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By Ofer Aderet, www.Haaretz.com

An ambitious international project led by two adventurous Israeli classicists aims to analyze and catalog every ancient inscription that has been made in Israel. Their meticulous work includes crawling through caves and cellars and Indiana Jones-style adventures.

Over the last few years. Hannah Cotton-Paltiel and Jonathan Price have spent much of their time far from the comfortable confines of the Ivory Tower, crawling through caves with flashlights in their hands, squeezing into crowded old basements and storage spaces, and rummaging through piles of old stones in private collections, churches, and museums around the world. Cotton-Paltiel, who holds the Shalom Horowitz Chair in classics at the Hebrew University, and Price, who chairs the parallel department at Tel Aviv University, are part of the Israeli arm of a unique international project that bears the scientific title Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae.

Work on the project began in 1999 and is expected to be completed in 2017. When it is complete, all of the ancient inscriptions discovered within the borders of the State of Israel will be gathered together in a single comprehensive scientific series. The seven-volume work aims to organize a sea of information that until now consisted of partial, truncated, and widely-scattered items; to track down inscriptions that have never been published; and to offer the widest range of contemporary interpretations for those inscriptions that are already known to scholars.

“This is a unique project, without any historical precedent,” says Cotton-Paltiel. Adds Price: “The idea has been around for several generations, but it’s being realized only now. The final product will provide an invaluable resource for historical research, one which has been lacking until now.”

Through Sisyphean and meticulous efforts combined with elements of Indiana Jones-style detective work, the researchers have managed to locate within Israel some 12,000 texts written between the 4th century BCE and the 7th century CE. “From Alexander to Mohammed, from the Hellenistic period to the Muslim conquest,” as the two scholars put it.

Some of the texts are dozens of lines in length; others have only a single word. They are written in more than 10 languages, of which Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Phoenician and Aramaic are only a partial list. They run the gamut from letters and receipts inscribed on bits of pottery, through names of deceased individuals written on ossuaries, to historic inscriptions that commemorate important events, people and places. For the contributors, this is the project’s most important innovation. It breaks with earlier practice by documenting, side-by-side, multilingual inscriptions that belong to the various peoples that lived in Israel. “Georgians, Armenians, Romans, Greeks, Syrians – everyone who was here was documented,” says Cotton-Paltiel, “not just the Jewish people.”

In similar projects to date it was the custom to sort inscriptions by language and publish each of them separately. “That division is old-fashioned,” Cotton-Paltiel says. “We present them all together, as they are, as an authentic expression of the different societies and cultures that coexisted in our region, and which deserve to be presented in an egalitarian manner.”

Among the inscriptions is one in Greek from the Temple compound in Jerusalem that bars gentiles from entering the Temple Mount, and a Hebrew inscription: “Lebeit hatekiya,” which was placed in the southwestern corner of the Mount, indicating the site where a shofar was blown to announce the beginning and end of the Sabbath.

“Inscriptions are an important and unique historical source,” explains Price. “They provide information in many areas that no other source can provide. It’s not just about documenting empires, but also about the history of family, religion, language, and culture.”

“Some complement, revise, or contradict information that exists in other sources,” adds Cotton-Paltiel. “There are some matters about which there is no history except from inscriptions – information that no literary source could give you.”

One part of the project involves collecting, documenting and cataloging all of the scholarly information that already exists about the known inscriptions. Another part is locating new inscriptions. In several cases, the researchers discovered pieces of the same inscription in different places, and assembled them like a jigsaw puzzle.

“We did not find a personal letter written by Jesus, but from our standpoint,” says Price, “any discovery made of a name we did not know before is an important addition. It is no exaggeration to say that we took people who were completely lost to history and restored them to the written record.”

Language mastery
The nerve center for the Corpus Inscriptionum project is a small and crowded room on the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University. An enormous filing cabinet on one wall holds all of the information that the researchers have managed to unearth about each and every inscription. Over the years they have combed through journals, encyclopedias, books, and monographs going back to the 18th century in search of details about the inscriptions.

Every scrap of information yielded by these sources about any inscription that was ever discovered in Israel is filed here by industrious students. Their qualifications include studying for a degree in classics or ancient history, and knowledge of the relevant languages. Cotton-Paltiel elaborates: “We are not talking about just anyone: These are young people, some of them from abroad, who have mastered Greek, Latin, Aramaic and Syriac, and the Talmud as well.”

The scholars are also attempting to photograph or else obtain photographic documentation of as many inscriptions as possible. “We want to see every inscription that can be seen with our own eyes,” explains Cotton-Paltiel. “It is not always possible. There are inscriptions that have been lost, have disappeared, or been broken, or that were sold on the antiquities market to private hands.”

To this end, the researchers enlisted two photographers who know the country inside and out, with whom they scour all the relevant sites where inscriptions are to be found. A partial list includes churches, museums, private collections, and warehouses. And not only in Israel: Thus, for example, Prof. Price found himself one day in an abandoned wine cellar in Oslo. The story of what brought him there begins at the end of the 19th century, and involves a colorful and eccentric man who became very famous in the port city of Jaffa in those days.

Plato von Ustinov was a Russian aristocrat who became a German Protestant. After getting to know members of the German Templar movement, he moved to Jaffa and built an estate there. Ustinov, whose grandson was the late actor Peter Ustinov, was a well-known antiquities collector. He lived in Jaffa for 30 years and enriched his collection with local antiquities. “The local Arabs learned that there was a mad Russian who paid good money for antiquities,” says Price, “and they would bring him thousands of artifacts that they found in burial caves and local excavations.”

