife.) The IDF regularly uses drones for targeted assassinations of suspected militants, saying the drones enable them to use “precision strikes” to avoid hurting civilians. Yet as Human Rights Watch has documented, the drone strikes during the Gaza War killed scores of children who were nowhere near armed combatants.

Israel markets its expertise in defense to the rest of the world. Israeli academic Neve Gordon cites a glossy government brochure on drones titled “Israel Homeland Security: Opportunities for Industrial Cooperation,” which boasts, “no other advanced technology country has such a large proportion of citizens with real time experience in the army, security and police forces.” The chapter called “Learning from Israel’s Experience” notes that “many of these professionals continue to work as international consultants and experts after leaving the Israel Defense Forces, police or other defense and security organizations.”

The work has paid off when it comes to drones: The Jewish state is the single largest exporter of drones in the world, responsible for 41 percent of all UAVs exported between 2001 and 2011, according to a database compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Israeli companies export drone technology to at least 24 countries, including the United States.

In addition to exports, Israeli companies also create subsidiaries in consumer countries. “To increase sales outside Israel, Israel’s defense companies have to set up subsidiaries in target markets, rather than expand local manufacturing,” Haaretz reported  in 2009. The Israelis “set up Stark in 2006 to drum up business in America,” according to Haaretz, because the U.S. prefers “to buy armaments and other defense gear from local companies.” In 2007, Stark  “inaugurated its first production outfit, which makes Hunter unmanned vehicles that it sells through Northrop Grumman. In fact, the U.S. armed forces have been using [Israeli-made] Hunter drones since the early 1990s.”

As for domestic drone uses, the Israeli example is perhaps most instructive at the U.S. border. The 5 million Palestinian Arabs living in and around Israel, like the 11 undocumented resident aliens in the United States, are ineligible for citizenship in the land they call home. Both groups are subject to monitoring, barriers to entry and rapid expulsion. Not surprisingly one of the first uses of drones by the Department of Homeland Security was to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border, where it now flies Israeli-made Hermes 450 drones.

And the Israeli example is instructive not just at the border, but also south of it, where the Mexican government has allowed the U.S. to fly drone missions as part of the drug war. Mexico has, apparently, learned a thing or two from its northern neighbor about the best country for buying drones. In March, when it allegedly purchased two new drones of its own, it knew where to go: Israel.

The Aleppo Codex is the most authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible, produced in the 10th century by the great rabbi Aaron Ben-Asher and the scribe Shlomo ben Buya. Friedman, who lives in Israel and has covered the Mideast and the Caucasus for the Associated Press and other publications, explains that the codex’s significance to Jewish faith and identity is more than symbolic. As a people scattered across the globe, “instead of being bound by a king, a temple, or geography, [Jews] needed to be bound by something else, something portable. What emerged was the idea that a people could be held together by words.” Yet in the centuries before printing, when words were transmitted orally and by copyists, it was all too easy for mistakes and variations to creep in, and “Jews could not be held together by a book if they were not reading precisely the same one.”

The codex was the perfect version of the Bible, a sort of atomic clock of Judaism, and intended to be the model for all subsequent copies. Its early history was fraught: captured by Crusaders in the fall of Jerusalem, ransomed by the Jewish community in Cairo and consulted by the fabled sage Maimonides, it was eventually taken to the Syrian city of Aleppo. There, it resided for half a century. Although it was well-cared-for by Aleppo’s Jewish community, it had come to be revered as a relic or treasure; few were allowed to see it and no one was allowed to copy it.

All that changed in 1947, when the establishment of the state of Israel by a United Nations resolution led to unrest in the Arab world and the harassment and persecution of Jewish communities in Muslim nations. In Aleppo, this took the form of riots and the sacking of the synagogue. The codex — commonly referred to as the Crown — was supposed to have been consumed in a fire set by the mob.

