Nonreligious Israelis have only themselves to blame for their country’s increasing religiosity, but they can do something about it.

By Rami Livni, HAARETZ

Rogel Alpher is shocked by the amount of religious content second-graders learn at Israeli state schools, and accuses Education Minister Naftali Bennett of spitting in secular faces.

Wrong. Bennett isn’t the address, just as there is no point blaming a cat for its healthy instincts when it licks the cream left in a dish. Settlers have a built-in political interest in weakening not only the left but also Israeli secularism as an ideological, existential and cultural option – because it is clear to them that a potential threat to their enterprise can only blossom in a secular setting. Bennett is no loser. He is selling a deal to secular Israelis in which only he is the winner: We get to bless wine and he gets the occupation. Any takers?
Read more…

By Herb Keinon, JPOST

Continuing a push for a two-state solution to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict is “messianic behavior,” at a time when what is needed is “opening our thoughts” to new diplomatic approaches, Education Minister Naftali Bennett said on Monday.

Bennett, in a 90-minute meeting with The Jerusalem Post editorial staff, stressed that one thing he does not want to see is a “second Palestinian state.”

“I do not believe in a second Palestinian state beyond what we have in Gaza,” the Bayit Yehudi head said.
Read more…

The opportunity now upon us may be lost forever as the PLO comes back to win its zerosum game against Israel.

By Caroline B Glick, JPOST

Since its inception in the late 1970s, the Israeli peace movement has been based on one thing: hope.

Members of the peace movement hoped the PLO’s war with Israel could be resolved through compromise. Proponents of peace with the PLO hoped that Yasser Arafat and his terrorist minions weren’t truly committed to Israel’s destruction.
Read more…

A Palestinian test case, courtesy of President Obama.

By Andrew C. McCarthy, NATIONAL REVIEW — December 31, 2016

It was the key national-security debate of the 2016 election. Donald Trump won the election, in no small part, because he appeared to be on the right side of it. Appeared is used advisedly: Trump was at least in the general vicinity of the bull’s-eye; his opponent wouldn’t even acknowledge the target existed — except in the most grudging of ways, and only because Trump had forced the issue.

The question boiled down to this: Are you willing to name the enemy?

After a quarter-century of willful blindness, it was at least a start. We should note, moreover, that it’s a start we owe to the president-elect. Washington, meaning both parties, had erected such barriers to a rational public discussion of our enemies that breaking through took Trump’s outsized persona, in all its abrasive turns and its excesses.
Read more…

By Eugene Kontorovich, WaPo

The U.S. decision to allow a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements to pass was met with bipartisan condemnation, including from leading players in efforts to achieve a two-state solution, such as Democrats Dennis Ross and George Mitchell.

Of course, the goal of the Obama administration was to box in President-elect Donald Trump’s foreign policy. The most direct way to reject the Security Council Resolution 2334 is to reject the opinions it expresses and act against its recommendations. Trump will likely seek to reverse the measure, not only because of substantial policy disagreements, but to reject the notion that a president can bind his successors more tightly through U.N. action than through statutes or executive orders. Read more…

By Jonathan S Tobin, COMMENTARY

DEBKA

The “Santa Claus” shooting rampage one hour after midnight, killing 39 New Year revelers and injuring 69 at the Istanbul Reina nightclub, was the first terrorist event of 2017. It came on the heels of the assassination of the Russian ambassador Andrew Karlov in Ankara on Monday, Dec. 19, by a Turkish special forces officer, 22-year old Mevlit Mert Atlintas, shouting “This is for Syria!” on behalf of Al Qaeda’s Syrian arm, the Nusra Front.

That murder had the historic distinction of marking the opening of the floodgates for the Syrian war and its terrorist adjuncts to start surging across the border into Turkey.
Read more…

Resolution 2334 asserts that Israel has no right to any of the lands it took control over during the Six-Day War.

By Caroline B Glick, JPOST

UNSC Resolution 2334 was the first prong of outgoing President Barack Obama’s lame duck campaign against Israel.

US Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech on Wednesday was the second.

On January 15, stage 3 will commence in Paris.

At France’s lame duck President François Hollande’s international conference, the foreign ministers of some 50 states are expected to adopt as their own Kerry’s anti-Israel principles.
Read more…

T. Belman. No one knew the law as it pertains to the territories better than Howard Grief, now deceased. Essentially, Shamgar gave them away just as Moshe Dayan gave away the Temple Mount. Imbeciles.

(Attorney) Howard Grief

Israel is always unjustly condemned by the United Nations as an occupier of “Arab land” in regard to Judea, Samaria and Gaza.  This condemnation that has no basis in either fact or law. This pernicious myth has provided the UN with the necessary pretext to intervene constantly in the internal affairs of these Jewish lands.

Astonishing as it may seem, this myth was created by Israel’s own legal establishment: (1) the Supreme Court; (2) the Attorney-General’s Office; (3) the Ministry of Justice; (4) the International Law section of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and (5) the Law faculties of Israel’s universities.
Read more…

Kerry believes that peace is what happens when the bad guys win.

By Daniel Greenfield, FPM

Before Obama decided to “abstain” from standing with Israel in a UN vote condemning the Jewish State, he had abstained from voting in defense of America in a UN resolution condemning the United States.

Obama, like Power and Kerry, have treated Israel just like they treated the United States.

John Forbes Kerry began his miserable career as a traitor seeking “peace” by pandering to the Communist leader negotiating on behalf of the Viet Cong. He concludes his miserable career in the Senate and as Secretary of State by going to war in the name of “peace” against the only democracy in the Middle East on behalf of a totalitarian Islamic ideology and its terrorist bands of killers.
Read more…

Attempts to present Jewish settlement in West Bank territory (ancient Judea and Samaria) as illegal and “colonial” in nature ignores the complexity of this issue, the history of the land, and the unique legal circumstances of this case.

Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs

The Historical Context
Jewish settlement in the territory of ancient Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) is often presented as merely a modern phenomenon. In fact, Jewish presence in this territory has existed for thousands of years and was recognized as legitimate in the Mandate for Palestine adopted by the League of Nations in 1922, which provided for the establishment of a Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancient homeland.
Read more…

By Tshediso Mangope
[grew up under apartheid and believed that Israel had the same policies. But seeing the country for himself changed his perspective.]

As a black South African and member of the African National Congress (ANC), I have often heard the accusation that Israel is an apartheid state—and therefore a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has to be based on a single state of Palestine between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. I recently made a trip to Israel and the West Bank in order to understand the issues and the prospects for resolving the conflict.
Read more…

Brigitte Gabrielle is a good friend of mine. I met her over 12 years ago when we were both starting out. She went on to build ACT which is the biggest national security organization in America.

By Rafael Medoff/JNS.org

WASHINGTON—Several Jewish organizations and leaders are expressing alarm over former U.S. diplomat Martin Indyk’s role in the Obama administration’s recent Israel policy moves.

Indyk served as U.S. ambassador to Israel, and then assistant secretary of state, between 1995 and 2001, followed by a stint as President Barack Obama’s envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2013-2014.

Reliable Washington sources report that the maps and proposals Indyk and his aides formulated in recent years are still central to the Obama administration’s strategy for the Palestinian issue. Indyk also is said to have remained in contact with key U.S. policymakers even though he left the Obama administration and now serves as executive vice president of the Brookings Institution.
Read more…