DEBKA

Acting on direct orders from Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian special forces raided the nine PA-ruled towns of the West Bank in the past 48 hours and detained 500 Hamas suspects, DEBKAfile’s military sources report. Abbas ordered the operation after discovering that Hamas had been hatching a plot for some weeks to stage an armed insurrection against the Palestinian Authority, starting in one of the Palestinian towns – possibly even the PA capital of Ramallah. They would assassinate him in the process of the coup.

Of late, Abbas has kept his distance from Ramallah and his seat of government and spends most of his time traveling in foreign countries, especially Arab capitals, where he feels safer under the protection of foreign security services than he does at home.
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THE TOWER

The terrorist organization Hamas misused international law during Operation Protective Edge last summer “to undermine Israel’s perceived moral standing and international support,” according to a report commissioned by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and released this week. The report (.pdf), which was written by a task force headed by five retired American generals, observed:

Contrary to accusations of widespread unlawful military conduct, we observed that Israel systemically applied established rules of conduct that adhered to or exceeded the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) in a virtually unprecedented effort to avoid inflicting civilian casualties, even when doing so would have been lawfully permitted, and to satisfy the concerns of critics. However, it is the conclusion of this Task Force that Israel’s military restraint unintentionally empowered Hamas to distort both the law and facts for their own purposes to the ultimate detriment of civilians’ safety, for which Hamas bears sole responsibility.

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Dear Friends and Supporters of Im Tirtzu,

Last week we embarked on a campaign whose goal is to strengthen the discourse in Israel on the importance of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. In addition, we are simultaneously undertaking widespread, intensive activities with the purpose of raising the voter turnout percentages in Israel’s periphery.

They say that each election cycle in the Jewish state is crucial. Yet, as Ecclesiastes teaches, “there is no new thing under the sun”.

Having said that, these elections are entirely different from any we have known until today.
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Nidal al-Mughrabi, Reuters Tuesday, 10 March 2015

A Qatari official visiting a Gaza neighborhood heavily bombed in last summer’s war with Israel said on Tuesday the Gulf Arab state had begun a project to rebuild 1,000 homes as part of a $1 billion aid pledge.

Mohammad al-Amadi, head of the Qatari Committee to Rebuild Gaza, said that earlier in the day Israel had allowed four truckloads of cement into the Gaza Strip so that the planned construction of the dwellings could begin.
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Daniel Gordis, BLOOMBERG

For all the vitriol in the U.S. surrounding Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech last week to Congress, it was nothing compared with what the Israeli prime minister faced upon his homecoming. Israeli politics are generally more vicious than their American parallel, and Netanyahu returned to face what is almost a perfect storm raging around his re-election campaign.

It began with comments by Meir Dagan, a former director of Mossad, who said that the prime minister’s conduct of the conflict with the Palestinians would lead Israel to being either a binational or an apartheid state. Dagan has long been critical of Netanyahu, but former Mossad chiefs have virtual demigod status in Israel, so his accusation (which he repeated in front of an estimated 80,000 peopleat an anti-Netanyahu rally Saturday in Tel Aviv, where he also said that Netanyahu has brought Israel to its worst crisis since its creation) clearly stung.
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Rabbanit Adina Bar-Shalom, Israel Prize winner and daughter of the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual founder of the haredi Shas party, took part on Monday in a meeting in Tel Aviv held by the Geneva Initiative in which 30 political activists from different parties were featured.

In the meeting, Bar-Shalom spoke about peace deals, saying “I’m afraid of the ramifications that will be from a radical right government. We don’t want a binational state. If we continue in the current situation – we’ll reach that.”

“A lot of blood was spilled here and every couple of years there’s another war. The only alternative is two states to two peoples. As more time passes we’ll only reach a worse (peace) deal,” opined the rabbanit.
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ITS A START

JPOST

An organization called Muslims Against Terrorism has launched an ad-campaign in Toronto aimed at pushing back against Islamic radicalism and a growing tide of anti-Muslim sentiment, the Toronto Sun reported Monday.

Led by local Imam Steve Rockwell, whose appearances on TV and radio broadcasts have made him a recognizable figure in recent debates over the place of Islam in Canadian society, the campaign has focused on expressing the dedication of Canadian Muslims to the security of their country and compatriots.

One advertisement, appearing on a Canadian subway platform reads: “Any Muslim who hurts Canada or a Canadian is an enemy of Islam. ”
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Labor 24, Likud 21 as Yesh Atid surges to 14. Majority of Yesh Atid and Kulanu voters want Herzog as prime minister.

