JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Surging street violence against African migrants, including a rampage that an Israeli broadcaster dubbed a “pogrom”, drew empathy for the rioters from the interior minister on Thursday.

Waving Israeli flags and chanting “Deport the Sudanese”, residents of a low-income Tel Aviv neighborhood where many of the border-jumpers from Eritrea, Sudan and South Sudan live held a march late Wednesday that turned violent.

Police said 20 people were arrested for assault and vandalism. Trash cans were set alight, storefront windows were broken and a crowd attacked an African driving through the area, breaking his car’s windows. No serious injuries were reported.

Interviewing Interior Minister Eli Yishai, Army Radio likened the incident to pogrom attacks on Jews in 19th century Europe. Yishai bristled at such language, citing police findings that Sudanese and Eritrean migrants were a crime risk.

“I cannot judge a man whose daughter gets raped. I cannot judge a young woman who cannot walk home,” said Yishai, who heads a party run by rabbis in the coalition government.

“I cannot under any circumstances judge people who get abused and harmed, and who are then confronted by the state, which says, ‘Why do you behave this way to the foreigners?’”

Fleeing poverty, fighting and authoritarian rule, some 60,000 Africans have crossed illegally into Israel through the relatively porous desert border with Egypt in recent years.

TEL AVIV (Reuters) – Though booted from the CIA as psychologically unfit, the heroine of the hit TV thriller “Homeland” will return for the second season pursuing leads in the Middle East, the show’s producer said on Friday.

During a Tel Aviv visit to shoot new scenes and pay homage to the Israeli hostage drama on which Homeland is based, Howard Gordon drew links with “24″, another U.S. television series of his about a renegade counter-terrorist.

“You’ll remember Jack Bauer was usually out for one reason or another. The fun of this experience is that the characters go in and out of positions of authority,” he told Reuters in an interview.

Carrie Mathison, Homeland’s intuitive and overwrought CIA officer played by Claire Danes, will be in Beirut at the outset of the second season, Howard said, twitching the veil on a script kept largely secret.

“There is a very specific reason why Carrie is called into action. And that process is really very dramatic and, hopefully, very emotional,” he said. “There is a piece of intelligence in this part of the world that only Carrie can access.”

Tel Aviv-area locations were standing in for the Lebanese settings due to challenges of insuring the cast and crew and the fact that “Israel looks a lot more like (Beirut) than southern California,” Gordon said.

Accompanying Gordon was David Nevins, president of entertainment for Showtime, the network behind Homeland, and other senior U.S. entertainment figures.

TEL AVIV, May 15 (Reuters) – Israel said on Tuesday it had set up a mechanism to get aid to the Palestinians in the event of a major earthquake.

A 5.5-magnitude quake rattled Israel and the occupied West Bank on Friday, reminding residents of their vulnerability to the Syria-African Rift, a northern extension of Africa’s Rift Valley.

“The working assumption is that they (Palestinians) do not have the means to deal with such a disaster on their own,” said Alon Rozen, director-general of Israel’s Civil Defence Ministry.

Given Israel’s control of the West Bank, it would, in the event of a major quake, host a United Nations aid distribution centre to receive relief from abroad for Israelis and Palestinians.

The last big quake in the region in 1927 killed hundreds of people. Such events tend to recur every 80 or 90 years.

Rozen said Israel decided last year to devote new attention to earthquake preparedness. “The aspect of international aid for the Palestinians was something we had not dealt with. Last September, we realised this was a shortfall.”

A U.N. official confirmed there was coordination with Israel, but the Palestinians said they had yet to be consulted.

TEL AVIV, May 15 (Reuters) – Israel has set up a mechanism to funnel aid to the Palestinians in the event of an earthquake, though its emergency relief services would not deploy throughout their territory, Israeli officials said on Tuesday.

