A Lost Opportunity: Israeli Investment in North Korea and the alleviation of Middle East missile proliferation.

October 18, 2012 by

After monitoring shady Syrian and North Korean dealings with regard to nuclear materials, the Israelis carried out an air strike called Operation Orchard. This strike against a facility in the Syrian desert was the culmination of several years of North Korean nuclear and missile dealings and negotiations with Southeast Asian (Iran and Pakistan), Middle Eastern (Iraq and Syria) and North African (Libya under Gaddafi) regimes. Only a few years before, in December 2003, a non-proliferation victory was declared when Colonel Gaddafi surrendered his stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Such weapons had been acquired from North Korea through the Pakistani AQ Khan network.

Of course, this is all standard elementary knowledge. What is of interest to me is how we got to where we are now, namely the missile proliferation and shady nuclear dealings between the aforementioned regimes and the ruling regime in Pyongyang. There was one instance in 1993 when the Israeli government seemingly showed signs of making an overture to North Korea by investing in that pariah state’s floundering economy in turn for its cessation of providing states like Iran with missiles.

The Israeli deal seemed to hint at investing some $1 billion into the North Korean economy. One assumes that such investment would have probably taken the form of hard capital along with much-needed agricultural methods and supplies.

As we know, due to the opposition of the United States, the deal was never introduced and never put into fruition. North Korean and US tensions increased in 1994 as a result of the former’s attempt to withdraw from the non-proliferation treaty and pursue the construction of a bomb. Not long after that the ‘Great Leader’ Kim il Sung passed away, his son succeeded him and the country as a whole became more militant as it became more impoverished. The economy went to hell and a famine in the late 1990′s saw to 2 million North Koreans dying from starvation. The new regime of Kim Jong il would also see to the North Korean state building a handful of nuclear weapons, as well as several missiles — which were supplied to both Iran and Pakistan.

If the United States hadn’t opposed the deal, one could speculate about how things could have turned out differently. For one, had Israel invested in 1993 and agreed to recognize the regime in Pyongyang, they could have had a formal deal to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program before it properly got off the ground. This may have lessened, to the point of elimination, the tensions between the US and North Korea the year after. On top of all that, the introduction of an agricultural system – one of Israel’s specialties – may have saved a great deal of North Koreans from the harsh famine years. It’s important to note that the stunted brainwashed people of North Korea were reportedly more hostile towards the west during said famine years, as they blamed the west for the famine rather than their aggressive regime.

This lost opportunity was unfortunate, however it does aptly demonstrate Israel’s potential to, in a positive manner, influence and, shape situations on the grounds of countries far from its borders.

Filed Under: Foreign Relations, Humanitarian Aid, Politics Tagged With: , , ,

A Look Back at the Coastal Road Massacre

August 19, 2011 by

The attack on the Egged tourist bus in Southern Israel this week brings back dark memories of the causes of the 1978 Lebanon intervention

Upon reading about the recent attack on the Egged tourist bus in Southern Israel, I was instantly reminded of the Coastal Road Massacre of 1978. The incident saw Fatah terrorists infiltrate into Israel from Southern Lebanon where they proceeded to highjack an Egged bus and engage in a brutal shootout which left over 38 Israelis dead.

The result of this attack led the Israeli government, under Menachem Begin’s leadership, to launch Operation Litani which, as the name implies, was an incursion into Lebanon that extended up to the Litani River. The mission was intended to destroy PLO bases and infrastructure. The 1982 invasion had same overall goal. It followed rocket attacks launched from PLO bases in Southern Lebanon against villages and towns in Northern Israel and the attempted murder of Israel’s ambassador to Britain in London.

Although the recent attacks on Southern Israel resulted in fe

wer casualties, it should be taken very seriously. The terrorists were able to infiltrate the Israeli border with Sinai with relative ease. If the bus driver hadn’t been so quick to slip away, these assailants may have been able to use the anti-tank missile they had in their possession against the bus. A similar attack against a school bus earlier this year claimed the life of 16-year-old Daniel Viflic.

This lax security along the Egyptian side of the border has been of major concern for the Israeli government. This was something I alluded to when it became clear last January that the situation in Egypt was becoming a revolutionary one.

The new Israeli Iron Dome missile defence system has been designed and deployed as a protective measure against Kassam rocket attacks launched by Hamas from Gaza. However, it is clear that more protective measures will have to implemented to protect against incursions of the kind that struck Eilat. Perhaps in the near future we will see the Shin Bet working even closer with the IDF in matters to do with national security.

