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Last Friday, a senior Iranian general confirmed that the Islamic Republic was manufacturing weapons including rockets in Aleppo and that some of those rockets were transferred to Hezbollah, bolstering the terror group’s already formidable stockpiles. The revelation of Iranian military production facilities in a foreign country was the first such acknowledgement by a senior Iranian official.

Chief of Staff of the Iranian Army, Major General Mohammad Bagheri noted that Iran’s production of missiles in Syria began in 2002 and that rockets manufactured at the Aleppo facility were transferred to Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon War also known as the Second Lebanon War. During that 33-day conflict, Hezbollah fired in excess of 4,000 rockets at Israel. Since the Second Lebanon War, Hezbollah, primarily with Iranian assistance, has increased its rocket and missile arsenal tenfold, from 12,000 to an estimated 120,000.

The general’s acknowledgement provides us with some sense of how entrenched the Iranians are in Syria and how they’re utilizing Syrian resources to supply their proxies. It is believed that the Iranians are employing between 7,000 to 10,000 Hezbollah operatives in Syria. Hezbollah represents one of four foreign pillars propping up the Assad regime and his flagging army. Iran maintains a military force of between 13,000 to 16,000 soldiers and, aside from Hezbollah, is believed to have recruited some 40,000 foreign fighters from Middle Eastern and Central Asian states. Russia maintains a sizable air and naval presence in Syria, supplemented by Special Forces and electronic warfare specialists.

Israel is watching these developments with keen interest. The Israelis are cooperating closely with the Russians to ensure that that their respective military forces, particularly their air forces don’t mistakenly tangle over the skies of Syria. The last time Israel dueled with the Russians was in July 1970 over the skies of the Suez Canal, during the height of the Cold War. Five Soviet MiG-21 fighters were shot down by Israeli F-4 Phantoms and Mirage jets. But so far, the Israelis and the Russians have managed to avoid hostile encounters with each other due to unprecedented cooperation between their respective military and political leaders.

What can we expect from President-elect Donald Trump’s administration?

The positions that Trump struck during the presidential campaign were sometimes inconsistent and even contradictory. So it is impossible to forecast precisely what he will do in office. But not everything is shrouded in mystery. Indeed, some important characteristics of his administration are already apparent.

First of all, President Barack Obama’s legacy will die the moment he leaves the White House on January 20. Republicans may not agree on much. But Trump and his party do agree that Obama’s policies must be abandoned and replaced. And they will work together to roll back all of Obama’s actions as president.

On the domestic policy front this means first and foremost that Obamacare will be repealed and replaced with health industry reforms that open the medical insurance market to competition.

With the support of the Republican-controlled Senate, Trump will end Obama’s push to reshape the US Supreme Court in the image of the activist, indeed, authoritarian Israeli Supreme Court. During his four-year term, Trump may appoint as many as four out of nine justices. In so doing he will shape the court for the next generation. Trump made clear during the race that the justices he selects will oppose the Obama-led leftist plan to transform the court into an imperial judiciary that determines social and cultural norms and legislates from the bench.

Trump will also clean out the Internal Revenue Service. Under Obama, the IRS became an instrument of political warfare. Conservative and right-wing pro-Israel groups were systematically discriminated against and targeted for abuse. It is possible to assume that Trump will fire the IRS officials who have been involved in this discriminatory abuse of power.

A top policy adviser to Donald Trump during his campaign said the president-elect doesn’t view Israeli settlements built in disputed areas as an obstacle to peace, a position sharply at odds with Obama administration policy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Obama administration opposes Israel’s settlement building, and has ramped up criticism from previous administrations—both Republican and Democratic—of the activity.

Jason Greenblatt, who Mr. Trump named co-chair of an Israel policy committee during his campaign in July, on Thursday played down any risk from the building activity to peace prospects.

“Mr. Trump does not view the settlements as being an obstacle for peace,” Mr. Greenblatt told Israel’s Army Radio. “The two sides are going to have to decide how to deal with that region, but it’s certainly not Mr. Trump’s view that settlement activity should be condemned and that it is an obstacle to peace. It is not the obstacle to peace.”

