Israel is working toward establishing a state for Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem instead of a Palestinian state, PLO Secretary-General Yasser Abed Rabbo claimed Saturday.

He said that there would be no negotiations with Israel in the near future due to the wide gap between the two sides.

Abed Rabbo also denied that the Palestinian Authority was planning to relay a message to Israel via Jordan detailing the Palestinians’ conditions for resuming direct peace talks.

The Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya TV channel reported over the weekend that Jordan’s foreign minister, Nasser Judeh, was slated to deliver the Palestinian message to Israel after bringing it to the attention of the Americans.

“There is no such message and we haven’t handed one to anyone,” Abed Rabbo told the PA’s Voice of Palestine radio station.

“These reports are nothing but speculations and assessments.”

Abed Rabbo said that Israel was continuing to build in settlements “so that it could establish a state for settlers, and not for Palestinians, in the West Bank and Jerusalem.”

Israel wants to prepare a new map for the Palestinian territories in order to impose it on the Palestinians and the world, he added.

“This, at a time when the Palestinians are seeking a negotiated solution on the basis of international legitimacy,” Abed Rabbo said, ruling out the possibility that the peace talks would resume in the near future.

Israel, he charged, does not want to launch a serious peace process. Rather, it wants contacts with the Palestinians, he said.

Abed Rabbo said that Israel also does not want to see an end to the split between the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He claimed that Israel was pushing toward placing the Gaza Strip under Egyptian control.

The PLO official blamed differences within Hamas for the failure of the recent Qatari-brokered reconciliation agreement between PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal.

Ahmed Assaf, a Fatah spokesman in the West Bank, said Saturday that the Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip have rejected the Qatari-engineered deal “because they want to preserve their privileges and illegitimate jobs.”

Iran, under intense Western pressure over its disputed nuclear program, declared an initial turnout of 65 percent in a parliamentary election shunned by most reformists as a sham.

Iran’s Islamic clerical leadership is eager to restore the damage to its legitimacy caused by the violent crushing of eight months of street protests after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election in a 2009 vote his opponents said was rigged.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who endorsed the 2009 result, has since turned sharply against Ahmadinejad. Some early results from Friday’s vote suggested the divisive president’s supporters were losing ground in the 290-seat parliament.

His sister, Parvin Ahmadinejad, failed to win a seat in their hometown of Garmsar, the semi-official Mehr news agency said. Elsewhere, Khamenei loyalists appeared to be doing well.

Final results were not expected on Saturday as millions of ballots cast must be counted by hand.

Khamenei, 72, had called for a high turnout to send a message of defiance to “the arrogant powers bullying us”.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Iran’s election was not free or fair. “The regime has presented the vote as a test of loyalty, rather than an opportunity for people freely to choose their own representatives,” he said.

No independent observers were on hand to monitor the voting or check the official turnout figures. An unelected Guardian Council, which vets all candidates, barred 35 sitting MPs from seeking re-election and nearly 2,000 other would-be candidates.

The vote took place without the two main opposition leaders. Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, who ran for president in 2009, have been under house arrest for more than a year.

Iran has been hard hit by Western sanctions over its refusal to halt sensitive nuclear activity.

Obama has said military action was among the options to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. “As president of the United States, I don’t bluff,” he told Atlantic magazine. But he also argued against a pre-emptive Israeli strike.

The dispute over Iran’s uranium enrichment program, which Tehran says is purely peaceful, barely featured in an election dominated by bread-and-butter debates over soaring prices and scarce jobs.

The vote will have scant impact on Iran’s foreign or nuclear policies, in which Khamenei already has the final say, but could strengthen the Supreme Leader’s hand before a presidential vote next year. Ahmadinejad, 56, cannot run for a third term.

The outgoing parliament has summoned him to answer questions next week about his handling of the economy in unprecedented hearings that could hamstring him for the rest of his term.

But the combative Ahmadinejad may try to turn the tables on his critics, some of whom say he has inflicted higher inflation on Iranians by slashing food and fuel subsidies and replacing them with cash handouts of about $38 a month per person.

Global oil prices have spiked to 10-month highs on tensions between the West and Iran, OPEC’s second biggest crude producer.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Friday global powers would be falling into a trap if they pursued talks with Iran, saying Tehran would use dialogue to deceive the world and carry on with its nuclear program.

Netanyahu will press Obama, who is facing a presidential election, to stress publicly the nuclear “red lines” that Iran must not cross, Israeli officials say.

