WarSclerotic

Tehran: For restored Iranian aid, Hamas must go back to supporting Bashar Assad.

Hamas, Gaza Strip

The split in the Palestinian camp was more pronounced this week than ever. While a Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority team sat down with Israel in Washington for US-initiated peace talks after Israel agreed to release 104 jailed Palestinians, a secret Hamas delegation arrived in Tehran to patch up the Gaza rulers’ quarrel with Iran. debkafile reveals that the delegation, headed by Muhammad Nasr, included Hamas’ military wing commanders and some of the Palestinian prisoners freed to buy the release of the Israeli soldier Gilead Shalit.
Our Iranian sources reveal that Iranian officials made it clear that ties with Hamas would not be severed. But if the Palestinian group wanted the flow of money and weapons restored, it must revive its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad and undersign Hizballah’s military intervention in the Syrian conflict.
This was easier said than done. The Hamas delegation in Tehran was in no position for an authoritative reply, because it could only speak for one of the three sections of its bitterly divided movement, as listed  by debkafile sources:

1.  The Politburo chief Khaled Meshaal’s party claims since the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood’s president Mohamed Morsi in Cairo that Hamas must henceforth obey the Brotherhood’s “world leadership” and not the leaders under military siege in Cairo.

This is obviously an equivocation since the Egyptian Brotherhood constitutes the movement’s world leadership. Taking this line invites the Egyptian military to continue its crackdown on Hamas and the sealing off of the Gaza Strip by the destruction of the smuggling tunnels to Sinai which sustained it. This operation has deprived the Hamas regime of more than half of its regular revenue and is jeopardizing its grip on the territory.
2. The second party is led by the Hamas prime minister of Gaza Ismail Haniyeh. He has broken relations with Meshaal and no longer defers to his authority. Haniyeh argues that his movement should not worry about its low fortunes or the enmity of many parts of the Muslim world, including the new regime in Egypt, Iran, Damascus and HIzballah, because its focus should be on holding onto power in Gaza and enhancing its authority in the local population.
Like Meshaal, Haniyeh also begs the question. How can he explain this policy when he is too broke to pay the salaries of government officials and members of the military wing, the Izzedin al Qassam Brigades.

3. The third group is headed by pro-Iranian, pro-Hizballah Mahmoud a-Zahar, along with the military wing commanders Mohammed Deif and Marwan Issa and the Hamas representative in Turkey, Saleh al-Aruri, who is also in charge of Hamas operations on the West Bank.

This group maintains that Hamas lacks the strength and resources for standing up to Egypt and its Persian Gulf backers led by Saudi Arabia and must therefore run back fast to the radical Iran-Syria-Hizballah fold.

The fate and fortunes of Hamas bear strongly on the US-led Israeli-Palestinian negotiating track which was resumed in Washington his week after a three-year stalemate and is due to continue within two weeks.
Israel has twice switched its orientation with regard to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip in the past nine months. In November 2012, Israel accepted the diplomacy of Muslim Brotherhood-ruled Egypt, Qatar and Turkey, for the ceasefire which ended its Pillar of Defense operation against Hamas missiles.
In July 2013, since the coup which overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, Israel is cooperating with the Egyptian military and its champion, Saudi Arabia.
This cooperation surfaced when Egyptian Apache gun ships appeared over Gaza skies following a secret Israeli deal with Cairo. What will happen when the Egyptian military goes forward with its plans for a major operation against Hamas – almost certainly in the teeth of opposition by the United States and Palestinian Authority with whom Israel launched peace talks this week?

7 reasons the Americans think this time will be different | The Times of Israel.

Undeterred by widespread Israeli and Palestinian skepticism, John Kerry is convinced he can broker a permanent accord. What does he know that we don’t?

