THE GUARDIAN
Bahman Baktiari
Friday, November 30, 2012
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
IAEA hacked over Israeli nuclear program
Published: 28 November, 2012, 06:41
Edited: 28 November, 2012, 06:41
Edited: 28 November, 2012, 06:41
The UN nuclear agency has confirmed that one of its servers has been hacked. A previously unknown group posted contact details of more than 100 experts working with the IAEA, calling on them to act against Israel’s alleged nuclear activities.
The group, called "Parastoo" – Farsi for the swallow bird and a common Iranian girl's name – published the names along with a statement "Parastoo Hacks IAEA" on November 25.
"Israel owns a practical nuclear arsenal, tied to a growing military body and it is not a member of internationally respected nuclear, biochemical and chemical agreements," the group said demanding the experts sign a petition calling for an “open IAEA investigation” into activities at Israel’s Negev Nuclear Research Center located near the city of Dimona.
It is commonly believed that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, though it has never confirmed, nor denied the fact. Tel Aviv however takes a hawkish stance against Iran, claiming that it is seeking to create weapons of mass destruction and describes the Islamic Republic as the greatest threat to the Middle East.
Tehran has strongly denied any allegations, insisting that its nuclear program is peaceful.
IAEA spokeswoman Gill Tudor said the agency "deeply regrets this publication of information stolen from an old server."She added that the server had been shut down some time ago and agency experts had been working to eliminate any "possible vulnerability" in it even before it was hacked.
The IAEA was doing "everything possible to help ensure that no further information is vulnerable," she said in an email, AP reports.
Monday, November 26, 2012
Israel defence minister Ehud Barak to quit politics
Israel's defence minister Ehud Barack has made the surprise announcement that he is quitting politics. See Article
Bahman Baktiari
Bahman Baktiari
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Eyal Weizman- Short Cuts ( London Review of Books- 24 November 2012)
In the course of the eight-day aerial bombardment of Gaza by Israel – using drones, F-16s and Apache helicopters – more than 1350 buildings were hit. They included military depots, which are considered legitimate targets under international humanitarian law. But the police stations, TV stations, a local healthcare centre, ministries, road tunnels and a bridge that were also targeted are legally protected as civilian infrastructure. To justify their destruction, Israel argued that ‘they belong to a terrorist entity.’ This is an argument that would render all public buildings and physical infrastructure in the Strip legitimate targets: it is not accepted by international lawyers outside Israel.
Israel’s attempt to provide any sort of legal defence at all, however tenuous, is a response to the Goldstone Report, which alleged (before Goldstone himself recanted) that both the Israeli military and Hamas had committed war crimes during the 2008-9 conflict, and that Israel might even be guilty of ‘crimes against humanity’. During the Goldstone storm, in a speech delivered at an Israeli security institute, Netanyahu called organisations that claimed to support the principles of human rights and international law the third strategic threat to Israel’s security – third after Iran and Hizbullah. Israeli think-tanks, like some of their Western counterparts, now refer to this ‘third strategic threat’ of legal action against state militaries as ‘lawfare’: the use of international law as a weapon by a non-state party, to make up for its weakness on the field of combat.
Mindful of the danger of further exposure to international legal action, during Operation Pillar of Defence Netanyahu ordered the military to exercise restraint so as to avoid the level of destruction seen in 2008-9. Israeli experts in international humanitarian law were more closely involved than they ever have been before in the planning of the attacks, and the military repeatedly proclaimed its commitment to minimising harm to civilians. The number of casualties was much lower than during Operation Cast Lead, when ten times as many Palestinians were killed, though as the operation approached its end the number of casualties rose: as the list of targets was depleted, the air force had no choice but to drop bombs on more populous neighbourhoods, with a higher risk of collateral damage.
But Israel is no longer content merely asserting that its aerial bombardments are justified under international law. It has begun to experiment with new kinds of bombing. After the 2008-9 attack, human rights advocates undertook an investigation using techniques associated with the new field of ‘forensic architecture’. In so doing they discovered the traces of a new Israeli strategy: small-scale craters caused by impacts on what had been the roofs of destroyed buildings. The Israeli military let it be known that it was using this tactic – known as ‘knock on the roof’ – again during Operation Pillar of Defence. It involves firing low-explosive ‘teaser’ bombs or missiles onto houses designated for destruction, with the intention of making an impact serious enough to scare the inhabitants into fleeing their homes before they are destroyed completely.
