Lebanon’s Maronite community has long been the region’s Christian citadel. “It used to be that when Christians around the region looked at the situation in Lebanon, it cheered them,” Elie Fawaz, a Lebanese political analyst, told me this week in Beirut. “They saw that here the Christians were equal to their Muslim counterparts. They were citizens and had the same rights as Muslims.” The citadel is now tottering. If Lebanon once served as a beacon for the region’s other Christians, the dimming of this light is making Christians in unstable countries like Iraq, Syria, the Palestinian territories, and Egypt even more vulnerable.

Lebanon’s Christian community comprises up to a third of the country’s total population. It is made up largely of Maronites but also includes Greek Orthodox and a number of other sects, like Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholic, Greek Catholic, and Roman Catholic. Christians were likely never a majority in Lebanon, and yet, says Fawaz, a Greek Orthodox, “the Christians didn’t act like a minority. They pushed their vision for an independent and sovereign Lebanese state.”

Historically, Lebanese Christians have provided some of the region’s most influential intellectual leaders, like Charles Malik, who helped write the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Michel Chiha, one of the authors of Lebanon’s 1926 Constitution. In the wake of Lebanon’s independence in 1943, the Christian vision was to build a sovereign state that would bring political and cultural modernity to the country and, eventually, to the broader Middle East.

That project stalled for a number of reasons. First, there was the relative demographic decline of the Christians in the post-independence period, due to the accelerated birth rates of Sunnis and Shiites. The French authorities that oversaw Lebanon during the mandate period created a power-sharing agreement that allotted Christians 50 percent of the parliament—the other 50 percent was split between Shia and Sunnis—and this struck Lebanon’s growing Muslim population as unfair. Most significantly, in addition to these domestic problems, the Christians were unable to protect Lebanon from the region’s furies, which culminated in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) that pitted a number of different domestic players, as well as regional and international actors, against one another.

One of the main causes of that 15-year conflagration was the support of Lebanese Sunnis for the Palestinian cause, which attached these Sunnis to a larger Arab regional identity with a shared goal of eradicating Israel. The Sunni community’s political, diplomatic, and financial support of the Palestinians set them squarely against the Maronites, who resisted turning Lebanon into a forward operating base for the P.L.O. They sought to preserve their vision of a Lebanon free from the region’s destructive political currents and to avoid the Israeli reprisals they rightly feared.

What’s instructive is that the Christians fought in the war. “In 1975, mothers sent their kids to fight the Palestinians,” says Fawaz. “They had a vision for Lebanon.”

That changed when political calculation and greed shifted Christians’ focus from their war against the P.L.O. and Yasser Arafat’s allies to each other. The Christians split into different factions that faced off during the civil war. Two decades after the end of the war, the Christians are still plagued by this fissure, and they are still represented by the same political leaders who took them to war against one another more than 20 years ago. The result, says Fawaz, “is that today the Christians have no vision. They are definitely a numerical minority and acting like one—reactive and fearful.”

The Christian community here is suffering from a number of symptoms of minority psychosis. Consider that the head of the Maronite church has spoken out in defense of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Patriarch Beshara Butros Rai called Assad “open-minded” in a September interview. “I am hoping Assad will be given more chances to implement the reforms he already launched,” Rai added. An unfortunately all-too-typical Christian fear and hatred of Sunnis has convinced many Lebanese Christians—as well as Syrian ones—that only Damascus’ Alawite minority regime can protect the region’s Christians from Sunni Islamists.

Obviously, a regime that has slaughtered protesters for almost a year hardly embodies the sort of values promoted in the gospel, or warrants the faith of a cleric. But more to the point: This is the same Syrian regime that waged an open-ended campaign of terror against Lebanon’s Christians starting in 2005. Christian politicians and journalists were assassinated; bombs detonated in Christian regions of the country. And the official head of Lebanon’s Christian community is now appealing to Assad for protection?

The Maronites had always distinguished themselves as among the region’s most stubbornly independent of confessional sects. But fear, resentment, and short-sighted political calculation have led them today to seek protection and patronage from the Middle East’s most dangerous and retrograde elements: Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah. Recently, Fawaz explains, senior church officials came out in favor of the arms of Hezbollah’s Islamic resistance. “The Maronite church,” Fawaz says, “has taken a position defending the party that stands accused of killing the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri.” Fear has compelled the Christians to abandon logic as well as moral scruple.

In the aftermath of the February 2005 assassination of Hariri, Damascus withdrew its troops from Lebanon after almost 30 years. That represented a golden opportunity for the country’s Christians. “They’d been resisting Syrian hegemony in order to regain a free and independent Lebanon,” Fawaz says. “With Syria out, the Christians had what they always said they wanted: Sunni leadership that had a Lebanon-first policy.” Some Christian parties did ally themselves with the largest Sunni party, led by the late Hariri’s son Saad. But the majority, under the leadership of Michel Aoun, the former head of the Lebanese army, partnered with Hezbollah instead.

In other words, today’s Christians seem less motivated by their vision of an independent Lebanon than by their hatred of the Sunnis. It’s true that Lebanese Christians, like other minority groups here, including the Shiites, suffered terrible persecution at the hands of the Sunnis, who for centuries treated them as second-class citizens (at best). But Lebanon’s current Sunni leaders are not Ottomans, never mind jihadists. Like the Christians themselves, the Sunni leadership here promotes liberal values and a liberalized economy.

By openly siding against the Sunnis and allying with Hezbollah—and by extension Iran—the Christians have let identity politics and ideology, rather than interests and values, drive policy. The Sunnis are the regional majority, and no matter what sort of revolutionary project Iran has in store for the Middle East, the Sunnis aren’t going anywhere.

The question for the Christians is how to respond to the upheavals that have reshaped the region over the last year. Lebanon’s Christian population has the power to set the agenda for the rest of their regional co-religionists. Either they can identify and work with those Sunnis who share their same vision for Lebanon and the rest of the region, or they can let ancient wounds dictate a strategy of resentment that will ensure their demise.

Those inclined to discount the possibility of a Christian-free Middle East would do well to remember that Jews, in the recent past, had a significant place in the Ottoman Empire and Iran. Were it not for the birth of a sovereign Jewish state that took in Jewish refugees thrown out by countries that turned against them, this regional minority might well have disappeared half a century ago. Without an Israel of their own, if the Christians don’t get it right their era in the Middle East may be coming to an end.

• Recent attacks against U.N. forces patrolling the Israel-Lebanon border came from Hezbollah, say Israel and France. Israel is concerned about the potential for escalation. [Haaretz]

• Iran plans to hold naval war games beyond the Strait of Hormuz, in international waters, not too far from U.S. ships. This’ll end well. [AP/WP]

• As the Arab League prepares its visit, 160 more were killed in Syria’s northwest. Or as Bashar Assad calls it, “Wednesday.” [NYT]

• In pleading the insanity defense, the lawyer for Levi Aron, accused killer of eight-year-old Leiby Kletzky, suggested that the inbreeding in that Brooklyn Hasidic community may have led to his client’s mental deficiencies. [NY Daily News]

• Jordan Zane Weiner, meet the world. [Page Six]

A federal indictment earlier this week blew open links between the Iran-backed Shia paramilitary organization that effectively runs Lebanon and the brutal Latin American cocaine trade, in particular the vicious Mexican cartel Los Zetas. If you haven’t read top investigative reporter Jo Becker’s exhaustive following-of-the-money—which includes five continents, untold numbers of used cars, and 85 tons of cocaine—now’s the time. The short of it is that Hezbollah benefits, at times directly, from the Latin American drug trade by laundering money via various means (including those used cars) to Beirut’s Lebanese Canadian Bank. The money quote comes from a U.S. investigator: “They operate like the Gambinos on steroids.”

It’s important for law enforcement to understand exactly how it works. It’s important for the rest of the world, however, to understand that Hezbollah feeds itself with the blood of horrific drug-related violence. This might not surprise those already predisposed to not liking Hezbollah, but in fact this is just one piece of the group’s much larger hypocrisy, which should be leveraged as effective PR in the Arab and Muslim world.

Larbi Sadiki pointed to another Hezbollah hypocrisy earlier this week: its continued support of Bashar Assad’s murderous regime in neighboring Syria—support that isn’t merely passive, but actually includes party head Hassan Nasrallah denying Assad’s atrocities. “When such a wildly popular resistance movement abandons the ideal, much less the practice, of liberation in support of tyranny, it loses credibility with the public,” he wrote. “Fighting Israel as a Syrian proxy is one thing, but opposing the Syrian people’s desire for democratic change is something else entirely.” Elias Muhanna reports that Hezbollah feels more vulnerable with its Syrian patron waning, and “recent polls also show that Hezbollah’s reputation has taken a considerable hit in the Arab world because of its alliance with the Assad regime.” (Contrast all this with Hamas, which has practiced “quiet dissidence,” according to Sadiki, and which is looking to decamp from its current headquarters, in Damascus, for greener pastures in Cairo or even Qatar. This is one advantage of being a Sunni rather than a Shiite group and thus able to forge strong alliances with countries besides Shiite-ruled Syria and Iran.)

So, Hezbollah backs a tyrant who kills his own people (and predominantly Sunnis) and makes its money from the tragedy of other poor oppressed people half a world away. Sounds like a pretty good pitch for Hezbollah’s enemies, including Israel, to make in the region.

(Headline from.)

Government Says Hezbollah Profits From U.S. Cocaine Market Via Link to Mexican Cartel [ProPublica]
Beirut Bank Seen as a Hub of Hezbollah’s Financing [NYT]
Hezbollah’s Hypocritical Resistance [NYT]
Nasrallah’s Fighting Words [NYT Latitudes]
A New Home for Hamas? [FP]

• Particularly in the wake of the storming of the British embassy Tuesday, the European Union is clamoring for fresh sanctions against Iran. Meanwhile, Iran simply released the 11 “students” detained for doing so. [WSJ/AP/WP]

• German prosecutors allege an Iranian plot to attack U.S. bases there. [Haaretz/Forward]

• Turkey is upping sanctions against Syria, and the conflict looks like it’s spilling over into Lebanon. [NYT/NYT]

• Under Quartet guidelines, President Abbas offered a proposal for going forward with peace talks. No reply from Prime Minister Netanyahu. [Haaretz]

• At a Jewish Manhattan fundraiser, President Obama told donors that Israel was the country’s most important ally. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Iranian students (“students”?) have stormed the British embassy in Tehran. [WP]

• This comes following an official downgrading of ties with Britain, which came after further sanctions aimed at Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. [NYT]

• In Egypt, the news is that the first day of elections went down relatively smoothly and peacefully. [NYT]

• Now that he has held out a month and his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is no longer threatening to break up the coalition over it, Prime Minister Netanyahu will likely unfreeze the $100 million in Palestinian Authority tax revenue. [Haaretz]

• Stalin’s daughter died at 85 in Wisconsin (!). Her first two loves were Jewish men; in neither case did her father approve. [NYT]

then the eastern Mediterranean is seething. There, claims to huge natural-gas reserves off the coast of Cyprus and Lebanon have raised tensions with Turkey, which occupies half of Cyprus, as well as with Israel. Cyprus and Israel are drilling for gas, angering Turkey. The militant Islamic group Hezbollah, in Lebanon, has threatened to attack Israeli gas rigs.

