Middle East Inside Line: Stalemate over Lebanon's Government; Israel's Settlements as "Human Rights"

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Stalemate over Lebanon Government: Lebanese Prime Minister-designate Saad al-Hariri (pictured) submitted the list for a new national unity government to Lebanese president Michel Suleiman on Monday. Hariri's "March 14" alliance gets 15 of 30 seats in the new cabinet and the opposition "March 8" alliance 10 seats. The other five seats will be chosen by the president.

Hezbollah and its allies refused to support the  list since several ministries and appointees that it demanded had been rejected by Hariri. Haaretz quotes one senior Hezbollah official: "We will not deal with this proposal because we know nothing about it. As far as we are concerned, it does not exist and we will have nothing to do with it."

President Suleiman is not expected to approve any Cabinet proposal that does not have opposition support.

Meanwhile, the Israeli Government has decided to intervene. An Israeli official said that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu addressed the issue in the past, and that his position then still stands: "If Hezbollah joins the Lebanese government, then the Lebanese government is accepting responsibility for Hezbollah's actions, including its actions against Israel."

Israel's Settlements Expand for Sake of "Human Rights": On Monday, right-wing lawmakers, including Supreme Court Judge Eliyakim Rubinstein, celebrated the establishment of a new neighborhood in the E-1 corridor connecting Jerusalem to settlement suburbs in the West Bank. National Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau and Information Minister Yuli Edelstein were also present.

Following Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak's decision to approve construction of 455 new homes, this was a "victory" demonstration for some Likud Party members. Landau told the crowd:

This land is ours and ours alone... It is the Arabs who are occupiers... A settlement freeze is a violation of human rights. What can we tell the families? Don't have any more kids, don't build another house, you can't have a playground here. This construction must not stop under any circumstances.

Middle East Inside Line: Chavez Attack on Israel, Gaza Low-Intensity Conflict

Chavez's Diplomatic Dive Bombing of Israel: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez targeted Israel and the U.S. during his visit to Syria. After a one-hour meeting with Syrian President Bashir al-Assad, Chavez blamed Israel for "dividing the Middle East" as "a country that annihilates people and is hostile to peace":

The entire world knows it. Why was the state of Israel created? ... To divide. To impede the unity of the Arab world. To assure the presence of the North American empire in all these lands.

I believe [this] is a fateful battle. It's either now or never in order to liberate the world from imperialism and change the world from a unipolar into a multi-polar world.

Likud Splitting over Settlements Issue? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is feeling pressure from his Likud Party members in the wake of headlines that he already accepted a temporary freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank. More than half of the party leadership has accepted an invitation to speak at a hawkish rally in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. Vice Premier Silvan Shalom, Ministers Gilad Erdan, Moshe Kahlon, Yuli Edelstein and Michael Eitan, and Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin have accepted, while Vice Premier Moshe Ya'alon has not decided whether to attend.

Shalom has asserted:

A clear, wide majority in the Likud would not give a hand to any step that would strangle the settlements, which is one of the party's banners... We need to take steps to advance the diplomatic process, but with conditions, and one of them must be not freezing the settlements that we built. The Palestinians cannot ask us to make unilateral, irreversible, far-reaching concessions that impact the permanent [borders] just for agreeing to meet with us.

Shalom added that US President Barack Obama's diplomatic process would "blow up in our face and lead to a dead end."

Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar supported Netanyahu on Thursday:

In today's complex situation, our prime minister whom we chose, Binyamin Netanyahu, must maintain all our national interests - the settlements that are the apple of our eye, Jerusalem, and also our relations with the United States and avoiding international isolation, because we will not be able to do the things that are close to our hearts if we are isolated.

Israel-Gaza Low-Intensity Conflict: Seven mortar shells were fired from Gaza into Israel, all hitting open areas without casualties or damage. On Thursday night, Israeli jets bombed a tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip.