1. Palestine, Back to the Future... Again., ,
2. Muslim Brotherhood Claims Egypt's Presidency, FrontPage Magazine, Rick Moran
3. On Egypt's 'peace' and Palestinian 'demilitarization', Oxford University Press, Louis René Beres
4. Saudi Arabia plans to fund Syria rebel army, The Guardian, Martin Chulov, Ewen MacAskill,and John Densky
5. Target: Syrian WMD, The Washington Free Beacon, Bill Gertz
6. Canada-Israel 'solidarity' includes defence partnership , The Canadian Press,

There was a time when the lands now known as Israel, (including Judea and Samaria and Gaza), and most of Jordan were called “Palestine”.  In fact, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 declared

“His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.

There followed considerable cooperation between the Jews, represented by Chaim Weizmann and the Arabs living in Mesopotamia, now Iraq, and Jordan, represented by Emir Feisal.  As a result, the Feisal-Weizmann Agreement was signed in January 1919, in which it was agreed that the Jews would get the lands lying west of the Jordan River watershed to the Mediterranean and the Arabs would get the land east of it.

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Mohammed Morsi, chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, was declared the winner of the presidential run-off held last weekend in Egypt. Morsi defeated former Mubarak-era prime minister Ahmed Shafiq, garnering nearly 52% of the vote to Shafiq’s 48%. What does Morsi’s victory mean? And more importantly, what kind of relationship will the new president forge with Egypt’s ruling military council who just recently dissolved the legally elected parliament, eliminated the assembly set up to write the constitution, and issued a “constitutional decree” that emasculated the powers of the presidency?

There is no doubt that Morsi’s victory has profound implications for Egypt and for the region. The Muslim Brotherhood, despite Washington’s insistence that it has evolved into a moderate political party, has never wavered in its belief that Israel should be destroyed, and that sharia law be implemented throughout Egyptian society. The Obama administration chooses to ignore the Brotherhood’s radicalism and violent past, in order to stay engaged with the Arab world’s largest and most populous country.

But realpolitik has its limits. To believe that the Muslim Brotherhood has morphed into a moderate, responsible political party, you must deliberately ignore its actions and accept what it has said at face value....

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For millennia, states and empires have negotiated formal agreements to protect themselves. Usually known as treaties, these agreements are always in written form, and are always fashioned and evaluated according to pertinent international law. Problems arise, however, whenever particular signatories decide that continued compliance is no longer in their own “national  interest.” It follows that treaties can be useful when there exists an enduring mutuality of interest, but can become more or less useless whenever such mutuality is presumed to disappear.

For the moment, Israel’s 1979 Peace Treaty with Egypt still seemingly remains in place. It goes without saying, however, that any ongoing regime change in Cairo that would extend some governing authority to the Muslim Brotherhood, or to its proxies, could result in a prompt Egyptian abrogation. Although any such willful termination of treaty obligations by the Egyptian side would almost certainly be in violation of The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, there is little that Israel or the “international community” would be able to do about it.

For Israel, this should ring warning bells on the closely related issues of Palestinian statehood. Back in June 2009, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu officially agreed to the creation of a Palestinian state.  But, with an apparent nod to prudent diplomacy, he conditioned this acceptance upon Palestinian “demilitarization.” More precisely, said the Prime Minister: “In any peace agreement, the territory under Palestinian control must be disarmed, with solid security guarantees for Israel.”

This agreement seemingly represented a “smart” concession, but only if there can ever be any reasonable expectations of Palestinian compliance. In fact, such expectations are thoroughly implausible. This is the case not only because treaties and treaty-like agreements can easily be broken, but because, in this particular case, any post-independent Palestinian insistence upon militarization would likely be entirely lawful....

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Saudi officials are preparing to pay the salaries of the Free Syria Army as a means of encouraging mass defections from the military and increasing pressure on the Assad regime, the Guardian has learned.

The move, which has been discussed between Riyadh and senior officials in the US and Arab world, is believed to be gaining momentum as a recent flush of weapons sent to rebel forces by Saudi Arabia and Qatar starts to make an impact on battlefields in Syria.

Officials in the Saudi capital embraced the idea when it was put to them by Arab officials in May, according to sources in three Arab states, around the same time that weapons started to flow across the southern Turkish border into the hands of Free Syria Army leaders.

Turkey has also allowed the establishment of a command centre in Istanbul which is co-ordinating supply lines in consultation with FSA leaders inside Syria. The centre is believed to be staffed by up to 22 people, most of them Syrian nationals....

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U.S. intelligence agencies are closely watching Israel’s military for signs it will conduct strikes on Syria’s stockpiles of chemical weapons, amid concerns the deadly nerve agents could fall under the control of Hezbollah or al Qaeda terrorists, U.S. officials said.

Syria’s arsenal remains vulnerable as the result of the internal conflict currently underway in Syria between government forces and opposition rebels, one official said.

“Everyone suspects Syria maintains an active chemical weapons program; and it would be dangerous not to plan accordingly,” the official said.

As for concerns the weapons will be captured or transferred, the official said: “Most countries that have CW stocks view it as a strategic, not tactical, tool—and strategic tools are usually pretty well protected and aren’t given away lightly.”

However, other U.S. officials said special operations forces are prepared to take action inside Syria in the event the regime falls and the country spirals further into chaos. The teams would seek to secure or destroy stockpiles of chemical arms to keep them from being taken over by terrorists. Hezbollah has been very active in Syria, and there are reports that al Qaeda terrorists have moved into Syria during the current crisis....

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Israel has received private assurances Canada stands ready to help defend the Jewish state, but just how far the Harper government intends to take that commitment remains unclear.

Newly released documents say Defence Minister Peter MacKay told Israel’s top military commander, Maj.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, during a 2011 visit to the Middle East, that “a threat to Israel is a threat to Canada.”

The statement came a year after cabinet colleague Peter Kent was upbraided as junior foreign affairs minister for telling a Toronto-based publication that “an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada.”

The declaration, appearing in an internal summary of MacKay’s trip to Israel, could have important implications given the increasing military co-operation between the two countries....

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