The Shelter That Isn’t
Why the old assumption that Israel won’t extradite its own citizens has been obsolete for a quarter-century—and why, in the unfolding prosecution of a collapsed Polish crypto exchange, every antisemitic remark posted beneath a news article is a small, undated gift to the defense.
I. A piece of inherited wisdom
One evening in September, 1997, a sixteen-year-old named Samuel Sheinbein—raised in Maryland, the son of an Israeli-born father—stepped off a plane at Ben Gurion Airport. He was fleeing a homicide charge in Montgomery County. He had never lived in Israel. His Hebrew, by most accounts, was the Hebrew of a bar mitzvah boy. But he carried Israeli citizenship through his father, and under a 1978 amendment to the country’s extradition law—passed by a Knesset that still held the European trauma in living memory, and championed by Menachem Begin himself—no Israeli national could be surrendered to a foreign jurisdiction for a crime committed after acquiring citizenship. In February, 1999, the Israeli Supreme Court, by a vote of three to two, in a decision whose prose carries an almost audible discomfort, declined the American request. Maryland prosecutors, watching on cable news, did not hide what they thought. The United States Congress began drafting legislation linking Israeli extradition policy to foreign aid.
I mention Sheinbein not because his case has any direct bearing on the prosecution unfolding today in Katowice, in southern Poland, but because his name is the hinge on which everything in that prosecution turns. The collapse, this spring, of Zondacrypto, a Polish cryptocurrency exchange whose former chief executive is now reported to have acquired Israeli citizenship within the past year and left the continent, has produced a chorus of online resignation. The Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Katowice, which opened its investigation on April 17th, now estimates losses at no less than three hundred and fifty million złotych—something on the order of eighty million euros, and climbing. The chorus, repeated with the certainty of a liturgy, runs as follows: Israel doesn’t give up its own. The matter is finished. One may as well mourn the money and move on.
The liturgy has two problems. The first is that it has been legally obsolete since 2001. The second is that, by repeating it in the particular register now colonizing Polish comment sections—a register in which the fugitive becomes “the Israeli,” and “the Israeli” becomes shorthand for a centuries-old stereotype—its speakers are handing the eventual defense lawyer in Tel Aviv a weapon he could not otherwise have dreamed of acquiring.
This essay concerns both problems, because they turn out to be the same problem, viewed from different angles.
II. How Israel became ordinary
For most of the nineteen-eighties and nineties, Israeli extradition law operated as a kind of tacit amnesty for white-collar flight. The mechanism was the 1978 amendment—known in the literature as Section 1A of the Extradition Law, 5714-1954—and its premise was moral rather than technical. A Jewish state, founded by refugees from a century of pogroms and deportations, would try its own citizens in its own courts, full stop. In place of extradition, Israeli courts assumed extraterritorial jurisdiction over conduct committed abroad, provided the conduct was also criminal where it occurred.
On the page, the arrangement was elegant. In practice, it was a disaster. Prosecutors in Brooklyn and Los Angeles began, quietly at first and then with open sarcasm, to speak of “Kosher Nostra”—an epithet that referred to the Israeli-American organized-crime networks who had discovered in Section 1A a kind of diplomatic-grade body armor. By the late nineties, even members of the Knesset were beginning to concede, in private, that the law as written had ceased to protect refugees from persecution and had started, instead, to protect fugitives from subpoenas.
Sheinbein was the most visible crisis—the one that finally moved the law—but he was not, as the popular American-turned-Polish telling sometimes implies, the sole beneficiary of Section 1A across its two-decade life. Others had used it. Sheinbein’s distinction was that he used it on American television, in the wake of a child’s murder, in a manner that Congress could not ignore. In April, 1999, the Knesset passed Amendment No. 6, permitting the extradition of Israeli nationals for the first time in more than two decades. In 2001, a second round of amendments completed the reform and—this is the crucial part—remade the statute in a form that most Polish commentators, two and a half decades later, still haven’t registered.
Three changes bear repeating.
First, the threshold for extraditable offenses dropped from three years to one. In practical terms, this means that nearly every serious fraud, every act of money-laundering, every breach of an anti-money-laundering statute, is now inside the extradition regime rather than outside it.
Second, the question of nationality and residence is now assessed at the moment of the alleged offense, not at the moment of the extradition request. This was the small, technical amendment that closed the Sheinbein loophole: acquiring Israeli citizenship after the fact, as a kind of retroactive insurance policy, no longer works.
Third—and this is the detail that the Polish comment sections have not absorbed—the shield against extradition now protects only those who were, at the time of the offense, both Israeli nationals and Israeli residents. A passport alone is not a shield. An Israeli citizen who was living somewhere else when the offense occurred is, for extradition purposes, ordinary.
