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| DAILY ALERT |
Thursday, January 26, 2023 |
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News Resources - North America, Europe, and Asia:
The U.S. and Israel kicked off a massive combined weeklong military exercise Jan. 23, the largest since Israel was moved to U.S. Central Command's area of responsibility in 2021. U.S. officials said the exercise, dubbed Juniper Oak, will include space assets, a carrier strike group, strategic bombers, stealth fighters, electronic warfare aircraft, Special Operations forces, and crews operating HIMARS precision artillery launchers. The exercise will involve 6,400 U.S. personnel, 450 of whom will be on the ground in Israel. Of the 142 aircraft participating, 100 are American, including Air Force B-52 strategic bombers, F-35s, F-15s, F-16s, Army Apache attack helicopters, airborne early warning planes, and electronic warfare aircraft. Six U.S. ships are participating, including the USS George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier, cruisers and destroyers. (Air & Space Forces) See also U.S. and Israel Launch Massive Joint Military Exercise to Send a Message to Iran - Courtney Kube Juniper Oak 23 is "the most significant exercise between the United States and Israel to date," a senior U.S. defense official said. Citing the focus on China and the 100,000 U.S. forces in Europe to support NATO and Ukraine, the official said, "We still have the excess capacity to be able to flex to another high priority area of responsibility and conduct an exercise on this scale." "The scale of the exercise is relevant to a whole range of scenarios, and Iran may draw certain inferences from that....It would not surprise me if Iran sees the scale and the nature of these activities and understands what the two of us are capable of doing. This is a sign that we continue to have Israel's back at a time where there's a lot of turbulence and instability across the region. If there's a sense that the Americans are distracted, or the Americans are going away from the Middle East, and therefore they have free rein for their malign activities, I think this will disabuse them." (NBC News) Sarah Margon on Tuesday withdrew her name from consideration to serve as assistant secretary of state for human rights, democracy, and labor amid allegations that she holds anti-Israel views. In Nov. 2018, after Airbnb removed listings in Jewish communities in the West Bank, she tweeted, "Thanks @Airbnb for showing some good leadership here. Other companies should follow suit." The Washington Post reported that Margon retweeted a New York Times article titled, "I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State." (Daily Caller) EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Jan. 20: "The [European] Commission considers that it is not appropriate to use the term 'apartheid' in connection with the State of Israel. The Commission uses the non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA definition) as a practical guidance tool and a basis for its work to combat antisemitism. Claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor is among the illustrative examples included under the IHRA definition." (European Parliament) The frigate IRIS Dena and IRIS Makran, Iran's largest warship, arrived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Monday as part of a round-the-world cruise, Iranian press reported. The ships deployed from the Persian Gulf last year and traveled east through the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, and around Cape Horn in South America into the Atlantic. (U.S. Naval Institute) News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:
Nine Palestinians were killed during a clash with the Israeli army in the Jenin refugee camp on Thursday, the PA Health Ministry reported. The IDF said the operation was launched to "apprehend a terror squad belonging to the Islamic Jihad terror organization," acting on intelligence provided by the Israel Security Agency to thwart "a major attack." Eight of the Palestinian casualties were armed militants, most of whom were Islamic Jihad operatives. At least 20 others were wounded in the fighting. Such an extensive operation in broad daylight is unusual and suggests the planned Palestinian attack was due shortly. One of the those killed was Salahat 'Iz a-Din, considered one of the most prominent militants in Jenin. (Ynet News) See also High Number of Deaths in Jenin Raid due to Threats Against Soldiers - Yaniv Kubovich A senior IDF official said the high number of casualties in the clashes in the Jenin refugee camp was due to the "threat level against troops." The suspects were previously involved in planning and executing shooting attacks on Israeli targets, he said. According to the official, the level of force used was correct. Security forces fired anti-tank missiles at the house where the suspects were hiding due to a barrage of gunfire from inside, along with explosive devices thrown in the direction of the soldiers. (Ha'aretz) The Israel Security Agency said Wednesday it had uncovered a scheme in which Hamas terrorists in Gaza use Palestinians from the West Bank, sometimes without their knowledge, to aid Hamas members in the West Bank in carrying out terror attacks. Hamas operatives in Gaza hid their real identities and, posing as businesses, recruited young Palestinians from the West Bank to carry out deliveries. Some transferred funds meant for buying weapons. Others transported packages with weapons or ammunition without knowing their contents. An Israeli defense source said that as a result of this case, "the security system will deny the entry permits of approximately 230 Gazan workers who work in Israel - relatives of those