Arutz Sheva

A poll on the Knesset Channel a week ahead of March 17 elections gives the Labor and Hatnua “Zionist Camp” of Yitzhak Herzog and Tzipi Livni an edge over Likud, with Labor coming in at 24 mandates and Likud at 21.

Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid continues its comeback to 14 seats, still a far cry from its current 19, and the joint Arab list comes in next at 13 mandates. Jewish Home at 12 seats continues to come in at fifth, a trend in recent weeks with intermittent results at fourth place.

Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu comes in next at nine, followed by Shas at seven, United Torah Judaism at six, and Yisrael Beytenu and Meretz getting five seats each. Eli Yishai’s Yachad – Ha’am Itanu joint list with Otzma Yehudit continues to pass the threshold with four seats.
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By Alex Markovsky

The future of American-Russian relations and the balance of power in Europe will – at least in the short run – depend on the resolution of the Ukrainian conflict. Notwithstanding the sanctions and denunciations by Western Europe and the USA, no development since the fall of the Berlin Wall has increased Russia’s influence as much as the acquisition of Crimea and the forthcoming division of Ukraine, which I predicted a year ago in my posts Crimea, Ukraine and the Agony of Impotence Parts I and II.

With the election of a pro-socialist government in the United States in 2008, Putin saw the opportunity for Russia to become the dominant force in world affairs. A scholar of Marxism well versed in the socialist curriculum, Putin knew that the American drive to socialism would require enormous spending on social programs and a massive expansion of the size of government. While Obama was spending on food stamps, solar energy and windmills, Putin was investing in oil and gas; while America was reducing its military budget and downsizing its armed forces, Russia was investing billions in modernizing the Russian military.
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IMRA

Finding a good high school just got a whole lot easier. Five leading Israeli schools have opened their doors to American teens and best of all, not only is the tuition free, the programs are all expenses paid, with housing, meals, transportation, books, and spending money all covered. Even the flight out to Israel is free.

The free high school in Israel programs are open to all Jewish students and offer a relief from the notoriously high tuitions paid for Jewish high schools in the US. And not only are the participating schools top tier academically, each features its own area of specialization, giving students a wide range of high school experiences to choose from.

There’s literally something for everyone.
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By Theodore Shoebat

The one who killed Boris Nemtsov was not Putin, but devout Muslims from the Balkans. One of them, Zaur Dadayev, was confirmed by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, to be a devout Muslim:

All who know Zaur (Dadayev) confirm that he is a deep believer and also that he, like all Muslims, was shocked by the activities of Charlie and comments in support of printing the cartoons

Zaur was also a high ranking member of the Chechen police force and distinguished for his bravery.

Another one of the Muslims involved in the killing of Boris blew himself up with a grenade once Russian police surrounded his house to arrest him.
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Report rejects American adoption of Israeli level of restraint

BY: Alana Goodman, FREE BEACON

Israel’s military restraint during the conflict in Gaza last summer “unintentionally empowered Hamas” by allowing the terror group to distort international law and secure a public relations victory by exploiting the media, according a task force of retired U.S. generals.

The task force also warned that Hamas’ disinformation strategy could be replicated against the U.S. military and advised the U.S. government to institute a plan to combat similar media campaigns in the future.

“Hamas supported false claims against the [Israel Defense Forces] by distorting stories and images to serve the organization’s narrative, and by manipulating stories in the international media,” said the Gaza Conflict Task Force in a report commissioned by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and released on Monday.
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[T. Belman. The Senators just euchred Obama.]

BY TAMAR PILEGGI, TOI

Nearly half of the US Senate wrote an open letter to the Iranian leadership Monday, warning that any deal reached between Washington and Tehran during the ongoing nuclear talks won’t remain in effect after President Barack Obama leaves office.

The letter, signed by 47 Republican senators, is the latest effort to pressure the Obama administration into granting Congress some oversight over the nuclear negotiations and emerging agreement, Bloomberg reported Monday.

“It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system … Anything not approved by Congress is a mere executive agreement,” the lawmakers wrote.
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By Karin McQuillan, AMERICAN THINKER

The American Jewish community, united to Israelis by bonds of the heart, has, through this tie, been facing terrorist onslaughts for years. Israel suffered the per capita equivalent of 250,000 Americans dead and wounded during the “peace process” when arch-terrorist Yassir Arafat was installed in power. Yet the rise of Palestinian and Arab-style Nazism has been ignored and tolerated by the majority of Jews, who at times appear deficient in basic human capacities for self-defense and reality testing. I will propose the thesis that American Jews display the faulty reactions typical of trauma victims.

