Stratfor and Ali Landry

In recent Stratfor articles they've been reviewing the strategic situation of the major Middle Eastern in light of the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war. This article by Reva Bhalla looks at Israel.

He looks at the Sinai as a buffer,the northern border, Jordan and the West Bank as well as Israel's need for a strong international ally.

It's a good article, but to be honest with the focus on the area some of it seems to be repetitious. However, it was good to see Bhalla bring Jorden into the mix.

For the article's Hot Stratfor Babe, repetition brought to mind clones, and clones brought to mind the cinematic masterpiece Repli-Kate.  OK, maybe cinematic masterpiece is buttering the bread a little thickly, but none the less Ali Landry, its female lead, wins the honor to represent the article.

In Repli-Kate some scientist guys accidentally clone a young female reporter. They get it in their heads to raise her to be what they consider to a guys ideal female: a beer drinking, football watching floozie. Meanwhile one of the guys falls crazy mad in love with the real Kate, and needless to say she finds out what they're up to and is none too pleased. I think you can probably figure it out from there. It is a movie that is both watchable and forgettable at the same time.

As for Ms Landry, she came up through the ranks of beauty pageants, transitioned to modelling, and has had a very modest career appearing in film and on television.


The Israeli Periphery
By Reva Bhalla, Vice President of Global Affairs, December 11, 2012

The state of Israel has a basic, inescapable geopolitical dilemma: Its national security requirements outstrip its military capabilities, making it dependent on an outside power. Not only must that power have significant military capabilities but it also must have enough common ground with Israel to align its foreign policy toward the Arab world with that of Israel's. These are rather heavy requirements for such a small nation.

Security, in the Israeli sense, is thus often characterized in terms of survival. And for Israel to survive, it needs just the right blend of geopolitical circumstance, complex diplomatic arrangements and military preparedness to respond to potential threats nearby. Over the past 33 years, a sense of complacency settled over Israel and gave rise to various theories that it could finally overcome its dependency on outside powers. But a familiar sense of unease crept back into the Israeli psyche before any of those arguments could take root. A survey of the Israeli periphery in Egypt, Syria and Jordan explains why.

Maintaining the Sinai Buffer

To Israel's southwest lies the Sinai Desert. This land is economically useless; only hardened Bedouins who sparsely populate the desert expanse consider the terrain suitable for living. This makes the Sinai an ideal buffer. Its economic lifelessness gives it extraordinary strategic importance in keeping the largest Arab army -- Egypt's -- at a safe distance from Israeli population centers. It is the maintenance of this buffer that forms the foundation of the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

The question percolating in Israeli policy circles is whether an Islamist Egypt will give the same level of importance to this strategic buffer. The answer to that question rests with the military, an institution that has formed the backbone of the Egyptian state since the rise of Gamel Abdul Nasser in 1952.



Over the past month, the military's role in this new Muslim Brotherhood-run Egypt quietly revealed itself. The first test came in the form of the Gaza crisis, when the military quietly negotiated security guarantees with Israel while the Muslim Brotherhood basked in the diplomatic spotlight. The second test came when Egypt's Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, attempted a unilateral push on a constitutional draft to institutionalize the Muslim Brotherhood's hold on power.

The military bided its time, waiting for the protests to escalate to the point that rioters began targeting the presidential palace. By then, it was apparent that the police were not to be fully relied on to secure the streets. Morsi had no choice but to turn to the military for help, and that request revealed how indispensable the military is for Egyptian stability.

There will be plenty of noise and confusion in the lead-up to the Dec. 15 referendum as the secular, anti-Muslim Brotherhood civilian opposition continues its protests against Morsi. But filter through that noise, and one can see that the military and the Muslim Brotherhood appear to be adjusting slowly to a new order of Nasserite-Islamist rule. Unlike the 1979 peace treaty, this working arrangement between the military and the Islamists is alive and temperamental. Israel can find some comfort in seeing that the military remains central to the stability of the Egyptian state and will thus likely play a major role in protecting the Sinai buffer. However, merely observing this dance between the military and the Islamists from across the desert is enough to unnerve Israel and justify a more pre-emptive military posture on the border.

Defending Galilee

Israel lacks a good buffer to its north. The most natural, albeit imperfect, line of defense is the Litani River in modern-day Lebanon, with a second line of defense between Mount Hermon and the Sea of Galilee. Modern-day Israel encompasses this second barrier, a hilly area that has been the target of sporadic mortar shelling from Syrian government forces in pursuit of Sunni rebels.

Israel does not face a conventional military threat to its north, nor will it for some time. But the descent of the northern Levant into sectarian-driven, clan-based warfare presents a different kind of threat on Israel's northern frontier.

It is only a matter of time before Alawite forces will have to retreat from Damascus and defend themselves against a Sunni majority from their coastal enclave. The conflict will necessarily subsume Lebanon, and the framework that Israel has relied on for decades to manage more sizable, unconventional threats like Hezbollah will come undone.

Somewhere along the way, there will be an internationally endorsed attempt to prop up a provisional government and maintain as much of the state machinery as possible to avoid the scenario of a post-U.S. invasion Iraq. But when decades-old, sectarian-driven vendettas are concerned, there is cause for pessimism in judging the viability of those plans. Israel cannot avoid thinking in terms of worst-case scenarios, so it will continue to reinforce its northern defenses ahead of more instability.

Neutralizing the Jordan River Valley

The status of the Jordan River Valley is essential to Israel's sense of security to the east. So long as Israel can dominate the west bank of the river (the biblical area of Judea and Samaria, or the modern-day West Bank) then it can overwhelm indigenous forces from the desert farther east. To keep this arrangement intact, Israel will somehow attempt to politically neutralize whichever power controls the east bank of the Jordan River. In the post-Ottoman Middle East, this power takes the form of the Hashemite monarchs, who were transplanted from Arabia by the British.

The vulnerability that the Hashemites felt as a foreign entity in charge of economically lackluster terrain created ideal conditions for Israel to protect its eastern approach. The Hashemites had to devise complex political arrangements at home to sustain the monarchy in the face of left-wing Nasserist, Palestinian separatist and Islamist militant threats. The key to Hashemite survival was in aligning with the rural East Bank tribes, co-opting the Palestinians and cooperating with Israel in security issues to keep its western frontier calm. In short, the Hashemites were vulnerable enough for Israel to be considered a useful security partner but not so vulnerable that Israel couldn't rely on the regime to protect its eastern approach. There was a level of tension that was necessary to maintain the strategic partnership, but that level of tension had to remain within a certain band.

That arrangement is now under considerable stress. The Hashemites are facing outright calls for deposition from the same tribal East Bankers, Palestinians and Islamists that for decades formed the foundation of the state. That is because the state itself is weakening under the pressure of high oil prices, now sapping at the subsidies that have been relied on to tame the population.

One could assume that Jordan's oil-rich Gulf Arab neighbors would step in to defend one of the region's remaining monarchies of the post-Ottoman order against a rising tide of Muslim Brotherhood-led Islamism with heavily subsidized energy sales. However, a still-bitter, age-old geopolitical rivalry between the Hejaz-hailing Hashemite dynasty and the Nejd-hailing Saudi dynasty over supremacy in Arabia is getting in the way. From across the Gulf, an emboldened Iran is already trying to exploit this Arab tension by cozying up to the Hashemites with subsidized energy sales to extend Tehran's reach into the West Bank and eventually threaten Israel. Jordan has publicly warded off Iran's offer, and significant logistical challenges may inhibit such cooperation. But ongoing negotiations between Iran's allies in Baghdad and the Jordanian regime bear close watching as Jordan's vulnerabilities continue to rise at home.

Powerful Partners Abroad

In this fluctuating strategic environment, Israel cannot afford to be isolated politically. Its need for a power patron will grow alongside its insecurities in its periphery. Israel's current patron, the United States, is also grappling with the emerging Islamist order in the region. But in this new regional dynamic, the United States will eventually look past ideology in search of partners to help manage the region. As U.S.-Turkish relations in recent years and the United States' recent interactions with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood reveal, it will be an awkward and bumpy experience while Washington tries to figure out who holds the reins of power and which brand of Islamists it can negotiate with amid messy power transitions. This is much harder for Israel to do independently by virtue of ideology, size and location.

Israel's range of maneuver in foreign policy will narrow considerably as it becomes more dependent on external powers and as its interests clash with those of its patrons. Israel is in store for more discomfort in its decision-making and more creativity in its diplomacy. The irony is that while Israel is a western-style democracy, it was most secure in an age of Arab dictatorships. As those dictatorships give way to weak and in some cases crumbling states, Israeli survival instincts will again be put to the test.

