By Shlomo Cesana, ISRAEL HAYOM

Not afraid to make far-reaching decisions. Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely

On the face of things, Israel’s standing in the international arena has never been worse. The media and other outlets, mainly from the left side of the political spectrum, are telling us that the world actively wants us to settle the conflict with the Palestinians and that the international arena is getting behind the Palestinian demand that Israel withdraw to the 1967 borders. They constantly remind us that there are no international embassies in Israel’s capital — Jerusalem. They note that the U.S. and the EU consistently condemn Israeli construction and sovereignty in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. Certain organizations talk about imposing sanctions on Israel and blast our policies as a matter of routine.
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Nashat Milhem tracked down in Wadi Ara, opens fire on forces and is killed, a week after he killed 3 in Tel Aviv; five people arrested

BY ADIV STERMAN AND JUDAH ARI GROSS, TOI

Nashat Milhem, the gunman who killed three Israelis last week in Tel Aviv, was shot and killed by Israeli forces in an exchange of fire in northern Israel on Friday afternoon.

He was located near his home in the Arara area. Initial reports said he had been “neutralized.” It was later confirmed that he had been killed at about 4.20 p.m.
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Troops at junction of Etzion settlement bloc thwart attack by trio from nearby village; another Palestinian tries stabbing near Hebron, is killed

By SUE SURKES, TOI

Israeli reservist soldiers on Thursday shot dead three Palestinians as they tried to carry out a stabbing attack near the junction of the Etzion settlement bloc in the West Bank.

“Three attackers, armed with knives, attempted to stab soldiers guarding the Gush Etzion junction,” the IDF said in a statement, and confirmed that all three attackers had been killed. No one else was wounded in the incident.
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T. Belman. I find this alarming. I do not want Israel to become a state of the Hareidi but to remain a state of all the Jews. The Hereidi are already too powerful and are not pulling their economic weight. Besides the Hereidim have some trouble with the state of Israel and are not committed to the state keeping Judea and Samaria..

Why the two-state solution is even less likely today

BY PADRAIG O’MALLEY, NEW REPUBLIC

Many obstacles stand in the way of a two-state solution to the conflict in Israel and Palestine.

At the moment, negotiations are a nonstarter for all parties.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has only a razor-thin majority in one of the most right-wing Knessets in Israeli history. President Barack Obama has tossed the ball to his successor. Recently, accounts have emerged of the U.S. administration giving up on there ever being two states and beginning to focus on what a one-state solution looks like. And then there’s the ongoing violence in Jerusalem and the West Bank that has been called “a leaderless intifada.” This violence has cemented additional layers of distrust of Palestinians to the ones Jewish Israelis already harbor. The hatred is calcifying.
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Unification of Israel and Judea & Samaria

By Dr Michael L. Wise (Original November 2003)

THE POLITICAL DIVIDE 

The political division within Israel was highlighted in May 2003, Prime Minister Sharon said, “You cannot like the word, but what is happening (in Gaza, Judea & Samaria) is an occupation — to hold 3.5 million[i] (sic) Palestinians under occupation I believe that is a terrible thing for Israel and for the Palestinians.” With much fanfare and protest, in a first step to end the occupation, in 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza.

The political divide of Israel has a long and ancient history. Tribal conflicts in the time of Joshua to the division of the country between the Kingdom of Judea and the Kingdom of Israel to the destruction of the second Temple in 70 CE to the Bar Kochba revolt weakened the nation. The political disputes of modern Zionism between Weizmann and Ben Gurion and the revisionists reflected deep divisions within the Yishuv.
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The attempt to equate Arab terrorism against Jews with Jewish “terror” against Arabs is playing right into the hands of Israel’s most vehement detractors.

