Envoys will engage directly with Israeli and Palestinian officials to find ‘concrete actions’ toward two-state solution

By Tamar Peleggi, TOI

Representatives of the Middle East Quartet will visit the region next week to meet with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and push forward with a renewed effort to revive the stalled peace process.

Envoys from the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia will hold direct talks with officials in Jerusalem and Ramallah and explore “concrete actions” that are “consistent with prior agreements” in order to facilitate a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the group said.

The meetings come after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said in an address to the United Nations General Assembly last week that the PA would cease to abide by agreements signed with Israel, claiming Israel had shown that it, too, was no longer committed to them.
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If the oil can be extracted at a reasonable cost, and that is a big “if” now, it would make Israel self-sufficient for decades.

By: Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu, JP

Syrian rebels, the Islamic State (ISIS) and the Assad regime, and today that means Russia, now have another reason to capture the Golan Heights – oil.

Drilling that began more than a year ago has exposed a huge find of billions of barrels of oil, but it is too early to know if the black gold can be extracted at a price that would make the oil commercially viable.

Afek Oil and Gas chief geologist Dr. Yuval Bartov was quoted by Globes as saying:
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T. Belman. Both the TOI amd HAARETZ used this title, “Dennis Ross: Netanyahu agreed to West Bank pullout in 2010”. This is not what he said Bibi said, so I changed it.

By Howard Goller, HAARETZ

REUTERS – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the United States five years ago that Israel could withdraw from most of the West Bank if his country’s security needs were met, former U.S. Middle East peace negotiator Dennis Ross recounts in a book to be published next week.

Prodded by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010 to say what he could do to advance peace talks and citing Israeli security needs, “he said that Israel could withdraw from most of the territory,” Ross writes in “Doomed to Succeed: the U.S.-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama.”

“He did not want to give percentages, but he understood what the Palestinians wanted, and if the Israeli security needs were accepted by us and met, he could be generally responsive.”
Ross has advised Republican and Democratic presidents, including Democratic President Barack Obama.
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An Israeli military spokeswoman said around 200 Palestinians massed at the border fence in northern Gaza, throwing rocks and rolling burning tires toward troops stationed on the other side.

JPOST

Six Palestinians who were part of a large group of rioters that approached the Gaza border with Israel were shot and killed by IDF soldiers on Friday, Palestinian medical sources said.

Some 200 Palestinians approached the Gaza – Israeli border fence from the Strip, burning tires and throwing rocks. They ignored calls by soldiers to stop, entering a 100-meter perimeter area that is a closed military zone, and getting to within 50 meters of the fence, an army spokeswoman said.

Soldiers first fired in the air to stop their advance. The rioters did not stop, however, and the IDF then fired at the legs of rioters, striking five of them, she added.
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T. Belman. This may be a plan but why just annex the Jordan valley and a small strip of land. We must annex a wide strip of land akin to all of C in order to make sure the highlands over looking the airport and Tel Aviv remain in our hands.

The Palestinians will start building rockets just as the Gazans did. We can’t stop this. When the rockets rain down on us, as they will, we will have to contend with them as we do with the rockets from Gaza.

Perhaps this is better than annexing it all and trying to avoid giving citizenship or paying $200 bullion to them to get them to leave.

By LIEL LEIBOVITZ, TABLET

You can call the recent onslaught of Palestinian violence against Israelis—six attacks on Wednesday and eight on Thursday, adding to the wave of bloodshed earlier this week—whatever you’d like. You can call it a new Intifada or the same old holy war; it hardly matters. What is obvious is that the situation demands resolution.

