WarSclerotic

Delusional hope over reality | Jerusalem Post Blogs – JPost.com.

Out of the ashes, to the height of self-sufficiency.

  ‘The IDF is strong, ready, and a deterrent to our enemies,” the IDF’s new chief of staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz told his troops in a Holocaust Remembrance Day message this week. “It is capable of thwarting any enemy that rises up to try to kill us.”

Indeed it is. And one would rather, by far, be on Israel’s side than that of its enemies in any looming conflict.

But as the 63rd anniversary of our independence arrives, even as Gallup’s global pollsters find our people to be the seventh- most contented on the planet, the threats to Israel are multiplying, in a region where, given the whirlwinds of turmoil, utter instability has become the new norm.

And making those very real threats still more galling is the deepening sense we have here that our enemies are somehow indulged, tolerated, differentiated from the enemies of others – and that we are often expected, uniquely, to suffer their onslaughts rather than confront them. Thus, to take the most recent glaring example of such immoral discrimination, the free world this week rejoices, understandably, at the elimination of mass-murdering Islamist terror chieftain Osama bin Laden while, simultaneously, the free world legitimizes, incomprehensibly, the Palestinian Authority’s partnership with the mass-murdering Islamist terrorists of Hamas. Incomprehensibly, that is, unless different standards are applied when evaluating the enemies of the Jews…

Great big, indomitable America quite rightly asks and is asked no moral questions about the targeted killing of suicide-bomb patron bin Laden and the continued fight against al-Qaida. Tiny, vulnerable, besieged Israel is first castigated by the UN and purportedly responsible world powers for the “unlawful,” “extrajudicial execution” of suicide-bomb patron Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and now encouraged to learn to live with Hamas.

Jerusalem Post reader Joel Kutner, in a letter to the editor this week, suggested pointedly that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu “commit to memory” sections of President Barack Obama’s speech announcing the elimination of bin Laden. The president declared: “As a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies. We will be true to the values that make us who we are.”

Any and every Israeli leader could and would say precisely the same about this country. And any and every Israeli leader should have the right to have such sentiments instinctively endorsed by any moral listener.

BENNY GANTZ, of course, wasn’t meant to be the chief of staff at all. That most challenging of roles was to have been filled by Yoav Galant. Gantz had risen as high as deputy, but narrowly missed out on the top spot, and was beginning to reconcile himself to a life out of uniform when the emergency summons came.

Born in Israel to a mother who was barely alive when she was liberated from Bergen- Belsen, Gantz emblemizes the near-miraculous revival of the Jewish nation after the Holocaust: The survivor’s child is now chief protector of the insistently surviving nation.

Standing tall and straight, Gantz nonetheless carries a perpetual air of concern. He exudes confidence and gravitas but also, in the furrows of his forehead and the lines around his eyes, shows the burden of responsibility. All the way through to his gut, he knows the evil that humankind is capable of doing to the Jews. He knows that it now falls to him, more than anyone else, to ensure that “never again,” rather than becoming an empty slogan, remains an ironclad fact.

And the Jewish state’s enemies are shifting, changing, multiplying, strengthening.

LOW, LOW down the international news agenda and the international diplomatic agenda, but at the very top of Gantz’s and Israel’s list of concerns, is Iran. Sanctions are having an impact, though not a crippling one. Viruses and other curious phenomena have affected the nuclear program, but not stopped it. And Iran’s march to the bomb, it is important to note in this era of regime change, is supported not only by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the clerics who empower him, but also by the “reformist” opposition, the “Greens,” who seek to replace him.

While world attention is focused elsewhere, Iran moves relentlessly closer to its goal. It has broadly mastered the technology and, should it decide to make an all-out push for the bomb, it could build a device in less than 24 months, perhaps even less than 12. If nothing changes in the near future, that “break out” period will shorten inexorably – as the Iranians’ mastery of the technological processes grows. Three years from now, it is believed, therefore, Iran would be able to make a dash for the bomb in a matter of months. Few analysts believe Iran would be so foolish as to initiate that final push unless or until it is certain it can reach its destination. The clock is ticking.

If the nature of the Iranian threat is all too familiar, Gantz has also taken office amidst the rise of all manner of unfamiliar challenges – including regional revolutions and recalibrations that even Israel’s vaunted intelligence services did not see coming. Egypt’s ouster of Hosni Mubarak? Nobody foresaw that. The Fatah-Hamas “reconciliation” accord? A bolt from the blue.