In 1913 Ustinov returned to Europe, where he died a few years later. His collection eventually wound up in Oslo. In the 1970s it was traced to an abandoned warehouse by the late archaeologist and journalist Zvi Ilan. Some of the inscriptions were put on display at a local museum, but many others remained far from scholarly eyes.

“Everyone thought it had been lost. Nobody knew what had happened to that collection,” says Price, whose own research had led him to Oslo, where “they were very excited to hear that there was still someone who was interested in these inscriptions and wanted to publish them,” he recollects. “When we arrived,” Price adds, “at first they thought that we had come to try to return the antiquities to Israel.” After some persuasion, however, they were permitted to arrange and photograph all of the items, a task that took several days.

Off-limits locales
One of Cotton-Paltiel’s tasks was to contact all of the religious institutions in Jerusalem. She says that all of them, including the museum of the Muslim Waqf (religious trust), responded with great cooperation. The Greek patriarch, for example, issued a special permit giving the scholars access to all the churches and monasteries under his supervision, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Accompanied by a priest and an architect, Cotton-Paltiel discovered genuine treasures inside that church, the traditional site of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus. She says they found some stones with inscriptions that had nothing to do with the church, which had apparently been “recycled” from other sites—i.e., used to plug up holes in the wall.

The high point of the visit occurred when they entered a room otherwise closed to the public, whose key is held only by an Armenian priest. “He opened the door for us, and there we saw an awfully famous Latin inscription left by Christian pilgrims,” she reconstructs excitedly. She photographed and documented it, of course.

The instincts that Price and Cotton-Paltiel have developed allow them to easily recognize and weed out attempted forgeries. For example, Cotton-Paltiel has learned from experience that “there is no such thing as a complete inscription on a stone that is broken on all sides.”

Other cases demand more careful scrutiny. “Occasionally you read in the paper about sensations such as inscriptions connected to the brother of Jesus, and so on,” explains Cotton-Paltiel. “We will go check them out for ourselves. In many cases we found that in a place where other people found riches beyond the imagination, there were merely worthless stones.”

Recently, a front-page story in this newspaper included a photograph of an inscription that was discovered of late in a cave beneath a residential building in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood. The person who made the discovery is Simcha Jacobovici, a journalist and filmmaker who deals in archaeology. The article said that he believes the discovery is earth-shattering and could potentially change everything we know about Christianity and its founder.
As in similar cases, Price is maintaining a guarded suspicion for now. “I won’t believe it until I see it for myself,” he says.

“There isn’t a museum in the country we haven’t been through or that isn’t on our list,” adds Cotton-Paltiel. “They open the warehouses for us as well and we come there with porters, arrange the findings, and document them.” The Israel Antiquities Authority, for example, cooperates with them regularly. “We have unofficially become an affiliate of theirs. They feel we are a national project.”

In addition, she says they “are in contact with every museum in the world that has antiquities that originated in Israel.” Some of them, such as the British Museum and the Louvre, demand payment for the information they provide.

The sea is the only place they have yet to search. “We don’t have enough time, but there are loads of things there—inscribed jars and weights, for example,” Cotton-Paltiel says.

Renowned scholars
As one might expect, the project comprises renowned scholars in a variety of fields, who complement each other’s knowledge. Thus, historians work alongside philologists and archaeologists. The distinguished list of participants includes: Benjamin Isaac, professor of ancient history at Tel Aviv University; paleographer Dr. Ada Yardeni, author of The Book of Hebrew Script and designer of a Hebrew typeface that bears her name; Dr. Haggai Misgav and Dr. Leah Di Segni, both epigraphers from the Hebrew University’s Institute of Archaeology; and Prof. Alla Kushnir-Stein, an expert on Land of Israel history and epigraphy from Tel Aviv University.

The project’s digital database contains a record of the written and photographed material and its scholarly analysis. It already contains several thousand gigabytes of material. After the material has been collected and analyzed in Israel, it is sent to the University of Cologne, location of the second arm of the project. Leading the German branch are professors Werner Eck and Walter Ameling, historians and epigraphists who are considered the leading experts in their field worldwide. Working alongside them is Marfa Heimbach, who built an electronic database customized to the needs of the project. Funding for the project also comes primarily from Germany. The DFG, the German Research Foundation, has already provided some 1 million euros and is expected to continue to fund the endeavor.

So far, two of the seven projected volumes in the series have been published: the first section of the first volume on Jerusalem inscriptions and the second covering Caesarea and the mid-coastal area. In the near future, a second section of the volume on Jerusalem will appear, and it will be followed by, among others, volumes on Jaffa and the southern coast (between Tel Aviv and Rafah ); the Negev (including Nabatean inscriptions and inscriptions in the language of desert tribes ); Ein Gedi and Masada; the Jerusalem environs; and the Galilee.

The work on the Galilee region is the biggest and most important part of the project, encompassing the largest numbers of churches and synagogues—”a massive amount of work, a significant share of which has never been published,” Cotton-Paltiel says. Once the entire series has been published and the issue of copyright has been settled, it will also be made available online.

And what about inscriptions situated in sites within the Palestinian Authority? “At an early stage, efforts were made to bring Palestinian scholars onto the team of editors for the project,” responds Cotton-Paltiel. Despite the initial enthusiasm, for reasons not in control of either party, the cooperation “did not reach fruition.” Hence, she acknowledges, “At the moment our project is limited to the State of Israel.” In the future, she hopes, the project’s scholars or their successors will be able to complete the job also in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

By Nina Shea www.NationalReview.com

In March, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released its 14th annual report, which it is mandated to do under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. The report identifies the world’s worst persecutors and makes foreign-policy recommendations, which are non-binding, to the administration and Congress. Its decisions are based on the agency’s visits to foreign countries, and a wide array of other sources, including the State Department’ s own excellent annual compilation of worldwide religious-freedom violations. The commission is distinctive because it is an independent federal agency, and it is to make its name-and-shame lists and policy recommendations unburdened by foreign-policy considerations other than the defense of religious freedom.

