The commander of Israel's Home Front issued a stark warning on Monday that the Middle East is headed for a full-scale, multi-front war that would see the use of weapons of mass destruction.
246 CommentsThe End of Israel?
US government spied on Israel's Washington embassy
The United States government has spied on the Israeli embassy in Washington by bugging its phones, according to a journalist who received secret transcripts from an FBI translator who was jailed for the leak.
Israeli army arms Jewish settlers in preparation for Palestinian unrest
Jewish settlers across the West Bank are being armed and trained by the Israeli military in anticipation of unrest and violence leading up to a Palestinian demand for statehood at the United Nations in three weeks.
Posted by Ryan Mauro Bio ↓ on Aug 18th, 2011
Saturday, 10 September 2011
Telegraph
5:04PM BST 06 Sep 2011
"After the Arab Spring, we predict that a winter of radical Islam will arrive," Major-General Eyal Eisenberg told a press conference in Tel Aviv.
"As a result the possibility for a multi-front war has increased, including the potential use of weapons of mass destruction."
But yesterday Israel's Defence Minister Ehud Barak did his best to discredit General Eisenberg's dramatic prediction.
While touring the Syrian border in Israel's north he said he could see no reason for Israel's adversaries to launch a large-scale conflict. "I am also convinced that none of our enemies will dare use chemical weapons against Israel, not now and not in the future," he added.
General Eisenberg himself took to Israeli army radio to explain that his comments had been taken out of context. He maintained, however, that the threat of a Middle Eastern conflict was increasing and pointed to strained relations between Israel and Turkey as a cause of further instability.
Major-General Uzi Dayan, a former national security advisor to Israel, also discounted the possibility of an imminent Middle Eastern conflict. "This pronouncement came from a very young General," he told the Daily Telegraph, but added that regional instability following the Arab Spring undoubtedly poses a growing security threat. Israel is watching Turkey and Egypt particularly closely fearing they may be about to enter into a hostile agreement, he said.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has announced he will visit Cairo next week to discuss political and economic cooperation with the Egyptian leadership.
Analysts predict he may use this trip to make his long-threatened trip to Gaza.
Posted by Giulio Meotti Bio ↓ on Aug 12th, 2011
How can a tiny nation, hated wherever it resides, possibly survive? This has been the paramount question governing Jewish life for two millennia.
During Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, the country lost more than 6,000 of her finest soldiers, which was 1 percent of her total population, the equivalent of 3 million losses pro-rated for America’s population. A devastating start on the road of independence.
So when one recalls the reality that faced Israel in 1948 and where the country is today, it is nothing short of a miracle. Every other people so conquered and exiled has in time disappeared. Only the Jews defied the norm. Twice.
But, I fear, never again. That’s why Israel’s worst-case scenarios matter today, even if the peaceniks continue to protest against occupying anybody except the cafes in Tel Aviv.
Maybe imagining nightmarish scenarios is only the fantasy of some pessimist writers. Maybe Israel will live through a very quiet period ahead and the worst-case predictions will never materialize.
But Israel’s enemies are working for a future that is clear to them: a world without Zionism, a world without Israel.
Why is it not alarming when Haifa, the third-largest Israeli city, is building “the largest underground hospital in the world” to be used in case of war? Is it immoral to be on alert for a possible disaster when the Jewish State is distributing new gas masks or when the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv installs numerous underground shelters? Even the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, is building a labyrinth of tunnels and rooms from where the Jewish leadership would guide the country in case of attacks.
Israel remains the only “bunkered” democracy in the world, a country where its military Research and Development Directorate calculated the effects of an Iranian nuclear bomb on Tel Aviv: “A blast radius of about 500 meters and 20,000 people killed,” they said.
According to a Yedioth Ahronoth poll published in 2007, 47 percent of Israelis said they were concerned that in 2048 – the centenary of Israel’s founding – there will be no Israel. Now the deadline is September 2011.
What will happen after the Palestinians will have sought the unilateral declaration at the United Nations?
Pinhas Inbar, one of the leading experts of the Middle East, in a dossier for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, explained that the Arabs could launch a “Third Intifada.” Other experts suggest that the Palestinians have no material interest in resuming the Jihadist struggle.
The Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, just declared that the Palestinians are planning “violence and bloodshed such as we have never seen.”
If the Palestinians get a vote for independence, the day after the UN resolution, the Arab security forces could violently lay claim to the land now in Jewish hands. If instead the UN enterprise is a setback, terrorist groups could revive terrorism on a large scale.
