BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 570, August 26, 2017

By Yaakov Lappin

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Creating deterrence was Israel’s goal in the last three conflicts it fought against Hamas, but that objective has been cast aside. Any future armed clash with Gaza’s Islamist rulers will be guided by a new Israeli objective: that of achieving a crystal clear victory over the enemy.

In past models of conflict, Israel responded to Hamas aggression through the use of force in a way that was designed to punish Hamas and convince it to return to a state of calm. Systematically destroying Hamas’s military capabilities was not an Israeli objective.

Today, while Israel hopes to avoid war, it is preparing for the possibility of a new conflict. War could erupt again in Gaza for a wide range of reasons.

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The region is more combustible given Israel’s concerns about steps taken by its US and Russian allies

By Jonathan Spyer, JPOST

A flurry of diplomatic activity is taking place in the Syrian and Iraqi arenas.

While the moves are occurring on separate and superficially unrelated fronts, taken together they produce an emergent picture of two camps, one of which works as a united force on essential interests, but the other does not.

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White House Official: Kushner Never Said Settlement Freeze Will Topple Netanyahu

Plan for Israel and the PA ready in 3-4 months – on the condition that the PA refrain from attacking Israel on the international front.

ARUTZ SHEVA

US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner asked Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to freeze diplomatic measures, such as those involving the UN and International Criminal Court, against Israel for a period of 3-4 months, in return for a pledge that the Americans would by then submit to the parties a formal political plan to jumpstart negotiations, Israel Hayom reported according to a senior PA official.

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Visiting White House advisers convey to PA leader that Israeli construction in West Bank, East Jerusalem will continue

TOI

A visiting delegation of White House officials reportedly told Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas this week that a freeze on Israeli settlement building was impossible as it would topple the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

PA officials told the pan-Arab newspaper al-Hayat that the Trump administration delegation made the remarks to Abbas during their meeting in Ramallah on Thursday, indicating that a settlement freeze could not be a precondition for resumed peace talks and that building would thus continue.

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By David Zukerman, AMERICAN THINKER

Will someone explain why the anti-democratic left keeps demanding clarification from President Trump on his position vis-à-vis neo-Nazis, the KKK, and white supremacists, among others?  Would anything the president said on the subject of Charlottesville satisfy them?  Started differently, would anything the president said on the subject cause the totalitarian left to end its campaign to cut short the Trump presidency as soon as possible?

Not only is President Trump a racist-sympathizer, at best, in the eyes of his enemies, but he is also “un-American.”  See the August 14 column by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman that ends with these words:

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DEBKA

Syrian army convoy attacked by ISIS tank fire

The Islamic State’s summer offensive is in full spate on three fronts – two in Syria and a third in European cities –  thus pricking the prevailing view of Western experts on Islamic terror that the caliphate’s territorial shrinkage in Syria and Iraq heralds its approaching demise

Some of the events of the last few days shed a more realistic light:

1. While Islamist forces were widely described as fleeing in panic from the major battlefronts of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, it turns out that they retreated in orderly military fashion while calculating how to preserve and deploy enough assets to initiate a broad counterattack.
This strategy hit the Syrian army with devastating effect on Thursday, Aug. 24. ISIS tanks came out of nowhere and surprised Syria’s elite Tiger Forces’ armored units and allied pro-Iranian Shiite militias, which had for some weeks been fighting to push ISIS out of the desert region east of Raqqa.

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THERE IS A SERIES OF VIDEOS HERE IN WHICH THESE TRUMPERS STOOD BY THEIR MAN AND DID SO KNOWLEDGEABLY A MUST WATCH.

By Dave Boyer, The Washington Times

APPARENTLY MCMASTER AND KELLY CAN HIRE AND FIRE WHO THEY WANT AND TRUMP HAS NO SAY IN THE MATTER. AND KELLY CAN DECIDE WHAT INFO TRUMP GETS AND WHO GETS TO SEE HIM AND TRUMP HAS NO SAY IN THE MATTER

White House aide Sebastian Gorka, a former Breitbart News staffer, has been ousted from the White House, according to a White House official Friday night.

“Sebastian Gorka did not resign, but I can confirm he no longer works at the White House,” the White House official said on condition of anonymity.

