The new coalition seems stable enough for people to believe a mistaken email about a three-year budget, but will it use its super-stability to pull further to the Right than ever before?

By Lahav Harkov, JPOST

Cabinet Ministers opened their email Wednesday night to find a surprise: a meeting on Sunday to discuss a three-year budget.

A minor panic broke out. Three years? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan for a two-year budget, thus bolstering his government’s stability until 2019, was controversial enough. Now that he has five more MKs to vote with the coalition, he’s going to try to make a budget that will last the rest of his term? In the end, the email was a mistake. The Finance Ministry was going to give a three-year overview, which is standard practice, regardless of how many years the budget is to last. (It’s going to be two years; don’t panic.)
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T. Belman. Yes, the government policy is to refrain from building in Judea and Samaria. Even Bennett’s right wing party accepts this. They have stopped demanding that the freeze be dropped. To highlight this, they choose to demand security measures in exchange for supporting the inclusion of Liberman rather than demanding more construction. Though Bibi has refused to acknowledge such a freeze, he has been enforcing one even in Jerusalem.

Meanwhile pressure is building to take unilateral steps to a TSS. Not only is this what Zionist Union and Yesh Atid are calling for, it is also what Kahlon’s party (including Galant and Oren) have called for. In addition two peace plan initiatives, have been launched, one in the US Jewish establishment and one in the Israel military/left establishment in Israel, calling for a peace deal based on Obama’s parameters. In all cases unilateral steps are being demanded because there is no partner for peace now or because now is not the time to enter an agreement. France has now launched a peace conference intended dictate such a framework and have the same endorsed by the UNSC. Obama, it is feared will not veto such a resolution. To make matters worse, the Democrats continue to distant themselves from a pro-Israel platform.

So far Bibi has not proposed unilateral steps though he has come perilously close to an agreement on the framework for peace. His stated position is that he wants direct negotiations and he doesn’t want a bi-national state. He refused to limit negotiations to the Kerry framework but at the same time negotiated based on it. Basically he is not prepared to reject the Obama parameters. He only seeks to tweek them on security issues and on timing issues. Everyone acknowledges that Israel will keep the settlement blocs but there is no agreement on what blocs are included.

The hand-writing is on the wall.

Yoav Galant says the government must take diplomatic initiative in the West Bank even without a Palestinian partner.

By Barak Ravid, HAARETZ

Construction and Housing Minister Yoav Galant said in a meeting with Jewish leaders in New York last week that the government’s policy is not to build in the West Bank and that he abides by it.
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by Daniel Pipes

T. Belman. See also As I See It: Democracy in turmoil by Melanie Phillips.

“Frighteningly, it seems that far from protecting Israel’s moral values some in the military and security establishment do not accept democratic values at all.”

Does Israel’s fascist Left know that it’s fascist?

By Daniel Greenfield, FPM

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak declared recently that the new Israeli government coalition has “been infected by seeds of fascism.” What are “seeds of fascism”? They’re a lot like sour grapes.

Barak had been a member of a coalition government with Netanyahu and Lieberman, the new Minister of Defense, and the subject of his fascism accusation. When Barak was in the coalition, was it also infected with “seeds of fascism”? Or do these magical fascist seeds only sprout when Barak is not in the coalition? Is Barak even now spreading his fascist seeds across the carpets of Israeli television stations every time he walks in to give another interview?
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An all-star panel lays out what the West must do to win.

DAVID HOROWITZ FREEDOM CENTER

TRANSCRIPT
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[THIS IS CRAZY AND RABBI RISKIN SUPPORTS IT.]

Unlikely initiative, supported by leading figures in settler movement, envisions 2 states, but one homeland — where ‘anyone can live

TOI

A group of Israelis and Palestinians has teamed up in a movement calling for a European-style confederation between Israel and a future state of Palestine, that would allow citizens from both sides of the conflict to live in either country but retain their original nationality.

