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Friday January 26, 2007

Shorts: Mideast

Olmert OKs new army head

Ehud Olmert approved the nomination of Maj. Gen. Gaby Ashkenazi as Israeli army chief of staff. The prime minister gave the green light Monday, Jan. 22 in a meeting with Defense Minister Amir Peretz, who named Ashkenazi, the ministry’s director-general, to succeed Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, who resigned last week as part of the fallout from Israel’s inconclusive 34-day war with Hezbollah in Lebanon last summer.

Earlier Monday, the Movement for Quality Government petitioned the High Court of Justice asserting that a new chief of staff should not be appointed until the Winograd Committee finishes its interim report on the war.

The court instructed Olmert and Peretz to submit a response within four days to justify the timing of the appointment. The recommendation must still be vetted by a judicial committee, followed by a Cabinet vote. — jta

Israel: 2007 ‘decisive’ on Iran

Israel officials have called 2007 the “decisive year” for acting against Iran’s nuclear program.

“The free world has the power to provide a response to the Iranian threat, and that response exists: 2007 is the decisive year,” Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz told an Israeli security conference Sunday, Jan. 21 after holding strategic talks with visiting U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns.

Mofaz said Israel endorses international diplomatic efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but his speech left open the possibility of pre-emptive military action.

Burns said the United States and Israel have the right to self-defense if Iran presses ahead toward attaining nuclear capability, but he was upbeat about a recent U.N. Security Council resolution that placed sanctions on Iran, with the possibility of more if it does not halt uranium enrichment.

“Iran is no longer on the offensive but on the defensive, and we have to keep it on the defensive,” Burns said.

Sharon was warned of Lebanon risks

Ariel Sharon was warned in 2004 of the military risk that Hezbollah posed to Israel, a declassified document showed.

Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Tzahi Hanegbi revealed this week that two years before the Lebanon war, his predecessor, Yuval Steinitz, sent then-Prime Minister Sharon a secret letter warning that Israel’s armed forces and home front were not prepared for the thousands of rockets that Hezbollah could launch in the event of a large-scale military confrontation.

The letter also was signed by Sharon’s son Omri, who was then a senior Knesset lawmaker, and Ephraim Sneh, now Israel’s deputy defense minister, also cast doubt on the Israeli Air Force’s ability to stem short-range Hezbollah rocket fire.

Sharon’s response is not known. — jta

Intel to halt production at one plant

Intel Israel will stop production at its Jerusalem Fab 8 facility at the end of the year as it completes the phase out of its activities in the automotive market.

“We decided to close the 6-inch technology activities all over the world and will end production of the ‘Legacy’ product at the end of 2007,” Alex Kornhauser, vice president and general manager of Intel Israel said Sunday, Jan. 21 at a press conference at the Intel Kiryat Gat campus.

“Our approximately 300 workers there will be offered positions in other Intel operations and we are now exploring alternatives on what to do with the site. — jps

Arab nominated as Righteous Gentile

A Tunisian farmer was the first Arab nominated for Yad Vashem’s Righteous Gentile designation.

Ha’aretz reported that the efforts of Khaled Abd al-Wahab, a Tunisian farmer who died in 1997, were discovered by historian Robert Satloff.

Some 60 Muslims are among the more than 20,000 Righteous Gentiles already named by the Holocaust museum and memorial in Jerusalem, but no Arabs are included.

Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, attributed this partly to historians’ lack of research in the area and also to some Arab rescuers’ desire not to be found, since the Holocaust — which made plain the Jews’ need for their own state — has become a touchy subject in the Arab world. — jta

Pole wins Jerusalem Prize

A Pole won an Israeli literary prize. This year’s Jerusalem Prize will go to Leszek Kolakowski in recognition of his critiques of the repressive aspects of Soviet communism and his championing of human liberty.

The prestigious literary prize will be presented at next month’s Jerusalem International Book Fair.

Born in 1927, Kolakowski earned a doctorate from Warsaw University and went on to serve on the faculties of Harvard, Oxford and the University of Chicago before retiring in 1995.

Past recipients of the prize include Bertrand Russell, Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Mario Vargas Llosa, Milan Kundera and Simone de Beauvoir. — jta

Hebrew U. displays Semitic snake spells

The earliest continuous Semitic text ever deciphered was displayed publicly for the first time Monday at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Richard Steiner, professor of Semitic languages and literature at Yeshiva University, interpreted Semitic passages in Egyptian texts discovered more than a century ago inscribed on the subterranean walls of the pyramid of King Unas at Saqqara in Egypt sometime between the 25th and 30th centuries BCE.

The passages, which were meant to protect royal mummies against poisonous snakes, were written in hieroglyphic characters, but Steiner discovered that they were composed in the Semitic language spoken by the Canaanites in the third millennium BCE, an archaic form of the languages later known as Phoenician and Hebrew.

Although the Egyptians viewed their culture as far superior to that of their neighbors, the find shows that their morbid fear of snakes made them open to borrowing Semitic magic. — jta

Dershowitz sees Israel going it alone

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz warned Israel that it could lose the political support of the United States.

Dershowitz, who has written extensively on pro-Israel advocacy and the war on terror, said in a televised speech to the Herzliya strategic conference in Israel that recent events suggest that the historically strong ties between Washington and Jerusalem could be strained in the future.

“Israel must be prepared to lose American support in the coming years, both diplomatically and economically,” Dershowitz said. “My message to Israel is, be strong, and be prepared to go it alone.” — jta

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