Israel Matzav does a great and thorough job discussing the history and importance of the Balfour Declaration from November 2, 1917.

The Palestine Post had this to say at the 25th anniversary, during the depths of the Holocaust:

Notice how even then, as Jews argued that the immediate establishment of a state would save countless lives from the Nazis, they still bent over backwards to point out that Jewish immigration to Palestine helped the Arab community and did not displace a single person. Notice also that even then it was assumed that the Palestine spoken of in 1917 included Transjordan. (See also my posting on Eastern Palestine.)

In 1947, on the eve of the UN Partition vote, the Arabs decided to strike on this anniversary, As usual, the strike ended up helping the Jews more than it hurt them:

But while the real Palestinian Arab people took advantage of a nice day off by visiting Jewish shops, their self-declared thought-leaders looked at things a little more violently, figuratively bashing Balfour’s head with Arab hammers:

The Jewish claim on Palestine does not depend on the Balfour Declaration, of course, but it was an important moment in modern Zionist history that illuminates much about the conflict.

cross-posted on Elder of Ziyon 

Just heard it on the radio, and here it is, already on Jpost:

The September 6 raid over Syria was carried out by the US Air Force, the Al-Jazeera Web site reported Friday. The Web site quoted Israeli and Arab sources as saying that two strategic US jets armed with tactical nuclear weapons carried out an attack on a nuclear site under construction.

The sources were quoted as saying that Israeli F-15 and F-16 jets provided cover for the US planes. The sources added that each US plane carried one tactical nuclear weapon and that the site was hit by one bomb and was totally destroyed.

I cannot find the original article on Al Jazeera site, but why bother? The next one will give more details on that tactical nuclear weapon that leaves no traces of radiation and passes undetected for two months.

But, at least, if it really was a nuke, it explains that categorical statement made by Syria’s ambassador to Washington:

“There are no nuclear North Korean-Syrian facilities whatsoever in Syria,” Moustapha said.

Not any more, true…

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.

It’s not just that Hezbollah has re-armed, it’s influence is being seen in Israel’s south too.

Hamas is apparently beefing up its border defense (and probably offensive capabilities too) in a manner reminiscent of its allies in the north of Israel.

Hamas has organized along the lines of a conventional army, with companies and battalions assigned to defense of specific sectors, a fixed chain of command and teams attempting to stage ambushes of Israeli forces as they enter and leave the strip.In the months after Hamas’ capture last year of an Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, Israeli forces made dozens of aggressive forays into Gaza, killing hundreds of Palestinian fighters without counting a single loss to enemy fire.
. . .
“They are building an army,” said Gen. Moshe Tamir, commander of the Israeli division assigned to Gaza, “and are trying to build bunkers and mortar positions along the border. We are constantly modifying our tactics and they are watching what we do.” He said more than 200 militants have been killed since the beginning of the year.

Given the building of the bunkers, Israel’s arms request to the United States makes a lot of sense.

The agency’s notification to Congress included a laundry list of missiles and munitions. Among them were: 2,000 Radio Frequency TOW anti-armor missiles, 1,500 114M3 Hellfire II air-to-ground missiles, 200 114L3 Hellfire II Longbow missiles, 100 Patriot guidance-enhanced missiles and 5,000 M141 83 mm bunker-defeat munitions.

(Emphasis mine)While the arms request makes sense as a reaction to Hamas, what doesn’t make sense is why Israel waited for the situation to reach this level. Has the false promise of diplomacy prevented Israel from acting militarily in an effective (and pre-emptive) manner?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Michael Hirsch of Newsweek, fresh off of mocking Rudolf Giuliani’s foreign policy team and misidentifying them, now has a solution to the problems in the Middle East. The President needs an envoy. A peace envoy. See if you can figure out what’s wrong from the following two excerpts.

Sorry, but it’s just not enough. First of all, Welch—though a consummate, hardworking diplomat—is not senior enough to resolve such titanic issues on his own. “He’s not engaging the leaders,” says Dennis Ross, who for many years was senior U.S. Mideast envoy for both Republican and Democratic administrations and recently summed up the lessons he learned in a book called “Statecraft.” “When I’d go out there I shuttled back and forth, seeing leaders 20 times in 10 days.”

and

Every major peace process that has had any measure of success has benefited from intensive, high-level guidance by either the top cabinet official or the U.S. president himself. There was Baker at Madrid. There was Henry Kissinger spending several weeks shuttling back and forth to make peace between the Israelis and Arabs in 1973. Jimmy Carter took two weeks off in 1978 to devote himself to the Israeli-Egypt peace achieved at Camp David. Going further back, Woodrow Wilson spent six months in Paris to negotiate the Versailles Treaty in 1919, and Teddy Roosevelt closeted himself with Japanese and Russian delegates for a month in August 1905 to achieve his Nobel Prize-winning peace accord ending the Russo-Japanese war (eliciting Henry Adams’s admiring comment that he was “the best herder of emperors since Napoleon”). There’s no question Rice wants a deal of the magnitude of those agreements. “She’s really committed to this,” says Miller, “because in about a year she could join the company of the inconsequential secretaries of State. She needs to deliver something that she owns.”

Hirsch is drawing on the experience of two “peace envoys,” Dennis Ross and Aaron Miller and yet, when he lists those major peace processes he left off the crowning achievement of their careers: The Camp David summit in July, 2000. Gee why wasn’t that mentioned, wasn’t it a rousing success given all the time and effort expended by these two highly successful peace envoys? The summit ended with a major peace agreement between Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak. Didn’t it?

It didnt? What? Despite being offered over 90% of the territory he demanded, Yasser Arafat chose not to accept a deal. Two months later he unleashed an all out war against Israel.

And while neither of the two was involved in the meeting in Geneva, their boss, President Clinton traveled there as an envoy from PM Barak of Israel offering President Assad a nearly complete Israeli withdrawal from the Golan. President Clinton was rebuffed by Assad.

The whole eight years of the Clinton administration - of which both Ross and Miller were a part demonstrated the futility of an administration devoting so much of its resources and political capital to bring peace to the Middle East. Will a peace envoy really make a difference? Here’s Hirsch again:

So Cairo is, like most of the Arab regimes, hedging its bets over whether it wants to back Abbas, and it is actively appeasing the newly empowered Hamas. No surprise there: Islamist forces are rising in all these Arab countries—in the most recent parliamentary election in Egypt in December 2005, the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas is a Palestinian spinoff of the Egyptian group) quadrupled its strength from 20 seats to 80. The upshot: getting the Egyptians to crack down on Hamas will require some high-level strong-arming from Washington, preferably by using the $1.3 billion in annual U.S. aid as leverage. Both the president and Rice must deliver that message repeatedly.

Egypt the first Arab state to make peace with Israel is now noticeably lax in preventing Hamas from obtaining weapons. Diplomacy is what’s needed? Or is there a fundamental weakness in the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, if Egypt can’t be counted on 30 years after its signing?

I subscribe to the latter. The goal of peace is a very attractive one. But working hard for it won’t make a difference, the conditions aren’t there.

Israel has come far in the past 20 years. (And I’m not saying that I approve.) The idea that a Palestinian state would be a good thing was the province of the extreme Left in Israel twenty years ago. Now nearly everyone serving in Knesset, no matter how far to the right, considers a Palestinian state an inevitability.

If you look at the so called moderates of the Palestinian Authority you see no such regard for Israel.

Longing for a peace envoy misses the point. The Arab world isn’t ready for peace and no matter the rank of the diplomat, that won’t change for the near future.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.