By David P. Goldman

Jews are sadly accustomed to becoming collateral damage in disputes in other peoples’ civil wars. Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a senior White House official, is one of the few gentile victims of a Jewish civil war. Dr. Gorka, long a Fox News commentator on counter-terrorism, will speak at the Jerusalem Post’s annual New York conference in May and at this year’s Zionist Organization of America Gala. But a left-leaning Jewish website, the Forward, has published 39 articles alleging that Gorka has neo-Nazi ties in Hungary, the country of his parents’ birth where he was active in politics during the 2000s.
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“It’s time to see Erdogan as no friend of the West.”

By Yochanan Visser, WESTERN JOURNALISM

Did Turkey’s despotic leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan test President Donald Trump last week when he launched massive aerial attacks on Trump’s main allies in the battle against the Islamic State, the Kurdish Peshmerga militia in Iraq and the Syrian Kurdish fighting force YPG?

Some experts say he did, according to the news site Al-Monitor.

True, Erdogan apologized for the attack on the Peshmerga fighters in the Mount Sinjar area in northern Iraq and said that the intended target was the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party that has a presence in northern Iraq.

Nevertheless, his order to launch the attacks on the Kurds shocked the U.S. military.
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Trump will be successful if he puts U.S. interests first—while still helping to maintain global order

If Donald Trump were a liberal Democrat, some of the media’s descriptions of “chaos” and “disarray” in the White House probably would be replaced with stories about “creative tension” among a “team of rivals.” As it is, the struggle between “nationalists” like Steve Bannon and “globalists” like Gary Cohn is characterized in near-apocalyptic terms. Yet as Mr. Trump told The Wall Street Journal last week, “I’m a nationalist and a globalist.” That is good news: Mr. Trump and the Republican Party should be weaving nationalist and globalist themes together rather than picking them apart.
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By Ben Cohen, ALGEMEINER

President Donald Trump boosted the “relevancy” of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas by inviting him to Washington for a White House meeting this week and now needs to lean on the Palestinian leader to take “hard steps” —  including an end of payments to terrorists and their families, a veteran US diplomat said on Monday.

In a conference call organized by The Israel Project, Ambassador Dennis Ross — who has worked on Middle East issues for numerous administrations since the Carter era and is now the William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy — said Abbas had been in the doldrums before being summoned by Trump.
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By Ben Cohen, ALGEMEINER

Former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Sunday that the pro-Israel stand he took while in office has made his successor, Justin Trudeau, cautious about moving in a different direction.

Speaking at a Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) gala dinner in New York — at which he received the media-monitoring group’s Emet (“Truth”) Award — Harper noted that his record during his nearly decade-long stint as prime minister showed that anti-Israel media bias could be overcome and that average Canadians viewed Israel favorably.
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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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What actually happened to form the State of Israel? Balfour, Partition and more.

By Hillel Fendel, INN

As Israel’s Independence Day arrives – its 69th edition is celebrated on Tuesday, May 2 – let’s face it: Not everyone knows exactly what happened when. Ask a given millennial how Israel arose, and as likely as not, the answer will be, “Uh, we were in exile for 2,000 years and then the British left and we had a State.”

Somehow something seems to be missing from that explanation…
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By Daniel Greenfield

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!

But ah! what once has been shall be no more!
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the dead nations never rise again.

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport – Longfellow
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TIKVAH

Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher.

How should Israelis think about the security and defense of the Jewish State when confronted with Palestinian claims to national sovereignty? What effect will Israel’s material prosperity have on the prospects for peace?  What role does honor and dignity, hadar, play in the statecraft of the Middle East?

Orator, statesman, writer, and political leader, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky is one of the principal figures in the Zionist founding. In this podcast, journalist and author Yossi Klein Halevi joins Tikvah’s Jonathan Silver to discuss a pair of Jabotinsky essays from the 1920s. “The Iron Wall,” and “Ethics of the Iron Wall” develop a security doctrine for the future Jewish State that is grounded in a realistic assessment of the human condition, and a sober analysis of national aspirations.
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by Jonathan Schanzer, Newsweek

Back in 1967, Moscow shrugged when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran, cutting shipping routes to the Israeli port of Eilat—Israel’s only one in the Red Sea. Egyptian and Syrian troop movements on the Israeli border — coupled with Nasser’s fiery rhetoric threatening mass slaughter — paved the way for war. All the while, Moscow fed the Egyptians and Syrians erroneous information about Israeli troop movements.