The Israeli Periphery is republished with permission of Stratfor.

Stratfor and Veronica Lake

In this Stratfor article George Friedman discusses the ongoing tensions between Iran on one side, and the U.S. and Israel on the other, regarding Iran's push to build an atomic bomb.

Friedman points out that the public rhetoric of the three countries likely differs greatly from the actual diplomatic moves and planning they are doing. Also, even if Iran had a testable device they are far from having a deliverable version of it.

He then expounds upon the theory that he has floated before -- that Iran may be following what he thinks is the North Korean model. In this model a nation derives diplomatic leverage from the threat of having nuclear weapons while not crossing red-lines that may draw harsh responses.

That may be, although it requires Iran to be acting in a far more rational manner than they may actually be operating under. While all alternatives are bad, betting wrong on the North Korean model may be the most catastrophic of all.

As for the article's Hot Stratfor Babe, since we're talking about bombs of course the choice had to be a Hollywood bombshell. Since there is a fair amount of sneaking around in all of it, Veronica Lake and her peek-a-boo hair style immediately came to mind and so she gets the honor for this article.

Ms Lake was an extremely popular actress during the 1940s. In fact, for a few years she was considered Hollywood's top drawing actress. However, she was difficult on the set and her reputation began to damage her ability to work with top tier talent.

She also began to drink heavily, and eventually her erratic behavior put and end to her career altogether. Sadly, her drinking grew worse and slid so low that at one point she was found bartending at an all women's hotel in New York. She also began to have bouts of paranoia, believing the F.B.I was trailing her. She died at the young age of 50 in 1973.


War and Bluff: Iran, Israel and the United States
By George Friedman, September 11, 2012

For the past several months, the Israelis have been threatening to attack Iranian nuclear sites as the United States has pursued a complex policy of avoiding complete opposition to such strikes while making clear it doesn't feel such strikes are necessary. At the same time, the United States has carried out maneuvers meant to demonstrate its ability to prevent the Iranian counter to an attack -- namely blocking the Strait of Hormuz. While these maneuvers were under way, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said no "redline" exists that once crossed by Iran would compel an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. The Israeli government has long contended that Tehran eventually will reach the point where it will be too costly for outsiders to stop the Iranian nuclear program.

The Israeli and American positions are intimately connected, but the precise nature of the connection is less clear. Israel publicly casts itself as eager to strike Iran but restrained by the United States, though unable to guarantee it will respect American wishes if Israel sees an existential threat emanating from Iran. The United States publicly decries Iran as a threat to Israel and to other countries in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia, but expresses reservations about military action out of fears that Iran would respond to a strike by destabilizing the region and because it does not believe the Iranian nuclear program is as advanced as the Israelis say it is.

The Israelis and the Americans publicly hold the same view of Iran. But their public views on how to proceed diverge. The Israelis have less tolerance for risk than the Americans, who have less tolerance for the global consequences of an attack. Their disagreement on the issue pivots around the status of the Iranian nuclear program. All of this lies on the surface; let us now examine the deeper structure of the issue.

Behind the Rhetoric

From the Iranian point of view, a nuclear program has been extremely valuable. Having one has brought Iran prestige in the Islamic world and has given it a level of useful global political credibility. As with North Korea, having a nuclear program has allowed Iran to sit as an equal with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, creating a psychological atmosphere in which Iran's willingness merely to talk to the Americans, British, French, Russians, Chinese and Germans represented a concession. Though it has positioned the Iranians extremely well politically, the nuclear program also has triggered sanctions that have caused Iran substantial pain. But Iran has prepared for sanctions for years, building a range of corporate, banking and security mechanisms to evade their most devastating impact. Having countries like Russia and China unwilling to see Iran crushed has helped. Iran can survive sanctions.

While a nuclear program has given Iran political leverage, actually acquiring nuclear weapons would increase the risk of military action against Iran. A failed military action would benefit Iran, proving its power. By contrast, a successful attack that dramatically delayed or destroyed Iran's nuclear capability would be a serious reversal. The Stuxnet episode, assuming it was an Israeli or U.S. attempt to undermine Iran's program using cyberwarfare, is instructive in this regard. Although the United States hailed Stuxnet as a major success, it hardly stopped the Iranian program, if the Israelis are to be believed. In that sense, it was a failure.

Using nuclear weapons against Israel would be catastrophic to Iran. The principle of mutual assured destruction, which stabilized the U.S.-Soviet balance in the Cold War, would govern Iran's use of nuclear weapons. If Iran struck Israel, the damage would be massive, forcing the Iranians to assume that the Israelis and their allies (specifically, the United States) would launch a massive counterattack on Iran, annihilating large parts of Iran's population.

It is here that we get to the heart of the issue. While from a rational perspective the Iranians would be fools to launch such an attack, the Israeli position is that the Iranians are not rational actors and that their religious fanaticism makes any attempt to predict their actions pointless. Thus, the Iranians might well accept the annihilation of their country in order to destroy Israel in a sort of megasuicide bombing. The Israelis point to the Iranians' rhetoric as evidence of their fanaticism. Yet, as we know, political rhetoric is not always politically predictive. In addition, rhetoric aside, Iran has pursued a cautious foreign policy, pursuing its ends with covert rather than overt means. It has rarely taken reckless action, engaging instead in reckless rhetoric.

If the Israelis believe the Iranians are not deterred by the prospect of mutually assured destruction, then allowing them to develop nuclear weapons would be irrational. If they do see the Iranians as rational actors, then shaping the psychological environment in which Iran acquires nuclear weapons is a critical element of mutually assured destruction. Herein lies the root of the great Israeli debate that pits the Netanyahu government, which appears to regard Iran as irrational, against significant segments of the Israeli military and intelligence communities, which regard Iran as rational.

Avoiding Attaining a Weapon

Assuming the Iranians are rational actors, their optimal strategy lies not in acquiring nuclear weapons and certainly not in using them, but instead in having a credible weapons development program that permits them to be seen as significant international actors. Developing weapons without ever producing them gives Iran international political significance, albeit at the cost of sanctions of debatable impact. At the same time, it does not force anyone to act against them, thereby permitting outsiders to avoid incurring the uncertainties and risks of such action.

Up to this point, the Iranians have not even fielded a device for testing, let alone a deliverable weapon. For all their activity, either their technical limitations or a political decision has kept them from actually crossing the obvious redlines and left Israel trying to define some developmental redline.

Iran's approach has created a slowly unfolding crisis, reinforced by Israel's slowly rolling response. For its part, all of Israel's rhetoric -- and periodic threats of imminent attack -- has been going on for several years, but the Israelis have done little beyond some covert and cyberattacks to block the Iranian nuclear program. Just as the gap between Iranian rhetoric and action has been telling, so, too, has the gap between Israeli rhetoric and reality. Both want to appear more fearsome than either is actually willing to act.

The Iranian strategy has been to maintain ambiguity on the status of its program, while making it appear that the program is capable of sudden success -- without ever achieving that success. The Israeli strategy has been to appear constantly on the verge of attack without ever attacking and to use the United States as its reason for withholding attacks, along with the studied ambiguity of the Iranian program. The United States, for its part, has been content playing the role of holding Israel back from an attack that Israel doesn't seem to want to launch. The United States sees the crumbling of Iran's position in Syria as a major Iranian reversal and is content to see this play out alongside sanctions.

Underlying Israel's hesitancy about whether it will attack has been the question of whether it can pull off an attack. This is not a political question, but a military and technical one. Iran, after all, has been preparing for an attack on its nuclear facilities since their inception. Some scoff at Iranian preparations for attack. These are the same people who are most alarmed by supposed Iranian acumen in developing nuclear weapons. If a country can develop nuclear weapons, there is no reason it can't develop hardened and dispersed sites and create enough ambiguity to deprive Israeli and U.S. intelligence of confidence in their ability to determine what is where. I am reminded of the raid on Son Tay during the Vietnam War. The United States mounted an effort to rescue U.S. prisoners of war in North Vietnam only to discover that its intelligence on where the POWs were located was completely wrong. Any politician deciding whether to attack Iran would have Son Tay and a hundred other intelligence failures chasing around their brains, especially since a failed attack on Iran would be far worse than no attack.

