These first two articles are directly about the drums of war; the third goes more to the underlying usually unspoken aspects of Israeli Zionist psychology and mindset.

CAIRO, July 14 (AFP - Agence France-Presse) Egypt signalled Saturday it was stepping up diplomacy on the eve of visits by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat amid growing fears of a regional war.

Palestinian officials said Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak would meet with Arafat on Sunday, the same day he is scheduled to host talks with the dovish Peres.

And while Mubarak will meet the two leaders who shared in the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to end the bitter Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a Peres-Arafat meeting remains unlikely, said Palestinian ambassador to the Arab League Mohamed Sobeih.

Analysts said the Peres visit and the increased diplomatic activity here reflected fears there were growing risks of an explosion of regional violence, with the failure of a one-month-old US-brokered truce to relaunch negotiations between the two sides.

More than 30 people have been killed since the US-brokered ceasefire was announced on June 13 and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced on Thursday Israel would resume its tit-for-tat retaliations to Palestinian attacks.

Mubarak is meeting with Peres despite the call by the Arab League in May for a break in all political contacts with Israel, as long as the Jewish state continued to suppress the Palestinian uprising or intifada.

Mubarak is waiving aside the Arab League prohibition "because he sees the situation as very serious and the risk exists that the area will be dragged into a regional war," explained Emad Gad, a researcher at the al-Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies.

Arab countries, including Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf states, were disturbed by the news, reported Thursday in the British publication Foreign Policy, that a military plan was submitted last Sunday to Israel's security cabinet for the invasion and destruction of the Palestinian Authority, inlcuding the ouster of Arafat.

Sobeih warned such a plan does not exclude Israeli action against Arab countries including Egypt.

"This worry has pushed forward the Arab countries, each on its own, to take quick steps. The Gulf Cooperation Council has called for an extraordinairy session of the Arab League, while Egypt has begun public and secret diplomatic activities," Sobeih said.

On Wednesday, Egypt's intelligence chief Omar Suleiman made an unannounced visited to Israel to see Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer. While three Israeli ministers, including Peres, have denied the existence of any such military plan, Egypt is clearly alarmed.

"Cairo wants to deliver a clear message to Israel that any operation against the Palestinian leadership, will lead the entire region into chaos. This will affect not only Europe, but will be harmful to all the countries in the region," Sobeih said.

Mubarak, himself, warned Israel last Monday not to threaten to oust Arafat and said it was an error to believe the intifada could be resolved by force. Egypt has also been made nervous by Israel's air raid against Syrian military position in Lebanon on July 1, injuring two Syrian troops and one Lebanese.

The raid -- the second in less than three months -- was a retaliation for an attack by the Damascus-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah against Israeli army positions in a disputed border area.

Mubarak's political advisor, Osama al-Baz, warned Saturday that "Syria would not be alone in the event of an Israeli aggression".

In an interview with the state-owned Al-Ahram daily, Baz said however that the risks of a war between Israel and Syria were "low".

"If Israel intends to launch military operations against Syria, it would pay dearly for its mistake because Syria cannot be alone in the event of an Israeli aggression", Baz warned.

Photo Caption: GUNNED DOWN IN GAZA: A friend kisses the body of a Hamas terrorist yesterday - shot by Israelis while trying to plant a bomb at the Gaza-Israel border. AP

[NEW YORK POST - July 14, 2001 -- JERUSALEM]: Palestinian paramilitary groups yesterday issued a chilling call to arms to fend off any Israeli invasion of Palestinian-controlled areas in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, The Post has learned.

The groups - Fatah and Hamas - have both been involved in terror attacks that have rocked the region for more than nine months, and brought the peace process to a virtual halt.

"The next days will be fateful and we have to be at the top of our preparedness to face the possibility of the invasion of the Zionist enemy to some parts of our liberated lands," read one directive from Fatah.

"The task of our competence will be not only to stop the Israeli forces, but to give them a lesson."

The directive then urges forces to prepare "thousands of Molotov cocktails" to hit back at armored Israeli vehicles, to place explosive devices along the roads and to prepare suicide bombers "who will be ready to die a martyr's death in the battle with the enemy."

Instructions also accompany the grim directive:

"Save your ammunition. Don't use light weapons against tanks and armored vehicles. Attack them only with Molotov cocktails. Create roadblocks."

And, the instructions urge, protect leaders of the Palestinian Authority "because the Israeli military might arrive at their homes and eliminate them."

Israel has repeatedly denied it is planning such an invasion.

Meanwhile, in London, a British newsletter that specializes in intelligence matters said the Israeli army will seek to destroy the Palestinian Authority's fighting forces in a massive offensive to start after the next major suicide bombing.

"Estimated Israeli casualties would be in their hundreds; Palestinian losses would be in their thousands," Jane's Foreign Report said, citing a source it said had seen the alleged plan by hard-line Israeli generals.

"By the end of the operation, the generals reckon that the president of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat, would have been forced to leave the West Bank or Gaza Strip," said the newsletter.

It said the aim was to force into exile or kill Arafat's close circle: "The 40,000-strong Palestinian armed forces would be disarmed and either dead or held in detention camps."

