PM to FM: 'It was a mistake'
By JPOST.COM STAFF, GIL HOFFMAN AND HERB KEINON
07/02/2010 14:16
Netanyahu and Lieberman meet to discuss Turkish FM meeting.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu met with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Friday, after Netanyahu failed to tell Lieberman about an effort to repair relations with Turkey.
"A decision like this must be made logically, in cooperation with all of the professional elements," Lieberman told Netanyahu. The FM reportedly also said that it would damage Israel's international standing to apologize to Turkey or to pay those who were injured on the Mavi Marmara.
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Netanyahu and Lieberman reportedly said that the incident was a mistake, and that they would work in cooperation from now on.
Lieberman only learned about a meeting in Brussels between Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu from Channel 2 news on Wednesday night. Netanyahu tried to reach Lieberman following the report, but the foreign minister has refused to take his calls.
Netanyahu's spokesman Nir Hefetz told Lieberman in a previously scheduled meeting on Thursday that leaving him out of the loop had been a simple mistake and not a deliberate attempt to keep him in the dark, but Lieberman did not accept the explanation.
Sources close to the FM vowed revenge saying that Liberman had realized that whoever pressured Netanyahu hardest and last tended to convince him, and that from now on, he intended to be the one applying that final, persuasive pressure.
Israel Beiteinu will remain in the coalition, but Lieberman's associates said it would no longer serve Netanyahu blindly.
"There are no thoughts about resigning, because we don't want to give that joy to anyone," Lieberman told Israel Radio. "It is a matter of what political culture we want to have in Israel, do we have good governance, and whether basic loyalty is respected. We must clarify all of this to the fullest, because it cannot go on this way."
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EU doesn't understand what Israel is up against'
By HERB KEINON
07/02/2010 03:17
Bulgaria's FM laments ‘lost' European sensitivity to Israel's security challenges.
European foreign ministers do not always have a fair understanding of what Israel is up against, and Turkey reacted "a little bit too strongly" to the Gaza flotilla episode, Bulgaria's Foreign Minister Nikolay Mladenov said this week in an interview with The Jerusalem Post.
Mladenov, whose country of some eight million people is among the most supportive of Israel inside the EU, made his comments on Wednesday, shortly before completing a three-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. During this visit, Mladenov made extremely friendly public comments about Israel at a time when such comments from foreign ministers around the world are anything but the norm.
For instance, on Tuesday, in a meeting with President Shimon Peres, he said, "We are lucky that the majority of Bulgarian Jews were saved and were able to go on to build Israel. This creates a strong, emotional connection and responsibility on our part to ensure Israel's safety and its future."
Asked why he made these comments at a time when Israel was facing increasing international isolation, Mladenov - who became Bulgaria's foreign minister in January, following a six-month stint as its defense minister - said, "Because I think that is what friends are for, to be with our friends when they are in trouble."
By "trouble," Mladenov said he meant that there was currently a "dramatic shift in the entire strategic situation in the region."
"We've seen a statement over the last couple years by Iran that it wants to erase Israel from the face of the earth," he said. He added that the troubles Israel faced also included a "faltering Middle East peace process" and a situation in the South where the disengagement from the Gaza Strip led to a constant barrage of Kassam rockets on the western Negev.
Israel, he said, needed to "work better" on explaining its position in Europe. "And this is one of the reasons why I came here. I wanted to see on the ground - after the flotilla and everything - the views of the Israeli government, how it sees a way out of this."
Asked if there was a fair understanding among his colleagues in the EU of what Israel was up against, Mladenov replied, "Not always, no. I'm being quite honest - no. I think sometimes we tend to oversimplify things in Europe, perhaps because war and confrontation and terrorism are not something that is a daily threat to many in Europe."
Mladenov said that "many countries have lost the sensitivity to the difficult security environment in which Israel lives. We often say that ‘we recognize Israel's legitimate security concerns,' but I sometimes wonder if we all know what stands behind these words."
Mladenov, who in 2006 spent time in Iraq as an adviser to the Iraqi parliament, said he had experience living in this part of the world and had a "fair idea of what it means to see someone blow themselves up in the middle of the street and stuff like that.
"I think we should be a little more sensitive to the fact that this is a very tough environment, and that Israel needs to be alert at every single moment in order to be able to protect its security and the security of its people," he said.
Mladenov said it was important for people to understand Israel's security concerns, and what it was like living in a place like Sderot under the Kassam threat, or "what does it mean to live in constant fear that somebody might decide to blow themselves up in the street, or what does it mean to live in the fundamental fear that there is a another country in the world that says it wants to destroy you as a country."
