WarSclerotic

Syrian rebels seize security compound near Golan Heights | JPost | Israel News.

Israel Hayom | Americans expect a friendlier policy on Israel.

Yoram Ettinger

Tehran: Our commanders now authorized to open fire. Go home, Obama!.

DEBKAfile Special Report March 17, 2013, 10:34 AM (GMT+02:00)

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei flanked by Rev Guards chiefs

The words and deeds coming out of Washington in the last three days bring little comfort to the Israeli government as it prepares for Barack Obama’s first visit as president Wednesday, March 20.
According to an authoritative leak, Washington has effectively cancelled the Europe-based missile shield system that was designed to protect that continent and Israel against Iranian ballistic missile attack. The cancellation was part of the plan announced by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel last week to install 14 additional missile interceptors in California and Alaska to build up United States defenses against a threatened North Korean attack.
Not only has the Obama administration reduced its missile defense commitment to Europe and Israel, debkafile notes that Washington persists in overlooking the tight coordination in tactics and diplomacy on nuclear issues between Pyongyang and Tehran.
The European-based missile shield has been put forward by Moscow repeatedly as a major obstacle to Russian-US cooperation on nuclear arms reduction and “other issues” – meaning the really hot-button ones of a nuclear Iran and the Syrian civil war.
By meeting Moscow’s complaint, Barack Obama was gambling heavily on coming out of the understandings he reached with Russian President Vladimir Putin with an acceptable settlement of the Iranian nuclear controversy and the future of the Assad regime in Syria.

So far, his winnings are slim.
Russian officials are not rushing forward to welcome the reshuffling of missile shields between Europe and America. Kremlin circles were quoted Sunday by The New York Times as commenting stiffly that there would be no reaction until they were fully briefed by American officials next week.
In any case, Tehran wants no part in the diplomatic softball game the Obama administration is playing with Moscow. Indeed, Iranian officials are behaving exactly like their North Korean partners – with threats.

Saturday, March 16, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Brig. Gen. Massoud Jazayeri broadcast two bellicose messages on the Revolutionary Guards website sephanews.com:
1 “Our commanders have been authorized to respond to any kind of hostile move by the enemy.”
debkafile’s military sources note that this message appeared two days after Iranian Air Force fighters tried to shoot down a US Predator drone flying over the Strait of Hormuz. It also comes at a time that Iranian officers are found on field combat duty in Syria and Lebanon as well.

2.  The Iranian general went on to declare: “Mr Obama, do not make a mistake: we too have all our options on the table. Before you get deeper in the region’s quagmire, go back home!”

This was Tehran’s answer to the US President’s comment Thursday in an Israeli TV Channel 2 interview:
“I have been crystal clear about my position on Iran possessing a nuclear weapon – that is a red line for us. If we can resolve it diplomatically that’s a more lasting solution, but if not I continue to keep all options on the table.” Obama added that Tehran is “over a year or so” away from getting a nuclear bomb.

In Tehran’s tightly controlled publicity environment,  General Jazayeri would not have dismissed the prospect of the US activating its military options with such contempt without authorization from the highest level, i.e. supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

He was effectively telling the US president that, after pulling American forces out of the Middle East and relegating the handling of the Syrian issue to Moscow, “Mr.Obama” had burned his military options in the Middle East and should go home.
Our Iranian sources add that that Jazayeri’s remark was addressed equally to Israel. If Obama’s main purpose in his visit is to hear what Israelis have to say – as he himself has stressed – then he is wasting his time. , In Tehran’s view, the Israelis too have no place in the Middle East and should get out – as Iran’s leaders often declare..

Obama and Netanyahu Have Reached Detente in Time for Israel Visit – The Daily Beast.

by Eli Lake Mar 17, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

Their relationship may be icy, but the president and prime minister won’t antagonize each other during Obama’s trip to Israel this week. They’ve quietly moved closer on Iran’s nuclear program, Eli Lake reports.

When President Obama arrives in Israel this week, he will be greeted with a lot of unhappy people.

Settlers say they will protest Obama’s address to university students because of a U.S. Embassy snub to students from a university in the West Bank settlement of Ariel. The Palestinian Authority’s foreign minister wants the U.S. government to coordinate his Jerusalem visit with the Palestinian side. Average Israelis are complaining the visit will make traffic a nightmare in the days before the Passover holiday. And the labor union that represents Israeli diplomats and foreign ministry workers has threatened a strike the week that he is coming, potentially disrupting the protocol for the meetings, the drivers, and the joint press appearances.

Welcome to Israel, Mr. President. But for all the pre-trip tumult in Israel, one person who is unlikely to cause Obama any problems is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Despite the icy personal relationship between the two leaders, Israel and the United States have quietly moved much closer on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program.

Six months ago, Netanyahu declined repeatedly to assure Obama that he would not attack Iran before the U.S. election. Obama sent a procession of senior officials from his own administration in the summer of 2012 to persuade Netanyahu to hold off.

