With tech developed in Israel, those who grow the world’s food will be able to support themselves, says program director, Dr Aliza Belman

BY DAVID SHAMAH, TOI

“Africa is clearly the future of agriculture in the world,” said Belman-Inbal, the program’s director. “It has 60 percent of the available uncultivated arable land in the world, and with the world set to double its population in the coming decades, we are going to have to produce a lot more food than we do now. Israel has a lot of experience and knowledge in these areas, and we believe that we can contribute a great deal to improving the situation in Africa.”

The Pears program intends to focus its efforts on Kenya, a country that already has an active tech innovation scene. “There are dozens of accelerators and incubators in Nairobi – it’s sort of a Silicon Savannah,” said Belman-Inbal. “Our objective is to develop connections between entrepreneurs and developers in Israel and Kenya to develop tech solutions for agricultural needs, and deliver them to small holders in the country.”
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International legal expert outlines Israel’s clear legal right to Judea-Samaria, wonders why Israeli leaders won’t say it out loud.

By Shimon Cohen, Editor, ‘Sovereignty Journal’

The new government must give top priority to making a decision about the ownership structure of Israel’s gas fields.

By Amiran Barkat, GLOBES

By Ted Belman

Shortly after Pres Obama’s inauguration in 2009, Likud, with Netanyahu at its head, was tasked with forming the government. He was concerned to balance the pressure he was under by the right wing of Likud so he invited  Ehud Barak, a former Chief of Staff of the IDF and former Prime Minister to break away from Labour by forming a new party. Netanyahu then invited it to join the Government. For Barak’s troubles he was made the Defense Minister, arguably the second most important ministry in the government. You will recall that Barak made an unprecedented offer to Arafat in the peace negotiations under President Clinton.

He appointed Michael Oren to the post of Ambassador to the US. While Oren had great credentials for the post he was also a left winger.
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By Ted Belman

Bibi makes a huge comeback in the last 72 hours.

He said he will first invite Bayit Yehudi to join him and will not invite Labour.

Bibi will have a nationalist government of about 64 seats but it will be stable.

Eli Yishai’s party did not reach the threshold.

Remember Bibi promised:

– thousands of houses in Jerusalem

– no Palestinian state

– no dividing Jerusalem

-not to release any more prisoner’s

If Israel wants coalitions that last for the duration of a Knesset term, it needs both Likud and Labor to become powerhouse political forces again.

By Moshe Arens, HAARETZ

Whoever ends up forming the next government will have a tough time assembling a coalition and holding it together while preparing for the next election. When the party forming the coalition has no more than 20-something seats in the Knesset, it is a foregone conclusion that it is not going to be stable. So while worrying about the housing crisis, the cost of living, a nuclear Iran, and the Hezbollah and Hamas rockets aimed at Israel, someone better start thinking about the root cause of the instability of Israel’s political system.
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For half a century, memories of the Holocaust limited anti-Semitism on the Continent. That period has ended—the recent fatal attacks in Paris and Copenhagen are merely the latest examples of rising violence against Jews. Renewed vitriol among right-wing fascists and new threats from radicalized Islamists have created a crisis, confronting Jews with an agonizing choice.

Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic

“All comes from the Jew; all returns to the Jew.”

— Édouard Drumont (1844–1917), founder of the Anti-Semitic League of France

I. The Scourge of Our Time

The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, the son of Holocaust survivors, is an accomplished, even gifted, pessimist. To his disciples, he is a Jewish Zola, accusing France’s bien-pensant intellectual class of complicity in its own suicide. To his foes, he is a reactionary whose nostalgia for a fairy-tale French past is induced by an irrational fear of Muslims.

Finkielkraut’s cast of mind is generally dark, but when we met in Paris in early January, two days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, he was positively grim.
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by Steven J. Rosen
Justice

http://www.meforum.org/5113/congress-unrwa

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DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis March 16, 2015, 8:56 PM (GMT+02:00)

Rivals or would-be partners?

Monday night, in the final hours before Israel’s fiercely contested general election Tuesday, March 17, the four-seat margin the polls had awarded Yitzhak Herzog’s opposition left-of-center Zionist Union against Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-of-center Likud was shrinking fast.

debkafile’s sources, which tapped into some of the inside estimates, found these two frontrunners frantically crunching numbers in a race that might well turn out to be too close to call.

Whaever happens, neither of the two biggest parties can expect to form a government without coalition partners. According to last-minute estimates, the Zionist Union expected 26 (out of 120) Knesset seats compared with Likud’s 23, while Likud confirmed its rival’s 26 seats, but awarded itself 24.
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Last-minute decision for Tzipi Livni not to run in a ‘rotation’ agreement breaks campaign promises before polls even open, MKs fire.

By Tova Dvorin, INN

The announcement Monday that Tzipi Livni would not serve in a “rotation” agreement with Labor-Hatnua leader Yitzhak Herzog has drawn significant ire from MKs Monday night, who pointed out the poor timing of the announcement –the night before elections.

