The following two (2) articles are from The Israel Project's The Daily Tip for June 11, 2014. After The Daily Tips is an interesting entry from Merriam-Webster Word of the Day for June 12, 2014
From The Daily TIP
Veteran journalists took turns at Wednesday’s daily State Department press briefing aggressively questioning NB 1 the wisdom and coherence of the Obama administration’s approach to a recently appointed Palestinian unity government – agreed to by the rival Hamas and Fatah factions – hours after rockets fired from the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip struck a major road in southern Israel. The Israelis held the new Palestinian Authority (PA) cabinet, which has formal jurisdiction over Gaza and is treaty-obligated to seize the illegal rockets inside the territory, responsible for the attack. Washington has committed itself NB 2 to working with and funding the new PA government. Veteran Associated Press diplomatic writer Matt Lee on Wednesday pressed State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki on how that position could be maintained in light of that morning’s rocket attacks. Psaki’s answer – that Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas had condemned the attacks but was unable to stop them – triggered another round of questioning. Lee questioned the geopolitical judgment behind supporting such a reconfigured and incapacitated PA, asking “if you recognize that [Abbas's] ability is extremely limited to prevent this kind of thing… how is it that you made the leap to go ahead and say, ‘All right, this is a government that we can do business with?’… if you think that this guy doesn’t have control over everyone who is either a member of or is backing his unity government, why would you do business with it?” When Psaki persisted in asserting that the U.S. would continue to fund the unity government, Reuters journalist Arshad Mohammed stepped in to ask why Washington was unwilling to use its leverage – “to stop dealing with the unity government or to stop funding it” – in order to stem the projectile fire. Mohammed suggested that the current policy, under which funding would continue despite the Palestinian attacks, signaled that Hamas could “send an unlimited number of rockets in and they can still be supportive of this unity government and you’ll still give the unity government and the PA money.”
Egypt’s Third Army has deployed the equivalent of a battalion of soldiers near the Israeli border to conduct counter-terrorism operations and prevent jihadists from targeting Israeli civilians – and especially civilian planes – with anti-aircraft weapons, according to a Wednesday report NB 3 published in the Times of Israel by veteran Israeli Middle East analyst Avi Issacharoff. The move was coordinated with Israel, and is bound to be read against a stream of news and leaks pegging Israeli-Egyptian security cooperation at unprecedented levels. Asaf Ronel, the world news editor from Israel’s left-leaning Ha’aretz, described the development as a “new level of cooperation between [Egyptian President el-Fattah El-Sisi] and Israel.” Concrete details have been emerging for almost a year of security cooperation in the Sinai Peninsula, and had been preceded even earlier by what appeared to be unprecedented military-to-military coordination. The Egyptians have also over the last year undertaken a systematic campaign to degrade the access that the Palestinian terror group Hamas has to the outside world, and to destroy the smuggling tunnels that the group used to import rockets and missiles that were subsequently turned against Israeli civilians. For their part the Israelis, along with Saudi Arabia and much of the rest of the Gulf, have expressed frustration over ongoing decisions by the Obama administration to deny counter-terror assets to the Egyptian military for deployment in the Sinai.
And finally
stoic \STOH-ik\
noun
1: capitalized : a member of a school of philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium about 300 B.C.E. holding that the wise man should be free from passion, unmoved by joy or grief, and submissive to natural law
2: one apparently or professedly indifferent to pleasure or pain
Obviously a Jewish (or Jewishly-aware) editor.
NB 1: State Department transcript of session at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2014/06/227452.htm#PALESTINIANS
NB 2: State Dept. Pressed on Hamas-PA Unity, Comparisons to Hezbollah in Lebanon http://www.thetower.org/0449oc-state-dept-pressed-on-hamas-pa-unity-comparisons-to-hezbollah-in-lebanon/
NB 3: Times of Israel report at http://www.timesofisrael.com/fearing-jihadi-attack-on-israeli-planes-egypt-sends-troops-to-border/
