The Associated Press reports: Israeli defense officials on Sunday confirmed $1.6 billion in deals to sell drones as well as anti-aircraft and missile defense systems to Azerbaijan, bringing sophisticated Israeli technology to the doorstep of archenemy Iran.

The sales by state-run Israel Aerospace Industries come at a delicate time. Israel has been laboring hard to form diplomatic alliances in a region that seems to be growing increasingly hostile to the Jewish state.
[…]
It was not clear whether the arms deal with Azerbaijan was connected to any potential Israeli planes to strike Iran. The Israeli defense officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not at liberty to discuss defense deals.

Danny Yatom, a former head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, said the timing of the deal was likely coincidental. “Such a deal … takes a long period of time to become ripe,” he told The Associated Press.

He said Israel would continue to sell arms to its friends. “If it will help us in challenging Iran, it is for the better,” he said.

Israel’s ties with Azerbaijan have grown as its once-strong strategic relationship with another Iranian neighbor, Turkey, has deteriorated, most sharply over Israel’s killing of nine Turks aboard a ship that sought to breach Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip in 2010.

For Israeli intelligence, there is also a possible added benefit from Azerbaijan: Its significant cross-border contacts and trade with Iran’s large ethnic Azeri community.

For that same reason, as Iran’s nuclear showdown with the West deepens, the Islamic Republic sees the Azeri frontier as a weak point.

Earlier this month, Iran’s foreign ministry accused Azerbaijan of allowing the Israeli spy agency Mossad to operate on its territory and providing a corridor for “terrorists” to kill members of Iranian nuclear scientists.

The Los Angeles Times reports: Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan, who had refused to eat for 66 days to protest his detention without charge or trial, agreed Tuesday to end his hunger strike in return for his release April 17, according to Adnan’s lawyer Jawad Boulus.

Boulus took Adnan’s case to the Israeli Supreme Court last week seeking to secure his release after reports from Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, who had visited him at Ziv Hospital in northern Israel, expressing concern about his health condition. However, after reaching a deal with the state prosecutor, the petition was withdrawn.

Adnan, 33, an alleged member of the Islamic Jihad organization, was arrested Dec. 17 and placed in administrative detention, which allowed Israeli authorities to hold him for a period that could be extended indefinitely without charge or trial. There are currently more than 300 Palestinians held in administrative detention.

A military court sentenced Adnan on Jan. 8 to four months of administrative detention, which means he would not have been released before May 8.

An Israeli Justice Ministry statement said Adnan will be released April 17 and that it will not ask for an extension of his administrative detention.

“As long as no new significant and substantive material is added regarding the appellant, there is no intention to extend the administrative detention,” the ministry said.

This comes shortly after Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev was insisting that Adnan is a “cold-blooded killer” who must be kept in detention for the safety of the public:

Jeff Halper writes: Even as I write this, the bulldozers have been busy throughout that one indivisible country known by the bifurcated term Israel/Palestine. Palestinian homes, community centers, livestock pens and other “structures” (as the Israel authorities dispassionately call them) have been demolished in the Old City, Silwan and various parts of “Area C” in the West Bank, as well among the Bedouin — Israeli citizens — in the Negev/Nakab. This is merely mopping up, herding the last of the Arabs into their prison cells where, forever, they will cease to be heard or heard from, a non-issue in Israel and, eventually, in the wider world distracted from bigger, more pressing matters.

An as-yet confidential report submitted by the European consuls in Jerusalem and Ramallah raises urgent concerns over the “forced expulsion” of Palestinians — a particularly strong term for European diplomats to use — from Area C of the West Bank (the 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli control but which today contains less than 5% of the Palestinian population). Focusing particularly on the rise in house demolitions by the Israeli authorities and the growing economic distress of the Palestinians living in Area C, the report mentions the fertile and strategic Jordan Valley (where the Palestinian population has declined from 250,000 to 50,000 since the start of the Occupation), plans to relocate 3000 Jahalin Bedouins to a barren hilltop above the Jerusalem garbage dump and the ongoing but accelerated demolition of Palestinian homes (500 in 2011).

At the same time the “judaization” of Jerusalem continues apace, a “greater” Israeli Jerusalem steadily isolating the Palestinian parts of the city from the rest of Palestinian society while ghettoizing their inhabitants, more than 100,000 of which now live beyond the Wall. Some 120 homes were demolished in East Jerusalem in 2011; over the same period the Israeli government announced the construction of close to 7000 housing units for Jews in East and “Greater” Jerusalem. “If current trends are not stopped and reversed,” said a previous EU report, “the establishment of a viable Palestinian state within the pre-1967 borders seems more remote than ever. The window for a two-state solution is rapidly closing….”

