The unnatural crowding on Israel’s coastline has thrown the eco-system out of kilter. Planning should be shifted eastward to take advantage of Israel’s geography.
By Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen, ISRAEL HAYOM
Most of the discussion about the damage caused by recent flooding in Israel’s coastal cities deals with the responsibility of the government authorities, which did not invest enough in infrastructure development. That’s only part of the story. The main problem, which we are virtually suppressing, stems from a failure in macro-planning. We aren’t facing mere problems of faulty sewage planning, but an entire outlook that failed by ignoring Israel’s basic geographic conditions.
Not since biblical times have so many people lived on the coast, which because of its location at the foot of the mountains is vulnerable to floods and swamp conditions. The High Priest’s Yom Kippur prayer mentions the residents of the Sharon region (“may their homes not become their graves”). But going back to the early days of Zionism, most of the Jews in Israel have crowded into the coastal strip. Today, 60% of the Jews in Israel live between Netanyahu and Rishon Lezion.
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Alongside the most pro-Israel US government in history, Israel finds itself caught in a political holding pattern, wasting precious chances that may not come again.
At a conference in Jerusalem last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel is suddenly experiencing “an unprecedented reality” and that the “change of the old order gives us the opportunity to liberate ourselves from old policies,” but warned that the opportunity will not last forever.
“There is a window of opportunity. It opened, but it could close,” Netanyahu told those gathered at the capital’s Begin Heritage Center for the Kohelet Policy Forum conference.
King of Jordan: I believe the ‘Deal of the Century’ will be released soon
US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on March 6, 2019, with Vice President Mike Pence, and Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Robert O’Brien. (AP/Jacquelyn Martin)
A top White House official has said US President Donald Trump’s administration will not necessarily wait until after Israel’s March 2 elections to release its long-awaited peace plan.
The launch of the so-called “deal of the century” has been delayed repeatedly by the political uncertainty in Israel, which will hold an unprecedented third vote in the span of a single year after two indecisive elections.
“I don’t think it necessarily depends on the elections,” White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien told the Axios website in comments published late Sunday. “They will have had three elections in a row, we’ll have to see.”
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Sharp jump in approvals and rejections comes as officials seek to expedite approvals process after High Court’s criticism
By TOI
Th East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan on September 9, 2019. (AP/Mahmoud Illean)
Israel granted citizenship to 1,200 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem last year, an all-time high, government figures show.
The figure is three times the number in 2018.
The number of citizenship requests denied — also roughly 1,200 — was similarly at an unprecedented high last year.
The sharp jump in approvals and rejections is not due to any change in the rate at which Palestinian are requesting the citizenship, the Haaretz daily reports, but in the Israeli government’s expediting of the approval process after a Supreme Court decision last year criticized the inefficiency in the citizenship request system.
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COGAT says there is ‘no procedure’ for ensuring people with entry permits go home; since 2014 over 50,000 entries granted for visits to prisoners
By TOI STAFF
Palestinian women at the Qalandiya checkpoint outside of the West Bank city of Ramallah, on June 23, 2017. (Hadas Parush/Flash90/File)
Israeli authorities have reportedly conceded that they have no system in place to ensure that Palestinians who cross into Israel with entry permits return to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The revelation has intensified concerns that the Hamas terror group could exploit the entry permits for facilitating terror activity within Israel’s borders.
The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Defense Ministry body responsible for liaising with the Palestinians, made the admission to the right-wing Im Tirtzu group.
Alon Schwarzer, head of Im Tirtzu’s policy division, told Army Radio on Sunday that “this is the most concerning answer we’ve received to any question we’ve ever asked. We saw data, like 50,000 permits for visits to inmates, most of whom are terrorists.”
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For far too long Israelis have been at loggerheads with each other as to the extension of Israeli sovereignty into Judea and Samaria. The opportunity to resolve this political logjam during Donald Trump’s Presidency must not be lost.
Israel’s next election due on 2 March 2020 must focus on the future of Judea and Samaria – not the future of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi).
A window of opportunity has been granted to allow Israel to extend its sovereignty into Judea and Samaria following US Secretary of State Pompeo’s statement on 19 November 2019:
“Turning now to Israel, the Trump administration is reversing the Obama administration’s approach towards Israeli settlements.
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Soft power and coercive diplomacy tools have not worked for almost 20 years against “peaceful Iran” (as Obama used to call it), and America has opted instead to exercise hard power. Trump’s order to kill Qassem Soleimani exposes once again the vast gap between the US and Europe on the problem of Iran.