It was not, and in 1958, the Crown was smuggled into Jerusalem by a cheese merchant who was one of the few Syrian Jews to receive official permission to emigrate to Israel. Friedman became interested in this “lonely treasure and millennium-old traveler” in 2008, when he decided to write an article about it. He imagined the piece would be “an uplifting and uncomplicated account of the rescue of a cultural artifact,” but what he discovered instead was a thicket of conflicting reports, missing records, puzzling omissions, stonewalling officials and obsessed amateur sleuths.

The mysteries surround not the ancient history of the book, but what happened to it between 1947 and the mid-1970s, although even establishing where things got dodgy proved to be a challenge. Friedman relates each piece of the story as he untangled it himself, and part of the pleasure of “The Aleppo Codex” is getting to tag along on the heels of a real-life investigative journalist as he does his detective work. Those years spent writing wire copy have not eroded the author’s eloquence, either, as the book’s headier touches attest: “Down in those streets, the stores now shuttered, the women of the manzul were receiving clients, and the men were submerged in cafe smoke like deep-sea divers, tubes between their lips, inhaling the rose-scented oxygen of water pipes.”

While the official story simply states that the Crown was presented to the president of Israel, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, upon its arrival in Jerusalem in 1958, Friedman unearthed evidence that this was no simple handoff. Most of the Jewish community of Aleppo had immigrated to Israel, and their rabbis insisted that the Crown was supposed to have been delivered to them. The cheese merchant maintained that the rabbis still living in Aleppo, the ones who had passed him the book, told him no more than to give it to “a religious man.” (The Syrian government prevented communication with the Jews in Aleppo, so his story could not be confirmed or disproved.) The Aleppo rabbis decided to take their complaint to court.

This dispute embodied major tensions within the newly formed state. The Aleppo rabbis had presided over what was, as Friedman writes, “an old community by the time Roman legions destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in AD 70.” The Israeli leadership, “largely secular European socialists,” did not strike the Aleppo Jews as “representing the entire Jewish people.” Why should these interlopers be allowed to appropriate a book that had been the focal point of Aleppo’s venerable Jewish community for half a millennium?

The codex lawsuit was also a dramatic example of what Friedman describes as a “largely untold story” concerning the migration of the Jewish Diaspora to Israel after the formation of the state. Along with the movement of people, there was also a “great migration of books.” Jews from all over the Muslim world were forced to leave neighborhoods their families had inhabited for centuries. Not only did distinctive local cultures vanish overnight, but so did many of their treasured texts, left at docks and airstrips with the promise that they would be forwarded on to their owners in Israel, and then never seen again. Well, not exactly never: Some of these books and scrolls turned up later in state archives and even in booksellers’ shops.

If that were all there was to the story of the Aleppo Codex, it would be fascinating (and dismaying) enough, but after wrestling with the shadowy story of how the Crown got to Jerusalem, Friedman turns to a second and even more disturbing question: Where is the rest of it? About 200 pages, some 40 percent of the Crown, are missing. These are the most important parts of all: the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch and the Torah. Again, the official story holds that portions of the Crown were burned in the 1947 fire, but this has since been disproved. A couple of single pages have been found in places as far-flung as Brooklyn, N.Y., where they were carried around by Aleppo old-timers as good-luck charms. The bulk of the Torah, however, remains MIA.

This is where Friedman’s investigation gets especially lively, as he consults with a former Mossad case officer and secretly records an impromptu interview with one of the dozen or so men rich enough to have bought the missing pages. Supposedly, this collector and his daughter were approached by two dealers with a briefcase at a Jerusalem book fair in the 1980s. They were shown an old codex identified as part of the Crown, but the collector says he refused to buy it because the price was too high. One of the dealers later turned up dead in a Tel Aviv hotel room registered to a man who didn’t exist.

Friedman has his suspicions about the collector’s story: Would this man really consider $1 million too much to pay for a supposedly priceless text? He devotes most of his energy, however, to getting to the bottom of who is responsible for ripping out the heart of the Crown and selling it on the black market. As he settles on three likely culprits, “The Aleppo Codex” builds to a moral crescendo more impressive than the climactic fight scene in any thriller. “A volume that survived one thousand years of turbulent history was betrayed in our times by the people charged with guarding it,” Friedman writes. “We might file this tale between Cain and Abel and the golden calf, parables about the many ways we fail.”