In fact, it closed long ago. In terms of settlers and Palestinians, the Israeli government treats the whole country as one. Last year it demolished three times more homes of Israeli citizens (Arabs, of course) than it did in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The demolition of Bedouin homes in the Negev/Nakab is part of a plan approved by the government to remove 30,000 citizens from their homes and confine them to townships.

None of this concerns “typical” Israelis even if they have heard of it (little appears in the news). For them, the Israeli-Arab conflict was won and forgotten years ago, somewhere around 2004 when Bush informed Sharon that the US does not expect Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders, thus effectively ending the “two-state solution,” and Arafat “mysteriously” died.

Since then, despite occasional protests from Europe, the “situation” has been normalized. Israelis enjoy peace and quiet, personal security and a booming economy (with the usual neoliberal problems of fair allocation). The unshakable, bi-partisan support of the American government and Congress effectively shields it from any kind of international sanctions. Above all, Israeli Jews have faith that those pesky Arabs living somewhere “over there” beyond the Walls and barbed-wire barriers have been pacified and brought under control by the IDF. A recent poll found that “security,” the term Israelis use instead of “occupation” or “peace,” was ranked eleventh among the concerns of the Israeli public, trailing well behind employment, crime, corruption, religious-secular differences, housing and other more pressing issues. [Continue reading…]

Mya Guarnieri reports: Last week, Tel Aviv City Councilman Binyamin Babayoff (Shas) sent a letter to Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai, Minister of Transportation Israel Katz, and Dr. Moshe Tiomkin, a Tel Aviv councilman and the head of the city’s Transportation, Traffic and Parking Authority. In an excerpt published by Mynet (local online Hebrew news affiliated with Ynet), Babayoff wrote that “illegal foreign workers fill the buses…” leaving no room for Jewish Israeli residents of South Tel Aviv. He added that “foreign workers… give off a bad smell and they might, God forbid, cause all kinds of diseases.”

Reminding of Jim Crow laws, Babayoff proposes that the state introduce separate buses for migrant workers and refugees or limit their access to buses during peak hours of heavy traffic, thus giving preference to Jewish Israeli residents.

Speaking to Mynet, Babayoff claimed that his proposal was not racist. He said that Jewish Israelis in South Tel Aviv “live a life of hell” because of the foreigners in the neighborhood. He added that his letter was a response to the appeals of “scared” residents.

In a comment to Mynet, the Tel Aviv Municipality condemned Babayoff’s proposal and called it “racist,” adding that it is committed to “caring for immigrant workers and their basic health needs, education, and welfare…”

(Though they’re not migrant workers, homeless African refugees might beg to differ with the city’s statement).

After Babayoff embarked on a campaign against migrant workers and refugees in the summer of 2010 — calling on South Tel Aviv landlords not to rent to these “infiltrators” and claiming that doing so violates Jewish religious law — 25 area rabbis signed an “Edict Forbidding the Rental of Apartments to Infiltrators.” Shortly thereafter, 10 South Tel Aviv real estate agents signed a petition stating they would not rent to illegal residents.

Later that year, hundreds of Israeli rabbis across the country signed a religious edict forbidding the rental or sale of property to Palestinian citizens of the state.

Last year, David Sheen, an Israeli journalist with Haaretz, filmed some of the Jewish nationalists in South Tel Aviv who want “foreign infiltrators” expelled from Israel.

Yossi Melman writes: Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and former Mossad chief Meir Dagan have a lot in common. They are both chubby and in their late sixties. They are both war heroes, decorated generals. And each rose to the highest positions in the Israeli defense establishment. But don’t mistake such biographical similarities for personal affinity. Barak and Dagan hate each other. Their animosity goes back years—and at the heart of their dispute is the critical question of how the Jewish state should deal with its enemies’ nuclear ambitions.

In December 2010, together with some 30 Israeli defense and political journalists, I boarded a bus that took us to a building on the top of a hill overlooking Glilot junction, five miles north of Tel Aviv. We had come to Mossad headquarters for a meeting with Dagan, who was then the head of the agency. It was supposed to be an off-the-record briefing. But this being Israel, within hours after the meeting ended, most of what Dagan told us was on the Web and in the papers.

What he said was shocking. The Mossad chief told us that Iran would obtain nuclear warheads by 2014 at the earliest, and thus, he argued, there was no need for an Israeli military strike for the time being. Dagan’s claim ran directly counter to the public line of Israel’s defense establishment: that Iran would obtain the bomb much sooner.