Israel makes much of the fact that it always tries to warn civilian inhabitants of impending bombings. The new procedure is a twist on the established ‘knock on the door’ method, which involved telephoning a house – with a recorded message, or using an Arabic-speaking air-force operator – to inform the inhabitants that in a few minutes the building would be destroyed. Sometimes phones that had been disconnected for months because the bill hadn’t been paid were suddenly reactivated in order to relay these warnings. According to the Israeli military, during the last 24 hours of Pillar of Defence, thousands of such calls were made to residents of Gaza, warning them of incoming strikes. (Israel can penetrate Gaza’s communication networks so easily because its telephone networks and internet infrastructure are routed through Israeli servers, which has advantages both for the gathering of intelligence and the delivery of propaganda.)
Of course, many inhabitants of Gaza don’t have a landline or a mobile phone. In these cases, an IDF spokesperson recently explained, the military’s legal experts recommend the use of leaflets to encourage people to leave their houses before they are destroyed. Teaser bombs are just another means of sending a warning. In 2009, an IDF lawyer said: ‘People who go into a house despite a warning do not have to be taken into account in terms of injury to civilians … From the legal point of view, I do not have to show consideration for them.’ To communicate a warning can indeed save a life. But the strategy is also aimed at changing the legal designation of anyone who is killed. According to this interpretation of the law, if a warning has been issued, and not heeded, the victim is no longer a ‘non-combatant’ but a voluntary ‘human shield’. In this and other cases, the laws of war prohibit some things but authorise others. This should give pause to those who have protested against Israel’s attack only in the name of the law.
We will learn more about the way Pillar of Defence was conducted when, over the coming weeks, it becomes possible to start reading the rubble. Some of what we know about the 2008-9 assault comes from an archive – the Book of Destruction – compiled by the Hamas-run Ministry of Public Works and Housing. The archive contains thousands of entries, each documenting a single building that was completely or partly destroyed, recording everything from cracked walls in houses that still stand, to complete ruins. The ministry will no doubt put together a new archive following the latest attack. Its list will be a close parallel to the one contained in a document owned by the Israeli military. This is the Book of Targets in Gaza, a thick blue folder that the outgoing chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, who presided over Operation Cast Lead, passed to his successor in a televised ceremony at the beginning of 2011: ‘I want to hand over something I carry with me all the time,’ he announced.
Bahman Baktiari
Bahman Baktiari
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Friday, November 23, 2012
Middle East changes may further weaken Iran influence on Palestinian
Iran, which has for years supplied Hamas with weapons, is up against the new Egypt for the militant group's loyalty. Changes in Syria could also weaken Iran. See article LA TIMES
Nathan Brown on Egypt's President latest Presidential Decree
Egyptian President's new Constitutional Declaration protects all his decrees/laws from judicial review until new constitution is passed.
NATHAN BROWN
NATHAN BROWN
Thursday, November 22, 2012
New Book: SYRIA: THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF ASSAD by Lara Setrakian
Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad, By David W. Lesch. Yale University Press, 2012. 288 pp.
“Whether or not he remains in power, Bashar Al-Assad, in my mind, has already fallen.” That is the assessment of David Lesch, who had the opportunity to visit Damascus for a number of sit-downs with the Syrian president before the Arab Spring. It is also a subtle mea culpa; Lesch forms part of the group of Syria experts who were pulling for Al-Assad after his early promise of reform.
With as close as any American might get to an inside view, Lesch’s Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad, serves as a useful primer on Bashar’s time in power. It chronicles the uprising in Syria as it emerged from the cracks of Baath Party rule, growing from the endemic Syrian complaints that coalesced in the heat of the Arab Spring. In the morass of information and misinformation about Syria, Lesch’s book is a vital anatomy of the uprising and a perceptive profile of one man in power.
How did Al-Assad the unassuming ophthalmologist morph into Al-Assad the authoritarian butcher? The turning point, says Lesch, was his survival of a dual onslaught: the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the killing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. Both developments heaped international pressure on Damascus, with thinly veiled threats of regime change. That Al-Assad made it through those episodes bred his hubris. And after his 2007 re-“election,” a referendum on his rule that passed by 97 percent, Al-Assad became a product of his own propaganda. By 2008, Lesch describes Bashar Al-Assad as a man fully believing his own sycophants.