Netanyahu’s political jockeying provoked an immediate and strong reaction in Israel.

Labor Party leader Shelly Yachimovitch, who will benefit politically if, as expected, she is now named opposition leader, said: “This ugly maneuver is going to be taught in universities for a long, long time.”

Israel’s Occupy-style protest movement, meanwhile, announced a series of demonstrations to call for political reform this coming weekend. The main question occupying Israel’s punditry even after this second twist remains the same: Is Netanyahu acting to strengthen his hand if he decides to strike Iran before the American elections in November?

Ari Shavit, a top political analyst at the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, who is known for his contacts in circles close to Netanyahu, told GlobalPost that the prime minister has been intent on early elections for at least a few months, for one principal reason that will not please Washington.

“Netanyahu designed to have early elections in Israel so they preempt the American elections in November and give him time to bring the Iranian nuclear crisis to a climax in autumn, in the two months between the Israeli elections and the Americans’,” he said.

Netanyahu’s decision to then abandon early elections in favor of a broader coalition appears aimed at that same result. “Netanyahu suddenly understood that the Likud” — Netanyahu’s party — “could easily split to the right, in which case, even if re-elected, he would not have the mandate he needs,” Shavit said. “Instead of an election preparing the ground for a confrontation, now he has unity preparing the ground for confrontation.”

The Israeli leader has long argued that a pre-emptive strike on Iranian facilities may be the only way to prevent Iran from developing nuclear-weapons capability.

But opposition from European leaders and US President Barack Obama, who supports a diplomatic approach, and from a growing chorus of former Israeli military commanders who argue that a unilateral strike would only delay, not halt, Iranian ambitions, have weakened the prime minister’s position.

Netanyahu’s logic seems to hold that if Obama is re-elected in November, he will no longer have to worry about domestic politics and will be able to press Netanyahu on Iran and the question of peace talks with the Palestinians — an area Netanyahu is eager to keep out of the international spotlight.

“The Iranian reason remains Netanyahu’s motivation,” Shavit said. “The difference is that now the season is shortened. He does not have to wait until the election on Sept. 4 before bringing the Iranian issue to a head. He can act now.”

Chanan Kristal, a political analyst for Israel Radio, had a somewhat different take. He said that two possibilities exist that can explain Netanyahu’s actions — but agreed that the move was driven by Iran.

“Either [Netanyahu] needs [new Deputy Prime Minister] Mofaz in his government in order to justify postponing any action against Iran, or he needs Mofaz inside so as to provide legitimacy for when he does attack Iran. Mofaz has so far come out against an attack, but it remains clear that those making the decision will be Netanyahu and Defense Minister [Ehud] Barak. For now, all bets are off.”

Shavit warned that anyone interested in preventing a conflict with Iran, such as the United States, will need to act swiftly to find a political solution.

“Otherwise there is a risk by the end of summer, we’ll find ourselves in a dire situation,” he said.

At the joint press conference announcing his union with Kadima and Mofaz, Netanyahu appeared to be peeved at much of the sniping he has recently faced by a growing list of former military and intelligence leaders expressing doubts about his Iran policy. He seemed especially put off by Yuval Diskin, the former head of Israel’s internal security agency and an apolitical figure respected across the board, who last week took the criticism farther than most.

“My major problem is that I have no faith in the current leadership, which must lead us in an event on the scale of war with Iran or a regional war,” he said. “I don’t believe in either the prime minister or the defense minister. I don’t believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings.”

The implication that Netanyahu and Barak are not competent to make decisions on matters of national security, specifically regarding Iran, ricocheted loudly across the political universe and clearly remained on Netanyahu’s mind today as he repeatedly stressed the “sanity” of his government and said: “I have even been referred to as messianic. Yes, messianic.”