Having said that, the Bulgarian diplomat added that providing security for one's own people "doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't look a little bit beyond the horizon and see what is the framework in which you can resolve this conflict in the longer run," and that it was important to consider the difficulties facing the Palestinians as well.
Asked to explain what some have described as an east-west split on Israel inside the EU, with Israel's greatest supporters - the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria - coming from Central or Eastern Europe, and its greatest critics - Ireland, Sweden, Portugal, Belgium, Greece - coming from Western Europe, Mladenov said one reason was simply that for Central and Eastern European countries that emerged from communism, the relationship with Israel was new.
"This relationship was banned under communism, so there is an interest in developing it," he said. He also said there was "a bit of a guilt feeling in Central and Eastern Europe, because in many countries, what happened in the Holocaust was not addressed in the way it was addressed in Germany, for example."
As Turkey's neighbor to the north, Bulgaria is carefully watching developments inside that country, and Mladenov - asked to explain how Sofia viewed Ankara's shift under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan - said he did not think Turkey's current search for a "new and more active role in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Balkans" had to do with a feeling of being rejected by the EU.
"I think the relationship between Europe and Turkey is very strong, and will continue to be strong, because Turkey is one of the most fundamental partners we have," he said. "I would like to see more alignment and coordination between what Europe does and what Turkey does in the region, so that we don't end up going in different directions, but actually are working in the same direction on a number of issues and conflicts that exist."
Mladenov said that regarding the "whole situation with the flotilla," Turkey "reacted a little bit too strongly."
Asked to explain, he replied, "Too strong in the sense that I'm not sure to what extent it serves the interest of the Palestinians."
The Turks, he was reminded, have said that this helped the Palestinians because now more goods are being allowed into Gaza.
Mladenov replied that the process of changing the "regime on getting goods in and out of Gaza" was something that had been under discussion for "quite some time. I don't think people should have died for that."
The Bulgarian foreign minister tiptoed around the question of whether he felt Israel's naval blockade on Gaza was legitimate, saying this was a decision Israel had to make based on its own security. He did say, however, that it was important to allow the access of goods in and out of Gaza to develop the economy there, which in turn would create "a bigger constituency in support of peace, because people will see the benefits of that peace emerging."
Mladenov also avoided a direct answer when asked whether Israel had approached Sofia about conducting IAF exercises over Bulgaria to make up for Turkey's refusal now to allow Israeli military planes in its airspace. He said Bulgaria and Israel have "very good security and defense cooperation, and that an Israeli-Bulgarian defense cooperation memorandum was signed earlier this year."
As to whether that memorandum included an agreement for IAF training in Bulgaria, he said, "I would imagine that it would include a lot of things."
Asked whether the investigative committee Israel set up to look into the flotilla episode was sufficient, Mladenov, echoing the consensus European position, said it was too early to tell, and that this would depend on how the committee performed its work.
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PA Thieves Drain Jewish Town Dry
by Maayana Miskin
Sixty Jewish families living in the town of Pnei Hever, near Hevron, face a Sabbath without water due to Palestinian Authority water thieves. Officials at Mekorot, Israel's national water company, say they are unable to help.
Pnei Hever and other Jewish towns in the Hevron region have faced daily water theft for some time. PA Arabs drill into water pipes leading to the town every night, stealing an estimated 75% of the towns' water supply.
On Thursday night, PA thieves drilled into the pipes leading to Pnei Hever and rerouted the water supply. Residents of the village woke up Friday morning to find that they had only 10 cubic meters of water to split between hundreds of people.
As Mekorot workers said they could not help, residents turned to the Public Security Ministry and Ministry for National Infrastructure in the hope of getting assistance.
A similar incident took place last Thursday, when residents of Pnei Hever awoke to discover that nearly all of their water had been stolen overnight. Children were forced to go to school or daycare without so much as brushing their teeth or washing their hands.
Yigal Klein, head of the Pnei Hever secretariat, said the water theft phenomenon was a familiar one. A resident recently witnessed an Arab truck driver fiddling with a water pipe near the Jewish town of Susiya, he said. "Many times trucks fill up with water and drive to the villages," he said.
Some of the pipes bringing water to local Jewish villages pass through Arab villages, where residents do what they please with the water supply and the IDF's hands are tied, he said.
Water bills have risen repeatedly in the last few months with a 5% rise to take effect shortly.
"What's most worrisome is that we've been told to prepare for an entire summer like this," he said. "Our regional council is trying to put pressure on the government ministries, on the Water Authority, on Mekorot, but we're getting the feeling that this is what's been decreed for us and there's nothing to do." (IsraelNationalNews.com)
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Syria Jails 400 in Crackdown on PKK
by Avi Yellin
Turkey's state news agency Anatolian reported on Thursday that Syrian security forces have detained 400 people in five cities as part of an extensive operation against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
Turkey has sought the support of its neighbors in the region and of the United States in its attempts to suppress Kurdish guerrillas, who have succeeded in killing more than 50 Turkish occupation soldiers in the last two months of escalating resistance. (For US position, click here).