One day before the AIPAC conference kicks off in Washington, an anti-Obama pro-Israel group is widening its criticism of President Barack Obama’s record on Israel — while the White House defends its treatment of the relationship.

The trailer for a new 30-minute video, entitled “Daylight: The Story of Obama and Israel,” cuts together clips of Obama quotes and outside commentary to put forth the narrative that Obama has made statements and taken actions as president that have put him out of step with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters.

“We believe that that the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines,” Obama is shown saying, a reference to his May, 2011 speech, where he for the first time explicitly defined U.S. policy as supporting the 1967 borders with agreed swaps as the basis for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

“He didn’t quite have a full grasp of what the full region looks like,” conservative journalist Lee Smith is shown saying in the video. “This is not how you treat an ally.”

The ad goes beyond the Israeli issue to suggest that the president is too solicitous of Muslim concerns. The end of the trailer shows Obama saying, “I want to make sure we end before the call to prayer,” a clip from his town hall meeting with Turkish students in Istanbul in April 2009.

The video was produced by the group the Emergency Committee for Israel, which has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on its pre-AIPAC publicity campaign, including posters and billboards all over Washington that question Obama’s commitment to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

“He says a nuclear Iran is unacceptable. Do you believe him?” the posters read. Then, next to a picture of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini and President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, it says, “Do they?”

ECI is run by executive director Noah Pollak and Michael Goldfarb, a former McCain-Palin staffer now working at the consulting firm Orion Strategies and as chairman of the board of the Washington Free Beacon, an new conservative website.

“Obama says a nuclear Iran is unacceptable,” Pollak told The Cable today. “We hope he means what he says, but the recent statements from his administration, his contentious relationship with the Israeli government, and his consistent efforts to weaken congressional sanctions don’t inspire confidence.”

The ECI board is comprised of Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, Gary Bauer, who has endorsed Rick Santorum, and Rachel Abrams, the wife of former NSC official Elliott Abrams, and the author of the controversial Israel-focused blog “Bad Rachel.” The group is also the only Israel-focused advocacy organization to have formed a SuperPAC in the run up to the 2012 election.

As part of its pre-AIPAC activity, ECI took out a full page ad in the New York Times yesterday calling out donors for supporting two liberal advocacy organizations in Washington, the Center for American Progress and Media Matters, and accusing those donors of “funding bigotry and anti-Israel extremism.”

Pollak also said that the video, billboards, and ads happen to refute a pre-AIPAC interview Obama gave to The Atlantic, in which Obama expressed frustration with the attacks coming from conservative lawmakers and groups like ECI that claim he is not pro-Israel.

“Every single commitment I have made to the state of Israel and its security, I have kept,” Obama said. “Why is it that despite me never failing to support Israel on every single problem that they’ve had over the last three years, that there are still questions about that?”

“Obama said today he doesn’t understand why there are questions about his record of support for Israel,” Pollak said. “We think this movie will set the record straight, and remind pro-Israel Americans of the facts of this administration’s failure to stand with Israel at some critical moments.”

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA), usually at the forefront of concerns about political stability, poses relatively little risk to the world’s energy supplies from domestic instability, an assessment by a leading political risk concern has found.

Maplecroft’s Resource Nationalism Index (RNI), which measures the strength and stability of political and legal institutions in 197 countries around the world, found that 44% of global oil production is located in countries posing an “extreme” or “high” risk. But MENA’s biggest exporters have a relatively low risk profile, a compilation of figures from Maplecroft and the global energy company BP show.

Not counting Iran, whose energy exports are already subject to Western sanctions, only 8% of the world’s oil from MENA countries is in extreme- or high-risk countries and no single country among them accounts for more than 3% of global production. Gulf oil producers, which account for 21% of world oil output, are tagged as “medium” risk by Maplecroft.

The Arab Spring has toppled leaders across the region, pounded economies and is putting into place Islamist regimes whose policies are still a question mark. But nearly all of MENA’s top energy producers in the Gulf have stood aloof from domestic turmoil. And when oil exporters have raided government coffers to pay for handouts and ensure popular support, higher energy prices are easily covering the costs.

Even MENA countries that have been hit hard by the Arab Spring have avoided targeting their energy industries for populist measures like nationalizations or demands to renegotiate contracts. But the Arab Spring has served as an incentive for economically pressured regimes around the world to exploit their energy and other natural resources at the expense of the multinational companies by taking over assets or demanding better terms.

“Regimes in resource-rich countries suddenly [are] cognizant after events in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere of what a dissatisfied populace can accomplish,” James Smither, Maplecroft’s associate director, said in comments provided to The Media Line. “All this in combination makes highly profitable private corporations extracting these countries’ natural wealth very expedient targets for revenue extraction and public chastisement.”

