Movement for Quality Government told it must seek clarification from Netanyahu on his plans following announcement of criminal charges, before it seeks legal intervention

By TOI STAFF 24 November 2019,

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a Likud party rally in Tel Aviv, on November 17, 2019. (Tomer Neuberg/Flash90)

An advocacy group filed a petition Sunday with the High Court of Justice seeking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s removal from office as he faces graft charges.

But the court swiftly rejected the appeal by the Movement for Quality Government in Israel, on the grounds that it should have first formally asked the prime minister how he intended to respond to the coming corruption charges before filing its petition.
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Netanyahu green-lights bill being drafted by Likud MK to give voters chance to directly elect PM if Knesset is deadlocked.

Arutz Sheva Staff, 25/11/19

As Israel inches towards its third general election in less than 12 months, the Likud is drafting a bill aimed at breaking the political deadlock – and preventing the possibility of a fourth election.

According to a report by Yediot Ahronot Monday, Likud MK Shlomo Karai is drafting bill which would resolve the ongoing political stalemate, giving voters the opportunity to directly elect the prime minister if no candidate is able to build a coalition government.

Under the current system, voters give their ballots to party lists, which in turn negotiate with other parties to form majority coalitions. The leader of the largest party able to cobble together a majority in the Knesset is typically the one selected to serve as premier.
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So far, Sa’ar is the only heavy hitter to call for an immediate primary. Netanyahu’s problems will start when others join the call

By Anshel Pfeffer, HAARETZ

From left: Likud members David Amsalem, Gideon Sa’ar, Amir Ohana and Nir Barkat at the Knesset, July 22, 2019  Emil Salman

Gideon Sa’ar has been back in frontline politics for more than two years — after taking a break before the 2015 Knesset election — and until now he’s not been in any hurry to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He has been biding his time, like everyone else in Likud, waiting for Netanyahu’s eventual departure. He said last month that when a leadership primary is held, he’ll contest it. But he wasn’t pushing for it to be held just yet.

Then, though, he said Thursday that if a new election is held next March, he’d demand that Likud hold a primary before it. And then, on Saturday, he went on television and said that, following the corruption indictment against Netanyahu, a primary must be held immediately.

Why the sudden rush? Netanyahu is on his last legs anyway, so why take on his hordes of supporters in Likud when they are at their most angry?
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By David Israel, JEWISH PRESS

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is insisting on expanding the constitutionally mandated primary to elect a Likud party chairman to include full primaries for the party’s Knesset list. Those have been conducted in February 2019, and although there has not been a functioning Knesset since, Netanyahu is free to argue that an upcoming new election (which is being anticipated) require everybody to run in the primaries.

Except that only last week, Netanyahu reached an agreement with Likud Center Chairman MK Haim Katz to cancel the primaries for the party list.
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By David Israel, JEWISH PRESS

The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK) announced on Saturday that the Iranian regime killed more than 300 protestors in different cities around the country, noting that the number of dead is “much higher and the regime is trying to conceal the scale of its horrific crimes.”

“The bodies of many of the martyrs have been collectively taken from hospitals or their location of martyrdom by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and other suppressive forces to unknown locations,” the MEK said.
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Thank you very much. Thank you very much. It’s a real honor for me to be here tonight and to join with all of you. I appreciate you all being here. And it’s particularly an honor for me to — to join all the very distinguished lawyers in this room.

Gene [Meyer] thank you for that introduction but I’m the 85th Attorney General.¹ And Chinese has come in very handy because I find that…when you read congressional enactments from right to left they make a lot more sense than when you read them from left to right.

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No matter how burning his sense of injustice, would that Netanyahu had taken a nobler course; instead he has plunged Israel deeper into a dreadful ordeal

By DAVID HOROVITZ, TOI 21 November 2019, 11:19 pm

In this Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2019 photo, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during an extended faction meeting of his right-wing / ultra-Orthodox bloc members at the Knesset (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

Among Israelis and those who care about Israel, there should be no celebrating the attorney general’s announcement Thursday that Benjamin Netanyahu is to stand trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Netanyahu is the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history, an astute, intelligent and articulate leader who has repeatedly won the public’s trust at the ballot box and steered Israel through the past decade’s multi-threatening challenges in a dangerous, unpredictable Middle East.
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At Netanyahu’s request, Likud MK showed Kushner his ‘win-win’ proposal for 12 industrial zones, network of Biblical sites aimed at Evangelicals; Greenblatt, Friedman ‘like it’