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, facing public criticism over his government's inability to stem the rising violence ahead of next year's national elections, has called on allies to cut off funds for the Kurdish freedom fighters and extradite suspected rebels to Turkey.
The majority of PKK operations have taken place in the area of Turkey populated by indigenous Kurds. The rebel forces, and many Kurds, consider adjacent areas of Syria, Iraq and Iran a part of the intended independent state of Kurdistan. The independence movement is active in those parts of Kurdistan controlled by Syria and by Iran through an offshoot called the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK).
The PKK also has bases in parts of northern Iraq, where Turkey and the United States have agreed to share intelligence on the group's activities. Washington and the European Union, like Ankara, consider the PKK to be a terrorist organization.
PKK resistance fighters have stepped up attacks on Turkish occupation forces after calling off their one-year truce on June 1, accusing Erdogan's government of failing to find a political resolution to the 26-year conflict.
The PKK first launched their revolt against Turkey in 1984 in a bid to liberate the north of their country from foreign rule. Since then, more than 45,000 people, mostly Kurds, have died in the violence.
The Kurds have been attempting to achieve an independent entity for over 80 years. At one point, Israel aided the Iraqi Kurdish rebels, led by the legendary Mala Mustafa Barzani, in their war against the suppressive Iraqi regime of the 1960s. One of Barzani's closest friends was said to be Sagi Chori, a Mossad officer allegedly responsible for planning several Kurdish operations in addition to training Kurdish fighters in Israel. Almost all Jews living in Kurdish areas moved to Israel during the 1940's and '50's.
Saddam Hussein's reign in Iraq (1979-2003) was characterized by genocidal attacks on the Kurdish population. American attempts to "democratize" occupied Iraq has appeared to gain Kurdish acceptance for the idea of regional autonomy as part of a larger central Iraqi government.
Turkey has attempted, often forcibly, to assimilate its sizable Kurdish population, estimated as approximately 20% of the entire population, since the 1930's. (IsraelNationalNews.com)
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IDF Feature: Tenacity and Talmud
by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz
Overlooking the conference table in the Academic Board Room at West Point, the famed American military academy, there stand the statues of three Jewish warrior-scholars - Joshua, King David and Judah the Maccabee.
When leaving West Point, head east, cross the Atlantic Ocean, travel the length of the Mediterranean Sea, come ashore on a Tel Aviv beach, and then make your way towards Jerusalem. About half-way to the holy capital city of Israel you will come upon the city of Modi'in - the revitalized hometown of that same Judah whose statue graces the board room of the United States Military Academy at West Point. And it is here, in the modern city of Modi'in, that new Maccabees are being shaped daily - living, breathing Maccabees, not stone carvings.
The institution turning out those scholar-warriors is the Meir Harel Yeshiva, a Hesder yeshiva (one of a network of Torah study academies combining demanding Judaic studies and military service) headed by Rabbi Col. Eliezer Chaim Shenvald
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Yoad would not be held back.
And one of the first scholar-warriors the yeshiva produced is a young man named Yoad Kaplan, from Caesarea.
In December 2008, at the tail end of Chanukah - holiday of the Maccabees - Kaplan and fellow Meir Harel Yeshiva student Uri Spiegel were squad commanders in the 51st Battalion of the Golani Brigade, gathered in a staging area just outside the Gaza region in southern Israel. Daniel Attar, also a Meir Harel Yeshiva student, was with another company assigned the same mission: enter Gaza and neutralize the enemy.
By that point, the Hamas regime in Gaza and its allied jihadists had been bombarding Israeli cities and towns with hundreds of Kassam and Grad rockets for years - ever more intensely after the unilateral disengagement from the region in 2005, in which thousands of Israelis were uprooted from their homes. As Yoad and his comrades waited, they heard and saw the Hamas rockets flying out of Gaza, heading toward their civilian targets on the Israeli homefront.
"We felt like emissaries.... It felt like we were defending our homes," Yoad told a local Modi'in newspaper. For his company commander, however, it was even more literal - his Ashdod home had been hit by a Hamas rocket just a short time earlier.
Operation Cast Lead (also called the Gaza War) began on the sixth day of Chanukah with a series of airstrikes, but one week later, on a Saturday night, the infantry was ordered to penetrate the enemy lines. The 51st, Kaplan's battalion, was one of the first in.
