Our wobbly ally

Caroline B. Glick, Jerusalem Post, Aug. 15, 2003

Eyebrows were raised on Tuesday when, just hours after Fatah and Hamas bombed civilians in Rosh Ha'ayin and Ariel, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said that Palestinian terrorism would have no effect on US Middle East policy.

So while the Bush administration claims to be going on the offensive, it attacks every move Israel makes both defensive and offensive to protect itself against terrorism.

Click here to return to our home page.

Israel's Ambassador accuses UN of hypocrisy
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, NEW YORK, Jerusalem Post, Sep. 15, 2003
 

The UN Security Council met Monday to discuss palestinian protests over the Israeli government's decision to remove Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat.

In advance of the meeting, Ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman Monday accused the Security Council of hypocrisy for considering the Palestinian resolution. Gillerman said the Security Council has met repeatedly to condemn Israeli actions, but ignores Palestinian suicide bombings and shooting attacks on Israelis.

As Gillerman was speaking, the Palestinian envoy to the UN Nasser al-Kidwa got up and left the discussion hall.

"High-minded rhetoric about the so-called legitimacy of Mr. Arafat's leadership and the illegitimacy of Israel's interference, are meaningless and hypocritical in the face of the hundreds of dead and injured innocent civilians killed with the direct approval or acquiescence of Mr. Arafat himself."

"For how long will there be states among us who are willing to continue the charade of touting Mr. Arafat as a legitimate leader committed to the welfare of his people and peaceful relations with his neighbors. The ruin that Mr. Arafat has left behind in Jordan, in Lebanon, and in the West Bank testify that he has brought nothing but despair and devastation to his own people and to other people in the region," Gillerman said.

"It would be a grave error if the Council were to come to the aid not of the victims of terrorism, but of their sponsor and perpetrator. The Council's focus should be directed first and foremost at terrorism and at its facilitators, and not at the response to terrorism. Pressure should be directed against the problem and not against those who are its victims, " he added.

Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and other members of the security Cabinet have made clear that the army has three options for "removing" Arafat: expulsion, assassination or laying a siege on his West Bank headquarters, including cutting off phone lines and electricity.

The council began consultations on a resolution drafted by the Palestinians late Friday and then adjourned until today, despite Palestinian pressure for a quick vote.

Council ambassadors said they wanted to consult their capitals and wait for the outcome of Secretary-General Kofi Annan's meeting in Geneva on Saturday with the foreign ministers of the five permanent council nations - the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France.

Russia considers that any attempt by Israel to remove Arafat would be
counterproductive and could lead to a serious global crisis in the Mideast, Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov said.

An attempt to kill Arafat could lead to "an immense and wide scale growth in the threat of terrorism," he said.

So far, the council has only issued a press statement saying "the removal of chairman Arafat would be unhelpful and should not be implemented." The statement, read by the council president, British Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry, reflected the consensus among the 15 council members.

The government is trying to persuade the United States to veto the resolution, Gillerman said, but at the moment it seems more likely Washington will abstain, allowing the resolution to pass. The United States has in the past vetoed resolutions that it has felt are too hard on Israel.

Without a U.S. veto, "we can expect a resolution, which the Palestinians and others are presenting as a moderate and lukewarm statement...but in my opinion the very fact of the meeting is proof...of the U.N.'s real hypocrisy," Gillerman said in an interview with Army Radio.

Israel has intensified its hunt for militants since an Aug. 19 bus bombing in which 23 people, including six children, were killed. After twin suicide bombing attacks last Tuesday, in which 15 people were murdered, the security cabinet decided to "remove" Arafat, calling him the major obstacle to peace.

"The fact that the Security Council remembers meet because of a decision to expel a person, who in everyone's opinion is a murderer and responsible for the wave of terrorism, and possibly for the worst terrorism in the 21st century, is a black mark," Gillerman said.

Arye Mekel, Gillerman's deputy, said Israel would use the Security Council podium on Monday to air its grievances against Arafat.

"Even if the U.N. doesn't like this (the Cabinet decision), it certainly isn't the first time that there is a difference of opinion between the state of Israel and the U.N...These resolutions have no teeth," Mekel told Israel Radio.

The Palestinian U.N. envoy Nasser al-Kidwa said the council must take an immediate stand "when illegal actions are taken by member states."

The Palestinian draft "demands that Israel, the occupying power, desist from any act of deportation and to cease any threat to the safety of the elected president of the Palestinian Authority."

It calls for the cessation of violence - including all acts of terror, provocation, incitement and destruction - and increased efforts by both sides to ensure implementation of the road map.

It also would reiterate the council's concern over the "tragic and violent" events that have taken place since September 2000 when the latest Israeli-Palestinian clashes began, "and the recent dangerous deterioration of the situation, including the escalation in extrajudicial executions and suicide bombings."

In the UK, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government on Monday said the Israeli government's suggestion that it was considering killing Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was "unacceptable."

A spokesman for Blair said the Israeli ambassador, Zvi Shtauber, was summoned to the Foreign Office and met with a British minister, Baroness Symons.

"At that meeting, it was made clear that the government views that the expulsion of President Arafat would be wrong, and would not be in the interests of long-term peace, and that the comments made about assassinating President Arafat were unacceptable," said Blair's spokesman, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity.

Earlier, Blair's office had been more guarded in its reaction.

"We have to recognize that raising the rhetoric is not necessarily a helpful way" of forwarding the road map to peace in the region, a spokesman told reporters earlier in the day.

Israel would be making an "extremely dangerous" mistake by forcibly removing Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from his seat of power, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said Monday.

Following talks with French President Jacques Chirac in Paris, Mubarak said fears that Israel might even assassinate Arafat would only plunge the troubled region into further violence.

"If everyone in the world killed his adversary, the world would be in total chaos," he told reporters, speaking in Arabic. A translation of his remarks was provided by Chirac's office.

Insisting, that killing Arafat "would resolve nothing," Mubarak said he has asked the Bush administration in Washington to pressure Israel into leaving the Palestinian leader alone.

"We told them (the Americans) that removing Yasser Arafat would be extremely dangerous," Mubarak said. "This is not because we love Yasser Arafat. This is about life, security and the stability of two countries."

Chirac agreed that expelling or otherwise eliminating Arafat would be futile, according to presidential spokeswoman Catherine Colonna. She added that world opinion viewed Israel's threats against Arafat as "counterproductive."

Chirac and Mubarak called on Israelis and Palestinians to start implementing the peace plan known as the "road map," which was drafted by the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.

Read the full text of the speech given to the Security Council by the Israeli Ambassador

Click here to return to our home page.

Muslim rage

Editorial, Jerusalem Post, Sep. 16, 2003
 
Yesterday, this newspaper ran a headline: "US: Israel shouldn't enrage Muslims." This is odd, coming from the United States. It is a clear throwback to the sentiment in some quarters that if only that thorn, Israel, were to be removed from the paw of the Arabs, things would go more smoothly.

The headline was based on Secretary of State Colin Powell's comment opposing exiling or harming Yasser Arafat, because "...there would be rage throughout the Arab world, the Muslim world, and in many other parts of the world." But if one were to follow such logic, does not Israel have at least as great grounds for complaint against the US? If assuaging radical Arab sensibilities should be a centerpiece of Western policy, would not a headline "Israel: US shouldn't enrage Muslims" be in order?

The US, after all, has recently invaded two Muslim countries and toppled their regimes; it occupies both and rules one of them directly. Along the way, the US has used aerial bombings against key targets in civilian areas in Afghanistan and Iraq, almost certainly killing more Muslim civilians than Israel has over the past three years.

At the same time, the US supports some Muslim regimes, such as in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, that are not held in high esteem by their citizens so much so that it is not thought to be a coincidence that all of the 9/11 terrorists who attacked America came from those two countries.

If sparking Muslim rage is a problem, than we here are amateurs compared to the US. Nor would we be disinterested parties, given that in the Muslim world, Israel is considered not only to be an American outpost, but the one most physically and diplomatically convenient to attack. Having been living under a terrorist onslaught for almost three years, Muslim "rage" is hardly an academic concern for us. If rage-minimization were the goal, it is Israel that would have to worry about the US more than the US about Israel.

Why, then, is Israel not asking the US to stop enraging Muslims? Because Israel agrees with the US that the surest way to enrage radical Muslims is to recognize the legitimacy of their rage rather than blame them for it. And we agree that the surest way to douse that "rage" is not by succumbing to terrorism but by proving that it can and will be fought and beaten.

Just before the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, for example, it was widely predicted that the Arab "street" would rise up and turn over the Middle East. In fact, the moment it became clear that the Taliban would be defeated, the anti-American protests in Arab capitals dissipated. According to the do-not-provoke theory, the result should have been the opposite: The "rage" should have peaked when Kabul fell.

The American people and government know that a policy of attempting not to enrage Arab radicals would be disastrous and would paralyze the war against terrorism. They also know that there is nothing America did or could stop doing that would have prevented 9/11, and that the only way to prevent future acts of mega-terrorism is to work relentlessly to root out terrorist groups and confront the countries that support them.

The idea that Israel should be an exception to this American understanding is strange, especially since the US has come to the same conclusion as Israel: that Arafat is preventing any Palestinian leader from lifting a finger to fight terrorism.
Presumably, the US position is based on the idea that Arafat can be persuaded to release his grip on the armed forces under his control or direct them to fight terrorism. Yet the US has provided no basis for this position. Given the failure and resignation of Mahmoud Abbas, the US cannot simply ask Israel to restrain itself without providing a reasonable alternative.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's acquiescence to US dictates has, for the time being, strengthened Arafat. It also places a burden on the US to deliver an alternative policy, given that Israel has been asked to desist from what it believes it must do.

The Arafat/Hamas alliance is testing the proposition that Palestinian statehood can be achieved through terror, rather than by crushing terror. If the US has an idea how to confront or break up this alliance without causing Muslim rage, we are all ears.

Click here to return to our home page.

Egyptian MP: Nothing Will Work with Israel Except Nuclear Bomb (AP/Ha'aretz)
    "That cursed Israel is trying to destroy al-Aqsa mosque," Mohammed el-Katatny of President Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic Party told a heated Egyptian parliament session on Monday.
    "Nothing will work with Israel except for a nuclear bomb that wipes it out of existence," he said.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Feb 13, 2007]

Egyptians See Israel, Denmark, U.S. as Enemies (AFP/Ynet News)
    A poll made public on Wednesday by an Egyptian state institute showed that 92% of Egyptians see Israel as an enemy - despite the peace agreement between the two countries.
    60% say Denmark is an enemy of Egypt, while 50% view America as an enemy.
    Countries crowned as "friends" of Egypt include Saudi Arabia, Libya, the PA, Sudan, and Syria.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Nov 2, 2006]

Egyptian Democracy Activists Demand End to Peace Treaty with Israel - Hamza Hendawi
Egypt's best-known democracy movement has switched causes and is now focused on demanding an end to the country's peace treaty with Israel. The Kifaya movement has launched a campaign to collect one million signatures on a petition calling for the annulment of Egypt's 1979 peace treaty with Israel. 100,000 signatures have been collected so far, said Kifaya spokesman George Ishaq.
    "One of the costs of pressing for democracy in the Middle East is the fact that most democratically based Arab parties...will be hostile to Israel," said Edward S. Walker, a former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and Israel and now with the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank. (AP/Washington Post)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Sep 15, 2006]

Jackson Diehl, Washingon Post Columnist, 12/5/2005:   How autocrats like Mubarak undermine their liberal opponents while strengthening Islamists in order to impress upon their people and the world at large that their only choice is between tyranny and Islamism.

Egypt Primes Children for Jihad - Yaakov Lappin (Ynet News)
    Egyptian Islamic Sheik Muhammad Nassar, a cleric working for the state ministry of religious endowment, has used a children's television program broadcast on Al-Nas television to encourage young children to strive for holy war.
    During the program, made available by the Arabic translation service MEMRI, the cleric told about Muslim children in history keen to "sacrifice" themselves and kill "infidels" for the cause of Islam.
    See also Egyptian Cleric Tells Children about Child Martyrdom (MEMRI)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Jul 6, 2006]

A Cold Peace with Jordan? How About No Peace at All - Uriel Heilman
Near the Shariah Islamic Law Department at the University of Jordan in Amman, a blue Star of David is spray-painted on a concrete path so students can trample the symbol every time they walk by. At the Center for Strategic Studies, center director Mustafa Hamarneh says, "Israel is probably the last openly bigoted racist country today." This is the voice of moderation in Jordan today. While the two governments have developed close strategic ties since their leaders signed a historic peace treaty 12 years ago, acceptance of Israel among rank-and-file Jordanians remains abysmally low.
    "The peace is between governments, not the people," said Hani Hourani, the director general of the Al-Urdun Al-Jadid Research Center in Amman. "It is not even between the elites. It is not even between NGOs." A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that a whopping 100 percent of those polled in Jordan have "unfavorable" views of Jews - more even than Lebanon's 99 percent. "Israel is not a country. It is a terrorist organization founded by the British government in 1948," said University of Jordan student Omar Al-Hinfi, expressing a commonly held view in his country. "It is something put in the whole Arab world to serve the colonial powers." (JTA/Philadelphia Jewish Exponent)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Oct 27, 2006]

Column One: A grave and gathering threat

Caroline B. Glick, Jerusalem Post, Dec. 12, 2003

One week after Egypt scuttled Israel's proposed UN resolution condemning the murder of Israeli children by terrorists, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom met with Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak in Geneva.

