by Moshe Dann, JPOST

There are times in a nation’s history when it seems swept inexorably towards the next stage in its development and its destiny, often amidst inner conflicts and sometimes violently. The American Civil War is an example of a society divided over the issue of slavery which led to a devastating conflict.  The issue was complicated because the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Roger Taney, had declared in the Dred Scott decision that slave-holding was a Constitutional right. Six years later, in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation which changed the course of American history. This was followed by Amendments to the Constitution which abolished slavery and guaranteed rights of all citizens.
Read more…

By Vic Rosenthal

ERETZ-ISRAEL was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom. – Beginning of  Israel’s Declaration of Independence, May 14, 1948

Today there is a deepening ideological divide on one important issue among Israeli Jews. It’s not especially useful to simply refer to it as “left vs. right,” although one’s opinion on this issue usually predicts where one falls on the political spectrum. It is a divergence of opinion about what kind of country we want to have. It’s the disagreement about defining a “Jewish state.”
Read more…

Pew Center Survey shows rapid climb in the percentage of US Orthodox Jews – and their influence goes beyond their numbers.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/221990

By Benny Avni, THE SUN

Roughly translated, “dugri” means “straightforwardness.” Antonym: diplomatic ambiguity. The Turkic word, pronounced DOOH-gree, entered the Hebrew language and became a staple of Israeli discourse. President-elect Trump’s approach to diplomacy appears to appreciate dugri.

And, hey, an American non-ambiguous dugri may just be what Middle East diplomacy now requires. Take the nomination of David Friedman, Mr. Trump’s long time confidante, bankruptcy lawyer and friend, to be America’s next envoy in Israel.

“I expect the next U.S. ambassador in Israel to support, like I do, strong, close and warm relations between our countries and support security cooperation, as we did during the Obama presidency,” Daniel Shapiro, President Obama’s ambassador in Tel Aviv, told me several days before Mr. Trump’ named Mr. Friedman.
Read more…

By Leon Wieseltier, WaPo

Contemplating the extermination of Aleppo and its people, I was reminded of a sentence that I read this summer. It appeared in an encomium to Elie Wiesel shortly after his death. It was a sterling sentence. It declared: “We must never be bystanders to injustice or indifferent to suffering.” That was Wiesel’s teaching, exactly. The problem with the sentence is that it was issued by the White House and attributed to President Obama. And so the sentence was not at all sterling. It was outrageously hypocritical.

Read more…

Friedman, an Orthodox Jew, is staunchly in favor of moving the embassy to Jerusalem, and building in Judea and Samaria.

By Herb Keinon, JPOST

US President elect Donald Trump’s nomination of David Friedman as his ambassador to Israel sends a message to the world that “we are going to look at things anew,” Becky Norton Dunlop, a senior official in Trump’s transition team, said on Monday.

Dunlop, who is the deputy to Ed Feulner, the senior adviser on the Trump transition team for policy and personnel, pointed out that although it was very rare for presidents-elect to make ambassadorial nominations before inauguration, Trump has only named two: to Israel and China.
Read more…

By FP Staff

A file photo of Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan (R) with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. Reuters

The conflict in Syria took another ugly turn on Monday night, after a 22-year-old Turkish policeman, Mevlut Mert Altintas, fatally shot the Russian Ambassador to Ankara, Andrei Karlov in broad daylight.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was quick to condemn the assassination, and said that the killing is aimed at straining ties between Russia and Turkey. He also added that the murder is intended at derailing Moscow’s effort to effect a solution for the four year long Syrian civil war.

Read more…

The chancellor talks a good game in trying to appeal to German voters wary of left-wing sympathy for Putin.

By John Vinocur, WSJ

With their re-election next year very much in mind, Angela Merkel and the members of her Christian Democratic Union are staking out positions on Russia that, for now, make them the toughest tough-talkers in the West.

The chancellor’s line on the likelihood of Germany’s 2017 political and voting process being hacked: “I say this simply—these cyber-attacks, including those that are called hybrid measures in Russia’s doctrine, now belong to every-day occurrence.”
Read more…

What is not at all clear is how the American Jewish community will fare in the coming years.

By Caroloine B Glick, JPOST

David Friedman, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to serve as the next US ambassador to Israel, has his work cut out for him.

Right after Trump announced his appointment, the nameless bureaucrats at the State Department mounted a rebellion. Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, the permanent members of the State Department’s Israel policy shop let it be known that Friedman is not to their liking.