The road to revolution was partly paved by the gutting of the Baathist system that Al-Assad inherited with the death in 2000 of his father Hafez Al-Assad, who had ruled Syria for thirty years. There was a generational rift between the technocrats Bashar appointed to carry out his reforms and the old regime stalwarts of his father’s era, stakeholders in the status quo, who pushed back against change. The clearest battleground in that divide was Syria’s “social market economy,” the Bashar-brand liberalization policy that brought a surge in shopping malls, ATM machines, and shiny consumer goods. I covered this Syrian economic opening for Bloomberg Television in 2010, after a bevy of Wall Street names, including Bill Miller and Barton Biggs, visited the country to sniff out opportunities. What I found, and what they saw, was an upper crust of Syrian society newly able to flaunt its wealth. It was a flourishing wasta-cracy, a system where one’s wasta, Arabic for connections, had become extremely enriching.
For Syria, it posed a challenge beyond the normal social frustrations of inequality. The way liberalization was handled meant that for the first time BMWs were conspicuously cruising Damascus at the same time as lower and middle income Syrians were losing their subsidies and social security blankets. This strained the social contract and left practically nothing of Baath Party ideology: Pan-Arabism had failed, resistance to Israel was trite and frozen, and Syrian socialism was being shredded by the kingpins of the younger Al-Assad’s economic reform.
By the time revolution erupted in March 2011, there was but a brittle regime to hold on to. Its strongest card was popular attachment to the idea of a strong and unified Syria, one that only Al-Assad could conceivably deliver. As protests escalated into civil war, that promise was fulfilled in reverse: as the regime came under threat, it weakened and fractured the country. Syrians nominally live within the same borders they’ve known for a century, but a palpable division is becoming increasingly apparent between the central Sunni heartland of Hama and Homs, the Kurdish north, and the Western enclaves of Al-Assad’s ruling Alawite sect in Lattakia and Tartous.
Lesch sketches out key reminders of what we already know: that barring some sudden about face, Syria faces a drawn out fight, an attrition of forces internal and external. Al-Assad hangs on by creating a “favorable stalemate,” a civil war dominated by superior regime power. Lesch also reminds us that the opposition in exile is seen as illegitimate, while any internal opposition is chopped down before it can rise; Al-Assad diligently picks off all potential opponents.
But still Al-Assad falters, and as Al-Assad falters, Syria festers. And as Syria festers, it throws off sparks that could ignite the entire region. These ramifications were foremost in my mind as I put down Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad. Syria has become another arena for the region’s sectarian boxing match. For Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Gulf, the battle in Syria becomes a jab at Iran, a swipe at Hezbollah.
Lesch points out some yawning hypocrisies in the Arab Spring: the irony of Iran backing the Egyptian and Tunisian protesters against pro-Western governments, yet supporting the Syrian regime’s brutal crackdown on its citizens. Similarly, America calls for the end of Al-Assad while backing the monarch of Bahrain in his clampdown on protesters demanding rights. It is a reminder of how the Arab Spring has become a strategic battle as much as a struggle for freedom. Either way, it has left Syria stuck in a bloody quagmire.
Lara Setrakian is a journalist based in Dubai. She contributes to ABC News, Bloomberg Television, and Monocle. She is the founder of Syria Deeply, an Internet platform for citizen journalists reporting from Syria. On Twitter: @lara.
With as close as any American might get to an inside view, Lesch’s Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad, serves as a useful primer on Bashar’s time in power. It chronicles the uprising in Syria as it emerged from the cracks of Baath Party rule, growing from the endemic Syrian complaints that coalesced in the heat of the Arab Spring. In the morass of information and misinformation about Syria, Lesch’s book is a vital anatomy of the uprising and a perceptive profile of one man in power.
How did Al-Assad the unassuming ophthalmologist morph into Al-Assad the authoritarian butcher? The turning point, says Lesch, was his survival of a dual onslaught: the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the killing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. Both developments heaped international pressure on Damascus, with thinly veiled threats of regime change. That Al-Assad made it through those episodes bred his hubris. And after his 2007 re-“election,” a referendum on his rule that passed by 97 percent, Al-Assad became a product of his own propaganda. By 2008, Lesch describes Bashar Al-Assad as a man fully believing his own sycophants.
