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Shiite religious leader Sayyed Muhammed Hussein Fadlallah played a leading role in the increasing Islamic radicalization of Lebanese Shiites and laid the foundations for Hizbullah's ideology of violent struggle against the West and Israel. He supplied an organized doctrine for the mujahid who is ready to sacrifice his life. Yet he opposed the aspirations of Iran to establish an Islamic republic in Lebanon.
A ship that clearly intends to breach a lawful blockade may be stopped when it is still on the high seas. Stopping the flotilla heading for Gaza in international waters 100 kilometers from Israel was not illegal; in time of armed conflict, ships intending to breach the blockade may be searched even on the high seas. Israel is in full compliance with international law because it fulfilled all of the conditions for a lawful blockade.
The PLO platform, as reaffirmed in the Fatah Congress in August 2009, states that their struggle will not stop until the Zionist entity is eliminated and Palestine is liberated. As a logical corollary, they refuse to accept Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. The Palestinian leadership insists that negotiations now start at the point they had reached with Olmert at the end of 2008. That means they are not satisfied with what was put on the table a year ago. They want more than that.
The conventional wisdom is that the success of a future peace agreement between Israel and an envisaged Palestinian state would require the support of an international peacekeeping mission. Yet bilateral peacekeeping has shown itself to be effective along the Israeli-Jordanian border, and bilateral security cooperation with multinational oversight has succeeded along the Israeli-Egyptian border. It may well be that primarily bilateral security arrangements, rather than an international peacekeeping mission, presents the best course.
Gaza is not cut off from the outside world. In the last year, the markets of Gaza have been flooded with produce and merchandise. From June 2007 (the date of the Hamas military takeover of Gaza), overall monetary transfers to Gaza have totaled over $5 billion from governmental and extragovernmental sources.
The Arab Gulf states are feeling compelled to adopt an appeasement policy toward Tehran while with increasing dread they helplessly follow the nuclear crisis, epitomized by Iranian determination and aggression in the face of American weakness.
The Egyptians have effectively manipulated the Iranian issue in order to advance their long-term nuclear objectives vis-a-vis Israel, and have created a new linkage between Iran and Israel. The Egyptian argument of linkage is completely baseless. Iran's drive for nuclear weapons emanates from its regional ambitions to become the main hegemonial power in the Middle East. Even if Israel did not exist, Iran would still be racing to develop nuclear weapons to further its own ambitions.
In February, Syrian President Bashar Assad hosted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Damascus. Afterward, Hizbullah's online magazine suggested that war with Israel was on the horizon.
Today there is an internal battle among Turkish Muslims between forces that want to be part of the Western world and those that want to return Turkey’s political identity to be based primarily on Islamic solidarity. But it isn’t Ottoman Islam that these Islamist Turks seek to revive. Their Islam is more in tune with the fanatically anti-Western principles of Saudi Wahhabi Islam.
The Iranians learned a great deal from the destruction of Iraq’s Osirak reactor by the Israel Air Force in 1981. The Osirak reactor was the key element in the Iraqi nuclear program: a single target which, when it was destroyed, set that program back very substantially. The Iranians saw this and they dispersed their nuclear program, putting much of it deep underground. There is no single target which, if destroyed, would substantially set back the Iranian nuclear program.
Israel's creation, far from being a foreign colonial transplant, can actually be seen as the vanguard of and impetus for decolonialization of the entire Middle East, including a significant part of the Arab world. It is not popularly recognized how the Arab world benefited from the Balfour Declaration, which served to advance their own independence from the colonial powers of England and France.
To grasp Iran’s ambitions and foreign policy it is necessary to understand the Islamic Republic’s religious ideology which aspires to establish global Islamic rule – under Shi’ite leadership. This belief lies at the heart of Iran’s foreign policy, including its ambition to acquire nuclear weapons.
In Israel, a combatant is a citizen in uniform. His state ought to have a compelling reason for jeopardizing his life. There is no army in the world that will endanger its soldiers in order to avoid hitting the warned neighbors of an enemy or terrorist. Israel should favor the lives of its own soldiers over the lives of the well-warned neighbors of a terrorist when it is operating in a territory that it does not effectively control, because in such territories it does not bear the moral responsibility for properly separating between dangerous individuals and harmless ones.
Mahmoud Abbas' new precondition that the international community recognize the 1967 lines in the West Bank as the new Palestinian border bolsters the assessment that the Palestinians have largely abandoned a negotiated settlement and instead are actively pursuing a unilateral approach to statehood. 
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad published a plan in August 2009 to unilaterally declare statehood after a two-year state-building process. However, any unilateral action that undermines the existing Oslo interim framework could jeopardize the peace process and remove the basis for the existence of the Palestinian Authority. Were the Fayyad plan to be adapted and integrated within a resumed negotiating process, on the basis of the extensive infrastructure that already exists in the Oslo Accords, then this plan could serve as a constructive starting point for any new round of negotiations.
