Jaffee Center For Strategic Studies

The Sabbath slayings of 21 Jews in an Istanbul synagogue triggered a Cabinet clash in Jerusalem on Sunday and intense speculation over the timing and target of what is foreseen here as an inevitable Israeli retaliation. "Look," commented one government official, "we as a Jewish state cannot sit idle and see Jews being massacred in a pogrom. One way or another we'll have to take an action. Where and how and what--this is up to us."

Israel condemned Iraq's invasion of Kuwait as a "naked act of aggression" Thursday and warned that if Iraqi troops entered Jordan, Israel would consider it an act of war and react accordingly. But otherwise, Israeli leaders took a serious but measured view of the latest round of war in the Middle East. And the nation remained calm.

Iraq may still be three to five years away from producing a deliverable nuclear warhead, Israeli experts say, but it has already developed missiles that can reach targets throughout the Middle East. Iraq's President Saddam Hussein, they say, is embarked on a "very aggressive" nuclear weapons program. "Hussein is trying to acquire all kinds of technology transfer from abroad to develop Iraq's nuclear weapons capability," Dr.

A Syrian pilot landed his MIG-23 jet fighter at an Israeli airstrip Wednesday, presenting military intelligence analysts with what could be a wealth of valuable information. The pilot set his plane down on a civilian airstrip near Megiddo in northern Israel about noon, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces said. He said the pilot, identified as Maj. Adel Basem, 34, had broken away from a training operation in Syria.

Israel on Tuesday launched a satellite widely believed to be capable of spying on its neighbors in the Middle East, a region springing headlong into the missile age. Government officials denied persistent reports that the satellite, called Ofek 2, carries sophisticated optics. The 352-pound probe is equipped only with communications and testing equipment, they said.

It's a sight from the heyday of the propeller plane, a dozen Douglas DC-3s lined up on a tarmac like old gray geese, ready to barnstorm their way into the next century. These grandfathers of aviation belong to the Israeli air force, which owns--and still operates--one of the world's largest collections of DC-3s, the twin-engine workhorses of World War II nicknamed "gooney birds" by American pilots.

Iraq's Scud missiles, with a 30-year-old design, are considered highly inaccurate and carry a relatively small payload. But today they proved capable of at least threatening to spread war on a vastly larger scale in the incendiary Middle East when Iraq launched several of the missiles toward Israel. Earlier this year, Iraqis tested the weapon with a chemical warhead for the first time, but it is not known whether they have developed an operational chemical warhead for the missile. The U.S.

As Palestinian and Israeli leaders grapple with the peace process, Palestinians living in the Palestinian areas are trying to figure out their own future. What seems clear is that the Netanyahu administration, like most Israelis, has yet to make up its mind about what they would like to see as the final status of the Palestinian territories. Sure, we all know what the Likud leader and half of Israel don't want to see: a Palestinian state.

A former senior Israeli military intelligence official asserted Thursday that the nation's spy agencies were a "full partner" to the United States and Britain in producing flawed prewar assessments of Iraq's ability to mount attacks with weapons of mass destruction. The sharply worded report by Shlomo Brom, a brigadier general in the army reserves, prompted one lawmaker to call for an independent inquiry into the performance of Israeli intelligence before the start of hostilities in Iraq.

Break the silence. This happens to be the name of a group of women artists from California who painted murals on the West Bank in honor of the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. It might also describe a small but growing willingness among Americans to have the Palestinians treated not as demonic "terrorists" who see heroism in each defeat but as an abused and dispossessed people entitled to their own state. An unusual number of new books on the Palestinians and their uprising, or intifada , might be considered a measure of this new mood.