Plunging oil prices have far-reaching implications for the global economy, the Middle East and the Jewish state.

Oil, once a strategic ace, strategic prince and political joker, is on the skids Hardly half a year since piercing the $100/barrel ceiling and peaking at $103, crude prices this week cracked the $65 floor, as some analysts predicted a $30 barrel sometime next year.

Such dives happen routinely in financial markets, but this one is different – because oil prices vector economic, industrial and geopolitical pushes and pulls more tellingly than any commodity, currency, bond or share.
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“Dad would be proud”

One for all and all for one’ can get pretty absurd,” the late Jerusalem Post staffer and columnist Sam Orbaum wrote about his identical triplet daughters 14 years ago. Orbaum, who passed away in 2002 at the age of 46, went on in the column, entitled “The threeness of it all,” to describe life as a father of identical triplets. Not only did he sometimes mix them up, Orbaum wrote in his well-known wry, comic style, but he was also constantly impressed by their tight bond – when for example they stood up for one another in fights in the school sandbox.
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THIS INTERVIEW IS FASCINATING. BENNETT IS OUTSTANDING.

Full transcript.

Lt Col Howard: Ambassador Ron Prosor’s address to the United Nations a couple of days ago eruditely reiterates the Jewish case and forthrightly exposes the cynicism and double standards of the international community in relation to Israel.

I urge you to read / listen to it, distribute it and retain it for future reference.

Mr. President,

I stand before the world as a proud representative of the State of Israel and the Jewish people. I stand tall before you knowing that truth and morality are on my side. And yet, I stand here knowing that today in this Assembly, truth will be turned on its head and morality cast aside.

The fact of the matter is that when members of the international community speak about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a fog descends to cloud all logic and moral clarity. The result isn’t realpolitik, its surrealpolitik.

The world’s unrelenting focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an injustice to tens of millions of victims of tyranny and terrorism in the Middle East. As we speak, Yazidis, Bahai, Kurds, Christians and Muslims are being executed and expelled by radical extremists at a rate of 1,000 people per month.

How many resolutions did you pass last week to address this crisis? And how many special sessions did you call for? The answer is zero. What does this say about international concern for human life? Not much, but it speaks volumes about the hypocrisy of the international community.
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DEBKAfile Exclusive Report December 6, 2014, 10:22 AM (IDT)

The six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) rulers meet in the Qatari capital of Doha next week amid high suspense across the Arab world. Its agenda is topped by moves to finally unravel the 2010 Arab Spring policy championed by US President Barack Obama, moves that also bear the imprint of extensive cooperation maintained on the quiet between Israel and key Arab rulers.

JPOST

Israeli officials in Jerusalem on Saturday praised US President Barack Obama’s nominee to succeed outgoing Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel.

Obama on Friday named Ashton Carter, a longtime Pentagon aide, to the top post just days after Hagel announced he would be stepping down.

The president said Carter “brings a unique blend of strategic perspective and technical know-how” to the job.

At a small ceremony, Carter told Obama that if he is confirmed by the US Senate, “I pledge to you my most candid strategic advice.”
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71% of respondents encourage bi-national state if two states not possible; more Americans tacitly back Palestinian statehood bid at UN

BY ILAN BEN ZION AND RICKY BEN-DAVID, TOI

A growing number of Americans back the idea of a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and over two-thirds of those surveyed in a recent poll published Friday by the Brookings Institution said they would call for a single democratic state should a two-state solution prove unviable.

According to the findings of the survey, the percentage of those polled who want Washington to advocate a single bi-national state with equal citizenship for Jews and Arabs has risen from 24 percent to 34%. The poll was conducted online in November 2014 by Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland. The authors did not specify over what time period that 10 point hike took place.
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See also: An unflattering portrait of Hillary Clinton by the NYT

TIMES OF ISRAEL

Former US secretary of state and likely 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Friday that the US must intensify and deepen cooperation with its Middle East partners, particularly Israel.