Where to begin? Not, sadly, with yet another round of negotiations. Even those who are, for some reason, still inclined to trust the despotic, corrupt, obfuscating and deeply illegitimate regime of Mahmoud Abbas would begrudgingly admit that bilateral talks can only work when there’s someone at hand to guarantee any agreement. The theater of carrots and sticks used to be an American production, which is why the Oslo Accords, having begun in secret in a chilly European capital, could only be made official with a handshake on the sunny White House lawn. But now that President Barack Obama has handed off regional hegemony to Iran and handed over Syria to Russia, no one in his or her right mind would pay a nickel for American guarantees. Vladimir Putin seems more trustworthy, in a horrible way, but with no strategic assets to be gained—the recent oil strike in the Golan notwithstanding—Putin has no conceivable interest in stepping in. The EU? The UN? Please.
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Within less than one hour, Palestinian stabs Jewish teen in Jerusalem, another stabs policeman in Kiryat Arba • Jewish assailant stabs four Arabs in Dimona, saying, “All Arabs are terrorists” • Jewish mob attempts to lynch three Arabs in Afula.

By Efrat Forsher, Danny Brenner, Avi Cohen, Yehuda Shlezinger, Shlomi Diaz and Israel Hayom Staff

Israeli police detain a Palestinian man suspected of stabbing an Israeli in Jerusalem on Friday | Photo credit: Reuters

A Palestinian terrorist stabbed a 16-year-old Israeli in Jerusalem on Friday, and within less than an hour another Palestinian stabbed a policeman in Kiryat Arba as the latest wave of terrorist attacks continued to spread throughout the country.

The 16-year-old stabbing victim in the capital was stabbed in his upper body and was lightly injured. The victim, who did not immediately realize he had been stabbed, tried to chase his assailant, who fled, only to be apprehended by police who were combing the area. The victim was taken to Hadassah Hospital for treatment. The weapon has not yet been found. Read more…

Persisting with its declared willingness to establish a Palestinian state while being unable to make the perilous concessions this calls for, makes Israel looks disingenuous and devious.

By Martin Sherman, JPOST

Al-Aksa [Mosque on the Temple Mount] is ours… they [the Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to

– Mahmoud Abbas, on official PA television, September 16, 2015

The 70th session of the UN General Assembly has come and gone. The problems it was supposed to address remain – undiminished.

The toxic tirade of Mahmoud Abbas, brimming with bile; the abject apologetics of Obama peppered with platitudes, the reproachful rebukes of Putin saturated with scorn and the rousing rhetoric of Netanyahu with all its elevating eloquence, all echoes of the past, offer little in terms of solutions on the ground. Read more…

“The man who propagates this murderous lie and orchestrates the death and mayhem that is its bloody harvest is none other than the West’s favorite Palestinian moderate.”

By Caroline Glick, JPOST

All the Palestinian terrorist attacks that have been carried out in recent weeks share one common feature. All the terrorists believe that by attacking Jews they are protecting the Temple Mount from destruction.

And why shouldn’t they believe this obscenity? Everywhere they go, every time they turn on their televisions, read the paper, go to school or the mosque they are told that the Jews are destroying al-Aksa Mosque. Al-Aksa, they are told, is in danger. They must take up arms to defend it from the Jews, whatever the cost.

One man stands at the center of this blood libel. The man who propagates this murderous lie and orchestrates the death and mayhem that is its bloody harvest is none other than the West’s favorite Palestinian moderate: PLO chief and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
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T. Belman. My sentiments, exactly. The Arabs keep making demands and we react. The world believes that their demands are justified and pressures us to concede. It is not enough for our government to attempt to keep the lid on the violence or to maintain the status quo. We should be making demands of our own such as , either we both can pray on the Temple Mount or none of us can or support for terrorism must stop or we will impose penalties like no money transfers, prosecution for incitement of both the PA and the leaders. Simply put, we should not allow it.

by Vic Rosenthal

I’ve been thinking about status quos (stati quo?) lately.

There’s the one on the Temple Mount, the absurd one that says that Jews may visit but may not pray. Lately Muslims have been trying to prevent Jews from visiting altogether. When you consider that this is and always has been the holiest site in Judaism, that Muslim colonialists built their triumphal mosque on top of the ruins of the Jewish Temple – which those Muslims now say wasn’t really there anyway – the absurdity is even more manifest.

