The cruel farce known as the peace process took another downturn this week as Fatah and Hamas signed a unity agreement in Doha, Qatar.

It’s not the first such agreement they’ve signed, and none of the previous instances was a smashing success. Most notably, the two sides’ Mecca Agreement of February 2007 collapsed four months later in Hamas’s bloody ouster of Fatah from Gaza; and the agreement reached in Cairo last May never got off the ground.

This time, though, there may be a crucial difference. It has to do with the mounting momentum of what’s called the Arab Spring.

Hamas was long the Sunni odd-man-out in Iran’s Shiite-dominated alliance. This year, though, top Hamas officials have had to leave Syria for refusing to support Bashar Assad’s brutality against the largely-Sunni populace. Meanwhile Hamas’s star has been rising again in the Sunni world—as evidenced by Gazan Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s recent well-received tour of Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, and Bahrain.

Israeli analyst Jonathan D. Halevi suggests Hamas is “trying to implement the strategy of the Arab Spring in the Palestinian arena.” On the background of the Islamist ascendancy in the region, Hamas sees its position among the Palestinians as strong and believes it will easily defeat Fatah in the elections envisaged by the Doha agreement.

If so, what’s in it for Fatah? In Halevi’s view, its leaders have the same perception as Hamas and believe their brand of relatively secular nationalism is on the downswing in the West Bank and Gaza as in most of the Sunni Arab world. Hence, in signing the Doha agreement, “the Fatah leaders prefer swimming with the current”—trying to hitch themselves to Hamas instead of fighting it—“to sinking beneath it.”

The terms of the agreement seem to bear out that analysis. A new unity government of technocrats is supposed to be set up, with Abbas as prime minister—but only for an interim stage. This government’s main task would be preparing for presidential and parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza. Since Abbas is currently president, his own rule would be on the line.

Most significantly, the Doha agreement says the sides are supposed to discuss incorporating Hamas into the PLO—the larger organization that encompasses Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. That, in other words, would mean the end of the Fatah-Hamas bifurcation that has enabled the purported “process,” with the U.S., Europe, the Israeli left and, more recently, the Netanyahu government, upholding the idea that Fatah represents a moderate wing that can be dealt with.

Last week Palestinian Media Watch revealed that the Mufti Muhammad Hussein, top cleric of the Palestinian Authority, had approvingly quoted a hadith calling for the genocide of Jews. Hussein, who was appointed to his post by PA president Mahmoud Abbas, did so at a ceremony marking the 47^th anniversary of the Fatah movement. The moderator at the ceremony chimed in that “Our war with the descendants of the apes and pigs [i.e., Jews] is a war of religion and faith.” As for Mufti Hussein, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu ordered Israel’s attorney-general to investigate him for incitement.

Palestinian Media Watch now reports that the mufti’s words have drawn international condemnation. This, actually, doesn’t amount to much—far less than, for instance, the typical round of condemnations when Israel announces plans to build homes in parts of Jerusalem that the enlightened world thinks should be Judenrein.

Alistair Burt, the UK minister for the Middle East, said: “I condemn the inflammatory words used by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and others…. To refer to the Jewish people in such a way and to talk of killing Jews is anti-semitism, pure and simple.” More surprisingly—seemingly—Palestinian Media Watch also offers a quote from Americans for Peace Now. This organization, founded in 1981 to drum up support for its Israeli parent-organization, Peace Now, states that it

strongly condemns the belligerent anti-Jewish comments made by the Palestinian Authority’s Mufti of Jerusalem at a public event in the West Bank earlier this month…. “We are appalled by these comments, coming from the most senior Muslim cleric on the Palestinian Authority’s payroll,” said Debra DeLee, APN’s President and CEO. DeLee added, “What we find particularly disturbing is that these vile comments were broadcast on the Palestinian Authority’s official television channel, amplifying their inciting [e]ffect.”

I was surprised by those seemingly unequivocal words, and checked the original statement on APN’s website.

Indeed, the context reveals that they weren’t unequivocal at all. Immediately after her above-quoted words, DeLee said further:

People in positions of religious authority, on all sides, bear a heavy responsibility of avoiding incendiary rhetoric. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a dispute between two national movements with conflicting claims to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Clerics on both sides must prevent this conflict from being perceived as a religious conflict and from becoming one.

DeLee, then, quickly turned her censure of the mufti’s words into an admonition to “both sides.” The problem is that, presumably, neither she nor the organization she represents could be so ignorant as not to realize that this is disingenuous.

Incendiary statements about Palestinians by Israeli rabbis are rare, confined to a fringe, and heavily denounced by the mainstream—if not leading to arrest, as in a case last year involving a rabbi who wrote a preface to an obscure book arguing that non-Jews could be killed in certain situations in wartime. Mufti Muhammad Hussein is, as mentioned, the governmentally appointed religious leader of the Palestinian Authority, and made his statement on official PA TV. Still more significant is that his words were hardly a fringe phenomenon but, instead, a standard and typical part of the PA’s comprehensive campaign, through media, mosques, and schools, of anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic incitement.

Are Israel and the U.S. fighting again? The news from the last several days gives that general impression. Is the cancellation of a major joint U.S.-Israeli military drill part of the frictions? Media reports are open to interpretation.

Last Wednesday Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, director of uranium enrichment at the Natanz facility, was assassinated in Tehran. Iran quickly blamed Israel and the U.S.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, however, hastened to “categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland added that the “United States strongly condemns this act of violence and categorically denies any involvement in the killing.” Clinton, for her part, also said the U.S. was seeking an understanding with Iran on stopping its uranium enrichment.

