WarSclerotic

Israel Allows Glimpse of Defense Advances – NYTimes.com.

PALMACHIM AIR FORCE BASE, Israel — The Israeli military allowed foreign reporters rare access to this heavily guarded Mediterranean base south of Tel Aviv on Thursday in what military officials described as an effort to showcase Israel’s technological advancements in the field of air defense and to underscore the array of threats to the country from rockets and missiles.

The invitation came soon after the unveiling of Israel’s new Iron Dome antirocket missile defense system. Two batteries successfully intercepted and destroyed midair most of the Katyusha-type rockets fired by Palestinian militants from Gaza against cities in southern Israel during a flare-up of hostilities last month.

The reporters were also given access for the first time to one of the base’s inner sanctums: the main command-and-control center of the Arrow system that is designed to identify, locate and destroy ballistic missiles from enemies farther afield, such as Syria and Iran.

Against a backdrop of various batteries, launchers and missiles on display in a courtyard of the base, Brig. Gen. Doron Gavish, commander of the Air Defense Corps, said that over the last 10 years Israel has been developing a “basket of tools” and a new security concept to contend with the changing threats. He added that last month’s operation of the radar-guided Iron Dome system, which is still under evaluation, was the first time in military history that a missile destroyed a short-range rocket.

The system, developed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., an Israeli company, is also being marketed abroad.

The multitier battle against rockets and missiles represents a shift in Israel’s military doctrine, officials here said, with the threat ranging from relatively crude, short-range rockets fired out of Gaza with a 12- to 25-mile capability to long-range ballistic missiles to be intercepted in the atmosphere or in space.

Senior military officers described a “new era” in defense, now that rockets and missiles have become the “main effort” of Israel’s enemies and the civilian population is on the front line. About 4,000 rockets were fired into Israel by the Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah organization during the monthlong war in 2006, and rocket fire from Gaza is a persistent danger.

Alongside the traditional pillars of Israeli overall military doctrine, including deterrence and attack capabilities, the new focus is on active air defense, early warning and passive defense, exemplified by bomb-proof secure rooms inside individual homes. A new Ballistic Picture Control Center, responsible for detecting incoming threats and alerting the population, became fully operational at the end of 2010.

In general, Israel has about a minute’s warning for every 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, a rocket travels. That means that when rockets fly short distances from Gaza into southern Israel, the warning time is mere seconds.

Israel shot down its first enemy plane, an Egyptian Spitfire, in the hours after its declaration of independence in May 1948. The last plane it shot down was in 1982.

The nature of the battlefield began to change in 1991 when, during the Persian Gulf war, Iraq fired 41 Scud missiles at Israel. The American Patriot surface-to-air missile system was deployed in Israel. But the Patriot was originally built as an antiaircraft system and was quickly modified to deal with incoming missiles, initially with poor results.

The Arrow has its origins in President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. After Mr. Reagan began his “Star Wars” program, Israel joined in the research and development effort. The Arrow system, which is made at Israel Aerospace Industries, has been partly financed by the United States.

The Arrow 2 intercepts missiles higher up, and one battery can cover major parts of Israel. The latest generation, known as Arrow 3, is now being developed.

The Arrow has been successful in intercepting ballistic missiles in live-fire tests, but has not yet been used in a real field of battle.

Inside the command and control center, known as the Cube, officers practice intercepting incoming missiles in simulations on large computer screens. One officer demonstrated a simulated interception of incoming ballistic missiles from Lebanon and Syria. The mostly radar-based system identifies the incoming missiles, heading for central Israel, and a defense plan is drawn up, determining the type of response and the point of interception.

If a missile is identified as heading for an unpopulated area, or the sea, no action is taken. But if a response is required, the officer approves the defense plan and authorizes the system to carry it out by the deceptively mundane act of pressing the F2 button.

Russian official: Iran atomic plant to operate in weeks.

  MOSCOW – Iran’s Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power plant will be fully operational within weeks, local news agencies quoted a senior Russian diplomat as saying on Thursday.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov spoke two days after the company that built the plant, a politically charged project that faced repeated delays, said the reactor had begun operating at a low level for tests before bringing it on line.

“The final launch of Bushehr is a matter of the coming weeks,” state-run RIA quoted Ryabkov as saying.

“But this is a longstanding project and so I would refrain from naming concrete dates — but we are already on the threshold of the final launch of the reactor.”

Begun in the 1970s by a German consortium, construction of the plant was abandoned after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution and has faced repeated delays since the mid-1990s, when Russia began work to complete it under a $1 billion deal with Tehran.

