In the long-term absence of peace with the Palestinians, better to cease pursuing the unattainable and adopt policies that can strengthen the country at home and abroad

By Evelyn Gordon

Note: After Mosaic published my essay “The Two-State Solution Is in Stalemate. Here’s What Israel Can Do to Prevail in early September, the magazine invited two people to respond to it, Elliott Abrams and Amnon Lord. The piece below is my response to their responses.

T. Belman. Evelyn Gordon is a very important right wing journalist. After discussing the reality of the present impasse, she recommended a different strategy. I didn’t agree with everything she suggested but I appreciated that she started the conversation in that long but important essay.

Many thanks to Elliott Abrams and Amnon Lord for their thoughtful responses to my essay.  Drawing on his own extensive experience, Abrams aptly highlights how the endless pursuit of an unattainable Israel-Palestinian agreement entails costs for the United States as well as for Israel, and also how the chaos currently sweeping the Middle East underlines the importance of preserving the region’s one remaining island of stability—and the folly of embarking on yet another destabilizing grand experiment. Lord, for his part, correctly emphasizes the need to maintain Israeli morale and “the national sense of justice and self-confidence,” a crucial addition to my own list of what Israel must do on the home front. He also reminds us of the hopeful significance of Israel’s burgeoning relations with both Asia and “moderate” Arab states.
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Benny Gantz believes better accord could have been reached, but praises diplomacy’s success in preventing war, delaying bomb for 10-15 years

BY REBECCA SHIMONI STOIL , TOI

WASHINGTON — Former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz said Friday he was not more concerned about Israel’s security following the signing of the nuclear accord between Tehran and world powers, adding that he saw the benefits of the deal which he said had prevented war. The deal, he said, was a case of the “cup half-full.”

“I refuse to get hysterical” about the nuclear deal, he told a gathering of policymakers and analysts in Washington DC Friday morning, in likely reference to official Israel’s excoriation of the agreement.
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On Islam, Ben Carson Is Right and Charles Krauthammer Is Wrong

By Andrew C. McCarthy

McCarthy explains what each said and why he agreed with Carson.

So do I.

Al Monitor

Talk is heating up in Congress and the Pentagon about whether to share America’s massive new bunker-busting bomb as a warning to Iran, but Israel remains cool to the idea.

The proposal is expected to come up during next month’s visit to Washington by Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Nov. 9 meeting at the White House. Interviews with current and former top-ranking Israeli military officials, however, suggest a distinct lack of enthusiasm for a cumbersome super-weapon of dubious military value.
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DEBKAfile  Exclusive Report  September 24, 2015, 12:23 PM (IDT)

By Evelyn Gordon, COMMENTARY

The one saving grace about anti-Semites is that, contrary to Barack Obama’sfamous claim, they generally are irrational and, therefore, they often overreach. The anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement has been doing exactly that recently. In the past month alone, it has suffered three resounding and damaging failures.

The first, of course, was its “success” in pressuring a Spanish reggae festival to disinvite American Jewish singer Matisyahu unless he issued a statement backing a Palestinian state. Matisyahu, to his credit, didn’t merely refuse; he also made sure the world knew why he wouldn’t be appearing as scheduled. The subsequent public outcry not only made the festival hurriedly backtrack and reinstateMatisyahu in his original slot, but also exposed the truth of the BDS movement’s anti-Semitism, which it has long tried to hide. After all, Matisyahu isn’t Israeli; he was asked to issue that statement, alone of all the artists at the festival, simply because he was Jewish.
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There is little that infuriates me more that the arrogance and ignorance of Yair Lapid, head of the Yesh Atid party, and the shameful myopia and shameless mendacity he exhibits.

By Martin Sherman, JPOST

The greatest tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that everyone knows how it will end. We will divide up the region. Israel will return most of the West Bank, and the Palestinian flag will fly on public buildings in east Jerusalem…The only unanswered question is how many more people will have to die along the way. And so we will fight against the extremists on both sides, including our extremists, the settlers – Yair Lapid, Der Spiegel, May 8, 2008

Jerusalem is not a place, it is the constitutive concept of Israeli identity and our most fundamental ethos… We will not divide Jerusalem. No matter what happens. If that eventually means there will be no resolution [of the conflict] then there will be no resolution. Countries do not conduct negotiations over their own capital – Yair Lapid, Wallah, December 27, 2014

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Analysis: Should Palestinian parents pay for minors’ rock-throwing?