“These are the people,” the Post’s Washington reporter Michael Wilner wrote, “behind the carefully worded reactions to breaking news developments in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.”
Read more…

TIP

The Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas is allowing injured Islamic State militants into the Gaza Strip to be treated and the transfer of weapons into Sinai to be used by ISIS’ branch based on the desert peninsula, Avi Issacharoff of The Times of Israel reported Sunday.

Issacharoff wrote that “one of the main smuggling tunnels [connecting Gaza and Sinai] is operating under the protection of Hamas and belongs to a smuggler who works with [Hamas].” The weapons are mostly anti-tank missiles and roadside improvised explosive devices: “The roadside bombs are a major challenge to the Egyptian Army; every week they inflict heavy casualties.” Issacharoff continued, “Explosives experts from [Hamas]…have arrived in the Sinai to assist with the assembly of the devices.” He noted that a former Hamas operative, Abed al-Hila Qishta, had his death announced by ISIS’ Sinai branch several days ago – he trained ISIS fighters in the use of anti-tank weapons and, despite severing relations from Hamas and joining the Popular Resistance Committees (another terrorist organization), he “has remained in close contact with [Hamas’] commanders in the Gaza Strip.”
Read more…

By JAMES MANN, NYT

James Mattis, Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, has voiced support for the Iran nuclear accord, while Mr. Trump has attacked it. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — With the announcement that he will nominate the Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state, President-elect Donald J. Trump has rounded out a foreign policy team that is, to put it mildly, profoundly different from that of any of his six Republican predecessors since World War II. It’s also unlikely to last particularly long.

Certainly Mr. Trump’s team is different from that of the George W. Bush administration, which came loaded with Republican foreign policy establishment figures — a difference that Mr. Trump will no doubt flaunt as a virtue. Indeed, the Bush team proves that appointing officials with long experience in Washington does not by itself guarantee a successful foreign policy, particularly not if there are intense disagreements within the group.
Read more…

DEBKA

Not much can be ascertained about President-elect Donald Trump’s administration future policies for the Middle East – any more than for most other parts of the world, except that his starting points are likely to be diametrically opposed to those of Barack Obama.

It is all still in the making. The Russian policy he decides to pursue after he enters the White House and his administration is in place is as unfathomable as are the motives that led him to appoint his lawyer and close adviser, the pro-settlement David Friedman, as US ambassador to Israel.
Read more…

By Richard Baehr, ISRAEL HAYOM

In the final months of the presidential campaign, a popular refrain at Donald Trump rallies, second only perhaps to “Lock Her Up,” was “Drain the Swamp.” The chant ostensibly referred to clearing out the bureaucratic/lobbyist control over the federal government, which had resulted in a government committed to serving the needs of the protected few at the expense of the unprotected many and debilitating America’s future growth prospects in the process.

There is no reason, however, why the term should not apply equally to the stale thinking that has permeated diplomacy in the Middle East for decades, enabling nonsensical beliefs to remain accepted and unchallenged. The fierce reaction to the announcement that Trump adviser David Friedman will be the next ambassador to Israel is evidence that among those who have actively participated in perpetuating failure in the supposed Israeli-Palestinian peace process there are many now worried about their jobs, their influence, or worse — that common sense, if given an outlet and applied to the region, may produce something outside the allowed set of acceptable policies to which they have adhered for so long.
Read more…

T. Belman. The problem all along was that there wasn’t a unified opposition to support. When Obama decided to oust Assad with the support of Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood, Russia and Iran were not on the scene. Had they been, Obama would never have decided to oust him. The big mistake was that he let the situation get away from him. In fact he invited it when he cut a deal Russia to avoid entering the fray himself because of the red line being crossed. After that Obama was a non-player.

As for unlimited cruelty, that’s war. Winning is all that matters especially when your life depends on it.

If he didn’t maintain the lie of opposition to Assad remaining in power, he would have avoided the suffering caused to so many Syrians.

By Asaf Ronel, HAARETZ,

U.S. President Barack Obama looked tired, even defeated, at his final press conference for 2016, which may be his last as president. He listed his achievements of the past eight years, but it wasn’t a press conference of a satisfied president, but rather of a leader worried about his country’s democracy and unable to influence the main events abroad – above all the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo.

“We all know what needs to happen. There needs to be an impartial international observer force in Aleppo that can help coordinate an orderly evacuation through safe corridors,” Obama said.
Read more…

By Prof. Efraim Inbar, BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 387, December 18, 2016

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Though he might be a novice in foreign policy, Donald Trump could bring about dramatic changes in the global arena by aligning with Russia against China. In this scenario, Russia would have an opportunity to align with Western civilization, ending a millennium-long schism. Will Russia be ready to end its cozy relations with the radical regime in Iran to become a true US ally in the fight against militant Islam?

