[An 1806 French print depicts Napoleon Bonaparte emancipating the Jews. (photo credit:Wikimedia Commons)]
At Jewish Book Week in London a few days ago, I took part in a panel discussion about the most pressing questions facing Jews today.
I raised one that has long been bothering me – whether Western secular values were undermining the ability of the Jewish people to survive.
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In recent weeks, the administration has warned various government ministers that any construction of housing for Jews in Jerusalem will be viewed with hostility by the administration.
The messages from Washinton ahead of Vice President Joe Biden’s arrival in Israel next week show President Barack Obama’s hostile policies toward Israel will maintained until he leaves office.
In recent weeks, the administration has warned various government ministers that any construction of housing for Jews in Jerusalem will be viewed with hostility by the administration. In contrast, the administration is pressuring Israel to permit construction of homes for Arabs in its capital city and harshly opposes all moves by the government to destroy illegal construction in Arab neighborhoods and in Judea and Samaria.
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President Barack Obama’s legacy in Syria is one of undelivered promises and red lines crossed, according to Al-Monitor interviews with more than a dozen US decision-makers.
On the eve of the five-year anniversary of the 2011 uprising, lawmakers and former administration officials shared their reflections on the key moments that have shaped recent US policy in Syria. They paint a picture of a president who hoped to guide events on the ground but was never willing to commit the full weight of America’s military and diplomatic arsenal to get his way.
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T. Belman. No mention is made in this article of why they want to remove him (the left and right have different reasons) nor of what policies a replacement leader would embrace. Who should be the next PM should be determined not on the personalities but on the policies. Is this change for change’s sake?
The consensus is that the prime minister can’t be ousted so long as the current political order remains intact; an alternative right-center alliance is in the works, but will candidates’ egos stand in the way?
This month marks the first anniversary of the election of the 20th Knesset. The next election is beyond the so-called hills of darkness, in three-and-a-half years, if held on schedule. But the political arena is seething and sizzling, with just one topic on the agenda: how to put an end to the lengthy rule of Benjamin Netanyahu, how to make his fourth term his last.
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Dozens of foreign policy insiders say they are ‘unable to support’ a ticket headed by Trump, in open letter.
Dozens of Republican foreign policy experts signed an open letter Wednesday in which they declared that they “are unable to support a Party ticket with Mr. (Donald) Trump at its head.”
The letter, which was published by War on the Rocks, a defense and foreign policy website, was initiated by Eliot Cohen, a former top State Department official under George W. Bush. “Hillary (Clinton) is the lesser evil, by a large margin,” he told Politico. Trump’s election would be “an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy,” he said, adding that “he has already damaged it considerably.”
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T. Belman. Hilary Clinton is now favoured to be the next President of the US. How can this be when you consider her transgressions and her utter failure in Benghazi and in the ME generally. Even Conservative hawks are preferring her to Trump. Is there no accountability for either her or Obama. Nixon was forced out of office for much less.
TEL AVIV – As a presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton has been making great efforts to distance herself from the disastrous consequences of the U.S.-NATO intervention in Libya in 2011.
A lengthy article published on the cover of Sunday’s New York Times details Clinton’s central role in convincing President Obama to join the effort to topple Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, leaving Libya, as the Times puts it, a “failed state and a terrorist haven.”
The Times documents Clinton’s role was “critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s forces.””
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[Egypt parliament expels lawmaker over meeting with Israeli]
By Elliott Abrams, ISRAEL HAYOM
There are a lot of fans of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi nowadays in Washington who argue that he is fighting terrorism and deserves American support.
Those fans ought to be aware of the ongoing persecution of Christians, which el-Sissi could act strongly to prevent — but does not. A very good example is the case of four Christian teenagers who have just been convicted under Egypt’s “blasphemy” laws — and sentenced to five years in prison, the maximum penalty.
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By Lior Ben-Chorin, THE NATIONAL INTEREST
Last Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that because of the Iran nuclear deal “there is no longer an existential threat to Israel from Iran.” He asserted that even Israel believed this was true. Kerry was referring to a speech last month by Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, head of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), in which the Israeli general explained that the deal had “many risks but also opportunities.” Eizenkot also quipped that assuming the worst case scenarios was “as dangerous as imagining the best case scenarios”—a veiled jab at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who previously asserted that the deal is a “historic mistake for the world.”y establishment in Israel. However, this disagreement over how to approach the Iran nuclear deal and, before that, Iran’s nuclear ambitions is long-running and indicative of spirited debate in Israel that gets little attention in the United States.
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Interior minister also acknowledges delay in processing over 10,000 waiting asylum requests, and says that nation-wide biometric database is necessary.
Interior Minister Arye Dery says that if the High Court won’t allow the state to deport asylum seekers to third countries, Israel will have to construct an additional detention facility.
“It will be an effective tool,” Dery told the Knesset Interior and Environment Committee, referring to deporting asylum seekers to Uganda and Rwanda, without referring to those countries by name. “If not, the Holot facility will not suffice. We will have to build another big facility with infrastructure. It’s a very big expense. I prefer not to go there. I prefer to carry out agreements we have with third countries in an orderly fashion.”
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IDF raid unearths secret gun factory, security officials warn such factories are becoming more common.
Weapons factories producing makeshift firearms are becoming more common,Reuters reports.
