T. Belman. Because of Trump’s remarks this week as to whether settlements are helpful or not to achieving peace. everyone has something to say about it. At the outset let me clarify “peace” is not the same as “a peace agreement.” The peace agreement that Obama sought so ardently, if achieved, would not have achieved peace. It was a prescription for war. Maintaining the status quo is more conducive to peace, primarily because Israel is in full control of Area C which includes the Jordan Valley. Accordingly, if Trump supports Israel’s retention of area C, it would certainly be conducive to peace and the settlements would not be an obstacle. In fact they would help solidify the peace. So the object of the exercise should be to achieve peace and not a peace agreement.

Furthermore Trump should not be so quick to seek the approval of the Arab world because they would demand too much. What ever he agrees to with Israel will alienate them but it won’t matter because they need the US and Israel, notwithstanding. The Palestinians are way down on their list of priorities.

Trump also said “there’s limited land left”, implying that that is the reason Israel should’t build new settlements. True, but sure that should lead Trump to broaden the discussion to include Jordan which has four times the land mass of Israel and a smaller population. A peace agreement and peace will only come about if Jordan is factored in.

In closing, I am very happy that he is getting a lot of advice and is considering his options.

President Trump praises Netanyahu but says ‘settlements won’t advance peace’.

By David Rosenberg, INN

On Friday, Israel Hayom published an interview with President Donald Trump, the first he has granted to an Israeli media outlet since taking office in January.

The interview was released just hours after President Trump dined with Israel Hayom owner and GOP donor Sheldon Adelson at the White House Thursday evening.
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“Next week can be the beginning of a new era in Israel’s relations with the US. But to make the most of this unprecedented opportunity, Israel needs to recognize its role as America’s ally.”

BY CAROLINE B. GLICK, JPOST

Less than a week after he was inaugurated into office, President Donald Trump announced that he had repaired the US’s fractured ties with Israel. “It got repaired as soon as I took the oath of office,” he said.

Not only does Israel now enjoy warm relations with the White House. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives in the US capital next week, he will be greeted by the most supportive political climate Israel has ever seen in Washington.
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The Islamic Republic’s theocrats have failed to convince their youth to go forth and multiply, limiting the nation’s shelf life as a strategic ally

By David Goldman, ASIA TIMES

Iran is dying, and no one knows it better than Vladimir Putin, who worked successfully to raise Russia’s fertility rate, unlike Iran’s theocrats, who have failed to persuade Iranians to have children.

Russia’s relationship to the only Shi’ite state of significance is less an alliance than a dalliance, motivated by Moscow’s fear of Sunni radicalism and its desire to establish a strategic beachhead in the Middle East.

But Iran is a depreciating asset whose value will disappear within a 20-year horizon. The question is not whether, but at what price Russia will trade it away.

Less than a week before D.C. trip, it’s unclear what Netanyahu will tell Trump on Palestinian issue. Bennett, meanwhile, is pushing him to drop two-state-solution from the agenda.

By Barak Ravid, HAARETZ

The security cabinet is expected to meet on Sunday to discuss policies Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will present at his meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump at their first meeting next Wednesday.

The cabinet meeting will take place less than a day before Netanyahu departs for Washington. Education Minister and Habayit Hayehudi chairman Naftali Bennett is urging Netanyahu to present a policy that does not include the establishment of a Palestinian state.
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By MARTIN SHERMAN

Any initiative to apply Jewish sovereignty to Judea-Samaria  without a  clear plan for dramatic reduction of its Arab population will imperil Jewish sovereignty over all  territory west of the Jordan

“One might expect that any support for a single state among Israeli Jews would come from the far Left… Recently, proposals to grant Israeli citizenship to Palestinians in the West Bank, including the right to vote for the Knesset, have emerged from a surprising direction: right-wing stalwarts… We should watch how this debate develop…and encourage it carefully”. – Ali Abunimah, “Israeli Right embracing one-state?” Al Jazeera. 

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.– An aphorism of uncertain origins, sometimes attributed to Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
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Experts contend reducing low-skill, low-education chain migration could also boost wages

by Brendan Kirby, PoliZette

A bill offered by a pair of Senate Republicans this week to reduce immigration could save taxpayers $1.7 trillion, according to back-of-the-envelope calculations by a scholar at The Heritage Foundation.

