Donald Trump’s staff shakeup is good for hawks—and terrible for Iran

By Matthew Continetti, FREE BEACON

Mike Pompeo / Getty Images

Almost immediately after the news broke that President Trump intends to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with CIA director Mike Pompeo, media figures speculated that the decision was about Russia. The argument went like this: Tillerson was fired because he had recently criticized the Russian government for its attack using a nerve agent on a former spy living in the United Kingdom. He thereby endangered détente with Russian president Vladimir Putin and so, the critics said, Trump sacked him.
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The minute the Palestinians recognize a Jewish connection to Jerusalem, he said, the whole edifice of Palestinian rejectionism would begin to collapse.

By Herb Keinon, JPOST

US President Donald Trump’s recent moves on Jerusalem constituted “shock therapy” against Palestinian rejectionism, which is the real obstacle to peace, Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer said in Washington.

Dermer was speaking at an event in the Senate on Tuesday where former Foreign Ministry director-general Dore Gold gave a presentation to about 100 legislators, congressional staffers and think tank members titled “Jerusalem: What’s at stake.”

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T. Belman. This was expected by all of us who follow Israpundit. The Jordan Option is getting closer and closer.

On Wednesday, March 14, President Donald Trump decided to take the plan off his immediate agenda. There was no formal announcement. Trump briefed his special Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt to pass the word round among officials from the Middle East who were attending a conference at the White House on the Gaza Strip’s problems. Asked when Trump would revive the plan, Greenblatt replied: Not for a year or two.

The motives behind Trump’s decision, first revealed now on this site, are explained in their  broad, regional context in the coming issue of DEBKA Weekly (for subscribers) out on Friday, March 16.

Saudi Arabia’s crown prince knows his country needs an economic overhaul, but his plans don’t add up.

By Steffen Hertog, FP

Saudi Arabia has moved from political paralysis to rapid action under the de facto leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He has introduced a raft of ambitious economic reform plans, including the kingdom’s first multiyear fiscal adjustment program, plans for the partial IPO of the national oil company Saudi Aramco, a wide-ranging privatization scheme, and several programs for state investments in new industries. He has swiftly removed his rival Mohammed bin Nayef as crown prince and led a far-reaching anti-corruption purge, leaving old elites stunned — and with lighter wallets.

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By Ted Belman

A few weeks ago I attended this conference and found it very worthwhile.

The Videos have now been posted.

By Eric Mandel, THE HILL

Should the United States distance itself from Israel to become a neutral negotiator?  

According to a Wall Street Journal article, the Trump administration’s recent “moves have been seen as favoring Israel by Europeans, the Palestinians and their supporters.”

Lost in the discussion is whether America’s national security interests would be best served as a neutral intermediary, or, as Nikki Haley recently said, “There’s nothing wrong with showing favoritism towards an ally.”

Is Israel a strategically vital ally?

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If the U.S. president doesn’t do anything more than declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel and move the embassy, the Israelis would deem it sufficient.

By Evelyn Gordon, JNS

U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, May 23, 2017. Credit: U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv.

Bipartisanship was the watchword at last week’s AIPAC conference, but it’s no secret that pro-Israel Democrats have trouble swallowing Israelis’ enthusiasm for President Donald Trump, whose approval rating in Israel hit 67 percent even before he decided to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. They can understand Israel’s joy over that decision. But they can’t understand its seeming disregard of Trump actions that harm Israel, like abandoning Syria to Iran and Russia or divulging classified Israeli intelligence to Russia’s president.

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T. Belman. I can hardly wait. In effect, Trump will have his dream team.

Then watch for more aggressive policies regarding N. Korea, Syria, Iran and dare I say, Jordan.

I see great potential for Russia and the US to cut a deal on Syria which effectively divides the country between two spheres of interest, namely Russian and American.

By Allah Pundit

“People close to the White House say they expect more major personnel shifts this week,” tweeted Maggie Haberman yesterday. Attorney General and National Security Advisor sound pretty major.

Cycling out Jeff Sessions and cycling in John Bolton would be even weirder than bringing in Larry Kudlow to run economic policy in a protectionist White House. Until Trump jumped into politics, Sessions was the most prominent nationalist in the Republican Party, certainly in elected office. Bolton, meanwhile, has been one of the GOP’s most outspoken hawks for decades. Somehow, a little more than a year into his term, a guy who got elected president running as an anti-interventionist “America First” populist is prepared to cashier the former and hire the latter. On what planet does that make sense?
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By Isi Leibler

But I believe the hysterical attacks on President Putin following his recent misplaced comments about interference in the US elections are outrageous and can lead to dire consequences.

A very significant portion of my life has been devoted to personally combating Russian anti-Semitism. I experienced firsthand the extent of hatred against Jews which was basically ingrained in most Soviet leaders and bureaucrats. I will never forget the day when a leading KGB officer proudly told me that it would be the happiest day in his life to see Jews being strung up from the lamp posts in leading Moscow streets.

