Bloomberg News

China has offered to go on a six-year buying spree to ramp up imports from the U.S., in a move that would reconfigure the relationship between the world’s two largest economies, according to officials familiar with the negotiations.

By increasing goods imports from the U.S. by a combined value of more than $1 trillion over that period, China would seek to reduce its trade surplus — which last year stood at $323 billion — to zero by 2024, one of the people said. The officials asked not to be named as the discussions aren’t public.
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B MYRON MAGNET, NATIONAL REVIEW

There’s a problem with getting too close to Turkey.President Trump is right to dismiss the “freedom agenda” in the Middle East. Long experience has disproved that idea that, under the umbrella of U.S. military might and with American encouragement, tribal Muslim societies with medieval and theocratic cultures and institutions will transform themselves into free democratic republics. Instead of an Arab Spring, we got years of jihadi civil war, culminating in the ISIS scourge of violence and terror. Read more…

I’m hoping buyer’s remorse on Obama will finally cause a Jewish shift to the right.

By Norman Podhoretz, WSJ

One of the most extraordinary features of Barack Obama’s victory over John McCain was his capture of 78% of the Jewish vote. To be sure, there was nothing extraordinary about the number itself. Since 1928, the average Jewish vote for the Democrat in presidential elections has been an amazing 75%—far higher than that of any other ethno-religious group.

Yet there were reasons to think that it would be different in 2008. The main one was Israel. Despite some slippage in concern for Israel among American Jews, most of them were still telling pollsters that their votes would be strongly influenced by the positions of the two candidates on the Jewish state. This being the case, Mr. McCain’s long history of sympathy with Israel should have given him a distinct advantage over Mr. Obama, whose own history consisted of associating with outright enemies of the Jewish state like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the historian Rashid Khalidi.
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The opening of the new ‘apartheid road’ connecting Jerusalem with its northern settlements was met with silence. Right-wing politicians are no longer afraid of a response, they know the world will remain indifferent

By Shaul Arieli, HAARETZ,

Cars drive on the new Israeli road divided by a wall to separate Palestinians and Israelis in East Jerusalem, January 10, 2019.AFP

The opening of the new road northeast of Jerusalem between Hizma and Zayem, which features separate lanes for Israelis and Palestinians, was greeted with almost total silence by the Israeli media, even though the road illustrates the government’s wanton spending in the West Bank and the Netanyahu government’s policy of pushing for annexation.
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This year saw a slew of activity from the Gulf states embracing Israel. What could 2019 have in store, particularly if the long-awaited Trump peace plan is released?

By David May and Varsha Koduvayur, FDD

The trickle of outreach between Israel and the Arab Gulf states became a torrent in 2018. While an open partnership remains elusive, the unprecedented volume of activity bodes well for what 2019 could hold in store.

The biggest and most overt display of Israeli-Arab rapprochement came with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Oman in October, where he met Sultan Qaboos. Though former Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres made trips to Oman in the 1990s, this trip was much more visible and the first official visit since the Second Intifada. Soon after Bibi’s visit, Israel’s transportation minister arrived in the sultanate to speak at a conference.

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While settler leaders quickly denounced fatal 2015 firebombing of Palestinian home, declining faith in the Shin Bet may have kept many moderates silent on Aisha Rabi’s 2018 death

By JACOB MAGID, TOI

Not even a day passed after the July 2015 firebombing of two homes in the Palestinian village of Duma before condemnations came flooding in from settler leaders as well as the broader Israeli right.

The Yesha settlement umbrella council released a statement the next morning expressing “shock and disgust” at the nighttime attack, in which parents Riham and Sa’ad Dawabshe were burned to death along with their infant son Ali.

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Al-Shabaab terrorist group says it carried out attack in Nairobi in retaliation for Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

By Elad Benari, INN

The Al-Shabaab terrorist group said on Wednesday it carried out the deadly attack on a Nairobi hotel and office complex in retaliation for US President Donald Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital last December, AFP reported.