Since that meeting more than a year ago, Dagan has been on a crusade to stop Israel from launching an imminent military strike against Iran. He has reiterated the argument that he laid out to us in Mossad headquarters—against a strike and in favor of sanctions and covert operations—at various public events and private conversations over the past year. And though Dagan is no longer head of Mossad, his view carries tremendous weight: His perspective on a possible Israeli strike is shared by many of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet ministers and Israel’s security establishment.

Dagan’s campaign has enraged Barak and Netanyahu, who accuse him of undermining Israeli deterrence. Barak and Netanyahu support an Israeli military strike in the near future, and for the past few months, with increasing intensity, they have tried to create the impression that they are considering such an attack this year.

Which view will prevail? At stake is the future of Israel, the lives of Iranians and Israelis, the supply of oil to the United States and the West, and the stability of the whole Middle East.

In Melman’s analysis of the struggle between Dagan and Barak, he pays a lot of attention to Israel’s attack on a nuclear reactor that Syria was alleged to be constructing in 2007. At the time and no doubt still now, there are those who viewed these allegations as part of a neocon conspiracy. The Syrians themselves claimed that the facility which got flattened in the Israeli attack was an agricultural research facility. Were that the case, it’s hard to understand why Bashir Assad would have failed to then make use of such a valuable propaganda opportunity. Western reporters could have been escorted around the site and shown all the shattered plant pots. Instead, bulldozers were swiftly moved in to bury every last trace of whatever the Syrians had been constructing. If they wanted to prove they had been falsely accused, this was a strange way of going about it.

Less than two weeks ago, Yoram Cohen, the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, warned that Iran would not allow assassinations of its nuclear scientists to continue without retaliation. Haaretz reported:

Lecturing at a closed forum in Tel Aviv, Cohen said that Iran believes Israel is behind the attacks on its nuclear experts, which have killed four scientists since November 2010. “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not that Israel took out the nuclear scientists,” Cohen said. “A major, serious country like Iran cannot let this go on. They want to deter Israel and extract a price so that decision makers in Israel think twice before they order an attack on an Iranian scientist.”

Commenters at the Washington Post, this site, and elsewhere, have been quick to suggest that the bombing in India and attempted bombing in Georgia could have been false flag operations initiated by Israel. Iranian officials have likewise made the same accusation.

This possibility strikes me as wildly improbable for several reasons.

Firstly, Mossad — like any other intelligence service — relies on the support of Israel’s foreign service staff. As deeply committed Zionists as they all might be, for Mossad to injure or kill Israeli diplomats would be impossible to justify and breed massive distrust between two government agencies that depend on each other.

Secondly, Israel doesn’t have too many friends but it counts India as one of them. It’s an alliance that’s worth more to Israel than it is to India. Why put that in jeopardy for a stunt like this?

A much more obvious explanation for these attacks is the one ventured by the head of Shin Bet: Iran is telling the Israelis they can’t continue their campaign of assassinations with impunity. And beyond that there is probably a wider implicit warning: to those who claim that Israel could launch a military strike on Iran without suffering a significant reprisal — think again.

Luckily for Tal Yehoshua Koren, the wife of an Israeli Defense Ministry representative to India, who was injured in today’s attack, she seems to have learned from the example of Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, who survived an assassination attempt in November 2010.

If you suspect someone has just attached a bomb to your car, jump out as fast as possible.

Update:

Haaretz adds: The bombings sparked the usual tough rhetoric from Israeli officials: Lieberman said Israel “would not overlook” the attacks, while Netanyahu vowed to “continue to act forcefully, systematically and patiently” against Iranian terror. Nevertheless, a harsh Israeli response is seen as unlikely.

One reason for this is that if, as is widely believed, Israel is behind a recent series of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran, government officials presumably knew that Iranian revenge attacks were likely and took that possibility into account. Though an innocent diplomat’s wife cannot be compared to a scientist directly involved in Iran’s nuclear program, Monday’s attacks were still limited enough that they didn’t violate the “rules of the game.” Indeed, the modus operandi of the New Delhi bombing exactly mimicked that used to kill several of the Iranian scientists. Hence a direct Israeli military strike on either Hezbollah or Iran seems unlikely.

Have we reached a quite predictable moment where counter-terrorism needs redefining? In other words, that when car bombings initiated by one state-sponsor of terrorism provoke a counter-attack of the same kind, that we should call such an attack an act of counter-terrorism?