By DAVID HOROVITZ, TOI 17 November 2019,

Then-Mayor Nir Barkat visits the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya to inaugurate a new road. (Kobi Gideon/Flash90)

Israel has presented to senior members of the Trump administration a major, long-term economic proposal to employ a quarter of a million Palestinians in Israeli-run West Bank industrial zones, and to develop up to two dozen major West Bank Biblical tourism sites with a focus on Evangelical Christian visitors, Likud MK Nir Barkat, the former Jerusalem mayor who is behind the plan, told The Times of Israel.

Entitled “Developing Win-Win Economy in Judea and Samaria,” the presentation was set out by Barkat to US President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Jared Kushner in the summer, at the direct request of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

It has also been seen by the outgoing Trump envoy Jason Greenblatt and the US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, both of whom “like it,” Barkat said.
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DEBKA

The shattering indictments for bribery and breach of faith brought against Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu,70, are only one stage in the relentless campaign to unseat him. His decision to fight for his innocence and win round the voters in Israel’s third election in a year, in early 2020, has brought down on his head the full weight of the legal, political and media establishments. They have no qualms about bending the immunity law to force him to quit office without waiting for an absolute court judgement of his guilt.

If there was a concerted coup conspiracy to oust him, as he charges, it is far from over. Since the attorney general announced the indictments last Thursday, one voice after another has candidly proposed circumventing the legal process if that is the only way to remove Netanyahu as prime minister before his day in court. On Saturday, Nov. 22, a former high court justice, Eliahu Matza, joined the chorus of law enforcement voices when, in a radio interview, he pressed the Knesset to refer to the Supreme Court the decision on his competence to form a government. By law, this is the sole jurisdiction of parliament.

This was incidentally a sly attempt to exploit the crisis for promoting the court’s long machinations for asserting its authority over parliament.

On the political front, the opposition Kahol Lavan, whose leader Benny Gantz failed to form a new government, like Netanyahu before him, urged law enforcement authorities to force the prime minister to give up all his cabinet portfolios.

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Lawmaker says PM’s irresponsible, destructive attacks on law enforcement are leading the country to ‘chaos’; calls for leadership contest in next two weeks

By TOI STAFF

Likud MK Gideon Sa’ar, speaking during a conference in Tel Aviv on September 5, 2019. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

Senior Likud lawmaker Gideon Sa’ar on Saturday castigated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for describing the charges against him as an attempted coup, demanded an immediate leadership contest in their ruling Likud party, and claimed he could “easily form a government.”

The Likud lawmaker warned that Netanyahu’s response to the criminal charges announced by Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit on Thursday, in which the prime minister has claimed he is being framed and has demanded that the law enforcement agencies who investigated him should themselves be probed, was irresponsible and dangerous.

“This is not an attempted coup. That is not accurate,” said Sa’ar. “It is not responsible to make this claim. It harms the Likud’s statesmanlike approach. It aims not for reform but to destroy the law enforcement hierarchies.”
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T. Belman. In 1981 Feith wrote:

““The issue is properly a political question, not a legal question.” The U.S. government “has recognized no country’s sovereignty over the West Bank since Britain controlled the area under the Palestine Mandate.” The sovereignty issue “is open and will not be closed until the actual parties to the conflict formally consent to a peace agreement.”

He was wrong to write so. Israel was and is the sovereign of this land by virtue of the fact that when we declared independence in 1948,  international law held held that Israel’s borders included all land west of the Jordan River. International Law and the State of Israel

“In international law, there is a clear rule regarding the establishment of new countries: the country’s borders are determined in accordance with the borders of the previous political entity in that area. So, what was here before? The British Mandate. And what were the borders of the British Mandate? From the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.” Kontorovich: Israeli rule in the ‘West Bank’ is legal under International Law 

Secondly, do we have to wait til doomsday for a political settlement. At what point of time can we just declare sovereingty over all the land and be done with the political settlement?

By Douglas Feith, NATIONAL REVIEW

It was not radical for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to revive the Reagan policy.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has just upended longstanding, widely held opinion about the legality of Israel’s West Bank settlements. Critics say he is off on the law, has radically broken with U.S. policy, and is undermining the pursuit of peace. Those critics are wrong on all scores.

