Concern for the MFO troops -- A Report from Fiji, of All Places

The following news item appeared in Fijilive on Wednesday, January 30:

Fiji officer faces the axe over media report
The Operations officer for the Fiji battalion in Sinai, Major Ilai Moceica, is likely to be sent on the next flight home after a local media report misquoted him. Military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Qiliho told Fijilive that “as a result of the misreporting by the Fiji Times, Major Moceica is likely to lose his job.” The report carried the headline, “Palestinians flood Fiji location,” and mentioned that Fiji soldiers are monitoring the movement of thousands of Palestinians across the Egyptian border. According to Qiliho, Major Moceica had explained to Egyptian authorities that he had been misquoted, but his fate is yet to be decided. Qiliho explained that Palestinians did not flood the Fiji location as reported. Fiji soldiers were stationed at a checkpoint just 100 metres away from where militants blew up the heavy steel wall along the border last week after Israel sealed off all its crossings with Gaza. The Fiji military confirms that all its men are safe.

Sphere: Related Content

Jerusalem Post: "Business Continues as Usual for Sinai Monitors"

According to today's Jerusalem Post:

The recent events on the Gaza-Sinai border have not impacted on the duties or deployment of the some 1,800 members of the Multinational Force and Observers [MFO] team monitoring the 1979 Camp David accords, a senior member of the force said Monday. Michael Sternberg, the MFO director-general's representative in Israel, said he did not anticipate "any changes in deployment of our operations."

Pray that Sternberg's right. The same JP edition reports, "As many as 20 cells may be in Sinai preparing to launch significant attacks on targets in Israel."

Sphere: Related Content

Gaza Chaos Likely to Metastasize Will American/Multi-National Forces in Sinai Turn Tail?

The pictures from the Gaza-Egypt border show tens of thousands of Gazans celebrating their “release” from the Hamas-controlled area. But the mass shopping spree may soon be replaced by a paroxysm of deadly terrorism. Consider the terrorist organizations and targets now in play.

• Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad are now relatively free to travel throughout the Sinai, including the long, lightly defended Egyptian-Israeli border. They are likely equipped with new weapons and explosives obtained from Hamas arsenals in Sinai. Those weapons no longer have to make the arduous route through tunnels into Gaza. Possible targets: All of Eilat and Israeli army positions and remote villages along the border. Exactly one year ago, in January 2007, a suicide bomber from Gaza infiltrated from Sinai and killed three Eilat residents.



• Egyptian resorts in Sinai are high on the terrorists’ target lists, particularly those that cater to Israeli and European tourists. Dozens of guests were killed in a Taba hotel bombing and beach camping areas in October 2004. Al Qaeda was suspected.
  


• Al Jazeera reported on Sunday that Egyptians arrested 20 armed Palestinians in Sinai. They were equipped with explosives and electronic devices to listen to Egyptian military transmissions. If true, the arrest suggests that foreign intelligence services may be playing a role in directing the terrorists. Best guess is Iranian, Hizbullah, and/or al Qaeda involvement.
  


• The 1,800 Multi-National Force and Observers (MFO) in Sinai are sitting ducks for the terrorists. The lightly armed soldiers come from 11 nations, but by far the largest contingent is from the United States. In recent days there were reports that the American forces withdrew from the El Gorah base near Al Arish. U.S.-led multi-national troops are at war with Islamic radicals in Afghanistan and Iraq. Chasing the Americans out of another base in the Middle East will be a great achievement for Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad, Bin Laden, and Assad. In August 2005 an IED was detonated near an MFO vehicle. In April 2006 a suicide bomber attempted to attack an MFO vehicle in Mansoura, Sinai.



• Today, January 27, the Fiji Battalion in Sinai reports that one of its three checkpoints is only 100 meters from where the Gaza security wall was breached. The unit, according to its commander, “is observing and monitoring the movement from Gaza into Egypt and out of the designated zone [emphasis added] of the MFO which we are part of.”
  