The Israeli Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, says that the army is not ready for “a mass invasion of the borders,” after Marwan Barghouti, a terrorist leader of the Fatah movement, sponsored an appeal for “popular marches” against the Jews. The army is building a northern barrier against Syrian and Lebanese infiltrations.
The Jerusalem police just held the largest joint drill since 2005, when Israel dismantled the Gush Katif. Attacks are expected against Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria. Violent episodes could take place against the military checkpoints and the security barrier.
There is a dossier about “popular terrorism” with road blocks and fire. The Arab community in Galilee could join the violence under the incitement of some violent Arab MKs that are asking to change the name of Israel in “Falastin” and to remove the portrait of Theodor Herzl from the Knesset.
The Islamic Jihad could launch Grad rockets on the Israeli southern cities like Ashkelon, Sderot and Beersheba. Thousands of Jews will have to flee to shelters. An al-Qaeda squad could bomb the Eilat airport with rockets launched from Jordan. Attacks could be planned against Jews at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
The Arab League could request the UN Security Council to order a no-fly zone above Gaza. Syrians, Lebaneses, Egyptians, Gazans and Jordanians could flood Israel with hundreds of thousands of people.
At the opening of the Durban III conference in New York, the assembly led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could condemn the “Israeli apartheid regime” and the Organization for the Islamic Conference could accuse Israel of destroying the Al Aqsa Mosque. Violent demonstrations could shake up the Islamic world, while appeasing religious leaders in the West would call for “respect for Islamic and Christian Holy Places.”
Rachel’s tomb in Bethlehem would again become the scene shootings and terrorism. Israeli leftist figures could advance the demand to de-Judaize the flag (with its Star of David) and the national anthem Ha-Tikvah, and drain school curricula, the army, and the constitution of their distinctive Jewish national character.
Turkey could break off its ties with Israel, and Israel would have to mobilize the army to face a new Egyptian threat. Jewish areas in eastern Jerusalem could be subjected to Arab sniper fire. The town of Maale Adumim could be besieged and its inhabitants slaughtered on the road. The Hebron Jews could be the victims of a new Jihadist pogrom like in 1929. Hamas and Hizbullah could shower a hail of rockets on Israel, reaching the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv.
Were Katyusha rockets to start falling on runways at Ben-Gurion Airport or on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway, Israel’s economy would simply cease to exist.
Thousands of Israelis could flee from Jerusalem. Israeli Arabs could gather in Nazareth to denounce the “apartheid” they are subjected to in Israel itself. Arab-populated areas of the Galilee, Akko, Jaffa and North Negev could go on general strike and commence violent protests.
The suicide bombers could blow up again in the restaurants, shopping malls, cafes and bus stops. The Western media would demonize the Israelis by new blood libels. Attacks could increase throughout Europe against Jewish schools and institutions.
The Iranian ayatollahs could announce that they have set up a nuclear battery to protect the “Muslim brothers.” The mullahs in Qom could convene in a secret meeting, under a portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini , to give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the go-ahead. From Tehran to Tel Aviv, an Iranian Shihab-3 rocket would take 12 minutes to hit the Jews.
In the mindset of the Islamic multitudes and Western appeasers, the goal is clear: they want an Israel that packs up and goes away. They dream about millions of Israelis with their suitcases in a long march that lead them to ships and aircraft. Destination: diaspora.
The Jewish houses left with everything in them, the Israeli postal offices empty, Yad Vashem closed, the Wailing Wall destroyed, the registry archives in Cesarea and Beth Shean vandalized, the Jewish bookshops toppled, the Knesset used by alley cats and the electric cars abandoned along the way like a huge flock of dead birds.
Call it the evaporation of the the State of Israel. The Jews would return to their homeless status in Russia, France, America, Poland. In Warsaw they might rebuild the ghetto. From Baghdad to Haifa, tens of thousands of miles covered only by the voice of Al Jazeera.
Can it happen? God forbid not. But if we peer into our hearts, can we really be completely sure that Israel will see its centennial in 2048?
Telegraph
9:08PM BST 06 Sep 2011
Shamai Leibowitz, 40, a contract Hebrew translator for the FBI, was jailed for 20 months last year after being prosecuted under the US Espionage Act for leaking the classified information.
The trial was conducted amid extraordinary secrecy with even the judge stating: "I don't know what was divulged other than some documents, and how it compromised things, I have no idea."
