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Found 1294 articles

DEBKAfile lifts fog from the Obama-Netanyahu balance sheet

August 10, 2009, 10:25 PM (GMT+02:00)

Almost a week after Israeli prime minister held his first talks with US president Barack Obama at the White House, last Tuesday, May 18, some of the fog obscuring their content is finally beginning to clear. The White House was forced to rebut a major misapprehension, that the US president would use his June 4 speech in Cairo to launch a new Middle East peace plan. There never was such a plan, DEBKAfile's Washington sources confirm. Obama did not demand the repartition of Jerusalem; neither is he keen to pursue the Palestinian issue at all at this time. He was mostly after space to engage in negotiation with Tehran without the threat of a surprise Israeli military strike against Iran's nuclear sites hanging over the talks. Netanyahu, on the one hand, persuaded Obama for the first time to accept a time limit for those talks; on the other, it is longer than Israel thinks safe. But he stood by his refusal to endorse Obama's "two state" solution of the Palestinian issue in return. Still, he knew the deadline would be hard to sell at home, especially after Iran successfully test- fired its first accurate long-range surface to surface missile while he was still in Washington.
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Obama committed to close ties with Israel - but demands settlement freeze

June 30, 2009, 1:25 PM (GMT+02:00)

Ahead of his high-profile speech of reconciliation to the Muslims world June 4, US president Barack Obama vowed to sustain close US tie with Israel but said the status quo in the region was "unsustainable" for Israel's security. In a National Public Radio interview late Monday, June 1, he emphasized his differences with Israel when he said: "We do have to retain a constant belief in… negotiations that will lead to peace" and "I've said that a freeze on settlements, including expansion to accommodate successive generations of settlers, is part of that." Israeli leaders must practice the same honesty as the United States - and be less defensive, say DEBKAfile's political sources, and say out loud that the Arab and Muslim world thrusts the "Middle East" issue, a euphemism for Israel, to the fore to present a solid front to the West, while avoiding addressing the real problems afflicting their societies and relations with the United States.
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Washington infighting mutes Netanyahu-Obama differences

June 28, 2009, 3:55 PM (GMT+02:00)

Netanyahu, Obama met before they won office

In less than a month, aides in Washington and Jerusalem have transmuted the head-on clash forecast for the first meeting between Binyamin Netanyahu has Israel's prime minister and US president Barack Obama Monday, May 18, into a warm, amicable encounter, DEBKAfile's political analysts say. This is less thanks to the Likud prime minister having softened his positions on Iran and the Palestinian issue, more to the political furor gripping Democratic Washington and the fraying of the president's key Middle East policies: Expectations of constructive dialogue with Tehran have receded, the Turkish-Syrian get-together Obama fostered has turned its back on Washington and the Palestinians are incapable of uniting on power-sharing or representation. Options for curtailing Iran's nuclear program will be tossed back and forth at length, according to Netanyahu's national security adviser Uzi Arad. He has said that so long as the Islamic Republic never gets its hands on a bomb, it is immaterial how this objective is achieved.
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Netanyahu-Mubarak Talks Aim to produce Arab-Israeli Front versus Iran

June 13, 2009, 6:01 PM (GMT+02:00)

Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak open to ideas for resisting Iran

If successful, Binyamin Netanyahu's first meeting as Israeli prime minister with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak at Sharm el Sheikh Monday, May 11, may well mark an epic turning-point in Middle East history recalling the 1979 peace breakthrough with Egypt. Their common goals – and Mubarak speaks for the Saudi king Abdullah on this issue – are the formation of an Arab-Israeli front against Iran and putting a spoke in US president Barack Obama's planned détente with Tehran. Most of all, the Netanyahu government utterly rejects the Palestinian-Iran tradeoff proposed by the Obama administration - and reaffirmed by US National adviser Gen. James Jones Sunday - that a two state-solution would diminish Iran's existential threat to Israel. Israel points out that no guarantees are offered for the latter. Therefore, Netanyahu prefers to put the Iranian menace on a different, regional footing.
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Netanyahu heads for collision with Obama administration

June 9, 2009, 12:53 PM (GMT+02:00)

Israeli PM Netanyahu vows to stop Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb

Israeli president Shimon Peres' task in Washington on May 4-5 is to blunt the sharp edge the White House is honing to force Israel to toe the new Washington line on the Palestinians, Syria and Iran. Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu can expect the full force of a bludgeon to be wielded in his White House talks on May 18. DEBKAfile's Washington sources report that their host is fired up to be the first US president in decades of close friendship and cooperation to clash openly with Israel and the bulk of US Jewry. Oblivious to Israel's claim of US support for its security in a hostile regional environment, Barack Obama is expected to squeeze the Netanyahu government hard for immediate engagement on the Middle East conflict without further delay. Peres and Netanyahu will be informed that Washington is setting up two trilateral peace commissions to hammer out peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians and Israel with the Syrians. US officials in both chairs will intercede with their own ideas to prevent them running into deadlock on disputed issues.
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Washington Helps Curtail Iran's Covert Suez Thrust

June 2, 2009, 10:19 AM (GMT+02:00)

Hassan Nasrallah: Iran's red herring

From early 2006, Egyptian and Western security services and Israeli intelligence have been aware of Hizballah's smuggling operations for Hamas on behalf of Tehran and Iran's covert networks in Sinai and the Suez Canal cities of Port Said, Suez and Ismailia. But last Wednesday, April 8, Cairo disclosed that Egyptian security forces had arrested 49 men, 41 Egyptians, seven Israeli Arabs, and one Lebanese citizen on charges of supporting Hamas and Hizballah. Iran was not mentioned. The arrests had begun last November and were continuing. The disclosure sparked a slanging match between Cairo and Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Yet neither touched the real bone of contention. It suited neither party to admit that the gang Cairo exposed led to a major undercover Iranian network operating in Egypt for three years. In the event of an American or Israeli military strike against its nuclear facilities, Tehran would have resources in place for retaliating against Saudi and Western traffic passing through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the waters off the Horn of Africa.
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Israel's Air & Missile Forces Could Wipe out Iran's Nuclear Sites

May 28, 2009, 7:43 PM (GMT+02:00)

The detailed report compiled by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) in Washington last month, complete with graphs and diagrams, has been reprinted in thousands of copies in Tehran. It is compulsory reading for its intelligence and Revolutionary Guards personnel because the Study on a Possible Israeli Strike on Iran's Nuclear Development Facilities concludes that the Jewish state has all the resources necessary for a successful strike. The CSIS paper maintains there is no need to destroy dozens or hundreds of sites; the destruction of seven to nine targets would be enough to cripple the Iranian program.
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Obama's charm offensive for radical rulers abandons Israel to Iranian threat

May 23, 2009, 2:54 PM (GMT+02:00)

The new US president's dramatic global policy shifts have easily dwarfed the knotty Israeli-Palestinian peace issue handed down from one US president to the next over decades. Barack Obama's outstretched hand to Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Iran's best friend in the Americas, on April 17, at the summit of American leaders in Port of Prince, made the talk surrounding Special Middle East Envoy George Mitchell's mission to Jerusalem and Ramallah this week sound eerily like voices from the past. Barack Obama has set his sights and heart on friendship with the rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran and their radical allies. The name and policies of the occupant of the prime minister's office in Jerusalem do not matter - any more than Tehran's determination to complete its nuclear weapons program in defiance of the world, or even its first A-bomb test in a year or two, for which intelligence sources report Tehran is already getting set. Washington may believe it can live with a nuclear-armed Iran – a decision probably taken first under the Bush presidency. But Israel cannot. Binyamin Netanyahu can either follow in the steps of Menahim Begin who bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor, or bow in the wind until the Obama tempest blows over.
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Netanyahu names professionals to his new inner military-security cabinet

May 23, 2009, 2:53 PM (GMT+02:00)

Moshe Yaalon, new minister for strategic affairs

Preparing to take over as Israel's 32nd prime minister this week, Binyamin Netanyahu bound 7-8 ministers and senior officials into a powerful new body to assist him in top-level decision-making on military, diplomatic, security and intelligence policy-making and actions. Its members fall into two main groups, military and strategic-intelligence. Their input will guide Netanyahu's steps on such critical matters as whether to strike Iran's nuclear facilities or the tenor of his government's relations with the Obama administration. It will be up to him as prime minister to pick his way among the divergent views offered him, because the members of the two teams, far from being yes-men, are individualists on the security issues in their fields of expertise
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