• That means that the tremors coming out of Gaza could spread across the Sinai and the Suez into Egypt itself. The Moslem Brotherhood does not require much to ignite riots in the streets of Cairo.

Sphere: Related Content

Hamas Jugend Palestinian Children, R.I.P. -- Rehabilitate Immediately Please

The next phase of the Mohammed al-Dura controversy is expected to be played out in a French court next month. The dubious authenticity of the iconic Mohammed al-Dura video tape seven years ago draws attention to the young age of many of the victims of the Middle East conflict. One such youth, Ahmed Bustam, is a 16-year-old Palestinian boy from Gaza who will probably die a violent death by the time he is 18. One day his name will appear in a story about Gazan youth who tried to plant a bomb on the fence between Gaza and Israel or in a story about a Kassam rocket crew killed by an Israeli missile before they could launch their volley from a teeming alleyway in Gaza.

Someone should be blamed and even brought to trial for Ahmed’s eventual death. Undeniably, Ahmed and thousands of Palestinian children like him are victims of an international war crime and violations of international law. Of course the international kangaroo courts generally blame Israel, but the real culprits who should be put in the dock are the late Yasser Arafat, his Palestinian Authority successors and the leadership of Hamas.

Ahmed Bustam’s name first appeared when he was interviewed in the Gazan neighborhood of Zeitoun by the Daily Telegraph (UK) on May 12, 2004 after six Israelis soldiers died when their armored personnel carrier hit a mine. Ahmed “gleefully recalled how he had approached the destroyed vehicle and removed the head of an Israeli soldier,” the Telegraph related. "People were running after me and we were kicking the head," he said. "We were spitting on it. When we heard a helicopter we started running. I carried the head of the Jew and ran away from the area and I took it to the people in the resistance."

Kicking a human head? What kind of kid plays soccer with a human head? The answer is clear: any Palestinian kid who grew up steeped in Hamas’ hateful propaganda, any Palestinian kid taught to kill, torture and maim by his school teachers, mosque preachers, summer camps, and kiddie television shows.

The pathological brainwashing of Palestinian children preceded Hamas’ takeover of Gaza. One month prior to the outbreak of the Al Aqsa Intifada in late September 2000, New York Times reporter John Burns saw the writing on the children’s wall. On August 2, the Times published Burns’ “Palestinian Summer Camp Offers the Games of War.” Burns described the 90 summer camps across the Palestinian territories – areas ceded by Israel to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords – where 25,000 teenagers were training in the use of firearms, the making of Molotov cocktails, the methods of kidnapping Israeli leaders, and conducting ambushes. But no alarm bells were set off in the United Nations or in the offices of the international human rights watchdogs.

The Palestinians discovered that they were onto something good: if teens could be trained to be killers without any international outcry, why not pre-teens? The Palestinian Authority and Hamas expanded their military training to six year olds! Today YouTube viewers can watch dozens of video clips of Palestinian kindergartens acting out attacks on Israelis with children in uniform and carrying toy guns, or of children extolling the acts of suicide bombers, or of Palestinian TV costumed characters torturing cats. "Since birth,” Sam Kiley wrote in the London Times seven years ago, “Palestinian children have been pumped full of religious fundamentalism which promises paradise for those who die for the cause of free Palestine... Approving or not, the Palestinian authorities have done nothing to stop children playing with their lives. Let's face it, dead kids make great telly." ("A Deadly Game" - Oct. 19, 2000)

In 2002, Yasser Arafat was asked by a Palestinian TV interviewer if he had a message to send to Palestinian children. His response: “The child who is grasping the stone facing the tank - is it not the greatest message to the world when the hero becomes a shahid [martyr]?” [PA TV, January 15, 2002]

An Ugly and Deadly Precedent

One has to go back 70 years to the Hitlerjugend, Hitler Youth, to find children steeped in such depravity. When Hitler took control over the German state the indoctrination of children in National Socialist ideology became an important objective. Speaking at the Reichsparteitag in 1935, Hitler declared, “He alone, who owns the youth, gains the Future!” The Hitlerjugend were indoctrinated in Nazi philosophies and hatred already in the 1930s. Thus by the time World War II broke out, and after years of training, they filled the ranks of the Gestapo and the SS. As explained by one SS commander, “Immature youths had to be transformed into men who lived according to the fundamentals of the SS as fanatic warriors, willing to sacrifice all and give no quarter.”

