BICOM seems determined to adhere to its commitment to two-state principles, down to the last Palestinian – and to block debate on plausible alternatives.

 By Martin Sherman, JPOST

With the two-state solution… Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made – just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse… Then we will move forward.

– Abbas Zaki, senior PLO official, ANB TV, Lebanon, May 7, 2009 

We need to… restate some basic truths, and think more creatively about how we can act in the world to make a positive contribution to securing these truths… peace will only come through engagement and deep mutual recognition between the two peoples, that there is no alternative to negotiations and mutual compromise, that a final-status agreement will secure two states for two peoples. – Prof. Alan Johnson, editor, Fathom magazine of BICOM (the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre), Autumn 2015 
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T. Belman. Netanyahu, Yaalon and Eisenkot all preached ethics and morality in attacking the actions of the lone soldier. They avoided whether we should change the rules that draw the line between morality and immorality. The Torah says thou shalt not kill and describes the death penalty for doing so. Anything less would undercut the commandment. Many states have capital punishment. Thus for them to execute a convicted person is moral and just. Similarly if Israel passed a law permitting summary execution even when the would be killer is laying on the ground then such action would be moral and ethical.

But our leaders say we shouldn’t change the law because it wouldn’t reflect well on us. Why so? We assassinate the enemy, whether he be a soldier or a scientist, when we think it appropriate. What is the difference? Offering due process to a terrorist rather than summary execution, may make us look good but undermines our deterrence. Due process is costly. Its another form of lawfare. Then there is the cost of keeping the convicted enemy for many years in jail. So many of these terrorists when released kill again. We are allowing our enemies to take advantage of us.

Instead we should state clearly that it is lawful and justified to kill someone for attempting to kill us. In fact, it is our duty to kill them. It is a service to the state.

By Moshe Feiglin

The soldier in Hebron shouldn’t have had to pull the trigger and kill the terrorist who had just attempted to murder his comrade. The officers in the area should have done so, and the order should have come from the Chief of Staff, the Minister of Security, and the Prime Minister. It should have been an order that was as clear as day and made public to all. Let me explain:

The seminal event that brought about the establishment of the State of Israel was the Holocaust, in which Jewish lives were considered worthless, or less.
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By Michael Rubin, COMMENTARY

Never before in recent history has the United States faced a country that has so persistently sought to kill Americans or attack Americans only to avoid consequences after every outrage. It’s not just a matter of:

• The 1979-1981 hostage situation.
• Assassinating an Iranian dissident in suburban Washington, DC.
• The 1983 Marine Barracks bombing.
• Seizing American hostages in Lebanon.

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By: David Israel, JEWISH PRESS

Martina Ragachova, Sean Patrick Murphy and Viviana Martinez have arrived in Israel over the past 15 years or so from the Czech Republic, Canada, and Ecuador, respectively, and each, for their personal reasons, decided to pursue becoming Jews through Orthodox courts, one in B’Nei B’rak, the other in Meah She’arim, that were not sanctioned by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. On Thursday a panel of nine Supreme Court justices led by Chief Justice Miriam Na’or decided that their conversions are valid in the eyes of the state and that they entitle them to a speedy acceptance as Israeli citizens under the Law of Return.
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By Evelyn Gordon, COMMENTARY

Like every major Islamist attack in Europe, last week’s terror attacks in Brussels left many Israelis wondering whether Europeans will finally understand what Israel faces. Unfortunately, such attacks are more likely to intensify anti-Israel activity in Europe. To understand why, it’s worth reading an article from the Islamic State magazine Al-Naba that propounds a surprising thesis: Jihad against Israel doesn’t take precedence over jihad anywhere else.
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By Jack Cashill, AMERICAN THINKER

I have read about the paradoxical alliance between Islam and the left for years. I have even written about it — at some length, in fact, in my newest book Scarlet Letters. But it was only a few weeks go that I got to see up close the mechanisms that allow people who celebrate homosexuals to find common cause with those who, when the law allows, happily sever their heads.

As a result of my book, I was invited to sit on a panel titled “Muslim in the Metro,” an event sponsored by an enterprise called American Public Square and televised in edited form — fairly, I must say — on the regional PBS channel here in Kansas City, KCPT.
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By Lea Speyer, ALGEMEINER

The world today is engaged in a “battle for truth” against three main lies being spread by antisemites and growing in popularity, said French philosopher and humanitarian Bernard-Henri Lévy.

