By Heshnmat Alavi, AMERICAN THINKER,

Following a historic period of perseverance, Syrian rebels and their families were forced to evacuate eastern Aleppo after its liberation back in 2012. An unjust, intense war was launched upon Aleppo by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and its proxy forces on the ground: Russia with its indiscriminate air strikes, and a lame-duck Syrian army of less than 20,000 deployable forces.

After more than 15 months continuous air raids and a long-lasting inhumane siege, Syrian rebels and civilians sealed an international agreement to depart Syria’s once economic and cultural hub.
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Citing Arab and Western sources, Netanyahu spokesperson says anti-settlement resolution ‘a deliberate push by the United States’

TOI

A spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said Israel has “rather ironclad information” that US President Barack Obama played an active role in both formulating and pushing for the UN Security Council resolution lambasting settlement construction, which passed on Friday after Washington decided not to exercise its veto and abstained.

Speaking to Fox News on Sunday, David Keyes said Arab sources, among others, had informed Jerusalem of Obama’s alleged involvement in advancing the resolution.

“We have rather ironclad information from sources in both the Arab world and internationally that this was a deliberate push by the United States and in fact they helped create the resolution in the first place,” Keyes told the US media outlet.
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By Ted Belman, AMERICAN THINKER

The Trump administration is dedicated to undoing the harm done by the Obama administration in the Iran Deal. To succeed, it needs the right team.

Most of you have never heard of the Center for Security Policy. That’s about to change because it has a prominent, if not dominant role, in the Trump transition team in matters relating to Iran, Russia, China and Islam. Gone from the corridors of power is the Brookings Institute who have a satellite office in Doha, Qatar and their Vice President and Director for Foreign Policy, Martin Indyk.  Soon, Pres Obama, the golfer, Sec’y Kerry, the bicyclist and Sec’y Clinton the failure will also be gone.
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[See also: Abbas confidant: We’ll take ‘hundreds’ of IDF soldiers to ICC this year]

Israel lost a significant battle on Friday. But the war over the ICC is still in play.

By Jonah Jeremy Bob, JPOST

How does the UN Security Council resolution declaring Israel’s settlements and buildings in the West Bank and east Jerusalem as illegal impact International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s decision about whether to dive deeper into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

First, the context. Bensouda opened a preliminary examination into alleged war crimes relating to the 2014 Gaza war and to the settlement enterprise in January 2015.

The million-dollar question has been whether she would move from a preliminary review to a full criminal investigation.
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Since Trump’s victory, there has been a sharp increase in building plans for the holy city, and the number of permits issued this year is more than triple than in 2015.

By Nir Hassan, HAARETZ

The Jerusalem Local Planning and Construction Committee is expected on Wednesday to approve permits to build 618 apartments in Jewish neighborhoods across the Green Line.

The meeting’s agenda was set before the United Nations Security Council resolution was passed on Friday condemning Israeli construction across the Green Line, including in East Jerusalem, as illegal.

But the new housing permits continue a trend this past year of a sharp increase in construction plans approved for East Jerusalem over the last two years.
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By Evelyn Gordon, COMMENTARY

The past month provides a textbook example of one of the major flaws in Western efforts to promote a two-state solution: a tendency to focus on all the wrong issues. The peace processing community is currently in a tizzy over something that ought to be an irrelevancy: the possibility that the Trump Administration might actually move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. But it had nothing whatsoever to say about a far more significant development: the outcome of recent elections for the governing organs of the Fatah party, aka Israel’s “peace partner.”

As Jonathan Tobin correctly pointed out earlier this week, the idea that moving the embassy would destroy the peace process is ludicrous. If Palestinians were willing to recognize Israel within the 1949 armistice lines, as they claim, they would have no reason to care where the embassy is located as long as it’s inside those lines, which the proposed Jerusalem locale would be.
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SPUTNIK

On Tuesday, the foreign ministers of Russia, Iran and Turkey discussed the situation in Syria, including Aleppo, in Moscow on Tuesday. Russia, Iran and Turkey agreed a joint statement to revive the political process to end the conflict in Syria.

