ETHAN BRONNER
NY Times
JERUSALEM — The new government of Israel is seeking to reorient the country’s foreign policy, arguing that to rely purely on the formulas of trading land for peace and promising a Palestinian state fails to grasp what it views as the deeper issues: Muslim rejection of a Jewish state and the rising hegemonic appetite of Iran.Advisers to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are drafting policy suggestions aimed at forming a framework that he plans to present to President Obama at their first summit meeting, in Washington on May 18. In addition, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman left Sunday for Europe on his first official visit, and on Tuesday, President Shimon Peres is to meet with Mr. Obama in Washington.
Such an ambitious effort to reformulate the conflict will be, by all accounts, tough to sell for two reasons.
First, even though the standard approaches have not yielded success, no alternative has emerged.
Second, the Obama administration has repeatedly backed the two-state solution, as have the Europeans. In other ways, too, this White House has seemed to be closer in outlook to Europe than the past administration was.
Israel’s effort to switch the discussion to Iran is likely to be met in Washington and in European capitals with the assertion that it is precisely because of the need to build an alliance to confront Iran that Israel must move ahead vigorously with the Palestinians as well as with the Syrians.
“President Obama views the region as a whole, and trying to isolate each problem does not reflect reality,” said a senior American official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the American policy was still in formation. “It will be a lot easier to build a coalition to deal with Iran if the peace process is moving forward.”
A senior Israeli official, who also would speak only if not named because Israeli policy was being formed, said he believed that when Mr. Netanyahu met Mr. Obama, he would acknowledge that ultimately the goal was a Palestinian state. But it is expected that he would say that such a state was far in the future because Palestinian institutions and economic development required a great deal of work — as well as investment from Arab states — and that Palestinian education and public discourse needed to be more oriented toward coexistence.
Mr. Lieberman is to begin his trip in Rome, seeing Foreign Minister Franco Frattini on Monday, and then travel to Paris, Prague and Berlin for similar meetings. He is one of the most controversial senior members of the Israeli government. As a candidate, he called for a loyalty oath aimed at Israeli Arabs. In addition, his public speech has been tough, sometimes brutal. And he himself lives in a West Bank settlement.
Israel’s own diplomats view his arrival as their chief with circumspection, especially because his predecessor, Tzipi Livni, was admired by her colleagues in Europe. Whenever she went to Paris, for example, she saw not only the foreign minister but also President Nicolas Sarkozy. So far, Mr. Sarkozy has not agreed to see Mr. Lieberman this week.
“I tell people who worry about Lieberman that I worry too,” a senior Israeli diplomat said, requesting anonymity to speak freely of his boss. “But after I stop worrying I tell myself, you have to be fair, you have to give this guy a chance to express himself as the foreign minister of Israel, not just as a candidate.”
Yigal Palmor, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that Mr. Lieberman had been scheduled to meet with all 27 European Union foreign ministers this month at a summit meeting, but that Mr. Lieberman had asked for a delay so the government could come up with its policy guidelines. The European Union agreed.
It seems likely that the plan that Mr. Netanyahu will present to Mr. Obama will have a strong regional component in an attempt to fend off pressure on Israel to accept the Arab League peace plan, which calls on Israel to return to the 1967 borders as well as to accept a right of return for Palestinian refugees to Israel. The new Israeli government completely rejects both.
Mr. Lieberman is one of the strongest advocates for rethinking Israel’s approach and rejecting what he views as failed past formulas. He wants tough sanctions against Iran as the first step. He told The Jerusalem Post in an interview published last week that the aim of the policy review was to make progress on Palestinian economic and political developments and “to take the initiative” in the region.
“People try to simplify the situation with these formulas: land for peace, two-state solution,” Mr. Lieberman told the newspaper. “It’s a lot more complicated.” He added that the real reason for the deadlock “is not occupation, not settlements and not settlers.” Nor, he said, is it the Palestinians. The biggest obstacle, he said, is “the Iranians.”
He, like the entire Israeli leadership, argues that since Iran sponsors Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, both of which reject Israel’s existence and seek its destruction, the key to the Palestinian solution is to defang Iran and stop it from acquiring the means to build a nuclear weapon.
Increasingly, the Arab world — especially Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan — seems worried about Iran as well. American officials who have recently visited those countries said that their leaders spoke about Iran in ways that were almost identical to what they heard from officials in Jerusalem. Therefore, the opportunity for a regional alliance against Iranian influence is great.
But, they say, for Arab leaders to work alongside Israel on this, even quietly, requires demonstrable Israeli movement on ending its occupation of the West Bank by freezing or reducing settlements and handing over more power to the Palestinians.
Israel dislikes that formulation, arguing that the two issues need to be addressed separately. If they are linked, it is in the opposite way from what the West says. In other words, Israel says the occupation can be ended most easily once Iran is put in its place because then there will be much less risk of Iranian weapons being used against Israel from neighboring territory. Meanwhile, Israel says it cannot be expected to freeze settlement growth entirely.
The American, European and Arab response is that for Iran to be checked, every nation needs to do its part, and Israel’s part is to work toward ending the occupation, stopping settlement construction and fostering the creation of a Palestinian state.
When a senior American official was told that the Israelis did not view the Iranian and Palestinian problems as linked, he replied simply, “Well, we do.”
Comment: This is what PM Netanyahu faces from this moment forward. He should know that he stands supported in remaining strong against USA and EU pressure-we should daily send an email message, a phne call on another day and then a fax to thank him for standing tall. Arlene Kushner offers some excellent advice today:
Those of you who are Israeli citizens, please contact him: Let him know that you are a citizen, and that you support him as he goes to the US. Ask him please to stand strong and to resist pressure to accept a "two state solution." Tell him that this is what his nation needs of him right now, that we need him to speak in the best interests of Israel and to speak out for Israeli rights.
Those of you who are American citizens can also contact him. But you will need to say something different. From Americans he needs to hear that not everyone in the US wants a two-state solution. Tell him briefly about how you personally work to support him from within the US: rallying support via e-mails, holding discussions with people, writing letters to the editor, contacting your Congresspersons or Senators -- or whatever else you do.
I ask that you go one additional step-engage the following key Knesset members in the same manner-here is the contact information:
Key Knesset Members:
Benjamin Netanyahu-PM
Telephone:02-6408456
Fax:02-6496659
Email:bnetanyahu@knesset.gov.il
Avigdor Liberman
Fax:02-6408921
Email:aliberman@knesset.gov.il
Moshe Ya`alon
Telephone:02-6408891
Email:myaalon@KNESSET.GOV.IL
Silvan Shalom
Telephone 2:02-6408378
Fax:02-6753792
Email:sshalom@knesset.gov.il
Ehud Barak
Telephone:02-6753223
Fax:02-6496117
Email:ehudb@knesset.gov.il
Monday, May 04, 2009
"We Have Met the Enemy..."
Arlene Kushner
Some of you who are Americans, and are of a certain age, will remember the cartoon figure Pogo, drawn by Walt Kelly. The most famous line Pogo ever spoke was, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
These words of wisdom -- the most appropriate I could think of -- came to me today as I surveyed the news. For what I encountered was this:
The AIPAC (American-Israel Political Action Committee) -- an American organization -- is holding its policy conference in Washington this week. As always, at the end of the conference, the delegates who have attended flood Capitol Hill and lobby their respective Senators and Congresspersons. Tomorrow the lobbying will be done. And guess what these delegates will be asking of their representatives? To sign on to a letter that will go to Obama that specifically calls for a "viable Palestinian state."
This is how a "pro-Israel" group is supporting the Prime Minister of Israel, who has declined to talk about a Palestinian state or a two-state solution. Their rationale is that they can be a "bridge" between Obama and Netanyahu.
~~~~~~~~~~
According to a Jerusalem Post report on this, there will be several draft letters included included in the packet provided to the delegates.
One sets out "basic principles" for negotiations, another insists upon an absolute Palestinian commitment to ending terrorism, etc.
Dr. Aaron Lerner, on the IMRA website today, calls AIPAC the "pigs can fly chorus" -- supporting a Palestinian state that would "ensure" peace, which is in fact an impossibility.
~~~~~~~~~~
Add to this a statement by Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, also, at least in theory, one of ours, who Sunday attended a closed door forum for AIPAC's largest donors. This was the moment of truth, he told them. The ability to confront Iran depends upon progress in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Give us a break!! This argument does not fly either.
Actually, the very reverse is true, for the stronger Iran is, the more it foments terrorism via Hamas, and the less likely peace with the Palestinians is. As to moderate Arab states, they will not predicate support for confronting Iran on this, for they very much want the Iranian threat defused for their own sakes.
~~~~~~~~~~
This, then, is what our Prime Minister will be walking into when he goes to Washington and meets with Obama on May 18. A very, very difficult time.
Each of us, however, can lend him support. It is, in fact, important that we do so.
Below you will find contact information for Prime Minister Netanyahu. Sending a fax is the best option.
Those of you who are Israeli citizens, please contact him: Let him know that you are a citizen, and that you support him as he goes to the US. Ask him please to stand strong and to resist pressure to accept a "two state solution." Tell him that this is what his nation needs of him right now, that we need him to speak in the best interests of Israel and to speak out for Israeli rights.
Those of you who are American citizens can also contact him. But you will need to say something different. From Americans he needs to hear that not everyone in the US wants a two-state solution. Tell him briefly about how you personally work to support him from within the US: rallying support via e-mails, holding discussions with people, writing letters to the editor, contacting your Congresspersons or Senators -- or whatever else you do.
Whether here in Israel, or in the US, please share this broadly by forwarding. Remove the "forwarding" data from the subject line and at the head of the message, and, if you wish, add your own introduction.
Fax: 02-670-5369
Phone: 03-610-9898
E-mail: pm_eng2@it.pmo.gov.il
~~~~~~~~~~
Very soon I hope to have more information on how you can help.
~~~~~~~~~~
see my website www.ArlenefromIsrael.info
Some of you who are Americans, and are of a certain age, will remember the cartoon figure Pogo, drawn by Walt Kelly. The most famous line Pogo ever spoke was, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
These words of wisdom -- the most appropriate I could think of -- came to me today as I surveyed the news. For what I encountered was this:
The AIPAC (American-Israel Political Action Committee) -- an American organization -- is holding its policy conference in Washington this week. As always, at the end of the conference, the delegates who have attended flood Capitol Hill and lobby their respective Senators and Congresspersons. Tomorrow the lobbying will be done. And guess what these delegates will be asking of their representatives? To sign on to a letter that will go to Obama that specifically calls for a "viable Palestinian state."
This is how a "pro-Israel" group is supporting the Prime Minister of Israel, who has declined to talk about a Palestinian state or a two-state solution. Their rationale is that they can be a "bridge" between Obama and Netanyahu.
~~~~~~~~~~
According to a Jerusalem Post report on this, there will be several draft letters included included in the packet provided to the delegates.
One sets out "basic principles" for negotiations, another insists upon an absolute Palestinian commitment to ending terrorism, etc.
Dr. Aaron Lerner, on the IMRA website today, calls AIPAC the "pigs can fly chorus" -- supporting a Palestinian state that would "ensure" peace, which is in fact an impossibility.
~~~~~~~~~~
Add to this a statement by Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, also, at least in theory, one of ours, who Sunday attended a closed door forum for AIPAC's largest donors. This was the moment of truth, he told them. The ability to confront Iran depends upon progress in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Give us a break!! This argument does not fly either.
Actually, the very reverse is true, for the stronger Iran is, the more it foments terrorism via Hamas, and the less likely peace with the Palestinians is. As to moderate Arab states, they will not predicate support for confronting Iran on this, for they very much want the Iranian threat defused for their own sakes.
~~~~~~~~~~
This, then, is what our Prime Minister will be walking into when he goes to Washington and meets with Obama on May 18. A very, very difficult time.
Each of us, however, can lend him support. It is, in fact, important that we do so.
Below you will find contact information for Prime Minister Netanyahu. Sending a fax is the best option.
Those of you who are Israeli citizens, please contact him: Let him know that you are a citizen, and that you support him as he goes to the US. Ask him please to stand strong and to resist pressure to accept a "two state solution." Tell him that this is what his nation needs of him right now, that we need him to speak in the best interests of Israel and to speak out for Israeli rights.
Those of you who are American citizens can also contact him. But you will need to say something different. From Americans he needs to hear that not everyone in the US wants a two-state solution. Tell him briefly about how you personally work to support him from within the US: rallying support via e-mails, holding discussions with people, writing letters to the editor, contacting your Congresspersons or Senators -- or whatever else you do.
Whether here in Israel, or in the US, please share this broadly by forwarding. Remove the "forwarding" data from the subject line and at the head of the message, and, if you wish, add your own introduction.
Fax: 02-670-5369
Phone: 03-610-9898
E-mail: pm_eng2@it.pmo.gov.il
~~~~~~~~~~
Very soon I hope to have more information on how you can help.
~~~~~~~~~~
see my website www.ArlenefromIsrael.info
Shas Digs in on Jewish Rights
Hana Levi Julian
Arutz 7
Interior Minister Eli Yishai announced Sunday that he plans to develop Jerusalem's City of David into a Jewish residential area. The area has been the source of a rich treasure of archaeological artifacts dating back to the Second Temple period, many of them documenting events that are noted in Jewish sacred and historical texts.
The statement earned the outrage of Palestinian Authority officials, who called the Netanyahu coalition a "government of settlers and settlements, and not a government of negotiation."
Khatem Abed al-Kader, an aide to PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, was quoted by the Hebrew-language daily Yediot Acharonot as saying the Interior Minister's words were "silly and dangerous."
Peace Now organization head Yariv Oppenheimer also expressed anger and fear that Yishai's plans would set off a new round of violence from disgruntled Arabs.
"Minister Yishai wants to destroy a chance to reach a future compromise between Israel and the Muslim world and make the Jerusalem issue unsolvable," he charged. "His fiery statements may set the entire region on fire and lead Israel to the start of a new intifada."
The Shas party chairman shared his plans with Jewish business owners prior to a meeting at the Jerusalem municipality that was set to decide on building plans for the area.
Yishai told the entrepreneurs that he intends to build Jewish neighborhoods next to existing Arab neighborhoods, adding that he also intends to create construction plans in the area for Arabs as well.
"Every building plan that comes must include Jewish settlement and an extensive tourism venture," he declared. "The City of David is the bedrock of our existence, the land of our sovereignty, and Jewish settlement there is our right."
All of the participants in the meeting were property owners who had purchased land in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood, also known by its Arabic name, Silwan.
Al-Kader warned in a veiled threat that the Arab residents of Silwan "are not just going to sit by." He also claimed that the land purchases were invalid. "Everything is illegal and even the claims of Jewish artifacts in the area have never been proven," he charged.
"Yishai should get the term 'unified Jerusalem' out of his head because it is not and will never be unified," al-Kader stated.
Ayalon: We Accept Two-State Goal
Gil Ronen
Arutz 7
“The government of Israel, because of our democratic tradition and because of the continuity principle, is going to abide by all previous commitments the former government took, including the acceptance of the road map to peace which will lead to a two-state solution,” Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said Sunday.
