08/05 Links Pt1: After the Abraham Accords, Olympics Continue to Build Israeli-Arab Peace; Moral Anorexia in the Cognitive War Against Israel

From Ian:

Arab News: After the Abraham Accords, Olympics Continue to Build Israeli-Arab Peace

To this day, sports are used to bring together Israeli and Arab children in an open, neutral, and friendly environment. Sports have a way of stripping down biased tendencies, and allowing people to connect on a basic, person-to-person level.

The Abraham Accords marked the beginning of a warm peace between two nationalities that were eager to move forward. Unlike past treaties, these accords were not limited to government interaction but extended to people-to-people exchange.

Across the Middle East — and in the face of armed conflict, terror, and political discord — brave individuals have decided that rather than hide behind barriers, it is time to start building bridges and connect with people from different religions, countries, and races.

Whether it is in sports, the arts, culture, or religion, when we push past personal biases and relate on a person-to-person level, we discover that we are more similar than we might think.

The Olympic Games were created on the premise of the 9th century BC Olympic Truce, which halted regional conflict to allow athletes and their families to travel safely to and from the Olympic games.

The Olympics continue to be a time of unity and pacifism, as the Saudi-Israeli judo match beautifully proves. Sports, in the form of “ping-pong diplomacy,” have improved international relations before. Let’s hope that the Tokyo Olympics can help do it again.

Dore Gold: Israel Enters the Arab World

When Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the U.S. Congress in 2015 to make the case against the Iran nuclear deal, many Arab heads of state heard him lay out the evidence for Iran's plans for increased control of the Middle East and found themselves nodding in agreement.

With hindsight, Netanyahu's controversial appearance looks like the catalyst that accelerated rapprochement between Israel and many Arab states. It set the stage for the Abraham Accords in 2020, which formalized new normalization agreements between Israel and key Arab states. Iranian aggression - more than any peace plan or blueprint for economic cooperation - became the glue that was binding Israel and some of its former adversaries.

The Israeli prime minister explained how four Arab capitals - Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, and Sanaa - had fallen under Iranian domination. "If Iran's aggression is left unchecked," he warned, "more will surely follow." In fact, Iranian media at the time was predicting the imminent fall of Saudi Arabia.

Without having planned it, Israel's diplomatic campaign against the Iran deal opened its door to the Arab world. Communication channels soon opened between Arab states and Israel, even in the absence of formal agreements. Israel has achieved a level of integration with a large part of the Arab world that would have been unthinkable not long ago.

The threat Israel and many Arab states face is the same. Tehran likes to remind its people that the Arab states had once been part of its territory, and that those lands must one day be returned to Iran. A common threat, to adapt a phrase, is a terrible thing to waste. The time to move this improbable, promising, and essential alliance forward is now.

Israel in contact with most Arab countries, including Iraq — senior diplomat

The Foreign Ministry maintains some form of contact with almost all Arab countries, including ones officially designated as “enemy states” like Iraq, a senior Foreign Ministry official said Tuesday.

“Over the last twenty years, the Foreign Ministry was always in touch with almost all the players in the Arab World,” said the outgoing director of the Foreign Ministry’s Middle East Division, Haim Regev, during a briefing in Jerusalem.

While he clarified that this list of covert contacts does not include Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, it does extend to Baghdad.

In 2019, Iraqi ambassador in Washington Fareed Yasseen said, “There are objective reasons that may call for the establishment of relations between Iraq and Israel,” speaking in Arabic at an event entitled “How Iraq Is Dealing with the Current Regional and International Developments” at the Al-Hewar Center for Arab Culture and Dialogue in Washington.

He noted that there is an important Iraqi community in Israel and they are still proud of their Iraqi attributes. “At their weddings, there is Iraqi culture of celebration. At their weddings, there are Iraqi songs,” the veteran diplomat, who has served in DC since November 2016, went on. Yasseen also noted “outstanding” Israeli technologies in the fields of water management and agriculture.

“But the objective reasons are not enough,” he added, stressing that there are “emotional and other reasons” that make open communication between Jerusalem and Baghdad impossible.

Though he faced backlash from other Iraqi officials, Yasseen was not recalled.

Israel’s Place in the New Order: A Practitioner’s Perspective

The world Israel lives in is dramatically different from the one in which our elders grew up, amid Cold War tensions and with large Arab armies at Israel’s borders. Within the last decade we witnessed the rise of China, America’s announced intention to reduce its presence in the Middle East, the aggressiveness of a weakened but assertive Russia, and the consequences of turmoil in the Middle East. We are faced with multiple threats, including a shifting balance of power in Asia and an increasingly lawless global system—scarred by the failure of globalization during the COVID-19 crisis. Amid all this, it is imperative that Israel sustain its own strength, while working hard to restore bipartisan support in the United States and making good use of the new alignments in the Eastern Mediterranean and with like-minded Sunni Arab nations.

A World of Difference
How different is the world we live in from that which we have been raised to expect? To answer this question we need to define the relevant timeframe discussed in this essay. Clearly this is a world radically different from the one in which I came of age and learned my trade as an intelligence officer—the post-1945 world in which two overly armed nuclear powers, the US and the Soviet Union, faced each other in deadly competition across the globe (with a block of the “non-aligned” trying, not always successfully, to stay on the sidelines); and the post-1948 world in which Israel faced the threat of enemy Arab states surrounding it with a million armed men, thousands of tanks, and hundreds of fighter aircraft.

