Conflicting views: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) with US president Barack Obama in Washington last year. Their poor personal and political relations have played a part in the rift between their countries

The world clustered around Barack Obama on Monday – with one very notable exception. Leaders of some 40 countries, from Argentina and Armenia to China and India, gathered in Washington to attend the nuclear security summit convoked by the US president. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, stayed away.

Israeli diplomats attribute Mr Netanyahu’s last-minute cancellation to Turkish and Egyptian plans to discuss Israel’s nuclear arsenal. But his absence from an event intended to show US allies and partners rallying around the American president’s agenda was, at the very least, deeply symbolic.

The US-Israeli alliance, for decades the cornerstone of Middle East power politics, is in rocky shape. The Obama administration is angry about Israeli settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. Mr Netanyahu’s government is recoiling at what it depicts as Mr Obama’s unreasonable demands.

The tension between the two sides has become a story of personal snubs and policy differences even as the US and Israel profess their devotion to each other. As George Mitchell, Washington’s Middle East envoy, prepares to return to the region, US officials are considering eventually issuing outlines of their own for an Israeli-Palestinian deal – a turn of events Israel is desperate to avoid.

But at root, the differences stem from the two countries’ contrasting reactions to an issue seen by both as crucial to their national interest, and, in Israel’s case, to its national survival: Iran.

“The principal difference between now and previous administrations is the Iran problem,” says a senior US official as he discusses the current US-Israeli stand-off. “From our perspective, it increases the urgency of Israel keeping the international community focused on that problem and not on other problems. And the Israelis need all of us to be working together on the common goal of keeping the pressure on the Iranians to back off.”

Still, as diplomats and analysts study the underlying causes of the US-Israeli rift, there can be little doubt that the poor personal and political chemistry between Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu plays a part. Their relationship is clearly much more confrontational than that between President George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime ministers.

Washington officials say Mr Obama was infuriated by Israel’s announcement of the expansion of a settlement in occupied East Jerusalem during a fence-mending visit last month by Joe Biden, the vice-president. Little more than a week later, Mr Netanyahu paid one of the most ignominious visits to the White House of any major ally in recent years – out of sight of the media, left to confer with his team in the Roosevelt room while Mr Obama dined without him, and exiting the building without any agreement despite two meetings with the president in a matter of hours.

Mr Netanyahu also presides over perhaps the most right wing coalition in Israeli history, while Mr Obama is widely perceived as among the most liberal presidents in decades. The Israeli leader is seen in Washington as obstructionist, while many Israelis regard Mr Obama as naive, inexperienced and – worst of all – the architect of a US policy of appeasement.

Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu share the view that Tehran must be stopped from acquiring nuclear weapons capability, a scenario both maintain would destabilize the wider Middle East and embolden Israel’s most committed foes. But there is a fundamental, and increasingly visible, rift on how best to respond. Crudely put, the Americans view Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts as the key ingredient in building an Arab coalition to curb Iran. Israel, by contrast, argues that a lasting Middle East peace is only attainable once the world has dealt with the threat from Tehran.

Speaking to more than 7,000 people at last month’s annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the powerful pro-Israel lobby group, Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State, highlighted the propaganda value of images of the occupied Palestinian territories, calling for Israel to help change “the facts on the ground” to “refute the claims of the rejectionists and extremists and in so doing create the circumstances for a safe, secure future for Israel”.

She added: “Behind these terrorist organizations and their rockets, we see the destabilizing influence of Iran. Now, reaching a two-state solution will not end all these threats … but failure to do so gives the extremist foes a pretext to spread violence, instability and hatred.”

The US is also stepping up work with Arab states to contain Tehran. But as General David Petraeus, head of US central command, said last month: “If you go to moderate leaders in the Arab world they will tell you that the lack of progress in the Middle East peace process causes them problems.”

Mr Netanyahu’s government treats the rise of Iran – and its nuclear ambitions – as an issue so urgent it leaves the peace talks in the shade. On his last trip to Washington he told members of Congress that the Palestinians were not presently a willing partner for peace. He also encouraged the passage of unilateral US sanctions legislation against companies investing in Iran – despite the Obama administration’s objections.