involved in terrorist activities." (Maariv-Jerusalem Post) On Wednesday near Kedumim in northern Samaria, video footage shows a Palestinian at an IDF security check who slowly gets out of his car and then suddenly dashes toward an IDF soldier brandishing a knife. The soldiers at the checkpoint opened fire, killing the Palestinian terrorist. (Jerusalem Post) Hizbullah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah recently announced that more than 9,000 new recruits had joined the "resistance." This number bolsters the 90,000 members of the al-Mahdi scouts. Nasrallah also recalled that the party can count on at least 100,000 experienced fighters, meaning that Hizbullah can mobilize 200,000 men in the event of an armed conflict. Mohanad Hajj Ali, a researcher at the Carnegie Middle East Center, questioned the validity of the figure of 100,000 fully dedicated combatants. He also cautioned that there is a major distinction between those within Hizbullah's ranks who have undergone a few weeks of small-scale military training and those who are fully dedicated to military operations. (L'Orient Today-Lebanon) In his new book, former CIA director and U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo reveals that during his term, the CIA rescued Mossad agents in imminent peril at the personal request of then-Mossad director Yossi Cohen. Israeli intelligence sources repeatedly denied that the operation in question was Israel's heist of Iran's secret nuclear archive in Tehran. Pompeo wrote, "Whenever Yossi called, I took it. He did the same for me....I was there to help our friends, no questions asked, no matter the risks. My people swung into action across the world. We connected with his team, and within 24 hours we had guided them to safe houses. Within the next two days, they were back in their home countries without the world ever knowing that one of the most significant clandestine operations ever conducted was now complete." (Jerusalem Post) Global Commentary and Think-Tank Analysis:
Israel's New Government Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs President Dan Diker and Talia Sasson, past Board President of the New Israel Fund, talked about how Israel should be discussed in light of current efforts to reform the judicial system, at the Jerusalem Post Democracy 2023 Conference on Tuesday. Diker said, "If Israel delegitimizes itself by using language that its harshest enemies have used against it, it will inflame antisemitism abroad and increase Israel's isolation in international organizations. Israel should be careful about its rhetoric and be very vigilant about what its enemies are saying about it." "When we use the language of Israel's harshest enemies - from the Iranian regime, Hizbullah, Hamas and the PA, which have accused Israel of being fascist - we are engaging in self-annihilation. In political warfare that has been foisted on Israel for decades, words are weapons and Israel must not become the 'weapons supplier' of its enemies." "Israel is a vibrant democracy. The question at hand is what the balance of the democracy should be. It is not as if there will be or won't be democracy. At the end of the day, it is important to speak loudly and confidently about our rights and our responsibilities as the democratic nation-state of the Jewish people. Stand up for freedom and stand up for democracy." (Jerusalem Post) What explains the hysterical reaction to the victory of Israel's new coalition government in the elections held there in November 2022? This led President Isaac Herzog to tell them to cool it. Herzog, himself the leader of the opposition to Netanyahu from 2013 to 2018, said, "Israeli democracy is long-standing and stable. The world of values of Israeli society is not easy to challenge." Most Israelis have accepted that the old thinking about the "two-state solution" is dead. It was ended by decades of Palestinian refusal to make peace with Israel - after Arafat's refusal to accept Ehud Barak's peace offer in 2000, Abbas' refusal to accept the even more generous offer from Ehud Olmert in 2008, and Abbas' refusal even to give an answer to President Obama's peace proposals. It was also ended by the intifadas - by Palestinian terrorism. No one has a serious answer to the question of how Hamas and other terrorists would be kept from power in the West Bank if the IDF withdrew in favor of "Palestinian statehood." Until that question can be answered, a sovereign Palestinian state is an unacceptable danger to Israel - and to Jordan as well. The Jewish state that actually exists still struggles each day against enemies who seek every day to kill Jews. As Israel's president reminded Israelis recently: "We have only one State of Israel." To slander and disparage it, to speak wildly and carelessly when every word spoken may become a weapon in the hands of Israel's enemies, is a sin. The writer, former Senior Director on the U.S. National Security Council for the Near East, is chairman of the Tikvah Fund and a board member of the Jewish People Policy Institute and the Israel Democracy Institute. (Commentary) The U.S. Arms Stockpile in Israel Israel's security establishment will examine a request by the U.S. to supply Ukraine with mothballed air defense systems. Israeli officials were surprised by the American request, since the U.S. and European countries that provide military aid to Ukraine are capable of providing much more advanced systems in greater numbers. One air defense system the Americans requested is the Hawk, which entered IDF service during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and was decommissioned a decade ago. The second is the Patriot air defense system, which entered service in Israel in the Gulf War and is being kept for use in case of emergency. These systems are not currently maintained and their condition is not clear. The American request puts Israel in a tough spot. Israel is interested in maintaining close relations and security coordination with Moscow to continue IDF strategic defensive missions in Syria and to allow the Jewish community in Russia an available access route to Israel. Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said that "Even sending older weapons systems to Ukraine is a high-risk proposition for Israel....The Kremlin still controls the skies over Syria. This is airspace the Israeli Air Force needs to access if it is to halt Iranian smuggling of advanced weapons to Hizbullah." (Ha'aretz) The U.S. military announced last week that it would take 300,000 American 155-millimeter artillery shells from a weapons stockpile in Israel and transfer them to the Ukrainian military. Israeli officials said the rounds were U.S.-owned and that how they were used was "American business." The U.S. has a substantial amount of combat material and equipment forward-deployed in Israel. I was in charge of those stockpiles when I was commander of U.S. European Command a decade ago. I toured the stockpiles on several occasions, and they are impressive, extensive and well maintained - ready for combat. One reason Israel is comfortable with withdrawing the 155-mm rounds is that this will free up space for precision-guided munitions, which is about all the Israeli air force uses. Preparing intelligently for war is a good way to prevent the need for actually fighting one. Replenishing the war reserve in Israel will help deter Iranian adventurism, tamp down options for mischief by Hizbullah and keep Syrian forces away from the Israeli border. The writer, a retired U.S. Navy admiral, is former supreme allied commander of NATO and dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. (Bloomberg-Washington Post) A relatively unknown U.S. arms depot in Israel has become a stockpile of democracy in recent months, as the Biden administration has transferred its artillery shells to Ukraine. In 1984, the U.S. established the War Reserve Stockpile Ammunition-Israel (WRSA-I), a forward-deployed arms depot that could serve as a readily accessible reserve for American forces in case of regional conflict. The station was also meant to function as an insurance policy for Israel, allowing it quick access to weapons if needed. Israel covers the facility's maintenance costs and has used the stockpile at least twice - during its 2006 conflict with Lebanon and in 2014 during its war with Gaza. In recent years, however, the existing stockpile has become obsolete, housing only shells and unguided munitions. Senior Israeli military officials say the depot hasn't been upgraded since before the Obama administration. The U.S. should take the time to equip the WRSA-I with updated materiel so that it may again be a tactical and strategic asset for Israel. It's vital that America restock the WRSA-I with precision-guided munitions (PGMs) because they allow the military to hit ground targets while limiting civilian casualties and other collateral damage. Israel already uses many U.S.-sourced PGMs in its campaign to roll back Iran's regionwide military entrenchment. Mr. Makovsky is president and CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. Mr. Misztal is JINSA's vice president for policy. (Wall Street Journal) Palestinians The Center for Peace Communications, a New York nonprofit, has produced a series of short, animated interviews with residents of Gaza conducted in 2022. Gazan men and women describe their professional disenfranchisement by Hamas and the repression of their personal freedoms. They tell of arbitrary arrests, shakedowns of merchants, and the silencing of journalists. They also denounce Hamas for starting wars with Israel it cannot win while hiding in bunkers and leaving civilians to suffer casualties. They convey an understanding of Hamas warfare as a play for aid money. "There's nepotism in everything here," according to Ashraf. "You need friends in the Hamas-run electric company to get a break on your bill. You'll be taxed exorbitantly otherwise - especially if you happen to be among the 17,000 Gazans with a permit to work in Israel." Amna wants her children to have a decent education, "to think rationally...and live a modern life." She fears sending them to Hamas-run schools "because that's where they indoctrinate people," instructing children "how they can go to heaven" through martyrdom, "and I don't want my kids to be exposed to that indoctrination." Hisham says, "Nowadays, it's not an occupier who is killing me," but rather Hamas, which imposes crushing taxes, leaving Gazans in abject poverty, while its officials have "land, businesses, and vast sums of money." A June 2022 poll by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy found that large majorities of Gazans "are frustrated with Hamas governance," and that 84% prioritize "internal political and economic reform over foreign policy issues." (Times of Israel) China may continue to be vocal on the Palestinian issue to preserve its image as it vies with the U.S. for influence in the Middle East, but its approach is seen likely to remain obscure and distant, observers say. Guy Burton, adjunct professor at the Brussels School of Governance and a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs, said recent statements from Chinese officials demonstrated Beijing's usual approach of showing sympathy for the Palestinian cause. However, it did not indicate any interest in China becoming a conflict mediator in the Middle East. "Amid Chinese [UN] representative [Zhang Jun's] criticism of Israel, he also said that it was up to countries who were most involved in the 'Oslo process' to support Israel and the Palestinians to resolve the conflict," Burton said. "He didn't name any countries, but it seemed telling that he didn't see it as China's role to do this." Li Shaoxian, a Middle East specialist at Ningxia University in China, said, "I think it is very difficult to promote Palestinian-Israeli peace talks at this stage and in this year. But, despite this, China's policy will be to continue to make efforts in this direction." (South China Morning Post) UN officials and the Palestinian Authority continue to perpetuate the lie that Israel has applied a "blockade" on "besieged Gaza." Yet statistics released by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reveal the truth. In 2022 there were 424,417 exits from Gaza into Israel via the Erez crossing. 