Tehran Mayor Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf said Iran was reviled because of Ahmadinejad’s dismissal of the Holocaust as “a myth.” “We were never against Judaism; it’s a religion,” Ghalibaf said in an interview with Iran’s Tasnim News Agency last week. “What we opposed was Zionism. Denying the Holocaust is not part of our foreign policy.”

Another candidate, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, chairman of the Foreign Policy Committee of the Islamic Consultative Assembly, said Ahmadinejad’s repeated statements on the subject had provoked unnecessary tensions with the international community.

“We paid for it without having gained anything,” he said. “Why must the Security Council admonish us? Why must all European countries condemn us?”

The attacks on Ahmadinejad are in line with hostility expressed towards him on other issues by the Iranian establishment, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Statements by the official press and numerous government figures refer to the outgoing president and the man he is supporting in the presidential race, Esfandiar Rahm Mashaei, as leaders of “the deviant sect” or “perverted group.”

Mashaei, a former intelligence officer who serves as chief of staff of Ahmadinejad’s office, is a relative of his by marriage.

The two share theological views focused on the imminent coming of the Shiite Messiah, putting them at odds with the clerical establishment in Iran. However, Mashei has made surprisingly conciliatory statements about the Jewish state.

“Iranians are friends of all people in the world, even Israelis,” he has said. “Iran is a friend of the nation in the United States and in Israel and this is an honor.”

Hardliners in Tehran are also determined to block the candidacy of a former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is seen as a leader of the reformist camp and a backer of the massive demonstrations that followed the 2009 elections.

The 78-year-old cleric surprised Iranians when he filed his candidacy last week at the last minute. It is not clear whether the moderate figure will be among the candidates chosen by the 12-member Guardians Council, which will publish a short list of approved candidates on Tuesday.

If he is permitted to run, analysts see him drawing widespread support among those disaffected from the regime. Rafsanjani advocates improved relations with the West, the freeing of political prisoners, and economic liberalization. His position on the nuclear question is not clear, but decisions on that issue rest more with the Supreme Leader than the president.

A senior Israeli intelligence official, Brig. Gen. Itai Brun, told a security conference Tuesday that “in our assessment, the (Syrian) regime has used, and is using, chemical weapons.”

Israel has warned it will take action if it discovers Syria has transferred chemical weapons to “hostile forces,” an apparent reference to Hezbollah or jihadi militias battling the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, but it has never issued warnings regarding the regime’s use of such weapons against the rebels.

However, the United States has issued such warnings: President Barack Obama cautioned the Assad regime in a speech last month, “We will not tolerate the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people. … The world is watching, and we will hold you accountable.”

Gen. Brun, who heads the research department of Military Intelligence, said the Syrian army had used lethal chemicals, probably based on Sarin nerve gas, against rebels “on a number of occasions”. Photographs, he said, had shown victims foaming from the mouth and with decreased pupil size, signs of a chemical attack.

Brun said the absence of international condemnation “could signal that such use is legitimate.” His remarks are the first time an Israeli official has given backing to charges of chemical warfare emanating from Syria.

Hagel said two days ago that U.S. intelligence agencies are still assessing whether chemical weapons were used in Syria. “The Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons would be a game changer,” he said. There was no immediate American reaction to Brun’s statement.

The aim of Hagel’s visit was to coordinate the positions of Jerusalem and Washington, particularly on Iran, and to assure Israel of America’s support by an infusion of weaponry.

This includes tankers for midair refueling, which would help sustain an attack on Iran by the Israeli air force, as well as the V-22 Osprey, an aircraft capable of vertical lift-off like a helicopter and the high-speed flight of a conventional aircraft. The Osprey could be useful for rescuing downed pilots in Iran or for inserting special forces behind Hezbollah lines if war breaks out with Lebanon.

Israeli commentators see Washington’s gift as coming with strings attached.

“The military and diplomatic aid from the United States, which is slated to grow, will also require Jerusalem to coordinate fully with Washington in the most sensitive matter, the handling of the Iranian nuclear threat,” wrote Ha’artez’s military correspondent Amos Harel. “[This] will limit Israel’s ability to act independently on this issue despite the lip service paid by Hagel and U.S. President Barack Obama a month before him to Israel’s right to act independently to protect itself.”