Since then, the Soviet Union has fallen apart and in our region, no Arab army (other than the Egyptian military) is large or significant enough to constitute a threat. But to better understand the world in which Israel must function, the changes—globally as well as regionally—within the last decade provide the relevant frame of analysis. This has been a decade in which the global distribution of power became much more evident, in light of several developments:

Eight years of rule—now set to be extended indefinitely—by Xi Jinping in China, under whose leadership the People’s Republic of China pursues a strategy of aggressive growth. It is already America’s peer rival, as it seeks a revision of the global order; this, in turn, has set in motion drastic changes in the global alignments and alliances. The return of the Democrats to power in both branches of government in the US and the ensuing debate (and internal fissures) on aspects of policy—including the “special relationship” with Israel—amid signs of radical polarization, leading the US away from the traditional role it is expected to play in the region and beyond.

The willingness and ability of Russia, despite demographic decline and severe economic limitations, to play an outsized role due to its readiness to use force, led by an assertive president and backed by an impressive and intimidating nuclear arsenal. The dramatic and confusing events of the so-called Arab Spring, which brought about the disintegration of several states. It is now evident that the non-Arab powers—Iran, Turkey, and Israel—are the tone-setters in a region once viewed as the heartland of Arab nationalism.

Looking toward the future, five key cycles of dynamic changes seem to have a transformative role and need to be addressed by policy makers.

Moral Anorexia in the Cognitive War Against Israel

And these moral anorexics dismiss Israel’s legal right to self-defense because, they claim, it is the stronger party in a disproportionate conflict between oppressor and oppressed, so law and rights can be ignored by the moral anorexic if they favor Israel. “The language of both-sidedness, of timeless or religious ‘conflict’ with moments of ‘escalation,’” the statement reads, “erases the military, economic, media, and diplomatic power that Israel, as an occupying force has over Palestine,” suggesting that if the two parties are asymmetrical, it is fundamentally unjust and therefore the Palestinian side does not have to conform to normal rules.

“While we mourn the loss of civilian life in Israel, “the Rutgers faculty begrudgingly acknowledge in admitting that Hamas’s terroristic violence caused Jewish deaths, “we also refuse to engage narratives that demand an ‘equal sides’ approach to a fundamentally unequal reality.” Israel, they contend, has no legitimacy in the first place because of its colonial nature and because it occupies and usurps an indigenous people’s lands, and cannot, therefore, justify the assaults on Hamas as being the lawful behavior of a sovereign state. “The demand to center Israel’s right to ‘self-defense,’” the statement continues, “erases the colonial context and delegitimizes the Palestinian right to resistance and to self-defense, both principles enshrined in international law.” So, they contend, if Israel’s very creation was unjust, the Jewish state can not now, or ever, claim legal rights when it acts to protect itself—only victims, the oppressed, can do that.

In May, following the Gaza disturbances, morally anorexic faculty and various academic departments and programs at the University of California, Davis issued their own grotesque “Faculty Statement of Solidarity with Palestinians” in which they expressed their “concerns for the suffering inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli airstrikes on the besieged Gaza Strip and condemn the state-sanctioned violence by settlers and lynch mobs against Palestinians in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Israel.” The characterization of Gaza as “besieged,” or, as it is frequently described, as the world’s largest outdoor prison, is yet another trope in the defamation of Israel. It will be remembered, specifically, that Israel completely disengaged from Gaza in 2005, removing every Jew—living and dead—from Gaza at great human and financial expense—all with the intention that a putative Palestinian state could be created there, and Gazans could take over successful and thriving greenhouses and other Israeli facilities left after the disengagement.

Instead, as moral anorexics are fond of forgetting, Hamas turned Gaza into a launching pad for rockets and mortars with more than 15,000 of them having been fired at southern Israel towns over the past 16 years, each one constituting a war crime and each one fired with the intention of murdering Jews. That is the reason for any blockade, or “siege,” and that is the reason the IDF finally had to enter Gaza in May to suppress the escalation in both the number and lethality of the weapons used against Israel.

The statement also includes inane references to the commonality of oppression of all victim groups in the contorted, self-righteous language of intersectionality, the moral anorexic’s attempt to slander Israel with suffering well beyond the borders in the Middle East.

“The Black Lives Matter movement in the US has helped spotlight the distressing similarities between, and the collaborations binding, US and Israeli policing,” the statement reads, raising the false accusation, referred to by activists as The Deadly Exchange, that the IDF trains U.S. police officers in tactics used to subdue, and harm, black suspects in this country—a very convenient, though disingenuous, way to pull Israel into the debate about Black Lives Matter and police brutality toward blacks.

It may be comforting for the moral anorexic to look at her- or himself and think they are full of virtue, tolerance, and morality, and that others can see these attributes in them and admire them for the values they profess. But, like the anorexic, it is a false view of the real person, someone who is frail and wasted away by his or her own self-deception.

South Africa may have the most antisemitic government in the free world

The millennium began full of contagious hope and fierce ambition. Not coincidentally, South Africa had a government which knew right from wrong. As the darling of the West the country had five jewels in its crown.

