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Prepared for the
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
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To contact the Presidents Conference: [email protected]
In-Depth Issue:
Arab States Fan Fires in Iraq - Amir Taheri (Jerusalem Post)
The Middle East: The Cash Haven - Christopher Dickey (Newsweek)
U.S. Says Israel Not Involved in Iraq Interrogations (Reuters)
Wife of Suicide Bomber Acquitted (CNN)
Israel to Fix Vandalized Georgian Fresco - Dan Waldman
(AP/Newsday)
Weizmann Institute Rakes in Royalties - Oded Hermoni (Ha'aretz)
Sub-Saharan Africa Blooms with Israel's Cooperation - Nahum Finkelstein (Addis Tribune-Ethiopia)
Useful Reference:
Anti-Terrorist Fence Cuts Samaria-Based Attacks by 90%
(Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
Israel Supreme Court Rules Security Fence Not Political, Does Not Violate International Law (Israel Supreme Court/IMRA)
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News Resources - North America, Europe, and Asia:
The International Court of Justice in The Hague has decided that Israel's West Bank barrier is illegal and should be removed. The court's ruling is not binding. (BBC) See also International Court of Justice Rules Against Israel's Security Fence - Aluf Benn Fourteen judges voted for the decision and the sole opponent was American judge Thomas Buerghenthal. The court was asked to deliberate on the issue of the security fence last December by the UN General Assembly. (Ha'aretz) See also Text of Fence Ruling (Electronic Intifada) Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenants, operating from hideouts along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, are directing a Qaeda effort to launch an attack in the U.S. sometime this year, senior Bush administration officials said on Thursday. Counterterrorism officials have spoken for weeks about a continuing stream of intelligence suggesting that al-Qaeda wanted to carry out a significant terror attack on U.S. soil this year. Intelligence reports referred to efforts "to inflict catastrophic effects" before the election. (New York Times) The insurgency in Iraq is led by well-armed Sunnis angry about losing power, not foreign fighters, and is far larger than previously thought, American military officials say. The insurgents can call on loyalists to boost their forces to as high as 20,000, a number far larger than the 5,000 previously thought to be at the insurgency's core. The insurgency is believed to include dozens of regional cells, often led by tribal sheiks and inspired by Sunni Muslim imams. A U.S. military official, who has logged thousands of miles driving around Iraq to meet with insurgents or their representatives, said a skillful Iraqi government could co-opt some of the guerrillas and reconcile with the leaders instead of fighting them. Resistance leaders come from Saddam's Baath Party, especially from his Military Bureau, an internal security arm used to purge enemies, and have formed dozens of cells. Most of the insurgents are fighting for a bigger role in a secular society, not a Taliban-like Islamic state, the military official said. (AP/Washington Post) See also How Secure is Iraq's Security? - Claude Salhani (UPI) Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is ready to discuss a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East as part of future peace talks, the head of the UN atomic watchdog agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, said Thursday in Jerusalem. "The prime minister affirmed to me that Israeli policy continues to be that in the context of peace in the Middle East, Israel will be looking forward to the establishment of a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East," he said. (AP/Washington Times) Egypt's highest Muslim religious authority Thursday denounced the kidnapping of foreigners by Iraqi Islamic insurgents, and violence against Israeli civilians. Sheik Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, the head of al-Azhar, the most prestigious school of theology in the Sunni Muslim world, said, "The kidnapping and killing of innocent people is banned and forbidden by Islam completely and those committing such acts have no Islamic values or morals." He also said, "Whoever detonates himself against the Israeli army...is a martyr, but targeting and killing inoffensive civilians is completely rejected and unacceptable." (UPI/Washington Times) The Madison City Council has postponed a vote on a resolution that calls for the adoption of Rafah, a city in the Gaza Strip, as a sister city after a debate and public testimony Tuesday dominated by speakers opposed to the project. Ald. Zach Brandon said the project represents "politics at its worst" and expressed regret that Madison and the City Council have been dragged into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Other opponents accused Rafah of being a hotbed of terrorism. Lester Pines, a member of the Madison Jewish Community Council executive board, took Jennifer Lowenstein, founder of the sister city project, to task for calling the board "a deeply racist, blindly pro-Israel organization." (Capital Times-Madison, Wisc.) News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:
