The American administration has rejected an Israeli request for military equipment and support that would improve Israel’s ability to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.
A report published last week by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) states that military strikes are unlikely to destroy >Iran’s centrifuge program for enriching uranium.
The Americans viewed the request, which was transmitted (and rejected) at the highest level, as a sign that Israel is in the advanced stages of preparations to attack Iran. They therefore warned Israel against attacking, saying such a strike would undermine American interests. They also demanded that Israel give them prior notice if it nevertheless decided to strike Iran.
As compensation for the requests it rejected, Washington offered to improve Israel’s defenses against surface-to-surface missiles.
Israel responded by saying it reserves the right to take whatever action it deems necessary if diplomatic efforts to halt Iran’s nuclearization fail.
Senior Israeli officials had originally hoped that U.S. President George Bush would order an American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities before leaving office, as America’s military is far better equipped to conduct such a strike successfully than is Israel’s.
Jerusalem also fears that an Israeli strike, even if it succeeded well enough to delay Iran’s nuclear development for a few years, would give Iran international legitimacy for its program, which it currently lacks. Israel, in contrast, would be portrayed as an aggressor, and would be forced to contend alone with Iran’s retaliation, which would probably include thousands of missile strikes by Iranian allies Hezbollah, Hamas and perhaps even Syria.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended Israel’s right to make its own decision about whether it takes military action against Iran, in an interview released over the weekend.
“We don’t say yes or no to Israeli military operations. Israel is a sovereign country,” she said in response to a question from The Politico Web site as to whether she was concerned that America would be blamed in the case of an IDF attack on the Islamic Republic.
Her statements come amid speculation that Washington has warned Jerusalem not to attack Iran and media reports that the US told Israel it doesn’t have the green light to use Iraqi airspace for any such attack.
A senior official with the US Defense Department has dismissed reports that Washington is planning a naval blockade of Iran.
“As a matter of policy we do not discuss current or future ship’s movements. However, I can tell you that reports of an alleged naval blockade of Iran are false,” Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder, a spokesman for the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.
“We routinely rotate deployed naval forces in the USCENTCOM area of responsibility,” he added.
The US Central Command supervises US military operations in the Middle East, East Africa and Central Asia.
On Monday, Egypt’s Middle East Times reported that a massive US and European armada was heading towards the Persian Gulf for a naval blockade of Iran.
The report said that the force included the nuclear-powered American aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt as well as forces from the British Royal Navy and a French nuclear submarine.
Israeli War Minister Threatens Palestinian Holocaust
Media who became obsessed with “wipe Israel off the map” misquote scurry to defend Vilnai after disgraceful comments
Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai has provoked outrage after threatening Palestinians with a “holocaust,” but the same media who obsessed about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “wipe Israel off the map” misquote are scurrying to defend Vilnai’s disgraceful comments.
“The more Qassam (rocket) fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves, “Vilnai told the Army Radio on Friday.
However, in a Reuters report, despite the fact that the rest of the statement was translated into English, the incendiary word “holocaust” remained in its original Hebrew version – “shoah”.
Why Reuters would choose to print the rest of the statement in English yet cherry-pick one word to remain in Hebrew is obvious – they don’t want to draw any attention to the fact that Vilnai is threatening the Palestinians with a holocaust.
Vilnai’s spokesman has attempted to diffuse the controversy by claiming Vilnai was speaking in terms of a “disaster” and not a holocaust.
But you can’t have your cake and eat it.
When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad allegedly called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” the media blindly repeated the quote ad infinitum, and it became second nature for them to carelessly drop it into any propaganda piece intended to hype Iran’s supposed threat to Israel and the world.
Barely a day goes by that Israeli, American and British warhawks don’t spew the phrase like a broken record in an attempt to create a catchy cliché and brand market the next jaunt of imperial blood-letting.
No matter that, according to numerous different translations, Ahmadinejad never used the word “map,” instead his statement was in the context of time and applied to the Zionist regime occupying Jerusalem. Ahmadinejad was expressing his future hope that the Zionist regime in Israel would fall, not that Iran was going to physically annex the country and its population.
To claim Ahmadinejad has issued a rallying cry to ethnically cleanse Israel is akin to saying that Churchill wanted to murder all Germans when he stated his desire to crush the Nazis. This is about the demise of a corrupt occupying power, not the deaths of millions of innocent people.