Commenting on Wednesday's meeting on Israel Radio, Shalom explained, "The very existence of the meeting... show[s] more than anything that the Egyptians have tried to warm up relations with Israel."

Shalom met with Mubarak ahead of the autocrat's trip to Washington. In so doing, while Shalom received nothing for his trouble of meeting with Mubarak, Mubarak received Israeli cover ahead of his meetings with US President George W. Bush. And Mubarak could use such Israeli legitimacy. This week, Egypt absorbed a public relations blow when the UN's Human Rights Report lambasted its miserable human rights record.

It is a shame that our foreign minister felt it necessary to confer such legitimacy on Mubarak. One of the worst-kept secrets in our region is that aside from Iran's nuclear weapons program, Egypt is the greatest looming threat to Israel's national security. As our governing officials pander to Mubarak and his top brass, these men oversee diplomatic and military policies that endanger the very existence of the Jewish state.

Egypt is generally applauded for what is considered its "constructive" role in attempting to end the Palestinian terror war. Mubarak's intelligence chief Omar Suleiman's efforts to secure a temporary cessation of terrorist attacks are viewed in a positive light.

In the Foreign Ministry's press release about the meeting in Geneva, the ministry said that Shalom "found that the Egyptian president was committed to the peace process." And yet Egypt plays a pivotal role in enabling, justifying, and prolonging the Palestinian terror war against Israel.

As Chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee MK Yuval Steinitz points out, the Egyptian initiative to achieve a temporary cease-fire among the various Palestinian terrorist organizations is aimed not at achieving peace, but at "preserving Hamas's terror capabilities."

"In pushing for the so-called hudna, the Egyptians are trying to force a temporary cease-fire that will save Hamas from the demand that it be dismantled as is dictated by the road map," Steinitz explains. "Doing so is not only counter to the expressed demands of the road map.

It is antithetical to the objectives of the US war on terror. These call explicitly for an end to state sponsorship of terrorism and for the denial of safe havens and bases of operation for terrorists," he adds.

For the past three years, the Egyptian military has turned a blind eye to the constant smuggling of weaponry to Palestinian terrorist forces through tunnel networks in the Sinai Desert. "In enabling the continuation of the smuggling operations, Egypt has become the logistical base for Hamas," Steinitz argues. [PAC Comment:  Direct from Egyptian army bases no less]

Egypt's support for the continuation of the Palestinian terror war is part and parcel of an overall strategy of weakening Israel politically, diplomatically, and defensively while building up the Egyptian armed forces to a level of parity with the IDF. Dr. Arieh Stav, director of the Ariel Center for Policy Research, explains, "Egypt is an impoverished country. Its per capita income is $870.

And yet, it spends a quarter of its GDP on its military. Egypt has 450,000 men in uniform and another 450,000 men in its paramilitary units. This battle roster does not include its reserve forces. By way of comparison, at the height of World War II, Nazi Germany did not spend such a large proportion of its GDP on its war efforts."

Egypt's military capabilities include a sophisticated and well-stocked arsenal of chemical and biological weapons as well as advanced ballistic missiles capable of targeting Israel.

According to Dr. Dany Shoham from Bar-Ilan University's Begin Sadat Center, the Egyptian chemical arsenal includes VX, sarin, mustard gas, and luisite.

"Egypt was the first Middle East country to develop and use chemical weapons. It did so effectively in its war with Yemen between 1962-67," Shoham notes, adding, "Egypt's chemical and biological weapons procurement programs reached their height in the 1970s and 1980s.

While in the 1990s, Egypt claimed alternately that its non-conventional arsenals were of a defensive nature or that it had no such arsenals, the fact is that there are no indications whatsoever that their chemical and biological weapons were dispensed with – to the contrary. Their weapons were also not rendered obsolete with the passage of time. There is in fact no certainty whatsoever that the Egyptians ceased their development programs."

Egypt's biological arsenal contains advanced strains of toxins, bacterial and viral agents. Egypt possesses varied and advanced dispersal systems for its unconventional weapons. These include chemical mines, artillery shells, aerial bombs, and ballistic warheads. Egypt's ballistic missile systems include advanced Scud and Nodong missiles. As late as this year, Egypt continued its ballistic missile collaboration with North Korea and there have been scattered reports of cooperation with Libya as well.

In the 1980's Egyptian scientists and engineers actively participated in Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons programs. This Egyptian-Iraqi cooperation continued, with less publicity during the 1990's according to US government sources at the time. In the lead-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, the Egyptian government refused US and British requests that those engineers and scientists be interviewed by US officials.

Egypt has continued to cultivate its weapons of mass destruction programs while modernizing its conventional armed forces. The $2 billion in annual US military assistance has allowed Egypt to transform its armed forces from a Soviet era force to a modern and sophisticated Western military.

Egypt has built local production facilities for the US M1A1 Abrams main battle tank. Israeli pilots have noted with alarm over the years that the US-trained Egyptian pilots in US-supplied F-16 fighter jets may well have achieved operational parity with the IAF.

And, Steinitz notes, "While Egypt has achieved near parity with Israel in ground and air forces, its naval power has outstripped Israel's. Today, the Egyptian navy has 2-3 times the number of naval platforms as Israel."

A former senior IDF intelligence officer allows that "Egypt's military buildup is beyond any proportion to conceivable external threats to Egypt and is a cause for alarm." Yet, at the same time, he argues that under Mubarak's dictatorship, Egypt has no interest in moving towards open warfare with Israel. "The problem will arise if a succession crisis ensues after Mubarak's death."

This argument, that 75-year-old Mubarak's despotic rule of Egypt acts as a barrier to protect Israel from his own massive buildup of Egypt's military forces, is the conventional wisdom on Egypt. It is voiced by officials throughout the political spectrum in Israel and accepted unquestioningly in Washington. The problem is that Egypt's military is explicit in naming Israel as the intended recipient of the full brunt of its massive might.

Starting in 1996, the order of battle at Egypt's annual Bader combined forces exercise has explicitly named the opposing force as "a small nation to the country's northeast." Unless the Egyptians are referring to the Gaza Strip, that nation is of course Israel.

"The Egyptian military has already achieved absolute superiority against any Middle Eastern and African state. Egypt has no military threat to deal with from anywhere. It does not even have border disputes with any of its neighbors," Steinitz notes. "It is clear that Egypt is working to achieve military parity with Israel. This is made all the more dangerous when one bears in mind that in the event of a war, Egypt will not be fighting by itself but rather as part of a coalition of Arab states."

Steinitz also notes with worry the recent intensification of cooperation between the Egyptian and Saudi Arabian air forces.

The Saudi air force has drawn recent attention because since the US-led invasion of Iraq it has stationed F-16 squadrons at Tabuk airfield, within striking distance of Israel. This deployment is in contravention of US pledges to Israel that the Saudi F-16s, flown by US-trained pilots, would be prohibited from using the Tabuk air base.

The US, which has almost singlehandedly overseen Egypt's conventional military ascendancy, has not made any serious attempt to alter Egypt's behavior. Again, the common wisdom is that Mubarak is a moderate who, regardless of his personal view of Israel, understands that it does not serve his interests to abrogate his country's peace treaty with Israel. And yet, largely as a result of the actions of officially-sponsored incitement, Egypt is one of the most anti-Semitic countries in the world.

As Steinitz notes, "Mubarak, through years of incitement, has prepared his people psychologically for war against Israel and has even brought them to assume that such a war is inevitable."

By signing a peace agreement with Israel, Egypt became the second-largest recipient of US military assistance in the world. It has received a pass for its anti-Semitism and active support of Palestinian terrorist organizations. Its massive militarization, non-conventional arsenal, and its refusal to develop its civilian economy or grant political freedom to its subjects have been systematically ignored.

In many ways, the Egyptian experience is mirrored by that of the PLO, itself an organization founded by Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1964. After signing the 1993 Oslo Accord with Israel, the PLO benefited from Israeli arms and US training of its forces.

Its incitement was ignored. Its corrupt autocracy in the territories was encouraged in the interest of "stability." The fact that on paper the PLO remains committed to peace with Israel preserves its international legitimacy in spite of its actions and declarations that prove unequivocally that it is still bent on Israel's destruction as its principle aim.

In Egypt's case, as Steinitz explains, "It is an alarming irony that while Israel has a peace agreement with Egypt, but remains in an official state of war with Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Syria, and Libya, Egypt causes Israel more damage diplomatically and constitutes a larger threat militarily than all these states that are still our declared enemies."

Click here to return to our home page.

On the front lines

Caroline B. Glick, Jerusalem Post, January 30, 2004

(Click here to be taken immediately a few paragraphs down to the analysis PM Sharon's Gaza Plan)

My home is alongside the ambulance route in Jerusalem so I don't need to listen to the radio to know when bombs go off in the city. If I don't hear the blasts themselves, I hear the ambulance convoys – their sirens screeching and howling as they pummel into traffic on their way to evacuate wounded and take them to the trauma wards. The sirens are a constant reminder that I live on the front lines of the war.

By noon yesterday, I received a more personalized confirmation of this fact. I heard news that among the wounded in yesterday's carnage are two of my friends. One is still in surgery as I write these lines. I am told that his wounds are not life threatening. The other, who got off with a broken knee, lies in Shaare Zedek's orthopedic ward awaiting word of whether she needs surgery. [PAC comment: January 29, 2004, 8:48 AM, Jerusalem: the 109th suicide bombing during the last 3 years]

Government sources were quick to tell us that there is no connection between the carnage in Rehavia and the deal negotiated with Hizballah that was proceeding in Germany as our enemies murdered and maimed us in the streets of Jerusalem. Science Minister Eliezer Sandberg announced, "There is no connection and it is forbidden to make a connection between the bombing and the deal for the prisoner swap."

The fact that the PLO's Fatah terror group claimed responsibility for the attack on Hizballah television should give considerable pause to those like Sandberg who protest that there is no connection. In fact Fatah and Hizballah have been cooperating closely since late 2001. Fatah receives funding and direction from Iran. Hizballah is an Iranian organization.

The date of the prisoner swap was announced publicly last week. No doubt, Hizballah has known the date for some time. There is no reason not to suspect that this information was passed on to Fatah and so today was chosen for the attack. What better way for Hizballah chief Hassan Nasrallah to declare complete victory over Israel than for his allies to carry out a massacre of Israeli civilians the day he secures the release of hundreds of their terrorist brethren?

We shouldn't be surprised that our national leadership is making such statements in the wake of the bombing. In the sensational build-up to the prisoner swap, we have received a full diet of groundless assertions by our leadership. IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon for instance said on Tuesday in the Knesset that Hizballah would be unlikely to resume kidnappings after the prisoner swap because its leadership knows that the IDF will respond militarily to such an action. Even Channel 2's left-wing commentator Amnon Abramovich couldn't resist mentioning that given Israel's decision not to retaliate for the abduction of our soldiers and subsequent Hizballah attacks, Israeli threats today have little credibility with Nasrallah.

Indeed, how can anyone with a modicum of common sense make the argument that terror doesn't pay when they look at the current positions of our government and security brass? Hizballah received 461 live terrorists and 59 dead terrorists for going to the trouble of abducting and murdering our soldiers and kidnapping Elhanan Tannenbaum. If that isn't a good payoff for terrorism, what is?

And yet, the deal with Hizballah is but one of the strategic errors of the government in recent days and weeks.

On Sunday, the government approved the election of Irineos I as the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem. In July 2001, Irineos penned a letter to PA chief Yasser Arafat riddled with anti-Semitic slanders. He told Arafat that the Jews are "crucifying" the Palestinians. In addition, Irineos informed Arafat that he looked forward to cooperating with Arafat in Jerusalem. Irineos has claimed that the letter is a forgery, but a police investigation, which was closed two weeks ago, substantiated its authenticity. Sources close to the investigation say that three people were with Irineos when he penned the letter and all provided testimony to the police that the letter was authentic.

The Greek Orthodox Church is the largest landowner in Israel after the Jewish National Fund. The church owns large swathes of Rehavia and Talbiyeh neighborhoods in Jerusalem including the land on which the Knesset, the Prime Minister's Residence and the President's Residence are located. As patriarch, Irineos will have the power to refuse to renew the leases for the land when they come due in the coming years.

The cabinet had no reason to approve the appointment. Israel is under no obligation to approve the lifetime appointment of an anti-Semite to an office which owns such sensitive sites. One must wonder what motivated our ministers to approve this appointment that risks handing control of such vital properties to Arafat's friend. In an interview with Kul al-Arab last week, Irineos's spokesman said that the cabinet bowed to pressure from the US and Greek governments as well as to pressure from Israeli businessmen in approving the appointment.