The Mouab website quoted Syrian opposition sources as saying the Israeli embassy in Jordan recently contacted members of the Syrian opposition living in Jordan to invite them for “consultation” inside the embassy. Some of the Syrians refused outright to meet with the Israelis while others agreed to meet with them outside the embassy.

The Mouab report was cited by the Times of Israel, which noted there was no confirmation from other sources.

An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, Yigal Palmor, declined comment. “As a matter of principle, we do not comment on such rumors,” he said.

Meetings were reportedly held between opposition representatives and the Israeli negotiators in upscale restaurants and hotels in Amman. The Israelis, who were said to speak fluent Arabic, are believed to have explored the creation of a buffer zone on the Syrian side of the border with the Golan Heights.

There have been frequent skirmishes in the area in recent months between Syrian army troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and forces aligned with the opposition, including Jihadists. Israel would be interested in seeing relatively moderate, non-Islamic opposition groups hold the territory along the border so as to preserve the calm that has prevailed there for the past 40 years and prevent the Jihadists from turning their guns on Israel.

Israel has set up a field hospital on the border and for the past few months has been treating wounded opposition fighters, hospitalizing the more seriously wounded inside Israel. At the same time, Israeli troops, which have reinforced the border, are firing into Syria, generally at Syrian army positions, whenever shells or bullets hit inside Israeli territory.

However, Israel is more concerned about Jihadi militias entrenching themselves along the border than about the Syrian army.

Israel had established a buffer zone in Lebanon in 1982, which was administered by the largely Christian South Lebanese Army, a force organized and backed by Israel. The zone collapsed when Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000.

Additionally, 200 troops from the First Armored Division have been ordered to Jordan to reinforce the few dozen American soldiers, mostly Special Forces, who have been stationed near the Syrian border for the past year alongside Jordanian forces.

A Defense Department official told CNN the deployment will give the United States the ability to “potentially form a joint task force for military operations, if ordered.” The decision by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is among signs of American readiness to intervene in Syria. The Pentagon had drawn up plans to send in up to 20,000 troops to prevent Syria’s large reserves of chemical weapons from falling into the hands of radical elements.

“Long live the descendants of apes and pigs,” Khalid Muntasir sarcastically wrote in the daily al-Watan, a bold jab at Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi who famously referred to Jews as descendants of apes and pigs in a widely seen video.

Muntasir based his column on the recent establishment of a foundation in the United States aimed at encouraging research in the life sciences by awarding prize winners $3 million each, compared to $1.1 million that goes with a Nobel Prize.

The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Foundation was established by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook; Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google; and Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire and Internet investor.

All three are Jewish, Muntasir noted.

“Who is more conscionable, moral, and loves life and his fellow man? Is it these three Jews who contribute to science, health, happiness, and the improvement of life, or [al Qaeda leaders] bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar?” Muntasir asked in his column according to the Middle East Media Research Institute, which monitors the press in the Middle East.

He compared the life-changing scholarship pursued by the scientific award winners with the scholarship of “those whom (Muslims) call scholars merely because they memorized 100 old books and can recite them without interpreting or even understanding them.”

While reading an article about the ceremony at which the first 11 prize winners were awarded $33 million for their work in fields like molecular biology and genetics, wrote Muntasir, he also watched a video from a friend showing a lecture by “an important [Muslim] speaker” on the benefits of having a beard for treating impotence.

“I closed the article, shut the computer, sighed and said: ‘It’s no use. … The voice of the sheikh in the neighboring mosque rose and echoed as he cursed the Jews, descendants of apes and pigs … while the worshipers rejoiced.’”

The flow came from the first of two enormous gas fields discovered off Israel’s coast in the past three years. The two fields, known as Tamar and Leviathan, are sufficient to supply Israel for 150 years, according to Bloomberg Business Week.

The Bank of Israel estimated that the flow this year from Tamar, the smaller of the two fields, would contribute one percent to Israel’s gross domestic product. Overall, the bank expects Israel’s economy to grow 3.8 percent this year.

