The pre 2nd world war Appeasement policy closely resembles today’s demands of “Proportionality”.

By Prof. David A. Frenkel, Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Business and Management, INN

The term “proportionality” is one of the remarkable inventions of the modern western legal systems. It enables the Courts find the desirable way in the interpretation of private rights versus the State in Administrative Law, solve disputes among litigants and set down appropriate punishments in criminal cases. However, this term is only appropriate where all conflicting parties act under the same legal frame and the values are accepted by all of them. The same rule may also be applied to conflicts in the international sphere, provided all parties in the conflict accept the same values and follow them.

However, in international conflicts, where not all the parties act in the framework of the international conventions, the term “proportionality” becomes an one way weapon applied and used against the party who does follow them and is called to restrain and abstain from any response against the attacking party, claiming that any response may escalate the conflict because, or despite the fact that, the attacking party does not consider himself bound by “proportionalities” or any other limits or accepted rules.
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Jan. 4, 2015 (Xinhua) — Israel’s cabinet on Sunday approved a new plan to enhance economic ties with Japan, amid efforts to boost Israeli exports to Asian markets.

The plan, sponsored by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, constitutes an investment of “tens of millions of shekels over three years,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement.

It did not elaborate on the cost of the plan, but said the government’s goal is to double exports of Israeli goods to Japan by 2020, so that exports would amount to approximately 1.1 billion U.S. dollars per year.

The plan includes opening a trade office in Osaka, in addition to another in Tokyo. Osaka is the largest city in Kansai, a region where many of Japan’s largest companies are located and has a gross domestic product (GDP) of about 1 trillion dollars.
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Voice of Israel

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner director of Shurat HaDin, Israel Law Center, speaks with VOI’s Daniel Seaman and Daniela Traub about the Palestinian’s latest appeal to the International Criminal Court in the Hague, and how her organization is initiating lawsuits against the Palestinian Authority and its leaders for crimes against humanity.

Listen now

by Efraim Inbar
BESA Center Perspectives
January 4, 2015

Turkey is officially a NATO ally, and President Barrack Obama has called the current President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a friend. But Erdogan-led Turkey does not behave as an ally or a friend of the US. This is not a new development.

Erdogan and his Islamist party, the AKP, have ruled Turkey since 2002. Erdogan’s Turkey has gradually distanced itself from the West, adopting domestic and foreign policies fueled by Ottoman and Islamist impulses.

Turkey has been on the road to an authoritarian regime for several years. Infringements on human rights have gradually increased. In truth, Turkey has never had a political system with checks and balances able to constrain attempts to consolidate power around one politician. In recent years, Erdogan has weakened further the few constitutional constraints against the ‘Putinization’ of the Turkish political system.
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By Janet Tassel 

“Don’t send my boy to Harvard,”

The dying mother said.

“Don’t send my boy to Syracuse,

“I’d rather see him dead!

“Yes, send my boy to Princeton, or better still Cornell,

“But as for Bran-D-E-I-S

“I’ll see him first in hell!”

In that ancient fraternity drinking song, the original punch line was “Pennsylvan-I-A.” But now Brandeis,  certified (by Daily Caller) as America’s second “Most Rabidly Leftist, Politically Correct College for Dirty, Tree-Hugging Hippies,” walks away with the honor.
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By Rom Lerner, ISRAEL HAYOM

Reports last week said that the scope of immigration to Israel had reached a 10-year high. I was one of the sea of immigrants who chose to move here this year, arriving from Kenya with the help of the Israel Scouts youth movement’s Garin Tzabar project. I’m currently waiting to be drafted into an IDF combat unit. Our aliyah carries added value, because all of the 400 young Jews who moved to Israel this year under the auspices of Garin Tzabar did so with the intent of being drafted into the Israel Defense Forces and performing valuable service as lone soldiers.