This is not a scholarly subtlety. In the case of the Zondacrypto executive—who is reported to have obtained Israeli citizenship only last year, while residing throughout the suspected offense period in Monaco—it is the entire case.
III. What the record actually shows
A useful exercise, when confronted with a stubborn assumption, is to pit it against recent numbers.
Germany has been the most aggressive European pursuer of Israeli-run investment scams—the call-center operations that, after Israel’s 2017 ban on binary options, migrated seamlessly into forex and crypto. As of this April, Germany has secured the extradition of dozens of Israeli nationals in connection with such schemes, with collective victim losses estimated in excess of a billion euros across five years. Yuri Dashevsky, handed over to Berlin in June, 2022, was, at the time, described in Israeli defense circles as a concerning precedent. He is no longer a precedent; he is a pattern. Earlier this month, an Israeli citizen was arrested in Rome on an Interpol Red Notice issued at Germany’s request, in a fifty-million-euro forex-and-crypto matter. Bulgaria, too, delivered Yuval Marshak—a former executive at an Israeli defense contractor—to federal prosecutors in the United States, on charges related to the Foreign Military Financing program.
The broader picture, drawn from the standard international-enforcement registries, is unambiguous. Interpol’s Operation HAECHI V, carried out in 2024, produced fifty-five hundred arrests across forty countries and the seizure of more than four hundred million dollars in virtual assets. Late last October, Eurojust coordinated the dismantling of a six-hundred-million-euro crypto-investment network—arrests carried out in Cyprus, Spain, and Germany, with the agency’s announcement following on November 3rd.
And the detail of most interest to a Polish prosecutor: in 2024, at least thirteen Israeli citizens were detained in Greece, Cyprus, and Montenegro on Interpol Red Notices. The requesting countries included France, Germany, the United States, Belarus, and Russia, with most of the offenses involving financial fraud. Poland does not appear on that particular list. But the mechanism—a Polish prosecutor files the request, Interpol issues the notice, a third country makes the arrest—is fully available, and the arrest in Rome three weeks ago demonstrates that it works in real time, not in theory.
Then there is the Europol-Israel working arrangement of July 17, 2018, which, contrary to the compressed way it is sometimes described in the Polish press, permits only the exchange of strategic information between the two agencies; it does not extend to personal data. A fuller operational agreement has been under negotiation since 2022 but was, in November of that year, frozen by E.U. member states, principally over data-protection concerns and over its potential application to the occupied territories. The practical consequence, for a case like Zondacrypto, is that direct investigative-data flow between Poland’s Central Cybercrime Bureau (CBZC) and Israel’s Lahav 433—formally an anti-corruption unit of the Israel National Police, colloquially “the Israeli F.B.I.”—still has to route through Interpol, mutual-legal-assistance treaties, or classical diplomatic channels. The architecture of coöperation exists; it is simply more layered than the headlines suggest.
The honest question, when someone asserts that Israel doesn’t surrender its own, is which Israel they mean. The Israel of 1978, certainly. The Israel of dozens of extraditions to Germany alone in the past five years—somewhat less so.
IV. The second door, which is also open
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that one of the Zondacrypto suspects did satisfy the narrow “citizen-plus-resident” test and was therefore shielded from extradition. The case would not end. It would simply move.
Under Section 15(A) of Israel’s Penal Law, 5737-1977, Israeli criminal jurisdiction extends to felonies and misdemeanors committed abroad by anyone who, at the time of the offense, was either an Israeli citizen or an Israeli resident. The doctrine—familiar to continental lawyers, unfamiliar to most laypeople—is aut dedere aut judicare: surrender, or try. Where extradition fails, the host state prosecutes, on the basis of foreign evidence transferred through mutual-legal-assistance channels. The conviction is entered in Tel Aviv rather than Warsaw. It is entered.
This is not theoretical. Aviv Talmor, who ran a Tel Aviv algo-trading firm called UTrade, was convicted by an Israeli court in September, 2022, of defrauding foreign investors of roughly twenty-two million dollars; the sentence of four years in prison was handed down the following January, and extended, on appeal in September of 2024, to five. The long-running prosecution of Moshe Hogeg, a prominent Israeli crypto entrepreneur arrested in November, 2021, is another; the police recommended charges in 2023. Lahav 433, in a series of raids on Tel Aviv call centers in 2023, pursued Israeli citizens accused of fleecing foreign investors. The Israeli shift is not moral; it is actuarial. The reputational cost of being known as a haven for financial fraud has come, gradually, to exceed the political cost of reforming the law.