The Bloomberg news agency reported that Ayalon made the comments in his Jerusalem office.
The statement is the most explicit one by the present government regarding the acceptance of the two-state model. Its timing is significant: Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman will begin a tour of Europe Monday. He will visit Italy, France, the Czech Republic and Germany. President Shimon Peres will meet President Barack Obama on May 5 and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will visit Washington a short time later.
The Deputy Foreign Minister, who is also from Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party, said that Iran was making an effort to derail progress toward peace by supporting Hamas in Gaza and Hizbullah in Lebanon.
Ayalon called for harsher international sanctions against Iran's nuclear program. Talks on the Iranian nuclear program “shouldn’t be open-ended” and the time alloted to them “should be measured by months and not years.”
To date, Netanyahu has stopped short of publicly endorsing the idea of a PA state. Instead, he has said that he intends to focus on “an economic peace” – built around improving the PA economy.
Shmuel Sandler, a political scientist at Bar Ilan University, told Bloomberg that Ayalon’s statement was meant to ensure Israel wouldn’t be blamed for slowing down peace negotiations. “They realized that it is not worthwhile not to accept this and pay dearly for it internationally,” Sandler said. “Why should they be punished for something that is very theoretical?”
Foreign Minister Lieberman said on April 1 that Israel is not bound by commitments it made at the Annapolis Conference in 2007 and would follow the “road map.” Ayalon’s statement appears to contradict that position.
Oren: Israel won't allow Iran nukes
Dr. Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador designate to the United States, said on Sunday that he did not believe Israel would allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Speaking at the annual convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Oren also said that many officials in the region consider the halting of Iran's support of terrorism vital to progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, "even if they do not say so" overtly.
Ynet reports that Oren was approached by hundreds of people who asked to congratulate him on the appointment, but he said he was still awaiting the cabinet's final decision on the matter. If his appointment is approved, Oren is expected to accompany Netanyahu on his first state visit to Washington on May 16. He received Lieberman's approval following a weekend meeting, in spite of remarks made earlier this year in which he supported Israeli withdrawal from parts of Judea and Samaria.
PM Netanyahu’s tank
President Peres’ meeting with Obama to serve as introduction to Bibi’s visit
Eitan Haber
Israel Opinion
YNET News
There is no doubt that someone at the White House’s protocol department suffered a stroke recently, or at the very least was overcome by consternation: Shimon Peres, the State of Israel’s president, is the first one to arrive for a meeting with President Obama? According to tradition and to the acceptable norms associated with the very special relationship between Washington and Jerusalem, it is customary for an Israeli prime minister, almost immediately after being elected, to pack his bags and head to the American capital. This is what almost all Israeli prime ministers in the last generation did.
Why? First and foremost, this is a gesture to the United States for everything it has said and done on behalf of the State of Israel thus far. And between us, this custom also constitutes acknowledgement and recognition of Washington’s influence (absolute influence, in my view) on Jerusalem.
Some would say that it’s a case of the slave traveling to meet his master (and I say: Let them say whatever they want! As long as the US cares for our security and economy.)
Moreover, in past generations, when it came to previous prime ministers, presidents or other ministers did not dare meet with the US president before the PM. The few attempts that were made to meet the president before the PM were cruelly torpedoed by the prime minister’s close associates.
Meanwhile, the US president would usually return the favor to a new Israeli prime minister, by always – always – meeting the Israeli PM before meeting any other Middle Eastern leader, thereby presenting to everyone in the world America’s fondness for the State of Israel over others. This is not just a question of protocol. Our neighbors would clench their teeth and mutter harsh words about the American president’s mother.
Yet this time around, almost half the world has already met Obama, including Middle Eastern leaders (amazingly enough, even Mahmoud Abbas,) while President Peres headed to Washington last night.
Obama to be ‘pleasantly surprised’
The fact that is visible to all, that is, Obama already met regional leaders and will meet Peres before he meets Netanyahu, points to one possibility: Netanyahu is greatly debating on the diplomatic plan he wishes to present to the US president.
The prime minister, who is more mature after 10 years in the opposition desert, is more American than many Americans and he fully realizes that with the kind of statements he made during the election campaign there is no point for him to even pack his neckties or head to the airport. He has overcome, a long time ago, the arrogance that prompted him to try to convince everyone, including the American president, that his way is the right way.
In addition, Obama conveyed very clear hints regarding his intentions and plans, and to Netanyahu’s credit, he understands the new winds blowing through the White House’s corridors. In this respect, President Peres’ journey to the White House is similar to a tank making way for the troops behind him through a minefield.
The experienced and wise Peres is the introduction to Netanyahu’s visit. He will praise Netanyahu and tell Obama about the lessons learned by the Israeli prime minister; Peres will also hint that Netanyahu of the election campaign is not the same Netanyahu when it comes to diplomatic initiatives (and of course, the same is true for Lieberman as well.) The American president shall be “pleasantly surprised” (or some kind of a similar expression) by Netanyahu’s’ peace intentions.
So at least in this respect, the State of Israel was granted the right Israeli president at the right time, as well as a prime minister who may reinforce, just like some of his predecessors, the well-known Israeli idiom: “Only the Right can bring peace, just like only the Left can embark on war.”
Assad urges US to talk to Hamas, Hizbullah
In interview with French TV, Syrian president says Damascus ready to help broker contacts with terror groups, says isolating them 'counterproductive if Washington wants to seek regional peace'
AFP
Israel News
YNET News
Syrian President Bashar Assad urged the United States on Sunday to reach out to terror groups Hamas and Hizbullah as part of the search for Middle East peace, in an interview with French television. Speaking to France 3, Assad welcomed what he said was a new willingness in Washington to listen to Syria's views since President Barack Obama took office, and said Damascus was ready to help broker contacts with the groups.
The United States regards both Lebanon's Hizbullah and the Palestinian group Hamas as terrorist movements, and does not recognize them, a stance which Assad said was counterproductive if Washington wanted to seek regional peace.
"I think the problem was with the previous administration," Assad said, criticizing former US president George W. Bush and welcoming Obama's decision to send envoys to open a tentative dialogue with Syria.
"I think if you want to solve the problem you can't go about saying: 'This is good and this is bad, this is evil and this is democratic, this is human rights and this is not politics'," he said.
"Politics is when you deal with reality. When you deal with influential parties to influence the position in a positive or a negative way," he said, calling on the United States to talk to both Iran and the terror groups.
"Hamas has influence and you cannot ignore them. You can't achieve peace while Hamas is outside this peace or against the peace," he said, adding that the same was true of Hizbullah.
Assad called for "direct or indirect" talks between Washington and Hamas, and added: "When they want to have help with these parties, any contact direct or indirect with Syria, and maybe direct, we are ready to help."
Last week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she had sent two diplomats to Syria, but Washington remains cautious in its dealings with a government that has close ties to Iran and to hardline armed groups.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
"Prospects Dim"
Arlene Kushner
None of the reports are encouraging -- nor did I expect they would be. That is, with regard to the meeting between PM Netanyahu and President Obama scheduled for later this month.
Oh, there is the usual spin from some sources about how Netanyahu will be warmly welcomed. But other reports are positively grim with regard to how intensely and determinedly Obama will be pressuring our prime minister. We know, without a question of a doubt, that these two heads of state have different worldviews and different perspectives on how to approach the situation in the Middle East. Netanyahu -- bless him for this! -- has yet to even utter the term "two state solution," while Obama has set the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as his first goal, declaring with breath-taking shortsightedness that everything else depends upon this.
Thus, we should not expect reports following the meeting of the beginning of a warm friendship developing between the two men, who really see eye to eye on the important issues, blah, blah, blah. Or, let us say, if we hear such reports, we should know better than to believe them.
~~~~~~~~~~
I remain pleased, at this point, with approaches reportedly being taken by Netanyahu. He is preparing with considerable care, and has a research team compiling facts and talking points for each issue that will be on the table with Obama.
What I am seeing again and again, with regard to reports that are coming out, is that this government is talking "tachlis" -- confronting issues that others were prepared to sweep under the carpet. The first was the matter of having the PA recognize us as a Jewish state -- for you can't even talk about a "two state solution" unless it's clear that one of those states is Jewish. And so the Palestinian refusal to do so is being exposed and their intention called into question.
Now I read that one source close to the Netanyahu team has said, "Two states for two people is more complicated than the slogan suggests. For example, what is to be done with Hamas in Gaza?"
To which I responded, Mazel tov! Here is someone stating the obvious, at last. Hamas has been the elephant in the room: everyone talked about negotiating with the PA as if Hamas were not there.
~~~~~~~~~~~
The key here is the ability of Netanyahu to stand strong in the face of that Obama pressure. More to come on this.
~~~~~~~~~~
With regard to the entire business of a negotiated "two-state solution," I ask you please to read and extensively share my latest piece, "Two States: A Figment of Obama's Imagination," which ran on Front Page Magazine. It deals in some detail with the complexities that are being ignored by Obama.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=34528
~~~~~~~~~~
As Netanyahu plans his approach to Obama, he is in consultation with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Minister for Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya'alon, and Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy, Dan Meridor..
His primary message to Obama and company will be that dealing with Iran has priority over talks with the Arabs, be they Palestinians, Syrians or Lebanese.
~~~~~~~~~~
For his part, Mahmoud Abbas, PA president, is himself delusional.
To date, as expected, all negotiations between Fatah and Hamas regarding formation of that much-touted unity government have failed. Abbas has now announced that he will form a new government, which Hamas has warned him not to do.
Yesterday, a representative of Fatah, Palestinian Legislative Council member Faisal Abu Shahla, declared that "the new government which President Abbas intends to form will be responsible for both the West Bank and Gaza."
Says he. But is Hamas on board with this? Clearly not. In fact, Hamas warns that this plan would be regarded as a "fatal blow" to Egyptian efforts to achieve a unity government.
In this eventuality, Hamas intends to form its own government. But Abu Shahla says this is "tantamount to a coup, and the deepening of division." Apparently he hasn't noticed that there has already been a coup.
"...this government [formed by Abbas] will not be [just] for the West Bank, as some people are saying, but will rather take responsibility for the Palestinians in Gaza, including for delivering salaries, social affairs and medical treatment abroad."
The PA has been sending money into Gaza for salaries all along, and is involved with helping people get medical treatment. Have no clue what's involved in being responsible for "social affairs." But this is not the totality of a government by any means.
This is a study in political confusion.
~~~~~~~~~~
While further clarifications may be necessary, I have from more than one source the suggestion that Obama, during his recent visit to Turkey, responded with such warmth to Prime Minister Ergodan, that the Turks have now been emboldened. In the wake of Obama's visit they moved to sign a pact with Lebanon -- which is on its way to Hezbollah control -- that will grant it both military training and arms.
Bad news for Israel. And yet one more troubling sign that Israeli security is not on Obama's radar.
~~~~~~~~~~
Israel is preparing seriously for possibility of conflict with Iran.
Those Air Force reservists who operate the Arrow and Patriot missile defense systems are being called up one day a week to sharpen their skills.
According to a top IAF officer quoted by the Post:
"We are working hard to be ready for the Iranian threat, "We are preparing for barrages, split warheads and other surprises and therefore we need to retain a high operational level by everyone, including reservists."
The preparation involves different possible scenarios: large barrages of missiles fired from different countries at once, and the need for the operator to decide which missile to intercept first and at what stage of its flight.
Additionally, today the French paper, L'Express, reported that Israeli fighter jets, preparing for a possible attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, recently conducted a drill above the Strait of Gibraltar.
~~~~~~~~~~
Do you remember the charges brought four years ago against two officials of AIPAC -- Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman -- that they had illegally disclosed classified information to Israel? The whole case smelled of ugly politics from the beginning.
Now the US government has decided to drop the case because of a diminishing possibility that it could succeed in securing convictions. Among the reasons for this change of heart was the fact that the defense had secured permission to call high profile former officials such as Condoleezza Rice to testify that the sort of sharing of information they did was standard procedure.
The defendants are delighted, but also express frustration that because there will be no trial there will be no opportunity to definitively prove their innocence.
"I was a person who had his whole life taken away from him," said Rosen.
But the issue transcends what happened to these two personally: "We're in a situation where the wild allegations against Israel and the friends of Israel are being printed all over the place, and some people believe."
~~~~~~~~~~
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has been accused of being a racist, hostile to Arabs, recently appointed Bedouin diplomat Ismail Khaldi as his Middle East advisor. Khaldi, who holds a masters degree in political science, served in the IDF and worked as a political analyst for the Defense Ministry. He was the first Bedouin to join Israel's Foreign Service, and now Lieberman is the first minister to appoint a Bedouin as his advisor.
~~~~~~~~~~
see my website www.ArlenefromIsrael.info
None of the reports are encouraging -- nor did I expect they would be. That is, with regard to the meeting between PM Netanyahu and President Obama scheduled for later this month.
Oh, there is the usual spin from some sources about how Netanyahu will be warmly welcomed. But other reports are positively grim with regard to how intensely and determinedly Obama will be pressuring our prime minister. We know, without a question of a doubt, that these two heads of state have different worldviews and different perspectives on how to approach the situation in the Middle East. Netanyahu -- bless him for this! -- has yet to even utter the term "two state solution," while Obama has set the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as his first goal, declaring with breath-taking shortsightedness that everything else depends upon this.
Thus, we should not expect reports following the meeting of the beginning of a warm friendship developing between the two men, who really see eye to eye on the important issues, blah, blah, blah. Or, let us say, if we hear such reports, we should know better than to believe them.
~~~~~~~~~~
I remain pleased, at this point, with approaches reportedly being taken by Netanyahu. He is preparing with considerable care, and has a research team compiling facts and talking points for each issue that will be on the table with Obama.
What I am seeing again and again, with regard to reports that are coming out, is that this government is talking "tachlis" -- confronting issues that others were prepared to sweep under the carpet. The first was the matter of having the PA recognize us as a Jewish state -- for you can't even talk about a "two state solution" unless it's clear that one of those states is Jewish. And so the Palestinian refusal to do so is being exposed and their intention called into question.
Now I read that one source close to the Netanyahu team has said, "Two states for two people is more complicated than the slogan suggests. For example, what is to be done with Hamas in Gaza?"
To which I responded, Mazel tov! Here is someone stating the obvious, at last. Hamas has been the elephant in the room: everyone talked about negotiating with the PA as if Hamas were not there.
~~~~~~~~~~~
The key here is the ability of Netanyahu to stand strong in the face of that Obama pressure. More to come on this.
~~~~~~~~~~
With regard to the entire business of a negotiated "two-state solution," I ask you please to read and extensively share my latest piece, "Two States: A Figment of Obama's Imagination," which ran on Front Page Magazine. It deals in some detail with the complexities that are being ignored by Obama.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=34528
~~~~~~~~~~
As Netanyahu plans his approach to Obama, he is in consultation with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Minister for Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya'alon, and Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy, Dan Meridor..
