Monday, 16 May 2011

Shin Bet head hits the ground running
By YAAKOV KATZ AND TOVAH LAZAROFF
05/15/2011 19:51
Shin Bet chief to be Yoram Cohen
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Cohen becomes first observant Jew to hold top security position;says "agency will have to adapt quickly to new strategic reality."


“The agency will have to adapt quickly to the new strategic reality that is changing in the region,” Yoram Cohen said on Sunday as he took up his post as the director of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency).
Making history as the first religiously observant man to hold the top domestic security position, Cohen was selected by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to succeed outgoing Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin, who wrapped up six years in the post and 33 years of service in the agency.
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“He [Diskin] has done a lot for the State of Israel,” Netanyahu said. “I am unable to say everything, but I can say that Yuval is a fighter. He started out in the [IDF’s] Shaked Reconnaissance Unit, was a deputy company commander and came [to the security agency] with this spirit, that of a field commander, that of a man trained in carrying out missions. He infused this spirit into the Shin Bet and I must say that the results speak for themselves.”
Netanyahu praised Diskin’s tenure under which the Shin Bet – together with the IDF – succeeded in bringing Palestinian terrorism to very low levels after the bloody times of the second intifada.
Cohen was Diskin’s deputy from 2006 to 2008 after serving in a variety of posts within the agency, including as head of the department charged with preventing Arab and Iranian espionage in Israel. Cohen beat out Diskin’s current deputy “Y.” who was rumored to have been the leading candidate for the post. He will likely resign.
In 2009, Cohen took a leave of absence and spent a year as a research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In 2010, he returned to the agency and headed up teams that worked on developing new technology.
In his speech, Cohen warned that the ongoing upheaval throughout the Middle East could evolve into new threats for Israel.
“This potential for escalation joins and influences other existing threats that we still have to deal with on the Palestinian front,” Cohen said.
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E. J'lem ‘Nakba Day’ protests ‘quieter’ than expected

By MELANIE LIDMAN
05/16/2011 03:00

Violence spreads to Isawiya; 400 try to block road in Walaja; police save woman and her two children from fire started by errant Molotov cocktail.

The streets of the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Isawiya were strewn with rubble and smoldering trash on “Nakba Day” on Sunday.
Dozens of youth darted between the buildings and used dumpsters for shields as they threw rocks at police forces moving up and down the steep main street of the neighborhood.
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Thirty six people were arrested for throwing stones and disturbing the peace across east Jerusalem, including nine in Isawiya.
Police said Nakba events in Jerusalem were “much quieter” than they had expected, according to Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby.
Ben-Ruby said that the large physical presence of security forces deployed across the city as well as frequent arrests played a fundamental part in deterring more intense violence.
There were scattered events of stone-throwing and violence in the Shuafat refugee camp and A-Tur. Additionally, roughly 400 left-wingers and Arabs protested in the neighborhood of Walaja on Sunday afternoon and tried to block the road.
Ben-Ruby added that police expect the situation to calm significantly in the coming days, and that security forces will be constantly monitoring intelligence to decide whether to decrease the number of patrols on the streets of east Jerusalem.
In Isawiya, the acrid smell of tear gas hung in the air from early morning, with security forces using tear gas, rubber bullets, and shock grenades to try and stop the stone-throwing.
The stone-throwers in Isawiya, which is located in northeast Jerusalem south of the Hebrew University, at times reached the rear gate of Hadassah University Hospital, Mount Scopus.
Three Molotov cocktails were thrown inside the rear gate of the hospital and exploded, but there were no injuries and no damages.
At one point on Sunday afternoon, police forces rescued a woman and her two children when a Molotov cocktail thrown at the police forces missed and went into a ground floor apartment, setting it ablaze.
The woman came out of the apartment in hysterics, and policemen entered the building and were able to rescue the woman’s three-year-old daughter and her months-old baby, all of whom were not injured.
Security forces used a fire-extinguishing vehicle and succeeded in putting out the blaze in the course of a few minutes.
Stores stayed open in the neighborhood despite the barrage of rocks and rubber bullets, and residents hurried to the convenience store to buy necessities as the exchanges between the youth and soldiers moved further down the street.
“Everything is open. No one is scared, no one is fleeing; we’re just trying to go about our lives,” said a 46-year-old construction worker named Ofik as he left the store with a pack of cigarettes. Like many residents, he said that this year’s violence during Nakba Day was worse than any he could remember.
“It is stronger than normal this year, much stronger because of so many things, the atmosphere is suitable for things like this to happen because of everything that happened in the other Arab countries,” said Amram, 54, who is unemployed.
“We would like to tell Israel, ‘You’re dancing over our wound.’” Near the main street, a spotless private clinic called the Baladna Medical Complex was treating residents suffering from gas inhalation. The clinic, which is associated with Clalit, treated 22 people for gas inhalation, and six for injuries from rubber bullet on Sunday. The majority of the patients came around 5 p.m., after the major stone-throwing had died down, said Dr. M., a general practitioner at the clinic.
“This is different from all the other years. There’s a change in all the Arab countries and we feel it,” said M., the owner of the clinic.
“Milad Ayish [the 17-year-old Ras el-Amud resident who died on Saturday from wounds he sustained while rioting on Friday in Silwan] ignited the anger of the young people. Isawiya is inseparable from Jerusalem, and what happens there affects us,” said M. “What do they want [the youth] to do, throw flowers?” Ben-Ruby told The Jerusalem Post that on days such as Nakba Day or during periods with riots, the most intense violence often moves from neighborhood to neighborhood around the city and is difficult to predict.
Friday and Saturday’s violence was concentrated in Silwan and Ras al-Amud, where police significantly increased their presence on Sunday.
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Analysis: The writing was on the wallBy MORDECHAI KEDAR
05/16/2011 02:32