Operation Cast Lead And Its Aftermath- Israel Strikes To Stop Hamas Rockets

The Unilateral Gaza Withdrawal And Its Aftermath

Hamas Smuggling New Arsenal into Gaza - Amos Harel (Ha'aretz)
    Hamas has smuggled a new arsenal into Gaza that would upset the balance of power, Israel believes.
    Militants currently have 160 tunnels beneath the Sinai border that they are using to smuggle longer range rockets, anti-tank missiles and perhaps even anti-aircraft missiles, security sources say. Some of the tunnels are large enough to let small all-terrain vehicles pass.
    With the help of Hizbullah, Hamas has drawn up a new strategy of engagement with the IDF based on anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles.
    In addition, Iranian technology has been used to increase the range of Kassam rockets Hamas is producing in Gaza to more than 20 km.
    Israeli officials believe Egypt has not managed to reduce the flow of arms into Gaza.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, April 22, 2009]

How to Release Hostages - Wayne Long (New York Times)
    During my 10 years as the chief security adviser for the UN in Somalia, my team and I negotiated releases in more than a dozen hostage cases.
    Our strategy was simple: UN assistance was withheld from the Somali clan or region by which or in which hostages were being held until those hostages were released. In every case there was a release, and in no case were hostages harmed or ransom paid.
    In 1995, for example, the water supply for Mogadishu, the capital, was shut off by the UN humanitarian agencies until a hostage who worked for another aid organization was released.
    On the first day of the shutoff, the women who collected water from public distribution points yelled at the kidnappers; on the second day they stoned them; on the third day they shot at them; on the fourth day, the hostage was released.
    The writer, a former Army colonel, was the UN's chief security officer in Somalia from 1993 to 2003.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, April 21, 2009]

Army's Ethics Chief: Israel Fought Fair in Gaza - Karin Laub
"I didn't see in the Gaza operation anything that can teach us or show us that something in the moral attitude of the IDF was...changed or spoiled," Brig. Gen. Eli Shermeister, the Israeli army's chief education officer and ethics watchdog, said in an interview. A wave of international criticism, and an imminent UN investigation, have deepened a sense in Israel that it is being treated unfairly and held to impossible standards. Most Israelis felt the war was a justified response to the Palestinian missile campaign that has disrupted life in southern Israel and killed more than 20 people. (AP/Washington Post)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, April 10, 2009]

Arms Pouring into Gaza - Guy Bechor
Immense quantities of missiles are still pouring into Gaza. Under the guise of a temporary calm, a major military buildup is being undertaken there ahead of the next round of fighting. Meanwhile, Israeli communities are still being bombarded. Iran, the Palestinians, and other elements are very determined to transfer the arms to Gaza and threaten Israel's population centers. The implication of the bombing in Sudan is that our security coordination with Egypt is slim. If the convoy in Sudan was meant to reach Egypt, why would the Egyptians have any problems seizing it, just like the Cypriots seized the arms ship that entered their territory? Apparently, we indeed have no way of counting on the Egyptians on this front. (Ynet News)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, April 3, 2009]

Gaza and Darfur: Some People Matter More than Others - Savo Heleta
The recent conflict between Israel and Hamas has created fury, especially in the Muslim world, with large demonstrations in a number of countries in the Middle East and North Africa. One has to wonder why the Darfur conflict has never received similar attention. Over the past six years about 200,000 civilians in Darfur have died from fighting, starvation and disease. The UN estimates that more than 2 million Darfurians, out of a population of about 6 million, are living in refugee camps. Yet to this day, not one Arab or Muslim leader has publicly criticized Sudan's actions in Darfur, even though both sides in Darfur are Muslim and Darfurians - both Arabs and Africans - are Sudan's most devout Muslims.
    Ahmed Hussein Adam, spokesman of the Justice and Equality Movement, currently the most powerful Darfur rebel movement, says it is shameful that many seem to "consider the blood of the people of Darfur less important than the blood of the people of Gaza." Abdel Wahid al-Nur, leader of one faction of the Darfur rebel Sudan Liberation Movement, thinks that "if the Arab and Islamic countries mobilized 10% of what they did for Gaza," they could have stopped the suffering of millions in Darfur a long time ago. (Sudan Tribune)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, March 27, 2009]

Experts: Palestinians Fire Improved Rockets - Shmulik Hadad
Experts say the two Grad rockets that landed in Ashkelon Saturday were new and improved models, capable of greater destruction than those usually fired from Gaza. The rocket that hit a school succeeded in penetrating the fortification used to protect it from projectiles. The rockets were locally manufactured 170 mm rockets with a range of 14 km (8.6 miles) and are capable of massive damage. [Standard Grads are 107 mm or 122 mm.] Two tractors were required to pull the rocket from the ground in which it had become lodged. (Ynet News)
    See also Ten Rockets Hit Israel Saturday - Yanir Yagna (Ha'aretz)
    See also Six Rockets Hit Israel Sunday - Shmulik Hadad (Ynet News)

Netanyahu: Why Pour Money into Gaza before Rockets Stop? - Herb Keinon
Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu voiced serious reservations during recent meetings with foreign leaders about money going into Gaza for reconstruction before the rocket fire on Israel has stopped. One Netanyahu aide said that with the Gaza reconstruction conference, it seemed as if the world felt that attacks on Israel were a thing of the past, when they were taking place daily. (Jerusalem Post)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, March 2, 2009]

Ashkelon, Back in Cross Hairs - Joshua Mitnick
Over the weekend in Ashkelon, a Hamas rocket landed in the courtyard of the Amit religious high school, spraying tiny metal shrapnel balls that left the walls with giant pockmarks. In an adjacent computer lab, the ceiling tiles were blown out from the force of the explosion, leaving monitors covered in dust and metal frames and a light fixture dangling overhead "Here is what's left of the computer lab," said Tomer Sultan, the computer teacher. "I used to worry about every little virus; now...80% of the computers are dead."
    The direct hit at the school injured no one because it occurred on a Saturday morning. "If it happened one day later, we would be at war now," said a security guard. Sultan said that Ashkelon residents had hoped that the operation in Gaza would stop the missile fire, but that didn't happen. (New York Jewish Week)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, March 6, 2009]

Separating Myths from Facts - Michael Gove
There is a wave of public feeling which holds that Western nations that take up arms against terrorist enemies are guilty of near-criminal folly. Their actions will be horrifically self-defeating, the terrorists they target will only emerge strengthened. A wave of criticism hit Israel in the aftermath of the counterterrorist fighting in Jenin, when words such as "massacre" and comparisons with the Russian razing of Grozny bubbled to the surface. The Chechen action cost the lives of tens of thousands of civilians. In Jenin the total number of casualties was 75: 26 terrorists, 23 Israeli soldiers and 26 civilians. Each death a tragedy. But the reality of that grim arithmetic is that it does not add up to the massacre that was reported. As we consider the heart-rending suffering in Gaza, let us also root our reaction in hard, corroborated facts which in some cases are only now emerging firmly. The writer is a Conservative member of the British Parliament. (Times-UK)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, February 19, 2009]

The Battle of Gaza - Clifford D. May
What took place in Gaza and Israel over the past three weeks was not a war - it was one battle in a war. Or, to be more precise, it was one battle in a "global insurgency" aimed at overthrowing what we used to call - in a more confident era - the Free World. "Yes, Allah is greater than America," Hamas supreme leader Khaled Mashaal said on al-Jazeera television a few years ago. "Allah is greater than the superpowers. We say to the West: By Allah you will be defeated." Too many people refuse to understand: Hamas is not fighting for a Palestinian state. Hamas is fighting for the annihilation of Israel which it would replace with an Islamic emirate. Not the same thing at all.
    There are those who will argue that Hamas wins merely by having survived. But Israel would have lost had it not fought - had it continued to passively accept an endless rain of Hamas missiles on its citizens. Over the days ahead, Hamas may resume its attacks on Israel, or dig new tunnels to smuggle in new missiles to prepare for future attacks. If so, Israel may feel the need to respond strongly - to re-establish deterrence and demonstrate that it can withstand pressure from those in the "international community" all too eager to try to appease radical Islam. The writer is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. (National Review)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 23, 2009]

Anti-Israel vs. Anti-Semite - Tom Neumann
I've seldom found someone who is anti-Israel but at the same time likes Jews. Anti-Israel attitudes do not fall into a pattern of normal political hostility of the type directed toward other countries. At their core, objections to Israel are not based on the country's policies but instead rest on Israel's very right to exist. Faced with terror attacks, there is no country in the world that would not have garnered sympathy except Israel. The exceedingly ugly character of the marches and rallies against Israel makes it clear that what we are witnessing is global anti-Semitism. There is precedent for the Hamas philosophy, the Nazis referred to it as seeking to make the world judenrein.
    That thugs beat a Jewish girl in Paris while telling her that it was revenge for Israeli attacks on Hamas goes well beyond the traditional bounds of protest. It was clear anti-Semitism reminiscent of similar events in European history. The lesson of the Holocaust is that Israel can and should expect neither fairness, honesty or justice from the world community. Israel can only depend on itself because anti-Semitism today remains not only tenacious, it is fashionable. The writer is executive director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. (Chicago Tribune)

Aerial Photographs Show Rocket-Launching Sites and Terrorist Bases in the Heart of Civilian Gaza Neighborhoods (Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center)
    Marked aerial photographs show how Hamas turned entire civilian neighborhoods, including houses, mosques, schools, hospitals and UN facilities, into quasi-military compounds from which it waged combat against the IDF.
    By doing so Hamas inevitably caused loss of life and property damage to innocent civilians.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 26, 2009]

Protecting Israel and Its Good Name - David Horovitz
Protecting Israel cannot now be achieved by walls and fences and defensive measures; the rockets have to be stopped at the source - and the source of the rockets, as ruthlessly determined by the Palestinians who manufacture and launch them, lies in the heart of the civilian populace. By cynical design, those who would kill our citizens thus ensure that their people are killed when we try to thwart the attacks - so that we are forced to fight not only to protect ourselves, but to protect our good name and our legitimacy as we do so. The true picture is an Israeli nation seeking to defend itself against a cynical, dishonest Palestinian terror leadership whose religiously inspired loathing for us far outweighs its concerns for the well-being of its own people. (Jerusalem Post)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, April 16, 2009]

UN Confirms: UNRWA School Not Hit By Israel
The United Nations Thursday backed down from a claim that one of its schools in Gaza was hit by an Israel Defense Force mortar attack last month, correcting its earlier media statements that a massacre occurred within the UN education facility. The UN's latest field report reads, "The humanitarian coordinator would like to clarify that the shelling, and all of the fatalities, took place outside rather than inside the school." The revelation reinforces the Israeli assertions that Hamas had been attacking the Israeli forces from civilian locations, thus the high civilian casualties from Israeli retaliation. (RTTNews)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, February 9, 2009]

UNRWA Schools in Gaza Infiltrated by Palestinian Terrorists - Jonathan D. Halevi
Recent years have seen the gradual takeover of UNRWA educational and welfare institutions in Gaza by Palestinian terrorist organizations, led by Hamas. Just six months after Hamas' general election victory, it won a clear victory in the UNRWA workers committee elections held on 14 June 2006. Suhil el-Hindi, head of the teachers sector at UNRWA schools, operates openly as Hamas' representative. He controls the curriculum in UNRWA schools, the employment of teachers in those schools, and the summer camps.
    Hamas Interior Minister Said Sayyam, responsible for Hamas terror operations, who was targeted in the recent Gaza war, was a teacher at UNRWA schools for 23 years. Following the Hamas takeover of Gaza in June 2007, parents of students in UNRWA schools wrote to the head of UNRWA charging that scores of teachers at the schools belonged to the Al-Aqsa Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, and requested an urgent investigation. In another example, Awad el-Kik, the principal of an UNRWA school in Rafiah, was also head of weapons and rocket manufacturing for Islamic Jihad in Gaza until he was targeted on 30 April 2008.
    It seems very likely that contributions by Western nations to UNRWA pay the salaries of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists who are educating the next generation of Palestinians in jihad against Israel and all non-Muslims. Western nations should demand that terror group activists be removed from UN institutions as a condition of continued funding. Lt. Col. (res.) Jonathan Dahoah-Halevi is a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and co-founder of the Orient Research Group Ltd. (Ynet-Hebrew)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 22, 2009]

January 21, 2009 - On the same day that the IDF completes troop withdrawal following its unilateral cease fire ending Operation Cast Lead, smuggling into Gaza from Egypt resumes

Hamas Fires Mortars at Border Crossings, Blocking Aid - Amos Harel
Hamas is intentionally harming humanitarian aid transferred from Israel by firing mortars at the Karni, Kissufim and Kerem Shalom crossings, the IDF liaison office for Gaza said. Palestinians fired eight mortar shells from central Gaza on Tuesday and the Israel Air Force responded to the shelling. Military sources said a harsh aerial response can be expected if the cross-border attacks continue. The Palestinians also fired light weapons into Israel on Tuesday near the Kissufim crossing and also set off an explosive charge. (Ha'aretz)

Hamas Intercepts Humanitarian Aid in Gaza - Khaled Abu Toameh
A Fatah official said that on Monday night alone, Hamas gunmen intercepted 12 trucks loaded with humanitarian aid that had been donated by the Jordanian government to Palestinians in Gaza. The trucks were on their way to UNRWA headquarters when Hamas gunmen stopped them and confiscated their contents. Jordanian authorities confirmed on Tuesday that Hamas gunmen had seized the trucks shortly after they entered Gaza through the Kerem Shalom border crossing. Last week Fatah activists and eyewitnesses claimed that Hamas had confiscated fuel and food that was en route to hospitals and schools housing thousands of Palestinians. (Jerusalem Post)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 21, 2009]

UN Halts Aid to Gaza in Dispute with Hamas - Griff Witte
The UN aid agency that serves more than half the residents of the Gaza Strip suspended humanitarian shipments on Friday, accusing Hamas of confiscating UN material for the second time in a week. The UN Relief and Works Agency said Hamas seized 10 trucks filled with rice and flour. Earlier in the week, the agency had accused Hamas of confiscating blankets and food from a UN warehouse. In a statement from New York, the world body said the suspension would remain in place "until the aid is returned and the agency is given credible assurances from the Hamas government in Gaza that there will be no repeat of these thefts." John Ging, head of the relief agency in Gaza, said Hamas' actions had "crossed a red line." "We're not going to bring aid in here and let it be hijacked by Hamas or anyone else." (Washington Post)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, February 9, 2009]

Don't Count on Egypt to Curb Arms Smuggling - Mordechai Kedar
No agreement to end arms smuggling will be implemented, even if the Egyptian regime wants it to happen. The Bedouins in the Sinai will continue to smuggle regardless of decisions that bind Egypt. Those familiar with Egyptian realities know that policemen at Sinai roadblocks, who earn several dozen dollars a month, will not stop taking bribes from trucks transferring arms to Gaza. In addition, the chances that a presidential decision on curbing smuggling will be implemented administratively are slim. Mubarak may want it, but his decisions are not carried out. This is not about malice; it's merely Egypt. (Ynet News)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 19, 2009]

On Proportionality - Michael Walzer (New Republic)
    Before the six months of cease-fire (when the fire never ceased), Hamas had rockets that could only hit nearby small towns in Israel. By the end of the six months, they had far more advanced rockets that can hit cities 30 or 40 kilometers away.
    Another six months of the same kind of cease-fire, which is what many nations at the UN demanded, and Hamas would have rockets capable of hitting Tel Aviv. And this is an organization explicitly committed to the destruction of Israel.
    How many civilian casualties are "not disproportionate to" the value of avoiding the rocketing of Tel Aviv?

