T. Belman. This article ignores the fact that in many if not most jurisdictions in the West, where a person, in good faith builds on someone else’s land, the owners, once determined, would be forced to receive generous compensation for that part of their lands, affected. That is what the Regulation Law seeks to accomplish. And remember that applies only to privately owned Palestinian lands. Israel also has the right to build on public land.

By: Prof. Amichai Cohen, IDI

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be facing a legal escalation. Recent events surrounding the evacuation of the Israeli settlement of Amona have ignited a long-simmering debate within Israeli society regarding the construction of a small portion of settlements on privately-owned Palestinian land in Judea and Samaria.

The Settlement Regulation Bill, which has caused a firestorm of controversy in Israel, is aimed at addressing this issue. It stipulates that no demolition orders will be carried out for a period of one year, during which time efforts shall be made to ascertain the ownership of disputed plots of land. At the end of the period, land found to be privately owned will be expropriated from its owners in exchange for an appropriate financial compensation. Due to strong opposition by legal experts, the version of the bill currently under consideration will not apply to Amona and a small number of similar cases, regarding which a Supreme Court ruling to evacuate already exists.
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New poll finds that 75% of Israelis support sovereignty in Judea and Samaria in some form, while only 7% support a Palestinian state.

By Shimon Cohen, INN

A new poll finds that the vast majority of the Israeli population would like to see Israeli sovereignty being applied over Judea and Samaria. Only seven percent of the public is interested in establishing a Palestinian state in these areas.

The poll, released on Thursday, was conducted between January 10 and 15 among a representative sample of the adult Jewish public in Israel, by the Maagor Mohot Research Institute directed by Prof. Yitzhak Katz. The poll surveyed a random probability sample of 514 responders online, with a 4.5% margin of error.
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By MARTIN SHERMAN

Are “Commanders for Israel” aware of the deadly defects in their ill-conceived program, but persist in promoting it anyway; or they are unaware of them, and are promoting it out of sheer ignorance?

[After Gamal Abdel Nasser’s death] the ability of the Arabs to coordinate their political and military activities has diminished. Even previously this ability was not great–now it is even less.

There is no need to call up our forces, even when threats are made and enemy forces are deployed along the [post-1967] cease-fire lines. Before the Six Day War, every Egyptian troop movement into Sinai compelled Israel to call up reserves on a significant scale. Now, there is no need for such a call-up as long as Israel’s lines of defense are emplaced along the Suez Canal…Israel’s military strength is sufficient to prevent the opposing side from attaining any military objective and political realities prevailing between the superpowers is not conducive to a renewal of fighting as it was in 1969-1970…Accordingly, Israel has freedom of action to deal effectively in preventing another round of fighting, should Egypt wish to open fire again. – Yitzhak Rabin, “The slow road to peace”, Ma’ariv, July 13, 1973.

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At pre-inaugural event in Washington, President-elect Donald Trump tells Israel Hayom he will move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, “and I’m not a person who breaks promises” • Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat launches campaign thanking Trump for his support.

ISRAEL HAYOM

President-elect Donald Trump landed in Washington, D.C. this week for the events leading up to his inauguration on Friday as the 45th president of the United States.

Trump’s close associate, Chairman of the 58th Presidential Inauguration Committee Thomas J. Barrack Jr., put on an event Tuesday evening to present Trump’s ideas to the 147 foreign ambassadors, consuls, and diplomats currently serving in Washington. The event was held at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, where the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 1949. The choice was symbolic — Trump wanted to send a message, particularly to U.S. allies, that he isn’t as terrible as he is portrayed.
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Netanyahu may delay vote to avoid conflict with U.S.; Israeli governments since Rabin have sought to build in E1 to secure Ma’aleh Adumim’s contiguity with Israel proper.

By Jonathan Lis, HAARETZ

But the bill’s sponsor, MK Yoav Kish (Likud) said he would be willing to exclude the controversial bloc from the draft law in the event its inclusion created a crisis within the governing coalition.

“It absolutely could happen that as part of a compromise we would put the bill through without E1. It’s something to think about … I don’t want someone to say he isn’t willing to join the process as a result of [Israeli] sovereignty being imposed also on E1,” Kish said.
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This speech was written by Jared Kushner and his orthodox friends (except for Trump’s irritating ad-libs). The speech caught the attention of 3.3 million CUFI evangelicals who turned out in record numbers and voted for Trump.

T. Belman. This analysis is way off base for a number of reasons. Can anyone point to a legal document which gives the Arab countries a say in the matter? As for the Palestinians, the Oslo Accords give them right to have Jerusalem as a final status issue. But so long as they are in violation of its terms they have no standing to demand this. Israel can at anytime cancel the Accords and do what she pleases.

I would remind you that Res 242 is silent on Jerusalem.

Satloff is showing way too much deference to the Arabs. That’s what the US has always done. She did the same thing in Res 242 by requiring Israel to withdraw from territories rather than to consider the ceasefire lines the new borders. Thereafter at the behest of the Arabs, she forced Israel into the Oslo Accords and required Israel to invite the return of Arafat. And on and on.

Washington Institute’s Robert Satloff writes policy memo on how to relocate the embassy without setting off an international crisis

BY ERIC CORTELLESSA, TOI

WASHINGTON — If President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his campaign pledge to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, he should do it quickly and adeptly, according to a report by a prominent Middle East scholar.

The paper to be released Tuesday by Robert Satloff, who heads the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, examines ways that Trump can fulfill his pledge without prompting violent unrest or a diplomatic crisis in the region.

For Trump, the question is how to deliver something the last three successive United States presidents went to great lengths to avoid. Satloff has laid out what he believes to be the answer in his new policy memo that presents a series of recommendations on how to execute the relocation.
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DEBKA

First Sgt. Erez Levy, 34, an officer in the operations branch of the Israel Police, was crushed to death Wednesday morning, Jan. 18, in a car-ramming attack at the Bedouin village of Umm-al-Hiran in the southern Negev region. He was laid to rest that afternoon at the military cemetery in the city of Yavneh. He left behind a wife and two children, along with his parents and siblings.

Levy’s murderer, a 47-year-old villager, who was a member of the southern branch of Israel’s radical Islamic Movement, was shot and killed.
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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 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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