Iranian Atomic Urgency
• Sanctions on Iranian oil now underway. Bloomberg News crunches the numbers.
• Aviation Week predicts a US attack on Iran in 2013 and examines the logistics:
“It is not an act of war against Iran, the Iranian people or Islam. It is a pre-emptive attack solely against their nuclear facilities and the military targets protecting them. We will take extraordinary measures to protect against collateral damage.”
• Washington Post columnist David Ignatius weighs in on Israel, Iran and the bomb. See also Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, who fisks Kenneth Waltz’s naive case for Why Iran Should Get the Bomb.
Arab Spring Winter
• On what basis might the Muslim Brotherhood roll back the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty? Dore Gold (Israel HaYom) explains:
Morsi explained that there were two agreements, between Israel and Egypt and between Israel and the Palestinians, and he implied that since Israel had not kept its commitments to the Palestinian side, Egypt was not obligated to maintain the peace treaty.
Using this legal argument, Morsi was re-opening one of the key issues that had been already settled in past Israeli-Egyptian negotiations thirty-three years ago: Namely, was there any formal linkage between the bilateral agreement between Israeli and Egypt and the state of relations between Israel and other Arab parties, especially the Palestinians? The Treaty of Peace was absolutely clear on the subject, rejecting the idea of linkage . . . The Egyptian Foreign Ministry knows well that this is what the Treaty of Peace states, but it is not clear the extent to which the international community is still aware of these subtle details.
• Syrian Activists Plan News Broadcasts As Alternative to State Media
• In his inaugural address, Mohammed Morsi promised to bring home Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who masterminded the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. “The Blind Sheikh” makes Jonathan Pollard look like a Boy Scout. The Wall Street Journal explains Morsi’s interest:
For die-hard devotees, Mr. Morsi has taken up a cause that proves his revolutionary credentials: ousted President Hosni Mubarak did nothing to seek the sheik’s release.
Rest O’ the Roundup
• Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir died. My antennae twitched over the construct of this Daily Telegraph sentence.
When the first intifada erupted in 1987 he was frequently asked how someone who once fought and killed in order to bring about a Jewish state could brand Palestinian militants “terrorists.”
And in another obituary, the Financial Times (via Google News) discovers the word terror:
Yitzhak Shamir, who has died at the age of 96, is most likely to be remembered as a terrorist against British rule in Palestine during the 1940s . . .
(Image of Pantsir-S1 via Wikimedia Commons/Vitaly Kuzman, Abdel-Rahman via Wikimedia Commons)
For more, see Thursday’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.
