Israel Daily News Stream 03/08/2012
March 8, 2012 14:47 by Pesach BensonIranian Atomic Urgency
*** Lead Screed *** An ugly commentary in The Economist goes off the deep end over the Prime Minister’s assertion that Israel should be master of its own fate:
But Israel has even less control over its own destiny than Portugal or Britain do. The main reason is that, unlike those countries, Israel refuses to give up its empire. Israel is unable to sustain its imperial ambitions in the West Bank, or even to articulate them coherently . . .
Having trapped themselves in a death struggle with Palestinians that they cannot acknowledge or untangle, Israelis have psychologically displaced the source of their anxiety onto a more distant target: Iran. An Iranian nuclear bomb would not be a happy development for Israel. Neither was Pakistan’s, nor indeed North Korea’s. The notion that it represents a new Holocaust is overstated, and the belief that the source of Israel’s existential woes can be eliminated with an airstrike is mistaken. But Iran makes an appealing enemy for Israelis because, unlike the Palestinians, it can be fitted into a familiar ideological trope from the Jewish national playbook: the eliminationist anti-Semite.
• IAEA chief Yukiya Amano shares his Iranian suspicions with CNN.
“Iran is not telling us everything. That is my impression. We are asking Iran to engage with us proactively, and Iran has a case to answer,” said Yukiya Amano, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
. . . “But there are also, there may be other facilities which are not declared, and we have the indication or information that Iran has engaged in activities relevant to the development of nuclear explosive devices.”
• Looks like the mullahs are trying to scrub away traces of radioactivity from Parchin. But don’t take my word for it. This from AP:
Satellite images of an Iranian military facility appear to show trucks and earth-moving vehicles at the site, indicating an attempted cleanup of radioactive traces possibly left by tests of a nuclear-weapon trigger, diplomats told The Associated Press on Wednesday . . . .
Two of the diplomats said the crews at the Parchin military site may be trying to erase evidence of tests of a small experimental neutron device used to set off a nuclear explosion. A third diplomat could not confirm that but said any attempt to trigger a so-called neutron initiator could only be in the context of trying to develop nuclear arms.
The diplomats said they suspect attempts at sanitization because some of the vehicles at the scene appeared to be haulage trucks and other equipment suited to carting off potentially contaminated soil from the site.
• Netanyahu may have agreed to delay strike in exchange for arms. And what might the IDF’s Iran wish list be?
Mahmoud Zahar
• Either Mahmoud Zahar’s sending mixed messages, or someone’s spreading misinformation. The issue? Whether Hamas will be a player or a bystander in a possible Israeli-Iranian war.
Zahar told the BBC:
But Mahmoud Zahhar, a senior leader of Hamas in Gaza, denied the group would get involved and told the BBC: “We are not part of any political axis.”
“If Israel attacks us we will respond. If they don’t, we will not get involved in any other regional conflict,” he added.
Mr Zahhar questioned Hamas’s ability to offer support from the Palestinian territory to the south of Israel, even if it wanted to.
But AP writes:
Later Wednesday, Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency quoted another senior Hamas official in Gaza, Mahmoud Zahar, as saying that “retaliation with utmost power is the position of Hamas with regard to a Zionist war on Iran.” Zahar could not be reached for comment Wednesday evening.
AFP and The Guardian have already quoted their own Hamas sources on record opting out of conflict so I’m leaning towards Iranian misinformation.
• Worth reading: Hamas Ties to Syria and Iran in Flux
• For residual commentary/analysis on the Bibi-Bam parley, see the staff-eds in the LA Times, Baltimore Sun, analysis at McClatchy News, and former IAEA chief Hans Blix for good measure.
• WSJ: A UN report accuses Iran of stepping up abuses of human rights.
• Wikileaks: The Saudis reached out to the Mossad for “intelligence collection and advice on Iran.” More at Israel HaYom.
Arab Spring Winter
• Syrian rebels who talked to the Financial Times (click via Google News) feel abandoned and disillusioned by the West:
“You provoke the people to rebel against the regime and then you stay away,” an activist named Mahmoud observed acidly, referring to the Western states that have called for the Syrian president to step down. “And then you send your journalists to see how Bashar al-Assad kills his people.”
• BBC: Syria’s deputy oil minister becomes highest level figure to join opposition.
• An arrangement to send Libyans injured in the civil war for treatment in Jordan is creating bad blood with charges of price gouging, patients being turned away for lack beds, cronyism, and more. The Media Line says Jordan’s medical tourism industry could take a hit if the controversy festers:
The potential for abuse is written all over the program.
Rest O’ the Roundup
• Blogger Zach Tilley was so adept at blogging mistakes in the Daily Iowan, the paper offered him a job as associate copy editor. Via Romeneseko, the DI’s Adam Sullivan writes:
So instead of getting salty that a blogger was promoting our mistakes, I emailed him and offered him a job as the associate copy editor. He accepted and will start in two weeks. He obviously has a good eye for detail and I’m hopeful the new position will cut down on the embarrassing errors that creep into the print edition.
