"McDonald's decision not to be a part of the Ariel mall is a miserable decision discriminating against the city's residents," Ariel Mayor Eliyahu Shaviro said.

Former interior minister Eli Yishai said on his Facebook page that he would eat the first burger grilled by McDonald's local competitor Burger Ranch, and that is rumored to take the American chain's spot in Ariel.

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This area may be in Syrian territory that,with the redeployment of regular Syrian army units to Damascus, has become a contested arena for various rebel groups.

Israel and Syria have been in a formal state of war since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. There are no diplomatic ties and no contacts, except through UN offices; it is illegal for Israelis to enter Syria, and Syrians entering Israel are considered enemy infiltrators.

UN peacekeeping forces have safeguarded a demilitarized zone along the generally quiet border since the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The last Israeli soldiers known to have been in Syria were returned to Israel in an exchange of POWs following the war.

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The United States had similar evidence, but when Olmert consulted with US President George W. Bush, who was embroiled in two regional wars as he neared the end of his term, Bush balked.

"Bush said no. He also asked that Israel not do it," recounts Itamar Rabinovich, who is a former Israeli ambassador to the United States and, as former chief negotiator with Syria, one of Israel's go-to experts. "Olmert listened and interpreted that this was a real problem for Bush but that he had to do it, and that Bush knew that. It worked perfectly. If you are head of government and you can understand things between the lines — that is hugely important."

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Clearly aware of first term missed opportunities in the relationship with America's closest Mideast ally, Obama chose to crown his two day trip to Israel and the Palestinian Authority with a passionate, forceful speech addressed to a group of more than 2,000 Israelis.

Whereas for the Obama administration the trip, and the speech, may represent a gamble on a second term commitment to the thorny problem of an Israeli-Palestinian peace, for Israelis it was a chance to see, up close and personal, a man who had remained for them a cipher.

Immediately following the address, Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, blogged, "I spoke to several members of the audience, who confirmed my impression that Israelis just wanted to know that he liked them. It's hard to understand this from the US, but the idea really did take hold here that Obama genuinely hated Israel. So this whole trip is a bit of a revelation for ordinary Israelis."

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JERUSALEM — A group of Jewish women gathered in prayer Monday at the Western Wall to mark Rosh Chodesh, the beginning of the new lunar month.

Even as they gathered to pray, police closed in. The women fell to the ground, unwilling to be dragged away.

Police did not want to be seen apprehending women at prayer, so they stepped back, waiting. Only after the service ended did police arrest 10, including three American rabbis: Robyn Fryer Bodzin, Debra Cantor and Susan Silverman, sister of famed comedienne Sarah Silverman.

Their crime? Being women wearing traditionally male religious garb at what is considered the holiest of Jewish sites.

The Western Wall is the last remnant of the original Temple of King Solomon, destroyed during the Babylonian invasions. It has been mentioned in Jewish texts since the fourth century and has, under the Law of Holy Places, been de facto designated as an Orthodox synagogue where the sexes pray separately.

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Exit polls indicate that the prime minister has lost up to 25 percent of his seats in the Knesset, Israel's parliament.

Even with the right-wing Netanyahu at its helm, the next government will necessarily have to reflect the influence of Yair Lapid, a centrist, secular, photogenic former journalist and the great surprise of these elections. He now leads Israel's new second-largest party, Yesh Atid (There is a Future).

In defiance of almost every forecast, the next coalition government of Israel will in all likelihood be significantly less beholden to right-wing hardliners than the current one. Based on a fragmented political mandate and reliant on inexperienced new faces, many predict it will be fragile and short-lasting.

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Lieberman, an important coalition partner of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was charged with fraud and breach of trust on Thursday, in connection with a larger case.

He was cleared of the more serious charges of bribery and money-laundering.

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This, he said, is the red line the world should set before Iran on its nuclear development.

The ploy engendered an immediate internet meme, and brought Netanyahu approval, notoriety and some grudging respect, for the efficacy in getting his message out.

On Monday, in much less graphic form, using the language of steely diplomacy, Europe showed Netanyahu what its own red line is: talk of construction in areas of the contested territories that would preclude a contiguous Palestinian state.

European governments were not amused by what in fact was a red flag maneuver, Netanyahu signaling to his rightward flank that he does not intend to curb settlement construction while, in fact, doing nothing.

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International outcry is mounting in reaction to Israel's announcement that it would permit the building of 3,000 housing units in an area called E1. If completed, the development would divide the West Bank in half.

"We deplore the recent Israeli government decision to build 3,000 new housing units and unfreeze development in the E1 block. This threatens the viability of the two state solution,” The British Foreign Office said in a statement. “Any decision about any other measures the UK might take will depend on the outcome of our discussions with the Israeli government and with international partners including the US and European Union."

In almost every European capital, from Stockholm to Paris and extending even to Moscow, Israeli ambassadors were called to hear angrily-worded rebukes by foreign ministries.

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The bus exploded at around noon Wednesday near military headquarters in central Tel Aviv, the Israeli commercial capital.

Israeli officials called it a terrorist attack, and said police have set up roadblocks in the area to find the person who planted the explosive device, Reuters reported.

"We strongly believe that this was a terror attack," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told the Associated Press.

The AP said that in Gaza, the bus bombing was praised from mosque loudspeakers.

US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is in the region, working to help broker a deal to end the violence after eight days of Israeli air strikes and Hamas rocket attacks.

