See also: 15 reasons why Netanyahu could lose the next Israeli elections

As Herzog and Livni unite to woo the center-left, the fate of the elections – and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process – will be decided on the center-right.

By Chemi Shalev, HAARETZ

1. Settlers and their supporters are habitual wishful thinkers, which is why they suffer from chronic disappointment. They were surprised by Begin’s Sinai withdrawal, dismayed by Shamir’s Madrid attendance, shocked by Rabin’s Oslo Accords , dumbfounded by Netanyahu’s Hebron departure, astonished by Barak’s Camp David offer, horrified by Sharon’s Gaza disengagement and absolutely flabbergasted by Olmert’s Annapolis offer.

They were also taken aback by Netanyahu’s two-state speech at Bar-Ilan in 2009, although they were accurate in their prognosis that it would amount to nothing. He didn’t have it in him, they said.
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By Eugene Kontorovich, WaPo

Yesterday I explained how Israel’s Jewish nation-state bill is unremarkable compared to many European constitutions with similar, and stronger, national homeland provisions. The proposed measure must also be understood in the context of Israel’s diplomatic situation. Israel’s biggest diplomatic issue is the status of Jerusalem and the West Bank, and international pressure to create a new Arab state there and in Gaza. The major argument by proponents of territorial withdrawal (including President Obama and Sec. Kerry) is that despite the serious security risks, Israel must retreat in order to maintain a “Jewish state.” Indeed, even foreign leaders, like President Obama and Secretary Kerry have both justified their pressure on Israel by invoking the preservation of the Israel’s Jewish identity.
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Israel spends much less than the PA on its foreign service, then wonders why it’s losing the PR war.

By Evelyn Gordon, JPOST

The worst thing about elections is that for the next three months, the media will ignore all the really important issues in favor of trivialities such as daily updates on the prospects for a united center-left bloc. That’s why the bombshell released by the Foreign Ministry last week has evaporated without a trace rather than provoking the outraged debate it should have sparked.

At a conference launching a new Knesset caucus on foreign affairs, the ministry revealed the full dimensions of Israel’s underinvestment in diplomacy. According to the subsequent report in Israel Hayom, Israel spends less than half as much on its foreign service as does the Palestinian Authority – an entity whose per capita gross domestic product is less than a twentieth of Israel’s. And then we wonder why Israel is losing the diplomatic battle.
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By Steven Kramer, ENCOUNTERING ISRAEL

Speaking at the Washington-based Brookings Institution’s Saban Forum on December 7, Secretary of State John Kerry intoned that because the 1-state solution is “not viable” to preserve Israel’s status as a Jewish, democratic state, there is only the 2-state solution. This is the mantra that the United States and the West have clung to through thick and thin.

Negotiations began in earnest between the Palestinian Arabs and Israel after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. It’s always been the fashionable thing to blame Israel for the lack of a peace treaty, as if Israel could have created a State of Palestine by itself. However, that is far from the case.
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By Ron Kampeus, JTA

Ashton Carter has championed the sale to Israel of state-of-the-art combat aircraft, has aligned himself with Iran hawks and was observed becoming misty-eyed when serenaded by Israeli soldiers.

Carter, 60, U.S. President Barack Obama’s secretary of defense nominee, has been depicted in the media as the un-Chuck Hagel: Assertive and a bureaucratic in-fighter where Hagel, whose two-year stint as defense secretary ended this month with his forced resignation, was seen as passive and at times at sea; and hawkish, where Hagel, a Vietnam vet who as a GOP senator was virtually alone in his caucus in criticizing the Iraq War, was brought in by Obama to draw down U.S. military involvement overseas.
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Survey finds 80% of Palestinians support recent spate of lone-wolf attacks; another survey finds 60% support rocket fire at Israel.

AP, Ynetnews

An overwhelming majority of Palestinians support a recent spate of attacks on Israelis amid heightened tensions over the most sensitive holy site in Jerusalem, according to an opinion poll released Tuesday.

The poll also found that more than half of Palestinians support a new uprising against Israel, and that the Hamas militant group would win presidential elections if they were held today.

Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki said the results reflected Palestinian anger over Israeli statements about the Jerusalem holy site, which is revered by Jews and Muslims, as well as a loss of hope following the collapse of US-brokered peace talks and Israel’s recent war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

“There is an environment in which violence is becoming a dominant issue,” said Shikaki. “This seems to be one of the most important driving forces.”
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By Vic Rosenthal

At the end of the 19th century, Theodore Herzl and Max Nordau realized that Jews had no future in Europe. They understood that enlightenment and emancipation hadn’t put an end to Jew-hatred, and progressive politics wouldn’t either. Europe, they saw, gave the Jewish people two options: total assimilation or death (and later history showed that even assimilation wouldn’t save them).