The United States and other Western nations for years urged Russia to abandon the project, fearing it would help Iran develop nuclear weapons. But an agreement obliging Tehran to repatriate spent nuclear fuel to Russia eased those concerns.

On Monday, a member of an Iranian parliamentary commission monitoring Bushehr said “final tests” were being conducted, and Iran’s Fars news agency said the plant would start providing power to the national grid within two months.

Bochkov said the reactor’s operational and safety systems were being tested at the low power level. This will be increased gradually and brought to full capacity, “and after that it will be integrated into Iran’s power grid,” he said.

Bochkov gave no time frame for that.

Syria troops surround city of Hama, known for 1982 revolt – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

President Assad’s father and predecessor leveled Hama to crush a Sunni uprising there in 1982, killing an estimated 10,000 to 25,000 people.

Syrian soldiers and tanks executing a nationwide crackdown on regime opponents surrounded the city of Hama on Thursday, which President Bashar Assad’s father laid waste to in 1982 to stamp out an earlier uprising, an activist said. Forces also used clubs to disperse 2,000 demonstrators on a northern university campus.

Assad, who inherited power from his father in 2000, is trying to crush an uprising that exploded nearly two months ago and is now posing the gravest threat to his family’s 40-year ruling dynasty. The level of violence is intensifying as forces move into more volatile areas, and the United States called the crackdown “barbaric.”

	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

Human rights activist Mustafa Osso said troops backed by tanks have deployed around the central city of Hama, known for the bloody 1982 revolt crushed by the regime, and security forces were detaining people.

In another echo of that earlier uprising, the Syrian army shelled residential areas in central and southern Syria on Wednesday, killing 18 people, a human rights group said.

The shelling of neighborhoods evoked memories of Assad’s father and predecessor, Hafez, whose most notorious act was shelling Hama in 1982.

He leveled the city to crush a Sunni uprising there, killing 10,000 to 25,000 people, according to Amnesty International estimates. Conflicting figures exist and Syria has made no official estimate.

Other activists said security forces used clubs to disperse about 2,000 demonstrators late Wednesday at the university campus in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city.

The intensifying military operation and arrest raids seemed to be an effort to pre-empt another day of expected protests throughout the country on Friday.

More than 750 people have been killed and thousands detained since the uprising against Assad’s autocratic rule began in mid-March. The revolt was touched off by the arrest of teenagers, inspired by uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, who scrawled anti-regime graffiti on a wall.

Syria’s private Al-Watan newspaper reported Thursday that Assad met for four hours with a delegation of Sunni clerics from Hama. It said the clerics asked the president to solve some problems pending since 1982, such as people who have been living in exile since then.

“President Assad accepted to study the case as long as it includes people who are known to be loyal to the nation,” the paper said.

Since the uprising began, authorities have been making announcements about reforms on Thursdays in an attempt to head off protests on Friday, the main day for demonstrations in the Arab world.

This week was no different: The state-run news agency, SANA, said Prime Minister Adel Safar introduced a new program to employ 10,000 university graduates annually at government institutions.

Unemployment in Syria stands at about 20 percent.

Rami Abdul-Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said Thursday that arrests are continuing throughout the country before expected protests on Friday.

“Authorities are detaining any person who might demonstrate,” he said.

In the northern city of Deir el-Zor, authorities placed cameras inside and outside the Osman bin Afan mosque, where many worshippers were demonstrating after the Friday prayers, he said.

Abdul-Rahman added that many former detainees were forced to sign documents reading that they were not subjected to torture and that they will not take part in future “riots.”

Assad is determined to crush the uprising despite international pressure and sanctions from Europe and the United States.

In Washington, White House press secretary Jay Carney condemned the violence. “The Syrian government continues to follow the lead of its Iranian ally in resorting to brute force and flagrant violations of human rights and suppressing peaceful protests,” he said, “and history is not on the side of this kind of action.”

State Department spokesman Mark Toner called the Syrian attacks “barbaric,” adding, “We don’t throw the word ‘barbaric’ around here very often.”

Officials in the Obama administration, which had sought to engage Syria after it was shunned under former President George W. Bush, said Tuesday the U.S. is edging closer to calling for an end to the long rule of the Assad family.

The officials said the first step would be to say for the first time that Assad has forfeited his legitimacy to rule, a major policy shift.

BBC News – Syria protests: Thousands of students rally in Aleppo.

Security forces have broken up a demonstration by thousands of students in Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, witnesses and activists say.

