By Maysaa Shaja AlDeen, Al Monitor

As soon as Saudi Arabia declared the end of Operation Decisive Storm on April 21, all parties to the Saudi war, the Houthis and former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, jointly declared victory on the same day, in a war where no one achieved gains, and joint losses were the name of the game.

On March 26, Saudi Arabia announced that Operation Decisive Storm aimed to restore the legitimate government in Yemen, put an end to the expansion of Houthis to the south and undermine the power of both Saleh and the Houthis. However, the government was not restored, and the Houthis and Saleh are still expanding and fighting battles in the provinces of Marib, Taiz, Aden and Dali.
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Ramallah-based fund paid for Breaking the Silence report against the IDF in Operation Protective Edge, says Im Tirtzu.

By Arutz Sheva staff

By Ari Sofer, INN

Jewish Home fighting for Justice Ministry, betting on PM’s desperation one day before government-forming deadline

BY HAVIV RETTIG GUR AND TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF

With just a day and a half left before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must tell President Reuven Rivlin whether he’s succeeded in forming a coalition, negotiations with the last would-be coalition partner have turned ugly.

Netanyahu has made the Jewish Home party an offer he believes it will be hard for party leader Naftali Bennett to decline: the ministries of education and Diaspora for Bennett, agriculture for Uri Ariel and culture and sports for Ayelet Shaked – three ministers from an eight-seat party – and the posts of deputy defense minister and the chairmanship of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee.

However, Bennett seems primed to play hardball and leverage his position as the final piece Netanyahu needs to form a government, demanding the Justice Ministry for Shaked apparently in lieu of the Culture and Sports Ministry.
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T. Belman.  I was there too and can tell you that Arlene did a great job of highlighting what was said.
 

By Arlene Kushner

This is the subject of a conference currently being held by Shurat Hadin, the Israeli Law Center, founded and run by the amazing Nitsana Darshan-Leitner.

Current laws of warfare are outdated, she explained in her introductory remarks.  The Geneva Conventions never envisioned the asymmetrical warfare that is waged today.  We must redefine the laws of warfare, so that democratic states can adequately fight back. Today, terror groups attack civilians, and when democracies fight back, their defense is referred to as a war crime.  Terrorists should not be able to apply to international courts as if they were victims when they are the perpetrators.

The IDF must be able to fulfill its mission of protecting the people of Israel and we we must protect our soldiers, as well.
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Yisrael Beytenu chief and outgoing foreign minister slams new government of ‘opportunists’, says choosing ‘principles over portfolios’.

Moran Azulay, YNET

Avigdor Lieberman will lead his Yisrael Beytenu party into opposition and will not join the new government, the outgoing foreign minister announced Monday, effectively ending a years-long partnership with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud.

“I am happy we chose principles and not portfolios”, Lieberman said at a faction meeting in Jerusalem. “What’s being built is not a national camp, but a government that smacks of opportunism”.

The Yisrael Beytenu leader also said he was resigning from his position as foreign minister.
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DEBKA

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have gone out of their way in the last fortnight to shower friendly gestures on Israel, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and even Ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer. Refuting the dire predictions by Netanyahu’s critics of a disastrous breach, Obama and Biden, by word and gesture, are putting behind them the rancor long marring relations between Washington in Jerusalem.

The White House launched its new charm campaign for Israel on April 13 by meetings with three groups of American Jewish leaders. Obama addressed the first with an emotional affirmation of his support for Israel and its security. Vice President Biden, National Security adviser Susan Rice and Biden’s national security adviser Colin Kahl then talked to another group of Jewish leaders, while Obama spoke to Jewish “community leaders”, a group of individuals who though unaffiliated are influential and generous donors to the Democratic Party.
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T. Belman. This article was dated Feb 6/15. In yesterday’s article, Ari Biggs, Regavim’s director of international relations, said:

“But Regavim takes issue not only with Europe, but also with Israel’s bureaucracy and legal system which allows the situation to continue unabated.