This year, USCIRF named 16 countries as the most egregious and systematic religious freedom violators in the world and recommended them for official “Country of Concern” (CPC) designation by the U.S. State Department. They are:

Burma, China, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, (north) Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

I thought Afghanistan should be on the list as well and said so in my dissent, which is excerpted further down in this column.

Christians, Jews, Baha’is, Mandeans, Ahmadiyas, Rohingya Muslims, Yizidis, Alevis, Shiite and Ismaili Muslims in Saudi Arabia, African traditional believers in Sudan, Uighur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong practitioners, Sufi Muslims, Pakistani Hindus, independent Buddhists in Vietnam, Cao Dai, and many others groups and individuals are persecuted in these 16 countries. They suffer arrest, torture, imprisonment, and even death for religious reasons, as well as other pressures. All these groups are covered in the USCIRF report.

Christians are far from the only religious group persecuted in these countries. But, Christians are the only group persecuted in each and every one of them. This pattern has been found by sources as diverse as the Vatican, Open Doors, Pew Research Center, Newsweek, and The Economist, all of which recently reported that an overwhelming majority of the religiously persecuted around the world are Christians. Globally, this persecution is experienced by all Christian faith traditions from Pentecostal and evangelical to Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox.

Cardinal Kurt Koch, President of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, calls this the “Ecumenism of the Martyrs.” As the Cardinal put it: “While we as Christians and as churches live on this Earth in an as yet imperfect communion, the martyrs in their celestial glory find themselves in full and perfect communion.”

In many cases the persecution is at the hands of the government, as, for example, in China, Burma, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, but often, in places like Nigeria and Iraq, it is committed by religious extremists and vigilantes in the society who operate within a climate of impunity. In Pakistan and Egypt persecution is sponsored by all three — the authorities, extremist groups, and vigilantes.

Persecution is intensifying now in the Muslim world, as documented throughout the USCIRF report. Each year, the report’s cover reflects a signal event in the global landscape of religious persecution. This year’s bears a photo of Egyptian mourners gathered in central Cairo on October 13, 2011, in honor of some 25 Coptic Christians killed days before by the Egyptian military during a demonstration over an attack on a church. The commission decided it was important to single out the Copts. There are rising fears for them now that Egypt will be governed by Islamists, some of whom, notably from the sizeable Wahhabi or Salafist parliamentarian faction, have openly declared their intent of religious cleansing.

Perhaps there is no more poignant and symbolic an assault on Christianity as a bombing attack against a church full of worshippers on Christmas, or on any Sunday. In recent years, we’ve seen the rise of just such attacks on churches in Egypt, Iraq, and Nigeria. Nigeria’s Catholic bishops report that some 200 individuals, mostly Catholic worshippers, were killed in coordinated Christmas bombings in 2011. In Iraq, there have been 70 documented church bombings over the past eight years.

Turkey, a democracy and NATO member, often held out as a model for the Arab Spring, was put on the USCIRF CPC recommendation list for the first time this year.

This may surprise some. After all, Turkey’s methods of religious control and repression stand in contrast to the bloody, un-self-conscious crackdowns found in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and North Korea.

These days, Turkey uses more sophisticated, subtler measures that are resulting in the elimination of its Christian and non-Muslim minorities. The cudgel is a dense tangle of bureaucratic restrictions that thwart the ability of churches to perpetuate themselves and, in some cases, even to meet together for worship.

Turkey’s Ambassador Tan predictably protested the listing as “unfair.” More surprisingly, after the State Department was tipped off by a USCIRF commissioner who was appointed by Pres. Obama, assistant secretary for human rights Michael Posner “reached out” on Turkey to another commissioner, resulting in his changing his mind after the report was put to bed. The Turkey decision resulted from a new analysis that will stir controversy.

As USCIRF chair Leonard Leo explained, “Some of the countries we recommend for CPC designation maintain intricate webs of discriminatory rules, requirements, and edicts that can impose tremendous burdens for members of religious minority communities, making it difficult for them to function and grow from one generation to the next, potentially threatening their existence.”

In casting my vote to put Turkey on the USCIRF black list, I could not forget the urgent words of a senior Christian religious leader in Turkey, who, out of fear, requested anonymity: “We are an endangered species here in Turkey.” Despite ten years of rule, despite its revolutionary measures in other spheres, such as in the economy, and despite its powerful mandate from the 2011 elections, AK Party’s government has failed to take critical actions in favor of religious freedom. Specifically, it has failed to rescind the regulatory regime that is contributing to its Christian minorities’ steady decline into statistical insignificance, now numbering a mere 0.15 percent.

Turkey’s Christian minorities struggle to find places in which they can worship, are denied seminaries in which to train future leaders, are barred from wearing clerical garb in public, see the trials of the murderers of their prominent members end with impunity, and, above all, lack the legal right to be recognized as churches so that their members can be assured of their rights to gather freely in sacred spaces for religious marriages, funerals, and baptisms, and otherwise carry out the full practice of their respective religions.

