WarSclerotic

‘Next 50 Days Most Fateful Since Yom Kippur War’ – Defense/Security – News – Israel National News.

Tzachi Hanegbi

Flash 90

“We now stand, in my opinion, before the 50 most fateful days in Israel’s history, since perhaps the Yom Kippur War, in which there were also several dozen fateful days.”

So said the former Head of Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Tzachi Hanegbi, at a closed meeting of Likud activists in Yafo. A recording of his speech reached daily newspaper Makon Rishon‘s reporter, Ze’ev Kam.

“The prime minister will have to make decisions that will bear a price tag. Allowing Iranian nuclear weapons has a price tag. The practical result will be a nuclear arms race in the entire Middle East,” he explained.

“Today, when we say that we understand the danger of the Iranian threat, and understand that a confrontation bears a price, it is because we want to prevent our sons and grandson from paying unbearable prices,” he said.

Hanegbi, who left Likud for Kadima and is now back in Likud, called on the activists to support Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and to “allow him quiet” and “strengthen his legitimacy” so that he can take the necessary decisions calmly.

‘Next 50 Days Most Fateful Since Yom Kippur War’ – Defense/Security – News – Israel National News.

Tzachi Hanegbi

Flash 90

“We now stand, in my opinion, before the 50 most fateful days in Israel’s history, since perhaps the Yom Kippur War, in which there were also several dozen fateful days.”

So said the former Head of Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Tzachi Hanegbi, at a closed meeting of Likud activists in Yafo. A recording of his speech reached daily newspaper Makon Rishon‘s reporter, Ze’ev Kam.

“The prime minister will have to make decisions that will bear a price tag. Allowing Iranian nuclear weapons has a price tag. The practical result will be a nuclear arms race in the entire Middle East,” he explained.

“Today, when we say that we understand the danger of the Iranian threat, and understand that a confrontation bears a price, it is because we want to prevent our sons and grandson from paying unbearable prices,” he said.

Hanegbi, who left Likud for Kadima and is now back in Likud, called on the activists to support Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and to “allow him quiet” and “strengthen his legitimacy” so that he can take the necessary decisions calmly.

Barak: US, Israel clocks ticking … JPost – Diplomacy & Politics.

Obama on the fence – Israel Opinion, Ynetnews.

Op-ed: White House policy toward Israel proves friendship cannot compete with interests

Yoaz Hendel

In Hebrew there is a slight difference between in the pronunciation and spelling of “obligation” and “commitment.” There is a big difference when it comes to the nuclear threat. The Obama administration has said everything it had to say in order to convince us that it is committed to Israel’s security. But what it isn’t saying is that it is obligated – because it isn’t.

When Obama speaks of commitment, he is referring to financial aid, security-related cooperation and vetoing anti-Israel UN resolutions. As far as he is concerned, this is an adequate display of the bond between the countries. As far as Israel is concerned, it’s admirable, but does not allay our concerns regarding Iran.

Obama has been walking the Iranian tightrope like an acrobat. Following a brief detachment from reality at the beginning of his term (the Cairo speech, the “new beginning” in relations with the Muslim world and the friendly nuclear talks), it appears that Obama understands that this goat cannot be milked with speeches and catchy slogans. He understands that the Iranian nuclear programis dangerous, and not only to Israel. But from an operational standpoint, he remains many interests away from resolving the crisis. If it were up to Obama, we could continue discussing this remarkable table that has all of the options and solutions on it. If it were up to Obama, the interest of calm would dictate everything.

Obama is not the first to find refuge in the comfortable commitment. Before him was the Republican president, George W. Bush, a friend of Israel, Olmert and Sharon. Bush respected the Israeli prime ministers. He hugged a lot, spoke a lot and did little. He refrained from attacking the nuclear reactor in Syria, and, despite the expectations, he did not attack in Iran either. Friendship cannot compete with interests.

The relationship between Obama and Netanyahu is very bad, as are the results. But it’s nothing personal. Israelis dislike Netanyahu because of his character or actions. When the Americans shy away from him, it is because of interests. When Obama chose not to visit Israel while travelling in the Middle East, he was not yet familiar with Netanyahu. When he was photographed with his feet on the table during a phone conversation with Netanyahu – they were still getting to know each other. When Obama froze, Netanyahu courted him as though he were lovestruck. Obama consciously chose a certain path. Netanyahu, a fan of the US, chose a different path.

