The thing is..
Apple have managed to prove that having a usable and more productive phone is more alluring than battery life.
12 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Aug 2007
Clearly this is a private initiative and not one from the government.
Secondly, the Gulf States and the Saudis are shit scared of nuclear Shiites (Iran is the only Shiite and non-Arab state - apart from Israel- in the Middle East and they are not so popular either), so if Israel did nuke Iran, (which it won't because operationally it's too complex, but it's certainly worth rattling sabres to stop them developing nuclear weapon capability) it would probably draw some polite applause from the Arabs.
Thirdly, Israel buys its oil from other places like Nigeria, Angola, Colombia, Mexico, Egypt, Norway, Russia, Kazakhstan, and some of the other -stans. Just Google for it.
Tools guy @1 - the Eclipse point is that you now have one tool where you can equally work well on Java or PHP, something which was not officially supported on Eclipse previously (yes I'm aware of the other PHPeclipse etc... projects). So if you want to build composite apps of PHP on Java, you don't need separate tools any more. Whether people will actually want to do this? Dunno yet.
Nice conspiracy theory. Your beliefs in the competence of the Israeli government are rather touching.
If the millions wasted on retired generals returning to public "service" via lucrative consulting contracts and government tender project cost overruns were saved, then perhaps we'd actually have some money to fund teams of inspired individuals to sit around reading poorly edited cut and pasted FUD written by the worlds marketing departments and disseminating the competitive intelligence info in realtime to product development teams spam filters.
Clearly, knowing press releases from companies who can't even afford professional translators is going to allow generate millions for companies who will magically and instantly create copycat products and announcements.
Probably easier to either discover info by inserting trojans directly onto corporate end users machines (that is sooo 2005) or just put level 7 probes into Internet backbone (read your Wired story here: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70908 ).