Two senior IDF officers, Colonel Yossi Turjeman who heads the Southern Command's Disengagement Authority, and another Southern Division colonel, were moderately injured by a roadside bomb that detonated near their jeep at the entrance to Morag in the Gaza Strip Thursday. Three other soldiers sustained light injuries in the attack, for which Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility. (Maariv International) Palestinians fired two Kassam rockets from Gaza Friday at the western Negev town of Sderot. No injuries were reported. (Jerusalem Post) See also Hamas Rejects PA Request to Halt Kassam Attacks - Khaled Abu Toameh Hamas confirmed Thursday that it had rejected a request by the PA to stop firing Kassam rockets at Israel. PA officials said earlier this week that many Palestinians in Gaza were unhappy with the attacks because they invited harsh IDF responses. Sami Abu Zuhari, a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, also expressed opposition to an Egyptian security presence in Gaza after the planned Israeli withdrawal and said the other Palestinian factions shared Hamas's position. Palestinian sources in Ramallah said on Thursday that the Egyptians were running out of patience with Arafat, who has yet to fulfill his promise to implement reforms and cede control over the PA security forces. (Jerusalem Post) Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will visit Turkey next week in an effort to mend strained relations after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan began speaking out against Israel's behavior in the territories. President Bush, in Turkey last week for a NATO meeting, spoke of the importance of relations with Israel during his conversation with Erdogan. (Ha'aretz) See also Israel-Turkey Spat Less than Meets the Eye - Barry Rubin There is no general crisis in Israeli-Turkish relations, and the Turkish government does not want one. Turkey recently got two big things it wanted from Israel - the long-negotiated deal for Israel to import Turkish water and a major contract for construction on an Israeli power plant. Thus, it was a moment when a Turkish government could score some domestic and regional points by criticizing Israel's defensive war against the Palestinians at little cost or risk. (UPI) The Catholic Church condemned anti-Zionism as a cover for anti-Semitism in a joint statement issued by a forum of Catholic-Jewish intellectuals this week in Buenos Aires. "We oppose anti-Semitism in any way and form, including anti-Zionism that has become of late a manifestation of anti-Semitism," the statement said. Ilan Steinberg, director of the World Jewish Congress, noted, "For the first time, the Catholic Church recognizes in anti-Zionism an attack not only against Jews, but against the whole Jewish people." (Ha'aretz) Tel Aviv District Court Thursday ordered the expulsion from Israel of Ann Petter, 44, an American activist who came to join a protest against the West Bank separation fence. Judge Oded Moderick said the International Solidarity Movement tries to "disrupt the defense authorities' functioning in the administered territories." "They include confrontations with IDF soldiers, entrenching themselves in terrorists' houses to prevent their demolition, taking Palestinians from one place to another during closures, and acting to disrupt the construction of the security barrier." (Ha'aretz) See also Some College Students Duping Birthright Officials to Press Palestinians' Cause - Michele Chabin Some young diaspora Jews are using popular youth programs like birthright israel and college fellowships as a vehicle to volunteer for a Palestinian-run group the Israeli government considers a danger to national security. Others are capitalizing on their dual Israeli-American citizenship and entering the country on Israeli passports to volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement, which works actively against Israel's policies in the West Bank and Gaza. (New York Jewish Week) Global Commentary and Think-Tank Analysis (Best of U.S., UK, and Israel):
India, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey voted to refer the Israeli fence to the ICJ for an advisory opinion even though they had themselves built barriers in areas contested by their neighbors. India is just completing a 460-mile barrier in the contested Kashmir to halt infiltrations supported by Pakistan; within the last two years, Saudi Arabia built a sixty-mile barrier along an undefined border zone with Yemen to halt smuggling of weaponry; and Turkey built a barrier in the southern province of Alexandretta, which was formerly in Syria and is an area that Syria claims as its own. The ICJ has not been involved in any of the other barrier disputes. (Washington Institute for Near East Policy) Vanessa Redgrave, the British actress and campaigner for human rights, told a meeting of foreign correspondents in Jerusalem that, ''Any Palestinian mother or schoolchild knows that a schoolchild who is dressed in the uniform can be and is frequently shot in the head - not in the chest, not in the legs, in the head.'' Redgrave based this horrendous