The road to revolution was partly paved by the gutting of the Baathist system that Al-Assad inherited with the death in 2000 of his father Hafez Al-Assad, who had ruled Syria for thirty years. There was a generational rift between the technocrats Bashar appointed to carry out his reforms and the old regime stalwarts of his father’s era, stakeholders in the status quo, who pushed back against change. The clearest battleground in that divide was Syria’s “social market economy,” the Bashar-brand liberalization policy that brought a surge in shopping malls, ATM machines, and shiny consumer goods. I covered this Syrian economic opening for Bloomberg Television in 2010, after a bevy of Wall Street names, including Bill Miller and Barton Biggs, visited the country to sniff out opportunities. What I found, and what they saw, was an upper crust of Syrian society newly able to flaunt its wealth. It was a flourishing wasta-cracy, a system where one’s wasta, Arabic for connections, had become extremely enriching.
For Syria, it posed a challenge beyond the normal social frustrations of inequality. The way liberalization was handled meant that for the first time BMWs were conspicuously cruising Damascus at the same time as lower and middle income Syrians were losing their subsidies and social security blankets. This strained the social contract and left practically nothing of Baath Party ideology: Pan-Arabism had failed, resistance to Israel was trite and frozen, and Syrian socialism was being shredded by the kingpins of the younger Al-Assad’s economic reform.
By the time revolution erupted in March 2011, there was but a brittle regime to hold on to. Its strongest card was popular attachment to the idea of a strong and unified Syria, one that only Al-Assad could conceivably deliver. As protests escalated into civil war, that promise was fulfilled in reverse: as the regime came under threat, it weakened and fractured the country. Syrians nominally live within the same borders they’ve known for a century, but a palpable division is becoming increasingly apparent between the central Sunni heartland of Hama and Homs, the Kurdish north, and the Western enclaves of Al-Assad’s ruling Alawite sect in Lattakia and Tartous.
Lesch sketches out key reminders of what we already know: that barring some sudden about face, Syria faces a drawn out fight, an attrition of forces internal and external. Al-Assad hangs on by creating a “favorable stalemate,” a civil war dominated by superior regime power. Lesch also reminds us that the opposition in exile is seen as illegitimate, while any internal opposition is chopped down before it can rise; Al-Assad diligently picks off all potential opponents.
But still Al-Assad falters, and as Al-Assad falters, Syria festers. And as Syria festers, it throws off sparks that could ignite the entire region. These ramifications were foremost in my mind as I put down Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad. Syria has become another arena for the region’s sectarian boxing match. For Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Gulf, the battle in Syria becomes a jab at Iran, a swipe at Hezbollah.
Lesch points out some yawning hypocrisies in the Arab Spring: the irony of Iran backing the Egyptian and Tunisian protesters against pro-Western governments, yet supporting the Syrian regime’s brutal crackdown on its citizens. Similarly, America calls for the end of Al-Assad while backing the monarch of Bahrain in his clampdown on protesters demanding rights. It is a reminder of how the Arab Spring has become a strategic battle as much as a struggle for freedom. Either way, it has left Syria stuck in a bloody quagmire.
Lara Setrakian is a journalist based in Dubai. She contributes to ABC News, Bloomberg Television, and Monocle. She is the founder of Syria Deeply, an Internet platform for citizen journalists reporting from Syria. On Twitter: @lara.
Iraqis locked in rival sectarian narratives
In 2003, US-led forces invaded Iraq, dismantled the state, and brought an end to Baathist rule.
Chaos followed, giving rise to civil war and laying the foundations of a new order.
Sectarianism is one of the pillars of that order. Until the invasion of Iraq, it was mostly associated with Lebanon, where Christians and Muslims shared power in peacetime, and fought over it during successive civil wars.
But after the invasion, Iraq lapsed into Sunni-Shia civil war, and almost a decade later, sectarianism has been wired into the Iraqi system.
Richard Haass on lessons of Northern Ireland for Israel -
Israel should learn from Northern Ireland
By Richard Haass
The Financial Times
November 21, 2012
Israeli missiles continued to fall on Gaza; meanwhile, a bus was blown up in Tel Aviv. But by the end of Wednesday, a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, and brokered by Egypt and the US, was signed. However, there is a big difference between a truce that is an interlude between rounds of fighting and one that presages a promising political process. It might take a willingness to learn from Northern Ireland, of all places, to tip the scales towards the latter.
By Richard Haass
The Financial Times
November 21, 2012
Israeli missiles continued to fall on Gaza; meanwhile, a bus was blown up in Tel Aviv. But by the end of Wednesday, a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, and brokered by Egypt and the US, was signed. However, there is a big difference between a truce that is an interlude between rounds of fighting and one that presages a promising political process. It might take a willingness to learn from Northern Ireland, of all places, to tip the scales towards the latter.
