By Evelyn Gordon, MOSAIC

In 2015, following lengthy negotiations, President Barack Obama concluded an executive agreement marking the accomplishment of a cherished policy goal: the nuclear deal with Iran known as the JCPOA. Also in 2015, after similarly lengthy negotiations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu concluded an agreement realizing a long-cherished policy goal of his own: a deal enabling development of Israel’s largest natural-gas field by a private American company and its Israeli partner. Both agreements included a commitment by the respective governments to refrain from adverse legislative action over the next ten to fifteen years: in Obama’s case, action to reinstate nuclear sanctions against Iran; in Netanyahu’s case, action to alter the regulatory regime for natural gas to the disadvantage of the private energy companies.
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Hezbollah has deployed at least a thousand fighters to Iraq where they are fighting alongside Iranian forces and Shi’ite militia, which Hezbollah trains.

By Caroline B Glick, JPOST

Israel officials are thrilled with the national security team that US President-elect Donald Trump is assembling. And they are right to be.

The question now is how Israel should respond to the opportunity it presents us with.

The one issue that brings together all of the top officials Trump has named so far to his national security team is Iran.
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It is not only the IDF Chief Rabbi’s appointment that the Supreme Court sees itself authorized to postpone, it is also ready to destroy Eretz Yisrael and ruin the lives of Jewish families. Israel must make a choice.

By Shifra Hoffman, INN

It seems surreal, to say the least, that after the traumatic expulsion of thousands of Jews from their homes in Gush Katif, that Israel, the Jewish homeland, has been ordered by the Supreme Court to destroy Amona, a so-called ‘settlement’ in Eretz Yisrael and to expel the brave and devoted Jewish families who have lived there for decades from their homes .

Never mind that each new expulsion emboldens the implacable Arab enemies, whose raison d’etre is to destroy Israel entirely, to continue their nefarious terrorist attacks against innocent Israeli Jewish men women and children!

Never mind that countless Arabs who claim Jewish homes were built on “their property”(sic) are squatters who migrated to Israel seeking employment after the Jewish State was reborn, in 1948.
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AND FOR THE ANSWER
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Habayit Hayehudi hails historic change: Israelis in Judea and Samaria are now official residents • Joint Arab List MK: Palestinians who sell land to Jews deserve to die • AG applies property dispute law to Judea and Samaria, legalizing dozens of homes.

Yair Altman and Israel Hayom Staff

Habayit Hayehudi: The outpost regulation law should be called the “Beginning Law,” because this is just a beginning | Photo credit: Reuters

The outpost regulation bill, which allows the government to grant permits to contested Judea and Samaria settlements, passed its first Knesset reading on Wednesday evening, with a vote of 58 to 51.
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PEOTUS is stacking his cabinet with friends of the Jewish State, but the geopolitical realities of Iran, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and ISIS may complicate his Middle East policy, whatever it turns out to be

By Lee Smith, TABLET

[..]
The first item on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s list when he talks to President-elect Donald Trump will be the strategic threat posed by the Iranian nuclear program and consequently the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which all but guarantees an Iranian breakout within 15 years. “The problem of how to deal with this deal is something I will discuss with President Trump when he takes office,” Netanyahu told a Saban Forum audience in Washington by satellite video this weekend. “Iran has actually become an even more aggressive power.”

There is no doubt that Netanyahu sees Trump as a much more sympathetic listener than his predecessor, Obama. It is no secret that one of the men closest to Trump, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is adamantly opposed to what Netanyahu described this weekend as a “bad” deal. Indeed, Trump has stacked his national security cabinet with figures on the record for their opposition to the Iran Deal, like secretary of defense nominee Gen. James Mattis, national security adviser Gen. Mike Flynn, and Rep. Mike Pompeo, who shortly before being named nominated for CIA director tweeted “I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terror.”
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By Carlotta Gaul, NYT

KABUL, Afghanistan — Fifteen years, half a trillion dollars and 150,000 lives since going to war, the United States is trying to extricate itself from Afghanistan. Afghans are being left to fight their own fight. A surging Taliban insurgency, meanwhile, is flush with a new inflow of money.