President Barack Obama shakes hands with incoming Secretary of State John Kerry, Dec. 21, 2012, in Washington. (photo credit: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

While the resumption of peace talks has been greeted with considerably more apathy, pessimism and outright hostility than optimism among Israelis and Palestinians, the American mediators are broadcasting an insistent confidence that things have changed and past failures might yet be overcome.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, the six-times-this-year visitor to the region to whom Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas ultimately could not say no, has been stressing that “this is a difficult process” and “many difficult choices lie ahead.” But, as Kerry said Tuesday at the media conference summing up the first two days of contacts, he is convinced that “we can get there.” Plainly, he wouldn’t have invested all that personal effort if he didn’t think there was a realistic prospect that the Israeli and Palestinian leaders would make the “reasonable compromises” he says are needed “on tough, complicated, emotional and symbolic issues.”

The next few months will determine if the skeptics — notably including veteran pundits who have seen so many such US-led peace bids crash and burn — have got it wrong this time, and the Kerry-led peace team has got it right. Here are 7 reasons the Americans, if not too many others, believe this time could be different.

1. President Barack Obama’s visit to the region is seen by the US peace team as the starting point of a potential sea change. Israelis were won over emotionally within minutes of Obama’s arrival at Ben Gurion Airport. He stressed the Jews’ attachment to this land, he took off his jacket, he went strolling around the airport in his shirtsleeves with “my friend Bibi,” and we were his. But the president is convinced that his trip had a substantive impact too, on Israelis, Palestinians and their leaders, impressing upon them the imperative to try to solve the conflict, and providing the assurance that his administration was committed to helping them do so.

2. Since then, Kerry has taken up the baton, and believes that he has built relationships of trust with Netanyahu and Abbas, convinced them of his investment in the peace effort, and gradually managed to create a more positive climate for progress. His efforts to minimize leaks have been a factor in the parties’ growing faith in him, the Americans believe. It’s an effort he’s intent on maintaining, so that private negotiations remain private — and trade-offs and compromises can be explored out of the media spotlight, without consequent public pressure — unless or until a deal is done. The appointment of Martin Indyk as the talks’ coordinator, they are confident, too, brings an experienced, trusted mediator into the mix. Indyk will be the hands-on player, possibly basing himself in the region as the talks move into higher gear. Kerry will be deeply involved, but has the rest of the world to worry about, and will not attend every session of negotiations.

3. Getting the sides to the table should have been relatively easy, and plainly wasn’t. Yet while critics highlight the fact that it took Kerry six trips to drag everybody off to Washington, the Americans prefer to highlight what they see as the tough decisions taken to get there. For Netanyahu, the wrenching agreement to the phased release of pre-Oslo prisoners; for Abbas, the climbdown on precondition demands for a settlement freeze and an Israeli acceptance of the pre-’67 lines as the basis for negotiating the borders of a Palestinian state. Maybe each leader only said yes to prevent the other from winning the blame game over a Kerry failure? Maybe, but that’s not the way the Americans see it.

Philip Gordon, National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East, arrives at the State Department in Washington, Monday, July 29, 2013. (photo credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

4. Unlike 2010, the last time the US managed to pull Israel and the Palestinians into the same room, there’s now a potentially lengthy period for the sides to negotiate. Three years ago, Abbas only came back to the table at the very end of Netanyahu’s 10-month settlement freeze, and the resumed talks were over almost as soon as they had begun. Now, they’ve committed to nine months of negotiation, and there’s more time if they need it, though Kerry believes nine months will be enough if there is a genuine readiness for viable compromise.

5. Both sides have committed to seriously discuss “all of the core issues,” as Kerry confirmed on Tuesday, and to do so early in the talks. Netanyahu may want Tzipi Livni to focus first on security; Abbas may want Saeb Erekat to initially concentrate on borders. But all issues are on the table from the get-go — including Jerusalem. The Americans know how wide the gaps are between the two sides. For instance, Netanyahu lectured Obama in the Oval Office, in public, two years ago about the impossibility of a return to the pre-1967 lines; but a return to those lines, with very minor adjustments, is precisely what Abbas is insisting upon. And yet, the Americans are convinced that, with growing trust, the necessary trade-offs can be made. Kerry did not engage in substantive back-and-forth negotiations on core issues during his half-a-dozen recent visits here. His focus was the back-and-forth on getting the sides to the table. But he knows the Israeli and Palestinian positions on the core issues, and believes both that reasonable compromises exist, and that the respective leaderships are capable of reaching them.

