On Tuesday, May 18, in busy rush hour traffic, a suicide bomber drove his Toyota minivan, packed with 1650 lbs. of explosives, alongside a NATO convoy in Kabul, Afghanistan and detonated. Eighteen people were killed, including five American soldiers and one Canadian. Forty-seven others were wounded.

According to an NYPD Shield Intelligence brief, it was the deadliest attack on foreign forces operating in Kabul this year. The Taliban claimed responsibility.

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The very next day, an estimated thirty to forty Taliban fighters launched a brazen, pre-dawn assault on U.S.-run Bagram Airbase, thirty miles north of Kabul. Though sixteen Taliban insurgents (four of whom were intended to be used as suicide bombers) were killed, at the end of the spectacular attack one U.S. contractor had been left dead and nine to twelve service members were wounded.

The Taliban took credit once again and claimed that seven suicide bombers had detonated at Bagram’s gates while thirty other fighters slipped inside; a report the U.S. military flatly denies. But did the U.S. military have advance information that the suicide bombing attacks were imminent? According to sources in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the answer appears to be yes.

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I was invited to speak on 21st century missile threats and defenses at the recent 7th annual Jerusalem Conference, 2010, held at the Regency Hotel on Mt. Scopus, in the city of David, but I was pleased as well to hear a wide variety of experts (speeches are delivered in English and Hebrew with convenient wireless earphone translation headsets).

This gathering is rooted in historic Zionism, the meaning of the land of Israel, and the spiritual meaning of Jerusalem. Many Israeli statesman and American political leaders come to address current security crises, as well as existential questions ever-present for the Jewish state still facing war.

The Palestinian Front

On the Palestinian front, many now believe that the idea of a small PLO state within the 1967 borders, to include Gaza, major parts of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, has lost its appeal within Araby.

Radical Islamism, unrealistic expectations, and daily incitement against Israel in mosques, the media, and madrassas, have all added up to another era of Palestinian intransigence and irredentism.

Unfortunately, the drive for Palestinian independence has not been equated with responsible state building leading to the kind of sovereignty that would help the Palestinian people themselves.

Palestinians universally wish to cast Israel off their shoulders, but this does not mean they support a fair division of land, or a desire to live in peaceful coexistence with a Jewish state in the middle east.

Israeli journalist and commentator Ehud Ya’ari stated that the Palestinians have now fully collapsed into the unwilling arms of the Israelis, and that Israel must urgently solve the seemingly unsolvable.

Israel is today faced with a reverse annexation: It is the Palestinians who have decided to annex Israel, because Israel did not annex them first.

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