By Herb Keinon, JPOST

At the end of a day in which international organizations in Europe severely rebuked Israel, and the French were poised to submit a joint resolution with the Jordanians and Palestinians to the UN Security Council calling for a Palestinian state in two years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a “spirit of appeasement” is blowing through Europe.

Speaking Wednesday evening at a reception for foreign journalists, Netanyahu cited three decisions – the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg’s taking Hamas off the EU’s terrorist list, the European Parliament’s resolution backing Palestinian statehood, and the call at a meeting of the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention to investigate Israel for supposed violations of that convention – as indicating Europe’s interest in appeasing the “very forces that threaten Europe itself.”

“Too many in Europe are calling on Israel to make concessions that would endanger not only the security of Israel, but also – paradoxically – the security of Europe,” he said.
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Evidently Kerry doesn’t have a problem with this resolution provided it doesn’t heighten tensions. Whatever happened to no unilateral moves or direct negotiations only,

By Ben Ariel, INN

UN Security Council

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is giving Israel another year to withdraw from Judea and Samaria than originally reported, according to the updated text of the draft resolution the PA submitted to the United Nations (UN) on Wednesday.

The text, seen by AFP, calls for Israel to “end the occupation” – that is, to withdraw from Judea and Samaria – by 2017, instead of 2016 in the original text that was published back in October.

The draft resolution would set a 12-month deadline for wrapping up negotiations on a final settlement and the end of 2017 as the time frame for completing an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria.
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Rick Spence, FINANCIAL POST

My daughter, Aliza Belman Inbal, makes me so proud.

Listen to Yishai Fleisher interview her to understand why.

Dr. Aliza Inbal is the Director of the Pears Innovation for International Development Program at Tel Aviv University. She joins VOI’s Yishai Fleisher in-studio to discuss her passion for Tikkun Olam – making the world a better place, and explains Israel’s interest in helping developing countries through Israeli technology and innovation.

http://www.voiceofisrael.com/?p=3184?auto=1

Ted Belman. Kerry wants no one to upset the elections in Israel. Obviously he feels it will strengthen the right. But the implication is then that the US won’t veto a UNSC resolution asking for a two year deadline for Israel to vacate the territories. Then the EU court removes Hamas from terror blacklist

And finally European Union lawmakers settle on resolution stipulating that peace talks should progress, rather than a motion to recognize a Palestinian state without conditions • Center-right groups oppose recognition without a negotiated agreement with Israel.

Obviously Bibi put our head in the noose with his Bar Ilan speech and now, the world is tightening the noose without our consent. And they said all matters are to be settled by negotiations. WE MUST TAKE DECISIVE ACTION. AT A MINIMUM WE MUST DECLARE NO NEGOTIATIONS WHERE THERE ARE PRECONDITIONS. IF NOT THAT TO BUY SOME TIME THEN WE MUST ABROGATE OSLO AND ANNEX WHAT WE WANT.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry holds “tough and sensitive” meeting in London with chief PA negotiator, ahead of potential unilateral Palestinian move at U.N. Security Council • Kerry: No one should interfere in the upcoming Israeli elections.

Shlomo Cesana, Daniel Siryoti, Yoni Hirsch, Israel Hayom Staff and News Agencies

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry meets with Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby (second from left) in London on Tuesday | Photo credit: AP

Will the unilateral Palestinian initiative at the U.N. be postponed until after the Israeli elections in March? U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is trying to get the Palestinians to delay their proposal to the U.N. Security Council for a resolution that would set a two-year deadline for the establishment of a Palestinian state and an “end to the occupation.”
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Start watching at 14:50 PM and watch until its all over.

The person to her left is Simon Johnson, CEO, The Jewish Leadership Council UK. He spoke well.

Many democracies also explicitly embrace their ethnic identity. The U.S. is unusual in not doing it.

By JOEL H. GOLOVENSKY, WSJ

The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has fallen apart and new elections are scheduled for March. One of the main controversies that cracked the government coalition was a proposed law to designate Israel the “Nation-State of the Jewish People.” The bill’s opponents have denounced it as antidemocratic, saying that it would turn non-Jews into second-class citizens. That criticism is based on a misunderstanding of the bill and of the nature of democratic nation-states.

I was one of the bill’s originators. All of us are passionately committed to liberal democracy of the type that Israel has worked to build since its birth in 1948. The proposed law does not have anything to do with religious practices. Not one of us favors theocracy, and none would want to live in a country that lacked full democratic rights for everyone, including freedom of religion.
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By Seth Franzman, JPOST

“In what way are we less Israeli than you?” asked Nafatali Bennett on his Facebook page Saturday night, after being blasted by longtime Yediot Aharonot columnist Nahum Bernea. Bernea had written on Friday that Bennett’s supporters were infused with nationalism, racism, and religious extremism. Bennet took exception, writing, “We will not be silent, we will raise our heads.”