None of which is to pretend that practical obstacles don’t exist. They do. The Israeli Attorney General must personally consent to any prosecution of a foreign offense, a gatekeeping function that has long been criticized for its selectivity. Israeli courts, assessing foreign extradition requests, apply their own evidentiary standard—”evidence sufficient to commit the person to trial in Israel”—which is higher than its equivalent in, say, Berlin. Polish evidence must survive translation, authentication, and the chain-of-custody review common to any serious mutual-legal-assistance proceeding. These are all real frictions. None of them is the stone wall that Polish comment sections take them to be.
V. The gift given to the defense
Now to the other problem, which is the harder one, and which no lawyer representing the Zondacrypto victims can responsibly avoid.
Something has happened, in the weeks since the executive’s reported flight, that is familiar from every large-scale fraud the internet has documented: the loss has become racialized. The comment threads beneath the Polish reporting now carry, with grim predictability, references to “the Israeli mafia,” to “Jewish swindlers,” to “running back to his own kind.” The wording varies. The shape is always the same. It is the shape of a stereotype that has been, for nearly a millennium, the standard vocabulary in which European majorities have explained their own losses to themselves.
A lawyer is obliged, here, to say something uncomfortable. Whatever one thinks of the moral character of this language—and I think what any decent reader would think—its practical effect, in the specific legal procedure that lies ahead, is to hand the defense a piece of evidence it could not otherwise obtain.
Israeli extradition law, in the form that has stood since the 2001 reforms—specifically, Section 2B of the 1954 statute—requires the refusal of any extradition request where there is reason to believe that the request is motivated by race, ethnicity, religion, or political opinion, or that the requested person would face persecution on any of these grounds upon transfer. The same principle animates Article 3(2) of the 1957 European Convention on Extradition, which is the operative instrument between Poland and Israel (the two countries never concluded a bilateral treaty). This is not a procedural nicety. It is, for defense counsel, a door.
The defense strategy, when it arrives, will not be that the Zondacrypto executive is innocent. That is a factual dispute, and with thousands of complainants and a money trail across five jurisdictions it is a dispute difficult to win. The defense will argue, instead, that the Polish request itself is tainted—that the domestic pressure driving it is antisemitic in character, that the prosecution is operating not as law but as the expression of a popular resentment. And under that thesis, exhibit A will be a collection of screenshots. Timestamped, usernamed, geolocated to Polish IP addresses. Drawn from forums and comment threads and, inevitably, from the comment sections beneath the very news stories that first reported the victims’ losses.
The Israeli court reviewing the request does not need to find that Poland’s entire legal system is antisemitic. It needs only to find what the case law, in a phrase the Israeli bar repeats often, calls “a reasonable apprehension.” Apprehension is not certainty. Apprehension is atmosphere, mood, register. The screenshots create it. The already-cautious evidentiary standard absorbs it.
There is an analogy that may be clearer than the law. Imagine a plaintiff bringing a civil action against a bank for wrongful seizure of his account. He has the paperwork. He has the witnesses. He has the records. And as he walks into the courthouse every morning, he is carrying a sign that describes the bank’s employees in language that the judge will not permit to be read aloud. When the bank’s lawyer rises and asks permission to read the sign into the record, everything in the case changes. The paperwork is still the paperwork. But the case is now about the sign.
It should be said, too, that Article 256 of the Polish Penal Code—the statute that criminalizes incitement to ethnic or national hatred—remains on the books. A sufficiently vehement comment under a news article is not merely a strategic error in the extradition proceeding to come. It is also, in itself, a chargeable offense. But the criminal-law dimension is the smaller of the two problems. The larger problem is the one the screenshots create for the prosecution whose success the commenters nominally want.
And there is one further point, which ought not to require stating but seems to. The community of Zondacrypto victims—there are, on current Polish prosecutorial estimates, potentially tens of thousands of them in Poland alone—includes, as any such community does, Polish Jews, Israeli dual nationals living in Poland, people who have relatives in both countries. These individuals were defrauded by the same mechanism as everyone else. Every antisemitic remark posted under a news article about the exchange lands on them, too. It lands on co-victims, which is a contradiction in terms.
VI. A modest prescription
From all of which a set of quite specific recommendations follows, none of them requiring the reader to share any particular moral view.
The first is linguistic discipline. The suspect in a fraud matter is never “the Israeli.” He is the defendant, the suspect, the accused—by name, or by role. His citizenship is a jurisdictional fact, pertinent to the mechanics of extradition and to nothing else. In the language of the power of attorney, the criminal complaint, the statement to the press, this rule is not merely good manners. It is operational hygiene.
The second is active custodianship of the public discourse. Law firms representing victims have both the standing and the interest to monitor comment threads on articles about the case, to flag hate speech to the platforms under the Digital Services Act’s notice-and-action regime, and to set the tone through their own published communications. This is not censorship. It is the maintenance of a record that the eventual defense cannot cherry-pick for a presentation in Tel Aviv.
