By Ted Belman

Israpundit is my blog. I have been publishing it now for 15 years. It is not a part time effort but a full-time job and then some.

Throughout this entire time, I have advocated for:

– the annexation of most if not all the land to the Jordan River

– Israel’s democracy i.e strengthening the Knesset over the High Court

– Israel’s historical truth and the rejection of the Palestinian narrative

– Israel’s legal rights to the land

– the legality of the settlements

This advocacy necessitated my push back against the policies of Obama, the EU, the UN, and the BDS movement.
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By Rael Jean Isaac, AMERICAN THINKER

One of the most widely accepted misconceptions concerning the Arab-Israel conflict (a subject awash in misconceptions) is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a “hard-core right-winger.” There is nothing in his behavior as prime minister from his first years in that office (1997-99) or in his more recent period in that office, beginning in 2009, to support this belief. On the contrary, like his predecessors, he has made repeated dramatic territorial and other concessions, including acceptance of the so-called “two-state solution.”
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DEBKA

American helicopters Thursday and Friday, March 23-24, dropped Kurdish and Arab fighters over a region west of the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa. Those forces quickly captured at least five villages and so cut jihadist concentrations in the northwestern Syria off from their Raqqa stronghold. DEBKAfile’s military sourcesreport this operation was the opening shot of the US-led campaign to isolate the Islamic State’s Syrian capital before storming it.
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Al-Diyar (Lebanese) 25 March 2017 at 08:54 hours
[Google translation]

The Syrian leadership has officially informed Israel indirectly through Russia that for every Israeli raid on Syria and against every Israeli aircraft that will strike Syria, a Scud missile carrying half a ton of explosives will be launched at Israel’s military bases.

If Israel attacks civilian centers in Syria, It will bomb Haifa Port and petrochemical plants.

As Israel does not announce its raids, Syria will not announce its missile strikes, but will leave Israel with a conclusion.
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By David Bedein, BEHIND THE NEWS IN ISRAEL

Informed observers of US Middle East policy often ?discuss developments between Israel and the US and limiting themselves to the ?difficulties of the eight years Obama, forgetting the differences between the Israeli and American governments over polices towards the PLO with five successive presidents.

However, having run a news agency in the heart of Jerusalem for the past 30 years, my perspective on US –Israel policy differences goes back 28 years, not 8 years.

The critical moment of crisis of confidence became pronounced when President ?Ronald Reagan recognized the PLO in December, 1988, ignoring US policy guidelines which tied US recognition of the PLO to a demand that the PLO must first accept UN resolution 242, denounce violence and recognize Israel.
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T. Belman, Bill Vidor sent me a couple of submissions and I asked him for some background. Here it is. He started by saying, “First let me congratulate you on your excellent article about “The 100 year betrayal of Israel by the West” I couldn’t have said it any better.

“Malediction on England and all the other nations for perpetrating such injustice and cruelty on our people, we must take courage, grab the ram by the horns and annex Judea-Samaria and that is all too it.”

I thought you might like to read it.

By Bill Vidor

I am just an ordinary fellow, I was born in Hungary in October 1940 in the city of Nagy-Várad (today it is Romania and the city is called Orádéá-Máre).

I survived the Holocaust by being hidden at my Grandmother’s and her sister’s place in Budapest at the seventh floor, in a one room penthouse apartment in a well-known establishment by the name of “The Hungarian Fashion Bazaar located on Rákoci Ut 64 owned by a person named Rutkai who fled Hungary in 1939. He left the management in the hands of my Grandmother’s sister’s who was the chief cashier at the time. I was hidden there from 1941 till 1945 till the Russians marched into Budapest in 1945.
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By: Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld , NY JEWISH LIFE

The contentious political climate in which we find ourselves today places a majority of Jews in some combination of liberal / leftist / Democratic spheres. Combined, they represent nearly three quarters of American Jews. The enthusiastic participation of so many of these leftist Jews in causes of very questionable interest to the future of Jews in America is something I find gravely disturbing.

Surely I have mercy (rachmunis) for innocent Syrian refugees, the victims of mass chaos in the Middle East resulting from the gross foreign policy mismanagement of the Obama years. The former President’s false “red lines” have resulted in the mass migration to the West of a population apart from western values, history, and institutions. Through proper vetting, individual refugees merit the historical promise of America, but not the fomentation of the type of ethnic imbalance we’ve seen in most European nations. Do liberal Jews ask why it is in the Jewish interest to invite large numbers of people to the U.S. who intrinsically despise them, and Israel?
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By Zvi November

One important facet of WWII was the comprehensive belief in racial ranking.  Nazi ideology held that Germans were the master race and the Japanese firmly believed in the superiority of the yellow race.

Today, the ongoing campaign to annihilate Israel is founded on blind, irrational and vicious hate based on outrages lies and libels that are accepted as facts by most of the Arab/Islamic world.  Arabs and Muslims rarely hear a positive word about Jews, Zionists or Israelis.  Hundreds of millions of people in the 57 Muslim majority countries have been brainwashed with a worldview and underlying Islamic theology that hold Jews in contempt.  Muslims who accept the unalterable tenants of their religion hate Jews and hope to destroy the Jewish state which in their bigoted view is illegitimate.
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With 187 of 193 voting Democrats signing, the letter to Trump released Friday is a pointed reminder of how divided the parties remain on how to define pro-Israel.

BY RON KAMPEAS/JTA /JPOST

The overwhelming majority of Democrats in the US House of Representatives urged President Donald Trump to reaffirm the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as U.S. policy.