By Martin Sherman, JPOST

The cumulative feeling left by this [Duma] case is… something that ought to worry every Israeli citizen. – Haaretz, January 5

The house had been set on fire by men who… are believed to be Jewish settlers.… Eyewitnesses saw FOUR men, who fled to the settlement of Ma’aleh Efraim. – Amy Davidson, “A Toddler Dies in the West Bank,” The New Yorker, July 31

Two witnesses said they saw TWO masked men outside the house watching as the family burned. – Jodi Rudoren et al, “Jewish Arsonists Suspected in West Bank Attack That Killed Palestinian Toddler,” The New York Times, July 31
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T. Belman. Savir is wrong to write, “Israel is exploiting the status quo to prevent Palestinian statehood through massive settlement expansion”.  If only. In fact the opposite is true. The Arabs are building more houses in Area C, illegally, I might add than Israel is building units for Jews.  This article also ignores that this is an election year in the US.  If the PA was serious about doing this, they would have done it during  Obama’s presidency rather than wait for a potential Republican administration.  In any event they will wait to see who gets elected.

by Uri Savir, al Monitor

In the West Bank these days, one thing is clear: The current status quo of random terror by individuals and a Palestinian Authority (PA) cooperating on terror prevention with Israel will not be maintained for long. The Palestinian street buzzes with rumors about a third intifada, the downfall of President Mahmoud Abbas and the collapse of the PA. All this speculation is grounded in realistic analysis of where the current Palestinian despair may lead.

The Palestinian leadership has a tentative strategy in place for the dismantlement of the Palestinian Authority and the establishment of a state under Israeli occupation.

A senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah Central Committee told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that Abbas may be forced to make good on the warning given in his speech to the UN General Assembly Sept. 30 and pass responsibility over the West Bank to Israel as the occupying power.
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AMEN TO THAT

Sources reveal Cairo has been worriedly asking for clarification over reports that Israel will lift Gaza blockade, let Turkey into Gaza.

By Ari Yashar, INN

Egypt recently contacted Israel requesting clarification over the rapprochement talks Jerusalem is holding with Turkey, it was revealed on Thursday.

Senior clerks in Jerusalem told Haaretz on condition of anonymity that the Egyptian government expressed its displeasure with the notion of Turkey being given an official role in Gaza, and further asked to clarify Israel’s intentions regarding Turkey’s demand to lift the naval blockade on the Hamas-run enclave.
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By Caroline Glick

In mid December, US Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech before the Brookings Institute’s Saban Forum. Kerry focused on the Palestinian conflict with Israel and sought to draw a distinction between the two-state policy model, which he supports, and the one-state policy model, which he rejects.

To justify his rejection of a policy based on Israeli sovereignty over areas beyond the 1949 armistice lines, Kerry raised a series of questions about what a one-state policy would look like.

I answered all of his questions, as well as many others, in great detail in my book The Israeli Solution: A One- State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. I will do so again here, albeit with the requisite brevity.
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By Hugh Fitzgerald, JIHAD WATCH

The multifarious geopolitical messes in the Middle East, the almost comical variety of resentments, hostilities, mutual denouncements, and hatreds in the Muslim lands that are presented to us each day on some news channel’s platter, the confusion worse compounded that overcomes us when we look at any part or aspect of the Camp of Islam — all this beggars belief, but you’d better nonetheless believe it.

You’d better believe, for example, that the Uber-Sunni Saudis, who gave rise to Al-Qaeda, who provided Al-Qaeda not just with Osama bin Laden but with a host of other members (including 11 of the 19 who went on that 9/11/2001 mission), are now dead-set on executing members of that same Al -Qaeda, and have just done so, and are also prepared to make war on the uberest-Sunnis of them all, the members of the Islamic State. And at the same time as those Saudi rulers execute, in the same galere, both those Al-Qaeda and Islamic State anti-Shi’a fanatics, they also can — and did — execute a leading Shi’a cleric in Saudi Arabia, one Nimr Al-Nimr. Those who like things kept simple, and not complicated, will be disappointed by the Muslim Middle East, where every (geopolitical) prospect teases, and only man is vile.
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DEBKA 

Review of a short and clear book aimed at the reclamation of the good name of the Jewish state.

by Rochel Sylvetsky, INN

The year 2016 seems as though it will be more of the same, only more so.

Massacres, murders and mayhem in the West, massacres, murders and chaos in Syria, kidnappings in Africa, Shiite-Sunni violence (hopefully not the bomb), stabbings and shootings in Israel – and no one, except the pro-Israel Jews are able to see that there is a straight line leading from Islam to Islamists to Islamic terror in all of the above.

The world insists on separating Israel from the rest of the terror that is trying to destroy anyone who is deemed an infidel. That has happened because years of well funded Arab propaganda laced with a good dose of hereditary anti-Semitism have convinced people that there is “a reason, a rationale,” as  US Foreign Secretary John Kerry egregiously explained after the Paris massacre, for killing Jews.
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ISLAM IS THE PROBLEM

By Guy Taylor – The Washington Times

Iran’s leaders on Tuesday revealed the existence of a previously undisclosed weapons bunker stocked with ballistic missiles, adding to President Obama’s diplomatic headaches in the region at a time when tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia have soared to new heights.