Israeli security officials have seen a rise in the number of weapon factories in Judea and Samaria, while experts familiar with the Palestinian Authority black market note the flood of locally produced of guns.
While an authentic M-16 assault rifle costs upwards of $18,000 in the PA black market, guns produced in local metal foundries can be found costing as little as $500.
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By Ted Belman
I attended a book launch last night held by the Arab Educational Bookstore in the American Colony Hotel in the eastern part of Jerusalem.
The title of the book was The Two-state Delusion: a tale of two narratives. Normally I wouldn’t have bothered because I would have assumed that the author was coming from the right and wouldn’t have anything new to tell me.
But this caught my attention because the author was Professor Padraig O’Malley, chair of the John Joseph Moakley for Peace and Reconciliation at UMass Boston’s and John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies. His approach was described as pragmatic, in-depth with no ideological bias and mutually respectful; a work of true peace specialist.
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Yoram will be in the US during May, 2016, available for speaking engagements (http://bit.ly/
1W5CrSr).Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
#6 of a six minute YouTube video series on US-Israel and the Mideast*Please clique: http://bit.ly/__IsThePalestinianIssueTheCruxOf TheArabIsraeliConflict1.
Erroneous assumptions produce erroneous policies, as has been the case of all US initiatives towards the Palestinian issue, which has been erroneously perceived – by the US foreign policy establishment – to be the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict.2. For example, the first 1948/49 Arab-Israeli War was not launched, by Arab countries, on behalf of Palestinian aspirations. The Arabs launched the war in order to advance their own particular – not Palestinian – interests through the occupation of the strategic area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
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Even if Israel and Turkey soon announce an end to their diplomatic crisis, which began almost six years ago as a result of the Mavi Marmara flotilla ship incident, relations between the two countries will not go back to how they once were. The golden era of cooperation in the security and intelligence fields between the two countries up until a decade ago will certainly not come back.
Turkey was a large and important market for Israel’s security industries, which provided drones, intelligence systems, tank and planes upgrades, and more. For years, there was close cooperation between the Mossad and Turkey’s intelligence agency, the MIT, which included meetings, an exchange of each countries’ situational assessments and more.
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Boys might like to fantasize about their conversion to Islam. Girls, perhaps, a bit less. A high school in England, Les Beauchamps in Guernsey, asked twelve-year-old students to imagine their conversion to Islam. The parents have not taken it very well and protested, but officials of the Education Ministry defended the initiative: “The program for religious education includes a framework to ensure that Christianity and the other five major religions (Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism) are studied in depth”.
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The prime minister says the move would ‘drastically reduce terrorist acts’ against Israelis.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has asked the attorney general to approve deporting relatives of terrorists from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip.
“I believe that this will dramatically reduce terrorist activities against Israel, its citizens and its residents,” Netanyahu wrote Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit on Wednesday.
Netanyahu wrote that terrorists with a “lone wolf profile” have carried out many of the attacks in recent months. He added that the assailants sometimes come from families who encourage and abet their activities. “I request your legal opinion to allow the procedure of transferring families who assist terror to the Gaza Strip,” remarked Netanyahu.
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By Zalman Shoval, ISRAEL HAYOM
French former Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has accused U.S. President Barack Obama of failing not only Syria, but the entire world by not bombing Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces after Assad crossed the “red line” of using chemical weapons. Fabius has also said that the current crises in the Middle East, the Ukraine, Crimea and more, all stem from the “dangerous ambiguities” of the “main pilot” of the Western camp — Obama.
It is not unusual for close allies to complain about each other, but Fabius’ harsh words seem to have set a new standard. True, Fabius is no longer serving in a diplomatic role, but we can assume his statements accurately reflected the opinion of the entire French diplomatic establishment, and possibly even that of other players in the Western camp. Last week, a prestigious British weekly characterized Obama’s policy in Syria, which is based on the hope that Assad will be removed from power without steps being taken to force him to step down, as “pathetic.”
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The southwester town of Zabadani, 30 km west of Damascus, is a ghost town, depopulated by five years of Syrian war ravages, except for one sign of life – or rather death. Since December, Hizballah has enclosed this once attractive tourist resort, strategically located on the Damascus-Beirut highway, into a heavily fortified ex territoria enclave whose high walls conceal the terrorist group’s new program for the development of weapons of mass destruction. This is disclosed for the first time by DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources.
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A number of seemingly insurmountable obstacles are preventing Israelis and Palestinians from ending decades of conflict. One of them is the unrelenting incitement planned and executed by the purportedly “moderate” Palestinian Authority and funded by the European Union, among other international bodies.
Just this week we received two reminders about the seriousness of the problem.
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T. Belman. I have to remind every body that Qalandiya is in Jerusalem. Look at the anger and the violence. Yet our government talks about a united Jerusalem and makes little effort to make it so. Isaac Herzog is calling for unannexing communities such as this from Jerusalem to achieve separation. Obviously this is a no-go zone just like in Europe.
According to an initial IDF investigation, Waze may have led two Israeli soldiers into refugee camp, sparking clashes that left one Palestinian dead and several wounded.
The Israel Defense Forces employed the controversial ‘Hannibal procedure’ late Monday night after two soldiers were attacked upon accidentally entered the Qalandiyah refugee camp, according to an initial IDF investigation. The IDF expects a full investigation to reveal that there were failures in judgement, and those involved in the incident may be tried at a later date.
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