“Europe has decided to go it alone, and Israel has decided to allow it,”

So which is it? Take note that Bibi made his announcement just prior to the recent elections.

European Union official defends unlicensed construction in Area C, says Palestinians have a right to build there

BY JUSTIN JALIL AND JTA February 6, 2015

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon to move forward with a plan to demolish some 400 Palestinian structures built in the West Bank with European funding, Israeli media reported Friday.

The prime minister’s order came shortly after a Thursday exposé in the Daily Mail claimed that the EU sank tens of millions of euros into homes which were not granted building permits by the Israeli government.
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By Uri Savir, Al Monitor

The Palestinian leadership follows with disdain and frustration the establishment of the new Israeli government: “With the outgoing government we thought it could not get any worse, but it seems that we were wrong,” a senior official in the entourage of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told Al-Monitor. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, did say that the advantage of the extremist nature of the Israeli government to-be is that now the Palestinian statehood issue would be put to the test, without international demands for incremental progress. “It’s a make-it-or-break-it time,” he said.

The Palestinian leadership, according to this source, is planning at the very outset of the new government to put a policy strategy in place to try to convince the international community to deal with the Palestinian issue again, despite the focus on the Iran negotiations.
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T. Belman.  I totally support this demand plus there should be a commitment to lift the freeze.

By Sha’i ben-Tekoa, AMERICAN THINKER

On April 27, the media quoted Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman — the foreign policy wizard who engineered the fiasco of the North Korean nuclear deal under Pres. Clinton and who is now working her diplomatic legerdemain on Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran — threatened Israel. She said that if Prime Minister Netanyahu’s new coalition government does not pledge allegiance to the Two-State Solution (TSS), the U.S. will “find it difficult” to back Israel in the U.N. Security Council as U.S. administrations have in the past scores of times by casting a veto.

With the U.N’s roster of member-states almost one-third officially Muslim, if not for the United States the Council would long ago have crippled Israel with sanctions like those passed against Apartheid South Africa that helped bring that racist system down. In 1975, the General Assembly judged Zionism in UNGA Resolution 3379 to be “a form of racism” too. That resolution was repealed in 1991 but not the fifty-three other General Assembly resolutions passed over the years that explicitly liken Israel to Apartheid South Africa.
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“A better deal is necessary. A better deal is possible. A better deal must and can be achieved. But if not, no deal is better than this bad deal,” PM Benjamin Netanyahu says • U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry accuses Iran deal critics of “hysteria.”

By Shlomo Cesana, Daniel Siryoti, Dan Lavie and Israel Hayom Staff

In a video message marking the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s 30th anniversary on Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Preventing Iran from being able to build nuclear weapons is the foremost challenge of our generation. Unfortunately, the Lausanne framework fails to meet this challenge and if it will be realized, it will make the world a much more dangerous place.”
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By Vic Rosenthal

By Ted Belman

I am reading Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi and highly recommend it for its insights. Much of it deals with the loss of kibbutzim power and ideology and the growth of right wing ideology.

One major event that I want to comment on has to do with the passing of Oslo ll, the Interim Agreement, in 1995. The agreement had to do with the withdrawal by Israel from cities in Judea and Samaria.

This agreement was passed by a vote of 61 to 59. To squeak out this victory Rabin had to bribe a right wing MK to switch sides and had to rely on the Arab vote. Thus it didn’t come close to being approved by a majority of Jews. Rabin told him, “I will make peace with whatever majority is available”.

A representative of the settlers, Rabbi Yoel Ben Nun, who had Rabin’s ear, met with him to discuss the agreement. The Rabbi asked, “If this is what you are giving away now, what will you have left to offer in a final-status agreement?”
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Killing this oversight would only give Obama more Iran running room.

Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2015

In the matter of the Corker-Cardin bill giving Congress a voice in the Iranian nuclear deal, allow us to adapt Churchill’s dictum on democracy: It’s the worst form of legislation, except for all the others that have been proposed.