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 16, 2009]

UN Agency That Runs School Hit in Gaza Employed Hamas and Islamic Jihad Members - Joel Mowbray
The UN agency that administers a school in Gaza - where Hamas operatives firing mortars at Israelis led to the deaths of civilians by Israeli return fire last week - has admitted to employing terrorists to work at its Palestinian schools in the past, has no system in place to keep members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad off its payroll, and provides textbooks to children that contain hate speech and other incendiary information.
    There is evidence that students educated in UNRWA schools are much more likely to become homicide bombers, said Jonathan Halevi, a former Israel Defense Forces intelligence officer who specializes in Palestinian terrorist organizations. Halevi has spent several years building an extensive database for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs of terrorist attacks by Hamas and other Islamic extremist groups. Halevi estimated that over 60% of homicide bombers were educated in UNRWA schools. (FOX News)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 15, 2009]

Hamas Is a War Crimes "Case Study" - Haviv Rettig Gur (Jerusalem Post)

• The fighting tactics and ideology of Hamas are a "case study par excellence" of a systematic violation of international humanitarian law, according to Irwin Cotler, a former Canadian justice minister and a leading expert in international law.

• "First, the deliberate targeting of civilians is in and of itself a war crime," he noted, referring to the Hamas rockets fired at southern towns for eight years.

• "A second war crime is when Hamas attacks [from within] civilian areas and civilian structures, whether it be an apartment building, a mosque or a hospital, in order to be immune from a response from Israel....Civilians are protected persons, and civilian areas are protected areas. Any use of a civilian infrastructure to launch bombs is itself a war crime."

• Third, "the misuse and abuse of humanitarian symbols for purposes of launching attacks is called the perfidy principle. For example, using an ambulance to transport fighters or weapons or disguising oneself as a doctor in a hospital, or using a UN logo or flag, are war crimes."

• The fourth violation "is the prohibition in the Fourth Geneva Convention and international jurisprudence against the direct and public incitement to genocide. The Hamas covenant itself is a standing incitement to genocide."

• The fifth crime relates to the scope of the attack on civilians, which upgrades the violation to a crime against humanity. "When you deliberately hit civilians not infrequently but in a systematic, widespread attack, that's defined in the treaty of the International Criminal Court and international humanitarian law as a crime against humanity."

• The final war crime for which Hamas is responsible is the recruitment of children into armed conflict.

• "When Israel responds and civilians are killed because Israel is targeting an area from which rockets were launched, then it is Hamas which bears responsibility for the deaths, and not Israel, according to international law."

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 15, 2009]

Hamas Raids Aid Trucks, Sells Supplies - Yaakov Katz (Jerusalem Post)
    Hamas on Monday raided some 100 aid trucks that Israel had allowed into Gaza, stole their contents and sold them to the highest bidders.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 13, 2009]

Israel's Motivation for March into Gaza - Oakland Ross (Toronto Star)
    "It's only a matter of a year or two before Hamas threatens Ben-Gurion, the only international airport Israel has," said Hillel Frisch, senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv.
    "The moment any missile flies within 10 kilometers of that airport, no foreign airline will fly that route."
    "There was no way that Israel could allow this to continue," said Frisch. "It just can't be. It's either us or them."
    Frisch also said Hamas' rocket capabilities will soon threaten "the most crucial installations of Israeli defense," if they don't do so already.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 11, 2009]

Blair: Gaza Cease-Fire Must Halt Hamas Smuggling
Any cease-fire in the Gaza conflict will require "clear and definitive action" to halt the smuggling of weapons and money, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday. "If there is strong action on that front, so that Israel feels it has achieved something - namely the end of the smuggling of weapons and finance to Hamas - then I think it is possible to resolve this reasonably quickly," Blair told CNN. "If that doesn't happen, if we're not in that position, then obviously it's going to go on."
    Olmert spokesman Mark Regev said any cease-fire must guarantee "real quiet" - and prevent Hamas from replenishing and expanding its arsenal. "Before the last cease-fire with Hamas began, Hamas had missiles with a range of 20 km.," Regev said. "By the end of the cease-fire, the range of the missiles grew to 40 km. Israel does not want the next cease-fire to allow them to get missiles with a range of 60 km." (CNN)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 7, 2009]

Israel's Moral High Ground - Saul Singer
The equation of the actions of Hamas and Israel is disgusting. Imagine terrorist group A attacking country B, where A is trying to maximize civilian casualties on both sides and B is trying to minimize civilian casualties on both sides. What sort of moral judgment would have trouble distinguishing between the two? By taking on Hamas, Israelis deserve the gratitude of decent people everywhere. More than that, by sending in troops to fight them on the ground, Israel is risking its precious soldiers to minimize Palestinian casualties. These soldiers risk becoming martyrs to human rights because they are fighting in places where other countries, including the U.S., might have called in an artillery or air strike and been done with it. (Washington Post)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 6, 2009]

Israel's Gaza Dilemma - Max Boot
Achieving total victory in Gaza would require Israel to wage war in the way that America fought Germany and Japan - all out until the enemy has no more capacity to resist. Then it would have to occupy the land and impose a peace at gunpoint to ensure that Gaza could never again be a launching point for attacks. None of this is beyond the Israelis' military capacity. Yet the odds are that they won't do it.
    The Russians have inflicted World War II-level carnage in Chechnya since the mid-1990s, and they don't care what anybody else says. But Israel is not Russia - or Algeria or Burma or Syria or any other state that has taken a scorched-earth approach to counterinsurgency in recent decades. For all the accusations of brutality that are routinely flung at Israel's armed forces, their conduct has been exemplary by historical standards. They have shown far less propensity for indiscriminate killing than did European states in the 1950s when confronting insurgencies in such places as Kenya, Cyprus, Vietnam and Algeria.
    The tragedy for Israel is that Hamas is the choice of the local people. The odds are that once Israeli troops leave, Hamas will rebuild its infrastructure, forcing the Israelis to go back in the future.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. (Wall Street Journal)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 5, 2009]

Hamas and the Palestinians - Khaled Abu Toameh
The majority of the Palestinians who voted for Hamas knew exactly what they were choosing. Indeed, in mid-December, more than 250,000 Palestinians took to the streets to celebrate Hamas' 21st anniversary. The Palestinians who are now shouting and crying because of the Israeli offensive should direct their anger first and foremost toward the "elected" government of Hamas. (Hudson Institute)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 4, 2009]

The Palestinians Share Responsibility for This Conflict - Carlo Strenger
I have been a very outspoken critic of Israeli policies for many years. Nevertheless, far from being only victims, Palestinians have made many active decisions that have shaped their fate and are co-responsible for the current situation. I am impatiently waiting for the moment in which there will be a Palestinian state and in which no Palestinian child will have to see an Israeli soldier in his or her lifetime. But the Palestinian decision-making process is making this very difficult, if not impossible.
    Politically correct moralists who let Palestinians off the hook and turn Israel into the sole culprit are making a huge mistake. It is high time that Palestinians begin to face their responsibility for their fate. Sacrificing their sons either as Shahids through suicide bombings or as targets behind which Hamas hides its arsenals of explosives in population centers is the perfect recipe for traumatizing or killing another generation of Palestinian children. (Guardian-UK)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 2, 2009]

Time Once More to Blame the Jews - Wesley Pruden (Washington Times)

• The Israelis finally get enough of the constant rain of rockets on their border towns and villages, fired by Hamas thugs recognized by nearly everybody as international jackals, and strike back to stop it. Guess who the villains are.

• Those thugs have become expert at retail death, killing one or two Jews one day, occasionally three or four on another. Death-by-rocket in Ashkelon and other cities in southern Israel is bad, but, like other urban inconveniences, not something to "overreact" to.

• Because the Hamas terrorists have perfected provocation as an art of war, the blame is attached to Israel by those always eager to "blame it on the Jews," and by a media unable to make distinctions and eager to draw moral equivalence between provocateur and the provoked.

• Much of the world long ago decided that it would no longer be moved by the suffering of the Israelis, nor impressed by their patience in the face of extreme provocation. The Israelis are friends of the Great Satan, after all, and so deserve whatever retail death their enemies can deal. We must give the provocateur a pass.

• The tragedy is that none of this is necessary. The Palestinians could have a two-state solution if they would only take it. But they are determined to win a one-state solution bought at the price of a second Holocaust. This is the reality that Israel's critics in the West willfully refuse to acknowledge. The Jews can expect to be made the villains of the piece - again.

  The writer is editor emeritus of the Washington Times.

  [Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, December 31, 2008]

An End to Israeli Restraint in Gaza - Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff
Israel is about to retaliate fiercely for Hamas' attacks. The situation will not necessarily develop into an all-out war, but the coming days will, so it seems, mark the end to restraint. Close to 200 Katyushas, Kassam rockets and 120-mm., Iranian-produced mortar shells have been fired at Israel since Hamas said it would not renew the lull that had expired on Dec. 19, 2008.

Hamas Offers Decades of Armed Struggle - Michael Young
It is worth questioning what Hamas has made of Gaza, a territory that could have once served as an encouraging example of what Palestinians could achieve when Israeli occupation ended. Instead, what we have is a failed political order, and one cannot blame this solely on Israeli pressures. Hamas has chosen the armed struggle, which required overcoming Fatah in Gaza before transforming the area into a garrisoned statelet.
    Hamas has been unable to give Palestinians a normal life despite a six-month cease-fire. The only thing Palestinians in Gaza can look forward to is the prospect of more carnage ahead. Hamas is not a state-building enterprise; it is a military movement that plays politics to retain the military option. The dystopia it offers is many decades more of the gun, leaving no room for discussion of an alternative, more desirable Palestinian future.
    If you live by the gun, you will probably die by the gun. That's the promise of the Middle East today, where weapons have become the ornaments of men, and where the foulest dictatorships end up looking like a good bet. (Daily Star-Lebanon)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, December 26, 2008]

Hamas Doubled Its Rocket Arsenal During Cease-Fire - Alex Fishman (Ynet News)
    Hamas possesses a rocket arsenal that is double the size and range of what it had six months ago. Hamas has 8-10,000 rockets of various types.
    Six months ago, its rockets had a 20-km. range (12 miles). Today, its rockets may be able to hit Beersheba.
    Hamas' defense system for Gaza includes eight divisions and 16,000 armed personnel, as well as anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons, and 50 km. of underground tunnels.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, December 19, 2008]

Inside Gaza's Rocket Factories - Janis Mackey Frayer
Thousands of rockets have been fired at Israel by Palestinians in Gaza. They often crash into homes, schools, cars, shopping malls, and bus stops. Israelis, including the elderly and children, have been killed and wounded and the damage cannot be measured by statistics alone. Day after day lives on the Israeli side of the border are steered by warning sirens and concrete shelters. Kids tend to not play outside.
    There are rocket "factories" and storage facilities tucked in alleys across the Gaza Strip, empty rooms or garages in concrete block buildings. The room we were shown bristled with rockets in varying sizes and stages of readiness. We were also shown drum-like roadside bombs stuffed with ball bearings and shrapnel. Abu Abir, a leader in the Al-Nasser Brigades of the Popular Resistance Committees, explained, "We show you this to send a message to the Israelis that we are getting stronger." (CTV News-Canada)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, November 21, 2008]

Hamas Building Underground City in Gaza - Amir Rappaport (Maariv-24Oct08)
    There are few high-rise building sites in Gaza these days, but the demand for cement is huge. Copying Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas is building enormous underground installations - ammunition bunkers, tunnels, and command posts.
    Responding to intelligence reports, Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai has reduced the flow of cement from Israel to Gaza and is weighing a total halt.
    Security officials say Hamas is building tunnels beneath the centers of major cities to enable freedom of movement for its forces should the IDF enter.
    In addition, outside the cities, Hamas is constructing tunnels beneath the major entry roads into Gaza, to be filled with explosives and then detonated beneath IDF convoys.
    The underground construction also includes hundreds of Kassam and Katyusha rocket launching positions that are protected from air attack.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, October 28, 2008]

Gaza withdrawal - three year anniversary

Thousands in Gaza Celebrate Jerusalem Terror Attack, Palestinians Distribute Sweets - Ali Waked
Gaza's streets filled with joyous crowds of thousands on Thursday evening following the terror attack at a Jerusalem school in which eight people were killed. In mosques in Gaza City, many residents went to perform the prayers of thanksgiving. Armed men fired in the air in celebration and others passed out sweets to passersby. Hamas issued a statement saying it "blesses the (Jerusalem) operation." (Ynet News)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, March 7, 2008]

Iranian 8-Km Mortars Fired from Gaza - Aaron Lerner
Israel Television Channel 2 correspondent Ronnie Daniel reported that for the first time Iranian 120mm mortars were fired on Tuesday at Israel from Gaza. They can do considerably more damage than Kassam rockets. Many of the protective reinforcements that have been placed in order to shield Israelis from Kassams do not provide protection from these mortars. In addition, the Iranian mortars travel at a speed that makes the warning system meaningless. (IMRA)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, April 3, 2008]

IDF: Islamic Jihad Producing Longer-Range Rockets - Hanan Greenberg (Ynet News)
    The Islamic Jihad terror group has recently begun manufacturing rockets with a 12.5-mile range, similar to the Grad (Katyusha) rockets already in use by terror organizations in Gaza.
    The new rockets are armed with a much deadlier warhead that carries double the amount of explosives carried by Kassam rockets.
    Armed groups in Gaza have also recently obtained two new types of Iranian-made mortar shells, some of which can travel up to 6.2 miles.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, March 27, 2008]

The city of Ashdod, several kilometers north of Ashkelon on the Mediterranean and home to over 200,000 residents, is preparing to be the next city to come within range of rockets from Gaza.