Turkey’s laws, aimed at promoting extreme secular nationalism, also encourage a culture of animosity toward Christians, who are seen to undermine “Turkishness,” despite Christianity’s 2,000-year presence there. Even starting a discussion about the genocide of Christians that occurred 100 years ago is a criminal offense in Turkey. Armenian editor Hrant Dink, who was assassinated in 2006, was himself convicted of “insulting Turkishness” for trying to do so.

Last year marked the 40th year that the Greek Orthodox seminary of Halki remained closed and in government hands. The Greek Orthodox community now numbers less than 2,000, and remains unable to educate and train its clergy. Indeed, none of the Christians groups in Turkey is permitted to train its leaders in the country. The Armenian Church is anxious to train more priests, and, in 2006, petitioned the education minister to allow the establishment of a state university faculty on Christian theology including instruction by the Patriarchate. Their request was ignored again throughout the past year.

The Syriac Orthodox community continued to be denied permission to have a second church to accommodate its flock of 20,000 in Istanbul, where the group has gathered for security after having been driven by violence out of its traditional lands over the last century. In 2010, the Supreme Court had granted the state’ s treasury parts of the 1,600 year old Mor Gabriel monastery, a site that is a second Jerusalem for the Syriacs. In November 2011, the government removed from museum status St Sophia church in Iznik — where the first Christian Ecumenical Council had met in A.D. 325 — and turned it into a mosque.

In a recent interview, Protestant Association chair Zekai Tanyar expressed their frustrations with government meetings in trying to navigate the regulations to open a church:
These visits do not go beyond polite stalling. . . . Churches find themselves shuttled between municipalities and governorships in their search for a solution to this problem. Even if one municipality responds positively, often the state Governor does not give approval. Sometimes the authorities respond with ridiculous excuses saying “there are not enough Christians in the neighborhood.” So are we supposed to do head counts and form ghettos?

Another describes the relentless pressure faced by Christian converts, who are officially supposed to be legal:
They have to contest for every inch of legal territory. They are constantly surveilled by national-security agencies. They have been threatened, attacked, hauled into court on bogus charges, and even brutally murdered by ultra-nationalists linked to a nationwide plot to destabilize the Turkish government. It is a disheartening, and sometimes dangerous, environment in which to worship and share one’s faith. Although many Turkish congregations meet quietly and safely on a Sunday, no group anywhere in the country meets without carefully taking the measure of each new person who walks through the door.

The AKP government points to some improvements for Christians, including the addition of worship services allowed for a particular church, citizenship for the leaders of another, and accurate national-identity cards for converts. But, overall, the downward trajectory continues for Turkey’s Christian communities.

* * *

I believe that Afghanistan, too, belongs in the ranks of the world’s worst religious persecutors. Apart from the depredations of the Taliban, Afghanistan’ s government under President Karzai fails to respect religious freedom, and its violations are egregious, ongoing, and systematic, thus meeting the statutory standard for CPC designation. The State Department’s recent religious-freedom report on Afghanistan found:
The government’s level of respect for religious freedom in law and in practice declined during the reporting period, particularly for Christian groups and individuals.

An example was the razing of that country’ s last remaining church after its 99-year lease was cancelled, as the State Department reported last September. This event did not draw the international protest that accompanied the Taliban’ s detonation of the Bamiyan Buddhist statues in 2001, but, with respect to the status of religious freedom, it is equally emblematic.

Afghanistan, therefore, has now joined the lonely company of hardline Saudi Arabia as a country with no churches. The millions of Christians in Afghanistan, including some very beleaguered and oft-jailed converts, must hide their faith and seek the protection and secrecy of walled embassy compounds to pray in community.

Furthermore, we learn from the State Department report that, in addition to Christians, particular “targets of discrimination and persecution” are Hindu and Sikh groups.

The one synagogue, located in Kabul, is shuttered because Jews dare not venture there.

The USCIRF report itself states:
Conditions for religious freedom are exceedingly poor for dissenting members of the majority faith and for minority religious communities. The Afghan constitution fails explicitly to protect the individual right to freedom of religion or belief and allows other fundamental rights to be superseded by ordinary legislation. It also contains a repugnancy clause stating that no law can be contrary to the tenets of Islam, which the government has interpreted to limit fundamental freedoms. Individuals who dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy regarding Islamic beliefs and practices are subject to legal action that violates international standards, for example prosecutions for religious crimes such as apostasy and blasphemy. In addition, the Afghan government remains unable, as well as at times unwilling, to protect citizens against violence and intimidation by the Taliban and other illegal armed groups.

The Afghan government’s slide into extreme intolerance accelerated this month when, at the behest of his senior Islamic advisers, President Karzai publicly backed their statement that women should not mingle with men in workplaces, schools or other areas of daily life, and should not travel without a male relative, according to a March 6 BBC report.

For anyone concerned about human rights and religious freedom, the USCIRF report is unsettling but important reading.

— Nina Shea is a commissioner on the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom, and director of Hudson Institute’s Center on Religious Freedom.

By David Rosenberg www.TheMediaLine.org

There is a new Gulf War underway, but be careful what you call it.

Google unwittingly sparked the conflict in early May when it dropped the name “Persian Gulf” from the body of water separating Iran from the Arabian Peninsula. It declined to call it the “Arabian Gulf” or simply “the Gulf,” either, perhaps making its 250,000 square kilometers (97,000 square miles) the biggest landmark on Google Maps to go nameless.

Iran, the modern state of Persia, lost no time in launching an attack on Google. “Google[‘s] fabricating lies… will not have any outcome but for its users to lose trust in the data the company provides,” Bahman Dorri, Iran’s deputy minister of culture and Islamic guidance, told the Fars News Agency.

