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WEEK OF JULY
24 THROUGH JULY 31
Palestinians to Sue Britain Over 1917 Balfour
Declaration
July 26….(Jerusalem Post) The Palestinians have called
on the Arab League to help them prepare a legal file against the British
government for issuing the Balfour
Declaration almost
100 years ago. Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki
spoke of the impact of that 1917 document, the first to formally recognize
the Jewish right to a homeland, in a speech he delivered on behalf of PA
President Mahmoud Abbas at the 27th Arab League Summit in Nouakchott,
Mauritania on
Monday evening.
“With the coming of this painful anniversary, the passing of approximately
100 years since the historic massacre of our land and our people’s fates,
and with the continuation of this catastrophe without a resolution, we call
on the secretariat general of the Arab League to support us in preparing a
legal file to raise against the British government for issuing the Balfour
Declaration and thereafter implementing it as a mandatory authority,” Maliki
said.
Maliki then proceeded to thank Arab countries and other
states, who have supported the Palestinian issue. “Our people will not
forget the good countries and peoples, especially our Arab brothers and many
other friendly countries, who extended and still extend their hands in
supporting, standing beside, and embracing our people in its trials and
tribulations,” he said. In a separate context, Maliki affirmed that Arab
states should not normalize relations with Israel before the establishment
of a Palestinian state. “We warn Arab states of the concept of ‘regional
cooperation and security’, which is aimed at creating regional security
cooperation between Arab countries and Israel and normalizing relations
before the end of the Israeli occupation,” he stated.
Maliki also said that the Palestinian leadership supports
an independent Palestinian state along 1967 borders. “The time has come,
before its too late, to galvanize Arab and international support to enable
our people to achieve its freedom and independence, establishing an
independent Palestinian state along June 4, 1967 borders,” he said. Since
the failure of the last round of negotiations in May 2014, the Palestinian
leadership renewed a international campaign to achieve statehood.
Russian
Arms for
Hizballah Cross Israel’s Red Line
Russian Forpost
UAV asrd on Israel's Searcher drone
July 25…..(DEBKA)
President Vladimir Putin turns aside all Israel’s complaints about Russian
arms supplies to Iran’s Lebanese proxy, Hizballah, whenever he talks to
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, roughly
every week-to-ten days. The issue is also raised without results by Israeli
officials on trips to Moscow, including the visit by Yossi Cohen, Director
of the Mossad, to the Russian capital on July 1.
Nonetheless,
Netanyahu persisted in complaining again about the Russian arms reaching the
Lebanese terrorist group in his latest phone conversation with Putin on
Saturday, July 23. He made the call, debkafile military
sources say, primarily to raise another topic at issue, the UAV (Unmanned
Aerial Vehicle) flights from Syria into Israeli airspace on July 17. After
their conversation, the Kremlin issued a bland statement saying that the two
leaders discussed issues related to the war on terrorism, and that both
agreed to continue the ties between the countries at “various levels.”
Our military sources
report that the conviction gaining ground now among IDF intelligence (AMAN)
and Air Force chiefs is that the drone was not Iranian or Hizballah’s but
Russian. They take a grave view of the episode - especially when the
unmanned aircraft, which hovered for some hours over the Golan and northern
Israel, appears to have been a “Searcher,” the reconnaissance drone
developed by Israel and manufactured by Russia as “Forpost” under Israeli
license.
Moscow is making use
of the sophisticated Forpost UAV for surveillance and intelligence-gathering
in Syria, Ukraine and terrorist targets in the Caucasian mountains.
If IDF chiefs are correct, then a Russian drone developed by Israel was used to spy on Israel after it was launched from an Iranian or Hizballah base in the Syrian Qalamun Mountains. This action crossed more than one Israeli red line. Adding insult to injury, the drone’s electronic jamming devices were activated to disarm the missiles and aircraft Israel scrambled to intercept it.
.
This issue is a further irritant on top of
the Russian arms supplies to Hizballah, which elude Israel’s efforts to
interrupt them by two covert tactics:
1. Russian weapons consignments to the Syrian
army are in excess of the recipient’s requirements; the surplus is secretly
diverted to the Hizballah. Israeli air strikes only smash the Iranian and
Syrian weapons convoys known to be heading out of Syria to Lebanon on the
strength of data provided by Israeli military intelligence (Aman). But the
traffic missed by Aman goes through to its destination. By this tactic, our
military sources report, Hizballah has succeeded in basing most of its
fighting units, not only in Syria, but also in Lebanon, on Russian weaponry,
last year, at a battalion level; by June 2016, including company
level. Their hardware is not limited to personal side-arms from Russia, but
also anti-aircraft and anti-tanks missiles.
Where do they come from?
2. The Russian military industry is the main
supplier of raw materials for Syria’s arms manufacture, including missiles.
Without this assistance, the Assad regime would not have been able to
manufacture the Scud C mid-range ground-to-ground missiles or the Fateh-110
missiles. Some of these made-in-Syria missiles are quietly consigned to the
Hizballah. Our sources have found that Putin habitually acts surprised and
feigns ignorance whenever Netanyahu raises the issue of the Russian weapon
supply to the Hizballah. He then promises to look into Israel’s complaint
and get back to him with an answer. Weeks go by and the Russian president
informs the prime minister that the thorough examination he ordered found no
evidence of any Russian military or civilian body supplying Hizballah with
weapons.
