Middle East Update

by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz
In an address to the 62nd session of the United Nations General Assembly on Monday October 1, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni made reference to the Bible, the festival of Sukkot and democracy. She also warned against appeasing those she called extremists.

“Three thousand years ago, the people of Israel journeyed from slavery in Egypt to independence in the land of Israel. The Bible tells us that on their voyage to liberty they made a crucial stop: the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. As the General Assembly gathers this year, the Jewish people recall that historic journey by marking the festival of Sukkot.”

With this Biblical interpretation, she framed the Israeli conflict with its neighbors as fomented by “those who reject these core values - those who seek power without responsibility; those whose aim is not to realize their own rights, but to deny those rights for others.

by Gil Ronen
Former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told Conservative Party delegates in Britain on Sunday September 30, that UN efforts to negotiate with Iran had failed and that he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the country. Influential conservative thinker Norman Podhoretz told a British paper that he has advised U.S. President George W. Bush to do just that.

by Hillel Fendel
Delayed by a few hours, Olmert’s gesture to Abbas - the release of 87 terrorist would-be murderers from Israeli prisons - has begun, ON October 1. The 87 terrorists, none of whom actually succeeded in their attempts to murder Jews, are being released in keeping with a good-will “propping-up” gesture on the part of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his government towards Fatah/Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen).

According to Arab residents of Gaza, Egyptian authorities temporarily opened the Rafiah crossing on Saturday September 29, in order to allow dozens of Hamas terrorists to enter Gaza. Over 80 Hamas terrorists were reportedly allowed to enter Gaza after being stranded in Egypt by the closure of the Rafiah crossing after the Hamas takeover of Gaza in June.

Arab terrorists threw Molotov cocktails at an Israeli driver on Saturday September 29. The attack took place near an Arab village northeast of Ramallah. The driver was not injured. IDF soldiers arrived at the scene and apprehended four of the attackers.

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Spain recently hosted its first international conference on the Holocaust, as Spanish schools prepare to introduce the Holocaust into their national history curriculum in the near future. Although Spain’s involvement in the Holocaust was limited - on the one hand, Spain refused to shelter Jews who had escaped via the Pyrenees Mountains, while on the other hand Spanish diplomats assisted in efforts in Budapest to save Jews.

Conal Urquhart
One of the kidnappers of the BBC journalist Alan Johnston, Muqtassar Khatab, was killed Wednesday September 26, when an Israeli missile hit the vehicle he was traveling in.

(VOA News)
The Iranian government is building a secret underground military nuclear facility near its existing complex at Natanz, the opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran asserted at a news conference in Paris Thursday September 27. The underground facility is five kilometers from the Natanz complex and will be operational in six months.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates asked Congress yesterday, September 26, to approve an additional $42.3 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the Bush administration’s 2008 war funding request to nearly $190 billion — the largest single-year total for the wars so far.

Nathan Burstein (Jerusalem Post)
Israel is on track to welcome more tourists in 2007 than in any year since the start of the second intifada in 2000. The country should greet a total of 2.3 million tourists by the end of the year, according to the Tourism Ministry. 2000 was the busiest year in the history of Israeli tourism, when the country had 2.41 million foreign visitors.