Google’s nameless decision is the latest in a controversy over the Gulf’s name that goes back to the 1960s and has ensnared everyone from the Asian Games, to the U.S. Navy, to National Geographic magazine. On one side is Iran, which has adopted the Gulf’s Persian name as a symbol of national grandeur; on the other are the Arab Gulf countries, who fear Iran is staking a territorial claim.

“The name of the Gulf has become a highly emotive controversy in the region, to an extent that can be difficult to understand,” Jane Kinninmont, senior research fellow at the Middle East and North Africa Program at London’s Chatham House, told The Media Line.

Google’s decision came only days after Iran’s “National Day of the Persian Gulf,” which is marked April 30 to commemorate the 16th-century battle in which the Iranian navy defeated the Portuguese. A spokesman for Google couldn’t immediately provide any comment on the decision or why it was taken now.

The dispute has taken on an added dimension as the two sides spar over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Saudi Arabia and most of the other Gulf Arab powers have sided with the West in seeking to rein in Tehran and have accused Iranian leaders of fomenting Shiite unrest in their Sunni-majority countries.

Analysts are not sure whether Iran is, in fact, stirring up trouble in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. But Tehran has certainly engaged in symbolic warfare. Last month, its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, visited Abu Musa, an island whose sovereignty is disputed with the United Arab Emirates. Earlier in the year, it staged naval exercises in the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that connects the Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, two bodies of water whose names have not attracted any controversy.

Iran framed the Persian Gulf name change as part of a bigger battle with the West and its Arab allies. “The efforts of the [global] arrogance and its Arab allies to remove the name of the Persian Gulf will result in its name becoming more durable,” said Dorri, using the government’s code word for the U.S.

Google Maps is no stranger to political controversy. It was forced to correct how it displays a microscopic island in the Strait of Gibraltar claimed by both Spain and Morocco after erring twice. A year-and-a-half ago, it created an international incident when a Nicaraguan army commander, relying on Google Maps, moved his troops into an area that was in fact in Costa Rica’s territory, taking down a Costa Rican flag and raising the Nicaraguan flag.

The name controversy over the Gulf, however, has no practical importance. To paraphrase Juliet, “What’s in a name? That which we call a gulf, by any other name would still be an international waterway.” Neither Iran nor the Gulf Arabs dispute that.

Nevertheless, history is on Iran’s side. As far back as the ancient Greek geographers Strabo and Ptolemy, it was known as the Persian Gulf or some variation of it. The 10th-century A.D. Arabic Christian writer Agapius did the same. In more recent centuries, mapmakers have employed the terms Arabian Gulf, Gulf of Basra, and Gulf of Qatif after a port now in Saudi Arabia.

Arab countries typically called it the Persian Gulf until the 1960s, but Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, riding a crest of Arab nationalism and unhappy about Iran’s then-friendship with Israel, lobbied for a name change. Arab nationalism has since receded, but the Arab Gulf has not budged on the issue.

“It’s useful for Iran to whip up nationalistic fervor against its Gulf Arab neighbors as a distraction from its internal economic problems and political infighting,” said Chatham House’s Kinninmont. “That said, the name Persian Gulf is well established in international usage — and the name of a body of water doesn’t have implications for sovereignty.”

The name-calling issue has put outsiders in an awkward position.

Tehran banned National Geographic from newsstands and barred its reporters in 2004 after it published a world atlas that called the waterway the “Persian Gulf” but added the words “Arabian Gulf” in brackets. Demanding a “correction”, Tehran promptly banned the American-owned magazine from Iran. The magazine surrendered.

Iran employed the same tactics two years later when the British news magazine The Economist published an article and map that referred to “The Gulf,” a favorite compromise for those who are trying to steer clear of the controversy. A spokeswoman for the magazine wasn’t available for comment, but an informal search revealed it was using Persian Gulf frequently, including in a 2010 article on the controversy.

The Gulf Arabs have not been above symbolic gestures. Two years ago, they pulled out of the Islamic Solidarity Games, which were being hosted by Iran that year, after they found out that the medals and official logo called the body of water the Persian Gulf. The Iranians refused to back down.

Even the U.S. Navy has annoyed the Iranians. Before it dispatched the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to the area, the navy ordered all personnel in 2010 to call it the Arabian Gulf. When word got out, angry messages began piling up on its Facebook page.

Google seems to have taken a different tack on its Google Earth site, which shows the planet’s natural contours with an overlay of human borders and place names. As of Monday, the waterway was called both the Persian Gulf and the Arabia Gulf, the latter placed below.

By Elad Benari www.IsraelNationalNews.com

The United States is worried that Shaul Mofaz and his Kadima party’s joining a unity government with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could result in an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities at any given moment, according to a report on Israel’s Channel 10 News last week.

U.S. government officials told Channel 10 News that they believe a Likud-Kadima joint government could make a decision about an Israeli attack on Iran at any moment and perhaps even before the U.S. presidential elections in November.

The report said that when the Americans believed early elections would be held in Israel on September, they thought it meant the attack in Iran would be postponed at least until after the election. Now, with the stabilization of Israeli politics and the current government likely to end its term on schedule, the situation has changed and the Americans are concerned.

According to the Channel 10 report, in order to try and prevent or at least postpone the Israeli decision on the issue, the Americans recently held marathon talks with Israeli officials at all levels.

Israel – like the United States, its European allies, and Gulf Arab states – believe Iran is conducting nuclear work with military applications.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently warned that as long as Iran poses a threat to Israel with its nuclear program, all options are on the table.

“I believe it is well understood in Washington, D.C., as well as in Jerusalem that as long as there is an existential threat to our people, all options to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons should remain on the table,” Barak said.

