By Ted Belman

This article has some very important truths about Netanyahu. READ IT.

From the start of the election campaign and even beyond his victory, Netanyahu has had one message – a unity government is not on the agenda. But YNET asks “can this declaration withstand a reality check?

After listing many Netanyahu’s quotes in which he negated a unity government, the YNET article continues:

But it was hard to find senior Likud ministers to parrot Netanyahu’s mantra during the campaign. Perhaps because its DNA is so completely different to that of previous political discourse between Likud and Labor.

Read more…

By Ted Belman

According to Arutz Sheva:

Jewish Home chairman Naftali Bennett on Sunday night threatened to end the coalition negotiations with the Likud, if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu decides to appoint Shas chairman Aryeh Deri as Religious Affairs Minister.

“Unilaterally taking the Religious Affairs portfolio from religious Zionism and giving it to Shas is the end of the negotiations with the Jewish Home,” Bennett announced on his Twitter account, in a signal to Netanyahu that he must reverse his decision to give the Ministry of Religious Affairs to Shas if he wants Jewish Home in the coalition.

Read more…

By Ted Belman

France has announced a plan to spend 100 million Euros to combat racism and antisemitism. It includes regular monitoring of racism and anti-Semitism in order to generate data; protect Jewish and Muslim houses of worship and communal institutions; and push back against discrimination.

Criminal actions with racist motives will be punished more harshly, while hate speech will be prosecutable under criminal rather than civil law. Internet hate also will get a closer look.

“The strategy focuses on the same four elements of [the] ADL’s efforts against anti-Semitism: public awareness campaigns, legal reforms, addressing cyber-hate and sponsoring anti-bias education programs in schools,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement.
Read more…

By Ted Belman

Under US pressure Israel has agreed to transfer $1.85 billion is customs duty collected on imported goods intended for the Palestinians And the PA has agreed that Israel could with hold close to 500 shekels to apply to the money owed to Israel electric Company.

There was no mention of any agreement regarding the ICC. Originally Israel with held the money as punishment for the PA joining. Is there an agreement here too that the PA won’t initiate complaints to the ICC?

ISRAEL HAYOM in explaining the deal, wrote:
Read more…

UTJ source tells Arutz Sheva that Likud has retracted prior agreements to repeal criminal sanctions from Enlistment Law.

By Haim Lev, Cynthia Blank, INN

Netanyahu looks ready to present Rivlin with rough outline of government as he seeks two-week extension to form a coalition.

By Gil Ronen, INN

In the course of this week, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is expected to ask President Reuven Rivlin for a two-week extension of the initial 28 days he received to cobble together a governing coalition. He will, however, probably inform Rivlin of the rough outline of what his government will look like.

According to Israel Hayom, which is considered close to Netanyahu, the Likud party will hold the Justice, Public Security, Transportation, Welfare and Education ministries, as well as several other portfolios. All in all, Likud will hold 10-12 portfolios.

Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu will receive the Finance Ministry, which Kahlon will head. In addition, it will receive the Construction and Housing Ministry, which will be headed by MK Yoav Galant, and the Envitronmental Protection Ministry, which will be headed by MK Eli Elaluf.
Read more…

Analysis: Relationship between Jerusalem and Beijing is blooming due to China’s growing self-confidence, its understanding that battle against Israel is no longer a uniting factor in the Muslim world, and its desire to maintain close ties with a regional power whose crisis with Washington is deepening.

By Yoram Evron, YNET

A renewed affair has been developing for the past three years between Israel and China. About 10 years after their relationship experienced a crisis following an American demand that Israel cut its security ties with China, Beijing has begun working to renew the close relations between the two countries.

The first clear sign was the resumption of high-ranking visits between Israel and China, including visits by chiefs of staff, defense ministers, and finally Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to China in May 2013, which created a great buzz. The Chinese foreign minister, deputy prime minister and politburo members have also visited Israel since then.
Read more…

Rubio gets it.

“We may have to decide at some point what is worse: a military strike against Iran and a nuclear armed Iran. I am not cheerleading for war. I don’t want there to be the need to use military force. But a nuclear Iran is an unacceptable risk for the region and the world,”.

Weekly Standard

Read more…

JPOST

Bayit Yehudi Chaiman Naftali Bennett is making common cause with his right-wing rival, Yisrael Beytenu chief Avigdor Liberman, in a bid to bolster both men’s bargaining position in coalition talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Channel 2 reported on Friday.

According to the network, Bennett and Liberman reached an agreement whereby the former would drop his demand to be named foreign minister – Liberman’s current position – in exchange for the latter’s assistance in obtaining other key portfolios while thwarting any attempt by Netanyahu to form a national unity government with the center-left Zionist Union.