Further complicating this is the bitter rift between Turkey and Israel after the deadly Israeli commando interception of a Turkish flotilla trying to transport aid to Palestinians in Gaza last year.

“Part of it,” adds a regional expert, “is just the greater assertiveness of Turkey’s foreign policy everywhere.” similarly with Hezbollah—for which the mammoth offshore gas field Leviathan could be, as Tablet Magazine Mideast columnist Lee Smith put it, a new Sheba Farms. The pretext is kind of the whole point.

Meanwhile, the article notes that global warming has unfrozen parts of the Arctic Sea, leading to disputes over energy sources and shipping lanes. Israel has no polar ice caps to melt, but it does have disappearing water: In some places, the Dead Sea’s coastline has receded by as much as one-third of a mile. Less water means more land; and around the Jordan River, more land axiomatically means more conflict. The northern section of the sea is in the West Bank. Is the new land the military’s? Israel’s? The Palestinians’? (They didn’t have this issue the last time the Dead Sea lost water, about 120 millennia ago.)

Meanwhile, while the Dead Sea had made the Final Fourteen in voting for something called the New 7 Wonders of Nature, it failed to make the last cut. Part of the problem is that Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Jordan all ran separate campaigns. The absence of peace claims one more casualty.

A New Era of Gunboat Diplomacy [NYT]
New Israeli-Palestinian Land Dispute Rises as Dead Sea Water Level Drops [Haaretz]
Dead Sea’s Bid As a New Wonder Is Dead [JTA]
Earlier: Israel-Lebanon Sea Border Dispute Heats Up

• Lebanon joined Syria in rebuking the Arab League’s call last week for the Assad regime to end violence against protesters. Probably because Lebanon is run by Hezbollah now. [DPA/Haaretz]

• A new bill in Congress would halt U.S. funding for any U.N. entity that supports Palestinian statehood. The administration opposes the bill on the grounds that it will decrease the United States’ ability to influence policy there. [Haaretz]

• The IDF is reinforcing its border defenses and forces in the south in anticipation of another terrorist attack emanating from Gaza and/or Sinai. [Haaretz]

• Rep. Michelle Bachmann kibitzed with several Orthodox rabbis in New York yesterday. [NY Post/Forward]

• Gaza residents with scholarships to study abroad are prevented—by Hamas—from leaving. [Al-Jazeera]

For six months, from North Africa and the Levant to the Persian Gulf, Arab masses toppled Arab regimes while Arab tribes and sects squared off against each other in internecine warfare. Now Israel, which has nothing to do with the intra-Arab conflict that instigated and shaped the events of the Arab Spring, has been dragged into a mess that shows no signs of ending soon.

If many Western analysts were a little too eager to overlook the anti-Israel—as well as anti-American—sentiment on display at Tahrir Square during the Egyptian uprising, their implicit interpretation was nonetheless accurate: Israel was not the central issue driving the protest movement that brought down Hosni Mubarak. The Arab Spring isn’t about Israel; it’s about the Arabs.

But the focus has returned to the Jewish state. The method employed is tawreet, an Arabic word that means embroiling. In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, Brookings Institution scholar Michael Doran explained its strategic value: “You embroil someone by goading him to take actions against a third party that will result in political effects beneficial to you.” Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, for instance, was a master of embroilment, using various Palestinian factions to attack Israel in order to create conditions that were domestically and regionally advantageous for himself.

Right now, as Doran told me in a phone interview, “it is in the interest of many actors in the region to heighten tension with Israel.” Among these actors, there’s Hamas, the Iranian-sponsored outfit that rules Gaza and seems to have more control than Egyptian security does over the porous Gaza-Egyptian border. But the perpetrators of the recent terror attacks on Israel also enjoyed some level of assistance from elements of Egypt’s security and military establishment. Egyptian Islamist factions may also have an interest in stoking the flames with Israel in order to position themselves as champions of “resistance” in the post-Mubarak political era.

Some analysts have suggested that the carefully planned and coordinated operations may be the work of al-Qaida, whose newly anointed leader, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, is eager to leave his mark in the country of his origins.

But none of these very reasonable explanations excludes the actor most interested in changing the subject away from Arab regimes: the non-Arab Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran is the sponsor of Hamas and a sometime ally of al-Qaida that, as Tony Badran, research fellow at the Foundation of the Defense of Democracies said, “has been trying to secure the Sinai since Mubarak was in power.”

Iran’s strategic achievements during the Arab Spring have been mixed. After the fall of Mubarak, which fulfilled one of the Islamic Republic’s longtime goals, Tehran also suffered some notable setbacks. When Gulf Cooperation Council forces entered Bahrain, Iran was incapable of exercising any influence by offering at least token protection to the Shia community there, showing the limits of Iranian bluster even when it came to their co-religionists in a nearby country.

It’s still unclear how Iran will come out of the Arab Spring, or to what extent the Obama Administration is capable of making the Iranians pay for their strategic overreach in a region where Washington has exercised hegemony for more than half a century. As long as Tehran can keep the regional conversation focused on Israel and resistance to the Zionist entity, the Persian Shiites in power will be able to bridge the sectarian gap that divides them from the Middle East’s Sunni Arab majority. But when events like the Arab Spring push the Israelis to the margins of the picture and instead underline Iran’s role in regional upheaval and its sectarian identity, things look much less rosy for the Islamic Republic.

Right now, Iran is facing considerable sectarian pressure. Last week, four members of Iran’s ally Hezbollah were indicted in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister, and Sunni leader, Rafiq Hariri. While it is unlikely that Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah will turn over the suspects, the organization finds itself increasingly isolated. Much of Lebanon, if not the majority, has turned its back on Hezbollah. Its own Shia community dreads the prospect of another war with Israel. Most significantly, Hezbollah may be on the verge of losing its strategic depth and supply lines that stretch across the border into Syria.

The Assad regime’s troubles constitute a threat to Iran’s vital strategic interests in the region. Syria is the one Arab state allied with Tehran, a relationship that has flourished over the last three decades, most recently in Iraq, where they made war against the United States and its allies. Losing Assad would also jeopardize Iran’s 30-year investment in Hezbollah, which has already moved much of its weapons from Syria to Lebanon.

Even if the Syrian regime survives, it is going to have problems putting the lid back on the sectarian cauldron that Assad brought to a boil through his policy of violent repression. It’s bad enough that the Syrian Alawite minority regime was slaughtering Sunnis during the middle of Ramadan, but last week the Syrian navy opened fire on a Palestinian refugee camp, not an operation destined to win popularity points from the Sunni mainstream.

Iran needs to defend Syria, but its options are limited. When the Syrian regime tried to change the subject by sending Palestinian protesters to the Israeli border on the Golan Heights in May and June, the opposition didn’t bite—they understood that the pressing issue was not the Jewish state but the Assads and their allies. Nor can the Iranians afford to throw good money after bad by getting Hezbollah to stir up trouble in Lebanon, since it’s not at all clear that the organization would fare well in—or even survive—another conflict with Israel.

Sinai was therefore Iran’s last, best hope for embroiling the Israelis. “Because of the Assad regime’s outrages against Palestinians and Syrian Sunnis, Hamas would probably not take orders from Syria at this point,” Tony Badran said. “But it would from Iran. The upside for the Iranians is that they have now found a front that doesn’t jeopardize their main asset in Lebanon, all while advancing Iranian strategic interests in Sinai/Egypt.”

Egypt was formerly the cornerstone of Washington’s regional security architecture, a role that last week’s attacks show it is no longer capable of playing. Whether the violence on its Israeli border was a carefully calculated project to extort more money from the United States or simply the result of an incapacitated Egyptian state, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s request that Egypt bulk up border security will fall on deaf ears.

Syria played a similar part in Tehran’s revolutionary project for the region, and is now on the verge of falling. The Arab Spring has shaken the two pillars—Egypt and Syria—of the Arab status quo, and a new regional order is now being born. Israel is likely to continue to pay a price, no matter how hard its leaders work to avoid getting drawn in to an inter-Arab conflict whose direction is still unclear.

• Syria accused the U.S. of waging “a humanitarian and diplomatic war” against it. So kind of you to say! [AP/WP]

• Yesterday’s attacks are already bringing attention to the new, dangerous, post-Mubarak lawlessness in Sinai. [NYT]

• Was Al Qaeda involved? Expert Bruce Riedel and others see evidence that the group has established a Sinai affiliate. [Washington Times]

• Lebanese politics explained, with limited reference to The Wire. [FP Middle East Channel]

• A new mosque opened in Staten Island, and the news is that there was no news. [NYT]

Tablet Magazine contributor Bruce Riedel, a former intelligence analyst and regional expert, argues that Saudi Arabia senses opportunity to reassert Sunni dominance against Shiite Iran and its Shiite proxies in that corner of the region, the Syrian regime and Hezbollah. (Syria has long been ruled by Alawites, members of an eccentric Shiite sect.) Assad’s regime, Riedel notes, is a crucial connector between Hezbollah, the group that essentially controls Lebanon, and its sponsor in Tehran; likely orchestrated the 2005 assassination of the pro-Saudi Lebanese prime minister; and has (foolishly) been seen “wrapping itself in the flag of Hezbollah,” to quote one Saudi paper, during its brutal crackdown on popular protests. In other words, this is all part of King Abdullah’s plan to cut off the head of the snake. Reports Riedel:

Riyadh worries that Assad will be replaced by chaos, but it has now come to the conclusion the risk is worth the price. If the Assad regime is destroyed, so too will Syrian support for Hezbollah be destroyed. If a new regime emerges that reflects the will of Syria’s majority-Sunni population, it can become a base for destabilizing the Hezbollah-dominated government in Beirut. The power balance in the Levant could be tilted decisively against Hezbollah and undercut Iranian regional influence.