Day after day, the shifting flux of Egyptian affairs prompts new challenges. Yes, Israel empathizes with a population that wanted to be rid of its autocratic leadership. But, yes too, Israel worries that the push for freedom will be subverted – that the well-organized Muslim Brotherhood could exploit an overhasty election process, just as Hamas profited in Gaza and the West Bank in 2006. And, yes again, as the Egyptian natural gas pipeline is repeatedly sabotaged, and the terms of that deal questioned; as wouldbe presidents express varying levels of hostility to the Israel- Egypt peace treaty; and as a sense of kinship with the people of Gaza flourishes, there is concern that the protesting Egyptian public, which was emphatically not focused on Israel in the infancy of its revolt, will seek out a familiar scapegoat amid its frustrations at the slow and problematic nature of change.

For Gantz and the IDF, the immediate practical consequence is that Egypt is “in play.” Remote from a collapsed central control, Sinai is becoming an anarchic zone of arms smuggling and terror planning. And the new Palestinian-unity-brokering Egypt shows every sign of removing itself from the battle against Hamas. An open Egypt-Gaza border might free Israel of some of its obligations to the people of Gaza, but it would also fatally undermine the IDF’s efforts to prevent arms smuggling into the Strip. Those rockets and other weapons systems too large to smuggle through the tunnels might soon be able to cross overland. No need, then, for “aid” flotillas; no possibility of a naval blockade intercepting the arms flow.

The new chief of staff was a young soldier when president Anwar Sadat flew to Israel in 1977 to launch the peace process. Gantz knows full well that when he was fighting with the IDF in west Beirut in 1982, not a single Egyptian soldier interrupted the tranquility of the newly peaceful border. In utterly unpredictable May 2011, by contrast, there is simply no telling what kind of response from Egypt would follow an outbreak of conflict on another front. There is no telling, that is, whether today’s Egypt, a country with which Israel had wanted to believe relations were normalized, might soon decide to ally itself with an enemy of Israel, or worse.

While questions about Egypt’s orientation abound, for the IDF there can be no waiting for answers. The new, unpredictable Egypt requires an allocation of resources, equipment and manpower to a frontier that, relatively speaking, was deemed quiet and essentially unthreatening just a few short months ago.

THE MOST likely flashpoint for conflict in the foreseeable future, however, remains the North. Here, too, of course, instability is the new norm. Bashar Assad’s mini-replication of his father’s 1982-style assault on his own people may be sufficient to put down public opposition. Alternatively, Syria may have a new leadership in months. Or it may be turning into another Libyanstyle failed state.

A collapsing Syria might weaken the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah- Hamas axis of evil, but it might also enable Iran to widen its influence. Syria under the Assads has been implacably hostile to Israel, has tried to develop nuclear weapons, and has amassed a vast range of dangerous armaments on our northern doorstep, but it has also acted with a kind of rationality and predictability. A war with Assad’s Syria would be hard but straightforward; the IDF has the capacity to set the nation back 50 or 100 years. A Syria without effective sovereign control, with its weaponry falling into unpredictable hands, would present all manner of fresh problems. For an insight, just look at Lebanon.

As the 2006 Second Lebanon War brought home, conclusively defeating an amorphous terrorist organization, embedded in the very heart of a civilian populace, in a state incapable of exercising sovereignty, is a near-impossible task. Watched closely by Israel for years, Hezbollah has developed in directions best-suited to outflanking and undercutting the IDF’s military advantages and superiorities. And, as underlined by Israel’s recent release of intelligence materials showing Hezbollah’s deployment in the villages of south Lebanon, it has only deepened its devilish intertwinement with the civilian population in the past five years.

In innumerable homes on the other side of our northern border, residents can point to their living room and, right through the doorway, their missile room. And the missiles, 40,000 or more of them, have ranges from eight kilometers to hundreds of kilometers. No other non-state actor – and Hezbollah is still not quite a state actor – has that kind of weapons capability. Certainly not the unlamented bin Laden’s al-Qaida.

For all its cunning, Hezbollah is not beyond reach; it certainly does have centers of power that the IDF can get to. But it poses a mounting danger.

UNDERSTANDABLY, MILITARY chiefs are guarded when describing the strides various enemy states, Hezbollah, Hamas and others are making, day by day, in reducing Israel’s military edge. But if you look at the components of fire power – range, numbers, diversity, accuracy, depth and devastation – their capacities are improving in all.

There are new nonconventional threats. New terror concerns. Threats to IDF communications systems. The potential for the mighty to be humbled via cyber-warfare and other asymmetrical innovations means that even the supremacy of Israel’s air capabilities, though unchallenged in any conventional sense, can no longer be taken for granted.

And then there are the Palestinians – led, now, by an alliance of the purportedly moderate and the avowedly extreme. First, we argued among ourselves as to whether Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority was genuinely prepared to accept the compromises necessary for a viable accord that would keep our state militarily and demographically secure alongside theirs. Then we worried that, even if Abbas did vindicate Netanyahu’s declared confidence in him as a “partner,” he might be swept away amid the regional turmoil. Now we see overt betrayal in his embrace of the Islamists – the ruthless extremists who killed their own people in seizing control of Gaza and have every intention of doing the same to ours.