The field is located 56 miles west of the Haifa port. The Leviathan field is slated to come online in 2016. The long-term value of the fields at today’s prices has been estimated at about $240 billion. More than half of profits are to be paid in taxes to the Israeli government.

“This is the beginning of a new era,” Isaac Tshuva, controlling shareholder of Delek Group Ltd., which holds a major stake in Tamar, told Business Week. “The Israeli economy will be able to exploit natural gas environmentally, geopolitically, socially and economically.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Business Week in an emailed statement, “We are taking a major step toward energy independence.”

Noble Energy of Houston is the majority shareholder in the enterprise, holding 36 percent of shares compared to Tshuva’s group, which holds 31 percent. Two smaller Israeli companies are also partners.

The government has not yet decided whether to allocate some of the gas for export or to use it only for domestic needs.

If a substantial portion is designated for export, a host of geopolitical factors come into play, including who gets it, at what rate, and what the political implications are.

Jordan and the West Bank are potential customers, since the rates will likely be substantially less than what they pay now for energy. Israel has received about 40 percent of its natural gas from Egypt, but in the past two years the pipeline in Sinai has been blown up more than a dozen times by militants, forcing Israel to import gas from elsewhere.

Israel’s own offshore infrastructure will be vulnerable to attacks and the Israeli navy and air force have already made preparations to meet them.

Haaretz’s editor-in-chief Aluf Benn suggested in a recent column that Netanyahu has not yet given up on an arrangement with Assad if the Syrian dictator survives the current uprising in his country.

Whereas President Barack Obama said at their joint press conference in Jerusalem last week that “Assad must go,” Netanyahu confined himself to denouncing the carnage in Syria and warning about chemical weapons falling into radical Islamic hands.

“For the past three years Netanyahu was Assad’s silent ally,” Benn wrote. “[Israel] made no deterrent military moves, did not openly support the Syrian opposition and did not even use the horrors in Syria for obligatory propaganda.”

The Syrian border has been the quietest of Israel’s borders since the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War four decades ago. There is concern in Israel that this might change drastically if the current regime falls and is replaced by anarchy that gives free reign to radical Islamic groups.

The mooted deal with Syria was first reported in Yediot Aharonot last year but Netanyahu’s office denied that Israel ever agreed to a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights, which was captured in 1967 during the Six Day War.

However, one of the Israelis involved in the indirect talks, Brig. Gen. (res.) Michael Herzog, confirmed that they took place.

Two American mediators—Dennis Ross, who was then a special assistant on the Middle East to Obama, and Frederic Hof, a former State Department official—had traveled between Damascus and Jerusalem in 2010 and 2011.

The Arab Spring and the uprising in Syria itself put an end to their mission.

Benn wrote in his column that the two said Assad was amenable, although details on border demarcations and security arrangements had not yet been discussed. Benn quoted an American source as saying, “It was very close.”

Meanwhile, the Israeli army has set up a field hospital on the Golan border, which for several weeks has been providing medical assistance to wounded Syrians, apparently without reference to which side they are on in the civil war.

Shalom happened to be the first word Obama spoke on Israeli soil as president, but all of the words that came afterwards only increased enthusiasm for him among Israeli reporters and commentators—an enthusiasm they found astonishing.

Obama was regarded by most of the Israeli media and public as distant, emotionally indifferent, and a grudging ally during his first term despite the financial and political assistance his administration bestowed on Israel. His tense, dour relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemed to extend to Israel itself.

However, his arrival speech, sprinkled with Hebrew phrases and lavish praise of the Jewish state and delivered with a friendly demeanor Israelis had not seen before, quickly won them over.

“Apparently we need a presidential visit from time to time to remind us how provincial we are,” wrote Sima Kadmon, a senior political writer for Yediot Ahronot. “A bit of informality, a few jokes, a few words in Hebrew, and we’re flooded with love for someone who suddenly seems as if he likes us.”

Kadmon and her fellow journalists had not abandoned their critical distance entirely. “Obama is here to win trust,” she wrote. “If he wants to pressure Netanyahu into a peace process, nothing will happen without trust.”