The group said in a statement picked up by the SITE monitoring group that its fighters stormed the DusitD2 complex on instructions by Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

“It is a response to the witless remarks of the US president, Donald Trump, and his declaration of Al-Quds (Jerusalem) as the capital of Israel,” said Al-Shabaab.
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By Yitzhak Ram, ISRAEL HAYOM

Very few public bodies have more influence over our lives than the Judicial Selection Committee. The litigiousness of public life in Israel has made judges main players in the social and public sphere, and courtrooms have become the primary arenas for sorting out public disagreements. The Supreme Court has assumed the authority to torpedo democratic decisions and political compromises.

Due to the interpretive doctrine currently pervading the country’s higher courts, laws cease to have meaning in and of themselves. It is the interpreter of the law who gives it its meaning, a meaning often completely unrelated to the intention and desires of the lawmakers who drafted it. Today, the monopoly on legislative interpretation belongs to the court, whose judges are appointed by a nine-member committee which works behind closed doors to perpetuate that same monopoly.
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Report claims Trump proposal calls for Palestinian state in 85-90% of West Bank, with most Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem as its capital

By ERIC CORTELLESSA, TOI Today,  

US President Donald Trump’s Mideast envoy Jason Greenblatt addresses the American Jewish Committee’s Women’s Leadership Board Spring Luncheon in New York on April 24, 2018. (Courtesy / Ellen Dubin Photography)

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Wednesday dismissed as “inaccurate” an Israeli TV report that said its forthcoming peace plan would offer Palestinians a state in most of the West Bank, with parts of East Jerusalem as its capital.

Channel 13 reported hours earlier that a “senior American” official had said Trump’s peace proposal would provide for Jerusalem to be divided, with Israel maintaining sovereignty in west Jerusalem, parts of east Jerusalem and the “holy basin,” including the Old City and its immediate environs. However, it added that the “holy basin” area would be “jointly run” with the Palestinians, Jordan and possibly other countries.
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Pomopeo appeals to Iranian public to rein in expansionist Islamic regime

BY: Adam Kredo, WFB,

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia—Following meetings with top Saudi Arabian leaders in the country’s capital on Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that one of the Trump administration’s top regional goals is to “make sure that the Iranian people get control of their capital,” a shot across the bow to a ruling regime that has spent billions to beef up its foreign military and terrorist operations.

Pompeo, speaking to reporters in Riyadh, said that the Trump administration’s primary goal is to empower the Iranian people to rein in the ruling regime, which has spent a fortune on foreign wars and terror operations as its own people suffer from a collapsing economy.
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By Conrad Black, AMERICAN GREATNESS

t is time for the president to take his opponents by surprise, as Richard Nixon once did. In 1971, President Nixon astounded his critics with the announcement of the trip to China and later his call for wage and price controls to prevent inflation. Similarly, in 1972, he caught his Democratic opponent, George McGovern, off guard when he revealed that North Vietnam had already rejected terms Senator McGovern said he should offer Hanoi.

With an opposition so smug and unimaginatively conducted as the Pelosi-Schumer pantomime horse, this should not be a great challenge for President Trump.
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By Victor Davis Hanson, NATIONAL REVIEW

Old stereotypes resurface among today’s woke progressives.

The old antisemitism was mostly, but not exclusively, a tribal prejudice expressed in America up until the mid 20th century most intensely on the right. It manifested itself from the silk-stocking country club and corporation (“gentlemen’s agreement”) to the rawer regions of the Ku Klux Klan’s lunatic fringe.

While liberals from Joe Kennedy to Gore Vidal were often openly anti-Semitic, the core of traditional antisemitism, as William F. Buckley once worried, was more rightist. And such fumes still arise among the alt-right extremists.
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By Jack Crowe, NATIONAL REVIEW

The Brexit deal painstakingly negotiated by British prime minister Theresa May over the past two years was rejected overwhelmingly by Parliament on Tuesday.

The deal, which fell in a 432–202 vote in the House of Commons, represented the only established path forward to prevent a so-called “no-deal” British exit from the European Union, which is set to take place in March and would likely result in massive political and economic upheaval.

In response to the historic defeat, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn tabled a vote of no confidence, which, if passed, would oust May and give Corbyn a chance to form a new government. If Corbyn’s bid to become prime minister then failed to gain the support of a majority of MPs within 14 days, Parliament would dissolve and a new general election would be held.
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