But in the meantime, we’re seeing tensions rising once against between Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip who deny responsibility for this attack. While I’d never give an organization like Hamas the benefit of the doubt, I think should another war break out Israel will have to exercise discretion in securing its borders and its civil society from such crafty and ruthless attackers who may attempt similar terrorist attacks in the foreseeable future.

Filed Under: Hamas, Security, Terrorism Tagged With: , , , ,

Recognizing The True Implications of Anti-Semitism

July 22, 2011 by

Lest we never fail to recognize the truly nasty and rotten core of the pseudo-intellectual conspiratorial and prejudicial form of bigotry and hatred that is the hallmark of anti-Semitism

The most infamous piece of anti-Semitic text that alludes to a conspiratorial Jewish world domination is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent piece of writing that suggests a small cabal of Jews were smart enough to manipulate the masses to fall unknowingly under their control but dumb enough to write down their entire plan for those same masses to read. The text has been aptly described by historian Norman Cohn as Hitler and the Nazi Party’s “warrant for genocide.”

It is alarming to see similar Medieval myths and libels (such as the Passover and Blood libels) used to slander and foment hatred for the Jews in Christendom. These lies are now being reused by some official sources in the Disputed Territories, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to incite condemnation, suspicion, and hatred of the Jews.

Hamas, whose charter calls for Israel’s annihilation, has the text on its website and preaches it as fact (as the Nazis had done before them) to instill the desire to take up the age old pathological creed of carrying out a campaign of genocide against the Jewish citizens of the world. When one believes such fabrications, what are the consequences?

Take another work of fiction as an example. The Turner Diaries a fictional diary of a neo-Nazi who, with a group of like minded individuals calling themselves the Order, carry out a campaign of sabotage and terrorism in an effort to overthrow the Federal Government of the United States. They succeed and instigate a race war and start a nuclear war in which they kill millions when they attack New York City and Tel Aviv in order to fulfill the said pathological creed. Here is a description of the aftermath of the nuclear attack on Tel Aviv:

“Within 24 hours after we hit Tel Aviv and half-a-dozen other Israeli targets last month, hundreds of thousands of Arabs were swarming across the borders of occupied Palestine. Most of them were civilians, armed only with knives or clubs, and Jewish border guards mowed down thousands of them, until their ammunition was exhausted. The Arabs’ hatred, pent up for 45 years, drove them on-across mine fields, through Jewish machine-gun fire, and into the radioactive chaos of burning cities, their single thought being to slay the people who had stolen their land, killed their fathers, and humiliated them for two generations. Within a week the throat of the last Jewish survivor in the last kibbutz and in the last, smoking ruin in Tel Aviv had been cut.”

Among other things, this book inspired Timothy McVeigh to carry out the now infamous bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing over 60 innocent people in 1995. It was this book, as a piece of anti-Semitic literature, that led him on the downward spiral that capitulated in him executing this horrendous terrorist atrocity.

Bottom Line: Antisemitism isn’t just another form of bigotry or intolerance. It is by all means a disorder that can prove to be life threatening to the bare foundations of civilization. It is a duty of civilization to ensure that its true meaning is never distorted and the term is never allowed to be degraded or devalued by those who wish to belittle the true nature of its callous, hateful, and superficial tenants.

Image by spletke.

Filed Under: Genocide, Hamas, Religion, Tel Aviv, Terrorism Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Iran: From Theocracy to Democracy

July 15, 2011 by

How Israel can help and will inevitably benefit from Iran’s gradual internal evolution from an extremist Islamic theocracy into a secular democracy.

History has many ironies, a good example of this is the relationship between the State of Israel and Iran, particularly given that this relationship began with the latter being among the first in recognizing the then new Jewish state upon its birth in 1948. These days the relationship between the two countries is very turbulent. Considering that the theocracy in power in Iran believes that the Jewish state will “vanish” and its support of terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, the two states are very close to a state of war.

Benjamin Netanyahu hit the proverbial nail on the head when asked in an interview about the Arab Spring. Mr. Netanyahu quickly responded stating that the current pro-democratic revolutions did not start in Tunisia, but started on the streets of Tehran a year and a half ago, and have since been violently subverted by the dictatorial theocratic regime there. This interview is well worth watching as Netanyahu makes the case that the Islamic world is catching up on the information age and collectively removing older forms of government and systems that are failing as they are no longer relevant.

The Arab Spring itself has been an interesting development to witness unfold; but not half as interesting as the struggle of the young Iranian people for democracy. After being brutally denied self governance by the authoritarian Islamic theocracy, a big question to be pondered is if Israel could and would play a positive role in helping the headstrong determined Iranian youth transform Iran from a dictatorship into a secular democracy.

