In a recent interview, Syria's President has called upon all Syrian factions to join with Palestinian groups to fight against Israel.

Syrian President Bashar Assad's long term plans include a continued struggle against Israel, Lebanese officials visiting Syria told Lebanese paper Al Akhbar.

 

"The commitment of the Syrian community to resist the Israeli enemy can help fortify the internal struggle facing Syria," Assad told the officials.

 

According to the official, Assad called on all Syrian factions to join with Palestinian forces in resisting Israel along the Golan Heights.

 

"We have to protect our oil from the Americans... and employ the proceeds in the development of our country and in the conflict with the Israeli enemy," Assad said.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

The vote on Palestitinian status at the UN may take them one step closer to petitioning the International Criminal Court, but that may mean more than the Palestinians are asking for.

Mahmoud Abbas’s successful bid to get Palestine non-member observer status at the United Nations takes Palestinians one step closer to becoming eligible to join the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which is empowered to investigate the worst international crimes. Although critics of Israel have long hoped to see Israeli leaders prosecuted by the Court, Israel has never ratified the ICC treaty, and the Palestinian territories, as a non-state, have thus far been unable to ratify, leaving their conflict off-limits.

 

The chance that Palestinians’ new UN recognition may change this has revived Israeli fears of one-sided prosecutions at the ICC. In light of those concerns, some western leaders have reportedly asked Palestinian officials to refrain from joining the court. In reality, however, ICC membership may prove more complicated for the Palestinians, forcing them, too, to take responsibility for their conduct. If anything, prosecutions of future Hamas crimes might proceed more easily than similar prosecutions of Israeli crimes.

 

Palestinian officials have long asked the court to initiate prosecutions for crimes committed by Israeli forces in Gaza during Israel’s 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead; the most recent hostilities in Gaza may renew such calls. Until now, however, the court’s prosecutor has declined to act because only states may ratify the ICC statute. If the ICC does gain jurisdiction over a newly recognized Palestinian state, the court would be able to look at crimes committed on Palestinian territory.

Read more at CS Monitor

Below is the text of the Cease Fire Agreement between Israel and the Hamas in Gaza.

Here is text of the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza. The text was distributed at the news conference in Cairo with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Amr.

Understanding Regarding Ceasefire in Gaza Strip

1.      a. Israel should stop all hostilities in the Gaza Strip land, sea and air including incursions and targeting of individuals.

b. All Palestinian factions shall stop all hostilities from the Gaza Strip against Israel including rocket attacks and all attacks along the border.
c. Opening the crossings and facilitating the movements of people and transfer of goods and refraining from restricting residents’ free movements and targeting residents in border areas and procedures of implementation shall be dealt with after 24 hours from the start of the ceasefire.
d. Other matters as may be requested shall be addressed.

 

2. Implementation Mechanism:

a. Setting up the zero hour for the ceasefire understanding to enter into effect.
b. Egypt shall receive assurances from each party that the party commits to what was agreed upon.
c. Each party shall commit itself not to perform any acts that would breach this understanding. In case of any observations Egypt as the sponsor of this understanding shall be informed to follow up.

 

In a powerful op-ed, David Ingatius looks at the never-ending conflict that is the Israel-Palestinian relationship, and says yes, we should continue to pursue peace.  To not do so dooms both sides to more of the same.

An Israeli official was listening a few days ago to the familiar critique that Israel doesn’t have any strategy in Gaza, just periodic tactical assaults on Hamas. The official finally exploded: “That is our strategy. Don’t you understand? We don’t have any other choice except to punch our adversary in the face every few years.”

 

The most depressing aspect about the latest Gaza war is that it dramatizes this “no-exit” aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Wars recur every four or five years, but they never seem to settle anything. The Israelis pound the Palestinians until they accept a cease-fire, but it’s temporary. The emotional state of war continues.

 

The first time I watched this movie was 1982. Israel invaded Lebanon to stop the rockets that were then harassing northern Israel. The invasion was called “Operation Peace for Galilee,” and the Israeli army rolled all the way to Beirut. With their massive firepower, the Israelis assumed the Palestinians would cut and run, as Arab armies had in previous wars. But the Palestinians stood their ground.

 

It turned out the Israelis didn’t have a good endgame strategy in that war, any more than in the current one. In 1982, they accepted U.S. mediation that eventually forced the Palestine Liberation Organization to leave south Lebanon and Beirut. But this proved a mixed blessing, to put it charitably: The PLO guerrillas were replaced by more disciplined fighters from Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia created by the war.