Pompeo made four main points. First, the settlements are not “inherently illegal.” Second, the West Bank’s fate should be determined through negotiations. Third, international law “does not compel a particular outcome” in favor of Israel or the Palestinians. And fourth, the issue is political in nature, not legal, and attacking the settlements’ legality “hasn’t advanced the cause of peace.” Read more…

T. Belman. While this may appear to be a setback, it isn’t. Since the settlements are not illegal, per se, and since Israel is fully in charge of Area C, there is absolutely no legal constraint to Israel building new settlements.

Furthermore, there is no need for Israel to annex the land because she is fully sovereign there. All she needs to do is apply Israel law. Then its a done deal.

Administration figures add the move also should not be seen as support for ‘unrestrained building’; US ambassador to Israel said behind shift in American approach

By TOI STAFF  20 November 2019,

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visits the prime minister’s Sukkah, during talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on October 18, 2019. At left is US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman (Amos Ben Gershom / GPO)

The new US policy to no longer considers settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem illegal “should not be seen as a green light for Israel to annex parts of the West Bank or start unrestrained building in settlements,” US officials told an Israeli news network Tuesday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly promised to quickly apply Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley if he is able to put together a new government amid ongoing political gridlock. He has indicated this would be acceptable to Washington, saying any such move would be made in “maximum coordination” with the United States.

Administration officials told Channel 13 news that the main motive for changing the policy, as announced by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday, was the Trump administration’s desire to reverse decisions and policy changes made by the Obama administration.
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Channel 12 does not name plotters, but notes ‘deafening silence’ of Erdan, Edelstein and Sa’ar since charges announced against PM; says rivals are talking, polling, but disunited

By TOI STAFF   22 November 2019, 10:20 pm

Illustrative: Clockwise from top left: Likud members Yisrael Katz, Yuli Edelstein, Gideon Sa’ar, and Gilad Erdan. (Flash90)

Several senior Likud lawmakers have reportedly been meeting behind the scenes in a bid to try and oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following the attorney general’s explosive Thursday announcement that he will indict the Israeli leader in three corruption cases.

According to a Channel 12 TV report on Friday, which did not cite sources, the senior Likud officials are convinced “the Netanyahu era is over” and are working to try dethrone him as head of the party within the current 21-day period allotted for the Knesset to agree on a prime minister before Israel would be forced to go to new elections.

Channel 13 reported similar backroom talks, with one unnamed person saying: “We are trying to figure out how to wrest the party from his hands.”
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Who would want to be stuck in the middle between the USA and China right now?Huawei Technologies, possibly? 

ASIA TIMES

The Chinese telecommunications giant was made an international pariah by US regulators earlier this year after a ban on buying key parts and on access to crucial markets.

You think that sounded the death knell for the company? Think again, says Asia Times Finance Editor Umesh Desai.

This week, writes Desai, Huawei announced a US$286 million bonus bonanza to its employees. Its bonds continue to trade above par, and its cash balances are massive. Hardly the signs of a company struggling under sanctions.

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T. Belman. Fitzgerald neglects to mention another reason the Fourth Genva Convention does not apply. Article 2 clearly states:

“The Convention shall also apply to all cases of partial or total occupation of the territory of a High Contracting Party, even if the said occupation meets with no armed resistance.”

Judea and Samaria was never  “the territory of a High Contracting Party.”

BY Hugh Fitzgerald, JIHAD WATCH

[…] Despite the fact that the U.N. General Assembly, and the U.N. Security Council, and the International Court of Justice, have all claimed that by building settlements in the West Bank, Israel violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, their judgments are flatly contradicted by the facts. We mustn’t let ourselves be overawed.

