Rockets in Jordan

Attackers fired at least three rockets from Jordan early Friday, with one narrowly missing a docked U.S. Navy ship and killing a Jordanian soldier. It was the most serious militant attack on the Navy since the USS Cole was bombed in 2000.

Another rocket fell close to a nearby airport in neighboring Israel, officials said. Jordanian and Israeli authorities said militants fired the Katyusha rockets from a warehouse in the Jordanian Red Sea port of Aqaba.

A group linked to al-Qaida claimed responsibility in an Internet statement.

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The [USS] Ashland and another vessel later sailed out of port as a result of the attacks, Brown said.

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The attacks come amid a time of tension in the region marked by Israel's withdrawal from the Palestinian Gaza Strip and the Egyptian attacks. Islamic extremists have long criticized Jordan's U.S.-allied moderate government for its peace treaty with Israel and close ties with the West.

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Navy Cmdr. Jeff Breslau said security measures employed by the Navy after the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen that killed 17 sailors were in place in Jordan.

  SF Gate article

Does that mean we're not able to protect our ships?

Bob quotes a NY Times editorial that reminds us of Gaza's history...

Without denying the genuine grief of many of the protesters, it's perhaps helpful to do a historical reality check. Gaza, a 25-mile-long, 6-mile-wide strip of land, was part of Mandatory Palestine, which was ruled by the British after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It was never part of the Zionist state intended by the United Nations partition plan that led to the establishment of Israel in 1948. At that point, five Arab nations immediately attacked the new nation, but Gaza wasn't even part of the territory Israel got in signing truces in 1949. It became the home of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing Israel, and Israel's armistice with Egypt in 1949 put it under Egyptian rule.

In the 1967 Israeli-Arab war, Israel captured Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, along with the West Bank (from Jordan) and the Golan Heights (from Syria). Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt after making peace, but kept control of Gaza. A second agreement called for negotiating eventual Palestinian autonomy there.

Gaza represents the worst side of Israel's settlement movement. The densely populated strip is home to 1.3 million Palestinians - most of them refugees, or offspring of refugees. Each square mile of Palestinian land holds, on average, about 14,000 people. Until this week, the Jewish settlers occupied 33 percent of the land.