This is why, say, you have four Sunni countries, including Saudi Arabia and Jordan, enthusiastically backing the referral of Syria to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

The weakening of the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah hegemon would also, of course, represent good news for Israel, which went to war with Hezbollah in 2006, is no friend of Syria’s, and considers Iran its prime national security threat. Indeed, for more than two months Israel has repudiated the notion that it prefers the cold stability of the current regime and has explicitly hoped for Assad’s ouster (“Allied with Iran, Mr. Assad has helped supply 55,000 rockets to Hezbollah and 10,000 to Hamas, very likely established a clandestine nuclear arms program and profoundly destabilized the region,” Ambassador Michael Oren has argued. “The violence he has unleashed on his own people demonstrating for freedoms confirms Israel’s fears that the devil we know in Syria is worse than the devil we don’t.”) It’s all another reminder that Israel’s interests are frequently aligned with its Sunni neighbors’ against Iran and its proxies.

Engagement With Syria: Time For Reassessment? [Washington Jewish Week]
Saudi Arabia Moves to Take Down Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah [The National Interest]
Israel Prefers the End of the Assad Regime to Its Continuance [WSJ]
Arab Countries Back Emergency U.N. Session on Syria [JPost]
Related: Storm Over Syria [NYRB]
Earlier: Reform Is Not a Watchword in This Administration
U.S. Re-Upping Syrian Ambassador
Iran Is Better Armed Than We Thought
Cut Off the Head of the Snake!

The last six months of instability in the region have brought a period of relative quiet to Israel, during which time the country has been enjoying unprecedented economic prosperity and the luxury of looking at some of its real social problems—which is to say that Israel really is enjoying a sort of democratic springtime. However, in the Arabic-speaking states, all that’s blossoming is violent conflict, especially in Israel’s neighbor Syria.

The Syrian uprising is now almost six months old, and some observers in Beirut, where I spent the past week, think it might go on for years. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is ratcheting up the violence and still has plenty of cards left to play. The opposition, for its part, has braved week after week of atrocities and shows no signs of backing down. Neither the regime nor its opponents are going anywhere, and neither the Obama Administration nor anyone else in the international community has the leverage or willpower to bring the issue to a conclusion, peaceful or otherwise.

Many Lebanese believe that the bloody standoff between Syria’s Alawite minority, which controls the army and security services, and the country’s Sunni majority will invariably worsen as the opposition there takes up arms. It’s little wonder that officials across Beirut’s political spectrum—from Druze leader Walid Jumblatt to Hezbollah, and from the Sunnis in the north to the Christians of the pro-democracy March 14 movement—fear that events in Syria will fuel Lebanon’s own simmering sectarian tensions.

Syria, in other words, is in the process of Lebanonization, referring not only to the madness of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war in the 1970s and ’80s but also its aftermath, which continues to the present. In this configuration, tribal factors, as well as local regional and international interests, will act as highly volatile elements of a political climate marked by violence or stalemate. In a Lebanonized Syria, as now in Lebanon, the state will not be able to function normally.

What we’ve watched the last six months across the Middle East is less a series of democratic uprisings—in which people stake their claims to individual liberties—than a series of battles in which tribes, sects, clans, and classes turn against the rivals that have humiliated them for so long. This is most obviously the model in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria, but it also pertains to Egypt and Tunisia, where the military and security apparatuses are best understood as privileged networks imposing their will on the rest of society. The courage on display in these uprisings, especially in Syria, is no less impressive or human just because it is based on communal grievances rather than on notions of individual rights.

Lebanonization is the region’s real status quo, but it is also fundamentally unacceptable to the United States, the Middle East’s great power for over half a century. This is why Washington backed various dictatorships, most of them much less cruel than that of the Assads, when those dictatorships’ repression allowed their societies to function at some level like real states. America’s interests in the region are energy, trade, and, after Sept. 11, stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. All of these interests are much harder to maintain and advance amid widespread conflict. Given the Obama Administration’s reluctance to take the lead in the Middle East, the entire region might well become Lebanonized, a scenario dangerous for U.S. interests and allies, including Israel.

The sectarian conflict at the heart of the Syrian uprising is precisely what the Assad family, Bashar and his father, Hafez, had fought to avoid for 40 years, and it was fear of this conflict that shaped the regime’s domestic and foreign policy. At home, there was Baathism, an ideology that subsumed sectarian difference under a totalitarian ideology similar in ways to both national socialism and communism.

In pre-Arab Spring Syria, few dared discuss minority issues, a taboo so powerful that it extends at present even to those most opposed to the regime’s physical and spiritual violence. Given the extensive brainwashing of many decades, it is too emotionally daunting for the opposition to push back the curtain and explain that they are being persecuted not as Syrians or human beings but simply as Sunnis.

To be sure, the opposition has extended its hand to the Alawites, but so far it’s not clear if many are accepting the invitation. A Lebanese activist recently relayed to me that a local Alawite official he’d just met explained that he had no choice but to side with Assad and was ready to defend his community against the Sunnis. When the Syrian navy shelled the Sunni neighborhoods of Lattakia this last weekend, there were reports that Alawites stood by cheering. If there were any Alawites prepared to cross communal boundaries, then surely the fate of a top Alawite official, Ali Habib, reminded the community where their allegiances should lie. The former defense minister was replaced last week, then either put under house arrest or, according to some reports, executed by the regime when word got out that he was someone to whom the Turks or Americans might reach out.

The White House fears the uncertainty that would likely follow Assad’s demise, but it’s pretty clear what would follow the present regime—not the specter of a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of the state but the ghost of Syria pre-Assad: an endless series of coups and counter-coups, which in the past ended only when Hafez al-Assad took the reins in 1970. The one-time air force officer and defense minister recognized that some of Syria’s instability grew out of its neighbors’ ability to cause problems in Damascus. The way to keep Syria’s rivals, like Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Israel, in check was to go on the offensive. Sponsoring terrorism against its neighbors was a primary method by which the Assad regime ensured peace at home.

By exporting sectarian conflict abroad, primarily to Lebanon and most recently to Iraq, Syria’s ruling class deterred the domestic sectarian conflict that would have cost the Alawite regime power and the community its lives. All of the regime’s efforts, at home and abroad, were wrapped in the banner of Arabism, the war to liberate Jerusalem and eradicate the Zionist entity.

The Assad regime can no longer afford the luxury of ideology, which is why it shelled a Palestinian camp on the Mediterranean coast over the weekend, sending thousands of refugees scattering. The Palestinians are simply one card in a much bigger Middle East poker game (a game in which, it should be noted, Israel doesn’t have a seat at the table). The central issue in the region is not the Arab-Israeli peace process but the Arab civil war that has been reignited under the ultimately cynical label of Arab Spring.

Israel has very little to do with current turmoil in the Middle East, a fact made plain by the paranoid nature of Arab propaganda, which blames Jerusalem for backing Arab dictatorships while accusing Israel of plotting to set the Arabs at each other’s throats. But while Lebanon’s civil wars made clear that Israel does not profit from Arab conflict, it also suggests that the Jewish state will invariably become a proxy in someone else’s war, which will not be to Israel’s benefit. Nor is there any upside, strategic or moral, in Israel pursuing the policy of an alliance of minorities and aligning itself, as some Israeli analysts have called for, with minority regimes like Assad’s that massacre their own people in the streets.

There’s something to be said for the longstanding claims of its enemies that Israel doesn’t really belong in the Middle East. How does a modern neoliberal democracy fit with the rest of the region, as it looks now? So far, Israel has managed to keep its head down. For the time being, Israel’s neighbors seem to have forgotten about it. But that quiet can’t last for long.

• Trouble at the American Jewish Committee, with executive director David Harris forced to repudiate its director on anti-Semitism and extremism’s statement that use of federal law to combat anti-Israel activism on campuses is wrong. [Jewish Journal/JTA]

• Hamas leader Khaled Meshal met yesterday in Cairo with officials from the Palestinian Authority and Egyptian intelligence. Is Gilad Shalit involved? [Haaretz]

• Iran expressed openness to a Russian proposal to restart nuclear negotiations through a series of small concessions on each side. [AP/NYT]

• Syria is using diplomats to harass and intimidate anti-regime protesters in other countries, including the United States, because they are charming that way. [WSJ]

• A bill proposed by Sen. Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, could withhold U.S. funding from certain Israeli military units if they are found to engage in human rights violations. [Ben Smith]

• Russia is semi-secretly working to restart nuclear talks with Iran. [AP/WP]

• Roughly one-fifth of the House of Representatives is visiting Israel during summer recess, especially notable given the poor relations between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu. [NYT] Texas

• An advocacy group accused Israel of arresting an Al Jazeera journalist and holding him without charges. [AP/WP]

• Glenn Beck, in Israel in advance of next week’s rally, called the #j14 protesters the “hard left” and repeatedly insisted referred to “Judea and Samaria.” [Ynet]

• Sen. Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, is sponsoring a bill to halt U.S. funding to three elite IDF units (including the famed Shayetet 13), which he says engage in human rights violations in the Palestinian territories. [Haaretz]

• A routine incursion to make arrests in a refugee camp outside Ramallah led to a firefight that caused two Palestinian deaths and five IDF injuries. [DPA/Haaretz]

• There was also a brief exchange of fire across the Israel-Lebanon border, though no one was injured. Each side blames the other for starting it. [AP/WP]

• The housing protests in Jerusalem have shaken society, galvanized the left, and depending on your point of view revealed either how well the question of security has been taken care of for Israelis or how poorly it has been swept under the rug. [NYT]

• Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan sat alone at the table—usually he is flanked by generals—following last week’s military resignations, in a symbol of his new authority over his country’s armed forces. [AP/WP]

• The guy who basically started the anti-sharia meme, many years ago, is a Hasidic lawyer named David Yerushalmi. [NYT]

• Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, accused Israel of trying to steal Lebanon’s offshore natural resources and vowed to respond to any Israeli provocation. (For more, see Lee Smith’s column today.) [AP/WP]

• The race to replace Rep. Anthony Weiner, whose district was in Queens and Brooklyn and about a quarter Jewish, is becoming a referendum on President Obama’s Israel policies (even as the Democrat is a modern Orthodox staunch supporter of the Jewish state). [NYT]

• Israeli ambassador Michael Oren met with convicted (but controversially held) Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in his prison in North Carolina. [Ynet]

• Swimming for peace. [NYT]

• Israeli forces raided the Jenin Freedom Theatre, which had been lead by the late Juliano Mer-Khamis, and arrested two last night. [+972]

The Tamar field, discovered in 2009 roughly 50 miles off Haifa, is estimated to contain 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, while the Leviathan field, discovered further west in June 2010, is double that at 18 trillion cubic feet, one of the largest offshore finds in the last decade. And yet much more important, a former Royal Dutch Shell chief scientist who’s now chief scientist for Israel Energy Initiatives “has devised an ambitious plan that would, if successful, turn Israel into one of the world’s leading oil producers,” according to an Energy Tribune report earlier this year. It turns out that the oil-shale deposits in Israel’s Shfela Basin, 30 miles southwest of Jerusalem, hold some 250 billion barrels of oil—roughly equal to Saudi Arabia’s proven reserves. In other words, Israel may well become a player in the highly competitive field of energy-producing nations, which includes Hezbollah’s patron, Iran.