Dispersed sites reduce Israel's ability to strike hard at a target and to acquire a battle damage assessment that would tell Israel three things: first, whether the target had been destroyed when it was buried under rock and concrete; second, whether the target contained what Israel thought it contained; and third, whether the strike had missed a backup site that replicated the one it destroyed. Assuming the Israelis figured out that another attack was needed, could their air force mount a second air campaign lasting days or weeks? They have a small air force and the distances involved are great.

Meanwhile, deploying special operations forces to so many targets so close to Tehran and so far from Iran's borders would be risky, to say the least. Some sort of exotic attack, for example one using nuclear weapons to generate electromagnetic pulses to paralyze the region, is conceivable -- but given the size of the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem-Haifa triangle, it is hard to imagine Israel wanting to set such a precedent. If the Israelis have managed to develop a new weapons technology unknown to anyone, all conventional analyses are off. But if the Israelis had an ultrasecret miracle weapon, postponing its use might compromise its secrecy. I suspect that if they had such a weapon, they would have used it by now.

The battlefield challenges posed by the Iranians are daunting, and a strike becomes even less appealing considering that the Iranians have not yet detonated a device and are far from a weapon. The Americans emphasize these points, but they are happy to use the Israeli threats to build pressure on the Iranians. The United States wants to undermine Iranian credibility in the region by making Iran seem vulnerable. The twin forces of Israeli rhetoric and sanctions help make Iran look embattled. The reversal in Syria enhances this sense. Naval maneuvers in the Strait of Hormuz add to the sense that the United States is prepared to neutralize Iranian counters to an Israeli airstrike, making the threat Israel poses and the weakness of Iran appear larger.

When we step back and view the picture as a whole, we see Iran using its nuclear program for political reasons but being meticulous not to make itself appear unambiguously close to success. We see the Israelis talking as if they were threatened but acting as if they were in no rush to address the supposed threat. And we see the Americans acting as if they are restraining Israel, paradoxically appearing to be Iran's protector even though they are using the Israeli threat to increase Iranian insecurity. For their part, the Russians initially supported Iran in a bid to bog down the United States in another Middle East crisis. But given Iran's reversal in Syria, the Russians are clearly reconsidering their Middle East strategy and even whether they actually have a strategy in the first place. Meanwhile, the Chinese want to continue buying Iranian oil unnoticed.

It is the U.S.-Israeli byplay that is most fascinating. On the surface, Israel is driving U.S. policy. On closer examination, the reverse is true. Israel has bluffed an attack for years and never acted. Perhaps now it will act, but the risks of failure are substantial. If Israel really wants to act, this is not obvious. Speeches by politicians do not constitute clear guidelines. If the Israelis want to get the United States to participate in the attack, rhetoric won't work. Washington wants to proceed by increasing pressure to isolate Iran. Simply getting rid of a nuclear program not clearly intended to produce a device is not U.S. policy. Containing Iran without being drawn into a war is. To this end, Israeli rhetoric is useful.

Rather than seeing Netanyahu as trying to force the United States into an attack, it is more useful to see Netanyahu's rhetoric as valuable to U.S. strategy. Israel and the United States remain geopolitically aligned. Israel's bellicosity is not meant to signal an imminent attack, but to support the U.S. agenda of isolating and maintaining pressure on Iran. That would indicate more speeches from Netanyahu and greater fear of war. But speeches and emotions aside, intensifying psychological pressure on Iran is more likely than war.

War and Bluff: Iran, Israel and the United States is republished with permission of Stratfor.

Stratfor and Michaela Bercu

In this Stratfor article George Friedman discusses the difficult strategic situation Israel is facing with the massive unrest taking place in both Syria and Egypt. He also touches upon the volatile situations of Lebanon and Jordan.

Bearing in mind that I'm just an internet blowhard and that Friedman presumably has much better sources tham me, I've long been skeptical of some of his takes in the region. In particular I thought he vastly overestimated the strength of Iran's position, and I think the situation in Syria bears out my skepticism.

With that out of the way, I also think you need to be careful to separate the Arab Spring of North Africa from the events in Syria, Iraq and Iran.

I think the Syria conflict is geopolitical hardball, with the Saudi's leading an Arab effort to gain control of Syria and strand Hezbollah in the process. If they succeed don't be surprised if the chaos spreads to western Iran. 

As for Egypt, I think that it, and the rest of the North African Arab Spring, is best viewed as a series of food riots. Egypt's stock of bread, cooking oil and currency is dwindling. With an early drought in the U.S. (not to mention the ethanol absurdity) and now India reporting drought problems, Egypt is going to find it even harder and more expensive to import the grain it must get to feed its populace. 

Regardless of the situation today, I think there are further hard knocks coming in Egypt that will likely flip the leadership situation several times. In the end the faction that can get the money to get  food imported will probably end up being the faction in charge.

As for the article's Hot Stratfor Babe, I've written about everything but Israel, but the article actually focuses on Israel's balancing act and so I turned to Israeli actresses and models. After an in-depth search I selected Michaela Bercu for the honor.

Ms Bercu is primarily a model, although she did have a role in Bram Stoker's Dracula as one of Dracula's wives. However, her big claim to fame is being Anna Wintour's first cover girl for Vogue when Wintour took over being editor-in-chief of the magazine. If you're thinking to yourself, "big deal" you're not alone. I thought the same thing.

At any rate Michaela seems to have had a very busy schedule as a model back in the 80s and 90s. Currently she's living in Tel Aviv and has 5 kids with her long time husband.


The Israeli Crisis
By George Friedman, August 14, 2012

Crises are normally short, sharp and intense affairs. Israel's predicament has developed on a different time frame, is more diffuse than most crises and has not reached a decisive and intense moment. But it is still a crisis. It is not a crisis solely about Iran, although the Israeli government focuses on that issue. Rather, it is over Israel's strategic reality since 1978, when it signed the Camp David accords with Egypt.

Perhaps the deepest aspect of the crisis is that Israel has no internal consensus on whether it is in fact a crisis, or if so, what the crisis is about. The Israeli government speaks of an existential threat from Iranian nuclear weapons. I would argue that the existential threat is broader and deeper, part of it very new, and part of it embedded in the founding of Israel.

Israel now finds itself in a long-term crisis in which it is struggling to develop a strategy and foreign policy to deal with a new reality. This is causing substantial internal stress, since the domestic consensus on Israeli policy is fragmenting at the same time that the strategic reality is shifting. Though this happens periodically to nations, Israel sees itself in a weak position in the long run due to its size and population, despite its current military superiority. More precisely, it sees the evolution of events over time potentially undermining that military reality, and it therefore feels pressured to act to preserve it. How to preserve its superiority in the context of the emerging strategic reality is the core of the Israeli crisis.

Egypt

Since 1978, Israel's strategic reality had been that it faced no threat of a full peripheral war. After Camp David, the buffer of the Sinai Peninsula separated Egypt and Israel, and Egypt had a government that did not want that arrangement to break. Israel still faced a formally hostile Syria. Syria had invaded Lebanon in 1976 to crush the Palestine Liberation Organization based there and reconsolidate its hold over Lebanon, but knew it could not attack Israel by itself. Syria remained content reaching informal understandings with Israel. Meanwhile, relatively weak and isolated Jordan depended on Israel for its national security. Lebanon alone was unstable. Israel periodically intervened there, not very successfully, but not at very high cost.

The most important of Israel's neighbors, Egypt, is now moving on an uncertain course. This weekend, new Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi removed five key leaders of the military and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and revoked constitutional amendments introduced by the military. There are two theories on what has happened. In the first, Morsi -- who until his election was a senior leader of the country's mainstream Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood -- is actually much more powerful than the military and is acting decisively to transform the Egyptian political system. In the second, this is all part of an agreement between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood that gives Morsi the appearance of greater power while actually leaving power with the military.

On the whole, I tend to think that the second is the case. Still, it is not clear how this will evolve: The appearance of power can turn into the reality of power. Despite any sub rosa agreements between the military and Morsi, how these might play out in a year or two as the public increasingly perceives Morsi as being in charge -- limiting the military's options and cementing Morsi's power -- is unknown. In the same sense, Morsi has been supportive of security measures taken by the military against militant Islamists, as was seen in the past week's operations in the Sinai Peninsula.

The Sinai remains a buffer zone against major military forces, but not against the paramilitaries linked to radical Islamists who have increased their activities in the peninsula since the fall of former President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. Last week, they attacked an Egyptian military post on the Gaza border, killing 16 Egyptian soldiers. This followed several attacks against Israeli border crossings. Morsi condemned the attack and ordered a large-scale military crackdown in the Sinai. Two problems could arise from this.