“The historic announcement of Livni and Herzog marks new lows in terms of broken promises,” MK Yariv Levin (Likud) stated Monday night. “If, until today, we had grown accustomed to the Left breaking its promises after elections, now these promises are being broken even before the polls open.”
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By Arlene Kushner

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By SCOTT ATRAN and DOUGLAS M. STONE, NYT

ERBIL, Iraq — THE Islamic State continues to control a huge section of Syria. But in Iraq, its advance has stalled. While Shiite militias and their Iranian allies fight the Islamic State ferociously, the Kurds have held a 640-mile front against the Islamic State’s advance. Their steadfastness should prompt America to rethink its alliances and interests in the region and to deepen its relationship with the Kurds — who are sometimes described as the world’s largest stateless nation.

Last week, the Sunni town of Tikrit (Saddam Hussein’s hometown) fell to largely Shiite forces from Iraq, backed by Iran. An offensive to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city and the heart of Arab Sunni nationalism, is now within reach. The Kurds plan to enter eastern Mosul, where many Kurds lived before the Islamic State seizedthe city in June, but they say that moderate Arab Sunnis must lead the effort to retake the rest of the city — not Baghdad’s predominantly Shiite forces or the Iranian-backed Shiite militias. The Kurds point out that it was grievances against Shiite rule that helped drive Sunni support for the Islamic State in the first place.

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By Abraham Miller, JEWISH PRESS

BIBI’S PENCHANT FOR PICKING LEFT WINGERS LIKE OREN, LIVNI, BARAK, AND WEINSTEIN IS TO BLAME.

REUTERS

Israel must try to repair relations with the United States no matter who wins Tuesday’s election, said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington and a potential foreign minister if his party joins the next government.

“We have to do a major reach-out. There’s some work to be done,” Oren said, citing strained ties after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s March 3 speech to Congress assailing a potential nuclear deal with Iran sought by President Barack Obama.

The US-born Oren, 59, was appointed ambassador by Netanyahu in 2009 and served until 2013. He is running for parliament as a candidate of the centrist Kulanu party that could be a kingmaker in building a governing coalition after the poll.

In an interview with Reuters, Oren, a historian, said Israel needed to restore bipartisan Congressional support in the face of Democrats’ anger over Netanyahu’s acceptance of the Republican invitation to address Congress.

One way to try to achieve that, he said, would be to declare that Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank would be limited only to areas which Israel intends to keep in any future land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians.
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Professor says that right bloc more viable, but Netanyahu may need to reach out to Labor anyway to save his spot as Likud head.

By Gedalyah Reback, INN

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu might be fighting for his political life, as the Likud campaign ramps up late in the game to fight off the Zionist Camp’s polls advantage. If Likud does not lead the next coalition, or at the very least make it into a national unity government, questions will center around the viability of Netanyahu as the party’s leader in an era in which personalities dominate election campaigns.
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By Ariel ben Solomon, JPOST

The Joint (Arab) List could soon be in a dilemma: Should it recommend Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog to form the next government, if the alternative is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? Would Herzog offer the Joint List enough goodies and promises so that it joins a leftwing coalition or at least cooperates with it? For the most part, the Joint List and its candidates have been clear that there is no chance they would join any government, since the conditions are not right.
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By Ron Jager, INN

The time is not ripe for change, no matter what the pollsters declare or what the press reports. And center-left parties and their leaders are simply unable to withstand political pressure when push comes to shove and simply back down.

Most critics of Prime Minister Netanyahu have been promoting an election strategy that recommends voting for center left political parties under the assumption that there are no longer any realdifferences in terms of security and defense issues between center left and the Likud. These home grown critics, many of them former Army Generals or former Security/Defense officials, in some instances funded by American Jewish liberals have claimed that even center left parties can make the right decisions when Israel’s security needs are challenged.
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by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY, NRO

Having the U.N. Security Council bless a deal wouldn’t make it binding under our Constitution.

So, as we warned earlier this week, the international-law game it is. It is no secret that Barack Obama does not have much use for the United States Constitution. It is a governing plan for a free, self-determining people.

Hence, it is littered with roadblocks against schemes to rule the people against their will. When it comes to our imperious president’s scheme to enable our enemy, Iran, to become a nuclear-weapons power — a scheme that falls somewhere between delusional and despicable, depending on your sense of Obama’s good faith — the salient barrier is that only Congress can make real law. Most lawmakers think it would be a catastrophe to forge a clear path to the world’s most destructive weapons for the world’s worst regime — a regime that brays “Death to America” as its motto; that has killed thousands of Americans since 1979; that remains the world’s leading state sponsor of jihadist terrorism; that pledges to wipe our ally Israel off the map; and that just three weeks ago, in the midst of negotiations with Obama, conducted a drill in which its armed forces fired ballistic missiles at a replica U.S. aircraft carrier.
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T. Belman.  I was there. The spirit was contagious. Lots of singing and dancing. More that half the crowd were under 18. Girls outnumbered the boys. Very exciting.

I have been thinking just how important this election is.  It reminded me how crucial the election was prior to the Oslo Accords.  The left passed the Oslo Accords by one vote. And it proved to be a monumental disaster for Israel.  We are still suffering the consequences from it. And now we are once again faced with a disaster. If the left wins the election, they will abandon Judea and Samaria and the Jews living there. The stakes are very high.

By Jewish Press

10:15 PM The massive pro-right rally is now over. Read more…