Israel argues that the maritime border should begin at a 90-degree angle from the coastline, while Lebanon says that it should continue in the same direction as the land border. But if Lebanon were to insist on that principle across the board, says David Wurmser, a former consultant to Noble Energy, a Houston-based firm with a large stake in the Tamar and Leviathan fields, “it would lose a lot of its territorial water to Syria. It’s clear who’s calling the shots here.”

The twist is that even as the Lebanese government gussies up phony challenges to Israel’s maritime borders, the map it submitted to the United Nations does not actually challenge Israel’s claims to the biggest prize that the Eastern Mediterranean has ever had to offer. If Syria has its own reasons for interfering with Lebanon’s border issues, so does Iran, it seems, which is using its Lebanese asset to keep a potential industrial rival in check. That is, the dispute is not personal: It’s not about Zionism, or liberating Jerusalem. This is not ideological, but strictly about business.

Doubtless, many in the Middle East believe the ideologies to which they’ve sworn their lives. And yet that same part of the Arab world that produced Wahabbism—the Persian Gulf—is also most in favor of normalization of relations with Israel. Indeed, the Saudis themselves have reportedly cooperated with Jerusalem on security issues regarding Iran—because what really matters to Arab rulers is holding on to their rule.

The lesson here is that ideology is useful in the Middle East only insofar as it is an instrument for managing power, and even Hezbollah might not be as ideological as we assume. In addition to the cash the Party of God is given by its Iranian sponsor, it also earns plenty through its own enterprises, some of them illegal. The money is used to buy weapons for the resistance, but the other side, usually forgotten by analysts, is that Hezbollah’s arms are there to protect Hezbollah’s money. Lebanon is a very competitive place, and more often than not the highest bidder gets what he wants, regardless of ideology or other loyalties. For instance, as Hussain Abdul-Hussain, the Washington correspondent for the Kuwaiti daily Al-Rai, told me, the same smuggling networks that move weapons through the Bekaa Valley from Syria to Hezbollah are now being used to provide satellite phones to the Syrian opposition determined to topple Hezbollah’s patron, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

That’s not to say that everyone can be bought off all the time. But too often we forget that the real interests driving Middle Eastern politics are often about power and money, not ideology. Hussain notes that what might decide Assad’s fate is the Sunni merchant class of Damascus. “If the merchants start holding on to foreign currency, especially dollars, that will devalue the Syrian lira,” he told me last week. “This will make it impossible for the regime to meet the payroll for the security services who are putting down the uprising. That will mean the merchants are betting against the regime.”

By reading the border dispute as an exercise in Iranian power politics, the weirdness of the map that the Lebanese submitted to the United Nations actually starts to make sense. Iran’s interests are clear: Hold the Israelis down while also crippling the independence of the Lebanese state. If Lebanon were to develop its own natural gas fields that might encourage the country to free itself from Iranian and Syrian tutelage.

Accordingly, Iran last week signed a memorandum of understanding with Lebanon’s Hezbollah-led Cabinet to help explore for gas and oil. That’s bad for Lebanon, but it’s not so great for Iran either. Imagine a Lebanese energy sector entirely dominated by Iran; were Hezbollah to target Israeli rigs or other machinery or installations off the coast, Jerusalem would retaliate not only against Lebanon but the Iranians as well. Israel, with a booming tech sector and one of the few economies to weather the financial crisis, could handle an attack on its energy industry.

Iran, however, would be brought to its knees. The country has no economy outside of the energy sector, which is one reason why it must guard its access to vulnerable markets, like Europe. And if Israel were capable of fulfilling Europe’s energy needs for even a decade (though some estimates suggest more like 20 years), that would change Europe’s diplomatic and political position. European intellectuals can scream about Israeli checkpoints as much as they want, but no European leader whose poll numbers might someday depend on affordable energy coming from Israel will be likely to cross Jerusalem. Iran will not only have less leverage over Europe if and when Israel can develop its field, but the Islamic republic will even lose the little advantage it has over Israel.

Actually, though, to my admittedly untrained eye, it seems as though Lebanon already did (for a detailed discussion of the maritime borders, see here). The Times reports that Lebanon’s proposed line conflicts both with a line that Israel and Cyprus have agreed to as well as indeed with a line (also with Cyprus) that Lebanon itself agreed to in 2007—you know, before everyone knew there was gaseous gold under the sea. “We signed an agreement with Cyprus that is in keeping with its agreement with Lebanon,” explained Israeli minister of strategic affairs Moshe Ya’alon. “They decided to sketch a new border south of the line that was agreed to in talks between Lebanon and Cyprus, and basically entered our territory. It was done with premeditation in order to create conflict with us, just like the Sheba Farms.”

Well, hopefully it was done because Lebanon just wanted a piece of the natural gas pie, and if giving them said piece, however much it may rightfully belong to Israel, satisfied it, then a pragmatic supporter of Israel would feel inclined to see it as a small price to pay to forestall war. The problem is that Lebanon is not run by Lebanon, but rather by the Iranian proxy Hezbollah. Maybe it wants its border so that it can get in on the natural gas; but maybe it also wants, as Ya’alon suggests, to create a border dispute that can serve as a pretext for a war that Iran wants anyway.

Rival Claims to Sea Territory Made by Israel and Lebanon [NYT]
Lebanon Accuses Israel of ‘Aggression’ in Its Proposed Sea Boundary Near Huge Gas Fields [AP/WP]
Lebanon: We Won’t Forfeit Maritime Rights [Ynet]
Related: The Next Lebanon War [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Lebanon Passes Oil Law

• Yet Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan insisted that Israel must not only express regret but actually apologize for last year’s flotilla raid. That will make Israel and Turkey’s negotiations toward formal diplomatic rapprochement more difficult. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• At least 12 died in anti-regime protests in Syria today, bolstered by U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford’s surprise visit yesterday to the dissident stronghold of Hama. [WSJ]

• Your weekend reading is this amazing profile of Joe Levin, the foremost private investigator specializing in the Hasidic world, courtesy the other daily magazine of Jewish life and culture. [NYT]

• China and Russia have reportedly been aiding Iran with its nuclear program since the 1990s. Thanks, guys. [Washington Times]

• Super-brief primer on next Monday’s Quartet talks from Aaron David Miller. [Wilson Center]

• Note the mutual useless stereotypes of Manhattan and Florida. [NYT Magazine]

• If you think of Lebanese politics as the English Premier League—“all about the relaxed rules about foreign ownership and player transfers—it becomes easier to understand (mainly if you already understand the EPL). [Karl reMarks]

• Francophilic intellectual Arthur Goldhammer blogs a review by Sylvie Kauffmann of an autobiographical book by Dominique Moïsi called Un Juif Improbable. But I’m sure there are plenty of non-Jewish French intellectuals. [French Politics]

• Influential film historian Robert Sklar died at 74. [NYT]

Viggo Mortensen as Freud? David Cronenberg directing? Keira Knightley receiving spank-therapy? Sign me up!

• Meanwhile, a new Amnesty International report questions whether Syria’s Assad regime is committing crimes against humanity. [Ynet]

• A small French boat from the flotilla managed to set a course for Gaza, but likely lacks the fuel to get there. [NYT]

• Israel plans to reinforce security at the airport in anticipation of Friday’s “aerial flotilla.” [AP/WP]

• Two Gaza men allegedly preparing to launch a missile were killed in an Israeli air strike. [NYT]

• There are signs that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is fracturing in advance of elections. [LAT]

All of the above? Yeah, that was January. Just January.

Since then, in the Territories, Hamas and the P.A. cracked down fiercely on popular protests in favor of unity. Then, suddenly, they agreed to unity, even though it was always doubtful it would actually work. But they stayed together long enough to mount the most threatening Nakba Day protests in years if not decades, and to threaten even worse come September—if they seek unilateral statehood.

Substantively, the most consequential thing President Obama did vis-à-vis Israel was veto a Security Council resolution condemning settlements. In a speech in May, Obama pledged similar opposition to the statehood gambit, condemned Hamas and the P.A.’s deal with it, sharply criticized Iran, and committed the U.S. to totally standing up for Israel’s security and right to exist. And he mentioned what the previous two presidents had assumed: That a two-state solution depended on land-swaps based on the ’67 borders. So, naturally, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded angrily, creating a huge diplomatic mess that has yet to be fully untangled, and which could have implications on the 2012 U.S. presidential contest.

The Fogel massacre. The Hamas rocket attacks. The Jerusalem bus stop explosion. Israeli responses claimed lives, including of innocents.

On the Iranian front, first we were given ample reason to believe that its purported nuclear program was substantially delayed. But then we learned that Stuxnet, while helpful, was no panacea. And then we learned that Iran has made significant progress on weaponization technology.

Egypt continues to move tentatively toward democracy.

In Lebanon, the sealed U.N. indictment for the 2005 assassination of the former prime minister (and father of the also-former prime minister, who had to resign when Hezbollah pulled its support) was only last week partially unsealed; expect things to continue to get hotter there.

It was weird that the Syrian regime was brutally cracking down on internal dissent, and barely anyone was saying anything. And that was half-a-half-a-year ago.

Former White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, who once harbored dreams of being the first Jewish Speaker of the House, instead decided to run for mayor of Chicago; was briefly declared ineligible, then not; then won.

We were there as Rabbi Gershom Sizoumu ran for and lost a seat in Uganda’s parliament. We observed the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Ellen Weiss, an NPR honcho and wife of the enormously influential Rabbi David Saperstein, was forced to resign. Rep. Peter King held hearings on the American Muslim community, attracting the opposition of the American Jewish community. The Reform movement picked a new head.

Jimmy Carter was sued by people who bought and hated his book. Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder sued Washington City Paper, and even got the Simon Wiesenthal Center to endorse his ludicrous accusation of anti-Semitism—maybe his buddy Tom Cruise helped? Jon Demjanjuk was convicted of helping carry out the Holocaust, and then set free.

Quote of the Half-Year (paraphrased): “Oops!” — Richard Goldstone.

Western countries invaded Libya, possibly out of Holocaust guilt. A crazy guy tried to blow up a Santa Monica Chabad house. Benjamin Netanyahu and Justin Bieber were plausibly mentioned in the same sentence. A glass ceiling was shattered when Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was picked to be the first woman to run either the Democratic or Republican National Committee. The Prince of Wales had the least Jewish wedding ever. Controversy swirled about playwright Tony Kushner. Jill Abramson was named the first woman editor of the New York Times. Dolph Schayes rooted for the Dallas Mavericks to win the NBA championship, and lo, it came to pass.

Eva Braun in blackface. Eva Braun speaking to the Tenafly JCC.