First, the Egyptians' ability to defeat the militant Islamists depends on redefining the Camp David accords, at least informally, to allow Egypt to deploy substantial forces there (though even this might not suffice). These additional military forces might not threaten Israel immediately, but setting a precedent for a greater Egyptian military presence in the Sinai Peninsula could eventually lead to a threat.

This would be particularly true if Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood impose their will on the Egyptian military. If we take Morsi at face value as a moderate, the question becomes who will succeed him. The Muslim Brotherhood is clearly ascendant, and the possibility that a secular democracy would emerge from the Egyptian uprising is unlikely. It is also clear that the Muslim Brotherhood is a movement with many competing factions. And it is clear from the elections that the Muslim Brotherhood represents the most popular movement in Egypt and that no one can predict how it will evolve or which factions will dominate and what new tendencies will arise. Egypt in the coming years will not resemble Egypt of the past generation, and that means that the Israeli calculus for what will happen on its southern front will need to take Hamas in Gaza into account and perhaps an Islamist Egypt prepared to ally with Hamas.

Syria and Lebanon

A similar situation exists in Syria. The secular and militarist regime of the al Assad family is in serious trouble. As mentioned, the Israelis had a working relationship with the Syrians going back to the Syrian invasion of Lebanon against the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1976. It was not a warm relationship, but it was predictable, particularly in the 1990s: Israel allowed Syria a free hand in Lebanon in exchange for Damascus limiting Hezbollah's actions.

Lebanon was not exactly stable, but its instability hewed to a predictable framework. That understanding broke down when the United States seized an opportunity to force Syria to retreat from Lebanon in 2006 following the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri. The United States used the Cedar Revolution that rose up in defiance of Damascus to retaliate against Syria for allowing al Qaeda to send jihadists into Iraq from Syria.

This didn't spark the current unrest in Syria, which appears to involve a loose coalition of Sunnis including elements of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists. Though Israel far preferred Syrian President Bashar al Assad to them, al Assad himself was shifting his behavior. The more pressure he came under, the more he became dependent on Iran. Israel began facing the unpleasant prospect of a Sunni Islamist government emerging or a government heavily dependent on Iran. Neither outcome appealed to Israel, and neither outcome was in Israel's control.

Just as dangerous to Israel would be the Lebanonization of Syria. Syria and Lebanon are linked in many ways, though Lebanon's political order was completely different and Syria could serve as a stabilizing force for it. There is now a reasonable probability that Syria will become like Lebanon, namely, a highly fragmented country divided along religious and ethnic lines at war with itself. Israel's best outcome would be for the West to succeed in preserving Syria's secular military regime without al Assad. But it is unclear how long a Western-backed regime resting on the structure of al Assad's Syria would survive. Even the best outcome has its own danger. And while Lebanon itself has been reasonably stable in recent years, when Syria catches a cold, Lebanon gets pneumonia. Israel thus faces the prospect of declining security to its north.

The U.S. Role and Israel's Strategic Lockdown

It is important to take into account the American role in this, because ultimately Israel's national security -- particularly if its strategic environment deteriorates -- rests on the United States. For the United States, the current situation is a strategic triumph. Iran had been extending its power westward, through Iraq and into Syria. This represented a new force in the region that directly challenged American interests. Where Israel originally had an interest in seeing al Assad survive, the United States did not. Washington's primary interest lay in blocking Iran and keeping it from posing a threat to the Arabian Peninsula. The United States saw Syria, particularly after the uprising, as an Iranian puppet. While the United States was delighted to see Iran face a reversal in Syria, Israel was much more ambivalent about that outcome.

Stratfor and Miri Bohadana

In this Stratfor article George Friedman discusses Vladamir Putin's visit to Israel. He focuses on two areas: Azerbaijan and Syria, where both countires have interests, although those interests are sometimes at cross purposes.

The article is a bit of a laundry list, but it is nice to be reminded of these issues affecting the two countries and how they deal with each other.

However, I do think more mention of Israel's security needs in light of Obama's indifference, if not out right hostility, would have helped.

The beginning of the article is excerpted below, with a link to the entire article at the end of the excerpt.

For the article's Hot Stratfor Babe I turned to Israeli models for inspiration. And inspired I was! After a careful search, and weighing the pros and cons of several candidates, I selected Miri Bohadana for the profound honor.

Ms Bohadana started her career at the age of 15 by entering the Miss Beer Shiva contest and entered several others finally representing Israel in the 1995 Miss World contest. At the same time she continued her modelling career.

She jumped to acting in the movie Eskimo Limon. The main mention of her being in it that I found  was to mention that she went topless in it. Whatever her acting appeal was, it was enough to land her in a series of TV appearances as both an actress and presenter.


Putin's Visit and Israeli-Russian Relations
By George Friedman, June 26, 2012

Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Israel on June 25 for his first state visit since retaking the presidency. The visit was arranged in mid-May, and so at least part of the agenda was set, given events in Syria and Egypt. The interesting thing about Israel and Russia is that while they seem to be operating in the same areas of interest and their agendas seem disconnected, their interests are not always opposed. It is easy to identify places they both care about but more difficult to identify ways in which they connect. It is therefore difficult to identify the significance of the visit beyond that it happened.

An example is Azerbaijan. Russia is still a major weapons provider for Azerbaijan, but the Israelis are now selling it large amounts of weapons and appear to be using it as a base from which to observe and, according to rumors, possibly attack Iran. Russia, which supports Armenia, a country Azerbaijan fought a war with in the late 1980s and early 1990s and technically still is at war with, ought to oppose Israel's action, particularly since it threatens Iran, which Russia does not want attacked. At the same time, Russia doesn't feel threatened by Israeli involvement in Azerbaijan, and Israel doesn't really care about Armenia. Both are there, both are involved and both think Azerbaijan is important, yet each operates in ways that ought to conflict but don't.

The same is true in the more immediate case of Syria, where its downing of a Turkish plane has created an unexpected dynamic for this visit. To think about this we need to consider Russian and Israeli strategy and its odd lack of intersection in Syria.

Russia's Need for a U.S. Distraction

Russia has complex relationships in the region, particularly focused on Syria and Iran. Russia's interest in both countries is understandable. Putin, who has said he regarded the breakup of the Soviet Union as a geopolitical catastrophe, views the United States as Russia's prime adversary. His view is that the United States not only used the breakup to extend NATO into the former Soviet Union in the Baltics but also has tried to surround and contain Russia by supporting pro-democracy movements in the region and by using these movements to create pro-American governments. Putin sees himself as being in a duel with the United States throughout the former Soviet Union.

The Russians believe they are winning this struggle. Putin is not so much interested in dominating these countries as he is in being certain that the United States doesn't dominate them. That gives Russia room to maneuver and allows it to establish economic and political relations that secure Russian interests. In addition, Russia has tremendously benefited from the U.S. wars in the Islamic world. It is not so much that these wars alienated Muslims, although that was beneficial. Rather, what helped the Russians most was that these wars absorbed American strategic bandwidth.

Obviously, U.S. military and intelligence capabilities that might have been tasked to support movements and regimes in Russia's "near abroad" were absorbed by conflict in the Islamic world. But perhaps even more important, the strategic and intellectual bandwidth of U.S. policymakers was diverted. Russia became a secondary strategic interest after 9/11. While some movements already in place were supported by the United States, this was mostly inertia, and as the Russians parried and movements in various countries splintered, the United States did not have resources to respond.

The Russians also helped keep the United States tied up in Afghanistan by facilitating bases in Central Asia and providing a corridor for resupply. Russia was able to create a new reality in the region in which it was the dominant power, without challenge.

The Russians therefore valued the conflict in the Middle East because it allowed Russia to be a secondary issue for the only global power. With the war in Iraq over and the war in Afghanistan ending, the possibility is growing that the United States would have the resources and bandwidth to resume the duel on the Russian periphery. This is not in the Russian interest. Therefore, the Russians have an interest in encouraging any process that continues to draw the United States into the Islamic world. Chief among these is supporting Iran and Syria. To be more precise, Russia does not so much support these countries as it opposes measures that might either weaken Iran or undermine the Syrian government. From the Russian point of view, the simple existence of these regimes provides a magnet that diverts U.S. power.

