By David WEInberg, ISRAEL HAYOM

The annual Herzog College Bible study seminar at Yeshivat Har Etzion in Alon Shvut – attended this week by over 6,000 men and women, young and old, religious and secular – is a magnificent enterprise. Participating in it is an intellectual treat and an exhilarating spiritual experience. Too bad that it gets no media coverage.

The Israeli press regularly ignores this uplifting event, year after year. The military censor herself couldn’t have done a better job of blocking news of the conference. Why? Probably because Israeli journalists are embarrassed by the Bible’s popularity. They may be petrified that so many people feel that the Bible is relevant.

The Herzog College Bible studies seminar was founded 25 years ago by its parent institution, the Har Etzion hesder yeshiva in Alon Shvut. The seminar offers a choice of 200 lectures across five days, ranging from Biblical archaeology to hermeneutics, linguistics, poetry, prophecy, politics, theology, history, geography, translation, cosmology and creationism, mysticism, midrash and law, covering all 24 books of the Bible.
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T. Belman. The NYT article follows.

Jerusalem comes under fire for its new Basic Law, which is similar to many European constitutions.

By Eugene Kontorovich, WSJ

Demonstrators attend a rally to protest against the “Jewish Nation-State Bill” in Tel Aviv, July 14. Photo: JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images

Let the hand-wringing and denunciations begin. On Thursday Israel finally expressed in constitutional law the basic achievement of Zionism: Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people. In the seven years since the new provision was first proposed, it has attracted a barrage of criticism from the U.S. and Europe. Foreign politicians have demanded Israel not pass the law, and they have not been mollified by the removal of most of its disputed provisions. A Monday headline at Foreign Policy warned that Israel was “debating democracy itself.” Arab Knesset members ripped up copies of the bill after its passage. One called it “the official beginning of fascism and apartheid.”
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DEBKA

Syrian rebel resistance to the Syrian Army advance on Quneitra opposite the Israeli Golan crumbled on Thursday, July 19, in the absence of Israeli military support. The terms of surrender that rebel leaders signed with Syrian army officers obliged them to hand over all their strongholds, including the town of Quneitra. The Syrian army was able to return to the positions held before the 2011 uprising without a shot. Rebels refusing to sign were to be sent with their families north to Idlib province.
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MKs vote 62-55 to enact contentious bill cementing Jewish people’s exclusive right to national self-determination in Israel • Arab MKs defiantly rip up law, are removed from plenum hall • PM: We’ve enshrined in law the basic principles of our existence.

ISRAEL HAYOM

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday praised lawmakers for voting to pass controversial legislation known as the nation-state bill into law, saying the move was “a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the history of the State of Israel.”

MKs voted on the bill following a heated, 11-hour debate that ran late into the night. The proposal, which enshrines Israel’s status as the national home of the Jewish people, passed its second and third parliamentary readings with a vote of 62 in favor and 55 against. Two MKs abstained.

Largely symbolic, the law stipulates that “Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people and they have an exclusive right to national self-determination in it.”
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DEBKA

The scandal over President Donald Trump’s defense of President Vladimir Putin against US intelligence at the Helsinki press conference – for which he, sort of, apologized – served him too as a distraction from a momentous military-intelligence deal the two presidents secretly contracted at their summit, with Israel’s approval.

DEBKAfile has obtained exclusive access to this deal and can reveal for the first time that it provides for the handover to Russian responsibility of all parts of southern and southwestern Syria abutting on the Israeli and Jordanian borders, including, most importantly, surveillance and observation elevations that oversee all parts of Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon and the eastern Mediterranean. Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu thereby gave Putin a valuable asset for boosting Russia’s military presence in Syria and the region at large.
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By Dov Fischer, AMERICAN SPECTATOR 

It really is quite simple. Everyone is smart except Donald J. Trump. That’s why they all are billionaires and all got elected President. Only Trump does not know what he is doing. Only Trump does not know how to negotiate with Vladimir Putin. Anderson Cooper knows how to stand up to Putin. The whole crowd at MSNBC does. All the journalists do.

They could not stand up to Matt Lauer at NBC. They could not stand up to Charlie Rose at CBS. They could not stand up to Mark Halperin at NBC. Nor up to Leon Wieseltier at the New Republic, nor Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone, nor Michael Oreskes at NPR, at the New York Times, or at the Associated Press. But — oh, wow! — can they ever stand up to Putin! Only Trump is incapable of negotiating with the Russian tyrant.

Remember the four years when Anderson Cooper was President of the United States? And before that — when the entire Washington Post editorial staff jointly were elected to be President? Remember? Neither do I.
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By Caroline B Glick, BREITBART

On a substantive level, it is impossible to understand the outcry against President Donald Trump following his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday.

Trump met with Putin because as president, he is required to meet with the leader of Russia just as every U.S. president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to meet with his counterpart at the Kremlin.