 

Now it’s Hezbollah that poses the deadly rocket threat to northern Israel. Hezbollah suicide bombings forced Israel to invade Lebanon again in 1996 (“Operation Grapes of Wrath”), then to withdraw in frustration from Lebanon in 2000, then to attack Hezbollah once more in 2006 (“Operation Change of Direction”).

 

Gaza has been a similar exercise in frustration, with each cycle of violence buying a few years of quiet, followed by more war. The Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 2005, only to have Hamas fire about 12,000 rockets and mortars at the Jewish state. The Israel Defense Forces invaded in 2008 (“Operation Cast Lead”), and a cease-fire followed. But in the years since, Hamas and other militias in Gaza have fired more than 3,000 rockets and mortars, despite periodic cease-fires.

 

On Nov. 14, the Israelis got fed up and retaliated (“Operation Pillar of Defense”) They assassinated Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari, triggering 1,500 new Hamas rocket attacks, to which Israel responded by bombing more than 1,400 targets. The lopsided death toll (at last count, 130 Palestinians and four Israelis killed) led to some international criticism, which undercut some of the military benefits for Israel.

Is there any escape from this Israeli-Palestinian version of hell? The mark of an Israeli realist is to say, glumly, that this is as good as it gets. Few Israelis imagine that real peace is possible with adversaries who refuse even to accept Israel’s existence. The idealists who embraced the Oslo agreement of 1993 have died, moved away from Israel or given up.

 

Maybe it’s because of Thanksgiving Day, our national festival of optimism, but the idea that America should simply accept the inevitability of perpetual conflict on Israel’s borders seems like a betrayal of both sides. This kind of war grinds down the character of decent people, so Palestinians can cheer when they hear about rockets targeting the families in Tel Aviv, or Israel supporters can denounce newspapers for running a photograph of a sobbing Palestinian journalist cradling his lost child, or send e-mails headed, “Cue the Dead Baby.”

 

Acting as peacemaker in this conflict has been a thankless job for the United States. It begets enmity in Israel, which doesn’t want its closest ally to be “evenhanded” in this life-or-death conflict. And it begets cynicism and bitterness among Arabs, who have heard so many American promises, to so little effect, that many have concluded the process is a charade.

 

But at the beginning of Barack Obama’s final term, he needs to take up this burden once more, as he did when he came into office. He has worked hard to develop relationships with three important backers of Hamas — Egypt, Turkey and Qatar. Even the Israelis think that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government has acted constructively in the crisis, and they’d like to see Egypt have more control of Gaza.

 

A cease-fire in Gaza would provide a new platform for negotiation — weird, unstable, but worth the effort of trying a few more steps. What’s the risk? Another war? The threat of future missile attacks? That dismal picture is called the status quo.

davidignatius@washpost.com

Read more at Washington Post

A look at why Hezbollah is keeping out of the conflict between Gaza and Israel.

For a week, Israel and Hamas have engaged in a war in and around Gaza, one in which thousands of rockets and bombs have been expended, scores have died, and tens of thousands have been forced to take cover. But to the north in Lebanon, Hezbollah, the Islamic militia that rained destruction on Israel in a 2006 war, held its fire. Why?

 

The consensus among U.S. government analysts and academic experts is that Hezbollah, which has controlled the Lebanese government for more than four years, believes discretion is the better part of valor. As it has in the past, as in Israel's Cast Lead Operation against Hamas at the end of 2008, Hezbollah decided against creating a diversion that would have helped its like-minded but only sometime ally.

 

Roger Cressey, NBC News analyst and former deputy counterterrorism director for the National Security Council, notes that Hezbollah is now essentially the government in Lebanon and has different responsibilities, different agendas. "There has never been a correlation between events in Gaza and Hezbollah's strategic decision-making," says Cressey.

Read more at NBCnews.com

Following a week that saw over 80 missiles and rockets fired into Israel from Gaza, US Ambassador to Israel condemns the terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians.

US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro on Thursday condemned terrorist rocket fire on Israeli communities.

 

“Rocket strikes from Gaza are outrageous. We support Israel’s right to defend itself. Our thoughts are with the residents of the South,” the ambassador wrote on his official Facebook page.

 

Shapiro is currently in Washington participating in the US-Israel Joint Economic Development Group.

 

The condemnation came as a fragile ceasefire was taking hold, after Wednesday saw more than 80 missiles fired on the south of Israel, injuring three foreign workers and causing damage to eight houses.

Read more at Times of Israel

The attack on the Israeli-Gaza border which left 16 Egyptian soldiers dead has set back relations between Cairo and Gaza.

Up until Sunday, relations between Cairo and Gaza were beginning to look bright. Hamas politicians from Gaza were working diligently on improving ties with Egypt’s new Islamist government, cautiously elevating them from the political low of the Mubarak years.

