Foreign Ministry warns international community against complacency, says recent IAEA report on Islamic republic’s nuclear program does nothing to lessen concern over Tehran’s nuclear program
Israel accused Iran of continued “fraud and evasion,” pursuant to a recent report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and said that “there is nothing in Iran’s response that should lessen the concern of the international community vis-à-vis its nuclear program.”

According to the IAEA report, the Islamic republic was continuing to defy United Nations demands to suspend uranium enrichment - a process used to make both nuclear fuel and the fissile material for an atom bomb.

“Regrettably, as a result of the lack of cooperation by Iran in connection with the alleged studies and other associated key remaining issues of serious concern, the agency has not been able to make substantive progress on these issues,” said the restricted report.

“This report emphasizes again that Iran is repeatedly violating UN Security Council decisions. It underscores the military elements in Iran’s nuclear activities,” the Foreign Ministry said in an official statement.

“Despite the fact that the IAEA takes the information presented to it at face value, Israel once again calls on members of the international community to increase the pressure on the Iranian government in order for it to abandon its threatening program to achieve nuclear energy,” the statement read.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert , who will set out for Washington on Sunday, is expected to spend much of his time discussing the issue of a nuclear Iran. He hopes to be able to convince the American administration to advance sanctions against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government.

Senior Israeli officials believe there is still time to stop the Iranian nuclear program in its tracks and are exploring all options to do so. In addition to diplomatic appeals to the US and European nations, including Russia, they hinted that non-diplomatic options are “still on the table.”

The final report of the International Atomic Energy Agency Wednesday, Nov. 19, says the Syrian complex bombed by Israel 14 months ago bore features resembling those of an undeclared nuclear reactor. “Significant” amounts of man-made uranium particles were found in situ. Those features include the proximity of the site to the adequate pumping capacity of cooling water required by a reactor.
This report will be submitted the nuclear watchdog board meeting in Vienna on Nov. 27-28. Damascus is accused of failing to produce requested documentation to support its declaration about the nature of the building and refusing follow-up IAEA visits to three other locations suspected of harboring possible evidence linked to Israel’s target.
DEBKAfile was the only publication to report that the Israeli attack targeted more than one Syrian site. Washington says that the site was a nascent reactor meant to produce plutonium for atomic bombs.
The nuclear watchdog asks Syria for more cooperation and to show debris and equipment whisked away from the site demolished by Israel for further examination.
DEBKAfile’s military sources stress that the IAEA report attests to one of the most formidable feats of Israel’s external intelligence agency Mossad in conjunction with the US CIA.

Syrian president Bashar Assad is now confirmed as having been in the process of building nuclear weapons intended for attacking Israel.

Despite all his election promises and assurances to Jewish groups and Israelis, Barack Obama plans to throw his weight behind the Saudi royal family’s 2002 plan to roll back Israel to at least its 1949 borders, the Times of London reported Sunday, citing sources close to America’s president-elect.

While the Saudi plan calls for recognition of Israel by Arab states, such promises have historically proven of scant value relative to the “hard currency” of territorial retreats. Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister and leader of the ruling Kadima party, and President Shimon Peres, have said that the Saudi plan could be a starting point for discussions but have stopped far short of accepting it.

Contrary to Obama’s promises at the last AIPAC conference in support of an “undivided Jerusalem” — a position he retreated from days later — the Saudi plan divides Jerusalem, hands over the Old City, Temple Mount and the adjacent Western Wall to the Arabs, and calls on Israel to take responsibility for the “Palestinian refugee problem.” It requires Israel to restore the strategic Golan Heights to Syria and allow the Palestinians to establish their capital in east Jerusalem. It would dismantle all Jewish settlements and even Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem, dislocating nearly a half-million Israelis, and leaving the state behind what diplomatic dove Abba Eban described as “Auschwitz borders.”

On a visit to the Middle East last July, the president-elect said privately it would be “crazy” for Israel to refuse a deal that could “give them peace with the Muslim world”, according to a senior Obama adviser.

Apparently there are many crazy Israeli, since the Saudi plan is unacceptable to the vast majority of Israelis, including Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud, the frontrunner to be prime minister in the next round of elections, slated for February 2009.

The Arab peace plan received a boost last week when President Shimon Peres, a Nobel peace laureate and leading Israeli dove, commended the initiative at a Saudi-sponsored United Nations conference in New York, stepping far beyond the ceremonial role that the Presidential role typically accords. He was loudly applauded for sycophantically telling King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who was behind the original initiative: “I wish that your voice will become the prevailing voice of the whole region, of all people.”

There are unconfirmed reports that the conference had to be temporarily suspended as Peres sought with difficulty to extract his proboscis from the rectum of the plenum.

A bipartisan group of senior foreign policy advisers have urged Obama to give the Arab plan top priority immediately after his election victory as the basis for an imposed solution on Israel. The advisers — enemies of Israel all — included Lee Hamilton, the former co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Democrat former national security adviser.

Brent Scowcroft, a Republican former national security adviser and Israel bashed, piled on as well, suggesting that an early start to the Palestinian peace process was “a way to psychologically change the mood of the region”.

According to a Washington source, Obama told West Bank constable Mahmoud Abbas: “The Israelis would be crazy not to accept this initiative. It would give them peace with the Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco.”