Mr. Greenblatt is an executive vice president and chief legal officer of the Trump Organization. He said he would be honored to serve in a Trump administration and work on issues including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but that it was too early to say whether he would.

President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and other U.S. officials have said Israel’s construction of settlements is hindering the possibilities to reach a peace deal providing for side-by-side Jewish and Palestinian states, a U.S. goal since the 1980s.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Thursday that Mr. Greenblatt’s comments contradict years of bipartisan U.S. policy.

“Trying to change facts on the ground only puts a negotiated settlement, a resolution of differences between the two parties, further away,” Mr. Earnest said at a press briefing. “So, the president views that kind of continued settlement expansion as counterproductive.”

Conservative Israeli lawmakers and Jewish settlers have welcomed the election of Mr. Trump as president, hoping he will move away from the decadeslong U.S. policy pursuing a two-state solution.

Mr. Trump in the past has been quoted approving of the Israeli settlements. On the campaign trail, he has promised to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The U.S. doesn’t recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital as it awaits a two-state solution.

Aaron David Miller, a former adviser to Republican and Democratic secretaries of State, said Mr. Greenblatt’s comments suggest that the Trump administration is unlikely to raise the issue of settlement building with Israel as a potential problem. Mr. Trump has made contradictory statements that make it hard to predict what he might do, Mr. Miller said. CONTINUE AT SITE

TEL AVIV—Israel’s conservative lawmakers and Jewish settlers on Wednesday welcomed Donald Trump’s victory, in the hope that the president-elect will break from decadeslong U.S. policy and shelve a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In his public statements, Mr. Trump had encouraged Israeli settlers to continue building in the West Bank on land Palestinians claim for a future state. He had promised to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, effectively recognizing the holy city as Israel’s capital. And he had questioned U.S. financial support to the Palestinian Authority, the body that governs the Palestinian territories.

“Trump’s victory is an opportunity for Israel to immediately retract the notion of a Palestinian state in the center of the country, which would hurt our security and just cause,” said Naftali Bennett, leader of the Jewish Home party that sits in Israel’s governing coalition and advocates for annexation of the West Bank.

Yehuda Glick, another member of parliament for the ruling Likud Party, invited the president-elect to visit Israel to “see with his own eyes that settlements are the way to peace,” referring to Jewish enclaves currently located alongside Palestinian cities in the West Bank.

The U.S. has repeatedly condemned Israeli construction in the West Bank and refused to accede to Israeli claim over Jerusalem as its capital. Palestinians also want to establish the holy city as capital of their own future state.

Since the Oslo peace accords of the 1990s, the U.S. has consistently advocated for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on borders captured by Israel during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

President Barack Obama’s policies on these issues haven’t differed significantly to previous White House administrations. But the U.S. leader has been increasingly at odds with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government over construction of settlements.

Israel this year has accelerated settlement building and many members of the government live in the West Bank and advocate a full annexation of the land.

Commenting on Mr. Trump’s victory, Mr. Netanyahu said the “President-elect is a true friend of the State of Israel, and I look forward to working with him to advance security, stability and peace in our region. The ironclad bond between the United States and Israel is rooted in shared values, buttressed by shared interests and driven by a shared destiny.”

In a statement, Saeb Erekat, secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which represents Palestinian political factions in peace negotiations, said a two-state solution had been in the national interest of the U.S. for decades.

“Security, peace and stability in this region will come only after defeating the Israeli occupation that started in 1967,” he said in a statement on state news agency Wafa. “And the establishment of the independent state of Palestine on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital to live in peace and security alongside the state of Israel.”

While Mr. Trump has received strong support from settlers and more conservative Israelis, the majority of Israelis preferred Mrs. Clinton in polls in the run up to the election. Mr. Trump’s campaign was criticized for being anti-Semitic in the U.S. But an exit poll of Israeli-American voting put Mr. Trump with 49% of the vote to 44% for Ms Clinton, according the organization iVoteIsrael and Keevoon Global Research.

“I’m in another universe,” said Marc Zell, co-chair of lobby group Republican Overseas Israel who lives in an Israeli settlement inside the West Bank. “It’s beyond my wildest expectations.”