The dormitory protest is thought to be the city’s biggest so far.

The students demanded an end to the military siege of other cities in Syria including Homs, Deraa and Banias, the main flashpoints of dissent against President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

Eighteen people were reported killed on Wednesday amid an ongoing crackdown.

Tanks shelled Homs, the country’s third city, and clashes were reported in towns and villages around Deraa, where the protests began in March.

Thousands of people have reportedly been arrested and hundreds killed in the government crackdown.

The Syrian government insists it is pursuing “armed terrorist gangs”.

On Wednesday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called on President Assad to “heed calls for reform and freedom and to desist from excessive force and mass arrest of peaceful demonstrators”.

So far untouched

There have been several student demonstrations at Aleppo in past weeks, but they have usually only involved a few hundred people and been swiftly dispersed.

This seems to have been the biggest so far, with several thousand students gathering on the campus on the western side of the city, and chanting slogans in solidarity with Deraa.

As has happened in the past, fellow students loyal to the Assad regime and security agents with batons moved in and dispersed the crowds.

One report said police closed the main road leading from the centre of the city to the campus, in an attempt to keep the crowd from spilling over into the city centre.

Aleppo itself has been largely untouched by the unrest so far.

Analysts say that unless Aleppo, and the Syrian capital Damascus, are fully caught up in the revolt, the protesters’ chances of toppling the regime are slim.

The BBC’s Jim Muir in Beirut, Lebanon, says the authorities know that and have done everything possible to ensure the flames of protest do not take hold in the two big cities.

Arrests

However, Homs, the third-biggest city in Syria, is still in the grip of a harsh crackdown by troops and tanks.

One resident there told the BBC that the Bab Amr district had been under siege since Saturday, with no water, electricity or access to medical care.

Shelling began early on Wednesday, and hundreds of troops were reported to have moved in.

Activists told the BBC that about 500 people had been arrested in Homs since Wednesday, including more than 100 on Tuesday night.

It has not been possible to verify the accounts because foreign journalists have not been allowed to enter Syria.

The state news agency, Sana, reported that troops and security agents had “arrested dozens of wanted men and seized large quantities of weapons and ammunition in Bab Amr”, as well as in Deraa.

It cited sources as saying that one soldier was killed and four were injured in Bab Amr, while one was killed and another injured in rural Deraa. A number of “terrorists” were killed and injured, it added.

Deraa, where the unrest began in mid-March, has been cut off by troops for more than two weeks, with dozens killed and hundreds arrested.

The government says the situation there is now normal, but it has refused to allow UN humanitarian teams in.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says 647 civilians have been killed since pro-democracy protests began on 18 March. Another rights group, Sawasiah, says more than 800 civilians have died.

Officials dispute the civilian toll and say about 100 soldiers have died.

Russia delivers 30 tons of fuel for Iran’s first nuclear plant at Bushehr on the Gulf.

Wednesday, 11 May 2011

A general view shows the reactor building at the Bushehr nuclear power plant in southern Iran, 1200 kms south of Tehran. (File Photo)

Assad kills 19 protesters, including boy, 8, infant, as Syrian regime arrests 10,000.

Wednesday, 11 May 2011

Syrian army troops in southern protest hub of Deraa. (File photo)

10,000 Syrians reportedly in custody as death toll hits 750.

  At least 10,000 protesters have been detained across Syria over the past few days in a mass arrest campaign the government hopes will help stem an uprising poised to enter its third month.

Syrian tanks shelled residential districts in two towns on Wednesday and at least 19 people were killed across the country, rights campaigners said.

It was one of the bloodiest days apart from the main Friday protest days, as President Bashar Assad’s regime intensifies its campaign to quell unrest in Homs, a city emerging as the country’s most populous center of defiance. Most of the violence occurred in the southern Deraa province, where the unrest first erupted on March 18.

Ammar Qurabi, head of the National Organization for Human Rights in Syria, said 13 people were killed in the town of Harra, about 60 kilometers northwest of Deraa city.

Most were killed when tanks shelled four houses. Two people – a child and a nurse – died in gunfire, he said.

Tanks also shelled a residential district in Homs, Syria’s third largest city, and at least five people were killed, a rights campaigner in the city said. A sixth person was killed by a sniper shot to the head as he stood in front of his house.

“The security forces are terrorizing urban centers,” said Najati Tayara, the activist in Homs.

There was no immediate comment from Syrian authorities, who have banned most international media from the country, making it difficult to verify accounts of events.

