Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the official ceremony for Holocaust Remembrance Day on Sunday to warn about the Iranian threat. “The world gradually accepts Iran’s statements of destruction against Israel and we still do not see the necessary international determination to stop Iran from arming,” Netanyahu said, calling on “all enlightened countries” to strongly condemn Iran and act with “genuine determination” to prevent it from building nuclear weapons. Go to Haaretz.

The world clustered around Barack Obama yesterday – with one very notable exception. Leaders of some 40 countries, from Argentina and Armenia to China and India, gathered in Washington to attend the nuclear security summit convoked by the US president. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, stayed away. Go to Financial Times.

Free Iran:  An incredibly alarmist, and over the top essay.  It’s this kind of irresponsible, sensational nonsense that leads to disasetours decions and actions.

President Obama’s naive belief in rationality could turn Israeli cities into cemeteries.

Obama confidently assumes that Tehran could be dealt with using the normally-compelling dynamics of nuclear deterrence. The problem with such threat-based optimism, however, is the always-underlying presumption of enemy rationality. Without rationality, deterrence will fail. Go to original article.

JERUSALEM (AP) — The mournful wail of air raid sirens pierced the air on Monday, bringing hectic Israel to a standstill as the country built on the ashes of the Nazi Holocaust remembered the 6 million Jews who perished in World War II.

Looming over Israel’s annual memorial for the Holocaust dead was its fear of a nuclear attack by Iran — and Israel’s prime minister used the occasion to upbraid the world for not curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Also at NPR — Go to NY Times.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres used the platform at yesterday’s Holocaust Remembrance Day memorial ceremony at Yad Vashem to urge countries around the world to work unwaveringly to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Also at JPost — Go to Haaretz.

In the midst of the recent U.S.-Israeli tumult, a curious conventional wisdom is starting to evolve. A Washington that cajoles Israel on its settlements and resumes the peace process in earnest may finally garner Arab support for dealing with Iran’s nuclear menace. Although pressuring Israel to restrain its settlements may be a sensible means of gaining constructive Arab participation in the peace talks, it is unlikely to affect the region’s passive approach to Iran. Indeed, should Tehran perceive fissures and divisions in U.S.-Israeli alliance, it is likely to further harden its nuclear stance. Go to Washington Post.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided not to attend next week’s nuclear summit in Washington. Israeli officials say Arab and other Muslim nations are likely to raise Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal at the conference. But that’s not his only reason for staying away from D.C. Also at AP – Go to NPR.

Binyamin Netanyahu’s refusal to attend a summit in the US is less to do with defence and more about East Jerusalem. Go to Guardian.

WASHINGTON—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided not to attend the Obama administration’s high-profile summit next week on nuclear terrorism and will instead send a deputy who oversees nuclear issues, the White House said Thursday. Go to WSJ.

Col. Sima Vaknin-Gil is the chief military censor. In the following conversation, she answers questions in the wake of what has been dubbed the “censorship scandal” – the banning of an affair from publication for an extended period of time.

Israel’s defense establishment had at last decided to withdraw its support of a months-long blanket gag order on a security-related affair, Haaretz learned Wednesday, with the names of those involved in the case and the charges leveled against them to be possibly released as soon as Thursday.

Sima Vaknin-Gil, according to Pulitzer Prize winner Judith Miller, the censorship in Israel resembles that in Iran. Is this true?

“Judith Miller is not an Israeli correspondent, she is not familiar with the censorship here and does not conduct any work related it. When she writes something that is incorrect, all I can do is merely chuckle or feel sorry. But when an Israeli newspaper takes this and turns it into a headline; and blackens parts of the article that of course did not even pass through our [censorship] because it was written and published abroad; and chooses to blacken parts because it knows some of them have been banned from publication by court order; and then it is presented as if that is censorship of the press and the media; all of that falls somewhere between being annoying and being harmful. Not for me personally, or for people in the censor’s office, but harmful mainly to the State of Israel. We come off as a third-world country and anyone who works with the censor knows that is not true. Israeli journalists don’t think we are draconian – because we aren’t.”

That refers to the censor who, as you always stress, censors only things that are connected to, or directly threaten, state security.

“More so, there is a legal test that obliges us daily and makes it extremely difficult when one wants to censor something. That is the test of near certainty which is a very high threshold. Only when you think that you have reached this threshold are you permitted to remove information from an article.”

But this test is not valid when talking about a gag order…

Go to Haaretz.

In response to a rocket attack, Israel launched multiple air strikes on Gaza early Friday and threatened a second Gaza war if Palestinian militants do not cease their rocket attacks. The air strikes targeted what Israel said were weapons manufacturing and storage sites. Palestinians said the sites struck included workshops and a factory.