Nelson Mandela
A constitution second to none
A legacy of 1st world infrastructure
High-voltage vitality
A nation at peace with itself

Today, outbreaks of rebellion, looting and burning signal a rock bottom after more than a decade of freefall. The elect failed to build a working state. They could not keep a dynamo economy ticking over. They weren’t even able to put one proper meal a day within the reach of hungry millions. Soup kitchens are run by charities, churches and individuals with a heart.

They struggle to feed the minions of bloated comrades – they like endearments, old communists in suits. In their whispering limos and guarded mansions they’d hardly be human if they felt for the destitute. Debauchers and plunderers, the elect took one generation to devour a legacy meant to uplift the people who voted them into power.

Here is a lesson that goes beyond yet another African country gone to the bad; actually, a lesson and a warning. An elite that keeps bad company ruins it for the entire nation. I have made this point often enough.

A recent public statement graphically illustrates the perverted, if not depraved, modality of rulers who revile the good and embrace the bad. The communiqué let it be known that the government of SA was,

“Appalled at the African Union granting Israel observer status in a year in which the oppressed people of Palestine were hounded by destructive bombardments and continued illegal settlements of their land.”

To give Israel (which has good relations with 46 African states) a seat at AU assemblies was “unjust and unwarranted.”

The bold lies are not the point. South Africa being the lone objector on the continent is also not the point. Rather it is the state of mind seemingly oblivious to the bedlam of allies and foes that a government has clung to over time.

Why South Africa Is Wrong to Condemn Israel's Observer Status at the African Union

Israel's inclusion as an observer at the African Union is an important gesture. Israel has diplomatic relations with 46 of the 54 sovereign countries in Africa, including the ground-breaking normalization agreements with Sudan and Morocco in the past year. By opposing the move, South Africa is losing many opportunities to harness Israeli solutions for many of the problems our country faces today, including power generation, water and sanitation. Other African states are actively co-operating with Israel to bring these benefits to millions of poor citizens.

Israel has already installed solar generation in many African countries, including Malawi, Uganda and Tanzania, providing light to schools and enabling refrigeration of food and medicine. Israel's drip irrigation technologies help African farmers increase crop yields. Israeli-designed water purification systems help make water drinkable.

The South African government is irrationally obsessed with the Israel issue. The Palestinians live under the rule of despotic leaders and yet our government has no words of criticism about the well-documented abuse of their own populations to maintain political power and, in the case of Hamas, advance the nefarious agenda of destroying Israel. South Africa remains silent about virtually every human rights abuse the world over, yet cannot contain itself when it comes to the only democratic state in the Middle East.

John Bolton: Israel’s (and America’s) imminent UNESCO mistake

UNESCO’s misbegotten decision triggered U.S. statutory obligations to stop funding any UN agency that accorded the PA “state” status. This statute’s origin is an iconic marker of the longstanding, bipartisan, U.S. opposition to Palestinian efforts to create facts on the ground in the UN’s friendly corridors. In 1989, over U.S. and Israeli opposition, the PLO tried to join the World Health Organization. Then-Secretary of State Jim Baker pledged to advise President Bush that the U.S. “make no further contributions, voluntary or assessed, to any international organization which makes any change in the PLO’s status as an observer organization.”

Baker’s warning stopped the PLO cold. Congress subsequently enacted his warning into law, thereby binding subsequent administrations. Nonetheless, in 2011, this plain language was ignored by all concerned: Obama, the PA and UNESCO’s membership. Even afterward, when Washington, as required, terminated funding, UNESCO failed to get the point. Accordingly, in 2017, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced America’s second withdrawal. Given this history of critical Republican attitudes on UN funding and the PA, and significant splits within the Democratic Party on the issue, Biden would be politically myopic to pick this fight again.

So why is Israel raising it now? Axios reports that Lapid believes “Israel’s withdrawal from international forums over claims they were biased only made Israeli foreign policy less effective.” We can only hope this reporting is deeply flawed; if true it would reflect a stunningly naive worldview, unprecedented among Israel’s modern-era foreign ministers.

What next? Will Israel join Washington’s plan to rejoin the deeply flawed UN Human Rights Council? Under Lapid’s reported rationale, and presumably Biden’s as well, this is entirely possible. Created in 2006, the Council was intended to avoid repeating the anti-American, anti-Israel practices of its predecessor, the Human Rights Commission. The reform effort failed so badly, however, that Washington and Jerusalem voted against establishing the new Council, and, once established, the U.S. declined to join. Obama reversed this policy, successfully seeking American election to the new forum. Entirely predictably, the Council’s behavior was as bad as its egregious predecessor. Trump’s senior advisers, rightly concluding there was no prospect for the Council to improve, unanimously recommended withdrawal, which occurred in 2018.

UNESCO membership might well be a non-event but for the evidence it provides of people’s views on larger issues. In “A Man for All Seasons,” Thomas More says scornfully, “it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world….But for Wales?” We can say here, that it never profits either America or Israel to compromise their vital national interests.…But for UNESCO?

UNRWA and a Jewish Palestinian Refugee Family

UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, is a major obstacle to peace between Israel and its neighbors. UNRWA was formed in 1949 to help Arabs who fled and left Israel, assimilate into surrounding Arab states. Instead, it has prolonged the Israeli-Palestinian dispute by refusing to help refugees integrate into their host countries, and has perpetuated the false hope of a Palestinian “right of return.”

As others have pointed out, “less than 5% of five million people deemed ‘Palestinian refugees’ [by UNRWA] meet the criteria for this status.” And UNRWA has admitted to cooperating with Hamas.