“I have enough experience to know that a military option is not a simple one,” Barak added. “It would be complicated with certain associated risks. But a radical Islamic Republic of Iran with nuclear weapons would be far more dangerous both for the region and, indeed, the world.”

Translated and posted by MEMRI TV Videos Middle East Media Research Institute

Hamas Minister of the Interior and of National Security Fathi Hammad Slams Egypt over Fuel Shortage in Gaza Strip, and Says: “Half of the Palestinians Are Egyptians and the Other Half Are Saudis” Al-Hekma TV (Egypt)

By Karin Brulliard, www.WashingtonPost.com

GAZA CITY — The housing stipends, promised by Hamas social workers after much of Umm Mohammed’s neighborhood was demolished in an Israeli military assault three years ago, never came. The water barrels pledged by municipal authorities seemed to go only to Hamas cadres. Electricity is a rarity.

And as Israeli airstrikes targeting Palestinian militants pounded the Gaza Strip last month, the housewife said, the enclave’s Hamas rulers watched from “their chairs” — lingo here for cushy seats of power.

“They say they are the resistance against the enemy,” said Umm Mohammed, 26, bouncing a baby on her knee. “Where is the resistance?”

The militant Islamist movement surged to a surprise victory in Palestinian elections in 2006 with promises of clean governance and a reputation for terrorist tactics against Israel, which had withdrawn from Gaza the year before. But after five years of Hamas administration, many in this besieged strip say it has lived up to neither. Hamas is fast losing popularity, and recent surveys indicate that it would not win if elections were held in Gaza today.

As enthusiasm for Islamist parties grows in the Arab world and prompts questions about what shape political Islam will take, some say Hamas’s path from violent opposition movement to de facto government could be instructive: The Gaza-based rulers, many analysts say, have become more pragmatic and more self-interested — a bit more like common politicians. Whether that means Hamas, an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, has altered its extremist ideology is far from clear.

Israel and the United States, which deem Hamas a terrorist organization, are unconvinced. Israeli military officials say the movement remains dedicated to Israel’s ruin, as stated in its charter, and is hoarding arms for future offensives. Although some Hamas leaders voice admiration for Turkey’s moderate and democratic Islamism to foreign audiences, others unfurl militant, anti-Israel rhetoric to chanting supporters.

Corruption and patronage

Ideology aside, the Hamas that won control of this Mediterranean strip, isolated by an economic siege and hobbled by 30 percent unemployment, no longer looks the same to many Gazans. It secured once-lawless streets, as promised. But hopes of Islam-guided fairness and an end to the graft that had tainted the tenure of the secular Fatah party have turned to widespread griping about Hamas corruption and patronage.

Hamas has hired more than 40,000 civil servants, and analysts say the top tiers are filled by loyalists. Members of the Hamas elite are widely thought to have enriched themselves through investment in the dusty labyrinth of smuggling tunnels beneath the border with Egypt and taxes on the imported goods. That money has been channeled into flashy cars and Hamas-owned businesses that only stalwarts get a stake in, critics say.

Street-level umbrage has risen in recent months alongside tax increases and a crippling power crisis that has caused 18-hour blackouts and gas station lines that snake around corners. It began after Egypt stopped providing subsidized fuel for vehicles and Gaza’s sole power plant through the tunnels. Analysts — and ordinary Gazans — say the crisis has been prolonged by Hamas’s refusal to import pricier fuel through an Israeli-controlled crossing.

Yet some diesel is making its way through Hamas-connected tunnels to Gaza’s black market, where it sells for as much as $30 a gallon.

“Can you smell that? Diesel,” one tunnel manager said on a recent morning as he crouched in the passage, a half-mile-long cylinder little wider than a water slide. Fifty gallons had just come through, a process the manager said was “eased” because one of the tunnel’s owners has a brother in government.

“Many aspects of the siege are imposed by Hamas,” said the manager, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fears of losing his job.

‘A police state’

If Hamas has not delivered clean governance, neither has it fully Islamized society, as some feared. Alcohol and belly dancing have been banned. But efforts to require schoolgirls to wear veils, prohibit women from smoking water pipes, or prevent “un-Islamic” behavior on the strip’s breezy beaches largely failed amid criticism from the public, which is generally conservative but “didn’t like Hamas or the government telling them how to behave,” said Gaza-based political scientist Mkhaimar Abusada.

Authoritarianism has come more in the form of quashed dissent and arrests of perceived political opponents, actions that even Hamas supporters concede have cost the group support.

“We became like a police state,” said Ahmed Yousef, a former adviser to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. “They became scared of any rally or demonstration.”

Hamas, eager to preserve its rule, has also become wary of provoking a new Israeli offensive in Gaza, costing it credibility in some quarters. Although Gaza’s cement-block buildings are papered with posters of gun-toting fighters, and Hamas allows Islamic Jihad and other militant factions to fire rockets into Israel, Hamas itself has mostly adhered to an unofficial ceasefire since the 2008-2009 Israeli offensive.

“The people did not accept that Islamic Jihad was left alone on the battlefield,” an Islamic Jihad spokesman who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed said of Hamas’s decision to abstain as Israel battled Palestinian militants last month.

Islamic Jihad’s performance — it lobbed hundreds of rockets toward civilian targets in Israel and lost 14 fighters — increased the group’s appeal, Ahmed boasted, noting that Hamas now has “different calculations and bigger responsibility. . . . It has a lot to lose.”

‘Policy incoherence’

Indeed, as political Islam rises in the region, Hamas has essentially abandoned longtime patron Syria, and a fairly public divide has emerged between Hamas hard-liners and those seeking a more pragmatic approach that might help relieve Gaza’s isolation.