Today the tension between the two leaders on Iran has diminished, according to U.S. and Israeli officials. No more does Netanyahu hint Israel will take matters into its own hands over Iran’s nuclear program. When Vice President Biden announced earlier this year the resumption of negotiations with Iran, Netanyahu’s government offered no public criticism. Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, the director of military intelligence for the Israel Defense Forces, told the annual conference here at Herzliya that he assesses “Iran’s nuclear program is advancing slower then they planned.”

That should be good news for Obama. Speaking this week to Israel’s Channel 2, the only Israeli news channel to get an exclusive interview with him, the president reiterated that all options were on the table. But he also seemed to imply he would rather come to Israel as a tourist. He told the news channel he wished he could “sit at a cafe and just hang out, wear a mustache, wander through Tel Aviv, meet with students at a university in an informal setting.”

During his visit, Obama also will attend a state dinner where one of the guests will be the first Miss Israel of African descent. He intends to address the nation’s students in Jerusalem. He will lay a wreath on the grave site of Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, and he will tour the Israel Museum. He’ll visit the Church of the Nativity, but he will not visit the remains of the outer wall of the second Jewish temple or, for that matter, al-Aqsa Mosque.

Diplomatically, though, the big news is that Obama and Netanyahu will not antagonize each other. Obama last week told Jewish leaders, according to two sources in the meeting, that he would not be bringing a peace plan to Israel but that he may present a peace proposal later this year if the opportunity arose.

The prime minster at first agreed to freeze some construction of buildings at settlements, but he did not continue the freeze after 2010, when Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas declined to start formal negotiations with Israel.

Netanyahu, for his part, has backed away from his Iran red line. Speaking at the Herzliya conference last week, U.S. Ambassador Dan Shapiro said, “There has been a very rigorous exchange between the analysts and the experts that have informed the policy and public utterances between the two leaders.”

“The process of the intelligence picture getting closer has been going on for some time,”  said Shmuel Bar, the director of studies for the Institute of Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center at Herzliya and a former senior Israeli intelligence official.

Netanyahu’s implicit threat to attack Iran was withdrawn at the end of September. At a speech before the U.N. General Assembly, he presented a graphic of a cartoon-style bomb with a red line right before the fuse marked 90 percent. The U.N. address and the cartoonish graphic signaled the Israeli prime minister would not be attacking Iran before the election, according to U.S. and Israeli officials. A spoof of the cartoon with an actor dressed as the Israeli leader is now a popular billboard hawking a cell-phone plan.

The speech signaled a significant change for the Israeli government on the trigger, or “red line,” for attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. For much of 2012, Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister at the time, said the red line for attacking Iran would be based on preventing Iran from installing the advanced centrifuges in the underground facility discovered by U.S. intelligence in 2009 known as Fordow.

Netanyahu’s U.N. address made clear that his new red line would be based on how much uranium Iran enriched to 20 percent purity. The highly enriched uranium needed for a weapon is easier to produce from stock material enriched to 20 percent as opposed to the lower enriched uranium at around 3.5 percent.

Israeli experts today say the exact amount of 20 percent enriched uranium to produce a bomb is around 250 kilograms. The latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency says Iran has enriched more than 250 kilograms of uranium to 20 percent levels, but much of this material has been diverted to metal rods and other kinds of storage that would not be suitable for bomb making. “The Iranians understand our red line, and for now they are respecting it,” said one former senior Israeli diplomat. Kochavi told the Herzliya conference that “Iran is making sure not to cross any international red lines because the survival of the regime is the biggest priority.”

Barak, who stepped down this month as defense minister, acknowledged at the end of October that Iran had begun diverting the uranium enriched to 20 percent levels, a factor he said led Israel to conclude it had more time before a potential attack on the facilities.

The diversion has given Western diplomats a second chance at negotiations with Iran. As Obama prepares for his trip to Israel, Netanyahu for now appears to be giving those negotiations the time they would need.

Seeing Beyond the Oslo Delusion | Mike Lumish | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel.

( This tells it like it is.  It’s a painful reality, but pain needs to be dealt with, not denied. – JW )

The Oslo Delusion is the mistaken belief that if only Israel would jump through certain hoops then there would be peace between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.  

At the center of the Oslo Delusion is the notion that the Jews of the Middle East have oppressed the Arabs in their tiny part of the world and if only Jews would be nicer then Hamas would have no reason to shoot rockets at them and dictator Abbas might stop encouraging genocidal hatred toward Jews on Palestinian Authority television.

It was the Oslo Delusion, of course, which gave us the failed Oslo “peace process.”  The reason that the peace process failed is not because Israel failed to do this, that, or the other, but because the goal of the majority population throughout the Middle East is not to live in peace with the Palestinian-Jews, but to eliminate Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people.  Palestinian-Arab nationalism, and, in fact, Palestinian-Arab ethnic identity, was born out of racist-religious opposition to Jewish self-defense and Jewish autonomy on Jewish land.  Period.

The Long Arab War Against the Jews of the Middle East has, as of this moment, five phases.