Nonetheless, President Biden has resumed funding to UNRWA, in spite of its ongoing cooperation with terrorist groups.

My four grandparents were driven out of Palestine in the 1920s by Arab terrorism.

During that time, Arab pogroms were precipitated by Haj Amin al-Husseini, who claimed that Jews were going to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque. My mom’s parents, and my dad’s parents, fell victim to Arab violence and murderous mobs in their home city of Jerusalem. As penniless Jewish Palestinian refugees, they were forced to flee, and sought safety and security in New York.

My mom’s mother, Sarah, remembered how her father, Chaim Hirsch Eisenbach, saved the life of a rabbi at the Western Wall by shielding his bloodied body from Arab attackers. Violent mobs roamed the alleyways of Jerusalem, responding to exhortations of local imams to drive the Jews from the land.

Sarah married Shimon, who traced his ancestry back to the Shlah Ha’Kadosh, the scion of the Horowitz and Gotlieb families. These families lived in Jerusalem long before 95% of the Arab Bedouins and fellahin immigrated from Syria, Egypt, and Arabia.

UNRWA’s entire existence requires perpetuating the conflict. Here’s 5 reasons why#UNRWA pic.twitter.com/qDQdXd99Gq https://t.co/3oqCxWT81o

— Emily Schrader - ????? ?????? (@emilykschrader) August 4, 2021

Mr. Prime Minister, you cannot say you didn't know.

In 2017, we sent you this report urging Canada to stop funding UNRWA teachers' systemic antisemitism. You never replied.

We wrote to your foreign ministry; no reply.

Apologies are nice, but actions speak louder than words. pic.twitter.com/zW89CICSKX

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) August 4, 2021

Israeli Aircraft Strike Rocket Launch Sites in Lebanon, Military Says

Israeli jets struck what its military said were rocket launch sites in Lebanon early on Thursday in response to two rockets fired towards Israel from Lebanese territory, in an escalation of cross-border hostilities amid heightened tensions with Iran.

The rockets launched from Lebanon on Wednesday struck open areas in northern Israel, causing brush fires along the hilly frontier. There was no claim of responsibility for the attack, which came from an area of south Lebanon under the sway of Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas.

Israel responded with several rounds of artillery fire on Wednesday before launching air strikes early on Thursday, the military said.

“(Military) fighter jets struck the launch sites and infrastructure used for terror in Lebanon from which the rockets were launched,” the military said in a statement.

The military also struck an area that had seen rocket launches in the past, it added.

Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV said that Israeli warplanes had carried out two raids on the outskirts of the Lebanese town of Mahmudiya, about 7.5 miles from the Israeli border. There were no reports of casualties.

Lebanese President Michel Aoun said Israel’s air strikes were the first targeting Lebanese villages since 2006 and showed an escalation in its “aggressive intent” towards his country.

Aoun also said in a tweet the strikes were a direct threat to the security and stability of southern Lebanon and violated UN Security Council resolutions.

IDF publishes footage of airstrikes inside #Lebanon this evening. #Israel pic.twitter.com/8G8CWmyPUE

— Joe Truzman (@JoeTruzman) August 5, 2021

Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel. Israel fired back.

But the @France24_en headline focuses on Israel. Why? pic.twitter.com/7YpYnTOxip

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) August 5, 2021

Will Israel’s politicized Supreme Court stick to law on Palestinian Sheikh Jarrah squatters?

Avi Bell, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law and at Bar-Ilan University’s Faculty of Law, slammed critics who “claim that the Israeli government should (or even that international law requires it to) deny the owners their property rights, but these claims are not based on any credible legal argument. They focus on the fact that the owners in the disputed cases are Jew, while the squatters and overstaying tenants are Arabs. The critics demand that Israel discriminate against and disregard the property owners’ lawful property rights due to their Jewish ethnicity.”

“There is no doubt of Jewish property ownership,” Kontorovich again emphasized. “What the judges are trying to do is to convince or pressure the Jewish property owners to accept less than normal property rights, not being able to decide who lives in the building.”

“If they do this, it means Hamas won the war, big time,” he added.

According to Kontorovich, the Supreme Court is essentially allowing Hamas to fire rockets indiscriminately and exert pressure on Israel’s leadership, and ultimately, change property laws in Jerusalem. “But the court’s job is very simple,” he explained, and that is “to determine whether the Jewish plaintiffs own this property, and if so, there are rules about what you can do with your property.”

Moving forward, Kontorovich said he believes that the court will “put forward some kind of proposal to say it is upholding the law, but get the Jews to accept less than the law will give them.”

He predicted that the court’s proposal would be “rejected” by the Jewish property owners.

‘A capitulation of the legal system in Israel’

Chaim Silberstein, head of Keep Jerusalem, a nonprofit organization that works to highlight the importance of a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty, told JNS, “The compromise that was suggested at the Supreme Court hearing is not really a compromise. It is a capitulation of the respected legal system in Israel, at the highest level to political and ideological pressure from the extreme left.”

Like Kontorovich, Silberstein also expressed his disappointment in the judges’ left-leaning bias, and who, in his opinion, “trample” on the rule of law, which is “judiciously applied against Jews when their eviction is required by the liberal elites.”

Silberstein slammed the Palestinian squatters, who he said “defiantly refuse to pay rent despite generous offers of compromise from the legal Jewish owners.”