Only last week there was confirmation from U.S. government officials that Israel is a state-sponsor of terrorism, having trained and deployed Iranian dissidents to conduct car bombings killing civilians in Iran. By internationally accepted definitions of terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism, there’s no question these were acts of terrorism and Israel’s role in instigating them makes it a state-sponsor of terrorism.

Now it would appear that Israel is reaping the reward for its own actions as Israeli diplomats have been targeted in India and Georgia. The attack in Delhi appears to have involved the use of the same method favored by Mossad — a magnetic bomb attached to the Israelis’ car by a passing motorcyclist.

We can now expect intellectual and moral acrobatics from Israel apologists who support the use of car bombs inside Iran but condemn their use anywhere else.

BBC News reports: Bombers have targeted staff at Israeli embassies in India and Georgia, officials say, with Israel accusing Iran of masterminding the attacks.

An explosion in Delhi injured one diplomat and three other people. Witnesses told local TV a motorcyclist had placed a device on the embassy’s car when it stopped in traffic.

A bomb underneath a diplomat’s car in Tbilisi was found and defused.

Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu said Iran was behind the two incidents.

“Today we witnessed two attempts of terrorism against innocent civilians,” he told a meeting of his Likud party MPs.

“Iran is behind these attacks and it is the largest terror exporter in the world.”

He also blamed Iran for recent plots to attack Israeli targets in Thailand and Azerbaijan that were prevented.

And he suggested that the militant Islamist Hezbollah movement was also involved.

Israel’s foreign ministry said that Israel had the ability to track down those who carried out the attacks.

The BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, in Jerusalem, says security at Israeli embassies has been tightened in recent months following warnings of potential attacks, after Iran accused Israel of a series of attacks on its nuclear scientists.

Israeli military authorities should immediately charge or release a Palestinian detained since December 17, 2011, without charge on the basis of secret evidence that he is not allowed to see or contest, Human Rights Watch said today. Khader Adnan Mousa went on hunger strike on December 18 to protest his administrative detention.

Adnan’s family, his lawyer, and doctors from an Israeli rights group, who visited Adnan this week told Human Rights Watch that his health has deteriorated seriously and that Israeli authorities had shackled him to his hospital bed.

“Israel should immediately end its unlawful administrative detention of Adnan and charge or release him,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “He may be approaching death from his hunger strike, and yet Israel is chaining him to his hospital bed without bothering to even charge him with any wrongdoing.”

Adnan, 33, has been on hunger strike for 55 days. According to a 2006 study by the British Medical Association, “during the 1980 and 1981 hunger strikes in Northern Ireland […] death generally occurred between 55 and 75 days.” In general, “the final stage” of a hunger strike occurs between 45 to 75 days “due to cardiovascular collapse or severe arrhythmias,” the study said.

Adnan’s sister and his wife told Human Rights Watch that Israeli forces arrested him at 3:30 a.m. on December 17 at their home in Arrabeh, near Jenin, in the northern West Bank. They said the soldiers did not inform the family of the reason for his arrest. His wife, Randa, said he has been arrested nine times, first in 1999, sometimes under administrative detention, and that he had also been convicted and sentenced by military courts for advocating on behalf of Islamic Jihad, an organization banned by the Israeli authorities.

Human Rights Watch has condemned attacks by the armed wing of Islamic Jihad against Israeli civilians as war crimes and crimes against humanity. However, Israel has not claimed that Adnan has participated in such attacks or charged him with any other crime, his lawyer said, and is holding him on the basis of secret evidence that he and his lawyer are not allowed to see or challenge. Adnan’s lawyer said the only known allegation against him arose when Adnan was questioned after his detention about his participation in a graduation ceremony for a kindergarten that was allegedly funded by Islamic Jihad.

On December 25, military authorities ordered Adnan’s remand in detention until January 8, when they ordered his administrative detention for four months. His first military court hearing was on January 30. During a second hearing on February 1, Adnan said he was placed in solitary confinement four days after his arres, and had been subjected to physical abuse, threats of assault, insults, prolonged interrogation, and unsanitary conditions of detention, his lawyer told Human Rights Watch.

Adnan’s family has been able to see him twice since his arrest: during the hearing on December 30, where they were not able to speak with him, and for 45 minutes at a hospital on February 7.Adnan’s wife told Human Rights Watch that he used to weigh 90 kilograms but that as of February 7 he appeared to have lost a third of his body weight and that he said had not bathed or changed clothes for a long time.

“His fingernails were very long,” she said, “and an Israeli prison guard was with him and one of his arms and both legs were chained to the hospital bed.”The visit occurred in Ziv hospital in Safed, inside Israel, where Adnan was transferred on February 6.