The “Two States, One Homeland” movement — the Israeli side of which is mostly comprised of settlers — is the culmination of four years of low-profile meetings and discussions between activists on both sides. It was reported upon by Channel 2 news on Friday night.
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T. Belman. This is similar to the one announced last week in “Pro-Israel” heavyweights press hard for 2 states. I reject both initiatives. They are trying to circumvent our government.

They are working in cahoots. You will remember the Geneva Initiative and the Oslo Accords, both negotiated by left wingers in secret.

New initiative calls for freeze on settlement building and acceptance of Arab Peace Initiative in principle

AP, TOI

A group of more than 200 Israeli military and intelligence officers criticized the government for a lack of action in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Friday and issued a detailed plan they say can end the impasse.

The report’s publication closely follows a week of turmoil in Israeli politics that saw the appointment of a defense minister who is an outspoken skeptic of peace efforts with the Palestinians.
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Dahlan, a bitter rival of Abbas, was driven from Gaza after Hamas seized control of the coastal enclave in 2007.

JTA, JPOST

The UAE, Egypt and Jordan are reportedly planning to have former Gaza strongman Mohammed Dahlan replace Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Citing unnamed senior Palestinian and Jordanian sources, Middle East Eye reported Friday on the joint plan to bring Dahlan, the former leader of Abbas’ Fatah party in the Gaza Strip, back from exile in the Gulf.
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The European Coalition for Israel Press Release

Brussels, May 25th, 2016 – The European Coalition for Israel has submitted a report to the European External Action Service (EEAS), EU’s diplomatic service, requesting all financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority be made conditional upon the PA ceasing all forms of incitement and radicalisation, including payments to terrorists. The report was presented in partnership with the organisations ‘International Legal Forum’ and ‘Tous Avec Nous’ from France at an official meeting with EEAS on Wednesday 25th May 2016 in Brussels.

The report exposes how payments to convicted terrorists are continuing to be paid, despite promises by the PA in 2014 that a new Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs under the Palestine Liberation Organisation is now responsible for these payments, whose funds do not come from Western donors. The report also lists examples of institutionalised incitement and radicalisation by the Palestinian Authority, both from official PA channels which glorify violence and martyrdom and from the current PA curriculum in schools which demonises Jews and describes them as “invading snakes”.
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T. Belman. What I like about this article is that it was published by the Center for Security Analysis which is a highly respected think tank in the US and a great friend of both Israel and America. If you read the bio of the author at the bottom of the article you will be further impressed because they hired him for this important position.

Its great to see an article like this being published in the US.

By Alex Van Ness, Center for Security Policy

On May 25, a new report on the diplomatic process between Israel and the Palestinians will be presented to the United Nations (UN). This report, produced by the Middle East Quartet — a group consisting of representatives from the United States, the European Union (EU), Russian, and the UN — claims that it will focus on both what it feels is to blame for the current stagnation in the peace process, as well as what can be done to facilitate its resumption.
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The good news is that Israel has the capacity to adapt and forge constructive strategies for weakening and dividing our enemies. The bad news is that we insist on obsessing over ourselves.

By Caroline B. Glick, JPOST

Last week a mob of 300 Muslim men in southern Egypt stripped a 70-year-old Christian woman naked and paraded her through the streets.

This Islamist atrocity came a few days before an EgyptAir flight from Paris exploded in the skies near Alexandria. It was the second passenger jet bombed by jihadists in Egypt in recent months.

Egypt is hanging on by a thread. Like the attack that downed a Russian passenger jet over Sinai last October, this week’s attack is likely the work of an Egyptian airport employee. It is yet more proof that nearly three years after the military deposed the Muslim Brotherhood’s jihadist government, the Brotherhood’s supporters remain seeded throughout the country and are capable of threatening the regime and the very survival of the Egyptian state.
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T. Belman. Israel should assume no responsibility for the plight of the Gazans. Anything Israel does to alleviate it, such as building a port or supplying cement, implies culpability.  Also by doing so, Israel is enabling Hamas to act without accountability. The more Israel and the West protect the Palestinians from the consequences of their leaders actions, the more we are helping to perpetuate such actions. We thus are enabling their intransigence and their terror.