Israel's Position on Syria

This brings us back to Putin's visit to Israel. From the Russian point of view, Syria is not a side issue but a significant part of its strategy. Israel has more complex feelings. The regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad, while the Soviets were allied with it, represented a significant danger to Israel. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Syria lost its patron and diminished as a threat. Since then, the Syrians under al Assad had two virtues from the Israeli point of view. The first was that they were predictable. Their interests in Lebanon were built around financial and political goals that could be accommodated by the Israelis in exchange for limitations on the sorts of military activity that Israel could not tolerate. Furthermore, Syria's interests did not include conflict with Israel, and therefore Syria held Hezbollah in check until it was forced out of Lebanon by the United States in 2005.

The second advantage of the al Assad regime in relation to Israel was that it was not Sunni but Alawite, a Shiite sect. During the 2000s, Israel and the West believed the main threat emanated from the Sunni world. Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas were all Sunni. Over the past decade, a corrupt minority Alawite regime has appeared preferable to Israel than a coherent majority radical Islamist regime in the north. It wasn't certain how radical it would be, but at the same time there appeared to be more risk on the Sunni side than on the Shiite side.

Israel's position on the al Assad regime has shifted in the past year from hoping it would survive to accepting that it couldn't and preparing for the next regime. Underlying this calculus was a reconsideration of which regime would be more dangerous. With the withdrawal of the United States from Iraq and with Iran filling the vacuum that was left, Iran became a greater threat to Israel than Hamas and the Sunnis. Therefore, Israel now desires a Sunni regime in Syria that would block Iranian ambitions.

Read more: Putin's Visit and Israeli-Russian Relations | Stratfor

Stratfor and Mili Avital

In this Stratfor article George Friedman discusses Israel's strategic circumstances. He argues that while for the past several decades Israel could act with a fair degree of independence, it is entering a new situation, particularly with regards to the rise of Iranian influence, that forces it to depend on outside powers, principally the United States, for support.

I think he is right that Israel is losing room to maneuver on its own. However, I think he tends to overestimate the policy inertia in the State Department  while underestimating the animus of the Obama administration.

Regardless, it is an interesting piece. I've excerpted the beginning of it below and, as always, you can follow the link at the end of the excerpt to read the entire article.

For the article's Hot Stratfor Babe I examined the ranks of Israeli actresses and after careful deliberation I selected Mili Avital for the honor.

Before moving to Hollywood Ms Avital started her career on the stage and screen of Israel where she won an Israeli Academy Award. Her most recognizable American role has been the female lead in Stargate, which is a polite way of saying the rest of her career has been less than stellar. None the less, she seems to stay busy, even if it is just making made for TV movies, straight to DVD flops and doing the  occasional guest spot on a TV drama. 


Israel's New Strategic EnvironmentBy George Friedman, April 3, 2012

Israel is now entering its third strategic environment. The constant threat of state-on-state war defined the first, which lasted from the founding of the Jewish state until its peace treaty with Egypt. A secure periphery defined the second, which lasted until recently and focused on the Palestinian issue, Lebanon and the rise of radical Sunni Islamists. The rise of Iran as a regional power and the need to build international coalitions to contain it define the third.

Israel's fundamental strategic problem is that its national security interests outstrip its national resources, whether industrial, geographic, demographic or economic. During the first phase, it was highly dependent on outside powers -- first the Soviet Union, then France and finally the United States -- in whose interest it was to provide material support to Israel. In the second phase, the threat lessened, leaving Israel relatively free to define its major issues, such as containing the Palestinians and attempting to pacify Lebanon. Its dependence on outside powers decreased, meaning it could disregard those powers from time to time. In the third phase, Israel's dependence on outside powers, particularly the United States, began increasing. With this increase, Israel's freedom for maneuver began declining.

Containing the Palestinians by Managing its Neighbors

The Palestinian issue, of course, has existed since Israel's founding. By itself, this issue does not pose an existential threat to Israel, since the Palestinians cannot threaten the Israeli state's survival. The Palestinians have had the ability to impose a significant cost on the occupation of the West Bank and the containing of the Gaza Strip, however. They have forced the Israelis to control significant hostile populations with costly, ongoing operations and to pay political costs to countries Israel needs to manage its periphery and global interests. The split between Hamas and Fatah reduced the overall threat but raised the political costs. This became apparent during the winter of 2008-2009 during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza when Hamas, for its own reasons, chose to foment conflict with Israel. Israel's response to Hamas' actions cost the Jewish state support in Europe, Turkey and other places.

Ideological or religious considerations aside, the occupation of the territories makes strategic sense in that if Israel withdraws, Hamas might become militarized to the point of threatening Israel with direct attack or artillery and rocket fire. Israel thus sees itself forced into an occupation that carries significant political costs in order to deal with a theoretical military threat. The threat is presently just theoretical, however, because of Israel's management of its strategic relations with its neighboring nation-states.

Israel has based its management of its regional problem less on creating a balance of power in the region than on taking advantage of tensions among its neighbors to prevent them from creating a united military front against Israel. From 1948 until the 1970s, Lebanon refrained from engaging Israel. Meanwhile, Jordan's Hashemite regime had deep-seated tensions with the Palestinians, with Syria and with Nasserite Egypt. In spite of Israeli-Jordanian conflict in 1967, Jordan saw Israel as a guarantor of its national security. Following the 1973 war, Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel that created a buffer zone in the Sinai Peninsula.

By then, Lebanon had begun to shift its position, less because of any formal government policy and more because of the disintegration of the Lebanese state and the emergence of a Palestine Liberation Organization presence in southern Lebanon. Currently, with Syria in chaos, Jordan dependent on Israel and Egypt still maintaining the treaty with Israel despite recent Islamist political gains, only Lebanon poses a threat, and that threat is minor.

The Palestinians therefore lack the political or military support to challenge Israel. This in turn has meant that other countries' alienation over Israeli policy toward the Palestinians has carried little risk. European countries opposed to Israeli policy are unlikely to take significant action. Because political opposition cannot translate into meaningful action, Israel can afford a higher level of aggressiveness toward the Palestinians.

Thus, Israel's strongest interest is in maintaining divisions among its neighbors and maintaining their disinterest in engaging Israel. In different ways, unrest in Egypt and Syria and Iran's regional emergence pose a serious challenge to this strategy.

Egypt

Egypt is the ultimate threat to Israel. It has a huge population and, as it demonstrated in 1973, it is capable of mounting complex military operations.

But to do what it did in 1973, Egypt needed an outside power with an interest in supplying Egypt with massive weaponry and other support. In 1973, that power was the Soviet Union, but the Egyptians reversed their alliance position to the U.S. camp following that war. Once their primary source of weaponry became the United States, using that weaponry depended heavily on U.S. supplies of spare parts and contractors.

At this point, no foreign power would be capable of, or interested in, supporting the Egyptian military should Cairo experience regime change and a break with the United States. And a breach of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty alone would not generate a threat to Israel. The United States would act as a brake on Egyptian military capabilities, and no new source would step in. Even if a new source did emerge, it would take a generation for the Egyptians to become militarily effective using new weapon systems. In the long run, however, Egypt will remain Israel's problem.

Syria

The near-term question is Syria's future. Israel had maintained a complex and not always transparent relationship with the Syrian government. In spite of formal hostilities, the two shared common interests in Lebanon. Israel did not want to manage Lebanon after Israeli failures in the 1980s, but it still wanted Lebanon -- and particularly Hezbollah -- managed. Syria wanted to control Lebanon for political and economic reasons and did not want Israel interfering there. An implicit accommodation was thus possible, one that didn't begin to unravel until the United States forced Syria out of Lebanon, freeing Hezbollah from Syrian controls and setting the stage for the 2006 war.

Israel continued to view the Alawite regime in Syria as preferable to a radical Sunni regime. In the context of the U.S. presence in Iraq, the threat to Israel came from radical Sunni Islamists; Israel's interests lay with whoever opposed them. Today, with the United States out of Iraq and Iran a dominant influence there, the Israelis face a more complex choice. If the regime of President Bashar al Assad survives (with or without al Assad himself), Iran -- which is supplying weapons and advisers to Syria -- will wield much greater influence in Syria. In effect, this would create an Iranian sphere of influence running from western Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria and into Lebanon via Hezbollah. It would create a regional power. And an Iranian regional power would pose severe dangers to Israel.

Read more: Israel's New Strategic Environment | Stratfor

Stratfor and Mira Furlan

The current Stratfor article revisits the Israeli/Palestinian situation in light of the upcoming United Nations vote statehood for the  Palestinians. 

Friedman points out that the vote comes at a time when there is an uneasy truce between the islamist Hamas faction and the more secular Fatah which is a remnant of the old Pan-Arabic movement of days gone by.  Should statehood, or at least some semblance of statehood of it, be granted then a power struggle between the two factions is certain to occur.