This is also true for the Iranian crisis. It is in the US’ interest to delay the decision as much as possible. Due to their military capabilities, the Americans have much more time than Israel’s window of opportunity allows. What will they do when they reach that point? Good question.

In the face of an economic crisis and a crumbling Arab world – the Americans will most likely do nothing. Here is where the Israeli pressure comes into play – the attack dilemma. If, as reported, Obama is advancing from the commitment stage to the obligation stage, then this would constitute a major achievement. If not, Netanyahu and Israelis in general are in for a difficult time.

Iran Crossing Into ‘Zone of Immunity’ | #1 News Site on the Threat of Radical Islam.

The night the Democrats lost control of the Israel message | The Times of Israel.

Proposed changes regarding Jerusalem and the mention of God are met with boos by convention delegates

By Haviv Rettig Gur September 6, 2012, 4:48 am

It all started as a Twitter gimmick by the Republican Party’s Jewish outreach arm.

The Republican Jewish Coalition began tweeting differences between the Democratic Party’s 2008 and 2012 platforms on Monday. By Tuesday morning, Republican activists were shopping those differences to reporters.

The differences were significant enough to justify stories in some Jewish outlets. While the platform still contained strongly pro-Israel language, Democrats had dropped all mention of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, cut the explicit call for Palestinian refugees to return to a future Palestine rather than to Israel, and more.

The story quickly spread to political blogs and from there to major American papers. By Tuesday night, Democrats had a real crisis on their hands.

One indication of the scale of the concern was the surprise and anger among Democratic leaders themselves as they heard about the platform changes, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and New York Senator Chuck Schumer appearing bewildered and saying they knew nothing about them, and Congressmen Eliot Engel and Howard Berman issuing statements expressing anger and opposition to the new text.

According to CBS News, corroborated by National Jewish Democratic Council head David Harris, President Barack Obama, too, was surprised and upset by the changes, and immediately ordered a voice vote reinstating language into the platform that affirmed Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. (Never mind that the Obama White House formally refuses to name Israel’s capital when asked.)

But the damage was not yet done.

In calling for the voice vote from delegates to reinstate the term “God” — in an excised phrase from 2008 that “gives everyone willing to work hard the chance to make the most of their God-given potential” — and the sentence about Jerusalem as Israel’s capital into the platform on Wednesday, Democratic leaders were taken aback by vociferous shouting of “boos” and “noes” in the half-empty Time Warner Arena in Charlotte.

The vote had to be taken three times before convention chair Antonio Villaraigosa could declare the changes passed.

The “boos” surprised not only Democrats, but reporters as well. CNN and other outlets ran special reruns of the moment in their prime-time news broadcasts from the convention.

Not only had Democrats neglected to place Jerusalem as Israel’s capital into the 2012 platform — apparently for the first time in 40 years — but they appeared on national television to be booing the restoration of the clause.

Democrats were hard at work Wednesday night playing down the incident.

“What I do know to be factually true is that the party platform is one of the strongest on Israel’s security in history,” said David Harris.

He added that the incident was unlikely to impact the election in November. “I find it very hard to believe that the average American Jew is going to look backward 63 days to one minute of television,” he said of the news networks’ coverage.

He contrasted that moment of television with the Democratic Party’s and Obama’s positions supporting unprecedented military assistance for Israel, and taking positions on a large number of social issues — “choice, the social safety net, Medicare” — that are in step with the views of a large majority of Jewish voters.

Harris may be right about the final outcome. But even a pessimist would be hard-pressed to imagine a worse hiccup for Democratic efforts on Israel.

It’s worth recalling that the Democratic convention began with a workshop for Democratic Jewish activists about how to rebuff Republican assaults on Obama’s Israel record.

At that gathering, Ira Forman, former head of the National Jewish Democratic Council and now the Obama campaign’s Jewish outreach director, said a drop of just 10% in Jewish support could translate into as many as 83,500 votes in Florida, a state won by George W. Bush in 2000 by just over 500 votes.

Polls of likely Jewish voters have been few and far between, but a Gallup poll from last month seemed to show precisely that 10% decline from the whopping 78% support President Obama enjoyed from the Jewish community in 2008, according to exit polls at the time.