I went up to the Mount around 1981, together with my cousin and her husband. Nobody asked if they were Jewish, and they even entered the Dome of the Rock. Nobody paid attention to whether any of us moved our lips, and needless to say nobody screamed curses at us from close range. Little by little, threats and violence have changed the status quo unfavorably for us.
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By Edward Luttwak, TABLET

In these grim times, I am afforded light relief by CNN—the only news channel offered by the treadmill of my Tokyo apartment house—as its presenters and pundits gravely debate the motives behind Putin’s investment in Syria. His own version is that he is fighting “extremism,” which oddly enough is the same dark threat that President Barack Obama also recognizes while rigorously avoiding the qualifiers Islamic, Islamist, or Muslim—although he will refer to Isol, prompting the thought that it is impossible to defeat an enemy one is afraid to name. There is no Isol or even Isis anymore, because the good old ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyah fi’l-?Iraq wa-sh-Sham—the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—has long since become the Islamic State of everywhere from Nigeria to Afghanistan, no doubt also including the British Isles and Michigan. Ignoring earnest declarations of its un-Islamic character solemnly issued by non-Muslim presidents, premiers, and prelates, volunteers who recognize the authenticity of the Islamic State keep pouring into its still-expanding borders, easily offsetting the casualties inflicted by the very expensive U.S. bombing campaign, now joined by the British, French, … and Putin, whose air force already claims dozens of air strikes against the common foe.
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A Torah Thought for Parashat Breishit

by Moshe Feiglin

“And the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep” (From this week’s Torah portion, Genesis 1:2)

“And G-d separated between the light and the dark” (ibid 4)

“And G-d said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide…’ (ibid 6)

“ And G-d made the firmament and He divided…” (ibid 7)

“And G-d said: ‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night” (ibid 14)

“…and to separate between the light and the dark” (ibid 18) Read more…

By Dr. Michal Rachel Suissa, Director of The Center against Anti-Semitism (SMA), Norway

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who is now governing in the eleventh year of the four year period he was elected to, announced prior to the recent UNGA summit that he would drop a ”bombshell” in his speech to the world leaders.  What this bombshell cooked down to, was a declaration that he would no longer continue to consider himself bound by the Oslo Accords and that Israel must assume all of its responsibilities as an occupying power.  Taken literally this would imply that there would no longer be a peace process and the Palestinian Authority would no longer draw its legitimacy from agreements with Israel.
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Has the Third Intifada begun? It doesn’t matter what we call it, as long as bloodshed remains the only conceivable response.

By Asher Schechter, HAARETZ | Oct. 7, 2015 | 8:19 PM

Jerusalem is exploding, the West Bank is on fire and as of Monday, the rioting had spread to Jaffa. As of writing, four Israelis had been murdered in the last three weeks of violence, and a 13-year old boy was shot dead by Israeli troops north of Bethlehem. Overeager tabloids, pundits and politicians have been quick to proclaim: “The Third Intifada has begun.”

The Third Intifada has been predicted at least since the second one ended, but has it truly begun? Probably not. This is still a depressing time to be an Israeli, nonetheless.
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If Rabin’s political camp has a chance, it must cast off the fabricated image of Rabin the messianic peacenik and return instead to the rough, direct, genuine Rabin.

By Ari Shavit, HAARETZ | Oct. 8, 2015 | 2:37 AM

In another few weeks, we will be returning to that square in the center of Tel Aviv now known as Rabin Square. It will have been 20 years since the night that split Israeli history into two. The speakers will be more distinguished than ever, and the speeches themselves more fiery than ever. And the crowds that will gather opposite Tel Aviv city hall will be pained and troubled. Every year, Yitzhak, the void is deeper. Every year, the despair is darker. The passage of time is not dulling the sense of loss, but rather intensifying it.
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By Gil Solomon

The recent outburst by Arab Knesset member Jamal Zahalka (AJN 2/10) highlights the leftist well intentioned nonsense of throwing citizenship, like confetti thrown on a passing parade, on an Arab population that despises you.

