By Jerry Gordon and Mike Bates, NER

Dr. Walid Phares was the Middle East and Foreign Affairs consultant to the Trump Campaign and national security and foreign policy expert at FoxNews.  Among his extensive published noteworthy works are the acclaimed best selling 2006 book, Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against America and the 2014 The Lost Spring: US Policy: in the Middle East and Catastrophes to Avoid.  He is currently under consideration by the Trump Administration for a possible post at the US State Department. We were afforded an opportunity to interview him on a wide range of Middle East issues facing the Trump Administration on Northwest Florida’s Talk Radio 1330amWEBY.  The program aired February 20, 2017.
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PM reportedly instructs Housing and Construction Minister to freeze units announced in wake of Trump inauguration.

Arutz Sheva

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu ordered Housing and Construction Minister Yoav Galant to freeze thousands of housing units which Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman had recently approved for construction in Judea and Samaria, it was reported Wednesday.

Netanyahu and Liberman had issued two announcements that a total of 5,500 housing units would be constructed in Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria shortly after US President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January. 2,000 of the units were to be available to be marketed immediately.

The Defense Ministry said in a statement at the time of the second announcement that “The decision comes as part of the resumption of normal life in Judea and Samaria and in order to provide a real answer to living and housing needs in the region.”
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An otherwise promising future is hindered by the unsolved Palestinian problem

By Daniel Pipes, Washington Times

Jordan’s King Abdullah II visited President Donald Trump on Feb. 3.

“We’re in dire straits.” So spoke Jordan’s King Abdullah a half-year ago. A just-completed week of intensive travels and discussions throughout Jordan finds no one disagreeing with that assessment. Jordan may no longer be hyper-vulnerable and under siege, as it was in decades past; but it does face possibly unprecedented problems.
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Majority also believe Netanyahu should resign if indicted in corruption probes

TOI Staff

A majority of Jewish Israelis are opposed to plans proposed by right-wing politicians to annex large parts of the West Bank, according to a poll released Tuesday.

In the wake of the election of US President Donald Trump, lawmakers from the Jewish Home party and the Likud have put across plans for Israel to extend its sovereignty over some of the large settlement blocs and called for Israel to step up settlement construction.
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By Zvi November

“Makor Rishon” is a politically incorrect Hebrew language newspaper because it is pro-Jews and enthusiastically pro-Israel. Its lead front page report on March 3, 2017 concerns the fact that tens of thousands of Gaza Arabs are treated in Israel every year. And according to the civil administration in Judea and Samaria, 97,000 Arab residents of these “territories” received treatment in Israel in 2015. Soft-hearted Israel, for purely humanitarian reasons, accepts these cases when “Palestinian”/Arab medical facilities are unable to treat them. Only patients who pose a security risk are refused entry. These emergencies are not covered by Israeli insurance schemes and the Palestinian Authority only reimburses Israeli hospitals with a tiny fraction of the monies owed to them. The additional pressure placed on Israeli hospitals means that Israelis (Jews and Arabs who are covered by insurance) have to wait longer for treatment by over-worked, stressed-out medical teams. This situation is never mentioned by Arab spokesmen who prefer to rant about Israeli “racism” and “apartheid”.

By Martin Sherman, IISS

Extending Israeli sovereignty over Judea-Samaria (and eventually over the Gaza Strip) is indeed a necessary condition for ensuring the ability of Israel to endure as the nation state of the Jewish people. It is, however, not a sufficient condition to ensure that worthy objective.  In fact, without additional complementary measures, such an initiative on its own is very likely to imperil Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel…in its entirety on both sides of the pre 1967 Green Line.

Twin Imperative

Accordingly, in order to ensure its long term survivability as the Jewish nation-state, Israel has to deal effectively with two imperatives: The Geographic Imperative and the DemographicImperative.

