Middle East Inside Line: Chavez Attack on Israel, Gaza Low-Intensity Conflict

Chavez's Diplomatic Dive Bombing of Israel: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez targeted Israel and the U.S. during his visit to Syria. After a one-hour meeting with Syrian President Bashir al-Assad, Chavez blamed Israel for "dividing the Middle East" as "a country that annihilates people and is hostile to peace":

The entire world knows it. Why was the state of Israel created? ... To divide. To impede the unity of the Arab world. To assure the presence of the North American empire in all these lands.

I believe [this] is a fateful battle. It's either now or never in order to liberate the world from imperialism and change the world from a unipolar into a multi-polar world.

Likud Splitting over Settlements Issue? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is feeling pressure from his Likud Party members in the wake of headlines that he already accepted a temporary freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank. More than half of the party leadership has accepted an invitation to speak at a hawkish rally in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. Vice Premier Silvan Shalom, Ministers Gilad Erdan, Moshe Kahlon, Yuli Edelstein and Michael Eitan, and Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin have accepted, while Vice Premier Moshe Ya'alon has not decided whether to attend.

Shalom has asserted:

A clear, wide majority in the Likud would not give a hand to any step that would strangle the settlements, which is one of the party's banners... We need to take steps to advance the diplomatic process, but with conditions, and one of them must be not freezing the settlements that we built. The Palestinians cannot ask us to make unilateral, irreversible, far-reaching concessions that impact the permanent [borders] just for agreeing to meet with us.

Shalom added that US President Barack Obama's diplomatic process would "blow up in our face and lead to a dead end."

Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar supported Netanyahu on Thursday:

In today's complex situation, our prime minister whom we chose, Binyamin Netanyahu, must maintain all our national interests - the settlements that are the apple of our eye, Jerusalem, and also our relations with the United States and avoiding international isolation, because we will not be able to do the things that are close to our hearts if we are isolated.

Israel-Gaza Low-Intensity Conflict: Seven mortar shells were fired from Gaza into Israel, all hitting open areas without casualties or damage. On Thursday night, Israeli jets bombed a tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip.

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