T. Belman. In 2003 just after the Roadmap was released, I wrote “Israel must shift the battlefield from its security to its rights”:

The fact remains, that the process or Roadmap is of no concern to anyone. What matters is that Israel be forced, by hook or by crook, by obfuscation or relentless pressure, to return to the ’49 borders. The rest is smoke and mirrors.

Many people, Tobin included, talk of the land as being “disputed”. I disagree. Jews are the only ones that have legal title to the lands. There is no basis in law for the Arabs to claim title to these lands. So I will never concede that there is any right but ours to the land.

By Jonathan S. Tobin, COMMENTARY

Israel diplomats were reportedly shocked this week when their country’s new deputy foreign minister asked them to speak up about Israel’s rights in the conflict with the Palestinians rather than just its security needs. As the Times of Israel reports, Tzipi Hotovely raised more than a few eyebrows when she told a gathering of the country’s diplomatic personnel that it was a mistake to downplay the country’s own territorial claims when seeking to counter complaints about Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Jerusalem. The very idea of quoting the Torah when speaking of ties to the biblical heartland of the Jewish homeland seemed to strike them and left-wing commentators who howled about it later as absurd. Indeed, as the left-wing Haaretz put it, the world may find the minister “hard to swallow.” But while the Likud Knesset member is swimming against the tide of international opinion as well as the culture of the ministry she’s running, she is right. Though many in an international community increasingly influenced by anti-Semitism and misinformation about Israel will never accept such arguments, as the Palestinians have demonstrated over the last generation, talk of rights always trumps security.
Read more…

ZOA

In a speech today at Adas Israel Synagogue in Washington, D.C., President Obama voiced his usual empty flowery platitudes about having Israel’s back and never allowing Iran to develop nuclear weapons, and even asserted that he was “an honorary member of the tribe” – while promoting policies that place a knife squarely in Israel’s back, and lying about his record and the Iran nuclear deal.

The President’s platitudes were clearly meaningless: In the next breath during his speech, Obama complained about Jewish “settlements” – which are in reality Jewish communities in historic Jewish land comprising less than 2% of Judea and Samaria, and promoted a Palestinian state – while ignoring the facts that the Palestinian Authority (PA) continues to promote anti-Jewish hatred in their schools, media and speeches, and that the PA is part and parcel of a unity government with the terrorist group Hamas, and that both the Hamas and PA President Abbas’ Fatah party’s charters call for Israel’s destruction. President Obama also ignored the fact that the PA is attempting to use the UN to establish a unilateral state that does not recognize Israel, refuses to negotiate with Israel, and is determined to wipe Israel off the face of the map. President Obama also said nothing about the PA paying pensions to terrorists who have killed Jews.
Read more…

The list includes the Jim Joseph Foundation, the Jewish Communal Fund, Alisa Doctoroff.

By Ronn Torossian, INN

Eric Goldstein, the CEO and executive vice president of UJA-Federation of New York is someone I am personally well acquainted with. As part of his previous communal leadership, he visited my office for a private meeting, and on numerous occasions we have discussed Jewish education, communal life and related issues.  When he was President of a Manhattan orthodox day school, I proudly donated funds to that institution and assisted him in his endeavor to raise more funds.  He’s a modern Orthodox New Yorker who cares deeply for the Jewish people.
Read more…

Ted Belman. I recently had the pleasure of meeting the author who was giving a talk on his activities in Lehi. He joined it in the late thirties. He had many tales to tell. After the War of Independence he made his way to America (I don’t know why) got educated and became an environmental scientist and professor.

By Mantania Ginosar, Zionism on the Web

The US has helped Israel on many fronts; therefore, we automatically believe that Israel should follow US dictates. However, Israel has paid too high a price for US erratic support. As you can read below, too many times the US has forced Israel to act against Israel’s self interests -seriously reducing Israel’s security. Therefore, Israel must evaluate carefully each US dictates and reject those that are detrimental to Israel’s interests.

Part of the problem is that the US does not consider Israel as a fully sovereign state. The US would not dare pressure any other small country, Finland, Norway, even Lebanon, the way it pressures Israel. Israel’s interests are only peripheral to the US own interests. Sometimes they are parallel, sometimes opposite
Read more…

T. Belman. Obama is not “questioning settlement policy” as he alleges, but opposing it. This line takes the cake for me, “If you express compassion or empathy towards Palestinian youth, who are dealing with checkpoints or restrictions on their ability to travel, then you are suspect in terms of your support of Israel.” I guess he is ignoring the stone throwing and terrorist attacks by these youths in order to empathize with their travel restrictions. Poor dears.

Its one thing to disagree with Israel’s policies, even Israelis do so, but its an entirely different thing to exert American pressure on Israel to change its policies or to penalize her for such policies.