First, the Fourth Geneva Convention came out of World War II, a response to the behavior of the Nazis in the countries they occupied and where they both moved peoples out – including Jews who were rounded up and sent to death camps, and also Poles and other Slavic peoples considered as untermenschen — and moved in more ethnic Germans, to parts of Poland, the Baltic states, and Czechoslovakia. But Israel was never an “occupying power” in the West Bank; it was there by right, the right conferred on it in the Mandate for Palestine and, one might add, by the fact that Jews had lived in the West Bank continuously for the past two thousand years. It was only between 1948 and 1967 that the West Bank was rendered Judenrein by the Jordanians. Second, Israel did not move any people out of the West Bank, nor did it forcibly move Jews into the West Bank. Those Jews who moved into West Bank settlements did so of their own volition.
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BY Chriwstine Douglass-Williams,JIHAD WATCH

In a sudden switch, after a decade of voting for Israel, Canada under Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has just voted in support of a “pro-Palestine” UN resolution which was sponsored by the State of Palestine, North Korea, Egypt, Nicaragua, and Zimbabwe. The Resolution calls for a “just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement” to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and explicitly refers to contested lands between the two countries as “Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

Resolution A/C.3/74/L.58 urges the international community to “support and assist the Palestinian people in the early realization of their right to self-determination.” The Resolution is antisemitic and serves the jihadist cause against Israel. It is the Palestinians who have rejected a Jewish state to begin with. It is a well-established fact that Israel has been fighting for its existence since its creation in 1948. To justify and strengthen the Palestinian resistance to “free Palestine” from “the River to the Sea” is, in other words, aiding in efforts to delegitimize and obliterate Israel altogether.
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T. Belman. The author is a former Canadian Ambassidor to Israel and a lawyer who now lives in Israel. That doesn’t mean she is right. For years now the Government in Israel has been fighting the “deep state” and making progress. The left says this fight is an attack on democracy whereas the right believes that democracy in Israel requires the Knesset to be the government of the country, not the bureaucracy.

Thus Bibi’s fight is part of a larger fight and should not be abandoned.

By Vivian Bercovici, COMMENTARY

[…] So now, in another first for Israel, all 120 elected MKs now have 21 days in which to attempt to do it somehow—a long shot that may, however, actually result in the unity government desired by the vast majority of Israelis.

Gideon Sa’ar, a very popular Likud member and nemesis of Netanyahu, let it be known on Thursday, before the AG’s announcement, that he believes there should be Likud primaries to select a new leader regardless of the PM’s legal woes. He also confirmed his candidacy.  It is inconceivable that Sa’ar took such a bold, public step without knowing he has the backing of several powerful Likud members. Sa’ar might be able to lead Likud into a unity government with Blue and White and other parties, leaving the ultra-orthodox and more extreme right-wing parties on the sidelines.
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by John Podhoretz, COMMENTARY

The indictments of Benjamin Netanyahu are a proximate cause of the political tumult into which Israel has fallen, with a third election almost certain after two inconclusive preceding tallies. The news that Israeli police had recommended the indictments played a key role in Netanyahu’s decision to call early elections in the first place—so that he could secure a mandate that would include the passage of a new law granting prime ministers immunity from prosecution while in office. As a 5-year-old Israeli relative of mine once informed me about my efforts at weight loss, “it don’t working.”

The indictments are sketchy. Two of them involve supposed schemes to get favorable press coverage, neither of which went anywhere. The third involves the idea that he was bribed by longtime fixer Arnon Milchan with cigars and champagne. When investigations of Netanyahu began in 2016, one of the matters being looked into was highly incendiary, having to do with whether the prime minister had favored relatives when it came to matters relating to new oil fields and the manufacture of submarines for the Israeli navy. Such questions go to the heart of Israel’s national security, and if it could have been proved that Netanyahu had compromised that security in any way, he would be toast now.
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Russian Journalist Petr Akopov: Macron Began To Identify Russia’s Place In The World Arena; However, Europe Strategically Needs Russia Much More Than We Need Europe

MEMRI

On November 7, the Economist published a lengthy interview with French President Emmanuel Macron, part of which was devoted Russia’s role in the world arena.[1]

In the interview, Macron predicted that Russia’s Eurasian project would fail leaving Moscow no alternatives aside from forging a strategic partnership with the European Union.[2]

However, Russian journalist Petr Akopov, writing in the conservative media outlet Vz.ru, takes issue with Macron and argues that Russia does have alternatives and it will never be a EU partner, in the sense that Macron intends. Akapov also adds that Europe strategically needs Russia much more than Russia needs Europe. “Europe is calling on Russia to tune in to a common future. But Russia will have an independent future, in which there will be a place for normal, long-term relations with Europe. An independent Europe, which is yet to be,” Akopov concludes.
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