Israel doesn’t need to appease J Street and BDS supporters in the American Jewish community.

By Lee Bender

It’s getting terribly tiresome hearing and seeing some liberal American Jews complain and harp that Israel is not doing much of anything “to make peace with the Palestinians” and are not acting with “compassion and justice.”  The constantly repeated refrain, including from groups such as J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace, and other BDS supporters, that the status quo is unacceptable; that Israel, which is the much stronger party, and not the “poor” “victim” Palestinian Arabs, must urgently do something now; make concessions; withdraw from “occupied territories” for the sake of a Palestinian Arab state on its doorstep –-  or else– is all too reflexive. And Israel will of course be isolated and vilified by the world and U.N. if it does not comply.  After all, “we all know what this is going to look like in the end.”
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By Yoram Ettinger, ISRAEL HAYOM

In 2017, the national security interests of the U.S. and Israel have converged in ?an unprecedented manner in response to anti-U.S. ?Islamic terrorism; declining European posture of deterrence; drastic cuts in ?the U.S. defense budget; an increasingly unpredictable, dangerous globe; ?Israel’s surge of military and commercial capabilities and U.S.-Israel shared ?values. ?

Contrary to conventional wisdom — and traditional State Department policy — ?U.S.-Israel and U.S.-Arab relations are not a zero-sum game. This is ?currently demonstrated by enhanced U.S.-Israel strategic cooperation, ?concurrently with expanded security cooperation between Israel and Egypt, ?Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other pro-U.S. Arab countries, as well as stronger ?cooperation between the U.S. and those same Arab countries. Unlike the ?simplistic view of the Middle East, Arab policymakers are well aware of their ?priorities, especially when the radical Islamic machete is at their throats. They ?are consumed by internal and external intra-Muslim, intra-Arab violence, which ?have dominated the Arab agenda, prior to — and irrespective of — the ?Palestinian issue, which has never been a core cause of regional turbulence, a ?crown-jewel of Arab policymaking or the crux of the Arab-Israeli conflict. ?
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by Cynthia Farahat, MEFORUM

Contrary to the wishful thinking of the Obama administration, the Muslim Brotherhood cannot be appeased.

In an April 11 Brookings Institution report titled “Is the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization?” senior fellow Shadi Hamid states that the Trump administration’s proposed designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group “could have significant consequences for the U.S., the Middle East, and the world.”
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Israel is finally taking a constructive position in its own defense.

BY CAROLINE B. GLICK, JPOST

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu adopted a new strategy for managing Israel’s diplomatic relations with the West. Long in the making and increasingly urgent, Israel’s new strategy is very simple. Foreign governments can either treat Israel in accordance with international diplomatic norms of behavior, or they can continue to discriminate against Israel.

If they act in accordance to international diplomatic norms, Israel will respond in like fashion. If they choose instead to discriminate against Israel and treat it in a manner no other democratic state is treated, Israel will abandon diplomatic convention and treat foreign governments as domestic critics.
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“A partnership has emerged between the Europeans and the Arabs to design an Arab document that rejects Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem and harms our holy places.”

BY TOVAH LAZAROFF, JPOST

Israel fears Europe might abstain or support a resolution that would reject Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, which UNESCO’s executive board in Paris is likely to vote on at its meeting on Tuesday, diplomatic sources told The Jerusalem Post.

Representatives from European nations and Arab states held consultations in Paris on Thursday to agree on a common text for Tuesday’s meeting.
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by Daniel Pipes, Washington Times
March 8, 2017

Winston Churchill (6th from left) taking time off from creating Transjordan in 1921.

“We’re in dire straits.” So spoke Jordan’s King Abdullah a half-year ago. A just-completed week of intensive travels and discussions throughout Jordan finds no one disagreeing with that assessment. Jordan may no longer be hyper-vulnerable and under siege, as it was in decades past; but it does face possibly unprecedented problems.

Created out of thin air by Winston Churchill in 1921 to accommodate British imperial interests, the Emirate of Transjordan, now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, for almost a century has led a precarious existence. Particularly dangerous moments came in 1967, when Pan-Arabist pressures led King Hussein (r. 1952-99) to make war on Israel and lose the West Bank; in 1970, when a Palestinian revolt nearly toppled him; and 1990-91, when pro-Saddam Hussein sentiments pushed him to join a hopeless and evil cause.
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T. Belman. I have some trouble with Jeremy Bob’s analysis. First he left out the fact that Netanyahu said he would restrict the volume of building. If we had unlimited volume many would be happy with the limitation, but we don ‘t. Jerusalem just announced 25,000 new housing starts planned. Let’s see how far that gets.

Secondly he fears a Trump’s reaction should we displease the Arabs whom Trump wants to please.  Even if we piss off the Arabs and Trump, the Arabs will still cooperate with Trump as it is in their mutual interest to do so.

By Jonah Jeremy Bob

Regarding the parameters of U.S.-Israeli policy on West Bank settlements, nothing is clear and everything is clear.

Nothing is clear in that there have been no public declarations by either side of the guidelines they will commit to for settlement building and limits on that building. Everything is clear in that the basic principles and dynamics of how President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu are approaching the settlement issue are set.
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By Evelyn Gordon

Regardless of whether you support or oppose a new law allowing Israel to bar entry to prominent supporters of anti-Israeli boycotts, one outcome was eminently predictable: Israel would lack the guts to enforce it even when doing so was most justified. That was amply proven by Wednesday’s decision to grant a one-year work visa to Human Rights Watch researcher Omar Shakir. By this decision, Israel eviscerated the one crucial point the law got right, despite the many it got wrong: You cannot wage an effective war on the BDS movement while giving the people behind it a pass. As the old truism goes, people are policy.
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By MARTIN SHERMAN

The launch of Israel Victory Caucus is an initiative that has the potential to be a positive paradigmatic game-changer in the discourse on  the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Palestinians will have to pass through the bitter crucible of defeat, with all its deprivation, destruction, and despair as they repudiate the filthy legacy of Amin al-Husseini and acknowledge their century-long error…there is no shortcut.—Daniel Pipes, A New Strategy for Israeli Victory, Commentary, December 14, 2016.