Through what has become known as citizen journalism, the world saw the horrific events as they unfolded on the streets of Tehran as thousands of distressed Iranians were violently and savagely beaten by the government Basij and Revolutionary Guard thugs. The prime example of this brutal violence was the shooting of Neda Agha Soltan. Her tragic last moments were captured on video uploaded to the internet within minutes. Now, having been seen by millions, she has become a symbol of oppression to young Iranians.

They are fighting for change, and that change predominately revolves around a change of the regime in Tehran, which has threatened Israel and is directly arming and financing a proxy force in Lebanon. Hezbollah, of course, sparked the deadly Second Lebanon War in 2006. Iran’s only real ally in the region, the al Assad dictatorship in Syria, is now soaked in the blood of the Syrian people who are also demanding change. The two states are becoming victims of inner strife as people are seeing past the hate the regimes foment for Israel which they do to try to divert the people’s discontent away from them.

The world is becoming a smaller place as a result of modern communication technology. What does this have to do with Israel? The pioneers of instant messaging were two Israelis who, as one of my own Israeli friends informed me, lived just an hour walk away from her house. It is such modern information technology that is enabling the world to see past the self-proclaimed representatives of such regimes like that of Ahmadinejad and see the real plight of the people.

It is widely speculated that the Stuxnet virus was created by the Israelis with the intent of delaying Iran’s nuclear ambitions. This has a positive effect as it gives the Iranians risking their lives in a campaigning for change more preciously needed time. If Iran were to go to war, it may give the ruling regime a chance to purge large numbers of the young Iranian activists (who make up a substantial part of the young, maturing, and discontent generation of the country) under the fog of war. Clearly the current Israeli strategy is a good one, as it is buying the democratic movement time to gradually take centre stage in the gradual metamorphosis of Iran from a fascistic theocracy into a secular democracy.

For Israel, this means a best case scenario where the mullahs will fall from their positions of power. Once the regime goes (along with the al-Assad regime in Syria), Hezbollah will no longer have steady supplies of military hardware and may be substantially weakened. On the other hand, the worse case scenario. This tactic may delay Iran’s nuclear ambitions but see the regime successful in suppressing the underlying pro-democratic upheaval. Even if that is the case, it still further weakens the regime as it will have to divert more resources into combating internal threats.

Either way, Israel (possibly inadvertently) is playing a substantial role in helping pave the way for the inevitable downfall of the regime in Tehran, which is only maintaining its hold on power through brute violence and subversion.

Image by Beverly & Pack.

Filed Under: Foreign Relations, Hezbollah, Internet, Media, Politics, Protestors Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Israel in History: 1991

July 14, 2011 by

By Paul Iddon

An interesting and eventful year in recent Israeli history

The early 1990′s proved to be a historically significant time as it ushered in a new post Cold War era in the west following the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union in late 1991.

1991 in particular proved to be an eventful and significant year for Israel. It started with as so to say business as usual, that business being the First Intifada. 1991 marked the 4th year of that Palestinian uprising and there didn’t seem to be any let up in sight. At the same time, there were high tensions around the Persian Gulf as the coalition forces were preparing for war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq following his invasion of Kuwait. Saddam vowed to destroy half of Israel should Iraq be attacked and had been publicly praised by the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who embraced him as an ally before and after he invaded Kuwait. The invasion and annexation of Kuwait saw over 300,000 Palestinians who lived there subject to Saddam’s brutal rule.

Iraq did attack Israel when the Desert Storm operation began. Saddam launched Scud missiles towards the densely populated Israeli cities of Haifa and Tel Aviv. He chose not to strike Jerusalem with such indiscriminate weapons as it may have meant hitting the Dome of the Rock.

While Israelis huddled in their homes awaiting the worst while wearing gas masks in the fear that the Scuds may have been configured to carry poison gas, the attacks resulted in few casualties.

One incident saw Palestinians jeering at the Israelis who they believed would soon be at the wrath of Saddam’s vaunted missile. Moments later they were in a panic as missiles landed near their own villages. They rushed to Israeli Army checkpoints demanding their own gas masks clearly signalling the end to their rooftop demonstrations.

42 missiles were fired from Iraq into Israel throughout the war in an attempt to try and provoke Israel into attacking Iraq and breaking up the coalition which included several Arab states that may have been unwilling to continue fighting alongside Israel. When the Persian Gulf War ended on the 28th of February 1991, 2 Israelis were left dead and 230 were injured.