Among countries in the MENA region, the only major oil producer carrying “extreme” risk is Iran, which accounted for about 5% of the world’s oil production in 2010 and ranked eighth on RNI. With the economy reeling from global sanctions and leaders feeling pressured by the street to act, Maplecroft warned that the few remaining foreign companies still active in the country may fall victim to populist measures.

“International oil companies that have continued to buy Iranian oil despite stringent US and EU-led sanctions are becoming increasingly exposed to risks associated with resource nationalism,” Torbjorn Soltvedt, MENA analyst at Maplecroft, said in comments provided to The Media Line. “The regime – which faces significant domestic challenges – is likely to attempt to turn the EU oil embargo into a unifying rallying point.”

Iraq also looks like a candidate for resource nationalism. The company is host to multinationals like ExxonMobil, Total, Lukoil and China National Petroleum; and has been offering concessions to develop oil and gas reserves after decades of neglect due to war and misrule. Iraq’s giant Rumaila oil field is being developed by BP and another major reserve, Majnoon, is being developed by Royal Dutch Shell.

But Iraq’s leaders are in the midst of a power struggle between Shiite and Sunni factions and the country has been hit by periodic waves of bombings since American forces withdrew in December. Maplecroft ranks Iraq at 13th in the world for risk.

Jonathan Terry, a MENA analyst for Maplecroft, said Iraqis growing up in the Saddam Hussein era were educated to distrust foreign energy companies and politicians like Shiite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr and attack them in speeches. Nevertheless, he said, the likelihood of nationalization is “low” because the economy is so reliant on foreign companies.

Among the other high-risk countries, the only significant producers are Libya and Algeria, but none account for more than 2% of global oil production. Libya, which was paralyzed by eight-months of civil war between strongman Muammar Gaddafi and his opposition, has been the only major energy exporter to shut down production due to the Arab Spring.

Libya reported this week, however, that oil production reached 1.4 million barrels a day in February, up by 100,000 barrels over January and close to the 1.6 million barrels it was pumping before the conflict. Officials have said they aim to return to pre-conflict output levels by mid-2012.

MENA is a smaller player in the global natural gas market, with at-risk countries accounting for 18% of the world’s total production, compared with 35% for all. Iran, an extreme-risk country, is the region’s biggest gas producer, accounting for just over 4% of the world total. But the other two bigger producers – Qatar and Saudi Arabia with a combined 6.2% share, are rated as “medium” risk by Maplecroft.

The RNI focuses on domestic factors, but the greatest threat to the Gulf producers today comes from a conflict between Iran and the West, particularly Israel, over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, the transit point for nearly all of the Gulf’s oil, and to bar exports to Europe.

The mathematics of war: A missile salvo on the greater Tel Aviv area, thousand of rockets fired at northern Israel, terror attacks against Israeli targets overseas, scores of Israeli casualties and countless others in bomb shelters – that is how a former top Israeli official described Iran’s possible reaction to an Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities.

According to a Thursday report in Yedioth Ahronoth, the former official – speaking anonymously with the New York Times – detailed the formula by which Israel assessed the magnitude of Tehran’s response: “1991 + 2006 + Buenos Aires, times three-to-five.”

In other words: The combined result of Saddam Hussein’s missile attack on Israel in 1991, Hezbollah’s missiles attacks on Israel during the 2006 Second Lebanon War and the terror attacks in Argentina’s capital in the early 1990s – times three. 

These attacks claimed the lives of hundreds of Israelis and Jews and the damage to the Israeli economy amounted to billions of dollars.

“Forty missiles fired at Israel are no small matter – but it’s better that a nuclear Iran,” he said.

The New York Times said that the assessment is based on the premise that while Iran would aspire to meet any strike with force, it would prefer not to ignite a regional war.

US defense experts, however, qualified the statement, saying the West’s ability to accurately predict Iran’s moves was limited.

Washington, the report said, believes that a strike on the Islamic Republic would result in a missile barrage on Israel; but it also believes that Iran would try to somehow disguise its connection to such a counter-attack, possibly by promoting terror attacks on nations who support Israel.

The Americans also believe it is likely Iran will use any such strike as a pretext to close off the Strait of Hormuz.

US defense sources said that Tehran is likely to try and avoid a direct attack on American interests, because the regime knows that an American military strike will inflict significant damage.

