Jerusalem News (20 July, 2014, 22 Tammuz, 5774)
Contents:
1. Important Recent Demographic Changes in the Middle East.
The One-State Solution Is on Our Doorstep by David P. Goldman
2. Hamas Tries to Create a Nuclear Disaster. Repeated Attempt to Strike at the Nuclear Reactor in Dimona
The "Moral Equivalence" - Hamas, ISIS, and the Media by Rachel EhrenfeldÂ
3. IDFÂ Summary of Activities for Saturday, July 19
4. Thirteen IDF Soldiers Killed in Gaza
5. Is this Nike Video Anti-Semitic?
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1. Important Recent Demographic Changes in the Middle East.
The One-State Solution Is on Our Doorstep
by David P. Goldman
Tablet Magazine
July 14, 2014
http://www.meforum.org/4753/israel-one-state-solution
Extracts:
Hamas launched its deepest strikes ever into Israel after the IDF cracked down on its West Bank operations following the murder last month of three Israeli boys, arresting nearly 900 members of Hamas and other terrorist groups. Humiliated in the territories, and unable to pay its 44,000 Gaza employees , Hamas acted from weakness, gambling that missile attacks would elicit a new Intifada on the West Bank.
 ...the whole of the surrounding region has become one big refugee crisis. Yet the seemingly spontaneous emergence of irregular armies like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) now rampaging through northern Mesopotamia should be no surprise. The misnamed Arab Spring of 2011 began with an incipient food crisis in Egypt and a water crisis in Syria . Subsidies from the Gulf States keep Egypt on life support. In Syria and Iraq, though, displaced populations become foraging armies that loot available resources, particularly oil, and divert the proceeds into armaments that allow the irregulars to keep foraging. ISIS is selling $800 million a year of Syrian oil to Turkey, according to one estimate , as well as selling electricity from captured power plants back to the Assad government. On June 11 it seized the Bajii power plant oil refinery in northern Iraq, the country's largest.
The region has seen nothing like it since the Mongol invasion of the 13th century. Perpetual war has turned into a snowball that accumulates people and resources as it rolls downhill and strips the ground bare of sustenance. Those who are left shiver in tents in refugee camps, and their young men go off to the war. There is nothing new about this way of waging war; it was invented in the West during the Thirty Years War by the imperial general Albrecht von Wallenstein, and it caused the death of nearly half the population of Central Europe between 1618 and 1648.
As a result of this spiraling warfare, four Arab states Libya, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq have effectectively ceased to exist. Lebanon, once a Christian majority country, became a Shia country during the past two decades under the increased domination of Hezbollah. Nearly 2 million Syrian Sunnis have taken refuge in Lebanon, as Israeli analyst Pinhas Inbari observes, and comprise almost half of Lebanon's total population of 4 million, shifting the demographic balance to the Sunnis while the mass Sunni exodus tilts the balance of power in Syria toward the Alawites and other religious minorities, who are largely allied with Iran. Jordan, meanwhile, has taken in a million Syrian Sunnis, making Palestinians a minority inside Jordan for the first time in a generation. A region that struggled to find sustenance for its people before 2011 has now been flooded with millions of refugees without resources or means of support. They are living for the most part on largesse from the Gulf States, and their young men are prospective cannon fodder.
The remaining states in the region Tuurkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran will alternately support aand suppress the new irregular armies as their interests require. Where does ISIS get its support, apart from oil hijacking in Syria and bank robberies in Mosul ? There are allegations that ISIS receives support from Turkey , the Sunni Gulf States , and Iran . Pinhas Inbari claims that Shiite Iran is funding Sunni extremists "to be certain that a strong Iraqi state does not emerge again along its western border." There are equally credible reports that each of these powers wants to stop ISIS. Saudi Arabia fears that Sunni extremists might overthrow the monarchy. Turkey fears that the depredations of ISIS on its border will trigger the formation of an independent Kurdish state, which it has opposed vehemently for decades. Iran views ISIS as a Sunni competitor for influence in the region.