One such youth was Alfons Heck who joined the Hitlerjugend at the age of 9. "I belonged to Hitler body and soul,” he related. According to Heck’s own account, he and eight million other German Hitler Youth cared for nothing but to win the war or die for Germany and its leader. As a teen, he fought on the French front. When the war ended he was tried and sentenced to a month of hard labor, exhuming mass graves of French prisoners. He refused to believe the atrocities blamed on the Nazis. He admitted that it took 30 years to accept a sense of guilt for the Holocaust.

So pervasive was the Nazi ideology that Heck and millions of Germans were forced to undergo a process of denazification. Nazi officials and their doctrines and practices had to be uprooted from the all cultural, media, political, judicial, and economic institutions. The re-education plan – more like a detox program -- took years to finally cleanse the Nazi poison from the German body politic.

Ahmed Bustam and hundreds of Palestinian youth have been -- and are still being – poisoned, and in some cases fatally. The Oslo process and the “Roadmap” abysmally failed to change the culture of hate that suffuses the Palestinian world. The veteran American negotiator Dennis Ross once reviewed the failed negotiations and admitted that “no negotiation is likely to succeed if there is one environment at the negotiating table and another on the street."

In a 2002 interview, Condoleezza Rice was asked about the Palestinian glorification of suicide bombers. "What does that picture of a baby dressed as a suicide bomber say about the hopes of Palestinians for life with the Israeli people as good neighbors?” she responded. “You know, we've all, in our lives, had experiences with hatred. I certainly have in Birmingham, Alabama. And it all starts with recognizing that the other person is human and deserves a future. If you're going to send your babies and your teenagers to kill other teenagers, something has broken down in this concept of humanity."

[The indoctrination and martyrdom of Palestinian children should at least serve to shut up the Palestinians’ Lady Haw-Haw, Hanan Ashrawi, who took great umbrage when the Palestinian Authority was charged with using Palestinian children as cannon fodder. “"Not even animals would send their children into battle," she said in November 2000. Similarly, in an interview with the Jordan Times in early 2001, Ashrawi said: "The most blatantly racist slur is the Israeli theft of our humanity as parents. In an attempt to rob us of our most basic feelings for our children, we are accused of 'sending children out to die' for the sake of 'scoring media points'."]

How many Palestinian children – including the iconic Mohammed Dura – have died just so that the Palestinian movement could score points, even if it meant committed war crimes against their own children?

According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Courts, the Palestinian recruitment and training of children are violations of international law. [“Conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years into the national armed forces or using them to participate actively in hostilities.”]

President Bush and Secretary of State Rice have come and gone from the Middle East, promising to press forward to achieve Middle East peace. But, unless far-reaching education-for-peace programs are launched and a comprehensive de-hamasization program is introduced by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and prime minister Salam Fayyad, Bush’s initiative will do little more than earn frequent-flier miles for its advocates.

Resources:

Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace

Teach Kids Peace

Palestinian Media Watch

Sphere: Related Content

Israel Agrees to Renew Shipments to Gaza -- Make Them Pay

Collective punishment is also carried out against Israel’s civilians every time Hamas fires a Qassam or Katyusha rocket at Sderot or Ashkelon. Yes, Israel should open the passageways into Gaza but only so that it could trade an oil tanker or a food shipment for every ton of explosives, unfired Katyusha, or 100 RPGs turned over by Hamas for destruction. That would guarantee Gaza thousands of supply trucks.

