The creation of a universally-recognized Palestinian state would be just a first step towards wiping out Israel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Friday.
Iran denied Israeli assertions that it sent weapons to Gaza aboard a ship intercepted by Israel\’s Navy. \”The Jerusalem occupation regime is a regime of lies, production of lies and dissemination of lies. We reject all of these mendacious reports,\” the Iranian army\’s chief of staff, Gen. Atallah Salhi, told the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency on Wednesday.
A careful reading of the WikiLeaks trove of State Department cables — which is laying bare some 250,000 secret dispatches detailing private conversations, assessments and dealmaking of U.S. diplomats — reveals a notable if perhaps surprising pattern: how often they get things wrong.
\” . . . The media are a little more balanced than on previous occasions, but I can\’t say I\’m not upset when I see on the front page of the Los Angeles Times a photo of two dead Arab girls . . . \”
Delivering a grim threat assessment for 2009, the Israeli National Security Council (NSC) said that Israel in 2009 may well find itself alone, facing Iran on the threshold of nuclear power, fighting rocket attacks on two fronts and without a Palestinian partner for a two-state solution.
Let us be frank: The current stalemate is ideological, not physical, and it hangs on two major contentions: \”historical right\” and \”justice,\” which must be wrestled with in words before we can expect any substantive movement on the ground.
To be an Israeli at the time of the state\’s 60th anniversary means to be resigned to living with insoluble emotional and political paradoxes. It means living with a growing fear of mortality, even as we celebrate our ability to outlive every threat. We are almost certainly the only nation that marks its Independence Day with an annual poll that invariably includes the question: \”Do you believe the country will still exist 50 years from now?\”
Approximately one in five Israelis living east of the West Bank security fence would leave if offered government support, a poll found. According to an internal government study, whose results were leaked Tuesday to Yediot Achronot, approximately 15,000 of the 70,000 settlers whose communities are not taken in by the fence would accept voluntary relocation packages.
As the Annapolis peace parley rapidly approaches, some of the Arab and Muslim players expected to play a key role in creating conditions for a favorable outcome are proving to be more of an obstacle than an asset.
\”Am I left?\” I asked the diplomat. I don\’t even know what left or right means anymore. At a moment in history when Israel\’s prime minister, from the center-right, ran on a ticket of unilateral withdrawal from the territories, something even the left opposed a few years back, and when the left in Israel advocates for a separation fence that its leaders once fought against, and when right and left are united in their disgust with the current government, these labels mean bubkes in Israel.
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