6. The Americans do not regard Abbas’s failure to seize Ehud Olmert’s 2008 offer to Abbas — which included a full withdrawal from the West Bank with one-for-one land swaps to encompass major settlement blocs, the division of Jerusalem into sovereign Israeli and Palestinian areas, and the relinquishing of Israeli sovereignty in favor of a non-sovereign trusteeship in the Holy Basin — as proof of Abbas’s ultimate intransigence. They believe both Abbas and Netanyahu have been impacted by the passage of time, by the new regional environment, by a shared concern at the conflict moving into a zone in which it becomes unresolvable. It’s not entirely clear why or how they believe these factors might soften the sides’ positions and lead them to take decisions they would not previously have taken. Regional instability is unlikely to push Netanyahu toward a greater readiness for territorial compromise, for instance, though the desire for greater concerted pressure on Iran might. But believe they do. Unlike the Olmert offer, sprung on Abbas on a “take it or leave it” basis by a prime minister soon to leave office, any deal this time would be arrived at gradually, through mutual trade-off and compromise.

7. The goal is emphatically to reach a final status, end-of-conflict accord. But the Americans are adamant that they do have fall-back positions. As underlined by the eruption of the Second Intifada in late 2000 — the Arafat-inspired strategic onslaught of suicide bombings — following the failure of the Camp David peace effort hosted by president Clinton, the Kerry team knows it would be irresponsible to shoot for the moon without a Plan B alternative landing place in the stars. Some kind of interim accord? Well, possibly. But to discuss it in any detail would be to undermine that effort at the real deal — an effort they are cautiously optimistic, this time, will pay off.

Ashton: Revived talks opens new doors for EU contribution to peace, security | JPost | Israel News.

Iran may also be enriching uranium using lasers, U.S. think tank says – Diplomacy & Defense – Israel News | Haaretz.

Institute for Science and International Security recommends further sanctions if Tehran does not give answers to the IAEA.

By Haaretz | Jul. 30, 2013 | 6:08 PM | 5

Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Photo by AP

Iran is suspected of secretly enriching uranium with the help of lasers, a program it says it ceased in 2003, according to a report by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. Iran only admits to enriching uranium via centrifuges.

The institute says Iran is still developing laser technology for enriching uranium. It notes accelerated construction at a site where this type of enrichment was once performed, and mentions then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 2010 statement that Iran had the ability to enrich uranium via laser isotope separation.

Based in part on images from commercial satellites, the institute notes the expansion of the Lashkar Ab’ad facility, where laser-assisted enrichment experiments have been done in the past. The facility was exposed in 2003 and later investigated by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Iran later announced that it had no intention of enriching uranium using laser technology, and IAEA agents who visited the facility said laser technology there was for civilian purposes. In February 2010, Ahmadinejad said Iran would for the time being enrich uranium using centrifuges rather than lasers, but the institute says the issue must be investigated considering Iran’s record of false statements.

The institute says Iran is taking steps to conceal the connection between the Lashkar Ab’ad facility and other organizations involved in laser technology, one of which has been subject to sanctions by the United States and the European Union.

The institute recommends that as long as Iran does not provide answers to the IAEA, it should be prevented from enriching uranium using lasers; one means would be additional sanctions on organizations and individuals involved in the field. The institute calls on governments to act immediately to prevent the transfer of laser technology and equipment to Iran.

The method of enriching uranium by exposing its vapors to laser beams was developed in Israel in 1969 by two young scientists: Prof. Menahem Levin of Tel Aviv University and Prof. Yeshayahu Nebenzahl. The two sought to patent the invention, but the state forbade them.

