By Alex Markovsky

The future of American-Russian relations and the balance of power in Europe will – at least in the short run – depend on the resolution of the Ukrainian conflict. Notwithstanding the sanctions and denunciations by Western Europe and the USA, no development since the fall of the Berlin Wall has increased Russia’s influence as much as the acquisition of Crimea and the forthcoming division of Ukraine, which I predicted a year ago in my posts Crimea, Ukraine and the Agony of Impotence Parts I and II.

With the election of a pro-socialist government in the United States in 2008, Putin saw the opportunity for Russia to become the dominant force in world affairs. A scholar of Marxism well versed in the socialist curriculum, Putin knew that the American drive to socialism would require enormous spending on social programs and a massive expansion of the size of government. While Obama was spending on food stamps, solar energy and windmills, Putin was investing in oil and gas; while America was reducing its military budget and downsizing its armed forces, Russia was investing billions in modernizing the Russian military.
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IMRA

Finding a good high school just got a whole lot easier. Five leading Israeli schools have opened their doors to American teens and best of all, not only is the tuition free, the programs are all expenses paid, with housing, meals, transportation, books, and spending money all covered. Even the flight out to Israel is free.

The free high school in Israel programs are open to all Jewish students and offer a relief from the notoriously high tuitions paid for Jewish high schools in the US. And not only are the participating schools top tier academically, each features its own area of specialization, giving students a wide range of high school experiences to choose from.

There’s literally something for everyone.
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By Theodore Shoebat

The one who killed Boris Nemtsov was not Putin, but devout Muslims from the Balkans. One of them, Zaur Dadayev, was confirmed by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, to be a devout Muslim:

All who know Zaur (Dadayev) confirm that he is a deep believer and also that he, like all Muslims, was shocked by the activities of Charlie and comments in support of printing the cartoons

Zaur was also a high ranking member of the Chechen police force and distinguished for his bravery.

Another one of the Muslims involved in the killing of Boris blew himself up with a grenade once Russian police surrounded his house to arrest him.
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Report rejects American adoption of Israeli level of restraint

BY: Alana Goodman, FREE BEACON

Israel’s military restraint during the conflict in Gaza last summer “unintentionally empowered Hamas” by allowing the terror group to distort international law and secure a public relations victory by exploiting the media, according a task force of retired U.S. generals.

The task force also warned that Hamas’ disinformation strategy could be replicated against the U.S. military and advised the U.S. government to institute a plan to combat similar media campaigns in the future.

“Hamas supported false claims against the [Israel Defense Forces] by distorting stories and images to serve the organization’s narrative, and by manipulating stories in the international media,” said the Gaza Conflict Task Force in a report commissioned by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and released on Monday.
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[T. Belman. The Senators just euchred Obama.]

BY TAMAR PILEGGI, TOI

Nearly half of the US Senate wrote an open letter to the Iranian leadership Monday, warning that any deal reached between Washington and Tehran during the ongoing nuclear talks won’t remain in effect after President Barack Obama leaves office.

The letter, signed by 47 Republican senators, is the latest effort to pressure the Obama administration into granting Congress some oversight over the nuclear negotiations and emerging agreement, Bloomberg reported Monday.

“It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system … Anything not approved by Congress is a mere executive agreement,” the lawmakers wrote.
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By Karin McQuillan, AMERICAN THINKER

The American Jewish community, united to Israelis by bonds of the heart, has, through this tie, been facing terrorist onslaughts for years. Israel suffered the per capita equivalent of 250,000 Americans dead and wounded during the “peace process” when arch-terrorist Yassir Arafat was installed in power. Yet the rise of Palestinian and Arab-style Nazism has been ignored and tolerated by the majority of Jews, who at times appear deficient in basic human capacities for self-defense and reality testing. I will propose the thesis that American Jews display the faulty reactions typical of trauma victims.

American Jews do not see themselves as victims, but as winners, and they are right. Most victimized groups are dysfunctional. Societies who have suffered two thousand years of oppression and assault could be expected to disintegrate into social pathology — murder, violence, alcoholism, family breakdown, neglect and abuse of their children — but the Jewish community, in every country, is to the contrary marked by the lowest levels in all these social symptoms.
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That, it turns out, is exactly what the new, higher electoral threshold has done

By Evelyn Gordon

In two weeks, Israel will conclude its first election campaign under a new law that significantly raised the electoral threshold. Previously, parties had to win 2.4 seats to enter the Knesset; now, they must win four. And judging by the polls, the result has been disastrous: Not only is the higher threshold keeping out parties we should want in, but it’s also letting in parties we should want out.