For Israel it was a disconcerting message. If getting rid of someone helping a fanatic regime obtain weapons capable of annihilating millions of people is a “violent act” to be condemned, is the Obama administration really serious about the threat? Or still dreaming of dialogue and “understanding” with that regime?

It is, indeed, particularly late in the game to talk of “understanding.” A day or two before Roshan’s killing, it was widely reported that Iran had “graduated” from aboveground uranium enrichment at Natanz to deep-underground enrichment at its Fordo facility, which would be much harder to attack from the air. Iran is doing so in the face of all sanctions and habitual U.S. threats that “all options are on the table.”

On Thursday, the day after Roshan was dispatched, President Barack Obama called Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Although not much has been disclosed about their chat, one can assume Obama wasn’t calling to say “I’m glad we see eye to eye on so many things—and, nice work in the security realm.”

On Sunday Israeli deputy prime minister Moshe Yaalon complained publicly about U.S. policy. He compared it to Britain and France, who “are taking a very firm stand [on Iran] and understand sanctions must be imposed immediately”—whereas

In the United States, the Senate passed a resolution, by a majority of 100-to-one, to impose…sanctions, and in the U.S. administration there is hesitation for fear of oil prices rising this year, out of election-year considerations. In that regard, this is certainly a disappointment, for now.

Not many hours after that, it was reported that the U.S.-Israeli military drill—which was to be the largest joint exercise ever between the two countries—had been postponed at least to sometime later this year. Originally planned for April, “Austere Challenge 12” was aimed at improving antimissile defense systems, as well as cooperation between U.S. and Israeli forces.

Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, reports that Hanan Ashrawi, Palestinian legislator and member of the PLO’s Executive Committee, has told Tony Blair, former British prime minister and currently representative of the Middle East Quartet, that unless Israel stops its objectionable behavior the Palestinians won’t return to negotiations.

She was referring to two meetings that were held in Amman this month between an Israeli and a Palestinian negotiator. All accounts agree that the talks were held to appease Quartet pressure and haven’t yielded anything. Whereas Israel expresses an ongoing willingness to keep trying, PA president Mahmoud Abbas has said that if Israel does not submit to Palestinian preconditions by January 26 “all options will be open”—by which he means finalizing a deal with Hamas and Islamic Jihad leading to “popular resistance.”

What Israel has to do, Ashrawi told Blair, is stop settlement activity and precommit to the 1967 borders. She complained: “With its stepped-up illegal settlement campaign and continued efforts to create facts on the ground, Israel is undermining any and all efforts to stimulate peace.”

One notable thing here is the demand that, to enable negotiations at all, one side cede the whole store to the other. What is supposed to be in dispute, what is supposed to be the subject of negotiations, is land Israel conquered in the Six Day War of 1967. If Israel is required to agree beforehand that it is illegal to build a single Jewish home anywhere in this land, and that it does not have valid claim to an inch of it, it is not clear what is the point of negotiations or what they are supposed to be about.

And another notable thing is that the Palestinian preconditions imply a curious new international norm: that when one side is attacked, it has to hand back to the attacker(s) everything that party(ies) may have lost, so that the attacker suffers no penalty whatsoever for having carried out aggression in the first place.

On the morning of June 5, 1967, as the Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian, and Iraqi armies closed in, Israel launched a preemptive strike that saved it from obliteration. In the preceding weeks—among other such statements—Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had said, “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel”; Syrian defense minister (later prime minister) Hafez Assad had said, “I, as a military man, believe that the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation”; Iraqi president Abdur Rahman Aref had said, “The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948. Our goal is clear—to wipe Israel off the map.”

By June 10, 1967, the Six Day War was over and Israel had conquered the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and Gaza and the Sinai from Egypt. According to both simple moral logic and international precedent, Israel was under no obligation to return any of the land that was supposed to serve as a springboard for a final, annihilatory attack. For instance, Germany, as a consequence of its aggression in World War II, permanently lost land to Poland and Russia.

The new star of Middle Eastern diplomacy is Gaza-based Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh. Most recently visiting Tunisia, he’s also been in Egypt, Sudan, and Turkey, and the itinerary will also include Qatar and Bahrain.

It’s Haniyeh’s first tour of the region since Hamas seized all power in Gaza in 2007. The timing is no coincidence. As Haniyeh himself told a rally in Tunis on Sunday:

Israel no longer has allies in Egypt and in Tunisia, we are saying to the Zionist enemies that times have changed and that the time of the Arab Spring, the time of the revolution, of dignity and of pride has arrived.

A crowd of 5000 men, women, and children in a stadium (another report puts the number much higher), waving PLO, Tunisian, and Hamas flags, responded with chants of “Death to Israel,” “The Tunisian revolution supports Palestine,” and “The army of Muhammad is back.” AP also reports that “At one entrance, people walked over a piece of cloth sporting the Star of David….”

The rally—presumably including the piece of cloth—was organized by Haniyeh’s hosts, the recently elected, ruling Ennahda Party. Ritually called “moderate Islamist” in Western media, its longtime leader Rachid Ghannouchi said in 1994: “We must wage unceasing war against the Americans until they leave the land of Islam, or we will burn and destroy all their interests across the entire Islamic world.”

Haniyeh, for his part, also expounded on the “new Middle East” in an interview to The Independent:

The Palestinian cause is winning. With the Muslim Brotherhood part of the government [in Egypt], they [the Egyptians] will not besiege Gaza. They will not arrest Palestinians. They will not give cover to Israel to launch a war….

Israel is disturbed by this. It knows the strategic environment is changing…. The Palestinians are winning more than anybody else due to what’s happening in the Arab countries. That will come out clearly in the future.

Undeniably, one has to give the Hamas chief some points for his analysis. At the time the “Arab Spring” broke out a year ago, Israeli warnings were at best ignored if not derided. Now, with Islamists prevailing in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, probably Libya, and possibly Syria, it makes perfect sense for a group like Hamas to feel a tailwind and a surge of confidence.