The Gaza Dilemma - Leslie Susser
If Israel had tolerated years of Kassam rockets raining down on the town of Sderot and other communities close to Gaza, the heavier, longer-range Grad [Katyusha] rockets crashing into the coastal city of Ashkelon crossed an unacceptable red line: They placed hundreds of thousands of Israelis under threat and put strategic installations at risk. Worse: If the trend was allowed to continue, bigger and heavier rockets could soon threaten metropolitan Tel Aviv.
    Maj. Gen. (res.) Doron Almog, former commander of the Southern Front responsible for Gaza, says Israel needs to act soon: "Otherwise, in a few years time, we could find ourselves fighting on two fronts, under a hail of hundreds of rockets a day, covering virtually all of Israel." (Jerusalem Report)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, March 24, 2008]

Israelis Bolster New Front Line with Gaza - Ilene R. Prusher
Seemingly overnight, the quiet seaside city of Ashkelon has become a frontline community in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since the end of February, there have been 15 "serious hits" of Palestinian rockets here, causing damage or light injuries. Realizing that a new dynamic has emerged, Ashkelon is taking serious precautions. The one thing it doesn't have yet is a surefire way to find people a safe place when a missile is careening in their direction. The city has 26,000 schoolchildren, but no schools are armored. And though there are shelters, it's impossible to get to most of them in time. (Christian Science Monitor)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, March 13, 2008]

Hamas MP: We Used Women and Children as Human Shields (MEMRI-TV)
    Hamas MP Fathi Hammad said on Al-Aqsa TV (Feb. 29, 2008): "The Palestinian people has developed its [methods] of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel."
    "They have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: 'We desire death like you desire life.'"

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, March 14, 2008]

Insatiable Extremism - Editorial
Israel is gone from Gaza. Yet Hamas has intensified its attacks on Israel. A mindset that loathes Israel more than it seeks its own freedom will not be remade by Israeli withdrawal or endless international funding and sympathy. A leadership inciting against Israel in its media, mosques and school system will not be rejected by the Palestinian public so long as much of that population is mired in a bigotry that inculcates permanent victimhood, refuses to recognize any shred of justice to Israel's sovereign claims, and extols the virtues of violence and death.
    What the Hamas-inspired murderous rocket fire across the Gaza border should long since have made plain to all is that even territory cleared of every last vestige of Israeli presence does not sate the appetite of the Islamists - who happen to constitute the parliamentary leadership freely elected by the Palestinian public. (Jerusalem Post)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, February 29, 2008]

Muslim Extremists from Egypt Poured into Gaza to Fight Israel - Khaled Abu Toameh
Thousands of Arab men flocked to Gaza from Egypt in the past two weeks, offering to join in the fight against Israel, sources close to Hamas said Wednesday. Some of the men had come from Iraq where they had been carrying out attacks against U.S. troops. "Hamas has turned the Gaza Strip into an international center for global jihad," said one PA security official. "Most of the men who entered the Gaza Strip through the breached border are now being trained in Hamas' camps and schools." Another PA security official said that a number of Iranian security experts had also entered Gaza to help train members of Hamas and other armed groups. (Jerusalem Post)
[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, February 7, 2008]

Israel Rising in Priority on Al-Qaeda Target List
"When the border was opened between Gaza and Egypt, I saw calls on forums for foreign fighters to come and infiltrate the Gaza Strip to lead the battle against Israel," said Dominique Thomas, a specialist on radical Islam at the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. "Israel has assumed a heretofore unprecedented priority on the target list of al-Qaeda and its allies," said Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit. (AFP)
[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, February 27, 2008]

Gaza's New Residents: Saudis and al-Qaeda - Nir Boms
Egyptian troops recently resealed the border with Gaza. The border incident, initiated by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, allowed some otherwise unwelcome guests to enter Gaza. The Bethlehem-based Maan news agency quoted Hamas sources as estimating the number of Arab men who had entered Gaza as new residents at 2,000. According to Arab sources, some had recently fled from Iraq, where they had been carrying out attacks against U.S. troops. A Sunni Muslim website that carries statements of al-Qaeda reported last week on the arrival of at least four Saudi militants to Gaza through Egypt. "Hamas has turned Gaza into an international center for global jihad," said one PA official. Another PA security official said that dozens of al-Qaeda operatives have managed to enter Gaza in the past two weeks. (Weekly Standard)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, February 20, 2008]

Breach in Gaza: Hamas Blockades the Peace Process - Editorial (Washington Post)

• Hamas provided a dramatic illustration of its ability to disrupt any movement toward peace between Israelis and Palestinians, as tens of thousands of residents of the Gaza Strip surged across the border into Egypt. President Hosni Mubarak announced that Gazans would be allowed to shop in Egypt because they "are starving due to the Israeli siege." In fact, as Mr. Mubarak well knows, no one is starving in Gaza.

• Israel closed its border with Gaza and disrupted power supplies in response to a massive escalation of Palestinian rocket launches from Gaza at nearby Israeli towns - between Tuesday and Saturday last week, some 225 rockets were aimed at the town of Sderot, where more than 20,000 Israelis have been relentlessly terrorized.

• Those who say their priority is an Israeli-Palestinian settlement ought to be trying to stop Hamas' disruptions. Egypt's obligation as a law-abiding state is to restore order on the border and prevent the ongoing and massive smuggling of armaments into Gaza. That would go a long way toward stopping the rockets.

• The Bush administration and European governments should act to stop the ongoing farce at the UN Security Council and the UN Human Rights Council, which have ignored months of daily rocket attacks aimed at Israeli civilians but now rush to condemn a partial, three-day disruption of Gaza's power supplies. Hamas, and the people of Gaza, should get a consistent message that relief lies not in blowing up international borders but in ending attacks on Israel and allowing a peace process to go forward.

Poverty-Stricken Gazans Spent $130 Million in Egypt in Two Days
Rami Abdou, an economic analyst, estimated that Gazans spent $130 million in less than two days, a princely sum for the poverty-stricken territory. (AP)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 25, 2008]

Israel to Send Animal Vaccine to Gaza after Border Breach (AP/Ha'aretz)
    Israel will deliver thousands of doses of vaccine for cattle and avian-borne diseases to Gaza.
    Gazans have brought in large numbers of camels, sheep, cows and chickens. Israeli authorities fear that with the new influx of livestock will come a wave of diseases not indigenous to Gaza, among them foot-and-mouth disease and avian flu that are known to exist in Egypt.
    Because of the proximity between Gaza and Israel, the diseases could easily spread into Israel.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 31, 2008]

A Visit to a Gaza Rocket Factory - Ulrike Putz
Abdul builds bombs for Islamic Jihad. He and his fellow militants can produce up to 100 per night. The rocket factory is housed in a kind of garden shed. Metal pipes with small wings lean against the wall: half-finished Kassam rockets. There are several tightly packed garbage bags on a shelf with "TNT" - the explosive looks like lumpy sugar. A large cauldron is sitting ready on a gas cooker while bags of fertilizer for the rocket fuel are piled up high up against the wall. "We get it in Israel," Abdul says.
    Instead of the usual 12, only three of Abdul's men have turned up. "The other guys are over in Egypt, shopping," he says. Will they be looking for ingredients for building rockets? "Hardly....We have enough raw materials to last for a few years." (Der Spiegel-Germany)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 30, 2008]

Boy Injured by Palestinian Rocket Loses Leg - Shmulik Hadad
Doctors at Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon were forced Sunday to amputate part of the left leg of Osher Tuito, 8, who was seriously injured in a rocket attack in Sderot on Saturday. "We are trying to keep the second leg, but it's also in bad condition," said Dr. Emil Chai, the hospital's deputy director-general. "Apart from that, he has a hole in his chest and his lungs are injured."  (Ynet News)
    Osher, who dreamed of becoming a soccer player, does not know yet that he has lost one of his legs. He remains under total sedation so he doesn't suffer from severe pain. Staffers at Barzilai Medical Center were themselves traumatized by Osher's suffering, as he was conscious upon arrival at the trauma room and repeatedly screamed "Save me!" (Jerusalem Post)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, February 11, 2008]

Israel's Statement to the Security Council: The Situation in Gaza and Sderot - Charge d'Affaires Gilad Cohen (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

Since the year 2000, more than 7,000 rockets and mortars have been fired at Israel by terrorists in the Gaza Strip. Last year alone, that number was over 2,000. And since Hamas' violent takeover of Gaza in June 2007, the frequency of rocket attacks rose 150%, to more than 250 rockets and mortars a month. This means, on average, one rocket is fired at Israel every three hours.

Not a day goes by when the Red Alert warning system does not sound, which gives children on playgrounds and in schools, and parents at home and at work, less than 15 seconds to find the nearest shelter before the next rocket comes slamming into their lives.

Escalation of Terror in Gaza (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

Beginning on Jan. 15 and over the next 24 hours, more than 100 rockets and mortars were fired by Palestinians from Gaza on the Israeli cities of Sderot and Ashkelon - indiscriminate fire raining down on Israeli civilians. A Hamas sniper murdered 20-year-old volunteer Carlos Chavez from Ecuador in the fields of Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha using a special .50 caliber sniper rifle.

More than two years ago, Israel removed all of its civilians, soldiers and settlements from Gaza and redeployed behind the recognized border in order to promote a peaceful solution - yet in return received Hamas-backed terror.

Since the Hamas takeover of Gaza in June, approximately 1,500 rockets and mortars have been launched at Israel. Israel has suffered dozens of casualties, hundreds of shock victims, thousands of traumatized children, and severe disruption of daily life.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 18, 2008]

Diplomat: Israel and U.S. Differ on Interpretation of Bush's 2004 Letter to Sharon - Barak Ravid and Nadav Shragai (Ha'aretz)
    The U.S. clarified to Israel during President Bush's visit that it disapproves of all Israeli building in eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank - including in the large settlement blocs, a senior Western diplomat said Tuesday.
    He added that Israel and the U.S. differ on their interpretation of the letter President Bush sent to former prime minister Ariel Sharon in April 2004.
    "The letter refers to major population centers and not the settlement blocs, while stressing that everything must also be decided in the negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians," the diplomat said.

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 16, 2008

Gaza Tunnel Smugglers Stay Busy - Dan Murphy (Christian Science Monitor)
    A visitor to the Palestinian border with Egypt completely ignorant of the problems of this part of the world might imagine for a moment that Gaza is home to a species of giant and unusually industrious ant.
    In dozens of spots along the narrow swath of land between the Palestinian town of Rafah and the metal fence that marks the Egyptian border, the region's sandy soil is piled high in crescents that fan out from holes leading underground, the work of hundreds of Palestinian smugglers.
    Never have the signs of smuggling activity been so obvious.

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 15, 2008

The Unholy Return of the Palestinian Pilgrims - Zvi Mazel (Jerusalem Post)

Under the joint agreement signed by Egypt, Israel, the PA, and the EU following Israel's unilateral disengagement from Gaza, the checkpoint at Rafah between Gaza and Egypt was to have been closely monitored by EU inspectors and double-checked by Israel through video surveillance.

However, the Hamas takeover of Gaza led to the flight of the EU inspectors, who feared for their lives, and ultimately to the closing of the checkpoint.

Israeli Defense Minister Barak came back from a visit to Egypt last week with a firm Egyptian commitment to have the Palestinians cross through the Kerem Shalom checkpoint so that Israel could make sure that no explosives or cash for Hamas would go through. Yet Egypt was not prepared to be portrayed any longer in the Arab media as a country persecuting innocent pilgrims in order to do Israel's bidding.

Though Egypt has made peace with Israel, it is first and foremost an Arab country aspiring to regional leadership, and wholeheartedly on the side of the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel. The idea that Egyptian soldiers would be instructed to stop smuggling at all costs is ludicrous in that context.