A growing cadre of Israeli political analysts view Netanyahu’s posturing on Iran as part of a long-term pre-electoral strategy — he faces mounting threats against the stability of his coalition.

Alon Liel, a 30-year veteran of the country’s foreign ministry, where he once served as director general, told GlobalPost he believes the Iranian issue is expedient for Netanyahu both internationally and domestically. Abroad, he is vulnerable to accusations that he is not moving toward peace talks with the Palestinians. Internally, he needs to shore up his right flank ahead of elections.

“In Netanyahu’s political circles, and even beyond that, it is very comfortable for him to lift the issue of Iran to high decibels. He needs to address internal political realities and consolidate an Israeli consensus, and also, internally and externally, to postpone the Palestinian issue,” he said. “He is much more comfortable talking about the Iranian danger than he is addressing the crisis with the Palestinians.”

Leil said that Netanyahu is “earnestly” concerned by the possibility of Iran developing into an existential threat to Israel, but thinks most of the rhetoric is aimed to serve his re-election campaign.

“I personally am much more frightened by the silence of the Palestinians than by the verbal back and forth between Obama and Netanyahu,” he said.

U.S. President Barack Obama responded swiftly to Netanyahu’s outburst over the five-week gaps.

“Now, the clock is ticking. And I’ve been very clear to Iran and to our negotiating partners that we’re not going to have these talks just drag out in a stalling process. But so far, at least, we haven’t given away anything — other than the opportunity for us to negotiate and see if Iran comes to the table in good faith,” Obama said. ”And the notion that somehow we’ve given something away — or a ‘freebie’ — would indicate that Iran has gotten something. In fact, they’ve got some of the toughest sanctions that they’re going to be facing coming up in just a few months if they don’t take advantage of these talks.”

Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York and chief of staff to four foreign ministers, told GlobalPost that Netanyahu’s outburst was irresponsible.

“The promptness and resoluteness of the U.S. response suggests that [if] Israel had reservations, [they] should have been conveyed through quieter channels. Mr. Netanyahu’s reaction gave the impression of a major divergence in U.S. and Israeli positions where one may not really exist,” he said.

American officials went out of their way to assure the Israeli public that their prime minister had been informed of every facet of the Istanbul talks ahead of time, while they were under way, and after their conclusion.

Netanyahu is juggling a number of challenges ahead of elections next year. Like many in the international Occupy movement, the organizers of last summer’s massive wave of social protests in Israel are gearing up for a renewed effort this season.

Also, senior political allies such as Deputy Prime Minister and former Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon are growling at Netanyahu from the right, threatening to bolt from his government if he complies with a Supreme Court order to evacuate illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Many Israeli ministers say they are resigned to the government’s collapse well before the scheduled date for elections, in late 2013.

Amos Yadlin, a former chief of military intelligence, took the unusual step last week to calm any talk of a possible Israeli strike against Iran, telling Israel Army Radio that “even if Iran achieves the capacity to make a bomb, I don’t think the first thing they’ll do is launch a bomb against Tel Aviv.”

Many Israeli analysts dismiss the squabble on Iran as mere posturing for the benefit of the media, positing that, behind the scenes, Netanyahu and Obama are coordinating a united front — or that Netanyahu is simply playing for local votes.

“Five weeks is not the end of the world,” Iran expert Meir Javedanfahr told the Israeli website Times of Israel, dismissing Netanyahu’s complaint about the time between negotiations.

Liel said Netanyahu “is a spin master with a genius for PR, a real master. The last thing he wants, for example, is for the UN to take up Palestinian demands, or the ticking time bomb of the settlements. He wants quiet on that front. And the best way to get that silence is to raise the tone of the Iranian issue.”

The Israeli blogger Anshell Pfeffer said naked electoral calculations explain Netanyahu’s impertinence.

“He needs to present the Israeli public with an achievement on the Iranian issue and he needs it soon. The prime minister hears not only the ticking of the Iranian atomic clock; last summer’s clamor from Tel-Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard also echoes in his ears. It was the lowest point of his second term, with his ratings plummeting and Likud ministers talking openly about losing the next elections.”

