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Prepared for the
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
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To contact the Presidents Conference: [email protected]
In-Depth Issue:
Evidence of Syrian Complicity in Attacks on U.S. in Iraq - Douglas Davis (Jerusalem Post)
Al-Qaeda Targets Gaddafi - Stewart Bell (National Post-Canada)
VC Indicator Survey Shows Surging Optimism - Batya Feldman (Globes)
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News Resources - North America, Europe, and Asia:
U.S. government officials said Thursday they believe some of the passengers boarding one of the three Air France flights from Paris to Los Angeles that were canceled this week because of security concerns might have intended to hijack it and crash-land in Las Vegas or another city along its flight path. Officials are suspicious about some of the passengers who did not show up at the airport to claim their seats on the ultimately aborted Flight 68 from Paris to Los Angeles, including one who is a trained pilot. In addition, "our fear is that other things are going on" that have nothing to do with jetliner flights in or out of U.S. airports, said one U.S. official briefed on high-level intelligence. (Washington Post) See also Personal Preparedness Guide A printable guide to address basic questions about personal preparedness for the possibility of a biological, chemical, or radiological event. (Washington Post) Palestinian militants have been quietly migrating to Bethlehem since Israeli soldiers pulled out over the summer. The day before Christmas Eve, the Bethlehem commander of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militant group with ties to Arafat, sat in an idling sedan at the edge of Manger Square. The trunk of his car was stocked with a tangle of M-16 rifles. "I'm sitting here talking to you, and the people can see me," said Abu Hussein. "This wouldn't have happened before, with the Israelis." Hussein enjoys a certain freedom in Bethlehem under the watch of Palestinian troops, with whom he says he enjoys an "excellent, excellent, excellent" relationship. "With the Palestinian police, it's mutual respect. We visit them and they visit us. We're all under the instructions of the president," he said, referring to Arafat. "Here we can walk around, we can drive around," said Abu Diya, a fugitive from Hebron who sought sanctuary in Bethlehem five months ago. Israel's complaints that Bethlehem has become a sanctuary for militants on the run are accurate, Palestinian security officials say. (Los Angeles Times) Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf escaped an assassination attempt Thursday, the second in 11 days, when two suicide bombers plowed their vehicles into his motorcade and detonated car bombs, killed at least 14 people and wounding 46. Describing the incident, Musharraf said the first suicide bomber had driven out of a gas station toward his car. A policeman tried to stop the car, and the bomber exploded the vehicle. "We increased the speed, but another bomb exploded at another petrol pump a few yards ahead of the first explosion," he said. "Debris of the blasted vehicle fell on my car, but Allah saved us," he said. (New York Times) News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:
A Palestinian suicide bomber killed four Israelis at a bus stop under the Geha bridge east of Tel Aviv Thursday - Corporals Angelina Shcherov and Rotem Weinberger, and Advah Fisher, all 19, from Kfar Sava, and Staff Sgt. Noam Leibovitch, 21, from Elkana. "Tonight's attack is another indication that the Palestinian Authority's terror industry is always ready to strike Israel at any opportunity," said David Baker, an official in the Prime Minister's Office. "This goes to show that Israel cannot let its guard down," he said. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility for the attack. Most of the PFLP cells' orders, defense officials say, still come from a group of PFLP leaders who have been in a Palestinian jail in Jericho, under British and American supervision, for more than a year, following the PFLP's assassination of minister Rehavam Ze'evi in October 2001. They have been given virtually unrestricted telephone access, issue frequent press statements, and receive regular visits from other PFLP members. The PFLP has also been known to receive money from organizations in Lebanon, and it frequently cooperates with local Fatah cells. (Ha'aretz) See also Who are the PFLP? (Jerusalem Post) "We are still committed to the road map and will try to implement it," a senior official in the Prime Minister's Office said. "But there is no doubt that these types of attacks, the continuous instigation, the lack of any preventive action, and the fact that Arafat heads the PA security apparatus and keeps them from taking any action will bring us closer to the security steps needed to ensure the security of our citizens." The official said that just as 130 suicide bombers over the last three years led to the construction of the security fence, and the failure to stop arms smuggling tunnels in Rafah leads to continuous IDF action there, the failure of the PA to take any action against the terrorist infrastructure "will bring them closer to what they want to avoid - Sharon's unilateral steps." Since the last suicide attack at Maxim restaurant in Haifa on Oct. 4, there have been over 300 terror attacks of various types, the official said. In addition, there have been some 40 to 50 terror warnings a week. "There has been no lull or quiet, just outstanding success by the security services in preventing the attacks," he said. (Jerusalem Post) The head of the Islamic Jihad's military wing in Gaza, Makled Hamid, 39, was killed Thursday along with four other Palestinians in an IDF missile strike on a car in Gaza City. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said "the military worked to foil what I would call a mega-attack in the Gaza Strip." IDF spokesman Capt. Jacob Dallal described Hamid as a "ticking bomb," and said Hamid "was behind a long, long list of terror attacks, and he was in the midst of planning a major attack." Soldiers also killed an Islamic Jihad member armed with a bomb near Ganei Tal in the central Gaza district Thursday. (Ha'aretz) See also Who is Makled Hamid? Makled Hamid was preparing a major terror attack inside Israel. Terrorists under Hamid's command fired Kassam rockets into Israel, carried out numerous shooting attacks against IDF and civilian targets, fired anti-tank missiles and mortar shells, dispatched suicide terrorists, and detonated dozens of explosive charges at IDF soldiers and Israeli civilians in Gaza. Palestinian security sources received Hamid's name a number of times from Israeli security sources, but did not take any action against him. (IMRA) Three telescopes built by Tel Aviv University will be sent into space on an Indian satellite to conduct a series of experiments in 2005. (Aljazeera-Qatar) See also Science Pact Signed with Israel (Financial Express-India) Global Commentary and Think-Tank Analysis (Best of U.S., UK, and Israel):