allegation on one of four documentary films produced by UNRWA and screened last month at its Geneva headquarters, while her UN colleagues and escorts sat beside her without batting an eyelash. This astounding and highly provocative charge is verbal poison that conforms to the 2,000-year-old blood libel that Jews allegedly engage in the premeditated murder of non-Jewish children. And it is astounding that the representatives of UNICEF and UNRWA who sat at the dais alongside Redgrave did not deign to disagree or correct her remarks. (Chicago Sun Times) We have come a long way in three years. The idea that Sept. 11 was a historic turning point, a wake-up call to a war declared by our enemies but ignored by us, has begun to fade. Yet the passage of time and the setbacks in Iraq have changed nothing of that truth. This is the first time in history that the knowledge of how to make society-destroying weapons has been democratized. Today small radical groups allied with small radical states can do the kind of damage to the world that in the past only a great, strategically located, and industrialized power such as Germany or Japan could do. (Washington Post) The Mongols occupied China very swiftly because they were good horse riders and the Chinese were pretty much helpless. But after the conquest, a Confucian sage told them, you can conquer China from horseback but you cannot rule it from horseback. The Americans can conquer Iraq with tanks but they cannot rule it from the back of a tank, which explains why American rule in Iraq cannot really succeed. We should forget about this democracy business in Iraq. There will not be democracy because there is no tradition of democracy. Even the countries which had promised reforms as part of the fight against terrorism don't take it seriously because it threatens the regimes in place. The sheiks of the Gulf area know that only by supporting each other's autocratic regimes can they survive. For more than 100 years, the Kurds have been promised a Kurdish state. They ask, we are 35 million, while the Palestinians are 7 or 8 million. Why can the Palestinians have a state, a second state perhaps, and we are still lingering behind? We are the only Iraqis that helped America actively during the war, to open another front after the Turks reneged. That kind of division of Iraq is practical - a Shiite-Sunni Arab state and a Kurdish state. The writer is Professor of Chinese History and Islamic Civilization at Hebrew University. (Briefing for foreign correspondents, 21 June 04) Weekend Features:
In the battle against Holocaust deniers, Birkenau's extermination facilities remain important forensic evidence. Today, tumbled and broken plates of concrete, the ruined structures that rise from the earth like arctic ice shoals, are the remnants of a once horrifically efficient piece of machinery. Between 1942 and 1944, more than a million human beings - mostly Jewish - were fed into these extermination plants, forced into subterranean chambers and gassed, their corpses removed and transported by mechanical conveyance to the crematoria ovens. The remnant ash was scattered in the surrounding fields, or dumped in a nearby pond whose muddied bottom, even today, is of a sticky gray viscosity laced with matchstick-size splinters of human bone. There is no arguing with the presence of the Birkenau gas chambers. Here the proof of the Holocaust is written in concrete and steel. (Wall Street Journal) The Golan Heights Winery brought in wine masters trained in California and France who raised local standards, setting the stage for a plethora of boutique wineries. "More than 1,700 years ago wine was made here," says Israeli wine maker Danny Valero. With its moderate, sunny climate, mineral-diverse soil, and high technology, Israel has the potential to produce world-class wines, he said. Altogether, Israel exports about five million of the 30 million bottles of wine it produces annually, much of that from large wineries such as Golan. (Reuters) Ross Filler - better known as Remedy, sole Jewish member of top American rap group The Wu-Tang Clan - is in Israel this week as a member of a birthright israel follow-up mission, Oranim Ambassadors, to learn more about Israel advocacy. Remedy made a name for himself with a trademark song about the Holocaust, "Never Again," featured on Wu-Tang's 1998 Gold album, Wu-Tang Killer Bee, The Swarm. The Ambassadors program is for Oranim birthright israel alumni who become active in Jewish issues. Remedy has spent the last year performing for synagogues, college campuses, and Jewish organizations, where he has conducted discussions with audiences about Zionism, anti-Semitism, and Israel. "It's weird to be a Jew in the rap world, but, to me, rap is the most real form of expression." "It seems like no matter what I do, I have to be attached to Jews and Israel. That's just how I seem to be evolving," he says. "Israel is incredible. There is no place in the world like it. I already went almost everywhere else and this is it....I feel magic in Israel." (Jerusalem Post) Observations: The Pattern of Palestinian Rejectionism - Yossi Klein Halevi (Jerusalem Post)
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