With 187 of 193 voting Democrats signing, the letter to Trump released Friday is a pointed reminder of how divided the parties remain on how to define pro-Israel. It comes on the eve of an American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference that the lobby had hoped would be a signal of bipartisan support for Israel. [ISN’T IT FOR ISRAELIS TO DECIDE]
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Israel hopes, with the help of Russia and the United States, that enough pressure can be placed on Iranian-backed militias to the point where they can be removed.

JPOST

United States, Russia and Israel have reportedly reached a consensus on the need to restrict and eventually expel pro-Iranian forces from gaining influence in Syria, the Kuwati daily newspaper Al-Rai reported Saturday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to the Arab outlet, has reached an understanding with Washington and Moscow that pro-Iranian forces, including Lebanese terror organization Hezbollah, constitute an “existential threat” to the Jewish state.

This threat, therefore, necessitates Israeli action in Syria, including conducting airstrikes and other assaults to keep weapons and advancing militias as far as possible from Israel’s northern border.
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T. Belman.  Evidently Kushner had some effect but not enough to get Britain to recognize our sovereignty over the Golan, the US hasn’t either. But in Britains statement notice they still call Judea and Samaria occupied Palestinian Territory.

London supports 2 of the votes, but slams bias and ‘selective focus’ on Israel, puts council ‘on notice’ that it had better change

BY TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF

The United Nations Human Rights Council adopted five resolutions critical of Israel on Friday, despite opposition from the US and an unprecedented critique from the UK.

Britain supported two of the five resolutions, but threatened to vote against any future such motions against the Jewish state because of the “bias” by the UN body.

“We are putting the Human Rights Council on notice,” Britain warned in a statement. “If things do not change, in the future we will adopt a policy of voting against all resolutions concerning Israel’s conduct in the Occupied Syrian and Palestinian Territories.”
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By Ariel Ben Solomon/JNS.org

What steps can the West take to defeat Islamic State? The U.S. and Israel should work to push the Syrian Kurds away from the Iran-Shi’a axis and Russia, and toward an alliance with the Americans and the Israelis, leading experts on Syria and the Kurds told JNS.org.

“The U.S. and Israel could win Rojava as a loyal Western satellite if they are willing to guarantee its sovereignty and sign a defense agreement,” said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert and director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, referring to the area consisting of several self-governing regions in northern Syria. Rojava is also commonly known as Western Kurdistan or Syrian Kurdistan.
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By Ted Belman

While shopping this morning for Shabbat, I started a conversation with a young man who advised that he made aliya from France. He had visited my home town of Toronto many times and loved it. So why did he make aliya when many Jews in France opt for moving to Canada.

This was worthy of a conversation so we went for coffee.

Turns out that he has a PhD in the study of relations between Algerians and Frenchmen. He is also secular, gay, happily married and the father of two. One more thing. He is a strong Zionist who eschews nationalism. Go figure.
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Amid reports denied by Netanyahu that Trump wants a freeze at isolated settlements, Israel says it intends to adopt a policy that takes US stance ‘into consideration’

BY ERIC CORTELLESSA, TOI

View of the Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumin, in the West Bank on January 4, 2017. (Yaniv Nadav/Flash90)

WASHINGTON — After four days of high-level discussions between the Trump administration and an Israeli delegation, which concluded Thursday, no agreement has been forged regarding Israel’s ongoing settlement construction, an issue that concerns US President Donald Trump, the Trump administration indicated Thursday evening.

“The United States delegation reiterated President Trump’s concerns regarding settlement activity in the context of moving towards a peace agreement,” according to a joint readout of the talks. “The Israeli delegation made clear that Israel’s intent going forward is to adopt a policy regarding settlement activity that takes those concerns into consideration.”
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The Iran deal Trump needs to make with the Russians is clear.

BY CAROLINE B. GLICK, JPOST

What can be done about Iran? In Israel, a dispute is reportedly raging between the IDF and the Mossad about the greatest threat facing Israel. IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot thinks that Hezbollah is the greatest threat facing Israel. Mossad Director Yossi Cohen thinks Iran’s nuclear program is the greatest danger facing the Jewish state.

While the media highlight the two men’s disagreement, the underlying truth about their concerns has been ignored.

Hezbollah and Iran’s nuclear program are two aspects of the same threat: the regime in Tehran.
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Will Assad start a war against Israel in order to try to unify all those fighting him against a common enemy?

By Mordechai Kedar, INN

Academic research has explored in depth the factors leading to the wars that broke out between nations in previous centuries, both in order to understand why wars take place and to develop ways of predicting nascent wars by “connecting the dots” between the signs signalling an approaching conflagration. Since the signals are clearly directly connected to the relations between the countries involved in a war, the literature points out the connection between internal problems affecting a state and the desire of its leaders to initiate a war with other countries. The literature also lists war-delaying factors, foremost of which is the high price of military and civilian fatalities and the damage to the country’s infrastructure.
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It is difficult to know what is more disturbing-whether some ministers actually believe in the policy proposals they promote – or whether they don’t—but promote them anyway

By MARTIN SHERMAN 

What I see clearly…is incredible negligence and lack of systematic, long-term planning effort on behalf of Israel’s top political brass…we are facing a deep crisis of political leadership, and a deep disbelief in our power to shape reality.  -From insightful Op-Ed, “Defeatism at Its Worst” by former Netanyahu staffer,  Anya Zhuravel-Segal July 14, 2014

It doesn’t matter what Trump thinks but what Bibi does.  – Richie036 , Talkbacker To Caroline Glick’s, “Trump Embraces The PLO Fantasy” March 13, 2017  Read more…

By David Rosenberg, INN

The US Senate voted Thursday to confirm President Trump’s pick for US Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman.

The tally for the final vote was 52 in favor of confirmation and 46 against in a largely party-line vote. Just two Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Bob Menendez of New Jersey, crossed party lines to vote in favor of confirmation.
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