Prime minister announces contentious legislation to be brought to government vote Sunday, as MKs clash during lively session debate.

Moran Azulay, YNET

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was forced to attend a Knesset plenum on Wednesday evening, after legislators invoked the “40 signature” rule. While the scheduled debate centered on the cost of living, MKs used the opportunity to challenge the prime minister on the “Jewish nationhood” bill.

Throughout the session, members of Knesset were called to order, with several opposition legislators being directed to leave the plenum by Knesset Chairman Yuli Edelstein.

Netanyahu took to the podium towards the end of the session to defend his decisions on the controversial legislation, officially defining Israel as a Jewish state, and to present the principles of his proposal. “The bill I will present will be based on Israel being a Jewish and democratic state. Israel guarantees equality of personal rights to all its citizens without discrimination based on religion, race, and gender.”
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By Seth Mandel, COMMENTARY

Part of the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is pretending to hold actors and institutions involved to a higher set of expectations than experience would dictate. Over the course of last summer’s war between Hamas in Gaza and the Israel Defense Forces, this meant propagating the idea that it was in any way shocking when the terrorist organization’s weapons–stockpiled for the express purpose of killing Jews in a maniacal, genocidal campaign–turned up, repeatedly, at schools run by UNRWA: the UN agency dedicated to keeping Palestinians living like refugees in perpetuity.

So now it’s unclear precisely how to react to a raft of stories demonstrating the reason it wasn’t surprising to find Hamas weapons in UNRWA schools: because UNRWA teachers and principles share Hamas’s violently anti-Semitic ideology. Yet in fact this is newsworthy, for an important reason beyond the obvious. First, though, it’s instructive to see just what American taxpayers are getting for their UNRWA money.
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Aharonovich advances bill to blacklist Hamas-linked Islamist groups who harass Jews, attack police on Judaism’s holiest site.

By Ido Ben-Porat, Ari Yashar, INN

Extremist group behind pro-BDS NGOs announces its partnership with Birthright cancelled for trying to ‘influence Israeli policy.’

By Ari Yashar, INN

The radical leftist group New Israel Fund (NIF) announced earlier this monththat its partnership with Taglit-Birthright Israel, Birthright Israel NEXT and Young Judea in which it guided trips to Israel for young American Jews has been cancelled.

NIF announced the development in a letter penned by the group’s director in the New York Tri-State area Stephanie Ives, which was obtained by Ron Torossian, CEO of the PR agency 5WPR and a regular Arutz Shevacontributor.

According to the group, they had been given three reasons for the cancellation, the first being that “Birthright Israel determined that [NIF’s] marketing of the trip was in violation of their policy because our NIF logo was slightly larger than the Birthright Israel logo.”
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By Raymond Ibrahim, FPM

Russia appears to be taking serious moves to combat the “radicalization” of Muslims within its border.

Recent pro-Islamic reports are complaining that Russia is banning the Islamic hijab—the headdress Islamic law requires Muslim women to wear—and, perhaps even more decisively, key Islamic scriptures, on the charge that they incite terrorism.

In the words of Arabic news site Elaph, “Russia is witnessing a relentless war on the hijab. It began in a limited manner but has grown in strength, prompting great concern among Russia’s Muslims.”

The report continues by saying that women wearing the hijab are being “harassed” especially in the “big cities”; that they are encountering difficulties getting jobs and being “subject to embarrassing situations in public areas and transportation. The situation has gotten to the point that even educational institutions, including universities, have issued decrees banning the wearing of the hijab altogether.”
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Israel’s ceasefire policy with Hamas is fundamentally mistaken, says the son of the Islamist group’s West Bank chief. It simply gives Hamas time to rearm, when it can and must be urgently uprooted

BY AVI ISSACHAROFF, TOI

To get to peace with the Palestinians, Israel needs to go to war against Hamas in Gaza, and fast.” That’s the view of Mosab Hasan Yousef, better known as the “Green Prince,” the son of West Bank Hamas chief Sheikh Hasan Yousef.

Mosab Yousef, who was a Shin Bet agent from 1997 to 2007, at the same time as he ran his father’s office, is well aware of the significance of what he is saying. “I know that this will sound to some people like dangerous rhetoric, a push for war, but my motivation is precisely the opposite. I’m speaking out because you can’t deal with reality by running away from it. You can’t take refuge in temporary solutions. Hamas has to be tackled at its roots, uprooted once and for all, and now is the perfect moment to deal with Hamas militarily in Gaza. The longer Israel waits,” he warned, “the more dangerous an enemy Hamas will become and the harder the battle. This is the time to initiate a war against Hamas.”