As Western criticism of the crackdown grows, a former mediator between Syria and Israel said Jerusalem would benefit from Assad staying in power, and the embattled president must be given a chance to show he has learned from his mistakes.

“It’s in the interest of Israel and the entire world that Bashar stay in power, because we don’t know what might replace him. There were many, many mistakes made, but these mistakes can be corrected,” said Ibrahim Soliman, a Syrian-American businessman who mediated secret, unofficial negotiations between the countries from 2004 to 2006.

By phone from the US, Soliman said the crackdown was being conducted by corrupt officials who must be purged from the Syrian government.

Assad “must be given a chance to get rid of these corrupt people, and I think he will. But he must be given a chance,” Soliman said.

The former mediator said he didn’t expect Syria to descend into a Libya-style stalemate in which neither side had the upper hand.

“If they continue what they’re doing, it’ll mean the destruction of their way of life.

I think within a few weeks the situation will cool down,” said Soliman, who has met Assad personally and has ties to the Syrian regime. “I think Syria will move toward more democratic ways than it has been over the last 40 years. Bashar and his advisers know that.”

Soliman said he is convinced that Assad and the Syrian public are ready for peace with Israel. “Syrians are ready for peace, but not peace at any price.

The Golan has to be returned, no question about it,” he said. “The key to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is peace between Israel and Syria…

Peace with Syria is the key to peace in the Middle East.”

In Homs, an activist told Reuters that a Syrian Christian was killed by a shot from a sniper to the head, and that the authorities were trying to increase sectarian tensions to undermine prodemocracy demonstrations. “Homs is shaking with the sound of explosions from tank shelling and heavy machine guns,” Najati Tayara said.

The offensive came a day after two senior officials told Western media that the Syrian uprising was nearing an end, and that authorities would not stand down under any circumstances.

Rami Makhlouf, a powerful cousin of the president, said the Assad family was not going to capitulate. “We will sit here. We call it a fight until the end…

They should know when we suffer, we will not suffer alone,” Makhlouf said in a New York Times interview published on Tuesday.

The same day, presidential adviser Bouthaina Shaaban told the paper, “we’ve passed the most dangerous moment… I hope we are witnessing the end of the story.”

Anthony Shadid, the Times reporter who conducted both interviews, was only allowed into the country for a few hours. The timing of the exceedingly rare US media interviews by Syrian officials suggests the Assad regime is taking extra measures to calm Western concerns about mounting bloodshed.

At least 750 people have been killed since protests began on March 18, rights activists said.

Syrian first lady Asma Assad may be living in a safe house in or near London, Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported on Tuesday, quoting a high-ranking Arab diplomat. “Her evacuation was carried out under conditions of immense secrecy, but she is now safely there with her three young children and surrounded by security guards,” the source said.

“Clearly her presence could cause huge embarrassment to the British, so none of this has been made public.”

Syrian security forces have released 300 people detained in Banias and restored basic services in the coastal city stormed by tanks last week, Reuters reported, quoting a human rights group.

Water, telecommunications and electricity had been restored, but tanks remained in major streets, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Tuesday. Two hundred people, including pro-democracy protest leaders, were still in jail, it said.

Demonstrators in Banias had raised posters of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who has had close ties to Assad, but disputed the official Syrian account of the violence.

Erdogan said more than 1,000 civilians had died and he did not want to see a repeat of the 1982 violence in Hama, Syria, or the 1988 gassing of Iraqi Kurds in Halabja, when 5,000 people were killed.

In southern Syria, four civilians in Tafas were killed as security forces widened a campaign of arrests, a human rights campaigner in the region said, adding that 300 people had been detained since tanks entered the town on Saturday.

Authorities have effectively barred foreign journalists from Syria, but Martin Fletcher, chief foreign correspondent for Britain’s The Times, was able to enter the country this week by posing as a tourist.

He was detained in Homs and for six hours was held in a windowless basement underneath an apartment building on a barricaded side street. He was not mistreated, but Fletcher’s experience gave him a rare view into the workings of the Assad security apparatus.

“Quite clearly what was happening, was the regime was rounding up any young man of fighting age it could find on the streets and locking them up,” he told the BBC. Dozens of young men were huddled on the basement floor, he said, and piles of belts and shoelaces nearby, apparently for use in interrogation.

Homs was clearly under martial law, Fletcher said, with police and armed thugs on every corner and tanks guarding every major intersection.

Outside of Homs, at least 100 tanks were deployed in anticipation of further unrest, he said.

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.