The two nationalist politicians were vocal critics of Netanyahu’s handling of Operation Protective Edge, frequently second-guessing what they perceived to be the premier’s timid strategy in defeating Hamas.
Read more…

US halted Israeli arms transfer to Nigeria to fight Boko Haram

Obama administration intervened to silence prosecutor in Argentine probe of Iranian leader
 

By Natan Sharansky  WASHINGTON POST 4-17-15

On a number of occasions during the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, the Israeli government has appealed to the United States and its allies to demand a change in Tehran’s aggressive behavior. If Iran wishes to be treated as a normal state, Israel has said, then it should start acting like one. Unfortunately, these appeals have been summarily dismissed. The Obama administration apparently believes that only after a nuclear agreement is signed can the free world expect Iran to stop its attempts at regional domination, improve its human rights record and, in general, behave like the civilized state it hopes the world will recognize it to be.

As a former Soviet dissident, I cannot help but compare this approach to that of the United States during its decades-long negotiations with the Soviet Union, which at the time was a global superpower and a existential threat to the free world. The differences are striking and revealing.
Read more…

By Martin Sherman, JPOST

I trust the Obama administration to get a good deal. – Isaac “Buji” Herzog to Jeffrey Goldberg, Saban Forum, December 2014

For 20 years, three presidents of both major parties proclaimed that an Iranian nuclear weapon was contrary to American and global interests – and that they were prepared to use force to prevent it. Yet negotiations that began 12 years ago as an international effort to prevent an Iranian capability to develop a nuclear arsenal are ending with an agreement that concedes this very capability… –Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, “The Iran Deal and Its Consequences,” The Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2015

As more and more emerges as to what we know – and what we don’t know – about the deal being brewed by the Obama administration with Tehran’s theocracy on its nuclear program, the more mindlessly moronic the pre-election platitudes of the former (and probably, the future) head of Israel’s opposition appear to be.
Read more…

By Caroline Glick, JPOST

This week in two meetings with prominent American Jews, President Barack Obama threw down the gauntlet. Either the Jews of America will rise to the challenge or they will allow Obama to marginalize them.

It is their choice, and now is the time for them to decide.

In the first meeting, Obama met with centrist Jewish leaders from major Jewish organizations like the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC. Major donors to these groups, like to almost every other major Jewish organization in America, are largely Democrats.
Read more…

Great list

By David M. Weinberg, ISRAEL HAYOM

[..]
Here is a quick review of 10 important policy modifications that can come about only if a conservative-nationalist coalition forms the next Israeli government.

1. Housing: The Israel Lands Authority must sell off all unplanned urban lands slated for eventual development. The government must radically streamline regulation in zoning, planning and building. This is the only way to truly bring down the high price of housing. Labor under Shelly Yachimovich fought such reforms tooth and nail, because the free market and privatization principles run up against her party’s socialist leanings.

2. Banking: Regulatory hurdles preventing Internet banking must be eliminated. The Labor-affiliated big banking elite (Bank Hapoalim and others) is adamantly opposed to this.

3. Food: All statutory powers must be stripped away from the “moatzot yetzur,” the state-protected “production councils” in the food industry, to bring about true competition and bring down food prices. These behemoth, archaic cartels were established by the kibbutz movement, which still holds significant sway in the Labor party.
Read more…

Only a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the Iranian regime could lead anyone to believe any deal will satisfy Tehran’s nuclear ambitions • The truth is the U.S. can bring Iran’s nuclear program to a halt — it simply chooses not to do so.

‘Now we need a super-majority to override the president’

By Bob Unrah, WMD

The bill that would enable Congress to review any nuclear deal with Iran is coming under fire for allegedly altering the Constitution’s requirements for treaties.

One prominent talk-radio host even is accusing the U.S. Senate of rewriting the Constitution to allow approval of a treaty with only one-third of the Senate, plus one.
Read more…

Clare Lopez comments on the Iran and p5+1 negotiations in Washington Times

But if we take a step backward and consider what we already know or ought to know about Iran’s nuclear weapons program, it should become rather quickly obvious that all this diplomatic wrangling about centrifuges, enrichment levels, inspection regimes, and sunset clauses is nothing but window dressing.

That’s because the real Iranian nuclear weapons program very likely is not the one they’re all tussling over. The real Iranian nuclear weapons program long ago was withdrawn behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy guarded by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS—Iran’s primary intelligence agency).

Something to think about.

Shelley Neese, who produced this video, writes:

My name is Shelley Neese. We have communicated in the past as Israpundit has published some of my op-eds. I am also a regular reader and so appreciate the work of Israpundit. Anyways, I wanted to share a new video that I have produced and went live with yesterday. It has huge potential to go viral and I produced it with the intent of educating a younger audience on the rise of antisemitism in France. Its part of an effort to help the Jewish Agency finance the thousands of requests from French Jews to make aliyah. The hard-hitting lyrics cover 200 years of Jewish history in France, from Dreyfus to the most recent kosher supermarket attack.
Read more…