His primary message to Obama and company will be that dealing with Iran has priority over talks with the Arabs, be they Palestinians, Syrians or Lebanese.
~~~~~~~~~~
For his part, Mahmoud Abbas, PA president, is himself delusional.
To date, as expected, all negotiations between Fatah and Hamas regarding formation of that much-touted unity government have failed. Abbas has now announced that he will form a new government, which Hamas has warned him not to do.
Yesterday, a representative of Fatah, Palestinian Legislative Council member Faisal Abu Shahla, declared that "the new government which President Abbas intends to form will be responsible for both the West Bank and Gaza."
Says he. But is Hamas on board with this? Clearly not. In fact, Hamas warns that this plan would be regarded as a "fatal blow" to Egyptian efforts to achieve a unity government.
In this eventuality, Hamas intends to form its own government. But Abu Shahla says this is "tantamount to a coup, and the deepening of division." Apparently he hasn't noticed that there has already been a coup.
"...this government [formed by Abbas] will not be [just] for the West Bank, as some people are saying, but will rather take responsibility for the Palestinians in Gaza, including for delivering salaries, social affairs and medical treatment abroad."
The PA has been sending money into Gaza for salaries all along, and is involved with helping people get medical treatment. Have no clue what's involved in being responsible for "social affairs." But this is not the totality of a government by any means.
This is a study in political confusion.
~~~~~~~~~~
While further clarifications may be necessary, I have from more than one source the suggestion that Obama, during his recent visit to Turkey, responded with such warmth to Prime Minister Ergodan, that the Turks have now been emboldened. In the wake of Obama's visit they moved to sign a pact with Lebanon -- which is on its way to Hezbollah control -- that will grant it both military training and arms.
Bad news for Israel. And yet one more troubling sign that Israeli security is not on Obama's radar.
~~~~~~~~~~
Israel is preparing seriously for possibility of conflict with Iran.
Those Air Force reservists who operate the Arrow and Patriot missile defense systems are being called up one day a week to sharpen their skills.
According to a top IAF officer quoted by the Post:
"We are working hard to be ready for the Iranian threat, "We are preparing for barrages, split warheads and other surprises and therefore we need to retain a high operational level by everyone, including reservists."
The preparation involves different possible scenarios: large barrages of missiles fired from different countries at once, and the need for the operator to decide which missile to intercept first and at what stage of its flight.
Additionally, today the French paper, L'Express, reported that Israeli fighter jets, preparing for a possible attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, recently conducted a drill above the Strait of Gibraltar.
~~~~~~~~~~
Do you remember the charges brought four years ago against two officials of AIPAC -- Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman -- that they had illegally disclosed classified information to Israel? The whole case smelled of ugly politics from the beginning.
Now the US government has decided to drop the case because of a diminishing possibility that it could succeed in securing convictions. Among the reasons for this change of heart was the fact that the defense had secured permission to call high profile former officials such as Condoleezza Rice to testify that the sort of sharing of information they did was standard procedure.
The defendants are delighted, but also express frustration that because there will be no trial there will be no opportunity to definitively prove their innocence.
"I was a person who had his whole life taken away from him," said Rosen.
But the issue transcends what happened to these two personally: "We're in a situation where the wild allegations against Israel and the friends of Israel are being printed all over the place, and some people believe."
~~~~~~~~~~
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has been accused of being a racist, hostile to Arabs, recently appointed Bedouin diplomat Ismail Khaldi as his Middle East advisor. Khaldi, who holds a masters degree in political science, served in the IDF and worked as a political analyst for the Defense Ministry. He was the first Bedouin to join Israel's Foreign Service, and now Lieberman is the first minister to appoint a Bedouin as his advisor.
~~~~~~~~~~
see my website www.ArlenefromIsrael.info
The Man who may be Israel's next ambassador to the United States
Dan Gordon
American Thinker
Article published before announcement that he is our new Ambassador
Dr. Michael Oren is being touted as Israel's next ambassador to the U.S. He's taking a number of hits in the press. Some people have said he's too conservative, others that he's too liberal. He is undeniably one of the world's foremost historians on the Middle East. That is, admittedly, his day job, not mine. I'm a writer. I have a play called "Irena's Vow" running on Broadway. So what qualifies me to comment in any way on the man who may be Israel's next ambassador to the United States? Doctor Oren, in addition to his other achievements, is also a major in the same reserve unit in the IDF in which I serve as a captain. I can tell you a bit about the man. I have served in two wars with him.
One night in the 2006 Hezbollah /Israel War Michael and I were serving as public affairs officers. We were up at the Lebanese border late at night when another officer came up and approached us and four or five others.
What most people don't realize is that for the first few weeks of that war Israel actually had fewer troops on the ground than Hezbollah. They quite literally outnumbered Israeli forces on the ground until the last few days of the war. A battle had been raging and Israel had taken casualties. They were looking for volunteers to go into Lebanon as a covering party and hook up with several ambulances that were evacuating wounded. They couldn't land a chopper because it was right in the heart of Hezbollah strongholds and they would have been shot out of the sky by anti air craft missiles.
Without saying a word Michael was the first to pick up his gear and volunteer.
We were a half dozen middle aged reserve officers. We didn't have an arDan Gordon's unitmored vehicle, so we actually went into Lebanon in my Avis rent a car. After looking for the ambulance for what seemed like hours we realized there was a screw up in co-ordinates and we were sitting ducks in a rent a car in Lebanon.
We headed back into Israel and waited at the border crossing for word on where the ambulances were. After a while the same officer found us and acknowledged that there had been a screw up in co-ordinates. Now there was another problem.
There was an ambulance with four dead Israeli soldiers that needed a covering party to go in for their evacuation. Again it was too dangerous for helicopters to land. Again they were asking for volunteers. Again Michael was the first to pick up his gear and volunteer.
My son had been killed at the age of twenty two in a horrific car accident. Michael's son had been wounded in action in a fire fight with terrorists. To all of us middle aged men these fallen boys could have been our sons. We went back into Lebanon in the rent a car.
We hooked up with the ambulance in a wadi or deep ravine. Flairs were going off above us, which meant that Hezb'allah knew we were there and were hunting for us. We served as the covering force while the fallen were evacuated. Later Michael's daughter, who was serving as a social worker in the Golani Brigade, called Michael on his cell phone. Her unit had taken a lot of wounded; most of them were her friends.
Michael turned to me and said , my daughter needs a hug. Can I borrow your car? The two of us drove down from the Lebanese border to Rambam Hospital in Haifa. Michael spent a half hour with his daughter; gave her a much needed hug and then the two of us drove back near dawn to rejoin our unit.
That is the kind of man Israel's ambassador designate to the U.S. is. He wouldn't hesitate to endanger his life not only to recover wounded, but to recover the fallen, and though exhausted himself, drove round trip, four hours to give his daughter a hug when she most needed her father's love.
There are other people who can amply describe Doctor Oren's experience in diplomacy. He has served a number of Prime Ministers and is a fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, which contains such luminaries as Nathan Shiransky and Lieutenant General (Res.) Moshe Ya'Alon.
I, on the other, hand can tell you about the man. Both Israel and the U.S. would be lucky to have Doctor Michael Oren serving in Washington.
Dan Gordon Captain (Res.) IDF
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/the_man_who_may_be_israels_nex.html at May 03, 2009 - 03:37:42 AM EDT
Comment: This is what makes us so proud-thanks Dan Gordon for sharing your story
American Thinker
Article published before announcement that he is our new Ambassador
Dr. Michael Oren is being touted as Israel's next ambassador to the U.S. He's taking a number of hits in the press. Some people have said he's too conservative, others that he's too liberal. He is undeniably one of the world's foremost historians on the Middle East. That is, admittedly, his day job, not mine. I'm a writer. I have a play called "Irena's Vow" running on Broadway. So what qualifies me to comment in any way on the man who may be Israel's next ambassador to the United States? Doctor Oren, in addition to his other achievements, is also a major in the same reserve unit in the IDF in which I serve as a captain. I can tell you a bit about the man. I have served in two wars with him.
One night in the 2006 Hezbollah /Israel War Michael and I were serving as public affairs officers. We were up at the Lebanese border late at night when another officer came up and approached us and four or five others.
What most people don't realize is that for the first few weeks of that war Israel actually had fewer troops on the ground than Hezbollah. They quite literally outnumbered Israeli forces on the ground until the last few days of the war. A battle had been raging and Israel had taken casualties. They were looking for volunteers to go into Lebanon as a covering party and hook up with several ambulances that were evacuating wounded. They couldn't land a chopper because it was right in the heart of Hezbollah strongholds and they would have been shot out of the sky by anti air craft missiles.
Without saying a word Michael was the first to pick up his gear and volunteer.
We were a half dozen middle aged reserve officers. We didn't have an arDan Gordon's unitmored vehicle, so we actually went into Lebanon in my Avis rent a car. After looking for the ambulance for what seemed like hours we realized there was a screw up in co-ordinates and we were sitting ducks in a rent a car in Lebanon.
We headed back into Israel and waited at the border crossing for word on where the ambulances were. After a while the same officer found us and acknowledged that there had been a screw up in co-ordinates. Now there was another problem.
There was an ambulance with four dead Israeli soldiers that needed a covering party to go in for their evacuation. Again it was too dangerous for helicopters to land. Again they were asking for volunteers. Again Michael was the first to pick up his gear and volunteer.
My son had been killed at the age of twenty two in a horrific car accident. Michael's son had been wounded in action in a fire fight with terrorists. To all of us middle aged men these fallen boys could have been our sons. We went back into Lebanon in the rent a car.
We hooked up with the ambulance in a wadi or deep ravine. Flairs were going off above us, which meant that Hezb'allah knew we were there and were hunting for us. We served as the covering force while the fallen were evacuated. Later Michael's daughter, who was serving as a social worker in the Golani Brigade, called Michael on his cell phone. Her unit had taken a lot of wounded; most of them were her friends.
Michael turned to me and said , my daughter needs a hug. Can I borrow your car? The two of us drove down from the Lebanese border to Rambam Hospital in Haifa. Michael spent a half hour with his daughter; gave her a much needed hug and then the two of us drove back near dawn to rejoin our unit.
That is the kind of man Israel's ambassador designate to the U.S. is. He wouldn't hesitate to endanger his life not only to recover wounded, but to recover the fallen, and though exhausted himself, drove round trip, four hours to give his daughter a hug when she most needed her father's love.
There are other people who can amply describe Doctor Oren's experience in diplomacy. He has served a number of Prime Ministers and is a fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, which contains such luminaries as Nathan Shiransky and Lieutenant General (Res.) Moshe Ya'Alon.
I, on the other, hand can tell you about the man. Both Israel and the U.S. would be lucky to have Doctor Michael Oren serving in Washington.
Dan Gordon Captain (Res.) IDF
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/the_man_who_may_be_israels_nex.html at May 03, 2009 - 03:37:42 AM EDT
Comment: This is what makes us so proud-thanks Dan Gordon for sharing your story
If this does not get your blood boiling, I do not know what will...
Netanyahu heads for collision with Obama administration
Israeli president Shimon Peres' task in Washington on May 4-5 is to blunt the sharp edge the White House is honing to force Israel to toe the new Washington line on the Palestinians, Syria and Iran. Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu can expect the full force of a bludgeon to be wielded in his White House talks on May 18.
DEBKAfile's Washington sources report that their host is fired up to be the first US president in decades of close friendship and cooperation to clash openly with Israel and the bulk of US Jewry. Oblivious to Israel's claim of US support for its security in a hostile regional environment, Barack Obama is expected to squeeze the Netanyahu government hard for immediate engagement on the Middle East conflict without further delay.
According to our sources, the White House staff is working at top speed on options for imposing its will.
Peres and Netanyahu will be informed that Washington is setting up two trilateral peace commissions to hammer out peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians and Israel with the Syrians.
US officials in both chairs will intercede with their own ideas to prevent them running into deadlock on disputed issues. DEBKAfile's sources confirm that the Obama administration will not spare the whip to force the parties into line.
The US president and his top advisers are convinced that the Palestinian problem is the main obstacle to accommodations for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran. Defense secretary Robert Gates and national security adviser Gen. James Jones are the leading advocates of this proposition, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton more skeptical but ready to back the president's Middle East determination to place Israel in the first line of fire.
Some of DEBKAfile's US sources admit that President Obama is himself under pressure because, despite the high approval rating he gained for his first 100 days in office, his myriad policy initiatives have yet to show results.
His economic remedies have steadied the banking system but not yet filtered down to the general public, he faces a hard slog in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan before making headway, and Tehran is playing hardball at every turn on the road to dialogue.
The only arena where the White House can hope for quick results is the Israel-Palestinian-Syrian track.
The two peace conferences in preparation recall Bill Clinton's success in forcing the Serbs, Bosnians and Croats to sign the Dayton Accord of 1995, so terminating a war of three-and-a-half years.
The presidential envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, was the architect of Dayton. George Mitchell, Obama's Middle East envoy, is in line for a similar role today. During his two rounds of talks in Middle East capitals, Mitchell has shown a smiling, genial face, but said little, while in Washington, a State Department team is working overtime on a new American "road map."
It starts out with pressure on Israel to freeze settlement activity on the West Bank and construction in East Jerusalem. At a later stage, Israel would be pushed to abandon large sections of the West Bank, remove authorized communities as well as unauthorized outposts and hand over the historic nucleus of Jerusalem.
Finally, the Israeli government would be required to accept an independent Palestinian state, even if its government is dominated by the rejectionist terrorist group Hamas.
Peres and Netanyahu will find administration officials deaf not only on Israel's arguments on the Palestinian issue but on a nuclear-armed Iran too. They will see the US president no longer prioritizing the suspension of Iran's nuclear aspirations, but bent on establishing a new Persian Gulf order that formalizes Iran's rising power. Washington's objective now is negotiations for setting the boundaries of Iran's Middle East expansion and limits for its nuclear program.
Israel will have no say in this process. In fact, by elevating Iran to premier regional power, America is sidelining its longstanding friends, Israel and Egypt, and setting aside their security and strategic interests for the sake of deals with Iran.
Dennis Ross, US envoy for Iran, carried this message to the capitals of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, last week.
But Obama's new Middle East design is not without powerful opponents:
1. Tehran itself will not let Washington dictate the limits of its expanding influence but insists on dialogue taking place amid "equality and mutual respect." This attitude also governs its nuclear aspirations. US diplomats will have to make the running to temper the ayatollahs rather than the other way round.
2. Cairo and Riyadh will resist with all their might the US bid to anoint Iran the crowning Middle East-Gulf power. Both perceive Iran's nuclearization as the inevitable outcome of this policy.
They are also extremely concerned by Oabana's public endorsement of Turkey as the senior Muslim power in the Eastern Mediterranean and Central Asia, a boost for Ankara's aspirations to resuscitate the Ottoman Empire.