Hamas’s visions, however, go beyond stepped-up warfare against Israel with possible Egyptian and other Islamist support. The group, as revealed in a major new report by Jonathan D. Halevi, also has political ambitions of gaining Western recognition. Given ongoing Western and, particularly, Obama administration friendliness toward the Islamists, it may not be an unreasonable goal.

As Halevi notes: “For Hamas, the central lesson from the Arab Spring is the U.S. administration’s and the European Union’s abandonment of the pro-Western regimes and their readiness, even haste, to support the popular revolutions and recognize the Muslim Brotherhood as a legitimate political actor.” Encouraged, Hamas has been in intensive negotiations with the West Bank Palestinian leadership—now at an advanced stage—on joining the PLO. If that goes according to plan, Hamas believes it “will be internationally recognized and replace Fatah in representing the Palestinian people….”

For now, the U.S. and the EU define Hamas as a terrorist organization and officially shun it. But as I noted already close to three years ago, that has not stopped a bevy of notable Westerners—Tony Blair, Javier Solana, Jimmy Carter, George Soros, James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Brent Scowcroft, are some—from portraying the movement as essential to peace. (Examples: Blair—“I do think it is important that we find a way of bringing Hamas into [the peace] process”; Carter—“…there’s no way to have peace in the Middle East without Hamas being involved”; Baker—“You have to get Hamas involved, because you cannot negotiate peace with only half the Palestinian polity.”)

Back in the real world, you can see Haniyeh here at Hamas’s twenty-fourth anniversary rally in Gaza on December 14, bellowing to a throng of 350,000 intermittently chanting onlookers that

the armed resistance and the armed struggle are the path and the strategic choice for liberating the Palestinian land, from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river, and for the expulsion of the invaders and usurpers [Israel] from the blessed land of Palestine…. Palestinian reconciliation…cannot come at the expense of [our] principles…. These principles are absolute and cannot be disputed.…We won’t relinquish one inch of the land of Palestine. The involvement of Hamas at any stage with the interim objective of liberation of [only] Gaza, the West Bank, or Jerusalem, does not replace its strategic view concerning Palestine and the land of Palestine.

Israel, then, has to gear up not only for the growing military threat of Hamas’s Gaza enclave but for a possible political-diplomatic offensive as well. The facts about Hamas are available and clear-cut. But they have to be hammered home hard when the will to delusion runs so deep.

This week an Israeli and a Palestinian negotiator, along with envoys of the Middle East Quartet, met in Amman. Don’t get your hopes up. It was the merest gesture to deflect diplomatic pressure, and what is actually brewing in the Palestinian arena has nothing to do with peace.

Fatah official Mahmoud al-Aloul said as much the day after the meeting—in a speech he gave on behalf of Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. Al-Aloul proclaimed: “The Palestinian leadership has spared no effort to seek peace and has complied with all [peace] initiatives. But all our efforts have been in vain…. The Israelis are not prepared for any solutions.”

And added: “We can’t restrain ourselves any longer in the face of settlement construction. The popular resistance will erupt in the next phase.”

It wasn’t just rhetoric. Al-Aloul’s threat jibes with recent reports by DEBKAfile and Khaled Abu Toameh. The picture these reports give has also been confirmed to me by a highly reliable source.

The picture is this: the “Arab Spring” sweeping the region has not left the Palestinian arena unaffected. Abbas thinks it will sweep him away, too, unless he joins forces with the Palestinian Islamist factions—principally Hamas but also Islamic Jihad. He aims to do that by, for the first time in history, incorporating at least Hamas in his relatively secular PLO. That way when the “Arab Spring” comes to the West Bank, Abbas hopes it will be directed against Israel instead of what’s left of his weakening rule.

To these ends Abbas already signed a reconciliation pact with Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in Cairo on December 24. That will help him, in DEBKA’s telling, “orchestrat[e] an Arab Spring-style uprising on the West Bank….” DEBKA predicts, though, that Abbas’s Palestinian Authority “will soon lose control as Hamas and [Islamic Jihad] ride into the enclave’s towns and villages. Any demonstrations will soon get out of hand and descend into violent turmoil.”

Abu Toameh concurs if in slightly less dramatic terms, writing that “in 2012, if [Hamas’s] agreement with Abbas is implemented, [it] will take control over the PLO.” He adds:

Hamas is joining the PLO not because it has changed, but out of a desire to make the Fatah-dominated organization stick to its true mission: the liberation of Palestine from Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—in other words, all the land that is currently Israel—and to achieve the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees to their original villages and homes inside Israel.

Once Hamas takes control over the PLO, it will seek to cancel all agreements and understandings reached between the organization and Israel, above all the 1993 Oslo Accords. Hamas also wants the PLO to withdraw its recognition of Israel.

It turns out that major Libyan rebel commander Mahdi al-Harati was one of the jihadists on the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish ship that tried to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza in May 2010. As John Rosenthal notes, “after the seizure of Tripoli, al-Harati was named second-in-command to Abdul-Hakim Belhadj, the head of the newly formed Tripoli Military Council.” Belhadj also has an interesting pedigree, having been in phone contact with the leader of the 2004 Madrid train bombings just weeks before they were perpetrated.

Al-Harati, for his part, told the Spanish daily ABC in December that “I was wounded on the Mavi Marmara and spent nine days in an Israeli prison.” ABC reporter Daniel Iriarte had come upon al-Harati and two more of Belhadj’s men in Syria; they candidly told him they were there to help their “Syrian revolutionary brothers.” That should raise alarms as to just what sort of elements might be replacing Bashar Assad—who, like Gaddafi before him, is a brutal thug but not necessarily the worst the region has to offer.