In 2001, President George Bush launched the Global War on Terror doctrine, articulated in his “overcome darkness with the light of hope” speech at the UN. His successor, Barack Obama, took a different approach to the fight against global terrorism, as characterized by his conciliatory “new beginning” Cairo speech in 2009.
Today, a third approach to the war on terror is unfolding. By ordering the targeted killing of Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani, Donald Trump essentially declared that no individual or nation responsible for the spread of global terror is immune from American action. If he follows through on that threat with further action, the US might find itself back in its former position of global sheriff. Read more…
The shooting down of a Ukrainian commercial airliner immediately after takeoff from the Teheran international airport is still shrouded in mystery. 176 passengers and crew died in the ensuing crash after one or two missiles from a sophisticated Russian Tor-M1 antiaircraft battery exploded near the plane. The Iranian regime initially denied any connection to the incident, but in the face of overwhelming evidence was forced to admit that their air defense system had downed the plane.
The Iranians said that it was a human error in which a “junior officer” mistook the plane for an American cruise missile. According to Brigadier-General Amir-Ali Hajizadeh, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force, “The operator identified the plane as a cruise missile but was unable to contact the central air defense command to confirm it. So he had to choose between shooting it down or not, and he choose [sic] to do it, Hajizadeh said. The operator had 10 seconds to make a decision.”
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US president calls for transparency, says he backs demonstrators, as memorial for those killed in Ukrainian plane crash turns to anger against regime
By AGENCIES and TOI STAFFToday, 1:36 am
Iranians students chant slogans as they demonstrate following a tribute for the victims of Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737 in front of the Amirkabir University in the capital Tehran, on January 11, 2020 (ATTA KENARE / AFP)
US President Donald Trump told Iranian protesters that he supported them and warned the regime against cracking down on demonstrations that broke out after Tehran admitted shooting down an airliner by mistake, killing all 176 people aboard.
“The government of Iran must allow human rights groups to monitor and report facts from the ground on the ongoing protests by the Iranian people,” Trump tweeted Saturday in English and Farsi. Read more…
T. Belman. The meme that Trump lacks a strategy was promulgated by the Democrats the moment he took office. Unfortunately, many pundits on the right bought into it including Carolyn Glick. When this happened, I always came to Trump’s defense. I always thought that he did indeed had a strategy. It was just that he didn’t broadcast it.
By CONRAD BLACK, Special to the Sun | January 7, 2020
The problem the administration has faced is that Russia as an issue has been so aggravated by Democratic myth-makers, with the (presumably) inadvertent cooperation of some congressional Republicans, that it has been difficult for Mr. Trump to deal with Russia sensibly without exciting partisan hysteria and crowding the Democratic television news networks with the tiresome faces and voices of President Obama’s now-discredited intelligence chiefs (James Clapper and John Brennan), beating the old tambourines about Russia determining U.S. elections.
The basic American conceptual problem with this whole complex of issues is that the United States has legitimate interests in the Middle East and has reasonable ambitions for a civilized relationship with Russia and Turkey, but the President has also pledged to extract the country from, and stay out of, permanent wars in the region. These are valid objectives that can be reconciled, but not easily.
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T. Belman. What a flimsy argument.. Very few people on the right have plans to overthow Abdullah. If he were overthrown, its not the beduoin who would seize power but the Palestinians under the leadership of Mudar Zahran, with the backing of the beduoin. The Palestinians, afterall make up 82% of the citizens. Also, using the words transfer, ethnic cleansing, aparthied and racism are misusing them and incendiary.
My plan, which has the best chance of succeeding, would make all Palestinians west of the Jordan R, Jordanian citizens. They are now citizens but this would remove any doubts. Israel can annex the land without being an apartheid state because there is no obligation to give residents who are citizens of another country, citizenship. They can remain as foreign residents. My plan also envisaging incentivizing Palestinians to move the Jordan. There will be no transfer. Finally, its not like Jordan wasn’t part of Palestine from the beginning. So this isn’t transfer, it is voluntary movement from one part of the original Palestine to another part.
ZOUBEIR SOUISSI / Reuters
Once again it is clear that the Israeli right has no solution to the issue of civil rights for Palestinians in the West Bank after the planned annexation, except for the overthrowing of the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan. And once again, it turns out that both the Israeli right and the ayatollahs’ Iran have a deep partnership with shared interests.
Let’s start with the second point: The Israeli right has a real need for a strong Iran, whose influence spreads through the Middle East, because this helps the right implement its strategic goals. Iran’s aggression unites the moderate Sunni nations in an alliance with Israel against Iran, at the expense of Arab solidarity with Palestinian nationalism and the Palestinian aspiration to end the occupation and establish a state.