Dan Kurtzer, a former Ambassador to Israel, submitted a paper to Obama on the question before this month’s presidential elections arguing that trying to reach bilateral peace agreements between Israel and individual countries in the Middle East was a recipe for failure as the record of Bill Clinton and George W Bush showed. In contrast, the broader Arab plan “had a lot of appeal”. A leading Democratic expert on the Middle East said: “There’s not a lot of meat on the bones yet, but it offers recognition of Israel across the Arab world.”

Most US citizens believe America should stand behind Israel, a poll conducted by Public Opinion Strategies and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and commissioned by The Israel Project found this week.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas meets with US President-elect Barack Obama in Ramallah this July.
Photo: AP

Most people surveyed also said that the US should prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

The poll, which was published for the non-profit organization on Sunday, found that 66 percent of respondents thought that the US should support Israel, whilst only six percent said it should back the Palestinians. 72% of respondents said that despite US domestic problems, a nuclear Iran must be prevented.

According to Stanley Greenberg of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, the data showed that regardless of the Democratic-Republican divide, Americans “find Iran with nuclear weapons to be a grave threat to the (United States) and feel the need to work hard to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.”

The poll also showed that 56% backed US President-elect Barack Obama prioritizing the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, while only 19% of respondents said that “making peace between Israel and the Palestinians” should be one of Obama’s two top foreign policy priorities.

By Joel C. Rosenberg

(Jerusalem, Israel, November 17, 2008) — Israel is unlikely to launch massive airstrikes to neutralize Iran’s nuclear weapons program before the U.S. inauguration on January 20, 2009, barring dramatic new intelligence that points to an imminent Iranian attack.

That’s my sense of things here after spending nearly a week on the ground.

There is scant evidence of a nation preparing for imminent hostilities. The Israeli political system is engaged in gearing up for elections next February 10th. What’s more, senior Israeli officials are still urging the U.S. to take the lead on stopping Iran. “We must unite our forces, led by the international community, led by the United States of America,” said outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in an address to some 4,000 Jewish leaders from around the world. He called for bilateral and international sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran and told American Jewish leaders: “Each and every one of us needs to play a role - lobby your government, lead your organization or identify a project that can exert additional pressure on Iran….It must become more costly to Iran to pursue nuclear weapons than to give [them] up.”

Last Thursday, I had the honor of addressing the World Likud Congress (pro-Israel political activists from the U.S., Africa and Europe) here in the holy city. I was on a panel of Israeli and Iranian experts on the threat posed to the Jewish State by the Ayatollah Khamenei, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the current regime in Tehran. While I agreed with much that my fellow panelists said, I was struck by their lack of urgency for Israel to take action. One said that Israel shouldn’t strike unless its leaders can be absolutely certain that by doing so Iran will not be able to build the Bomb for at least another ten years. Another suggested Israel should not infuriate the incoming Obama administration by launching attacks on Iran without a clear green light from the new President.

I respectfully disagreed. First, let’s be clear: there is almost no scenario by which the Bush administration is going to launch attacks on Iran in the next sixty days or so and thus hand an on-going war to a new American President. Second, the Obama administration has made it crystal clear that it is not going to make neutralizing Iran’s nuclear threat via military means a priority, much less a top priority. Just the opposite: Obama intends to launch “unconditional” negotiations with Tehran. So waiting for the U.S. to “take the lead” is a non-starter at this point. Third, Israel faces an existential threat from Iranian nuclear weapons and it cannot afford to wait much longer. Once Iran has the Bomb, six million Jews here will be in supreme peril. There will never be a “perfect” time to strike Iran, and Israeli leaders will never be able to be certain ahead of time just how long their attacks will push Iran back from getting the Bomb. But is not buying five more years of security - if ten are not possible - still worth it? Fourth, Israel should never surrender its national security decision-making process to Washington. Did Jerusalem wait for the U.S. to act against the enemies of the Jewish people in 1967? Did Jerusalem wait for the U.S. to bomb Iraq’s nuclear facilities in 1981? Fifth, more than ever, Israel leaders like “the sons of Issachar” described in I Chronicles 12, “men who understood the times and knew what Israel should do.”

[UPDATE: President-elect Obama now says he supports the Saudi "peace" initiative. This would require Israel to go back to its 1967 border, re-divide Jerusalem, give up the strategically vital Golan Heights, and give away all of the Biblical lands of Judea and Samaria and the strategically vital Jordan Valley.]

As I’ve written previously, war with Iran will be horrific at many levels. I do not wish for it. Indeed, I am praying passionately for the peace of Jerusalem, as the Bible teaches me to do. But the notion of Iran’s genocidal, apocalyptic leaders getting weapons of mass destruction in their hands is completely unacceptable. I am, therefore, resigned to the possibility that there may now be no other option but for Israel to launch preemptive strikes, since it is increasingly clear Washington won’t.

As I have no influence on such decisions, I am focusing on helping Israelis prepare for the next war. For much of the past week I have been with my Joshua Fund team here in Israel, working with local Jewish and Christian leaders to stockpile emergency relief supplies. I have also had the privilege of preaching at two Israeli congregations to encourage local believers here to continue walking with the Lord, loving their neighbors, praying without ceasing, and girding themselves for the dark days that very well may lie ahead. More on that in my next dispatch.

[AP: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert speaks during the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities in Jerusalem, Sunday, Nov. 16, 2008. Olmert told the gathering that Iran is still trying to make nuclear weapons, and the world must make a concerted effort to stop the project.]