By Julian Hattem, THE HILL

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Wednesday called for the United States to “shake the rust off” its foreign policy and move toward an “America first” model in one of his most focused efforts to outline how his potential administration would operate.

In making a series of attacks on President Obama, Trump offered rough details on some of his proposals to withdraw many of the U.S.’s commitments from overseas and instead use economic leverage to accomplish its goals from afar.
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By Jonathan Ferzige, BLOOMBERG

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach to Israel’s international relations is changing.
Criticized by U.S. and European leaders over his policies toward the Palestinians, the Israeli leader is cultivating allies in other parts of the world that share economic interests and enemies.

Netanyahu’s government started free-trade talks with China in March, is negotiating favored-nation status with Japan and last week hosted Singapore’s prime minister on his first visit to Israel.
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By Thomas Lifson, American Thinker

A new euphemism has been constructed to lessen the impact of a plan to multiply by 20 the number of Muslims entering the United States and receiving funding to settle here. It’s called “alternative safe pathways,” and it is a backdoor plan, npt yet publicly acknowledged by its sponsors. Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner explains:

In a move around the standard refugee settlement process in America, the United Nations and the administration are scheming to find other ways to boost the number of Syrians entering the country, from 10,000 this year to possibly 200,000.
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DEBKA\

The US withdrew its forces from the Sinai Peninsula last weekend in retaliation for Egypt’s transfer of sovereignty over Tiran and Sanafir islands to Saudi Arabia, according to DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources. They also report that the move came after Washington protested to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi over its exclusion from the consultations and military coordination between Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel regarding the islands.
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DUBAI/MOSCOW | BY BOZORGMHER, REUTERS

When Iran took delivery of the first parts of an advanced Russian air defense system this month, it paraded the anti-aircraft missile launchers sent by Moscow to mark Army Day.

Tehran had cause to celebrate: the Kremlin’s decision a year ago to press ahead with the stalled sale of the S-300 system was the first clear evidence of a growing partnership between Russia and Iran that has since turned the tide in Syria’s civil war and is testing U.S. influence in the Middle East.
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T. Belman. I received the following article from Nomi with this note:

“You are so right.

Palestinians nowhere in sight before twentieth century

This is the message we have to get out there. Here is the UK even those who call themselves Zionists do not know the facts, and Zionist organisations do not want to touch the subject. I attach one piece I wrote on in after doing a lot of research. I hope you find it interesting.
Lets keep at it.”

I asked her who she was and she replied:

“My name is Nomi Benari. I run ‘Middle East Education’ which gives talks in mainstream schools on ‘The Arab-Israeli conflict, both sides of the story’, a Jewish speaker together with a Muslim speaker. We tell the students we are not pro- one side or the other, but are pro truth.
I am a member of, but not very active with the ZF and SWU UK.

My father, Yehuda Benari, was Jabotinsky’s personal secretary. My grandfather David Jochelman attended the first Zionist Congress. “

By Nomi Benari

At a time when the very legitimacy of Israel is being increasingly questioned, the following is not simply dry history, but rather exposes the ignorance of those deligitimisers.

Inhabitants of ‘Palestine’ during the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate

For those who want to understand the Arab-Israeli conflict and the differing historical, legal and political claims of both sides, it is necessary to look at the history of the area at least from as far back as the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s control. We can learn a lot by referring to statements by independent witnesses and official documents from 1517-1948, which are explored below.
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By Zalman Shoval, ISRAEL HAYOM

Just under a century ago, on May 16, 1916, France and the United Kingdom signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which shaped the borders of our region and to a certain extent helped lead to the fulfillment of the Zionist vision. France and the U.K. were driven by their geopolitical interests, but other factors played a role as well, including the ambitions of Arab nationalists, for whom the expected benefits of helping the French and British in World War I against the Germans and Turks did not pan out.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement determined that the areas that would become the future states of Iraq, Kuwait and Jordan would fall under British control, while France would get the areas that would later become Syria and Lebanon (and also a small part of Turkey).
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Our generals are not on the same page as the rest of us. In fact, they aren’t even reading the same book.

By Caroline Glick, FPM

It’s been a long time in coming, but it finally happened.

The IDF General Staff has lost the public trust.

This is terrible for the General Staff. But it is more terrible for the country, because the public is right not to trust our military leaders. They have earned our distrust fair and square.

The final straw came in less than optimal circumstances.
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Investigative journalist reveals UNRWA schools hold terror celebrations, Israel ignores and blocks US law against terror indoctrination.