US President-Elect Donald Trump lacks foreign policy experience, and during the election campaign did not proffer any comprehensive outlook on global affairs. He offered bits and pieces of ideas (building a wall along the Mexican border, moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, disparaging NATO, and demanding that allies raise their defense expenditures). Overall, he expressed isolationist sentiments alongside inconsistent and unpredictable thoughts. In any case, his focus is likely to be on domestic affairs.
Read more…

BY ALLAHPUNDIT, HOT AIR

Is Trump’s fondness for Russia a simple matter of admiring Putin’s ruthless fascist moxie or is it all part of a game of eight-dimensional chess he’s playing to box in China? There’s a theory kicking around in foreign policy circles that his looming detente with Putin is actually “Nixon in reverse,” i.e. instead of making nice with China as Nixon did in 1972 in order to form an axis against Russia, Trump might be making nice with Russia in order to form an axis against China. No less than Henry Kissinger predicted the eventual necessity of that move when he and Nixon were planning their rapprochement with Mao decades ago:

On Feb. 14, 1972, President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger met to discuss Nixon’s upcoming trip to China. Kissinger, who had already taken his secret trip to China to begin Nixon’s historic opening to Beijing, expressed the view that compared with the Russians, the Chinese were “just as dangerous. In fact, they’re more dangerous over a historical period.”

Read more…

T. Belman. Hopefully Trump will recognizer Kurdish independence both in Iraq and Syria. Then it should build up their military. Israel already has a strong relationship with the Kurds. Thus the US will have two strong allies who can fight their own battles situated to the north and the south of two Iranian proxies. In addition the US could get the Kurds to lead in the destabilization of Iran. Remember there are over 8 million Kurds in Iran adjacent to the new Kurdistan.

Netanyahu has good relations with Azerbaijan who was prepared to allow Israel to attack Iran from their territory. They recently announced that they had bought $5 billion in military hardware from Israel. Many Azeries live in Iran adjacent to Azerbaijan.

Kazakistan is also friendly.

By Laurie Mylroie, KURDISTAN24

The Kurdistan Region, including its most senior officials, has warmly welcomed the election of Donald Trump. Almost certainly Trump will prove friendlier than Barack Obama. But that friendliness will probably manifest itself in small, individual decisions, rather than a single big one, like declaring support for Kurdish independence.

And a lot will depend on the Kurds themselves: understanding the new environment; making smart, thoughtful decisions; and taking the right steps to exploit the opportunities that the new US administration offers.
Read more…

T, Belman. I do not believe there is any lovelost between Russia and Iran.  Iran wants to conquer all of Syria but Russia doesn’t. She has has what she wants and would clearly prefer a relationship with the US.

I do not believe that Trump will accept Iranian dominance over all of Syria and Iraq, So I believe discussions are now taking place for their mutual benefit. Turkey may be forced to live with the Kurdish state.

… there is no chance Assad will be removed from power …

by Yochanan Visser, WESTERN JOURNALISM

Aleppo has finally fallen — as Western Journalism predicted in May — and it will be a turning point in the Syrian civil war that has raged for more than five years.

The second-largest Syrian city (called Halab in Arabic) had been the scene of very intense fighting and bombardment over the last two months.

On Wednesday, the Russian-led pro-Assad coalition forced the last remaining rebels in Eastern Aleppo into accepting a cease-fire deal that was meant to evacuate thousands of civilians and members of rebel groups.
Read more…

JNi.Media, JEWISH PRESS

Media reports about the Arab struggle to retrieve the lands of Amona has been presented by politicians and the media as part of an Arab tradition of loyalty to their land.

Indeed, one of the Arab claimants against the Amona community has been quoted as saying, “If your child dies, you can make another one in his place, but land that you sold cannot be replaced.”

And yet, a report in Friday’s Makor Rishon suggests reality on the ground in Judea and Samaria reflects a somewhat different set of values. Local Arabs may not be willing to sell their land, but many of them don’t live on said land either, preferring instead to emigrate to the US.
Read more…

By Thomas Lifson, AMERICAN THINKER

Even though she never mentions the concept, former Reagan and Bush senior official Linda Chavez makes an excellent case that the success of the Trump presidency depends on sweeping civil service reform.  The title of her article in the New York Post indicates her chosen focus: “Will Trump’s Cabinet picks be able to beat the bureaucracy?”

Drawing on her experience, she lays out all the reasons the answer to her question probably will be no. For example:
Read more…