On the other hand, even as Reuters is forced to admit, Vilnai’s use of the word “shoah” is intrinsically allied to the context of “Discussions of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews,” adding, “Many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other contemporary events.”
So will the media make reference to one of Israel’s top minister’s expressing his wish to inflict a Palestinian “holocaust” in all future reports about Israel’s geopolitical motives, just as they do with Ahmadinejad’s supposed call to wipe Israel off the map?
There’s more chance of Yasser Arafat and Menachem Begin coming back from the dead to broker a peace settlement.
Palestinian exodus into the Egyptian side of the Rafah
Tens of thousands of Palestinians on foot and on donkey carts poured into Egypt from Gaza Wednesday after masked gunmen used land mines to blast down a seven-mile barrier dividing the border town of Rafah.
The border breach was a dramatic protest against the closure of the impoverished Palestinian territory imposed last week by Israel.
Jubilant men and women crossed unhindered by border controls over the toppled corrugated metal along sections of the barrier, carrying goats, chickens and crates of Coca-Cola. Some brought back televisions, car tires and cigarettes and one man even bought a motorcycle. Vendors sold soft drinks and baked goods to the crowds.
They were stocking up on goods made scarce by the Israeli blockade and within hours, shops on the Egyptian side of Rafah had run out of stock. The border fence had divided the Rafah into two halves, one on the Egyptian side and one in southern Gazan.
Ibrahim Abu Taha, 45, a Palestinian father of seven, was in the Egyptian section of Rafah with his two brothers and $185 in his pocket.
“We want to buy food, we want to buy rice and sugar, milk and wheat and some cheese,” Abu Taha said, adding that he would also buy cheap Egyptian cigarettes.
Abu Taha said he could get the basic foods in Gaza, but at three times the cost.
Police from the militant Islamic group Hamas, which controls Gaza, directed the traffic. Egyptian border guards took no action, imposing no border controls for those who crossed.
“Freedom is good. We need no border after today,” said unemployed 29-year-old Mohammed Abu Ghazal.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told reporters in Cairo his border guards originally had forced back the Gazans on Tuesday.
“But today a great number of them came back because the Palestinians in Gaza are starving due to the Israeli siege,” he said.
No starvation has been reported in Gaza. But many of the 1.5 million residents have faced critical shortages of electricity, fuel and other supplies over months because Gaza has been virtually sealed since Hamas seized control of the territory by force in June.
“I told them to let them come in and eat and buy food and then return them later as long as they were not carrying weapons,” Mubarak said.
Israel cuts power to 1.5 million people in Gaza, 5 hospital patients die, food shortages a distinct possibility
Day after Gaza blackout, PM says ‘Gazans can walk’
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged Monday that Israel would not allow the Gaza Strip to slide into a humanitarian crisis in the wake of the decision to halt fuel supplies over ongoing rocket fire on the Negev, but later said that gas-deprived Gaza residents “can walk.”
“As far as I’m concerned, all the residents of Gaza can walk and have no fuel for their cars, because they have a murderous terrorist regime that doesn’t allow people in the south of Israel to live in peace,” the prime minister said in broadcast remarks.
Also Monday, a Qassam rocket struck the western Negev. Southern Israel absorbed more than a hundred rockets fired from Gaza last week, but the weekend marked a significant drop in Qassam attacks with only five fired on Sunday.
Olmert made the pledge to prevent a humanitarian crisis in separate talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen. Mubarak called Olmert on Monday to express his concern over the deteriorating situation in Gaza.
“We will not allow a humanitarian crisis in the Strip,” Olmert told both leaders.
“We will provide the population with everything needed to prevent a crisis, but we will not supply luxuries that would make life more comfortable,” he added.
Olmert also told Verhagen that 75 percent of children in the Negev suffer from anxiety as a result of the daily rocket attacks.
“Israel does not want to use the same means and shoot without aim,” he said. “We are trying to attack terrorists, but we also show the population that it cannot shed itself of responsibility for the situation. We won’t allow the Palestinians to fire on us and destroy life in Sderot, while in Gaza life is going on as usual.”