See Gaza "Blackout" and the Laws of War by J. Peter Pham. "... Notwithstanding the outraged howls from the external enablers of Hamas, there is no basis in international humanitarian law for claiming any belligerent is obliged to supply energy to territory occupied by the enemy, conventional or otherwise."

Sphere: Related Content

Ms. Rice Visited Israel, Not Birmingham, Alabama

Two months ago in Annapolis Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice compared the plight of Palestinians to the experience of African-Americans some 40 years ago in the segregated South. "I know what it is like to hear that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian," she said. "I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness." The reporter continued, “As a black child [pictured with her mother] in the South, [she remembers] being told she could not use certain water fountains or eat in certain restaurants.”

Well, Ms. Rice, I recently returned from the South – southern Israel – and I saw a far different scene from the Jim Crow measures you experienced in the land of the Confederacy. My wife and I drove some 200 miles south from Jerusalem to Eilat, Israel’s “little Riviera,” for a week’s vacation. It coincided with the Muslim holiday of Id al Adha, and we shared Eilat with thousands of Israeli citizens of Muslim faith and Palestinian national identity.

I recall the de facto segregation in the Takoma swimming pool in northwest Washington DC where I grew up. In our Eilat hotel, on the other hand, it was impossible to differentiate between the Israeli Jewish and Muslim kids splashing in the pool. In the 1960s, ten years after Rosa Parks, seating on D.C. Transit buses and at the Peoples Drug Store soda counter reflected a habitual racial separation. There was nothing similar in the Eilat hotel dining room on Friday night which was filled with Jewish families saying Kiddush at their traditional Shabbat meal alongside Arab families partaking of the Ashkenazi gefilte fish and the Sephardi couscous. The Israeli Arabs’ 4x4 monster SUVs cast shadows over our modest sedan at the famous 101 roadside rest stop in the Negev desert where all Israelis – Muslim and Jewish – shared the restaurant, kids’ rides and washrooms.

Anyone suggesting that Jim Crow is present in Israel should be eating crow (except for the fact that it’s not kosher). That includes the Washington Post correspondent Scott Wilson who recently filed a story, “For Israel's Arab Citizens, Isolation and Exclusion.”

Israeli Arabs or Palestinian Israelis

Standing in line at an Eilat supermarket check-out we stood behind an Israeli Arab woman who spoke no Hebrew or English, only Arabic. She was a Palestinian from the West Bank who was married to an Israeli Muslim citizen, one of many West Bankers who have found a surreptitious way to accomplish the Palestinian goal of a “right of return” to the area of pre-1967 Israel.

Instead of traveling a route past the Dead Sea and parallel to the Jordanian border, our drive went straight south along Route 60 from Jerusalem. The first 30 miles were through the southern half of the West Bank, known for centuries as “Judea.” That took us past Hebron (Al Khalil on map), Arab villages and Jewish villages and towns -- misnamed for years as “settlements.” The term connotes temporary, military-style encampments. They’re nothing of the sort, with many stylish residences housing second and third generations of Israeli Jews.

Hundreds of Palestinian cars, trucks, and the distinctive yellow Palestinian taxis shared the road with us. My wife and I, in one of the few cars with the yellow and black Israeli license plates, kept looking for the supposedly omnipresent Israeli Army roadblocks and checkpoints. Frankly, we were a little anxious, and we were a lot curious about Ms. Rice’s complaint that Palestinians “can’t go on a road.” Along the whole route of this major thoroughfare – some 30 – 40 miles we did not see one roadblock or checkpoint! Only at the “crossing points” between the West Bank and pre-1967 Israel did we see checkpoints, established to prevent suicide bombers and terrorist groups from attacking Israeli targets. One such checkpoint recently discovered 6.5 tons of the bomb-making chemical, potassium nitrate, hidden in bags of sugar sent by the European Union as humanitarian aid.

Yes, there are checkpoints – and choke points – around some Palestinian towns, and travel to areas adjacent to Jerusalem and other major Israeli cities is often made difficult as the Israeli army attempts to thwart terrorists going into Israel and Palestinian car thieves fleeing Israel with their loot. But we travelled the length of a large, contiguous Palestinian region where Palestinian school children, merchants, truckers and commuters experienced no interference whatsoever as they traveled.

