By Edward Wong and Alan Yuhas, NYT

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his wife, Susan, on Friday before traveling to Switzerland for the annual Bilderberg Meeting.CreditCreditFabrizio Bensch/Reuters

New elections in Israel are just the latest nail in the tire of the deflating ‘Deal of the Century.’

BY OMRI NAHMIAS, JPOST,  MAY 31, 2019

Jared Kushner . (photo credit: REUTERS)

WASHINGTON – As any cook learns on his first day of culinary school, it is not safe to defrost a dish and then store it back in the icebox. Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt worked for months on defrosting their much anticipated peace plan, and now it seems like they don’t have any choice but to freeze it again for an unknown period.

In any conversation with administration officials during the past two months, there was one word that you could repeatedly hear: momentum. The peace team members were well aware that they have one opportunity to lay out their vision, and it better be successful.

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by Seth Frantzman, The Jerusalem Post
May 30, 2019

Polls show Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will likely do well in snap elections in September.

In power for ten years, the Israeli prime minister appeared to stumble on Wednesday when he drove the Knesset to dissolve itself and call new elections. Ostensibly this was because Benjamin Netanyahu had failed to form a coalition government. But how could the master politician who has dominated Israeli politics for a decade and has thirty years of experience in the Knesset’s coalition politics end up in a situation like this? What if it is actually the best of both worlds for him? He continues on as prime minister with polls showing that he will likely do well in September, and his rivals have to fight over the scraps.
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By Dick Morris, WESTERN JOURNAL

President Donald Trump speaks to the media. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)

Several months ago, I had the zechus to serve as the dinner chairman of the National Council of Young Israel gala at the Marriot Marquis in Manhattan. The dinner – which celebrated the unique bond between the United States, the Jewish people, and Israel – featured a program that highlighted Jewish veterans who fought in World War II.

In the days following the dinner, the National Council and I were unexpectedly attacked for putting together a “Trump rally,” leading to criticism of the NCYI leadership for allegedly hijacking the organization and turning it into the political arm of the Republican Party.

Nothing could be further from the truth.
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by Ilias Kouskouvelis and Konstantinos Zarras, Middle East Quarterly

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu (left) meets with Egyptian president Sisi, New York, September 2017. Egyptian-Israeli security cooperation reached its peak after the ousting of President Morsi while Riyadh’s warming relations with Israel have also strengthened Egyptian-Saudi cooperation in the face of the growing Iranian threat.

An Oscillating Relationship

Saudi Arabia and Egypt have each claimed a leading regional role, and their relations have long swung between cooperation and indirect confrontation. During Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rule (1954-70), Cairo emerged as the main claimant for regional hegemon. Saudi-Egyptian antagonism then came to the forefront and culminated in the proxy war in Yemen (1962-70) where the two states found themselves fighting on opposing sides. Yet Egypt’s defeat in the June 1967 war and Nasser’s death in September 1970 ushered in a thaw between the two states. Cairo gradually shifted towards the Western camp and recognized Riyadh’s prominent role in the Muslim world, in exchange for generous economic support. Under Hosni Mubarak’s rule, close relations with the desert kingdom became one of Egypt’s foreign policy pillars.[2]
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by Dr. Eric R. Mandel, MEPIN, JPOST

According to the research of Harvard’s Erica Chenoweth, more than half of nonviolent revolutions are successful, as long as more than 3.5% of the population participates to ensure regime change, whereas less than 25% of violent uprisings succeed.

CAN THE regime be changed?. (photo credit: REUTERS)

Is the hostile behavior of the Islamic Republic of Iran just a mild thorn in the United States’ side, or is it a direct and growing danger to American and allied security interests?

With the exception of those married to preserving the Iran nuclear agreement at any cost, the idea of a nonviolent regime change in Iran is a very appealing notion. In theory, it would serve American interests by removing a dangerous nemesis with American blood on its hands, and it could also create the possibility of turning a malignant enemy into a potential ally in the Muslim world, while freeing the Iranian people from 40 years of terror, repression and hardship.

But does regime change always mean kinetic military action, or is it possible to change a malevolent regime without force?
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Arab autocrats, who need Israel far more than Israel needs them, desire a confident Israel to crush its enemies, not a craven country that bends to terrorists.

By Rafael Castro, INN

Likud gains 2 seats after merger with Kulanu, Blue & White sinks. Labor wiped off of political map. Broad right-wing alliance nets 7 seats.

By David Rosenberg, INN

By BENNY AVNI, Special to the Sun | May 31, 2019

As Israel gears up to a surprise election, the American-led peace plan touted as the “Deal of the Century” seemed to suffer a major blow. But don’t write off the deal yet.

By Raymond Ibrahim, AMERICAN THINKER

Of all of Islam’s conquests of Christian territory, the most symbolically significant occurred today, on May 20, 1453, when Constantinople fell.  For not only was “New Rome” a living and direct extension of the ancient Roman Empire and current capital of the Christian Roman Empire (or Byzantium), but its cyclopean walls had prevented Islam from entering Europe through its eastern doorway for the previous seven centuries.

