Welcome to Middle East Newsline, a defense news service by independent journalists with a real understanding of the region.

Our correspondents gather information from Ankara, Athens, Amman, Cairo, Jerusalem, London, Moscow, Nicosia, Ramallah and Washington on developments in the Middle East as well as on issues that affect the region. These issues include weapons sales and development, strategic business deals in defense and energy, and threat environment, such as terrorism and insurgency.

Middle East Newsline is not just an assembly line of information. Its focus is strategic and the service concentrates on actual developments and trends rather than on passing rhetoric. The result is news of significance. News you can use.

Our coverage for news and information goes beyond the region. We cover Russia because of its close military and political ties to the Middle East. We cover North Korea because it is regarded as one of the active weapons proliferators in this region. We cover Congress because its hearings contain valuable information on the Middle East as well as weapons programs that affect it.

The greatest strength of Middle East Newsline is its regional focus. We report on Israel’s military, strategic programs and relations with its neighbors. We closely follow developments in the Palestinian Authority, which appears on the verge of statehood. Our service also monitors Islamic fundamentalism and particularly its ties with other groups in the West. Our aim is to address two issues to our clients: the defense market in the Middle East and the threats that drive weapons sales.

Currently, we provide our subscribers with full online access to updated news and archives and a choice of two E-mail services: Daily Edition and Weekly Defense. Our clients are largely professionals who want us to cut away the fluff and just provide the significant developments and trends that do not appear in the general press. The result is a concentrated but easy read that brings you a daily comprehensive picture of the region.

We also provide strategic country profiles as well as customized reports on virtually any issue in the Middle East. Most of these reports can be prepared within a week of order.

Middle East Newsline is directed by Steve Rodan, a journalist with more than 20 years experience who has worked for U.S., European, Arab and Israeli newspapers, radio and television. Rodan is fluent in Arabic and Hebrew and has won awards for investigative and enterprise reporting. He was one of the first journalists to write on Iran’s missile and nuclear weapons programs, Israeli-Russian joint defense marketing, and the first to document Egyptian-North Korean missile cooperation. He has provided exclusives to such publications as Jane’s Defense Weekly in London, Defense News in Washington, Military Technology in Bonn, The Jerusalem Post in Israel, The Sunday Express in London and Le Nouvelles Actuelles in Paris. He has traveled extensively and is both an expert of the region as well as a specialist on military and strategic issues

January 9, 2009

It might not be over until the fat lady sings, but Hamas has already made history. The Islamic regime absorbed massive Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip and kept firing missiles on cities throughout southern Israel.

More important, it has been Israel rather Hamas that is now seeking a ceasefire. Hamas has shown it could mobilize Arabs and Muslims against their regimes throughout the Middle East while maintaining strong support from such rivals as Iran and Saudi Arabia. Most important, Hamas has proven that it can play the military and diplomatic game even better than Hizbullah in 2006. Today, Hamas has graduated into a strategic threat to Israel and a model for Sunni regimes throughout the region. Welcome to 2009.

January 10, 2009

If there has been one Middle East country of which can be said has been on its best behavior lately, it is Iran. Despite repeated assurances from its friends in the West, Teheran until the end remained concerned that U.S. President George Bush would order a last-minute air strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. With President-elect Obama in Washington and Bush cleaning out his closets in the White House, that threat appears to have passed. This,more than anything else explains the low Iranian profile during the Hamas-Israel war. Western intelligence agencies agree that 2009 marks the transformation of Iran into a nuclear power. Then watch Iran’s regional and international profile soar.

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