“A lot of these groups are now having to do this difficult dance and straddle these two constituencies,” Shadi Hamid, research director at the Brookings Doha Center, said of Hamas and other Islamist organizations in the region. “That leads to considerable policy incoherence.”

Where that is heading is unclear, and Hamas leaders are noncommittal. Taher al-Nunu, a spokesman for the movement, said Hamas leaders restrained fighters last month because they thought Israel was trying to provoke them to learn about their weapons arsenal, not because they have abandoned armed tactics.

“We are not working by remote control like Israel wants,” he said.

But Nunu said Western powers have ignored symbolic moves by Hamas, such as Haniyeh’s decision to make his first official trip abroad, in January, to Turkey — a country whose electoral democracy and moderate Islamism are serving as a “model” to a growing number of Hamas leaders, Yousef said.

One month after that trip, though, Haniyeh visited Iran, another longtime Hamas benefactor.

Despite public discontent, Hamas officials seem unruffled. The movement’s grip inside Gaza remains near-total, in part because a unity deal with Fatah, which could lead to elections, is on ice.

That leaves Abu Khaled, an unemployed former shopkeeper, to seethe in his 11th-floor apartment in Gaza City. Khaled, 55, said he voted for Hamas because it promised change and justice, which he figured meant there would be jobs.

But only those who “pray in a Hamas mosque” get work, he said, adding that the movement’s leaders look as though they have gotten comfortable with their mini-state and have forgotten about fighting for Palestinian independence.

“We used to take taxis, now we walk. We were eating, now we are not. We must admit, things changed — but for the worse,” Khaled said wryly, speaking through coils of cigarette smoke. “Hamas is controlling us. They are responsible for us.”

By The Associated Press

Iran claimed Sunday that it had reverse-engineered an American spy drone captured by its armed forces last year and has begun building a copy.

Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, chief of the aerospace division of the powerful Revolutionary Guards, related what he said were details of the aircraft’s operational history to prove his claim that Tehran’s military experts had extracted data from the U.S. RQ-170 Sentinel captured in December in eastern Iran, state television reported.

Among the drone’s past missions, he said, was surveillance of the compound in northwest Pakistan in which Osama Bin Laden lived and was killed.

Tehran has flaunted the capture of the Sentinel, a top-secret surveillance drone with stealth technology, as a victory for Iran and a defeat for the United States in a complicated intelligence and technological battle.

U.S. officials have acknowledged losing the drone. They have said Iran will find it hard to exploit any data and technology aboard it because of measures taken to limit the intelligence value of drones operating over hostile territory.

Hajizadeh told state television that the captured surveillance drone is a “national asset” for Iran and that he could not reveal full technical details. But he did provide some samples of the data that he claimed Iranian experts had recovered.

“There is almost no part hidden to us in this aircraft. We recovered part of the data that had been erased. There were many codes and characters. But we deciphered them by the grace of God,” Hajizadeh said.

He said all operations carried out by the drone had been recorded in the memory of the aircraft, including maintenance and testing.

Hajizadeh claimed that the drone flew over Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan two weeks before the al-Qaeda leader was killed there in May 2011 by U.S. Navy SEALs. He did not say how the Iranian experts knew this.

Before that, he said, “this drone was in California on Oct. 16, 2010, for some technical work and was taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan on Nov. 18, 2010. It conducted flights there but apparently faced problems and (U.S. experts) were unable to fix it,” he said.

Hajizadeh said the drone was taken to Los Angeles in December 2010 where sensors of the aircraft underwent testing at an aerospace factory.

“If we had not achieved access to software and hardware of this aircraft, we would be unable to get these details. Our experts are fully dominant over sections and programs of this plane,” he said. “It’s not that we can bring down a drone but cannot recover the data.”

There are concerns in the U.S. that Iran or other states may be able to reverse-engineer the chemical composition of the drone’s radar-deflecting paint or the aircraft’s sophisticated optics technology that allows operators to positively identify terror suspects from tens of thousands of feet in the air.

There are also worries that adversaries may be able to hack into the drone’s database, as Iran claimed to have done. Some surveillance technologies allow video to stream through to operators on the ground but do not store much collected data. If they do, it is encrypted.

Media reports claimed this week that Russia and China have asked Tehran to provide them with information on the drone but Iran’s Defense Ministry denied this.

By Elizabeth Samson, Special To The Jewish Week www.thejewishweek.com

In a stunning about-face, and after decades of violence justified by excuses of being under occupation, Hamas in January admitted that Gaza is not occupied by Israel. And yet, the United Nations, which has long been reluctant to acknowledge Gaza’s change in status, is still silent on the issue.

In response to a statement by Hamas Politburo Chief Khaled Mashaal that Hamas planned to hold mass demonstrations against Israel inside Gaza to parallel those organized by the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, Hamas Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar declared such a protest to be irrelevant. Al-Zahar stated that while the West Bank is “still under occupation” and that all forms of resistance, including armed resistance, should be used in that territory, “popular resistance is inappropriate for the Gaza Strip.” “Against whom could we demonstrate in the Gaza Strip?,” al-Zahar asked. “When Gaza was occupied, that model was applicable.”

The international law of occupation requires that a hostile army have “effective control” over a territory in an area where its authority can be exercised, and to the exclusion of the territory’s established government. As foreign minister speaking on behalf of the Hamas government, al-Zahar is giving public credence to what has been a fact since September 2005 – that Israel is no longer in Gaza and that the Israeli government does not displace Hamas’s authority. The assertion that Gaza is no longer occupied is strongly supported by international law derived from the Geneva Conventions and legal precedent. For Hamas to state otherwise would undermine its own power and would be a profound display of the weakness of its government.