The White House was not happy. “The more you resort to throwing your weight around in someone else’s backyard the less compunction they will have about doing the same,” says Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator now at the New America Foundation think-tank in the US.

In his own speech to Aipac, the Israeli prime minister brushed aside any suggestion that the broader conflict between the Muslim world and the west was linked to Israel: “Militant Islam does not hate the west because of Israel. It hates Israel because of the west – because it sees Israel as an outpost of freedom and democracy that prevents them from overrunning the Middle East.” — This is not a view widely shared outside Israel. “We are all saying to Israel that if the main threat in the area is indeed Iran then they are not on the right road for a solution,” says a senior western diplomat, stressing European and Russian support for Mr Obama’s position.

The logic sketched out by the US and its allies goes as follows: containing Iran requires an Arab coalition; an Arab coalition requires an Israeli-Palestinian peace process; an Israeli-Palestinian peace process requires Israeli concessions; and the Israeli concession required right now is a halt to new settlement building in occupied East Jerusalem. In her Aipac speech, Mrs Clinton also argued that, in the absence of a peace deal, demographic trends and other factors put Israel’s long-term survival as a democratic Jewish state at risk.

“They can stick to their position of principle on East Jerusalem but just because they can doesn’t mean they have to,” the senior US official says of the Israeli government. “And that’s what we are suggesting, just out of their own self interest – some forbearance there to make it possible for the Palestinians to be more forthcoming.”

Israeli analysts close to the Netanyahu government see things differently. “President Barack Obama capitalised on a minor Israeli glitch [the announcement during Mr Biden’s visit] … to fabricate a crisis in US-Israeli relations,” says Efraim Inbar, the director of the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Affairs. “This appears to fit Obama’s overall foreign policy approach of estranging democratic allies while appeasing anti-American dictators.”

Yet to other Israelis the fighting talk of the country’s political right masks a dangerous complacency. They note that Israel has become even more dependent on US military and diplomatic support than in the past.

“If you look at the threat perception in Israel, the threat is mainly considered to be coming from Iran. But it is also quite evident that Israel cannot deal with the Iranian threat on its own,” says Shlomo Brom, a senior analyst at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies and the former director of the army’s strategic planning division.

It is a view widely shared among US analysts. Israel, they say, is likely to need US assistance for any effective military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities – and to deal with the backlash certain to follow such an attack.

Meanwhile, there is considerable discomfort in Washington about some of Mr Netanyahu’s language on Iran, which he has likened in the past to Nazi Germany. “I don’t think it is in America’s interest or of anybody else who is a friend of America to encourage America into a collision with Iran,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former US national security adviser. “The issue really is how can one achieve an outcome which is going to be good for the American national interest, ensure Israel’s indefinite well-being and security, and some measure of genuine justice for the Palestinians?”

Many people maintain that Israel and the US will ultimately be able to patch up their differences and resume their traditional close relations. Powerful forces in Washington feel uncomfortable with the current tensions. Many conservatives view Israel as an ally unlike any other, a fellow democracy in a sea of authoritarian states. The administration’s stance has found opposition or only muted support on Capitol Hill, where Aipac remains a formidable force despite increasing divisions among Jewish-Americans themselves. Leading Republicans have voiced sharp criticism of the tougher line on Israel.

That kind of support leads some Israelis to believe Mr Netanyahu can, and should, defy US pressure. As Dore Gold, the president of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs and a former Netanyahu adviser, says: “The relationship between the US and Israel is not restricted to their governments … The people of the US are with us and Congress is certainly with us.”

One thing is clear: even as the diplomatic tensions mount, no one in Washington is questioning the American commitment to Israel’s security, a pledge described by Mrs Clinton as “rock-solid, unwavering, enduring and for ever”. She boasted in her Aipac speech that Washington was increasing the $3bn military assistance the US delivers to Israel each year. Nor does the Obama administration see much scope in reducing other subsidies to Israel. All the same, some officials are looking at one possible source of pressure: eventually issuing US “parameters” or guidelines for a peace deal.

The Obama administration is, in other words, shaping a policy more nuanced than its predecessors’: it seeks to blend a cast-iron commitment to Israel’s security with a much more critical stance on settlement building and the peace process. As Iran continues its progress towards nuclear capability, it is a distinction that seems unlikely to disappear. For Mr Netanyahu and his government, uncomfortable times lie ahead.