To some extent, I believe, all these reports are true. The mess in the Middle East brings to mind the machinations around Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years War between 1627 and 1635, when France's Cardinal Richelieu paid Sweden's King Gustavus Adolphus to intervene on the Protestant side in order to weaken France's Catholic rival Austria. At different times, Protestant Saxony and Catholic Bavaria allied with France, Austria, and each other, respectively. France and Sweden began as allies, briefly became enemies, and then were allies again. Looming over this snake-pit of religious, dynastic, and national rivalries was the figure of Albrecht von Wallenstein, the Austrian generalissimo who twice saved the Empire from defeat at the hands of the Protestants. Wallenstein, commanding a polyglot mercenary army with no national or religious loyalty, played both sides, and Austria had him murdered in 1634.
There is more than coincidence to the parallels between the Middle East today and 17th-century Europe. Iran's intervention into Syria's civil conflict inaugurated a new kind of war in the region, the sort that Richelieu practiced in the 1620s. Iran's war objectives are not national or territorial in the usual sense; rather, the objective is the war itself, that is, the uprooting and destruction of potentially hostile populations. With a third of Syria's population displaced and several million expelled, the Assad regime has sought to change Syria's demographics to make the country more congenial to Shiite rule. That in turn elicits a new kind of existential desperation from the Saudis, who are fighting for not only the survival of their sclerotic and corrupt monarchy, but also for the continuation of Sunni life around them. Today Iraq's Sunnis, including elements of Saddam Hussein's mainly Sunni army and the 100,000 strong "Sons of Iraq" force hired by then-U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus during the 2007-2008 surge, are making common cause with ISIS. Tomorrow they might be shooting at each other. The expectation that the waves of sectarian and tribal violence that have caused national borders to crumble across the Middle East will die down in 30 years may be both incredibly grim and wildly optimistic.
...The fall in Muslim birth rate is most extreme in Iran and Turkey, with different but related consequences. When Ayatollah Khomeini took power in 1979, the average Iranian woman had seven children; today the total fertility rate has fallen to just 1.6 children, the sharpest drop in demographic history. Iran still has a young population, but it has no children to succeed them. By mid-century Iran will have a higher proportion of elderly dependents than Europe, an impossible and unprecedented burden for a poor country. Iran's sudden aging will be followed by Turkey, Algeria, and Tunisia....
Between 2005 and 2020, Iran's population aged 15 to 24, that is, its pool of potential army recruits, will have fallen by nearly half. To put this in perspective, Pakistan's military-age population will have risen by about half. In 2000, Iran had half the military-age men of its eastern Sunni neighbor; by 2020 it will have one-fourth as many. Iran's bulge generation of youth born in the 1980s is likely to be its last, and its window for asserting Shiite power in the region will close within a decade.
....Iran does not have a suicide wish, but it knows that it is dying, and has nothing to lose by rolling the dice today.
The Sunni powers view Iran's desperate expansionist drive with as much dismay as do the Israelis. The Saudis already worry about Iranian subversion in their Shia-majority eastern province. Turkey, meanwhile, sees the sand running out in the hourglass. After decades of civil war with its Kurdish minority and 40,000 deaths, Turkey is gradually becoming Kurdish. The Kurds have 3.3 children per female versus only 1.8 for ethnic Turks, demographer Nicholas Eberstadt estimates, which means that within a generation, half the recruits to the Turkish army will come from Kurdish-speaking homes. Turkey has done all it can to forestall the emergence of a Kurdish state on its border, but it has failed. Iraq's breakup has given rise to a Kurdish state de facto if not yet de jure, and it is only a matter of time before Turkey itself shows territorial cracks.
Israel is the great exception to the decline in fertility from North Africa to Iran, as I argued in a 2011 essay for Tablet magazine. The evidence is now overwhelming that a Jewish majority between the Jordan River and the sea is baked in the cake.
The CIA World Factbook estimates total fertility of Arabs in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza at just 2.83 in 2014, versus 3.05 in 2011. The total fertility of Israeli Jews, meanwhile, has risen above three children per female. ...