A few years later they discovered that the secret had leaked to the United States and that an Exxon subsidiary had built a facility using this method. The two professors later received monetary compensation after suing the state for not letting them take out a patent.

In any case, the method is expensive, requiring hundreds of tons of uranium. Iran began trying to enrich uranium using lasers under the Shah, when American companies were eager to sell Tehran nuclear technology of all types, including reactors, enriched uranium and laser laboratories.

The experiments went on secretly during the presidency of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who revived Iran’s nuclear program in the 1990s. These experiments were exposed only in 2003 following visits by IAEA agents.

In 2007 Yossi Melman, writing for Haaretz, assessed that Iran had not achieved a breakthrough on the laser method. He said it was hard to believe that after the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, China, Australia, and, according to foreign sources, Israel had failed to make significant progress, Iran would.

Levin himself has said that uranium enrichment via gas centrifuges is cheaper and better. Breakthroughs in recent years in the United States have made this method more efficient, but it is unclear whether Iran is capable of such technology.

In any case, Israeli officials have said in recent weeks that the pace of enrichment in the centrifuges that Iran is now building will let it skip from 3.5-percent enrichment to above the 90 percent needed for a nuclear bomb. The fear is that within weeks Iran will overcome the last obstacle to building a bomb without Western intelligence knowing ahead of time.

Ex-Mossad Head: Peace Talks were Bungled – Middle East – News – Israel National News.

Meir Dagan

Flash 90

Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad intelligence agency, said in an interview published Tuesday that the negotiations vis-a-vis the Palestinian Authority (PA) were poorly handled and therefore do not have much chance of succeeding.

“This should have been handled differently,” he explained. “We should have conducted secret negotiations with the Arab League, and only then begun open negotiations with the PA. The problem of Jerusalem, for instance, is not a PA problem but a problem of the entire Arab world. At least two states, like Jordan and Saudi Arabia, need to be brought on board, in order to give backing to any move.”

The PA and Israel have common reasons to want to advance the talks, Dagan opined. These include “the strengthening of Islam, the Iranian problem and the weakening of the PA. All these can give a boost, but I do not have much hope for the negotiations that began tonight.”

Regarding Syria, Dagan said that Israel need not fear “a few dozen Al Qaeda terrorists along the fence.” It is the Syrian army that gives Israel a reason to worry, he said, “and as far as Israel is concerned, Assad needs to go home as soon as possible.”

Dagan said that the military regime in Egypt is a good thing for Israel, and that Jordan is also in a good situation. “The regime is stable and strong, and the Hashemite monarchy is in full control of the kingdom.”

“At this time,” Dagan added, “Israel has no need to attack in Iran. We have not yet reached that situation. When the reality changes, western intelligence will know everything. Today, an attack means uniting the Iranian nation, which is currently disunited, against Israel – and this includes a war. At this time, it will give us nothing.”

Iran May Achieve Nuclear Breakout Capability in Mid-2014 – Bloomberg.

Iran may achieve the “critical capability” to process low-enriched uranium into fuel for a nuclear weapon without detection by international inspectors by mid-2014, according to a report by a research group.

Iran would reach this capability by acting on plans to install thousands of additional enrichment centrifuges at its Natanz and Fordow sites, according to David Albright, a former nuclear inspector, and Christina Walrond of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.

 

An Iranian worker puts on the final touches to a mural of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at Enghelab square in Tehran. Photographer: Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

Preventing Iran from achieving the capability to break out from nuclear safeguards will require international efforts to limit the number and type of centrifuges built by the nation, according to the report issued yesterday.

“Although increasing the frequency and type of inspections at the enrichment plants is important, it is by no means sufficient to prevent Iran from achieving critical capability,” according to the analysts.

President Barack Obama has said the U.S. will prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. America and other world powers are seeking an initial agreement halting Iran’s production of 20 percent enriched uranium — one processing step short of weapons-grade — and removing the stockpile of such medium-enriched uranium so that it can’t be diverted for weapons.