The quip going around nonprofit circles these days is that the Ford Foundation's support for Palestinian extremists is the one area of funding it could defend on the grounds of donor intent - an allusion to the notorious anti-Semitism of automaker and founder Henry Ford. In response to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency series detailing Ford's support for Palestinian NGOs crusading against Israel, Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley has announced that the Senate Finance Committee will review the matter. With $10 billion in assets and offices that stretch from Santiago to Hanoi, Ford today has become a major player in international affairs. We hope Senator Grassley goes through with hearings, not only to find out where all that Ford money ended up in the Middle East, but also to raise the larger public issue of whether the tax code is being used to subsidize attacks on American interests. (Wall Street Journal) In a certain sense, Arafat was the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Authority was Arafat. The result of this autocracy was, according to one Palestinian human rights activist, "a police state without a state." Arafat's critics accuse him of eliminating virtually all alternatives to him and refusing doggedly to appoint a deputy who would take over in case of the chairman’s death, senility, or incompetence. Arafat is nearly 75, and with frail health. According to Atif Udwan, professor of political science at al-Azhar University in Gaza, "when he disappears, many will leap for power and money." "The question of who will succeed Yasser Arafat will not be an exclusively Palestinian affair. There are the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Americans, and even the Israelis. All those will try to manipulate the post-Arafat arrangements to their favor." According to the Palestinian Basic Law, the Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council will assume executive power pending the election of a president in two months. However, many doubt that the largely undisciplined Fatah hierarchy would adhere to the rule of the Basic Law. According to Azmi Shuaibi, a former PA cabinet minister, the absence of Arafat will weaken Fatah considerably. Abd al-Sattar Qassim, professor of political science at al-Najah University, argues, "Fatah will definitely disintegrate and polarize into many groups and factions." (Aljazeera-Qatar) A recent poll showed that 28% of students were more "sympathetic" to Israel and 22% more "sympathetic" to Palestinians, as compared with the general American population that sides with Israel by more than 3 to 1 (49% to 14%). During the 1990s, Israel stopped all of its programming on college campuses, as well as many of its auxiliary public relations efforts, because it was convinced that good policies (i.e., the peace process) needed no explaining. Our government must re-enter the fray and stand shoulder to shoulder with those organizations that have worked so hard on campuses to defend Israel against this unprecedented onslaught. (New York Jewish Week) Today Hanukkah is well established as part of the annual "holiday season." Its enhanced status is a tribute both to the assimilating tug of America's majority culture and to the remarkable openness of that culture to Jewish customs and belief. Hanukkah was established to commemorate the revolt of the Maccabees, the first time in history that a people rose up to fight religious persecution. (Boston Globe) Weekend Features:
In A Season in Bethlehem, Newsweek's Jerusalem bureau chief Joshua Hammer covers the siege of the Church of the Nativity and all of the disheartening violence of the Palestinian intifada as it unfolded from the fall of 2000 to the present. At the center of the book is the Abayat tribe, a Bedouin clan whose sons became leaders of the Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigade, which to Israel was a terrorist cell behind a surge of attacks in the weeks before the siege and which to Palestinian Christian residents was to be feared as a band of thugs who set out to put their historic town in the center of the conflict. Hammer takes readers inside Bethlehem and its surrounding villages, stripping away the cliche image of Hallmark nativity scenes. He accurately points out the storming of the holy site by armed Palestinian gunmen "exacerbated the ill will" felt by Palestinian Christians toward the Palestinian leadership. (Boston Globe) In Islamikaze - Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology, Raphael Israeli proposes the creation of an alliance of Western and democratic states (AWADS) that follows six "rules of engagement": 1) Strict control of immigration from Muslim countries; 2) Reciprocal arrangements for controlled immigration, tourism, and educational exchanges to guarantee equivalent, unimpeded bilateral flow, devoid of characteristic Muslim discriminatory regulations towards other races, faiths, or nationalities; 3) Making various forms of assistance contingent upon accountability, progress in human rights, meaningful efforts at population control, renunciation of force/violence in dealing with other nations/communities, and monitoring and controlling incitement to hatred and violence in mosques and media outlets; 4) Terminating all military assistance and weapons sales by AWADS to non-member states; 5) Mosque construction in AWADS nations, particularly projects funded by Saudi Arabia, will be contingent upon reciprocal arrangements to construct religious institutions for other faiths in Muslim nations; 6) The importation into AWADS nations from Muslim countries of books, movies, clerics and missionaries, print media, or audio/video tapes must be reciprocal, contingent upon the unrestricted flow of similar AWADS cultural assets into Muslim countries, and all such assets will be required by law to be devoid of messages that disseminate hate. (FrontPageMagazine) Roman Greenberg was 10 when he arrived in Tel Aviv from Russia with his mum, dad, and younger brother. At 14, Greenberg found his way to one of the anonymous little boxing gyms in Israel. He won silver medals at the European Cadet Championships in Macedonia in 1997 and the European Junior Championships in Latvia the following year. In 2000, he won another silver medal in Budapest for the World Junior Championships. After meeting Robert Waterman, a British boxing promoter, Greenberg relocated to Finchley and turned professional at age 19. "Max Baer was the last [Jewish] heavyweight champion of the world and that was for about five minutes 70 years ago," Waterman admits. In 2003, Greenberg fought eight times and stopped or knocked out all of his opponents with a casual ease that separates dumb heavyweights from real prospects. (Independent-UK) Observations: The Continuing War - Ze'ev Schiff (Ha'aretz)
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