At a facility in Judea of UNRWA, the UN body tasked with caring for “Palestinian refugees,” a festive ceremony was held on Monday honoring Abd al-Hamid Abu Srour, the 19-year-old Hamas terrorist who exactly a week ago bombed a bus in southeastern Jerusalem.

Journalist David Bedein, director of the Jerusalem-based Israel Resource News Agency as well as the Center for Near East Policy Research, told Arutz Sheva about the UN event to honor the terrorist who conducted the first bus bombing of the current terror wave, in which he died while wounding 15 victims.
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T. Belman. In 2006 I wrote, The Peace Process is a Bigger Danger to Israel Than Hamas

The biggest threat Israel faces today is the “peace process”, with its insistence on the Saudi Peace Plan. It is aided and abetted by Israel’s “We Are Tired” camp and its “Let’s Make a Deal” camp.

And it always has been, because its premises are false

BY MICHAEL MANDELBAUM, COMMENTARY

The American presidency has accumulated a number of traditions that anyone holding the office is expected to perpetuate. Examples include delivering the State of the Union address to Congress, lighting the national Christmas tree, and presiding over the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. The next president will no doubt continue all three. If he or she follows the pattern established by the most recent incumbents, however, the result of the peace process will be failure. Indeed, the continuation of the peace process as it has been practiced will not simply be futile: It will be positively harmful. The conduct of the peace process has made peace less likely. If it is to continue at all, a fundamental change in the American approach is needed.
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9,000 Photos from 1800’s British Mandate of Palestine – with no trace of ‘Palestinians’

Posted on February 13, 2013 by ADMIN 280 Comments

Where ARE all those Palestinians, the proclaimed one million of them who lived in Israel before they were ‘displaced’?

Nowhere.

Nowhere, because they never existed.

And where are all the mosques for those “1 million Palestinians”? With Muslims comes mosques. There can be no Muslim population without a large proportion of mosques. If they had been 1 million at the turn of the Century, or even in 1920 after they began immigrating to fight the British, with their rapid population growth Palestine would consist of over 40 million people today and not 4 million. That alone proves the Palestinian jihad lies. Their population is small because they are new invaders and occupiers who arrived late with an aim to commit jihad. They never lost land that was never theirs to begin with!
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by Vic Rosenthal

It’s a truism these days that traditional Jew-hatred has moved up one level of abstraction and turned into psychopathic Israel-hatred. Indeed, excessive concern over the question “is anti-Zionism antisemitism?” usually indicates that the questioner is guilty of both. There’s nothing surprising about this: in this day of globalization of trade and communications, Jew-hatred has globalized as well.

The centuries of dealing with Jew-hatred have made us familiar with various strategies for self-defense, although before we had a state and an army there weren’t many effective ones.
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Grad student workers union passes resolution to support BDS, demands NYU cut ties with Tel Aviv University for its ‘discrimination.’

By Ari Yashar, INN

The graduate student workers union at New York University (NYU) last Friday voted to support the BDS movement boycotting Israel, and asked that NYU cuts its ties with Tel Aviv University (TAU) for its “discrimination” – even though the university has many Arab students.

NYU’s Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) is a labor union representing around 2,000 graduate workers and research assistants.

The BDS motion passed in a 2/3 vote, with over 600 union members participating in the decision which, while it has no authority to change university policy, indicates the hostility towards Israel on campus.
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By Ted  Belman

Yonah Jeremy Bob introduces us to Daniel Reisner, “godfather of Israeli experts on international law and war crimes”. He was the guy who shifted Israel’s approach to Palestinian violence from a law-enforcement paradigm to an armed-conflict approach. So far so good.

But argues that we should comply with international treaties;
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T. Belman. I was going to write this article until I came upon what Dore Gold wrote in 2005. I certainly couldn’t improve upon it. The point I wanted to make was that the international community, led by the US, the EU and the UN, all of whom constantly accuse Israel of violating international law, are themselves the biggest violators because they refuse to be bound by Res 242.

Instead, they demand 100% withdrawal and and ignore the requirement of defensible borders. President Obama tasked his military to study the border issue in order to make the case that the ’67 lines could be “defensible borders”. But Israel didn’t buy it.

I noted my disagreement with Gold who praised the US for abiding by it. In my comment #13, I begged to differ.

Also, Res 242 laid out the principles to achieve peace between all parties to the conflict. The Palestinians didn’t exist as a people at that time, let alone a country, and it wasn’t included. But in 1993, their spokesman, the PLO, agreed that Resolutions 242 and 338 should be the basis for negotiations with Israel when it signed the Oslo Declaration of Principles.

Nevertheless, they reject the true meaning of the resolution as does the US, EU and UN.