Add to the mix Hezbollah is southern Lebanon, both Egypt and Syria in domestic turmoil and even farther out -- Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey all who seek influence in the Middle East and you have a recipe for chaos fraught with a lot of unintended consequences. 

When ever the topic is the mess of Israeli/Palestinian politics I, for obvious reasons, look for an actress with messy hair from the TV show Lost. For this article I've selected Mira Furlan who plays the older version of the character Danielle Rousseau for the honor.

Danielle was a young pregnant women who crashed on the island with a scientific expedition 16 years before the plane in the TV show crashed. After the Smoke Monster rips off the arm of one of the scientists Danielle goes bonkers and kills the rest of them, including her husband, because she thinks they have the sickness. She then gives birth to her daughter Alex, who promptly gets kidnapped by Ben who's an Other and is wearing a bad toupee (kidnapping babies is pretty much of a hobby for folks living on the island).

Danielle spends her time wandering around the jungle jibbering like a lunatic and setting traps baited with teddy bears. I guess she's to trying to recapture Alex with them. When our castaways finally arrive on the island Danielle ends up saving pregnant Claire from the Others, who had drugged Claire in an attempt to kidnap her soon to be born son Aaron. However, being drugged, Claire doesn't remember Danielle helping her.

Claire gives birth and Danielle cooks up the scheme to stampede the castaways with claims that the Others are going to attack them. As they're all running around in a panic over this news Danielle bonks Claire upside the head and kidnaps Aaron so she can trade him for Alex. Meanwhile, as that's going on the Others kidnap Walt, who is another castaway kid

As I said, kidnapping kids is a hobby on the island. In fact, we later learn that on the other side of the island two other castaway kids have already been kidnapped, but that's a story for another day. At any rate, Danielle ends up eventually joining the castaways and getting reunited with her long, lost daughter Alex. Unfortunately... well... let's just say that doesn't work out as well as could be expected. 

As a bonus, after the article I've included the scene where she is first introduced. In the scene she's torturing Sayid, who is a Republican Guard torturer with a heart of gold (yea, it is every bit as goofy as it sounds), in an attempt to get information about Alex's whereabouts. 


ISRAELI-ARAB CRISIS APPROACHING
By George Friedman, August 23, 2011

In September, the U.N. General Assembly will vote on whether to recognize Palestine as an independent and sovereign state with full rights in the United Nations. In many ways, this would appear to be a reasonable and logical step. Whatever the Palestinians once were, they are clearly a nation in the simplest and most important sense -- namely, they think of themselves as a nation. Nations are created by historical circumstances, and those circumstances have given rise to a Palestinian nation. Under the principle of the United Nations and the theory of the right to national self-determination, which is the moral foundation of the modern theory of nationalism, a nation has a right to a state, and that state has a place in the family of nations. In this sense, the U.N. vote will be unexceptional.

However, when the United Nations votes on Palestinian statehood, it will intersect with other realities and other historical processes. First, it is one thing to declare a Palestinian state; it is quite another thing to create one. The Palestinians are deeply divided between two views of what the Palestinian nation ought to be, a division not easily overcome. Second, this vote will come at a time when two of Israel's neighbors are coping with their own internal issues. Syria is in chaos, with an extended and significant resistance against the regime having emerged. Meanwhile, Egypt is struggling with internal tension over the fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the future of the military junta that replaced him. Add to this the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and the potential rise of Iranian power, and the potential recognition of a Palestinian state -- while perfectly logical in an abstract sense -- becomes an event that can force a regional crisis in the midst of ongoing regional crises. It thus is a vote that could have significant consequences.

The Palestinian Divide

Let's begin with the issue not of the right of a nation to have a state but of the nature of a Palestinian state under current circumstances. The Palestinians are split into two major factions. The first, Fatah, dominates the West Bank. Fatah derives its ideology from the older, secular Pan-Arab movement. Historically, Fatah saw the Palestinians as a state within the Arab nation. The second, Hamas, dominates Gaza. Unlike Fatah, it sees the Palestinians as forming part of a broader Islamist uprising, one in which Hamas is the dominant Islamist force of the Palestinian people.

The Pan-Arab rising is moribund. Where it once threatened the existence of Muslim states, like the Arab monarchies, it is now itself threatened. Mubarak, Syrian President Bashar al Assad and Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi all represented the old Pan-Arab vision. A much better way to understand the "Arab Spring" is that it represented the decay of such regimes that were vibrant when they came to power in the late 1960s and early 1970s but have fallen into ideological meaninglessness. Fatah is part of this grouping, and while it still speaks for Palestinian nationalism as a secular movement, beyond that it is isolated from broader trends in the region. It is both at odds with rising religiosity and simultaneously mistrusted by the monarchies it tried to overthrow. Yet it controls the Palestinian proto-state, the Palestinian National Authority, and thus will be claiming a U.N. vote on Palestinian statehood. Hamas, on the other hand, is very much representative of current trends in the Islamic world and holds significant popular support, yet it is not clear that it holds a majority position in the Palestinian nation.

All nations have ideological divisions, but the Palestinians are divided over the fundamental question of the Palestinian nation's identity. Fatah sees itself as part of a secular Arab world that is on the defensive. Hamas envisions the Palestinian nation as an Islamic state forming in the context of a region-wide Islamist rising. Neither is in a position to speak authoritatively for the Palestinian people, and the things that divide them cut to the heart of the nation. As important, each has a different view of its future relations with Israel. Fatah has accepted, in practice, the idea of Israel's permanence as a state and the need of the Palestinians to accommodate themselves to the reality. Hamas has rejected it.

The U.N. decision raises the stakes in this debate within the Palestinian nation that could lead to intense conflict. As vicious as the battle between Hamas and Fatah has been, an uneasy truce has existed over recent years. Now, there could emerge an internationally legitimized state, and control of that state will matter more than ever before. Whoever controls the state defines what the Palestinians are, and it becomes increasingly difficult to suspend the argument for a temporary truce. Rather than settling anything, or putting Israel on the defensive, the vote will compel a Palestinian crisis. [continued after the jump]

Stratfor and Esti Ginzburg

In this Strafor article Friedman discusses the rising tension between Hamas and Israel in light of the protests, revolutions, civil wars and interventions currently roiling the Middle East. 

It would be in Hamas's interest, particularly with the current, weak American Administration, for the unrest in the streets to eventually focus on Israel. However, there has yet to be a convergence between Hamas's interests and the interests of the people conducting uprisings throughout the Middle East. 

Recently, Hamas has resumed a steady drizzle of rocket attacks against Israel. This is likely intended to draw a sharp response from Israel that Hamas hopes would swing the Egyptian, and broader Arabic, crowds to their side. 

So far Israel is responding with restraint, but how long they can maintain a reactive and defensive posture is difficult to say. It seems as if the winds of war are beginning to blow.

For the last Stratfor article involving Israel I chose Bar Refaeli as the Hot Strafor Babe. Ms Rafaeli had drawn criticism for dodging the Israeli draft. One of her harshest critics was Esti Ginzburg, and Israeli model who believes it is the duty of young Israelis to support the draft. 

For that reason I've chosen Esti Ginzburg to be this article's Hot Strafor Babe. There are many pictures of her on the web frolicking around in bikinis and the like, but  I think a picture of her in her IDF uniform is more fitting to illustrate this article. Hopefully her, and all her comrades in arms, will have a peaceful summer after all.


THE ARAB RISINGS, ISRAEL AND HAMAS
By George Friedman, April 12, 2011

There was one striking thing missing from the events in the Middle East in past months: Israel. While certainly mentioned and condemned, none of the demonstrations centered on the issue of Israel. Israel was a side issue for the demonstrators, with the focus being on replacing unpopular rulers.

This is odd. Since even before the creation of the state of Israel, anti-Zionism has been a driving force among the Arab public, perhaps more than it has been with Arab governments. While a few have been willing to develop open diplomatic relations with Israel, many more have maintained informal relations: Numerous Arab governments have been willing to maintain covert relations with Israel, with extensive cooperation on intelligence and related matters. They have been unwilling to incur the displeasure of the Arab masses through open cooperation, however.

That makes it all the more strange that the Arab opposition movements -- from Libya to Bahrain -- have not made overt and covert cooperation with Israel a central issue, if for no other reason than to mobilize the Arab masses. Let me emphasize that Israel was frequently an issue, but not the central one. If we go far back to the rise of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and his revolution for Pan-Arabism and socialism, his issues against King Farouk were tightly bound with anti-Zionism. Similarly, radical Islamists have always made Israel a central issue, yet it wasn't there in this round of unrest. This was particularly surprising with regimes like Egypt's, which had formal relations with Israel.

