<< January 2010 | March 2010 >>

The EU has converted 54 of its foreign delegations into embassy-type missions "authorised to speak for the entire Union", as the result of the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty on 1st January. The move has led to fears that "British consular facilities could be shut down", with critics saying that it will "shift power away from the British Foreign Office towards a new EU diplomatic service". The embassies will be headed up by ambassadors who are empowered to speak on behalf of the EU as a whole. Mats Persson, director of the Open Europe think tank, said the new embassies would "for all practical purposes take over the job of representing Britons on the world stage. Common EU embassies means that Britain can be overruled on crucial diplomatic matters".

A senior official of Israel's aid mission to Haiti, following the major earthquake there, highlighted the fact that Israel would suffer an earthquake of similar proportions. Speaking to the Knesset, Mr. Avi Shapira said that "Israel sits on one of the largest fault lines in the world (the Syria-Africa rift) and that it is a certainty that a major earthquake will eventually strike the region".

Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, recently announced that Israel will have to encircle any new Arab entity in Judea and Samaria. Speaking to foreign reporters, he said, "Israel must ensure an efficient way, at the entry and exit points, to stop rockets from being smuggled into the territories close to Israel. This will require an Israeli presence on the eastern side of the Palestinian state".

This was immediately rejected by the PA Chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, who said, "The Palestinian leadership will not accept the presence of a single Israeli soldier in the Palestinian territories after the end of the occupation". In an interview with an Arabic-language Russian television station, he said that the Palestinians would "never make peace with Israel unless he is guaranteed sovereign control over the eastern half of Jerusalem".

Another Palestinian spokesman made their position clear by saying, "We will not accept anything less than a completely sovereign Palestinian state on all the territories with its own borders, resources and airpace. We will not accept any Israeli presence, either military or civilian, on our land, and we will not accept that our state be under Israeli protection".

Following the visit of the Norwegian Foreign Minister to Israel in late January, Israel National News (INN) reported that the Norwegian government "all too often seizes the opportunity to besmirch the Jewish state and is renowned as one of the principal Israel-bashers in Europe". A Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten, described as "the viciously anti-Israel daily", surprisingly carried an editorial "deploring the escalation of anti-Semitism which was forcing Jews to emigrate. It attributed the increased hatred to the anti-Semitic Muslim immigrants and the impact of the hostile anti-Israeli environment". The INN report concluded, "We can only hope that in the course of time, Norway will elect a government that will be more evenhanded toward Israel. Until then, we should be under no illusions. This Norwegian government is not neutral. It is rabidly hostile".

Towards the end of January, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, predicted that Israel will be destroyed by the Muslims in the not-too-distant future. "Definitely, the day will come when nations of the region will witness the destruction of the Zionist regime. How soon or late that will happen depends on how Islamic countries and Muslim nations approach the issue". In recent years, Khamenei has referred to Israel as a "cancerous tumour" that must be removed from the Middle East.

Israel Today, in commenting that Khamenei's views are identical to those of the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said, "With Iran's spiritual and civilian leadership so opposed to the existence of the Jewish state, Israel has no choice but to view the Islamic Republic's efforts to obtain nuclear weapons as an existential threat"

It has been reported that, in the event of a military strike by Israel, Iran has drawn up "four-pronged war plans" comprising Iran, Hizbollah, the Palestinian Authority and Syria. These preparations are being made as Iran estimates "the chances of a war eruption in 2010". The following is the general format of the proposed plan of action:

1. Ballistic missile attacks will focus on disabling Israel's strategic military sites, such as air force bases, missile bases, its nuclear facilities and naval bases. Targeting Israeli population centres is a lower Iranian priority.
2. Hizbollah elite units will sweep across the Lebanese border into northern Israel to capture large swathes of Central and Western Galilee. They will apply Israel's invasion doctrine at the same time as Israeli armoured columns and infantry divisions head north to hit Hizbollah strongholds in southern and central Lebanon and open their way to Damascus.
3. The Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad will open a southern front from the Gaza Strip. It will consist of a missile bombardment of southern Israel and deep cross-border terrorist raids via hidden tunnels running under the dividing fence. Hizbollah agents will organise and mount terrorist attacks from covert cells buried in the West Bank and inside Israeli-Arab communities.
4. Syria's initial involvement will be limited to cover by artillery or air for Hizbollah operations. But if the fighting escalates or drags on, Hizbollah will invite Syrian back-up forces to go into Lebanon. Damascus will open Front No. 4 against Israel from the Syrian side of the Golan Heights.

Hizbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is "straining at the leash to attack Israel, however the crisis over Iran's nuclear programme turns out". Speaking in the middle of January, he said, "I promise you, in view of all the threats you hear today... that should a new war with the Zionists erupt, we (the Lebanese resistance movement) will crush the enemy, come out victorious, and change the face of the region. God willing, Israel, the occupation, hegemony, and arrogance are in the process of disappearing".

Syria's President, Bashar Assad, "threatened to devastate Israel's cities if it dares to use military force against terrorist threats such as Lebanon's Hizbollah". He said, "All the facts point that Israel is driving the region toward war, not peace. Israel is not serious about wanting peace". Syria's Foreign Minister added his voice by saying, "If war breaks out . . . it will indeed be total war, whether it begins in south Lebanon or Syria". A pan-Arab newspaper recently reported that Syria and Hizbollah were mobilising their forces for war with Israel.

An Israeli Knesset member recently declared, "Since it is obvious that the Obama administration is not going to solve the Iranian nuclear issue, 2010 will be a fateful year in the history of Israel". A senior US official, speaking on condition of confidentiality, leaked the following comment to a Kuwait newspaper, "If Syria allows surface-to-air missiles to go through to Hizbollah, war will break out and Tel Aviv will hit Damascus directly. A possible military attack by Hizbollah on Israel will be met with a damaging attack on Lebanon. Israel made the mistake of not striking Syria once before in 2006, but if Hizbollah goes back to the offensive, Damascus will not be spared again".

Benjamin Netanyahu, commenting on the tragedy of Auschwitz, spoke of the Jewish people having the "capability of identifying a threat in time and defending itself. The situation has changed entirely in the last 65 years. We are a nation capable of defending itself and of alerting the rest of the world of danger. We have the status of a country".