Today’s Top Stories
1. Breaking news: As today’s roundup went to press, there were early reports of an IDF patrol along the Egyptian border coming under fire. The IDF confirmed that two soldiers were injured. The army returned fire on the unknown assailants. Egyptian forces reportedly clashed with the presumably same gunmen. The IDF is trying to determine whether there was an infiltration as well.
Jihadi terror groups in the Sinai have launched a number of attacks; one Egyptian report blames this incident on smugglers. Developing . . .
2. Israel is mulling a proposal that UN peacekeepers who fled the Syrian Golan be replaced by unmanned aerial drones. According to Arab media reports picked up by the Jerusalem Post, the Assad regime has already assented.
By the way, the Post adds (and the AP elaborates) that fighting near the Israeli-Syrian border will heat up; Bashar Assad’s exploiting the US war on ISIS to recapture key areas like the Quneitra border crossing.
3. Haaretz obtained an internal EU document describing its red lines on settlement activity. Israeli officials are concerned the paper foreshadows sanctions.
The document specifically spells out construction in Givat HaMatos, Har Homa, and E1, plans to relocate 12,000 Bedouins, plus changes in the Temple Mount’s status quo all as threats to the two-state solution.
Israel and the Palestinians
• The Israeli defense establishment is moving to produce more armaments at home. According to Israeli media reports, this is “in light of potential boycotts and politically-inspired resupply delays.”
“The full truth, revealed here for the first time, is much more severe: apparently, during Operation Protective Edge, the USA had completely stopped all connections with Israel’s defense procurement delegation based in the USA. For days, no item whatsoever could be shipped. The expected airlift of US ammunition had never even arrived at its point of departure,” according to the report.
• Israel sent a delegation of unusually high-level officials to meet with the UN Human Rights Committee about the Gaza conflict. With the looming threat of war crimes charges, was the Geneva face time successful? That depends on how you read this Jerusalem Post assessment.
On a related note is the announcement of a separate UN probe of both Israeli attacks on UN facilities and Hamas using the sites to store and launch rockets.
• Worth reading: Vanity Fair‘s Adam Ciralsky examines the strategic threat of Palestinian terror tunnels. Did Israel avert a Hamas massacre?
The alleged plan of attack (as pieced together by defense and security professionals through electronic intercepts, informants, interrogations of Hamas operatives, as well as computers and satellite imagery obtained from Hamas compounds during the war) was chilling: a surprise assault in which scores of heavily armed Hamas insurgents were supposedly set to emerge from more than a dozen cross-border tunnels and proceed to kill as many Israelis as possible.
A sidebar to the article included a Q&’A with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal. Ciralsky asked good questions, but I wish he had pressed on Meshaal’s shifty insistence that Hamas only targets soldiers and settlers. Hamas doesn’t support a two-state solution, and wants to wipe Israel off the map. Who isn’t an occupier?
• If you’re following the American Studies Association’s flailing efforts to make their academic conference an Israel-free zone, you need to keep up with Professor Eugene Kontorovich.
UPDATE: THE ASA HAS RELEASED A RESPONSE to the charges of national origin discrimination. They astoundingly claim their policy has not changed; that the “boycott” was always limited to “on an institutional level will not engage in collaborative projects with Israeli research institutions.”
The claim is demonstrably false. Their written explanation of their policy clearly stated that scholars who are “representatives” of institutions would be barred based on their national origin. Now they say no one will be barred. If they do not understand the difference between someone and no one, it will be hard to explain.
• Quotes that make me go hmmmm. Here’s what Major General Yoav Mordechai, the director of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), told Maan News about revelations that the daughter of Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh was recently treated in an Israeli hospital:
“When Hamas is concerned about certain patients for personal reasons, they have no problem allowing them to go to Israeli hospitals, but when we established a field hospital during the war, Hamas refused to send injured people to that hospital for treatment,” he told Ma’an.
• If Israel didn’t exist, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would have to invent it. We’re still the most popular diversion for nutty world leaders. Here’s Erdogan’s response to the 2014 World Press Freedom Index, which called Turkey “one of the world’s biggest prisons for journalists.” (Turkey ranked way below Israel, and even worse than Palestine in the report issued by Reporters Without Borders. The full report‘s in pdf.)
Commentary/Analysis
• I hope John Kerry feels a little shame when he reads Frida Ghitis’s take on linking Israeli-Palestinian peace to ISIS. The Miami Herald columnist writes:
Kerry obviously yearns for an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. So do I. So do millions of people. The goal is worthy in itself, but it doesn’t need to be justified with absurd connections that somehow disembody it from its many intrinsic challenges. We don’t wish for peace between Israelis and Palestinians because it would stop the rise of extremism. We need it because when two peoples live side by side in peace they all live better lives; because reaching a good, stable and lasting agreement that ends decades of tensions that regularly explode into war would be a wonderful thing all by itself.
• Jordanian support ISIS is worrisome
• Weighing in on the “Death of Klinghoffer” opera controversy are Walter Russell Mead, Seth Lipsky, and Alan Dershowitz
• For more commentary/analysis, see Daniel Siryoti (Silent Israeli Arab majority doesn’t agree with Hanan Zoabi).
Image of EU via flickr/bob, tunnel via YouTube/idfnadesk
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream and join the IDNS on Facebook.