Adnan’s lawyer, as well as doctors from Physicians for Human Rights, an Israeli group, visited him at Ziv hospital separately and also stated that Israeli authorities kept Adnan shackled to his hospital bed during the visits. The Israeli physicians’ group stated that a guard from the Israel Prison Service refused to leave the area to permit the doctor to examine Adnan in private.

The Israeli doctors’ group told Human Rights Watch that Israeli authorities previously allowed their doctors to examine Adnan once, on January 29, when he was transferred from prison to the Assaf Ha-Rofeh hospital. Adnan stated that he would allow further examination and treatment only by the group’s doctors, but the Israel Prison Service transferred him to five different medical institutions during the following eight days, making it difficult for doctors and family members to visit him, according to the doctor’s group and his lawyer.

On February 6, an Israeli military judge, Dalya Kaufman, approved his administrative detention on the basis of an assessment by a physician for the Israel Prison Service, rejecting Adnan’s petition for release due to his deteriorating condition. However, Adnan has refused to allow prison service medics to perform medical examinations and has requested that medical examinations be conducted in private, rather than in the immediate presence of prison guards, and that the results be confidential, rather than shared with prison and security services, the physicians’ group said. Israeli authorities have not allowed the Israeli doctors to carry out examinations under such circumstances.

The military judge also ruled out alternatives to administrative detention on the basis of secret evidence that Adnan is a risk to Israeli security.

Adnan was shackled to his bed again at an appeals hearing against his continued detention, held at Ziv hospital on February 9. A military appeals court judge, Moshe Tirosh, did not reach a decision on the appeal but said he would do so within a week; the details of the hearing were not public, said Addameer, a Palestinian prisoners’ group.

Under Israeli military law, detainees considered a threat to Israeli security may be held without charge or trial for periods of up to six months, which can be renewed indefinitely. Administrative detainees are not told the reason for their detention or the specific allegations against them. A military judge must approve the detention order, but most of the material submitted by the prosecution is classified and not shown to the detainee or his lawyer, because Israeli military authorities claim it cannot be revealed for security reasons.

Israel’s international legal obligations, however, require it to inform those arrested of the reasons for the arrest at the time, to promptly inform them of any charges against them and to bring them before a judge, and in criminal cases, to provide a fair and public trial in which the defendant may challenge any witnesses against them.

Palestinian prisoners in Ofer, Megiddo, and Ramon prisons began a hunger strike in support of Adnan on February 2, Addameer said.

Israeli authorities were holding 307 Palestinians in administrative detention as of December 31, up from 219 administrative detainees at the beginning of 2011, according to the Israel Prison Service.

“Israel should end, today, before it’s too late, its almost two-month-long refusal to inform Adnan of any criminal charge or evidence against him,” Whitson said.

While the following report focuses on Israel’s ties to the Iranian terrorist group, Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), it also indicates these links mean that Israel is indirectly tied to al Qaeda. Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and nephew of 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, was employed by the MEK as a bomb-maker.

NBC News reports: Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders.

The group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, has long been designated as a terrorist group by the United States, accused of killing American servicemen and contractors in the 1970s and supporting the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran before breaking with the Iranian mullahs in 1980.

The attacks, which have killed five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and may have destroyed a missile research and development site, have been carried out in dramatic fashion, with motorcycle-borne assailants often attaching small magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims’ cars.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Obama administration is aware of the assassination campaign but has no direct involvement.

The Iranians have no doubt who is responsible – Israel and the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, known by various acronyms, including MEK, MKO and PMI.

“The relation is very intricate and close,” said Mohammad Javad Larijani, a senior aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, speaking of the MEK and Israel. “They (Israelis) are paying … the Mujahedin. Some of their (MEK) agents … (are) providing Israel with information. And they recruit and also manage logistical support.”

Moreover, he said, the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, is training MEK members in Israel on the use of motorcycles and small bombs. In one case, he said, Mossad agents built a replica of the home of an Iranian nuclear scientist so that the assassins could familiarize themselves with the layout prior to the attack.

Much of what the Iranian government knows of the attacks and the links between Israel and MEK comes from interrogation of an assassin who failed to carry out an attack in late 2010 and the materials found on him, Larijani said.

The U.S.-educated Larijani, whose two younger brothers run the legislative and judicial branches of the Iranian government, said the Israelis’ rationale is simple. “Israel does not have direct access to our society. Mujahedin, being Iranian and being part of Iranian society, they have … a good number of … places to get into the touch with people. So I think they are working hand-to-hand very close. And we do have very concrete documents.”

