Long-time colleague/rival says PM suffers from ‘political paranoia,’ is ‘all talk’ on thwarting Tehran’s nuke project, is allowing Hamas to rearm in incomprehensible ‘silent deal’

BY DAVID HOROVITZ, TOI

The Israeli government will not take the steps necessary to stop Iran from getting the bomb, former foreign minister Avigdor Liberman said.

In an interview in which he savaged his former political ally Benjamin Netanyahu, Liberman said the prime minister is “all talk” when it comes to thwarting Iran, and in practice “it’s clear that he doesn’t have any intention to do what we need to do to prevent Iran from (attaining) nuclear capabilities.”

Liberman, who chose not to take his six-member Yisrael Beytenu Knesset faction into the new coalition, also charged that the government has a “silent agreement” with Hamas under which the Islamist terror group is being allowed to rebuild and improve its military infrastructure in Gaza.
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T. Belman. Perhaps this excellent criticism should also have been directed to American Jews. A J Street Poll found that “57% approved of Obama’s policies towards Israel “.

Obama is clearly determined to undermine the standing of the newly elected Israeli government by embarking on a campaign to promote an utterly fictional narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

By Isi Leibler, JPOST

It is time to stop making excuses for American Jewish leaders and their failure to respond to US President Barack Obama’s latest charm offensive, expressing “admiration” for Jews and “love” of Israel as a mantle to cast moral aspersions against the democratically elected government of Israel.

Obama is clearly determined to undermine the standing of the newly elected Israeli government by embarking on a campaign to promote an utterly fictional narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict, even in advance of the June 30 deadline of the “negotiations” with Iran.
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By Joseph Klein, CFP

According to the New York Times, citing unnamed diplomats, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon bowed to “unusual pressure from Israel and the United States” in deciding not to include either Israel or Hamas on a list of “armies and guerilla groups that kill and maim children in conflicts worldwide.” The list is included in an annex to an annual report by the Secretary General entitled “Children and armed conflict,” which he just released for 2015. The list, as its title states, is intended to identify specifically the entities that “recruit or use children, kill or maim children, commit rape and other forms of sexual violence against children, or engage in attacks on schools and/or hospitals in situations of armed conflict.”

Ban Ki-moon considered the recommendation of his special representative for children and armed conflict, Leila Zerrougui, to include both Israel and Hamas on this list as a reflection of their actions and the deadly consequences to children arising from the Gaza conflict last summer. The list already includes such Islamic jihad terrorist groups as the Islamic State, the al-Nusra Front, Boko Haram, the Taliban, Al Shabaaba, Al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula and the Houthis, as well as government forces of the Syrian regime, Yemen, Sudan and Afghanistan.
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Senior diplomats expose EU sanctions list all ready to force Israel into ‘peace talk’ concessions; Obama is threatening to let it happen.

By Ari Yashar, INN

Israel has been fighting the Iran nuclear deal due to the great danger it poses, but senior Western officials have revealed it is also doing so because once a deal is reached, the European Union (EU) and UN are planning a diplomatic offensive targeting the Jewish state.

The political assault is meant to force Israel into returning to yet more peace talks with the Palestinian Authority (PA) and making dangerous concessions in the process – and reportedly the EU already has a list of sanctions ready to force Israel to bend.

A senior Western diplomat told Ma’ariv in a report published Tuesday that “a diplomatic attack against Israel is expected soon that will surprise even the pessimists in Jerusalem.”
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New European guidelines would require Israel to label products made in Judea and Samaria and exported to Europe • Israeli officials: This amounts to a type of boycott and discourages Palestinians from returning to peace talks.

Associated Press and Israel Hayom Staff

Israel would be required to label products that are made in Judea and Samaria and exported to Europe under guidelines being prepared by the European Union.

The move is the latest sign of international discontent with Israeli construction in Judea and Samaria, as well as frustration over the bleak state of Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.

It also comes as a grassroots movement promoting boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel appears to be gaining steam.
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See also: Where Is the World Christian Outcry? Huffington Post

Can men of the cloth square the circle of exerting themselves to attack Jews while having no time for Christendom exploding on their doorstep?

By Steve Apfel, INN

Christian people are not like Muslims. They have no tradition of putting themselves out for co-religionists. Under attack they’ll remember to pray for them, perhaps; but picket embassies, occupy piazzas, marshal the media into battle, take the UN by storm – never.