With their nation’s future at stake, Afghan leaders have renewed a plea to one power that may hold the key to whether their country can cling to democracy or succumbs to the Taliban. But that power is not the United States.
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The Amona evacuation of 2006. More than 200 people were injured (Photo: Amit Shabi)

Brig. Gen. (res.) Meir Bokovza, Maj. Gen. (res.) Yisrael Yitzhak and former Police Commissioner Moshe Karadi recount the traumatic evacuation of the Amona outpost in 2006, hoping it won’t end the same way this time around. ‘Decision makers must understand that everyone who comes there will be prepared to fight.’

More than 10 years have passed since that night in early February 2006, but when Brig. Gen. (res.) Meir Bokovza starts recounting the great drama that took place in the outpost he was sent to evacuate, he gets all tense and excited as if it all happened a week ago.
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VALERIE VOLCOVICI AND TIMOTHY GARDNER, REUTERS

Donald Trump will pick an ardent opponent of President Barack Obama’s measures to curb climate change as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, a Trump transition team source said on Wednesday, a choice that enraged green activists and cheered the oil industry.

Trump’s choice, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, fits neatly with the Republican president-elect’s promise to cut back the EPA and free up drilling and coal mining, and signals the likely rollback of much of Obama’s environmental agenda.
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Lockheed Martin Israel CE Joshua Shani tells “Globes” about Israel’s newest fighter aircraft.

GLOBES

Of the 33 F-35 stealth fighter planes purchased by Israel, the first two will be delivered in three weeks, landing at Nevatim Air Base in southern Israel. Another round of purchases of this advanced, expensive, and controversial fighter is already around the corner. A decision is likely in the coming weeks, with the security cabinet being asked to approve the Ministry of Defense plan to buy 17 more planes.

The first 33 planes were purchased in two series: the first for $2.75 billion and the second for $2.82 billion, including infrastructure, parts, and training simulators.
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Einat Wilf, THE TOWER

Israel has one glaring problem: lousy timing. Most of Israel’s apparent problems, certainly the ones its critics claim it has, emerge from Israel’s repeated inability to be synchronized with prevailing global moods. But patience has its rewards—over time, as challenges facing Israel turn out to be global rather than local, Israel’s failings appear so much less so, if at all.

Consider, as an appetizer, the minor but remarkably annoying issue of airport security. During the 1990s, when I was working on projects in Israel for a global consulting firm, senior partners of the firm would arrive in Israel for a two- to three-day stay to oversee the projects. They would invariably arrive angry. Fuming, really. “What is this crazy security you have at your airports? How dare they look in my bag? How do you ever expect to be part of the global economy if you carry on this way?” The Israelis among us would bow our heads in shame, apologize profusely and mumble something about necessity and terrorism.
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Many Israelis had hoped that President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi would take ground-breaking steps toward normalization; It still has not happened.

By Zvi Mazel. JPOST

President Sadat made history by coming to Jerusalem, and the peace agreement followed two years later. Much is made in Israel of the strong security cooperation between the two countries regarding the fight against Islamic terrorism in northern Sinai. Egypt is far more discreet on the subject.

The “cold peace,” a term coined during the Mubarak years to describe the relations between the two neighboring countries, shows no sign of thawing in spite of a few gestures of goodwill lately. There is once more an Egyptian ambassador in Israel after four years and the embassy of Israel has reopened in Cairo – albeit on the grounds of the residence of the ambassador. Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry made a high profile visit to Israel; furthermore, speaking to high school’s students in Egypt, he stated that Israel’s fight to defend itself could not be construed as terrorism.
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T. Belman. As I understood it, Israel’s planes are no match for the Russian planes and certainly not for the S-300 and S-400 missile/radar systems that Russia has deployed in Syria. Therefore this attack and the one last week could only have been carried out with Russian complicity. Am I wrong?

Important military airport, installations near Damascus reportedly bombed; several Hezbollah fighters killed, sources say

BY DOV LIEBER, TOI

Israeli airstrikes hit an important Syrian regime military airport in Damascus, the pro-Hezbollah Lebanese news network Al Mayadeen claimed Wednesday.

According to the report, the planes struck the Mezzeh Military Airport, located in a suburb of Damascus, around 4 a.m..

Other Arabic media, including al Jazeera and al Arabiya, confirmed that a large explosion had occurred at the airport. Some reports say the fire was caused because a weapons depot exploded.
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By Isi Leibler, JPOST

American Jews will be marginalized and be perceived as the extension of a Democratic Party which is drifting increasingly further away from its traditional pro-Israel policy.