And we hear the international community, including, risibly, even the United States, suggesting that this empty “reconciliation” – which Hamas will breach at its convenience – might somehow be constructive. Hamas, whose prime minister declares insistently that it will never recognize “illegitimate” Israel because the Jews have no right to sovereignty here. Hamas, whose charter urges adherents to “kill the Jews” to hasten the day of judgment. Hamas, which condemned the US’s “criminal” elimination of the “Muslim warrior” bin Laden. The new Palestinian alliance cannot possibly “advance the cause of the peace,” to quote the White House Chief of Staff William Daley. What it can do, what it does, is give Iran a stronger foothold alongside us and reduce, at a stroke, Israel’s capacity to loosen its security grip in the West Bank.

THE PHYSICAL threats – in a region that, as we turn 63, is moving further away from acceptance of Israel’s fundamental right to exist – range from a single attacker all the way through to weapons of mass destruction. From knife to nuke, and everything in between.

Gantz’s task, in his first weeks and months in unexpected office, is to assess each potential front, each potential threat, and decide how the IDF can and should prevail: What will constitute victory on today’s muddled battlefield, and which resources does he require to achieve it? The chief of staff is no longer simply the first warrior. He must oversee the legal implications of any battle he fights, and prepare the media ground as well.

He is also first protector of the home front – in a climate where, for some time now, the IDF has been making clear that the next major conflict will likely be the first in which Israel’s civilian fatalities will outstrip the IDF casualties.

The Iron Dome missile defense system – successful, astoundingly, on eight of the nine occasions when it was fired during the recent Gaza flare-up – is no panacea, but it is a considerable boost. No other nation currently boasts the defenses that Israel offers its civilians. Then again, no other nation is attacked the way we are.

Ultimately, no war can be won simply with defensive capabilities. Yet the better the home front defense, and the safer the IDF knows the people of Israel to be, the more options Gantz has for offense.

Doubtless, in the weeks and months ahead, we will hear the defense establishment lobbying for extra money to meet the expanding range of threats. What Gantz needs more than money, though, is people – good people.

He needs to minimize the draft-dodging. He needs backing from government to institute national service for all Israelis, including non-Jews and the ultra-Orthodox, with the IDF empowered to choose the personnel it feels it must have to keep this country safe. He needs to hold on to the best and the brightest in uniform for longer, with the resources, for example, to retain hi-tech specialists for whom the financial benefits of the private sector are so compelling.

And he needs to shape the IDF in his image – an army committed to victory, achieved with integrity, founded on the moral rock of our inalienable right to be here.

IN TODAY’S often morally misguided world, it is very difficult to be recognized as both strong and just. Usually, however absurdly in some cases, it is the weak who are automatically regarded as having justice on their side.

As it turns 63, the Jewish nation sometimes feels as though it is back, not in 1948, without a friend in the neighborhood, but a few years earlier still, with barely a friend in the world. But in life-saving contrast to those dark years, we have revived our homeland, and it flourishes.

We are and will continue to be both strong and just. We have built a vibrant, diverse, declaredly contented society. And with an army now headed by a general who emblemizes that rise from the ashes to the height of self-sufficiency, “we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies. We will be true to the values that make us who we are.”

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report May 11, 2011, 12:30 PM (GMT+02:00)

Assad’s mouthpiece tycoon Rami Makhlouf

Egypt’s military rulers promised Hamas’ political leader Khaled Meshaal to let him transfer his base, command center and residence from troubled Damascus to a new haven in the Gaza Strip as an inducement for signing the Palestinian unity agreement with Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah on May 4. This is disclosed for the first time by debkafile‘s intelligence sources.  In Damascus, Bashar Assad’s close confidante Rami Makhlouf threatened that Syria would go to war against Israel in reprisal for US and Europe backing for the uprising.

Makhlouf, an international business tycoon, is on the US and EU sanctions lists. In an interview with the New York Times Wednesday, May 11, he said: “If there is no stability here, there’s no way there will be stability in Israel. No way, and nobody can guarantee what will happen after, God forbid, anything happens to this regime.”
He advised the US and Europe not to “put a lot of pressure on the president, don’t push Syria to do anything it is not happy to do.”
The Syrian president is examining two strategic options, he said: “Going to war against Israel, and/or sending weapons shipments to the West Bank and to Israeli Arabs for use in terrorist attacks against Israel.

debkafile‘s military sources note that Makhlouf, who is a cousin of Bashar Assad, built up his fortune from smuggling Saddam Hussein’s underground fighters, weapons and funds from their havens in Syria to Iraq, as well as al Qaeda combatants and leaders to fight Americans into the wartorn country. He therefore has excellent connections with terrorist networks and is very familiar with their requirements for pursuing suicide bombing campaigns.