Ms. Rice, thank God Almighty that the U.S. civil rights movement was led by the likes of Reverends Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy. Imagine how the U.S. government would have reacted if the movement were led by the militant Black Panther’s Booby Seale or Huey Newton, or a terrorist group such as the Symbionese Liberation Army led by Donald “Field Marshal Cinque” DeFreeze. Government agencies probably would have set up roadblocks and checkpoints around every American urban center. Ms. Rice, if a non-violent Palestinian national movement were ever to emerge and really purge the terrorists, then your comparisons would be worthy of consideration.

Sphere: Related Content

Mr. Bush, Thanks for Your Support of Israel, But Stay Out of Israel’s Domestic Politics

Upon arrival at Ben Gurion Airport, George W. Bush was ready for his emergency assignment of assuring Ehud Olmert’s political survival. As he walked down the receiving line and was introduced to Shas’ Minister Eli Yishai, Bush said he “understood he needed to talk to Yishai the next day to convince him to stay in the government,” Ha’aretz reported.

At Thursday night’s dinner in Olmert’s official residence, Bush repeated the message, “"Take care of Olmert, so he will stay in power." Sitting across the table from him were Ministers Yishai, Avigdor Lieberman (Yisrael Beitanu), Ehud Barak (Labor) and Shaul Mofaz (Kadima), all poised to jump Olmert’s leaky ship or push him off the plank after publication of the Winograd Commission investigation of the Lebanon War or if Olmert’s negotiating team goes too far. [All except Lieberman can be seen in the picture to Olmert’s right.]

In 1972 then-Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin was criticized for his support of tricky-Dicky Richard Nixon. American presidents got involved in past elections in Israel, openly exhibiting their opposition to Prime Ministers Shamir and Netanyahu. Involvement in Israel’s domestic politics was wrong then; it’s wrong now. Bush should not be supporting any Israeli, especially one under investigation for misfeasance, nonfeasance and malfeasance.

Sphere: Related Content

Israeli Nuclear Moles in the U.S.? Sounds Hot? It’s Not

A headline ran in Ha’aretz on Sunday: “FBI Translator Says Israel Planted Nuclear ‘Moles’ in U.S.” The paper’s reporter pulled a couple of lines from a story in the Sunday Times of London and voila a major story. Not only is the story an old one, but 99 percent of it deals with Turkish agents in the U.S. And it’s based on the claims of a contract translator, Ms. Sibel Edmonds, who worked a grand total of six months in the FBI. Behind the story, however, may be the “mega” story about American attempts to catch spies in Washington, including Israelis and American Jews.

Ms. Edmonds, a Turkish American, worked as a translator for the FBI after 9/11. Her task: transcribing and evaluating thousands of taped phone conversations, mostly involving senior Turkish diplomats in Washington and Turkish-Americans. She claims that in her six months at the FBI she witnessed misconduct, incompetence and the possible infiltration of her translation unit by Turkish intelligence. Since her firing in 2002, she has become a leader of government “whistle-blowers” and has written extensively about Turkish involvement in narco-terrorism, black-market nuclear activity and illegal contributions to American politicians. Edmonds also rails against the “industrial military complex” and “foreign interests,” such as the Saudis, working in Washington, undermining American national interests. Edmonds claims that the FBI and Justice Department have used draconian measures to silence her criticism. Along the way she has attracted an armada of civil liberty organizations, leftist activists, anti-Turkish Armenian groups, and chronic conspiracy theorists. Perhaps her biggest exposure was in a lengthy Vanity Fair article in August 2005, “An Inconvenient Patriot.”


Israel is barely mentioned in her charges about the corruption and spying in Washington. Until, that is, Sunday’s London Times article, “For Sale: West’s Deadly Nuclear Secrets.” Israel shows up only in the 15th paragraph in a sentence about un-translated FBI tapes dating back to 1997 related to “links between the Turks and Pakistani, Israeli and U.S. targets.” Two paragraphs later the Times continued, “Turks and Israelis had planted ‘moles’ in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology.”

