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JAFFA (Dagsavisen): In the next few days, Pompeo will visit three countries: Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Not only will he visit, as America’s first secretary of state, a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, but he will also attend a G20 summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
But the reason the tour is concerning is because it coincides with Trump’s sudden and extensive replacements in the Defense Department, even though there are only two months left in the presidency. Top management, including Defense Secretary Mark Esper, have been replaced by hawks and Trump loyalists.
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– The Iranian regime is concerned. Because they know that with Trump anything is possible. After Qassem Soleimani’s murder, Iran is on high alert, said Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born Israeli expert affiliated with IDC, a research institution north of Tel Aviv. Qassem, who was the driving force behind Iran’s growing military power in the Middle East, was killed by an American drone when he landed at Baghdad airport in January.
Read more about it here: Donald Trump claims Qasem Soleimani was killed to avoid war
… and here Iran promises revenge after the liquidation of Soleimani
You want steps
Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates want a more aggressive line with respect to Tehran and fear that the Joe Biden administration will do the opposite: revive the Iran nuclear deal, the deal Trump withdrew from in 2018.
– The United States is now also introducing even tougher sanctions against Iran. The goal is, on the one hand, to give Biden new negotiating cards regarding Tehran, but also to make it difficult for the next president to return to the nuclear deal, says Javedanfar in an interview with Dagsavisen.
– It is no longer necessary to attack the Iranian nuclear program militarily. It may come as a surprise, but today’s sanctions hit Iran much harder than before the nuclear deal was signed in 2015, he says.
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Operation in Tehran
This weekend, the New York Times reported that Israeli agents, on behalf of the United States, had killed the deputy commander of Al Qaeda on a street in Tehran. Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah is said to have been killed when two motorcyclists approached his car and fired five shots out the window. His daughter, who was the widow of Osama bin Laden’s son, is also said to have been killed in the attack, which according to the newspaper took place three months ago.
However, the announcement of the murder this weekend is not accidental, believes Javedanfar.
“If it is now clear that Iran actively supported al Qaeda, it will be difficult for Biden to get back to the nuclear deal,” he said.
Iran denies that it was the Egyptian Abdullah who was killed and instead says it was a Lebanese Hezbollah activist who was shot.
In any case, Israel clearly has good intelligence in Iran. In 2018, Mossad agents stole half a ton of secret documents and files about the nuclear program from a warehouse in southern Tehran. A few months later, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed a radioactive facility in the capital that the regime had tried to hide from UN nuclear inspectors. Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced that Iran has produced at least 12 times more enriched uranium than the nuclear deal allows.
It is still a mystery in Israel how the Mossad obtains such top-secret information. One possibility is that Israel sends its own Israeli agents to the enemy country, but one expert, who prefers to remain anonymous, thinks it is something else.
“The regime in Iran is so hated by the people that it is not a big problem for Israel to mobilize local spies,” the source told Dagsavisen recently.
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Visit to the settlement
Pompeo, during his visit to Israel, will also visit a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank. The foreign minister is heading to a vineyard attached to the Psagot settlement, located east of the Palestinian city of Ramallah. Since the 1967 war, when Israel occupied the West Bank, the United States has viewed the illegal settlements and an obstacle to a peace deal. This will be the first time a senior American manager has visited such a place.
“This is a dangerous precedent that legalizes the settlements and is a blow to UN resolutions,” Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh said at the weekend.
The planned visit to Saudi Arabia will also have great diplomatic significance. After Saudi agents killed and stabbed journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Istanbul consulate in October 2018, Riyadh has fought diplomatic isolation. But on Friday, Saudi Arabia will host the G20 summit, the meeting place for the world’s economic and political elite. Pompeo’s involvement crowns Saudi Arabia’s attempts to return to “good company.”
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– Not a suitable host
But not so fast, says DAWN, a new human rights organization that rallied after Khashoggi’s murder.
– The Saudi government is not a suitable host for the G20 summit, the group protests and condemns the country’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
“As an absolute monarchy without any significant democratic representation, the Saudi government has a long history of simply silencing the necessary voices that we need in the global conversation to meet the major challenges we face,” the group said in a press release. .
DAWN, which stands for Democracy in the Arab World Now, was formally created by Khashoggi himself, but he failed to launch the group into the world before he was assassinated. Instead, several leaders of other human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, have come together to do the work that Khashoggi was unable to do.
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