Now based in the US, Mosab Yusef is currently on a visit to Israel, and I met with him in Tel Aviv. It was five years ago that I first revealed that he was an agent assisting the Shin Bet — Israel’s most reliable source in Hamas, central to the prevention of numerous suicide bombings and attacks, and to the exposure of Hamas terror cells — and the identity of his handler, “Captain Loai,” Gonen Ben Itzhak. As we sat together near the Tel Aviv beach, his criticisms of Israeli government policy were clear and fierce.
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By Prof Abraham Ben-Zvi, ISRAEL HAYOM

U.S. President Barack Obama had a hard time disguising his delight when he announced Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s forced resignation Monday, after less than two years in office.

Hagel’s smiles were equally forced during the press conference that focused on his de facto ouster, but the artificial appearance of harmony and amicability within the administration was maintained to the very last moment, as mandated by kitschy American tradition.

This brought the current chapter in the career of the former senator (R-Neb.) to an early end, before he had the chance to make his mark on the security doctrine exercised by the American superpower, but not before he was made into a convenient patsy for “all the president’s men.”
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Gaza calls on international powers to reprimand Israel on ‘racist’ law, says it will ’cause holy war.’

By Tova Dvorin, INN

See also: AIPAC urges new sanctions in wake of Iran talks extension

Dems, Republicans promise new sanctions on Tehran, no more cooperation

BY: Adam Kredo, FREE BEACON

VIENNA—Just hours after Secretary of State John Kerry announced that talks between Iran and the West ended in failure, congressional leaders are planning to take their own action against Tehran in a legislative bid to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons, according to multiple lawmakers and senior congressional insiders familiar with the strategy.

Negotiations between the United States and Iran will resume as early as December and continue through July 2015 as the sides seek to overcome an impasse over Tehran’s demands that it be permitted to retain the most controversial aspects of its nuclear work, Kerry told reporters during a press conference Monday evening, originally the deadline for talks.

A final framework should be finished in four months, giving negotiators until July to hash out a finished framework, Kerry said, underscoring that negotiations with Tehran remain “tough” and “they’re going to stay tough.”
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Recently I took the position that we must choose our battles and that now was not the time to fight for the right to pray on the Temple Mount. A number of people wrote to me trying to get me to change my mind and sent me a number of articles in support of our right. I replied that none of these articles mention a commitment by Israel to allow the Waqf to determine who can pray there. Where upon he sent me Article 9 of the Peace Treaty between Jordan and Israel signed in 1994 which included the provision

“The parties will act together to promote interfaith relations among the three monotheistic religions with the aim of working towards religious understanding, moral commitment, freedom of religious worship, and tolerance and peace.

” So I dug further.

One lawyer wrote

:”Challenges have been brought in court against the prohibition of Jewish prayer and the courts have ruled that prayer is permissable but have allowed the police discretion to deny Jews that right in the interest of maintaining the peace. That, of course, means allowing masses of people behaving criminally to override the legal rights of others. It makes rule of law subject to the agreement of violent criminals. In any case, I know of not such formal relinquishment of Jewish right.”.

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There is a strategic Palestinian Arab plan. The pulling on Al Aqsa can lead to an unraveling of the whole Zionist enterprise. We ignore it at our peril.

Matan Peleg and Douglas Altabef, INN

In Jewish tradition, the Temple Mount, Har Habayit, is uniquely holy, special and significant.

Not only the site of the site of the First and Second Temples, the Mount, Mount Moriah, is considered to be the site of where Abraham sacrificed Isaac, Jacob dreamed of the ladder ascending to heaven, and in some interpretations, the site of Gan Eden itself.

Al Aqsa occupies a corner of the Mount, part of the Herodian extension, not considered to be of any significant stature by Jews, and frankly, a place of zero interest to us
And while our political leaders are eager to mute its significance, our adversaries have correctly perceived its importance. In true supersecessionist fashion, they have raised the Temple Mount as an existential issue in the form of mythical threats to the Al Aqsa mosque.
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By Ted Belman

The U.S. State Department said Monday evening that it expected Israel to “stick to its democratic principles,” in its first response to the Jewish nation-state bill.

“Israel is a Jewish and democratic state and all its citizens should enjoy equal rights. We expect Israel to stick to its democratic principles,” the State Department said.

First of all there is nothing undemocratic about the bill.

The US has no business telling us what laws to pass.

These criticisms are meant to discredit Zionism.  Zionism is not racism.

Paterson tells leader of Conservatives how to leave the EU.

By Richard North, 

The actual speech text is here, delivered at 11 am this morning. It is reviewed in The Times, in the Telegraph, the BBC, the New Statesman and elsewhere (140 reports and counting).

The essence of speech is that, instead of pussy-footing around, Cameron should cut to the chase and commit to invoking Article 50 the moment a Conservative government takes office after the election. With an electoral mandate, there is no need for a referendum.

Negotiations on a exit settlement should then proceed, using the “Norway option” as the base, involving joining EFTA and adopting the EEA agreement. Additionally, the entire EU body of law should be repatriated, to ensure legislative continuity, allowing for selective repeal and amendment as appropriate and necessary.
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By Vic Rosenthal

Narrative is everything in information warfare.