That al-Harati’s résumé includes the Mavi Marmara is, however, rich in irony from an Israeli standpoint. The nine Turkish club- and knife-wielding lynch-mob members who were killed on the ship became, as I noted back then, the most internationally regretted jihadists of all time. This despite the fact that anyone with access to YouTube could see that the mob had savagely assaulted the Israeli naval commandos who boarded the ship bearing paintball guns.

“Man spits at eight-year-old girl.” Add “in Israel” to that and you have another international media circus.

No doubt, the phenomenon—ultra-Orthodox Jewish men harassing girls on their way to school for supposedly “immodest” dress—is appalling enough. And well over 99 percent of Israelis realize it. Even a typical AP report noted that

The televised images of Naama sobbing as she walked to school shocked many Israelis, elicited statements of outrage from the country’s leadership, sparked a Facebook page with nearly 10,000 followers dedicated to “protecting little Naama” and a demonstration was held Tuesday evening in her honor.

The article also says, though, that the “8-year-old schoolgirl…found herself on the front line of Israel’s latest religious war”—without suggesting what that latter phrase might mean. For the record, Israel’s wars with its neighbors are driven in large part by Islamic religious tenets on the neighbors’ part, and, on Israel’s part, by a will to physical survival. If you doubt it, check some of the statements about Israel by Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or this latest report about a Palestinian Authority youth magazine that first glorified Hitler and now offers maps in which Israel is already obliterated.

This week Israel was alerted to a danger—an internal one—and is already solidifying spontaneously and passionately against it. It is not a danger on the order of some of the external ones. But it is real. True, the ultra-Orthodox community is diverse, and those harassing girls in the town of Beit Shemesh are members of a tiny, deranged sect.

But there are more widespread problems. It is not acceptable that anyone anytime be pressured to sit at the back of a bus—and such incidents are on the upswing, or at least they were until this week. While small but increasing numbers of ultra-Orthodox men are enlisting in the army and joining the workforce, other parts of this population are growing more radical. Given the high ultra-Orthodox birthrate, Israelis rightly fear their towns someday becoming battlegrounds like Beit Shemesh.

As noted, the anti-extremism demonstration in Beit Shemesh was held Tuesday evening. On Wednesday Doron Matalon, a female soldier, boarded a bus in Jerusalem used mostly by ultra-Orthodox. An ultra-Orthodox man, Shlomo Fuchs, told her to sit in the back. She refused; he started cursing her. Matalon stood her ground and asked two ticket inspectors to call the police. They stopped the bus, prevented Fuchs from getting off, and called the police who arrived within minutes and arrested him. He now faces felony charges of sexual harassment.

Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon, a deep thinker and close colleague of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, claimed to a Jerusalem audience this week that Israel has talked some sense to President Barack Obama about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“We convinced the American administration,” Yaalon said, “that there is no way to solve the conflict in one or two years…. The US is trying to manage the conflict now, rather than solve it.”

Reporter Gil Hoffman notes that “there has been no public indication that the Americans have given up their hope of solving the conflict, and the US helped draft the Quartet position that aims to solve the conflict by the end of 2012.”

And just a few weeks ago Defense Secretary Leon Panetta sounded as sure as ever that the conflict could be solved if the parties would just “get to the damn table” and Israel would “reach out” to its neighbors and be more pliable.

Yaalon, for his part, gave Obama less credit on Iran, saying that “France and Great Britain are leading the West now in calling for crippling sanctions on the Iranian central bank and preventing Iran from exporting oil, while the US is unfortunately leading from behind.”

Still, as Hoffman points out, Yaalon’s words regarding the Palestinian issue constitute “the first time a high-ranking Netanyahu administration official has indicated that the US had shifted from conflict resolution to management.”

If Yaalon is right, one would expect an easing of the administration’s pressure on Israel regarding this issue—pressure that has been obsessive and often brutal.

Upon taking office the administration proclaimed all Jewish life over the 1967 lines—including in parts of Jerusalem that it saw as off limits to Jews—illegitimate and the main obstacle to peace. Obama pursued the theme in his June 2009 Cairo speech, in which he sang the praises—often with invented “facts”—of Islam as a civilization while portraying “the settlements” as the hub of evil and equating self-imposed Palestinian displacement with the Holocaust.

The pattern of Israel-abuse reached another high point with the administration’s tantrum over Israeli building plans in Jerusalem in March 2010 and Obama’s notorious snub of Netanyahu at the White House. Also around that time Obama signed onto Arab attempts to divest Israel of its nuclear deterrent—that is, its fundamental guarantee of survival in the region.

Even more grave, though, was the president’s explicit call in May this year for an Israeli return to those 1967 death-trap borders, a violation of solemn American commitments dating back forty years to uphold Israel’s right to defensible boundaries.

Naturally, even if the pressure lets up at this stage, one can attribute it to the upcoming US elections unless the administration shows some explicit sign of actually having learned something on the Palestinian issue.

Seemingly, though, it would be hard for Washington not to learn something about the difficulty of achieving amity in the Middle East. One would think a headline like last week’s “Deadly Blasts Rock Baghdad…” would leave an impression, coming so soon after the U.S. pullout and tolling over 60 dead and over 200 wounded.

The big drama so far in Israel this week has involved Tanya Rosenblit, a 28-year-old writer and translator. Boarding a bus from the coastal town of Ashdod to Jerusalem, she stood her ground for about half an hour when ultra-Orthodox (haredi) Jewish men tried to pressure her to take a seat at the back. Rosenblit became an instant heroine, appearing on TV with the transportation minister and publishing an op-ed about her experience in one of Israel’s largest dailies.