The third is prosecutorial discipline. From the first page of the first criminal complaint, the Polish case must be constructed with extradition in mind. The charges—as qualified by the Katowice Regional Prosecutor’s Office: Article 286 § 1, Article 294 § 1, and Article 299 §§ 1 and 5 of the Polish Penal Code, covering qualified fraud and money-laundering—must correspond, offense for offense, to their Israeli equivalents. They do. Section 415 of the Israeli Penal Law reaches qualified fraud, with a seven-year maximum; the Prohibition on Money Laundering Law, 5760-2000, reaches laundering, with its Section 3(a) providing for up to ten years’ imprisonment. Both clear the one-year extradition threshold by comfortable margins. The evidence gathered in Poland must be gathered, from the beginning, with the Israeli courtroom as its eventual audience: transactions tied to named victims, clean chains of custody on the digital materials, parallel mutual-legal-assistance requests to Estonia, Monaco, Cyprus, and Switzerland to freeze assets before they disperse.
The fourth is a matter less of law than of politics, in the old Aristotelian sense. Israel is not of one mind on this subject. The Knesset ban on binary options, enacted on October 23, 2017, was driven, explicitly, by Israeli lawmakers’ concern for their country’s reputation; it extended to activity directed at foreign clients as well. Lahav 433 arrests Israeli citizens accused of defrauding foreigners. Israeli attorneys, among them Nir and Gib Rotenberg—who have represented most of the Israelis extradited to Germany—are open participants in a domestic debate about the proper limits of citizen protection. Polish victims, in other words, have natural allies in Israel: journalists, victims’ advocates, lawyers who have spent years arguing that their country should not be a shelter for this kind of operation. That alliance disappears the moment Polish public discourse slides into the language of ethnic grievance. Nothing consolidates Israeli opinion faster than the perception that a Jew, abroad, is being prosecuted as a Jew.
VII. A closing observation
The belief that Israel does not extradite its own is, at this point, a consolation rather than a legal proposition. It licenses resignation. It allows the loss to be filed under “unfortunate” rather than “actionable.” In this respect, the myth serves not only the man who might be pursued but also, more quietly, those who lack the energy to pursue him.
Israeli extradition law today is a normal European extradition law. It has its characteristic caution on evidence. It has its Attorney General’s filter. It has its residence test and its sentence-return guarantees. But it is normal, and economic crimes—including the crypto ones—fall squarely inside it. The 1957 European Convention on Extradition applies between Warsaw and Jerusalem. The 2018 Europol working arrangement, narrow as it is, functions. The Zondacrypto investigation, opened on April 17th by the Katowice Regional Prosecutor’s Office, now concerns harm estimated at no less than three hundred and fifty million złotych. If the Polish prosecutors do their work, and if the Polish victims do not actively destroy that work from the comments sections, the prosecution need not end in a shrug.
To the victims, then, a request that is also a cool-headed piece of legal advice: do not give the defense a weapon it does not already possess. Every sentence you write on the public record, these weeks, will be read. Every screen will be captured. Every comment will be dated. If you feel the need to express your loss, express it in a form that strengthens the case rather than weakens it. File a criminal complaint. Bring your transaction records to counsel. Be counted among the documented complainants.
The law, in the end, is a craft of patience. And patience, unlike resentment, tends to extradite the people it ought to.
Robert Nogacki – licensed legal counsel (radca prawny, WA-9026), Founder of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec.
There are lawyers who practice law. And there are those who deal with problems for which the law has no ready answer. For over twenty years, Kancelaria Skarbiec has worked at the intersection of tax law, corporate structures, and the deeply human reluctance to give the state more than the state is owed. We advise entrepreneurs from over a dozen countries – from those on the Forbes list to those whose bank account was just seized by the tax authority and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning.
One of the most frequently cited experts on tax law in Polish media – he writes for Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and Parkiet not because it looks good on a résumé, but because certain things cannot be explained in a court filing and someone needs to say them out loud. Author of AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto: Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator. Co-author of the award-winning book Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy (Security of a Modern Company).
Kancelaria Skarbiec holds top positions in the tax law firm rankings of Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Four-time winner of the European Medal, recipient of the title International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.
He specializes in tax disputes with fiscal authorities, international tax planning, crypto-asset regulation, and asset protection. Since 2006, he has led the WGI case – one of the longest-running criminal proceedings in the history of the Polish financial market – because there are things you do not leave half-done, even if they take two decades. He believes the law is too serious to be treated only seriously – and that the best legal advice is the kind that ensures the client never has to stand before a court.