Talking with my fellow members of the garin (a group of people immigrating to Israel together), I always seek the true reasons that led us to take this brave step. Many talk about the anti-Semitism that is rearing its head in recent years, forcing Jews to hide their identity, about fear of discrimination or about anti-Semitic incidents. A few even speak in whispers about a new threatening atmosphere that reminds us of stories from Jewish history we read about and heard Holocaust survivors tell chokingly. Others talk about the economic crisis Europe and the U.S. have undergone in recent years, which is even affecting the well-to-do Jewish communities.
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Ted Belman. I think that Berdishevsky is promoting Israel as a state of all its citizens rather than the nation state of the Jews. His arguments are not convincing at all. He espouses the opposite of what Martin Sherman espouses.

By Norman Berdichevsky

Many observers of the Israeli scene are convinced that the extreme views of the elected Arab Knesset members are a true measure of the community’s rejection of any accommodation of living peacefully and harmoniously with the Jewish majority. To do so is a common error in the mistaken and often ignorant understanding of Arab culture and the realities of Middle Eastern politics that characterize almost all of the so called “pundits” and reporters working in the field for major news gathering agencies. This includes the BBC at the top of the list with a huge staff of competent professionals and many years residence in the region. This short-sighted view has been put into dramatic relief by the universal praise accorded to the so called “Arab Spring” as a huge progressive step towards “democracy” and the recipient of extravagant praise from President Obama. He cavalierly abandoned his strongest ally. Egyptian President Husni Mubarak. in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood and its leader Muhammad Morsi only to see the Egyptian people rise in defiance against the islamists in what has been called the largest mass political demonstration in history.

How can one explain the apparent massive shift in sympathies and the ignorance of our State Department that continues to repeat the same mistake? Ignorance of Arab culture, language and mentality lie at the bottom of all these turnabouts.
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INSS Insight No. 652, January 4, 2015

By Oded Eran , Robbie Sabel

[..] Although not adopted, the text of draft resolution submitted to the UN Security Council by Jordan on behalf of “Palestine”1 merits examination. The submission of the draft resolution as such on behalf of the Palestinians was clearly a violation of the Palestinian undertaking under the Oslo agreement, in which Israel and the PLO agreed that “neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.”

Insofar as the UN Security Council is a political body making political decisions, even had the draft resolution been adopted it would not have been a judicial finding or a statement of international law, but rather a statement of the political views of the majority of members of the Council. The Security Council is authorized by the UN Charter to take binding decisions, but only when it determines under Chapter VII of the Charter that there has been “a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression.” None of the UN Security Councils resolutions since 1948 have used Chapter VII language in relation to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, including the Jordanian draft. Even Resolution 242 was not adopted under Chapter VII and only became binding when it was accepted by all the parties to the conflict.
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T Belman. Netanyahu should never have said that we won’t build because of the condemnation. I understand his desire to not attract attention from the ICC issue. To this end, there is no need to say we wont build. Better to not say anything on that score.

Lieberman: Palestinian moves at ICC show Oslo Accords have collapsed
Lieberman accuses European countries of abandoning Israel, points to support in UNSC for Palestinian statehood as proof of problematic ties.

By Barak Ravid, HAARETZ

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is preparing a harsh response to the Palestinian moves at the International Criminal Court in The Hague but clarified late last week that it will not include a declaration of settlement construction, Foreign Ministry Director-General Nissim Ben Sheetrit told Israel’s envoys to Europe at a conference in Jerusalem on Sunday.

In November 2012, after the Palestinian Authority’s status at the United Nations General Assembly was upgraded to non-member observer state, Netanyahu ordered a wave of settlement construction to the tune of thousands of housing units and the advancement of plans for the Mevasseret Adumim neighborhood in the E-1 corridor between Ma’aleh Adumim and Jerusalem. Read more…

JPOST

Both Jews and Arabs are proud to be Israeli, according to the extensive annual Israel Democracy Institute Democracy Index, which IDI president Yohanan Plesner and academic director Tamar Hermann presented Sunday to President Reuven Rivlin.

The poll of 1,007 respondents representing a statistical sample of the Israeli adult population has a margin of error of only 3.2%. Since 2003, the Index has served as a critical barometer of Israeli public opinion for Israeli politicians, government decision-makers, and newspapers of record around the world.