We write this as the bill—named for Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker(R., Tenn.) and ranking Democrat Ben Cardin (Maryland)—is being assailed by some of our conservative friends as a damp squib that won’t stop President Obama from striking a bad deal with Tehran while giving the agreement an implicit seal of Congressional approval. Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have proposed amendments that, while defensible on their merits, would give Democrats the political excuse many of them seek to vote against the bill.
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By Ted Belman

Under no circumstances should Iran be allowed to get the bomb, given that they are the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, have killed many Americans and constantly chant death to America. For those who care, it is also dedicated to destroying Israel, America’s most stalwart ally in the Middle East. I would have thought this, self-evident.  Apparently not.

President Obama, from the beginning of his first term choose engagement with Iran as opposed to confrontation. But Iran proved a reluctant fiancée. Obama had to bribe her by lifting significant sanctions that were in place that were beginning to bite. Once the negotiations started in earnest, Obama continued to abandon his read lines by making concession after concession. But Iran held her ground.
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Israel is set to become even more polarizing in American politics.

By Peter Beinart, The Atlantic,  Mar 19/15

Some of Benjamin Netanyahu’s victims are obvious: Isaac Herzog, who hoped to unseat him; Barack Obama, who hoped for an Israeli leader who wouldn’t conspire against him with the GOP; anyone who still believes in the two-state solution.

Others are less obvious. Consider what Bibi has done over the past few months to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which lobbies on behalf of the U.S.-Israel alliance in Washington. To its critics, AIPAC looks like a right-wing organization. But that’s not how it looks inside. AIPAC’s staff is militantly bipartisan. After all, they must maintain their influence no matter who runs Washington. And AIPAC’s members have, historically, been mostly Democrats. Since most American Jews are Democrats, it’s hard to run a large, mainstream American Jewish group without having lots of them around.
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T. Belman. Bennett is therefore the only one that might kill the coalition by not joining it or bolting later necessitating new elections. We have yet to see what is to happen with the construction freeze.

To obtain political quiet and government longevity, Netanyahu is piling his future partners’ plates with honors, irrespective of the size of their factions. All except Naftali Bennett.

By Yossi Verter, HAARETZ

In the little spare time he has – by all accounts, in the small hours of the night – Benjamin Netanyahu apparently watches the American cult TV series “Breaking Bad.” It’s about a chemistry teacher from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who falls ill with cancer, and in order to pay for expensive treatments and ensure his family’s future, turns to the production and sale of crystal meth.The new highs (or lows) of extreme violence, absolute evil and unfathomable cynicism portrayed in every episode undoubtedly help the premier chill out after hours of coalition bargaining with Naftali Bennett and all the others.

One of the key comments that Walter, “Breaking Bad”’s protagonist, makes to his young partner-in-crime, Jesse, when warning him against falling prey to the charms of a local drug lord, is: “Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer.”
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Regavim, the right-wing equivalent of Peace Now, says Europe is using an impoverished Bedouin population to create political facts on the ground

By Elhanan Miller, TOI

Illegally constructed structures in the hamlet of Arareh, east of Jerusalem, April 29, 2015 (photo credit: Elhanan Miller/Times of Israel)

Two biblical verses look down from the conference room wall of Regavim, an Israeli NGO that monitors and reports on illegal Arab construction in Israel and the West Bank. The first, taken from the book of Genesis, sums up the organization’s motivation, iterated in the words of God to Abraham: “All the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring, forever.”

The second, epitomizing Regavim’s modus operandi, quotes from the first chapter of Isaiah: “Zion will be delivered with justice.” Regavim – Israel Independence Fund was founded in 2006 by newly elected Jewish Home MK Bezalel Smotrich and Yehuda Eliyahu in response to a September 2005 Supreme Court case brought by Peace Now against the illegal outpost of Harasha in Samaria.
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