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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: click here In-Depth Issues:
Fatah Heads Talk about New Israeli Security Director - Arnon Regular (Ha'aretz)
Palestinian Weapons Come from Egypt, Libya, Yemen (Middle East Newsline)
Revote Ordered for Gaza Town (Reuters/Ha'aretz)
PA TV Sermon Sees Extermination of Jews and Subjugation of Christians - Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook
(Palestinian Media Watch)
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News Resources - North America, Europe, and Asia:
Iran sent its foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, to Baghdad on Tuesday. Almost 25 years after Iraq and Iran started an eight-year war that left a million people dead, the government in Baghdad is now led by officials with close personal, religious, and political ties to Iran's ruling Shiite ayatollahs. Kharrazi appeared eager to put the U.S. on notice that Iran expects to wield influence in Iraq, especially in the long term: "The party that will leave Iraq is the United States, because it will eventually withdraw, but the party that will live with the Iraqis is Iran, because it is a neighbor to Iraq." (New York Times) Beset by U.S. attempts to isolate his country and facing popular expectations of change, Syrian President Bashar Assad will move to begin legalizing political parties, purge the ruling Baath Party, sponsor free municipal elections in 2007, and formally endorse a market economy, according to officials, diplomats, and analysts. Emboldened opposition leaders, many of whom openly support pressure by the U.S. even if they mistrust its intentions, said the measures were the last gasp of a government staggering after its hasty and embarrassing troop withdrawal last month from neighboring Lebanon. (Washington Post) At least 15 Christians were injured when Palestinian police opened fire on a crowd in Bethlehem in the wake of the elopement of a Christian girl and a Muslim man. The establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994 brought an influx of Muslims into the mostly Christian city and its adjoining middle-class towns of Beit Jala and Beit Sahour. Christians accuse Muslims of taking over land and jobs and forcing them out of political power. Earlier this month, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both militant Muslim groups, won municipal elections over the secular Fatah party for the first time in Bethlehem's history. (San Francisco Chronicle) News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:
"The threat to Israeli aircraft is increasing and the security service is investing greater resources to protect them," the new director of the Shin Bet security service, Yuval Diskin, told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Tuesday. Diskin warned that the world Jihad is planning to strike Israeli targets overseas, concentrations of Israeli tourists, and especially Israeli aircraft, as they tried to do in Kenya using shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles. (Maariv-Hebrew, 18May05) See also Shin Bet Chief: Hamas Showing Restraint - For Now - Gideon Alon Diskin said Hamas was showing restraint and not carrying out attacks at the moment because it wanted to "make it through" the PA elections, "but that doesn't mean it won't change afterward." Diskin also said that Hamas was gathering strength at the expense of the PA. He said that as long as Hamas is not disarmed, it was better that Hamas not join PA government institutions, because the moment its leaders become political figures it will be harder to carry out targeted operations against them. Diskin further warned that "some parts of the Negev have become extraterritorial," noting that the smuggling of drugs and weapons from Egypt was rife. (Ha'aretz) Diskin called the PA's inability to curb militant groups a "ticking time-bomb" and that Israel cannot approve of the situation with nothing being done to dismantle terror infrastructures. He said that as long as there was a chance for Abbas to succeed he should be given the opportunity to do so. The benefit of Abbas is that he does not believe in terror, but on the other hand he has no intention of making diplomatic concessions to Israel, including on the right of return, Diskin said. (Jerusalem Post) Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, touring the north on Tuesday, warned that Hizballah is likely to continue operations across the Lebanese border, including attempts to kidnap soldiers. "Hizballah will try to strengthen the ethos of its control over south Lebanon in light of the withdrawal of the Syrian forces," said Mofaz. "We demand that the Lebanese government take responsibility for everything that happens along the northern border," he said. (Jerusalem Post) "In the present conflict against Palestinian terror, the IDF had excellent intelligence, like no other army has ever had in dealing with terror. I have found no other army with such quality of intelligence in a war of this type," said Brig.-Gen. Gadi Eisencott, commander of the Israel Defense Forces' Judea and Samaria division, who for the past two years directed most of the operations against terror organizations in the West Bank. It is often mistakenly thought that most intelligence information comes from the Shin Bet security service, but in fact a great deal of it originates with military intelligence, through the eyes and ears of its battalions in the field. Eisencott is among those who argue that advanced technology, including the air force, is not enough to win the war on terror. The enemy must know that it faces experienced fighters who also use pistols, and at short range. That is what causes terrorists to run and hide. Eisencott believes that if Palestinians begin firing Kassam rockets and mortars from the West Bank on adjacent Israeli cities, there will be no choice but to occupy the area from which the rockets were fired. (Ha'aretz) About 50 armed and masked Palestinian gunmen briefly besieged a Palestinian police station in Hebron Tuesday night, accusing local police chief Awni Samara of corruption and demanding his immediate resignation. They fired their weapons in the air, but did not aim at the building. Palestinian terrorists and police exchanged gunfire in two other West Bank towns Monday. (AP/Jerusalem Post) Global Commentary and Think-Tank Analysis (Best of U.S., UK, and Israel):
Fatah, the secular, nationalist organization that has dominated Palestinian politics for decades, is worried, and Hamas, the radical Islamist organization branded a terrorist group by the U.S. and the EU, is gaining ground. The prospect of Hamas's political integration within the PLO and the PA has generated anxieties. Some fear that it will take control of Gaza or even the authority as a whole; that it will tie Abu Mazen's hands; or that it will upset the diplomatic process. But Hamas has a natural ceiling in the limited number of Palestinians that will back its hardcore Islamist positions. (Guardian-UK) In Afghanistan alone, at least 16 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in anti-American rioting linked to a now retracted report that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated a Koran by throwing it into a toilet. In Iraq, Baathist and jihadist suicide bombers have killed 400 Iraqi Muslims in the past month - most of them Shiite and Kurdish civilians. Yet these mass murders - this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims by other Muslims - have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the Muslim world. Many of these jihadist suicide bombers, according to a Washington Post report, are coming from Saudi Arabia. The Bush team needs to be forcefully demanding that Saudi Arabia and other key Arab allies use their media, government, and religious systems to denounce and delegitimize the despicable murder of Muslims by Muslims in Iraq. (New York Times) See also Do Riots Save Islam's Honor? - Irshad Manji Newsweek has retracted its report about the defiling of Islam's holy book, the Koran, by interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. But it's too late. Muslims everywhere are questioning America's respect for all religions. Yet even if the Koran was mistreated, are violent riots justified? (Los Angeles Times) Observations: Return Address - Efraim Karsh (New Republic)
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