Yesterday’s confrontations reflect new regional realities and a derisive perception of Israel. And there’s more to come.

For years, I have been hearing of plans by Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria to march en masse toward the Israeli border, under the watchful, headline-making eye of the international media – especially the Arab media. Israel would never dare shoot the marchers, it was reasoned, especially if they walked unarmed and showed no violence.

I wrote and spoke about these plans in Israeli media outlets.

Recently, a few things changed in the Arab milieu, and we saw the consequences on Sunday.

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First and foremost is the development of a “Yes, we can” sentiment – the belief that unarmed masses can overcome and defeat dictators. The “exposed body” protest is the new nonconventional weapon of frustrated, unemployed young people, a weapon against which the regime is expected to be helpless. Tunisians, Egyptians, Yemenis and Syrians use and have used this weapon against their rulers; now the Palestinians have adopted it for use against Israel.
The second development is Facebook and Twitter, means by which a public can organize despite the regime’s efforts to stifle it, and where leaders can mobilize a rebellion without the danger of revealing their real names. Social media was indeed the way Sunday’s events were organized.
The third change is the involvement of the Syrian and Lebanese regimes in events, since bus upon bus of disgruntled Palestinians could not have reached the border with Israel on Sunday without those governments’ knowledge and consent. The regimes’ cooperation stems from their effort to export their internal problems to Israel, and turn TV cameras away from what happens in Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip to Israel and its actions against the Arabs.
Syrian residents of Deraa recently shouted at the cameras, “We hope Israel will occupy us, because the Syrian military is more cruel than the Israeli army.” The Syrian regime believes that dead bodies near the border with Israel will “restore sanity” to the civilians in Deraa.
The fourth fresh element is the link between Syria, Lebanon and Gaza – the Iranian link. These three arenas are all under the influence of the ayatollahs, and there is no better date on which to blame Israel for the mess in the Middle East than May 15, the notorious “Nakba.”
But we must not overlook the Israeli factor, which has an important role: In past years, Arab players have seen and heard that Israel concedes whenever it is subject to external pressure. The Likud, which historically was strongly opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state, is today willing to accept one. A unified Jerusalem, an Israeli consensus for years, is today on the verge of division. Even the return of refugees – once considered anathema across the political spectrum – is contemplated, at least to a limited extent, by some politicians on the left.
And when Israel’s enemies see it compromising its core “principles” under external pressure, and realize its “red lines” are at most pale pink, hope rises that further pressure will be rewarded with further concessions; strong pressure from the refugees, for instance, will bring war-weary Israelis to give up on that point, too.
Israel’s image today – despite the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9 – is that of a weak, wimpy state, a state that can be nailed to the global cross by Richard Goldstone, a state where announcing plans to build 1,600 homes in Jerusalem is enough to raise the ire of the current resident of the White House. Its neighboring countries are certain that Israeli society – especially the elite living in ostensibly hedonist, pacifist, post-Zionist Tel Aviv – will sell out all that it once held sacred in return for peace and quiet on Shenkin Street, because it has lost the will to fight.
At the same time, in the eyes of the rest of the world, Israel is becoming a leprous country – thanks to classical anti-Semitism amplified by European guilt over the evils of the Holocaust and colonialism. (It is always easier to beat the Jew’s breast in contrition than one’s own.) Israel is therefore expected to never resort to force against the unarmed “returnees”; those are the means used by the likes of Libya’s Gaddafi and Syria’s Assad.
Sunday’s events are not the last word. The dynamic in the Middle East is one of escalation and enhancement. Every person killed today is the martyr of tomorrow’s funeral, the funeral itself becoming a violent protest and its victims, in turn, the next day’s martyrs. Israel must thus be resolute on the one hand, but restrained and measured on the other, since a rising death toll will only exacerbate the situation.
This country must carefully weigh its actions in confronting the new realities. It has no interest in sharing a cell with this region’s dictators.
Dr. Mordechai Kedar is a lecturer in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University and a research associate at the University's Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies.

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