by Adm. James Stavridis, TIME

The U.S. spends a great deal of time focusing on the military capabilities represented by the Middle Eastern nations it rightly considers threats: Iran and Syria. And we correctly spend much political and military capital working with our Arab allies and partners, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain. But our best military partner in the region, by far, is Israel–a point that has been lost amid the fury and posturing over President Obama’s condemnation of settlements and Donald Trump’s announcement of both an ambassador and the decision to move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The U.S. would be well served to more fully develop its partnership with the Israel Defense Forces in several crucial areas as we stand together facing the challenges of the Middle East.
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Baruch Dayan Emet.

By Mitchell Bard. TOI

The answer to the question of how to resolve the conflicting claims over Palestine has been to partition Palestine into two states. This assumes, however, that the parties only have a dispute over land, but this has never been the case. The conflict has always had political, religious, historical, geographical and psychological dimensions. The international community’s unwillingness to accept this reality has led to the continued fantasy that a two-state solution is possible. An honest appraisal of the historical record indicates it was never possible for one principal reason, the Palestinians have never been prepared to share any part of the land they claim as their own. This irredentism is based in large measure on the view that Jews have no place in the Islamic world – except as second-class citizens (dhimmis) under Muslim rule. No UN resolution or State Department formula will change this reality and therefore it is time acknowledge the two-state idea as presently conceived is dead.
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What is it about Beit El that has so captured the attention and donations of key figures in the incoming U.S. administration, all the way up to Trump himself?

By Judy Maltz, HAARETZ

David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador-designate to Israel, heads an American fundraising organization that pumps a few million dollars a year into the settlement of Beit El. The parents of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, have donated many thousands to its institutions. The president-elect himself has made out a $10,000 check for Beit El’s residents.

What is it about this one religious West Bank settlement that has so captured the hearts and imagination of key figures in the incoming U.S. administration?

Among the 230 Israeli settlements and outposts scattered across the West Bank, there are others – Efrat and Ma’aleh Adumim, for example – with a more distinctive American flavor and where English is far more widely spoken. Beit El, in fact, has a larger population of Bnei Menashe – a community of converts from the rural corners of Northeast India who claim descent from lost Israelite tribes – than it does Americans.
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Want to see Anti-Utopia? Look at the stand of mind of the Western establishment.

By Alexander Maistrovoy, INN

After Trump’s  win, a huge part of enlightened America was plunged into mourning. Students were crying, teachers canceled lectures to calm them down, a “hotline” started working to help desperate people.

In the USSR such mass hysteria happened only after Stalin’s death, when people cried thinking that it was the end of the world.

What brought American students to such despair? They are unlikely to be able to explain it, but it’s a very dangerous syndrome of mass insanity. It’s a symptom that the cultural totalitarianism of the West is firstly far more effective than the Soviet political totalitarianism and secondly – it is much more deadly and poisonous. It has suppressed the will, consciousness and emotions of people – what Soviet party members didn’t achieve.
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By Shoula Romano Horing, AMERICAN THINKER

On Sunday, January 15, top diplomats from as many as 70 nations, led by the departing United States secretary of state, John Kerry, gathered in Paris to express once again their sick obsession with the creation of a Palestinian State at the expense of Israel.

With all the recent catastrophic challenges facing the Middle East, Europe, and the world, such as brutal wars of massive death and destruction, terrorism, and an ever-deepening refugee crisis, the international community has accepted the invitation of French President François Hollande to come together again to hammer out what despite all logic, they seem to think is the most monumental challenge facing the world today: the two-state solution. Sadly, the Obama administration, with Kerry’s anti-Israel speech and failure to veto an anti-Israeli UN Security Council Resolution, seems to have made a decision to spend its last few weeks galvanizing the international community to isolate and scapegoat the Jewish State and the only democracy in the Middle East.
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After UK blocks EU from endorsing Paris conference communique, Palestinian and European officials accuse Theresa May of aligning with Jerusalem to cozy up to Trump

BY RAPHAEL AHREN, TOI

Palestinian and European officials on Monday slammed the UK’s apparent readiness to defy international consensus and stand up for Israel, accusing London of aligning with Jerusalem to garner favor with the incoming Trump administration.