The tycoon would not have made his remarks to the NYT without the Syrian president’s nod. So they may be safely interpreted as a declaration that the Assad regime is holding Israel hostage for its survival against the groundswell of popular disaffection shaking it for more than two months.

Those remarks were also addressed to Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon, the sources of weapons consignments to Syrian protesters which Damascus believes Saudi Arabia as well as the US and European nations are generating. If that influx is not stopped, therefore, the Syrian government threatens to respond in kind by secreting arms and money into the West Bank and Israeli Arab districts in order to foment an armed uprising against Israel. This step would also undermine another Western interest by menacing Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

According to debkafile‘s intelligence sources, the transfer of Khaled Meshaal lock, stock and barrel, from Damascus to Gaza serves the diametrically opposite interests of the current Egyptian and Syrian rulers alike. It was agreed between them – out of totally different considerations – during several visits to the Syrian capital by the new Egyptian intelligence minister Gen. Murad Muwafi from mid-March to late April:
For Cairo, the relocation of the Hamas epicenter to Gaza is pivotal to Egypt’s return to an active role in the Palestinian arena, whereas Damascus sees the strengthened Hamas presence in Gaza as a key instrument for implementing Makhlouf’s threats.
Our sources say that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has responded to these disruptions with two discreet steps:
1. The defense ministry’s political coordinator, Gen. (res.) Amos Gilad, was removed from the Israeli-Egyptian military-cum-intelligence track. The formal reason given for his exclusion was the removal from power of Hosni Mubarak’s intelligence minister, Gen. Omar Suleiman, with whom Gilad developed strong personal ties. He is now under investigation and partial house arrest in Egypt.
The real reason is that his evaluations and forecasts which formed the basis of Israel’s security policy in recent years proved erroneous. The Israeli government must now go back to square one to chart new courses in the face of radical changes around its borders.

2.  Gilad’s place is taken by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s personal political adviser, Yitzhak Molcho, who earlier this week was sent to Cairo for talks with the new intelligence minister, Gen. Muwafi, to explore the new ties between Egypt, Syria and Hamas and find out what Cairo was aiming for by the reshuffle of these relationships.
Molcho returned to home just before Independence Day (Tuesday, May 10) with a very despondent report. The only ray of light he saw was the possibility of Syria and Egypt, each for its own reasons, leaning on Hamas to climb down on its price for setting the Israeli soldier Gilead Shalit free nearly five years after he was kidnapped on the Israeli side of the Gaza border.
While Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak were putting their heads together on tactics for grappling with the explosive new situation Egypt is helping to put in place in the Gaza Strip, Makhlouf put a message from his masters up front: The real danger to Israel of a military flare-up lies in Damascus which continues to call the Palestinian shots.

Why Should Israel Make Peace With Failed States? | The New Republic.

“Living Dead: Why is Syria Going Up in Flames?” is the second article, really an interpretative essay on Syria where a new writer for TNR, Theo Padnos, lived for several years. We think we know a dictatorship by how it behaves in exigent threat. But Padnos actually conveys the essence of how “normal” life prepares people slowly, almost casually, for dread. You can even sing along with the fashionable young of Damascus in the jolly days. But you’ll end up being cannily knowing about the erratic and also almost completely static rhythm of the police state. How well the tyranny plays off these two impulses determine its destiny. Maybe Assad will win this call. But maybe he won’t.

Still, the Obama administration has been wishing him well for at least two years. Or, rather, it should be said that Obama administration initiatives involving Syria—had they been successful which, of course, they were not—would have propped up the dictatorship by exaggerating its intrinsic sway, its own freedom of movement and the justice of its grievance against Israel. It is as if we have suddenly decided that a regime that tries to capture another country and loses territory in the process has the right to have it repatriated as if nothing had ever happened. Try, try, and try again, so to speak.

This is especially the case in the Levant where the diplomacy of boundaries going back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire—whose power had been wielded at a time from Vienna to Central Asia—was so scrawly and shifting that no one could know from one day to the next where this scepter held sway and that one did not. A propos these vagaries, in the diplomatic talks between France and England following the signing of the Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916 up to 1923 the biblical phrase “from Dan to Beer-Sheva” was the template of any map. But, of course, the words were more evocative than determinate, metaphoric than concrete. And so the cartographic war, from then and now, continues. What are Syria’s real claims to the Golan Heights? There were Syrian Arabs in the Golan prior to 1967. But no one actually thought of himself as ethnically or nationally Syrian. Instead, they replicated the diversity of hate, the permanent schismatics of difference. Moreover, the resident Alawite contingent—surprise! surprise!—is quite loyal to Israel. And there are Druze whose affinities are hard to judge since they are neither Arab nor Jew. In any case, what is Syria? It is certainly not a coherent or cohesive nation, what with its constant incitement of sectarian strife. And then there is the hydrostrategics of its geography, a permanent temptation for anyone governing from Damascus.    