On the home front, Nextbook Press author Hillel Halkin was honored, and Rush Limbaugh said we were a “radical left-wing” outfit. We rolled out a welcome mat for Goldblog. And the American Society of Magazine Editors confirmed that it enjoys The Scroll.

We said several goodbyes, most of them sad: Elizabeth Taylor; Chris Hondros (whose photograph adorns the top of this post); Juliano Mer-Khamis; and Debbie Friedman, whose death I managed to turn into a controversy, though I swear I mourn for her as well. I don’t, however, mourn for one of the most important U.S. neo-Nazis, who was killed by his own son. There were many other sad goodbyes. Meanwhile, Sen. Joseph Lieberman announced he would retire after four terms. John Galliano’s career ended, or at least lulled, on less favorable terms. So did Rep. Anthony Weiner’s. Oh, and a final goodbye: Enjoy your virgins, Osama. Hamas will enjoy them with you. (Fortunately or not, Noam Chomsky’s religion does not conceive of an afterlife.)

Where do we stand now? Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for rape, which is looking more questionable by the day; Israeli central banker Stanley Fischer was barred from replacing him as head of the International Monetary Fund. The most Jewish state got gay marriage thanks in part to a handful of Jewish Republicans. Israeli-American law student Ilan Grapel is still being detained by Egyptian authorities under dubious espionage accusations. Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest domestic rival may well be retired Mossad chief Meir Dagan. The Gaza flotilla remains docked.

How should you deal with all this? We suggest going the f**k to shul.

• Defense Minister Ehud Barak tried to tone down the rhetoric and his government’s response to the impending flotilla. [Haaretz]

• The U.N.-backed court has delivered four indictments in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanon Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. If they are of four of the wrong people—senior Hezbollah or Syrian officials—the country could blow up, so stay tuned. [WP/AP]

• Activists have accused Israel of sabotaging two flotilla boats. [Haaretz]

• The Syrian army moved out of Hama as well as several smaller cities, giving the anti-regime protesters breathing room and an arguable victory. [NYT]

• Iran accused the United States of using the Syrian uprisings to try to drive a wedge between Damascus and Tehran. Hey, even a paranoid person is right sometimes! [JPost]

• The Republican Jewish Coalition has made over 20,000 robocalls to warn of President Obama’s alleged abandonment of Israel’s security needs. [WSJ]

• How Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan manages to reside between a rock and a hard place. [NYT]

• The Knesset cancelled hearings into the prominent Ofer Group’s ties to Iran, which made it the target of U.S. sanctions; and it turns out the new top national security adviser did much work with the business. [WSJ]

• A Lebanese Shiite sheikh was charged with spying for Israel. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Iran’s defense minister, wanted in connection with a 1994 Buenos Aires Jewish community center bombing, briefly visited Bolivia. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Some Israeli officials see Egypt’s opening of the Rafah Crossing as a boon: It will ease international pressure on Israel’s blockade of Gaza (with the flotilla sailing next month), and the weapons are getting in anyway. [NYT]

• Word is Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have been talking secretly. [Telegraph/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Amy Winehouse has gone back to rehab. I wish there were an adequate song lyric that I could utilize to cleverly summarize this. [Page Six]

• President Obama visited the memorial of the Warsaw Ghetto today. [AP/Haaretz]

• Iran’s atomic envoy insisted sanctions have had no effect on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. So then they won’t mind the yet tougher ones that were proposed in the U.S. Senate? [AP/WP]

• U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon—Italian troops— sustained injuries in a bomb attack, the first since 2008. [AP/WP]

• Amazing story about IDF paramedics, and their treatment of, among others, injured Palestinians. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

• Robert Satloff wrote the most cogent objection to President Obama’s mentioning the ’67 borders. [Washington Institute]

• Howard Jacbson’s Jewiest interview yet! (Which is saying something!) [KCRW]

•For your weekend viewing, a Charlie Rose roundtable on Mideast peace, starring (among others) contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg. [Charlie Rose]

• Not all Democrats have sold Obama out on Israel. [The Plum Line]

Happy Memorial Day.

But what are the rest of us to make of this bit of text, we whose eyes glazed over in math class and require a calculator to work out a 20 percent tip on a $100 check? The answer lies in the spirit rather than the letter of the text, and in spirit this week’s parasha delivers a simple but profound message: We all count. Even a small nation, or in particular a small nation, must keep track of each and every soul. Seen through this prism, numbers are not abstractions; each one corresponds with a living, breathing human being. Which, of course, is why we should be very careful to handle numbers with accuracy and care—fudge a number, and you’ve sinned against the very core of the tangible and the real.

Ours, alas, is the era of unreal numbers, from the falsified spreadsheets of Bernie Madoff to the felonious schemes of the equally criminal yet tragically unpunished swindlers behind the subprime mortgage bubble. Bluffing discreetly on balance sheets is bad enough; do it in the open, on the largest imaginable stage, and we’re headed down a dangerous road.

Unfortunately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of the Congress earlier this week was a master class of numeric (and other) inaccuracies. Because these things matter—they matter very much—let us, in the spirit of this week’s parasha, do the Jewish thing and set the record straight.

Netanyahu said: The vast majority of the 650,000 Israelis who live beyond the 1967 lines reside in neighborhoods and suburbs of Jerusalem and Greater Tel Aviv.

Actually, there are 304,569 Israelis living in the West Bank, according to the Israel Defense Forces. Add to that East Jerusalem—which, according to most credible sources, is home to about 200,000 Israelis—and you hit the 500,000 mark. Even if one chooses to be generous and give the prime minister these East Jerusalemites in his count, one has to wonder, as Jonathan Lis recently did in Haaretz, why Netanyahu, who later on in his speech roared that “Jerusalem must never again be divided,” would possibly choose to include the residents of the undividable capital in the overall tally of the contested populace.

Of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, only Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy real democratic rights. I want you to stop for a second and think about that. Of those 300 million Arabs, less than one-half of 1 percent are truly free, and they’re all citizens of Israel.

This bit of bluster may come as somewhat of a slight to Israel’s northern neighbor, Lebanon, where the robust parliamentary elections of 2009 drew a record-high voter turnout. Also in line for surprise are the Iraqis, who, despite still struggling to find democracy’s balance, came out in droves to vote in the recent 2010 elections for the Council of Representatives: 62.4 percent of Iraqis cast a ballot that year, only a slightly less impressive showing than the 65.2 percent of Israelis who exercised their civic duty in the nation’s most recent elections in 2009. Oh, and Jordan? Its 120-member House of Representatives holds a substantial number of seats for women and religious and ethnic minorities. You know, as they’re wont to do in fiercely oppressive, thoroughly non-democratic countries.

As the cherry on top of Netanyahu’s rhetorical ruses comes the fact that two days before the prime minister thundered in Congress, the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee passed, in a preliminary vote, a new bill that would give preference to  applicants for government jobs who are veterans of the IDF, thereby openly discriminating against Israeli Arabs, who do not serve in the army. Add to that the so-called Nakba Law, which prohibits Israeli Arabs from teaching or commemorating their interpretation of the historical events that led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, as well as other laws currently under consideration in the Knesset—like the one that would require all citizens of Israel to pledge allegiance to their nation as a uniquely Jewish state—and this whole “truly free” business begins to crumble.

In Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers. We are not the British in India. We are not the Belgians in the Congo. This is the land of our forefathers, the Land of Israel, to which Abraham brought the idea of one God, where David set out to confront Goliath.

David, actually, swung his fateful sling in the valley of Elah, near modern-day Beit Shemesh, which is squarely within the boundaries of Israel proper. And if Netanyahu truly believes Israel is nothing like the Brits or the Belgians, he is welcome, of course, to do with the West Bank as had once been done with Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and annex them. Until then, however, the prime minister has to choose: If he wishes to follow the Bible as his unsurpassable guide to realpolitik, let him declare so openly and allow his constituents to support or reject his theological aspirations. But if he wishes to guide the ship of state according to the acceptable, rational norms of Western democracies, all that blessed biblical stuff is, alas, rather irrelevant. Seen from that perspective, asserting martial law on a territory and its citizens, setting up an intricate bureaucracy of governance, oppressing any aspirations for self-governance, and insisting time and again that the natives are too corrupt and incompetent to govern themselves sounds like it’s one punch bowl away from feeling right at home at the Bengal Club.

The fun never ends. One could, for example, juxtapose Netanyahu’s encomiums for the riotous youth of the Arab spring with his efforts to drum up support for the despotic Hosni Mubarak as the Egyptian president was losing his grip on power earlier this year, or contrast Netanyahu’s claim that “the Palestinian economy is booming” with the World Bank’s report, released this April, which finds that the very same economy would soon be rendered “unsustainable” unless Israel relaxes the considerable restrictions it still places on the Palestinian private sector.

But instead of hurling oneself against the firm wall of slurs and untruths Netanyahu erected in his Washington speech, let us read the parasha instead, and recall the spirit, sacred and fierce and urgent, that urges us to keep our accounting strict and strictly honest.

Nakba Day began inauspiciously when a truck driver from the Israeli Arab town of Kafr Qasem went on a rampage in Tel Aviv, crashing into multiple vehicles, killing one person and injuring 18. Witnesses said that when he finally drew to a halt, he began assaulting passersby, shouting, “Death to the Jews.” Israel Hayom used a witness’ description of the driver as its headline: “Im Retzah Ba’eynayim” (“With Murder in His Eyes”). Police initially refrained from confirming that the incident was a terror attack, but a police official said later in the week, “The indications are that it was carried out deliberately.” The driver says it was an accident. Wrote one blogger, “Forgive me if I’m a bit skeptical.” The incidents in Tel Aviv and the north overshadowed Nakba Day protests elsewhere. In the West Bank, thousands of Palestinians gathered in Ramallah and protesters clashed with Israeli security forces in Qalandiya; at the Gaza border, Israeli troops opened fire on Palestinians attempting to reach the security fence and killed a Gaza man suspected of planting a roadside bomb in the area.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset this week that Israel was prepared to “cede parts of our homeland (moledet) for true peace” with the Palestinians, but added that he did not believe that Israel has a Palestinian peace partner. Yedioth characterized the comments as a “promo” (it even used the English word) for Netanyahu’s speech before both houses of Congress next week. “Netanyahu once again crossed the Rubicon, and once again rushed to renounce and quickly clamber back up the bank whence he came,” wrote Ben Caspit in an analysis for Maariv headlined “Tza’ad Leyamin, Tza’ad Lasmol” (“One Step to the Right, One Step to the Left”).