Jewish immigration is consistently positive and accelerating, while Palestinian emigration, at an estimated 10,000 per year since 1967, is reducing the total Arab population west of the Jordan River. Palestine Authority data exaggerated Arab numbers in Judea and Samaria by about 30 percent, or 648,000 people, as of the 1997 census. As Caroline Glick observes in her 2014 book The Israeli Solution, Jews will constitute a 60 percent majority between the river and the sea, and "some anticipate that due almost entirely to Jewish immigration, Jews could comprise an 80 percent majority within the 1949 armistice lines and Judea and Samaria by 2035."
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2. Hamas Tries to Create a Nuclear Disaster. Repeated Attempt to Strike at the Nuclear Reactor in Dimona
The "Moral Equivalence" - Hamas, ISIS, and the MediaÂ
by Rachel EhrenfeldÂ
 http://acdemocracy.org/the-moral-equivalence-Hamas-ISIS-and-the-media/?utm_source=The+%22Moral+Equivalence%22+-+Hamas%2C+ISIS%2C+and+the+Media&utm_campaign=Hams+moral+equivalencender+the+Iron+Dome&utm_medium=email
Extracts:
 Hamas's fighting methods in the current round of Israel's Operation Protective Edge illustrate, yet again, the practical and ideological proximity between Hamas and the atrocious radical Islamic organization the "Islamic State" (ISIS). However, Hamas's effective use of "public opinion" and all media venues is second to none.
Hamas and the ISIS have proven that its terrorist policy has no moral restrictions. From the onset, Hamas, and the ISIS, have directed their massive and ongoing murderous attacks against civilian targets to cause as much carnage as possible. Unlike ISIS, while losing their military power, Hamas is cleverly using Gazans as human shields and the gullible media to pave the way to a strategic victory.
Hamas has boasted that it repeatedly directed its long-range rockets at strategic targets in Israel, which, had they hit their mark, could have led to thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of casualties had the chemical plants in Haifa been attacked. Firing rockets on Tel-Aviv's international Ben-Gurion airport endangers the safety of airlines, including American carriers, with a fate similar to that of Malaysia Airline Flight MH17. And Hamas's repeated rocket attacks on Dimona's nuclear reactor demonstrate that these Islamists are in a real hurry to become martyrs; a successful attack on Dimona would cause a nuclear holocaust in the whole region, including Gaza and the West Bank.
 Organizations with ideological affiliation to ISIS, such as "the Islamic State in Bayt Al- Maqdis" have joined the campaign against Israel. Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, is the de-facto ruler of the Gaza Strip. It provides a safe haven for all Palestinian terrorist organizations and allows the al-Qaeda affiliates to operate freely (as long as they do not defy its orders).
Hamas's and ISIS's leaders reiterate the religious commitment of their movement to the genocide of the Jewish people in Israel, as well as their determination to reestablish the Islamic Caliphate, with Jerusalem as its capital. Both organizations strive for a global revolution that would result in the reconquering of Spain (Andalusia) and of Rome (the Vatican) ahead of a global Islamic rule.
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3. IDFÂ Summary of Activities for Saturday, July 19
IDF Spokesperson Announcement - Summary of Activities for Saturday, July 19
July 20, 2014
Location : Tel Aviv
Since the beginning of Operation Protective Edge more than 1,770 rockets
were launched from the Gaza Strip at Israel;1,333 rockets out of which hit
Israeli home front and additional 360 rockets were intercepted by the Iron
Dome.
Since the beginning of the ground phase of Operation Protective Edge more
than 265 rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip at Israel; approximately
190 rockets out of which hit Israel. One of which killing a civilian in the
Negev. Additional 63 rockets were intercepted by the Iron Dome. IDF forces
struck some 480 terror targets using air, naval and ground forces;
uncovering 13 tunnels with 34 access points to them across the Gaza Strip.
Since the ground operation commenced, at least 70 terrorists were killed.
More than 13 terrorists were brought to Israel for questioning.
Over the course of the day, while foiling an attack emanating from the
central Gaza Strip, two IDF soldiers were killed. Several others were
wounded.
