T. Belman. I have some trouble with Jeremy Bob’s analysis. First he left out the fact that Netanyahu said he would restrict the volume of building. If we had unlimited volume many would be happy with the limitation, but we don ‘t. Jerusalem just announced 25,000 new housing starts planned. Let’s see how far that gets.

Secondly he fears a Trump’s reaction should we displease the Arabs whom Trump wants to please.  Even if we piss off the Arabs and Trump, the Arabs will still cooperate with Trump as it is in their mutual interest to do so.

By Jonah Jeremy Bob

Regarding the parameters of U.S.-Israeli policy on West Bank settlements, nothing is clear and everything is clear.

Nothing is clear in that there have been no public declarations by either side of the guidelines they will commit to for settlement building and limits on that building. Everything is clear in that the basic principles and dynamics of how President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu are approaching the settlement issue are set.
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By Evelyn Gordon

Regardless of whether you support or oppose a new law allowing Israel to bar entry to prominent supporters of anti-Israeli boycotts, one outcome was eminently predictable: Israel would lack the guts to enforce it even when doing so was most justified. That was amply proven by Wednesday’s decision to grant a one-year work visa to Human Rights Watch researcher Omar Shakir. By this decision, Israel eviscerated the one crucial point the law got right, despite the many it got wrong: You cannot wage an effective war on the BDS movement while giving the people behind it a pass. As the old truism goes, people are policy.
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By MARTIN SHERMAN

The launch of Israel Victory Caucus is an initiative that has the potential to be a positive paradigmatic game-changer in the discourse on  the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Palestinians will have to pass through the bitter crucible of defeat, with all its deprivation, destruction, and despair as they repudiate the filthy legacy of Amin al-Husseini and acknowledge their century-long error…there is no shortcut.—Daniel Pipes, A New Strategy for Israeli Victory, Commentary, December 14, 2016.

At just about the time that this column was submitted for publication (Thursday, April 27, 2017), an event of potentially great long-term significance was taking place in Washington. This was the launch of the Congressional Israel Victory Caucus (CIVC) by Congressmen Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Bill Johnson (R-OH).
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By Mudar Zahran, MEFORUM

Thus far the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has weathered the storm that has swept across the Middle East since the beginning of the year. But the relative calm in Amman is an illusion. The unspoken truth is that the Palestinians, the country’s largest ethnic group, have developed a profound hatred of the regime and view the Hashemites as occupiers of eastern Palestine—intruders rather than legitimate rulers. This, in turn, makes a regime change in Jordan more likely than ever. Such a change, however, would not only be confined to the toppling of yet another Arab despot but would also open the door to the only viable peace solution—and one that has effectively existed for quite some time: a Palestinian state in Jordan. Read more…

By Amir Tibor, HAARETZ

WASHINGTON – U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said on Wednesday during his daily press briefing that human rights groups such as Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem are an important part of “any functioning civil society.”

Toner made the comment in reply to a question about Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision earlier this week to cancel his meeting with German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel because the latter met with representatives of the two organizations.
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Hamas spokesperson calls move ‘a dangerous escalation, and a fit of insanity’ as enclave’s energy crisis spirals

BY DOV LIEBER, TOI

The Palestinian Authority on Thursday informed Israel it would no longer pay for electricity that the Jewish state supplies to the Gaza Strip, as a power crisis in the Hamas-run enclave deepened.

The announcement of the PA refusal to sponsor electricity came in a statement by the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT).

Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri called the move “a dangerous escalation, and a fit of insanity.”
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By Dr. Mária Schmidt, AMERICAN CENTRE FOR DEMOCRACY

George Soros, his global Open Society Foundations and the hundreds of other organizations also funded by him are noisily and sometimes violently demonstrating against policies and governments who fail to accede to his agenda. There are lawsuits and   Congressional investigations into his activities in the United States. In Hungary, the government is passing new laws to curtail his foundations and his Central European University’s operations.

To balance Soros’s version of what’s taking place in Hungary, read excerpts* from an article written by Dr. Mária Schmidt, the director general of the House of Terror Museum, and the XXI Century Institute, in Budapest: Read more…

Is US policy-making run by a bipartisan elite cartel? Perhaps the president is a figurehead; the media show changes, but the long-term goals—chosen by the CFR—are always the same. If so, Trump’s Middle East policies will feel different, but they will yield familiar fruits.

By Francisco Gil-White, HIR

In Part 3 we pointed out that in the Trump administration everything is happening according to the predictions we made in Part 1. Despite the contrary perception promoted in his speeches, Trump is supporting jihadism, strengthening Iran, and undermining Israeli security. But we don’t have a crystal ball; how then do we manage to predict?

We try to see, first, whether we can find patterns in the policy history of past US administrations. This allows us to infer, as a hypothesis, an intention. This exercise has revealed a stable pro-jihadist and anti-Israeli tradition (Part 2). Then we try to estimate the probability that a new president will change that tradition; to do that, we study the structure of the policy-creation system. In what follows, we summarize that structure.
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According to NGO Monitor, European-funded groups use the “facade of human rights and international law” to blur the lines between “peaceful” or “nonviolent” campaigns and violent “resistance.”

BY LIDAR GRAVÉ-LAZI, JPOST APRIL 27,

European governments have been funding NGOs involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict that blur the lines between violence and nonviolence and legitimize attacks against Israeli civilians, according to a report released Thursday by watchdog organization NGO Monitor.