The writer is a former Israeli ambassador to Egypt

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 3, 2008

Israel Has Video of Egypt Helping Hamas Terrorists Cross Gaza Border - Yaakov Katz, Herb Keinon, and Hilary Leila Krieger (Jerusalem Post)
    Israel is sending video footage - which shows Egyptian security forces assisting Hamas terrorists cross illegally into Gaza - to the U.S. Congress to pressure Egypt to clamp down on Hamas smuggling activities.
    The House and Senate agreed Sunday to hold back $100 million in military aid for Egypt unless Secretary of State Rice certifies that concerns about smuggling weapons into Gaza and human rights abuses have been addressed.
    Last week, Israel filed an official complaint with Cairo after Egypt unilaterally opened the Rafah Crossing and allowed Palestinians who claimed to be traveling to Mecca for the hajj pilgrimage to leave Gaza.
    Israel has received intelligence indicating that among the 1,700 pilgrims are a significant number of Palestinian terrorists who traveled to Iran and Lebanon for military training.

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, December 18, 2007

The Rocket Threat from Gaza, 2001-2007 - Reuven Erlich
Palestinian rocket fire at Israel from Gaza began in 2001. As of the end of November 2007, there have been a total of 2,383 identified rocket hits in Israel. Rocket fire has been directly responsible for the deaths of ten Israeli civilians , nine of them Sderot residents. In addition, 433 individuals have been wounded. Mortar fire has been responsible for the deaths of ten individuals, eight civilians and two IDF soldiers. Of the 150 wounded, 80 were civilians and 70 soldiers. More than 190,000 Israelis now live under the potential threat of daily rocket and mortar attacks. (Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center)
    See also Video: Israelis Under Siege in Sderot
You try to be never more than 15 seconds away from the nearest shelter. (EuroNews)

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, December 14, 2007

Fatah Isn't the Answer - Michael Oren (Wall Street Journal, 20Jun07)

Though Fatah originally aspired to replace Israel with a secular state, it refashioned itself in the 1990s as an Islamic movement, embracing the lexicon of jihad. Hundreds of mosques were built with public funds, and imams were hired to spread the message of martyrdom and the hatred of Christians and Jews. These themes became the staple of the official PA media, inciting the suicide bombings that began in 2000 and poisoning an entire generation of Palestinian youth.

   Fatah has never fulfilled its pledges to crack down on terror. Though Mahmoud Abbas routinely criticizes Palestinian terrorist attacks as "contrary to the Palestinian national interest" - not an affront to morality and international law - he has never disavowed the al-Aqsa Brigades, a Fatah affiliate responsible for some of the bloodiest attacks against Israeli civilians.  In the past, such assaults have served as a means of maintaining Fatah's legitimacy as a resistance movement and countering charges that the organization sold out to America and Israel. In fact, a distinct correlation exists between the amount of support that Fatah receives from the West and its need to prove its "Palestinianess" through terror.

   The unbridled corruption of the PA and its Fatah headmen served as a principal cause of Hamas' electoral victory in 2006, as well as its takeover of Gaza. Unless, Fatah has reforms itself financially, ideologically and structurally, resuming the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars in aid by the U.S. and the international community is sure to be squandered -- used to hire more gunmen and procure better weapons.  Abbas will continue to denounce terror while ignoring the terrorist units within his own organization, while PA imams will persist in preaching their jihadist sermons.

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, June 20, 2007

Wishful Thinking - David Horovitz (Jerusalem Post)

No diplomatic framework can succeed so long as the killers who seek its collapse are free to detonate bombs, gun down civilians and fire off rocket barrages at the first hint of real progress. That's why the only process that can possibly succeed is one that places the countering of terrorism, and the attempt to marginalize it, as the first crucial step.

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, August 21, 2007

"West Bank First": It Won't Work - Robert Malley and Aaron David Miller
Having embraced one illusion - that it could help isolate and defeat Hamas - the Bush administration is dangerously close to embracing another: Gaza is dead, long live the West Bank. It is premised on the notion that Fatah controls the West Bank. Yet Fatah has ceased to exist as an ideologically or organizationally coherent movement. Behind the brand name lie a multitude of offshoots, fiefdoms and personal interests. Most recent attacks against Israel were launched by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the unruly Fatah-affiliated militias, notwithstanding Abbas' repeated calls for them to stop. Given this, why would Israel agree to measurably loosen security restrictions?
    We should not be fooled by Abbas' rhetoric. Sooner or later he will be forced to pursue new power-sharing arrangements between Hamas and Fatah and restore unity among Palestinians. (Washington Post)

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, June 19, 2007

Palestinian Conflict Could Hit Home - From Oil Prices to War on Terror
The consequences of Western failure in Gaza could be dire, according to Dennis Ross of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Every brand of radical Islamist will be there - from al-Qaeda to Hizbullah joining Hamas," he said. If radical Islamists are able to establish a heavily armed state of their own in Gaza, it will be another sign to their adherents that this group is on the march and that the West is in retreat. "If they're expanding their presence there and they believe that time is on their side and they're winning, then in fact they will focus more and more on us," Ross said.
    And the challenges go beyond Gaza and the Arab-Israeli dispute, as the Taliban is back in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Al-Qaeda is also flexing its muscles in Lebanon, and Hizbullah is resurgent. (ABC News)

Fundamentalists Threaten Israel from All Sides - Con Coughlin
Hamas makes no secret of the fact that it now receives most of its financial and military support from Iran. The Iranian government signed a memorandum of understanding with the Hamas leadership in June last year in which it agreed to fund the militant group to the tune of £400 million. In addition, Iran provides military training to Hamas members by sending them to camps in Lebanon and Iran run by the elite Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards.
    Earlier this year, the Iranians sought to establish new supply lines to Gaza. On February 24, Khaled Mashaal, Hamas' supreme leader, traveled to Khartoum where he met senior Quds Force officials and Sudanese politicians who are broadly sympathetic to Hamas' political objectives. The main topic of conversation was setting up a supply route that would enable Iran to smuggle rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank missiles, guns and explosives through the porous border between Gaza and Egypt.
    Ordinary Palestinians, it is true, in both Gaza and the West Bank, are suffering hardship. But this is not because of a lack of funds entering the Palestinian territories: it is because successive Palestinian administrations have made no effort to distribute the resources available equably among the population. By forcing the majority of Palestinians to exist in dire poverty, Hamas succeeds in attracting widespread sympathy from international do-gooders who do not understand the sadistic economic manipulation that is taking place.
    Hamas is trying to replicate Hizbullah's success in Gaza, not a pleasing prospect for Israel, which now faces the threat of having two Iranian-backed, Islamic fundamentalist organizations dedicated to its destruction camped on its northern and southern borders. (Telegraph-UK)

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, June 15, 2007

The Specter of "Hamastan" in Gaza - Dennis Ross
In several days of discussions in Jerusalem and Ramallah recently, the debate I witnessed in both places wasn't about the stalemate in the peace process or the Arab peace initiative. It was about the conflict between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza - and whether Gaza was in fact already lost to the Islamists. The consensus was that Hamas had made a deliberate calculation to attack all key security positions held by Fatah in Gaza and that the Fatah forces now had few, if any, senior commanders still in that area. All those I spoke with were worried about the consequences of Gaza's becoming an Islamist enclave. They saw it offering inspiration to other Islamists throughout the Middle East and providing a new haven for Islamists of all stripes. (Washington Post)

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, June 4, 2007

Battleground in Gaza - Editorial
Gaza looms as a major battleground in the larger global struggle with jihadism, with the Israeli military squaring off against terrorist proxies of Iran and Syria in addition to al-Qaeda factions burrowing into the region. Hamas has built in essence a 12,000-man militia - two to three times the size of the Hizbullah force in last summer's Lebanon war. Gaza is crawling with hundreds of terrorists. As Gaza descends into chaos, Israel, which withdrew all of its soldiers and civilians from there two years ago in the hope that the Palestinians would respond by building a viable independent state, must decide whether to conduct major military operations against Gaza-based terrorists who are expanding their capability to attack neighboring Israeli towns.
    Since November more than 250 Kassam rockets and mortars have been fired from Gaza. In Sderot in Israel, nine- and ten-year-old children in day-care centers routinely practice what to do in the event of rocket strikes, and a week ago a rocket fired from Gaza struck a Sderot house close to a kindergarten. When Israel withdrew from Gaza, tens of thousands of Israeli civilians were within range of Palestinian rockets; today, that figure is 200,000 and growing. (Washington Times)

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, May 16, 2007

Destroyed Synagogues Used as Bases to Fire on Israel - Aaron Klein
The ruins of two large synagogues in evacuated Jewish communities of the Gaza Strip have been transformed into military bases used by Palestinians to fire rockets at Israeli cities, according to Abu Abir, a spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees. "We are proud to turn these lands, especially these parts that were for a long time the symbol of occupation and injustice, like the synagogues, into a military base and source of fire against the Zionists and the Zionist entity," Abir said. (New York Sun)

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Feb 27, 2007

Aid to Palestinians Increases Since Hamas Election - Steven Stotsky
Following Hamas' victory in last year's Palestinian elections, the international community suspended direct aid to the PA government. But in fact, aid to the Palestinians has substantially increased since Hamas took over. In order to bypass Hamas, Western governments simply redirected aid to the office of Mahmoud Abbas, who at least in theory recognizes Israel.
    Total donations to the Palestinians in 2006 amounted to at least $775 million, more than doubling total foreign donations reported by the IMF in 2005. This leaves the Palestinians as the largest recipients per capita of charitable assistance in the world. The decline in the Palestinian economy has occurred despite the increase in foreign support, and not because of any supposed decrease in aid. (CAMERA)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Feb 22, 2007]

Daniel Mandel: For Palestinians, non-acceptance of Israel trumps statehood. To this day, PA maps and atlases pretend Israel does not exist, PA-salaried clerics call for the murder of Jews, TV and radio broadcasts, popular songs and poetry extol the glories of suicide attacks, textbooks teach that Israel is unfit to live, and streets and colleges are named for suicide bombers. Why the studious avoidance of the abundant evidence of Palestinian intentions and conduct?

What Did the Palestinians Do with Their "Marshall Plan"? - Ben-Dror Yamini
The Palestinians have bought themselves a place of honor on the list of unfortunates in the world. A well-oiled public relations campaign has turned them into a nation of victims. Misery pays. One of the countries hated by the Palestinians the most, the United States, has since 1993 helped them more than any other nation in the world, according to World Bank figures. From 1994 to 2004, the U.S. provided the Palestinians with $1.3 billion, the EU $1.1 billion, and Japan $530 million. In addition to direct aid, the U.S. is also the largest contributor to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

    In 1992, the Palestinian per capita GDP was $2,683 per person. If there had not been terror, the Palestinian economy could have grown during the 1990s into one of the leaders in the Middle East. The money was used for three major purposes: perpetuation of the refugees as victims, purchase of weapons and explosives, and corruption. Opportunities to achieve independence and prosperity were rejected for the ultimate goal: the removal of Israel from the map.

    In relation to their numbers, the Palestinians have received more aid than provided by the Marshall Plan after World War II. Since the Oslo agreements, the Palestinians in the territories have received $5.5 billion, or $1,300 per person. By comparison, in the Marshall plan, each European enjoyed only $273 (in today's numbers). Above all, the guilt lies with those who gave these huge sums without having the Palestinians undergo a period of recovery from their futile dreams of the destruction of Israel. The result is, primarily, the continued destruction of Palestinian society. (Maariv-Hebrew, 5Jan06)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Jan 8, 2007]

Sderot Elementary School: Twenty Seconds to Take Cover - Moran Zelikovich
Eti Azran, principal of the Sderot elementary school which was hit by a Palestinian rocket Wednesday morning, is used to seeing children running to take cover. According to Azran, "The biggest danger as far as we are concerned is when the children get off the ride at the beginning of the day or get on the bus at the end....Once the siren is heard we have to take cover within 20 seconds. It's a problematic mission when you are in the exposed street." On Wednesday, Azran continued, "We all ran to the fortified rooms. After the first fall I wanted to go outside to see if the children were alright, but the blast of the second fall threw me back into the class. That's when I knew the second fall was very close to us." She believed that a miracle is what saved the children's lives, and the force of habit that the children have to run directly to fortified areas and cling to the walls when an alarm is sounded. (Ynet News)

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Nov  23, 2006

Shin Bet: Rise of Terror in Gaza a Strategic Problem - Gideon Alon (Ha'aretz)
    The rise of terror in Gaza is a strategic problem, and if it isn't dealt with properly, in three to five years Israel will face the same reality in Gaza that exists in Lebanon, Shin Bet Chief Yuval Diskin told the Israeli cabinet Sunday.
    Diskin said the Philadelphi Route, along the Egyptian border, is breached, and several tons of explosives and hundreds of weapons have been smuggled through it.
    Diskin regarded Egyptian supervision of the crossings as ineffective and suggested reviewing agreements that were signed with the Egyptians last year.

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, August 21, 2006

July 2006: 66.8% of Palestinians support kidnappings of Israeli civilians; 77.2% back the Kerem Shalom tunnel operation and subsequent kidnapping of Israel Defense Forces Corporal Gilad Shalit; 60% support continued rocket fire into Israel.

Return to Gaza: Disengagement has failed

Gerald M. Steinberg, National Post, Thursday, June 29, 2006

As an early Israeli supporter of unilateral disengagement, I admit that this plan, like the earlier Oslo "peace process," has failed. Hopes that the unprecedented move, including the dismantling of all Israeli military bases, checkpoints and even civilian houses in Gaza would reduce the violence and promote mutual accommodation were naive. Almost a year after the exit, attacks against Israelis continue to escalate, Palestinian society is in a state of advanced anarchy and the security pledges from Egypt and Europe, brokered by the U.S., have proven worthless.

