Deputy Minister Ofir Akunis criticizes EU and U.S. for condemning Israel’s designation of areas in Gush Etzion as state land.

By Hezki Ezra, INN

Ofir Akunis

By Ted Belman. What the EU is saying is what they have always said, is that the only borders they accept and the borders that both sides agree to. This in fact is what Res 242 provides and what the US has always said. But they are wrong to refer to the ’49 Armistice Lines as “the ’67 Borders”. The US, particularly this administration, has always been against settlement activity. There is nothing wrong with declaring it ‘state land” after due process. Israel is called upon to do this all the time. What the US is doing is attempting to intimidate Israel from building settlements. They recognize that the more Israel builds, the more difficult it will be to reach a peace agreement. Israel’s position is the less she builds the more difficult it will be to arrive at a peace agreement. The weaker Israel is the more intransigent the Arabs are. They do not want a peace agreement with Israel. What America is trying to do is to prevent Israel from doing what it is legally entitled to do.

There is no prospect for peace so long as the Arabs supported by the US demand the the settlement be based on the ’67 lines even with swaps. Israel will never agree to it. Given that reality there is no reason for Israel to stop building.

EU releases statement slamming Israel for choosing “this delicate moment” to make announcement, says it won’t recognize “any changes to pre-1967 borders.”
By MICHAEL WILNER, HERB KEINON, TOVAH LAZAROFF, GIL HOFFMAN, JPOST
The United States is concerned that Israel expanded its holding of state land in the West Bank by close to 1,000 acres for a new settlement city and that plans are pending for additional building activity in east Jerusalem.

US Ambassador Dan Shapiro “relayed our concerns over the weekend,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters in Washington on Tuesday, as she called on Israel to reverse Sunday’s decision regarding the land located in the Gush Etzion bloc, in an area known as Gva’ot.
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At cost of $100,000 per interceptor, defense minister says Iron Dome is expensive, but prevented greater economic losses.

Itay Blumenthal, YNET

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon commented on the defense budget and the cost of Operation Protective Edge during Calcalist’s Economic Forum Tuesday, and said that though military expenses are high, the expense is required to deal with the new form of terror threats Israel is faced with.

“The direct cost of the operation stands at more than $9 billion,” the defense minister said, adding that dealing with terror is “expensive,” and that even if the “defense budget would be tripled it would still not be a waste of money.”
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DEBKAfile Exclusive Report September 2, 2014, 9:40 PM (IDT)

Credible information has reached Saudi, British and Australian agencies that two al Qaeda branches – IS in Iraq and Syria and AQAP at its base in Yemen – have wrapped up plans to roll out coordinated terrorist spectaculars around the 13th anniversary of the September 11, 2011 attacks on New York and Washington. According to DEBKAfile’s counterterrorism sources, they are preparing to strike simultaneously in the Middle East and a West European city. Next, they will go for US targets in the Middle East and Europe.

In the estimate of Islamist experts, the IS and AQAP have decided to delay direct terrorist action in the United States, calculating that an attack on America will have a greater shock impact some time after the first cycle of outrages, toward the end of 2014 or early 2015.
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Calm when it comes to Putin, ISIS and Hamas, but furious with Israel.

By Bret Stephens, WSJ, Sept. 1, 2014

Barack Obama “has become ‘enraged’ at the Israeli government, both for its actions and for its treatment of his chief diplomat, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. ” So reports the Jerusalem Post, based on the testimony of Martin Indyk, until recently a special Middle East envoy for the president. The war in Gaza, Mr. Indyk adds, has had “a very negative impact” on Jerusalem’s relations with Washington.

Think about this. Enraged. Not “alarmed” or “concerned” or “irritated” or even “angered.” Anger is a feeling. Rage is a frenzy. Anger passes. Rage feeds on itself. Anger is specific. Rage is obsessional, neurotic.

And Mr. Obama—No Drama Obama, the president who prides himself on his cool, a man whose emotional detachment is said to explain his intellectual strength—is enraged. With Israel. Which has just been hit by several thousand unguided rockets and 30-odd terror tunnels, a 50-day war, the forced closure of its one major airport, accusations of “genocide” by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, anti-Semitic protests throughout Europe, general condemnation across the world. This is the country that is the object of the president’s rage.
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Common enemies and shared interests have aligned the Saudis, the Egyptians, and other Arabs with the Jewish state. That’s the good news.

By Elliott Abrams, MOSAIC

“The status quo is unsustainable,” President Obama said of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon after taking office in 2009. “The status quo is unsustainable,” then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told AIPAC in March 2010. “The status quo is unsustainable and unacceptable,” United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon averred in 2013. This year, Secretary of State John Kerry, with his customary light touch, informed the Munich Security Conference: “Today’s status quo absolutely, to a certainty, I promise you 100-percent, cannot be maintained. It’s not sustainable.”