At just about the time that this column was submitted for publication (Thursday, April 27, 2017), an event of potentially great long-term significance was taking place in Washington. This was the launch of the Congressional Israel Victory Caucus (CIVC) by Congressmen Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Bill Johnson (R-OH).
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By Mudar Zahran, MEFORUM

Thus far the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has weathered the storm that has swept across the Middle East since the beginning of the year. But the relative calm in Amman is an illusion. The unspoken truth is that the Palestinians, the country’s largest ethnic group, have developed a profound hatred of the regime and view the Hashemites as occupiers of eastern Palestine—intruders rather than legitimate rulers. This, in turn, makes a regime change in Jordan more likely than ever. Such a change, however, would not only be confined to the toppling of yet another Arab despot but would also open the door to the only viable peace solution—and one that has effectively existed for quite some time: a Palestinian state in Jordan. Read more…

By Amir Tibor, HAARETZ

WASHINGTON – U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said on Wednesday during his daily press briefing that human rights groups such as Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem are an important part of “any functioning civil society.”

Toner made the comment in reply to a question about Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision earlier this week to cancel his meeting with German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel because the latter met with representatives of the two organizations.
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Hamas spokesperson calls move ‘a dangerous escalation, and a fit of insanity’ as enclave’s energy crisis spirals

BY DOV LIEBER, TOI

The Palestinian Authority on Thursday informed Israel it would no longer pay for electricity that the Jewish state supplies to the Gaza Strip, as a power crisis in the Hamas-run enclave deepened.

The announcement of the PA refusal to sponsor electricity came in a statement by the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT).

Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri called the move “a dangerous escalation, and a fit of insanity.”
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By Dr. Mária Schmidt, AMERICAN CENTRE FOR DEMOCRACY

George Soros, his global Open Society Foundations and the hundreds of other organizations also funded by him are noisily and sometimes violently demonstrating against policies and governments who fail to accede to his agenda. There are lawsuits and   Congressional investigations into his activities in the United States. In Hungary, the government is passing new laws to curtail his foundations and his Central European University’s operations.

To balance Soros’s version of what’s taking place in Hungary, read excerpts* from an article written by Dr. Mária Schmidt, the director general of the House of Terror Museum, and the XXI Century Institute, in Budapest: Read more…

Is US policy-making run by a bipartisan elite cartel? Perhaps the president is a figurehead; the media show changes, but the long-term goals—chosen by the CFR—are always the same. If so, Trump’s Middle East policies will feel different, but they will yield familiar fruits.

By Francisco Gil-White, HIR

In Part 3 we pointed out that in the Trump administration everything is happening according to the predictions we made in Part 1. Despite the contrary perception promoted in his speeches, Trump is supporting jihadism, strengthening Iran, and undermining Israeli security. But we don’t have a crystal ball; how then do we manage to predict?

We try to see, first, whether we can find patterns in the policy history of past US administrations. This allows us to infer, as a hypothesis, an intention. This exercise has revealed a stable pro-jihadist and anti-Israeli tradition (Part 2). Then we try to estimate the probability that a new president will change that tradition; to do that, we study the structure of the policy-creation system. In what follows, we summarize that structure.
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According to NGO Monitor, European-funded groups use the “facade of human rights and international law” to blur the lines between “peaceful” or “nonviolent” campaigns and violent “resistance.”

BY LIDAR GRAVÉ-LAZI, JPOST APRIL 27,

European governments have been funding NGOs involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict that blur the lines between violence and nonviolence and legitimize attacks against Israeli civilians, according to a report released Thursday by watchdog organization NGO Monitor.

According to the report, several European- funded NGOs use the “facade of human rights and international law” to blur the lines between “peaceful” or “nonviolent” campaigns and violent “resistance” – “a term used by Palestinians to refer to armed groups that carry out attacks on Israel.”
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http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/228640

What we ought to want is a Europe filled with variations of Israel

By Bruce Walker, AMERICAN THINKER

Charles Krauthammer is a very bright guy who is nearly always right on the issues, but his argument that a Le Pen victory in the French presidential election would be a disaster for Europe is utterly wrong-headed. France, he said on Fox News last week, is the lynchpin of modern Europe and is necessary to prevent a return to the sort of nationalism that plagued the continent during the last century.

The nationalism he is referring to was the hyper-aggressive attitude of Germany, Italy, and Russia – whose misconduct is well known – and also of Poland, whose arbitrary annexation of Vilnius and grab of Teschen during the partition of Czechoslovakia needlessly disrupted Eastern Europe. The problem then, as now, is not “nationalism,” which is neither good nor bad in itself, but rather aggressive nationalism that threatens neighbors.
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By Clare M. Lopez, CENTER FOR SECURITY POLICY

The Iranian regime’s nuclear weapons program, born in secrecy and kept hidden for years, has never skipped a beat and today continues on course in underground and military facilities to which inspectors have no access. On 21 April 2017, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the oldest, largest, and best organized democratic Iranian opposition group presented startling new evidence that the jihadist regime in Tehran is violating the terms of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) agreement reached in July 2015 among the P-5 +1 (Permanent Five Members of the UN Security Council plus Germany), the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), and Iran.
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