Christendom right now is in dire straits. What would Paul the Apostle have done with some 100 millionfollowers under existential threat? Has there been a time like the present when every hour another Christian is martyred?  The way the church was afflicted under the Romans pales by comparison. Even under Muslims in medieval times the burning and slaying and pillaging to near extinction is dwarfed by the scale of what’s happening now.
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Poll finds half Gaza residents want to leave, 63% support missile attacks on Israel while blockade in place

AP

Gaza residents are unhappy with the territory’s Islamic militant Hamas rulers and their war with Israel last summer, a new Palestinian poll released Tuesday shows.

The poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed that half of Gaza residents want to emigrate, compared to 25 percent in the West Bank.

The center’s director, Khalil Shikaki, said the 50-percent emigration figure in Gaza is higher than ever before and that among young people it is even higher, about 80 percent.
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By Gili Cohen, HAARETZ

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said on Tuesday he did not believe a stable peace agreement could be reached with the Palestinians in his lifetime – one of the bleakest assessments from a top-level cabinet member since talks collapsed last year.

Ya’alon, one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest allies, accused the Palestinians of having “slammed the door” on efforts to keep discussions going, and said they had rejected peace-for-land deals for at least 15 years.

Peace negotiations broke off in April 2014, with disputes raging over Israeli settlement building in occupied land Palestinians seek for a state and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s unity deal with Hamas Islamists who rule Gaza and do not recognize Israel’s right to exist.
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By Toba Lazaroff, JPOST

Settlement construction in the West Bank rose sharply in the first quarter of 2015, with a 219 percent spike in completed housing and a 93% rise in starts, according to data released by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday.

The increase that occurred just prior to the March 17 election was not reflected in the CBS data on nationwide building, which showed that completed housing went up by 15.5 % and the starts dropped by 2%. The report, which focused mostly on the housing situation across the country, was released in the midst of an increased push by the international community to boycott Israel over the issue of settlement construction.
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T. Belman. TOI diminishes the importance of this speech.

BY RAPHAEL AHREN, TOI

Some Israeli politicians make history at the Herzliya Conference, the country’s premier politics and security gathering. In 2003, for instance, prime minister Ariel Sharontold the world for the first time about his plan to disengage from Gaza.

On Tuesday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might have also made history, in a sense — by delivering what was arguably his weakest speech in years, if not one of the weakest of his career: lackluster, meandering, repetitive, at times banal. Perhaps worst of all for a politician, it was uninspiring.

Prime ministers give many speeches and can’t be expected to reinvent the wheel every time they take the podium. But while Netanyahu’s one-hour filibuster was characteristic in that the content offered very little in the way of dramatic news, it was strikingly atypical for a usually brilliant rhetorician. Remember his speech to Congress in March? Supportive or not of his decision to lobby in DC against the president, his address was resonant, fluent, well-argued, mesmerizing.
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T. Belman. This is the title chosen by the editors of TOI. I totally disagree with it and with their sub-title “At the heart of a rambling policy address was PM’s unapologetic defiance in the face of international frustration over stalled peace efforts”. He is not being defiant because he wants to obtain certain assurances whereas in reality he has accepted their basic demands.

BY HAVIV RETTIG GUR, TOI

Just five minutes into Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s meandering Herzliya Conference speech Tuesday night, it was clear that he meant for it to be ignored — at least, that is, by Israel’s prime time television news, to which conference organizers had timed the event.

The delivery style – smiling knowingly into the audience, telling odd vignettes about India’s prime minister and Google’s CEO, switching between Hebrew and English seemingly at random, praising free-market capitalism with no clear point, even at one point recalling his own reforms of Israeli currency controls from the mid-1990s – was all so out of character and so hard to follow that it is hard to escape the conclusion that he did not mean for it to be closely followed by a local audience.

This is, after all, Benjamin Netanyahu — calculating, thoughtful, proud of his tactical prowess.
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T. Belman. The Herzliya Conference is very prestigious. Israel prime ministers often make important policy speeches there. I take Bibi at his word. He has resisted demands from the right for retaining all or part of J&S and that’s why he single-handedly imposed a construction freeze there. He is prepared for ’67 lines plus swaps but only insists on two things, recognition and demilitarization. He did not insist on an undivided Jerusalem. Believe him.

PM opens up about covert construction freeze, saying in secret meetings Abbas demanded continuation of the non-official ‘gesture.’

By Ari Yashar, INN

In an hour-long address to the Herzliya Conference on Tuesday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu spoke about the peace process and regional tensions that are creating a new reality in the Middle East – he also spoke about the largely hushed up building freeze in Judea and Samaria.