Please note that this is the first time that Arutz Sheva has published INTO THE FRAY. Bye Bye JPOST.

Hamas are not burrowing tunnels because Gaza has no port. They are burrowing them despite the fact it does not have one.

By Marin Sherman, INN

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.–Attributed to Albert Einstein.

Just when you thought that you could not possibly hear anything more preposterous on how to help resolve the  conflict with the Palestinian-Arabs, somehow someone always manages to prove you wrong—and comes out with a policy proposal so glaringly absurd that it transcends what you  mistakenly believed was the pinnacle of imbecility.
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By Daniel Greenfield, SULTAN KNISH

150 years ago, Mark Twain visited Muslim-occupied Israel and wrote of “unpeopled deserts” and “mounds of barrenness”, of “forlorn” and “untenanted” cities.

Palestine is “desolate”, he concluded. “One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings.” The same is true of the Palestinian Museum which opened with much fanfare and one slight problem. While admission is free, there’s nothing inside for any of the visitors to see except the bare walls.

The Palestinian Museum had been in the works since 1998, but has no exhibits. The museum cost $24 million. All it has to show for it are a few low sloping sandy buildings indistinguishable from the dirt and a “garden” of scraggly bushes and shrubs. The Palestinian Museum is open, but there’s nothing inside.
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UN WATCH

UN’s 2016 World Health Assembly voting on anti-Israel resolution, May 25, 2016

GENEVA, May 25 — The UK, France, Germany and other EU states voted today for a UN resolution, co-sponsored by the Arab group of states and the Palestinian delegation, that singled out Israel at the annual assembly of the World Health Organization (WHO) as the only violator of “mental, physical and environmental health,” and commissioned a WHO delegation to investigate and report on “the health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory” and in “the occupied Syrian Golan,” and to place it on the agenda again at next year’s meeting.
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T. Belman. The author is a former party official in Yisrael Beytenu and served as an adviser in the Israeli Ministry of Defense. In contrast Algemeiner reports,

In at least four articles published over four days — a Thomas Friedman column, a staff editorial, a news article and an op-ed by Ronen Bergman — the New York Times has taken the side of ousted Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya’alon against the man Prime Minister Netanyahu has chosen to replace him, Avigdor Lieberman.

The Times has described Mr. Ya’alon as “pragmatic,” while denouncing Mr. Lieberman as “far-right” and “extremist.”

And so does the BBC and many other major news outlets.

Liberman is neither “far right” nor “extremist”.

Liberman is not a right-winger

by Gregg Roman, FORWARD

Peaceniks may be up in arms about the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as Israel’s next minister of defense, but the country’s enemies are worried — and rightly so.

Yes, as the inevitable flurry of articles accompanying his appointment are sure to point out, Lieberman once said that Israel could bomb the Aswan dam in the event of war with Egypt and he also said that captured Palestinian terrorists should be “drowned in the Dead Sea.” But Lieberman, arguably the biggest loudmouth in Israel (he recently called Netanyahu — the man he’s been angling to work for — “a liar, cheater and crook”), is also a reasonable politician.

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By Vic Rosenthal, ABU YEHUDA

…European universalist ethics no longer promotes the survival of cultures that espouse it in the environment that is present-day Europe. We certainly see in present-day Europe all of the above responses to this pressure: adaptation, migration and cultural failure. – Part I

This is even more true for Israel. A nation-state whose moral code is based on the idea that all men are brothers will not survive in the Middle East. It needs to operate according to more tribalistic moral principles, in which the welfare of its own culture and people are given priority over others.

What are the practical implications of such a change to our moral principles?
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T. Belman. The battle for Islam is supposedly between the reformers and the moderates against the Wahabbists. Unfortunately, there is no battle for Islam. The reformers are few in number and have no significant resources at their disposal. Therefor they are inconsequential. In addition the US and the EU have legitimized CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood thereby deligitimating any reform voices. I see no light at the end of the tunnel unless the west wages war on the Jihad movement. This ideology must be defeated.