I’m sure a lot of bloggers will be emboldened . . .
(Images: Church of the Nativity via Flickr/ChrisYunker, Zahar via YouTube/alljie, Saudi coat of arms via Wikimedia Commons/Anuskafm)
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream.
Clicking “Unsubscribe instantly” on your mailing will remove you from the Israel Daily News Stream list, but not from your regular HonestReporting emails.
Albert Edelson
6:15 pm
Mar 08, 2012
Your (ECONOMIST) story “Auschwitz complex”, May 6, 2012 is a case study in confabulation and bloated, false logic. During WWII when Britain was barely master of its fate, many people gave their lives so that it could survive the German onslaught. I recall the pink coloured political map of the world showing Britain’s colonies…yes, you certainly did lose your global empire. So now you imagine that your national trauma is relevant to Israel. To claim that Israel is trying to “…sustain its imperial ambitions in the West Bank”, is a malicious overstatement. We are in fact a tiny country threatened by vicious Iranian Islamo-Fascism. In January 1939 Germany’s Führer pledged: “The complete annihilation of the Jews” to the people of Germany. Should we disbelieve Ahmedinejad’s identical pronouncements? Sadly our narratives of repression and threatened extermination are for real, and I write these words as a Holocaust Survivor. Sad to say, your AntiSemitism really shows, and we’ll continue celebrating Passover around the table with our families.
Well-loved. Agree or Disagree:
45 
0
Jerry Meents
7:31 pm
Mar 08, 2012
No suprise, I am amazed that the Palestinians did not made Hitler and Stalin honorary
Palestinian citizen’s.
Well-loved. Agree or Disagree:
27 
0
Lynette Gautier
7:48 pm
Mar 08, 2012
“Jesus is the Palestinian prince of hope and peace and Bethlehem is his birthplace,” say the Palestinians.
Since Jesus was presented to the Jews as the Christ, the Messiah, and since He stated that He came ‘to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’, and since Jacob was named Israel and thus his descendants likewise, the Palestinians, descendants of Ishmael must be raving if they believe they can hope to prove a connection. They are so totally wrong that their claim is breathtakingly ridiculous.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that they make it up as they go along with no regard for historical truth; they must think that the rest of us can’t read, can’t think and are total dimwits.
Well-loved. Agree or Disagree:
36 
0
Israeli troops, Palestinians clash over prisoner - USA TODAY - ScrollPost.com
12:24 am
Mar 09, 2012
[...] Din Drowns Out PalestiniansNew York TimesIsrael stacks the legal deckLos Angeles TimesIsrael Daily News Stream 03/08/2012Honestreporting.comAl-Arabiya -Middle East Monitorall 412 news articles » Related [...]
Agree or Disagree:
0 
0
Frank Adam
2:02 pm
Mar 09, 2012
Whoever wrote this “clever clever” Economist piece under the cartoon banners apparently of The E’s review of US election cover might know a lot about the US but has not read Jewish history seriously. To be kind they might know that UK diplomacy is dominated by an historic experience of overeas naval supremacy now archived, and a historic experience in overseas trade about which the current generation fails to understand it needs cultivating; but this author fails to empathise with the Jewsih historic experience of eliminationist anti-semites in the Biblical Books of the Exodus and Esther, the exiles by the Babylonians and Romans and the hardly gentlemanly behaviour of the Crusaders passing through the Rhineland; the Chmielnitski massacres of the 17th century and Tsarist pogroms of 1882 and after. He also for the mess of pottage that is cheap oil UN votes and Middle East transit by Suez or air fails totally to see that in 1947-48 the Arabs wished to fatally cleanse the Holy Land of its Jewish communities whethher Zionist or merely religious – as proven by the Arab riot targets of 1920 21 29 and 36 besides the Arab pogroms of the Baghdad farhud 1941 Aden 1947 and Tripoli 1945.
Israel has every right to be nervous, but also has to hold its nerve because whether the US bombs Iran or Israel does, the Iranian regime sees the two as hand in glove and will bomb back Israel and US targets available to it regardless of who dropped the first attack.
It makes more wily policy in the circumstances to use diplomacy both public ie speeches and media interviews, and the formal discreet sort to remind Iranians that: first the Palestine Arabs will suffer every bit as badly if a war starts; second that Iran and the Moslem World generally also has/have ideological and real interests that could suffer badly in a – not even nuclear – exchange of warlike actions. Third Israel and friends should use every platform available to ask the leading question – given what happened to Spain, Russia and Germany, wha twould attacking Israel do to improve life in the Arab and Mosllem Worlds?
Agree or Disagree:
3 
0
Len Kurtz
7:40 pm
Jun 17, 2012
Israel, empire? Israel is the size of New Jersey, only better. Settlements comprise about 2% of the West Bank. This is just vicious Jew hatred from the arrogant Economist.
Agree or Disagree:
0 
0