STARTS AT 13 INUTES

By Sherwin Pomerantz

Israeli technological innovation, driven by the country’s necessity to solve its own existential problems, is now helping many other people around the world to solve theirs.  Although this has been true for some time, it is often informative to look at some current examples that demonstrate Israel’s continued leadership in global innovation.

Artificial Intelligence Creativity Demonstrated in China

Members of Israel’s business community recently took part in a large conference in Zhongguancun, China (near Beijing) heralding advances in artificial intelligence and underscoring Israel’s growing strength as a hub for the field. Read more…

Egypt is a signatory to international conventions that hold it responsible for the migrants that sneak across its borders into Israel. It is time that policy was implemented.

By  Yonatan Yakobovich, ISRAEL HAYOM, Israel Electric Corporation has signed a deal of defeat with Egyptian gas companies. As part of the deal, Israel will forgo over $1.2 billion out of the $1.76 billion an international process of arbitration awarded it. A quick recap: Egypt did not live up to its commitments to supply natural gas to Israel because of a series of bombing attacks on its main pipeline in the Sinai. The amount compromised on during arbitration was significantly lower than the amount Israel demanded, and now it seems that the country has to forgo about 70% of it, without receiving anything from the Egyptians.
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In an interview with Al Jazeera, Jared Kushner says Bahrain meeting will be a success despite a Palestinian boycott.

AL JAZEERA

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner said it will not be possible to solve the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a deal “along the lines of the Arab Peace Initiative”.

Kushner made the comments during an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera shortly before his departure for a Washington-sponsored “workshop” in Bahrain‘s capital, Manama, where officials and businesspeople from the United States, Israel, and several Arab states will discuss on Tuesday and Wednesday the economic part of the long-delayed US Middle East peace plan.

“I think we all have to recognise that if there ever is a deal, it’s not going to be along the lines of the Arab peace initiative,” said Kushner, who is also US President Donald Trump‘s son-in-law and has been tasked by him to lead the Middle East peace process.

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Senior Russian official stands by Tehran’s claim that US drone was shot down in Iranian airspace, defends rights of foreign troops to remain in Syria despite Israeli opposition

By JUDAH ARI GROSS, TOI 

Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev speaks at a trilateral summit with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, center-right, US National Security Adviser John Bolton, center-left, and National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat at the Orient Hotel in Jerusalem on June 25, 2019. (Noam Revkin Fenton\Flash90)

Russia’s top national security adviser spoke out on behalf of Iran during trilateral meetings with his Israeli and American counterparts in Jerusalem on Tuesday, backing Tehran’s claims against the United States and supporting its ongoing military presence in Syria, which Israel sees as a threat to its security.

The trilateral conference of Israeli, Russian, and US national security advisers is the first event of its kind to be held in Jerusalem and, according to Israel, is aimed specifically at countering Iran, including both its nuclear aspirations and its influence throughout the Middle East.
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In an interview with Al Jazeera, Jared Kushner says Bahrain meeting will be a success despite a Palestinian boycott.

AL JAZEERA

Officials to gather for so-called ‘Peace to Prosperity’ workshop, the economic part of Trump’s ‘deal of the century’.

AL JAZEERA

Bahrain is set to host the so-called “Peace to Prosperity” workshop to discuss what the US described as the economic part of President Donald Trump’s “deal of the century”, his proposal for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The meeting on June 25 and 26 in Manama has been widely criticised over the lack of representation of the Palestinian leadership, which is boycotting the gathering.

According to the White House, the meeting “will facilitate discussions on an ambitious, achievable vision and framework for a prosperous future for the Palestinian people and the region”.

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By Mordechai Sones,  INN  23/06/19 10:14I

As far back as 1996, various commentators have pointed out that no matter how many violations of Oslo occur, no matter how many times Oslo is declared dead, Oslo itself is never nullified, and the “peace process” goes on. The Palestinian Authority and its control of “areas A and B” – and their takeover of Area C – continues no matter how many violations it commits.

Apparently, diplomats call Oslo an “agreement,” but use it as a smokescreen for the inexorable transfer of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza to PA control, notwithstanding continuous PA violations that would have invalidated any real treaty years ago.
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The PA president says ‘there is no potential for a political solution’ with Trump

BY MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN, JPOST

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. (photo credit: REUTERS/MOHAMAD TOROKMAN)

Palestinians are ready to return to the negotiating table with Israel, but with two preconditions: the recognition of Israeli occupation of east Jerusalem and the “vision” of a two-state solution, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told foreign reporters in Ramallah on Sunday.

The Palestinian president said that he would not ask for anything outside of what is already prescribed by the international community as legitimate, including the most recent United Nations Resolution 2334.

“I will go to the White House and continue what I started with [US President] Donald Trump,” Abbas said.
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They’ve rejected every peace initiative. Their no-show this week in Bahrain should be the last.

This week’s U.S.-led Peace to Prosperity conference in Bahrain on the Palestinian economy will likely be attended by seven Arab states—a clear rebuke to foreign-policy experts who said that recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the Golan Heights as Israeli territory would alienate the Arab world. Sunni Arab states are lending legitimacy to the Trump administration’s plan, making it all the more notable that the Palestinian Authority itself refuses to participate.

The conference’s only agenda is improving the Palestinian economy. It isn’t tied to any diplomatic package, and the plan’s 40-page overview contains nothing at odds with the Palestinian’s purported diplomatic goals. Some aspects are even politically uncomfortable for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Given all that, the Palestinian Authority’s unwillingness to discuss economic opportunities for its own people, even with the Arab states, shows how far it is from discussing the concessions necessary for a diplomatic settlement. Instead it seeks to deepen Palestinian misfortune and use it as a cudgel against Israel in the theater of international opinion.
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Time for some original thinking

By Kurt Schlichter, TOWN HALL  6-23-19

Assuming nothing happens between the time I write this and the time you read it, it appears that Donald Trump has refused to take the sucker’s bait and engage us in open war with Iran. And while I remain more hawkish than many of my fellow supporters of the Trump Revolt against the garbage liberal elite, it’s pretty clear that Trump was right. Some quality conservatives disagree with me in good faith, but whatever makes Fredocons like Bill Kristol upset is presumptively a good idea.