“We were expecting the United Kingdom, in particular, to play an effective role in the international system that rejects the Israeli occupation and its settlement enterprise,” Palestine Liberation Organization Secretary-General Saeb Erekat said in a statement released Monday evening, hours after the government of Prime Minister Theresa May blocked a French effort to have the European Union endorse a peace conference it held Sunday.
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Trump will take office on Friday. Since he was elected, he has given every reason to believe that Abbas and his deputies and their European and American enablers will have to either put up or shut up

By Caroline Glick, JPOST

With a gun on his hip, on November 13, 1974, PLO chief Yasser Arafat stood before the UN General Assembly and made the West an offer that it didn’t refuse.

At the end of a long speech in which he rewrote history to erase all connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel and criminalized the very notion of Jewish freedom, Arafat declared, “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat: Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

Arafat’s offer has served since that time as the foundation of European relations with the Palestinians and the wider Islamic world. It has also been the basis of US-PLO relations for the better part of the past four decades.
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There is a simple way to achieve the two-state resolution.

David Singer, INN

72 States and Organizations who met in Paris on 15 January repudiated Security Council Resolution 2334 (“UNSCR 2334”) – just three weeks after it was passed on 23 December 2016.

UNSCR 2334 had reiterated the Security Council’s:

“vision of a region where two democratic States, Israel and Palestine, live side by side in peace within secure and recognized borders,”
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Outgoing Pentagon official cites “significant, well-documented deficiencies,” but says Defense Department “has no plan to adequately fix and verify hundreds of these deficiencies” in current schedule • He says testing will not be complete until 2019-2020.

Ilan Gattegno and Israel Hayom Staff

The F-35 stealth fighter jet

The F-35 stealth fighter jet program is continuing to hit considerable turbulence, a new Pentagon report has found.

The damning new report, which lists 276 “deficiencies in combat performance,” estimated that it would cost half a billion dollars to extend the August 2017 Initial Operational Test and Evaluation deadline.

The report by Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon’s outgoing director of combat testing, cited the fighter jet’s “significant, well-documented deficiencies in critical combat capabilities.”

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By Joan Swirsky —— Bio and Archives

In 2009, America experienced a genuine coup d’état, exquisitely formulated and flawlessly executed after decades of planning by the socialists, communists, and jihadists among us who loathe America and have wished for nothing less than transforming our great country into a mecca of far-left, anti-American policies, punctuated by preposterous liberal constructs like political correctness and multiculturalism, and ultimately subservient to Sharia law.

As strange, indeed mind-bending, as this seems, remember that anything that is alien to American values and promises to undermine America’s passion for freedom and strength is considered a good thing and heartily embraced by the America-hating left. Hence, their fetish with Islam, a political system-cum-“religion” that is antithetical to every value that sane Americans hold dear. Read more…

By Ted Belman, 10/07/05

Everyone is familiar will Hillel’s quote, loosely translated, “If I am not for myself, who am I? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?”

I have always understood this to mean that an individual must make the case for his particular before making the case for the other. Particularism before universalism. Neither should be to the exclusion of the other, but the former, according to Hillel, comes first. One might add that it is only natural to fight for yourself before fighting for others. The twentieth century witnessed within the Jewish community a flight from the Jewish particular in favour of the universal. As the Jews came out of the ghetto, they shed religion for secularism. They became Communists in Russia, socialists in Europe and liberal Democrats in America.
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By Hugh Fitzgerald, JIHAD WATCH

“Palestinian” leader Mahmoud Abbas’ advisor on religion, one Mahmoud Al-Habbash, has declared that a move of the American embassy to Jerusalem by the Trump administration would constitute “a declaration of war on all Muslims,” and then threatened:“This will not pass in silence.” He was not alone. A half-dozen other “Palestinian” leaders chimed in with similar threats, claiming that if “America recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of the Jews,” then America will have declared “a new war against the Palestinians and also against the Arabs and the Muslims.”
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Trump Advisers Tell French Officials: We Strenuously Object to Paris Peace Conference