Spotted around Israel are failed states. I doubt that the states to the north, Lebanon and Syria, can be mended. Their essence was always difference. But certainly not as democracies where the rights of diverse groups are honored. Nobody sang hymns to variety and diversification in the lands of the Arabs. Have we already forgotten Iraq where the colonials established Sunni rule over a vast preponderance of Shia? In Syria, 10 percent of the population governs. The majoritarian rest, the Sunnis and their Muslim Brotherhood vanguard, have been cowering since 1982 … until they had just cowered too much. Pity the Alawites when the Sunnis will strike for revenge. On the other hand, how much can you pity the Alawites who have been plundering and imprisoning and also murdering for four decades?

What had Obama in his head when he tried to jumpstart Israeli negotiations with Syria? Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, what else? The answer is simple and transparent: Israel’s retreat from territories it had captured while they were being used by enemies trying to vitiate Israel itself. But this is the president’s steady trope. Israel should withdraw from the West Bank and ancient Jerusalem and East Jerusalem and, yes, the Golan Heights, too, without a shred of evidence that it would be protected, could be protected from attack by armed soldiers, armed aircraft and armed terrorists, by a deadly admixture of regular troops with guerrillas somehow coddled by human rights organizations which define the latter virtually as civilians. Do you believe that the Arabs truly want peace? Does President Obama? Well, I don’t. There is always the ministration that NATO could force the keeping of a peace. But Obama has blown that alternative, too, by virtually opting out of its venture against Qaddafi and leaving the leadership to Great Britain and France, whose bona fides are suspect.

Why am I not a believer? Because the only unifying strand in the disparate state systems of the Arabs is their struggle against the Jews, the Zionists, the Israelis. Nothing else motivates them so doggedly. The Christians also are targets of the various Muslim governments under which they live, and their numbers are falling in every country of the region—except Israel where those who kneel at the cross are experiencing what one might even call a revival. This is especially so in Jerusalem where, quietly but decisively, the communicants of Jesus are hitching their future to Zion. Ironic, no?

But the future plight of the Christians in the region has been foreshadowed in Egypt where yet another slaughter of innocents took place on May 8 after a string of fiery incidents. “We are in a jungle,” cried a Coptic bishop. Eleven men and women, both Christian and Muslim, were left for dead, with about 250 wounded, of which some 50 were shot. Two churches were incinerated. It was an assault by Salafists who make the Muslim Brothers appear moderate.

We are now being sermonized, mostly by journalistic oracles, to believe that these last months are a Prague Spring for Muslims. They have an agenda and it is to convince Israel not to be a killjoy but to join the party and ease the path to peace. I happen to believe that Arabs need to learn to live with each other before Israel opens itself to its neighbors’ villainy now being practiced on their own.

“Living Dead: Why is Syria Going Up in Flames?” is the second article, really an interpretative essay on Syria where a new writer for TNR, Theo Padnos, lived for several years. We think we know a dictatorship by how it behaves in exigent threat. But Padnos actually conveys the essence of how “normal” life prepares people slowly, almost casually, for dread. You can even sing along with the fashionable young of Damascus in the jolly days. But you’ll end up being cannily knowing about the erratic and also almost completely static rhythm of the police state. How well the tyranny plays off these two impulses determine its destiny. Maybe Assad will win this call. But maybe he won’t.

Still, the Obama administration has been wishing him well for at least two years. Or, rather, it should be said that Obama administration initiatives involving Syria—had they been successful which, of course, they were not—would have propped up the dictatorship by exaggerating its intrinsic sway, its own freedom of movement and the justice of its grievance against Israel. It is as if we have suddenly decided that a regime that tries to capture another country and loses territory in the process has the right to have it repatriated as if nothing had ever happened. Try, try, and try again, so to speak.

This is especially the case in the Levant where the diplomacy of boundaries going back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire—whose power had been wielded at a time from Vienna to Central Asia—was so scrawly and shifting that no one could know from one day to the next where this scepter held sway and that one did not. A propos these vagaries, in the diplomatic talks between France and England following the signing of the Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916 up to 1923 the biblical phrase “from Dan to Beer-Sheva” was the template of any map. But, of course, the words were more evocative than determinate, metaphoric than concrete. And so the cartographic war, from then and now, continues. What are Syria’s real claims to the Golan Heights? There were Syrian Arabs in the Golan prior to 1967. But no one actually thought of himself as ethnically or nationally Syrian. Instead, they replicated the diversity of hate, the permanent schismatics of difference. Moreover, the resident Alawite contingent—surprise! surprise!—is quite loyal to Israel. And there are Druze whose affinities are hard to judge since they are neither Arab nor Jew. In any case, what is Syria? It is certainly not a coherent or cohesive nation, what with its constant incitement of sectarian strife. And then there is the hydrostrategics of its geography, a permanent temptation for anyone governing from Damascus.    

