An informed brief according to international law which constitutes an important, scholarly exposition of Israel’s situation in the face of the PA demand for statehood.

By Louis Rene Beres, INN

Many legal and practical problems are associated with the impending Palestinian “final demand” for statehood. Jurisprudentially, even if an expanding number of European states should jump on the “Palestine” bandwagon, and agree uniformly to recognize this 23rd Arab state, these actions would still have no authoritative legal effect. This isbecause, inter alia, the governing treaty on statehood – the Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1934) stipulates a number of explicit criteria that always must be satisfied, irrespective of recognition.[i]

There are other substantial problems with the contrived Palestinian end-run around international law. In principle, declarations of support for Palestinian “self-determination”[ii] might not be unreasonable per se if the Palestinian side were authentically committed to a “Two-State Solution.”[iii] Yet, both Fatah and Hamas, even as they periodically war on each other, somehow manage to agree on at least one overriding point. This is their unchanging annihilatory mantra: (1) Israel represents an abomination in the Dar al-Islam (the world of Islam), purely on irremediable religious grounds, and: (2) Israel is nothing more than “Occupied Palestine.”
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Down with the Hellenists

by Steven Shamrak

The name of Jewish holiday, Hanukkah, is derived from a Hebrew word – meaning “to dedicate.” It used to be a minor Jewish festival with no Biblical source.

The Chanukah story permeates Israel. It is not just the story of the miracle of the oil, or the reclamation and restoration of the Temple. It is the story of Jewish victory over oppressors, of defending our homeland against those who seek to delegitimize our connection to it and destroy our nation. It is a narrative that all Jews, Israelis and Zionists, can relate to very strongly, as it is a story that has played out many times throughout our history.

Hanukkah is one of the quintessentially Zionist holidays. It is a holiday of freedom, celebrating the victory of the Maccabees over the Syrians. It reaffirms the centrality of Israel and of Jerusalem in Jewish cultural life. Without love of Israel and Jewish national existence, Hanukkah has no real meaning.
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THIS IS SHAMEFUL TO THE POINT OF BEING HILARIOUS

Wherever you look in the Middle East, there is mayhem, some of it bloody and some of it economic or political.

By Mordechai Kedar, INN

The prevailing atmosphere of the last few days when it comes to the Middle East is of a situation that is spinning out of control in all manner of unconnected spheres.

The Palestinian Autonomy is rushing ahead to gain recognition of its statehood in the Security Council, the European Parliament, the International Court and many other international institutions, in a step that is a clear and blatant violation of the Oslo Accords that created the Authority itself. Israel has not as yet reacted seriously to these Palestinian steps, and it has now emerged that Minister Livni, who was given the responsibility for negotiations with the Palestinian Authority (PA) is ideologically and politically in the camp of the architects of Oslo.

Someone in Israel fell asleep while on duty guarding the lands that the League of Nations granted the Jewish people as far back as the 1920 San Remo Conference.
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Why my sisters can’t think straight about Israel

By Phyllis Chesler, TABLET

These days, Israel is far too dangerous a word to pronounce in a Western intellectual or social setting. Say it—and you risk uncivil argument.

For example, it’s ten months after Sept. 11, and I am having dinner with a friend and colleague of many years. We are talking up the usual storm, laughing a lot, enjoying each other’s company when one of us uses the word: “Israel.” My friend, an independent and sophisticated thinker stops talking. Suddenly, the air becomes thin. She takes a deep breath. Her tone is no longer light; it has become dark, coarse, mocking.

“Israel?! It deserves exactly what it’s getting. And more. And don’t think America doesn’t deserve what it’s getting too.”
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DEBKAfile Exclusive Report December 17, 2014, 6:07 PM (IDT)

Legislators who Fund UNRWA Confronted with Reality of… UNRWA Education for War

David Bedien is the leading researcher and critic of UNRWA. Israel Behind the News is his newsletter.

I send out his latest newsletter because of its enormous importance but for some reason the links didn’t work.

Please visit his site and see what is so important.

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