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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 Issues:
IDF: Iran Has Secret Nuclear Program - Arieh O'Sullivan (Jerusalem Post)
Two Presbyterian Staff Members Who Met with Hizballah Are Fired - John H. Adams (The Layman)
UN Plans to Oversee Palestinian Elections - Arnon Regular and Aluf Benn (Ha'aretz)
Mother Celebrates Wedding of Palestinian Martyr Son (Palestinian Media Watch)
Russia Warns of "Wahhabism Threat" in Pankisi (Civil Georgia-Georgia)
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News Resources - North America, Europe, and Asia:
President Bush said Saturday there were indications that Iran was speeding forward in its production of a key ingredient for nuclear weapons fuel, a move he said was "a very serious matter'' that undercut Iran's denials that it was seeking to build weapons. Diplomats had said on Friday that Iran had told the International Atomic Energy Agency that it was racing to produce uranium hexafluoride, a gas that can be enriched into bomb fuel, before it begins to observe the temporary suspension of nuclear activity that it negotiated with the Europeans. (New York Times) See also A "Good-Cop, Bad-Cop" Approach on Iran Richard Armitage, who is leaving his post as deputy secretary of state, explained in an interview with Al Jazeera on Friday the U.S. strategy of suddenly increasing the heat on Iran's nuclear program. "The incentives of the Europeans only work against the backdrop of the United States being strong and firm on this issue," he said. "In the vernacular, it's kind of a good-cop bad-cop arrangement. If it works, we'll all have been successful." (New York Times) Israel will do "everything in its power" to enable Palestinian elections to take place, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said Monday after meeting in Jerusalem with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. (AP/Washington Post) See also Powell Arrives in Israel - Arnon Regular and Aluf Benn Political sources in Jerusalem attach little significance to Powell's visit because he is about to step down from his post and the Palestinian leadership is still unstable. According to political sources, Sharon will state that there has been no change in the PA since Arafat's death. (Ha'aretz) "Nothing the French say will dispel the conspiracy theories" about what killed Arafat, said Ethan Dor-Shav, a political scientist with Jerusalem's Shalem Center. "It was 100% predictable that the Palestinians needed Arafat to die as a martyr. The possibility of a normal death of old age was simply unacceptable. He had to die by the hands of Israel. It was absolutely necessary for the national myth." "Every Palestinian wants to see him as a hero; they expected him to be martyred," said Mohammed Yaghi, of the Palestinian Center for Mass Communication, a Ramallah-based think-tank. "If we created a myth about Arafat's death, we have also created the expectation that everyone must now live up to this myth. There will be unity of purpose, a national responsibility to finish what he started." (Toronto Star) See also Poll: 80% of Palestinians Believe Arafat Was Poisoned A poll conducted by the Center of Opinion Polls and Survey Studies at Najah University on November 19-20, 2004, asked: "Several Palestinian personalities support the conviction that Arafat died by being poisoned, do you believe this?" Yes - 80%, No - 9%. (IMRA) News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:
Despite an initial drop in attacks after Arafat's death, Palestinian terror operations in Gaza have quickly returned to their previous level of intensity, senior IDF officials said. According to a Southern Command officer, 16 terrorists were killed in the past two weeks, the same number that were killed in the two weeks before Arafat's medical deterioration. According to a senior military officer, "Terror groups are continuing to operate in order to send a message to the new Palestinian leadership to take them into account." Hamas has appeared to stop firing Kassam rockets at southern Israel. The officer explained, "It is a strategic decision of Hamas to create an equation in which the Kassam would be used only when the IDF enters Palestinian territory." (Maariv International) Hundreds of farmers in southern Israel will be out spraying insecticide Monday in a bid to stop the locusts swarming into the country. Millions of locusts ate their way through parts of Eilat on Sunday and streamed into the western Negev. So far damage to crops has been marginal. (Ha'aretz) See also Locusts: Nutritious and Delicious...But Are They Kosher? - Nir Hasson (Ha'aretz) Global Commentary and Think-Tank Analysis (Best of U.S., UK, and Israel):
Western diplomats may have been stunned by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's blatant effort to ward off the newest coalition offensive against terrorist strongholds in Fallujah, but they should not have been surprised. The UN appears to be more preoccupied with defending those most directly threatening international peace and security, while criticizing the policies of those protecting world order and asserting their right of self-defense. In effect, Annan was providing diplomatic cover for the likes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi while undercutting the embattled legitimate government of Iraq. This wasn't the first time the UN tilted to the wrong side. During the last decade, the UN was repeatedly afflicted with this syndrome as it sought to deal with one explosive crisis after another. Its highest officials assigned equal responsibility for the outbreak of wars to the victims of attacks as much as to those who planned and executed them. In the Middle East, it led the UN's judicial arm in The Hague - the International Court of Justice - to insist that Israel dismantle its security fence in the disputed West Bank without calling for specific measures against the suicide terrorism that caused it to be built in the first place. One wonders if the UN had existed in the Middle Ages whether it would have banned the use of shields and armor while sanctioning the employment of the cross-bow. The writer heads the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and is the author of Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos. (New York Sun, 19Nov04) See also Dear Kofi... - Editorial Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has replied to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's letter objecting to coalition efforts in Fallujah. "The terrorists and insurgents operating from places like Fallujah are exporting their violence to other parts of the country, terrorizing and killing innocent Iraqis....I was a little surprised by the lack of any mention in your letter of the atrocities which these groups have committed. I believe that the blame for the violence and difficulties in Iraq at the moment should be laid squarely at their door." (Wall Street Journal, 10Nov04) See also Assignment UN - Arnold Beichman The UN General Assembly, a haven of anti-Americanism, regularly condemns one country, Israel, another democracy, as a putative violator of human rights. Over and over again the General Assembly has stigmatized Israel by overwhelming majority votes while ignoring human-rights violators like Cuba and North Korea. This is the institution Kofi Annan calls - no snickering, please - "the indispensable home of the human family." The writer is a research fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. (Washington Times) See also The Crisis of Legitimacy: America and the World - Robert Kagan Ever since the UN's creation almost six decades ago, the Security Council has failed to function as the UN's more idealistic founders intended. And it has never been accepted as the sole source of international legitimacy, not even by Europeans. Europe's recent demand that the U.S. seek UN authorization for the Iraq war, and presumably for all future wars, was a novel - even revolutionary - proposition. The writer is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. (Centre for Independent Studies-Australia) With the liberation of Fallujah and the fall of the jihadist regime in the town, it is apparent that American media intend to keep their story on message: the message being that the U.S. military operation there has failed and that Fallujans, and Iraqis in general, still hate the intervention forces. At the same time, other reports tell a more significant and eloquent story: the jihadists had set up a Taliban-style dictatorship, in which women who did not cover their entire bodies, people listening to music, and members of spiritual Sufi orders - that is, ordinary Fallujans - were subject to torture and execution. Strangely, throughout the Iraqi struggle, Western media have joined Western politicians in a reluctance to name the "foreign fighters" in Fallujah as what they are - mostly Wahhabis, and mainly Saudis. (Tech Central Station) Observations: A Look at Life after Arafat - Mortimer B. Zuckerman (U.S. News)
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