ISTANBUL — Since the Turkish republic’s founding 87 years ago, the military has stood as unquestioned guardian of secular democracy, intervening when it deemed necessary to keep religion out of politics in this overwhelmingly Muslim nation.

But now, battered by allegations of corruption and scandal, the authority of the once-unchallenged military is being whittled away by an increasingly assertive and confident public. The critics are a diverse array of democracy advocates, head-scarf-wearing Muslim women, journalists and others who complain that the military’s grip on power has largely benefited wealthy and secular elites.

Old taboos are collapsing amid the new questioning of a military-political order established by revered national founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Ceren Kenar, 25, a graduate student in Istanbul, recalled marching in the streets of Ankara to protest against a blunt military foray into domestic politics in 2007. She said that when she wasn’t detained, “that was the moment I knew Turkey had changed.”

Turks now freely discuss and criticize the military. Most remarkably, senior officers, once immune from any kind of prosecution, have been arrested in an alleged conspiracy to oust Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party from power.

A secret organization

The officers are accused of taking part in an underground organization, known as Ergenekon, that allegedly plotted to overthrow Erdogan after he was elected in 2002. The arrests have deeply demoralized and rattled the military upon which Washington depends.

The United States wants Turkey to continue with democratic reforms, but it also wants its military to remain a strong, reliable ally in the region. President Obama signaled the importance of Turkey — which borders Iran, Iraq and Syria — a year ago when he made it his first international destination as president.

After visiting Ataturk’s tomb, Obama told the Turkish parliament that the founder’s “greatest legacy is Turkey’s strong and secular democracy.” That legacy is at the heart of Turkey’s current power struggle.

Erdogan is pushing a major overhaul that would amend the country’s 28-year-old military constitution with reforms including changes to statutes covering the prosecution of military officers. In a recent poll, 58 percent of respondents said Turkey needs a civilian constitution compared with 20 percent who said it doesn’t. Three months ago, a law was passed limiting the military’s role to guard against external threats rather than perceived domestic ones.

The Turkish military is not clearly controlled by civilian leaders — unlike that of the United States, where the president is commander in chief of the armed forces.

“The Turkish army chief of staff doesn’t consider himself subordinate to the minister of defense. He does not consider himself subordinate to the prime minister, either,” said Yasemin Congar, 43 and editor of Taraf, the two-year-old Turkish newspaper that has broken most of the Ergenekon stories.

“In Turkey, the elected governments have never been the real power,” she said. “That’s what’s changing now. It’s kind of an unwritten law that they always abide by the military. It’s the founder of the republic, guardian of the regime, guardian of secularism. Now it’s changing a bit. But it’s a very, very hard process.”

Because of her dangerous central role publicizing the Ergenekon plot, Conger travels with bodyguards. She is careful not to take the ferry to work across the Bosporus, the beautiful strait that splits Istanbul and separates Europe from Asia, presumably for fear that she could be assassinated and dumped overboard.

Ergenekon is maddeningly complex and filled with pulp-fiction plots such as alleged plans by the military to blow up mosques to create chaos. Some Turks say the stories sound too fantastical to be real. But many others say that they ring true in a nation where the military has a history of orchestrating coups to oust governments it doesn’t like.

For many, the most startling aspect of Ergenekon is that it is discussed at all, and that the military has not been able to quash it.

“The significant thing about Ergenekon isn’t that it’s happening — because there’s some amount of truth behind some of these allegations,” said a Western diplomat in Ankara who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The significant thing about this is that they’ve managed to resolve these things up until now without any kind of crisis.”

Beyond more open criticism of the military, society is shifting in more subtle ways.

Symbolic change

Ataturk’s image is still just about everywhere, but when Turkey issued a new currency last year, the founder of the republic was put on only one side of the bill rather than both. The military no longer guards the parliament building, a symbolic change.

Still, the military has many fans who believe it has nobly guarded against religion undermining the nation’s secular character. Many here suspect, for example, that Erdogan wants to turn Turkey into an Islamic state.