While Democrats remain confident of winning a large majority of Jews in November come what may, they are increasingly aware that just a small drop — even in voter turnout — could swing the election.

And while Democrats can point to a long list of accomplishments stemming from the Obama White House’s support for Israel — massive US investment in Iron Dome and other systems, a US veto of the unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood at the UN, and more — Democrats just aren’t in control of the story.

On Wednesday, what began and could have ended as a partisan spat on the opinion pages of Jewish communal papers became, for a moment, the centerpiece of national prime-time television news shows.

Few Jewish voters saw the Republican Jewish Coalition’s tweets or press releases on Monday. But few Jewish voters could have missed the boos and embarrassment from the convention floor Wednesday night.

The Democrats lost control of the story Wednesday. It will take more than a convention workshop to regain their footing and get their own message to millions of Jewish voters.

Democrats change platform to add God, Jerusalem – Yahoo! News.

Waiting for the US on Iran is like Russian roulette | The Jewish Chronicle.

It is no mystery that US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are not each other’s first choices for their respective jobs.

Washington and Jerusalem have spent almost four years seeking to dismiss recurring news stories about the friction between these two men and, more importantly, their policies.

Whether or not these differences are media-hyped, they exist and are bound to become wider as the election season advances and Iran’s nuclear programme continues its march to weapons capability.

Recent utterances by US Chief of the US Joint Staffs General Martin Dempsey indicated again that America was not prepared to back Israel in what appears to be a looming pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear installation. Fuelled also by leaked details of a stormy exchange between US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro and Mr Netanyahu, the air is filled with suspicion and recrimination.

Here, then, is what matters about Israel, Iran and the United States.

First, Israel will not attack unless it feels that the window for a successful military operation is closing.

Second, if Israel were to make this decision, US electoral circumstances would matter little — for Israeli leaders, this is a life-or-death decision which they are not likely to postpone over an electoral calendar.

Third, no US president would risk consigning his name to history as the one who let Iran go nuclear. President Obama is no exception and Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s accusation that he has “thrown Israel under a bus” would be proved false if it came to the crunch. If Mr Dempsey and his colleagues in US intelligence agencies told Mr Obama that Iran was about to cross a critical threshold, it is unlikely that the president would hold off a strike because of an election.

Fourth, given the historical precedent of intelligence failing to predict nuclear breakout in countries such as India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iraq, Syria and Libya, point number three is infinitely less reassuring than at first glance.

Fifth, for Israel, the threshold for a nuclear Iran comes much sooner than for the US. Point three, again, is moot to a large extent because, in all likelihood, the Americans are correct, from their perspective, when they say Iran is one to three years away from a nuclear bomb. Their threshold is weapons assembly, but for Israel and its more limited strike capabilities, crunch time comes sooner.

Sixth, brinkmanship on this matter comes to an abrupt end with the onset of the rainy season over Iranian skies — rhetoric is weatherproof, air raids are not — and might not wait until spring.

For Israel, letting the US electoral cycle come to fruition might mean postponing a decision until April 2013. By this time, it may be too late. For America, postponing until November 7 means ensuring that no foreign policy crises distract the president from a re-election bid in a very tough year.

Israel’s dilemma, then, will become more acute in the coming weeks: showing loyalty to a president Israel’s leaders do not fully trust may deprive it of its ability to steer the ship of history as it wishes. And that is not an option.

Emanuele Ottolenghi is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies in Washington DC

America’s second-highest ranking officer arrives in secret | The Times of Israel.

The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is in Israel this week amid rising tensions between the two countries

Admiral Winnefeld, left, a former F-14 Navy fighter pilot, with Secretary of Defense Panetta in 2011 (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The only unusual thing about the second-highest ranking officer in the US armed forces’ trip to Israel this week is that, apparently, it was a secret.

Admiral James A. Winnefeld, Jr., the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited an Iron Dome battery near Ashkelon Wednesday and, as a guest of IDF Deputy Chief of the General Staff Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh, took part in security meetings that addressed “the cooperation between the two armies,” Army Radio revealed Thursday.