It is not clear why Israel was not a rallying point. One possible explanation is that the demonstrations in the Islamic world were focused on unpopular leaders and regimes, and the question of local governance was at their heart. That is possible, but particularly as the demonstrations faltered, invoking Israel would have seemed logical as a way to legitimize their cause. Another explanation might have rested in the reason that most of these risings failed, at least to this point, to achieve fundamental change. They were not mass movements involving all classes of society, but to a great extent the young and the better educated. This class was more sophisticated about the world and understood the need for American and European support in the long run; they understood that including Israel in their mix of grievances was likely to reduce Western pressure on the risings' targets. We know of several leaders of the Egyptian rising, for example, who were close to Hamas yet deliberately chose to downplay their relations. They clearly were intensely anti-Israeli but didn't want to make this a crucial issue. In the case of Egypt, they didn't want to alienate the military or the West. They were sophisticated enough to take the matter step by step.

Hamas' Opportunity

A second thing was missing from the unrest: There was no rising, no intifada, in the Palestinian territories. Given the general unrest sweeping the region, it would seem logical that the Palestinian public would have pressed both the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and Hamas to organize massive demonstrations against Israel. This didn't happen.

This clearly didn't displease the PNA, which had no appetite for underwriting another intifada that would have led to massive Israeli responses and disruption of the West Bank's economy. For Hamas in Gaza, however, it was a different case. Hamas was trapped by the Israeli-Egyptian blockade. This blockade limited its ability to access weapons, as well as basic supplies needed to build a minimally functioning economy. It also limited Hamas' ability to build a strong movement in the West Bank that would challenge Fatah's leadership of the PNA there.

Hamas has been isolated and trapped in Gaza. The uprising in Egypt represented a tremendous opportunity for Hamas, as it promised to create a new reality in Gaza. If the demonstrators had succeeded not only in overthrowing Hosni Mubarak but also in forcing true regime change -- or at least forcing the military to change its policy toward Hamas -- the door could have opened for Hamas to have increased dramatically its power and its room to maneuver. Hamas knew that it had supporters among a segment of the demonstrators and that the demonstrators wanted a reversal of Egyptian policy on Israel and Gaza. They were content to wait, however, particularly as the PNA was not prepared to launch an intifada in the West Bank and because one confined to Gaza would have had little effect. So they waited.

For Hamas, a shift in Egyptian policy was the opening that would allow them to become militarily and politically more effective. It didn't happen. The events of the past few months have shown that while the military wanted Mubarak out, it was not prepared to break with Israel or shift its Gaza policy. Most important, the events thus far have shown that the demonstrators were in no position to force the Egyptian military to do anything it didn't want to do. Beyond forcing Mubarak out and perhaps having him put on trial, the basic policies of his regime remained in place. [continued after jump]

Sunday Links

The falling stock of the weak horse.

Waterdrops for all.

Losing the fight over gas prices.

15 sites to cut your operating costs.

Cognition nutrition.

The audacity of narcissism.

The lazy programmer's guide.

Leopard vs. crocodile—caught on camera.

The coming age of government activism.

Cold fusion researcher found to be guilty of scientific misconduct.

Hezbollah's true colors.

From sawdust to biofuel.

France's broken and immoral social model.

Naomi Klein, Howard Rotberg, and the struggle for truth about Israel

I'm sorry I have been absent from Flares for a while as I devoted limited blogging time to trying to build up our little group in Vancouver dedicated to resisting the corrosion of our self-ruling nationhood. One visitor to our Covenant Zone has been the writer, Howard Rotberg, whom I want to tell you about and encourage to check out his book that has landed him in a Kafkaesque nightmare. I will be blogging more about the effectively banned in Canada book and the nightmare. But first, here (below the fold) is a post showing how our media is turning ever more delusional in its quest to appear "progressive", and presenting Howard's response to the invidious Naomi Klein.

Earlier this week, my colleague, Dag, quoted a Palestinian writer who is mightily disturbed that even those Jews who are, like him, politically to the left, may be under the impression that Jewish people have a right to exist as a somewhat compact national people in their own country, like say the Chinese, Pakistanis, or Saudis. In the writer's words:

Those on the "far left," who are [on] the brink of being classified as "self-hating Jews," including self-styled humanitarians such as Meretz MK Yossi Beilin, only serve to massage their own egos and consciences by portraying an image that they are fighting for peace. In reality, these people assign themselves to the same racist and exclusivist ideology that came into form long before the creation of the state of Israel.

Well, it might sound a bit deranged, but he's right, inasmuch as racially-bound and competing communities must have been around since the first human community split into two, some hundreds of thousands of years ago, and racial and/or cultural boundaries have always since remained a part of human life.

But the question he's really asking, while trying to appear authoratative, is this: is a utopian vision of "one-world" with no national or racial boundaries, just one big government, under the hand of, say, Islamic theocrats and/or the technocratic left, more likely to foster peace and harmony (and avoid bloody civil wars) than something like the current inter-national system where nations have a right and a responsibility to defend certain boundaries, including if they so choose (as most nations or states do), racial or religious ones?

The answer is apparent to us here at Covenant Zone, for a number of reasons we frequently discuss and won't recapitulate now. We believe that the blood on the hands of the utopian "one world" or "communist international" left reached around a 100 million in the last century alone (more or less, depending on the individual's brand of leftism - and let's not forget that Hitler was an incipiently post-national leftist), and shows no signs of stopping now with the growing alliance of the left and fundamentalist or Orthodox Islam, not to mention the left's sympathy for various third-world tyrants in the "post-colonial" era.

The horrors of the Western left in supporting angry anti-Western rhetoric, like that Dag uncovered, was again on display in the Georgia Straight last week. The Vancouver weekly reprinted an article by Naomi Klein that originally appeared in Britain's leading leftist paper, the Guardian. It is perhaps not surprising, if heart breaking, that faced with "avant-garde" Palestinian rhetoric in the arenas of "progressive" global opinion elites, rhetoric that now claims even leftist Jews are vile racists if they continue to show any support for Israel's existence as a particular nation (the only serious guarantor of the lives of half the world's Jews), we find leftist Jews, whose very lucrative careers are dependent on one-world leftist "cosmopolitanism", swinging against Israel, as Naomi Klein does.

Klein claims that Israel today has a booming economy because it can sell the world all kinds of security and military hardware and software that is tested on Palestinian "guinea pigs", leading to the implied conclusion that Israel doesn't want to stop its conflict with the Palestinians, which is of course nonsense. The vast majority of Israelis would love to live in peace, as a mostly (not exclusively) Jewish island in a reasonably friendly Arab sea. It's just that many no longer think it likely. The Palestinians, through rejecting peace accords, and enforcing orthodox Islamic opinion, have clearly revealed that they will only accept a peace in which Israel no longer exists in a land Islam claims as its own. Yet despite this, Klein paints the Jews of Israel as profiting mightily from bloodshed, instead of doing what every responsible state must do: provide its people with security, as much security as is necessary given the realistic threats against it and within it.

Klein writes:

All told in 2006, Israel exported $3.4 billion in defence products–well over $1 billion more than it received in U.S. military aid. That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain.

As already noted, there is no secret why Israelis have had to become highly skilled in producing high quality military equipment: their much larger neighbours keep promising to wipe them off the map. Nonetheless, and even if Klein's figures are correct (and we doubt she would low-ball them), $3.4 billion in an economy whose 2006 GDP is estimated as $170.3 billion hardly justifies the portrayal of Israel as an economy built on war and blood, quite aside from the fact that spending on national security is uniquely associated with bloodshed only by nihilists who forget that any amount of peace and security must be defended, and who think that man's growing capacity to do evil must be equated with evil (as if, in a world with nuclear weapons and nuclear power, the outcome must be total devastation of the planet in nuclear war, not cheaper energy and all the social goods that go with it).

In fact, while Israel has the military or technological capacity to wipe out all the Palestinians, they do nothing of the sort. They are usually (with occasional modest and inevitable errors) the epitome of restraint when facing an enemy that vows to wipe one's people out and that increasingly allies with rogue states that will soon have the military technology to do so.

Klein concludes her outrageous diatribe thus:

Palestinians–whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling "Hamasistan"–are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs.

So, in a way, [Tom] Friedman is right: Israel has struck oil. But the oil isn't the imagination of its techie entrepreneurs. The oil is the war on terror, the state of constant fear that creates a bottomless global demand for devices that watch, listen, contain, and target "suspects". And fear, it turns out, is the ultimate renewable resource.