Just two weeks ago Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh spoke of “unprecedented positivity” following his meeting with President Mohammed Morsi in Cairo. The Egyptian president promised to ease Palestinians’ travel restrictions, and the Rafah border crossing gradually began broadening its scope of activity.

Now the terror attack on the Egyptian border police outpost Sunday night, in which 16 Egyptians were killed, has brought everything back to square one.

Read more at Times of Israel

A terrorist attack on the Israeli-Egyptian-Gazan border has left 16 Egyptian soldiers dead and broke through the Israeli border, travelling a mile into Israel before being stopped by the Israeli Air Force.

The terrorists who smashed into Israel at the Kerem Shalom border crossing on Sunday night managed to drive about a mile into Israel, and were traveling at 70 kilometers an hour along the road toward Kibbutz Kerem Shalom, before the Israeli Air Force was able to get a clear shot and blow up their armored vehicle without risk to civilian traffic on the road or nearby.

That was one of the findings of the IDF’s initial investigation into what officials said Monday was a very carefully planned and complex terror attack.

The Shin Bet intelligence service on Friday gave the army a general warning of the danger of an attack at the Kerem Shalom crossing, two days before the terror cell — apparently comprised of Bedouin and other gunmen from the Sinai Peninsula, with close links to and possible participation of Gaza-based terrorists — launched the attack that left 16 Egyptian soldiers dead and penetrated the Israeli border.

Read more Times of Israel

The Presbyterian Church has decided against divestment from companies doing business with Israel, but it was by a very narrow margin.

By the narrowest of margins, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA defeated a resolution calling for divestment from companies that do business with Israel’s security forces. The 333-331 vote was the closest the anti-Israel BDS (boycott, divest and sanction) movement has come to getting a major American Christian denomination to endorse such a measure. The close vote is a victory of sorts for the Jewish groups, such as the Jewish Council on Public Affairs (JCPA) that lobbied hard to defeat the motion. But the narrow margin is a virtual guarantee that divestment advocates will be back next year with expectations of victory at the Presbyterian conclave as well as at other gatherings of mainline Protestant groups.

Though there is little support for Israel divestment among the rank and file members of Presbyterian congregations, there is no denying the growing appeal among church activists for BDS proposals. The defeat of BDS this week may show that a narrow majority of Presbyterian delegates still understands that a vote for such a resolution involves the church in what amounts to an economic war against the Jewish state and a potential break in relations with American Jews. But the close call may indicate that support for anti-Zionism among liberal Protestant groups such as the Presbyterians is on the rise and it may only be a matter of time before they prevail.

The three companies targeted for divestment in the vote were Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions and Hewlett-Packard. Though church activists considered the resolution to be distinct from a broad BDS vote, even this proposal betrayed the malevolent nature of the anti-Israel movement. Motorola and Hewlett-Packard produce devices that help the Israel Defense Forces monitor security checkpoints for terrorist explosives and other dangers. Caterpillar vehicles help construct Israel’s defense barrier that keeps out suicide bombers as well as demolish illegal construction and structures that shield terrorist activities.

Read more at Commentary Magazine

In an new amendment the the foreign appropriations bill, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved wording to distinguish between Palestinian refugees who were alive in 1948 and those who are decendents.

The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee approved language that would distinguish between Palestinian refugees alive in 1948 and their descendants.

The amendment to the foreign appropriations bill, initiated by Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and passed Thursday, requires the State Department to report within a year on approximately how many people are receiving assistance from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency "whose place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948 and who were displaced as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict; and who are descendants" of those people.

Should the Obama or any subsequent administration heed the new requirement, it would deliver a diplomatic blow to Palestinian efforts to leverage their refugee status in peace talks with Israel by aligning U.S. policy with Israel on the matter.

Read more at JTA

Today is the day Palestinians commemorate the "Nakba," the "disaster" that brought about the rebirth of Israel. I'm an advocate of a Palestinian state on 100 percent of the West Bank and Gaza (with land swaps, obviously -- the nefarious Obama plan that the majority of Israelis also endorse) and of a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem, but what I won't do is label as a "nakba" a war that saw the 600,000 Jews of Palestine prevent their own slaughter at the hands of invading Arab armies.

The Middle East suffers today from the crucial mistakes made by Arab leaders in the late 1940s. The United Nations, you'll recall, voted to divide Palestine into two equal halves, one for a Jewish state, the other for an Arab state. The Jews accepted the plan; the Arab leadership, thinking its armies were strong enough to annihilate the Jews, invaded, and then proceeded to lose. As a consequence of the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees -- some were expelled by Jewish forces in the course of fighting, some fled, others were encouraged to leave by their leaders. Today, many of the descendants of these refugees are still warehoused in camps with the approval of the Arab states which, one might think, would have paid to resettle these descendants of refugees. Other refugee populations from the  tumultuous period following World War II have all been resettled, obviously.