In January 2011 Israel’s Supreme Court declared forced gender segregation on buses illegal. Politicians from both right and left condemned the attempt to coerce Rosenblit. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said “a fringe group must not be allowed to dismantle what we share in common.” Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger, himself ultra-Orthodox, said, “We don’t have the authority to force our ideas on others. This country does not belong to the haredi community.”

Gender segregation on Israeli buses has, of course, gotten attention from lofty places lately. Speaking to the Saban Center earlier this month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it and other Israeli phenomena reminded her of Iran. And last week in an already-notorious op-ed Thomas Friedman included segregated bus lines for the ultra-Orthodox community (to repeat, now outlawed) in a volley of jibes against Israel.

As the above story reveals—yes, there is a problem; and yes, it’s being addressed. It should also be seen in the right dimensions: only a small proportion of the public buses serve neighborhoods (mostly in Jerusalem) of the ultra-Orthodox, who account for 9 percent of the Jewish population. But, for some, catching a rumor somewhere (sex-segregated buses in Israel!) is enough to heap some more vilification on the much-criticized Jewish state.

And how did the problem come about? Does it really signal a deterioration of democracy, as Clinton complained? Or does it in fact reflect something quite different?

The ultra-Orthodox have always been a problematic community in Israel, ranging from hostile to ambivalent toward the secular state. But back in 1948 when Israel was established, they were a tiny community. Young haredi men were exempted from military service and even given state support for yeshiva studies. The secular-Jewish majority tended to see the haredim as an eccentric remnant of the Diaspora that, in any case, would soon wither on the vine.

The Palestinians have been in the news thanks to Newt Gingrich calling them an “invented” people seeking Israel’s destruction. A Palestinian event a couple of days later got much less coverage—even though it bore out at least the second part of that description.

Hamas, which rules Gaza and won the Palestinian parliamentary elections resoundingly in 2006, has celebrated the 24th anniversary of its founding with a gala gathering of 350,000 in Gaza City. At it Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh proclaimed:

Resistance is the way and it is the strategic choice to liberate Palestine from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea and to remove the invaders from the blessed land of Palestine…. Hamas, together with other stubborn resistance factions, will lead the people towards uprising after uprising until all of Palestine is liberated.

The crowd, for its part, responded with chants of “We will never recognize Israel.”

To honor the event Hamas’s military wing Izzadin al-Qassam released a statement saying it had killed 1,365 Israelis, perpetrated 1,117 attacks against Israel including 87 suicide bombings, and fired 11,093 rockets at Israeli targets. As Evelyn Gordon notes,

Hamas’ boasts are almost certainly exaggerated: It claims “credit” for more than 80 percent of all Israeli casualties since 1987, whereas Israeli data shows a much more equal distribution between Hamas and its rival, Fatah, aka Israel’s “peace partner.”…

In other words, Hamas’s bloodlust is so intense that it takes “credit” even beyond its actual record of slaughter of men, women, and children. That record includes, for instance (in collaboration with Palestinian Islamic Jihad), the bombing of the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem in 2001, which killed 18, including children aged ten, eight, four, and two.

The Jerusalem Post’s highly credible military correspondent Yaakov Katz reports this week that Hamas has set up bases and rocket-production facilities in Sinai so as to prevent Israel from bombing them from the air. Israel still has a peace treaty with Egypt—still nominally sovereign over Sinai—and is anxious to preserve a modicum of decent relations even as Egypt slides toward Islamism. An air force raid on Egyptian territory would, of course, not be the best way to do that.

Especially since the Mubarak government fell last February, Sinai has descended into anarchy—a haven for global-jihad terror groups and Bedouin smuggling gangs. Israel has tried to help the post-Mubarak regime get a handle on things by bending the terms of the peace treaty and allowing Egyptian battalions into Sinai to try and clean up the mess. By all accounts—whether out of lack of ability or will—they’ve had little success.

But for Gaza-based Hamas to set up military facilities in Sinai is an ominous turn for the even-worse. It means either that Cairo’s loss of control of the peninsula is so complete that it couldn’t prevent Hamas’s move; or, more sinister yet, that it approves of it.

That would constitute little less than a passive act of war against Israel even before the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists have taken over Egypt.

In a follow-up, Katz reports that an Egyptian official told the daily Al-Masry Al-Youm that there was no truth to the original report, saying: “No one can ever bring in military tools or erect missile bases in Sinai. Egypt would not allow such a breach to its sovereignty.” Katz, however, attributes the official’s words to “an effort to protect [the Hamas facilities] from Israeli air strikes.”

All this has happened against the backdrop of yet another exchange of hostilities between Israel and terror groups in Gaza. It started on Thursday when the Israeli air force assassinated a terror leader who—while based in Gaza—was planning another attack into Israel from Sinai (there already was one in August, which killed eight Israelis). Since then a few dozen rockets have been fired from Gaza into Israel, with Israel striking back at Hamas targets. Although this latest round seems to have died down, the situation remains tense and volatile.

Worried about losing some of the Jewish vote for 2012, President Obama has been sweet-talking American Jews lately and making some staunchly pro-Israel statements. In September he told the UN General Assembly:

Let us be honest with ourselves: Israel is surrounded by neighbors that have waged repeated wars against it. Israel’s citizens have been killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide bombs on their buses. Israel’s children come of age knowing that throughout the region, other children are taught to hate them. Israel, a small country of less than eight million people, look[s] out at a world where leaders of much larger nations threaten to wipe it off of the map. The Jewish people carry the burden of centuries of exile and persecution, and fresh memories of knowing that six million people were killed simply because of who they are. Those are facts. They cannot be denied.

Strong stuff—the kind of stuff really pro-Israel people really say, and think.