On becoming Ottoman sultan, Mehmet, or Muhammad II (b. 1432, r. 1451-1481) — “the mortal enemy of the Christians,” to quote a contemporary prelate — made ready for war.  Throughout the spring of 1453 the city watched helplessly as his forces made their way to and surrounded Constantinople by land and sea. One contemporary remarked that Muhammad’s “army seemed as numberless as grains of sand, spread… across the land from shore to shore.” In the end, some one hundred thousand fighters came.
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In surprise twist, radical Saudi preacher apologizes for his movement’s past and hails the crown prince’s reforms.

BY ZVI MAZEL, JPOST

EXTREMIST THEMES from the Muslim Brotherhood appeared on Al Jazeera. (photo credit: REUTERS)

Sheikh Aid al-Qarni – one of the leaders of the Al-Sahwa al-Islamiyya (“Islamic Awakening”) radical movement – apologized publicly on a Gulf television channel earlier this month for the excesses he and his fellow members in Saudi Arabia committed in the ’80s and ’90s. He admitted that they had made grievous mistakes in attempting to impose their extremist religious views and forcing the government to acknowledge the supremacy of the sages of Islam, thereby damaging the fabric of the country. The government had indeed taken far-reaching steps to enforce strict religious observance in order to appease the group.

“We were wrong,” Qarni said, “in contradicting the Koran and the Sunna and misrepresenting the tolerance of Islam, thus causing hardship to the faithful. Islam is a religion of peace, confidence and mercy,” all things he said he failed to understand when he was young. Life, he continued, has since led him to change his views, and he now believes in the moderate Islam open to the world of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS).
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Border Inferior to pre- ’67, 3rd Party-Based Security, Multiple Sovereignties

IMRA

Last night PM Netanyahu charged that Avigdor Liberman is “now” part of the
left after forcing snap elections for the second time,
In truth – Liberman has ALWAYS been left!
Here is something I wrote over two years ago:

Weekly Commentary: Liberman Consistent: Border Inferior to pre- ’67, 3rd
Party-Based Security, Multiple Sovereignties
Dr. Aaron Lerner  15 March, 2017

There’s nothing new about Minister of Defense Avigdor Liberman’s positions.

From the very start of his political career he has advocated:

#1.  Redrawing Israel’s borders to remove large Arab communities.  The
resulting lines would be militarily inferior to the terrible pre-’67 border.
While Liberman promises the move would dramatically reduce the Arab
population inside Israel this assertion ignores that the affected Israeli
Arabs could opt to change their official place of residence to a location
remaining inside Israel and/or successfully challenge their unilateral loss
of Israeli citizenship in the Supreme Court.
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Angelo M. Codevilla, HOOVER INSTITUTION  Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Pitilessly, the past quarter century’s events have dismissed the hopes for peace with the Arabs that Israeli diplomats, often accompanied by U.S. counterparts, detailed to the world in 1993 as they explained the concessions they had finalized in Oslo. Previously, they had treated Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization as a terrorist organization to be marginalized if not destroyed. The list of its outrages, from bombing school buses and airports to murdering Olympic athletes, spoke for itself. In 1982, the U.S. saved the PLO from imminent destruction by an Israeli and Lebanese alliance, and sustained it in supervised exile in Tunisia. U.S. policy had always nourished hopes that, were the PLO to be given responsibility and treated as a partner, it would moderate itself. This would result in a Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel.

In Israel, substantial high-level opinion had come to share these hopes. And why not? The Soviet collapse, having removed the PLO’s main source of funding and hope of support, radically weakened Syria. The Israelis judged that the PLO had little choice but to take the generous option of peace and partnership offered to it. Besides, Israel had been suffering from a wave of PLO-organized violence in the West Bank, and longed for a broad path to peace. Hence, the Oslo Accords.
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By Barry Strauss, HOOVER INSTITUTION

The Trump Administration has changed course in various ways from its predecessor when it comes to relations with Israel. Among other things, the current American government has moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and reduced aid to the Palestinians. In addition, the administration is on the verge of unveiling the so-called Deal of the Century, a new proposal for an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan.

What are the strategic consequences of these initiatives? And how do they advance American national interests? To answer these questions, we need to start with the broader context of American foreign policy.

As a global power, and the sole state capable of defending the liberal world order, the U.S. has interests around the world. Understandably, it has focused of late on East Asia, given the challenges of China and North Korea. Then too there is the importance of other states in the region, especially Japan. Yet other issues in other parts of the world call for attention as well, for example: the revolt against dictatorship in Venezuela, the future of NATO, trade relations in North America, dealings between India and Pakistan, economic development in Africa, and power politics in the Middle East. I turn to the latter here.
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By Andrew J. Sciascia, WESTERN JOURNAL

The Trump administration moved to revoke an Obama-era rule that affords anti-discrimination protections to transgender individuals under the Affordable Care Act.

The proposed regulation, which the Health and Human Services Department released Friday, would exclude “gender identity” from being read into current sections of federal law that maintain that healthcare providers may not discriminate because of one’s sex.

“In 2016, HHS issued a new rule that redefined discrimination ‘on the basis of sex’ to include termination of pregnancy and gender identity, which it defined as one’s internal sense of being ‘male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female,’” HHS’ Friday press release read.
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