It is also the end result of successive Israeli Governments turning their backs on and forsaking the Temple Mount since the victory of 1967, when Moshe Dayan in an act of supreme political idiocy, let the Muslim Waqf retain control of this most holy of Jewish sites, where both Jewish Temples once stood and now dominated by the Dome of the Rock mosque. This is a site which, had it been retained all these decades past, would be where foreign dignitaries would have been escorted to and not to Yad Vashem, a memorial to our countless graveyards.
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T. Belman.  Its all about restoring calm rather than asserting our rights. We should place a greater value on our rights.

Bibi changed this to also ban Arab MK’s.

The premier’s decree is an apparent attempt to de-escalate tensions, particularly as it relates to events on Temple Mount.

JPOST

Netanyahu said on Wednesday that Jewish members of the Knesset and government ministers would not be allowed to visit the Temple Mount in the wake of recent violence that has raised tensions throughout Israel and the West Bank.

Netanyahu adopted the measure after convening the security cabinet Wednesday evening. Senior policy-makers made the recommendation in an effort to avoid a “dangerous provocation” that could set off a “powder keg.”
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Arlene Kushner reports:

Since yesterday, there have been more terror attacks. Good that announcements have been made about measures to be taken, but we need them in place like yesterday. Some plans, such as installing cameras, will take time. But the troops – empowered to act as they need to – must be out in force.

One of the trouble spots with regard to rock throwing and similar terrorist actions has been in the vicinity of the Jewish community of Tekoa, in the Judean Desert.

Terrorists are fond of throwing rocks at the cars driving on the road from Tekoa to Jerusalem (a new road, not represented on this map, that goes to the Har Homa neighborhood of Jerusalem). Of late there has been considerable difficulty in this region, with cars frequently pelted by rocks.
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It’s not just the misleading headlines and selective context – western media outlets have long since eschewed journalism to act as the Palestinians’ official propaganda arm.

By Ari Soffer, INN

International news outlets are often accused of displaying an anti-Israel bias, highlighting Palestinian claims and narratives while playing down or ignoring theIsraeliviewpoint altogether.

Selective headlines, misleading and selective use of terminologies and blind trust of Palestinian (or pro-Palestinian) sources – fact-checking be damned – are just some of the more obvious examples of this phenomenon.

Former Associated Press journalist Matti Friedman famously went a step further earlier this year, blowing the whistle on the ingrained anti-Israel bias within his own former company, and shedding light on how international journalists have long since eschewed objective reporting in favor of hostile propaganda where Israel is concerned.
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Carson is the only one who knows anything. Cruz knows but isn’t as forceful as he should be on the danger.

By Carol Brown, AMERICAN THINKER

As the world faces the rising threat of Islamic supremacy, the number of leaders speaking the whole hideous truth about this evil can be counted on one hand. If GOP presidential candidates are our future, will any of them rise to the occasion and be a bold voice for truth when speaking about this force that seeks to destroy us? I decided to find out. Below is a snapshot of where the top six candidates stand on the threat of jihad, with a focus on four sub-topics noted below:

• Islamic law (sharia)
• Immigration jihad (hijra), addressed in the context of the current “Syrian refugee crisis”
• Response to Ben Carson’s statements on Muslims, sharia law, the Constitution, and the presidency
• Miscellany (additional noteworthy points that vary from one candidate to the next)

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DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis

After the Israeli cabinet launched measures Tuesday, Oct. 6, for “strengthening anti-terror defense” – such as cameras in the sky – and officials labored to spread word that the surge of Palestinian violence of the past week was beginning to ebb, Israel was hit that night from offside by a vicious pro-Palestinian upheaval in the Tel Aviv suburb of Jaffa. Hundreds of Israeli Arabs swarmed onto the streets to hurl rocks and burning containers at police, passing buses and Jews on the street. Six police officers were injured. Fired up by the radical Israeli Northern Muslim Movement, the rioters brandished Palestinian flags and yelled “Allah is Great!” and “With our blood we shall redeem Al Aqsa!”
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