The person Leibowitz leaked to was identified in the trial only as "Recipient A". Now Recipient A has come forward and identified himself as Richard Silverstein, who runs a liberal Jewish blog "Tikun Olam: Make the World a Better Place".
Mr Silverstein, 59, told the New York Times that Leibowitz passed him some 200 pages of verbatim phone records because he feared an Israeli attack on Iran and was concerned about Israel's efforts to lobby the US Congress and the American public.
He said that he had burned the documents in his garden in Seattle when Leibovitz, a joint US and Israeli citizen who lived in Silver Spring, Maryland in the Washington suburbs, came under investigation in 2009.
Mr Silverstein said he remembered that the conversations included discussions among American supporters of Israel, embassy officials and at least one member of Congress.
"What really concerned Shamai at the time was the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran, which he thought would be damaging to both Israel and the United States," Mr Silverstein said.
The two men became friends after Mr Silverstein said he got to know Leibowitz, a lawyer and long-time political activist, after he noticed that he had a liberal blog called "Pursuing Justice".
At his sentencing, Leibowitz said that he made a mistake. At the time he disclosed the classified information, he believed the documents showed a "violation of the law" but in hindsight he should have pursued other options within the government to report his concerns.
Leibowitz, the father of seven-year-old twins and a leader of his synagogue, was an odd choice for an FBI translation post. He was born in Israel to a prominent academic family and represented controversial clients such as Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian leader convicted of directing terrorist attacks against Israelis.
A former CIA officer told The Daily Telegraph that Israelis routinely spy on American intelligence officials and it was neither surprising nor improper that the US government did the same. All CIA officers who serve in Israel are viewed as having had their identities compromised for the rest of their careers.
The public revelation could help the Israelis in their campaign to free Jonathan Pollard, an American civilian naval intelligence analyst sentenced to life in 1987 for spying for Israel.
Although the US government routinely eavesdrops on some Washington embassies, spying on close allies is an extremely delicate issue.
The FBI conducts any wiretaps on embassies in the US but intelligence obtained is passed to the CIA and other agencies. Matthew Aid, an intelligence writer, said the intercepts are carried out by the FBI's Operational Technology Division, based in Quantico, Virginia. Translators like Leibowitz work at an FBI office in Calverton, Maryland.
The FBI, the US Justice Department or the Israeli Embassy in Washington refused to comment on Mr Silverstein's claims. The Israeli foreign ministry said: "we will not dignify these reports with a comment".
A former Israeli senior security officer told the Daily Telegraph: "This spying incident is of no major concern to Israel. We have our differences with the United States – that's no secret – but they remain our strategic friend."
Telegraph
On Monday morning, a Palestinian man from Nablus drove a stolen taxi into a police blockade outside a Tel Aviv nightclub before stabbing several onlookers Photo: AP
Phoebe Greenwood in Tel Aviv
5:21PM BST 30 Aug 2011
The Israeli Defence Force fears that demonstrations ahead of the UN debate on September 20 will bring violent confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli settlers living illegally in settlements across territory occupied by Israel.
Leaked documents documents have outlined Israeli plans to arm security guards working on the Jewish settlements with riot gear, including tear gas and stun grenades.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, an Israeli army spokesperson confirmed that the military is training "community leadership and security personnel throughout Judea and Samaria" but refused to comment on whether they were also being provided with additional arms.
An Israeli security source told the Daily Telegraph: "These security officers are employed by the Ministry of Defence and have to be able respond to any security threat, like the murders in Itamar. It would be irresponsible if we did not prepare them for every eventuality."
In March this year, five members of the Jewish Fogel family were killed while they slept in their home in the West Bank's Itamar settlement by two Palestinian teenagers from a neighbouring village.
Mata Vilnai, the Israeli home affairs minister announced on Tuesday that a terror cell based in the Sinai Peninsula is preparing to carry out a series of attacks in Israel over the coming weeks.
On Monday morning, a Palestinian man from Nablus drove a stolen taxi into a police blockade outside a Tel Aviv nightclub before stabbing several onlookers. Eight people, including several teenagers, were injured.
Gill Kosover, who owns a car workshop outside where the attack took place, said Israelis are braced for more violence.
"This is nothing," he said. "This will happen more and more as we head towards September. This is just the beginning. Things are starting to boil here."
B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights agency, has reported 42 cases of Jewish settler violence for police investigation since the beginning of 2011, including the murder of two Palestinian teenagers.