The revelation prompted fresh hand-wringing within the Obama administration, which has awkwardly sought to avoid taking sides since the regional saber rattling ratcheted up over the weekend with Riyadh’s execution of a prominent Shiite cleric and the subsequent sacking of the Saudi Embassy in Tehran.

The weapons bunker is also the latest provocation by Iran since the much-touted signing of a nuclear deal last summer, provocations that have provided more ammunition to critics both at home and in the Middle East who say President Obama’s outreach to Tehran has done nothing to curb Iran’s aggressive policies in the region.
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Today’s issues: Anti-Semitism in Europe, adjusting Israel’s TV to the right, an armed intifada is on our doorstep, and Islamic State’s propaganda threat.

ISRAEL FOREIGN MINISTRY

The Jerusalem Post notes the first anniversary of the double terrorist attack that targeted the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine and the Hyper Cacher, and points out that in Europe, Jews are still being killed because they are Jews. The editor asserts that “European nations currently lack systematic methods of collecting data on anti-Semitism,” and declares: “Europeans have a moral obligation to take violent anti-Semitism seriously. An important first step should be to develop systematic methods for measuring the phenomenon.”
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Or does Trump need protecting from Muslims?

By Daniel Greenfield, FPM

After an Islamic terror attack, Americans are told that they’re foolish and fearful to worry about the type of Islamic terrorism that just filled a local morgue with bodies. Instead of focusing on the families of the dead, the media coverage sharply pivots to a million stories about Muslims who claim to be terrified of a “backlash” from Americans and must be protected from the threat of this imaginary backlash.
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Why would you refuse to condemn those who murder in your name?
By Dennis Prager, FPM

Last week, an opinion piece appeared in The Washington Post that tells you much of what you need to know about the moral fabric and intellectual depth of the ACLU and much of the left.

Written by Rana Elmir, deputy director of the Michigan chapter of the ACLU, the title says it all: “Stop asking me to condemn terrorists just because I’m Muslim.”

Here is how her column begins:

“As an American Muslim, I am consistently and aggressively asked — by media figures, religious leaders, politicians and Internet trolls — to condemn terrorism to prove my patriotism.

“I emphatically refuse.”

Even putting aside her refusal as a Muslim to condemn the greatest organized evil in the world, her misleading rhetoric is revealed by another aspect of the opening sentence.
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By Bernard-Henri Levy, ALGEMEINER

Iran is no paragon of democracy.

And when its leaders denounce the “criminal workings” of the “vile” Saudi regime and its links to terrorism, the pot is calling the kettle black.

Yet what occurred this past weekend in Saudi Arabia is worrisome for several reasons.

Executing 47 people in a single day, first of all, is a strange way to begin the year. Except if the goal is to beat the kingdom’s record of 153 in 2015 (and 87 the year before), in which case they have made a good start.
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THIS ARTICLE IS SPOT ON
By Lauri B, Regan, AMERICAN THINKER

In his masterpiece, Common Sense, Thomas Paine observed:

Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.

Paine may have been discussing the British monarch circa 1776, but his insight is equally applicable to Obama and Co., who reign like kings while exhibiting ignorance and incompetence. This is particularly surprising, given that many liberal policymakers, including Obama, are highly educated, and therefore presumably adept at critical thinking and analysis. But after seven years of Obama leading the Democratic Party in insane notions of transforming the country, it is clear that rational thought and common sense are skill sets greatly lacking among liberal elites.
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MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Today’s issues: The Sunni-Shi’ite divide, the Wild West comes to Tel Aviv, a wakeup call for the public, and the real danger to Europe.

The Jerusalem Post comments on the conflagration between Sunni and Shi’ite Moslems in the Middle East, and argues that the strongly held belief that it is advantageous when one’s enemies are at war with one another is not a valid contention in this case. The author contends that it is “absurd it is to talk of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the catalyst of all that goes wrong in the Middle East,” and asserts: “It is the Sunni-Shi’ite divide, more than any other factor, that is driving unrest in the region, and clashes between Shi’ites and Sunnis are not an Israeli interest.”
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