That was enough for Ha’aretz to produce its sensationalist headline.

More Questions than Answers

In the Vanity Fair article, Edmonds described the Washington FBI office where she monitored Turkish conversations along with two other Turkish speakers: “The translation department was housed in a huge, L-shaped room in the F.B.I.’s Washington field office. Some 200 to 300 translators sat in this vast, open space, listening with headphones to digitally recorded wiretaps.”

Some important questions come to mind:

• This was not the National Security Agency or CIA listening in to foreign conversations, this was the FBI’s domestic counter-intelligence office in Washington and other American cities. The investigation into the activities of AIPAC and other American Jewish organizations reportedly began in the late 1990s, even before 9/11 and Pentagon analyst Larry Franklyn came on the scene. What was the FBI looking for?
  
  
  
• Presumably, a large number of wiretap translators were recruited to listen for Arabic-speaking terrorists. Is this how Nada Nadim Prouty, an illegal immigrant with possible Hizbullah ties, found her way into the FBI? In a case of déjà vu, the Vanity Fair article – written in the summer of 2005 – reports that the daughter of a Pakistani general and former military attaché in Washington received a job with top-secret clearance to monitor Pakistani calls in the FBI translation office, despite warnings from a counter-intelligence officer . “FBI director Robert Mueller had promised Congress that the bureau would hire lots of new Middle Eastern linguists, and normal procedures had been short-circuited as a result,” VF reported.



• U.S. intelligence agencies have been searching for imaginary Israeli moles for years, reportedly believing that Jonathan Pollard had an accomplice more than two decades ago. In May 1997, sources leaked to the Washington Post a report that the National Security Agency monitored a conversation between Israeli officials about going to an American official “Mega” to secure a copy of a letter from Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Yasser Arafat. Did they find their mole? The conversation took place months before I arrived at the Israeli Embassy as DCM, but it was clear to me then that Mr. Mega was nothing more than a nickname for an American official authorized to liaise with the government of Israel. The Mega incident as well as Edmonds’ testimony of wiretaps of the Turkish Embassy should be a warning for all garrulous diplomats everywhere.



• Lastly, Edmonds never worked on the Israel/Hebrew desk. The introduction of Israel into the London Times’ story about Edmonds suggests that the anti-Israel, anti-Neo-Con conspiracy theorists may be joining with Edmonds’ supporters. In her recent interviews about the Turkish lobby, Edmonds parrots the charges leveled by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt against the “Israel Lobby.” She even suggests that investigations into AIPAC and the American-Turkish equivalence are linked.

As Washington get closer to the American elections and President Bush’s three months of the interregnum, there’s a scurrying of activity to secure presidential pardons for federal prisoners. The new/old reports and leaks about Israeli spying will increase as efforts are made to secure the release of Jonathan Pollard. It’s important to recognize the leaks for what they are and from whom they come.

Sphere: Related Content

Recommended Reading: Jihadi Jew-Hatred

Jeffrey Goldberg reviews Matthias Küntzel’s new book, Islamis, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, in today’s New York Times. It’s not PC these days to charge Muslims with anti-Semitism (specifically, anti-Jewism, because Arab spokesmen are quick to respond, “We can't be anti-Semitic; we’re also Semites.”). But both Goldberg and Kuntzel bravely swim against the stream.

Writes Goldberg: The anti-Semitic worldview, generally speaking, is fantastically stupid. … Anti-Semitic conspiracy literature not only posits crude and senseless ideas, but also tends to be riddled with typos, repetitions and gross errors of grammar, and for this and other reasons I occasionally have trouble taking it seriously.

