“Because of the Iran threat and possibility of US abandoning the Saudis, the Saudis may decide that they need a strategic alliance with Israel sooner rather than later.”
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman attends a graduation ceremony for the 95th batch of cadets from the King Faisal Air Academy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia December 23, 2018.
(photo credit: BANDAR ALGALOUD/COURTESY OF SAUDI ROYAL COURT/HANDOUT VIA REUTERS)
An Iranian-backed war against Israel involving Hezbollah in Lebanon on one end, and a Saudi peace deal on the other, could be in the air, according to author Joel Rosenberg, who has spoken with leaders in the region.
“I write about worst case scenarios,” said Joel Rosenberg.
The author of political thrillers has also become a witness to history in the region in recent years, meeting monarchs and political leaders as the Abraham Accords took shape. As such his political thrillers, the fourth of which has just been released, can be a window into what might happen in the region, gleaned from real life scenarios.
“One of themes of my novels is this: To misunderstand the nature and threat of evil is to risk being blindsided by it. I’m not trying to predict a Third Lebanon War is going to happen, much less in 2021. I don’t want it to happen at all.
“But a novel can act like a war game, it can take people into threats and dangers that they may not be thinking about and help them imagine what could happen if American leaders are blindsided by threats they don’t see coming,” he says.
The last time I saw Rosenberg was in Dubai during the brief window when thousands were traveling daily from Tel Aviv to Dubai.
In December he met the UAE’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs for an interview he published at All Israel News. In the past he has met the King of Jordan and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.
The Israeli military is currently updating plans for a prospective military strike on Iranian nuclear sites and may act without U.S. support, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz says.
Speaking to Fox News last week, Gantz said the Israeli Defense Force has identified targets inside Iran that could allegedly be used to develop nuclear weapons.
“If the world stops them before, it’s very much good. But if not, we must stand independently and we must defend ourselves by ourselves,” Gantz said in the interview, showing an apparently classified target map that revealed Hezbollah missiles and civilian infrastructure along the Lebanon-Hezbollah border.
“This is a target map. Each one of them has been checked legally, operationally, intelligence-wise, and we are ready to fight,” Gantz said.
While President Joe Biden has suggested that he would lift sanctions on Iran and return to the 2015 nuclear accord, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), that could place him at odds with Israeli leadership, Gantz said in the interview.
“The American policy should be American policy, and Israeli policy should stay Israeli policy,” Gantz said.
Israeli Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi previously said that since the beginning of 2020, Israel has struck about 500 Iranian-connected sites inside Syria; Biden in late February authorized an airstrike in Syria.
The Israeli military displays hundreds of tons of arms seized at dawn on a ship bound for Syria and the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, around 100 nautical miles from the Israeli coast, at the port of Ashdod, Israel, on Nov. 4, 2009. (Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)
Separately, last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that Israel will work independently, echoing Gantz’s remarks, to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
“I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, and so far, we’ve been successful,” Netanyahu said.
Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami on March 7 responded to Gantz’s and Netanyahu’s comments, asserting that Tehran would destroy the Israeli cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa.
“Sometimes, the Zionist regime [Israel] out of desperation makes big claims against the Islamic Republic of Iran to allegedly threaten it while this regime knows and if it doesn’t know, it must know that if it does a damn thing, we will raze Tel Aviv and Haifa to the ground,” Hatami proclaimed, according to the Tehran Times.
“Iran has all the dimensions of power to maintain the stability of the country, and one of the salient features of the soft power of the Islamic Republic, which has various components, is the axis of resistance,” he said.
Netanyahu spoke with Vice President Kamala Harris on March 4. According to a readout from Harris’s office, the two officials agreed to continue cooperating on the Iran nuclear program “and the regime’s dangerous regional behavior.”
Report: Iran behind explosion near Israeli embassy in New Delhi
Ynet|
Published: 03.08.21 , 08:53
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Al-Quds Force is allegedly responsible for the explosion outside of the Israeli embassy in New Delhi in late January, according to an investigation by India’s counterterrorism agencies.
The investigation revealed that the attack was carried out by a local Shi’ite unit, The Hindustan Times reported.
