Today’s Important Highlights from Israel. Syria, IDF, Iran and the Israeli elections.
- Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad has instructed his commanders to attack Israel and American targets if he is assassinated, according to rumors published in state-linked Iranian press outlets that place Assad at meetings with top commanders. Other reports, this time published in Saudi media, place Assad and his family on an offshore Russian warship in the Mediterranean, with Assad having lost “confidence” in his personal security detail. Misinformation from both sides regarding the location and security of strongmen is a hallmark of late fighting in civil wars such as the one which has gripped Syria for almost two years, claiming more than 60,000 lives. Speculation that the Assad regime is in terminal decline has prompted an increase in the tempo of analysis regarding the potential for a hard-line Islamist takeover of Syria.
- IDF officials uncovered an attack tunnel on Monday that opened into Israeli territory near the Israeli community Kibbutz Nir Oz. A similar tunnel was used in the 2006 attack in which Palestinians killed two Israeli soldiers and kidnapped a third Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. Another attack through a tunnel could be expected to severely undermine regional stability, especially if the attack included mass casualties and kidnappings, which the discovered tunnel seems to have been built to enable. The discovery comes as the rival Palestinian factions in control of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Hamas and Fatah respectively, are seeking reconciliation under Egyptian auspices. It promises to call into question the intentions of the Hamas negotiators, who would be expected to accept previous Palestinian agreements with Israel in the context of a unity government.
- Washington should enhance “constraints on supply of goods Iran needs for its nuclear and missile programs,” the American non-partisan Project on U.S. Middle East Nonproliferation Strategy said in a new report on the Iranian nuclear program. The group emphasizes that Iran’s atomic program violates international law along multiple dimensions, including putting Tehran in violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions. It comes amid suggestions that talks between P5+1 and Tehran may resume by late January. Some analysts expect that Iran will seek an immediate reduction in sanctions as part of an opening negotiation gambit. U.S. officials, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, have instead insisted that Iran should conduct meaningful negotiations before the West will make concessions.
- With a week left before Israelis vote in the country’s January 22 election, converging polls indicate that the race remains as it has since the election was declared months ago: a center-right bloc anchored by the Likud-Beiteinu slate wielding about a dozen more seats than a fragmented center-left bloc. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud-Beiteinu slate is still expected to win up to twice as many seats as the second-placed party, the center-left Labor. This week’s polls give Likud 33-35 seats and Labor on 16-17 in the 120-seat Knesset. Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party, which has been taking votes from the right of the Likud-Beiteinu slate, is expected to perform no better than third place. No poll this week has given the party more than 15 seats.