The disaster, in other words, was the result of a series of mistakes made the leaders of the Arab states in 1948. There is not much recognition of this fact. Instead, those who romanticize the "nakba" argue that the Jews did not have a right to any slice of their historic homeland and that the Arabs were right to try to strangle the Jewish state at birth.

Read more at The Atlantic

After yet another tragic incident in which civilians were slain in the name of extremism, a call to stop the incitements to murder; a call for politicians and leaders to stop condemning on the one hand, and then praising on the other these horrific, unjustifiable acts.  If we really want to stop the terror, we must stop the incitement to murder.

This week, after a young rabbi and three children were shot to death at a Jewish school in France, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas cabled condolences to French president Nicolas Sarkozy. In that brief cable, according to the official Palestinian news agency WAFA, Abbas claimed that he always absolutely opposed any killing of civilians. And yet, just a few weeks ago, Abbas held a meeting in Turkey to honor the Palestinian prisoner, released by Israel as part of the Gilad Shalit deal, who had used the internet to lure an Israeli high school boy to his terrorist murderers last year.

 

This month also marks the first anniversary of the Fogel murders, for which two Palestinian teenagers were convicted of killing a family of five in the West Bank settlement of Itamar. At the time, Abbas condemned this attack, earning an acknowledgment from some American and even some Israeli observers. Nevertheless, on the very same day, the PA officially dedicated a major town square in honor of Dalal al-Mughrabi, a Palestinian woman implicated in the murder of thirty-seven Israeli civilians during a bus hijacking in 1978. And within a few days, official PA television broadcast a new song lauding the "heroism" of the killers at Itamar.

 

In the year since the Itamar massacre, particularly in the past few months, the PA's record about glorifying violence against civilians has generally taken a turn for the worse. The PA youth magazine Zayzafuna, for instance, recently published a girl's dreamy vision of Hitler -- ironically prompting UNESCO to withdraw funding for this publication, even as Palestine was admitted to that organization as a full member. The official mufti of Jerusalem delivered a televised sermon invoking the hadith (quotation attributed to Muhammad) about "the Muslims killing all the Jews" to bring on Judgment Day -- in sharp contrast to earlier PA efforts to scrub Hamas-style rhetoric from mosques under its jurisdiction. And Abbas himself delivered a highly inflammatory address to a conference on Jerusalem held in Doha last month that falsely accused Israel of planning to destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque. In each case, the PA response to criticism was not apology or even acknowledgment, but denial or deflection, by pointing to supposed Israeli provocations or transgressions.

As southern Israel was barraged by rockets for a fourth straight day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was hitting back "strongly and decisively," and its Iron Dome anti-missile defense system was intercepting many of the rockets coming from the Gaza Strip.

"The IDF is continuing to -- strongly and decisively -- attack the terrorists in the Gaza Strip," Netanyahu said Monday at the Knesset. "Whoever intends to harm our citizens, we will strike at him."

Israel has responded to the barrage of missiles with more than 30 attacks on rocket-launching sites and weapons facilities. At least 20 Palestinians, including two civilians, have been killed since the recent violence began. Several dozen Palestinian civilians, including several children, reportedly have been wounded in the strikes.

President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu met at the White House this week.  Both leaders agreed that Israel needs to be able to defend itself, and President Obama again emphasized that the US "has Israel's back."

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may not have bridged their differences on how to deal with Iran, but each managed to give the other a measure of reassurance.

In his speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Obama held his ground, declining to articulate new American red lines on the Iranian nuclear issue and strongly advising against “loose talk of war.” Yet he earned the praise of the prime minister and the pro-Israel lobby with his acknowledgement that Israel needs to be able to defend itself, and his vow that America has Israel’s back.

While Obama stressed diplomacy as a continued option in public and private comments, Netanyahu indicated in the two leaders’ private meeting that he believes sanctions have been exhausted. Yet even if the prime minister does not share the president’s patience, he also told Obama that there is not yet any Israeli decision to attack Iran, according to Israeli press reports.

An Israeli diplomat's wife in New Delhi was injured by a car bomb, and a second bomb was disabled in a staff member's car at the Israeli embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Monday's attacks came the day after the fourth anniversary of the assassination of the operational chief of Hezbollah, Imad Mughniyeh, who was killed Feb. 12, 2008 in Damascus by a car bomb. Hezbollah blames his killing on Israel. Israeli embassies and other missions had been on high alert in advance of the anniversary.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Iran was behind the attacks.

Read more at JTA