Obama went so far as to castigate Netanyahu from warning, prior to the elections, that “Arab voters are coming out in droves.” The left, Obama included, attempted to make Netanyahu a racist for such a remark, but it is anything but. Had he warned that the Zionist Union are bringing their supporters out in droves, it would have been thought of as entirely legitimate because he who succeeds in getting out their vote, increases his chances of winning the elections. It was intended as a threat to his own party workers that they should strive harder to bring their supporters out in droves.

By Rebeccah Shimoni Stoil, TOI

[..]
Obama’s interview (by Goldberg) was at times defensive, arguing that criticism of Israel’s policies did not constitute a lack of support for Israel and the Jewish people as a whole — and, for that matter, that he was not “bifurcating” the American Jewish community. Obama’s opponents have pointed to his pursuit of an Iranian nuclear deal as linked to his very public run-ins with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over topics that include both Iran, the two-state solution, and the status of Israeli Arabs.
Read more…

By Caroline Glick, JPOST

EU foreign policy chief Fredrica Mogherini has some explaining to do.

During Mogherini’s visit this week she spoke loftily of Europe’s concern for peace and desire to play a role in establishing a Palestinian state at peace with Israel. And that was very nice.

But what is the EU doing to promote these admirable goals? How do the millions of euros the EU and its member states shovel annually into the coffers of NGOs who exist to delegitimize Israel advance these goals? The timing of Mogherini’s visit this week was propitious. She came the same week as “Nakba Day,” the day Israel’s enemies mourn its coming into existence 67 years ago.

The concept of the “Nakba,” is an act of political war against the Jewish state. It was invented to deny Israel’s right to exist by propagating the libel that the state was born in sin. The explicit demand at the heart of the “Nakba” narrative is that Israel must be destroyed for justice to be achieved.
Read more…

T. Belman. In 2003 just after the Roadmap was released, I wrote “Israel must shift the battlefield from its security to its rights”:

The fact remains, that the process or Roadmap is of no concern to anyone. What matters is that Israel be forced, by hook or by crook, by obfuscation or relentless pressure, to return to the ’49 borders. The rest is smoke and mirrors.

By Herb Keinon, JPOST

Deputy FM Tzippi Hotovely swept into her new office on Thursday using religious-based arguments and telling ministry employees all of the Land of Israel belongs to the Jews.

Hotovely, who served as deputy transportation minister in the last government, reworked one of the slogans her previous ministry made well known: “On the road, don’t be right, be smart.”

For many years, she said, Israel’s diplomats have tried to be smart, rather than right.
Read more…

By Martin Sherman, JPOST

In shoot the Hippopotamus with bullets made of platinum; Because if I use leaden ones his hide is sure to flatten ‘em. – The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts, Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953)

This week, the chairman of the Jewish Agency, Natan Sharansky, published an anguished opinion piece in The Jerusalem Post (May 19) titled “Campuses are flooded with Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.”

In it he bemoaned the fact that “…today, nearly every American campus is as awash in double standards, efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state and rhetoric demonizing Israel as the newspapers of Europe or the committees of the United Nations.”

Right diagnosis; wrong prescription
Read more…

Rabbi David Algaze urges American Jews not to ignore the ‘infiltration’ of orgs like the New Israel Fund into Celebrate Israel Parade.

By Ari Soffer, INN

Liberman says no way

By Lahav Harcov, JPOST

Government Ministers and Arab MKs should work on a socioeconomic plan to help the Israeli Arab population, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed in his first meeting with Joint List chairman Ayman Odeh Thursday.

The two met in the Prime Minister’s Office and mostly discussed Israeli Arabs’ socioeconomic situation.

Netanyahu pointed out that his governments invested significant funds in Israeli Arabs in the past six years and said that there is a need to continue and reduce social gaps in Israel.
Read more…

T. Belman. American Jews may swallow this hogwash, I don’t.

President says in Atlantic interview he cares so deeply about Israel that he’s motivated to criticize continued settlement activity and comments from Netanyahu.

By Michael Wilner, JPOST

Political forces” in Washington seek to provide the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a rubber stamp for its policies, US President Barack Obama said this week in an interview with the Atlantic magazine.

The interview, with the outlet’s Jeffrey Goldberg, was published one day before the president is scheduled to address Congregation Adas Israel in Washington, where he is expected to outline his administration’s plans to combat a rising tide of anti-Semitism across Europe.
Read more…

DEBKA

A mighty explosion struck the Iranian embassy in Damascus Wednesday night, May 20, debkafile’s exclusive intelligence and counter-terrorism sources reveal. First reports are of “heavy casualties” and serious damage to the embassy compound. The Iranian and Syrian governments have clamped a curtain of secrecy down over the disaster, although the thunder of the explosion and rush of special forces and relief teams to the scene in the Syrian capital could not be concealed.

debkafile’s sources add: The explosion has initially been attributed to the Syrian arm of al Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra. A day earlier, Tuesday, Ali Akbar Velayati, senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was known to be present at the embassy building in Damascus. It is not known whether he was still there when the explosion occurred or had meanwhile departed for Tehran.
Read more…

On Sunday, Robert S. Wistrich – the director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem – emailed the following column to ‘Jerusalem Post’ Editor-in-Chief Steve Linde, asking that it be published in the coming week. Wistrich died suddenly on Tuesday. We dedicate his last column to perpetuating his memory. May his words live on.