However, she permitted herself to refer to the American president with the broad smile as “a hunk.” Ma’ariv newspaper noted that differences still existed between the two leaders about the Palestinian issue and when the “red line” with Iran would be crossed, possibly triggering military action against its nuclear facilities.

Although in the past Obama had referred to Israel’s establishment largely in the context of the Holocaust, as a place of refuge, this time, he repeatedly made reference to Israel’s ancient roots in the land and its Biblical heritage.

“We heard those words,” wrote Keinon. “Our enemies heard those words.”

Writing in Ma’ariv, Ben-Dror Yamini said that Obama had won Israel’s trust by not choosing to hector it about West Bank settlements as he often did in the past, even though he has plainly not abandoned his views about their negative effect.

“Peace is psychological, a matter of trust,” wrote Yamini. “It’s not clear whether there’s any chance [for advancing the peace process with the Palestinians] but what is clear is that only an American president and administration regarded as friends can accomplish something.”

Keinon noted that during Obama’s first term the president seemed to feel the need to avoid embracing Israel and demonstrate even-handedness if he wished to promote regional peace. This attitude increased Israel’s sense of isolation.

“We want to be accepted, so want to be loved,” Keinon wrote. “Obama landed and showed us love.”

“The rocket battles, successful or not, during Pillar of Defense have been fully reconstructed and analyzed, interception after interception, and the results are unambiguous,” wrote Uzi Rubin in Haaretz. “The success rate matches the defense establishment statements.”

The success of the system was widely seen as a game changer that virtually neutralized the single effective weapon in Hamas’ arsenal: rockets. Hamas fired more than 1,500 rockets into Israel during the weeklong skirmish and it and Hezbollah reportedly have thousands more in reserve.

The Iron Dome radar is capable of detecting a rocket’s likely impact point within moments of liftoff. If the rocket is heading for an open field or a park within a built-up area, the Iron Dome battery will ignore it. Of the rockets fired during the November battle, two-thirds were thus ignored.

Time magazine reported Israeli officials saying at the time that 90 percent of incoming rockets had been destroyed while then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said “more than 80 percent” had been intercepted.

No precise breakdown has yet been given. Rubin wrote that Israel “reported that more than 80 percent of the rockets aimed at built-up areas were intercepted and destroyed in the air.”

There were only two fatal impacts despite the large number of rockets fired: three were killed in a house and one was hit in an open field.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Theodore Postol has studied American missile interception systems. He determined in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War that the success rate of the much-vaunted Patriot anti-missile system “could have been less than 10 percent, perhaps even zero,” the BBC reported.

Rubin wrote that Postol based his judgment about the Iron Dome system on videos filmed by civilians on their smart phones and on admittedly incomplete information.

Postol’s claim “bears no resemblance to real scientific research,” Rubin said.

Citing figures of the total number of rockets fired by Hamas provided by the terrorist organization and Israel, Rubin is unclear how Postol can reconcile his claims to the data we now know.

“According to Defense Ministry figures, about 480 rockets were about to fall in built-up areas,” Rubin wrote. “If only 10 percent of them were intercepted, where did the nearly 430 rockets that apparently fell nowhere, at least not in one piece, vanish?”

Israel is rushing more Iron Dome batteries into production and upgrading the ones it already has in preparation for a possible outbreak of hostilities with Hezbollah.

An Iron Dome battery was deployed at Ben Gurion Airport for President Barack Obama’s inspection upon his arrival Wednesday.

Wang, unlike his six compatriots, intends to study for the rabbinate and return to his native city of Kaifeng on the Yellow River. He would become the first spiritual leader in more than 200 years of an ancient, almost forgotten, Chinese Jewish community that has virtually disappeared through assimilation.

According to scholars, Jewish merchants likely from India or Persia who settled in the town, which was located on a branch of the Silk Road, probably founded the community about 1,000 years ago.

At its peak, the community is said to have numbered 5,000 people. A synagogue known as the Temple of Purity and Goodness was built along with a study hall, a ritual bath, and a communal kitchen in 1163. It was eventually destroyed in a flood.