3. Jerusalem will resist being cast into a peripheral role in the strategic and military processes going forward with regard to Iran, the Palestinians, Syria and their terrorist arms, Hizballah and Hamas, all of which bear pivotally on Israel's future existence. Like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the Netanyahu government may not accept being crushed between two hostile regional powers, Iran and Turkey, whose aggressive pretensions Washington is promoting.
- Netanyahu is marshalling all Israel's resources, including an active role for President Peres, to avoid dropping into the role of second- or third-rate Middle East power whom no one consults.
Peres, whose rich diplomatic experience and international reputation make him a prime asset, has been pressed into service to become the first Israeli president to step out of his ceremonial role into active-policy-making.
- The Israeli prime minister will also take advantage of the interests Jerusalem shares with Cairo and Riyadh in frustrating the new Washington orientation – and not only with regard to Iran.
Netanyahu and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak have arranged to put their heads together and are meeting before their separate trips to Washington.
- Israel has not abandoned its option of a military strike against Iran's nuclear installations and its economic infrastructure. US officials, led by the defense secretary, are accordingly pouring contempt on the extent of the damage Israel is capable of inflicting. Next, they will try and tie Israel's hands by discrediting Netanyahu and his administration.
- A final arrow in Netanyahu's quiver is the ability to enlist American public opinion, which is traditionally supportive and sympathetic to Israel, against Obama's Grand Middle East Design. He will seek to canvass support among friends in the US Congress and the Jewish community.
Comment: Those of us who live here understand the "new Obama policies" mean our destruction. I used to think otherwise, however, having interviewed many military, security and government individuals and after studtying the behavior of our next door enemies I realize the truth to my statements. Granted, sitting 7-10,000 miles away, surrounded by the comfort of one's trappings and security, not having to live next door to groups of people wanting you dead enables you to believe something else. this is your perception and it has become your truth. The difficulty is that perception is often not aligned with reality-I ask that you consider this before blindly supporting our demise-no matter how sensitive and caring you think you are.
Settlers arrested in clashes
Clashes erupt near Gush Etzion as settlers approach village of Umm Safa, residence of terrorist who murdered Israeli teenager with ax. Two Palestinians wounded as IDF troops try to quell ensuing violence. Four settlers detained for questioning
Efrat Weiss
Israel News
YNET News
Two Palestinians sustained light-to-moderate wounds Saturday evening from IDF fire in the village of Umm Safa near Gush Etzion after clashes erupted between the Palestinian residents and settlers from the nearby community of Bat Ayin. Four settlers have been detained for questioning, including two men currently serving in the IDF. The army said that the two admitted to discharging their weapons.
Umm Safa was home to the terrorist who last month infiltrated Bat Ayin and murdered an Israeli teenager with an ax.
According to the current report, settlers approached the village at around 6:00 pm. IDF troops were alerted to the scene, and they demanded of the settlers to leave the area immediately after declaring it a closed military zone.
Several of the settlers refused to heed the soldiers' instructions, and opened fire towards the village – though their fire caused no injuries. The troops stopped the fire, and took four of the settlers into custody for questioning.
The gunfire however sparked riots within the village, and soldiers also opened fire in an attempt to disperse the rioters. At least two Palestinians have been reported wounded by the IDF fire. Eyewitnesses reported that clashes are still intermittent despite official complaints that had been lodged, and that the army and police were not doing enough to keep the settlers at bay.
In response the army said: "The IDF is working tirelessly to defend the residents of this area. It is unfortunate that irresponsible parties are creating unnecessary work for IDF soldiers, which interferes with the routine defense operations. This is grave incident and an unnecessary provocation that endangered lives."
An official with the IDF's Central Command told Ynet that following the incident "anyone who attempts to create a provocation or to behave violently would be dealt with immediately by the authorities".
"The IDF will not tolerate riots or the illegal use of arms," the official said.
The terrorist from Umm Safa is 26-year old Moussa Tit, who was arrested three weeks ago by the Shin Bet as a primary suspect in the murder of a 16-year old youth, which occurred in Bat Ayin last month.
Tit confessed to the murder and the simultaneous injuring of a 7-year old boy, and said he had committed the crime because he desired to become a martyr.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
THE COMPANY HE KEEPS
William Mehlman
The opacity of the Obama administration’s professed dedication to the safety and security of Israel becomes more pronounced with each passing week. Former U.S. ambassador Charles Freeman’s aborted appointment to the chairmanship of the president’s National Intelligence Council is history, but its reverberations refuse to subside. By now we all know why this appointment was aborted. The question that won’t go away is why it was ever made.
Given Freeman’s stellar performances riding shotgun for the Saudis and the Communist Chinese, even as the “goddess of democracy” was being systematically assaulted by their regimes, by what stretch of whose imagination was the ambassador deemed fit to be sifting national intelligence data, much less presiding over the process? “Don’t ask us,” could serve as a summation of the response of the President and his inner circle, their collective arms extended full length.
It was Freeman himself who let the cat out of the bag. Withdrawing his name from further consideration for the National Intelligence Council chairmanship, he issued what the Washington Post described as a “two-page screed “ in which he cast himself as the victim of an “Israeli lobby” whose “tactics plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency” and which is “intent on forcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government. The aim of this lobby,” he continued, “is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of their views…and the exclusion of any and all options for decisions by Americans and our government, other than those that it favors.”
While never having been mistaken for a member of Israel’s “amen” corner, even the Washington Post found all this a bit much to bear. “Yes, Mr. Freeman was referring to Americans who support Israel,” it declared in a March 12th editorial entitled “Peddling a Conspiracy Theory, “and his statement was a gross libel.” That the former ambassador feels the way he does about Israel is hardly news. He’s declared on more than one occasion that he thinks all of America’s problems with the Islamic world can be traced to its supposed open-ended support of the Jewish state. That Freeman thought he could predicate his withdrawal from the NIC nomination on an Israeli “conspiracy”, totally ignoring the furor he raised in Congress over his links to Saudi Arabia and China, says as much about the new atmosphere the Obama administration has brought to Washington as it does about himself.
Speaking to that subject in a recent Jerusalem Post column, Caroline Glick observed that “In the past, while anti-Israel politicians, policy makers and opinion shapers were accepted in Washington, they would not have felt comfortable brandishing their anti-Israel positions as qualifying credentials for high position. Freeman’s appointment showed that is no longer the case. Today in Washington there are powerful circles of political players for whom a person’s anti-Israel bona fides are his strongest suit.” Indeed, she goes on to note, Freeman’s defenders underscored his ambivalence toward Israel as their reason for defending him, even to the point of ignoring his assertion in one instance that America deserved the attacks launched upon it on September 11, 2001. “They felt the fact that he raised the hackles of Americans who support Israel,” she said, “was reason enough to support him. Whether his views on other issues are reasonable or not was of no interest to them.”
That they also seemed to be of little or no interest to the Obama people is clearly a cause for concern. Political toilet training being an incremental process, if the Freeman fiasco was an isolated matter, it might be passed off as one of those “accidents” that inevitably mark the crawling stages of every new administration in Washington. But there was nothing isolated about the Freeman appointment. It was illustrative of a pattern of highly questionable foreign policy appointments by this White House, bound by a common thread of antipathy toward Israel. Like that involving Freeman, some of the most controversial among them were not subject to Senate review and confirmation.
A Democratic controlled Senate might not have nixed the nominations of Samantha Power and Robert Malley to the National Security Council, but it would not have let them pass without some serious debate. Power, a Harvard genocide expert who served as one of Obama’s campaign advisors, is a product of the International Crisis Group, a think tank heavily funded by billionaire George Soros. Not surprisingly, it has made a specialty of bashing Israel. Power was part of the ICG directorate that voted to bestow its 2008 “Founders Award” on Soros, in acceptance of which the renowned arch-critic of Israel and all things Israeli praised it for its exemplary work on the “Palestine Question.” Power, who is heading up the National Security Council’s “Multilateral Institutions” section, stopped just short of accusing Israel of genocide for its 2002 Defensive Shield operation against Tanzim terrorists in Jenin, settling for a charge of “major human rights abuses.” But she has not been shy of suggesting the injection of U.S. military forces into Judea and Samaria to safeguard the “human rights” of the Palestinians.
Power doesn’t blanch at force majeure as an answer to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. With a heavy dollop of moral equivalence, she mused in a recent interview that “imposition of a solution on unwilling partners is dreadful. I mean it’s a terrible thing to do…but it’s essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark, rather than a deterrence to people who are fundamentally politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people.”
Robert Malley, another horse out of the International Crisis Group stable, has been holding hands with Syrian dictator Bashir Assad since 2006. A former Clinton administration National Security Council honcho and key member of ICG’s Middle East policy team, he succeeded in winning for ICG a rare prize among American think tanks—an office in Damascus. Malley is believed to have been the mover behind Senator John Kerry’s February trip to Syria, highlighted by the senator’s effusive commendation of Assad, Hezbollah’s co-sponsor, for his valiant efforts on behalf of what turned out to be a still-born rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas. It was Malley who reportedly persuaded Obama to suspend further enforcement of U.S. sanctions against Syria and Malley who fired up the President’s enthusiasm for reopening the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, closed in February 2005 in response to Syria’s involvement in the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
Frederic Hof, Obama’s choice for the Damascus ambassadorial post, is a consummate Arabist (he once referred to the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as “a cancer killing the Oslo Process”) and a protégé of George Mitchell, the President’s “Special Envoy” to the Middle East. Mitchell billed his initial pre-election visit to Israel as a “listening tour.” He was back in Jerusalem following the election and by all indications the “listening” is over. Still basking in the afterglow of the “Good Friday” peace agreement he cobbled together in Northern Ireland, one that has begun to fray around the edges, the former Maine Senator is convinced that there are no differences—political or territorial—that cannot be split . Among the first things he‘s given notice he wants to split away from Israel are its communities in the strategic hilltops of Judea and Samaria. He’s already made it known that the dismantling of those communities was promised to former president, George Bush by former prime minister Ehud Olmert. That promise, as Mitchell defines it, was not Olmert’s alone, but Israel’s and he fully expects the Netanyahu government to make good. Of course, a victory on this front will be seen as setting the stage for an even bigger split—the division of Jerusalem.
The celebrants of such an event would be almost certain to include Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. As mere “unofficial” advisors to the President, they fall well under the Senatorial confirmation radar but their animus toward the Jewish state, burnished to a fine polish over the years, is only too recognizable. Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Chief, shares a place with Samantha Power on the board of the International Crisis Group, a testament in itself to his feelings about Israel. They were on full display in his recent testimony on Iran before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he ridiculed Israel’s contention of an existential threat raised by Iran’s quest for an atomic bomb. America’s “nuclear umbrella,” he averred, furnished all the protection Israel needed, adding, in a transparent jab at the Jewish state, that “we should be very careful not to become susceptible to interested parties.”
Scowcroft, the most impassioned advocate of a hard line against Israel during his tenure as advisor to George H.W. Bush, is currently beating the drums for direct U.S. “engagement” with Hamas from his post as chairman of the international board of the U.S. Middle East Project. Co-created with one-time American Jewish Congress chairman Henry Siegman, the board, including seven Arab members, is a loud voice in favor of imposing a Fatah/Hamas regime on Israel in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. In a Washington Post op-ed last fall, Scowcroft opined that resolving the “Palestinian issue” would “liberate Arab governments to support U.S. leadership in dealing with regional problems” as well as “dissipate much of the appeal of Hezbollah and Hamas, dependent as it is, on the Palestinians’ plight.”
While his language is more elegant and his views marginally less radical, Scowcroft’s rumored possible replacement of Freeman as chairman of the National Intelligence Council amounts to a distinction without a great deal of difference. In his February testimony, he implored the Senate Foreign Relations Committee not to take its eyes off the Palestinian ball. “The main gist,” he told the Senators, “is that you need to push hard on the Palestinian peace process. Don’t move it to the end of your agenda and say you have too much to do. And the United States needs to have a position, not just to hold their coats.” Vis-a-vis the Iranian threat, Scowcroft said he was primarily concerned with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran precipitating a nuclear arms race throughout the Middle East. As far as Israel was concerned, he saw no reason to dissent from Brzezinski’s view that its fears were overblown.
You won’t catch Obama’s National Security Director, General James Jones (USMC, Ret.), taking large exception to that sentiment. That much was obvious in the embarrassing wake of IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi’s March 17th trip to Washington to review fresh intelligence related to Iran’s threat to his nation’s existence. The sound of doors slamming in his face could have been heard all the way back to the Hakiriyah in Tel Aviv. Though appointments were scheduled well in advance, Defense Secretary Gates, Vice President Biden, National Intelligence Chief Blair and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mullen, Ashkenazi’s military counterpart, all found they had more important things to do. Jones, the former Marine commandant, was the only administration policy maker who had any time for him and he made it clear from the get-go that Iran was not a subject he cared to discuss. Sources in Washington report that virtually the entire session was taken up with American demands that Israel lift further security restrictions on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the words of one diplomat, “the [Obama] administration was sending a very clear message to Israel, and that is ‘we want to talk about Palestine and not Iran.’”
Finally, there is Susan Rice, the administration’s ambassador to the United Nations. A Brookings Institution Senior Fellow, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during Bill Clinton’s second term, Oxford Rhodes Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford, daughter of a Cornell University economics professor and Federal Reserve System governor, Rice was ticketed for the political stratosphere from the day she was elected president of the student council at Washington’s exclusive National Cathedral High School. As chief torch bearer for “engagenomics,” Barack Obama’s chosen foreign policy wand, she could not have made landfall in a more suitable venue than Turtle Bay.
Rice does not intend to disappoint. Her first act, barely a month after Senate confirmation, was to announce that the U.S. would contend for a seat on the UN’s “Human Rights Council,” the same “ragtag” retailer of anti-Israel snake oil from which John Bolton, George Bush’s UN representative, disengaged the U.S. in 2006, deeming any further association with an organization responsible for 26 condemnations of Israel over the previous three-years as “legitimizing something that doesn’t deserve legitimacy.”
Ambassador Rice and her boss think otherwise. While describing the Human Rights Council’s record as “disturbing” (“Yes, of course we mean Israel,” she responded to a reporter’s request for clarification), she apparently didn’t find it disturbing enough to preclude America’s bid for reentry. “We do not see any inherent benefit, as demonstrated by recent history, in being outside the tent and simply being critical,” she told reporters at a news conference following the announcement. She coldly dismissed the argument put forth by the Republican Jewish Coalition and Florida Congresswoman Illeana Ros-Lehtinen, the ranking member of the House International Affairs Committee, that in failing to condition America’s return to the UN body on substantive structural reforms, including the barring from its deliberations of human rights violators like Libya and Zimbabwe, the United States was throwing its diplomatic leverage to the four winds. “We don’t view engagement or diplomacy as a reward, “ she replied. ”It’s a tool to advance our interests.”