The state comptroller (mevaker hamedina) accused Defense Minister Ehud Barak of violating “the spirit of the rules” (ruah haklalim) meant to prevent conflicts of interest by waiting until three days before he joined former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government, in 2007, before transferring the shares in his international consultancy firm to his daughters. But Haaretz’s Aluf Benn wrote (albeit in a piece that came out before the comptroller’s report was released) that Barak stands a good chance of becoming prime minister again. Responding to the headline on Benn’s story, “Ehud Barak Doesn’t Care If No One Likes Him,” one commenter wrote: “That is good, since no one likes him.”

Israel’s Sephardic and Ashkenazic chief rabbis as well as Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef ruled that celebrations of the Lag Ba’Omer holiday, which begins Saturday night, should be postponed a day to keep Israelis from desecrating the Sabbath (hilul Shabbat) by starting the holiday’s traditional bonfires before Shabbat has ended. But other rabbis oppose the move, and many of the celebrants can reasonably be expected not to care. “Are all those kids—especially the ones who don’t give much of a hoot what the chief rabbis say—going to push off the burning a day?” one Jerusalemite wrote. “We’ll be away this weekend. … But I have a feeling that we’ll be smelling a few roasted marshmallows on the way home.”

Everyone else has recommended it, but still, you should read this take by Andrew Exum, an active-duty counterinsurgency expert turned national security blogger. Israel’s response to the marching was not, he says, in line with past overreactions (such as—this is my example, not his—the response to the Gaza flotilla), but rather entirely understandable: “What were they supposed to do in the face of a breach of the border?” he asks. “And what did the protesters think would happen?” He adds, “You can’t really fault a military for protecting the territorial integrity of its state by force.”

Exum concludes, “Israel has been kidding itself if it had imagined itself immune from the non-violent, peaceful protests that have been sweeping the Arabic-speaking world,” and there are actually two separate ways, albeit stemming from the same place, in which yesterday represented the first day that the Arab Spring truly came to Israel. Place one is Syria: Much as the two-month-long (and counting) uprising against the Assad regime made Hamas feel threatened and spurred it to ostensibly reconcile with its bitter rival Fatah, the Assad regime, itself feeling threatened, needed a scapegoat, and there is surely no better scapegoat in the region than Israel; thus, the Assad regime, almost certainly, cynically harnessed the genuine feelings of its Palestinians by allowing them, for the first time, to actually storm the border, precisely in an effort to draw a response from Israel that could be used to distract its citizens from their uprising against the regime itself and to threaten the international community that support for deposing the regime could lead to more days like yesterday. It is certainly fair to point out that on the same day that four Syrian Palestinians were killed by the IDF for trying to cross in Israel, eight Syrians were killed by Syrian security services for trying to cross into Lebanon. In the context of the past two months, only the former event was extraordinary.

(By the way, contributing editor Jeff Goldberg rightly calls out Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner for his overly earnest treatment of just whether, in fact, the Assad regime let this happen on purpose, when past history indicates that angry protesters reach that border only when the regime wants them to. Likewise, Anthony Shadid’s more fair-minded Times news analysis was headlined, as of last night, “A Random Border Skirmish? Or Is Syria Playing the Israel Card?” when in fact the piece itself makes very clear that it’s the latter. [Also, “random”? It was Nakba Day!] I’m usually not one of those people when it comes to the Times, but come on.)

It would be convenient if the entire thing could be blamed on the awful Assad regime, but it of course can’t. The Arab Spring, and the examples especially of Tunisia and Egypt, in which longtime despots were replaced through popular protests, have made Arabs feel newly empowered about their ability to influence how they are governed. It has also unleashed ugly forces that these despots had kept contained (violence against Egyptian Christians continued this weekend.)

The Arab Spring has made Palestinians feel as though they can shape their destiny vis-à-vis Israel as never before, and if reconciliation—in which a group that calls for Israel’s destruction, Hamas, was welcomed into the main governing body—is any indication; if ostensibly moderate President Mahmoud Abbas’s recent statements that Palestinians will never give up the right of return and that yesterday’s dead were martyrs are any indications; and if one of the most restive Nakba Days in recent years is any indication; then as of right now, the mainstream Palestinian vision of the Palestinian future is incompatible with the mainstream Israeli vision of the Israeli future. That doesn’t justify Israel’s ignoring these latest events. Rather, it demands two things: tactically, a combination of restraint and insistence on red lines; and strategically, inventive diplomacy and compassion. Israel demonstrated the former yesterday; here’s hoping the latter is on the way.

Israeli Troops Fire as Marchers Breach Borders [NYT]
Just Another Sunday in the Levant [Abu Muqawama]
A Random Border Skirmish? Or Is Syria Playing the Israel Card? [NYT]
How to Understand the Golan Heights Demonstrations? [Goldblog]
Scores Wounded in Latest Religious Clashes in Egypt [WP]
Earlier: Has Assad Reached Our Breaking Point?
On Reconciliation, ‘The Devil Is In the Details’

• Lebanon’s more complicated, diffuse upheaval. [NYT]

• Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is taking notification that he will likely be indicted in strive. If it happens, it won’t happen for several months. [NYT]

• David Ignatius looks at three important leaders in the new Egypt: Amr Moussa; Mohammed ElBaradei; and mega-businessman Naguib Sawiris, a Coptic Christian. [WP]

• Acting on a U.S. extradition request, Israelis arrested an official from the scandal-tainted Iowa Agriprocessors kosher meat plant. [AP/NYT]

• For the first time, two non-Jews entered into a civil union in Israel. [JTA]

• Amir Mizroch lays out exactly why Israel is in deep trouble when the U.N. General Assembly rolls around in September. [Forecast Highs]

• Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit offers a biting rebuke to the Israeli left on the occasion of Juliano Mer-Khamis’s murder. [Haaretz]

• “What kind of kosher steakhouse is filled with rambunctious yahoos and hot jazz music at 1 in the morning?” “Uh … the best damn kosher steakhouse on the Upper West Side!” [Vos Iz Neias?/DNAinfo]

• Orthodox Brooklyn Rabbi Mordecai Fish became the latest to go down in the Solomon Dwek sting, pleading guilty today to knowingly laundering $900,000 of criminal proceeds. [DOJ/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Baruch S. Blumberg did not only discover Hepatitis B and show how it could lead to liver cancer—he then helped develop the vaccine. He died Tuesday at 85. [NYT]

• An interesting take on how the logistics of reporting have helped foment anti-Israel bias among the media. [Standpoint/Jewish Ideas Daily]

• A study shows that the United States could learn much from Israel’s health care system. Of course, since Israel has universal health care for its citizens, that’s probably a lost cause. [JTA]

• Roger Cohen’s column on Richard Goldstone’s mea culpa—excuse me, his “volte-face”—is weird and kind of incoherent. [NYT]

• The keynote speaker at Christians United for Israel’s annual conference in July in Washington, D.C., will be soon-to-be-ex-Fox News host Glenn Beck. [JTA]

• Though abandoned, Lifta, just north of Jerusalem, is the last intact pre-1948 Arab village in Israel. The Palestinians want it to be an open-air museum; the Israelis want to build apartments there. [LAT]

• Worth re-reading Moshe Halbertal’s masterful takedown of the Goldstone Report from late 2009 in light of the week’s events. [TNR]

The Passover story, told through Google.

• If it’s Friday, it means post-prayer marches in the Arab world. Anti-government forces are protesting throughout Syria. [AP/WP]

• At the United Nations, President Shimon Peres condemned attempts to achieve Palestinian statehood through the international body and bemoaned the damage already done by the Goldstone Report. [NYT]

• Speaking of which, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice told a congressional hearing, “What we want to see is for it to disappear.” [JTA]

• After a visit from Prime Minister Netanyahu, German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned of the urgency of peace talks. [NYT]

• Saad Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister ousted earlier this year by Hezbollah, blamed Iran for its “flagrant intervention” in internal affairs. [AP/WP]

• How Iran lies behind all of the United States’ calculations during this time of regional upheaval. [NYT]

• In Egypt, the religious radicals are very much involving themselves in the political process, and are likely to achieve success (and the grand mufti says this is all workable). [NYT]

• Ever since Hezbollah toppled Lebanon’s Western-backed government, the U.S. has halted weapons shipments. [WSJ]

• Israel will likely soon approve nearly one thousand new houses in East Jerusalem. [AP/WP]

• Israel is appealing to the U.N. to stop a planned May Gaza flotilla, like last year’s. [Reuters/NYT]

Sure enough, we have received tentative evidence that the sale of Egyptian natural gas to Israel was corrupt.

Earlier this week, a Kuwaiti paper reported that Mubarak’s two sons received hundreds of millions of dollars in commissions from the sale of natural gas to Israel—specifically, that each got a 2.5 percent cut of 2005’s 15-year, $2.5 billion deal with East Mediterranean Gas, of which one of the sons is the largest shareholder.

Haaretz noted that Egypt supplies 40 percent of Israel’s natural gas, which uses it to generate 20 percent of its electricity.

So what happens now that such revelations have appeared—reportedly, the Kuwaiti paper learned of these kickbacks from interior department documents that presumably became more available ever since Mubarak’s three-decade reign ended? And what happens if and when Egypt’s government grows more responsive to its people? Likely, Israel will need to pay more for Egyptian natural gas or get less of it. Already its supply is less secure, as evidenced by the blowing up of a pipeline in the Sinai in the midst of the unrest leading to Mubarak’s ouster.

Fortunately for Israel, it has recently made several massive offshore gas discoveries; less fortunately, some of those fields are disputed by Lebanon—a disagreement widely seen to be a likely future beginning to war. It is remarkable that not three months ago, Israel had no concern for its continued steady supply of Egyptian natural gas.