What is usually meant by this assertion is something quite specific: that in the “occupied territories” of Gaza and the West Bank, a Palestinian state must very soon be erected—or else. “It is critical for us to advance a two-state solution where Israelis and Palestinians can live side-by-side in their own states in peace and security,” Obama added in that 2009 statement. He has repeated the line endlessly, and so has every world leader except for Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei (who has a rather different objective in mind).
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Support for the terrorist organization Hamas has skyrocketed in Judea, Samaria and Gaza according to a new poll, after Hamas “skyrocketed” Israel with a massive missile barrage and terror war in Operation Protective Edge.

A full 61% of Arab residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza would pick Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh for unity government president if elections were held today, according to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll reported Tuesday by Associated Press (AP).

By contrast, Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was found to have dropped sharply to a mere 32% in support.

The survey also found a “grass is greener” effect, with support for each of the two higher in the area under the other’s control; Haniyeh received 53% support in Gaza and 66% in Judea and Samaria, while Abbas got 43% in Gaza and 25% in Judea and Samaria.
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An intelligence alert sparked a massive manhunt that came up with two suspects and kept Israeli civilians safe.

By: Hana Levi Julian, JP

Police set up roadblocks throughout the Sharon region and beyond to track down terrorists believed to have infiltrated the area. 

Police have arrested two men from the central Israeli Arab city of Taibe in connection with an intelligence report of a possible terrorist infiltration from Samaria.

The alert from the Israel Security Agency (ISA / Shin Bet) warned that terrorists may have infiltrated the Sharon region around Kfar Yona, slightly east of Netanya, intending to perpetrate an attack.

Schools were ordered to keep the children indoors as security personnel continued to search the area. “We are treating this [intelligence] alert very seriously, so we have deployed a large number of forces in the field,” police told the Walla! news site.

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WATCH THIS VIDEO RANT.

[Read also 95% of BBC Viewers say Multiculturalism Doesn’t Work by Daniel Greenfield]

By Robert Klein Engler, AMERICAN THINKER

Recently, the Hindustan Times ran an article noting that the Nalanda University has reopened after being destroyed 800 years ago. “… the new university took off with only two schools — the school of ecology & environmental studies and the school of historical studies, seven faculty members and 15 students.”

We learn later in the article that Nalanda University was dealt its final blow in 1193 AD. Bakhtiar Khilji, a Muslim general of Qutbuddin Aibak, set out to uproot Buddhism in Northern India. “The Turkish invaders set ablaze and destroyed the huge library of the university, said to rival one at Luxor in Egypt.”

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Regional heads vow a large public campaign if PM doesn’t stop de facto freeze, nipping in the bud all local development.

By Ari Yashar, INN

The Times will publish the most awful Abu Ghraib photos – as it should – but will not publish a picture of an ISIS terrorist holding a knife standing alongside an American.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, JPOST

‘America reinforces its values and thus its security by being transparent about even the worst abuses of those values, not by hiding the evidence deep in a file drawer.”

This sentence is from a New York Times editorial of August 30, 2014. The editorial was written in response to a decision by Federal district court Judge Alvin Hellerstein forcing the Obama administration to justify why it will not release approximately 2,000 photos that allegedly document abuse by the American military and investigators in Iraq and Afghanistan, which begs the question of why The New York Times forced us to remove a photograph of a hooded ISIS executioner holding a knife while standing by American journalist James Foley. (A copy of the ad is available at www.shmuley.com and www.thisworld.us.) We were forced to remove the photograph and replace it with one without a knife in order to have the ad appear this Tuesday in the Times.

Why did the Times condemn the American government for trying to suppress images of alleged abuse on the part of the American military, while it seeks to suppress the horrors of the world’s most monstrous terrorist organization, which decapitates Americans? But even that was a lot better than The Los Angeles Times that demanded the removal also of a second image which depicted Hamas terrorists standing alongside hooded “collaborators” which they were about to execute. The Telegraph in London demanded the same in order for the ad to be published.
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DEBKAfile Exclusive Report September 1, 2014, 10:47 PM (IDT)

A wide-reaching Egyptian military hunt is on across northern and central Sinai for intruding Hamas and Islamic Jihad rocket squads and the launching sites they have buried beneath the desert surface, according to DEBKAfile’s exclusive military and counter-terrorism sources.