In the kind of mortifying post script to the affair that occasionally causes even its most fervent supporters to wonder why they stick their necks out for the Jewish state, the Republican Jewish Coalition and Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen wound up with egg on their faces when Aharon Leshno Yaar, Israel’s Geneva-based UN representative, joined with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and a host of leftist and notably anti-Israel “human rights” floggers in welcoming America’s projected return to the Council as a “concrete embodiment of the U.S. commitment to a new era of engagement.” One hopes that the Netanyahu government’s replacement of Mr. Leshno Yaar in Geneva becomes an early order of business.
In a sobering assessment of the new Obama era of U.S-Israel relations, British author and journalist Melanie Phillips commented that the “Israel bashers and Jew-haters with whom [Obama] has surrounded himself, aided and abetted by new realist appeasers and (often Jewish) useful idiots…” have only succeeded in “pursuing with far greater ferocity the change in strategy that was already apparent when George W. Bush became fatally weakened—forcing Israel to sacrifice its security, all for the illusory goal of a Palestinian state that would almost certainly become yet another proxy for Iran and which, far from helping defang the Middle East, would result instead in regional instability and yet more terrible war.”
That the West, as she predicts, “will be next if Obama succeeds in throwing Israel under the bus,” has notably failed to cut any ice with Scowcroft and the other “realists,” who have been driving this agenda, “including,” Phillips adds, “those who wish Israel would just vanish off the face of the earth.” That puts the ball squarely in the court of Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud-led coalition. It is a collection of ill-fitting parts, but somehow the new prime minister will have to find the key to making it work, if Israel is to have any chance of prevailing over the terrible hand it’s been dealt.
*The author represents AFSI in Israel and is co-editor of the Jerusalem-based internet magazine ZionNet (www.zionnet.net).
Posted by Ruth at 10:11 PM | OUTPOST
The opacity of the Obama administration’s professed dedication to the safety and security of Israel becomes more pronounced with each passing week. Former U.S. ambassador Charles Freeman’s aborted appointment to the chairmanship of the president’s National Intelligence Council is history, but its reverberations refuse to subside. By now we all know why this appointment was aborted. The question that won’t go away is why it was ever made.
Given Freeman’s stellar performances riding shotgun for the Saudis and the Communist Chinese, even as the “goddess of democracy” was being systematically assaulted by their regimes, by what stretch of whose imagination was the ambassador deemed fit to be sifting national intelligence data, much less presiding over the process? “Don’t ask us,” could serve as a summation of the response of the President and his inner circle, their collective arms extended full length.
It was Freeman himself who let the cat out of the bag. Withdrawing his name from further consideration for the National Intelligence Council chairmanship, he issued what the Washington Post described as a “two-page screed “ in which he cast himself as the victim of an “Israeli lobby” whose “tactics plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency” and which is “intent on forcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government. The aim of this lobby,” he continued, “is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of their views…and the exclusion of any and all options for decisions by Americans and our government, other than those that it favors.”
While never having been mistaken for a member of Israel’s “amen” corner, even the Washington Post found all this a bit much to bear. “Yes, Mr. Freeman was referring to Americans who support Israel,” it declared in a March 12th editorial entitled “Peddling a Conspiracy Theory, “and his statement was a gross libel.” That the former ambassador feels the way he does about Israel is hardly news. He’s declared on more than one occasion that he thinks all of America’s problems with the Islamic world can be traced to its supposed open-ended support of the Jewish state. That Freeman thought he could predicate his withdrawal from the NIC nomination on an Israeli “conspiracy”, totally ignoring the furor he raised in Congress over his links to Saudi Arabia and China, says as much about the new atmosphere the Obama administration has brought to Washington as it does about himself.
Speaking to that subject in a recent Jerusalem Post column, Caroline Glick observed that “In the past, while anti-Israel politicians, policy makers and opinion shapers were accepted in Washington, they would not have felt comfortable brandishing their anti-Israel positions as qualifying credentials for high position. Freeman’s appointment showed that is no longer the case. Today in Washington there are powerful circles of political players for whom a person’s anti-Israel bona fides are his strongest suit.” Indeed, she goes on to note, Freeman’s defenders underscored his ambivalence toward Israel as their reason for defending him, even to the point of ignoring his assertion in one instance that America deserved the attacks launched upon it on September 11, 2001. “They felt the fact that he raised the hackles of Americans who support Israel,” she said, “was reason enough to support him. Whether his views on other issues are reasonable or not was of no interest to them.”
That they also seemed to be of little or no interest to the Obama people is clearly a cause for concern. Political toilet training being an incremental process, if the Freeman fiasco was an isolated matter, it might be passed off as one of those “accidents” that inevitably mark the crawling stages of every new administration in Washington. But there was nothing isolated about the Freeman appointment. It was illustrative of a pattern of highly questionable foreign policy appointments by this White House, bound by a common thread of antipathy toward Israel. Like that involving Freeman, some of the most controversial among them were not subject to Senate review and confirmation.
A Democratic controlled Senate might not have nixed the nominations of Samantha Power and Robert Malley to the National Security Council, but it would not have let them pass without some serious debate. Power, a Harvard genocide expert who served as one of Obama’s campaign advisors, is a product of the International Crisis Group, a think tank heavily funded by billionaire George Soros. Not surprisingly, it has made a specialty of bashing Israel. Power was part of the ICG directorate that voted to bestow its 2008 “Founders Award” on Soros, in acceptance of which the renowned arch-critic of Israel and all things Israeli praised it for its exemplary work on the “Palestine Question.” Power, who is heading up the National Security Council’s “Multilateral Institutions” section, stopped just short of accusing Israel of genocide for its 2002 Defensive Shield operation against Tanzim terrorists in Jenin, settling for a charge of “major human rights abuses.” But she has not been shy of suggesting the injection of U.S. military forces into Judea and Samaria to safeguard the “human rights” of the Palestinians.
Power doesn’t blanch at force majeure as an answer to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. With a heavy dollop of moral equivalence, she mused in a recent interview that “imposition of a solution on unwilling partners is dreadful. I mean it’s a terrible thing to do…but it’s essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark, rather than a deterrence to people who are fundamentally politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people.”
Robert Malley, another horse out of the International Crisis Group stable, has been holding hands with Syrian dictator Bashir Assad since 2006. A former Clinton administration National Security Council honcho and key member of ICG’s Middle East policy team, he succeeded in winning for ICG a rare prize among American think tanks—an office in Damascus. Malley is believed to have been the mover behind Senator John Kerry’s February trip to Syria, highlighted by the senator’s effusive commendation of Assad, Hezbollah’s co-sponsor, for his valiant efforts on behalf of what turned out to be a still-born rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas. It was Malley who reportedly persuaded Obama to suspend further enforcement of U.S. sanctions against Syria and Malley who fired up the President’s enthusiasm for reopening the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, closed in February 2005 in response to Syria’s involvement in the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
Frederic Hof, Obama’s choice for the Damascus ambassadorial post, is a consummate Arabist (he once referred to the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as “a cancer killing the Oslo Process”) and a protégé of George Mitchell, the President’s “Special Envoy” to the Middle East. Mitchell billed his initial pre-election visit to Israel as a “listening tour.” He was back in Jerusalem following the election and by all indications the “listening” is over. Still basking in the afterglow of the “Good Friday” peace agreement he cobbled together in Northern Ireland, one that has begun to fray around the edges, the former Maine Senator is convinced that there are no differences—political or territorial—that cannot be split . Among the first things he‘s given notice he wants to split away from Israel are its communities in the strategic hilltops of Judea and Samaria. He’s already made it known that the dismantling of those communities was promised to former president, George Bush by former prime minister Ehud Olmert. That promise, as Mitchell defines it, was not Olmert’s alone, but Israel’s and he fully expects the Netanyahu government to make good. Of course, a victory on this front will be seen as setting the stage for an even bigger split—the division of Jerusalem.
The celebrants of such an event would be almost certain to include Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. As mere “unofficial” advisors to the President, they fall well under the Senatorial confirmation radar but their animus toward the Jewish state, burnished to a fine polish over the years, is only too recognizable. Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Chief, shares a place with Samantha Power on the board of the International Crisis Group, a testament in itself to his feelings about Israel. They were on full display in his recent testimony on Iran before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he ridiculed Israel’s contention of an existential threat raised by Iran’s quest for an atomic bomb. America’s “nuclear umbrella,” he averred, furnished all the protection Israel needed, adding, in a transparent jab at the Jewish state, that “we should be very careful not to become susceptible to interested parties.”
Scowcroft, the most impassioned advocate of a hard line against Israel during his tenure as advisor to George H.W. Bush, is currently beating the drums for direct U.S. “engagement” with Hamas from his post as chairman of the international board of the U.S. Middle East Project. Co-created with one-time American Jewish Congress chairman Henry Siegman, the board, including seven Arab members, is a loud voice in favor of imposing a Fatah/Hamas regime on Israel in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. In a Washington Post op-ed last fall, Scowcroft opined that resolving the “Palestinian issue” would “liberate Arab governments to support U.S. leadership in dealing with regional problems” as well as “dissipate much of the appeal of Hezbollah and Hamas, dependent as it is, on the Palestinians’ plight.”
While his language is more elegant and his views marginally less radical, Scowcroft’s rumored possible replacement of Freeman as chairman of the National Intelligence Council amounts to a distinction without a great deal of difference. In his February testimony, he implored the Senate Foreign Relations Committee not to take its eyes off the Palestinian ball. “The main gist,” he told the Senators, “is that you need to push hard on the Palestinian peace process. Don’t move it to the end of your agenda and say you have too much to do. And the United States needs to have a position, not just to hold their coats.” Vis-a-vis the Iranian threat, Scowcroft said he was primarily concerned with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran precipitating a nuclear arms race throughout the Middle East. As far as Israel was concerned, he saw no reason to dissent from Brzezinski’s view that its fears were overblown.
You won’t catch Obama’s National Security Director, General James Jones (USMC, Ret.), taking large exception to that sentiment. That much was obvious in the embarrassing wake of IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi’s March 17th trip to Washington to review fresh intelligence related to Iran’s threat to his nation’s existence. The sound of doors slamming in his face could have been heard all the way back to the Hakiriyah in Tel Aviv. Though appointments were scheduled well in advance, Defense Secretary Gates, Vice President Biden, National Intelligence Chief Blair and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mullen, Ashkenazi’s military counterpart, all found they had more important things to do. Jones, the former Marine commandant, was the only administration policy maker who had any time for him and he made it clear from the get-go that Iran was not a subject he cared to discuss. Sources in Washington report that virtually the entire session was taken up with American demands that Israel lift further security restrictions on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the words of one diplomat, “the [Obama] administration was sending a very clear message to Israel, and that is ‘we want to talk about Palestine and not Iran.’”
Finally, there is Susan Rice, the administration’s ambassador to the United Nations. A Brookings Institution Senior Fellow, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during Bill Clinton’s second term, Oxford Rhodes Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford, daughter of a Cornell University economics professor and Federal Reserve System governor, Rice was ticketed for the political stratosphere from the day she was elected president of the student council at Washington’s exclusive National Cathedral High School. As chief torch bearer for “engagenomics,” Barack Obama’s chosen foreign policy wand, she could not have made landfall in a more suitable venue than Turtle Bay.
Rice does not intend to disappoint. Her first act, barely a month after Senate confirmation, was to announce that the U.S. would contend for a seat on the UN’s “Human Rights Council,” the same “ragtag” retailer of anti-Israel snake oil from which John Bolton, George Bush’s UN representative, disengaged the U.S. in 2006, deeming any further association with an organization responsible for 26 condemnations of Israel over the previous three-years as “legitimizing something that doesn’t deserve legitimacy.”
Ambassador Rice and her boss think otherwise. While describing the Human Rights Council’s record as “disturbing” (“Yes, of course we mean Israel,” she responded to a reporter’s request for clarification), she apparently didn’t find it disturbing enough to preclude America’s bid for reentry. “We do not see any inherent benefit, as demonstrated by recent history, in being outside the tent and simply being critical,” she told reporters at a news conference following the announcement. She coldly dismissed the argument put forth by the Republican Jewish Coalition and Florida Congresswoman Illeana Ros-Lehtinen, the ranking member of the House International Affairs Committee, that in failing to condition America’s return to the UN body on substantive structural reforms, including the barring from its deliberations of human rights violators like Libya and Zimbabwe, the United States was throwing its diplomatic leverage to the four winds. “We don’t view engagement or diplomacy as a reward, “ she replied. ”It’s a tool to advance our interests.”
In the kind of mortifying post script to the affair that occasionally causes even its most fervent supporters to wonder why they stick their necks out for the Jewish state, the Republican Jewish Coalition and Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen wound up with egg on their faces when Aharon Leshno Yaar, Israel’s Geneva-based UN representative, joined with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and a host of leftist and notably anti-Israel “human rights” floggers in welcoming America’s projected return to the Council as a “concrete embodiment of the U.S. commitment to a new era of engagement.” One hopes that the Netanyahu government’s replacement of Mr. Leshno Yaar in Geneva becomes an early order of business.
In a sobering assessment of the new Obama era of U.S-Israel relations, British author and journalist Melanie Phillips commented that the “Israel bashers and Jew-haters with whom [Obama] has surrounded himself, aided and abetted by new realist appeasers and (often Jewish) useful idiots…” have only succeeded in “pursuing with far greater ferocity the change in strategy that was already apparent when George W. Bush became fatally weakened—forcing Israel to sacrifice its security, all for the illusory goal of a Palestinian state that would almost certainly become yet another proxy for Iran and which, far from helping defang the Middle East, would result instead in regional instability and yet more terrible war.”
That the West, as she predicts, “will be next if Obama succeeds in throwing Israel under the bus,” has notably failed to cut any ice with Scowcroft and the other “realists,” who have been driving this agenda, “including,” Phillips adds, “those who wish Israel would just vanish off the face of the earth.” That puts the ball squarely in the court of Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud-led coalition. It is a collection of ill-fitting parts, but somehow the new prime minister will have to find the key to making it work, if Israel is to have any chance of prevailing over the terrible hand it’s been dealt.
*The author represents AFSI in Israel and is co-editor of the Jerusalem-based internet magazine ZionNet (www.zionnet.net).
Posted by Ruth at 10:11 PM | OUTPOST
Friday, May 01, 2009
IDF officer outlines Israeli military ethics in Gaza
Debra Rubin
NJJN Bureau Chief/Middlesex
April 28, 2009
Imagine you are a soldier in the field when a suspected suicide bomber comes at you. Should you shoot or not? “Eight seconds — that’s all you have to decide,” said Col. Bentzi Gruber, a reserve vice commander in the Israel Defense Forces.
Speaking April 22 before a group of Rutgers University students gathered at the New Brunswick Theological Seminary on the main campus, Gruber showed actual films from the recent Operation Cast Lead into Gaza. The students saw cars loaded with explosives detonating, secret tunnels, and booby-trap rigged houses. Gruber also showed Gazans grabbing and using children as shields as they run across streets.
“They do this because they know we won’t shoot,” said Gruber, who oversees 20,000 soldiers. “We won’t do it. A Palestinian kid and a Jewish kid are the same thing to me.”