There is, of course, no mention by Klein that much of what she says about Israel can be said about the Palestinians who massively prepare for war, though in somewhat less high-Tech forms, and who are thus rightly feared:

... Hamas was not using a random hit list. Every Hamas patrol carried with it a laptop containing a list of Fatah operatives in Gaza, and an identity number and a star appeared next to each name. A red star meant the operative was to be executed and a blue one meant he was to be shot in the legs - a special, cruel tactic developed by Hamas, in which the shot is fired from the back of the knee so that the kneecap is shattered when the bullet exits the other side. A black star signaled arrest, and no star meant that the Fatah member was to be beaten and released. Hamas patrols took the list with them to hospitals, where they searched for wounded Fatah officials, some of whom they beat up and some of whom they abducted.

Aside from assassinating Fatah officials, Hamas also killed innocent Palestinians, with the intention of deterring the large clans from confronting the organization. Thus it was that 10 days ago, after an hours-long gun battle that ended with Hamas overpowering the Bakr clan from the Shati refugee camp - known as a large, well-armed and dangerous family that supports Fatah - the Hamas military wing removed all the family members from their compound and lined them up against a wall. Militants selected a 14-year-old girl, two women aged 19 and 75, and two elderly men, and shot them to death in cold blood to send a message to all the armed clans of Gaza.

If Hamas will do that to fellow Palestinians, it's outrageous to claim that Israel shouldn't be afraid and that fair-minded people shouldn't see all the Israeli investment in security as an investment in saving lives. Of course, you might choose to disbelieve the above quote, because it appeared in a leftist Israeli paper, Haaretz, which buried the shocking details at the end of the story (hat tip: Boker tov, Boulder). However, you could find similar stories recently, though not given too much attention, in many news outlets. In any case, the stories of recent weeks are quickly downplayed by writers like Klein who belittle the coinage of "Hamasistan". Boker tov Boulder (Anne Lieberman), being in contrast a morally sound kind of Jew, writes:

Politically, I'm about as anti-Palestinian-Arabs as you can get, yet I am shocked and appalled at the deafening silence from the world - yet again - in the face of the rampage by Hamas in Gaza. I am shocked and appalled that in our time people are labeled with numbers and stars, and then abused and killed. That there is not worldwide condemnation is astounding.

Where are the pro-Palestinian activists now? Where are all those bleeding hearts who want Israel to see that the poor palestinians get a state, made up of Israeli concessions? It seems they have left it to us right-wing pro-Israel bloggers to raise a voice in defense of the Palestinian Arab population of Gaza. Ironic, isn't it? But I believe that no one anywhere should ever be treated like this. Not Jews, not Arabs, not any innocent population. Because it's wrong. Whatever the scale, wherever or whenever it happens. It was wrong when the Nazis did it and it's wrong now, when Hamas is doing it. And anyone who is silent in the face of this, is complicit.

Well, I don't expect Naomi Klein (a name presently receiving more than a million Google hits, btw) to be bad mouthing Hamas anytime soon. She seems to be preparing for the release of her new book - The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which will no doubt prove as lucrative in the capitalist marketplace as her previous efforts - by allying herself, intellectually, with those forces that are creating disasters to which capitalism, and by extension its Kleins, must respond.

I remember a period of years when Klein's book No Logo was everywhere. You couldn't walk into a Chapters Bookstore here in Vancouver and not see stacks of them on the front tables. By way of contrast, consider the fate of a much better writer and a visitor to Covenant Zone (we hope to see more of him), whose book has been
effectively banned by Chapters-Indigo (read chapters 2 and 12 of Howard Rotberg's new online book to learn why), a book retailing giant that the Canadian left denounce for its owners' supposed pro-Israel stance, a business which controls something like seventy percent of the Canadian retail book market and which can thus go far in rewarding or silencing Canadian authors.

It is not a question of quality. I have just read Howard Rotberg's first, effectively banned in Canada, book (a novel which, by telling the story of a non-fiction author and his book, provides an excellent account of Israeli-Arab history and its misrepresentations by the Judeophobic opinion of the Western media and political elites who seem hell-bent on preparing the ground for the destruction of Israel in "the Second Holocaust") and highly recommend it. It is not high-brow literary experimentation; it is an accessible and excellent primer for anyone wanting to get their heads straight on why and how the state of Israel must be defended, packaged as an entertaining novel.

When Howard saw Naomi Klein's outrageous article in the Georgia Straight, Vancouver's long-established entertainment and news weekly that mixes leftist opinion (including somewhat pro-Hamas, i.e. somewhat pro-terrorist, articles) with pages mostly devoted to big colourful expensive ads for the latest products of consumer capitalism, he wrote an excellent reply. The Straight published a slightly abridged version of Howard's letter. One thing their editor didn't like was the explicit labelling of Klein as a Jewish anti-Semite. It is perhaps unfortunate that Judeophobia - i.e. resentment of the Jews for being too successful, or creative, and too resistant to competitive attack on such; for being first in discovering/receiving monotheism and all that has gone with that much-envied mark of firstness - is, in today's commonly accepted usage, still labeled "anti-Semitism" (a term which properly applies to a form of nineteenth-century European "scientific" racism and, as such, something Klein might reasonably deny).

But there can be little informed doubt that in this article Klein positions herself in a way that is inimicable to the security of millions of Jews who face a real existential threat against which they must responsibly defend. There is no doubt that Klein's case against Israel is that it is too successful in the inter-national marketplace, because it is too strong in defending itself. In other words, she ascribes to Israel the qualities the "anti-Semite" or Judeophobe (who generally wants the Jews to convert to his faith, or to disappear) traditionally ascribes to the Jew. It takes rhetorical humbug, and ignorance, to deny, as many do, that this kind of anti-Zionism is not also a form of antisemitism or Judeophobia.

So, with Howard's permission, I am pleased to provide the full text of his letter to the editor of the Georgia Straight:

So, Naomi Klein has come up with the original theory that Israel profits mightily from its situation of being surrounded by Arabs who want to destroy it. ("Israel thrives, Gaza suffers", June 21st regarding Israeli exports of anti-terrorism equipment and expertise)

No mention that Israel turned over Gaza to the Palestinians without any quid pro quo.

No mention that Israel is a leader in all aspects of high tech, with such inventions as the computer chip and cell phone technology, and a multitude of medical technology, having been pioneered in Israel. No mention that many large companies like Intel, Motorola, IBM, Microsoft, Alcatel and 3Com all have research and development facilities in Israel. Intel and Motorola also manufacture advanced products in Israel, and many other multinationals have purchased local companies, buying their patents and acquiring their human talent.

No mention that twenty percent of the country's workforce are university graduates, the highest proportion in the world after the U.S., compared with 17% in Canada, 12% in Britain and 8% in Italy. Israel has the world's highest percentage of engineers (135 per 10,000 people compared to 85 per 10,000 in the U.S.) and, with 28,000 physicians, by far the highest number of medical doctors per capita in the world. In addition, Israeli academics publish more scientific papers in international journals (110 for every 10,000 persons) than any other country in the world.

But Klein alleges that "the chaos in Gaza …doesn't threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv and may actually boost it." No mention of the dislocations to the Israeli economy of having to defend itself from periodic attacks, having to take reservists away from their occupations, having to periodically evacuate certain cities, as Iranian-backed terrorists lob missiles across the border. No mention of the threats from possible Iran nuclear weapons.

Why doesn't she mention any of this: Because to anti-Semites like Klein (even Jewish ones), the Israelis are the new Shylocks – driven like Shylock into a business Klein disapproves of, the Jew-Israelis are now making "profits" from the suffering (even the blood) of others. Thank you, Ms. Klein for yet another adaption of the anti-Semitic blood-libel, that Jews drink the blood of Christians/Muslims/whoever.

The "constant state of fear" which Klein alleges the Israelis to be profiting from, was the result of the actions of Islamists and their supporters in anti-Israel Europe. Israel has tried in various ways (the Oslo Process, unilateral disengagement from Gaza) to facilitate an independent Palestinian state, which is lot more than the Arabs ever did. Blaming the Jewish victims of terror for Shylock-like behaviour is despicable.

Klein's article first appeared in Britain's The Guardian. Britain is the world leader in appeasement of Islamist terrorism and intimidation. There is no need, however, for the Georgia Straight to be printing this kind of stuff in Canada. It sickens me.


Howard Rotberg