U.S. national security and indeed, international security are dependent on the leaders of the two powerful nations developing cooperative relations. The ability of U.S. and Russian leaders to work together plays a key role in preventing another world war. It would have been a dereliction of duty if Trump had not met with Putin.
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U.S. lawmakers pressure State Department to declassify Obama-era report on number of refugees from Israel’s War of Independence • Republican Senator Ted Cruz: Access to report will help Americans have a transparent debate on U.S. funding of UNRWA.

MEMRI
In an article published July 15, 2018 in the Saudi government daily Al-Yawm, Saudi journalist Sukina Meshekhis called on the Arab countries to take bold steps, including certain concessions, in order to advance peace with Israel. She wrote that peace is a supreme human aim for which all peoples yearn, but that in order to achieve it there is a need for concessions and sacrifices. Noting that throughout history there have been many conflicts among various countries, she stated that all of them eventually ended, no matter how terrible they were. The Arabs have missed too many opportunities to make peace with Israel, and this is stopping them from developing and advancing, she said, adding that this is why she is calling on them to leverage the agreements that some Arab countries have signed with Israel – the Egypt-Israel Camp David Accords, the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, and the Oslo Accords – into an opening for promoting a comprehensive peace. She added that the collective interest of the Arabs today “requires rapprochement and understandings with Israel,” and therefore they must be more pragmatic.
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By Semih Idiz, AL MONITOR

The summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki was watched very closely in Turkey. Ankara’s focus, however, was on what it may produce for Syria, rather than the issues that created a storm in the United States and Europe.

Ankara is disconcerted by recent reports in the American press of behind-the-door talks between Washington and Moscow about US forces leaving Syria on the condition that Russia limits Iran’s influence in that country.

Military gains by the Bashar al-Assad regime in southern Syria, with active support from Russia, while the United States backed off from supporting opposition fighters have also heightened Ankara’s concerns.
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Russia has mutual interest with US and Israel in ultimately removing Iranian forces from Syria, says Dep. Min, ex-ambassador Michael Oren.

By David Rosenberg, INN

While critics of President Donald Trump blasted his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, both President Trump and senior Israeli leaders seemed optimistic that the closed-door meeting in Helsinki, Finland may have yielded important strategic understandings between the world’s largest nuclear powers regarding one of the most explosive geopolitical issues.

Pundits, Democratic lawmakers, and even some Republicans excoriated President Trump over the meeting, claiming the president walked away from the two-hour meeting with Putin empty handed.

“President Trump proved not only unable, but unwilling to stand up to Putin,” Senator John McCain (R-Az.) said in a statement Monday.
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By Jack Cashill, AMERICAN THINKER

On July 17, 1996, 22 years ago today, a missile or missiles blew TWA Flight 800 out of the sky off the south coast of Long Island.  The plane out of JFK was on its way to Paris.  All 230 souls on board, 53 of them TWA employees, died in the crash.

This is not conjecture.  This is fact.  As I told the audience of TWA veterans with whom I spoke during my 2016 Book-TV presentation at the TWA Museum in Kansas City, “If I were coming here to spread some conspiracy theory, I would be dishonoring their memory [the 53] and insulting you.”

The audience members, several of whom worked on the investigation, had no doubt I was telling them the truth, at least as well as we know it.  I would invite those who do have doubts to watch the Book-TV presentation.
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T. Belman. Take note that this article uses this spelling for “antisemitism”.  That’s the way it should be.  It was never “anti-semitism”.

It is easy to see what the driving force behind these ommissions was. The Labour Party wants to continue bashing Israel’s policies with attacks that run afoul of these guidelines.

Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis’s letter to Labour National Executive Committee follows strong criticism by 68 leading UK rabbis in The Guardian newspaper on Monday.

BY JEREMY SHARON, JPOST

The Chief Rabbi of the UK Rabbi Ephraim Mirivis strongly criticized the Labour party for failing to adopt in full antisemitism guidelines set out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, saying its omission of critical clauses constitutes an “unprecedented message of contempt to the Jewish community.”

Mirvis wrote his letter to the Labour National Executive Committee which is set to approve new guidelines on antisemitic behavior within the party which has been beset by numerous antisemitism scandals from its members in recent years.
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Election meddling, Iran deal, Crimea, and Syria discussed

By Bill Gertz, FREE BEACON

By President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin held talks in Helsinki on Monday in a bid to reset relations damaged by Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election and the covert Russian takeover of Ukraine’s Crimea.

During a private, one-on-one meeting and a later working lunch with aides, the two leaders discussed a range of topics, including the Russian government’s covert cyber influence operation targeting the 2016 presidential campaign and Moscow’s illegal military operations the led to the annexation of Crimea and overall covert action to destabilizing Ukraine.
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