Spotted around Israel are failed states. I doubt that the states to the north, Lebanon and Syria, can be mended. Their essence was always difference. But certainly not as democracies where the rights of diverse groups are honored. Nobody sang hymns to variety and diversification in the lands of the Arabs. Have we already forgotten Iraq where the colonials established Sunni rule over a vast preponderance of Shia? In Syria, 10 percent of the population governs. The majoritarian rest, the Sunnis and their Muslim Brotherhood vanguard, have been cowering since 1982 … until they had just cowered too much. Pity the Alawites when the Sunnis will strike for revenge. On the other hand, how much can you pity the Alawites who have been plundering and imprisoning and also murdering for four decades?

What had Obama in his head when he tried to jumpstart Israeli negotiations with Syria? Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, what else? The answer is simple and transparent: Israel’s retreat from territories it had captured while they were being used by enemies trying to vitiate Israel itself. But this is the president’s steady trope. Israel should withdraw from the West Bank and ancient Jerusalem and East Jerusalem and, yes, the Golan Heights, too, without a shred of evidence that it would be protected, could be protected from attack by armed soldiers, armed aircraft and armed terrorists, by a deadly admixture of regular troops with guerrillas somehow coddled by human rights organizations which define the latter virtually as civilians. Do you believe that the Arabs truly want peace? Does President Obama? Well, I don’t. There is always the ministration that NATO could force the keeping of a peace. But Obama has blown that alternative, too, by virtually opting out of its venture against Qaddafi and leaving the leadership to Great Britain and France, whose bona fides are suspect.

Why am I not a believer? Because the only unifying strand in the disparate state systems of the Arabs is their struggle against the Jews, the Zionists, the Israelis. Nothing else motivates them so doggedly. The Christians also are targets of the various Muslim governments under which they live, and their numbers are falling in every country of the region—except Israel where those who kneel at the cross are experiencing what one might even call a revival. This is especially so in Jerusalem where, quietly but decisively, the communicants of Jesus are hitching their future to Zion. Ironic, no?

But the future plight of the Christians in the region has been foreshadowed in Egypt where yet another slaughter of innocents took place on May 8 after a string of fiery incidents. “We are in a jungle,” cried a Coptic bishop. Eleven men and women, both Christian and Muslim, were left for dead, with about 250 wounded, of which some 50 were shot. Two churches were incinerated. It was an assault by Salafists who make the Muslim Brothers appear moderate.

We are now being sermonized, mostly by journalistic oracles, to believe that these last months are a Prague Spring for Muslims. They have an agenda and it is to convince Israel not to be a killjoy but to join the party and ease the path to peace. I happen to believe that Arabs need to learn to live with each other before Israel opens itself to its neighbors’ villainy now being practiced on their own.

Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief emeritus of The New Republic.

Syrian tanks shell residential area in coastal city, activists say – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Syrian security forces arrested scores of people in Homs and in Baniyas, the latest focus of Assad’s escalated crackdown against protesters; EU okays new sanctions.

By Reuters

Syrian army tanks shelled the Bab Amro residential district in the country’s third largest city of Homs on Wednesday, a human rights campaigner in the city said.

“Homs is shaking with the sound of explosions from tank shelling and heavy machineguns,” said Najati Tayrara.

	A man throws a rock at a passing tank in a location given as Deraa on April 25, 2011, in this still image from an amateur video
	Photo by: Reuters

Earlier this week, Syrian security forces arrested scores of people in Homs and in Baniyas, two restive cities where President Bashar Assad has sent troops to crush a seven-week-old revolt against his authoritarian rule.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said people were detained in the central cities on the Mediterranean coast — the latest focus of Assad’s escalated crackdown against protesters, as well as other regions.

Meanwhile, the European Union member states have agreed to issue a weapons embargo against Syria and impose sanctions upon 13 of its nationals, paving the way for the restrictive measures.

The embargo is meant to block weapons “that could be used for internal repression” from being exported to Syria, the European Council said late Monday.

Syria’s upheaval began on March 18 when protesters, inspired by revolts across the Arab world, marched in the southern city of Deraa. Assad initially responded with vague promises of reform, and last month lifted a 48-year-old state of emergency.

What Do Israel’s Leaders Really Think About Iran? – Global Spin – TIME.com.

Israel bombing Iran could, indeed, be a spectacularly stupid idea, but does the Israeli public really need to hear that? That not-in-front-of-the-kids message seemed to be the gist of Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak’s criticism of Meir Dagan, recently retired head of the Mossad intelligence agency, who last week warned publicly that the idea of Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities was “the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard”.  Barak on Monday expressed doubt about the veracity of Dagan’s reported remarks (although the man himself hasn’t yet contested them), but added, “if we are to deal with these matters responsibly, then it is not right to share these thoughts – even if they are legitimate – with the public.”