In his acceptance speech for the Warrior for Truth Award at the third annual Algemeiner “Jewish 100 Gala”in New York Monday evening, Lévy explained that while the current wave of antisemitism has not yet won, “It could win at the end” if “the work for the truth, the battle for truth” is not waged.

Referring to the classic ancient enemy of the Jews recounted in the Torah, Lévy said, “Who is Amalek today? What is the face of Amalek today? Amalek is everywhere, of course, but especially in the minds and bodies of the antisemites. When people ask me in my country, but also everywhere, what to do against antisemitism, how to reply to antisemitism, how to resist this wave which has not won at all but which could win at the end, I used to say that the only reply is a battle for truth.”
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By Uzi Baruch, INN

During a hearing on Thursday on the extension of the detention of a soldier who last Thursday shot a wounded Arab terrorist, the military prosecutor announced that the murder charges that were leveled against him last Friday in a similar hearing have been dropped.

Instead the soldier is being charged with manslaughter, and not murder.

The hearing was held at the Qastina military court, following a similar extension request on Tuesday when hundreds of protesters showed up at the court to support the soldier. A large showing of protesters were present outside the court again on Thursday.
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BY EDWARD ALEXANDER

Every Anglophone reader, Jew and non-Jew, owes it to him or herself to read Jews against Themselves. And every non-Anglophone country that aspires either to establish or maintain democracy owes itself a good translation. Rarely has a book so thoroughly and eloquently identified, analyzed, and rebuked a form of thinking that endangers the very democracy from which that thinking arose. In this case, one might call the problem “the tyranny of penitence” or “masochistic omnipotence syndrome”—the tendency to blame oneself for everything in the vain hope that in fixing oneself, one can fix everything.[1]
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British based publication al-Hayat cites unnamed diplomatic source as saying “the timing of the move and its political context is still not clear.”

The US and Russia have agreed to let Syrian President Bashar Assad seek refuge in another country as part of a future political solution regarding the prolonged civil war engulfing his country, British based publication al-Hayat reported Thursday.

An unnamed senior diplomatic source with knowledge of the agreement told al-Hayat that US Secretary of State John Kerry has already informed a number of his Arab counterparts on the understanding, but stressed that “the timing of the move and its political context is still not clear.”
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T. Belman. The goal of rebuilding trust is an impossible task. The parties should be left to their own devices to work out a deal or not. The Quartet should butt out.

By Herb Keinon, JPOST

Envoys from the Middle East Quartet, made up of the US, Russia, EU and UN, met in Jerusalem earlier this week to work on a report it is expected to release in a number of months on the steps needed to create a political environment conducive to a relaunch of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

During the visit the representatives met with officials from the Prime Minister’s office and the Foreign Ministry, as well as representatives from the Palestinian Authority and the PLO.

The PA is an arm of the PLO.
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President Assad: Negotiating With Present Opposition Delegation Is Pointless; The Way To End The Crisis Is Through Military Victory

MEMRI

On March 25, 2016, the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, which is close to the Syrian regime and to Hizbullah, posted statements made by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad at the Arab and Islamic Assembly for Supporting the Resistance Option, held in Damascus on March 19-20. According to the daily, Assad rejected any possibility of reaching a political solution with the opposition delegation of the Syrian High Negotiations Committee (HNC) to the Geneva talks, saying that the real way to resolve the crisis is by defeating “terrorism” on the battlefield. It should be noted that Assad has clarified in the past that a terrorist is anyone bearing arms against the regime and that the HNC delegation, which includes representatives of armed opposition groups, is a delegation of “traitors and terrorists.”[1]
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By Isi Leibler, ISRAEL HAYOM

The turmoil associated with the American presidential elections has impacted much of the nation, and certainly the Jews. Many, both liberal and conservative, feel their traditional political affiliations have been destabilized.

Grass-roots voters have rebelled against entrenched long-term politicians and have astounded analysts by supporting relatively obscure personalities who have introduced levels of primitive populism into American politics unseen since the days of Huey Long.

Those deeply concerned about Israel find themselves in a special quandary.
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Subjected to racist push-back after he wrote a blazing book decrying the Left, journalist Nick Cohen embraced the challenge and became what his enemies think he is

BY JENNI FRAZER, TOI

ON — Despite not being Jewish, atheist Nick Cohen, one of Britain’s best-known journalists, had never had a problem with his surname. It was, he thought, part of the furniture.