Let’s clarify some things. Iran is our enemy – the notion that we might wish to avoid being drawn into open conflict today does not mean these mullah bastards don’t deserve to be hanged from the very cranes they use to murder gays, women who refuse hijab oppression and people who like freedom. We have been at covert war with them for four decades, and they’ve murdered our people from Lebanon to Iraq and elsewhere. We are morally justified in wiping out Iran’s scummy leadership and using as much force as we choose to prevent their obtaining the bomb that Obama and his coterie of collaborators tried to hand it. Don’t confuse the fact that it is not to our advantage to openly attack Iran (or at least its rulers) right this minute with the mistaken idea that Iran is not our enemy. We have every moral right to inflict ruthless payback.
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Iran’s downing of an American drone over the Strait of Hormuz seems part of Iran’s calculated strategy in the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, Israel is preparing for the possibility of being dragged into the fray.

by Yaakov Lappin, ISRAEL HAYOM

The Iranian destruction of an American intelligence-gathering drone over the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday represents the continuation of a clear, consistent and calculated Iranian strategy of brinkmanship, which began in May.

Iran said it used a domestically produced surface-to-air missile system to bring down the advanced drone, scoring a valuable propaganda victory against the United States.

It appears as if Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have come to the conclusion that the Trump administration has a fairly high tolerance level to Iranian provocations, and this assessment is forming the basis for a string of Iranian attacks throughout the region.
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T. Belman. The Deal of the Century was and is a mirage. What counts is the Jordan Option. I remain more hopeful than ever.

Document outlining Peace to Prosperity scheme includes measures that would require security compromises, likely putting the prime minister and others on the right in a bind

By RON KAMPEAS, JPOST

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convenes his cabinet with United States Ambassador to Israel David Friedman to inaugurate a new settlement named after US President Donald Trump in a gesture of appreciation for the US leader’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, June 16, 2019. (AP/Ariel Schalit)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Days ahead of a workshop where Jared Kushner will seek tens of billions of dollars for his Middle East peace plan, the White House unveiled an outline of its economic portion, including proposals, such as a Gaza-West Bank link, that are sure to rattle Israel’s government.

The “Peace to Prosperity” plan authored by a team led by Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, was posted on the White House website on Saturday. It does not outline the political portion, which the plan architects say will come in November, after Israel’s September elections and coalition-building.
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New Right leader says those who are overly stringent on performing Jewish conversion ‘are causing massive damage to Israel and Judaism, blames ‘haredi’ Chief Rabbinate for the problem.

BY JEREMY SHARON, JPOST

New Right leader Naftali Bennett has promised to pass a law allowing municipal chief rabbis the ability to conduct Jewish conversions as a way of solving what he described as a “time bomb” of Jewish intermarriage in Israel.

The conversion issue is notably the flagship concern of former Shas MK Rabbi Haim Amsalem,
who is number two on the electoral list of the Zehut Party with whom Bennett would like to unite his New Right Party.

In a Facebook post he wrote over the weekend, Bennett noted the large number of Israeli citizens from the former Soviet Union who are integrated into Jewish society, are the descendants of Jews and who marry Israeli Jews, but are not Jewish according to Jewish law.
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By Vic Rosenthal

Gideon Levy is an antisemitic misozionist* who is paid for his poison by an Israeli newspaper. He is a truly despicable human, but sometimes he’s useful as an exemplar of the extremist Israeli please-cut-my-throat Left.

Recently he wrote,

If Israel is a democracy, it’s a state of all its citizens. There is no democracy that isn’t a state of all its citizens. From America to Germany, all are states of all their citizens. If they weren’t, to whom would they belong? Only to their privileged citizens. There’s no such thing as a democracy that belongs only to the privileged of one nationality.  The state belongs to everyone. A regime that segregates and discriminates is called apartheid. There is no other name. … A state of all its citizens isn’t “the slogan of the enemy,” as the new foreign minister [Yisrael Katz] put it. It’s the heart and soul of democracy.

It’s a cold day in Hell when our dear Gideon doesn’t refer to Israel as an apartheid state, but usually he is referring to the fact that Palestinian Arabs living in Judea and Samaria cannot vote. This time he seems to be inspired by an even more fundamental fact, that Israel is defined – by its Declaration of Independence and now by its Nation-State Law – as a Jewish state. Since there are Arabs living here – even though these Arabs have the right to vote and hold office, as well as all the other usual civil rights – Israel cannot be a democracy.
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BY Abraham Cooper Harold Brackman, THE HILL

African American and Jewish members of Congress, led by Reps. John Lewis (D-Ga.), Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.), Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), Will Hurd (R-Texas) and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), announced the formation of a Congressional Caucus on Black-Jewish Relations.

American Jews — reeling from two deadly attacks on synagogues, violent attacks on Jews on the streets of New York City, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s vocal attacks on Jews and Judaism — should welcome this initiative as a ray of hope against the backdrop of gathering storm clouds.

So, too, should African Americans who have made substantial social and economic gains since Martin Luther King Jr. led the crusade for civil rights a half-century ago. Today, African Americans and Jews still top the FBI’s annual list of groups targeted for hate crimes, and their houses of worship have been targeted by violent racists. Both have much to gain from reinvigorating the historic alliance of African Americans and American Jews.
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Trump Takes Stand, Issues Stern Warning to Iran