In his view, “the just and correct result of this court case should be the immediate eviction of illegal squatters from properties they have withheld from their rightful owners for decades.”

“The court now has the chance to prove that it rules purely according to the law and that justice is blind,” stated Kontorovich. “The question is: Will it rise to the challenge?”

What @KenRoth of course conveniently omits, because he is so engulfed in Jew hatred, is that the Jews here are the lawful owners of the property. But not let facts get in way of @hrw. https://t.co/Snn4vZi2W5

— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) August 4, 2021

Inviting Israeli journalists to Ramallah is a 'big sin' - PJS

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate on Thursday condemned a visit by Israeli journalists to Ramallah as a “big sin.”

The Israelis visited Ramallah on Wednesday at the invitation of the PLO’s Committee for Interaction with Israeli Society. The group regularly organizes visits by Israelis to the city for meetings with senior Palestinian officials.

The committee is headed by Mohammed al-Madani, a senior official with the ruling Fatah faction of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

During the visit, the journalists met with a number of senior Palestinian officials, including PLO Executive Committee member Ahmed Majdalani. The PJS, which is dominated by Fatah loyalists, represents hundreds of Palestinian journalists in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and east Jerusalem. It has in the past called for boycotting Israeli journalists and media outlets and told its members not to meet with Israelis. The PJS and other anti-Israeli groups argue that the purpose of such meetings is to “promote normalization between the Palestinians and Israel.”

Senior Fatah official Monir al-Jaghoub said, however, that the meeting came to “present the Israeli press with a picture of the Palestinian reality resulting from the occupation’s [Israel’s] policies of settlement [construction] and ethnic cleansing, specifically in Jerusalem.” The purpose of the meeting, he added, was to get the Israeli public to learn about the “daily suffering of the Palestinians as a result of Israeli the right-wing policies, which will not lead to stability and peace.”

PMW: What did you learn in camp today? To “praise” terrorists, admire “Martyrs,” and erase Israel

A youth camp organized by Fatah’s Shabiba high school committees featured pictures of arch-terrorist Abu Jihad, who planned attacks in which at least 125 were murdered; mass murderer Dalal Mughrabi, who led the murder of 37 including 12 children in 1978; Abu Iyad, who headed the terror organization Black September and planned the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 among other attacks; and Abu Yusuf Al-Najjar, who was the Commander of Operations of Black September.

The screenshot from the official PA TV broadcast shows Fatah Nablus Secretary Muhammad Hamdan speaking in front of pictures displayed at the camp. In the top row of the pictures the first to the left is Abu Jihad, next is Dalal Mughrabi. Below her to the left is Abu Yusuf Al-Najjar. To the right of Hamdan in the second row is Abu Iyad.

Official PA TV newsreader: “The Fatah Movement Shabiba High School Committees concluded the ‘Guardians of the Mountain’ camp in Nu’eima, which is in Jericho. The camp was established to find a place for extracurricular activities and to teach the participants the principles of affiliation, discipline, coexistence among themselves, and to familiarize them with the missions of the [PA] Security [Force] members.”

[Official PA TV News, July 31, 2021]

In another Fatah camp - for the "Lion Cubs and Flowers” – young children were taught to glorify and give “praise” to “the prisoners,” “the wounded,” and “the Martyrs” – most of whom are/were terrorists who attacked Israel. The video shows the Damascus Gate Summer Camp held in Azzoun, east of Qalqilya. Children at the camp are chanting in response to the calls of a female camp guide:

Ismail Haniyeh expressed hope that Hamas detainees in Saudi Arabia will be released soon after news that their sentences will be announced next week. A Hamas leader, his son, and others have been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for financing terrorism since 2019.

— Joe Truzman (@JoeTruzman) August 5, 2021

Seth Frantzman: One year since the Beirut disaster and its impacts - analysis

The ammonium nitrate and bankruptcy of Lebanon were only the end result of this process. Lebanon still lacks a government. Saad Hariri abandoned efforts to form a government three weeks ago. France and other countries that have sought to prop up Lebanon and keep things moving forward have been frustrated.

Natural disasters and mistakes happen. The explosion could be compared to the collapse of the condo tower in Miami in the US. But the major difference is that in Lebanon, there is a sense of more nefarious channels at work.

Consider the murders of prominent critics of Hezbollah and other intellectuals and politicians in 2005 and after. The author Samir Kassir, for instance, was killed. Lokman Slim was killed in February. That’s how Hezbollah does things. Maj. Wissam Eid of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces Information Branch, who helped identify the Hezbollah phone network used in the murder of Hariri, was killed by a bomb in 2008.

It was the attempts to curtail Hezbollah’s phone network that led to clashes in Beirut in 2008, in which Hezbollah showed its true power and control of the country. Hezbollah had installed a private noncommercial fiber-optic land-line telephone network to provide secure communications for its members. Imagine a political party in any other country that also has an armed militia and has its own phone company only for its members. That is what Hezbollah has.

The international community has largely ignored the role of Hezbollah, sometimes not even mentioning it in reports on Lebanon, because to acknowledge its true power, the degree to which it is more powerful than the state, and Lebanon a subcontractor of Hezbollah, an appendage, is to admit that largesse provided to Lebanon largely exists to prop up Iran’s proxy and help it play a role in Syria and Iraq.