Through out the two thousand of Jews living in the Diaspora, there has been no precedent for the behavior of major liberal mainstream sectors of the American Jewish community. They are undermining themselves and provoking massive waves of resentment from Americans, many of whom were favorably disposed toward them.

The United States has been the home of the largest Jewish community in the Diaspora over the past half-century and was regarded by many Jews as the “goldene medina.” Traditional antisemitism is at an all-time low with the exception of the current anti-Israeli agitation initiated at campuses by Muslims and far-left radicals. Many Jews have become affluent and powerful, and Jews in general are highly respected by most Americans.
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Obama

• I will have the most transparent administration in history.  
• The stimulus will fund shovel-ready jobs.  
• I am focused like a laser on creating jobs.  
• The IRS is not targeting anyone.  
• It was a spontaneous riot about a movie.  

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T. Belman. This is an enormous threat to our liberty. The establishment and the MSM are threatened as never before with the rise of social media which is controlling the message and thus undermining their power. They are are desperate.  They have created a new category to be banned.  News called fake news where they alone decide what is fake. Essentially it is any truth they don’t like the public to know. At the same time they suppress the telling of truth by any part of the establishment, when that truth is at odds with the message they want to deliver.

George Orwell’s 1984 is upon us.

By Liam Deacon, BREITBART

The unelected executive arm of the European Union (EU) is threatening to escalate from “non-legislative” action if Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube do not censor what it considers “illegal” online speech within 24 hours.

In May of this year, the U.S. tech giants signed a “code of conduct”, promising to work with the Commission and national law enforcement to “criminalize” and “sanction” “individual perpetrators” as well as committing to “promoting independent counter-narratives” that the EU favours.
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T. Belman. Jared Kushner is the owner of the Observer. An anti-Trumper sent me a screed, Trump’s son-in-law just published a plan to shut down protests and it’s absolutely horrifying, by Tom Cahill, in which Kushner was attacked for publishing this Op-Ed. Cahill also worried about Kushner’s role in the Trump administration. I found nothing wrong in the Observer’s Op-ED.

Robert Creamer-type operations—like coordinated nation-wide protests—require money

By Austin Bay, THE OBSERVER

It’s time for the FBI to conduct a detailed investigation into the violence and political thuggery that continue to mar the presidential election’s aftermath. A thorough probe of the protests—to include possible ties to organizations demanding vote recounts—will give the Bureau’s integrity-challenged director, James Comey, a chance to sandblast his sullied badge.

Director Comey must also include “elector intimidation” on his post-election investigation list. Reports that members of the Electoral College are being harassed and threatened by angry, vicious (and likely Democratic Party) malcontents require Comey’s quick and systematic attention.
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Draft legislation passes preliminary reading after article that would have overturned the impending eviction of Amona outpost in Samaria is excluded • Left decries “annexation” • Human rights group: Palestinians won’t even be able to object to land grab.

By Gideon Allon, Mati Tuchfeld, Efrat Forsher and Yair Altman, ISRAEL HAYOM

Residents of Amona will be evicted, but other settlements will receive legal standing if the bill passes

The controversial outpost regulation bill passed its preliminary Knesset reading Monday, following an impassioned debate. The legislation proposal seeks to “regulate Israeli settlement in Judea and Samaria and allow it to continue to take root and develop,” by allowing the government to retroactively grant some contested outpost the necessary permits.

Earlier Monday, the Ministerial Committee on Legislation held a special meeting to approve a new draft of the bill, excluding its original Article 7, which referred specifically to the Samaria outpost of Amona, in which it is facing a court-ordered eviction on Dec. 25. The committee approved the bill over the objection of Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit, who opposes any version of the bill, arguing that it is unconstitutional.

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By Peter Skjurkiss, AMERICAN THINKER

The United States is importing people with a religious and cultural propensity to commit horrific acts of hatred and revenge against Western Civilization. This is madness rooted in politics.

On November 28, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, a Somali-born Muslim inspired by ISIS, went on a rampage at Ohio State University. He injured 11 when he rammed his car into a group of students with murderous intent and then immediately went on a knife attack before campus security shot him dead.

No soon had this fanatic’s body reached room temperature then Stephanie Clemons Thompson, employed as something called an “assistant director of resident life a Ohio State,” started calling for sympathy and compassion for Artan and lamented that he was taken out so quickly. In her Facebook posing, Thompson refers to Artan as a “BUCKEYE, a member of our family.”
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