Russia, Iran, Turkey Negotiating on Syria According to Russian top diplomat Sergei Lavrov, the three countries want to help Damascus and the Syrian opposition to come to an agreement. They will also act as a guarantor of this agreement.
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Citizens of Israel, I would like to reassure you. The resolution that was adopted yesterday at the United Nations is distorted and shameful but we will overcome it. The resolution determines that the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem is ‘occupied territory’. This is delusional.

The resolution determines that the Western Wall is ‘occupied territory’. This too is delusional. There is nothing more absurd than calling the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter occupied territory. There is also an attempt here, which will not succeed, to impose permanent settlement terms on Israel. You might recall that the last one who tried to do this was Carter, an extremely hostile president to Israel, and who just recently said that Hamas is not a terrorist organization. Carter passed sweeping decisions against us at the UN of a similar kind, and this was also unsuccessful. We opposed this and nothing happened.
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By Nadav Shragai, ISRAEL HAYOM

We can continue the argument over the settlements with the world of U.S. President Barack Obama and his supporters in legal and diplomatic language, rightfully protesting his hypocrisy and hoping for better under incoming President Donald Trump.

But all this cannot be done without screaming in the ears of the world — especially during Hanukkah — a single basic truth, as Simon the Hasmonean put it some 2,200 years ago: “We have not taken foreign territory or any alien property, but have occupied our ancestral heritage, for some time unjustly wrested from us by our enemies; now that we have a favorable opportunity, we are merely recovering our ancestral heritage” (Maccabees 1, 15:33-34).
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T. Belman. In 2011, a similar resolution was coming up before the UNSC and this letter was sent. In this case Obama vetoed it.

JCPA, Vol. 11, No. 1     May 29, 2011

Letter to the UN Secretary General:

• The following is a letter drafted jointly by lawyers of the Legal Forum for Israel and by Amb. Alan Baker, Director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
• The letter is directed to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and signed by jurists and international lawyers from around the world.
• The letter cautions the Secretary General as to the inherent illegality and harm to the UN and to the Middle East peace process which would be caused by the adoption of a resolution declaring a Palestinian state and determining its borders.

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By Clarice Feldman, AMERICAN THINKER

In the Jewish calendar it’s the year 5777. That’s how long we date our history. The United Nations has lasted a mere forty-five years. Founded to promote world peace, it has devolved into a corrupt, anti-democratic, anti-Semitic den of thieves, where a “cartel of Bronze Age backward” nations regularly gets resolutions passed to attack the only democratic, modern state in the Middle East while ignoring genocide, despotism, slavery, and ethnic and religious persecutions that take place in their own lands.

Only people as blinkered as Obama, Powers, and Kerry could think otherwise, unless they, too, so despise Jews and Israel that they willingly accept the fiction that the UN is an impartial body trying to bring peace to the area. This week, with the connivance of the usual bastard nations and with the surprising addition of New Zealand  (whose main export, wine, should be boycotted in disgust) rammed through a resolution to ban settlements outside the 1967 borders of Israel. They did this despite unprecedented efforts by president-elect Trump to keep the resolution from being considered. At his behest, Egypt postponed the effort to consider the resolution, only to have the administration succeed in conniving with New Zealand and the Palestinians to get it back on the agenda.
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BY RICHARD l CRAVATTS, TOI

The shameful and morally incoherent December 23rd resolution vote by the UN Security Council demanding that “Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem,” also includes dangerous language that proclaims that Israeli settlements, which are “dangerously imperiling the viability of the two-state solution,” have “no legal validity.”