Dismissing the negative press coverage surrounding tensions between the Netanyahu government and the Obama administration, Clinton said that cooperation between Israel and the US over the past six years has been “quite extraordinary.”

“The funding on Iron dome, the funding of other military needs and equipment, the continuing strategic consultation that we’ve been consistently engaged in, no one can argue with the commitment of this administration to Israel’s security,” Clinton declared at the annual Saban Forum in Washington Friday evening.
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As Jewish institutions fight over American evangelicals’ deep pockets, an in-depth look at a controversial yet fruitful relationship

BY AMANDA BORSCHEL-DAN, TOI

WELL WORTH THE READ

Shirley Lewis wrote to me to correct this. “Nope.  Not center left. It is hard left”. She makes her case below.

The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles has consistently presented a left of center viewpoint and consistently bars right wing opinion from its pages.

Its publisher/editor Rob Eshman recently wrote Proposed nation-state law crosses American Jewish red lines.

His long time protagonist and collaborator friend of mine, Lt Col Howard wrote the following to him.

ESHMAN: “I know Benjamin Netanyahu knows all this. He is a very smart man. He certainly doesn’t need me to draw him any pictures.”… On this 1 point, I agree with you 100%.

Rob, in Israel , previously the left such as Livini, supported such a bill. Much of the current opposition to the bill’s talking points are political hype and not factual since the final provisions of the bill are still subject to a lot of change and negotiation.

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By CAROLINE B. GLICK , The Jerusalem Post

These elections are necessary. The up to NIS 1.2 billion that taxpayers will have to pay to finance the vote scheduled for March 17 is money well spent. And if the current polls are even close to what the election results will be three months from now, then the public understands that they are necessary and intends to elect a government that will serve it better than the one that just dissolved.

To be sure, Netanyahu is the one who decided to call elections. But the person responsible for making it impossible for the existing government to function is Lapid. Over the past few months Lapid has had the political equivalent of a nervous breakdown.
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By Martin Sherman, JPOST

Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in [the legislature] – Orson Welles

Elections are won… chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody – Franklin Pierce Adams

This Wednesday, the inevitable happened. The improbable coalition, cobbled together out of irreconcilably disparate components, finally disintegrated.

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

The disintegration of the coalition was virtually inevitable from the moment it was formed. From the get-go, it was the product of the puerile petulance of its principal participants and the perverse partnerships that this produced.
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By Jeremy Sharon, JPOST

[..]
And one of the primary goals of Lapid and his Yesh Atid party was to roll back entitlements secured by the haredi parties for their sector, get haredi men into the army and the workforce, and secure a raft of measures that would loosen the grip of the Orthodox religious establishment over the life-cycle choices of the general public.

It was because of the desire to implement this agenda that Lapid was so adamant in his refusal to sit with the haredi parties in government, and their absence from it was considered a considerable opportunity to force through reforms on these issues.
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T. Belman: Is this poll not irrelevant. Netanyahu’s party is slated to get about 25 seats in next Knesset. That will make Likud the biggest party. With support of Bennett, he will get the first opportunity to form the government.

By Gil Hoffman, JPOST

Prime Minister Nanyahu’s chances of coasting to an easy victory in the March 17 election took a surprising hit on Thursday when a Panels Research poll taken for The Jerusalem Post and its Hebrew sister newspaper, Ma’ariv Sof Hashavua, found that a hefty majority of Israelis want him to lose.

The poll, taken on Wednesday among 500 respondents representing a statistical sample of the adult population, indicated that the election could end up being close and assumptions that Netanyahu cannot be defeated may be incorrect.
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The movie he never finished has been produced by the Israel Broadcasting Authority; it is a travesty because its message is in direct opposition to what he wanted to portray.

Dr. Mordechai Kedar, INN

“In Israel one cannot get a budget to produce movies that present only the Zionist view in a positive fashion and do not reflect the existence and rights of the Palestinian people.”