These are:

Phase 1, 1920 – 1947: Riots and Massacres

Phase 2, November 1947 – April 1948: Civil War in the British Mandate

Phase 3, 1948 – 1973: Conventional Warfare

Phase 4, 1964 – Present: The Terror War

Phase 5, 1975 – Present: The Delegitimization Effort

I date the Delegimization Effort from the 1975 United Nations declaration of Zionism as racism.  It is the Delegitimization Effort which is currently proving to be the most effective weapon in the anti-Israel Arab arsenal.  The reason for this is because it not only erodes Israeli support throughout the world, but because it also justifies the never-ending violence against us.  According to the delegitimizers Israel is a racist, colonialist, imperialist, militaristic, apartheid, racist state that should never have come into being to begin with.

It is the Big Lie and it serves to weaken the Jewish minority will to defend itself even as it inflames the vast Muslim majority to hatred against Jews and, thus, violence toward Jews.

What delegitimizers would have the world believe is that despite the fact that the Arab Middle East is a brutal and entirely illiberal region, it is the democratic Jewish State of Israel which represents the main abuser of human rights and therefore Israel must be perpetually condemned and eventually eliminated.  This is, in fact, a continuation of the National Socialist delegimization effort against the Jews of Europe in the early part of the last century transplanted to the Middle East with the assistance of people like Haj Mohammed Effendi Amin el-Husseini, the former “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem.

My central argument is that the Oslo Delusion has inclined Jews, and others, throughout the world to use the very language of delegitimization to discuss the conflict. Because during the 1990s many of us held considerable hope that a reasonable conclusion of hostilities was possible with a Palestinian-Arab State living in peace next to Israel, we tended to employ the language of our enemies because we hoped those enemies might become friends.

The language of the Oslo Delusion includes terms such as “Occupation” and ”Settlers” and “West Bank” and “East Jerusalem” among others, but let’s focus on these four because they are exceedingly prominent throughout the international media and, in themselves, do very serious damage to the ongoing cause of Jewish self-determination and self-defense on historically Jewish land.

The first thing to note about each of these terms is that they are entirely false as descriptors of reality in either an historical sense or a current sense.  The second thing to note is that each of these terms condemns the Jews of the Middle East as aggressors in the argument before the argument even begins.  Because they do so, they also incline well-meaning and self-reflective Jewish liberals to turn inward even as those very same terms incite Arab-Muslim hatred toward us.

East Jerusalem:

Let’s start, in reverse order, with East Jerusalem.  Your average interested and concerned westerner would very easily get the impression that East Jerusalem is a separate entity from Jerusalem proper and one that rightly belongs to the Arab-Muslim population, but not Israel.  It is therefore considered Occupied Palestinian Territory.  I am writing this from Oakland, California and I am writing this from the perspective of a highly assimilated diaspora American Jew.  I can therefore tell you that in the United States people think of East Jerusalem as the section of Jerusalem that rightly belongs to the Arabs and should, in any final conclusion of hostilities under the Oslo Delusion, go to dictator Abbas and his cronies.

The only problem, of course, is that there is no such thing as East Jerusalem.  There is Jerusalem.  Jerusalem has a northern section and a southern section and a western section and an eastern section, but “East Jerusalem” is a fiction that is generally employed throughout the international media.  It is a term that we accepted in our Delusions of Oslo because many of us, including me, were willing to accept the partition of the city if it honestly would bring about peace.  The term is neither historically accurate, nor reflective of current conditions in the city, but it gained currency during the period of the Oslo “peace process” because our hopes for peace far overreached Arab willingness to make peace.

The current use of the term does nothing so much as bolster dictator Abbas’s claim to the ancient Jewish city which is a Jewish birth-right.  Jerusalem is the city of the Jews in much the same way that Paris is the French city and London is the English city.  From an historical perspective, Jerusalem has never been the capital of anyone else’s land.

It is our home.

Others may live there and they may do so in something very close to equal rights, but Israel is, and will remain, the home of the Jewish people.

West Bank:

The international press refers to Judea and Samaria as “the West Bank.”  I always did, as well, because as someone who was raised within the Oslo Delusion this was simply the term that we used.  What I did not know until fairly recently was that “West Bank” was a term created by Jordan shortly after 1948 for the purpose of erasing Jewish history on historically Jewish land.  Under the Oslo Delusion it did not really matter because the presumption was that much of that land would go to the Arabs, anyway, within a final status agreement.  Now that we understand that there will be no final status agreement within a “two-state solution” there is no longer any reason to continue to referring to Jewish land in terms designed to erase Jewish history.

Furthermore, when we speak of Judea and Samaria as the West Bank we give people around the world good reason to believe that Judea is somehow not Jewish and that both Judea and Samaria is Arab land, which of course it is not.  Four thousand years of Jewish history tells us that Judea and Samaria are Jewish.  This is Jewish land and it has been Jewish land since pre-history and why in this world would Jewish people use anti-Jewish language to describe their own historical homeland?