Lebanon is like an offshore subsidiary of Iran, and the pretense that Lebanon exists as a country is helpful to Iran because it can use it to get around sanctions, to move weapons, to threaten Israel, and to launder money and even drugs.

It is no surprise to see the Syrian regime, for instance, often linked to trade in drugs such as Captagon pills. Hezbollah also runs drugs in South America and in Africa, and conducts other illicit trade. Hezbollah’s drug trade is so large and important to Iran that during the lead-up to the 2015 Iran deal, reports later concluded that due to the Obama administration’s “determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking.”

It is not a stretch to draw a direct line from the drug trafficking to the ammonium nitrate and the 218 killed last year in Beirut.

Iranian Petroleum Products Will Arrive in Lebanon Soon

Hizbullah representatives are currently in Tehran to complete discussions with the Iranian government on transferring gasoline and diesel from Iran to Lebanon. Hizbullah made it clear that these products “will soon arrive and be brought into Lebanon either by sea or by land.”

Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah recently revealed that in light of the Lebanese government’s inability to resolve the country’s fuel crisis, Hizbullah “will go to Iran, negotiate with the Iranian government… and buy vessels full of petrol and fuel oil and bring them to Beirut port.” He continued with a challenge to Lebanon’s government: “Let the Lebanese state (dare to) prevent the delivery of petrol and fuel oil to the Lebanese people! … We can no longer tolerate these scenes of humiliation.”1

On June 25, 2021, Nasrallah noted that Hizbullah had completed all logistical arrangements for this purpose and was awaiting action from the Lebanese government.2 It was emphasized that the monetary payment to Iran for these products would be paid in Lebanese currency and not in dollars in order to facilitate the purchase.

The collapse of the Lebanese economy and paralysis of vital sectors of the country, including electricity and fuel utilities, will lead to the breaking of sanctions imposed on the import of petroleum products from Iran. Thus, Nasrallah will register another victory in the battle over the character and future of the Lebanese state.

Ibrahim El-Sakr Official in the Lebanese Forces: May God Grace My Son and I with Martyrdom on the Altar of the Lebanese Forces; I Will Not Wait for Things to Come My Way While Hizbullah Turns the Christians in Lebanon into Dhimmis #Lebanon @LFofficialpage pic.twitter.com/buKjJVpJ9b

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) August 5, 2021

Lebanon today: protestors in #Beirut chanting:

Beirut: Free Free, #Iran: Out, Out!

pic.twitter.com/8e0sdZ5vg2

— Emily Schrader - ????? ?????? (@emilykschrader) August 4, 2021

Lots of anti Iran/ anti Hezbollah can be heard here as the protesters are walking towards Beirut’s Martyrs square on the first anniversary of Beirut Blast pic.twitter.com/hC6efGs1M3

— Nafiseh Kohnavard (@nafisehkBBC) August 4, 2021

Macron Criticizes ‘Failing’ Lebanese Leaders as $370 Million Raised

French President Emmanuel Macron criticized a “failing” Lebanese political class he blamed for their country’s economic turmoil at a donors’ conference that raised $370 million on the anniversary of the Beirut port blast.

One year since an explosion ripped through the capital’s port and plunged Lebanon further into economic crisis, its politicians have yet to form a government capable of rebuilding the country, despite French and international pressure.

“Lebanese leaders seem to bet on a stalling strategy, which I regret and I think is a historic and moral failure,” Macron said in opening remarks as host of the international donors’ conference.

“There will be no blank check for the Lebanese political system. Because it is they who, since the start of the crisis but also before that, are failing.”

France has led international efforts to lift its former colony out of crisis. Macron has visited Beirut twice since the port blast, raised emergency aid and imposed travel bans on some senior Lebanese officials in his quest for a reform package.

He has also persuaded the European Union to agree on a sanctions framework that is ready to be used.

But his initiatives have been in vain so far.

Houston {WE HAVE A PROBLEM}
President of Lebanon fell asleep during a virtual conference to save #Lebanon. https://t.co/eKtOyC43RS

— Rania Kisar (@RaniaKisar) August 4, 2021

MEMRI: Amid Escalation In Rocket Attacks On U.S. Forces In Syria, Pro-Regime Syrian Press Threatens: This Is A New Phase In Resistance; Every Rocket Will Be Met With A Rocket 'Until Occupiers Leave'

Recently there has been an increase in operations against the U.S. military presence in Syria. Within only two weeks there were six incidents of rocket and mortar fire against two bases of the U.S.-led Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS in northeastern Syria: the Al-Omar oil field east of Deir Al-Zor, which is the largest coalition base in Syria and houses U.S., French and British troops, and the base at the Conoco gas field in the same region.[1] While the attacks did not result in casualties, they no doubt reflect a shift in the struggle against the U.S. forces in Syria, which has until now mainly involved local villagers throwing stones at military vehicles and blocking military patrols, as well as clashes with regime forces at checkpoints manned by the latter.[2]

The trigger for the recent escalation was the June 27, 2021 U.S. airstrikes on positions of the Iran-backed militias on the Syria-Iraq border. The U.S. Defense Department announced that the positions attacked belonged to the Iraqi militias Kataib Hizbullah and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, which have been involved in action against U.S. forces in Iraq.[3] Following the airstrikes, the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) – the umbrella organization of the Iran-backed Iraqi militias, which includes the two militias which were attacked – announced that four operatives had been killed, and in response several of the militias threatened revenge.[4]

So far, no organization has claimed responsibility for the recent rocket and mortar attacks on the U.S. bases in Syria, but the threats of the Iran-backed Shi'ite militias indicate that they are probably behind them. Syrian state papers, and the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, which supports the Syrian regime, presented the attacks as a new phase in the Syrian popular resistance aimed at expelling the Americans from Syria, and warned that they would continue and escalate. They threatened that, from now on, every American attack will be met with a counterattack. It should be noted that threats of violent action against the U.S. forces have been made in the Syrian media for years.[5]

Israel is ready to strike Iran to stop its aggression, nuclear program - Gantz

Israel is ready to strike Iran, Defense Minister Benny Gantz said on Thursday as tensions between the two countries continue to mount following a deadly drone attack against a civilian commercial ship in the Persian Gulf.

