Today’s Top Stories
1. Might the White House sacrifice Israel’s qualitative military edge for the sake of achieving a nuclear deal with Iran?
According to the Wall St. Journal (via Google News), the White House may offer “loose” defense pacts and increased arms sales to the Gulf states for their support of a nuclear deal. Gulf state leaders are due in Washington for a summit on the matter with President Obama this month. The Journal writes:
The Persian Gulf countries say they need more drones, surveillance equipment and missile-defense systems to combat an Iranian regime they see as committed to becoming the region’s dominant power. The Gulf states also want upgraded fighter jets to contain the Iranian challenge, particularly the advanced F-35, known as the Joint Strike Fighter . . .
The challenge Mr. Obama faces at Camp David is to assuage growing fears among those Sunni countries that want military superiority over Shiite-dominated Iran, while not undermining longtime U.S. security guarantees to Israel.
Current law mandates that the U.S. uphold Israel’s qualitative military edge over its neighbors.
The New York Times adds
Defense analysts say that with the balance of power in the Middle East in flux, that could change. One possibility would be to wait three years after delivering the F-35 to Israel and then approve it for sale to the United Arab Emirates — the Arab ally most likely to get the first chance to buy the stealth fighter — which would give Israel a three-year head start.
2. Damascus reportedly gave important Alawite families 48 hours to leave Damascus for Latakia. Rebels are threatening to ancestral Alawite lands along the Syrian coast that — in a last ditch scenario — would form an Alawite rump state. It’s all hands on deck. The Jerusalem Post picked up on Arab media reports. It’s all hands on deck.
On Friday, sources belonging to rebel groups boasted that their battles against the Syrian army were taking place in the highlands of Jabal al-Akrad, a range that includes some of the highest peaks in Syria.
A commander of the Ahrar al-Sham, a faction belonging to the rebel coalition fighting Assad’s forces, claimed that “the capture of the peaks would put the Alawite villages in our firing range,” communities that include Qardaha, the hometown of the Assad dynasty. On Friday, sources belonging to rebel groups boasted that their battles against the Syrian army were taking place in the highlands of Jabal al-Akrad, a range that includes some of the highest peaks in Syria.
3. As the Nepal death toll passed 7,000, the search for Or Asraf came to a grim end as searchers found the 22-year-old Israeli’s body on a mountainside. Due to difficult terrain and weather, efforts to retrieve the body will begin tomorrow. Asraf was the only Israeli fatality in Nepal.
Israel also announced it would adopt a Nepalese village to rehabilitate. One member of the IDF rescue mission, Dr. Ariel Bar, shared his observations of the crisis.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Fulvio Martusciello, the EU’s “Israel-relations czar” demanded better controls and accountability on EU aid to the Palestinians. According to the JTA, Martusciello cited an EU audit slamming wasted aid money to the PA, a nonbinding resolution raising concerns about money laundering and terrorism financing, and the PA’s “salary payments” to families of terrorists jailed in Israel.
• In a Haaretz interview, ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said low-ranking IDF soldiers, as well as Palestinians, could be prosecuted for war crimes.
• The Palestinians are still pushing to get Israel kicked out of FIFA, international soccer’s governing body. According to Reuters, the Palestinians are confident they’ll get the necessary three-quarter majority of FIFA’s members.
• Hamas announced one of it’s people died in a tunnel collapse near the Israel-Gaza border.
• The Indiana General Assembly became the second state legislature to pass a bill formally opposing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign (BDS) against Israel. Resolution 74 follows a similar move by Tennessee lawmakers.
• Coming attractions for this summer: ‘Freedom Flotilla III’ to embark for Gaza.
• The Government Press Office is giving the 50 new Knesset members training in how to address the media and more effectively represent Israel. YNet coverage.
Mideast Matters
• The US Navy’s now escorting cargo ships near Iran. More at CNN.
• Boycott of Iranian goods gains Arab traction
• It appears that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi suffered a severe spinal injury in a US airstrike more than two months ago. Media reports say the organization’s new leader is former physics professor Abed al-Rachman Mustapha (a.k.a. Abu Alaa al-Afri).
• NOW Lebanon: After seeing what ISIS did with the advanced weapons taken from the Iraqi army, Hezbollah’s keen to get its hands on Bashar Assad’s rockets before ISIS does.
• ISIS slaughtered 300 Yazidi captives in Iraq.
Around the World
• Ukrainian aliyah tripled the first quarter of 2015.
• CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, has raised issues of ethical journalism. Gupta, a neurosurgeon and journalist, was filmed performing emergency medical procedures on Nepalese earthquake victims.
In one video, Gupta says he was asked to help operate on an eight-year-old girl. In another video, he resuscitated a woman in a helicopter going into cardiac arrest. He certainly deserves praise for saving lives, but was it proper to keep the cameras filming? Should CNN have aired the footage?
• Two young Paris Jews were attacked by mob of 40 people.
• A memorial plaque for Ilan Halimi, a French Jew who was kidnapped, tortured, and brutally murdered in 2006, was found desecrated.
Commentary/Analysis
• Looking at the possible outcomes of the British elections, Melanie Phillips is underwhelmed by what the results will mean for Israel and UK Jews.
In short, the UK’s election alternatives on Israel would seem to be between decent but ignorant and thus incoherent on the one hand, and poisonous, existentially agonized and lethal on the other.
• Judith Bergmann wonders about the hypocrisy of European consumers too socially conscious to purchase Israeli produce.
While nothing on earth makes their blood pressure soar quite so much as encountering Israeli produce in their local supermarket, they happily stuff themselves with Iranian dates and pomegranates, Egyptian carrots and green beans and Turkish cherries and grapes. They dress themselves in cheap clothes produced by overexploited, underpaid children working under slave-like conditions in Bangladesh and Pakistan, and they do not give it a second thought if young women on death row in China sewed their jeans, as long as they get their money’s worth. If North Korea produced anything other than grief and nuclear weapons, they would rush to consume its produce, as well.
• More commentary to ponder.
– New York Post: UN report outlines how Hamas used kids as human shields (staff-ed)
– Professor Eyal Zisser: Hezbollah is raising its head
– Elder of Ziyon: Why doesn’t anyone compare Baltimore to Hamas police?
– Amir Taheri: Why Iran can’t deliver what Obama hopes
– Michael Totten: The Iranian leader’s bizarre Twitter feed
– Aaron David Miller: Is Assad finished, for real, this time?
– Michael Crowley: Iran’s dire Strait
Featured image: CC BY-NC-SA Ed Yourdon via flickr with additions by HonestReporting; F-35 CC BY-NC flickr/US Air Force
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