No one was killed in the air strikes or the rocket attack from Gaza on Thursday, though three children were wounded in the Israeli strike.

The air strikes come as tension has increased between Gaza and Israel recently after a period of relative calm following Israel’s three-week winter offensive in Gaza last year.

Agence France-Presse reports that Israel’s deputy prime minister, Silvan Shalom, threatened to use stronger force in Gaza if the rocket attacks do not stop.

“If this rocket fire against Israel does not stop, it seems we will have to raise the level of our activity and step up our actions against Hamas,” Shalom told public radio.

“We won’t allow frightened children to again be raised in bomb shelters and so, in the end, it will force us to launch another military operation,” said the deputy premier.

“I hope we can avoid it, but it is one of the options we have, and if we don’t have a choice, we will use it in the near future,” he said.

Hamas leader in Gaza Ismail Haniya responded by blaming Israel for escalating tension and calling on the international community to end Israel’s “aggression.”

A BBC video reports that four of the air strikes hit near the area where the two Israeli soldiers were killed last week. It called the strikes the heaviest attacks since the war in Gaza last year, when more than 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died.

Also:

MSNBC:  Israeli warplanes bomb Gaza Strip

Go to CS Monitor.

Free Iran:  A very weak case against containment by the far right Jerusalem Post Editorial.  They make their case at the end but provide interesting information up till then.

The idea of “containment” seems to be marginalizing any last prospect of a preemptive military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.

Indications are beginning to multiply that the Obama administration’s decision to drastically ratchet up pressure on Israel over building in east Jerusalem might be tied to the US’s de facto policy of avoiding a military confrontation with Teheran.

Although US officials publicly deny this, recent weeks have seen growing signs that the United States is reconciling itself to a nuclear Iran.

The idea of “containment” – based on the conception that what worked during the Cold War with the USSR and China will work with the mullahs now – seems to be marginalizing any last prospect of a preemptive military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities if, or rather when, the current effort at engagement and sanctions is recognized as having failed. The idea seems to be that when a nuclear Iran appears, it will be deterred from directly utilizing its nuclear capability or exporting it to the likes of Hizbullah and Hamas.

In a recent news analysis, New York Times reporter David Sanger quoted extensively from the latest cover story of Foreign Policy, entitled “After Iran Gets the Bomb,” and stated flatly that “the administration is deep into containment now – though it insists its increases in defensive power in the Gulf are meant to deter a conventional attack by Iran.”

And while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking at the policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last week, said no fewer than four times in quick succession that a nuclear-armed Iran would be “unacceptable,” she also refrained from directly mentioning the possibility of military intervention.

Nor did revelations this week that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has apparently ordered work to begin soon on two new nuclear plants, to be built inside mountains to protect them from attack, elicit a more aggressive US response.

One of the leading proponents of “containment” is Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser and an enthusiastic supporter of Obama who has warned against the fallout from a military strike on Iran.

Against this backdrop, the Obama administration’s deliberately overblown reaction to the expansion of a haredi neighborhood in east Jerusalem can be interpreted as a warning that Israel no longer enjoys Washington’s unconditional support in all spheres. As Stephen Hayes put it in a recent piece in the Weekly Standard, “You think we overreacted to a housing spat in Jerusalem? Try bombing Iran.”

Indeed, Brzezinski, who worked on a policy paper on Iran with US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates back in 2004 at the Council of Foreign Relations, said in an interview with The Beast in 2009 that US armed forced should shoot down Israeli fighter planes if they bucked US orders and attacked Iranian nuclear facilities.

WITHIN THE framework of the US’s emerging strategy of containment, an Israel pushing for military intervention is a liability. An Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities without US backing is almost out of the question.Israel would need US permission to overfly Iraq, to refuel and to repair IAF fighter planes in regional US army bases. Even if Israel were to decide it was compelled to act and somehow manage without technical aid from the US, it is now unclear whether the US would backIsrael in the UN Security Council and beyond amid the inevitably condemnatory diplomatic, economic and military aftermath.

Yet Israel must continue to resist containment. A nuclear Iran does not merely remake the balance of power in the Middle East and embolden the Islamists in their rapacious struggle against the West; it is an existential threat toIsrael.

Even if one believes that Teheran is sufficiently “pragmatic” not to strike directly at the Jewish state whose elimination it overtly seeks, no one can guarantee that fundamentalist Teheran would not slip a crude bomb or material to Hamas, Hizbullah or an al-Qaida-inspired terror network.