The Israelis put an end to all of it with a blitzkrieg that neutralized Russia’s Arab clients in six days, and in the process seized the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and much of the Golan Heights.
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Al Monitor

Will US rethink plans for Raqqa?

In May 2016, we asked how long the United States and Turkey could keep up appearances of alliance and partnership in Syria, given differences over US backing for the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).

Following Turkey’s airstrikes April 25 against the YPG in northern Syria and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in the Sinjar region of Iraq, reality may be outpacing appearances.
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By Ted Belman

“Israel is continuing to expand settlements and undermining the chances of achieving peace,” Abdullah said in a speech before Arab leaders at the 28th Arab League Summit in Jordan.

The world generally accepts this idea and so does everything it can to stop Jewish building in Judea and Samaria. Even Pres Trump is on board with the need to do so.

What, in essence, they are saying is that the only path to peace is the two-state solution and so the possibility of it must be preserved at all costs. No one in the international community doubts, for a moment that ultimately it can be achieved or that, when achieved, it will bring peace. This is so even though history and logic say it will never happen.
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By Mort Klien and Daniel Mandel, ZOA

Discussion of the Arab/Israeli situation is often unilluminating because so much of it is based on groundless assumptions and stubborn fictions. Perhaps the most pervasive one today afflicting the international political class is the notion that Palestinian Arabs primarily desire a state of their own, living peacefully alongside Israel.

Some examples in recent years:

• December 2016, then-Secretary of State John Kerry: “polls of Israelis and Palestinians show there is still strong support for the two-state solution.”

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Is Germany leading European support for the resolution attacking Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem?

By Tovah Lazaroff, JPOST

Israel is angry at Germany for the anticipated European support for the resolution attacking Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, which UNESCO’s Executive Board in Paris is scheduled to approve this Tuesday, diplomatic sources told The Jerusalem Post.

The behind-the-scenes conflict preceded the public argument between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel over his meeting with the left-wing group Breaking the Silence during his visit to Israel last week.

Netanyahu canceled his meeting with Read more…

By Daniel Greenfield, FPM

Everyone in Congress claims to be pro-Israel.

When Keith Ellison, a former Farrakhan acolyte who accused Israel of being an Apartheid state, can claim to be pro-Israel… then the term has absolutely no meaning.

Currently members of Congress who…
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DEBKA

The US has sent a group of US Marines armed with eight-wheeled Stryker armored carriers to northern Syria as a buffer between Syrian Kurds and Turkish forces, after Turkish air strikes killed 20 members of the US-backed Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units) militia, injured 18 and destroyed the local Kurdish command headquarters. Clashes broke out between Turkish and Kurdish forces after the air strikes.

The convoy of US armored vehicles took up positions at the village of Darbasiyah in the northeastern Hasakah province, a few hundred meters from the Turkey border.
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By Tabitha Korol

Arab leaders met in Egypt for the Arab League Summit ostensibly to start a peace process with Israel, the same peace process that the Arabs have, without exception, always declined in the past.  This time, they hope that our new President Trump will support a two-state solution, one that would deliver a border common to Israel and her avowed, homicidal enemy. They also expect to negate Trump’s campaign promise to move America’s embassy to Israel’s capital, Jerusalem, in keeping with the construct of violence that the Mohammedans have scorched into the history of every vanquished territory.
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T. Belman. Since Trump’s spokesperson Toner said that Breaking of Silence and B’Tselem should be spoken to, surely Trump will follow his own advice and meet with Mudar Zahran.

Michael Ross explains why US President-Elect Donald Trump should develop a relationship with Mudar Zahran, the Jordanian Opposition Coalition (JOC) Secretary General. Among other things, Ross highlights that Zahran and the JOC have done more politically compared to any other government in exile in order to bring peace to the Middle East.

By Michael Ross

For the last half a dozen years, Jordanian Opposition Coalition (JOC) Secretary General Mudar Zahran has been on a mission – a mission that many say is larger than life because it will not only save lives and bring peace to his people but more importantly, bring to an end an iron-fisted dictatorship that has mismanaged Jordan’s economy and threatened the lives and future of her people. As such, President-Elect Trump needs to talk with Mr. Zahran, embrace the information he is presenting and by doing so, will help stop terrorism, save lives and money and combined, help bring peace to the region.
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