The murder and kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by Palestinian terrorists, who launched the attack from a tunnel dug from a house in Gaza under the border, was the last straw. Even before then, the dozens of rockets raining down on houses and schools every week, and numerous other terror efforts, had already signaled the approaching end of this unique experiment in conflict reduction. Instead of taking advantage of the opportunity for progress, Palestinians moved their rocket launching teams into the most densely populated neighborhoods, goading Israel into responding. And whenever a Palestinian was killed, even when Israel was not involved, they could count on political groups such as Human Rights Watch to condemn the Israeli Defense Force, regardless of the evidence.

The role of the Palestinian population in supporting terror is central, but the international community also bears considerable responsibility for the latest disaster. For years, the Europeans, the UN and others had provided massive support -- financial as well as political -- to PLO leader Yasser Arafat in the hope that he would make peace. After that proved to be a mirage and Arafat died, the members of the Quartet (the European-inspired framework designed to push hopes for peace co-operatively) pressed numerous schemes to prop-up Arafat's successors. These failed to achieve anything of significance.

Without skipping a beat, as soon as the Israelis left, the Palestinians extended the terrorist infrastructure to encompass the resources they had gained. A few months later, the entry of Hamas officials, pledged to radical Islam and the eradication of Israel, sped up this process.

As the attacks accelerated, and no evidence for a change for the better was forthcoming, Israelis also rediscovered the mistake of giving responsibility for their survival to outsiders. The security arrangements negotiated with Egypt and Europe, which accompanied the withdrawal of Israeli military forces from Gaza in August 2005, have all collapsed.

The first agreement was signed with the Egyptians, after former prime minister Ariel Sharon overruled many advisors, and agreed to remove Israeli troops from the 13-kilometer border strip between Gaza and Egypt. The IDF had been very active in stopping Palestinians from smuggling explosives, terrorists and various anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles under the border. Although turning over this responsibility to Cairo was a calculated risk, the hope was by making this move, Israel would be seen to have ended the occupation of Gaza. And perhaps the Egyptian presence along the border and inside Gaza would encourage the Palestinians to turn their energies from war to peace.

In parallel, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice brokered a separate security arrangement covering the Rafiah crossing. On Nov. 15, 2005, Rice pressed then prime minister Sharon to agree to a joint Palestinian-European Union arrangement in this very sensitive area. The U.S. was responding to pressures from the Europeans, who desperately wanted a major role in what was seen as the latest "peace process."

A short time after the agreement was signed, Palestinians bulldozed a breach in the barrier along the Philadelphi corridor and moved freely into and out of Egypt. The 70 European "observers" were shunted aside and chased away by various Palestinian gunmen. As a result, the smuggling of weapons and terrorists has grown into a torrent, and these agreements have joined many others in the dustbin of Middle East peace efforts.

After paying a high price for these hopes, Israelis have rediscovered the fundamental need for direct control over their own security. This lesson has been learned on many occasions -- in 1948, when no one protected them from a mass invasion that almost crushed the nascent country; in 1967, when the UN suddenly removed the peacekeepers stationed in the Sinai following the previous war; and in 1973, when Egyptian forces were able to use weapons that the American-brokered cease-fire was supposed to have kept far away from the front. But after a few years, the combination of international pressure on Israel and the hopes that perhaps there will be changes this time, have led to another round of Palestinian attacks and a reluctant Israeli return to responsibility for its own security.

It is still far too early to know how the return to Gaza will end. But even if the kidnapped soldier is released, the Israeli forces cannot simply turn around and leave Gaza, waiting for the next attempt. Israel is unlikely to reoccupy the poor and hate-filled cities, but the days when Palestinian groups could simply drive from Egypt into Gaza with weapons and terrorists are over. Reliance on outsiders -- particularly Egypt and the European Union -- for security is over, and Israel has no choice but to resume control over Gaza's borders. This will at least help to prevent more terror and kidnappings, and perhaps eventually convince some Palestinians that the only option they have is to take control over their own society, and finally make the compromises necessary for real peace.

- Prof. Gerald M. Steinberg is the director of the Program on Conflict Management at Bar Ilan University in Israel

Palestinians Do It Again - Miss a Peace Opportunity -  (Chicago Sun-Times) Editorial
The responsibility for this escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rests with the Palestinians who have yet again turned their backs on peace. Rather than take the withdrawal of Israel from Gaza as an opportunity to build a future for their children, they instead refused to relinquish their embrace of a culture of hate and death. Just last year, the Israelis uprooted Israeli communities in Gaza and left the strip. Opponents within Israel complained that it was opening the way for the creation of a terrorist state, that the Palestinians would engage in fantasies of how Hamas and other terrorists had sent the Israelis running. The optimists hoped the Palestinians would get serious about the business of self-governing.

    With their economy in shambles and the international community ready to help them with aid and advice to build a functioning society, the Palestinians showed where their priorities are. In new elections they chose Hamas to run their government, selecting a terrorist organization pledged to wage eternal war on Israel and Jews. Hamas in April appointed a terrorist with a history of firing rockets into Israel to head a "security force."

    The latest outrage was the kidnapping of a wounded Israeli soldier over the weekend. This attack was no spur of the moment affair, but was carried out through a tunnel out of Gaza that had taken months to dig. The fundamental requirement for any movement toward peace is for Abbas, the Palestinian Authority, and the Palestinians themselves to reject terrorism and disarm the terrorists. It's the one step they never seem to want to take.

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, June 28, 2006

The Terrorist Regime Next Door - Editorial  (Washington Times)
Since Israel withdrew from Gaza last summer, more than 500 rockets have been fired at Israeli civilian targets from PA-controlled Gaza, hitting schools, kindergartens, farms, private homes, and factories. In Sderot, an Israel town several miles from the Gaza border, an estimated one-third of the children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the near-daily rocket barrages from Gaza, where Hamas is now in charge. Security threats emanating from Gaza have been further exacerbated by the fact that weapons smuggling from Egypt has increased dramatically following Israel's pullout last year. [Ashdod, Kiryat Gat, and Ofakim will soon be within range of rockets fired by Palestinians in Gaza.]
 

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, June 20, 2006

Military Intelligence: Palestinians May Have 100 Katyusha Rockets in Gaza - Yaakov Katz (Jerusalem Post)
    While only one Katyusha rocket has so far been fired at Israel (on Election Day), Military Intelligence believes the Palestinians have at least 100 more.
    In addition, the army suspects that Palestinians have anti-aircraft missiles and other new weaponry.
    Iranian and Syrian terror and bomb experts have also entered Gaza from Egypt and are in the midst of setting up new terror infrastructures, with the goal of duplicating them in the West Bank. Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, April 10, 2006

IDF: Gaza Is Wide Open to Weapons Smuggling and Entry of Terrorists - Amos Harel (Ha'aretz)
    The IDF admits that Gaza is wide open to weapons smuggling and the entry of terrorists - both through the Rafah terminal and through recently reactivated tunnels beneath the Philadelphi route in Rafah.
    PA sources say ten terror operatives affiliated with al-Qaeda and other global jihad factions have infiltrated the Gaza Strip in recent weeks and are involved in smuggling materiel on a large scale.
    Among the terrorists who entered were specialists who underwent training in sophisticated explosive devices and mass attacks at camps in Lebanon and even in Iran and Afghanistan.

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, April 6, 2006

The Security Implications of a Hamas-Led Palestinian Authority
- Lt.-Gen. (res.) Moshe Yaalon (Washington Institute for Near East Policy)

• It is not sufficient to say that Hamas' victory was simply a Palestinian popular response to Fatah corruption; it must be viewed, more accurately, as a victory for radical Islamism, as perceived by radical Islamists globally. Hamas' electoral victory provides encouragement to terrorists and rogue regimes, and inspiration to Muslim Brotherhood affiliates in pro-Western regimes, including Egypt and Jordan.

• Hamas' victory will improve cooperation among the Hamas-led PA, Hamas terror apparatuses, Palestinian terrorist organizations, Iran, and al-Qaeda, a dangerous alliance which will grow with or without Western financial backing of the Hamas-led government.

• Hizballah has moved operational headquarters from Beirut to Gaza, while operating terror cells in the West Bank and Gaza; its ability to operate will only increase once Hamas officially takes power.

• Hamas will permit al-Qaeda elements to increasingly penetrate the PA, where they are currently recruiting frustrated Fatah activists and former Hamas terrorists opposed to the period of calm.

• Hamas will pursue - by production or imports - longer-range, more lethal, and more accurate rockets, capable of hitting Ashkelon and more northern coastal cities. Hamas will further attempt to import hand-held air defense missiles and antitank missiles.

• The main security issue to be settled between Hamas and Abbas is responsibility for the PA's various security apparatuses. Abbas is certainly not the horse to bet on in this dispute.

• Hamas will likely maintain the murabitoun (approximately 3,000 armed militiamen) and the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades (its terror apparatus), much like the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, to be deployed at its discretion. At the same time, Hamas will likely allow other proxies, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah terror activists, to operate under its directives.

• The international community must unite behind a diplomatic siege and an active boycott of the PA. Israel should freeze its economic agreements with the PA on border procedures and further intensify its military counterterrorism activities, especially in Gaza.

  The writer served as Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces until June 2005.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Feb 21, 2006]

Palestinian Rockets on Ashkelon Pose Grave Threat - Yaakov Katz (Jerusalem Post)
Israel needs to prepare for a large-scale disaster caused by Kassam rockets which could strike the Ashkelon power plant or chemical storage tanks in the nearby industrial zone, senior security and government officials warned on Thursday.

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, February 17, 2006

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein. Klein asked, "Did Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and northern Samaria last year, by giving away territory and uprooting thousands of Jews for nothing in return from the Palestinian side, help Hamas by showing that terrorism produces these results?" Ha'aretz's Danny Rubinstein answered, "Yes, unilateral withdrawal certainly played into the hands of Hamas and strongly helped in their election victory."

3,000 Rifles Streaming Monthly into Gaza - Yaakov Katz
Since the disengagement from Gush Katif, there has been a significant increase in the amount of weapons and explosives smuggled into the Gaza Strip, Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Tuesday. "The amount of weapons and explosives smuggled into the Gaza Strip from Egypt has grown drastically, by more than 300 percent," he said. "If before the disengagement they smuggled in 200 to 300 rifles a month, they are now smuggling in close to 3,000."
    Since the pullout, Diskin said, Palestinians have smuggled three anti-aircraft missiles into Gaza compared to none before disengagement. He added that close to 200 RPGs and tons of explosives were also smuggled into Gaza on a monthly basis. With external assistance, he warned, the terror groups would have long-range rocket capability within a matter of months. (Jerusalem Post)

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 11, 2006

Gaza Was Going to Show the World - Patrick Bishop
I have always been reluctant to accept the Israeli statesman Abba Eban's observation that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, but arriving in Gaza Monday, it had to be admitted that the man had a point. Four months ago, when I was last here, the place sparkled with optimism. With the Israelis gone, Gaza was going to show the world what Palestinians could do when left to their own devices.
    Now it felt more like the Wild West. Our regular driver, Ashraf, was not there to meet us. He has the bad luck to belong to the Masri clan, who are currently engaged in a blood feud with their rivals, the Kafarnehs. The toll so far is five dead and 70-odd wounded. As we passed through the town of Khan Yunis, the main road was blocked by what I took at first to be an election rally. Wrong. The Masri boys were at it again, this time wading into the Tahas, their sworn enemies in the southern end of the strip. As we turned into a parallel street to detour round the mob, we ran into a gun battle, with the rivals trading Kalashnikov fire from opposing blocks of flats. (Telegraph-UK)

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 10, 2006

Former IDF Chief of Staff: Al-Qaeda Sees Gaza as "Safe Haven," Establishing Base - Ori Nir  (Forward)
    Al-Qaeda operatives are establishing a base in Gaza for launching attacks against Israel and neighboring pro-American Arab regimes, Israeli security officials say. Israel's former military chief of staff, retired Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya'alon, told the Forward in an interview that in the wake of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in August, al-Qaeda began to see the area as a safe haven. "What we are recently identifying is the entrance of various so-called vanguard, precursor elements - al-Qaeda operatives without a doubt - who are coming with a long-term plan to establish an infrastructure there." "They are already there to take advantage of the negative potential in Gaza: the instability, the chaos, the lack of Palestinian Authority control. They will use it to establish an operational base or to control, from there, al-Qaeda cells in the West Bank."
    Israeli officials are concerned that al-Qaeda operatives could smuggle in missiles with longer ranges than the Kassam rockets that Palestinian militants currently use or bring in stronger explosives for suicide bombs, Ya'alon said. "Israel is a preferred target, whether on its own merits or as a symbol of the West."

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, December 30, 2005

Senior PA Leaders Envision Continuing "Active Resistance" in West Bank (Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies)
    PA national security advisor Jibril Rajoub and PA minister of civil affairs Muhammad Dahlan have recently openly advocated the continuation of "active resistance" (i.e., terrorist activities) by Fatah and the other Palestinian terrorist groups in the West Bank and oppose disarming them.
    The statements express a basic concept that after the disengagement, the focus of the violent confrontation with Israel should be transferred from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank, while lip service continues to be paid to the lull.
    This concept is shared by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and elements in Fatah, and is opposed to Abbas' pronouncements in favor of an end to a militarized intifada.