Iran is vigorously pursuing several missile and space programs at an almost feverish pace with impressive achievements. The solid-propellant Sejil missile signifies a breakthrough. Iran will face no significant hurdle in upscaling the Sejil to put most of the EU under threat.
In seeking to constrain Israeli settlement activity, the U.S. is essentially trying to obtain additional Israeli concessions that were not formally required according to Israel's legal obligations under the Oslo Accords. The U.S. and Israel have already negotiated specific guidelines for settlement activity so that it will not diminish the territory of a future Palestinian entity. Given the fact that the amount of territory taken up by the built-up areas of all the settlements in the West Bank is 1.7% of the territory, the marginal increase in territory that might be affected by natural growth is infinitesimal. It might be that the present tension in U.S.-Israeli relations is not over settlements, but rather over the extent of an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank that the Obama administration envisions.
- Nadav Shragai 
The highly acclaimed Daily Alert Internet newsletter,
produced for the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish
Organizations by the Jerusalem Center, offers 100 hyperlinked
excerpts of Israel-related news stories each week from mainstream
English and Hebrew media sources.
When Prime Minister Ariel Sharon first proposed his Gaza Disengagement Plan he did not seek a quid pro quo from the Palestinian side. Instead, he obtained one from the United States in the form of a letter from President George W. Bush, dated April 14, 2004, in which the U.S. assured Israel that with respect to the disputed West Bank, Israel was entitled to defensible borders. How the idea of defensible borders works into the post-Iraq War Middle East is fully examined as well as the territorial, legal, and policy implications of this critical U.S. guarantee.
The Jewish majority in Jerusalem is declining due to the mass migration of the Jewish population from Jerusalem, together with the migration of an additional Arab population into Jerusalem. According to the proposed master plan for the city, the planned inventory of Jewish housing does not meet expected needs for 2020, while the planned inventory of Arab housing will suffice until at least 2030. 
As the uses of force in Somalia, Kosovo, and Iraq show, Western armies are very concerned about protecting the lives of their soldiers, and to that end are willing to risk many civilian lives. They also find acceptable the notion that civilian lives can be forfeited in order to attain important military goals. 
The principle of universal jurisdiction has been, and continues to be, an important tool in the legal practitioner's tool box and an essential means for achieving justice for international crimes. Unfortunately, the principle has also become a political device employed for far more cynical means and far less noble purposes. In the early 1960s, Israel was one of the first states to invoke the principle of universal jurisdiction in its groundbreaking trial against Adolf Eichmann, the "architect of the Holocaust."
Amb. Dore Gold and Judge Richard Goldstone discussed the UN Report on war crimes in Gaza at Brandeis University on Nov. 5 
Israel is a multi-racial society, and the Arab minority actively participates in the political process. There are Arab parliamentarians, Arab judges including on the Supreme Court, Arab cabinet ministers, Arab heads of hospital departments, Arab university professors, Arab diplomats in the Foreign Service, and very senior Arab police and army officers. Incitement to racism in Israel is a criminal offence, as is discrimination on the basis of race or religion. The comparison of Israel to South Africa under white supremist rule has been utterly rejected by those with intimate understanding of the old Apartheid system.
Israeli-Syrian negotiations in 1999-2000 discussed security arrangements to compensate Israel for the loss of the Golan Heights. The idea was to guarantee that in case of war, IDF forces could quickly return to the place where they are currently stationed. This analysis demonstrates that Israel does not possess a plausible solution to its security needs without the Golan Heights. Not only was the "solution" proposed in the year 2000 implausible at the time, but changing circumstances have rendered Israel's forfeiture of the Golan today an even more reckless act.
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., Saudi Arabia was under intense scrutiny since 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. In Feb. 2002, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia proposed to Israel "full withdrawal" from the territories in return for "full normalization." In a flash, Abdullah transformed the discourse from Saudi involvement in terrorism to Saudi peacemaking. However, by the time the Abdullah trial balloon reached the Arab summit in Beirut in March 2002, the initiative had been modified and its terms hardened. It watered down "full normalization," rewarded Syria with a presence on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, and enshrined a Palestinian "right of return" to Israel.
IDF Maj.-Gen. (res.) Doron Almog addressed a conference in London on Nov. 26, sponsored by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Global Law Forum and the Henry Jackson Society, through a video link, since according to British law he could be arrested in Britain for allegations made by Palestinian activists with regard to his past efforts to fight terrorist organizations in Gaza.
Iran has accelerated its quest for regional supremacy through its mobilization of both Shiite and Sunni terror surrogates, including Hizbullah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq and in the Gulf, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigades in the Palestinian territories. This pivotal Iranian role has unfortunately not been fully appreciated, and even downplayed in certain quarters.
The main recurrent motif in Arab cartoons concerning Israel is "the devilish Jew." This image conveys the idea that Jews behave like Nazis, kill children and love blood. The similarity with themes promulgated by the Nazis is evident. Many Arab cartoons praise suicide bombing or call for murder. The collective image of the Jews thus projected lays the groundwork for a possible genocide.
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