The United States, contrary to its customary role, abstained from the vote, which passed by a vote of 14 in favor out of 15 countries, and this departure marks a new low in the U.S.’s relations with Israel, even though the State Department under President Obama has, during the last eight years, promiscuously referred to the Israeli settlements as “unhelpful,” “obstructions to peace,” and “illegitimate.”
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“The Security Council,

“Reaffirming its relevant resolutions, including resolutions 242 (1967), 338 (1973), 446 (1979), 452 (1979), 465 (1980), 476 (1980), 478 (1980), 1397 (2002), 1515 (2003), and 1850 (2008),

“Guided by the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and reaffirming, inter alia, the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force,

“Reaffirming the obligation of Israel, the occupying Power, to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations and responsibilities under the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 12 August 1949, and recalling the advisory opinion rendered on 9 July 2004 by the International Court of Justice,
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T. Belman. This article was published two days ago. Its even more pertinent now that the resolution on settlements has passed.

Are you going to be the one to convince Trump that, perhaps, despite all that has happened, recognizing a Palestinian state is a worthy endeavor?

By Rabbi Joseph Gerlitzky, INN

The story goes that sometime, toward the end of the 1940s, a passerby chanced upon a decrepit army bunker, in which two soldiers crouched in the mud, clutching their weapons. Apparently, they had been holding out there since the Second World War, seeing that word of the war’s conclusion had never reached their ears. Instead, for nearly half a decade, they remained at their posts, waiting for the enemy to arrive…

In an interview given to channel CBS by Benjamin Netanyahu on December 11, 2016, the Israeli prime minister sounded not much different than those two benighted soldiers, crouching in the mud, clutching their rusty weapons, blind to the fact that the world beyond their bunker had radically changed.
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By Ted Belman

For the record, the settlements are not illegal either because the Fourth Geneva Convention doesn’t make them so or it doesn’t apply to these lands.

Netanyahu shares some of the blame because he never embraced the Levy Report and never makes the case that the settlements are legal. He just argues they are not an obstacle to peace. He left the field wide open for the UN to pass this resolution.

I believe that this resolution is ultra vires the UN Charter. The UN has no right to set the borders. It may only act to keep the peace. Also remember the hateful Zionism is Racism resolution was repealed.

Something more is needed than just reducing or cutting off US financial support for the UN or the PA. And for certain there will never be a negotiated solution.

It is time for unilateral action. Israel and the US should decide what to do in keeping with the 2016 GOP platform which was unanimously passed. THEN DO IT.

Our response must wait for Jan 20 as there is still time for a Chap 7 resolution to be passed.

I think this resolution will serve as a catalyst for good things for Israel.

Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) President Morton A. Klein released the following statement:

We are outraged  – but not surprised – that President Barack Hussein Obama and U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power enabled the passage of an extraordinary, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Israel UN Security Counsel resolution this afternoon. Also, the Resolution was filled with falsehoods and distortions. Obama and Kerry’s phony claim that they allowed this Resolution because Jews living in Judea/Samaria eastern Jerusalem would prevent a Palestinian State is a canard.The fact is that almost all Jews living in these very small areas are areas that would never be given away or prevent a State. The reason there’s no Palestinian State is the Arabs rejection of a State in 2000,2001,2007 in virtually all of Judea/Samaria and parts of Jerusalem.
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HAARETZ

U.S. didn’t veto the resolution because it reflects facts on the ground and is consistent with U.S. policy, Samantha Power says;

Trump: ‘Things will be different after Jan. 20.’

THIS RESOLUTION IS THE STRAW THAT WILL BREAK THE CAMELS BACK.

THE BIG LOSER WILL BE THE UN. THE US WILL DESTROY IT AND REPLACE IT.

ISRAEL WILL TRIUMPH.

Next year will see general elections in Holland, France and Germany, and nationalist parties in all three countries are likely to win or at a minimum be profoundly strengthened.

By Caroline B Glick, JPOST

US Pres Obama has but a month left in office. But he has a month left. And he is using it. In the days remaining, Obama is using the full authority of his office to advance his policies with the hope of rendering permanent his mark on American policy.

Domestically, Obama is working to undercut the capacity of his successor, President-elect Donald Trump, to implement his plans of expanding domestic oil and gas exploration and development.
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