It was also one of the first hit when the enemy fired dozens of mortars toward the advancing Israeli ground forces. Yoad and 17 other soldiers suffered wounds of varying severity when a shell landed in their midst that very night. Suffering from what was determined to be moderate injuries, Yoad was evacuated to Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, where he was rushed immediately into the operating room. Doctors worked diligently to save his arm.
After a few days of hospitalization, Yoad mentioned matter-of-factly to his doctor that he was going to begin an officer's course in two months. It was then that Yoad got the shocking news: only after another year of rehabilitation would it be possible to determine if he could ever return to a combat unit, much less an officer's course.
But Yoad would not be held back.
For the next several months, he made intense efforts to strengthen himself both physically - with physiotherapy three times a week - and spiritually - with a return to high-level learning at Meir Harel Yeshiva. Doctors, physiotherapists, friends and family were amazed by Yoad's speedy recuperation, which they saw as just short of miraculous.
Within seven months of suffering what was supposed to be a debilitating arm injury, Yoad requested to return to combat duty. He quickly persuaded all the relevant decision-makers that he was fit to take part in the infantry officer's course, no matter how physically demanding it may be.
So it was that Yoad Kaplan was called to step forward before hundreds of new and veteran officers two months ago to be awarded recognition as Outstanding Officer of the Course. At the concluding ceremony, when Yoad received his Second Lieutenant rank, IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak offered high praise for Yoad's dedication to excellence. His success, they said, demonstrates the awesome power of faith in the righteousness of one's cause and tenacity in reaching one's goals - with which one can achieve the impossible.
Building those character traits, along with moral and practical leadership skills, are part and parcel of the encompassing Torah learned, lived and taught at Hesder Yeshivas such as the Meir Harel Yeshiva. There can be no doubt that Judah the Maccabee would feel more at home overlooking Rabbi Shenvald's study hall than he ever could peering down from the mantelpiece at West Point.
(Nissan Ratzlav-Katz - "a dynamic and effective writer," according to former US presidential speech-writer David Frum - provides marketing and business communications services for a wide array of organizations in Israel and abroad. He is also a former Opinion Editor for Israel National News.com. Nissan can be reached at nissan@nrk-online.com or through www.nrk-online.com.)
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Gaza Under Hamas: A Taliban-like Regime?
video
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/insideisrael/2010/July/Gaza-Under-Hamas-A-Taliban-like-Regime-/
JERUSALEM, Israel -- On Monday, June 28, masked gunmen destroyed a U.N. summer camp facility in the Palestinian Gaza Strip. A U.N. official called it "another example of the growing levels of extremism in Gaza."
The destruction marked the second attack in less than a month on a U.N. facility designed to provide summer fun for the children of Gaza.
"Now nearly 500 kids are prevented from coming to that camp because of the burning and destroying that place," the U.N. official said.
The attack is one more sign that Gaza under Hamas is becoming a Taliban-like regime.
"Hamas is forcing people to live within the confines of a harsh moral code and punishing those who try to exercise their few remaining rights," said in a statement by Human Rights Watch, a group who opposes Israel's current policy toward Gaza.
Since Hamas overthrew Fatah in a bloody 2007 coup, many Christians have also fled Gaza. Several Christian stores and schools have been vandalized and a prominent Christian, Rami Ayad, was murdered by Islamic radicals.
Hamas's charter calls for the destruction of Israel.
"Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it," the charter reads.
Hamas and other Islamic groups from Gaza still fire rockets and mortars into southern Israel. Towns like Sderot have even fortified their playgrounds with bomb shelters like a concrete hardened caterpillar.
"Picture a bomb shelter and a photograph in one picture you understand how this reality is completely unique and completely unacceptable in the entire world," said Noam Bedein of the Sderot Media Center. "While we talk abroad about Al-Qaeda, Iran, we already have Iran in Sderot's back yard, one kilometer away from Sderot."
Hamas has allied itself with Iran and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned that Hamas is establishing an Iranian base on the Mediterranean.
Yet following the recent flotilla incident, Hamas gained legitimacy while Israel faced an international investigation. Despite the threats to Israel and the West, Hamas is being treated like an accepted reality.
Instead of isolating Hamas, some nations prefer to negotiate with them. This was the position put forth earlier this week by Russia's foreign minister when he visited Jerusalem.
The Obama administration has also pledged $400 million in aid for the people of Gaza and the West Bank, a move some analysts see as stabilizing Hamas and its dictatorship.
Some countries protect the Hamas government because some feel the West -- instead of fighting Hamas -- will sanitize it, then embrace it just like it did to Israel's enemy in the 1980s -- Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
After recent developments, it appears the Islamist stronghold on Israel's border has not become weaker, but stronger.