Enrichment Focus

The institute’s report focuses instead on Iran’s production of low-enriched uranium, usable as reactor fuel for power generators, which may be further enriched to bomb grade given time and sufficient centrifuges. Albright and Walrond cited scenarios in which current safeguard measures would be insufficient to detect quickly an Iranian decision to divert enough low-enriched uranium to make weapons-grade material for one or more nuclear weapons.

“Breakout times at critical capability would be so short that there simply would not be enough time to organize an international diplomatic or military response,” the analysts said.

Iran’s leaders have said its nuclear program is for civilian purposes. U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hasn’t made a decision to produce a bomb, though the nation is developing its capability to do so.

Enrichment facilities in Fordow, near the holy city of Qom, and Natanz, 130 miles southeast of Tehran, are run by Iran and monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran says the 20 percent enriched uranium, which has been of the most immediate global concern, is being processed to provide fuel for a research reactor used to produce medical isotopes.

The institute’s report says monitoring alone isn’t enough and that international negotiations should press for a halt to installation of additional centrifuges and set a cap on the total number and capabilities of those production devices.

The report also raises the possibility that Iran may be building another enrichment facility that it hasn’t declared to international monitors and that would provide an alternative route to a breakout nuclear-weapons capability.

To contact the reporter on this story: Terry Atlas in Washington at tatlas@bloomberg.net

By KHALED ABU TOAMEH

07/30/2013 19:30

Hamas leaders on Tuesday released documents which, they said, prove that Fatah and the Palestinian Authority are responsible for Egyptian media campaign against the Islamist movement in the Gaza Strip.

Iran: Armageddon at hand, prepare for war.

Islamic messiah Mahdi expected to return with Jesus, kill infidels

Published: 18 hours ago

Officials of the Islamic regime last month held their annual conference on the Mahdism Doctrine to prepare for the coming of the last Islamic messiah, the Shiites’ 12th Imam, Mahdi.

Shiites, whose clerics rule Iran with an iron fist, believe that at the end of times, Mahdi, a 9th century prophet, will reappear with Jesus Christ at his side, kill all the infidels and raise the flag of Islam in all four corners of the world, establishing worldwide Islamic governance.

Ali Larijani, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, said at the conference that, “I hope (Iran’s) Islamic Revolution is that of the righteous government before the coming,” according to Fars News Agency, the regime’s media outlet run by the Revolutionary Guards.

“Righteous government” is a key to Mahdi’s return, the Shiites believe.

“It has been stated in the Islamic hadith that a wave of uprisings (such as the current upheavals in the Arab world) … takes place before the main uprising and that the righteous government (takes place) before the coming, which I hope (Iran’s) Islamic Revolution is that.”

The speaker said that metaphysics and modern technology have diminished human spiritualism, causing a sense of nervousness in which people have lost hope, and that this effect will reach its maximum before the coming.

“All mental crises are rooted in hopelessness and despair in life,” Larijani said, “and from a society point of view, this is because the big powers of the world are pushing for a culture that has no identity and with their power give their illicit desires a legal aspect. With the help of their media, they explain away the biggest corruption.”

Many regime officials participated in this year’s conference, including military commanders, and several guests spoke of the importance of the Shiite ideology on Mahdi’s coming and the need for jihad for the final battle. The Mahdaviat conference is convened annually to prepare for the coming.

A high Iranian politician said recently that he believes the Syrian revolution could be the catalyst for sparking a worldwide conflagration that will usher in an era of Muslim domination of the world.

Become a part of the investigative reporting team uncovering the truths about Iran, and get author Reza Kahlili’s “A Time to Betray” about his life as a double agent inside Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

“One can smell from the crisis in Syria the coming … of the end of times and the coming of the last Islamic messiah,” said Ruhollah Hosseinian, a member of the Islamic regime’s parliament. Hosseinian has served as deputy of the Intelligence Ministry and a member of the board of trustees of the Islamic Revolution Document Center.

Based on hadiths by Muhammad and his descendants, the Syrian revolution is a start to the coming of Mahdi, Hosseinian said in a speech quoted by Fars News Agency.