On his paternal side, the family had “abandoned their religion, so he wasn’t Jewish, and more to the point, my mother and my grandmother weren’t Jewish either, so according to Orthodox Judaism’s principles of matrilineal descent, it was impossible for me to be a Jew,” says Cohen.

But then in 2007 Cohen wrote a book, “What’s Left?”, a provocative and witty account of his belief that British liberals had lost their way. According to Cohen, “all hell broke loose” in the wake of that book’s publication.
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by Jonathan Spyer, The Jerusalem Report

The cold numbers are the first thing that hit you. Figures telling of a human catastrophe on a scale hard to compute. Suffering on a level to which any rational response seems inadequate – 470,000 people killed, according to the latest estimates; 11.5 percent of the population injured; 45 percent of a country of 22 million made homeless; 4 million refugees and 6.36 million internally displaced persons. Life expectancy is down from 70.5 years in 2010 to an estimated 55.4 years in 2015. Welcome to the Syrian civil war.

For those of us who have covered the war closely, these are not just numbers in black and white. They have behind them searing images and memories impossible to erase.

I remember the throngs of refugees in the olive groves close to the border fence north of Aleppo in the summer of 2012. The battle for the city was raging at its full murderous strength a few kilometers to the south. The refugees, mostly Sunni Arabs, were trying to find a place safe from the destructive intentions of Bashar Assad’s air force. They had no way to get into Turkey. Their forlorn hope was to take their families as close as possible to the border fence. They believed that the Syrian Air Force would not dare to bomb so close to the powerful northern neighbor.
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By Herb Keinon, JPOST

Graham said he did not see any chance of Obama failing to veto a French resolution in the UN Security Council on the peace process during the last months of his presidency, or even initiating a resolution himself locking in parameters of an agreement.

If Obama would bring his own parameters to the Security Council, “Congress’s reaction would be violent,” he said.

If the US presidential race comes down to Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump, Israel should “pull for Congress,” an institution that “has Israel’s back more than any other institution,” South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said Tuesday in Jerusalem.
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Between the years 1997-2013, according to the report, the Civil Administration found 20,086 instances of illegal construction in Area C.

By Tova Lazaroff, JPOST

The IDF has failed to tackle the widespread phenomenon of illegal West Bank construction, having demolished only 30% of such structures over a 19-year period, the State Comptroller said in a report it issued on Monday.

Between the years 1997-2013, according to the report, the Civil Administration found 20,086 instances of illegal construction in Area C of the West Bank, which is under Israeli civil and military control.

Of those illegal structures, 13,481 were built by Palestinians and 6,605 by Israelis.
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BY MEIRA SVIRSKY, THE CLARION PROJECT

A hot warning received by intelligence officials revealed that theIslamic State (ISIS/ISIL) is planning an “imminent attack” on Jewish children in Turkey. Officials believe the most likely target is in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul, where a Jewish school is attached to a synagogue and community center.

The information was obtained after Turkey arrested six ISIS operatives in the southern city of Gaziantep last week.
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BY DAVID P. GOLDMAN

European security has collapsed, perhaps irretrievably. So many prospective terrorists are now operating in Europe that security services have lost the capacity to monitor potential threats. There is no historical yardstick against which to gauge the breakdown of law enforcement in Europe. Most remarkably, the wound is self-inflicted.

Two suicide bombers today shut down Brussels, home to NATO as well as the European Union, killing at least 21 bystanders and severely injured 35 at the city’s airport and the Maelbeek metro station. Air and rail transportation has stopped and mobile telephone networks are saturated. The authorities presume that today’s attacks avenged the capture of Salah Abdeslam, the last man at large from the cell that executed the Paris attacks last Nov. 13.
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Netanyahu must act immediately to pass legislation to curb the court’s authority and restore the powers of the public’s elected representatives.

By Caroline Glick, JPOST

Israel’s democracy is in critical condition.

Sunday, the High Court of Justice ruled that the government’s natural gas policy is unlawful. The policy, which was negotiated with foreign energy companies, was to be the basis for developing the massive offshore Leviathan gas field. It was supposed to anchor future gas prices, ensure gas revenues for the government and energy security for the country in the coming decades. On the basis of this policy outline, the government negotiated deals to supply natural gas to Egypt, Turkey and Jordan.
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