Two of Dagan’s predecessors in the Mossad job didn’t agree, and raced to endorse Dagan’s view — and also his right to open such a potentially cataclysmic question for public discussion.  Dagan had previously annoyed his boss by making public his assessment, on his last day at the Mossad, that Iran would not have nuclear weapons before 2015, and that covert action and sanctions are the most effective response. And he warned that while an air strike could not be guaranteed even to destroy Iran’s facilities, which are scattered and in some possibly concealed, the consequence of such as strike would be that “There will be war with Iran.  This is one of the things we know how to start, but not how to end.”

Dagan’s views are plainly at odds with the line that his political bosses are putting out: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in particular, has made a habit of putting forward alarmist assessments of Iran’s capabilities and apocalyptic warnings of Israel’s own intentions in response. Even some in Washington are unconvinced. A 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable from the Tel Aviv Embassy, published by WikiLeaks, includes the following in respect of meetings between U.S. Defense Department officials and their Israeli counterparts:

“Israel continues to offer a worst-case assessment of the Iranian nuclear program, emphasizing that the window for stopping the program (by military means if necessary) is rapidly closing. General [Yossi] Baidatz argued that it would take Iran one year to obtain a nuclear weapon and two and a half years to build an arsenal of three weapons. By 2012 Iran would be able to build one weapon within weeks and an arsenal within six months. (COMMENT: It is unclear if the Israelis firmly believe this or are using worst-case estimates to raise greater urgency from the United States).”

If so, Dagan’s assessments weren’t exactly helping. But even  Barak,  himself reportedly  in the bomb-Iran camp within Israel’s cabinet, has shown a willingness to publicly differ with Netanyahu on the implications of  the Iran threat. Netanyahu, as opposition leader, in 2006, told a group of foreign ambassadors visiting Israel, “The year is 1938 and Iran is Germany.” That, as Fareed Zakaria pointed out was preposterous hyperbole. Germany in 1938 was by far the most powerful military nation in the world. “Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion,” wrote Zakaria. “It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century.”  In the geopolitical tableau of 1938, Zakaria told a TV interviewer, Iran would be Rumania.

Not that Bibi Netanyahu pays much heed to the assessments of Fareed Zakaria. He’s still insisting that Iran represents a mortal threat to the Jewish State. On Holocaust remembrance day on May 1, Netanyahu warned that Iran is “openly working to destroy the Jewish state” and is “arming [itself] with nuclear weapons in order to realize those ambitions.”

But the message that a nuclear-armed Iran spells doom for Israel is too much even for Barak. Last October, the defense minister said bluntly that “I am not among those who believe Iran is an existential issue for Israel.” That was because Israel’s own military capacity meant that despite Iran posing a major geopolitical challenge, it did not threaten Israel’s existence.  “Israel is strong, I don’t see anyone who could pose an existential threat.”

Days after Netanyahu’s Holocaust remembrance speech, Barak reiterated his message, in an interview with Israel’s Haaretz  newspaper,  that even if Iran built a nuclear weapon, it would not drop such a bomb on Israel.  Barak’s point: Even if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would be unlikely — as long as its leaders had not lost their minds — to court obliteration by Israel’s massive (but unacknowledged) nuclear arsenal, with its second-strike capacity via submarine, by attacking the Jewish State. Barak believes that the suggestion that an Iranian bomb would destroy Israel is dangerous, because it could prompt a brain-drain of Israel’s best and brightest.

Not that Barak opposes bombing Iran: Even if he believes Iran wouldn’t attack Israel, the Defense Minister sees the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon as changing the regional balance of forces by removing Israel’s overwhelming military advantage, thereby emboldening enemies such as Hamas and Hizballah and giving Iran greater scope to support their proxy warfare without fear of Israel’s wrath.

Barak and Bibi reportedly agree is on maintaining the option — and the belief, in the West  that Israel maintains the option– of unilateral military action. (The Iranians don’t believe that Israel would bomb them, but they do believe that the Israelis are waging a sustained covert war, through computer viruses and assassination of scientists, against Iran’s program. If so, that would have been Dagan’s department.)  That belief keeps pressure on Western capitals to do more to pressure Tehran. And it also helps the Israelis put Iran, rather than the Palestinians, at the top of the agenda when the U.S. and other Western countries are dealing with Israel.

The Israelis may even be feeling a heightened sense of urgency in putting Iran back on the table because the Arab Spring has, in fact, weakened the U.S.-Israeli position on Iran — and has helped drive what Barak warned was a “diplomatic tsunami” heading for Israel in September, in the form of diplomatic support for Palestinian statehood regardless of Israel’s preferences. Where President Hosni Mubarak, for example, had been a pivotal Arab figure in the U.S.-led campaign against Iran and also against other enemies of Israel such as Hamas, the regime that replaced him, more mindful of Arab public opinion, has   moved to normalize ties with Tehran and with Hamas.