He described the devotion of the national-religious public to “the land, the Torah and the nation” and said that no longer will it be silent when its slandered; “have we not sacrificed enough to get into the club?” Bennett phrased his debate as that between the majority and the elites in the academy, judicial system and media.

It isn’t the first time of course that Israelis have been presented with this cleavage of the “elites vs. the people.” It was this rising cry that fueled the 1977 and 1981 elections in which the “system” of Labor Zionist domination was overthrown by the masses of voters who Mapai secretary- general had once called a “cancer” that “endangers the existence of the state.”
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by Michael Freund, Jerusalem Post

With its universal themes of heroism, faith and determination, Hanukka has become one of the most well-known and familiar of Jewish holidays.

Or has it? Year in and out, Jews gather for eight nights to light candles, sing songs and celebrate the miracles performed for our ancestors more than two millennia ago. We fry potato latkes, exchange presents and perhaps take a vacation from our daily routines.

This, in a nutshell, is the common conception of the festival: the Hellenists tried to destroy Judaism, we won, now pass me a jelly doughnut.

But the sad truth is that Hanukka, like so many things nowadays, has been “dumbed down,” stripped of its deeper meaning and ripped from its original context. As a result, there are three central themes of the Hanukka story that have been largely swept aside, even though they speak directly to the period in which we now live. Specifically, these are: battling assimilation, struggling to liberate Judea and Samaria, and longing for a rebuilt Temple.
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Organization says thousands of Jewish women currently trapped after being lured into abusive relationships with older Arab men.

Arutz Sheva

Learn and Return, an organization that works to prevent Jewish women and girls from getting trapped in abusive relationships with Arab men, has uncovered the shocking truth of an epidemic of young Jewish girls being forced into drug use and prostitution by older Arab men.

Mishmar Ezrachi, of Beersheva in southern Israel, reported to Learn and Return’s rescue counselor how numerous Jewish girls from the area had been lured into relationships with Bedouin Arabs through gifts and kindness, and willingly follow their suitors to their village. But once there, the girls were forced to take drugs and turned into addicts. Then they are forced prostitute themselves in order to earn money to support their habit.
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Dick Cheney says he would “do it again in a minute.” He’s right.

By BRET STEPHENS, WSJ

I am not sorry Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational mastermind of 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times. KSM also murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl in 2002. He boasted about it: “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew,” he said after his capture.

I am sorry KSM remains alive nearly 12 years after his capture. He has been let off far too lightly. As for his waterboarding, it never would have happened if he had been truthful with his captors. It stopped as soon as he became cooperative. As far as I’m concerned, he waterboarded himself.

I am not sorry the CIA went to the edge of the law in the aftermath of 9/11 to prevent further mass-casualty attacks on the U.S. I am not sorry that going to the edge meant, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein put it in 2002, doing “some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves.” I don’t suppose she was talking about removing our shoes at airport security.
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For a Shas politico to consider teaming up with religious Zionists would have been inconceivable not long ago.

By Evelyn Gordon

The election campaign’s most interesting development to date has been the reports that former Shas chairman Eli Yishai is considering joining forces with Uri Ariel’s religious Zionist Tekuma party. This is interesting even if, as currently seems likely, it doesn’t happen – not because of how it might affect the election dynamics, but because of what it says about the way walls are crumbling in haredi society.

True, Sephardi haredim have always been less insular than their Ashkenazi counterparts. But even in Shas, jumping ship to join forces with religious Zionists would have meant certain ostracism not so long ago. And Yishai is no fringe figure; he was Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s handpicked choice to lead Shas for years until Aryeh Deri returned to politics, and the party leadership, last year. Thus it’s hard to imagine him even considering such a move if he didn’t think the haredi world had changed enough that he could do so without severing ties with it.
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Israeli Tech Startups Attract Chinese Investors

China’s Search for Tech Investments Leads them to Israel

Terrorists storm military-run school, killing over 100 children; Taliban calls attack revenge for gov’t targeting their families; military says 4 gunmen killed, search ongoing.

AP

A top Pakistani official said that 126 people have been killed in a Taliban attack on a military-run school in the northwestern city of Peshawar.

Pervez Khattak, the chief minister of the province where the attack occurred, says that roughly the same number of students have been wounded.

Bahramand Khan, director of information for the Chief Minister’s Secretariat, said more than 100 of the dead were school children.

Taliban gunmen stormed the school in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar on Tuesday, officials said, in the highest-profile militant attack to hit the troubled region in months. Read more…

By Fred Maroun, TOI

If I were Israeli in 1948 when Israel declared itself independent, how would I have felt about the Arab refusal to create an Arab state next to a Jewish state, and their threat to destroy us?

During the war of independence, would I have been a good soldier as my cherished Jerusalem was under siege, my fledgling state was encircled, and one percent of my fellow citizens were killed?

Would I have been a good farmer, teacher, entrepreneur, engineer, or pilot as my country was relentlessly attacked until 1967 when we surprised the world by handily beating much larger enemies?