After centuries as a coherent group, the Jewish community dwindled through intermarriage, particularly after the death of its last rabbi in the 19th Century. There is no longer a Jewish community as such in the Kaifeng metropolitan area where nearly five million persons live.

However, about 1,000 residents regard themselves through family tradition as descendants of the ancient Jewish community. Although they are indistinguishable in appearance from the other Chinese around them, many retain Jewish customs handed down by their elders, like not eating pork.

Wang, 26, says that his Jewish first name,Yaacov, was given him by his grandfather. “My grandparents always told us that we were descendents of the Jews,” he told Haaretz. “I wanted to know more.”

The arrival in Kaifeng of Jewish tourists from the West has sharpened interest among the descendants in their Jewish roots in the past two decades. About a dozen of them have begun meeting on Sabbath eve each week for a prayer service but their knowledge of Jewish prayer is scant.

The trip to Israel by the seven young men, all in their 20s, was facilitated by Shavei Israel, a non-profit organization based in Jerusalem which seeks to locate traces of “lost” Jewish communities around the world and reconnect them to the religion.

“It is the closing of a historical circle,” the organization’s director, Michael Freund told Haaretz following completion of the group’s conversion process.

One of the converts, Xue Fei—known today by the Hebrew name Yonatan—had practiced dentistry in Kaifeng and said he wants to become certified as a dentist in Israel.

“I feel as if I have been reborn,” he told Haaretz. The seven learned Hebrew and studied religious texts in a yeshiva in a course devised especially for them in Israel. Six underwent circumcision (the seventh was already circumcised). They expressed readiness to undertake army service and voiced hopes of finding suitable wives, preferably from the large community of Persian Jews in Israel in acknowledgement of their own presumed Persian heritage.

Syrian state TV confirmed Wednesday an Israeli airstrike on a military site near Damascus, according to the Associated Press. U.S. officials have reported the strike, but did not disclose the location, according to the AP.

The attacked weapons delivery appears to be an attempt by embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to arm Hezbollah with SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles, according to the Israel Project (TIP).

“Israeli officials have been warning for months, and in increasingly explicit language, that Jerusalem will not allow the transfer of Syria’s advanced weapons including and especially chemical and biological weapons, to terrorist groups,” TIP noted in a press release.

Israeli officials told a group of reporters at a TIP briefing that Jerusalem is determined to prevent Assad from arming the violent militant group.

The reported strike came days after Israeli Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom said in a radio interview that Israel would not tolerate the transfer of chemical or biological weapons from Syria to Hezbollah.

“It would be crossing a line that would demand a different approach, including even action,” he said.

Military officials later said Israel would also block the transfer of advanced weapons systems such as state-of-the-art Soviet anti-aircraft missiles in Syria’s possession or land-to-sea missiles, which would endanger gas-exploration rigs off Israel’s shores and curb Israeli naval patrols off Lebanon.

Reuters quoted a Western diplomat and anonymous security sources as saying planes had attacked a target near Lebanon’s border with Syria. Agence France Presse quoted a security source as saying the target was a weapons convoy.

Lebanese officials, who denied an attack took place, said four Israeli warplanes crossed into Lebanon early Tuesday night and flew low over villages in the southern part of the country, a Hezbollah stronghold. Four other planes later replaced the foursome, and these in turn were replaced by four planes, which finally departed Lebanese air space at 2 a.m.

A senior Iranian official declared on Saturday that any external attack on Syria would be regarded in Tehran as an attack on Iran. The official, Ali Akbar Velayhatai, an aide to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is believed to have had Turkey and Western powers in mind but his warning might be regarded as relevant if an Israeli air attack took place on Syrian soil.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week summoned a meeting of all senior security officials the day after the recent national elections to discuss the danger of non-conventional and state-of-the-art weapons being transferred from Syria to Hezbollah.

That meeting was followed by heightened activity by the Israeli air force along the border. Two Iron Dome batteries which had downed hundreds of rockets fired from 
Gaza two months ago were transferred to the north to deal with a possible outbreak of rocket fire from there.