Israel’s Channel 1 broadcast the first chapter of a two-chapter film titled “The Curse of Hadrian” this week. The idea for the movie’s production was raised about ten years ago by my dear friend, the late Tsafrir Ronen,  who hoped to disprove the narrative – or, more accurately, the lie – concerning the existence of a Palestinian nation.

Tsafrir was a fighter for the Land of Israel and the Jewish People who came from the mainstream secular left. A founder of the secular nationalist Nahalal Forum and of Kibbutz Gilgal in the Jordan Valley, he served as advisor to Prime Minister Rabin in the 1992 elections, but changed his views after the Oslo Accords.

The name Palestine, he said, had nothing to do with the people who call themselves Palestinians today. The name was given to the land of Judea by the Roman Caesar Hadrian (reigned 117-138 CE), the emperor who put down the Bar Kochba Rebellion with great cruelty.
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TIP

A madly intrusive justice system is one of the most potent threats the country faces. Can it be stopped?

BY MOSHE KOPPEL, MOSAIC  DEC. 4 2014

It is no secret that the state of Israel suffers from both external and internal threats to its life as a flourishing democracy. Less well known is that one of the most potent such threats arises from the unlikeliest of quarters: Israel’s own hyperactive justice system.

Let me begin with an anecdote. Even in Israel’s famously contentious environment, it’s startling to see a government minister interrupt a supreme-court hearing to shout that the state attorney representing his own ministry has been sabotaging him—and that he wants to represent himself. But that is exactly what Ehud Olmert, then Israel’s minister of industry, did in the summer of 2003.
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Obama administration reportedly meets to discuss tougher stance on Israel’s West Bank construction policies

By Adiv Sterman, TOI

Senior officials at the White House and the US State Department held a confidential meeting to discuss the possibility of leveling sanctions against Israel to deter the Israeli government from launching new construction projects in settlements across the West Bank and in East Jerusalem neighborhoods, Israeli officials were quoted as saying on Thursday.
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Ted Belman: The authors obviously want to preserve the status quo to enable the peace process to continue. As a result, they are against this legislation.  While the Oslo Accords prohibit the parties from taking unilateral steps changing the status quo, the PA by sucking up to the UN for support is definitely violating this prohibition. The EU by financing Arab construction in Area C is also violating the Oslo Accords.  The PA itself violates the OA in many ways which are fundamental to it.  So in effect violating the Oslo Accords is the name of the game and Israel can play it to.

INSS Insight No. 638, December 4, 2014

By Gilead Sher and Keren Aviram

The “Norms Law” that was recently approved by the Ministerial Committee for Legislative Affairs proposes the direct application of Knesset legislation to Israeli residents of the West Bank. This bill limits the discretion of the military commander of the region, who is the legal and legitimate sovereign under international law, and subordinates it to the will of the Knesset. In practice, this measure will replace the legal sovereign of the West Bank and change the status of the region from territories subject to “belligerent occupation” to territories that have undergone de facto unilateral annexation to the State of Israel. Israel would be wise to take this blueprint off the table immediately.

Topics:

Israel, Law and National Security

The Bill
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by Isi Leibler
December 4, 2014
http://wordfromjerusalem.com/?p=5426

It has been reported that American Jews still voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party in the recent midterm congressional elections. At the same time, there is mounting evidence that increasing numbers of American Jews at the grassroots level have become disillusioned and in many cases outraged by the shabby manner in which the Obama administration has treated Israel over the past six months. This, despite the fact that the American Jewish leadership establishment, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, had failed to criticize the biased and frequently hostile remarks against Israel personally expressed repeatedly by President Barack Obama.

Yet in contrast to the establishment, the Zionist Organization of America has emerged over the last year as the front-runner of American Jewish organizations, which consistently condemned the administration with respect to its Israel policies.

This has resulted in many rank-and-file American Jews, disappointed by the embarrassing silence of their leaders, no longer considering the ZOA to be a marginal or extremist group.
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