The poll found that 86% of Israeli Jews and 65% of Israeli Arabs described themselves as either very or quite proud to be Israeli. Only 13% of Israeli Jews and 34% of Israeli Arabs are not so proud or not proud at all to be Israeli. Read more…

THE AUTHOR IS NO FRIEND OF ISRAEL

Ben White, ME MONITOR

Speaking to the Security Council on Tuesday shortly after voting against the doomedPalestinian-drafted resolution on statehood, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power referred three times to an “unsustainable status quo” between Israel and the Palestinians.It is of course Washington itself that bears most responsibility for this status quo, through its diplomatic, military, and economic support for the occupier, and leadership of a decades-long ‘peace process’ that has given Israel the cover to de facto annex its way to a permanent occupation.

There is another ‘status quo’, however, that is already shifting: U.S. public opinion. In a poll conducted last November for the Brookings Institution, when asked about their preferred solution to the conflict, 34% of Americans said their government should push for one state with equal citizenship. That was up from 24% a year previously, a significant difference.
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By David Brooks, NYT

METULA, Israel — If I were a political novelist, I’d try to write a novel about Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel.

The story would be partly Nixonian. Netanyahu is surpassingly brilliant, as even his opponents here concede. He knows the minute guts of Israeli politics and has read deeply into big history and grand strategy. He is also said to be suspicious, solitary and insular. It is hard to stay on good terms with him, whether you are on his staff, or his nation’s closest ally.

The story would be partly Kennedyesque. The Netanyahu clan was presided over by Benjamin’s brilliant father Benzion, the great medieval historian. The eldest brother Jonathan was the golden child. When Jonathan died in the raid on Entebbe in 1976, hopes shifted to Benjamin, who is known as Bibi. Political analysts have spent decades psychoanalyzing the family dynamic, with mixed results, but a novelist who studied Sophocles or Tolstoy might be able to make some sense of it.
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UN Resolution 242 is recognized as the key UN resolution relating to the Israeli-Arab conflict which could alter how many reveal the issues in dispute especially as regards to borders.

By Yonah Jeremy Bob, JPOST

THE ISRAEL-JORDANIAN border fence. The future holds a very uncertain prognosis.

As the UN Security Council and International Criminal Court return to focusing on Israel, an about-to-be-published study reveals new sides to Council Resolution 242, recognized as the key resolution relating to the Israeli-Arab conflict, that could alter perceptions of issues in dispute, especially regarding borders.

According to an article by Prof. Eugene Kontorovich of Northwestern University, to be published soon in the Chicago Journal of International Law, a new side has emerged in the unending debate over the meaning of UNSC Resolution 242, which establishes principles for setting Israeli borders and withdrawal from territories conquered in 1967.
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Israel faces a twin peril, far more menacing to its survival as the nation-state of the Jewish people than the Iranian nuclear program or a Palestinian state.

By Martin Sherman, JPOST

The minute we leave South Lebanon we will have to erase the word Hezbollah from our vocabulary, because the whole idea of the State of Israel versus Hezbollah was sheer folly from the outset.It will most certainly no longer be relevant when Israel returns to its internationally recognized northern border.
– Amos Oz, “Try a Little Tenderness” (Interview),Haaretz, March 17, 2000

The ultimate test of this agreement will be a test of blood. If it becomes clear that [the Palestinians] cannot overcome terror, this will be a temporary accord and… we will have no choice but to abrogate it. And if there is no choice, the IDF will return to the places it is about to leave in the upcoming months.
– Yossi Beilin, Ma’ariv, November 26, 1993

The nightmare stories of the Likud are well known. After all, they promised Katyusha rockets from Gaza as well. For a year, Gaza has been largely under the rule of the Palestinian Authority. There has not been a single Katyusha rocket. Nor will there be any Katyushas.
– Yitzhak Rabin, radio interview, July 24, 1995
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T. Belman. This is credible. Netanyahu was ready to accept the Kerry Framework with some reservations. So not much divided Netanyahu, Livni and Herzog. Let us assume that Obama bettered the Framework to encourage this government to form. We know that Obama has also been protecting Israel at the UNSC. If everyone is in agreement save for Abbas, they will ram the deal down his throat.

In Feb 2014, I wrote The US should cut a deal with Israel and end the conflict.. I never imagined that Netanyahu would cut a deal so close to the’67 lines. This deal would have been under negotiation since the breakup last March. That perhaps explains why the freeze has remained in place and why Yaalon allowed the Arabs to build in Area C.