The visit comes amid significant tension between American army brass and Israeli leadership. General Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, discussed a possible Israeli strike against Iran last week and said that while Israel had the power to ”clearly delay but probably not destroy Iran’s nuclear program,” he also, according to a report first published in the Guardian, took the unusual step of adding “I don’t want to be complicit if they choose to do it.”

The remark drew plenty of anonymous ire in Israel. Senior government sources said that it showed “vehement American oppositon” to an Israeli strike before the November 6 elections.

That same week Time magazine reported that the largest joint American-Israeli military exercise, Austere Challenge 12, scheduled to be held in late October and to include missile defense warships and thousands of troops, was significantly reduced in scale. The reduction, the magazine reported, “may make it more difficult for the Israeli government to launch a pre-emptive strike on Tehran’s nuclear program.”

Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin of the US Air Force, a former F-16 pilot, will command the joint drill in October (Photo credit: US Air Force)

Lt. Gen. Craig A. Franklin, Commander, 3rd Air Force, Ramstein Air Base, Germany, commander of the upcoming exercise, is slated to arrive in Israel next week.

General Winnefeld’s visit will be formally announced later Thursday.

After Obama intervenes, Democrats return omitted language on Jerusalem to party platform | The Times of Israel.

Provision defining Jerusalem as capital of Israel was left out of 2012 document, igniting firestorm of criticism

President Barack Obama waves to supporters as he arrives at the Charlotte/Douglas International Airport for the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina on Wednesday. (photo credit: AP/Chuck Burton)

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina — Democrats returned language affirming Jerusalem as Israel’s capital to their party platform on Wednesday. According to Obama campaign officials, the change was made following an intervention by the US president.

The party’s platform committee met in Charlotte, the site of this year’s Democratic Party convention, to restore language from the 2008 platform to this year’s platform.

“They are returning the language to the 2008 situation,” Robert Wexler, a top Jewish surrogate for Obama’s reelection campaign and a drafter of this year’s platform, told JTA. “The exact language.”

“Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel” appeared in the 2008 document, along with the caveat that the matter should be left to final status negotiations.

A Democratic National Committee official also confirmed the reinsertion.

The removal of the language caused a firestorm of criticism from pro-Israel groups, Republicans and Democratic lawmakers in Congress, who said it blindsided them.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney had said Tuesday it was “unfortunate” that “the entire Democratic Party has embraced President Obama’s shameful refusal to acknowledge that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. Four years of President Obama’s repeated attempts to create distance between the United States and our cherished ally have led the Democratic Party to remove from their platform an unequivocal acknowledgment of a simple reality. As president, I will restore our relationship with Israel and stand shoulder to shoulder with our close ally.”

But the Times of Israel reported earlier Wednesday that the Republicans, too, toned down language in their 2012 platform regarding Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem.

The Republican platform changes from 2008 included removing the adjective “undivided” from references to Jerusalem, and cutting the sentence supporting the relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Democratic campaign officials had earlier said that the language was removed from their party platform because the overall platform focused on Obama’s achievements — in Israel’s case, the enhancement of security cooperation and the isolation of Iran.

Democrats accused Republicans of hypocrisy regarding the Jerusalem issue on Tuesday, and of seeking to distract attention from the Democratic National Convention, but they did not deny the Republican account of the changes made to the platform.

“President Bush signed waivers 16 times to avoid moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem,” noted David Harris, executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, accusing Republicans of “stunning, but not surprising” hypocrisy on the issue.

“Jewish Democrats know full well that Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel,” said the Democrats’ Harris. “We – like President George W. Bush before and leaders of both parties for decades – also know that the final status of Jerusalem will have to be formally decided by the parties. This should come as a surprise to nobody.”

Republican Jewish groups Tuesday listed several changes to the Democrats’ platform that they said were detrimental to Israel — including the exclusion of the express statement that “Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel”; the removal of a provision insisting that Palestinian refugees will only be resettled in a future Palestinian state, not in Israel; and the excision of a call to isolate of Hamas until it renounces terrorism and accepts the peace process. All those provisions were included in the 2008 Democratic party platform but removed from the 2012 platform.

It was not immediately clear Wednesday whether all these changes would now be reversed by the Democrats. Nor were there indications as to whether the Republicans, too, might now restore excised language on Jerusalem.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.