The sponsors of the bill, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.), have not estimated the fiscal impact of the proposal. But they cite models projecting that the result of eliminating an immigration diversity visa program and prohibiting new citizens from sponsoring their extended family members would reduce legal immigration by about 4.3 million people over the first 10 years.
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Prof. Paul Eidelberg

The prescient George Orwell saw treason in the Left’s corruption of language, something comparable to what we now almost innocently term “political correctness,” which in reality is a denial of evil.

This denial covers cowardly fear, the fear of facing the dangers and sacrifices required in the struggle against evil. Such fear is a consequence of the hedonism and self-indulgence fostered in the consumerism of contemporary life, which is so far removed from the original struggle involved in the break-away of mankind from the set ways and authoritarianism of the old Christian order.

It should be obvious that intellectual/moral cowardice and physical cowardliness have accompanied the ascendancy of commercial democracy. This modern democracy replaces commercial competition for armed conflict. Hence, what is called “political correctness” combines the democratic fear of truth and of death underlying the Liberal West’s reluctance to recognize Islam as the embodiment of evil.
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by Michael Freund

After Monday’s passage of the law aimed at regulating certain land issues in Judea and Samaria, Israel’s ostensible friends in Europe wasted little time before lambasting the Jewish state in remarkably harsh terms. Mustering all the vitriol at their disposal, which appears to be boundless when the subject is Israel, the leaders of the Continent went on a rhetorical rampage that was as obscene as it was offensive.

As usual, it was the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Federica Mogherini, who scaled the heights of hyperbole when she called the law “new and dangerous,” as though resolving land disputes through compensation was an entirely unheard-of concept in modern law. But then Mogherini went further, declaring that “the Israeli parliament has legislated on the legal status of land within occupied territory which is an issue that remains beyond its jurisdiction.”
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ANALYSIS / The West Bank has always meant both a homecoming to the landscapes of the Bible and a potentially disastrous intertwining with a foreign people
The settlements grow apace, peace remains stalled and Israel’s intentions seem a genuine mystery in Western capitals. Yet the question has a surprisingly simple answer, one which hasn’t changed since 1948

BY HAVIV RETTIG GUR, TOI

May 15, 1967, the night before Israel’s nineteenth Independence Day, in a small religious seminary in downtown Jerusalem, an elderly rabbi with a black hat and a venerable, wispy white beard was admonishing his disciples.

The rabbi, Zvi Yehuda Kook, would come to be recognized as the spiritual father of the West Bank settlement movement. But this was still weeks before the Six Day War, and Israel had yet to conquer the West Bank.

In his unusually emotional sermon that night, Kook recalled another “famous night,” the fateful night of November 29, 1947, when news reached Israel of the United Nations vote to partition the land then known as Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab one.
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Despite sustained attacks in the media, majority of voters support president’s executive orders

by Kathryn Blackhurst, LifeZette

Despite the mass hysteria origination from the mainstream media and leftist activists, 55 percent of American voters approve of President Donald Trump’s executive orders that revoked funding from sanctuary cities and imposed a temporary travel ban, according to a Morning Consult/Politico poll released Wednesday.

Since the president initiated executive action to crack down on illegal immigration, boost border security, and promote national security in the fight against terrorism, liberals have gone into hysterics and decried Trump’s “Islamaphobia” and “anti-immigrant” beliefs. The hyperbole and wall-to-wall negative coverage in much of the media seems to have done little to deter ordinary Americans from supporting Trump’s efforts.
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By Leslie Stoffel –

“In politics stupidity is not a handicap.” Napoleon Bonaparte

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” Plato

The Prime Minister of Canada will be holding a vote on February 16, 2017, Motion M103, that if passed, will enact Islamic Blasphemy Laws in Canada creating a defacto Sharia compliant state on the Northern border of the United States.
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DEBKA

Moscow signaled on Wednesday, February 8, that it has started – or is about to start – supplying precision weapons to the Syrian military in order to boost its capabilities against the Islamic State organization.

It came in an announcement by Ilyas Umakhanov, deputy chairman of the Russian Federation Council, who said, “Russia will continue an asymmetrical response (to terrorism) in Syria, which may include the regrouping of forces and means…and of course the supply of high-precision weapons to the Syrian government.”
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T. Belman.  The harshness with which the Trump administration reject criticism is unfathomable.  Why is Trump doing this? Friends don’t do this to friends.

The way a resolution to restate Jewish focus of Holocaust was shot down sends unmistakable signal when it comes to new rules of power in D.C, Jewish community and, by extension, Israel.