14,909 exits were for Gazan patients, who were accompanied by 10,930 people, entering Israel to receive medical treatment. In addition, there were 245,145 exits from Gaza into Egypt via the Rafah crossing. OCHA also reported that 74,096 truckloads of commodities entered Gaza from Israel via the Kerem Shalom crossing. Only 5% were carrying humanitarian products. In addition, thousands of trucks entered Gaza from Israel carrying fuel. Since the UN's own statistics debunk the false claim that Gaza is under "blockade" or "seige," why does this lie persist? The writer is Head of Legal Strategies for Palestinian Media Watch. (Palestinian Media Watch) Other Issues Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ascribes great importance to achieving a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia, which, he believes, will end the Arab-Israeli conflict as we know it. Therefore, Netanyahu has been working through secret channels with the Saudis in recent months to promote the issue. There are already several hundred Israeli business executives in Saudi Arabia running businesses even though there are no official ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Security and intelligence contacts are believed to take place. Israeli commercial aircraft fly over Saudi territory. A normalization agreement with the Saudis will assist in establishing an Israeli, Arab, and American coalition against Iran and may positively affect Israel's relations with the Palestinians. Such an agreement could prompt the Palestinians to understand that the Arab world wants peace with Israel and that it is their turn to integrate into this process. Yet at this time, there is no indication of progress in the secret contact between Israel and Saudi Arabia. (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) The Syrian civil war provides a unique opportunity for the Islamic Republic of Iran to expand its hegemony across the region by cementing its presence in a pivotal Arab state. The pronounced secularism of Syria's Alawite-led Baath regime notwithstanding, Damascus and Tehran have maintained a close relationship since 1979. Iran adopted a two-pronged strategy: converting Sunni Muslims to Shiism and settling Shiites from neighboring countries throughout Syria. In 2021, six Iranian universities were operating in Syria, five of which were established after the outbreak of the civil war. These universities use curricula approved by the Iranian ministry of science and require fluency in the Persian language. Likewise, more than fifteen Iranian cultural centers have opened across Syria. (Middle East Quarterly) British Muslims are now the second-largest religious grouping in the UK. The 2021 census shows that the Muslim population is now 4 million in England and Wales, 6.5% of the population and an increase of 1.2 million since the 2011 census. Back in 1961, the British Muslim population was only around 50,000. There are now more than 2,000 mosques and Islamic centers in the country. At the last general election in 2019, a record 18 British Muslim MPs were elected, 10 of whom are women. The writer is director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding. (Arab News-Saudi Arabia) Last week, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government dean Doug Elmendorf reversed course after initially rejecting the nomination of retired executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, as a fellow at its Carr Center for Human Rights. Roth claimed that he had been "canceled" and that "academic freedom" was at stake. This is an inversion of the truth. The voices that are systemically silenced or absent on campus today include pro-Israel voices. Student supporters of the BDS movement disrupt pro-Israel speakers on the rare occasions they come to campus. Administrators turn a blind eye to an organized campaign of calumny against Israel as an "apartheid" state, which frequently spills into physical violence against Jewish students. In 2021, Human Rights Watch became the first global human-rights organization to accuse Israel of "the crime of apartheid." In 2009, Robert Bernstein - a founder of Human Rights Watch's precursor, Helsinki Watch, and its chairman for 20 years - wrote that Mr. Roth had exchanged the group's mission to "pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters" for an obsessive bias against Israel, which aided those who wish to make it "a pariah state." After Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that Israel must be "wiped off the map," Mr. Roth claimed in 2012 that this and similar statements weren't incitement to genocide, only "advocacy." The writer is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. (Wall Street Journal) A recent controversy involved Kenneth Roth's human rights fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School. For nearly three decades, he led Human Rights Watch on an anti-Israel vendetta. It's not like Harvard lacks obsessive Bash-Israel-Firsters. One