Speaking to Ynet, Gantz was asked by Attila Somfalvi if the Jewish state was ready to strike Tehran, to which he answered yes, saying that the Islamic Republic was a threat to the country, Middle East and the entire world.

Israel considers Iran’s nuclear program as the number one concern and although Tehran has always denied seeking nuclear weapons, it is believed that they are continuing to develop the capabilities to produce a nuclear weapons arsenal as well as produce ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

“Iran is an international and regional problem. The world witnessed one example on Friday,” Gantz said referring to the deadly attack against the Mercer Street tanker, which was carried out by a suicide drone.

“This could happen to anyone,” he said.

With new Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi taking over from moderate Hassan Rouhani on Thursday, Gantz said that he could lead Iran to even more extreme regional and security policies.

“I’m telling the world, pay attention. It’s coming.”

Mordechai Kedar: Dismantle Iran now

Iran’s disintegration would probably not be peaceful. It would likely more resemble the Yugoslav than the Soviet model, if only because of the Persian majority’s unwillingness to lose the oil, gas, water and other natural resources found in the territories of non-Persian minorities. Persian national dignity also plays an important role in the controlling of non-Persian peoples.

And yet, the collapse of the ayatollahs’ regime and the disintegration of Iran would be a blessing—and not only for the tens of millions of Iranians who would be free from the yoke of one of the most oppressive regimes in the world. Such a development would also bring an end to Iranian subversion throughout the Middle East, and the attendant civil wars and internal instability it has caused. It could eliminate the international wave of terrorism Iran has spread over the past four decades, as well as the counterfeiting, money-laundering and drug-smuggling in which it engages. The collapse of the regime could go far toward ensuring the safety and security of the Middle East and the wider international community.

The international community must therefore vigorously support the struggle of the ethnic/national minorities in Iran against the Islamist regime (as well as the struggle of the Persian majority against this regime) and their efforts to dismantle the Iranian state.

U.S. President Joe Biden should immediately abandon any intention of returning to the nuclear deal or to lifting sanctions on the regime, and instead invest significant resources—overt and covert, civilian and military—to helping the Iranian minorities free themselves from Persian suffocation.

Hassan Rouhani's Iranian Presidency Has Been an Abject Failure

At the same time, Mr Rouhani portrayed himself a liberal who was committed to relaxing some of the regime's more burdensome requirements, such as the demand for all women to wear a veil. Yet, as Mr Rouhani prepares to leave office, it is now abundantly clear that he has failed at every level.

His much-vaunted reform agenda has achieved nothing. A movement opposed to obliging women to wear a veil in public spaces was rapidly crushed in 2018, while attempts to release leading reformers, such as former Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Moussavi, from house arrest, came to nothing.

Moreover, far from overseeing an easing of Iran's repressive regime, Mr Rouhani has presided over a series of brutal crackdowns against anti-government protesters, which have resulted in hundreds of deaths and thousands of activists being jailed.

By far the greatest failure of the Rouhani era, though, has been his inability to revive the Iranian economy, an ambition that has been undermined by his government's attitude towards the controversial nuclear deal Tehran agreed with the Obama administration in 2015.

Under the terms of the deal, which saw punitive sanctions lifted in return for Iran freezing its nuclear enrichment activities, Iran was supposed to adopt a more constructive approach to its dealings with the outside world, and use the estimated $150 billion it received to rebuild the economy.

Instead, the Rouhani regime used the funds to finance its efforts to expand its malign influence in the Middle East, prompting former US President Donald Trump to withdraw from the deal and reimpose punitive sanctions against Tehran. Consequently Iran now faces its worst economic crisis in decades -- the value of the rial has halved in the past year and inflation is running at around 20 percent -- with the result that the regime is now under severe pressure.

So, far from being the president that transformed Iran's fortunes for the better, Mr Rouhani will forever be remembered as one of the most disastrous leaders in the country's history.

A reporter asked @StateDeptSpox what the Biden administration thinks about the European Union's decision to send a high-level delegation to the inauguration of Iran's new mass-murderer president.

Spox referred the reporter to the European Union for comment. Repeatedly.

??? pic.twitter.com/EDXOTDIH3M

— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) August 4, 2021

Dear @Reuters: ”Hardline” would describe someone who adheres strictly to a firm policy. This radical cleric sent 5,000 innocent political prisoners to their deaths. https://t.co/WPiYiRiqTI

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) August 5, 2021

Under Rouhani, Iran has sponsored militias destabilising Iraq, Lebanon & Yemen, supported Syrian dictator Assad, provided terror groups in Gaza funds to fire rockets at Israeli civilians, and is responsible for a spate of naval attacks.