Report: Mubarak’s Sons Received Millions of Dollars for Backing Israeli Gas Sales [Haaretz]
Related: The Next Lebanon War [Tablet Magazine]
Israeli Natural Gas Field Is a Significant Find [JTA]
Earlier: Why Egypt Can Handle Democracy Now
How Egyptian Unrest Affects Israel’s Energy

• Iran, Bahrain, and Yemen, inspired by Egypt’s example, experienced maybe their biggest anti-government protests yet (Iran’s biggest since 2009). [WP]

• “I find it very ironic that Iran is trying to give lessons in democracy to anybody,” said Secretary of State Clinton, referring to its government’s support for Egyptian protesters after it clamped down on its own street strife. Snap! [Laura Rozen]

• On the anniversary of father Rafik’s assassination, Saad Hariri, ousted from Lebanon’s prime ministership by Hezbollah, formally joined the opposition to the Hezbollah-backed government. [WSJ]

• An assistant to the judge who presided over (Jewish) Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s sentencing to eight years in prison on trumped-up, politically motivated charges went public with her allegation that the fix was in. [NYT]

• A Gallup poll shows Israel’s favorability rating in America remains consistently high, at 68 percent. [JTA]

• Big news in the West Bank: Chief Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat resigned; Prime Minister Salam Fayyad disbanded the cabinet and planned to form a new one; and new presidential and parliamentary elections will be held in September, in a response to calls in the wider Arab world for more democracy. [NYT]

• A new report, conducted and released by Symantec, found that the computer virus Stuxnet, widely believed to be Israel’s handiwork, infected Iranian nuclear facilities at just five initial points. [NYT]

• President Obama reiterated his support for the U.N.’s probe into former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination as the sixth anniversary of the event approaches. [Ynet]

• The top U.S. general and a top U.S. diplomat were in Jordan this weekend to reassure (and be reassured by) King Abdullah II, whose reign has been unprecedentedly challenged in recent weeks. [WP]

• One of the most significant consequences of the events in Egypt for the U.S. and Israel could be the subsequent decline in counterterrorism cooperation. [WP]

• Very good analysis: Why Egypt 2011 is not Iran 1979. [NYT]

Increased uncertainty for Israel’s energy situation is one of the less heralded but still important consequences of the Egyptian unrest. In response, Israel is speeding up exploration of its massive new offshore natural gas fields (which Lebanon has bellicosely contested); considering increasing quantities from its fields in the south; and even exploring the production of fossil fuel from shale. Perhaps most remarkably, Prime Minister Netanyahu, couching his proposal in the language of Palestinian economic improvement, suggested commencing talks with Palestinian negotiators about developing an offshore field off Gaza’s coast. Of course, given that Gaza is ruled by folks whom Netanyahu doesn’t (publicly) talk to, this proposition may prove tricky.

So already you can begin to grasp the potential consequences of what’s going on in Egypt—increased Israeli desperation? further Lebanese tensions over the offshore fields? rapprochement, or the reverse, with Hamas driven by mutual economic and energy interests? a shaky situation in Jordan turned shakier by energy shortages (Jordan also relies on Egyptian natural gas)? And all this merely in the less obvious dimension of energy. This is what people mean when they describe the remarkable past weeks as “an earthquake.”

Gas Pipeline Explosion Was Terror Related, Probe Finds [JTA]
Natural Gas Supply to Israel Cut Off After Blast at Egyptian Terminal [WP]
Israel: A Controversial Shale Project and Energy Security [Babylon & Beyond]
Israeli Leaders Suggests Palestinian Gas Talks [WSJ]
Earlier: Lebanon Passes Oil Law

• The Palestine Papers keep on giving: In 2009, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told U.S. envoy George Mitchell that President Obama lost “credibility … throughout the region,” adding, “people in the Middle East are not taking Barack Obama seriously. They feared Bush, despite everything.” [JPost]

• The Qatari emir told Sen. Kerry about a year ago that now is the time for the United States to engage Syria, and that Hamas will accept a deal along the 1967 borders, though won’t say so publicly. This one’s WikiLeaks. [WikiLeaks]

• Her intentions aside, Anthony Grafton condemns Sarah Palin’s invocation of the term “blood libel” for the damage it does to history and to the memories of countless Jews who suffered because of it. [TNR]

• A new entry in the “who sucked more, Hitler or Stalin?” debate from Bloodlands author Timothy Snyder. Turns out that Stalin was more motivated by ethnicity than was thought … but that Hitler really did kill significantly more innocents. [NYRB]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Nicholas Noe argues that U.S. policy toward Lebanon since the 2005 Cedar Revolution was a colossal failure, only helping Hezbollah, and that the one way to head off a really bad confrontation with Israel would be to push Israel to make peace with Syria. [NYT]

• Gal Beckerman remembers the late Samuel T. Cohen, the little-known inventor of the neutron bomb whose memoir was called F*** You: Mr. President. [Forward]

• David Nesenoff, the journalist who asked the question that prompted Helen Thomas’s infamous response, has been appointed editor and publisher of Long Island’s The Jewish Star. [The Jewish Star]

• Hélène Grimaud is a courageous, amazing, and beautiful French pianist. So naturally she has to be Jewish, right? Wikipedia, take it away: “She is descended from Sephardi Jews from Corsica on her mother’s side and from Berber Jews on her father’s side.” God, French Jews are great. [NYT]

• Weekend reading: Two articles by the late Daniel Bell. [Dissent]

• The legendary Eric Hobsbawn tackles the strange tale of the Jews of San Nicandro, ably handled in Tablet Magazine by books critic Adam Kirsch. [LRB]

• Futurist-novelist William Gibson finds Stuxnet’s roots in the world of digital vandalism. [NYT]

30 Rock makes a joke about Tablet Magazine’s official Canadian Football League head coach, the tastefully named Marc Trestman (h/t Kaplan’s Korner):

Most remarkably of all: The United States might be … siding with the protestors. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs called for an end to violence and the lifting of the Internet ban. Secretary of State Clinton insisted that “leaders need to respond” to their peoples’ calls for democracy; Sen. John Kerry, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, went further, explicitly calling for free and fair elections. On top of that, the Obama administration is publicly threatening to reconsider the $1.5 billion in annual U.S. military aid Egypt receives, which, as I noted earlier today, was actually the initial result of Egypt’s becoming the first Arab country to make peace with Israel.

Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution came first, but the unrest in Egypt is a bigger deal because the Arab and even broader Muslim world has long taken its cues first and foremost from Egypt. In addition to Tunisia and Egypt, there is of course the unstable situation in Lebanon; protests in Yemen; and, today, much more placid yet very real marching for regime change in Jordan.

I just named three of the four countries that border Israel, and the two Arab states that recognize it. It is no wonder that the mood in Israel is cautiousness, the sense that these revolts represent “an earthquake,” and some concern over these regimes’ toppling—even if, broadly speaking, one watching this must greatly sympathize with the masses of young people who have known nothing but authoritarianism, agitating for democratic government. One wants to think that a democracy such as Israel would be sympathetic, but one cannot blame the country for worrying that arguably hovering in the background of the Egyptian protests is the Muslim Brotherhood, the powerful Islamist party, which is not at the protests’ forefront—yet, and maybe not ever (similarly aligned groups are most definitely poised to benefit from unrest in Yemen and likely to benefit from Tunisia’s regime change). Bruce Riedel, who wrote about Al Qaeda yesterday in Tablet Magazine, argues today that even should the Muslim Brotherhood—whose Palestinian branch is Hamas—rise to lead the protests, it should not be a cause of overmuch concern. But Israel is not likely to agree with Riedel’s analysis.

Truthfully, anyone who says they know what is going to happen next—whether Mubarak’s regime will maintain power or not, and in what form; what character the Egyptian revolt will take on—is lying. So sit tight, keep watching the news, and—if I may editorialize for a moment—cheer on, for now, the courageous youth of Egypt.

Egypt Calls In Army as Protestors Rage [NYT]
U.S. Calls for Egypt to Respond to Its People [WSJ]
U.S. to Review Aid to Egypt, WH Spokesman Says [WP]
The Taking of Kasr Al Nil [New Yorker]
Don’t Fear Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood [Daily Beast]
Earlier: Lebanese Power Broker Supports Hezbollah

• 400 Rabbis are marking the occasion with an ad in the Wall Street Journal calling for Rupert Murdoch to sanction Glenn Beck for “literally hundreds of on-air references to the Holocaust and Nazis when characterizing people with whom you disagree.” [WaPo]

• Lebanon’s new Hezbollah backed Prime Minister assured the US Ambassador that good ties with Washington will be maintained. [Canadian Press]

• As Egypt’s protests enter their third day, they are spreading from Cairo, and taking a toll on the country’s economy. [Haaretz]

• Meanwhile, over 10,000 protestors have taken to the streets in Yemen. [NYT]

• Tullia Zevi, leader of Italian Jewry and journalist, is dead. She was 91. [NYT]

• Daniel Bell, public intellectual, is dead. He was 91. [NYT]

That’s Israel’s northern border. On its southern border, Egypt today is experiencing unprecedented pro-democratic protests against President Hosni Mubarak, whose “emergency rule” is in its fourth decade. The thousands who flooded a central Cairo square seem to have been inspired by Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, to which the United States just essentially lent its imprimatur. The New Yorker’s Website has a great dispatch, and contributing editor Jeff Goldberg posts the following video, with the headline: “This Is Not Something That Usually Happens in Egypt.” Indeed.

Lebanese Sunnis Stage Angry Protests as Hezbollah-Backed Candidate Is Appointed PM [WP]
Clinton Warns Hezbollah-Backed Government May Alter U.S. Ties With Lebanon [Haaretz]
Broad Protests Across Egypt Focus Fury on Mubarak [NYT]
Key Diplomat Says U.S. Approves of Tunisia Revolt [LAT]
Letter from Cairo: Anger and Silence [News Desk]

• Crowds of Palestinians reacted angrily to the Palestine Papers, blaming their leadership for being willing to give so much away (as well as, in some cases, blaming al Jazeera for trying to discredit their leadership. [WP]

• Iran is “no longer interested” in a fuel-swap deal, it said at talks last weekend. [NYT]

• While insisting that they are unverified, the State Department reported that the Palestine Papers makes peace negotiations more difficult. [Haaretz]

• Despite the official Palestinian Authority line that the Papers are a “pack of lies,” a former negotiator admitted to al Jazeera that they are valid. [Ynet]

• In new Papers, President Abbas admits that asking Israel to absorb one million refugees would be “illogical,” and that the leadership would settle for 100,000 under a final deal. This news is likely also not to be received well. [Haaretz]

• Two-day international talks over Iran’s nuclear program were essentially over before they began, with the Islamic Republic insisting on the right to enrich uranium from the outset. [LAT]

• Introducting “The Palestine Papers”: Secret documents from Palestinian negotiators that show them offering Israel a great deal. Much more at 10 am. [NYT]

• The new composition of President Obama’s top advisers means the administration is likely to no longer engage the Mideast peace process as much as it has, in part because it will no longer trust Prime Minister Netanyahu as a good-faith peace-maker. [Politico]

• As negotiations over Lebanon’s next government begin, Hezbollah’s leader pledged his group, which has the power to craft a parliamentary majority, would follow state rules and would seek a national unity cabinet. [NYT]

• Egypt’s interior minister pinned the New Year’s day church bombing that killed 21 Coptic Christians on a Gaza-based group linked to Al Qaeda. [WSJ]

It’s worth remembering that it was not six years ago that Jumblatt’s support lay with Hariri and March 14 and against Hezbollah; and it’s also worth remembering that today’s announcement was predictable (indeed, predicted), as Hariri Jumblatt, as columnist Lee Smith reported last year, threw his support to Hezbollah some time ago. Why? One word: Iran. Your weekend reading assignment is this 2009 New Republic dispatch, in which contributing editor David Samuels argued, “In the new Middle East, Tehran—armed with the strategic insulation that nuclear weapons confer—will be able to destabilize any government it doesn’t like without fear of military reprisal. As nearby regimes weigh the pros and cons of life inside the nuclear cage with the Iranian tiger, Lebanon offers a preview of what the future might be like.” That, in a nutshell, is what has changed between 2005, when Jumblatt could feel comfortable on the pro-America side of the fence, and today, when he can’t.