While Barak may be sending what amount to mixed messages as a result of the dual concerns to keep pressure on Iran but also to avoid spooking Israelis into fleeing, Dagan may be addressing a second danger posed by Netanyahu’s apolocalyptic talk: In a state whose national identity is constructed on the ashes of the Holocaust, telling the public that Iran’s nuclear program represents  a latter-day Auschwitz actually paints Israel’s own leadership into a tactical corner, creating an expectation of decisive military action among its own citizenry. Dagan appears to believe that initiating a war with iran as potentially causing more problems for the Jewish State than it solves. That’s a position shared by outgoing U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates.  And the current assessment of U.S. intelligence is that while Iran continues to assemble, under the rubric of its energy program, the means to build nuclear weapons, it has not yet taken a strategic decision to go ahead and build such weapons.

But with Netanyahu due in Washington shortly, unlikely to be bringing with him any offer likely to be accepted by the Palestinians as a basis to restart peace talks, it’s a safe bet that we’re going to be hearing a lot more about Iran’s nuclear program in the coming weeks than we had been during the Arab Spring.

Israel to spend $2B on missile defense – UPI.com.

TEL AVIV, Israel, May 10 (UPI) — Israel’s announcement that it will spend $2 billion on building up its anti-missile defense system over the next few years, on top of whatever it can squeeze out of the Americans, underlines the military’s deep concerns that the country faces a new kind of war.

The military is wrestling with how to fund multiple objectives over the next few years at a critical juncture in Israel’s 63-year history.

Defending military installations and Israel’s cities, for the first time vulnerable to firestorms of missile attacks, is just one priority, but a pressing one.

Arms procurement is another, split between bolstering the air force, acquiring new German submarines that, reports say, will be capable of launching nuclear-tipped missiles and maintaining sizeable ground forces.

Right now getting Israel’s multilayered missile-defense system in place is a key priority because missiles and rockets will be the spearhead of any assault by Iran or Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in the Palestinian-ruled Gaza Strip — or all four together.

The political pressure to protect Israel’s population centers has become intense amid fears a new war is looming.

On Monday, the Haaretz daily quoted the director general of the Defense Ministry, Reserve Maj. Gen. Udi Shani, as saying Israel plans to invest $1 billion in the development and production of the Iron Dome interception system.

This radar-guided system, designed to shoot down rockets and missiles with a range of 3-45 miles, as well as mortar shells, was deployed in southern Israel earlier this year.

But it remains under development by the Haifa-based Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.

So far there are only two batteries, which in March shot down eight of nine Grad-type rockets fired from Gaza. But the system has yet to be tested against a major, sustained rocket bombardment.

Each battery costs $80 million. Israel needs at least 13 more but Shani spoke of another 10-15. Of these, a U.S. grant of $205 million will pay for four.

Shani said another $1 billion will be spent on the Magic Wand air-defense system, designed to down intermediate missiles with ranges of 25-185 miles. This two-stage system, also known as David’s Sling, is being developed by Rafael and the U.S. Raytheon Corp.

“I hope that by 2012 we’ll have the first operational capabilities,” Shani said. “We need to accelerate the process.”

Along with the third, high-altitude tier, the Arrow 3 built by state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries in conjunction with the Boeing Co., the Israeli air-defense system “will be the largest technological development project in the field of missile interception in the world,” Shani observed.

The defense establishment’s expensive focus on building an anti- missile shield was given great impetus by the 34-day war with Hezbollah in 2006.

During that conflict, Hezbollah fired nearly 4,000 rockets into northern Israel in the most sustained bombardment the Jewish state has ever endured.

Today, that threat has grown immensely and, outside of nuclear attack, is the greatest danger the Jewish state faces.

Israel’s military is bracing for a war that could last up to two months, probably in the summer months, this year or next. Major military campaigns in the Middle East generally take place during summer.

That’s the best time for Israel because its air power is most effective with clear skies, while ground forces can maneuver more easily.

“Having in mind the massive arms buildup in the region during the past few years, we can expect any large conflict to be unusually brutal,” Israel-based analyst Victor Kotsev observed.

“Israeli military planners have predicted that hundreds of missiles will rain on Tel Aviv — mostly from Syria and Lebanon — and have issued grim warnings that they will do whatever it takes to curtail the fire.”

The Israelis say Hezbollah, armed by Iran and Syria, has more than 42,000 missiles and rockets, including several hundred long-range weapons capable of hammering Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest urban area and its financial and industrial center.

The Palestinian Hamas, also aided by Syria and Iran, has an estimated 5,000 rockets, Israel claims.

Since it could take two months for Israeli forces to clear Hezbollah out of south Lebanon and knock out its heavily fortified missile sites, Israel could be hit by up to 400 missiles a day during that period.