Analysis: New rules – Fire only when life is threatened

Security cabinet relaxes open-fire rules, stiffens penalties against rock throwers

Ghert Wilders speech at beginning of his trial in Nov 2011
By Ghert Wilders, Gates of Vienna

The lights are going out all over Europe. All over the continent where our culture flourished and where man created freedom, prosperity and civilization. The foundation of the West is under attack everywhere.

All over Europe the elites are acting as the protectors of an ideology that has been bent on destroying us for fourteen centuries. An ideology that has sprung from the desert and that can produce only deserts because it does not give people freedom. The Islamic Mozart, the Islamic Gerard Reve [a Dutch author], the Islamic Bill Gates; they do not exist because without freedom there is no creativity. The ideology of Islam is especially noted for killing and oppression and can only produce societies that are backward and impoverished. Surprisingly, the elites do not want to hear any criticism of this ideology.
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by David Cole, TAKI’S MAGAZINE 

A phone rings in the Oval Office. President Obama drops his practice club and rushes to his desk. Raising the handset of the turquoise-green, crescent-decorated emergency phone to his ear, he listens, his face reflecting the intensity of the moment. It’s as he feared—somewhere in America, a Muslim’s feelings are hurt. Brunch with Pharrell will just have to wait; this president has a tweet to compose.

Okay, so maybe it didn’t exactly happen that way. But last week, when a Muslim high school kid’s homemade clock that resembled a suitcase bomb was bafflingly mistaken for a suitcase bomb, the most powerful man in the world took time out of his day to tweet support for the humiliated student. But this piece isn’t about Mark Zuckerberg (or Obama, who also happened to send a supportive tweet). It’s about how Muslims in the West are often held to the kind of standard normally reserved for the delicate or the disabled.
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During parade commemorating Iran-Iraq War, Maj. Gen. Atoallah Salehi says Iran “longs” for Israel to act so Iran can annihilate it • President Hassan Rouhani says Iranian military is the best defense against Islamic State.

An Iranian military parade that took place in Tehran on Tuesday served as another opportunity for the country’s upper echelon to promise to destroy Israel and attack the United States.

By Judith Bergman, ISRAEL HAYOM

It was recently publicized that Saudi Arabia has been elected to chair the U.N. Human Rights Council panel in charge of appointing independent experts. According to theU.N. Watch independent monitoring group, Saudi Arabia was chosen to head the Consultative Group, a five-member group of ambassadors that has the power to select applicants from around the world for more than 77 positions dealing with human rights mandates. These include positions such as the U.N. special rapporteur on violence against women and experts for working groups on the issues of discrimination against women and the rights of migrants and religious minorities.
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Ted Belman. The headlines being used for this article are provocative and shouldn’t be. INN used “France: Marine Le Pen Charged for Comparing Muslims to Nazis”. She simply reminded Frenchmen that the Muslem takeovers of parts of our cities was also an “occupation”.

By Mat Wanderman, INN

French National Front (NF) leader Marine Le Pen is being charged with inciting racial hatred for comparing Muslims praying outdoors to the Nazi occupation of France.

The charge dates back to 2010, at which time there were reports that mosques in in Paris and other cities were overcrowded, leading to people praying in the streets.

During a party rally, she said, “I’m sorry, but for those who really like to talk about the Second World War, if we’re talking about occupation, we can also talk about this while we’re at it, because this is an occupation of territory. It’s an occupation of swaths of territory, of areas in which religious laws apply… for sure, there are no tanks, no soldiers, but it’s an occupation all the same and it weighs on people.”
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By Alex Maistrovoy

A new round of the “Great Game”* in Syria is the evidence not so much of the growing power of Moscow, as of intellectual helplessness and degradation of the West

Western leaders, the media and experts state the obvious: the Kremlin is trying to save Assad. Of course, yes, but principal points remain outside of the focus of their attention.

It is not only about Syria. It’s about two polar ideologies, two worldviews incompatible with each other.