The European Union, Israel’s largest trade partner in the world, is watching by as Israel tightens its barbaric siege on Gaza, collectively punishing 1.5 million Palestinian civilians, condemning them to devastation, and visiting imminent death upon hundreds of kidney dialysis and heart patients, prematurely born babies, and all others dependent on electric power for their very survival.
By freezing fuel and electric power supplies to Gaza, Israel, the occupying power, is essentially guaranteeing that “clean” water — only by name, as Gaza’s water is perhaps the most polluted in the whole region, after decades of Israeli theft and abuse — will not be pumped out and properly distributed to homes and institutions; hospitals will not be able to function adequately, leading to the eventual death of many, particularly the most vulnerable; whatever factories that are still working despite the siege will now be forced to close, pushing the already extremely high unemployment rate even higher; sewage treatment will come to a halt, further polluting Gaza’s precious little water supply; academic institutions and schools will not be able to provide their usual services; and the lives of all civilians will be severely disrupted, if not irreversibly damaged. And Europe is apathetically watching.
Princeton academic Richard Falk considered Israel’s siege a “prelude to genocide,” even before this latest crime of altogether cutting off energy supplies. Now, Israel’s crimes in Gaza can accurately be categorized as acts of genocide, albeit slow. According to Article II of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the term is defined as:
“[A]ny of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; …”
Clearly, Israel’s hermetic siege of Gaza, designed to kill, cause serious bodily and mental harm, and deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about partial and gradual physical destruction, qualifies as an act of genocide, if not all-out genocide yet. And the EU is suspiciously silent.
US President George W. Bush promised Israel’s opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu that the United States will join the Jewish state in a nuclear strike against Iran, Israel Radio reported today.
Former Prime Minister Netanyahu, opposition Likud party’s hardline chairman who opposes the US-backed Annapolis peace process, reiterated to President Bush his stance, that a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Iran’s nuclear installations was the only way to stop the Islamic nation’s nuclear weapons ambitions.
“I told him my position and Bush agreed,” Netanyahu told Israel Radio.
During their 45-minute meeting at King David hotel in Jerusalem Netanyahu also told Bush that “Jerusalem belongs to the Jewish people and will remain under Israeli sovereignty for eternity.”
President Bush issued a stark warning to Iran over Strait of Hormuz incident, saying that “all options are on the table to protect our assets.”
“There will be serious consequences if they attack our ships, pure and simple,” Bush said during the joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Jerusalem. “And my advice to them is, don’t do it.”
Bush criticized those who interpret the National Intelligence Estimate, which found that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons program in 2003, as a sign that Iran was no longer a threat.
“Let me remind you what the NIE actually said,” Bush stold reporters. “It said that as far as the intelligence community could tell, at one time the Iranians had a military — covert military program that was suspended in 2003 because of international pressure. My attitude is that a non-transparent country, a country which has yet to disclose what it was up to, can easily restart a program.”
Israel is keeping all options on the table if economic and diplomatic pressure fails to halt archfoe Iran’s nuclear programme, Israel’s ambassador to the United States said on Thursday.
“In assessing the threat from Iran we see in sync and think similarly. Both America and Israel understand the severity of the threat, the implication of the threat if it grows,” Israel’s US Ambassador Sallai Meridor said.
He spoke a day after visiting US President George W. Bush met Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Jerusalem at the start of his regional visit for talks that focused on the Islamic republic.
“Both the US and Israel would prefer seeing this threat removed through diplomatic-economic means without any need to take other steps,” he said.
Asked if a military strike was a realistic option, Meridor said “both the US and Israel haven’t removed any option from the table,”
“All options are on the table, not only in the future. They are on the table if we get to the point, and I hope we don’t get to the point, that diplomactic and economic preferred alternatives will fail to produce the hoped for results.”
International support for new sanctions on Iran has been waning since a US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in early December said that the Islamic republic had halted a nuclear weapons programme in 2003.
Israel considers the Islamic republic its main regional threat in the wake of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s repeated statements for it to be wiped off the map.
Widely considered to be the Middle East’s sole if undeclared nuclear power, Israel along with the US suspects that Tehran’s nuclear programme is a cover for developing atomic weapons, a charge Iran denies.
The American administration has rejected an Israeli request for military equipment and support that would improve Israel’s ability to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. 
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended Israel’s right to make its own decision about whether it takes military action against Iran, in an interview released over the weekend.
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