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The U.S. State Department has notified Congress of the biggest arms sale in American history – a $60 billion purchase by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Totally offensive in nature, the package, with its attack planes, helicopters, and “bunker-buster” bombs, was clearly designed to deter Iran. King Abdullah has also significantly upgraded the Saudi Arabian National Guard, which amounts to the personal militia of his family faction.
How do we resolve the dilemma of a peace agreement that includes handing over the Golan Heights to the Syrians, while facing the fact that Israel cannot be defended without the Golan Heights? The way around this was supposed to be the inclusion in any peace agreement of specific security arrangements. Yet this approach was based on a number of assumptions, all of them misguided.
Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s visit to Lebanon constitutes an additional stage in the process of the Lebanese state’s collapse. From now on, Hizbullah supporters will find it difficult to argue that theirs is a national Lebanese party operating in the Lebanese reality on behalf of Lebanese objectives.
According to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the real root of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians had been their ongoing refusal to recognize "the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own in their historic homeland" and he has singled out this issue as a key "prerequisite for ending the conflict." Netanyahu's proposal puts back on the global agenda a fundamental Jewish national right that was once axiomatic but today is rarely mentioned.
This analysis identifies patterns exhibited by the Iranian government and the Iranian people since ancient times. Most importantly, it identifies critical elements of Iranian culture that have been systematically ignored by policymakers for decades. It is a precise understanding of these cultural cues that should guide policy objective toward the Iranian government.
To stand any real chance of success, every insurgent or terrorist movement needs a safe haven to operate from. Israel has had more than a flavor of what it can mean to leave hostile groups in control of lands adjacent to its own borders in southern Lebanon and in Gaza. Any similar move to totally cede control to the Palestinians of the West Bank or a part of Jerusalem would carry immense risk. 
U.S. policy since 1967, developed under President Johnson, included the idea that the so-called ’67 borders were incapable of providing Israel with adequate defense and would change. The letter from President Bush to Prime Minister Sharon of April 14, 2004, makes no reference to the ’67 borders. It refers to “the armistice lines of 1949.
President Obama came into office with strong preconceptions about foreign policy and especially about the Arab-Israeli conflict. The main result of the administration’s new policy was to encourage the Palestinians to take more hard-line positions. Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas began to insist on preconditions for direct negotiations which never existed before.
Jerusalem has a population of 800,000 people today, which will grow to a million people twenty years from now. The current population ratio is one-third Muslim, two-thirds Jewish, and two percent Christian. In the next twenty years, we anticipate a need for 50,000 apartments – one-third for the Arab population and two-thirds for the Jewish population. Jerusalem must stay united. There is not one example in the world of a divided city that ever worked.
A ship that clearly intends to breach a lawful blockade may be stopped when it is still on the high seas. Stopping the flotilla heading for Gaza in international waters 100 kilometers from Israel was not illegal; in time of armed conflict, ships intending to breach the blockade may be searched even on the high seas. Israel is in full compliance with international law because it fulfilled all of the conditions for a lawful blockade.
The PLO platform, as reaffirmed in the Fatah Congress in August 2009, states that their struggle will not stop until the Zionist entity is eliminated and Palestine is liberated. As a logical corollary, they refuse to accept Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. The Palestinian leadership insists that negotiations now start at the point they had reached with Olmert at the end of 2008. That means they are not satisfied with what was put on the table a year ago. They want more than that.
Gaza is not cut off from the outside world. In the last year, the markets of Gaza have been flooded with produce and merchandise. From June 2007 (the date of the Hamas military takeover of Gaza), overall monetary transfers to Gaza have totaled over $5 billion from governmental and extragovernmental sources.
The Egyptians have effectively manipulated the Iranian issue in order to advance their long-term nuclear objectives vis-a-vis Israel, and have created a new linkage between Iran and Israel. The Egyptian argument of linkage is completely baseless. Iran's drive for nuclear weapons emanates from its regional ambitions to become the main hegemonial power in the Middle East. Even if Israel did not exist, Iran would still be racing to develop nuclear weapons to further its own ambitions.
Israel's creation, far from being a foreign colonial transplant, can actually be seen as the vanguard of and impetus for decolonialization of the entire Middle East, including a significant part of the Arab world. It is not popularly recognized how the Arab world benefited from the Balfour Declaration, which served to advance their own independence from the colonial powers of England and France.
Mahmoud Abbas' new precondition that the international community recognize the 1967 lines in the West Bank as the new Palestinian border bolsters the assessment that the Palestinians have largely abandoned a negotiated settlement and instead are actively pursuing a unilateral approach to statehood. 
Iran is vigorously pursuing several missile and space programs at an almost feverish pace with impressive achievements. The solid-propellant Sejil missile signifies a breakthrough. Iran will face no significant hurdle in upscaling the Sejil to put most of the EU under threat.