By Robert Wistrich, leading scholar of anti-Semitism, di…

“Today’s anti-Semitism is a product of a new civic religion that could be termed “Palestinianism.”

There are few topics of more pressing concern today to Jewish communities around the world than the current resurgence of anti-Semitism. Thus, there could have been no more appropriate time for the 5th Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism to meet than last week in Jerusalem. It was a large and impressive gathering of participants from all over the world, initiated by the Foreign Ministry, together with its Diaspora Affairs Department.

In my own remarks to the conference I emphasized the need to free ourselves from certain outdated myths. My first point was that even today, Jews in Israel and the Diaspora are fixated on the dangers of far-right traditional anti-Semitism – whether racist, religious or nationalist. While neo-fascism has not altogether disappeared, it is in most cases a secondary threat.
Read more…

For PA chief Mahmoud Abbas, the idea of a “greater Palestine” – that would stretch from “the river to the sea” – is now an official policy.

By Shimon Cohen, INN

T. Belman. Obama and the Gulf states don’t want to defeat ISIS. They reject the option of allowing Iran-backed shiite proxies to join them in the fight because if ISIS is defeated the Shiites would take over the area. It is suggested by this author that the reason the Iran army disintegrated in Mosul last year and now in Ramadi is because they were ordered to do so. PM al-Abadi of Iraq hoped by doing so, the Sunni opposition to the Shiite militias joining the fight against ISIS would evaporate. The US and Sunni states prefer to have ISIS maintain their gains as a bulwark to the advance of Iran and its shiite militias.

By Yaron Friedman, YNET

[..]
Are the countries involved in the war on terror really determined to destroy ISIS?

The wrong remedy
When a doctor recommends a wrong remedy for a serious illness, he may aggravate the problem. If it’s a virus or a bug, it could develop immune methods against antibiotics which is too weak.

The American remedy for ISIS in the form of airstrikes has proved to be insufficient. A massive ground offensive is required. Every commander who has been killed has a deputy, and every 100 terror activists bombed by the coalition planes can be replaced with 100 new volunteers.
Read more…

The Hallelu Foundation is dedicated to winning the propaganda war being waged against Israel.

By Daniel Greenfield, FPM

This month the left lost its mind over Ayelet Shaked. The daughter of an Iraqi Jewish immigrant, Ayelet Shaked was an infantry instructor who worked for Israel’s elite Golani Brigade and a computer scientist who worked for Texas Instruments. Now she’s a mother of two married to a former fighter pilot.

She’s also Israel’s new Justice Minister.
Read more…

Just as Hamas uses its civilians as human shields against Israeli military attacks, so the Israeli government uses its civilians as human shields to fend off diplomatic attacks from the international community.

By Martin Sherman, JPOST

The most righteous of men cannot live in peace if his evil neighbor will not let him be.
– Wilhelm Tell, Act IV, Scene III, by Friedrich von Schiller, 1804

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his.
– Gen. George S. Patton Jr.

There is always a cost to defeat an evil. It never comes free, unfortunately. But the cost of failure to defeat a great evil is far higher.
– Jamie Shea, NATO spokesman, BBC News, May 31, 1999, on civilian casualties inflicted by NATO in the Balkans.
Read more…

By Alexander Maistrovoy, Israeli journalist

Iran – another predator is set free during Obama’s cadence

They are not empires yet. They don’t have enough power or the resources for becoming such. However, all of them – Russians, Turks, Arabs, Persians, – are dreaming about empires, recalling old conquests and victories. And all of them should be grateful to the West, and the US president in particular.

Turkey was first. In April 2009, speaking in a joint news conference with Erdogan in Ankara, Obama named Turkey a “leading US ally” and a “role-model partnership” of the world.

By this time the “leading US ally” had a very impressive track record.
Read more…

By Michael Ordman

Israel is the Cream of the Crop

The Jewish festival of Shavuot (Pentacost) celebrates Israel’s wheat harvest and the source of the prosperity it generates.  Israel’s agricultural technology is bringing prosperity to those nations willing to recognize the true benevolent nature of the Jewish State.

The theme of Expo 2015, which opened in Milan Italy on May 1st, is “feeding the planet”. Already 22,000 have visited the Israel Pavilion and marveled at its 70-meter wall where crops grow vertically on minimal irrigation.  One week previously, 35,000 (including 200 Gaza farmers) attended Agritech 2015 in Tel Aviv where Israel’s Netafim installed the biggest agricultural wall in Israel.  Netafim’s drip-irrigation technology is currently growing crops that feed over a billion people. Read more…