In a program that was both a personal account and an overview of Israeli military ethics, Gruber outlined how the IDF strives to minimize civilian casualties even in the middle of war.
The program was sponsored by the Orthodox Union’s Jewish Learning Initiatives on Campus and cosponsored by Rutgers Hillel.
“Tonight’s topic is very important for everyone to hear,” said student coordinator Avi Gilboa, a junior engineering major from Tenafly. “Bentzi did a good job of explaining the facts of what’s really happening in the field. We opened this up to the entire college because we felt it was something everyone should hear.”
With more than 20 years in the reserves, Gruber has been given permission to present materials and information usually seen only by military or government officials.
A computer engineer in civilian life, he said his own ethics stem from learning from his Holocaust survivor mother to have respect for all human beings.
Gruber also runs hesed-in-the-field programs, bringing together IDF soldiers and the seriously ill and the mentally and physically disabled for special events, including taking them along on maneuvers.
As Gruber showed the footage, in some instances bullets could be heard in the background. Aerial footage showed terrorists moving under cover of night.
“Force is used in proportion to the mission,” said Gruber. “We always try not to do much damage.”
If a pilot spots a terrorist in a taxi with four children, he said, “we won’t shoot even if this terrorist killed 10 people yesterday and four soldiers today. We will wait and find him another day.”
‘This is war’
Gruber used footage of a man with a rocket launcher on a crowded street as another example of a non-shooting situation because of the potential danger to innocent civilians.
These policies have held down collateral damage to civilians to rates far below that of U.S. forces in Iraqi hotspots like Fallujah, according to Gruber.
“If Tijuana started to launch rockets into Los Angeles, how long do you think it would take the U.S. Army to respond — three days, three months, three years? How about three seconds?”
By contrast, Israel suffered more than three years of missile attacks in the south before launching the Gaza initiative.
Before Israel bombs neighborhoods, Gruber said, residents are given warnings to leave their homes via leaflets dropped days in advance. As he showed a film of a call center, he pointed out one caller contacting Palestinians to warn them bombing was imminent. Text messages are also sent to cell phones.
“No other country would do the same,” said Gruber.
Palestinians also use ambulances, schools, mosques, and homes to hide caches of weapons and launch rockets and as hiding places for fighters, he said.
While Gruber said he would never give an order to shoot at an ambulance — “I don’t know; maybe there’s a pregnant woman in there” — a mosque or school can become a legitimate target.
He showed film of terrorists climbing into an ambulance as he instructed the audience to count with him. He stopped the film as the seventh armed man climbed in.
There were 295 noncombatants killed in the Gaza offensive — including 89 under age 16 and 50 women; Gruber acknowledged, “For me, every one of these is a tragedy.”
“But you have to understand: This is war,” he added. “But for me it is a tragedy even to kill an enemy.”
Clinton: No possibility of funding Hamas
US Secretary of state says no aid would be offered to Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas
Yitzhak Benhorin
Israel News
WASHINGTON – US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has rejected reports that the Obama administration will agree to transfer funds to a Palestinian government that includes Hamas members "There is no possibility of funding Hamas," Clinton told the Senate's Appropriations Committee Thursday. "That is absolutely not possible under the language of the supplemental, nor is it possible under our administration's policy."
"What we have said is that if there were to be, which at this moment seems highly unlikely, a unity government that consisted of the Palestinian authority members from Fatah and any members from Hamas, the government itself plus every member of the government would have to commit to the Quartet principles," Clinton added. "Namely, they must renounce violence, they must recognize Israel and they must agree to abide by the former PLO and Palestinian authority agreements."
"That has been our policy, and that is what we have told our partners in Europe and elsewhere, which is why we've been very hesitant and quite unconvinced about any efforts to create a unity government," the secretary of state said.
Clinton was denying recent reports claiming that the Obama administration softened the text of the request for aid to the Palestinians, so that funds could be transferred even in case a national unity government with Hamas is set up in the Palestinian Authority.
Israeli intel: "Obama wants to make friends with our worst enemies and until now the worst enemies of the United States"
Jihad Watch
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/025898.php
"Obama will want to show Iran, Syria and radical Muslims that the United States could pressure Israel on a strategic level."If Israel falls, the jihad will not end. It will, in fact, be emboldened as never before, and focus with new energy and confidence upon Europe and elsewhere. If Israel falls, the United States will be in greater peril from the Islamic jihad than ever before.
"Israeli intel warns Netanyahu on Obama policy: 'We have become an obstacle,'" from the World Tribune, April 24 (thanks to Shirley):
TEL AVIV — A classified assessment relayed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Obama and his senior advisers would incrementally diminish U.S. strategic cooperation with Israel developed over the last 20 years.
"Obama wants to make friends with our worst enemies and until now the worst enemies of the United States," an Israeli source familiar with the intelligence assessment said.
"Under this policy, we are more than irrelevant. We have become an obstacle."...
Israeli sources said the administration would reject Israel intelligence on such threats as Iran and Syria while advancing the Obama agenda to reconcile with the two states, both listed as state sponsor of terrorism by the U.S. State Dept.
On April 20, Israeli military intelligence commander Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin warned the Cabinet that Obama was prepared to allow Iran to retain its capability to assemble nuclear weapons and support Hamas and Hizbullah.
"Obama wants to advance the peace process in the direction of realistic discussions with extremist elements," Yadlin said.
The Israeli intelligence assessment envisioned that Obama would maintain his reconciliation policy with Iran and Syria through at least 2010. The sources said the assessment determined that Obama was convinced that such a policy would enable a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Obama will want to show Iran, Syria and radical Muslims that the United States could pressure Israel on a strategic level," the source said. "The pressure has already begun and will intensify throughout the next year or two."
The military intelligence chief said Obama was also courting the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Yadlin said both Damascus and Teheran have not significantly reduced their support for insurgency groups throughout the region.
"President Bashar Assad hopes to turn over a new leaf with U.S. President Barack Obama," Yadlin said. "However, while Western powers are being hosted at the palace in Damascus, Syria is continuing to be used as the back yard of the axis of evil. Assad is letting Hizbullah and Iranian forces freely conduct their affairs in Syria and use its territory for Hizbullah deployment."
Yadlin said Obama's policies have generated dismay among Arab allies of the United States. He said Arab countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia were concerned that U.S. reconciliation efforts would merely encourage Teheran and its proxies to intensify destabilization efforts. In April 2009, Egypt reported a Hizbullah network that operated in Cairo and the Sinai Peninsula.
"The Arab world is starting to understand that Iranian proxies are a threat to the region," Yadlin said. "The Hizbullah activity in Egypt is not an isolated incident. Iran has infrastructures across the world seeking to perpetrate terror attacks against Israel."
At the same time, the Obama administration was expected to restrict U.S. arms exports to Israel in an effort to deny systems that could be used in any attack against Iran or Syria. The intelligence sources said this policy was implemented during the last year of the Bush administration and would intensify under Obama.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/025898.php
"Obama will want to show Iran, Syria and radical Muslims that the United States could pressure Israel on a strategic level."If Israel falls, the jihad will not end. It will, in fact, be emboldened as never before, and focus with new energy and confidence upon Europe and elsewhere. If Israel falls, the United States will be in greater peril from the Islamic jihad than ever before.
"Israeli intel warns Netanyahu on Obama policy: 'We have become an obstacle,'" from the World Tribune, April 24 (thanks to Shirley):
TEL AVIV — A classified assessment relayed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Obama and his senior advisers would incrementally diminish U.S. strategic cooperation with Israel developed over the last 20 years.
"Obama wants to make friends with our worst enemies and until now the worst enemies of the United States," an Israeli source familiar with the intelligence assessment said.
"Under this policy, we are more than irrelevant. We have become an obstacle."...
Israeli sources said the administration would reject Israel intelligence on such threats as Iran and Syria while advancing the Obama agenda to reconcile with the two states, both listed as state sponsor of terrorism by the U.S. State Dept.
On April 20, Israeli military intelligence commander Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin warned the Cabinet that Obama was prepared to allow Iran to retain its capability to assemble nuclear weapons and support Hamas and Hizbullah.
"Obama wants to advance the peace process in the direction of realistic discussions with extremist elements," Yadlin said.
The Israeli intelligence assessment envisioned that Obama would maintain his reconciliation policy with Iran and Syria through at least 2010. The sources said the assessment determined that Obama was convinced that such a policy would enable a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Obama will want to show Iran, Syria and radical Muslims that the United States could pressure Israel on a strategic level," the source said. "The pressure has already begun and will intensify throughout the next year or two."
The military intelligence chief said Obama was also courting the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Yadlin said both Damascus and Teheran have not significantly reduced their support for insurgency groups throughout the region.
"President Bashar Assad hopes to turn over a new leaf with U.S. President Barack Obama," Yadlin said. "However, while Western powers are being hosted at the palace in Damascus, Syria is continuing to be used as the back yard of the axis of evil. Assad is letting Hizbullah and Iranian forces freely conduct their affairs in Syria and use its territory for Hizbullah deployment."
Yadlin said Obama's policies have generated dismay among Arab allies of the United States. He said Arab countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia were concerned that U.S. reconciliation efforts would merely encourage Teheran and its proxies to intensify destabilization efforts. In April 2009, Egypt reported a Hizbullah network that operated in Cairo and the Sinai Peninsula.
"The Arab world is starting to understand that Iranian proxies are a threat to the region," Yadlin said. "The Hizbullah activity in Egypt is not an isolated incident. Iran has infrastructures across the world seeking to perpetrate terror attacks against Israel."
At the same time, the Obama administration was expected to restrict U.S. arms exports to Israel in an effort to deny systems that could be used in any attack against Iran or Syria. The intelligence sources said this policy was implemented during the last year of the Bush administration and would intensify under Obama.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
"Unease"
Arlene Kushner
With the state of world affairs, it would be difficult indeed to feel a sense of ease.
In an "exclusive" today the Jerusalem Post reported that PM Netanyahu, when he goes to the US on May 18, plans to tell President Obama that Israel will accept "some form" of the Arab peace plan. While the first impulse is to fear that he's caved already -- I intend to give Netanyahu the benefit of the doubt here. At least until I know more.
We must remember that this is not an official announcement. The Post got this from "sources" close to government planning.
And then, we need to know what "some form" of the plan means. The Arab (Saudi) plan is a recipe for Israel's destruction, calling as it does for our return to '67 lines and "return of refugees." Netanyahu is not about to sign off on either of these. Then, what?
~~~~~~~~~~
Aaron Lerner, on his IMRA website today, asks if Netanyahu is doing some "fancy verbal footwork." And indeed that may be precisely the case.
It may be that Netanyahu wants to appear to have given Obama something, without actually giving him anything. Yes, he can intone, this and this part of the plan resonate with us. Then Obama can put out press releases about how he is already moving matters along. While Netanyahu, knowing full well that all the pieces are not going to fall into place, remains confident of the outcome: no "two state solution," no withdrawals from Judea and Samaria, no dividing Jerusalem.
But this high level game-playing is risky. It requires nerves of steel and the ability to know when to stop. Otherwise you're on your way down that slippery slope, and something truly is conceded.
~~~~~~~~~~
But there is more. And it's most unsettling. According to the Post report, Israel "will compromise on the Palestinian issue to obtain more direct and aggressive US assistance on the Iranian front."
This linking of the two issues was verbalized last week by Secretary Clinton. What she suggested was that we won't get support from the Arab states for taking on Iran unless the Arabs see we are moving on Palestinian negotiations. This was both offensive and off base, for behind the bluster is the Arab desire to see us stand strong against Iran.
So, is Netanyahu caving in response to what she said, or is he trying to maneuver the situation to his advantage?
The next question to be asked, of course, is what the quid pro quo would be: Precisely what sort of US assistance on the Iranian front would be sufficient for Netanyahu to become more "flexible" with regard to the Palestinians? Additional sophisticated weaponry or equipment? Permission to fly over Iraq?
Here I make a speculation, coming from nothing but my own sense of the situation and my understanding of our prime minister. The issue of the danger of Iran has loomed large in Netanyahu's consciousness for some time. He's been speaking consistently and forcefully about the need to take action.
Could it be that he's doing an abbreviated sort of triage here? If -- and it would be rightly so -- he sees Iran as THE existential danger to us, he would conclude that it's the threat most important to counter. And, even as he still intends to hold the ground against a Palestinian state, he would see caving (or appearing to cave) on that issue, up to a point, wise if it allows us to more effectively take on Iran.
Only speculation. Only questions. For now.
~~~~~~~~~~
It's actually easy to see why Netanyahu, along with a great many of us, is being driven to distraction by Obama's stance on Iran.
Yesterday, the White House rejected any suggestion of putting time limits on its negotiations with Iran and suggested that this process could take a long time.
White House National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer told reporters that "it's not appropriate at this time to be trying to establish timetables, but rather seeing how the engagement can move forward...there are opportunities there for us to engage with the Iranian government."
But in terms of Iranian nuclear development we don't have a long time. This is precisely what the Israeli government has been imploring the US not to do.
~~~~~~~~~~
To exacerbate the situation, there is this:
Mehdi Ghazanfari, head of the Iranian Trade Promotion Agency, has told an Iranian news agency that Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France and the United Kingdom have carried out some $15.4 billion in bilateral trade with Iran over the past year.
And people wonder why sanctions haven't worked. What these self-serving, short-sighted nations are doing is in defiance of UN Security Council sanctions imposed on Iran.
~~~~~~~~~~
Larry Summers, Obama's chief economic adviser, went to a Yom Ha'atzmaut celebration at the Israeli Embassy in Washington yesterday, carrying a message from the president:
Obama, he said, would pursue peace, but not at all costs. His administration remains committed to the security and independence of Israel.
Not remotely do I believe this.
Summers explained that Obama would pursue, "Peace that defends innocent people, peace that guarantees freedom, peace that does not reward terror, peace that the Middle East deserves after such a long time."
What platitudinous and vacuous words.
~~~~~~~~~~
Putting the lie more definitively to the conciliatory words above is a report from the World Tribune, citing Israeli intelligence sources. One source was quoted as saying:
"Obama wants to make friends with our worst enemies and [those who were] until now the worst enemies of the United States. Under this policy, we are more than irrelevant. We have become an obstacle."
The prediction being made is that Obama would continue to appease Syria, and Iran, believing that this would make it more possible to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Obama will want to show Iran, Syria and radical Muslims that the United States could pressure Israel on a strategic level. The pressure has already begun and will intensify throughout the next year or two."
The report further said that the Obama administration would ignore Israeli advice, and, indeed, that is precisely what we're seeing with regard to US refusal to put time limits on talks with Iran.
~~~~~~~~~~
see my website www.ArlenefromIsrael.info
With the state of world affairs, it would be difficult indeed to feel a sense of ease.
In an "exclusive" today the Jerusalem Post reported that PM Netanyahu, when he goes to the US on May 18, plans to tell President Obama that Israel will accept "some form" of the Arab peace plan. While the first impulse is to fear that he's caved already -- I intend to give Netanyahu the benefit of the doubt here. At least until I know more.