Russian anti-Semitism dates back centuries. It was encouraged by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Tsars perpetrated pogroms to divert attention from other social issues. Whilst the communists initially condemned anti-Semitism, in practice they maintained it as a state policy.

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By James Stavridis, TIME

By Shmuel Rosner, JEWISH JOURNAL

Eliezer Tauber is an Israeli academic who specializes in the modern history of the Middle East. In the past decade, he dedicated a lot of time to writing a book about the so-called “massacre of Deir Yassin.” The result was a book arguing that there was no massacre in Deir Yassin. A detailed account of a fateful day, minute by minute, hour by hour. A convincing account. I’d be surprised to find any scholar whose familiarity with this event is more intimate. Tauber knows the names of everybody, he knows the time and the place where everybody was fighting, or hiding, or wounded, or killed.

What happened in Deir Yassin in April 9, 1948, became a seminal event of Israel’s War of Independence. This Palestinian village was located to the west of Jerusalem, and was attacked by Jewish fighters of the Irgun, one of Israel’s pre-state underground forces (the main force, Haganah, was the established force; Irgun was an opposition force, under the leadership of Menachem Begin).
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By Evelyn Gordon, COMMENTARY

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with President Donald Trump last week, he had two main items on his agenda: thanking Trump for his decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and urging U.S. action on Iran. At first glance, these items seem unrelated. In fact, they’re closely intertwined. The decision to relocate the U.S. embassy has turned out to be a strategic building block in Trump’s effort to renegotiate the nuclear deal with Iran.

To understand why, consider the dilemma facing his administration when it first took office. Without a serious American threat to scrap the nuclear deal, there was no chance that even America’s European allies–much less Russia, China and Iran–would agree to negotiate a fix for some of the deal’s biggest flaws. Yet conventional wisdom held that the administration would never dare flout the whole rest of the world, along with virtually the entire U.S. policy community, by withdrawing from the deal. So how was it possible to make the threat seem credible short of actually walking away from the deal?
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“If they are really going to develop this in desert areas of all three countries, you’d expect Israeli technology perhaps to have a role to play.”

By Ben Lynfield, JPOST

To observers, Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman Al Saud’s flagship idea may seem overly ambitious – to build a mega-city known as Neom along the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea that extends across the borders to Jordan and Egypt.

Indeed, its proponents are describing the planned 26,500 square kilometer city in almost messianic terms. “Neom is positioned to become an aspirational society that heralds the future of human civilization by offering its inhabitants an idyllic lifestyle set against a backdrop of a community founded on modern architecture, lush green spaces, quality of life, safety and technology in the service of humanity paired with excellent economic opportunities,” says Neom’s website.
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By Daniel Greenfield, FPM

The first rule of Muslim grooming gangs is that no one is allowed to mention them. Not even when they abuse 1,000 girls.

A pair of whistleblowers who raised fears over the Telford child sex abuse scandal which affected up to 1,000 girls were both punished and silenced, it emerged today.

The brutal sex gang targeted the innocent girls over a 40-year period in what may be Britain’s ‘worst ever’ child abuse scandal.

Girls in the town of Telford in Shropshire were drugged, beaten and raped at the hands of the violent groom gang which was active since the 1980s.
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Peninsula has become a battleground over the future of country

By Jacob Wirtschafter and Amr Eltohamy — Special to The Washington Times 

CAIRO — Egyptians took to the streets last year to protest President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi’s decision to give two strategically important Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia.

But that protest — rare in a country where Mr. el-Sissi has clamped down on the political opposition — could pale in comparison with the backlash the government would face if Mr. el-Sissi agrees to a rumored American Arab-Israeli peace plan that would ask Cairo to give up some of the Sinai Peninsula as a new homeland for Palestinians. In turn, Palestinians would cede much of the West Bank to Israeli settlers.
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By Benny Johnson, DAILY CALLER

Donald Trump has fired Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State and said he would nominate CIA director Mike Pompeo as his replacement. The new director of the Central Intelligence Agency will be Gina Haspel, provided that her nomination is confirmed by the Senate.

Here are some important footnotes about Haspel’s career:

• Haspel will be the first female CIA director in history. The position, which dates back to 1946 when President Truman established the CIA, has to this date been held by 24 different men.
• Haspel has more than 30 years of history with the CIA. She joined the agency in 1985 and has served the majority of her career in clandestine operations.

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By Michael Oren, JNS

While Israel is mired in domestic scandals and coalition crises, the greatest threat the country has known since the eve of the Yom Kippur War—perhaps since the War for Independence—is steadily taking shape. This menace, posed of course by Iran, essentially consists of a wide range of growing threats closing in on us. The Iranians, who invented the game of chess, are exceedingly adept at playing several boards simultaneously, with the winner’s prize no less than control of the entire Middle East and beyond.