anti-Zionist more here or there won't really make a difference. The real problem is that Roth would be a negative role model for aspiring activists who should learn to get their facts right as a precursor to righting wrongs. Roth's anti-Israel animus led him to act sloppily and push false accusations in ways that should concern any academic committed to truth. He throws around the "apartheid" word ahistorically, injecting irrelevant but damning race-based questions and false South African analogies into the national conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. In his decades-long, anti-Israel fury, Roth mis-educated the entire human rights community. In rushing to demonize Israel, Roth sacrificed the fundamental distinction between imperfect but fixable free countries and perfectly awful regimes. What serious academic would want some zealot teaching students how to trash facts, ignore subtleties, and eradicate useful distinctions in the name of human rights? Just because Roth bashes Israel, he was hailed as a truth-seeker and defended as a martyr. The writer is a Distinguished Scholar of North American History at McGill University. (Algemeiner) Antisemitism On 27 January, as we mark the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and International Holocaust Remembrance Day, many Australians will pause to commemorate the six million Jews - including 1.5 million children - who were tortured, experimented on, shot, gassed, drowned, and burned by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. It's quite easy to commemorate dead Jews. But what is the point if you're unwilling to stand up for live Jews today? For the generations immediately following 1945, the sheer enormity and horror of the Holocaust was enough to put public expressions of antisemitism out of fashion. But as the memory and knowledge of the Holocaust fades, antisemitism is again rearing its ugly head on a global scale. (ABC-Australia) Weekend Features Critics refer to some of the newly ascendant parties in the Israeli government as "hypernationalist and Jewish supremacist." If by these epithets they mean that their members and supporters care more for Jews - their national family - than they do for the enemies of the Jews; that they are hell-bent on putting a stop to the weekly slaughter of innocent Jewish civilians by Arab terrorists; and that they believe that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish People, and oppose the erection of a jihadist Palestinian polity controlled by Hamas, then this is just classical Zionism. Ben-Gurion would affix his signature to these propositions. We, whose children and grandchildren will, God willing, grow up here in Israel, want peace more than anybody. We believe, as has many an Israeli strategist hailing from both sides of the political-ideological divide, that peace will come only if we are strong, and only if we are insistent on our rights to this land. In addition, we have noted that when Yair Lapid was at the helm, he came up with no better or more humane ideas for dealing with the conflict than any of his predecessors. The State of Israel was created, and continues to exist, for one purpose: to ensure the survival and prosperity of the Jewish People. Unless we keep present in our minds our polity's Jewish nationalist raison d'etre, and keep at bay those universalist, Western-based notions that are geared by definition to undermine nationalism in all its forms, this country is done for. The writer is chair of the department of Middle East studies at Bar-Ilan University. (Jewish Review of Books) Following a redesign of how Elbit Systems' Iron Fist active protection system is incorporated onto a Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, the U.S. Army is now preparing to field the capability to a full brigade. (Defense News) Israeli aerospace and defense company Elbit has signed a five-year contract with NATO to supply anti-missile systems for its fleet of tanker transport planes. (i24News) Israel Aerospace Industries won a U.S. Department of Defense contract to develop and deliver a new attack drone described as a hybrid electro-optically guided missile. The U.S. said the purpose was to increase "the organic precision strike lethality and survivability of small tactical teams." (UPI) See also Video: Point Blank - a Hand-Launched Electro-Optical Guided Missile (Israel Aerospace Industries) Fanny (Mina Weizmann) was a Berlin-trained doctor who immigrated to the Jewish homeland from Russia in 1913. Curt Prufer, a German diplomat, was also the head of German intelligence in Palestine, and he recruited Fanny to spy against the British. The British were allied with Czarist Russia, and Fanny was an anti-czarist socialist. Prufer dispatched his new recruit to Egypt in May 1915, where she was welcomed as a doctor at the overcrowded British military hospitals. To report to her spymasters, Fanny accompanied a wounded French soldier to Rome, then went to the German embassy in Italy. The embassy was under British surveillance. Weizmann was arrested and taken back to Egypt for trial, then was deported to Russia. After the war Fanny returned to Jerusalem where she married a British Mandate official. She practiced medicine until her death from disease in 1925 at the age of 35. Fanny was the youngest sister to Zionist leader and pro-British scientist Chaim Weizmann, who would become Israel's first president. (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) Observations: Where Iran Casts a Shadow, Human Rights Recede - Israeli President Isaac Herzog (Politico-EU)
See also Israeli President Herzog Addresses European Parliament on International Holocaust Remembrance Day - Owen Alterman (i24News) |
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