A 5.5-magnitude quake rattled Israel and the occupied West Bank on Friday, reminding residents of their common vulnerability to the Syria-African Rift, a northern extension of Africa’s Rift Valley, despite the deadlock in talks on founding an independent Palestinian state.

Given Israel’s control over and inside the West Bank, it would, in the event of a major quake, host a United Nations aid distribution centre to receive relief from abroad, by air and the Mediterranean sea, for Israelis and Palestinians.

“The working assumption is that they (Palestinians) do not have the means to deal with such a disaster on their own,” said Alon Rozen, director-general of Israel’s Civil Defence Ministry.

The last big quake in the region, in 1927, killed hundreds of people. Such events tend to recur every 80 or 90 years.

Rozen said the need to arrange for the U.N.-mandated contingency On-Site Operations Coordination Centre (OSOCC) arose after Israel, whose home front preparations focus on incoming missiles in a future war, decided last year to devote new attention to earthquake preparedness.

“The aspect of international aid for the Palestinians was something we had not dealt with. Last September, we realised this was a shortfall,” he said.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel’s parliament convened on Monday to dissolve itself and set a September 4 election that opinion polls predict will renew Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership mandate as Israel confronts Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The looming ballot has deepened doubts about the right-wing prime minister’s threats to attack Iran and raised the question of whether his window of opportunity is now too narrow.

“My intention is to form as wide a coalition as possible in order to bring about stability and lead Israel in the face of the great challenges still ahead of us,” Netanyahu told his cabinet earlier in public remarks.

The next national election was not due until October 2013, but new legislation that might force ultra-Orthodox Jews to serve in the military and an upcoming budget debate have threatened to unravel a governing coalition of religious and nationalist parties.

Israeli leaders have insisted the election campaign would have no impact on their decision-making with regard to Iran, which includes the possibility of launching an Israeli strike against its nuclear installations.

A Netanyahu victory two months before the U.S. election could give him leverage over Barack Obama on the Iranian and Palestinian issues while the president is still engaged in his own campaign and wary of alienating pro-Israel U.S. voters.

“During this interim the new Israeli government will have absolute authority, while the U.S. administration will be impotent,” said Ari Shavit, a columnist for the liberal Haaretz daily.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Iran’s nuclear strategy could eventually allow it to build an atomic bomb with just 60 days’ notice, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said on Friday.

His remarks elaborate on long-held Israeli concerns that Iran is playing for time even as it engages world powers in negotiations aimed at curbing its uranium enrichment drive. Talks are due to resume in Baghdad on May 23.

“They are currently trying to achieve immunity for the nuclear program,” Barak told the Israel Hayom newspaper.

“If they arrive at military nuclear capability, at a weapon, or a demonstrated capability, or a threshold status in which they could manufacture a bomb within 60 days – they will achieve a different kind of immunity, regime immunity.”

Iran insists that its often secretive uranium enrichment is for peaceful energy and medical needs. At higher levels of purification, such projects can yield fuel for warheads, but Israel and the United States agree Iran has not taken that step.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last year issued a report detailing alleged Iranian research and development activities that were relevant to nuclear weapons, lending independent weight to Western suspicions.

Barak has said Iran is holding off until it can dig in behind defenses sufficient to withstand threatened Israeli or U.S. air strikes on its nuclear facilities.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The prospect of an imminent election in Israel will not affect its strategy for tackling Iran’s nuclear program, including plans for a possible preemptive war, Defence Minister Ehud Barak said on Wednesday.

Rifts in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative coalition over military conscription and budget cuts have prompted parties to mobilize to bring forward the ballot to as early as September, a year ahead of schedule.

That has raised questions about whether an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear sites – long threatened, although viewed by some Netanyahu critics as a bluff – might now be shelved due to government reluctance to send potential voters to bomb shelters.

“Elections will not affect deliberations of the professional echelon in everything regarding the Iranian issue,” Barak said on his Facebook page, adding that Israel still saw military force as among “options on the table”.