Washington does, however, think Iran will opt for an indirect assault against its interests worldwide, or against oil production facilities in the Persian Gulf.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Obama Administration is unlikely to change its stance on Iran.

The White House believes that the US must stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but that does not mean it is ready to declare that the US will impede Iran’s desire for “nuclear capabilities.”

A proposal to that effect has already been brought before Congress, and is widely backed by AIPAC.

US President Barack Obama is set to speak at the next AIPAC conventions in Washington, where he is expected to detail the US’ “red lines” on Iran.

If you look at a map of the Old City of Jerusalem, you’ll notice something odd. While the vast majority of the Old City’s streets form a crowded casbah of winding alleyways, there are a few straight-as-a-ruler streets that bisect the city from north to south and east to west.

The best known of these straight roads are Beit Chabad and Hagai streets, exiting through the Damascus Gate; David Street, exiting the Jaffa Gate; and the Via Dolorosa.

Like the rest of the Old City’s streets, these straight roads are narrow but, unlike the others, they preserve a historical skeleton of sorts that forms the basis of the Old City we know today. This skeleton was created, most archaeologists agree, not during Jewish, Christian or Muslim rule, but during the Roman period, when the city of Aelia Capitolina was built on the ruins of Jerusalem following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD.

Ironically, it is actually the streets of this imperial and pagan city – which supposedly left behind no cultural or spiritual heritage for modern Jerusalem – that have bequeathed to the city the skeleton structure that has survived to this day.

In the history of Jewish Jerusalem, Aelia Capitolina is the very embodiment of defeat and destruction – a reminder of the humiliation of the Second Temple’s destruction, which erected a pagan temple in its place. This image has distanced Aelia Capitolina from the fathers of Israeli archaeology, who were naturally drawn to the ornate, Jewish city that preceded it. “No one concealed Aelia Capitolina, but we wanted to talk about the Second Temple,” says Dr. Ofer Sion, of the Antiquities Authority. “Aelia Capitolina was an accursed city, a city from which we were banished. It was more idealistic to excavate the Second Temple.”

Almost all of the archaeologists who study Aelia Capitolina call it “an elusive city.” As opposed to the Jerusalem of Second Temple times that preceded it, Aelia Capitolina has not been entirely unearthed during the many excavations that have been performed in the city since 1967. The residents of Aelia Capitolina did not leave written texts like the works of Flavius Josephus during the Second Temple era or of Christian travelers in the following period.

It is known that the Roman city was established by Emperor Hadrian between 130 and 140 AD. After the Bar Kochba revolt of 135, Jews were forbidden to enter the city. Its most important inhabitants were the soldiers of the 10th Legion, who would remain encamped in Jerusalem for 200 years.

Salvage operations

Following the latest wave of excavations, which began in the mid-1990s, more and more archaeologists have become convinced that Aelia Capitolina was a much larger and more important city than was once thought, and its influence on the later development of modern Jerusalem was dramatic.

Aelia Capitolina has sprung to life in a significant way through no less than four extensive excavations that have taken place in the Old City area, and in a number of other digs in other parts of Jerusalem. Most of these digs have been rescue excavations by the Antiquities Authority, salvage digs carried out before new construction and development goes ahead. In a few more years, Aelia Capitolina could again be covered over by new buildings.

In the rear section of the Western Wall plaza, in the spot where the Western Wall Heritage Foundation intends to erect a large building that it calls “the Core House,” Antiquities Authority researcher Shlomit Wexler-Bedolah discovered an ornate and broad Roman street, complete with shops on each side. This is the eastern cardo, along whose path Hagai Street would later be paved.

Three hundred meters to the south, another Antiquities Authority researcher, Dr. Doron Ben-Ami, discovered the place where the Roman street apparently ended. The corner of the street is adjacent to the Givati parking lot at the top of the Silwan valley – the spot where the Elad organization intends to build a large visitors center. In a large rescue excavation at this location in recent years, Ben-Ami exposed a large, fancy Roman villa unlike any other structure from its time in the entire country. He estimates that the villa he uncovered was the home of the regional governor or some other central authority.

In another excavation, in the tunnel under the Western Wall, Wexler-Bedolah and archaeologist Alexander Onn re-estimated the dating of a large bridge leading to the Temple Mount. As with other ancient monuments this too turned out to be of Roman origin and not from the Second Temple period. Another example is the Roman bathhouse and swimming pool discovered by Sion a year and a half ago. “It’s a tremendous spa, a country club,” Sion says, comparing the bathhouse to similar facilities found in other parts of the Roman Empire.