Decades of violence – “the troubles” – set the backdrop to negotiations. Success had its roots in British policy. London’s objective was to end the terrorism and bring about a political settlement. Doing so required persuading the Provisional IRA that it would never be able to shoot or bomb its way into power and that there was a political path open to it that would satisfy some of its goals and many of its supporters, if it would act responsibly.
The government of Israel has internalised the first but not the second part of Britain’s strategy. Israel has carried out massive air strikes that have reportedly destroyed the bulk of Hamas’s Iran-supplied, longer-range missiles and killed dozens of Palestinians, including Hamas’s military chief.
But military force has limits. Israel cannot bludgeon the Palestinians into submission. Nor should it want to reoccupy Gaza: there is no reason to believe the results would be any better this time round.
Israel needs a Palestinian partner if it is ever to enjoy peace and be the secure, prosperous, democratic, Jewish state it deserves to be. But such a partner will not just emerge; Israel, as the stronger party, actually needs to help the process along.
Right now Israel has two potential but deeply flawed partners. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank has an apparent desire to make peace but is too weak to make meaningful concessions. Hamas is easily strong enough but is unwilling to reject violence and accept Israel.
So Israel has a choice: it can work to strengthen the secular leadership on the West Bank or it can work to moderate Hamas. The former argues for dropping sanctions put in place to weaken and humiliate the PA. The latter means not just frustrating Hamas militarily but demonstrating that negotiation is likely to yield better results.
It is not clear whether Hamas is open to compromise. Even less clear, though, is what it has accomplished with this latest round of fighting. Hamas has again demonstrated its willingness to take the fight to Israel but also its inability to get results.
What has made the Hamas action singularly counterproductive was that it came on the heels of a visit to Gaza by Qatar’s prime minister and an infusion of financial support. Hamas had essentially weaned itself from dependence on Iran and Syria only to squander the opportunity.
Hamas is in competition with the PA that rules over the West Bank for who represents all Palestinians. Hamas enjoys an advantage, though: its agenda of political Islam much better captures the zeitgeist in Egypt and throughout the region, whereas those ruling the West Bank, including many former associates of Yassir Arafat, are widely seen as in the image of Arab strongmen who have been removed from power.
But Hamas only benefits from this comparison if it fully embraces political Islam as a means and not just an end. Distancing itself from armed aggression will not deliver a viable Palestinian state.
Israel needs to put Hamas to the test. It can do this by putting forward the outlines of a fair and comprehensive settlement and a reasonable path for getting there. The US should work closely with Israel in framing this proposal. Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, should use the rest of her time in the region to urge this course. Her goal should be to stimulate a debate in the Arab and Palestinian worlds that would press Hamas to change its ways or risk being caught between those who are even more radical and those prepared to compromise.
This was the dynamic created in Belfast. In the end, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness – the leaders of Northern Ireland’s Hamas equivalent – met the British challenge. They put down their arms, entered the political process and reached agreement with those they had fought for decades. Leaders of both communities deserve credit – but no more than the British, Irish and US governments that created a context for diplomacy.
It is up to Israel, the US and Arab governments to do the same now. No one can be certain the effort will pay off; what is sure, though, is that the choices and options will only become worse with the passage of time.
The writer is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was the US envoy to the Northern Ireland peace process from 2001-03
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Monday, November 19, 2012
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Financial Times: Israel needs a Gaza strategy more than war
By Efraim Halevy ( The writer is former head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency)
THE FINANCIAL TIMES NOVEMBER 18 2012
Almost a week after “Operation Pillar of Defence”, morale is running high in Israel. The public is justifiably proud of the performance of the air force, which has flown more than 1,000 sorties. The air strikes have decapitated much of Hamas’s command level, including the death of Ahmed Jabari, the leader of the Islamist group’s military wing.
Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, singled out the destruction of Iranian-made Fajr-5 missiles as particularly worthy of praise in his first media briefing. The second stage of the operation, now in advanced preparation, entailed cabinet approval to call up about 75,000 reserve soldiers on Friday night. Husbands and fathers hastily left the sabbath night dining tables to join their units.