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The subject: cyber-security. Or, in other words, monsters in the night. There they were, in their tweed jackets and sturdy-framed glasses, talking about what no one wants to talk about.

"The next war will use digital elements — but will not be a digital war," said Dr. Nimrod Kozlovski, a consultant on law and information technology and information security, with eerie prescience.

In fact, much of the discussion in conference corridors puts in chilling perspective the cyber chatter that broke out at the start of the current Israel-Gaza conflict.

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"Jabri was a senior Hamas operative who served in the upper echelon of Hamas' command and was directly responsible for executing terror attacks against the State of Israel in the past number of years," military sources said.

The killing of Jabri came a day after Hamas launched a barrage of more than 100 missiles into southern Israel, most of which were intercepted by the country's Iron dome missile protection system. The attack also comes just two months before the scheduled national elections in Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now finds himself between a rock and a hard place, which is no place any candidate wishes to be.

On the one hand, the Syrian civil war continues to spill over into the Golan Heights, the rocky territory Israel won from Syria in the 1967 war — which remains disputed, but quietly so, ever since.

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In Jerusalem Tel Aviv, the day after the elections felt a bit like it does when a cousin delivers bombshell news at a family reunion, with eruptions of frenzy and concern.

There were those, like esteemed Ha'aretz columnist Chemi Shalev, who wagged their fingers in slightly reproachful I-told-you-so's. No one had been fully honest about the Republican campaign, he said.

"Nowhere was the blatant disregard for facts, for reality and for a sense of proportion more evident than in the hypocrisy and hyperbole so cynically employed in order to try and depict Obama as some sort of latter day Haman who seeks to undermine Israel, if not to destroy the Jewish people completely," he wrote. "Many millions of dollars were wasted in a futile effort to wrest away a few percentage points of Jewish voters away from the Democrats and into the Republican camp."

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"We take into account every possible scenario — everything from a major military attack to a multi-focal incursion to a situation with civilians crowding the border. Also, the possibility that we may have to go inside Lebanon if we have to," said one intelligence officer in Israel’s Northern Command, standing on an outlook a rock’s throw from Lebanon and a hill away from Syria.

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A primitive cartoon of a bomb depicting Iran's progress toward building a nuclear weapon, on which he drew a thick red line just under the point of detonation, became the subject of bafflement, jocularity, derision and even some approbation at the expense of serious talk about the substance of his speech.

“Netanyahu's aim was to have everyone speak about [the drawing] and to demonstrate that time is running short,” said professor Eytan Gilboa, an expert on Israel-US ties at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University.

"Anyway, those making fun of it don't have better solutions," he added.

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"I have a very good team of extraordinarily experienced, highly successful consultants, a couple of people in particular who have done races around the world," Romney says. "I didn't realize it. These guys in the US — the Karl Rove equivalents — they do races all over the world: in Armenia, in Africa, in Israel. I mean, they worked for Bibi Netanyahu in his race. So they do these races and they see which ads work, and which processes work best, and we have ideas about what we do over the course of the campaign. I'd tell them to you, but I'd have to shoot you."

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On Meet the Press, Netanyahu said Iran was "20 yards from a bomb."

Netanyahu has repeatedly called for Obama to declare his "red lines," or, in other words, to put his cards on the table when it comes to Iran. In an hour-long phone call on Tuesday, Obama responded that he intended to do no such thing.

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That long meeting was the cabinet’s annual intelligence review. The leak, published in Yedioth Acharonoth, the country’s most widely-read newspaper, revealed high-level disagreements about the imminent (or not) threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program.

The security cabinet includes a dozen cabinet members in addition to Netanyahu himself.

Netanyahu’s outburst may reflect the enormous pressure his government is under as it faces what many say is one of the most dire security situations in the country’s history. In addition to Iran, Israel is watching potentially hostile elements line up along its borders with Syria and Egypt.

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In 1991, on the occasion of the first visit of an Argentine president to the State of Israel, the chief executive, Carlos Menem, landed at Ben Gurion airport and promptly pinched the bottom of a respected (and pretty — and suddenly shocked) local journalist covering his arrival.

Next, the concierge of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel registered a call from the presidential party’s floor, requesting access to local escort services.

All this shone in newspaper headlines.

A few years later, an Argentine ambassador fled the country after being accused of raping an Israeli embassy employee.

Israelis may be forgiven for finding the debate about Rep. Kevin Yoder's skinny dip at the Sea of Galilee a bit quaint, even heartening.

For one, late night skinny-dipping at the Sea of Galilee is a revered local tradition, often after a night of casual imbibing and relaxation at any of the campsites that line the water.

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And keeping it together depends to a growing extent on one man, Moshe Feiglin.

Feiglin is an unprecedented hybrid on the Israeli political scene, who threatens the stability of Netanyahu's own party, the Likud, and whose faction has been compared, including by himself, to the Tea Party within the Republican Party in the United States.

"Feiglin is a Trojan horse within the Likud," said Yossi Klein Halevi, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and a longtime scholar of the Jewish right wing. "And Netanyahu knows it and is treating him as such."

Feiglin, 50, a father of five and grandfather of four, is a striking character. Tall, pale and reed thin, and an avid cyclist, he expresses himself with calm precision. He is unbending. His aims are to participate actively in mainstream politics and, at the same time, to assert a messianic, faith-based foundation to his vision.

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