If the Israeli government and the Israeli people wish to carve out the heart of our historic home in order to give even more land to the Arabs that is OK with me so long as the agreement results in a peaceful resolution of the Arab war against the Jews in the Middle East.  But it must be understood that this decision is entirely up to Israel and that the Palestinian-Arab occupiers of that land have no rights to it beyond whatever generosity Jewish Israelis may have toward them for the purposes of a peaceful resolution.

Settlers:

Within the mainstream media and throughout progressive-left venues and newspapers, only the Jews in Judea and Samaria are considered “settlers,” while the Arabs are said to live in “villages.”   Despite the fact that Jews have lived in this region for four thousand years the obvious implication is that the Jews are usurpers of the land while the Arabs represent its “indigenous” population.  This is historically false.  The Jews lived on that land for thousands of years before the vicious Arab conquest of the seventh century.  When “progressives,” or “progressive Zionists,” refer to Jews who live where neither Barack Obama, nor Mahmoud Abbas, want Jews to live as “settlers” they are quite consciously undermining Jewish claims to Jewish land which they think of as “illegal” and “illegitimate.”

Among the various failures of progressive-left Zionism, whipping up hatred toward other Jews is among the most immoral and odious.  Because most progressive-left Jews, diaspora or otherwise, remain blinkered by the Oslo Delusion they are more than willing to spread hatred toward their fellow Jews who live beyond the Green Line.  They do so because they continue to blame Arab aggression toward Jews on the Jewish victims of that aggression.

One of the major lies peddled by people such as Mahmoud Abbas and Barack Obama and Muhammad Morsi is that the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria is the primary impediment to a conclusion of the Long Arab War against the Jews in the Middle East.  This also is false and, indeed, entirely racist.  There is no reason why dictator Abbas cannot sit down with Prime Minister Netanyahu and draw a line on a map even if Jews are living within the Palestinian-Arab section of that map.  To suggest that Jews cannot be allowed to live in a Palestinian-Arab state is to justify long-standing Koranically-based race-hatred toward Jewish people and this is precisely what Obama does every time he complains about the so-called “settlements.”

Occupation:

This is the big one.  When the western left, including progressive-left “Zionists,” refer to the Occupation (with a Big O in order to give the impression that the Jews are conducting the Big Mama and Source of All Previous Occupations) they immediately convey the impression that the Jews have no rights whatsoever to the historical Jewish heartland.  After all, if Israel is “occupying Palestinian land” then dictator Abbas has every reason to demand that Israel ethnically cleanse Jews from Judea.

The term “Occupation” means that the argument is closed before its begun and I find this to be a terrible injustice toward the Jewish people.

The truth of the matter is that what people mean by the Occupation is Jews building housing for themselves in Judea and Samaria.  It means Jews protecting themselves from Jihadi violence through the erection of the security barrier and the various check points which inconvenience Arabs.  But what the Occupation really is is the means by which Jewish people protect themselves from Arab aggression.

The Necessary Context:

What we need to do, it seems to me, is discuss the conflict within the long history of Jewish oppression under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperialism from the 7th century until the end of World War I.  This is the necessary context without which discussing the conflict would be something akin to discussing the history of African-Americans with no reference to either Jim Crow or to slavery.

The conflict as it stands now cannot be understood without direct reference to the fact that Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria were conquered by the Arabs in the seventh-century wherein they immediately placed the native Jewish population under the yoke of imperial domination.  In some places and times it was better and in some places and times it was worse, but from the seventh-century until the twentieth-century the Jews of the Middle East never had it better than did African-Americans under the racist, violent, and humiliating system of Jim Crow in the United States.

The tendency in the west is to think of Jews as the oppressors of Arabs in the Middle East when the exact opposite is actually the case.  The Middle East contains about 6 million Jews and about 400 million Arab-Muslims who, for the most part, do not accept Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land out of Koranically-based anti-Jewish bigotry.  For thirteen centuries the Jews in that part of the world were, essentially, slaves within the Arab-Muslim system of racial supremacy known as dhimmitude and the moment that the we freed ourselves via the Zionist project of national liberation, the Arab governments launched a war that continues to this day.

It is a war of the vast majority population against a tiny minority huddled together on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea.

Israel is losing the argument on the international stage because, at least in part, the terms that we use to discuss the conflict are the very terms created by the enemies of the Jewish people.  We can never win the argument if those terms, such as “Occupation,” suggest Jewish aggression when, in fact, it’s really a matter of self-defense against a much larger, hostile majority population in the region.  We must rethink the very terms of the conversation because if we stick with Oslo terminology than we have no chance.

Here Comes Obama:

Barack Obama will soon be landing at Ben Gurion Airport.  My suspicion is that his visit will kick off the next round of the Delegitimization Effort against the Jews of the Middle East.  If we wish to stem the tide of hatred toward us then we need to stop discussing the conflict in the terms created by Jewish enemies.

We need to stand up for ourselves and we need to do so within the context of the long history of Jewish subjugation on our own lands under Arab occupation.

Placing the conversation within these terms is not only helpful toward the goal of freedom from ongoing Arab persecution, it also happens to be historically accurate.

It’s also about standing up for the human rights of the Jewish people.