But no one should be fooled. In recent days, statements by two very senior officials and one lesser official have shown that this administration remains relentlessly anti-Israel in some of its basic attitudes.

On Friday at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy in Washington, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta again warned Israel not to attack Iran. He repeated the reasons he gave in an almost identical warning two weeks earlier: harmful economic consequences, retaliations against U.S. forces, and ineffectiveness, since, he claimed, an attack would only set Iran’s nuclear program back a year or two.

Aware that Israel’s prime minister and defense minister regard that nuclear program as an imminent—possibly within less than a year—existential threat, Panetta added that Iran is “a very grave threat to all of us,” that sanctions against Iran must be “strong, [imposed] quickly, and purposeful,” and that “it is my department’s responsibility to plan for all contingencies and to provide the president with a wide range of military options should they become necessary.”

One can ask why that should be worth the effort when, according to Panetta, the military option is close to useless anyway. But if sanctions are the thing, one can ask why the administration keeps obstructing Congress’s push to sanction Iran’s central bank. Might it have to do with “existential” fears about rising oil prices on the part of an administration that, facing an election, has already ravaged its country’s economy so badly?

This time around, though, Panetta didn’t content himself with merely admonishing Israel not to deal with its cardinal security problem, and instead to “count on us”; he also told Israel it was responsible for its—and America’s—problems in the Middle East. Israel—and not the Islamist tide now engulfing the region, which Washington’s own perverse policy of coddling and encouraging Islamists in Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, and Libya has done so much to enable.

Israel, Panetta said, needs to “reach out and mend fences with those who share an interest in regional stability—countries like Turkey and Egypt, as well as Jordan.”

He said that just as the election results from Egypt were showing an overwhelming win for the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement for which jihad to the death against Israel is a fundamental tenet.

He said it even though Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan  has waged an unremitting campaign against Israel with the same jihadist underpinnings. As even the New York Times put it in September:

Evidently heedless of American attempts to engineer a thaw in Turkish-Israeli relations, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey used his appearance before the annual General Assembly on Thursday to enumerate a long list of grievances with Israel, a former regional ally….

And naturally, in this context, Panetta pulled out that old shibboleth—the Palestinians. “Just get to the damned table,” he snarled; “rather than undermining the Palestinian Authority, it is in Israel’s interests to strengthen it by…continuing to transfer Palestinian tax revenues and pursuing other avenues of cooperation.”

Explosions, generally of a mysterious kind, have been rocking the Middle East lately. On Monday night residents of the Western Galilee were awoken by some of them when someone—it’s not clear who—fired four Katyusha rockets from just over the Lebanese border. The rockets damaged a chicken coop and a gas tank.

Israel responded with artillery fire into southern Lebanon. Although Hizbullah has amassed tens of thousand of missiles there—making a mockery of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 (2006) that was supposed to prohibit that from happening—the IDF didn’t think Hizbullah had fired the Katyushas.

The Shiite organization has been in a tough bind. One of its patrons, the Assad regime in Syria, is tottering, and Lebanon’s anti-Hizbullah March 14 coalition is accordingly getting bolder. And last week a Hizbullah arms depot was hit by one of those unexplained explosions, with some accounts saying Israel was behind it. Hizbullah, then, is not seen as itching for a clash at this point.

Instead the IDF assessed that a small Al Qaeda-linked or Palestinian group had fired the rockets—as has happened before from Lebanon, the last time in October 2009. By late afternoon on Tuesday an Al-Qaeda-affiliated group indeed claimed it was responsible.

The attack came hard on the heels of a reportedly much larger explosion in Esfahan, Iran, home of a major nuclear facility. Are the various Middle Eastern booms connected to each other?

One who thinks they are is security professional Daniel Nisman, who argued in an op-ed on Tuesday that Monday night’s Katyusha attack was

in no way a fluke…. It is no coincidence that the relative calm in the [Israeli] north was shattered just hours after another mysterious explosion rocked a strategically important Iranian city. The reported blast in Esfahan…was the latest in what is perceived to be an enhanced sabotage campaign by Western spy agencies following the latest critical report by the IAEA.

While sharing the view that Hizbullah was not a likely culprit, Nisman said the

Syrians and Iranians…still need an outlet from which to send a warning message to the Israelis. Palestinian and Sunni militant groups provide the most convenient option…. The fact that the attack was small…signals that the Iranians and Syrians seek to warn…Israel that its operations to undermine Iranian or Syrian aspirations will not go unchecked.

In a warning of another kind on Sunday, Iranian defense minister Ahmad Vahidi had already talked of “150,000 missiles” hitting Israel if it attacks Iran.

As of Friday morning, it was expected in Cairo that, later in the day, up to a million people would be confronting the Egyptian army in the Tahrir Square area. It had earlier been reported that the target of such a gathering would be the “Judaization” of Jerusalem. By now, though, it appears clear that if the event occurs, the fury will be directed mainly at Egypt’s own military regime that has tried to hold things together since President Hosni Mubarak was thrown out of office last winter.

Tens of thousands of anti-regime protesters have been swarming in the Tahrir Square area for about a week. Police have killed about 40 and wounded hundreds. A ceasefire was attempted on Thursday morning, with Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi’s regime going so far as to apologize for the deaths and promising to prosecute the perpetrators. But by Thursday afternoon it had already broken down with fresh outbreaks of violence.

Unlike those of Qaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria, the regime is not bent on staying in power at any price and indeed appears desperate to try and appease the protesters. Parliamentary elections are set for Monday, and the regime moved presidential elections up from 2013 to next spring. But the protesters out in the streets—some of them—appear driven by a blind fury and keep demanding that the regime step down immediately.