By Allison Kaplan Sommer, HAARETZ

Any hope of a congressional repudiation of the White House Holocaust Remembrance Day statement that left out Jews and anti-Semitism fell victim to partisan politics on Tuesday.

A proposed resolution in the House of Representatives would have contravened the White House statement, declaring “the indisputable fact that the Nazi regime targeted the Jewish people in its perpetration of the Holocaust and calling on every entity in the executive branch to affirm that fact.”
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By Sol Stern, ISRAEL BEHIND THE NEWS

After President Obama greased the wheels for the UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s settlements policy, then President-elect Trump tweeted that “things will be different after January 20th.” I didn’t vote for Trump, but for the sake of restoring some sanity to America’s Middle East policies, I fervently hope he fulfils that promise.

To make a real difference, our next president needs to understand how the United Nations’ hostility to the Jewish state is rooted in perverse institutions that have been abetted by previous US administrations. The most glaring example of this is the inaptly named United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). With its US$1.3 billion budget (30% of which comes from US taxpayers), this agency actually perpetuates the refugee problem it was created to solve, while promoting Palestinian rejectionism and Jew hatred. Trump will soon have the means to drain the UNRWA swamp. If he does so, he would increase the chances of peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
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By Yossi Fuch, ISRAEL HAYOM

The new Judea and Samaria Settlement Regulation Law is necessary because large areas of the territories were never properly registered in land registries. Moreover, the properties listed in the Jordanian land registry were not properly surveyed, resulting in thousands of buildings being built on privately owned land.

Under Israeli law, if a person builds on someone else’s land unintentionally and in good faith, he or she may stay on the property as long as the landowner is properly compensated.

The new law has a similar provision because, under Palestinian law, selling land to Israelis is punishable by death, making it all but impossible to buy the rights to contested plots. The law is constitutional and is in line with Israeli values. It is as valid as the other property laws passed by the Knesset because Israel does not consider itself to be an occupying power in Judea and Samaria and it believes that giving Israelis the same rights as Palestinians advances the state’s vision.
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By Ted Belman

What follows are three articles condemning Israel for the regulation law for many reasons, chief among them is that they make the TSS harder to achieve. Europe together with Obama set the parameters of such Peace agreement which itself was impossible to achieve. The problem is with them for supporting the PA rejection of anything remotely possible and the PA incitement to violence. Their criticism really pisses me off.

Outpost law damaging Israel’s credibility, French envoy charges

This is troubling for the international community, who is wondering if she should trust Israel when Israel says it’s ready to discuss with its neighbor, the Palestinians, to reach an agreement on the two-state solution,” ambassador Hélène Le Gal told Army Radio in an English-language interview.

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The first Jordanian condemnation came yesterday and it was decidedly sharp.

BY BEN LYNFIELD, JPOST

The Settlement Regulation Law passed on Monday night leaves Jordan in the lurch, poses a fresh challenge to the stability of the troubled kingdom and puts more pressure on the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty.

With the majority of its population of Palestinian origin and with the kingdom’s legitimacy bound up with its role – recognized by Israel – as protector of the holy sites in Jerusalem, Jordan has a greater stake than any other country in a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Passage of the law is clear proof in Jordanian eyes that Israel is not interested in such a solution.
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T. Belman. This was a horrendous mistake by the Trump administration. They doubled down when they called the criticism “pathetic”. And now they are calling it “asinine”.

Deputy assistant to Trump says that criticism of statement on Holocaust was motivated solely by a desire to attack the president.

JTA

A deputy assistant to Donald Trump said that criticism of the White House statement on the Holocaust that omitted Jews was motivated solely by a desire to attack the president.

Sebastian Gorka lashed out after being asked Monday by conservative talk show host Michael Medved if he would acknowledge that it was “questionable” for the White House not to specifically acknowledge the Jewish people in its Holocaust remembrance day statement last month.
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By Roie Yellinek
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 408, February 7, 2017

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Donald Trump was intensely critical of China throughout his campaign, and tension between the two countries is likely to increase now that he occupies the White House – but only in the economic and diplomatic spheres. The Middle East, including Israel, could nevertheless be drawn into the conflict as a confrontation zone between the superpowers due to the region’s natural resources, intersecting sea routes, and overall geostrategic importance.
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Yesterday the Knesset passed the Regulation Law, which says more or less the following: “True, we robbed the lands of another nation, but wherever we have already settled the robbed lands, we will ignore international law and remain there.”
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