Hadiths from Ali, the Shiites’ 1st Imam, also state that a sign of the coming will be the fall of the walls of Damascus.

Hosseinian told the audience that they should prepare themselves for war.

“The coming of his highness is assured … the prophet has promised that people from the east, which according to the hadith means Iran, take power and prepare for the government of Imam Mahdi.”

Despite the Islamic regime being under crippling U.N., U.S. and EU sanctions, it has refused to stop its illicit nuclear program. Over a decade of negotiations with talks as recent as April with the 5+1 world powers have failed. The West hopes that it could restart negotiations once Iran’s new president, Hassan Rowhani, takes office in August.

However, a former intelligence officer now defected to a Scandinavian country said the West must understand that even the election of Rowhani was by design by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, only to buy time so that the regime could reach its goal of becoming a nuclear-armed state. Some analysts believe that Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons is to facilitate the coming.

Any new negotiations must be prompt and serious, making the Islamic regime understand that there will be no wasting time, said the source, adding that the world’s balance relies on how the West handles the regime’s nuclear ambitions.

Iranian media said Rowhani would nominate Mohammad Forouzandeh, a former chief of staff of the Revolutionary Guard and a former defense minister, to head Iran’s nuclear negotiating team.

Israel Hayom | Disturbing levels of naïveté.

Zalman Shoval

In the 1930s, The Times of London was the main voice of those in Britain who believed in conciliation, who called to appease the Nazi regime or at least to learn to accept it, because “there is no way to stop it regardless.” These days it is The New York Times taking a similar stance pertaining to Iran.

Seventy-four years have passed since the conciliatory approach toward dictators and those who threaten world peace was proven, in all its ensuing cruelty, to be a monumental failure, but it seems that not everyone has learned this lesson.

An editorial in The New York Times calls for a determined stance, not against Iran, heaven forbid, but against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other “hard-liners” in Washington, because they are pushing U.S. President Barack Obama to state clearly to Iranian president-elect Hasan Rouhani that the military option is still on the table if the Islamic republic does not abandon its nuclear aspirations. You can read it again and still not believe it.

And what is this strange objection based on? On a new president being elected in Iran, who unlike his predecessor is full of smiles and sweet words toward the West in general and the United States in particular, and therefore “the United States should reach out to Mr. Rouhani, and with its other partners — Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany — it should put together a broader nuclear proposal. … That should include a process for acknowledging Iran’s right to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.”

The article also preaches against imposing further sanctions on Tehran, because doing so “would make negotiations impossible.”

The newspaper elegantly disregards the fact that Iran’s nuclear program is in no way under Rouhani’s purview, rather Ayatollah Ali Khamenei calls the shots, and fails to recognize that in Iran’s electoral reality, Rouhani cannot function (and perhaps would not have been elected in the first place) without the overt and covert support of Khamenei and the ayatollahs.

Perhaps more concerning than this specific editorial piece is the fact that over the past few weeks, the international and American media are producing, at a greater rate, more articles, usually penned by “Iranian experts,” arguing to adopt the same conciliatory approach expressed in The New York Times.

While it is true that in the past we also heard from professors, who from their lofty academic perches also advised us to come to terms with an Iranian bomb, they were the negligible minority. Now it is difficult to open a paper without seeing articles, for example, like the one by former U.S. State Department official Cliff Kupchan (currently director for the Middle East at Eurasia Group), who believes that the new Iranian president provides a chance for talks to succeed that should not be squandered.

The concerning question that must be asked, of course, is whether a guiding hand is not behind all of this media activity. While Obama vowed publicly that “Iran will not have a bomb,” there are those who doubt his determination, and the very fact that until now there has not been one clear American warning regarding the military option, could strengthen these misgivings.

It would be an exaggeration to accuse American policymakers of the same conscious policy of appeasement employed in the 1930s in Europe (and in America as well) toward Hitler, but the possibility that Washington will adopt a policy of “containment” is growing stronger. In other words, the U.S. will accept, in actuality, a militarized Iranian nuclear capability, with the warning that if Tehran uses a nuclear weapon it can expect to receive a decisive counterblow.