Israel, reputed to have the region’s sole atomic arsenal, has long said it would strike Iran to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons. Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful.

The United States and European Union have sharply tightened economic sanctions on Iran this year, and have called on Israel to show restraint to give the new measures a chance to bite. Washington says it too would be willing to strike Iran as a last resort, but the White House believes it is too early to give up on diplomacy.

Nuclear talks between major powers and Iran, which broke down last year, restarted in Istanbul on April 14 and are expected to continue later this month in Baghdad.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – He may be ready to brave Iranian air defenses, retaliatory missiles and Western diplomatic blowback in tackling Tehran’s nuclear program, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will find it hard to fly past flak from his own senior staff.

Remarks by recently retired security chiefs and the current military commander questioning the views of Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak on Iran have opened a rare rift in a Jewish state that usually puts up a united front against regional enemies.

Yuval Diskin, who as former Shin Bet domestic intelligence chief was effectively in charge of vetting government officials, on Friday deemed Netanyahu and Barak “messianic” and unfit for war.

If the Netanyahu government was ever serious about carrying out a long-threatened, last-ditch and tactically thorny assault on Iran’s nuclear sites against the misgivings of many Israelis and foreign allies like the United States, the criticism from Diskin and others may have tipped the scales against.

The right-wing premier describes a future Iranian bomb as a second Holocaust-in-the-making, to be stopped at all costs.

But that case may be tougher to make in the face of derision from men he once trusted to fend off immediate threats like suicide bombers, guerrilla rockets and armed infiltrators.

“They genuinely disagree and are trying to signal the Israeli public, knowing that they retain credibility,” said Dennis Ross, a former Middle East adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama, in reference to Diskin and Mossad ex-spymaster Meir Dagan, another detractor of Netanyahu and Barak.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – A former Israeli spymaster has branded the country’s leaders unfit to tackle the Iranian nuclear program and “messianic” in the strongest criticism from a security veteran of threats to launch a pre-emptive war.

Other veterans have come out against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak.

But the censure from Yuval Diskin, who retired as head of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service last year, was especially strong and unusual in using the language of religious fervor that Israelis associate with Islamist foes.

“I have no faith in the prime minister, nor in the defence minister,” Diskin said in remarks broadcast by Israeli media on Saturday. “I really don’t have faith in a leadership that makes decisions out of messianic feelings.”

The Prime Minister’s Office and Defence Ministry had no immediate response to Diskin’s remarks. But Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman rebuked Diskin and questioned his motives.

The catastrophic terms with which Netanyahu and Barak describe the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran have stirred concern in Israel and abroad of a possible strike against its uranium enrichment program. Iran says the project is entirely peaceful and has promised wide-ranging reprisals for any attack.

World powers, sharing Israeli suspicions Iran has a covert bomb-making plan, are trying to curb it through sanctions and negotiations. Those talks resume in Baghdad next month, but Barak on Thursday rated their chance of succeeding as low.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – A former Israeli spymaster has branded the country’s leaders unfit to tackle the Iranian nuclear program because of what he called the “messianic feelings” behind their threats to launch a pre-emptive war on Iran.

Other veterans have come out against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently, but the criticism from former domestic intelligence chief Yuval Diskin was especially strong.

“I have no faith in the prime minister, nor in the defense minister,” Diskin, who stepped down as head of the Shin Bet a year ago, said in a speech partly broadcast by Israel Radio on Saturday.

“I really don’t have faith in a leadership that makes decisions out of messianic feelings.”

The catastrophic terms with which Netanyahu and Barak describe the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran have stirred concern in Israel and abroad of a possible strike against a uranium enrichment program Iran says has peaceful ends.

World powers have been trying to curb Tehran through sanctions and negotiations that are due to resume next month.

Although Israel has threatened a pre-emptive strike if diplomacy fails, some experts believe that could be a bluff to keep up pressure on Iran, making it harder to interpret the swirl of comments from the security establishment.