Kerry calls PM from Paris, vows no further UN action US secretary promises to soften text of final communique at peace summit, says there will be no followup moves

Kicking off summit, Paris says now not time to halt peace effort

UK signals closeness to Trump with snub to French Middle East summit

JEWISH PRESS

The heads of Moetzet Yesha – The Council of Judea and Samaria, received an invitation to President Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony in Washington D.C., according to a report in Makor Rishon. The invitation was passed on to them via the Chamber of Commerce of Orthodox Jews (US), who are connected to Trump’s special advisor Jason D. Greenblatt.

The settlement council will most likely be represented at the inauguration by Mayor of Efrat, Oded Revivi, who also heads the foreign desk for Moetzet Yesha, and Beni Kashriel, the Mayor of Maale Adumim.

In addition, several other people connected to Jewish life in Judea and Samaria have been invited, but according to the report, they prefer not to publicize their invitations.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this morning (Sunday, 15 January 2017), at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting, made the following remarks:

“The conference convening in Paris today is a useless conference. It is being coordinated between the French and the Palestinians. Its goal is to try and force terms on Israel that conflict with our national needs. Of course it pushes peace further away because it hardens the Palestinian positions and it also pushes them away from direct negotiations without preconditions.

I must say that this conference is among the last twitches of yesterday’s world. Tomorrow’s world will be different – and it is very near.”

The Left is losing the culture war within the Jewish community.

By Daniel Greenfield, FPM

Seen from above, the 2016 electoral map of New York City is blue with dots of red. Trump’s home district is blue, but across the water a red wedge slices into Brooklyn. Around that red wedge are districts where Hillary won 90 percent of the vote and Trump was lucky to get 5 percent. Inside it, he beat her in district after district.

The voters who handed him that victory are the Chassidic Jews of Williamsburg who dress in fur hats and black caftans. Their districts, crammed in by hipsters and minorities, are a world away from the progressive activist temples whose clergy went into mourning at Hillary’s loss.
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Obama and his followers in the US and around the world refuse to see the connection between the policies borne of that ideology and their destructive consequences.

BY CAROLINE B. GLICK, JPOST

Pres Obama promised that his would be the most transparent administration in US history.

And the truth is, it was. At least in relation to his policies toward the Muslim world, Obama told us precisely what he intended to do and then he did it.

A mere week remains of Obama’s tenure in office.

But Obama remains intent on carrying on as if he will never leave power. He has pledged to continue to implement his goals for the next week and then to serve as the most outspoken ex-president in US history.
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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers told senior French officials during New York meeting that they object to the very holding of the conference, especially so close before Trump’s inauguration.

By Barak Ravid, HAARETZ

PARIS – Senior French officials met a few weeks ago in New York with President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers and presented the program for the international peace conference to be held Sunday in Paris, Haaretz has learned. Trump’s team was said to have objected strenuously to the very holding of the conference, especially at this time, five days before Trump’s inauguration.

The Paris conference is not expected to produce practical decisions, but rather to serve as declarative event of the international community’s intentions toward the Middle East peace process. According to French diplomats, the conference is being held at this time, a few days before the inauguration, to convey a message to the president-elect about the importance the international community ascribes to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the extent of international consensus.
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BY YOSSI MELMAN, JPOST

While Assad has vowed revenge for the alleged Israeli attacks, his patron, Russia, has thus far remained silent.

If Russia, Assad’s biggest supporter, was against Israeli attacks and warned against them, it would have limited Israel’s freedom of action.

This leads us to believe that there is probably a quiet understanding between Jerusalem and Moscow. Beyond “de-conflicting,” or preventing the two militaries from shooting at each other, the full nature of the agreement remains unknown.
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