In seeking to constrain Israeli settlement activity, the U.S. is essentially trying to obtain additional Israeli concessions that were not formally required according to Israel's legal obligations under the Oslo Accords. The U.S. and Israel have already negotiated specific guidelines for settlement activity so that it will not diminish the territory of a future Palestinian entity. Given the fact that the amount of territory taken up by the built-up areas of all the settlements in the West Bank is 1.7% of the territory, the marginal increase in territory that might be affected by natural growth is infinitesimal. It might be that the present tension in U.S.-Israeli relations is not over settlements, but rather over the extent of an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank that the Obama administration envisions.
The highly acclaimed Daily Alert Internet newsletter,
produced for the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish
Organizations by the Jerusalem Center, offers 100 hyperlinked
excerpts of Israel-related news stories each week from mainstream
English and Hebrew media sources.
When Prime Minister Ariel Sharon first proposed his Gaza Disengagement Plan he did not seek a quid pro quo from the Palestinian side. Instead, he obtained one from the United States in the form of a letter from President George W. Bush, dated April 14, 2004, in which the U.S. assured Israel that with respect to the disputed West Bank, Israel was entitled to defensible borders. How the idea of defensible borders works into the post-Iraq War Middle East is fully examined as well as the territorial, legal, and policy implications of this critical U.S. guarantee.
The Jewish majority in Jerusalem is declining due to the mass migration of the Jewish population from Jerusalem, together with the migration of an additional Arab population into Jerusalem. According to the proposed master plan for the city, the planned inventory of Jewish housing does not meet expected needs for 2020, while the planned inventory of Arab housing will suffice until at least 2030. 
Amb. Dore Gold and Judge Richard Goldstone discuss the UN Report on war crimes in Gaza at Brandeis University.
As the uses of force in Somalia, Kosovo, and Iraq show, Western armies are very concerned about protecting the lives of their soldiers, and to that end are willing to risk many civilian lives. They also find acceptable the notion that civilian lives can be forfeited in order to attain important military goals. 
The principle of universal jurisdiction has been, and continues to be, an important tool in the legal practitioner's tool box and an essential means for achieving justice for international crimes. Unfortunately, the principle has also become a political device employed for far more cynical means and far less noble purposes. In the early 1960s, Israel was one of the first states to invoke the principle of universal jurisdiction in its groundbreaking trial against Adolf Eichmann, the "architect of the Holocaust."
Israel is a multi-racial society, and the Arab minority actively participates in the political process. There are Arab parliamentarians, Arab judges including on the Supreme Court, Arab cabinet ministers, Arab heads of hospital departments, Arab university professors, Arab diplomats in the Foreign Service, and very senior Arab police and army officers. Incitement to racism in Israel is a criminal offence, as is discrimination on the basis of race or religion. The comparison of Israel to South Africa under white supremist rule has been utterly rejected by those with intimate understanding of the old Apartheid system.
Israeli-Syrian negotiations in 1999-2000 discussed security arrangements to compensate Israel for the loss of the Golan Heights. The idea was to guarantee that in case of war, IDF forces could quickly return to the place where they are currently stationed. This analysis demonstrates that Israel does not possess a plausible solution to its security needs without the Golan Heights. Not only was the "solution" proposed in the year 2000 implausible at the time, but changing circumstances have rendered Israel's forfeiture of the Golan today an even more reckless act.
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., Saudi Arabia was under intense scrutiny since 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. In Feb. 2002, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia proposed to Israel "full withdrawal" from the territories in return for "full normalization." In a flash, Abdullah transformed the discourse from Saudi involvement in terrorism to Saudi peacemaking. However, by the time the Abdullah trial balloon reached the Arab summit in Beirut in March 2002, the initiative had been modified and its terms hardened. It watered down "full normalization," rewarded Syria with a presence on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, and enshrined a Palestinian "right of return" to Israel.
IDF Maj.-Gen. (res.) Doron Almog addressed a conference in London on Nov. 26, sponsored by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Global Law Forum and the Henry Jackson Society, through a video link, since according to British law he could be arrested in Britain for allegations made by Palestinian activists with regard to his past efforts to fight terrorist organizations in Gaza.
Iran has accelerated its quest for regional supremacy through its mobilization of both Shiite and Sunni terror surrogates, including Hizbullah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq and in the Gulf, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigades in the Palestinian territories. This pivotal Iranian role has unfortunately not been fully appreciated, and even downplayed in certain quarters.
The main recurrent motif in Arab cartoons concerning Israel is "the devilish Jew." This image conveys the idea that Jews behave like Nazis, kill children and love blood. The similarity with themes promulgated by the Nazis is evident. Many Arab cartoons praise suicide bombing or call for murder. The collective image of the Jews thus projected lays the groundwork for a possible genocide.
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