Netanyahu shows his disbelief and
continues to raise the issue each time he speaks with Putin.Meanwhile, the
Russian arms supply to Hizballah goes on with Israel constrained from
interfering.
Debkafile: These
occurrences demonstrate that the military and intelligence relations between
Israel and Russia are in fact a far cry from the entente
cordiale presumed
in Israel and Western capitals. Indeed, working relations are handicapped by
the effect of such incidents to erode even the limited understanding the two
leaders reached to coordinate military intelligence and air force operations
in the Syrian arena.
WEEK OF JULY
17 THROUGH JULY 23
In Turkey, Erdogan Locks Up US Airmen,
Nuclear Arms in Incirlik
July 21….(DEBKA) Some 1,500 US airmen
and their families have been locked in the southern Turkish air base of
Incirlik together with a stock if tactical nuclear bombs since President
Reccep Erdogan crushed an attempted coup on Saturday, July 16. In the four
days up until Wednesday, July 20, therefore, no air strikes against ISIS in
Syria and Iraq have been staged that Turkish base.
This extraordinary situation, reported
here by debkafile’s
military sources, whereby a large group of American military personnel are
held virtual captive by an allied government, was almost certainly raised in
the phone call that took place Tuesday between
President Barack Obama and Erdogan. But the most outlandish aspect of this
affair is that no American official has raised it in public, nor even by the
administrations most vocal critics at the Republican convention which
nominated Donald Trump as presidential candidate.
The situation only rated a brief mention
in some Russian publications under the heading: “Turkish investigators enter
& search Incirlik air base where US nukes are housed.” Our military sources
report that deep bunkers located near the base’s running strips house B61
tactical nuclear gravity bombs.
In the course of the massive
sweep-cum-purge Erdogan is conducting in every corner of the country,
hundreds of police officers accompanied by Ministry of Justice and Attorney
General Office investigators are the only people permitted to enter the
strategic air base, and only emergency cases may leave, after coordinating
with the Turkish authorities.
The base is under virtual siege by large police contingents, cut off from electric power for several days except for local generators which will soon run out of fuel. This pressure appears to be Erdogan’s method of turning hundreds of Americans on the base into hostages to force Washington into extraditing Fethullah Gulen, whom he accuses of orchestrating the failed coup from his place of asylum in Pennsylvania. The victims of Erdogan’s strategy of extortion are several US units deployed in Incirlik under squadron command. They include engineering, communication, logistics, air control, a military hospital with medical and operational facilities, air transportation and more. The Turkish squadron and base commander, Brigadier Gen. Bekir Ercan, is under arrest, suspected of a senior role in planning and executing the coup, by assigning the aircraft and helicopters to support it, responsibility for the disappearance of a large number of aircraft and aiding the defection of air crews to Greece. He is one of the more than 6,000 military personnel including fellow generals arrested on suspicion of active complicity in the coup plot.
By Wednesday more than 50,000 people had been rounded up, sacked or suspended from their jobs by Turkey's government in the wake of last week's failed coup, including 9,000 police officers, the suspension of about 3,000 judges and widening Tuesday to include teachers, university deans and the media who are accused of links with Gulen. However, fears for the fate of the US airmen trapped in Incirlik and the tactical nukes were exacerbated by the comments of two top officials of the Erdogan regime Tuesday. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim insinuated that the Americans may be viewed as partners, at least passive ones, in the conspiracy, in view of the use the plotters made of Incirlik for sending aircraft based there and arming them for the missions of intercepting the President’s airplane (which was never realized) and bombing the Parliament building in Ankara (which was).
The Turkish Labor Minister, Süleyman
Soylu, was more explicit: “This coup has America behind,” he twitted in his
Twitter account. The Obama administration’s caution over the scary Incirlik
impasse appears to derive from trepidation, shared by Riyadh, Cairo and
Jerusalem, that the autocratic Turkish ruler’s Stalinist purge reaching into
all branches of government and all walks of Turkish society is part and
parcel of a comprehensive Muslim revolution underway in Turkey. An
incautious word from Washington may quicken the process.
WEEK OF JULY
10 THROUGH JULY 16
July 15….(Israel
Today) US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on
Wednesday declared
on Twitter that the party’s platform is now more pro-Israel than it has ever
been. Indeed, the Republican Party’s Platform Committee did make surprising
policy changes that no previous candidate would or could have represented.
The new platform erases all reference to a “two-state
solution” and utterly rejects “the false notion that Israel is an occupier.”
It further states that Jerusalem is the “indivisible” capital of the Jewish
state. “Our party is proud to stand with Israel now and always,” that
portion of the Republican platform concludes. The changes must still be
approved by the full Republican National Convention. Hours later, Trump
again took to Twitter to ask, “Is President Obama trying to destroy Israel
with all his bad moves?”
It remains surprising to most (at least those who don’t
read the Bible) how such a small country embroiled in a relatively minor
conflict could be such an important plank in the platforms of the two
parties contesting the most influential job in the world.
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