Boaz Bismuth, special correspondent in Cairo for Israel Hayom, reported on Thursday that

Tahrir Square, the symbol of the original uprising, is no longer the home of the revolution…. the battlefront is now on Mohammed Mahmoud Street, the street that leads from the square to the Interior Ministry. That is where protesters and police officers violently clash, where the battle is waged. That is where people are wounded and killed.

But while these protesters have mostly been secular youths impelled more by hatred of the regime than by any coherent notion of what’s supposed to replace it or how Egypt is supposed to be run, Bismuth noted that: “Some protesters are organized: the bearded ones. And they come in groups. The women, covered in black from head to toe, also take part in the demonstration….”

Clearer still:

In today’s Egypt, the khaki uniforms of the army that were so highly revered during that 18-day revolution back in January-February have been replaced by beards. Lots of beards. Muslim Brotherhood beards but also many Salafist beards. Beards that have joined forces to ensure that not only deposed President Hosni Mubarak is gone, but that any memory of his legacy is gone too. Beards that promise that everything will be alright only because “Allahu akbar” (God is great).

In other words: the shabab or violent, youthful protesters basically don’t know what they’re doing, probably are not keen on an Islamist regime, but are helping pave the way for one while the Islamists observe with satisfaction.

Observing the upheaval in Egypt with a lot more trepidation than satisfaction is Israel, where views are divided as to the implications but most are negative.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has given Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak a clear warning: don’t attack Iran. Panetta

pointed to a U.S. analysis that a strike on Iran would set back its nuclear program, which Iran says is only for peaceful purposes, by one or two years at most. It would also have implications for U.S. forces in the region.

He added that “thirdly, there are going to be economic consequences to that, that could impact not just on our economy but the world economy.”

What to do, then, if a military strike would be both pointless and harmful?

“The United States feels strongly,” Panetta says, “that the way to deal with [the problem] is to work with our allies, to work with the international community to develop the sanctions and the diplomatic efforts that would further isolate Iran.”

Barak, for his part, doesn’t seem reassured by that. He said it would “probably” take no more than “three-quarters” of a year before

no one can do anything practically about [Iran’s nukes] because the Iranians are gradually, deliberately entering into what I call a zone of immunity, by widening the redundancy of their plan, making it spread over many more sites with many more hidden elements.

Barak also warned that “a nuclear Iran would have deep repercussions for the Middle East, prompting countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt to ‘turn nuclear’ and starting a countdown to putting nuclear materials in the hands of terrorists.”

Another who’s not impressed by the Obama administration’s Iran policy, which Panetta’s words can be assumed to reflect, is Illinois Republican Senator Mark Kirk. As he told FoxNews: “They are not taking any real action against the Central Bank of Iran or other parts of the nuclear program…and then telling everyone else that they shouldn’t do anything either.”

Adrian Blomfield, Jerusalem correspondent for Britain’s Telegraph, reports that “Israel has refused to reassure President Barack Obama that it would warn him in advance of any pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear capabilities,” and that Obama “was rebuffed last month when he demanded” such a guarantee.

Blomfield says he has this dope from “insiders briefed on a top-secret meeting between America’s most senior defence chief and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s hawkish prime minister….” He’s referring to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s visit to Israel last month, during which, in a “private meeting with Mr Netanyahu and the defence minister, Ehud Barak,” Panetta conveyed Obama’s “urgent” demand. Yet

the two Israelis were notably evasive in their response, according to sources both in Israel and the United States….

Alarmed by Mr Netanyahu’s noncommittal response, Mr Obama reportedly ordered the US intelligence services to step up monitoring of Israel to glean clues of its intentions.

The report meshes with Panetta’s not-so-veiled warning to Israel just before that visit to lay off Iran, and with his statement this week—albeit not explicitly directed at Israel—that an attack on Iran could have “unintended consequences…. It could have a serious impact in the region and it could have a serious impact on US forces in the region.”

The same message came through from Europe this week. French foreign minister Alain Juppe said an attack on Iranian’s nuclear facilities would “drag the world into an ‘uncontrollable spiral.’” In the wake of last week’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran’s nuclear progress—confirming all of Israel’s warnings over the years—EU foreign ministers “ruled out any military action for now.”

Juppe did say the EU would be “asking the European Investment Bank to freeze loans to Iran.” Meanwhile the EU foreign ministers “decided to wait till their next meeting on Dec 1., before taking further action.”

It somehow doesn’t have that ring of urgency.

And yet, as The Telegraph’s Blomfield also notes, “many in [Israel] believe time is running out.”

Blomfield quotes Ephraim Asculai, former IAEA official and an Israeli expert on Iran’s nuclear program, saying that “if the Iranian regime decides to do so, it can produce a nuclear explosive device within a year, plus or minus a few months.” There are also warnings that Iran could soon be transferring most of its nuclear production under a mountain near Qom, making it much harder—or impossible—to bomb from the air.

Is Israel, then, facing the threat essentially alone? If so, it would hardly be unprecedented. There’s an inglorious history of the United States and Europe leaving Israel to fend for itself against threats, sometimes even existential ones.

It happened in Israel’s 1948-1949 War for Independence, when it found itself embargoed by the West (with Britain aiding the Arab side) and had to turn to the Soviet bloc for arms. Just before the 1967 Six Day War, Israel’s “ally” France slapped an arms embargo on the region that was mainly aimed at Israel.

On Saturday the Israeli air force hit an Islamic Jihad squad in Gaza that was preparing to fire a rocket into Israel. The leader of the squad was killed, the other three members wounded.

Soon after, on Saturday night, two retaliatory rockets were fired from Gaza, one of them causing shrapnel wounds to a foreign worker.