Two senior U.S. officials confirmed for NBC News the MEK’s role in the assassinations, with one senior official saying, “All your inclinations are correct.” A third official would not confirm or deny the relationship, saying only, “It hasn’t been clearly confirmed yet.” All the officials denied any U.S. involvement in the assassinations.
[…]
The U.S. suspicion of the MEK doesn’t end there. Law enforcement officials have told NBC News that in 1994, the MEK made a pact with terrorist Ramzi Yousef a year after he masterminded the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. According to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Yousef built an 11-pound bomb that MEK agents placed inside one of Shia Islam’s greatest shrines in Mashad, Iran, on June 20, 1994. At least 26 people, mostly women and children, were killed and 200 wounded in the attack.

That connection between Yousef, nephew of 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, and the MEK was first reported in a book, “The New Jackals,” by Simon Reeve. NBC News confirmed that Yousef told U.S. law enforcement that he had worked with the MEK on the bombing.

Ben White writes: The presence of a few Palestinian members in the Knesset (MKs) is often touted as a sign of Israel’s robust democracy. Yet elected representatives of the Palestinian community inside Israel face growing harassment by the state, by fellow MKs and the media.

On Monday, the trial of MK Said Naffaa, from the Balad party, opened in Nazareth. Naffaa is charged with “travelling illegally to an enemy state, assisting in organising a visit to an enemy state, and being in contact with a foreign agent” – all relating to a trip he made to Syria as part of a Druze delegation in 2007.

Naffaa has denied the charges, insisting that “all his activities and meetings fall within the framework of his duties as an elected public official”.

Two years ago the Knesset house committee voted overwhelmingly to strip Naffaa of his parliamentary immunity. At the time, the committee chair declared: “Holding a Knesset seat is not a permit to visit enemy countries and hold meetings with terrorists.” MK Michael Ben-Ari (National Union) suggested that Naffaa and “his colleagues go to the Syrian parliament and work from there“.

An editorial in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz has called the prosecution of Naffaa “unwarranted, harmful and smack[ing] of political persecution based on nationality”. It is part of the state’s efforts to use criminal law against the Palestinian leadership in Israel. Another Arab MK, Mohammad Barakeh is still facing two charges (of an original four) relating to his participation in demonstrations in 2005 and 2007, and the allegation he assaulted or insulted police officers.

MK Haneen Zoabi, while not facing criminal charges, has been the target of the most vicious incitement and smears. Two weeks ago, a photograph was published in the Israeli media of her meeting with the Hamas-affiliated Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) speaker Aziz Dweik in the West Bank. That was followed by reports that two other Arab MKs had met with Dweik.

The response was an outpouring of invective. MKs from prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud urged the state to “immediately remove the fifth column from the Knesset”, while the chair of the house committee, MK Levin described Arab MKs as “competing [to be] the greatest traitor and terrorist sponsor”. Another Likud MK, Miri Regev, said that “the time has come for Arab Knesset members to realise their place“.

Noah Millman reviews The Unmaking of Israel:Gershom Gorenberg is an exception to the rule — more than one rule. He’s an Orthodox Jewish Israeli of American origin, a group that generally tilts sharply to the right in an Israeli context. But he’s decidedly on the political left, an advocate of not only freezing settlement construction but of initiating evacuations “without waiting for a signature on a peace agreement,” of negotiating a two-state solution based on the Green Line (the armistice lines of 1949, the de facto borders prior to the 1967 war), of the separation of synagogue and state, and of true civic equality between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. More than this, he has a realistic understanding of how the Zionist project must have been perceived by the Arab population of the Levant from the beginning: when he talks about the Palestinian Nakba — “catastrophe,” which is how the Palestinian Arabs refer to the events Israeli Jews call the War of Independence — he doesn’t put the word in scare quotes. But though Gorenberg is a man of the left, he also describes himself as a Zionist, rather than a non-, anti-, or post-Zionist. That is to say, he describes himself as a Jewish nationalist.

The State of Israel is also an exception to the rule — more than one rule. Like Greece and Algeria, India and Vietnam, Kenya and Lithuania, and numerous other states today, it is the fruit of a movement for national liberation, of a struggle, in the words of the Israeli national anthem, to be “a free people in our own land.” Unlike any other movement for national liberation, however, Zionism did not seek an independent state for an already existing nation living in a territory but rather to create a nation and a state out of a people scattered across the globe that had lived nearly two millennia in diaspora from its ancestral home. Like the United States and Canada, Brazil and Argentina, Australia and South Africa, Israel is also a settler state, created by a European population that came not merely to rule but to occupy and to substantially displace the indigenous people. Unlike any other settler state, however, the settlers of Israel understood themselves not to be venturing forth but to be coming home — and though individually any Israeli could make a home in any number of places, as could anyone from anywhere, in aggregate there is no other place on earth that they could call home.