Critics cite Erdogan’s push to allow women to wear head scarves at state universities — a major political issue here — and to make adultery illegal. He failed at both. His advocacy of taxes on tobacco and alcohol, both prohibited under Islam, also raised red flags.

Erdogan’s biggest political problem may be that he has failed to convince much of the traditional elite that he won’t take away their secular freedoms. One prominent critic, retired Brig. Gen. Haldun Solmazturk, said he doesn’t trust Erdogan to make decisions that will preserve Turkey’s secularism.

Still, many Turks are questioning whether Ataturk’s vision is appropriate in modern, diverse Turkey, a burgeoning economic and regional power with aspirations to join the European Union.

Kenar, the Ankara graduate student, predicted that protests against the military’s dominant role in society would continue to grow.

“The overuse of Ataturk created a generation like mine,” she said.

Syria is providing Hizbullah terrorists in Lebanon with the Scud missiles that traumatized Israel in the 1991 Gulf War, and a “Scud Crisis” is threatening to ignite an all-out war between Israel and Hizbullah, the Kuwaiti al-Rai newspaper reported.

President Shimon Peres confirmed the reports prior to leaving for his three-day visit to France.

Paraphrasing Psalms 120:7, the president said on Israeli radio, “Syria claims it wants peace while at the same time it delivers Scuds to Hizbullah whose only goal is to threaten the state of Israel.  “I am for peace; When I speak, they are for war.”’

Al-Rai reported this week that Israel warned the Obama administration “it will take steps” if the United States does not succeed in pressuring Syria to cease arming Hizbullah with the weapons. The U.S. State Department then summoned Syrian Ambassador Imad Mustafa “to inform his government about the level of danger if the missiles crossed the border.”

Israel reportedly sent warnings it would bomb Lebanese and Syrian targets if the long-range missiles cross the border into Lebanon. There are conflicting reports on whether several Scud missiles already have been delivered to Hizbullah terrorists. Despite the almost invisible line between Lebanese armed forces and Hizbullah, the Obama has administration shipped weapons to the Beirut-based government, which is heavily dominated by Syrian interests.

The increasingly open threats made by Syrian leaders and members of the Hizbullah terrorist group in Lebanon have led analyst David Schenker of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) think tank to warn that war may be on the horizon. In addition, he noted, a future war could include Syria and not only its proxy Hizbullah: in February, Syrian leaders said Syria would not “sit idly by” in case of another war with Israel.

Syrian President Bashar Assad recently told visiting U.S. Senator John Kerry that Syria was not arming Hizbullah with the deadly weapons, but the American government was not convinced.

“These reports are unequivocally false and are a product of the Israeli government that is trying to speciously create a raised level of tension in the region to justify a future conflagration of violence on their part, or simply to divert attention from the real issue at hand: Israeli settlements and expansionism,” Syria’s Washington embassy spokesman told Foreign Policy’s The Cable.

U.S. President Barack Obama, as part of his “engagement” policy, recently renewed official diplomatic relations with Syria even though the United States defines it as country that supports terror.

Iraq, which was under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in 1991, pounded Israel, including metropolitan Tel Aviv, with 40 missiles (pictured at left). In what has been termed a Divine miracle, no one was killed by the explosions.

Dr. Max Singer, a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies, writes this week that the only chance for peace in the Middle East is if the West disabuses the Arabs of two fallacies.

A founder and senior fellow of the Hudson Institute, Singer writes that within the Palestinian Authority, a debate rages between those who favor retaining the goal of eliminating Israel, and those who favor giving up that goal to gain peace and prosperity. In addition, many within the PA draw hope from the growing anti-Israel international movement that Israel can eventually be destroyed – either from within, or because it will be forced to make more concessions than it can safely live with.

If peace is to have a chance, Singer writes, Western leaders need to convince the PA side that both notions are wrong.            

Jewish Links to Land – Important Part of Peace
An important component of the latter notion is the continued denial by the PA leadership of the Jewish People’s ancient connection to the Land of Israel and Jerusalem. This denial precludes the possibility that Arabs will agree to the notion of an honorable peace with Israel.