The first of these imperative calls for Israeli control (i.e. sovereignty) over all the territory east of the coastal plain up to the Jordan River—to prevent intolerable risks to its physical survival; the second imperative calls for significant reduction of the Arab presence in the territory under Jewish sovereignty to forestall the emergence of an intolerable demographic threat to its dominant Jewish character. Read more…

War, up close and personal

By Jonathan Spyer, MEF

EASTERN MOSUL, IRAQ “So I’m a sniper, right, and I see four IS guys approaching. I’m on a roof. I take down two of them. Then the rifle jams. And they’re coming forward. So I make it down the stairs, and I throw a grenade as theyre in the courtyard of the house. One of them’s killed outright. The other’s badly wounded. So he’s lying there, in a bad way, can hardly move, so I disarm him, he has a rifle and also a pistol. He’s calling to his friend, it seems. In Russian. He was a Russian. But the friend isn’t answering because he’s dead. So he looks over at me and he can see I’m making the pistol ready. I don’t speak Russian and I guess he realized the friend wasn’t answering. So he looks at me and he says to me in Arabic ‘Don’t you fear God?’ So I tell him ‘no’ and put two bullets in his brain.”
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DEBKA

EXCLUSIVE:  For the first time ever, the top soldiers of the United States, Russia and Turkey are holding a secret meeting in the Turkish town of Antalya for an urgent two-day effort to avert a clash between their three armies, which stand ominously face to face in northern Syria.

Gen. Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the US Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian armed forces, and Gen. Hulusi Akar, Chief of Staff of the Turkish army sat down together on Tuesday, March 7.
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By Dennis Prager, TOWNHALL

Last week, the Jerusalem Post and other news agencies reported that in a Paris suburb, two Jewish brothers wearing kippot (Jewish skullcaps) were attacked while driving their car by Middle Easterners driving another car.According to a case report: “While the vehicle was in motion, the driver and a passenger shouted anti-Semitic slogans at the brothers that included ‘Dirty Jews, You’re going to die!’ … The vehicle forced the brothers to stop their car, and they were surrounded by several men … The men came out of a hookah cafe on to the side street … The alleged attackers surrounded the brothers, then kicked and punched them repeatedly while threatening that they would be murdered if they moved. One of the alleged attackers then sawed off the finger of one of the brothers.”
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The Israeli Defense Minister raises fears over applying sovereignty to Judea and Samaria.

By Caroline B. Glick, JPOST

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman is in over his head.

Few had high hopes for Liberman when he was appointed to his post, but most observers on the political Right were willing to swallow the pill of having a man with an understanding of military and strategic affairs that began and ended with applause lines because his appointment solved two pressing political problems.

Liberman’s appointment to serve as defense minister brought his Yisrael Beitenu party into the government, which increased the size of the coalition from its razor-thin 61-seat majority to a more healthy 66 seats. Moreover, by appointing him, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was able to remove Moshe Ya’alon from the Defense Ministry. Ya’alon had become unacceptable to Likud voters due to his rush to convict IDF Sgt. Elor Azaria as guilty of criminal wrongdoing last March when Azaria killed a downed terrorist who had stabbed a fellow soldier in Hebron.
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T. Belman. Trump is positioning the US so that it can negotiate with Russia from a position of strength.

DEBKA

The Pentagon announced Tuesday, March 6, that a US armored convoy was deployed around the disputed northern Syrian town of Manbij, and in an unusual move, released a video depicting the convoy and its men.

A US military spokesman tweeted that the US deployment was a deliberate action taken to assure that forces within the US-led coalition deterred aggression and kept the focus on defeating ISIS.

Affirming that the US-led coalition was aware of the location of Russian-backed Syrian forces, Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis told reporters Monday.
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Daniel Johnson and Tzipi Hotovely

(Tzipi Hotovely © Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Daniel Johnson ©Francesco Guidicini)

Daniel Johnson: One of the issues that I know you’ve been very much embroiled in is this question of whether Israeli law will apply to the West Bank. This is clearly in the interests of not just settlers but Arabs too, Palestinians as well, so how are we going to resolve that and how are you going to present this to the world not as a bid to move the goalposts, but simply as doing justice?
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By Cliff Kincaid, RENEW AMERICA

By Ted Belman

After Lieberman’s startling remarks last week concerning a rupture in in our relationship with the US should we annex Judea and Samaria in whole or in part and the Women of Green’s disavowal of what he said, the US clarified yesterday.