The Federalist said Mr. Gorka told President Trump in a letter that he can better serve his agenda from outside the White House.

“[I]t is clear to me that forces that do not support the MAGA promise are — for now — ascendant within the White House,” he said in the letter. “Regrettably, outside of yourself, the individuals who most embodied and represented the policies that will ‘Make America Great Again,’ have been internally countered, systematically removed, or undermined in recent months.”

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By Robert Laurie,

Uh-oh.  Probe widening.

You’re probably aware that, on Thursday, a federal Grand Jury indicted former Wasserman Schultz IT aide Imran Awan on four felony counts.  Most agree that the charges – which include bank fraud, making false statements, and conspiracy – are just a placeholder.  The investigation into a much larger set of crimes is ongoing and it’s virtually impossible to find anyone who thinks these few meager charges will be the end of the story.

According to the New York Post, the probe is ‘widening’ and their sources indicate that investigators now suspect that Imran Awan and his allies were stealing government info, including classified material, and selling it to both Pakistani and – wait for it – Russian intel agencies.

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By Joel B Pollak, BREITBART

The Palestinian Authority reportedly plans to give White House envoy Jared Kushner an ultimatum when he visits Ramallah on Thursday: deliver Israeli concessions in 45 days, or we blow up the peace process and go to the UN.

The ultimatum marks a stunning reversal in negotiating postures since Kushner officially took up the task of negotiating a deal between Israelis and Palestinians on behalf of his father-in-law, President Donald Trump.

At the start of the administration, the Palestinian leadership was so shocked by Trump’s election victory that they did not even know whom to call in the White House. They were fearful of the incoming administration, which was stacked with pro-Israel advisers and appointees, and which was determined to upset the Beltway consensus about everything, especially the Middle East. Trump, and Kushner, had virtually unprecedented negotiating leverage.

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By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN

As the deep state plays out its plans to use the phony allegations of conspiracy with Russia to oust President Trump — as we explain in our new book Rogue Spooks— there are increasing signs that the deep state is taking over the Trump Administration and controlling what the president does and says.  Chastened and battered by the worst press any president has ever had, is Trump pulling in his horns to get a break and serve out his term in peace?

The New York Times reports that General John Kelly, Priebus’ successor as Chief of Staff, is controlling access to the president more tightly than any of his predecessors since H.R. Haldeman policed the gate to the Oval Office under Nixon.  Nobody goes in or out without Kelly’s permission. Nobody can send Trump a memo or even news clippings unless they go through Kelly.  Reportedly, Kelly has even sought to limit access to the president by members of his family — Jared and Ivanka.

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By Aaron Klein, BREITBART

JERUSALEM — Embattled White House National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has been given a larger partnership role in efforts being overseen by Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, to secure an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, according to a report in Politico.

The media outlet reported that McMaster brokered a new arrangement giving the National Security Council (NSC) more input over policy matters pertaining to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. According to Politico, Victoria Coates, an NSC official, will work full-time under Jason Greenblatt, who has been helping Kushner lead Israel-Palestinian peace efforts as the Trump administration’s envoy for international negotiations.

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By Peter Fry, NEWSMAX

Democracies have a blind faith that treaties can disarm totalitarian regimes. The notion that “peace in our time” is possible through a scrap of paper is an irrational addiction in Washington, D.C., the opioid of the U.S. State Department.

The free world is free because it has laws and contracts, and an ideological imperative to believe in the efficacy of negotiation and compromise. The totalitarian world is not free because its laws and contracts are lies, merely a propagandistic means to the end of tyranny, where the ideological imperative is to enslave.

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The Left has written its values into our laws.

By Daniel Greenfield, FPM

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…”

The First Amendment assumes that the proper sphere of government is policies, not values. And so it protects the right of political participation and prohibits a state church that would define values.

The government had the right to decide to go to war with France. It did not have a right to decide what you should believe. Politics extended into the realm of policies, not beliefs.

But as religious belief declined, politics replaced it as the repository of moral and ethical values. This transformation began on the left. The left was the least religious in the traditional sense. And the most likely to build up an ideology of secular values with which to displace traditional religious values.

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