Report: Rebels take control of routes to Damascus – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Roi Kais and AP

Syrian rebels have taken control of areas close to Damascus, where intense fighting has effectively shut down the country’s main international airport to anything but military flights, Al Jazeera reported Saturday.

The Free Syrian Army extended its hold over the eastern half of Ghouta, an agricultural belt surrounding Damascus to the south and east, on Saturday as heavy fighting raged in several areas in and around the capital.

It was also reported that the Syrian regime is expanding its use of widely banned cluster bombs.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch said Syrian forces have dropped at least 156 cluster bombs in 119 locations across the country in the past six months, causing mounting civilian casualties.

Rebels in Aleppo (Photo: MCT)

The regime denied that it is using cluster bombs, but the report said that two strikes in the past two weeks killed 11 civilians, including two women and five children.

Cluster bombs open in flight, scattering smaller bomblets. They pose a threat to civilians long afterwards since many don’t explode immediately. Many countries have banned their use.

Human Rights Watch said it based its findings on field investigations and analysis of more than 450 amateur videos.

Earlier on Saturday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the CIA has started gathering intelligence on Islamist extremists in preparation for potential drone strikes.

US officials claim that the Counterterrorism Center, which is responsible for running the CIA’s secret program for drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, has recently ordered a group of targeting officers to improve intelligence collection on Syrian militants who could pose a terrorist threat.

‘Bulgaria won’t push for EU sanctions on Hezbollah’ | JPost | Israel News.

( Is it any wonder radical Islam believes it can defeat the West? – JW )

Iran is ‘dead scared of Israel,’ says ex-Mossad chief | The Times of Israel.

Islamist regime ‘won’t make it’ to the bomb, Efraim Halevy tells UK Zionist Federation; former MI6 head compares Iran to ‘dangerous adolescent’

Sir Richard Dearlove (left) and Efraim Halevy address the Zionist Federation event in London (photo credit: Courtesy Zionist Federation)

Iran is “dead scared of Israel,” and Israel has the means at its disposal to “take care of the Iranian threat,” former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy said in London.

Speaking at the UK Zionist Federation’s annual gala dinner last week, Halevy, who also served as Israel’s national security adviser, said the Iranian threat was “very serious,” that “the Iranians are misleading the world,” and that “every means” should be used to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But for now, he cautioned, “We shouldn’t discount negotiations” and shouldn’t “underestimate the president of the USA. [Barack Obama] understands the rule of game.”

“I have the indelible impression that Iran is dead scared of Israel,” he said.

In the final analysis, Halevy stated, Iran “will not make it” to the bomb.

Halevy told the audience of over 400 that Israel’s existence “is not in danger and shouldn’t be questioned” despite a variety of security challenges. Among them, he acknowledged that Israel now “has a serious problem concerning Syria,” noting that rebel forces are present on what had for decades been a quiet border, and that “some rebel leaders have said they will do what [President Bashar] Assad couldn’t do, and that’s to regain the Golan Heights.”

Addressing the same event, Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of Britain’s MI6 secret intelligence service, described Iran as “a state with many flaws and weakness, and a political system that is very fragile. There is a way through this crisis,” he insisted.

Dearlove added: “Iran is equivalent to a dangerous adolescent, but one does not want that adolescent to have access to certain technologies and weapons. The route the international community is on is the best and most practical.”

Hinting at the possibility of the regime falling, he said, “I wouldn’t actually rule out significant political change in Iran. Politics in Iran is not stable.” He noted that Iranians see the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria as “the start of an attack on the viability of their own regime.”

Israel’s Ambassador to the UK, Daniel Taub, praised the Zionist Federation as one of “the most passionate, energetic and effective organizations working to support the state of Israel… at the very forefront of making Israel’s case.”

Israel’s Ambassador to the UK Daniel Taub addresses the Zionist Federation event in London (photo credit: Courtesy Zionist Federation)

“In today’s climate if you are antisemitic,” Taub noted, “probably the most convenient avenue for you to express your hatred is through hatred of the state of Israel.” Israel, he said, “has many faults and we are working to correct them. But we also have to remember that at its core the hostility towards Israel has nothing to do with our failures. In fact it’s the contrary, it has to do with its success.”

He went on: “The fanatics who disrupt Israeli performers and Israeli orchestras, who try to shut down Israeli speakers or try to cut ties with Histadrut, the only democratic trade union in the Middle East — all of these people don’t care about Israel’s faults. What they cannot accept is that despite all their efforts to the contrary, Israel is alive and well and flourishing economically and culturally. It’s investing and creating, winning Nobel prizes, helping the third world in agriculture and medicine… That is the Israel the ZF is supporting.”

Alan Aziz, the director of the Zionist Federation — which runs more than 170 events a year including seminars, advocacy campaigns, training programs, demonstrations and cultural events — said the event was sold out, and that the audience included the heads of 35 other organizations.

The Ya’alon Plan: Israel’s Man for Iran.

