DAILY ALERT

In-Depth Issues:

Report: Iran Seeking Purified Uranium Ore from Kazakhstan (AP/Wall Street Journal)
    Iran is close to clinching a deal to clandestinely import 1,350 tons of purified uranium ore from Kazakhstan, according to an intelligence report obtained by AP on Tuesday.
    Tehran appears to be running out of the material which it needs to feed its uranium enrichment program. Such imports are banned by the UN Security Council.
    A summary of the report said the deal could be completed within weeks and that Tehran was willing to pay $450 million for the shipment.

Al-Qaeda Groomed Abdulmutallab in London - Sean O'Neill and Giles Whittell (Times-UK)
    Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day airline bomb plot suspect, immersed himself in radical politics while a student in London and was former president of the Islamic Society at University College.
    Security sources are concerned that the picture emerging of his undergraduate years suggests that he was recruited by al-Qaeda in London.
    Security sources said that Islamist radicalization was rife on university campuses, especially in London. He is the fourth president of a London student Islamic society to face terrorist charges in three years.

Former Guantanamo Detainees Fuel Growing Al-Qaeda Cell in Yemen - Sudarsan Raghavan (Washington Post)
    Former detainees of the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have led and fueled the growing assertiveness of the al-Qaeda branch in Yemen that claimed responsibility for the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a U.S. airliner.
    They include two Saudi nationals: the deputy leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Said Ali al-Shihri, and the group's chief theological adviser, Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaish. Months after their release to Saudi Arabia, both crossed into Yemen and rejoined the terrorist network.
    The group partially led by former Guantanamo detainees may have equipped and trained Nigerian bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
    See also Al-Qaeda's Resurgence in Yemen - Gregory Johnsen (Washington Institute for Near East Policy)

Egypt Cracks Down on Foreign Protesters Heading to Gaza - Liam Stack (Christian Science Monitor)
    On Sunday, more than 1,000 international activists from 42 countries descended on Cairo to kick off the Gaza Freedom March, a humanitarian convoy and media spectacle organized by U.S. activist group Code Pink.
    But Egypt stopped the activists from driving across the Sinai Peninsula, keeping them from getting near the Egypt-Gaza border.
    Medea Benjamin, one of the march organizers, says she and 50 other U.S. nationals were "beaten up" by Egyptian police when they went to the U.S. Embassy in Cairo on Tuesday.
    On Sunday, between 250 and 300 French protesters blocked a major eight-lane thoroughfare in Cairo for three hours, provoking the wrath of Egyptian police. The protesters were corralled onto the sidewalk in front of their embassy and held there for two days.
    See also Egypt to Allow 100 Protesters into Gaza - Samer al-Atrush (AFP)
    Protest leaders stranded in Cairo accepted an Egyptian offer on Tuesday to allow only 100 out of about 1,300 protesters into Gaza after the activists staged demonstrations.

News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:

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

Observations:

Israel's Right to the "Disputed" Territories - Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon (Wall Street Journal Europe)

• There is this perception that Israel is occupying stolen land and that the Palestinians are the only party with national, legal and historic rights to it. Not only is this morally and factually incorrect, but the more this narrative is being accepted, the less likely the Palestinians feel the need to come to the negotiating table.
• The boundaries of the West Bank were set during the armistice agreement between Israel and Jordan that ended the war that began in 1948 when five Arab armies invaded the nascent Jewish state. At Jordan's insistence, the 1949 armistice line became not a recognized international border but only a line separating armies. After the Six-Day War, when once again Arab armies sought to destroy Israel, the Jewish state subsequently captured the West Bank.
• Eugene V. Rostow, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in 1967, stated in 1990: "Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338...rest on two principles, Israel may administer the territory until its Arab neighbors make peace; and when peace is made, Israel should withdraw to 'secure and recognized borders,' which need not be the same as the Armistice Demarcation Lines of 1949."
• Lord Caradon, the British UN Ambassador at the time and Resolution 242's main drafter, said in 1974 that, "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial."
• The U.S. ambassador to the UN at the time, former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, stated in 1973 that, "the resolution speaks of withdrawal from occupied territories without defining the extent of withdrawal." This would encompass "less than a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from occupied territory, inasmuch as Israel's prior frontiers had proven to be notably insecure." Even the Soviet delegate to the UN, Vasily Kuznetsov, conceded that the resolution gave Israel the right to "withdraw its forces only to those lines it considers appropriate."
• Rostow found no legal impediment to Jewish settlement in the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria as the territory had been known around the world for 2,000 years until the Jordanians renamed it. He maintained that the original British Mandate of Palestine still applies to the West Bank. He said "the Jewish right of settlement in Palestine west of the Jordan River, that is, in Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem, was made unassailable. That right has never been terminated and cannot be terminated except by a recognized peace between Israel and its neighbors."