We must remember that this is not an official announcement. The Post got this from "sources" close to government planning.
And then, we need to know what "some form" of the plan means. The Arab (Saudi) plan is a recipe for Israel's destruction, calling as it does for our return to '67 lines and "return of refugees." Netanyahu is not about to sign off on either of these. Then, what?
~~~~~~~~~~
Aaron Lerner, on his IMRA website today, asks if Netanyahu is doing some "fancy verbal footwork." And indeed that may be precisely the case.
It may be that Netanyahu wants to appear to have given Obama something, without actually giving him anything. Yes, he can intone, this and this part of the plan resonate with us. Then Obama can put out press releases about how he is already moving matters along. While Netanyahu, knowing full well that all the pieces are not going to fall into place, remains confident of the outcome: no "two state solution," no withdrawals from Judea and Samaria, no dividing Jerusalem.
But this high level game-playing is risky. It requires nerves of steel and the ability to know when to stop. Otherwise you're on your way down that slippery slope, and something truly is conceded.
~~~~~~~~~~
But there is more. And it's most unsettling. According to the Post report, Israel "will compromise on the Palestinian issue to obtain more direct and aggressive US assistance on the Iranian front."
This linking of the two issues was verbalized last week by Secretary Clinton. What she suggested was that we won't get support from the Arab states for taking on Iran unless the Arabs see we are moving on Palestinian negotiations. This was both offensive and off base, for behind the bluster is the Arab desire to see us stand strong against Iran.
So, is Netanyahu caving in response to what she said, or is he trying to maneuver the situation to his advantage?
The next question to be asked, of course, is what the quid pro quo would be: Precisely what sort of US assistance on the Iranian front would be sufficient for Netanyahu to become more "flexible" with regard to the Palestinians? Additional sophisticated weaponry or equipment? Permission to fly over Iraq?
Here I make a speculation, coming from nothing but my own sense of the situation and my understanding of our prime minister. The issue of the danger of Iran has loomed large in Netanyahu's consciousness for some time. He's been speaking consistently and forcefully about the need to take action.
Could it be that he's doing an abbreviated sort of triage here? If -- and it would be rightly so -- he sees Iran as THE existential danger to us, he would conclude that it's the threat most important to counter. And, even as he still intends to hold the ground against a Palestinian state, he would see caving (or appearing to cave) on that issue, up to a point, wise if it allows us to more effectively take on Iran.
Only speculation. Only questions. For now.
~~~~~~~~~~
It's actually easy to see why Netanyahu, along with a great many of us, is being driven to distraction by Obama's stance on Iran.
Yesterday, the White House rejected any suggestion of putting time limits on its negotiations with Iran and suggested that this process could take a long time.
White House National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer told reporters that "it's not appropriate at this time to be trying to establish timetables, but rather seeing how the engagement can move forward...there are opportunities there for us to engage with the Iranian government."
But in terms of Iranian nuclear development we don't have a long time. This is precisely what the Israeli government has been imploring the US not to do.
~~~~~~~~~~
To exacerbate the situation, there is this:
Mehdi Ghazanfari, head of the Iranian Trade Promotion Agency, has told an Iranian news agency that Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France and the United Kingdom have carried out some $15.4 billion in bilateral trade with Iran over the past year.
And people wonder why sanctions haven't worked. What these self-serving, short-sighted nations are doing is in defiance of UN Security Council sanctions imposed on Iran.
~~~~~~~~~~
Larry Summers, Obama's chief economic adviser, went to a Yom Ha'atzmaut celebration at the Israeli Embassy in Washington yesterday, carrying a message from the president:
Obama, he said, would pursue peace, but not at all costs. His administration remains committed to the security and independence of Israel.
Not remotely do I believe this.
Summers explained that Obama would pursue, "Peace that defends innocent people, peace that guarantees freedom, peace that does not reward terror, peace that the Middle East deserves after such a long time."
What platitudinous and vacuous words.
~~~~~~~~~~
Putting the lie more definitively to the conciliatory words above is a report from the World Tribune, citing Israeli intelligence sources. One source was quoted as saying:
"Obama wants to make friends with our worst enemies and [those who were] until now the worst enemies of the United States. Under this policy, we are more than irrelevant. We have become an obstacle."
The prediction being made is that Obama would continue to appease Syria, and Iran, believing that this would make it more possible to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Obama will want to show Iran, Syria and radical Muslims that the United States could pressure Israel on a strategic level. The pressure has already begun and will intensify throughout the next year or two."
The report further said that the Obama administration would ignore Israeli advice, and, indeed, that is precisely what we're seeing with regard to US refusal to put time limits on talks with Iran.
~~~~~~~~~~
see my website www.ArlenefromIsrael.info
Thousands Can Flee to Samaria
Hillel Fendel Thousands Can Flee to Samaria
Samaria (Shomron) Regional Council head Gershon Mesika says that the wide open expanses of the hilltops and valleys of his municipal council are the answer to the dangerous population density in the Tel Aviv region. he army and other government bodies recently held an exercise for emergency scenarios in Samaria. Among them was a drill for the emergency absorption of thousands of Jews in the region.
Samaria, also known as the northern part of the West Bank, is the large hilly area in the middle of Israel which lies just north of Jerusalem and east of Tel Aviv. Since Jewish towns exist there alongside Arab villages, it is widely assumed that Arab enemies would be less likely to attack the region for fear of harming Arab/Muslim population centers.
“At present,” Mesika writes in an article that will appear in the Our Land of Israel weekly publication this Friday, “the reality is that over five million people live in Gush Dan, the area known as ‘between Hadera and Gedera’ [roughly 540 square miles which encompass Greater Tel. Aside from the environmental and planning problems this causes, it sharpens the dangers we face from non-conventional weapons.”
“The more we encourage citizens to leave the low-lying and crowded Gush Dan area and move to Samaria, the more the State of Israel will thus reduce the non-conventional threat it faces – especially the threat emanating from Iran’s nuclear plant in Bushehr.”
“It’s true: We should enact the Yitzhar-for-Bushehr plan – but not in the sense in which some anti-Israel forces would have it [Israel’s withdrawal from Yitzhar and the other Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria in exchange for Western pressure to close down Busheh, but the opposite. The government of Israel must initiate a large-scale construction campaign in the Samarian region and start building new communities in its wide expanses, which are ready and waiting to absorb millions of Jewish residents.”
Though the IDF drill did not address the the Iranian missile threat specifically, Mesika’s forward-looking headline is “Samaria: The Response to the Iranian Nuclear Threat.”
Mesika also noted ironically that the explanatory literature for the drill “revolved precisely around the threats we issued a few years ago, when we warned against the Disengagement withdrawal from northern Samaria and Gush Katif.”
FACT CHECK: Obama disowns deficit he helped shape
Calvin Woodward
WASHINGTON (AP) - "That wasn't me," President Barack Obama said on his 100th day in office, disclaiming responsibility for the huge budget deficit waiting for him on Day One.
It actually was him - and the other Democrats controlling Congress the previous two years - who shaped a budget so out of balance And as a presidential candidate and president-elect, he backed the twilight Bush-era stimulus plan that made the deficit deeper, all before he took over and promoted spending plans that have made it much deeper still.
Obama met citizens at an Arnold, Mo., high school Wednesday in advance of his prime-time news conference. Both forums were a platform to review his progress at the 100-day mark and look ahead.
At various times, he brought an air of certainty to ambitions that are far from cast in stone.
His assertion that his proposed budget "will cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term" is an eyeball-roller among many economists, given the uncharted terrain of trillion-dollar deficits and economic calamity that the government is negotiating.
He promised vast savings from increased spending on preventive health care in the face of doubts that such an effort, however laudable it might be for public welfare, can pay for itself, let alone yield huge savings.
A look at some of his claims Wednesday:
OBAMA: "Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit.... That wasn't me. Number two, there is almost uniform consensus among economists that in the middle of the biggest crisis, financial crisis, since the Great Depression, we had to take extraordinary steps. So you've got a lot of Republican economists who agree that we had to do a stimulus package and we had to do something about the banks. Those are one-time charges, and they're big, and they'll make our deficits go up over the next two years." - in Missouri.
THE FACTS:
Congress controls the purse strings, not the president, and it was under Democratic control for Obama's last two years as Illinois senator. Obama supported the emergency bailout package in President George W. Bush's final months - a package Democratic leaders wanted to make bigger.
To be sure, Obama opposed the Iraq war, a drain on federal coffers for six years before he became president. But with one major exception, he voted in support of Iraq war spending.
The economy has worsened under Obama, though from forces surely in play before he became president, and he can credibly claim to have inherited a grim situation.
Still, his response to the crisis goes well beyond "one-time charges."
He's persuaded Congress to expand children's health insurance, education spending, health information technology and more. He's moving ahead on a variety of big-ticket items on health care, the environment, energy and transportation that, if achieved, will be more enduring than bank bailouts and aid for homeowners.
The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated his policy proposals would add a net $428 billion to the deficit over four years, even accounting for his spending reduction goals. Now, the deficit is nearly quadrupling to $1.75 trillion.
---
OBAMA: "I think one basic principle that we know is that the more we do on the (disease) prevention side, the more we can obtain serious savings down the road. ... If we're making those investments, we will save huge amounts of money in the long term." - in Missouri.
THE FACTS: It sounds believable that preventing illness should be cheaper than treating it, and indeed that's the case with steps like preventing smoking and improving diets and exercise. But during the 2008 campaign, when Obama and other presidential candidates were touting a focus on preventive care, the New England Journal of Medicine cautioned that "sweeping statements about the cost-saving potential of prevention, however, are overreaching." It said that "although some preventive measures do save money, the vast majority reviewed in the health economics literature do not."
And a study released in December by the Congressional Budget Office found that increasing preventive care "could improve people's health but would probably generate either modest reductions in the overall costs of health care or increases in such spending within a 10-year budgetary time frame."
---
OBAMA: "You could cut (Social Security) benefits. You could raise the tax on everybody so everybody's payroll tax goes up a little bit. Or you can do what I think is probably the best solution, which is you can raise the cap on the payroll tax." - in Missouri.
THE FACTS: Obama's proposal would reduce the Social Security trust fund's deficit by less than half, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
That means he would still have to cut benefits, raise the payroll tax rate, raise the retirement age or some combination to deal with the program's long-term imbalance.
Workers currently pay 6.2 percent and their employers pay an equal rate - for a total of 12.4 percent - on annual wages of up to $106,800, after which no more payroll tax is collected.
Obama wants workers making more than $250,000 to pay payroll tax on their income over that amount. That would still protect workers making under $250,000 from an additional burden. But it would raise much less money than removing the cap completely.
---
Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Jim Kuhnhenn contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON (AP) - "That wasn't me," President Barack Obama said on his 100th day in office, disclaiming responsibility for the huge budget deficit waiting for him on Day One.
It actually was him - and the other Democrats controlling Congress the previous two years - who shaped a budget so out of balance And as a presidential candidate and president-elect, he backed the twilight Bush-era stimulus plan that made the deficit deeper, all before he took over and promoted spending plans that have made it much deeper still.
Obama met citizens at an Arnold, Mo., high school Wednesday in advance of his prime-time news conference. Both forums were a platform to review his progress at the 100-day mark and look ahead.
At various times, he brought an air of certainty to ambitions that are far from cast in stone.
His assertion that his proposed budget "will cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term" is an eyeball-roller among many economists, given the uncharted terrain of trillion-dollar deficits and economic calamity that the government is negotiating.
He promised vast savings from increased spending on preventive health care in the face of doubts that such an effort, however laudable it might be for public welfare, can pay for itself, let alone yield huge savings.
A look at some of his claims Wednesday:
OBAMA: "Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit.... That wasn't me. Number two, there is almost uniform consensus among economists that in the middle of the biggest crisis, financial crisis, since the Great Depression, we had to take extraordinary steps. So you've got a lot of Republican economists who agree that we had to do a stimulus package and we had to do something about the banks. Those are one-time charges, and they're big, and they'll make our deficits go up over the next two years." - in Missouri.
THE FACTS:
Congress controls the purse strings, not the president, and it was under Democratic control for Obama's last two years as Illinois senator. Obama supported the emergency bailout package in President George W. Bush's final months - a package Democratic leaders wanted to make bigger.
To be sure, Obama opposed the Iraq war, a drain on federal coffers for six years before he became president. But with one major exception, he voted in support of Iraq war spending.
The economy has worsened under Obama, though from forces surely in play before he became president, and he can credibly claim to have inherited a grim situation.
Still, his response to the crisis goes well beyond "one-time charges."
He's persuaded Congress to expand children's health insurance, education spending, health information technology and more. He's moving ahead on a variety of big-ticket items on health care, the environment, energy and transportation that, if achieved, will be more enduring than bank bailouts and aid for homeowners.
The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated his policy proposals would add a net $428 billion to the deficit over four years, even accounting for his spending reduction goals. Now, the deficit is nearly quadrupling to $1.75 trillion.
---
OBAMA: "I think one basic principle that we know is that the more we do on the (disease) prevention side, the more we can obtain serious savings down the road. ... If we're making those investments, we will save huge amounts of money in the long term." - in Missouri.
THE FACTS: It sounds believable that preventing illness should be cheaper than treating it, and indeed that's the case with steps like preventing smoking and improving diets and exercise. But during the 2008 campaign, when Obama and other presidential candidates were touting a focus on preventive care, the New England Journal of Medicine cautioned that "sweeping statements about the cost-saving potential of prevention, however, are overreaching." It said that "although some preventive measures do save money, the vast majority reviewed in the health economics literature do not."
And a study released in December by the Congressional Budget Office found that increasing preventive care "could improve people's health but would probably generate either modest reductions in the overall costs of health care or increases in such spending within a 10-year budgetary time frame."
---
OBAMA: "You could cut (Social Security) benefits. You could raise the tax on everybody so everybody's payroll tax goes up a little bit. Or you can do what I think is probably the best solution, which is you can raise the cap on the payroll tax." - in Missouri.
THE FACTS: Obama's proposal would reduce the Social Security trust fund's deficit by less than half, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
That means he would still have to cut benefits, raise the payroll tax rate, raise the retirement age or some combination to deal with the program's long-term imbalance.
Workers currently pay 6.2 percent and their employers pay an equal rate - for a total of 12.4 percent - on annual wages of up to $106,800, after which no more payroll tax is collected.
Obama wants workers making more than $250,000 to pay payroll tax on their income over that amount. That would still protect workers making under $250,000 from an additional burden. But it would raise much less money than removing the cap completely.
---
Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Jim Kuhnhenn contributed to this report.
Obama on the deficit: 'That wasn't me'
Rick Moran
American Thinker
I burst out laughing last night when the president said that. He reminded me of a little boy who broke a dish right in front of his parents only to look them right in the eye and exclaim, "That wasn't me."
Leaving aside the fact that the Democrats have been in charge of the Congress since January of 2007,the federal deficit for that year was a manageable $161 billion. At that time - before the bailouts and trillions dumped into credit markets - the projected 2009 deficit was a worrisome $482 billion.