The appeasement of anti-Semitic, anti-Western mullahs, who see themselves in the ascendant and can claim vast millions of supporters globally, cannot be compared to the Cold War standoff with aging, ideologically bankrupt Soviet apparatchiks. The present confrontation more closely resembles Hitler’s decision in 1936 to send German troops into the Rhineland – belligerently violating the Versailles Treaty – while France and Britain stood by passively.

As the subway bombings in Russia illustrate yet again, radical Islam is far from losing momentum, and it threatens freedom everywhere – not only in Jerusalem, but in Moscow and in Washington. “Containment” won’t cut it.

Go to Jerusalem Post.

The former Soviet leader thought he could browbeat Kennedy only to discover, in Vienna, that the Kennedy charm was not unalloyed to steel (“It will be a long, cold winter.”) Netanyahu was the first foreign leader to think he could steamroll Obama. He earned a frosty comeuppance.

…The Israeli leader toyed with Obama’s unequivocal call in Cairo last June for a “stop” to Israeli settlements. He allowed the ill-timed announcement that 1,600 apartments for Jews will be built in East Jerusalem. Then, rather than scrap that, Netanyahu chose cheap cheers from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee with “Jerusalem is not a settlement.”

(I say cheap because everyone knows Jerusalem is not a settlement. That’s not the issue. The issue is that the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem is rejected by the rest of the world and any peace agreement will involve an inventive deal on its status. To build is therefore to provoke.)

Obama was not amused. He airbrushed Netanyahu’s White House visit. The message was clear: The Middle East status quo does not serve the interests of the United States (or Israel). When Obama says “stop,” he does not mean “build a bit.”

…Obama’s stance has also demonstrated that his focus on Israel-Palestine will not be diverted by Netanyahu’s push to place the Iranian nuclear program front and center. This is critical: Iran cannot be a Palestine-postponing pawn.

Already, there are shifts in Israeli attitudes as a result of the new American clarity. Last year, Netanyahu described Iran’s leaders as “a messianic apocalyptic cult,” which was silly. Of late we’ve had Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, setting things right: “I don’t think the Iranians, even if they got the bomb, are going to drop it in the neighborhood. They fully understand what might follow. They are radical but not total ‘meshuganas.’ They have a quite sophisticated decision-making process.”

Yes, as I’ve argued, the Iranian regime is not nuts, one reason it has survived. It’s intermittently ruthless — consistently since June 12 — but proceeds by calculation, much of it about survival.

Go to NY Times.

…Iran is an estimated one to three years away from building the bomb. And its local clients and proxies, Hizbollah in Lebanon and the Hamas in Gaza, have been equipped by Tehran (and Syria) with rockets with which to pound Israel’s cities and air bases.

The White House and State Department still speak about mobilising the world community for sanctions to halt Iran’s nuclear programme. But Russia and China are not on board for effective sanctions, while Obama and the American military have manifestly no stomach for a military confrontation with Iran.

Indeed, Netanyahu by now may suspect that the Americans have resigned themselves to a nuclear-armed Iran and are relying on deterrence to fend off an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel. But many Israelis fear that the anti-Semitic mullahs may prove less rational than the ageing apparatchiks who ran the Kremlin during the Cold War nuclear stand-off.

The only action that could halt Iran’s march toward nuclear weaponry is a strike by Israel. Whether Israel can do so effectively without a green light and some assistance from Washington is unclear.Free Iran:  To paint all mullahs with a wide brush of being irrational and anti-Semitic reflects poor judgment and bias which, inevitably, results in wrong decisions.  Moreover, as ruthless as the regime leaders are, they are not irrational or suicidal.  For the past thirty years, they have demonstrated a ruthless, adventurous, cunning, duplicitous but completely rational foreign policy.  For instance, they stopped the Iran-Iraq war when it threatened the regime’s survival so it would seem extremely unlikely that they would initiate a nuclear confrontation directly or indirectly by giving a bomb to a surrogate  when they know perfectly well that the consequence of such an act would be the end of their regime.  Containment and deterrence are a far better option that military strikes against Iran.

At a minimum, Israel would need American permission to overfly Iraq and perhaps landing rights, for refuelling and repair, in regional US air bases. Israel may also need additional equipment and weaponry. After an air assault, Israel would need American political backing to prevent Security Council condemnation and sanctions resolutions, and a promise of support and supplies if a wider Middle East war ensued.

While many Arab and Western governments would no doubt privately welcome the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities, their public posturing would be different.

So far, Obama – like George W Bush before him – has vetoed an Israeli pre-emptive strike. The Americans are fearful of the chaos that might engulf the Middle East and are aware of their vulnerability in the region. They assume that the Iranians would charge them with complicity, whether or not they were complicit.

