ISRAEL - IRAN - SYRIA - HAMAS - HEZBOLLAH - WWWIII?

What do you think?
Some commentators have said WWWIII is underway. Do you agree?

Who struck the first blow?

Is there a coalition among adversaries of Israel? Will Israel survive this one? Will we?

Israel is prepared to express sorrow for the plight of Palestinians who became refugees when the country was created, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Monday.

"We will participate in expressing sorrow for what happened to them," Olmert told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, adding, "but also for what happened to us, the suffering of hundreds of thousands of Jews who were driven out of Arab countries."

Israel expressed outrage on Sunday after a mob of Jewish settlers rampaged through a Palestinian village in the West Bank to avenge the stabbing of a nine-year-old boy in a nearby settlement.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert condemned Saturday's settler attack on the village, during which four Palestinians were shot and wounded, and vowed to halt settler "pogroms" in the occupied territory.

"This phenomenon of taking the law into their own hands and of brutal and violent attacks is intolerable and will receive the strictest and most severe treatment," Olmert told reporters ahead of a weekly cabinet meeting.

"There will be no pogroms against non-Jewish residents in the state of Israel," he added.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's hopes of succeeding the scandal-hit Ehud Olmert as prime minister got a boost from an opinion poll on Monday, two days before she faces rivals in a party leadership vote.

The survey of members who can vote in Wednesday's party primary showed 47 percent backed Livni's bid to become Israel's first woman leader since Golda Meir in the 1970s, compared to 28 percent for Iranian-born deputy premier Shaul Mofaz. Candidates must score above 40 percent to avoid a run-off ballot next week.

The poll by the Dialogue agency for Channel 10 television and Haaretz newspaper gave the two other contenders seeking to lead the centrist Kadima party six percent each. Analysts are wary of such polls, however, especially on a primary in which just 74,000 activists are entitled to vote at party-run venues.

Syria said that a fifth round of indirect peace talks with Israel scheduled for Thursday had been postponed at the request of the Jewish state.

"The Israeli side asked for it to be postponed," Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem told reporters in Damascus on Wednesday.

"When Israel is ready to resume the talks, we will be ready as well," said Moualem, who was speaking after a meeting with his Spanish counterpart.

So polling stations should been closed since 7 minutes by now ...

Last update - 23:44 17/09/2008
Kadima primary: Key facts about Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni
By Reuters

Exit polls by all three major Israeli TV stations showed Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni as the winner of the ruling Kadima party's primary Wednesday, making her the successor of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as party leader and likely the next premier. Here are some key facts about her:

Livni was born in Tel Aviv on July 8, 1958, and is a leading member of the Kadima party. She is the country's second woman foreign minister - the first was Golda Meir, who later served as prime minister from 1969 to 1974.

Livni, 50, has already launched a campaign to replace Olmert. She called in vain in 2007 for Olmert to step down following the release of the Winograd Report, which sharply criticized his handling of the 2006 Second Lebanon War.

Elected to the Knesset as a member of the right-wing Likud party in 1999, she was one of Kadima's founding members alongside then prime minister Ariel Sharon. He left Likud in 2005 and formed Kadima with some rebels from Labor as he pushed through a plan to pull troops and settlers from Gaza.

A former operative with the Mossad, Livni had a career as a commercial lawyer before serving as justice minister under Sharon. Her husband, with whom she has two adult sons, is a prominent Tel Aviv entrepreneur.

Livni comes from a well-known ultranationalist family but has endorsed withdrawal from some occupied lands as a pragmatic way to preserve Israel's Jewish majority - if not to achieve a peace agreement.

At times outspoken, she once called Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas "irrelevant." Since the launch of the Annapolis peace process in November last year, Livni has been Israel's chief negotiator with the Palestinians.

Violent incidents across Lebanon in recent days have raised fears of a return to sectarian violence that left at least 65 people dead in May, correspondents say.

I have been interested in commentary that her new position will make peace talks more difficult?

Is Assad truly a moderating force in the Middle East today, a man transformed from agitator to peacemaker -- like Saul who, according to the Holy Scriptures, transformed himself into Paul as he traveled to Damascus in Biblical days? Can Assad, with his track record as an authoritarian leader, use his foreign policy successes to turn his country into a Middle Eastern model of democracy? Or is he still a dangerous adversary who is merely maneuvering?

September 26, 2008
Radical Settlers Take on Israel
By ISABEL KERSHNER

YITZHAR, West Bank " A pipe bomb that exploded late on Wednesday night outside the Jerusalem home of Zeev Sternhell, a Hebrew University professor, left him lightly wounded and created only a minor stir in a nation that routinely experiences violence on a much larger scale.

But Mr. Sternhell was noted for his impassioned critiques of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, once suggesting that Palestinians “would be wise to concentrate their struggle against the settlements.” And the authorities found fliers near his home offering nearly $300,000 to anyone who kills a member of Peace Now, a left-wing Israeli advocacy group, leading them to suspect that militant Israeli settlers or their supporters were behind the attack.

If so, the bombing may be the latest sign that elements of Israel’s settler movement are resorting to extremist tactics to protect their homes in the occupied West Bank against not only Palestinians, but also Jews who some settlers argue are betraying them. Radical settlers say they are determined to show that their settlements and outposts cannot be dismantled, either by law or by force.

There have been bouts of settler violence for years, notably during the transfer of Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005. Now, though, the militants seem to have spawned a broader, more defined strategy of resistance designed to intimidate the state.

This aggressive doctrine, according to Akiva HaCohen, 24, who is considered to be one of its architects, calls on settlers and their supporters to respond “whenever, wherever and however” they wish to any attempt by the Israeli Army or the police to lay a finger on property in illegally built outposts scheduled by the government for removal. In settler circles the policy is called “price tag” or “mutual concern.”

Besides exacting a price for army and police actions, the policy also encourages settlers to avenge Palestinian acts of violence by taking the law into their own hands " an approach that has the potential to set the tinderbox of the West Bank ablaze.

Hard-core right-wing settlers have responded to limited army operations in recent weeks by blocking roads, rioting spontaneously, throwing stones at Palestinian vehicles and burning Palestinian orchards and fields all over the West Bank, a territory that Israel has occupied since 1967. They have also vandalized Israeli Army positions, equipment and cars.