Arab Spring Winter
• German government report details how Hezbollah uses mosque groups to raise money. The Jerusalem Post writes:
It is unclear from the report if the Hezbollah funds in Germany are funneled to aid the terrorist group’s efforts in Syria to support the regime of President Bashar Assad.
The report showed a steady presence of Hezbollah members in the Federal Republic, 950 members, the same figure for 2011. The intelligence agency’s 2010 report showed the number of Hezbollah members to be 900.
• Worth reading: Michael Totten visited Hezbollah’s tourist theme park in southern Lebanon. The park, he says, sanitizes Hezbollah’s history, never noting it’s airplane hijackings, suicide bombings, kidnappings of Westerners, or terror attacks around the world. That’s because the park targets Lebanese hearts and minds, not Westerners:
An honest Hezbollah museum would have a wax figure of a journalist chained to a radiator.
• AP tries to make sense of Sunni/Shiite enmity.
• What does the Egyptian-Ethiopian water dispute have to do with Israel? Answers Zalman Shoval:
If the Ethiopian initiative takes off, it will cause geopolitical aftershocks in the entire region that will shift the center of power from Egypt to Ethiopia, which will also have diplomatic consequences . . .
Israel also finds itself in a dilemma: The agreements and ties with Egypt are the foundation of its diplomatic and security policy, but its growing and strengthening ties with Ethiopia are also an important part of its considerations. Until now Israel has refrained from any sort of involvement in the swelling storm, and we should hope this continues to be the case.
• You can imagine what happens next: Media reports say Egypt will run out of diesel fuel, petrol, and butane around the end of June.
• For more commentary/analysis, see Bill Keller and Tariq Alhomayed,
Rest O’ the Roundup
• JTA: Prime Minister won’t object to a cut in US military aid as a result of the US budget sequester.
• Jacob Frenkel is returning to his former post as chief of the Bank of Israel. Israeli finance personalities discussed what it all means with Globes.
• Worth reading: David Pollock and Michael Eisenstadt examine How the US Gains From Israel Alliance.
(Image of Germany via Wikimedia Commons, Ethiopia via Wikimedia Commons/Jialiang Gao)
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream.