For instance, Moslem leaders in the PA repeatedly claim that the Temple Mount – the holiest site in Judaism, where Abraham nearly sacrificed his son Isaac, where the two Holy Temples stood, and where the third is to be rebuilt – has no Jewish history or background. In the words of the chief Moslem cleric of the Palestinian Authority, Mufti Ikrama Sabri, “The claim of the Jews to the right over [Jerusalem] is false, and we recognize nothing but an entirely Islamic Jerusalem under Islamic supervision…”  

Similarly, Islamic Movement chief Raed Salah has said, “We reiterate for the 1,000th time that the entire Al-Aqsa mosque [on the Temple Mount], including all of its area and alleys above the ground and under it, is exclusive and absolute Moslem property, and no one else has any rights to even one grain of earth in it.”

Jordan, too, has not waived its demands for sovereignty and responsibility over the Temple Mount. Jordanian government minister Abdel Salam Abbadi said last week that Jordan’s 1988 decision to disconnect from Judea and Samaria did not mean that it detached itself from Jerusalem and the holy sites.

Groups Work for Jewish Temple Mount
To counter this approach – and thereby to help achieve the goal of which Singer wrote – various Jewish groups in Israel seek to cement the Jewish bonds to the Temple Mount. They visit the Mount whenever possible, attempt to secure rights for Jews to visit and pray there, arrange marches outside the Temple Mount gates, and raise Temple Mount awareness with events, classes, pamphlets, exhibits and more.

Among them are The Temple Institute, the Organization for the Renewal of the Temple, the Sanhedrin, the Organization for Human Rights on the Temple Mount, and others.

Petition to Netanyahu
The Organization for the Renewal of the Temple has initiated a petition/letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, urging him to add the Temple Mount to his new list of sites preserved as National Heritage sites. The letter states that though “the Temple Mount is the holiest site in the world for the Jewish people, yet the Muslim authorities, aided by Israel Police, systematically deny the right of religious expression on the Mount to all non-Moslems. On numerous occasions the High Court of Justice has upheld the Jewish people’s right to pray at the site, yet the police continue to prevent this. Furthermore, Jewish visitors are harassed and degraded… Please, end this travesty and allow Jewish freedom of expression at the Temple Mount. I urge you include the Temple Mount in your “Heritage Plan” of sites significant to the Jewish people.”

The Temple Institute, engaged in education, research, and development towards the Holy Temple in accordance with Biblical law, recently held its 29th annual Temple Institute Passover Symposium, under the banner of “Integrating Modern Technology into the Holy Temple.” Issues discussed included questions such as, “Will massive digital screens allow worshipers to observe the work of the High Priest from a great distance? Will computers be used to keep track of the sacrifices, public and private? Will special impurity-proof buses be used to transport Passover pilgrims and their Paschal offerings?”

* Israel remembers 6 million Jews Two-minute siren wails across country as Israelis honor memory of Shoah victims. Memorial ceremonies held at Yad Vashem, Knesset; PM Netanyahu, President Peres read out names of relatives who died in Holocaust

* PM slams world silence on Iran Netanyahu warns Iran’s genocidal intentions reminiscent of holocaust.

* Think Tank Speculates War Could Break Out with Syria The increasingly open threats made by Syrian leaders and members of the Hezbollah terrorist group in Lebanon have led analysts to warn that war may be on the horizon.

* US Expert Predicts ‘Oil and Gas Rush’ to Israel A US energy industry expert estimates that international companies may soon join exploration efforts for oil and gas in Israel.

* Gates: Nuclear Iran not inevitable In Moscow, Russia assures MKs it won’t send S-300s to Iran for now.

* US President Barack Obama warns of nuclear terrorism President Barack Obama has said the biggest threat to US security is the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon.

* Hungary’s right-wing opposition claims election win Hungary’s conservative opposition party, Fidesz, has secured a convincing victory in parliamentary elections, ousting the Socialists.

* EU sees upswing in antisemitic attacks The number of antisemitic incidents mushroomed in many western EU countries in 2009 due to an organized anti-Gaza war campaign.

* Clinton downplays Netanyahu no-show at summit Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denied the United States had been blindsided by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to pull out of President Obama’s nuclear security summit.

* Turkey to Challenge Israel, Support Hamas Turkey is planning a gesture that will challenge Israel and provide support to Gaza’s Hamas leaders next month.