In the last week of warfare with Israel, up until the declaration of the Aug. 26 ceasefire, Hamas and Jihad secretly moved rocket teams across the border into Egyptian Sinai. They plan to use them as a second front for resuming rocket fire on Israel, or provide themselves with a lever in case no deal comes out of the Cairo negotiations later this month for a durable ceasefire and the rehabilitation of the shattered Gaza Strip.
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BY DAVE BeNDER, ALGEMEINER

Israel’s ministerial intelligence oversight chief recently charged that a string of American attempts to train and arm “moderate” militias and armies in neighboring states and entities have collapsed into the Mideast dust.

“…not just the Iraqi Army they had built is collapsing. Everywhere the Americans had tried that thing – they failed,” Yuval Steinitz, Minister of Intelligence, Strategic Affairs and International Relations recently told U.S. colleagues, according to an interview with Israel Defense in June, first published on Sunday.

Steinitz, speaking just prior to the implementation of Operation Protective Edge, and the metastasis of ISIS/ISIL – the so-called Islamic State – throughout much of Syria and Iraq, contended that “in the Gaza Strip, too, the Palestinian police forces were beaten by Hamas in 2007, and now the same thing is happening in Iraq.
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By Caroline Glick, JPOST

The war with Hamas is not over. What we are experiencing today is a temporary cease-fire.

The most basic reason the war is not over is because Hamas has no existence outside its war against the Jewish state. Hamas exists to obliterate Israel. The goal of each round of fighting is to soften Israel up for the next round.

Hamas will only stop fighting when it is defeated. And Israel did not defeat Hamas.

Not only did Israel not defeat Hamas, according to Haaretz, senior IDF commanders are now lobbying the government to enable Hamas to credibly claim victory.
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JCPA

There is considerable confusion about the recent action of Israel’s civil administration declaring 988 acres of West Bank territory as state land. In general, West Bank territory may be divided into three legal categories: state land, private land, and land whose status is to be determined. The territory in question had the status of territory whose status is to be determined. Before the declaration of the land as state land, an investigation had to be undertaken by Israel’s civil administration that took several years in order to ascertain its exact status.
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Abbas wants us to draw a line so that he will start nibbling away at it or probably he will use it to justify there is no purpose in negotiating with Israel. Under no conditions should Israel present a Plan. Ted Belman

By Avi Ischaroff, TOI

While grappling with the tensions with Hamas, the Palestinian leader simultaneously intends to renew the diplomatic pressure on Israel. His peace plan, which he is set to submit for Arab League approval by the end of this week, envisions filing a request with the Americans in the coming days to pressure Israel to present a map of a future Palestinian state as the basis for substantive negotiations. After Israel presents the map, Abbas’s plan calls for a firm timetable to be laid down for a gradual Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

If Israel refuses his plan, or refrains from responding, the Palestine Liberation Organization intends, within three months, to seek a UN Security Council resolution that recognizes the establishment of a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines.

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[It sounds to me that this was the purpose in backing Abbas in Gaza ceasefire negotiations.]

The PA president won’t rebuild Gaza if Hamas stands in his way, and won’t work with Israel in the West Bank unless there is substantive progress toward Palestinian statehood

AVI ISSACHAROFF, TOI

On Sunday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas gathered his advisers at his Muqata’a headquarters in Ramallah ahead of a planned visit by his chief negotiator Saeb Erekat and intelligence chief Majed Faraj to the US. The negotiators are set to meet next week with US Secretary of State John Kerry and present him with Abbas’s new diplomatic proposal.

However, the meeting also reviewed the tense relations between the PA and Hamas, strains that have most certainly continued even after the cessation of the 50-day conflict in the Gaza Strip. It has become clear to the Palestinian leader and those close to him that, despite the pleasantries heard from Hamas leaders praising Palestinian unity and reconciliation, words and actions are two different things.

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By Ted Belman

PM Netanyahu talks of a new “political horizon”.  And then we read Saudis are pushing for peace.  Lapid informed the international press, Netanyahu hints he will agree to convene regional peace conference.

Yesterday I brought these events to the attention of a longtime US intelligence officer whose work involved Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states. His contacts in Saudi Arabia are numorous.

What are chances of Saudis making a better offer to Israel?  Would they be willing to agree to a peace agreement with Israel in which Israel kept half of Area C so that Israel would remain on the Jordan and would not have to uproot 150,000 Jews?

he replied: Read more…

No guarantee arms for Kurds won’t end up with PKK: experts

ABC Aus

Sarah Dingle reported this story on Monday, September 1, 2014 12:14:00

ELEANOR HALL: One major concern about sending arms to the Kurdish government is that those arms could end up in the hands of the proscribed terrorist organisation the PKK.

The PKK has defeated Islamic State fighters on several occasions and Peshmerga generals are already facing accusations that they’re selling arms to the PKK.

Sarah Dingle has more.
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