How Washington Has Understood UN Security Council Resolution 242 and Israel’s Requirements for Withdrawal

By Dr. Dore Gold, JCPA, 2005

U.S. Policy Does Not Seek Israel’s Return to the 1967 Borders

The United States has historically backed Israel’s view that UN Security Council Resolution 242, adopted on November 22, 1967, does not require a full withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice Lines (the 1967 borders). Moreover, in addition to that interpretation, both Democratic and Republican administrations have argued that Israel was entitled to “defensible borders.” In other words, the American backing of defensible borders has been bipartisan, right up to its latest rendition that was provided by President George W. Bush in April 2004. And it was rooted in America’s long-standing support for the security of Israel that went well beyond the various legal interpretations of UN resolutions.
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Ted Belman

In my recent post HAARETZ: The Wicked Scheme to Turn Israeli School Kids Into Jewish ISIS, Exposed, I took Harel to task for his “vitriolic” views. I shouldn’t have. He was being sarcastic.

I received this email:

What I want to stress is that Israel Harel is strongly in favor of building Jewish identity through this kind of educational program. It is not Israel Harel who is being “vitriolic.” Harel is sarcastically or ironically revealing to us the content of a Ha’aretz article in Hebrew. As I’m sure you know, unlike that article and the owners and key writers of Ha’aretz, Israel Harel (like Moshe Arens) is one of Ha’aretz’s voices from the right.

I suspected as much at the time, but nothing in the article suggested he was other than the fact that his statements were way over the top.

And yes, now that you mention it, I do recall him having sensible views.

Haaretz has gotten so bad that I believed that it and many of its readers would hold such views.

Philip Gordon says the administration did just enough in Syria to perpetuate the conflict without resolving it.

By Jeffery Goldberg, The Atlantic

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with Philip Gordon, who held the Middle East portfolio at the National Security Council from 2013 to 2015 (and before that, served as assistant secretary of state for European affairs) about my Atlantic article, “The Obama Doctrine.” The piece tried to explain how the president understands the world, and America’s role in it. (This week, the president is on a tour of the some of the countries he discussed in the article.)

Gordon, a loyal Obama man, is, like his ex-boss, somewhat-to-very fatalistic about the ability of the U.S. to direct the course of events in the Middle East (“realistic,” rather than “fatalistic,” is the term the president prefers). Gordon is known for, among other things, a pithy and concise formula he developed to explain why President Obama, and many of his advisers, are so hesitant to engage fully in the various catastrophes of the Middle East. In Iraq, the Gordon dictum goes, Obama learned that full-scale invasions leading to regime change don’t work; in Libya, he learned that partial interventions leading to regime collapse don’t work; and in Syria he learned that non-intervention also doesn’t work. An unspoken but obvious lesson: Once a president reaches this set of conclusions, can you blame him for wanting to pivot to Asia?
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DEBKA

DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources and its sources in the Gulf report exclusively that US President Barack Obama failed to convince the leaders of the six Gulf Cooperation Council member states, during their April 22 summit in Riyadh, to support his Middle East policy and cooperate with Washington.

Our sources also report that Saudi Arabia, with Turkey’s help, and the US carried out separate military operations several hours before the start of the summit that showed the extent of their differences.
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HANNITY: There Will Be No Contested Convention – Things Are Happening Behind the Scenes (VIDEO) –

Sean Hannity said “things are happening behind the scenes” – there will be no contested convention. There are rumors to the effect that Marco Rubio will endorse Donald J. Trump and pass him his 173 delegates. The Donald already has 846.

Trump said he would consider Marco Rubio for his VP

The facts are hard to swallow, but they are the truth.

By Mordechai Kedar, INN

My dear friends, Jews in Israel and the Diaspora.

I am sorry to tell you that the terror attacks we suffer today and yesterday, a week ago, a month, a year and a decade and century ago, are all part of the same war, the same struggle, the same Jihad waged against us by our neighbors for over a century. Sometimes it is a full scale war with tanks, noise, flames, planes and ships and sometimes it is a war on a slow burner known as “terror” with explosions, stabbings and shots. Each of these is Jihad in Arabic, each is aimed at Jews just for being Jewish.

I regret to remind you of the fact that this war began way before the establishment of the Jewish state declared in 1948. The riots and massacres of 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-39 et al, were not due to a Jewish state or what our enemies call the “occupation” of 1948, and certainly not because of the 1967 “occupation”. The bloody and cruel massacre of the Jews of Hevron in 1929 was carried out against Jews who were not part of the Zionist movement, quite the contrary. The Palestine Liberation Movement (Fatah) was founded, may I remind you, in 1959 and The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964, years before the 1967 “occupation” that was a result of Israel winning the Six Day War.
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