We must be very clear that accepting a bomb will be understood throughout the entire region as the end of the American superpower’s ability to determine, or at least to influence, matters in the Middle East.

The Israeli prime minister has been unfairly criticized in the past for comparing, allegedly, outgoing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (and Khamenei) to Hitler. But Netanyahu never actually compared the former to the latter, despite the similarities; rather, he recalled the enlightened world’s weak response to the threats and actions of the Nazis toward the Jews. To our great sorrow, this comparison would likely be appropriate if not for Israel’s ability, unlike Europe’s Jews under Hitler’s boot, to defend itself on its own, even against the Iranian threat.

Kerry in secret final-status talks with Netanyahu and Abbas on borders, security, Jerusalem, Jordan Valley.

John Kerry hosts Israel, Palestinian peace negotiators.

The ceremonial launch of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations early Tuesday, July 30, over the Muslim iftar meal in the State Department Jefferson room, made a photogenic front for the real brass-tacks bargaining on core issues of the long Middle East dispute, which Secretary of State John Kerry has been handling discreetly with the principals, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. This was first revealed exclusively in the last DEBKA Weekly issue of Friday, July 26.

While the formal US-led talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams were being set up for the benefit of the public in the US, the Arab world, Israel and the Palestinians, Kerry was putting hard questions to the Israeli and Palestinian leaders and pushing for answers on borders, security, the Jordan Rift Valley and Jerusalem.  From time to time, he brought Arab leaders into the process, especially from the Persian Gulf.
Abbas made his sudden trip to Cairo Monday, July 27 to demonstrate to the US Secretary and Israeli prime minister that he had his own lines to Arab rulers independent of Kerry’s tactics. In the end, his show fizzled. No important Egyptian leader had time to see him before the formal launch of talks in Washington or clue him in on the Egyptian military’s plans for the Gaza Strip and its Hamas rulers.
The technical aspects and negotiating procedures were left to the official negotiators, Justice Minister Tzipi Llivni and Saeb Erekat, to sort out Tuesday. However, debkafile’s sources in Jerusalem and Washington report exclusively that Kerry had meanwhile challenged Netanyahu on three core issues:

Would he adopt the security arrangements-versus-borders formula conceded by his predecessor Ehud Olmert to President Obama and Abbas in early 2009, in which he offered to cede around 94.6 percent of the West Bank to the Palestinians?
Although the Palestinians never accepted the offer, they are now trying to make it the starting-point of the current round of talks. If Netanyahu rejected this, Kerry asked what alternative he had in mind in terms of territory he is prepared to cede on the West Bank – bearing in mind that Jewish settlements stand on app. 9.8 percent of the West Bank (not counting Jerusalem).
In this way, the US Secretary quietly launched final-status negotiations on future borders

He also asked the Israeli prime minister what he meant in terms of the scope and depth of Israel’s proposed withdrawal when he insisted that Israel must retain a security presence on the Jordan Rift Valley which marks part of Israel’s eastern border. Kerry wanted to know if Jewish communities would be removed and only a military presence left in place.

This question jumped the process fast forward to the interrelations between security measures and the final borders between the Israeli and Palestinian states.

Kerry also wanted to find out how much financial aid Israel was ready to commit for raising the standard of living of West Bank Palestinians.
A question he addressed to both Netanyahu and Abbas related to the deployment of an international force as a buffer between the Palestinians and the Israel Defense Forces.
The prime minister was open to discussing this plan. Abbas gave his answer from Cairo Monday night when he declared that “not a single Israeli must remain in the Palestinian state, whether soldier or civilian.” He indicated that he would not object to an international force on the lines of UNIFIL in Lebanon or the Multinational Force in Sinai,or even NATO units.
He also asked Kerry to put forward ideas on the Jerusalem question and the shape of the Palestinian state’s borders.