This exceptional man has written a book, The Unmaking of Israel, about that exceptional state and its protracted and deepening crisis. And it is, appropriately enough, an exceptional contribution to the genre.

What is exceptional about the book is the frame within which Gorenberg chooses to tell a mostly familiar story — familiar, anyway, to anyone conversant with the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Gorenberg is not the first person to write a book decrying the human consequences of Israel’s settlement enterprise in the West Bank, and indeed, though he does decry them forcefully it is not the purpose of his book either to document them or to persuade anyone who does not already agree that the occupation has had frightful ramifications for the Palestinians. Nor is he the first person to make the “demographic argument” for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — the argument that Israel cannot remain both a democratic state and a Jewish state if it does not retain a substantial and stable Jewish majority, which would not be the case if the West Bank were incorporated into Israel proper. Indeed, this latter point is now part of the Israeli conventional wisdom—every party to the left of Likud formally endorses it, Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nominally accepts it as well, and even the platform of Avigdor Liberman’s far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party depends on the same premise (which is why that platform proposes trading the heavily Arab areas within the Green Line for the Israeli settlement blocs in the West Bank as part of a hypothetical agreement). But this is also not the primary thrust of Gorenberg’s book; he takes it for granted that everyone understands the basic arithmetic.

Rather, the thrust of the book, as the title states, is to demonstrate that the series of decisions made during and after the 1967 War that resulted in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza set in motion a process that has progressively “unmade” the State of Israel. Indeed, the progressive expansion of the settlement enterprise has so eroded the foundations of the signature achievement of political Zionism—Israel as we now know it—that not merely a “Jewish democratic state” but the state as such is now imperiled.

Jonathan Cook writes: The wheel is turning full circle. Last week the Israeli parliament updated a 59-year-old law originally intended to prevent hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from returning to the land from which they had been expelled as Israel was established.

The purpose of the draconian 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law was to lock up any Palestinian who managed to slip past the snipers guarding the new state’s borders. Israel believed only savage punishment and deterrence could ensure it maintained the overwhelming Jewish majority it had recently created through a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Fast-forward six decades and Israel is relying on the infiltration law again, this time to prevent a supposedly new threat to its existence: the arrival each year of several thousand desperate African asylum seekers.

As it did with the Palestinians many years ago, Israel has criminalised these new refugees – in their case, for fleeing persecution, war or economic collapse. Whole families can now be locked up, without a trial, for three years while a deportation order is sought and enforced, and Israelis who offer them assistance risk jail sentences of up to 15 years.

Israel’s intention is apparently to put as many of these refugees behind bars as possible, and dissuade others from following in their footsteps.

To cope, officials have approved the building of an enormous detention camp, operated by Israel’s prison service, to contain 10,000 of these unwelcome arrivals. That will make it the largest holding facility of its kind in the world – according to Amnesty International, it will be three times bigger than the next largest, in the much more populous Texas.

The Guardian reports: Hackers disrupted online access to the Tel Aviv stock exchange, El Al airlines and three banks on Monday, in what the government described as a cyber-offensive against Israel.

The attacks came just days after an unidentified hacker, proclaiming Palestinian sympathies, posted the details of thousands of Israeli credit card holders and other personal information on the internet in a mass theft.

Stock trading and El Al flights operated normally despite the disruption, which occurred as Israeli media reported that pro-Palestinian hackers had threatened at the weekend to shut down the Tase stock exchange and airline websites.

While apparently confined to areas causing only limited inconvenience, the attacks have caused particular alarm in a country that depends on high-tech systems for much of its defence against hostile neighbours. Officials insist, however, that they pose no immediate security threat.

Paul Pillar writes: The killing of an individual foreigner overseas, if carried out for a political or policy purpose by either a nonstate actor or clandestine agents of a state, is an act of international terrorism. At least that is how U.S. law defines it, for purposes such as the State Department’s annual reports on terrorism. This form of terrorism is part of what put Iran on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, the Iranian regime perpetrated numerous assassinations of exiled Iranian political dissidents, in Europe as well as in other countries of southwest Asia. The Iranians effectively ended this assassination campaign about a decade and a half ago, largely to improve relations with the European countries on whose soil many of the assassinations occurred and perhaps also because by then Iran had bumped off nearly all of the people on its hit list. We should assume, however, that Iran retains the capability to assassinate far-flung targets again, and that it would consider doing so if searching for ways to strike back at adversaries that are striking it.