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, November 14, 2005

Saul Singer, NRO, Nov. 17, 2005: [T]he standard U.S. formulation juxtaposing Israeli settlements and Palestinian terrorism in the same breath — as Rice again did this week — is not just harmless lip service. The whole enterprise of posing as an honest broker between a jihad and its intended victim is a harmful anachronism.

It is time for the U.S. to state what the "peace process" has become: a matter of waiting for the Arab world in general, and the Palestinians in particular, to recognize that the Jewish people have a right to a small national home in the midst of a sea of Arab states. It is a matter of the Palestinians accepting the state that Israelis are dying to hand over to them, if they would only give up their dreams of displacing Israel entirely.

The U.S. reluctance to replace the "peace process" with a demand for Arab recognition of Jewish national rights is a massive concession to radicalism that undermines the entire American post-9/11 regional agenda. It is as if, in post-World War II Germany and Japan, the U.S. tried build new democracies without bad mouthing Nazism or kamikazes. The widely denounced call by Iran's president's to "wipe Israel off the map" is only a more open expression of the reigning Arab zeitgeist that is accepted as a fact of life by the West.
 

Kim Howells, Britain's Minister of State: "The Palestinians are receiving more aid per capita than any other people on the face of the earth, and we want to see some proper response." "Sooner or later [the Palestinians] have to take a tough decision and start disarming the armed factions within Gaza and the West Bank."  "Look, they have 60,000 troops in the PA, they have all the equipment they need. What they need is the political will to do it"

Bad Start in Gaza, Editorial, The Washington Post Company, September 15, 2005
ONLY DAYS after the final withdrawal of Israeli forces, the Gaza Strip is on the verge of anarchy. Despite promises to impose law and order, the Palestinian Authority has allowed mobs of looters and armed extremists to rampage through former Jewish settlements, where they have burned or bulldozed synagogues left standing by Israel. Many of the valuable greenhouses that, with the generous help of international donors, were saved for use by the Palestinians have been stripped of equipment as police stood by and watched. Despite a formal agreement with Israel to maintain security, Egypt has allowed [PAC Comment: and continues to allow] thousands of Palestinians to illegally cross its border, including rifle-brandishing militants.  More . . .

Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia: War for Jerusalem Has Started

August 27, 2005, Hamas military commander Muhammad Deif: "I thank Allah the exalted for His support in the Jihad of our people and for the liberation of the beloved Gaza Strip, and I ask him to help us to liberate Jerusalem and the West Bank, Acre, Haifa, Jaffa, Safed, Nazareth, Ashkelon, and all of Palestine." "Gaza is just the beginning....We will not rest until all of our nation returns." 

Legal Acrobatics: The Palestinian Claim that Gaza is Still "Occupied" Even After Israel Withdraws, Dore Gold.  Why do Palestinians not want the world to recognize Israeli withdrawal for what it is? Because that means Israel would no longer be in the international dock and the Palestinian Authority would then have to take responsibility for what happens inside Gaza,  Robert Satloff.

Let us speak frankly: no power, human or divine, will be in a position to prevent a huge stockpiling of arms in Gaza within a few years, Yehoshua Porath

Settling In for a Long Wait - Charles Krauthammer (Washington Post)

• Israel has no peace partner - Mahmoud Abbas has nothing to offer and has offered nothing - and in the absence of a partner, there is only one logical policy: Rationalize your defensive lines and prepare for a long wait.

• Far from Israel getting any credit for this deeply wrenching Gaza withdrawal, the demand now is for yet more concessions - from Israel. The New York Times called the Gaza withdrawal "only the beginning" and declared that Sharon "must also be forewarned" that giving up the West Bank must be next.

• This is a counsel of folly. The idea that if only Israel made more concessions and more withdrawals, the Palestinians would be enticed into making peace is flatly contradicted by history. We are not talking ancient history here; we are talking the past 12 years.

• Under Oslo, Israel made massive, near-suicidal concessions: bringing the PLO back to life, installing Arafat in power in the West Bank and Gaza, permitting him to arm militia after militia, and ultimately offering him (at Camp David 2000) the first Palestinian state in history, with a shared Jerusalem and total Israeli withdrawal from 95% of the formerly occupied territories (with Israel giving up some of its own territory to make the Palestinians whole). How were these concessions met? With a savage terrorist war that killed 1,000 Israelis and maimed thousands more.

• The Gaza withdrawal is not the beginning but the end. Apart from perhaps some evacuations of outlying settlements on the West Bank, it is the end of the concession road for Israel. And it is the beginning of the new era of self-sufficiency and separation in which Israel ensures its security not by concessions, but by fortification, barrier creation, realism, and patient waiting.

• Waiting for the first-ever genuine Palestinian concessions. Waiting for the Palestinians to honor the promises - to recognize Israel and renounce terrorism - they solemnly made at Oslo and brazenly betrayed. That's the next step. Without it, nothing happens.

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, August 19, 2005

The Gaza disengagement created several unfortunate precedents: unilateral action without receiving anything in return; relinquishing the demilitarization of the territories by giving up control of the boundaries; removal of settlers outside the context of a bilateral agreement; and the deployment of Egyptian troops in the Sinai as a revision to the Camp David Accords.  Israel's Search for Peace and Security: The Challenges Ahead - Lt. Gen. (ret.) Moshe Yaalon (Washington Institute for Near East Policy)

Life after Gaza - Mortimer B. Zuckerman (U.S. News)

Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, August 29, 2005

It is hard to imagine what sort of pressure could have possibly justified such a dangerous move. And yet, Irineos's appointment is small potatoes when compared with the prime minister's newest plan to unilaterally withdraw from Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. [PAC Comment: Economists believe the evacuation of the Gaza Strip could cost nearly $10 billion.  Further, Israel's enemies take any retreat as a sign of strategic decline and military weakness.  Fatah terrorists told Ma'ariv, "Sharon refers to this as a withdrawal. We call it a capitulation. . ."  Muhammad Dahlan, former PA minister of security: "The withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is a victory for the Palestinian people's will." The implementation of the disengagement plan marks “the beginning of the end for Israel,” says Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal.  Also see: Yoram Ettinger: Gaza - Security-wise and Historically Part of Israel and Yaakov Amidror: The Unilateral Withdrawal: A Security Error of Historical Magnitude;  Daniel Pipes: Ariel Sharon's Folly.  Egypt presses to exploit Israel's  disengagement-related troubles to remilitarize the Sinai -- Post withdrawal, Egypt permits Gaza border anarchy.

IDF: "Terror to Grow after Pullout" - Ilan Marciano (Ynet News courtesy Conference of Presidents)
Terrorism is expected to grow following the upcoming Gaza and northern West Bank pullout, IDF Central Command Head Maj.-Gen. Yair Naveh told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee during a tour Sunday.  There is a "huge" rise in the amount of weaponry being smuggled into the West Bank, he said. ]

This plan is packaged as a way of enhancing Israel's security. And yet, any way one looks at it, it involves the surrender of control of large swathes of strategically vital areas of Judea and Samaria to terrorists in the midst of war.

3/12/04 Update: Caroline Glick, "[N]ow it is clear that the plan that Sharon has so far refused to present to his cabinet is not simply about a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. It is also about a unilateral withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. . . [This high risk plan] strengthens our enemies among the Palestinians. [It] is far worse than the [Oslo plan] we were bamboozled into accepting 11 years ago."  What Gives? --- What is the value of the "Commitment" PM Sharon is seeking from the U.S. for the withdrawal?

4/15/04 Update: President Bush's letter to PM Sharon:  Does it signal:

(1) Capitulation to terror creating an expectation for the transfer of more territory to the Palestinians -- Colin Powell: "The reason we were supportive of PM Sharon's plan is that, finally, we are getting settlements out of the occupied territories. It's not the end of the process; it's the beginning of the process." "With the evacuation of four settlements in the West Bank...that is the beginning of a process to see what else might be evacuated."  Of no less concern, Powell clarified U.S. position on the refugee issue by saying: "What ultimately will be decided with respect to return of refugees has to do with a negotiation between the two parties."  (Is Jordan's King Abdullah getting his own letter to add "balance?"  Anyway, Pres. Bush, himself, nixes 'assurances' to Sharon.  Stench of bias emanating from signers of an open letter to President Bush denouncing the current administration’s “unabashed support” for the sole democracy in the Middle East: Israel.)

or

(2) Defeat for the PA by imposing a solution upon it?

Is it  an extension of Pres. Bush's June 24, 2002 vision or is it being transformed into a meaningless gesture as a result of Scty Powell's subsequent "clarifications" in response to blistering criticism by Europe/Arabs.

Caroline Glick: A good attorney wrote Bush's letter. . . There is no commitment here. Jerusalem Post: It is a measure of how far Israel's diplomatic position has fallen that [this] is considered a signal victory.

6/29/04 Update: Gaza Disengagement May Ignite Escalation - Amir Rappaport
According to the reasonable scenarios, the terrorist organizations will increase their efforts to conduct attacks as the date of the disengagement approaches. They are in the midst of a competition. The Palestinian public will remember the winner as the one that succeeded in driving Israel out of the Gaza Strip, amidst death and destruction. This competition is likely to ignite an especially severe escalation. The attack on the Orhan outpost Sunday increased the number of Israeli casualties in Gaza to 20 dead in the last two months. (Maariv International)
    See also Resistance Activists Blow Up IDF Outpost
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said that "all the Israeli statements about a withdrawal from the Gaza Strip are due to the Palestinian resistance operations. We are completely confident that as the Hizballah Organization managed to kick the Israeli forces out of Lebanon, the Palestinian resistance will kick them out of the Palestinian territories, and we will continue our resistance." (PA Press Center)Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, June 29, 2004

See:  After the Gaza Disengagement: Establishing Defensible Borders for Israel]

In the hours after yesterday's attack, unnamed government sources were quick to see the massacre as a way to advance the program. Sources claimed to Ynet, "If the Palestinians were behind fences, maybe they would finally reach the conclusion that terror doesn't pay." This little bit of strategic wishful thinking was apparently directed toward the two US envoys, David Satterfield and John Wolf, who are here visiting this week in yet another attempt to draw water from a rock and get Palestinian terrorists to reform themselves. The sources argued, "The unilateral steps the prime minister advocates are the only way to save the president's vision and the road-map plan."

How exactly a unilateral withdrawal under fire by Israeli security forces would advance anything other than Yasser Arafat's vision of the destruction of Israel is unclear. Why would the forced transfer of Israeli citizens from their homes in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and the redeployment of IDF forces out of Palestinian population centers, make the situation better for Israel and worse for the PLO? Advocates of Sharon's plan claim that it has four distinct advantages for Israel. They say that unilateral withdrawal will reduce contact between Israel and the Palestinians and, as a result, lessen the Palestinians' desire and ability to kill Israelis. They say that if the IDF leaves the Palestinian population centers and redeploys behind static barriers like the fence, Israel's lines of defense will be enhanced. They say that an Israeli withdrawal will increase the international legitimacy of Israeli counter-terror measures in the future and they argue that unilateral withdrawal will enhance Israel's demographic balance with the Arabs.

But the Palestinians, like their ally Hizballah, have already proven all these contentions false. When Israel transferred control of Palestinian cities to the PLO, the government built bypass roads around the cities to enable Israelis to drive through the territories without contact with the Palestinians. Yet, this move to prevent contact failed to prevent attacks. The Palestinian gunmen simply left the cities and began shooting Israeli motorists on the bypass roads. In so doing they proved that it isn't contact with Israelis that moves Palestinian terrorists to murder, it is the existence of Israelis that moves them to murder. Retreating behind a barrier won't make them stop killing us. It will only make them change their route of approach.

The fact of the matter is that Arafat has taken the territory that Israel transferred to his control and transformed it into a terror fiefdom. If IDF forces withdraw, these areas will not magically become islands of tranquility. They will, like South Lebanon, become strongholds of terrorists who will train and arm and set out for attacks from their now safe havens.

The main reason that Israel has yet to seriously retaliate against Hizballah is that Hizballah, in the wake of the IDF's withdrawal from South Lebanon, has deployed thousands of rockets along the border. If Israel attacks, they will launch the rockets against us. So who has deterred whom here?

Another reason for lack of action by the IDF against this unacceptable terrorist threat is international pressure. The US opposes IDF action in Lebanon for fear that such action will destabilize the region. Why would the US respond differently to attacks emanating from behind the fence after an IDF withdrawal? Finally, how will the demographic balance be in any way enhanced by the withdrawal? The only population that will dwindle as a result of the plan is the Israeli population in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Aside from that, the situation will be unaffected.

In short, the prime minister's withdrawal plan will simply reenact in Judea, Samaria and Gaza the IDF retreat from Lebanon in 2000. The Palestinians see the plan as such. Hizballah too sees it as such.

As Thursday's massacre in Jerusalem proved, yet again, our terrorist enemies have transformed our entire country into a frontline community. Our enemies see no difference between civilians on a bus, soldiers on a border or businessmen traveling in the Persian Gulf. All of us are targets for murder, blackmail and manipulation. They view Israeli retreats as their victory. They view Israeli concessions as their gain. This week's retreats have no doubt played into our enemies' hands. If our leadership's strategic blindness is not soon rectified it may usher in a more dangerous phase in our war for national survival.

[PAC Comment: Also see Moshe Arens: Pulling defeat from the jaws of victory.]

Click here to return to our home page.