Once the new Israeli government is sworn in, a new minister of defense will enter the ministry – Lt. Gen. (Res.) Moshe “Bogi” Ya’alon. What is on the agenda and how will Ya’alon fulfill his strategic perspective against the threats facing Israel?

“I don’t envy you,” said Moshe Ya’alon to the head of the IDF’s Directorate of Military Intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi. This was several months ago, when Kochavi presented the Directorate’s 2013 assessment to the Israeli government. “When I headed the intelligence directorate, everything was easier. When I began my role, I received organized files about Hafez al-Assad, Yasser Arafat, Hassan Nasrallah, and other regional leaders. When I was done, I moved the files onwards. Now, everything is changing in the Middle East, at a dizzying rate, and no file is relevant. Briefs concerning new, unknown figures need to be prepared all the times, like the files about the leaders of the Syrian opposition.”

Ya’alon said these words as a member of the political-security cabinet and as the Israeli minister for strategic affairs in the previous Netanyahu administration. Unless there are unreasonable developments, he will march this Monday on a red carpet towards the bureau of minister of defense. Ya’alon will become Kochavi’s boss, and on top of the Middle Eastern concerns, primarily Iran, he will also face the key social issue of solving the recruitment of Haredim into IDF service.

Will Ya’alon send the IDF to attack in Iran? Will he revolutionize the military? It is possible to assess his plans based on recent conversations that he held and his expressions as the minister of strategic affairs. This is not a challenging task, as Ya’alon is not a complicated character. His heart and mouth are usually the same – when he says something, he means it, even if the expressions sometimes involve some sort of complication (as IDF Chief of Staff in the past decade, his sayings got him into entanglements more than once).

Instability
Ya’alon won’t have that much to learn about the job from Ehud Barak, Israel’s minister of defense for the past six years. The mutual appreciation between the two is not particularly high. Barak did not wait this week for the formal announcement by the new government in order to say farewell. The General Staff’s Planning Branch prepared presentations and tried to convince him until the very last moment so that he would influence Netanyahu not to dramatically cut the defense budget in the next government (a cut will happen in any case). However, Barak was concerned with IDF departure ceremonies and the ceremony held by the defense ministry on Wednesday. Barak packed his office belongings, and has prepared to march into the sunset with his wife for days of fun and business. He may yet return to the arena, when he feels like doing so, or when called to do so in the future.

Ya’alon doesn’t need to study much – he has been living the field of defense 24/7, and it is what secured him the topmost role in the third Netanyahu administration. Should there be a defensive complication, it will be on his head – no one will blame Netanyahu for a failed appointment.

The main characteristic of the period when Moshe Ya’alon is entering the role of minister of defense is the lack of regional stability – lack of stability in Egypt, Syria and even in Jordan, and with terrorism returning to the Judea and Samaria region. The borders have once again become frontier regions, with terror organizations such as Global Jihad located on the other side (only in Syria and Sinai so far). Strategic weaponry is still being accumulated in Israel’s surroundings, despite mysterious attacks in places like Sudan and Syria, attributed by global media to the IDF. These include inaccurate rockets with seven kilogram warheads, as well as missiles with warheads containing hundreds of kilograms of explosives, capable of hitting specific targets, even from a distance of 300 kilometers. Such missiles include the Yakhont shore-to-sea missile that Russia provided to Syria, which may have even been acquired by Hezbollah, for example.

The general public does not yet understand the full significance of this threat. In a paradoxical manner, the calmest border at this time is the one with Lebanon. Hezbollah has almost completely constrained its fire – in the past year, it renewed its activities somewhat, and even worked to provide hundreds of kilograms of explosives to terror cells in Israel. The ceasefire with Nasrallah does not necessarily a result of his fear of the IDF, as people in Israel tend to think since the Second Lebanon War in 2006. He is more afraid of losing his Iranian patrons, who built up his forces as a threat aimed at Israel for the event that Iran’s nuclear facilities are attacked. Tehran’s Revolutionary Guards have deprived Nasrallah of the authority to initiate major offensive activities against Israel on his own, so as not to drag Israel into a conflict and waste the weaponry arsenal on what they consider to be nonsense.

In many regards, Ya’alon as minister of defense and his chief of staff Gantz are of the same mind. Both are paratroopers in their hearts, and they are not the more rugged kind that the Golan brigade usually produces. As chief of staff, Gantz holds thinking forums while dressed in civilian clothes, so that the participants will be able to speak freely without fear of ranks. When Ya’alon was chief of staff, he held forums where the order of the speakers was not according to rank, from the lowest rank and up to the highest ranking person who concludes the debate (in such debates, the junior officers usually say what the commander is expected to say at the end more than what they really think).

In his first year as minister of defense, Ya’alon will need to formally approve the IDF’s five-year plan for force buildup, known as “Oz.” Barak successfully maneuvered the government as minister of defense to increase the defense budget, even in years where Netanyahu and Treasury Minister Steinitz dramatically announced budgetary cuts.