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This last week was like a bad bet, one where President Trump insisted he could get Democrats to
defend Iran and someone said there was just no way that was possible. If this hypothetical existed,
President Trump would’ve won, easily.
Maybe I grew up in a different country, but I swear there was a time when the country rallied
together in times of crisis. Petty differences always existed, but as a nation we had the “your
mamma” rule – where someone could say anything they wanted about their mother, but there was a
line for everyone else. Americans are free to gripe about what our government does, what they don’t
like about the country, but when someone outside the country did something to an American, that
was the line. Read more…
By Ofra Bengio, BESA January 10, 2020
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The killing of Qassem Soleimani could prove to be a turning point in the history of the Middle East as a whole, but first and foremost in Iraq. That country has been contending for months with a popular uprising that has produced chaos and turned it into an arena for a titanic battle between Iran and the US.
The Iraqi uprising erupted on October 1, 2019. Several months earlier, an Iraqi journalist published a scathing article under the headline, “Is Iraq Now a Leaf Blowing in the Wind?”
By Martin Sherman
Whatever the operational efficacy of targeted assassinations may be—or not be—the conscience of every decent individual should rebel at the thought that arch-purveyors of terror should be permitted to pursue their deadly profession with impunity
Destroy the seed of evil, or it will grow up to your ruin – attributed to Aesop, Greek fabulist (circa 620 BCE – circa 584 BC).
Last week’s assassination of the commander of the Quds brigades, the overseas arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) thrust the topic of targeted killings of high-ranking adversaries dramatically to the center of international debate—and ignited the dispute over their use as an instrument of policy, both in terms of their moral justification and their operational efficacy.
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The city’s few remaining Jews praise Egyptian leader Sissi for funding project, part of a push to draw tourists by marketing country’s rich cultural heritage
ALEXANDRIA — Egypt unveiled Friday a newly renovated 14th-century synagogue in Alexandria as part of a push to market the country’s rich cultural heritage.
The Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue, boasting green and violet stained glass windows and towering marble columns, was built in its current form in 1850 by an Italian architect on top of the original edifice dating back to 1354; the original building was badly damaged during Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798.
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By Daniel John Sobieski, AMERICAN THINKER
Susan Rice was a little less ubiquitous this time around than during her infamous five-talk-show world tour repeating the lie that the Benghazi terrorist attack was the fault of an inflammatory video and not due to the criminal negligence of President Barack Hussein Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. But there she was again on MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Comedy Hour” defending her former boss, this time against charges that President Trump cleaned up more of Obama’s Iran mess by terminating the life and reign of terror of Iranian Gen. and Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani:
The Obama administration wasn’t presented with the opportunity to take out Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was killed by a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad early Friday, former national security adviser Susan Rice said Friday night.
“Had we been presented such an opportunity, what we would have done is weigh very carefully and very deliberately the risks versus the potential rewards,” Rice told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow….
Rice questioned whether Trump made the right decision.
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Is Trump going going to do the painful thing that his predecessors eschewed?
The writer is an Iranian-American writer, poet, satirist, novelist, essayist, literary translator, public speaker and political analyst who has been writing and speaking out about the danger of radical Islam internationally. He has become a formidable voice in the USA against the danger of global jihad and Islamization of America. He maintains a website at www.amilimani.com. and wrote the book Obama Meets Ahmadinejad and a new thriller Operation Persian Gulf
Four decades ago, former President Jimmy Carter interfered in Iran’s affairs by sending a message to Iran’s generals via his ambassador, William Sullivan and General Huyser to make sure that Iran’s military remained neutral during the revolution. Sullivan oversaw secret talks with opposition leaders even as he pressed the Shah to restrain his security forces. He was in favor of the Shah’s departure from Iran and Khomeini’s return from exile.
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By John Eidson, AMERICAN THINKER
Is the federal government a disinterested player in the debate on climate science? Not based on an impressive video that outlines some of the shenanigans of government agencies, which supposedly watch the matter.
Composed of 13 federal agencies that conduct research on global changes that impact society, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) is a federal project that issues periodic reports about the climate in the United States. In 1989, the year it was established, USGCRP was mandated by Congress to coordinate federal research related to the human and natural forces that affect the global environment. Billed as the leading federal authority on global warming science, USGCRP and its affiliate agencies are tasked with educating a trusting public about Earth’s ever changing climate.
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