In other words, Gaza has Israel covered. The Israeli air force generally carries out successful pinpoint strikes, but Gaza can always exact a price. Even when its projectiles cause no physical damage to people or property, they make sure the residents of southern Israel don’t know a moment’s security.

The pattern was similar in the previous round. Islamic Jihad opened it with a Grad rocket on Wednesday, October 26. Three days later Israel wiped out a five-man cell in Gaza. Islamic Jihad responded with about 40 rockets and mortars that killed one civilian, wounded nine, and damaged property. Israel hit back effectively until the rockets and mortars stopped. But Israelis don’t regard this as a “victory” or a reasonable way to live.

And over the weekend there was an alarming report that “in response to a heightened threat of anti-aircraft weaponry from Gaza and Egypt, the IAF has ordered its planes to temporarily avoid flying over Israel’s southern border.” It’s believed that terrorist groups in the area have “newly procured anti-aircraft weapons from Libya [that were] smuggled into the Gaza Strip and the increasingly lawless Sinai Peninsula….”

Not surprisingly, so long as Israel makes no decisive move in Gaza, the strategic threat only grows. Smuggling has been a free-for-all since the fall of Hosni Mubarak. Gaza’s rockets can now reach the Tel Aviv area while ever more sophisticated and dangerous weaponry flows in from Libya (another “Arab spring” liability), Iran, and elsewhere.

Also not surprisingly, in this situation, voices in Israel are calling to reoccupy Gaza and put an end to the threat. While some of these come from outside the government, an official in the upper echelon, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, has spoken openly of “toppling Hamas from power and reestablishing control over the southern Strip” where the smuggled weapons enter. Hamas being, of course, the ruler of Gaza, Islamic Jihad a still-weaker rival.

So what’s Israel waiting for?

First it was the Shalit deal. Then it was about a week of rocket fire from Gaza, seasoned with the Palestinians’ UNESCO triumph. Now Israel is in a tizzy again—about attacking Iran.

On November 8 the International Atomic Energy Agency is set to release a report on Iran’s nuclear program that is expected to be the most damning ever, saying the program goes well beyond the civilian sphere. It wasn’t that, though—at least not directly—that triggered the uproar in Israel.

What got it going was a front-page column on Friday by veteran, left-of-center, anti-Netanyahu columnist Nahum Barnea in the fiercely anti-Netanyahu daily Yediot Aharonot. Called “Atomic Pressure,” it claimed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak had already decided, just the two of them, on an Israeli move against Iran.

All hell broke loose. The issue of the Iranian nuclear threat to Israel—usually inanely relegated to the margins by the media, often in favor of saucy scandals or outrage over the price of cottage cheese and gasoline—suddenly sprang forth on every news and opinion page of the Hebrew press. Now every two-bit journalist was pronouncing on what is actually the paramount, existential issue facing Israel, dwarfing all others even though many of them are not exactly trivial.

Some public figures reacted with fury, claiming Yediot and other anti-Netanyahu elements of the media were deliberately stirring up the storm to turn the public against a strike on Iran—or just to discomfit Netanyahu (they also don’t much like Barak, of left-of-center background but now close to the prime minister). It was claimed that turning these ultra-sensitive security issues into a wild public free-for-all was the height of galling irresponsibility.

Among the critics are three members of Netanyahu’s eight-minister inner cabinet, a key decision-making body. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said what the media was publishing had “no relation to the truth” yet was causing “tremendous damage.” Minister-without-Portfolio Benny Begin called it a “campaign of recklessness.” In an op-ed in another daily, Maariv, Intelligence and Atomic Energy Minister Dan Meridor said the media hubbub amounted to a form of treason.

[Note: the writing of this article required an intermission for a rocket attack on Beersheva from Gaza.]

On Monday the Palestinians were overwhelmingly voted into UNESCO—the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It’s a pity. Palestinian “education” consists largely of anti-Semitic hate, their scientific achievements are nil apart from importing ever more sophisticated weapons, and as for their culture…Israelis have again been getting a taste of that in recent days.

Since Wednesday, on and off, the Israeli south has again been under a barrage from Gaza. One man has been killed and eight people wounded, along with extensive property damage including nine cars blown up in a parking lot. Some 200,000 children have been kept home from school. The Israeli air force has killed ten terrorists in retaliatory raids that amount to little more than tit-for-tat.

So far, though, not one of the 40-plus rockets and mortars fired from Gaza appears to have been fired by Hamas, its ruling organization. All, or nearly all, have been fired by another group, Islamic Jihad. Palestinian “culture” being what it is, you sometimes need a scorecard to keep up with the various Palestinian terror movements. But Islamic Jihad is not just another of those small, global-jihadist, Al Qaeda-linked groups occasionally heard from in Gaza.

Israeli military analyst Ron Ben-Yishai writes that Islamic Jihad has lately

accumulated (with the active support of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards) military power that is equal to—and in some cases greater than—Hamas’s military capabilities.

Islamic Jihad has more long-range rockets than Hamas, thousands of activists, and some 10,000 supporters and collaborators….

And Israeli Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh, a Palestinian-affairs expert, concurs, noting that

Today, [Islamic Jihad] poses a serious challenge to the Hamas government.

With the help of Iran and Syria, Islamic Jihad has become a major player in the Palestinian arena….

It’s almost certain by now that Islamic Jihad—which is viewed by some as being more radical than Hamas—will one day rise to power in the Gaza Strip.

As for why Islamic Jihad chose now to heat things up, accounts vary, but all agree that it’s at Iran’s (and probably also Syria’s) prodding. Abu Toameh writes that “According to informed Palestinian sources, relations between Hamas and the Iranians and Syrians have deteriorated because of the movement’s refusal to publicly support the embattled regime of President Bashar Assad.”