The IDF didn’t have to fight a war with Iraq, but it found itself involved in a humanitarian operation later that year called Operation Solomon, which like its predecessors, Operation Moses and Operation Joshua, saw the Israelis covertly take Ethiopian Jews to Israel. They did this out of fear and concern for these Jews who may have been threatened by the political destabilization in the region.

Using IAF C-130 Hercules transport planes along with El Al cargo planes the IDF transported a total of 14,325 Jews to Israel giving them a new and much safer home.

While Israel  is often accused of carrying out apartheid policies of the likes of Apartheid South Africa, those hurling such accusations blatantly disregard the fact that Israel had saved African Jews from some of the more impoverished parts of the world and made them citizens. 1991 showed that Zionism could no longer be officially equated to racism, as the UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 claimed. The revocation of Resolution 3379 was a historically significant event in itself as it was the only resolution that has ever been revoked.

Image by rahuldlucca.

Filed Under: Disputed Territories, Palestinians, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Bibi’s Dresden Comparison

May 27, 2011 by

Starting during the time of the Second Lebanon War, former and current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu often made comparisons between Israel’s so called disproportionate responses to rocket attacks by terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah to Churchill’s firebombing of Dresden as a direct response to the attacks on London in late World War II.

Does he have a point? Does this argument hold water?

The V2 followed the V1 flying bomb which was fired indiscriminately at civilians in London in mid to late 1944. The V-2 was a ballistic missile and the progenitor of such missiles that would be later improved and modified as the prototypes of early Cold War era missiles the United States and the Soviet Union produced. In its short operating history, the V2 killed over 7,000 people when fired at London and Antwerp. However, the production of these weapons cost the lives of 12,000 forced laborers.

As Bibi points out, the Allies reaction to this was to firebomb Dresden where an estimated 25,000 people perished. This wasn’t the first of such incendiary bombings carried out by the Allied air forces who had previously in 1943 (before V1′s or V2′s entered service) destroyed Hamburg. The Hamburg attack leveled 250,000 houses and killed over 40,000 civilians.

In reality, Hamburg was one of the few cities in German that wasn’t Nazified and did not vote for Hitler in the first place. However, Hamburg was a strategic target on the grounds that it was a large industrialized port city that made a valuable contribution to the German war effort. The human cost was tragic as working class neighborhoods were purposely targeted and wiped out.

In the Second Lebanon War, the Israeli Air Force carpet bombed the Southern Beirut suburb of Dahieh, a Hezbollah stronghold. They did this after dropping leaflets warning civilians to leave for their own safety. While this wasn’t near Dresden standards (2,000 people died on both sides in the six weeks of the Second Lebanon War), casualties were indeed substantially limited and avoided. Israeli attacks were not nearly as frivolous as the indiscriminate Hezbollah rocketing of Northern Israel.

They were also not as frivolous as Iraq’s missile attacks on Tel Aviv and Haifa during the Persian Gulf War of 1991. A news clip of these attacks from 1991 shows the current Prime Minister, then Deputy Foreign Minister, giving a short comment on the attacks.

Iraq used Scud missiles against Israel in the Gulf war, an early Soviet variant of the V2 missile. Saddam vowed to wipe out Tel Aviv with such missiles throughout the course of the war. Israel never retaliated as it was feared an Israeli retaliation would play into Saddam’s hands.

According to Patrick Tyler, author of A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East – from the Cold War to the War on Terror, former Israeli Minister of Defense Moshe Arens and Prime Minister Shamir were called by President Bush. Bush offered supported the use of Israeli ballistic missiles on Iraqi air bases. This move would keep Israel out of the war zone but give it a measure of retaliatory satisfaction. Shamir declined the offer. Arens stated that the military effect of such an attack may go unnoticed by the Iraqis as they were already being heavily bombarded in the Desert Storm campaign.

This incident gives a lot of credence to Bibi’s Dresden comparison as not only did Israel not respond with a massive indiscriminate attack on Baghdad in kind, but it completely refrained from attacking and saved many civilian casualties.

While Bibi does make an interesting point, the fundamental argument is that there is no such thing as a clean war. The essential point he is trying to get across is that Israel isn’t the one who tries to make war any dirtier.

Filed Under: Hezbollah, Media, Politics, Security, Terrorism Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Eagles over Auschwitz

May 20, 2011 by

In commemoration of the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust Israeli Air Force F-15′s did a fly over of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland on September 4th 2003 marking 60 years since Adolf Hitlers ‘Final Solution’.

[Note from Eric: Paul is going to join up on our team here at the Israel Situation, and he is starting by bringing over a handful of great past posts from his personal blog that relate to Israel. Please welcome him to the team]

Filed Under: Genocide, Religion, Security Tagged With: , , , , , , ,