DAILY ALERT

In-Depth Issues:

Egypt Warns Israel Not to Take Peace Treaty for Granted (Daily Star-Lebanon)
    Mustafa al-Fekki, the head of the Egyptian Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, said Israel should not think the "peace reached with an Arab country can be guaranteed while it continues to perpetrate its crimes and aggressions," referring to the peace treaty Egypt signed with Israel in 1979.
    Mufid Shehab, secretary of state for parliamentary affairs, openly accused Israel on Wednesday of having threatened Egypt's stability.

Jordan Islamists Urge Cut of Israel Ties (UPI)
    The Islamic Action Front, the political wing of Jordan's Muslim Brotherhood, on Thursday called "on Arab countries with peace treaties with Israel to take immediate action to cancel these treaties."
    Jordan's Islamists, who are closely related to Hamas and command the largest opposition bloc in parliament, do not recognize their country's 1994 peace treaty with Israel.

Palestinian Female Prisoners Have "Blood on Their Hands" - Orly Halpern (Globe and Mail-Canada)
    Ahlam Tamimi was sentenced by an Israeli military court to 16 life sentences: one for each person killed in an attack on a restaurant in August 2001.
    Ms. Tamimi brought the bomb in a guitar case to a suicide bomber who blew himself up in the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem.
    Tamimi is one of 109 Palestinian women security prisoners in Israeli prisons, whose release Hamas is demanding in exchange for an Israeli soldier they abducted Sunday.
    The women are accused of acts such as planning suicide bombings, aiding suicide bombers, preparing suicide-bomb belts, attacking Israeli soldiers with knives, and being members of a terrorist organization.
    "Sixty-four of the women...have blood on their hands," prison authority spokeswoman Orit Stelster said.

Hamas Men Blast Way into Egypt - Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel (Ha'aretz)
    Masked gunmen blew a four-meter-wide hole in the concrete barrier between Gaza and Egypt at Rafah Thursday.
    Palestinian sources reported that Hamas operatives were responsible for the blast and had succeeded in crossing into Egypt.
    Two Palestinian policemen were wounded in the explosion

The Roots of Islamism - Michael Gove (Times-UK)
    From the Hamas killers in Gaza to Hizballah terrorists in Lebanon and Islamist fighters across southeast Asia, there is a ruthlessness in the selection of civilian targets reinforced by a willingness to embrace suicide bombing, a belief that Western influence needs to be cleansed from Muslim lands and a desire to see a narrow and highly politicized form of Islam imposed across the Muslim world.
    Islamism is not Islam in arms, it is a political creed which perverts Islam, just as fascism degraded nationalism and communism betrayed socialism.
    Islamism appeals to that part of the human soul which has always been capable of being drawn to revolution, violence, and the exaltation of the self through membership of the elect.
    Islamists believe in the re-ordering of society to secure total submission to a narrow, puritan, and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam.
    They are conducting a civil war within the Islamic world designed to overthrow existing regimes, which they consider to be unforgivably apostate, and replace them with a single and unified Muslim state, the restored caliphate.
    Islamists believe that the sanctity and culture of Muslim lands are menaced and defiled by Western influences, from capitalism to feminism, which have to be eradicated.

Syrian Regime Cracks Down on Opposition - Bernard Gwertzman (Council on Foreign Relations)
    A major crackdown underway in Syria is trying to silence the growing number of intellectuals and political activists calling for change.
    Scott Lasensky, a senior research associate for the U.S. Institute of Peace, who just returned from Damascus, says, "What is remarkable is the number of independent analysts and activists, reformers, and oppositionists who are operating despite a political crackdown, which has been heavy over the past few months....The crackdown includes arrests with people literally dragged from their homes and thrown in prison."
    "What is obvious and needs to be noticed...is the resurgence of political life and political activity in Syria, a place where political development was essentially suffocated."

The Improvement in Israeli-South Korean Relations - Yaacov Cohen (Jewish Political Studies Review)
    In 1962, Israel and South Korea established full diplomatic relations, but in 1978 Israel closed its embassy in Seoul for budgetary reasons.
    In 1992 Israel reopened the embassy, and since then relations in all fields have improved considerably.
    The two countries' economies became complementary, and in the 1990s Israel became South Korea's main Middle Eastern market.
    The writer is a former Israeli ambassador to South Korea, Japan, Venezuela, and Spain.

"Free Telephony Is the Tip of the Iceberg" - Harvey Morris (Financial Times-UK, 28Jun06)
    Baruch Sterman, just back from the Globalcomm trade fair in Chicago, enthuses:
    "It was amazing how many Israeli companies were there. You walk down the aisles and half the people are speaking Hebrew. You'd think Israel was hundreds of millions of people and the technology center of the world."
    Israel certainly punches above its weight in the high-tech sector.
    Sterman says the next "big thing" in communications technology - Voiceover Internet Protocol or VoIP - was the main talking point at the Chicago trade fair.
    Home computer users know VoIP in the form of services such as Skype that provide free voice and video calls to subscribers worldwide.

News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:

Global Commentary and Think-Tank Analysis (Best of U.S., UK, and Israel):

Observations:

Palestinians Targeting Pre-1967 Israel - Maj.-Gen. (res.) Shlomo Gazit (bitterlemons.org)

• Nearly a year has passed since the Israeli settlements were removed and the Israel Defense Forces withdrew from Gaza. Israel hoped that, once its disengagement was completed, the Palestinians would have no cause to continue carrying out terrorist acts once the rationale of removing the occupation was gone, and that the urgent need to organize the lives of the local Palestinian population would alter domestic Palestinian priorities. Neither of these things happened.
• In Palestinian eyes, the evacuation from the Strip was an unequivocal victory for armed struggle, and what "succeeded" in Gaza in their view would produce a similar success in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and - why not - in Beersheba, Tel Aviv, and Haifa.
• In the absence of IDF forces, and with the Sinai border virtually wide open, the Gaza Strip has become a giant depot for the development, manufacture, and import of ordnance that fuels an unending attack on Sderot and the other Israeli towns and villages around the Strip. Today Palestinian fire is directed, without exception, at targets within the "green line," where there is no controversy regarding Israel's sovereignty.
• The Palestinian objective is to attack and kill any Jew, indiscriminately, within Israel. Palestinian terrorists prefer to attack innocent civilians, particularly in crowded population centers. The terrorist organizations don't care whether, where, and how many innocent Israelis they hit; on the contrary, this is their objective. They have never lost any sleep over the massive murder of Israeli boys and girls who just wanted to have fun in a Tel Aviv beach disco or the dead and wounded among hundreds of guests who came to celebrate Pesach at a hotel in Netanya.
• This is not the case with Israel and the IDF: if and when Israeli fire hits an innocent Palestinian, Israel is called upon to prove and, what is even more difficult, to convince the world that the victim indeed chanced to be positioned next to terrorists who were defined as legitimate targets by any standard.

  The writer was Israel's first Coordinator of Government Operations in the Administered Territories (1967-1974), and Head of Military Intelligence (1974-1979).