For decades, the notion that Israel is an occupier has been the rallying cry of the Palestinians, seemingly an almost greater raison d’etre for them than an actual pursuit of self-determination, as evidenced by the consistent rejection of every peace offer presented to the Palestinians and the unyielding rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel. While renouncing the language of occupation with respect to Gaza may be perceived as a concession to Israel, al-Zahar is actually demonstrating the strength of his government and boldness in the face of detractors in Gaza who are desperate for an excuse to continue to fight Israel.

There has been no official Israeli military or civilian presence in Gaza since September 12, 2005, when the last Israeli soldier left the territory and the government declared its specific intent to no longer occupy Gaza and withdrew all of its military and civilian installations. However, UN Watch, an NGO that monitors the actions of the United Nations, has brought further attention to the fact that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has refused to declare Gaza to be anything other than occupied. As recently as September 22, roughly six years since the Israeli disengagement, the U.N. authorized a mission to visit the “occupied Palestinian territory, specifically the Gaza Strip.” In addition, an official U.N. fact sheet on the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” includes the map of Gaza.

While it is not legally necessary for the U.N. to acknowledge the absence of occupation in Gaza – application of the Geneva Conventions and legal precedent have satisfied those requirements – it is politically important for there to be a recognized change in status so that Israel will no longer be held to the more stringent legal requirements of an occupier and to lend greater legitimacy to Israel’s acts of self-defense. Gaza should have the intermediate status of a “sui generis” territory – unique, of its own kind or class – under the control of its own governing authority for the period between the end of occupation and until the finalization of permanent status negotiations. And, considering that the law, the facts, and the leadership of Hamas all indicate that Gaza is not occupied, there is no legitimate reason to continue to deem Gaza to be under occupation, a legally and factually inaccurate status.

The purpose of the United Nations is “to bring about by peaceful means … adjustment or settlement of … situations which might lead to a breach of the peace.” However, continually declaring that Gaza is still occupied territory and not allowing for an intermediate status may only encourage violence because the Palestinian people in Gaza will feel that their voices are not being heard. Furthermore, by denying a change of status the U.N. is doing the people of Gaza a great disservice — it is denying their autonomy as they struggle to prove their worthiness as a nation among nations.

In light of the groundbreaking proclamation by Hamas Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar, Secretary Ban should abandon the outdated and inaccurate rhetoric of occupation employed by the U.N. for so long. The United Nations should now seize the opportunity to have the words and actions of the organization reflect its stated determination “to promote social progress” and extend “better standards of life in larger freedom” to the Palestinian people of Gaza.

Elizabeth Samson is a Visiting Fellow at the Hudson Institute. She is an attorney specializing in international law.

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Israel’s soldiers have witnessed miracles. They are defended from on high from unimaginable danger and unthinkable odds. We should support and be proud of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers who defend Israel, fight evil, and support what is good in the world.

Half a year after his release from more than five years of captivity in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, Sgt. 1st Class Gilad Shalit is being discharged from the Israel Defense Forces. Unlike other soldiers on their day of release, Shalit will not need to report to the Tel Hashomer Recruitment Base in Tel Aviv to receive his official discharge from the army, but will instead benefit from a quick computerized process from his home in Mitzpe Hila in northern Israel.

Shalit signed his release papers on Monday in the presence of an officer from the IDF’s Personnel Directorate. Upon his release, he will be transferred to the Defense Ministry’s Rehabilitation Division as a disabled veteran.

Shalit was freed Oct. 18, 2011, in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, in what some have called the most lopsided prisoner swap in Israeli history. Meanwhile, some of the Palestinians released in exchange for Shalit have apparently returned to participating in terror-related activities.

Omar Abu Sanina, who was among those released, wrote an instruction manual for terrorists in Judea and Samaria on how to kidnap Israeli civilians or soldiers: “You must avoid hiding the [prisoner] in barren places, in a cave or in a wooded area, unless it is a body or a head. If it is a living person, who must be brought food and drink at least once a week, it is preferable to hide them in a home, a farm, a work place etc.”

Abu Sanina transferred the instructions, which included specific methods of carrying out a kidnapping, on a memory card to his family in Judea and Samaria. The memory card was intercepted by the Israeli Security Agency (the Shin Bet). Abu Sanina, 31, a Fatah member sentenced to life in prison, was expelled to Gaza during the first phase of the prisoner swap.

Among other things Abu Sanina wrote his family for them to pass on: “You must try and procure resources, weapons and explosives, but with extreme caution and through the appropriate channels. Arms can be taken from the enemy, even if you must first use a cold weapon.” Abu Sanina emphasized that “in the first stage, a cell must be created according to the guidelines, its members must be equipped with whatever they need and the cell must train to carry out uncomplicated attacks.”

In order to maintain secrecy, Abu Sanina wrote, “You must inform us of the attack only after it is done, and only through coded messages. You mustn’t discuss anything in the open or give details; only face to face. The announcement of the attack will be done by us through the ‘Supreme Military Council.’”

The ISA on Tuesday also reported another case of terror activity by a prisoner released for Shalit: Daoud Hilou, 21, from Ramallah.

Hilou was convicted for attempting to sell arms, for which he was caught only a month after his release. At the end of March, an IDF military court sentenced Hilou to 44 months in prison. In addition to that, he will have to serve 17 months from the previous sentence he was serving before being released early as part of the Shalit deal.