Former foreign minister and member of Israel’s opposition, Tzipi Livni congratulated Mr. Trump on Twitter but also said she hopes he delivers the promises of his conciliatory acceptance speech, “not the campaign.”

At the start of his run, Mr. Trump suggested that the burden of making peace between Israelis and Palestinians rested largely on Israel, but reversed the position during a speech in Washington to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most influential pro-Israel lobbying group in the U.S. CONTINUE AT SITE

Most Israelis will be relieved when Barack Obama leaves the White House. Although few are brimming with confidence about either of the candidates to replace him, Israelis will not miss much about Obama: the eight years of constant friction with a four-times-elected Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; severe and obsessive public criticism for such actions as building homes for Jews in supposedly proscribed parts of Jerusalem, and the like.

There is also concern that the lame-duck Obama will take a pernicious parting shot at Israel from the United Nations.

As John Hannah notes in a Foreign Policy article on restoring America’s role in the world, the next U.S. president should:

… make sure the Israeli prime minister is among the first foreign leaders received at the White House and leave no doubt that the days of public backbiting and “distancing” from America’s most important and capable Middle Eastern ally are over.

But public frictions, and even harmful diplomatic moves, are not the worst of Obama’s “legacy” for Israel.

Far more serious is the deteriorating security environment he leaves in his wake.

Israel’s Channel 2 has reported that the Israel Defense Forces are “in a panic” as Russia increasingly fills the Middle East vacuum that Obama’s policy has left. Particularly worrisome is Russia’s deployment of its highly sophisticated S-300 and S-400 antiaircraft systems in Syria, and of its only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, in the Mediterranean.

The Algemeiner website, summing up the Channel 2 report, says the Russian systems in the area are already:

… dramatically hampering the way the Israeli Air Force and Navy are able to operate.

Both these branches of the IDF, according to Channel 2, were used to flying and sailing wherever and whenever they saw fit, with no real threat to their movement. But since Russia began to intervene in the Syrian civil war … things have changed.

The Jerusalem Post notes:

[T]he mobile S-300 and S-400 batteries are capable of engaging multiple aircraft and ballistic missiles up to 380 km. away, putting significant parts of Israel in their crosshairs.

And although Russian president Putin is not seen as having any special animus toward Israel, a former Israeli Air Force commander told the Post:

[W]e must keep in mind that conflict with Russia could happen … [Israel] would have no other choice but to destroy the S-300s.

Meanwhile, Israeli military-affairs analyst Alex Fishman reports on the rapid proliferation of mass-destruction weapons in the region:

Deterrence reached its peak in 2013 when the American administration threatened to attack the Assad regime should it continue to attack its citizens with chemical means.

After making a highly publicized threat, of course, the administration backed off — and it’s been downhill since then. A UN report in August said chemical weapons use had spread in the fighting in Syria, and a UN report in October said the Syrian government was “still carrying out attacks with toxic gas.” CONTINUE AT SITE

The upcoming conference coincides with mounting tensions in Fatah, the result of internal bickering and growing discontent with Abbas’s autocratic rule.

Since its founding 50-some-odd years ago, the secular Fatah faction and its leaders have brought nothing but disaster, not only to Palestinians, but to other Arabs as well.

The business of Fatah is relevant to the entire international community, including Israel. Why? Because Fatah dominates the PA, which is supposed to be Israel’s peace partner and which is funded and armed by the US, EU and other international donors.

Hamas will continue to exploit Fatah’s corruption in order to gain more popularity among the Palestinians. The truth, however, is that neither Hamas nor Fatah has fulfilled repeated promises to improve the living conditions of the people.

Abbas and his old-guard cronies will continue to clutch onto power and resist demands for real reforms. And they will continue to blame Israel, and everyone else, for the misery of their people, misery they themselves have wrought.

Barring last-minute changes, the Palestinian Fatah faction, which is headed by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, is scheduled to hold its Seventh Conference in Ramallah on November 29. This will be the first gathering of its kind since August 2009.

The upcoming conference coincides with mounting tensions in Fatah, the result of internal bickering and growing discontent with Abbas’s autocratic rule. Some 1,300 delegates to the conference will be asked to vote for two of Fatah’s key decision-making bodies — the 23-member Central Committee and the 132-member Revolutionary Council.