Chris Gunness, a spokesman for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, accused Israeli soldiers of turning a blind eye to settler assaults on Palestinians: "The close relationship between the IDF and the illegal settlement project in the West Bank is confirmed by the many reports we see of the most violent settlers forcing Palestinians of their ancestral land under the noses of the IDF, sometimes with their protection if not connivance," he said.
When an enemy gives insight into his strategic thinking, it pays to listen. A Hezbollah member of Lebanon’s parliament, retired Brigadier-General Walid Sakariya, predicts that Israel will be destroyed by a “Shiite crescent” in a war with hundreds of thousands of deaths. This war, he says, can only commence once two things happen: Iraq is absorbed into Iran’s bloc after a U.S. withdrawal and the Syrian regime is saved.
Sakariya says that Iraq is blocking plans to destroy Israel by acting as a “buffer zone.” Once U.S. forces completely leave, Iraq will fall to the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah axis, permitting Iranian forces to march through its territory. A “Shiite crescent” is created, bringing together over 100 million people in a war against Israel, he explains. He recognizes the high cost of such a conflict, and predicts “hundreds of thousands” of “martyrs” and the use of nuclear weapons by Israel. To Sakariya, the prize of destroying Israel is worth that price. The war hasn’t started only because Iran’s bloc anticipates more permissible conditions.
However, Sakariya concedes that the plan to destroy Israel requires preserving Syria as a member of the “confrontation” bloc and adding Iraq. Iran has undoubtedly made achieving these objectives its top priority.
“If Syria, as a confrontation country, fails, America and the Zionist enterprise will be victorious,” he said.
The Iranian regime quickly dispatched the Revolutionary Guards to Syria to help the Assad regime cope with the uprising against it. Joint commander centers were built in Homs and in Damascus International Airport. Iran is spending $23 million to build a Revolutionary Guards base at an airport in Latakia by the end of 2012. It will be able to host planes that can deliver up to 40 tons of weapons each. Defected Syrian soldiers claim that Iran and Hezbollah are behind the executions of disloyal troops, and Iranian snipers are active on the ground.
Iran’s proxies are working hard to force a complete withdrawal of U.S. military personnel from Iraq in order to open up the opportunities mentioned by Sakariya. In June, the number of U.S. casualties spiked to the highest monthly level since 2008. The U.S. blamed the attacks on Iran, and top officials publicly warned of reprisals. Three Iranian proxies were responsible: Kaitab Hezbollah, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, and the Promised Day Brigade, a group that split from the Mehdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr, who is also pledging to renew his jihad if U.S. forces stay.
Moqtada al-Sadr fled to Iran when the surge began. There, he earned the title of Grand Ayatollah. The Iranians clearly want to use him to lead the Iraqi Shiites. In April, he threatened to “escalate military resistance” if U.S. forces stay past the end of the year, and one of his aides said, “We are all time bombs and detonators at the hands of Moqtada al-Sadr.” He recently declared that any non-combat U.S. soldier in Iraq will be considered a legitimate target. “Whoever stays in Iraq will be treated as an unjust invader and should be opposed with military resistance,” his online statement
There are strong obstacles standing in the way of Sakariya’s vision. The Iranians are undoubtedly employing every method and every technology they can to save the Assad regime in Syria, yet the protests continue to grow. Defectors claim that many more soldiers are deserting than is being reported. One defector said that 4,000 soldiers defected in Damascus alone, and hundreds of others have been imprisoned for refusing to shoot civilians. A Syrian opposition site claims that over 22,000 soldiers, including 7,000 officers have been jailed for disobeying orders.
In Iraq, Iran has been forced to downscale its proxy warfare. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that there has been a “dramatic reduction” of Iranian-backed attacks in recent weeks because of joint U.S.-Iraqi operations. The Iraqi government seems certain to authorize an extension of the U.S. military’s stay, with the U.S. offering to keep 8,500 to 10,000 troops in the country.
The Iraqi political environment is also unfavorable to Iran. Over 40 percent of Iraqi Shiites view Iran’s influence negatively, and only 18 percent view it positively. In the last elections in March 2010, the cross-sectarian bloc led by Iyad Allawi , a pro-American, secular Shiite, came in first place. The bloc of Prime Minister al-Maliki, who authorized offensives against Iranian proxies, came in a close second. The parties most closely aligned with Iran were defeated in a landslide.
Hezbollah MP Sakariya has done the West a favor by outlining the ambitions of the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah axis for the region, and identifying the linchpins of its strategy. If the fall of the Assad regime and the continued presence of the U.S. military in Iraq is what the axis is fighting against, then that is exactly what we must fight for.
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