At one extreme, we see the time-honored tradition based on the primacy of national interests and perceptions of themselves as Empire. At the other extreme, there is a schizophrenic set of amateurism, idealism, Neo-Marxism ideology, quasi-religious utopias of universal triumph of democracy “for all, here and now”, violently distorted conceptions of human rights and civil liberties.
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By Yuval Avivi, AL MONITOR

A 2010 survey conducted by the Central Bureau of Statistics showed that 25.7% of secular Jews in Israel aged 20 and older fast on Yom Kippur. It also showed that the customs most frequently observed among the secular are participation in traditional Passover dinner ceremonies — 81.5% reported celebrating the Seder and 67.3% lighting Hanukkah candles — festive family occasions that are not physically or spiritually difficult, like a day-long fast.

Indeed, many members of the secular Jewish public in Israel actually choose to fast and visit a synagogue on Yom Kippur. The Israeli news website Mako published a provocative article three years ago, wondering: Is there a point in a secular person fasting on Yom Kippur, when he’ll continue sinning the next day?

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T. Belman, Conrad Black is a wonderful word smith and a good historian. His description of the ME situation is right on. But I don’t understand why he is making a case for America to assume more Syrian refugees. In so doing he ignores that they are Muslims.

By CONRAD BLACK, Special to the Sun | September 23, 2015

The unannounced policy of the Obama administration of progressively withdrawing from much of the world, while it has been riddled with inconsistencies and been the subject of endless dissembling, is starting to incite regional powers to fill part of the resulting vacuum. The most positive recent example of this is the long-awaited determination of the Japanese diet to approve the dispatch of Japanese military forces beyond immediate Japanese territorial limits, even if Japan itself is not under attack.

For the first time in the 70 years since the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II, after having been driven back 2,000 miles in the central and southwest Pacific and flung out of the Philippines, after losing its entire navy, and after enduring the only two military applications of the atomic bomb, Japan is resuming its role as one of the world’s great powers. Prime Minister Abe has explicitly predicted much closer cooperation between the Japanese navy (self-defense force) and the U.S. Seventh Fleet
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THANK YOU.

By Evelyn Gordon, COMMENTARY

Israeli journalist Amira Hass has finally explained a mystery that long puzzled me: how the European Union manages to reconcile its policy on the Middle East with its self-image as a champion of morality, human rights, and compassion. In one short sentence, she neatly encapsulates the moral rot at the heart of the modern multicultural left: “We don’t rate suffering.”

The great European mystery is the fact that the Syrian conflict remains far below the Palestinian-Israeli one on Europe’s foreign policy agenda, even though on both moral and practical grounds, the Syrian crisis clearly deserves precedence. Not only has it killed more than 10 times as many people in four years as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has in seven decades, but it’s currently flooding Europe with refugees and creating, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel noted, an even greater threat to European unity than the euro crisis. Read more…

with fears of Hezbollah attaining lethal weapons in Syria with help from Iran.

By Herb Keinon, JPOST

Israel and Russia agreed to a create a mechanism to prevent accidental confrontation between their forces in Syria, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said following a meeting on the outskirts of Moscow Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Netanyahu, in a phone briefing with Israeli diplomatic reporters after the meeting, said it was devoted entirely to the complicated situation on Israel’s northern border.

“I made clear our policy to try to prevent through various means the transfer of lethal weapons from Syria to Hezbollah, which is actually done at the direction of Iran,” said Netanyahu, who spent just a few hours in Russia for the meeting before flying immediately back to Israel.
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T. Belman. When a President takes the oath in his inauguration to uphold the constitution and law of the land, he must resist any implementation of Sharia. Cinton twittered that she disagreed with Carson. She cited the US constitution “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any public office or Public Trust.” Obviously if a person takes the oath to uphold the constitution they are duty bound to do so even if it is contrary to Sharia. But this is not the case here. Muslims are not allowed to take an oath that violates their duty to Sharia. We have seen how the Democratic Party is running roughshod over the constitution. Bottom line is that we shouldn’t elect a Muslim to any office which requires the oath. Don’t give them the opportunity to mislead us.

What Adams was saying was that tolerance and equality are not to be extended to groups and doctrines that are subversive.

by AWR HAWKINS, BREITBART