The public has been given the highest marks for reacting promptly and calmly when warning sirens have announced an impending rocket attack. Iron Dome anti-missile batteries have destroyed many hundreds of rockets in mid-air. Mr Barak has been quoted as saying that “there is no reason to ask for a ceasefire until Hamas comes begging for it on its knees”.
The aims of the operation have been publicly stated: to halt the rocket attacks on Israel entirely; to restore Israel’s deterrence; and to secure a long-term commitment from Hamas that it would respect a ceasefire. But little to nothing has been revealed on how the Israeli leadership hope to secure this result.
When asked publicly if the aim was to uproot Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, said this would have to await the “next government”. This allusion to the impending general election scheduled for January 22 was the first shot in a subsequent string of comments focusing on growing support for postponing the poll. The next day Mr Lieberman said that there was no justification for a ground offensive unless Israel was determined to see it through to the very end. Was this one more deception or a bold statement of intent?
A ground operation is often fraught with uncertainties and the experiences of unfinished business in both the Lebanese war of 2006 and the operation in Gaza in 2009 are fresh in peoples’ minds. In the past 48 hours serious voices, such as those of Dan Halutz, the former chief of staff, and Amos Yadlin, the former military intelligence chief, have stressed the need for a quick exit strategy once Israel declares victory.
Herein lies the rub. Hamas, badly beaten but uncowed, is defiant in setting its own terms for a ceasefire: an Israeli commitment to halt targeted assassinations; an end to the blockade on Gaza; and free passage between Gaza and Egypt. These demands are unacceptable to Israel.
All eyes therefore are on Mohamed Morsi, the American-educated Egyptian president. His sympathies lie with Hamas, which is a sister movement of the Muslim Brotherhood, but he is duty bound to preserve his country’s interests, which preclude the free entry of terrorist operatives into Sinai – which is already a hotbed of violent anti-Egyptian activity. On Saturday Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, Qatar’s emir, and Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader, arrived in Cairo in the wake of President Barack Obama’s call on Mr Morsi to take the lead in defusing the tension. Even Saudi Arabia has deferred to Cairo.
There are those in Israel who believe this could be the supreme test of Egypt under Mr Morsi to seize the moment and save the entire region from sliding into chaos.
The situation in the Palestinian Authority is precarious. Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah movement are pathetically irrelevant. Their foreign minister will be visiting Gaza as a member of an Arab League mission, a demeaning status indeed. Widespread unrest in Jordan in response to a steep rise in the price of energy products could develop into a national insurrection endangering the monarchy. Such an event would be a big setback for Israel, both politically and security-wise. The weaker Hamas emerges in the Gaza Strip, the stronger the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the principle Iranian proxy, will become. Elsewhere Iran, the main threat to Israel, has suffered serious setbacks in recent months, primarily in Syria, its strategic ally in the region.
Thus much more is at stake in the current flare up. If it spreads and a ground offensive inevitably produces photo opportunities of dead and wounded, the “street” in all the Arab capitals could erupt and unleash wild consequences, forcing Mr Morsi and others to step back and let the chips fly and land wherever. Regimes and governments can collapse overnight in a second version of the Arab spring. No one can predict the outcome.
Israel must not allow Hamas to feign victory through pictures of rockets flying over Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Yet it is imperative that Israel contributes to an Egyptian-crafted and American-supported formula for the region. If it doesn’t, it might have to grapple alone with the fallout from the latest escalation in violence. Indeed, Israel will have to do what no government has done before: determine a comprehensive strategy on the future of Gaza and its 2m inhabitants.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Israelis debate significance of apartheid survey
A controversial survey implies widespread support among Israeli Jews for an apartheid-style regime if Israel were to annex the occupied territories. But it adds such an annexation is unpopular. See the article here.
Friday, November 16, 2012
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Monday, November 12, 2012
Sunday, November 4, 2012
When drugs are tested on humans
Hundreds of Indians have died in drugs trials, as the number of foreign companies testing products there grows. BBC DOCUMENTARY
Bahman Baktiari
Bahman Baktiari
Saturday, November 3, 2012
Iran suspends uranium enrichment
Iran suspends uranium enrichment. Is the move intended to demonstrate flexibility before the meeting with P5+1 ?
Bahman Baktiari
Bahman Baktiari
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Israel admits killing deputy of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat
"Israel has long been suspected of slaying Khalil al-Wazir, who was better known by his nom de guerre Abu Jihad, in Tunis, the country's capital. " See ARTICLE
Bahman Baktiari
Bahman Baktiari
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