“I committed to two states at Bar Ilan,” he said, referencing his controversial 2009 speech voicing support for the establishment of a Palestinian state. “The solution as I see it is a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes Israel as a Jewish state.”
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By Daniel Greenfield, FPM

Behind the rise of ISIS, the Libyan Civil War, the unrest in Egypt, Yemen and across the region may be a single classified document.

That document is Presidential Study Directive 11.

You can download Presidential Study Directive 10 on “Preventing Mass Atrocities” from the White House website, but as of yet no one has been able to properly pry number 11 out of Obama Inc.

Presidential Study Directive 10, in which Obama asked for non-military options for stopping genocide, proved to be a miserable failure. The Atrocities Prevention Board’s only use was as a fig leaf for a policy that had caused the atrocities. And the cause of those atrocities is buried inside Directive 11.
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By Daniel Greenfield, FPM

In Washington D.C., the new director-general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and a former Saudi Major General, both of whom run think tanks with close ties to their respective governments, shook hands.

It wasn’t their first time.

Obama wasn’t there when it happened, but in a way he was responsible for it.

Both men are foreign policy experts who help shape the foreign policies of their countries and had conducted five previous meetings. The topic of the meetings was Iran.
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Here’s a contrary opinion: Contrary To Media Projections Erdogan’s AKP Will Dominate The Government Of Turkey And Use It To Help Usher In The Antichrist Government By Walid Shoebat.

By Prof. Dan Shapira, ISRAEL HAYOM

T. Belman. The Report examined different scenarios as though they were mutually exclusive. But what about the estimated benefits or costs from a failed peace agreement. Furthermore it estimated the benefits to a number of scenarios. Why? Because a peace agreement is so unlikely that other options had to be considered.

The peace settlement it envisages requires the evacuation of 100,000 Jews, but 150,000 is more likely involving a 50% increase in costs and human misery. As for the PA and Israel, neither are interested in allowing 600,000 descendants of the original refugees to enter the new Palestinian state. And I have yet to read that the international community would absorb 2/3 of the cost.

Should Israel have to take over J&S with the failure of the PA it would likely lead to the annexation of all the land. I doubt this was taken into account.

As for Israel doing nothing, they forecast even greater harm due to BDS. I believe they are making unfounded assumptions here. The US would never support sanctions or boycotts. In fact it is now legislating against them. True they acknowledge “The lion’s share of BDS’s economic damage, Ries added, would result from “investment flows” — decisions by capital funds, banks and so on to restrict the amount of money flowing to Israel.” So far, there is no evidence of this happening, quite the opposite.

This study is too academic for me. It merely plays with numbers. It doesn’t factor in the perils and negative consequences.

Two-state deal would put extra $120 billion in Israeli coffers, while Palestinian economy would grow by $50 billion, Rand report says, but absence of deal could cost country billions

By Raphael Ahren, TOI

Israel stands to gain some $120 billion (NIS 460 billion) over the next decade from a peace agreement with the Palestinians based on the two-state solution, according to an extensive new study from an American think tank.
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Supreme Court ‘Kicked Israelis in the Face’
Nitzana Darshan-Leitner, head of lawfare NGO Shurat Hadin, says SCOTUS decision on Jerusalem ‘truly damages every single Israeli.’

By RICK RICHMAN, NY SUN

Those disappointed in the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday in Zivotofsky v. Kerry, which struck down a law allowing Jerusalem-born Americans to have “Israel” listed in their passports as their the place of birth, are missing the long-term significance of the case, which will play out about three months from now.

The United Nations General Assembly is laying plans to opens its next session on September 15, and there have been rumors that France plans to submit to the Security Council a resolution to prescribe a Palestinian state in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, with a capital in Jerusalem, with a negotiating deadline of 18 months. The Obama administration is thought to be considering voting for the resolution, or allowing it to pass with a U.S. abstention.
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Danny Seaman writes to advise:

On our show, In The Lions’ Den, this week we assess the real impact of BDS. Major Jewish philanthropists scurried to meet in Las Vegas this weekend; the Israeli government convened emergency meetings and experts pitched in to address the threat, so why do we believe the BDS campaign has failed? How can the assault on Israel be combated and why is the Israeli media inflating the threat?

http://www.voiceofisrael.com/the-burning-failure-of-bds-hatred-of-israel/?auto=1

To Listen to the full show with GVAHIM and the Midburn Festival-  PRESS HERE!