In Blow to Hariri, Jumblatt Pledges Support for Hezbollah [JPost]
Related: The Next Lebanon War [Tablet Magazine]
The Year of the Elephant [TNR]
Earlier: U.N. Files Sealed Indictment in Lebanese Killing
Hezbollah Departs Lebanese Government

• Two-day Iranian nuclear talks in Turkey begin today, with optimism in the air and expectations firmly tugged low. [LAT]

• The Terkel Commission, which is Israel’s probe of the flotilla incident, is expected to clear the IDF when it issues the first part of its report Sunday. [Arutz Sheva]

• This Fayyad fellow: What is he really up to? [LAT]

• Top administration Mideast adviser Dennis Ross is in Israel, trying to hammer down each side’s security requirements. [JTA]

• Hamas has accused Israel the Palestinian Authority of halting important medical shipments into Gaza. [Haaretz]

• Russian President Medvedev visited the West Bank and expressed Russian support for a Palestinian state, and was eagerly cheered. [NYT]

• An appeals court may have saved one Satmar rabbi ten years in jail, ruling that one count of incest, involving an incident somewhere in Belgium, Israel, or points in between, could not be brought stateside. Ugh. [NY Post]

• Speaking of which, Brooklyn is a magical place—like Marrakesh!—where Jews and Muslims live side-by-side in peace. [Guardian/Le Monde/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Arab leaders look on Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution with fear even as duplicates in their countries seem unlikely, at least in the short-term. [NYT]

• Don Kirshner, who produced songs by Carole King and Phil Spector at the Brill Building, died at 76. [NYT]

Hezbollah fears reprisals from the country’s Sunni minority as well as a blow to its reputation as patriotic for Lebanon if the indictments finger its own operatives for the killing of the Sunni former leader of the country—an operation originally thought to be sponsored by Syria but now believed to have been the doing of the Iran-sponsored indigenous Shiite group. Hezbollah broke with the (now on-his-way-out) prime minister, Saad Hariri, a U.S. ally—he was literally at the White House when Hezbollah made its move last week—after he refused to boycott the U.N. findings. As The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright poignantly notes, Saad is Rafik’s son.

Tim Fitzsimons’s primer in Slate is highly recommended (as is Hanin Ghaddar’s companion essay, which makes plain just how greatly sectarianism dominates Lebanese politics and society). The actual unsealed indictments of Hezbollah operatives and officials may ignite further havoc. But in one sense, the damage has already been done: The government has disbanded; Hariri has denounced Hezbollah; Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, defended his yanking of ten ministers from the government, blamed Hariri for “exposing” the country, and repeated his claim that the tribunal is (what else?) an American-Israeli conspiracy aimed at his group.

The next step, as Fitzsimons explains, is for Hariri’s group—the March 14 coalition—and Hezbollah’s group—March 8—to maneuver to form a new government, a scramble that will probably be decided by Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, who finds himself as the country’s de facto power broker (fans of The Wire should think of him as Prop Joe, the East Sider helping to becalm the West Side’s warring factions). Jumblatt will likely side with Hezbollah, but even if he doesn’t, or doesn’t right away, the writing is on the wall: In Lebanon, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, and perhaps above all general instability are ascendant. “If there were hedging stakes involved,” writes Fitzsimons, “today would be a day to sell America and Saudi Arabia, and buy Iran and Syria.”

U.N. Formally Files Sealed Indictment in Killing of Former Lebanese Leader [WP]
Lebanon Delays Talks on New Government [NYT]
What’s Going On in Beirut? [Slate]
Is There No Place for People Like Me in Lebanon? [Slate]
Lebanon’s Tragic Hero [The New Yorker]
Related: The Next Lebanon War [Tablet Magazine]
Cinders of Lebanon [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: What Is Hezbollah Thinking?
Hezbollah Departs Lebanese Government

• But by destabilizing Lebanon, its base, Hezbollah’s gambit was not without its risks. [NYT]

• How ‘bout China and Russia! China flat-out refused Iran’s offer for a tour of its nuclear facilities, seen as fuzzy at best since the United States was not invited; and Russia such a tour would not be a replacement for negotiations and U.N. inspects. [AP/NYT]

• The man said to be in charge of laundering money to Hamas from sources such as Iran—previously the assassinated Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s job—was arrested in (where else?) Dubai. [Ynet]

• Yossi Alpher notes that the recent moves toward Palestinian statehood do not touch issues like the right of return and so actually could, judo-like, be used by Israel to move toward a final deal on rather favorable terms. [JPost]

• Israel and Greece, which have drawn closer as Israel and Turkey have bickered, formed a regional force for dealing with natural disasters. [JTA]

Thanassis Cambanis, author of a recent book on Hezbollah, argues today that the Party of God’s gambit is driven entirely by its fear of the United Nations tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri (the current prime minister’s father). The tribunal is expected to implicate Hezbollah’s ally, Syria, as well as Hezbollah itself, when it hands down its indictments, probably imminently.

Writes Cambanis:

Simply put, Hezbollah cannot afford the blow to its popular legitimacy that would occur if it is pinned with the Hariri killing. The group’s power depends on the unconditional backing of its roughly 1 million supporters. Its constituents are the only audience that matters to Hezbollah, which styles itself as sole protector of Arab dignity from humiliation by Israel and the United States.

These supporters will be hard-pressed to understand, much less forgive, their party if it is proved to have killed a leader who was loved by the nation’s Sunni Muslims and also respected by Christians, Druze and even many Shiites, who form Hezbollah’s core support. That is why Hezbollah denies any role in the assassination even though it has unabashedly taken responsibility for destabilizing moves like setting off the 2006 war with Israel or pushing Lebanon to the brink of civil war in 2008.

How Hariri responds is important: Cambanis advises him to stand firm. But he also predicts, “Hezbollah is likely to emerge the end winner because it is willing to sacrifice the Lebanese state to maintain its standing in the Middle East and its perpetual war against Israel.” Which, as far as Israel is concerned (to say nothing of the Lebanese people), wouldn’t be great news.

Hezbollah’s Latest Suicide Mission [NYT]
Israeli Troops Go On Alert Amid Lebanon’s Political Turmoil [JTA]
Talks to Choose New Lebanese PM To Begin Next Week [JPost]
Related: The Next Lebanon War [Tablet Magazine]
Cinders of Lebanon [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Hezbollah Departs Lebanese Government

• The administration’s on-and-off engagement with Lebanon left it with few options when the Hezbollah ministers walked out of the government yesterday. [NYT]

• New Israeli intelligence showing Iran’s halting nuclear development—it may not even try to build a bomb in the near future—has eased Israeli and American political pressure for military options. There are talks the week after next. [Reuters]

• Speaking in Qatar, Secretary of State Clinton called on Arab states to fight their own corruption and lack of democratic practices, blaming these for helping feed extremists. [WSJ]

• The German mediator quietly completed two days in Gaza trying to negotiate the freedom of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit. [Haaretz]

• A nine-year-old Gaza girl paralyzed in a 2006 Israeli airstrike as well as her father and brother were granted temporary-resident status so that she can continue to receive medical care. [AP/NYT]

• Auschwitz drew a record 1.38 million voluntary visitors in 2010. [Haaretz]

• Secretary of State Clinton forcefully accused those threatening to topple Lebanon’s government of trying to subvert the U.N. tribunal investigating the former prime minister’s assassination. [Laura Rozen]

• Israel is quietly but actively supporting Sudan’s Christian south in its efforts to secede, while essentially the entire Arab world backs the unionist regime in Khartoum. One reason for Israel’s support for independence? Trade opportunities. [World Tribune]

• Pro-Israel groups are finding it is most effective to be cruel only to be kind. [JTA]

• Newly released documents purport to show that West Germany knew of Adolph Eichmann’s whereabouts eight years before Israeli agents tracked him down and captured him in Argentina. [Der Spiegel]

I think I’ll try Alaska.

The current Lebanese prime minister just happened to be in Washington, D.C., today; he also just happens to be Rafik Hariri’s son, Saad. Hariri and President Obama met at the White House before Saad headed back to his country. “The efforts by the Hezbollah-led coalition to collapse the Lebanese government only demonstrate their own fear and determination to block the government’s ability to conduct its business and advance the aspirations of all of the Lebanese people,” a White House read-out said. “The President and Prime Minister reaffirmed their commitment to strengthening Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence, implementing all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions, and continuing a wide-ranging and long-term partnership between the United States and Lebanon.”

Tablet Magazine Mideast columnist Lee Smith, who lived in Lebanon for several years, has written extensively about the deterioration of the situation in Lebanon and how it could affect Israel. In June, he reported that a third Israeli-Lebanese war—this one a follow-up to the 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah—was a “when, not if” question. In August, he argued that the United States had essentially abandoned Lebanon to Hezbollah—among others, Hariri himself was forced to collude with the group that had a hand in his own father’s death—and that Israel was bearing the brunt of the blame for it.

Hezbollah Ministers Quit Over Hariri Probe, Toppling Lebanon Government [Haaretz]
Related: Cinders of Lebanon [Tablet Magazine]
The Next Lebanon War [Tablet Magazine]

But, according to Jeffrey Feltman, the former ambassador, this is the same paper whose editorial board was the only one that refused to meet with him; which frequently committed errors in reporting his activities; and “will no more criticize Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, than Syria’s state-run Tishreen newspaper would question the president of Syria” (“Critics say the paper’s protestations of editorial freedom ring a little hollow,” the profile acknowledged, “given that it operates under the tacit protection of Hezbollah”).

The discrepancy brings to mind Tablet Magazine Mideast columnist Lee Smith’s piece last week, in which he alleged that many Western observers condescend to certain regional actors and hold them up as beacons of morality when, if they behaved identically but did so in the West and as Westerners, they would be condemned. “While it is man’s ability to tell good from bad that makes him most human, certain Western intellectuals take the unwillingness, or inability, to do so as a sign of the genius to rise above the small-minded morality of the masses,” Smith argued. “Excusing Hezbollah may seem like the rational decision-making of a thoughtful intellectual who is observing a society ostensibly different from his own, but in reality the moral universe of the Middle East is no different from in the rest of the world.”

Heroic Journalism in Lebanon? Ex-Envoy Disagrees [NYT]
Related: Rarity in Region, Lebanese Paper Dares to Provoke [NYT]
High Morals [Tablet Magazine]