As AP points out in this Fact Check, Obama supported the original Bush TARP bill and then proceeded to pile on debt until that 2009 projection stands at an "official" $1.75 trillion - four times higher than the original projection under Bush. And that number, as most economists believe, is a joke with the real deficit probably kissing $2 trillion.
And AP points out that his claim regarding his budget being able to halve the deficit by 2012 is also a knee slapper according to most economists.
Obama's penchant for blaming others for his disasters will only go on for so long. This narcissistic man who believes he can do no wrong and who is cultivating a cult of personality to ensure people will vote for him no matter how bad things get will not have a clue what to do once his "blame Bush" crutch has been taken from him.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/04/obama_on_the_deficit_that_wasn.html at April 30, 2009 - 11:38:48 AM EDT
American Thinker
I burst out laughing last night when the president said that. He reminded me of a little boy who broke a dish right in front of his parents only to look them right in the eye and exclaim, "That wasn't me."
Leaving aside the fact that the Democrats have been in charge of the Congress since January of 2007,the federal deficit for that year was a manageable $161 billion. At that time - before the bailouts and trillions dumped into credit markets - the projected 2009 deficit was a worrisome $482 billion.
As AP points out in this Fact Check, Obama supported the original Bush TARP bill and then proceeded to pile on debt until that 2009 projection stands at an "official" $1.75 trillion - four times higher than the original projection under Bush. And that number, as most economists believe, is a joke with the real deficit probably kissing $2 trillion.
And AP points out that his claim regarding his budget being able to halve the deficit by 2012 is also a knee slapper according to most economists.
Obama's penchant for blaming others for his disasters will only go on for so long. This narcissistic man who believes he can do no wrong and who is cultivating a cult of personality to ensure people will vote for him no matter how bad things get will not have a clue what to do once his "blame Bush" crutch has been taken from him.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/04/obama_on_the_deficit_that_wasn.html at April 30, 2009 - 11:38:48 AM EDT
US General: Fatah Soldiers are 'Founders of Palestinian State'
Iyar 5, 5769, 29 April 09 02:05by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/SendMail.aspx?print=print&type=0&item=131098
Palestinian Authority special forces were praised by an American general this week for becoming the founders of a new Arab country within Israel's current borders.
"As I look at you, I couldn't be more proud of the fact that you stepped up to be the founders of a Palestinian state," U.S. Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton told a battalion in his speech to the troops Monday in Tulkarm. Dayton is responsible for the military training of the PA special forces. The statement was reported by the Reuters news service.
The American government has spent tens of millions of dollars outfitting the PA troops, which it calls “special forces,” possibly in order to avoid contradicting the Oslo Accords that limit military activities of the PA. Dayton has been overseeing their training, which takes place in Jordan and at a base built in Jericho with U.S. funds. Weapons for the “special forces” are provided by Arab countries, with Israeli approval.
The Olmert administration also approved a gift of armored personnel carriers from Russia with the stipulation that they be unarmed. In addition, Russia had wanted to hand over two helicopters to the PA as well.
Dayton told Reuters that the Obama administration plans to expand the training program for 1,500 more PA troops, creating three more battalions, in the next 12 months. Dayton already has supervised the training of 1,600 troops, most of whom are deployed in large PA-controlled Arab cities, including Jenin, Shechem and Hevron.
Despite their presence, the IDF continues to carry out the task of arresting terrorists, particularly at night when the PA forces do not operate.
"If it goes the way the administration has asked for, we will accelerate dramatically what we are doing here in terms of training and equipment, and filling in the gaps in between," Dayton said during his visit in Tulkarm, located almost adjacent to the Judea-Samaria separation barrier and only a few miles east of Netanya.
The additional training program requires approval from Congress for more funding that would allow the construction for more PA military bases in Judea and Samaria. Without defining the cost of the additional training and construction, Dayton stated it will entail “more financial support than we have ever had before.”
Both the past Bush administration and the current Obama government declared the training helps the standing and security of PA Chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, who is seen as a moderate peace partner for Israel. Officials in the Obama administration have said that the budget for Dayton will grow from $75 million last year to $130 million in 2009.
Fatah and the rival PA faction, the Hamas terrorist organization, are trying to reach a unity agreement which would make Hamas a recipient of American aid. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has stated that American financing would be problematic if Hamas joins Fatah without recognizing Israel's right to exist, and disarming.
Fatah also does not officially recognize Israel, and Abbas said on Tuesday he refuses to view the country as a “Jewish State.”
www.IsraelNationalNews.com
© Copyright IsraelNationalNews.com
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/SendMail.aspx?print=print&type=0&item=131098
Aggie's Comments: Sure, continue to increase the training and arming of PA "special forces," the better to prepare them for another war against Israel, as already threatened by King Abdullah of Jordan and as evidenced by the rearming of Hamas and Hizballah. And this in the face of the bellicose refusal by Abbas to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
We must write our Senators and Reps, imploring them NOT TO INCREASE FUNDING FOR MILITARY TRAINING, ARMING, OR BASE BUILDING of the PA forces.
Aggie
Diane Feinstein, FAX-- (202) 228-3954.
331 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-3841
Web Form: feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactU...
House of Reps contact:
http://www.house.gov/writerep/
Senator contacts:
Hillary Clinton:
email: http://contact-us.state.gov/cgi-bin/state.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php?p_sid=Z4yFxdYi&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPSZwX3NvcnRfYnk9JnBfZ3JpZHNvcnQ9JnBfcm93X2NudD0xMTEmcF9wcm9kcz0mcF9jYXRzPSZwX3B2PSZwX2N2PSZwX3NlYXJjaF90eXBlPWFuc3dlcnMuc2VhcmNoX25sJnBfcGFnZT0x
for topic, select "US foreign policy"
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/SendMail.aspx?print=print&type=0&item=131098
Palestinian Authority special forces were praised by an American general this week for becoming the founders of a new Arab country within Israel's current borders.
"As I look at you, I couldn't be more proud of the fact that you stepped up to be the founders of a Palestinian state," U.S. Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton told a battalion in his speech to the troops Monday in Tulkarm. Dayton is responsible for the military training of the PA special forces. The statement was reported by the Reuters news service.
The American government has spent tens of millions of dollars outfitting the PA troops, which it calls “special forces,” possibly in order to avoid contradicting the Oslo Accords that limit military activities of the PA. Dayton has been overseeing their training, which takes place in Jordan and at a base built in Jericho with U.S. funds. Weapons for the “special forces” are provided by Arab countries, with Israeli approval.
The Olmert administration also approved a gift of armored personnel carriers from Russia with the stipulation that they be unarmed. In addition, Russia had wanted to hand over two helicopters to the PA as well.
Dayton told Reuters that the Obama administration plans to expand the training program for 1,500 more PA troops, creating three more battalions, in the next 12 months. Dayton already has supervised the training of 1,600 troops, most of whom are deployed in large PA-controlled Arab cities, including Jenin, Shechem and Hevron.
Despite their presence, the IDF continues to carry out the task of arresting terrorists, particularly at night when the PA forces do not operate.
"If it goes the way the administration has asked for, we will accelerate dramatically what we are doing here in terms of training and equipment, and filling in the gaps in between," Dayton said during his visit in Tulkarm, located almost adjacent to the Judea-Samaria separation barrier and only a few miles east of Netanya.
The additional training program requires approval from Congress for more funding that would allow the construction for more PA military bases in Judea and Samaria. Without defining the cost of the additional training and construction, Dayton stated it will entail “more financial support than we have ever had before.”
Both the past Bush administration and the current Obama government declared the training helps the standing and security of PA Chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, who is seen as a moderate peace partner for Israel. Officials in the Obama administration have said that the budget for Dayton will grow from $75 million last year to $130 million in 2009.
Fatah and the rival PA faction, the Hamas terrorist organization, are trying to reach a unity agreement which would make Hamas a recipient of American aid. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has stated that American financing would be problematic if Hamas joins Fatah without recognizing Israel's right to exist, and disarming.
Fatah also does not officially recognize Israel, and Abbas said on Tuesday he refuses to view the country as a “Jewish State.”
www.IsraelNationalNews.com
© Copyright IsraelNationalNews.com
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/SendMail.aspx?print=print&type=0&item=131098
Aggie's Comments: Sure, continue to increase the training and arming of PA "special forces," the better to prepare them for another war against Israel, as already threatened by King Abdullah of Jordan and as evidenced by the rearming of Hamas and Hizballah. And this in the face of the bellicose refusal by Abbas to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
We must write our Senators and Reps, imploring them NOT TO INCREASE FUNDING FOR MILITARY TRAINING, ARMING, OR BASE BUILDING of the PA forces.
Aggie
Diane Feinstein, FAX-- (202) 228-3954.
331 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-3841
Web Form: feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactU...
House of Reps contact:
http://www.house.gov/writerep/
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Hillary Clinton:
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The Hamas Charter
Overview:
On January 25, 2006, the day Palestinian Legislative Council elections were held, Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahar, senior Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip and candidate for the post of foreign minister, stated that Hamas was committed to the ideology of its 1988 charter. He noted emphatically that “the movement [would] not change a single word in its charter,” which calls for the destruction of the State of Israel, and would not become a purely political movement, but quite the opposite, it would continue its policy of “resistance” (i.e., terrorist attacks) (Reuters, Gaza, January 25). The Hamas charter referred to by Mahmoud al-Zahar was formulated during the first year of the previous round of the violent Israeli-Palestinian confrontations (1987-1993). It was edited and approved by Ahmad Yassin, the movement’s founder and leader (who died in a targeted killing in March 2004), and issued on August 18, 1988. It is Hamas’s most important ideological document and as of this writing, copies continue to be circulated in the Palestinian Authority-administered territories. It makes extensive use of Islamic sources (the Qur’an and hadith1) to assure its religious Islamic basis.
The main points of the Hamas charter:
* The conflict with Israeli is religious and political: The Palestinian problem is a religious-political Muslim problem and the conflict with Israel is between Muslims and the Jewish “infidels.”
* All Palestine is Muslim land and no one has the right to give it up: The land of Palestine is sacred Muslim land and no one, including Arab rulers, has the authority to give up any of it.
* The importance of jihad (holy war) as the main means for the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) to achieve its goals: An uncompromising jihad must be waged against Israel and any agreement recognizing its right to exist must be totally opposed. Jihad is the personal duty of every Muslim.
* The importance of fostering the Islamic consciousness: Much effort must be invested fostering and spreading Islamic consciousness by means of education [i.e., religious-political indoctrination] in the spirit of radical Islam, based on the ideology of the Muslim brotherhood.
* The importance of Muslim solidarity: A great deal of importance is given to Muslim solidarity, one of whose manifestations is aid to the needy through the establishment of a network of various “charitable societies.”
* In addition, the charter is rife with overt anti-Semitism: According to the charter, the Jewish people have only negative traits and are presented as planning to take over the world. The charter uses myths taken from classical European and Islamic-based anti-Semitism.
The translation of the charter, which follows below, is of the 2004 edition, published in an ornate format in Qalqilya2 and issued to celebrate the 17th anniversary of the movement’s founding. Copies were among the documents found by IDF soldiers in the Islamic Club in Qalqilya on September 27, 2005.
Sheikh Ahmad Yassin’s picture appears on the front cover of the 2004 Qalqilya edition. A picture of his temporary successor, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Rantisi (who died in a targeted killing in April 2004) appears on the back cover. On the insides of the front and back covers there are pictures of prominent terrorists who died during the confrontation (shaheeds) and of jailed Qalqilya residents. Some of the Qalqilya terrorists took part in suicide bombing attacks, for example, Sa’id Hutri, who blew himself up at the Dolphinarium Club in Tel Aviv on June 1, 2001, killing 21 civilians and wounding 83, the overwhelming majority of all of whom were teenagers; and ‘Abd al-Rahman Hammad, who was head of the Hamas terrorist-operative infrastructure in Qalqilya a
On January 25, 2006, the day Palestinian Legislative Council elections were held, Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahar, senior Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip and candidate for the post of foreign minister, stated that Hamas was committed to the ideology of its 1988 charter. He noted emphatically that “the movement [would] not change a single word in its charter,” which calls for the destruction of the State of Israel, and would not become a purely political movement, but quite the opposite, it would continue its policy of “resistance” (i.e., terrorist attacks) (Reuters, Gaza, January 25). The Hamas charter referred to by Mahmoud al-Zahar was formulated during the first year of the previous round of the violent Israeli-Palestinian confrontations (1987-1993). It was edited and approved by Ahmad Yassin, the movement’s founder and leader (who died in a targeted killing in March 2004), and issued on August 18, 1988. It is Hamas’s most important ideological document and as of this writing, copies continue to be circulated in the Palestinian Authority-administered territories. It makes extensive use of Islamic sources (the Qur’an and hadith1) to assure its religious Islamic basis.
The main points of the Hamas charter:
* The conflict with Israeli is religious and political: The Palestinian problem is a religious-political Muslim problem and the conflict with Israel is between Muslims and the Jewish “infidels.”
* All Palestine is Muslim land and no one has the right to give it up: The land of Palestine is sacred Muslim land and no one, including Arab rulers, has the authority to give up any of it.
* The importance of jihad (holy war) as the main means for the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) to achieve its goals: An uncompromising jihad must be waged against Israel and any agreement recognizing its right to exist must be totally opposed. Jihad is the personal duty of every Muslim.
* The importance of fostering the Islamic consciousness: Much effort must be invested fostering and spreading Islamic consciousness by means of education [i.e., religious-political indoctrination] in the spirit of radical Islam, based on the ideology of the Muslim brotherhood.
* The importance of Muslim solidarity: A great deal of importance is given to Muslim solidarity, one of whose manifestations is aid to the needy through the establishment of a network of various “charitable societies.”
* In addition, the charter is rife with overt anti-Semitism: According to the charter, the Jewish people have only negative traits and are presented as planning to take over the world. The charter uses myths taken from classical European and Islamic-based anti-Semitism.
The translation of the charter, which follows below, is of the 2004 edition, published in an ornate format in Qalqilya2 and issued to celebrate the 17th anniversary of the movement’s founding. Copies were among the documents found by IDF soldiers in the Islamic Club in Qalqilya on September 27, 2005.
Sheikh Ahmad Yassin’s picture appears on the front cover of the 2004 Qalqilya edition. A picture of his temporary successor, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Rantisi (who died in a targeted killing in April 2004) appears on the back cover. On the insides of the front and back covers there are pictures of prominent terrorists who died during the confrontation (shaheeds) and of jailed Qalqilya residents. Some of the Qalqilya terrorists took part in suicide bombing attacks, for example, Sa’id Hutri, who blew himself up at the Dolphinarium Club in Tel Aviv on June 1, 2001, killing 21 civilians and wounding 83, the overwhelming majority of all of whom were teenagers; and ‘Abd al-Rahman Hammad, who was head of the Hamas terrorist-operative infrastructure in Qalqilya a
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