The Netanyahu government, more so than its predecessors, confuses sovereignty over Israeli territory with sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza Strip – which is what inevitably sets off the protests, causing Israel to freak out and sooner or later commit some act or acts that most of the world finds appalling. It’s a vicious circle; no matter how much security Israel’s military, political and economic power provide, the occupation does not let this country rest. The events of Sunday were a great example.

“Israel will prevent hostile elements from entering,” vowed the minister of public security, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, during a security drill at the airport before a planned “fly-in” by 1,500 pro-Palestinian activists, mainly Europeans, who were hoping to land and bus straight away into the West Bank. They wouldn’t have had to go through Ben Gurion, of course, if the  Palestinians in the West Bank – or Gaza – were allowed to do what free nations do, such as build their own airport. This was the implied point of the “Welcome to Palestine” fly-in.

Nothing doing, said Israel’s powers-that-be.

As they did when they headed off a similar protest last summer, Israeli authorities gave foreign airlines the names of the majority of activists who’d bought tickets to Ben Gurion for Sunday, warning that upon landing they would be deported ASAP and the airlines that flew them in would be billed. In response, Air France, Lufthansa, Britain’s Jet2 and other carriers canceled most of the activists’ tickets, while the few dozen who did manage to get on flights were scooped up by Israeli security as soon as they touched down, and detained for deportation.

In the arrivals hall at Ben Gurion, camera crews and cops waited for something to happen, but the only action was provided by two Israeli leftists who held up “Welcome to Palestine” placards before being hustled off by police. A small group of right-wing counter-protesters unfurled a big Israeli flag and gave interviews to bored reporters.

“The pictures speak for themselves – all is quiet, the operation was a great success, the security forces prevented an attempt to undermine Israel’s sovereignty,” Benzi Sao, the police officer in charge, told Channel 2 news. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bureau wrote up a sarcastic letter to hand to the activists awaiting deportation: “We … suggest that you first solve the real problems of the region, and then come back and share with us your experience. Have a nice flight.”

Mission accomplished, as far as official Israel was concerned. Then it all went to hell.

The fly-in was only the second story on Channel 2 news, having been pushed down by a shocking video taken that afternoon in the West Bank by pro-Palestinian activists. It showed one of them, a young, blond, unarmed Dane, getting abruptly smashed in the face by an M-16 rifle wielded by a senior Israeli army officer. The video, posted on YouTube, went viral. A still photo showed the officer, Lt. Col. Shalom Eisner, rearing back with his rifle, about to bash another protester in the back.

About 250 Palestinians and Western sympathizers had been on a protest bike ride when Eisner and his men tried to break it up. He said the protesters had attacked them with sticks, and was photographed later with his hand bandaged, saying a protester had broken a couple of his fingers. The protesters, though, said they’d done nothing but ride their bikes when the soldiers went after them.

Whatever the truth, the YouTube looked terrible for Israel, and nothing could justify Eisner’s act. He apologized, the army called it a “grave” incident and suspended him. Netanyahu said: “This kind of behavior does not represent Israeli soldiers or officers, and it is not acceptable in the Israeli army or the State of Israel.”

Well-l-l-l-l…  The talkbacks and Facebook seemed considerably more pro-Eisner than anti-, with endless variations of “The only purpose in these scumbags’ lives is to instigate, and create mayhem. If the soldier hit this bum, he deserved it.” (From “tough jew” on The Jerusalem Post’s talkbacks.) One of Israel’s 120 Knesset members, Michael Ben-Ari, who is banned from entering the U.S. because of his affiliation with the outlawed, violently anti-Arab Kach party, actually said: “Well done. … Radical leftists must be handled with a heavy hand.”

Israeli soldiers and policemen trying to run the West Bank, playing Goliath to the Palestinian side’s David – this story is as old as the occupation, which will be 45 years old in June. On the surface, things are under control, except for the odd incidents that keep driving this country crazy. On the surface, it could be evidence of a guilty conscience.