The salient example of the first problem relates to the Arab parties. A poll published in Haaretz last month found that Arab voters overwhelmingly want their MKs to focus on their own community’s socioeconomic problems rather than the Palestinian problem (70% to 30%). They also overwhelmingly want their MKs to join the government (61% to 36%), since coalition parties wield more influence than opposition parties do; this desire is so strong that almost half that 61% favor joining regardless of who becomes prime minister. Finally, since existing Arab MKs not only spend most of their time and energy supporting the Palestinians, but adamantly refuse to join any government (as MKs Masud Ganaim and Ahmed Tibi recently reaffirmed), almost half the respondents were, unsurprisingly, highly dissatisfied with their current MKs.
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Those attacking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to address the U.S. Congress must be unaware of how the U.S. Constitution actually works.

By Moshe Arens  HAARETZ Mar. 8, 2015

It has been a long time since there was so wide-ranging a consensus on a single issue in Israel as the threat that Iran would pose were it to possess a nuclear bomb. All the major political parties agree it would represent a great danger to Israel, and that efforts must be made to prevent such an eventuality. Moreover, it is generally recognized that the agreement currently taking shape in negotiations between the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (the P5+1) and Iran – but actually between the United States and Iran – is far from satisfactory as far as Israel is concerned.

One might therefore have expected that Israel’s prime minister would have the blessing of the vast majority of Israelis when he took off for Washington, D.C., to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress – at the invitation of the Speaker of the House of Representatives – all united in the hope that he might be successful in bringing about a change in the course of the negotiations with Iran.
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T. Belman.  I originally posted this article on Oct 3/14.  It dealt with whether Netanyahu agreed to Kerry’s frame work as a basis for restarting talks. Essentially from Bibi’s own mouth we learn that he agreed to the framework as the basis of negotiations to get them started but was free to not agree to any part of the framework during negotiations.  Bibi had no intention of making a deal.  He only wanted to preserve negotiations. But the Document of Concessions negotiated in back channels was dated August 2013 long before and independent from the Framework discussion. Today, Dermer explained:

“In complete contrast to what is claimed, at no stage was any concession agreed upon. This was an attempt to ignite negotiations based on the principles of the international community, while Israel retains the right to reject topics that it doesn’t accept.”

YNET discussed Dermer’s role in the most biased way here.

By Ted Belman (Originally posted on Oct 3/14)

In May 2014 I posted:

US to Netanyahu: ‘We oppose unilateral steps’

By Ronn Torossian, NEW YORK POST

Why are the organizers of this year’s Celebrate Israel Parade letting a vehemently anti-Israel group march along down Fifth Avenue?

Sunday, May 31, brings North America’s largest one-day celebration for Israel. Each year, tens of thousands celebrate the beauty of Israel — the land and her people — marching beneath blue-and-white banners to commemorate the modern-day miracle of the state of Israel and to pay homage to America’s closest ally in the Middle East.

Yet the parade organizers — the New York Jewish Community Relations Council and the UJA-Federation — refuse to prevent a demonstrably anti-Israel group, the New Israel Fund, from marching.

How demonstrably? Well the New Israel Fund funds the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement — which aims to treat Israel as an international moral leper like apartheid-era South Africa.
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By Jerry Gordon, NER

Polls in Israel are notoriously biased by the polling organizations. Probably worse than in the US. As Mike Bates, my colleague at 1330amWEBY’in Florida, said, during a recent Voice of Israel  National Security segment, “you only get the response your are seeking by asking biased questions”. That may explain a lot about why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got only a modest bounce overall in Israeli polls following his  compelling Address  before a Joint Meeting of Congress on March 3^rd.  Some polls had results that favored Netanyahu’s speech and views about the overarching threats to Israel’s security on Israel’s Golan frontier and a looming nuclear one from apocalyptic Shia Mahdist regime in Iran.
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T. Belman.  This is very good news. So is the good news that Likud has surged to 26 mandates.

US official: Iran nuclear deal not limited to decade, aspects will continue ‘indefinitely’

Any nuclear agreement with Iran will not be limited to a decade, but rather will contain verification and supervision elements that could last indefinitely, a senior US official said Sunday.

JPOST

The official, in a telephone briefing  with Israeli journalists,  said that the P5+1 is trying to reach political  understandings with Iran by the end of March, after which the next three months would be spent dealing with the technical and scientific details of the agreement to ensure that the Iranian nuclear program will remain  “exclusively peaceful.”

The official said the sides were working hard to reach the political understandings by the end of March, but “we are not in a rush. We want the right deal, and not have the pressure of time,” she said, echoing comments made a day earlier by US Secretary of State John Kerry.
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T. Belman.  I believe Dennis Ross. He has no reason to lie. Why did Bennett say it was correct? The left is really piling on Netanyahu. Everywhere except INN I read articles trashing Netanyahu and all kinds of former IDF and intelligence people are doing their utmost to discredit him. Bibi is blamed for everything. Its a bloody avalanche.  Bennett also weighed in.