If you give your enemy the narrative, then the game is tilted in his favor from the start.
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By Uri Heitner, ISRAEL HAYOM

There is no contradiction, not even a tiny sliver of contradiction, between Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people and Israel as a liberal democracy that grants universal equal rights to all its citizens.

Though it has not yet officially passed, it is unfortunately already obvious that the discourse surrounding the Jewish state law is an indication of the worrying triumph of post-Zionism over the public consciousness.

The announcement of the state’s establishment in 1948 spoke about “the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel … in view of our natural and historic right.” Every nation has the natural right to an independent state in its homeland. The historic right is the right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.
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By Dror Eydar, Israel Hayom, 11-24-14

Two kinds of people oppose the Jewish state bill (which, if passed, would become a constitutional Basic Law defining Israel as the national home of the Jewish people):
*Naive people, who pretend to be familiar with the content of the bill but don’t really know what it is about, and *people who actually oppose the idea of a Jewish state but try to disguise their opposition with generalizations.

There are several versions of this bill, and on Sunday the cabinet voted in favor of the prime minister’s bill, a revised version of the bill initially penned by Likud MK Zeev Elkin. I spoke with some of the bill’s opponents in the cabinet and learned that they were willing to support the prime minister’s version, but not Elkin’s or the version penned by Habayit Hayehudi MK Ayelet Shaked. Fine. Let’s see what they do down the line.
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By Yoram Hazony, TOI

As civil war rages in Syria-Iraq, Libya and Yemen, and tensions between Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem reach levels not seen in more than a decade, the Israeli government has approved a ‘Jewish State Law’ that will confirm Israel’s constitutional standing as “the nation-state of the Jewish people.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been devoting a great deal of time and attention to this piece of legislation, which outsiders might find incongruous.

Some on the Israeli left, backed by prominent voices in the American media, have urged that the law is an unneeded provocation, if not simply racist. In fact, however, the Jewish State law is much needed at this time — not only to assure Israel’s long-term viability, but also as the harbinger of a future solution to the broader crisis of legitimacy that has crippled the entire state system in the Middle East.
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UAE says Council on American-Islamic Relations should be banned, US disagrees.

By Zvi Mayzel, INN

The list of terrorist organizations published on November 16 by the United Arab Emirates cabinet is causing acute embarrassment in the West, since the Muslim Brotherhood and all its offshoots, from the Middle East to Africa, Asia, Europe and the US, figure prominently there.

The UAE did not stop there and, alongside the usual suspects – al-Qaida and its affiliates, Islamic State, Boko Haram, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis and the like, listed well-known Islamic organizations in Italy, Sweden, Finland, Serbia, Great Britain (four), Denmark, Norway, Germany, Belgium and the United States (two). Though all are NGOs operating as welfare associations or associations for the defense of the rights of Muslim minorities in Western countries, they have strong ties to the Brotherhood. Some of these organizations were created by the first waves of Arab immigrants to Europe in the ’50s and were later taken over by the Muslim Brothers; others were created by the Brotherhood at the same time to make sure that the newcomers – students and workers – kept their Islamic identity and did not integrate into Western society.
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Slomiansky reveals how Israeli funds continue to reach terrorists despite staggering PA debt, and what he intends to do about it.

By Shimon Cohen, Ari Yashar, INN

Knesset Finance Committee chairman MK Nissan Slomiansky (Jewish Home) told Arutz Sheva he is looking for legislative and parliamentary means to block the transfer of funds from Israel to the Palestinian Authority (PA).

“We must recognize there’s a crazy absurdness here that I don’t understand,” Slomiansky said. “A terrorist who murdered and attacked and goes into jail has his finances covered during the years in jail, for him and his family.”

The MK described how money finds its way from the PA to the families of the terrorists and into their personal accounts – all while Israel passes on to the PA taxes it collects for it as per the Paris Protocol and the Oslo Accords, even as the PA fails to stand by its agreements, and owes Israel staggering sums, including over 1.4 billion shekels (over $360 million) in unpaid electric bills.
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Tzipi Livni vows to fight the Jewish State bill and may vote against it – forcing Netanyahu to fire her. Yair Lapid has vowed to vote ‘nay.’

By Gil Ronen, INN

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition is hurtling toward a crash that could spell its end on Wednesday, as Netanyahu prepares to bring the Jewish State law to a Knesset vote.

At Netanyahu’s insistence, the government decided Sunday that all coalition MKs – including ministers – will be bound by coalition discipline in the vote, and must vote in favor of it.

Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who heads Hatnua, a coalition partner with 6 MKs, is adamantly opposed to the bill.

In an interview with Channel 2 Sunday evening, Livni said: “I will not lend a hand to this bill. It’s a bad, anti-Zionist, anti-democratic law which is contrary to the Declaration of Independence. I will not be a partner of it in any way, shape or form. If the prime minister decides to dismiss ministers who are fighting for a Jewish-democratic Israel, that can certainly be his decision. I have never given up on my principles,” she added.
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