According to the report, several European- funded NGOs use the “facade of human rights and international law” to blur the lines between “peaceful” or “nonviolent” campaigns and violent “resistance” – “a term used by Palestinians to refer to armed groups that carry out attacks on Israel.”
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http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/228640

What we ought to want is a Europe filled with variations of Israel

By Bruce Walker, AMERICAN THINKER

Charles Krauthammer is a very bright guy who is nearly always right on the issues, but his argument that a Le Pen victory in the French presidential election would be a disaster for Europe is utterly wrong-headed. France, he said on Fox News last week, is the lynchpin of modern Europe and is necessary to prevent a return to the sort of nationalism that plagued the continent during the last century.

The nationalism he is referring to was the hyper-aggressive attitude of Germany, Italy, and Russia – whose misconduct is well known – and also of Poland, whose arbitrary annexation of Vilnius and grab of Teschen during the partition of Czechoslovakia needlessly disrupted Eastern Europe. The problem then, as now, is not “nationalism,” which is neither good nor bad in itself, but rather aggressive nationalism that threatens neighbors.
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By Clare M. Lopez, CENTER FOR SECURITY POLICY

The Iranian regime’s nuclear weapons program, born in secrecy and kept hidden for years, has never skipped a beat and today continues on course in underground and military facilities to which inspectors have no access. On 21 April 2017, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the oldest, largest, and best organized democratic Iranian opposition group presented startling new evidence that the jihadist regime in Tehran is violating the terms of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) agreement reached in July 2015 among the P-5 +1 (Permanent Five Members of the UN Security Council plus Germany), the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), and Iran.
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By Michael Rubin, Commentary Apr. 25, 2017

Regardless of how the Obama administration described their nuclear deal with Iran, it increasingly looks like history will judge the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) as being as bad as or worse than the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea.

Long before Donald Trump allowed—temporarily—strategist and former Breitbart editor Stephen Bannon onto the National Security Council, President Obama ensconced Ben Rhodes on the council to coordinate spin and media strategy. Rhodes famously created an echo chamber to downplay or deny weaknesses in the agreement. Two new revelations highlight just how dishonest senior Obama administration officials—especially Secretary of State John Kerry and his immediate staff—were in their handling of Iran.
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By Francisco Gil-White, HIR April 5

According to many in the mainstream media, the Trump-Netanyahu summit evidenced a ‘pro-Israeli’ turn. That would be a direct challenge to the HIR model. But we don’t see it. The result of the summit, we claim, was ‘pro Iran.’ To say otherwise, as we show, requires important historical omissions.

Preliminary note

To edit and correct a scientific model one must make predictions and see how close to reality they come. This is why, before Donald Trump took his oath of office, we made public in Foreign Affairs our predictions concerning his policies (Part 1). We have found a consistent and traditional US policy to strengthen jihadism generally and Iran particularly, and to undermine Israeli security (Part 2); so we predicted, based on that, that Trump would do the same. Our conclusion:

“We suspect that, though the discourse will be different, Trump’s policies in the Middle East will be quite similar to Obama’s.”
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by JNS.org

JNS.org – US State Department documents revealed on Monday that the Trump administration plans to increase increase aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA), even as the White House prepares significantly cut foreign aid in other parts of the world.

The documents, published by Foreign Policy magazine, detail the State Department’s internal budget plan and show a planned increase of 4.6 percent in aid to Palestinian areas in the West Bank and Gaza for the fiscal year of 2018, amounting to some $215 million.
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T. Belman. The Beduoin refuse to be bound by the law of the land. They are and remain squatters who show no respect for land ownership and zoning. And they are not indigenous as they claim.

BY BEN LYNFIELD, JPOST

Construction Minister Yoav Gallant on Tuesday sharply criticized an alleged Beduin “takeover” of swaths of the Negev and called for increased settlement of Jews in its eastern part to stem perceived Beduin encroachment there.

The remarks, which raised the specter of intensified home demolitions against the Beduin, were condemned as racist and a false depiction of the situation in the Negev by Balad MK Goumha Azbarga.
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United States Ambassador to UN pledges to continue to stand up for Israel.

By Elad Benari, INN

Nikki Haley, the United States Ambassador to the UN, on Tuesday spoke before the World Jewish Congress’ (WJC) Plenary Assembly in New York, vowing that “it’s a new day for Israel at the United Nations.”

“The United States will no longer be silent as Israel is unfairly attacked at the United Nations. Silence is not my thing anyway, but that’s especially true when it comes to standing up for America’s friends. And we have no better friend in the Middle East than Israel,” Haley told the gathering.
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By John Hayward, BREITBART

In Part 1 of this look at the Islamic world, we examined three nations with Muslim majority populations where the future of religious freedom is in question.

Next, we will run through the Muslim-majority countries where Islam is the state religion. The nations of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia were all covered in a previous article on President Trump’s executive order to temporarily restrict immigrants and visitors from those points of origin. All name Islam as their official state religion.
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By Yves Coleman, WORKERS LIBERTY

Since 2011, when Marine Le Pen became the leader of the Front National, the presence of antisemitism (but not of racism) has decreased in its official public declarations. Marine Le Pen has tried several times to make an official visit to Israel; she has contacted the leaders of the American Jewish community, made appeals to Jewish voters, and so on.

But evidence about what the activists and the local cadres of the FN say in internal meetings shows that antisemitism and even Holocaust denial are still current in the National Front. Moreover, all the polls confirm that the FN is the party that attracts the most antisemitic and racist voters. Only, it is now forbidden to express anti-Jewish sentiments on Facebook, on FN websites, in public meetings or at press conferences. Antisemitism is thriving in the FN, only it is reserved for the internal discussions of the party.
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