American Jews do not see themselves as victims, but as winners, and they are right. Most victimized groups are dysfunctional. Societies who have suffered two thousand years of oppression and assault could be expected to disintegrate into social pathology — murder, violence, alcoholism, family breakdown, neglect and abuse of their children — but the Jewish community, in every country, is to the contrary marked by the lowest levels in all these social symptoms.
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That, it turns out, is exactly what the new, higher electoral threshold has done

By Evelyn Gordon

In two weeks, Israel will conclude its first election campaign under a new law that significantly raised the electoral threshold. Previously, parties had to win 2.4 seats to enter the Knesset; now, they must win four. And judging by the polls, the result has been disastrous: Not only is the higher threshold keeping out parties we should want in, but it’s also letting in parties we should want out.

The salient example of the first problem relates to the Arab parties. A poll published in Haaretz last month found that Arab voters overwhelmingly want their MKs to focus on their own community’s socioeconomic problems rather than the Palestinian problem (70% to 30%). They also overwhelmingly want their MKs to join the government (61% to 36%), since coalition parties wield more influence than opposition parties do; this desire is so strong that almost half that 61% favor joining regardless of who becomes prime minister. Finally, since existing Arab MKs not only spend most of their time and energy supporting the Palestinians, but adamantly refuse to join any government (as MKs Masud Ganaim and Ahmed Tibi recently reaffirmed), almost half the respondents were, unsurprisingly, highly dissatisfied with their current MKs.
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Those attacking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to address the U.S. Congress must be unaware of how the U.S. Constitution actually works.

By Moshe Arens  HAARETZ Mar. 8, 2015

It has been a long time since there was so wide-ranging a consensus on a single issue in Israel as the threat that Iran would pose were it to possess a nuclear bomb. All the major political parties agree it would represent a great danger to Israel, and that efforts must be made to prevent such an eventuality. Moreover, it is generally recognized that the agreement currently taking shape in negotiations between the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (the P5+1) and Iran – but actually between the United States and Iran – is far from satisfactory as far as Israel is concerned.

One might therefore have expected that Israel’s prime minister would have the blessing of the vast majority of Israelis when he took off for Washington, D.C., to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress – at the invitation of the Speaker of the House of Representatives – all united in the hope that he might be successful in bringing about a change in the course of the negotiations with Iran.
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T. Belman.  I originally posted this article on Oct 3/14.  It dealt with whether Netanyahu agreed to Kerry’s frame work as a basis for restarting talks. Essentially from Bibi’s own mouth we learn that he agreed to the framework as the basis of negotiations to get them started but was free to not agree to any part of the framework during negotiations.  Bibi had no intention of making a deal.  He only wanted to preserve negotiations. But the Document of Concessions negotiated in back channels was dated August 2013 long before and independent from the Framework discussion. Today, Dermer explained:

“In complete contrast to what is claimed, at no stage was any concession agreed upon. This was an attempt to ignite negotiations based on the principles of the international community, while Israel retains the right to reject topics that it doesn’t accept.”

YNET discussed Dermer’s role in the most biased way here.

By Ted Belman (Originally posted on Oct 3/14)

In May 2014 I posted:

US to Netanyahu: ‘We oppose unilateral steps’

By Ronn Torossian, NEW YORK POST

Why are the organizers of this year’s Celebrate Israel Parade letting a vehemently anti-Israel group march along down Fifth Avenue?

Sunday, May 31, brings North America’s largest one-day celebration for Israel. Each year, tens of thousands celebrate the beauty of Israel — the land and her people — marching beneath blue-and-white banners to commemorate the modern-day miracle of the state of Israel and to pay homage to America’s closest ally in the Middle East.

Yet the parade organizers — the New York Jewish Community Relations Council and the UJA-Federation — refuse to prevent a demonstrably anti-Israel group, the New Israel Fund, from marching.

How demonstrably? Well the New Israel Fund funds the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement — which aims to treat Israel as an international moral leper like apartheid-era South Africa.
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By Jerry Gordon, NER

Polls in Israel are notoriously biased by the polling organizations. Probably worse than in the US. As Mike Bates, my colleague at 1330amWEBY’in Florida, said, during a recent Voice of Israel  National Security segment, “you only get the response your are seeking by asking biased questions”. That may explain a lot about why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got only a modest bounce overall in Israeli polls following his  compelling Address  before a Joint Meeting of Congress on March 3^rd.  Some polls had results that favored Netanyahu’s speech and views about the overarching threats to Israel’s security on Israel’s Golan frontier and a looming nuclear one from apocalyptic Shia Mahdist regime in Iran.
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