This increasing number of Roman-era discoveries strengthens the notion that the Temple Mount, even after its destruction, did not lie totally barren, but was used for pagan worship rites.

But not only the Old City and its immediate surroundings have turned up new findings from Aelia Capitolina. Excavations made a few years ago in the area near the Binyanei Ha’uma international convention center, carried out in preparation for the expansion of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, uncovered a large pottery-workers village that served as the legion’s central clayware manufacturing plant. Along the route of Jerusalem’s new light-rail, remains of a large water facility serving the legionnaires were discovered, and in the area of Shuafat, a Jewish settlement from the same period was discovered.

The latest excavations give archaeologists much greater insight into Aelia Capitolina than was possible even a decade earlier. Experts agree the city was planned extraordinarily well, based as it was on designs of other cities in the empire and according to orders that came directly from the emperor. It included broad streets, numerous and magnificent entrance gates, temples and infrastructure, and it even housed a new elite of army officers and free soldiers who turned Aelia Capitolina into a thriving city.

“When I began to study the history of the Roman city, it was a barren field,” says Prof. Yoram Zafrir, one of Israel’s most veteran archaeologists. “Today, it is clear that the basic structure of Jerusalem is that of Aelia Capitolina.” Zafrir describes the process by which, after the Roman period, beasts of burden replaced wagons, the central government became weak and streets became “privatized.” This process led to the city that we know today.

“Similarly to the British Mandate, which lasted just 31 years but had a significant impact on modern Jerusalem, from the perspective of architecture, the Roman period established a whole new, imperial language that still holds sway today,” archaeologist Dr. Guy Stiebel concludes. Stiebel even notes the irony of history: “Aelia Capitolina effectively saved Jerusalem. It raised her once again onto the stage of history. She returned like a phoenix from the ashes.”

The fruit was found in the banks of the Kolyma River in Siberia, a top site for people looking for mammoth bones.

The Institute of Cell Biophysics team raised plants of Silene stenophylla – of the campion family – from the fruit.

Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they note this is the oldest plant material by far to have been brought to life.

Prior to this, the record lay with date palm seeds stored for 2,000 years at Masada in Israel.

The leader of the research team, Professor David Gilichinsky, died a few days before his paper was published.

In it, he and his colleagues describe finding about 70 squirrel hibernation burrows in the river bank.

“All burrows were found at depths of 20-40m from the present day surface and located in layers containing bones of large mammals such as mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bison, horse, deer, and other representatives of fauna from the age of mammoths, as well as plant remains,” they write.

“The presence of vertical ice wedges demonstrates that it has been continuously frozen and never thawed.

“Accordingly, the fossil burrows and their content have never been defrosted since burial and simultaneous freezing.”

The squirrels appear to have stashed their store in the coldest part of their burrow, which subsequently froze permanently, presumably due to a cooling of the local climate.
Sugar sweet

Back in the lab, near Moscow, the team’s attempts to germinate mature seeds failed.

Eventually they found success using elements of the fruit itself, which they refer to as “placental tissue” and propagated in laboratory dishes.

“This is by far the most extraordinary example of extreme longevity for material from higher plants,” commented Robin Probert, head of conservation and technology at the UK’s Millennium Seed Bank.

“I’m not surprised that it’s been possible to find living material as old as this, and this is exactly where we would go looking, in permafrost and these fossilised rodent burrows with their caches of seeds.

“But it is a surprise to me that they’re finding viable material from this placental tissue rather than mature seeds.”

The Russian team’s theory is that the tissue cells are full of sucrose that would have formed food for the growing plants.

Sugars are preservatives; they are even being researched as a way of keeping vaccines fresh in the hot climates of Africa without the need for refrigeration.

So it may be that the sugar-rich cells were able to survive in a potentially viable state for so long.

Silene stenophylla still grows on the Siberian tundra; and when the researchers compared modern-day plants against their resurrected cousins, they found subtle differences in the shape of petals and the sex of flowers, for reasons that are not evident.

The scientists suggest in their PNAS paper that research of this kind can help in studies of evolution, and shed light on environmental conditions in past millennia.

But perhaps the most enticing suggestion is that it might be possible, using the same techniques, to raise plants that are now extinct – provided that Arctic ground squirrels or some other creatures secreted away the fruit and seeds.

“We’d predict that seeds would stay viable for thousands, possibly tens of thousands of years – I don’t think anyone would expect hundreds of thousands of years,” said Dr Probert.

“[So] there is an opportunity to resurrect flowering plants that have gone extinct in the same way that we talk about bringing mammoths back to life, the Jurassic Park kind of idea.”