You call this "pragmatist," @TheEconomist? pic.twitter.com/pBlOGBTtp6

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) August 5, 2021

Seth J. Frantzman: Oman Attack: Is a Showdown with Iran Brewing?

Israel is concerned not only about the nuclear program, but the wider Iranian threat that comes from Iranian entrenchment in Syria, Iranian arms flowing to Hezbollah and also Iranian drones based in Yemen and Iraq, as well as Iranian ballistic missiles. “The Iranian people are not our enemy. The Iranian regime is threatening us and sparking a regional arms race,” said Gantz.

Meanwhile, Lapid emphasized that this is not a conflict between armies in Syria. “This is not a covert operation against a military facility,” he said of Iran’s recent actions. “This is an attack on the world's trade routes, this is an attack on freedom of movement. This is an international crime.”

It is not clear what Israel will do next. The United States and the UK have both slammed Iran for the attack. Israel is expected to respond but it has a range of options. In addition, there are concerns about how Iran might react. Iranian media has said the attack on the ship was Iran’s retaliation after an Israeli airstrike in Syria. This means both sides think they are responding. The difference is that Iran’s drone attack killed two people on the ship, a UK and Romanian citizen. These were civilian sailors, not combatants.

Israel has been cementing its ties internationally recently. Its F-35 jets have done numerous joint drills with the United States and others and Israel recently hosted a joint UAV drill with a half-dozen countries. Israeli drones are state-of-the-art and they make up some eighty percent of flight time of air force assets.

Seth J. Frantzman: Iran’s attacks are finally shining a spotlight on its deadly drones

What is the mysterious Shahed 136, that may or may not exist? It was first reported by Newsweek in January as having been seen in Yemen from a grainy satellite image that shows a triangular-shaped object. But subsequent reports were very precise in claiming it had a 2,200 km range. That’s a convenient range because it means it can strike Eilat from Houthi-controlled Yemen. Apparently it can also strike at ships.

It remains to be seen if evidence of the type of drone used in the attack will be revealed. In May, Israel also accused Iran of flying a drone into Israeli airspace via Syria, similar to a February 2018 incident in which an Iranian drone from the T-4 base in Syria entered Israeli airspace. That drone is sometimes called the Shahed 141, or Saegheh in news reports.

Iran may hide behind a plethora of names for its various drones, which are then renamed when Iranian allies build them. In Iraq, for instance, the pro-Iran militias called. Hashd al-Shaabi have been parading their drones and using them to strike at the US. Middle East Eye says “on 26 June, the Popular Mobilisation Authority (PMA) - a governmental umbrella group for paramilitaries - held a military parade at Camp Ashraf in Diyala Province, 70km northeast of Baghdad. The display included most of the weapons and forces at the PMA’s disposal, including a number of drones that the PMA later tried to deny were part of the parade. However, MEE obtained exclusive images of the crafts in the parade. All of them are Iranian-made and some were assembled inside Iraq, according to specialist Iraqi officers and PMA commanders.”

This report names several types of Iranian drones. “Included in the parade were Mohajer 6, Sahab 1, Sahab, Baaz and Safir drones, easily identifiable as the PMA even wrote their names on the vehicles carrying them around Camp Ashraf.”

The Hashd has had drones since around 2015, according to reports. The Houthis, who acquired Iranian drones around the same time use the Hudhed-1, Raqib, Rased, and Saamad 1 and the Qasef-1, Qasef 2k, Sammad 2 and Sammad 3. Given this menagerie of systems, determining which struck the ship may take time. What is important is that countries are waking up to the Iran drone threat.

Report: Attempted Iranian Hijacking in Gulf of Oman Thwarted by Vessel’s Crew

The attempted Iranian hijacking of a tanker vessel in the Gulf of Oman that began on Tuesday was thwarted by the ship’s crew, who disabled its engines, preventing it from being diverted to Iran, according to a report in The Times.

The hijackers fled the ship on Wednesday as it was approached by US and Omani warships.

The first sign that something was amiss came on Tuesday evening, when the Automatic Identification System trackers of six tankers off the coast of Fujairah simultaneously announced that they were “not under command,” according to The Associated Press. Shortly afterward, Oman’s military received a report that the Panama-flagged Asphalt Princess had been hijacked in that area, and dispatched maritime patrol aircraft and naval vessels.

In a maritime radio recording shared with the AP by commodities-pricing firm Argus Media, a crew member can be heard telling the Emirati coast guard that armed Iranians had boarded the tanker. “Iranian people are on board with ammunition,” the crew member said. “We are … now, drifting. We cannot tell you our exact ETA to Sohar,” the vessel’s listed port of destination in Oman. The call cut off shortly afterwards.

Satellite tracking data showed the ship heading toward Iranian waters early on Wednesday, before stopping and changing course for Oman, according to AP.

The incident comes amid heightened tensions in the Arabian Sea following a fatal drone attack on an Israel-linked oil tanker off the coast of Oman on July 29.

Michael Oren on Iran's 'Maritime Terrorism'; Israel Calls for Action at UN

Reminder: The Islamic Republic of Iran is an evil regime. For bargaining chips, it holds hostages in prison like British citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, separating an innocent mother from her child for years.@khamenei_ir & @JZarif, you are despicable.https://t.co/sSeQslbEhP

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) August 5, 2021

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