“We are not going to speak publicly about the details of private communications between governments,”

“President Trump is committed to working with Israel and the Palestinians on a comprehensive peace deal that will allow both sides to live in the peace and security they deserve,”

“The administration needs to have the chance to fully consult with all parties on the way forward. We are just getting that process started. As the president has said, he would like to see a ‘level of reasonableness of both parties,'”

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By Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar

The heads of Women in Green have severe criticism for Minister Lieberman’s words against the application of sovereignty and assert that he bases his position on misleading data, ignoring the changes in the Middle East and the American administration.

Women in Green responds with severity to the words this morning of Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman in the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee against the vision of sovereignty.
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T. Belman. This needs clarification from a known source on the Trump team. As I have said before, the litmus test is permission to build. That is currently being held up. Building is way more important than the US moving its embassy. So much for Kushner and Friedman and Greenblatt. It may well be that the world community can force a solution on us which is akin to the Kerry parameters. Trump has yet to do anything that would assure us that we will get more land than the former administration was willing to give us.

Avigdor Lieberman says Israel should clearly state it has no intention of imposing Israeli law on West Bank.

By Jonathan Lis, HAARETZ

The U.S. administration told Israel that annexing the West Bank would lead to an immediate crisis between the two countries, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman told lawmakers on Monday.

“We received a direct message… imposing Israeli sovereignty [on the West Bank] would mean an immediate crisis with the new administration,” Lieberman told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. “The coalition should clearly state that there is no intention to impose [Israeli] sovereignty.”
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By Alexander Markovsky

In his first speech to members of NATO, American Secretary of Defense Mattis said, “Americans cannot care more for your children’s future security than you do.”  This echoes his boss Donald Trump’s campaign statement, “Number one it (NATO) was obsolete, because it was designed many, many years ago.” Normally, a new president can count on the backing of his own party, but on this issue there is a rare consensus on both sides of the aisle in support of the existing policies.

The core divergence of geopolitical views is this:

• Supporters of NATO see American commitments as implicitly limitless and irreversible. They insist that the arrangements have worked well for the United States, and any attempt to challenge them is not in America’s national interests. Ideologically, adherence to existing commitments defines our national interests.

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by Noah Beck, Special to IPT News

Hamas operatives burst into the Associated Press (AP) Gaza bureau during the 2014 war with Israel, angered by a picture shot by an AP photographer. Gunmen threatened the AP staff, which never reported the incident.

The incident shows that Hamas can control what journalists report, and what they don’t, former AP Middle East reporter Matti Friedman says in a new documentary, “Eyeless in Gaza.”

Producer Robert Magid’s 50-minute film, which is screening via pay-per-view online, examines the flaws and challenges in reporting on the 50-day war.
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T. Belman. This article covers the case against the law quite well but hardly addresses the case for them.

The NGO petition to the High Court of Justice is the second one to be filed against the law.

BY TOVAH LAZAROFF, YONAH JEREMY BOB, JPOST,

The Settlements Regulation Law” could place individual Israeli politicians, military personnel and civilians before the International Criminal Court at The Hague on charges of war crimes, 13 NGOs told the High Court of Justice on Sunday.

The 13 organizations, led by Yesh Din and Peace Now, issued the warning as part of their 63-page petition to the High Court against the law, which was passed on February 6.
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By Joel B Pollak, BREITBART

Democrats’ efforts to raise suspicions about alleged — and, thus far, imaginary — links between President Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government may have backfired spectacularly.

The spotlight is now on President Barack Obama and his administration’s alleged surveillance of the Trump campaign, as well as his aides’ reported efforts to spread damaging information about Trump throughout government agencies to facilitate later investigations and, possibly, leaks to the media.

On Sunday morning, the White House released a statement indicating that the president would ask the congressional committees investigating Russian hacking theories to add the question of “whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016.”
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