Conflict Blotter

The latest development on the Syria front is a report in Jane’s Defence Weekly reported today in the Israeli press. According to Jane’s, as relayed by Yediot Aharanot, 15 Syrian officers and dozens of Iranian experts died earlier this symmer in an explosion at a missile installation for manufacturing chemical weapons southeast of Aleppo (see […]

[Read more →]

Here’s a court case worth following. An Israeli court began hearing on Tuesday a lawsuit, filed by five Israeli soldiers who fought in Jenin refugee camp during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, against the director of the 2002 documentary “Jenin, Jenin.”
According to the Jerusalem Post, the plaintiffs site 13 incidents of libel […]

[Read more →]

There have been a pair of reports on the woeful state of the Palestinian economy this week. A British government report released yesterday called on Israel to strike a balance between short-term security needs and Palestiniain economic development. The report argues that removing checkpoints and road blocks in the West Bank and thus freeing […]

[Read more →]

The US State Department has grown sore with Israeli airport screeners’ treatment of American citizens of Arab descent, Haaretz reports.
The State Department officials stressed that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was very perturbed by this issue and said they expected immediate improvement.
They also warned their Israeli counterparts that unless there was a change, they would […]

[Read more →]

I just came back from the Jerusalem peace concert, headlined by the Black Eyed Peas, whose lead singer Will.i.Am offered repeated and ringing “I love Israel” endorsements during the show.  He even suggested he might convert to Judaism and move to Israel because it has the most beautiful girls in the world. It looks like […]

[Read more →]

Ever since spring we’ve been hearing in the local media and elsewhere that Israeli intelligence and military officials thought the summer of 2007 would be eventful. They warned of war with Syria, or a round two with Hezbollah, or with a shodown with Hamas in Gaza. But the summer just ticked on quietly. The alarmists […]

[Read more →]

One of the more healthy means of dealing with Holocaust traumas, I’d say. As a journalist, this is a story I’m kicking myself for having missed.
Read under the table by a generation of pubescent Israelis, often the children of survivors, the Stalags were named for the World War II prisoner-of-war camps in which they were […]

[Read more →]

I was in Sinai over the weekend and the chatter among vacationing Cairenes was all about the rumors of the 79 year old Mubarak’s demise. The regime has blamed the Muslim Brotherhood and even Hamas for spreading lies to destabilise the regime. Abu Aardvark offers a nice review of the incident and its ramifications. He […]

[Read more →]

 As I’ve written before, Lebanon is the most logical next target for global jihad in the Middle East. Here’s Nic Blanford’s latest:
Fatah al-Islam, which violently burst onto Lebanon’s turbulent political scene, triggered the worst internal violence since the 1975-19 civil war. But even though its leader, Shaker al-Absi, is dead and almost all his militants […]

[Read more →]