The Center for Security Analysis is backing The Secure Freedom Strategy: A Plan for Victory Over the Global Jihad Movement, Russia is also proposing that the West, Russia included join together to defeat this ideology. The Russian Orthodox Church has called for a Holy War.

Wahhabi oil money has spread extremism globally

By Salman Shaheen,  THE WORLD WEEKLY

The atrocities committed by Islamic State as it spreads its tendrils across the world underscore a wider conflict taking place between liberal democracies and those drawn to revolutionary Islamism – often angry and disenfranchised people railing against the predominant ideological system who have found recourse in the new way of life offered by their particular reading of scripture as the angry and the disenfranchised might once turned to socialism or nationalism.

But what so violently battered down the doors of the public consciousness on September 11, 2001 and returned with renewed vigour with the rise of Islamic State is not simply a battle between jihadis and the West, but a battle for the heart and soul of Islam itself between those who see it as a religion of peace and tolerance and that minority who want to drag it back to a wholly darker age.

The battle for Islam’s soul dates back to the middle of the 18th Century and the unforgiving Najd desert when an exiled man came upon the sanctuary of an oasis. What he did there would change the world forever.
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T. Belman. This proposal is totally in line with the policies of the Zionist Union which Israelis have rejected. Their goal is to advance the creation of a Palestinian state along the lines of what Obama has suggested i.e., ’67 borders with swaps and eastern Jerusalem its capital. It ignores Israel’s right to defensible borders and Israel’s right to keep some of the land. It also ignores Israel’s security.

By Ron Kampeas, JTA

WASHINGTON (JTA) — In a rare and sharp split with Israeli government policy, a group of Jewish community leaders wants to get a proposal for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the next president’s desk.

Two complementary U.S. and Israeli working papers to be launched next week propose immediate actions Israel can take to prepare the ground for two states and a longer-term security structure that aims to satisfy Palestinian ambitions for sovereignty and Israeli security needs.
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T. Belman. This, of course, depends on the definition of a right winger. In my definition, a right winger is one who rejects appeasement and believes in Israel’s right to J&S. A right winger is also one who is against the creation of Palestine for either security or religious reasons.

Liberman’s guiding principal is less Arabs in Israel. That’s why he wants to give up eastern Jerusalem and “The Triangle” region southeast of Haifa. Together they contain 500,000 Arabs. I don’t know how Israeli citizenship can be taken from these Arabs legally.

Former MK Professor Aryeh Eldad says Liberman’s true intentions are to divide Jerusalem, not to eliminate Hamas leaders.

By Eliran Aharon, INN

Former MK Professor Aryeh Eldad had some harsh criticism on Tuesday for incoming Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman.

“Liberman is no longer on the right,” Eldad told Arutz Sheva on the sidelines of the launching of his new book, entitled “How Things Are Seen from Here”.

“Liberman is trying to look like an impassioned right-winger, claiming he will eliminate [Hamas leader Ismail] Haniyeh and bring about the collapse of Hamas. But in fact, Liberman wants to divide Jerusalem and is serious about it, Liberman wants to establish a Palestinian state and is serious about it, Liberman intends to give up on Umm al-Fahm and to transfer Arabs who live there to the Palestinian state. He is only right-wing when he needs to curse Arabs,” said the former MK.
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By JONATHAN S. TOBIN, COMMENTARY

The names of those chosen to be on the Democratic Party platform committeewere announced yesterday, and the headlines were about Bernie Sanders getting his due. Sanders was able to name five of the 15 members of the committee with Hillary Clinton getting six and Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz naming four. The group will have plenty to argue about as they decide just how far to the left they will tilt as Democrats prepare for the general election. But it is also painfully obvious that one of the clear points of disagreement will be about Israel and the Palestinians.

Three of Sanders’ picks are outspoken opponents of Israel. While there are some clear supporters of the Jewish state among the others chosen, there are also others who are deeply critical of Israel. It is not clear that such a group can possibly arrive at a consensus and avoid a painful floor fight about how “even handed” Democrats will claim to be about the Middle East conflict, we do know one thing, any pretense of this being a pro-Israel party is now officially exploded.
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