Israel's decades-long rejection of peace is now spawning new worries on the Golan Heights
The Israeli army fired artillery rounds on Syrian territories on Friday after some of its soldiers on the Golan Heights' ceasefire lines were targeted by gunfire and mortar shells.
Similar incidents are not new and have happened sporadically in recent months, with future attacks on Israeli soldiers now becoming even more likely as the Syrian regime crumbles, the pan-Arab newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi noted in a weekend editorial titled The Golan Heights front is heating up.
"The novelty, though, is that last week's mortar shells were not fired by Syrian government forces. Rather, they were the work of Islamist jihadist groups."
The Syrian army has withdrawn two divisions with more than 20,000 soldiers from the ceasefire lines of the Golan Heights, a demilitarised area since the 1970s. They were then redeployed in and around Damascus in preparation for the "final battle" with the rebels, which some observers argue will take place within the next two months, according to the paper.
Now, if attacks on Israeli interests from the usually quiet Golan Heights become more systematic and more potent, Israel will seriously regret the "golden chance" that it had for over 20 years to make peace with its neighbours.
"As moderation recedes in the Arab world while hard-line Islamism advances … Israelis may pay the high price for that historic mistake."
Israel is going through an extraordinary phase of uncertainty, which is partly manifested in the amount of pressure it puts on the United States to make it refrain from providing the Syrian armed opposition with advanced military supplies, the paper said.
"Another aspect of that uncertainty shows in Israel's intentions to build another buffer wall, this time in [the Golan Heights] region."
The Syrian army's withdrawal from the Golan Heights area has left behind a security void that is being filled by jihadist groups. The most prominent of these is Al Nusra Front, which has pledged allegiance to Ayman Al Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaeda, the newspaper added.
There is a good chance that the operations of these groups will soon expand beyond mortar shells and gunfire.
"Buffer walls may help prevent the infiltration of militants and reduce the number of martyr attacks … but they cannot stop missiles and heavy mortar shells," the paper observed.
A good reminder of that is the number of missiles launched by the resistance from the Gaza Strip that have reached the heart of Tel Aviv and beyond.
"Indeed, the Syrian borders with occupied Palestine may soon be heating up, as the Sinai front and, earlier on, the Lebanese borders did before," the paper said in conclusion. "When that happens, Israel's walls are going to be of little help."
The rumour mill is not helping Egypt
One of the worst setbacks for Egypt today is the amount of false rumours portending doom and gloom, and requiring considerable time and effort from officials to prove that they are entirely unfounded, the Cairo-based newspaper Al Ahram said in its main editorial yesterday.
"Every day we wake up to a whole bunch of rumours about how the country is going down the drain," the paper said.
"The most recent example of what comes out of this bottomless - and certainly motivated - rumour mill is a purported conflict between the presidency and the army, which has forced both institutions to dedicate valuable time to respond."
The meeting last Thursday between President Mohammed Morsi and members of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) served to debunk all allegations of a back room clash between the top two institutions.
During the meeting, Mr Morsi said the army is "in the heart of every Egyptian", that it has endeavoured to protect the revolution and that it will always contribute to Egypt's welfare.
"That in itself was an apt rebuttal against sceptics and rumour-mongers," Al Ahram noted.
For his part, Col Gen Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, Egypt's defence minister and Scaf chairman, reiterated that the army will always be at the service of all Egyptians and will never "betray the people".
No reason to support North Korean regime
When North Korea threatened to launch a nuclear strike against the United States, a good number of Arabs on Facebook and Twitter expressed their excitement about the news, with the less scrupulous ones even wishing that Pyongyang would deliver on its sombre promise, wrote columnist Hazem Saghiya in yesterday's edition of the Abu Dhabi-based newspaper Al Ittihad.
These emotions are motivated by the same kind of anti-American sentiment that made some Arabs cheer when Al Qaeda struck at the heart of New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the columnist argued.
Only, this time, it is worse.
"[Back] then, there was a pretext for Arabs and Muslims to sympathise with the terrorists, because they share the same faith or cultural background. That pretext simply doesn't hold in the North Korean case."
Sure, some of the late dictators of Baathist ideology, like Saddam Hussein of Iraq or Hafez Al Assad of Syria, did not hide their fascination with the North Korean model, the columnist said.
"That was not a secret. But it is only in the past few days that we are starting to realise that Kim Il-sung's brainchild has something of a following among us," the columnist said.
* Digest compiled by Achraf El Bahi