Iran itself has been a victim of this form of terrorist violence. This has included some instances, such as the killing of Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan, in which Iranian interests have paralleled those of the United States. It has included during the past two years the killing in Iran of several nuclear scientists, the most recent of whom died this week from an explosive placed on his vehicle. Actions are more important than nomenclature, so if you prefer not to apply the T-word to these killings then just imagine what the reaction would be if something similar were occurring in the United States. Imagine the response if even just one scientist (let alone four or five) who was employed, say, at one of the U.S. national laboratories had been been similarly assassinated and a foreign hand was suspected. There would be screams of “act of war” and the U.S. president would be hard-pressed to hold back impulses to strike back forcefully. Now put yourselves in the Iranians’ place. Not only do they face the serial assassination of their scientists, but they face it amid an environment filled with numerous other indications of foreign hostility, including the economic warfare, the saber rattling and the contest among American politicians to see who can shoot the most rhetorical venom at Iran. From this perspective, aptly described by Vali Nasr, it should hardly be surprising if Iran strikes back while it sees more reason than ever before to develop a nuclear weapon in the hope of deterring U.S.-led aggressiveness.

A former senior Israeli security official tells the New York Times that uncertainty about who was responsible for the latest assassination is useful. “It’s not enough to guess,” he says. “You can’t prove it, so you can’t retaliate. When it’s very, very clear who’s behind an attack, the world behaves differently.”

How true that might be really depends on the form of retaliation. As Nasr and Pillar note, the rationale for Iran to want nuclear weapons in order to deter foreign aggression, has never been more compelling. So why should Tehran slow itself down in pursuit of that goal by allowing itself to rise to an Israeli bait?

Indeed, the longer Iran exercises restraint and the more reckless Israeli antagonism becomes, the more reason there is to ask: whose nuclear weapons in the Middle East should we fear the most?

Israel maintains a policy of nuclear ambiguity, which is to say that although it has a nuclear arsenal estimated to include as many as 400 weapons, it refuses to accept the international treaty obligations imposed on most other nuclear powers. Moreover, according to some observers it has its own version of “mutually assured destruction”. Unlike the original MAD doctrine which constrained the Soviet Union and the United States, Israel has the “Samson Option,” which is to say Israel won’t allow itself to go down without destroying human civilization in the process.

This is how Professor David Perlmutter articulated this apocalyptic vision ten years ago:

Israel has been building nuclear weapons for 30 years. The Jews understand what passive and powerless acceptance of doom has meant for them in the past, and they have ensured against it. Masada was not an example to follow — it hurt the Romans not a whit, but Sampson in Gaza? With an H-bomb? What would serve the Jew-hating world better in repayment for thousands of years of massacres but a Nuclear Winter. Or invite all those tut-tutting European statesmen and peace activists to join us in the ovens?

For the first time in history, a people facing extermination while the world either cackles or looks away — unlike the Armenians, Tibetans, World War II European Jews or Rwandans — have the power to destroy the world. The ultimate justice?

That might be the ultimate justice if everyone on the planet posed a threat to Israel, but Israel’s enemies are in truth far less numerous. So really, the image being evoked here is not one of justice but of the ultimate form of vengeance.

Individuals and nations can be at their most dangerous when cornered. As Israel continues its slide away from democratic principles and becomes increasingly strident in asserting itself as a Jewish theocratic state, the world has more reason to fear a nuclear threat in the Middle East that does not lurk somewhere over the horizon but is already a clear and present danger.

Avner Cohen, author of Israel and the Bomb and The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb, is the foremost scholar on the subject of Israel’s policy of nuclear ambiguity, and as he notes, Israel’s nuclear arsenal is only of value if Israel can remain the sole nuclear power in the Middle East.

On the one hand, the bomb’s purpose was clear: Ben-Gurion, who remained so helpless throughout the Holocaust period, wanted an ‘insurance policy’ to protect against a recurrence of such a tragedy. If you have the capability of threatening Hiroshima, you stave off Auschwitz. On the other hand, the other side could try to attain the same status. And if it were to succeed, then, suddenly, all of the calculations would be altered, moving from one extreme to the other. This was not like the Americans and the Russians, who found themselves more or less in a situation of parity. When both sides in the Arab-Israeli dispute have the bomb, Israel is trapped in an awful situation, worse than at the starting point. Thus, Israel’s real interest is for nobody to have the bomb.

Yet rather than pursue that goal of regional disarmament and the creation of a nuclear-weapon-free Middle East, those who are gunning for a war against Iran only have one ambition: that Israel must retain its regional military dominance.