By Dudi Caspi, Shlomo Cesana and Gadi Golan, ISRAEL HAYOM

Dennis Ross, who mediated peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, responds to Yedioth Ahronoth report suggesting PM Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to dramatic concessions • Netanyahu: Report is a pile of nonsense orchestrated by Noni Mozes.

Dennis Ross, the man allegedly behind the “concessions document” published by Yedioth Ahronoth over the weekend, told Israel Hayom that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “never agreed to Israeli withdrawal to 1967 borders, dividing Jerusalem or the right of return.”

By Elad Benari, INN

Minister Yuval Steinitz

Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz, a close associate of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, insisted on Friday that a report in Yedioth Aharonoth, outlining supposed land concessions offered to the Palestinian Authority by Netanyahu, was false.

According to the report, in secret talks with the PA, Netanyahu’s representative presented a document offering a bevy of concessions, including a return to the 1949 Armistice lines with land swaps on a meter for meter basis, certain recognition of PA aspirations for Jerusalem, a PA hold in the Jordan Valley, a possibility for “Palestinian refugee” return on an individual basis, the evacuation of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, and leaving some Jewish residents under PA rule.
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Original document shows Israel accepting return to ’67 borders, agreeing to consider Palestinian right of return on case by case basis; Netanyahu: I never agreed to these concessions. Bennett says he did.

By Itay Blumental, Roi Yanovsky, YNET

Zionist Union leader Tzipi Livni on Sunday slammed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “cowardly” response to a secret document of far-reaching concessions to the Palestinians, which was revealed over the weekend by Ynet and its sister print publication Yedioth Ahronoth.

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Kerry and Fabius refute reports of gap between allies on remaining roadblocks to agreement on curtailing Tehran’s atomic program.

Is this the Bibi effect?

News Agencies

The United States and France sought on Saturday to play down any disagreements over nuclear talks with Iran, saying they both agreed the accord now under discussion needed to be strengthened.

“We are on the same page,” US Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters after talks with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius in Paris.

“If we didn’t think that there was further to go, as Laurent said, we’d have had an agreement already,” Kerry added. “The reason we don’t have an agreement is, we believe there are gaps that have to be closed. There are things that have to be done to further strengthen this. We know this.”
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The boost in German-Iran trade comes as Israel and Germany prepare to celebrate 50 years of diplomatic relations.

By Benjamin Weinthal, JPOST

Fresh trade data shows Germany’s industry secured a windfall in revenue due to the easing of Iran sanctions.

According to the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, German exports to the Islamic Republic in 2014 climbed by 30 percent to reach €2.4 billion.

The strong revival of German-Iranian relations comes at a sensitive time for Israel. Germany and Israel are immersed in a series of celebratory events to remember the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations.
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By Ted Belman

HAARETZ

If the IDF had taken Gaza, Ya’alon said, rockets would still be fired from there today, and holding the Gaza Strip would cost Israel 10 billion shekels ($2.5 billion) a year.

YNET

The squabble over the cost of the military campaign during Operation Protective Edge is intensifying. Contrary to Defense Ministry figures indicating a sum of NIS 9-10 billion, Finance Ministry officials claimed on Monday that the cost of the military campaign amounted to just NIS 6.5 billion, based on calculations made by Accountant General Michal Abadi-Boiangiu.

It appears from these numbers that the cost of “mowing the lawn” every few years is less than the cost of reoccupying Gaza.
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Order signed in January will allow for expansion of Ma’aleh Adumim in Jordan Valley.
By Chaim Levinson, HAARETZ

GOC Central Command Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon signed an order in January canceling the status of an army firing zone in the Jordan Valley, which will allow for the expansion of the settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim. However, the army continues to demolish Palestinian homes in the Jordan Valley claiming they are in firing zones.

The area in question is called Firing Zone 912, which was declared a firing zone more than 40 years ago. It extends from Ma’aleh Adumim (east of Jerusalem) to the Dead Sea in the east and Umm Daraj in the south, and is still used by the Israel Defense Forces for training, particularly by the Armored Corps. There are a number of army bases in the area, including the Nabi Musa base.
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Dept. of Justice set to file criminal charges against NJ’s Bob Menendez, sponsor of two key Iran bills, CNN reports

TOI

A top pro-Israel Democrat in the US Senate, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), may be charged with corruption following allegations he used his office to advance the business interests of a Democratic donor in exchange for gifts.

Menendez defiantly said Friday he has always been honest in office even as a person familiar with the matter said he’s expected to face criminal charges soon.

“Let me be very clear, I have always conducted myself appropriately and in accordance with the law,” Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, said at a press conference in his home state. “Every action that I and my office have taken for the last 23 years that I have been privileged to be in the United States Congress has been based on pursuing the best policies for the people of New Jersey and this entire country.”
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