As chief of staff, Moshe Ya’alon founded the C4I Branch a decade ago, and may work to strengthen it as minister of defense. During Ya’alon’s term, the Ground Forces branch will not rest easily; There are essential facts that are etched into Ya’alon’s memory: eventually, the majority of infantry forces arrive to the battlefield by foot or in soft vehicles. He himself made it to the crossing of the Suez canal during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, by bus, and entered Lebanon by foot during Operation Litani as a paratrooper company commander. As head of the minister’s committee for the IDF’s force build-up affairs in the previous government, Ya’alon blocked part of the plans for acquiring Merkava tanks and Namer APCs. The original IDF plans for acquiring armored instruments were reduced due to pressures from Israeli ministers.

Fewer Iron Dome Systems

The new minister of defense is not among the enthusiastic fans of the Iron Dome system, nor of the other systems for intercepting enemy missiles. He is interested in the Iron dome and the David’s Sling systems, but in a reasonable amount, and not in numbers that necessitate enormous budgets and manpower, even if most of the funding continues to come from the US.

It seems that during the Ya’alon period, the IDF will suffice with the master plan of acquiring 13 Iron Dome batteries (five batteries are already operational today). Grandiose plant for filling Israel with Iron Dome batteries which were considered under Ehud Barak will be taken away.
Bogi and Bibi
It seems that more than Netanyahu wanted Ya’alon as his defense minister, the appointment was one that was forced upon him, despite the fact that the connection between them goes back dozens of years.

The Netanyahu-Barak team left behind one unfinished mission: halting the Iranian pursuit of a nuclear bomb. Now, the mission to halt the Iranian bomb falls to the hands of Ya’alon as well. In contrast to what is commonly thought, Ya’alon is not an opponent of an Israeli strike in Iran – nor is he one of those supporting such an attack. It all depends on the circumstances, the issue and the chances of success. The truth is that at the current point in time, Israel lacks a genuine military option for attacking Iran. If an attack does occur, moments before Iran gets to a bomb, it will be done by the US, and not by Israel.

In a recent interview published by IsraelDefense, Ya’alon said that “the most dangerous threat today is the nuclear threat on the part of Iran, which is working to achieve regional hegemony. It is funding terrorist activities in our region and sending its long arms here. It is impossible to deal with the Middle Eastern instability without dealing with this threat – it must be at the top of our priorities, not necessarily the Palestinian-Israeli issue, and we need to prepare for defending ourselves.

“However, this does not necessarily mean war in the next year. Ahmadinejad must be presented with a very simple dilemma – nuclear weapons or regime survival. Iran faced this dilemma in 2003, and at the time, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei halted the nuclear project so as not to give the West an excuse for an attack, after the entry of US forces into Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran knows that the West has far greater capabilities than it does, but it is not convinced of the Western willingness to fight it. It’s possible that the 2003 dilemma may be restored today, but for that to happen, much more severe sanctions must be imposed on Iran, which is something that has yet to happen.” In general, Ya’alon is familiar with the Iranian issue. As minister for strategic affairs, it was at the core of his dealings, and even managed many contacts with the US.

With regards to the Palestinian issue, the US may not find Ya’alon so amicable. As is his custom, he will tell the US what he thinks, and his opinions of the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazzen), and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad are nothing special. 20 years ago, Ya’alon supported the Oslo Agreement, which he retroactively defined as “a Trojan horse” when he was IDF chief of staff. Today, he does not believe that Abu Mazzen and Fayyad are genuinely working to end the conflict, and repeatedly reminds the fact that they completely rejected generous proposals from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

Citizen or General
Nine years away from the Kiriya HQ, including nine months in a Washington research institute, have changed Ya’alon. In the Chief of Staff’s bureau, he did not excel in selecting teammates. His aides established a fortified wall around him, cutting him off from the lower ranks.

As a politician, he surprised people with his endless informal meetings with members of the Likud HQ, even if he was not thrilled with wandering about the party branches. As minister of defense, Ya’alon is expected to appoint Maj. Gen. Dan Harel as director general, and bring with him some people from the ministry of strategic affairs, including ministry director general, Brig. Gen. (Res.) Yossi Kuperwasser.

The beehive built around him will affect his success as minister of defense, perhaps more than anything else.

Obama won’t trip over Netanyahu’s Iran ‘red line’ – Alarabiya.net English | Front Page.

U.S. President Barack Obama visits Israel next week at the onset of spring – the “red line “previously drawn by his host, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to trigger an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites.

But an Israeli-Iranian war, Washington’s nightmare as it tries to scale back defense commitments abroad and avoid a draining Gulf oil crisis, does not appear trip-wire imminent.

Officials and analysts say Iran warded off Israel’s threat by calibrating mid-level uranium enrichment so it does not accrue enough fuel for a potential first bomb – the threshold Netanyahu warned about in a United Nations speech in September.

He was presenting a worst-case extrapolation from U.N. nuclear inspector reports. The most recent of those, however, found a slowdown in the stockpiling of the 20 percent fissile uranium that Iran, in the face of mounting Western suspicions, says is part of an entirely peaceful program.