It is possible that Netanyahu hoped to reach an agreement with Obama based on a trade-off – Israeli concessions on the Palestinians in exchange for America agreeing to an attack on the Iranian installations. But Obama apparently offered Netanyahu nothing, while demanding everything on the Palestinian front.  Free Iran:  This is just ridiculous.  “Israeli concessions on the Palestinians in exchange for America agreeing to an attack on the Iranian installations” – so what now Israel is going to hold the United States hostage till America caves in to Israeli pressure? Why does doing the right thing on the Palestinian front – whatever that may be – have anything to do with what needs to be done in Iran – whatever that may be? This kind of nonsense and twisted logic  is only going to provide more fuel for the extremists in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East who want to perpetuate violence and hatred.

Telegraph: Prof Benny Morris teaches at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and is the author, most recently, of ‘1948, a History of the First Arab-Israeli War’ (Yale UP)

See also:

NYT:  Hobby or Necessity? Free Iran:  An insightful analysis by Mr. Thomas Friedman

If you think this latest Israeli-American flap was just the same-old-same-old tiff over settlements, then you’re clearly not paying attention — which is how I’d describe a lot of Israelis, Arabs and American Jews today.

This tiff actually reflects a tectonic shift that has taken place beneath the surface of Israel-U.S. relations. I’d summarize it like this: In the last decade, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — for Israel — has gone from being a necessity to a hobby. And in the last decade, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — for America — has gone from being a hobby to a necessity. Therein lies the problem.

…To put it another way, the collapse of the peace process, combined with the rise of the wall, combined with the rise of the Web, has made peacemaking with Palestinians much less of a necessity for Israel and much more of a hobby. Consciously or unconsciously, a lot more Israelis seem to believe they really can have it all: a Jewish state, a democratic state and a state in all of the Land of Israel, including the West Bank — and peace.

…Now, in the same time period, America went from having only a small symbolic number of soldiers in the Middle East to running two wars there — in Iraq and Afghanistan — as well as a global struggle against violent Muslim extremists. With U.S. soldiers literally walking the Arab street — and, therefore, more in need than ever of Muslim good will to protect themselves and defeat Muslim extremists — Israeli-Palestinian peace has gone from being a post-cold-war hobby of U.S. diplomats to being a necessity.

Both Vice President Joe Biden and Gen. David Petraeus have been quoted recently as saying that the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict foments anti-U.S. sentiments, because of the perception that America usually sides with Israel, and these sentiments are exploited by Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to generate anti-Americanism that complicates life for our soldiers in the region. I wouldn’t exaggerate this, but I would not dismiss it either.

The issue that should make peacemaking a necessity rather than a hobby for both the U.S. and Israel is confronting a nuclear Iran. Unfortunately, Israel sees the question of preventing Iran from going nuclear as overriding and separate from the Palestinian issue, while the U.S. sees them as integrated. At a time when the U.S. is trying to galvanize a global coalition to confront Iran, at a time when Iran uses the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict to embarrass pro-U.S. Arabs and extend its influence across the Muslim world, peace would be a strategic asset for America and Israel.

See Also:

FP:  Israel, Iran, and existential threats

In 1981, Israel destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, declaring it could not live with the chance the country would get a nuclear weapons capability. In 2007, it wiped out a North Korean-built reactor in Syria. And the next year, the Israelis secretly asked the Bush administration for the equipment and overflight rights they might need some day to strike Iran’s much better-hidden, better-defended nuclear sites.

They were turned down, but the request added urgency to the question: Would Israel take the risk of a strike? And if so, what would follow?

Now that parlor game question has turned into more formal war games simulations. The government’s own simulations are classified, but the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution created its own in December. The results were provocative enough that a summary of them has circulated among top American government and military officials and in many foreign capitals.

For the sake of verisimilitude, former top American policymakers and intelligence officials — some well known — were added to the mix. They played the president and his top advisers; the Israeli prime minister and cabinet; and Iranian leaders. They were granted anonymity to be able to play their roles freely, without fear of blowback. (This reporter was invited as an observer.) A report by Kenneth M. Pollack, who directed the daylong simulation, can be found at the Saban Center’s Web site.

A caution: Simulations compress time and often oversimplify events. Often they underestimate the risk of error — for example, that by using faulty intelligence leaders can misinterpret a random act as part of a pattern of aggression. In this case, the actions of the American and Israeli teams seemed fairly plausible; the players knew the bureaucracy and politics of both countries well. Predicting Iran’s moves was another matter, since little is known about its decision-making process. —DAVID E. SANGER

Go to NY Times.