Would I have left Israel in 1973 when my nation was almost lost and my people threatened with massacre yet again under another combined Arab attack?
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By Gerald Steinberg, ME Quarterly

In May 2014, Zochrot—a radical Israeli nongovernmental organization (NGO)—was the focus of widespread mainstream media coverage featuring its iNakba mobile application (app). Articles on the app and Zochrot were published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Haaretz, The Christian Science Monitor, Time Magazine, and several prominent blogs. Most, including The New York Times, promoted Zochrot’s agenda while others, such as The Washington Post, included some criticism.

Designed and promoted as a vehicle for drawing attention—particularly among journalists—to the Palestinian narrative of the 1948 war, iNakba features an interactive map and photos of pre-1948 Arab villages and encourages the “right of return” narrative through crowd sourcing. As stated by The New York Times, “Perhaps the app’s greatest promise is its social component—users can upload photos and videos, or ‘follow’ villages to virtually recreate lost communities.”[1] Small wonder that the release of the app was timed to coincide with Israel’s sixty-sixth Independence Day (May 15) and the Nakba (catastrophe) as Palestinians and Arabs call this event.
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Ted Belman. I would have no difficulty trading the triangle with its 300,000 Arabs for an equal amount of land in J&S. Trouble is that our Supreme Court would nix it because the Arabs would lose their citizenship and would not be allowed back into Israel. Furthermore the PA wouldn’t accept it. I think Liberman knows this but he is trying to make a point.

Liberman man another point that I totally agree with.

“We must also act. We cannot sit idly by only saying that we oppose this.”

“The lack of an Israeli initiative deteriorates our position in the international arena, will harm our relations with our friends in the West and will not allow us to stand up for the things that matter to us,”

Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman urges Israel to be proactive in fighting international pressure, forge ties with ‘moderate’ Arab world.

By Tova Dvorin, INN

Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman criticized the UN Security Council’s pressure on Israel Tuesday, noting that the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) demands to force Israel to withdraw from Judea and Samaria within a strict two-year timeline is part of “a political attack” on the Jewish state, fomented by the EU.

“Even the European Parliament [itself] will vote tomorrow to recognize [the PA as] a ‘Palestinian state’ in Luxembourg,” Liberman said. “In addition, the Luxembourg Court of Justice will petition to remove Hamas from the EU’s blacklist of terrorist organizations and the Geneva Conference will convene to sign the Geneva Convention – another step designed by Palestinians to condemn Israel and present it as aggressive and a violator of human rights.”

“All these moves, joining other similar moves, some of which have already been made and others which will be carried out, are part of a planned organized and designed to force Israel to ‘face facts,'” he continued. “This is a political attack we must deal with it in a smart and determined manner.”
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Ted Belman. Moshe Dayan gave the keys to the Temple Mount to the Wakf without receiving anything in return. So legally, Israel is not bound by that decision and can change the locks, so to speak. It is unconscionable that Jews are not permitted to pray there. We are not asking to pray in the mosque itself or even in the perimeter surrounding it but the temple mount was built by Jews some 600 years before it was conquered by Muslims. And the Jews have come back to claim what is theirs.

As is their wont, they obliterate the presence of any other religion on territory conquered by them. Now that Israel has conquered it back she should wipe out their presence just as they do to others. But Israel doesn’t do that. Jews are too liberal. But maybe they could learn from the Muslims. By giving respect to the Muslims, she is sowing the seeds of her own destruction. That’s why Sherman and Feiglin, and Kahane before them, want them removed from Israel. By allowing them to dictate to us, we are accepting dhimmi status in our own lands.

If Israel does not do something about freedom of prayer on the Mount, its survival is at stake.

By Giulio Meotti, INN

Arab spokesmen, unlike their Israeli counterparts, are not ashamed to be “intransigent” or to cherish territory.

Arab spokesmen, unlike most of their Jewish counterparts, are not ashamed to make the Temple Mount the center of their new war against Israel.

Arab spokesmen care so much about the site that they can claim that Abraham wasn’t a Jew, that Jews never had a Temple in Jerusalem, that Jews in Biblical Israel are “the descendants of monkeys and pigs”.

Arab spokesmen were so skillful and able to manipulate history that today the UN, Europe, America and the chattering classes, which have no religion at all, are all reinforcing the Arab claim that any who died on the Temple Mount were martyred defenders of holy places, mowed down by savage, unprovoked “Israeli settlers”.
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By Victor Davis Hanson, NRO

Barack Obama will end his tenure with the ruin of Hope and Change. The implosion was brought about not by the marginalization of Hope and Change, but by the power of the U.S. government to reify the slogan in a way we have not seen since the 1930s.

Survey the wreckage.

The hope-and-change therapeutic approach to foreign relations ended logically with historic cuts in defense, lectures about American culpability, pink lines and the end of Syria, farcical Iranian talks, in Libya the short trip from “leading from behind” to Benghazi, the self-induced suicide of Iraq, the empowerment of Putin, a pivot to Asia that invited ridicule, and the charade of a war against ISIS.
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