The German scholar Matthias Küntzel tells us this is a mistake. He takes anti-Semitism, and in particular its most potent current strain, Muslim anti-Semitism, very seriously indeed. His bracing, even startling, book, “Jihad and Jew-Hatred” reminds us that it is perilous to ignore idiotic ideas if these idiotic ideas are broadly, and fervently, believed. And across the Muslim world, the very worst ideas about Jews — intricate, outlandish conspiracy theories about their malevolent and absolute power over world affairs — have become scandalously ubiquitous….

Küntzel makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism. He says that in the years before World War II, two Muslim leaders in particular willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses. They were Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem (pictured), and the Egyptian proto-Islamist Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood….

Goldberg concludes: The former Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi once told me that “the question is not what the Germans did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to the Germans.” The Jews, he said, deserved their punishment. Küntzel argues that we should see men like Rantisi for what they are: heirs to the mufti, and heirs to the Nazis.

I recently wrote an article called Hamas Jungen (pending publication) that argues that not since the Nazis formed the Hitler Jungen have masses of children been brainwashed to worship death as they are in Palestinian schools, camps and TV. De-nazification was required then for Germany’s children. De-hamasification is the order of the day in the Middle East today.

Sphere: Related Content

Analysis: That’s Not Rain Falling on Ashkelon Heads Will Israeli Government Respond to Katyusha Fire from Gaza?

A 122-mm Katyusha rocket was fired from Gaza this morning and fell in a residential neighborhood north of Ashkelon some 16 kms (10 miles) from the Gaza border. While no one was hurt, the ramifications for the region on the eve of President Bush’s visit could be immense.

For seven years Israel’s governments have been insensitive and obtuse to the plight of Israeli citizens of Sderot and environs who have suffered from the terror of the smaller Qassam rockets and mortars flying out of Gaza. But when 30-kilo Katyusha warheads fall on the heads of 100,000 Ashkelon residents and strategic targets such as a critical power plant and a port, maybe even Ehud Olmert will take note.




[Google Earth provides a satellite glimpse of the proximity between Ashkelon and Gaza. A map available at the University of Texas map collection online is a good reference for current and future events in and around the Gaza Strip.]



Not long after Yasser Arafat’s arrival in Gaza in 1994, Ariel Sharon told me that the Palestinians had succeeded in smuggling Katyusha rockets into Gaza. They were held under the Palestinian Authority’s lock and key. When Gaza fell to Hamas last summer so did the rockets. Subsequently, the several dozen Katyushas were supplemented by scores more that were smuggled into Gaza from Egypt through the infamous tunnels.

Clearly, the rockets are coveted by the Palestinians. Exactly six years ago to the day the PA’s Karine A ship was intercepted with its 50 tons of Iranian-supplied weaponry, including 50 Katyushas.

Today’s Katyusha was not the first fired from Gaza. In March 2006 a Katyusha was fired and fell harmlessly near a kibbutz. But today’s Katyusha fell in a populated area, and its launch crew may have been trained in Iran. These rockets are assembly line weapons; not Qassam rockets made in some Gazan back-alley workshop. While Hamas now has tons of high quality explosives to improve the Qassam lethality, they can’t approach the Katyusha’s 22 km (14 mile) range. (Note the pictures: The Katyusha requires two men to carry; the Qassam only one.)

There are tens of thousands of Katyushas available on the black market around the world or being manufactured by “Axis of Evil” countries. A couple of years ago I photographed hundreds of the rockets stacked pell-mell at a supply base in an eastern European country. The base’s security was almost non-existent, and no inventory measures had been taken to indicate whether weapons were missing.

Hamas clearly seeks to replicate Hizbullah’s tactics and successes against Israel. Both are funded and trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Long-range indiscriminate rocket fire and tunnels (see Mining for Trouble in Lebanon ) are their trademarks. Israel’s northern residents evacuated their cities and towns when they suffered Katyusha barrages in previous attacks. A large percentage of Sderot’s citizens have left because of the Qassams. Will Ashkelon be next?

No doubt, Syria and Iran want to disrupt Bush’s visit any way they can.

Lebanon, beware.

Sphere: Related Content