The report said the reason that Israel would wait until the next major suicide-bomb attack was that it would motivate the soldiers to be unflinching in their thirst for revenge.

The Israeli operation would be initiated by heavy F-16 and F-15 air raids - possibly preceded by an artillery barrage - on all the main Palestinian Authority command and control centers in Gaza and Ramallah, the report said.

It said that up to 30,000 paratroops, infantry and armored brigades would then quickly move in, with losses expected at up to 1 percent, or 300 men.

[Ha'aretz - 12 July] Israel's policy of restraint has failed not only in Israel, in the military sense. For the first time in many years, and against the background of what has become a chronic war of attrition, there are forces, mainly in Europe, that are no longer satisfied with the establishment of a Palestinian state. They now deny the very right of a Jewish state to exist within any borders. And if in the past such voices could be heard only from the fringes, today they are increasingly being heard from intellectuals, media figures and rightist and leftist politicians. Shimon Peres likes to talk of the support Israel enjoys as a result of its restraint, but the Knesset members who returned this week from an Interparliamentary Association conference report that they encountered a hostile atmosphere and genuine hatred, the likes of which they had never encountered before. Major newspapers and television stations, especially in Europe, have come out pointedly against Israel, in some cases using terminology reserved in the past exclusively for Nazis.It seems that when the Jewish people demonstrate weakness, particularly in their own country, all swoop down to attack it with the their beaks and claws. And Israel's crisis of direction, will and military ability is having a deleterious effect on the Jews of the Diaspora. In many locations in Europe, they find they are once again forced to contend with soaring and terrifying hatred, like in the days when the Jews did not yet have a state. Jewish schools are guarded like prisons and community institutions have become fortresses. Anti-Semitic hatred, more often than not camouflaged as "legitimate" anti-Israeliness, is once again rearing its ugly head, especially in the media. More than 50 years after the establishment of the Jewish state, which allowed Jews to stand tall in the Diaspora and caused anti-Semitism to go underground, it is once again hard to be a Jew in Europe. And this time, with the irony of history, the Jewish state itself is partly to blame.

Most Arabs in Europe are recent arrivals there whom one might expect to feel the insecurity of immigrants (a large proportion of them are not even citizens). They nonetheless, and by the thousands, very aggressively demonstrate their identification with the acts of murder perpetrated by their Palestinian brethren against civilians, including the terror attacks at the Dolphinarium and the shopping malls. But the Jews, most of whom are native-born and well-established European citizens, do not dare to come out against them. Israel, which in the past made them feel proud and bolstered their identity, is now, because of its weakness, having an adverse effect on their status and prestige. It appears that the Jewish state has not solved the problem of anti-Semitism, as the Zionist theories postulated. Recently, and particularly in the last 10 months of weakness and restraint, anti-Semitism has once again reared its ugly head - sometimes openly, but mainly in the guise of anti-Zionism and anti-Israeliness - to spit out its venom and hatred, most commonly in the countries of the European Union.

Europe has a great fear of an inundation by Arabs. The French, for example, shudder at the thought that Muslims might take over cities and districts in southern France. Especially great is their fear that fundamentalist terror, like the explosion in the Twin Towers, will arrive in their cities. The Bin Laden phenomenon, fear of which caused the panicked flight of the American navy last week (perhaps influenced by the film "Pearl Harbor"?) from the ports of the Gulf, has filled American and European hearts with terror. And on the other hand, the number of Jews currently living in Europe is tiny compared to the influx of Arabs and Muslims in recent years. But despite this, most Europeans, even in those countries such as Norway - with very few Jews, have thrown their support wholeheartedly behind the Palestinians. And France of all places, where opposition to the Arab presence is greatest, is where about one third of all violent anti-Semitic acts in the world occur.

The European Union has taken a unilateral, open and blatant stand in favor of the Arabs. And the media, in particular the British media, has taken an obvious and sometimes even malicious and anti-Semitic position against Israel. On the BBC - and not only on its "special" on Sabra and Chatilla - we can already hear frequent claims that the Arab suffering of today is the result of the ethnic cleansing (the most morally charged term in the Western world today) that Israel carried out in its 1948 war.

The denial of Israel's right to exist as the state of the Jewish people has become the stuff of legitimate discourse in all cultural salons and prestigious talk shows in Europe. Arabs, who are often invited to participate in them without any Jewish balance being provided (or in the presence of Israelis who share the Arabs' views), are not the only ones who hold these convictions. Never, since the days of the Nazis, has anti-Semitism reared its head the way it is doing today, cries that moderate man, Michael Malchior, Shimon Peres's deputy. In Norway, where he served as chief rabbi, Israel's Law of Return has become the prototype of "absolute evil" and Zionism an evil and racist movement. And all this has happened since the signing of the Oslo agreements, encompassing very broad circles of society, with intellectuals and government officials taking an active role in stirring up the muddy wave. This is yet another product of the "Restraint is strength," and "Our moderation has caused the world to identify with Israel" strategy. The world, at least from the way it has been responding lately, has chosen to identify with the murderers of children.

Mid-East Realities

www.middleeast.org

Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2001/7/284.htm