One more thing. Though Netanyahu said that he didn’t agree to a freeze, he imposed one defacto. Similarly, though he rejected negotiations based on the division of Jerusalem and and borders along the ’67 lines plus swaps, he nevertheless negotiated on that basis. There would have been no sense to negotiations otherwise. The fact that he was ready to accept the Kerry Framework says volumes even though he also said that he had reservations. My guess is that the reservations like the rejection of a freeze and the declaration of Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel, were for local consumption.

DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis

The Israeli government has traditionally been headed by one of the two rival mainstream blocs, the right-of-center Likud or the left-of-center Labor, excepting for unity governments in times of crisis and one case of a rotating premiership. Neither bloc has ever achieved a majority for forming a cabinet without a cluster of small factions.

This time may be different, DEBKAfile’s political sources report. The opinion samplings taken privately by party strategists indicate a close run in the March 17 general election between Binyamin Netanyahu’s Lilkud and Yitzhak Herzog’s opposition Labor, since he formed a partnership with Tzipi Livni and her small Hatnuah. Likud stays marginally ahead with 23-24 (out of 120) Knesset seats compared with Labor’s 20-22.

Instead of engaging in the excruciating, separate horse-trading for a government coalition after the elections with a bunch of small factions, Netanyahu and Herzog appear to have found common ground on the broad lines of a power-sharing partnership.
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How the US and the EU are to blame for its failure.
A critical analysis; Res 242, Oslo Accords, RoadMap, Kerry Framework
What Netanyahu has agreed to.
If not two states, then what?

SPEAKER: Ted Belman BASc, LLB

DATE: Monday January 19, 2015
TIME: 7:30 PM
PLACE: OU ISRAEL CENTER, 22 Keren HaYesod St., Jerusalem

Ted Belman is the Editor/Publisher of Israpundit.org and has been for 12 years. He made Aliya from Toronto in 2009 and currently lives in Jerusalem.

He has devoted his full time to Israpundit and has made it one of the most important pro-Israel blogs on the internet.

His articles are regularly published by American Thinker, Canada Free Press, Arutz Sheva and many other sites.

He is interviewed weekly on the Zelda Show which is produced in Toronto. In addition he is periodically interviewed by Middle East Radio Forum and the Denice Pandel Show both of which are broadcast from the United States.

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Ted Belman. This is an interesting article. Livni acknowledges how far Netanyahu was willing to go to maintain the negotiations with Abbas and clearly fingers Abbas as the prarty responsible for their surcease. This was contrary to the blame Netanyahu game the left wanted to voice. The author asks if the Livni/Herzog duo intends to offer Abbas more than the proposal he was offered by Kerry and turned down. He concludes they have no serious answer.

He writes “We know that the Likud, despite Netanyahu, will continue to drag us towards a bi-national state – a catastrophe.”. There is no truth to this whatsoever. Even if what he means is even if this isn’t the goal that Likud is striving for, their rejection of the TSS will lead us there. Netanyahu says the same thing. I disagree. Its fear mongering on both their parts. There is no way that anyone on the right would agree to that.

By Ben-Dror Yemini, YNET

There was no need for a further shift to the right, in the wake of the primaries, to clearly show that the Likud comprises a strong nucleus – a majority perhaps – that is opposed to a Palestinian state. Benjamin Netanyahu is just the dress window.
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Who ‘Assassinated’ Feiglin in Likud Primaries?

By Orli Harari, Ari Yashar, INN First Publish: 1/2/2015, 12:10 PM

Likud MK Moshe Feiglin was given an unrealistic spot to get into the next Knesset in Likud primaries tallied on Thursday, but according to reports on Friday that wasn’t mere chance – he was the target of an orchestrated “political assassination” from within the party.

According to Yedioth Aharonoth, the main hand behind Feiglin’s primaries failure was none other than Haim Bibas, director of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s elections headquarters, mayor of Modi’in and director of the regional authority of the city.

Bibas held a campaign to convince Likud activists in Judea and Samaria not to support Feiglin, according to the paper.
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