Major occurrences during the past day:
   This morning, forces foiled an attempted terrorist attack. Several
terrorists disguised in IDF uniform, in order to deceive and attack
non-suspecting Israelis, infiltrated into Israel from the central Gaza Strip
through a tunnel. They were aiming to carry out a lethal attack in one of
the nearby communities when they came upon an IDF force patrolling the
vicinity. The terrorists exercised machine guns and fired an anti-tank
missile at the force, which immediately returned fire, killing a terrorist
and forcing the rest back into Gaza. two IDF soldiers were killed and two
IDF soldiers were moderately wounded and evacuated to a hospital. IAF
continued and pursued the attackers targeting several of them as they
returned to the Gaza Strip.
    Not long after, IDF prevented another attack on the border with
the southern Gaza Strip. Two terrorists fired shots and an anti-tank missile
at a nearby force. The soldiers returned fire, killing one of the
terrorists. The second terrorist was wearing an explosive belt which
exploded, causing his death. In the aftermath of the incident, forces
uncovered tranquilizers and cuffs in his possession, carried with intention
to abduct Israelis.
    Later that evening, a terrorist emerged from a concealed tunnel
shaft while firing at IDF forces. The troops immediately retaliated, killing
the terrorist.
In addition to operational activity by IDF forces, in conjunction with the
Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), five trucks
of humanitarian aid were transferred into the Gaza Strip today. The trucks
were carrying approximately 20 tons of medical supplies, including
antibiotics, intravenous fluids, personal first aid kits, and blankets.
________________________________________
IMRA - Independent Media Review and Analysis
Website: www.imra.org.il
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4. Thirteen IDF Soldiers Killed in Gaza
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/183117#.U8v4fZu_kdU
Golani, armor and engineering corps forces were met with effective close range guerrilla actions in Shejaiya, Gaza.
By David Lev
First Publish: 7/20/2014, 6:02 PM
Extracts:
Thirteen IDF soldiers have been killed since Saturday night, the IDF said. The process of identifying the bodies is still ongoing.
Golani Brigade, armor and engineering corps forces were met with effective close range guerrilla actions in Shejaiya, Gaza. The dead are apparently all from the Golani Brigade. The Brigade's commander, Col. Rasan Alian, was also lightly injured.
According to Channel 2, there were several incidents that involved IDF deaths. In the most serious incident, an armored personnel carrier hit a large explosive charge and the forces that rushed to assist the soldiers who were hurt subsequently came under fire. In another incident, anti-tank missiles were fired at a structure soldiers had entered.
Their deaths raised to 18 the total number of soldiers killed since the army began a major ground operation in Gaza late on Thursday.
About 63 soldiers were wounded in the heavy fighting in Gaza since Sunday night.
The residents of Shejaiya, a known hotbed of terrorists, were notified ahead of time by the IDF to leave the area because the IDF intends to enter it. Hamas had filled the neighborhood with booby traps well ahead of time, and the advance warning given by the IDF may have helped the terrorists there prepare for the IDF to enter.
The heavy casualties dealt to the IDF and the need to evacuate the dead and wounded under fire apparently led to a furious response by the IDF, which the Palestinians are currently presenting to the world as a massacre.
Currently there are 65 IDF soldiers being treated for injuries in hospitals around the country. Seven of the soldiers are in serious condition, three have moderate to serious injuries, and the rest have moderate or light injuries.
In the twelve days of rocket attacks by Hamas since the beginning of Operation Protective Edge, Arab terrorists have fired about 1,000 rockets at Israel, and at least 130 of them have come from Shejaiya, where fighting has been heavy since Saturday, the IDF said Sunday. In the neighborhood are not just rockets, but also large amounts of weapons, and workshops for the production of missiles, the IDF said.
Meanwhile, Hamas terrorists continued to fire rockets at Israel Sunday afternoon. Rockets were fired at Beersheva, Ashkelon, and southern Negev communities throughout the later afternoon Sunday.
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5. Is this Nike Video Anti-Semitic?
Animated soccer stars compete against evil clones who wear uniforms bearing a logo that looks like the Star of David
http://www.aish.com/ci/a/Is-this-Nike-Video-Anti-Semitic.html
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