Netanyahu has not publicly revised the spring-to-summer 2013dating for his “red line”. But several Israeli officials privately acknowledged it had been deferred, maybe indefinitely.

“The red line was never a deadline,” one told Reuters.

The chief U.S. military officer, General Martin Dempsey, has questioned Israel’s ability to deliver lasting damage to Iran’s distant, defended facilities. Netanyahu, meanwhile, makes little secret of preferring that Washington take the lead in any war.

Yet while mobilizing Gulf forces and saying it was open to military force as a last resort, the Obama administration has resisted Israeli calls to present Tehran with a clear ultimatum.

Clocks and kilos

Interviewed by Israel’s top-rated television news program on Thursday, Obama voiced cautious hope that negotiations, re-launched last month between the United States, five otherworld powers and Iran, could still curb its disputed nuclear drive.

“There’s a window – not an infinite period of time – but a window of time where we can resolve this diplomatically, and that it is in all of our interests,” he told Channel Two TV.

The U.S. “red line” was Iran reaching the verge of acquiring a nuclear bomb, Obama said, adding: “That would take over a year or so … But obviously we don’t want to cut it too close.”

Confidence in Obama is not unanimous among Netanyahu’s circle. While one Israeli official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said “American presidents don’t bluff” and that therefore Obama should be trusted, others worried Iran might elude scrutiny and dash to nuclear arms capability.

“The key question is not when Iran will have a bomb, but only when we can no longer prevent Iran from having a bomb,” Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, told reporters.

He accused Iran of planning to run an accelerated, “shorter track” toward nuclear weaponry “that is invisible because it is underground”.

A Feb. 21 U.N. report said Iran had 167 kg (367 lb) of mid-level enriched uranium, in gas form, after converting some of the stockpile to solid reactor fuel. Experts say it would need 240-250 kg (530-550 lb) of the gaseous material for a bomb, though the fuel would have to be further enriched to 90 percent purity.

Yet Iran has also been expanding centrifuges so it could rapidly ramp up mid-level enrichment if it chose, diplomats say.

Netanyahu alluded to those developments on March 4 when here iterated his “red line” in a speech to a pro-Israel lobby in Washington, saying Iran was “putting itself in a position to cross that line very quickly once it decides to do so”.

An Israeli official posited Iran could gather 230 kg to 240kg of mid-level uranium – just short of a bomb’s worth – and then, between inspectors’ weekly visits to the enrichment plants, churn out the few kilograms required to close the gap.

Next, it could move all the material to a secret location for prospective later processing into weapons fuel, making the Islamic Republic a “latent nuclear power”, the official argued.

“For now, we know what sites would have to be targeted in a military strike,” the official said. “Can any of us, even the Americans, be sure of having such full knowledge in the future?”

The United States sounds more secure about nuclear inspections and intelligence monitoring of the Iranians, as well as in its ability to intervene militarily at short notice.

“We assess Iran could not divert safeguarded material and produce a weapon-worth of WGU (weapons-grade uranium) before this activity is discovered,” U.S. National Intelligence Director James Clapper said on Tuesday.

Strategic ambiguity

Gary Samore, Obama’s former nuclear non-proliferation adviser, disputed the idea that Iran would break out of the U.N. inspections regime with just one bomb’s worth of fuel, or that it would be capable of making a quick switch to the highest level of uranium enrichment, given its technical lags.

“Nobody knows, including the Iranians, how much 20 percent (enriched uranium) they need to have a bomb’s worth. They have never done it. They have never converted,” Samore, who is now executive director at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said in a phone interview.

That made threshold questions “inherently ambiguous”, said Samore, who referred to Netanyahu’s “red line” alternatively asa “red zone”.

Mark Fitzpatrick, a former U.S. State Department official who heads the non-proliferation and disarmament program at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies, had similar doubts about whether Iran would try to sneak past Netanyahu’s “red line” and, if so, whether Israel would respond with strikes.

“Nobody’s going to make a war-or-peace decision based on a few kilograms of 20 percent enriched uranium,” he said. “Nobody knows what Israel’s real ‘red line’ is. I don’t think Israel knows either.”

Fitzpatrick faulted Netanyahu for fixating on Iran’s 20percent enrichment, arguing that this risked distracting from ongoing progress in other risky aspects of its nuclear program like centrifuge improvements and tons of low-purity uranium.

“That may not have been a clever way of putting it, because Iran is able to make tactical adjustments and can push back the so-called ‘red line’ as long as it wants,” he said.

But Fitzpatrick also saw a tactical gain for Netanyahu “in reminding the world that there was a concrete threat here, after the world has heard so much sabre-rattling from Israel”.

Israel, which is reputed to have the region’s sole atomic arsenal, has spoken about being ready to attack Iran for close to a decade – rhetoric some Israeli officials say was designed, at least in part, to stiffen the determination of war-wary world powers to find a diplomatic alternative through sanctions.

Samore said the international coalition had been “deeply energized for years” in confronting Tehran. “I think we still have a reasonable prospect of stopping them, and that if the Iranians misstep, the U.S. will act,” he said.