The catastrophe that actually befell the Jews of Europe was more severe than Herzl had imagined in his worst nightmares. The Jewish state that he inspired ultimately came to be, as he accurately predicted, but unfortunately it happened too late to save most of the European Jews.

You can blame the British or the Arabs, and they certainly did their best to hold it back, but the main reason the state was not declared until 1948 was that so many Jews were unsure, diffident, afraid of provoking more Jew-hatred, or of the opinion that “something could be worked out” with the gentile world. For example, the influential British Jew Edwin Samuel Montagu,opposed the Balfour Declaration and was responsible for weakening its language.
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HAMODIA EDITORIAL

The anguish-filled saga of Jonathan Pollard took yet another painful turn last week, when it was revealed that the Parole Board denied Pollard’s request for parole after 29 agonizing years in prison. The members of the Parole Board, which is an arm of the U.S. Justice Department, had the opportunity to end a travesty of justice that has been going on for far too long. Instead, they compounded it, making a mockery of the American justice system.

Since Hamodia’s inception, we have been a vigorous and forceful advocate for Jonathon Pollard. On numerous occasions we have published editorials, interviews and opinion pieces calling for his release. On occasion, we have received inquiries from readers demanding to know why Jonathan never chose to apply for parole.
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THIS SHOULD APPLY TO THE ARABS AS WELL IN JUDEA AND SAMARIA.

Under a bill being considered, no call to an act of violence or terror deserves to be protected by the principle of freedom of expression.

By Revital Hovel. HAARETZ

The Justice Ministry is considering lowering the evidence criteria for incitement to violence or terror — lower than had been envisioned by former Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who was fired last week.

Last month, Livni said she aimed to tweak the definition of incitement to violence in order to come down harder on extremists without significantly undermining freedom of expression. The requirement for an indictment would be “reasonable probability” that the call to violence would be carried out.

But according to a new memo crafted by the ministry, probability would not have to be considered — simply the call to violence.
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By Eugene Kontorovich, Washington Post December 9

Israel’s proposed constitutional legislation to confirm its status as the “nation state” of the Jewish people has not only generated controversy within Israel, where it has helped bring down the current parliamentary coalition, but has also drawn criticism from the U.S. and Europe. The draft legislation has been decried as extreme and undemocratic. (To be clear, no draft bill has been approved, only a set of compromise principles for reconciling several rather different versions; apparently, people do not have to read the bill, or know any of its provisions, to oppose it.)

These objections do not hold water. For one, ensuring Israel’s status as a Jewish nation state is a goal expressly endorsed by the same critics, when it comes to pressuring Israel into diplomatic concessions. Second, the law is far from unusual by Western standards: it actually does far less to recognize Jewish nationhood or religion than provisions common in other democratic constitutions. This post will consider the general parameters of the legislation in comparison to constitutional provisions of other Western democracies. Tomorrow, a second post will relate the law to the “two state solution.”
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75% of Israeli Jews See No Contradiction Between Israel Being Jewish and Democratic. Yet 40% of Israeli Jews believe that passing the bill would damage the interests of the State.

58% of Israeli Jews favour continuing peace talks. Yet 74% of Israeli Jews do not believe they will lead to peace.

So will the positions of Bennett and Netanyahu on these matters help or hurt them in the elections?

Israel Democracy Institute.

The Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) and Tel Aviv University are releasing the monthly Peace Index poll, which this month covers Israeli public opinion on Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, the proposed Basic Law “Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People,” and recent Arab-Jewish tensions.

Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations
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Iranian IRGC Missile Unit Commanders: We’ve Developed 2,000-km Range Missiles And Equipped Hizbullah With 300-km Range Missiles; Fars News Agency: Israel’s Illusions About Its Natural Gas Fields Will Be Buried In The Mediterranean

By: U. Kafash, Y. Mansharof, and A. Savyon* MEMRI

Two weeks before November 24, 2014, the end date of the Joint Plan of Action between Iran and the P5+1, websites close to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) began reporting about the capabilities of the IRGC missile unit, and in particular about this unit’s capability to strike and destroy Israel. At the same time, there has been a marked increase in threats by IRGC officials on behalf of Hizbullah about the latter’s readiness to strike any point in Israel. Furthermore, the IRGC-affiliated Fars news agency is touting the capability of Hizbullah’s Iranian missiles to damage Israel’s natural gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea, as well as Israeli naval vessels.

On November 24, IRGC commander Ali Jafari said at a conference at Shahid Modares University: “Today, the entire area of the occupied territories [Israel] is within range of the missiles of the resistance — meaning the fall of the Zionist regime. Of course, the matter does not end here, and certainly the final liberation [of Palestine] will come about.”[1]
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The story of Israel’s most recent finance minister is a depressing one, where a politician pursued popularity instead of doing what was needed.

By Nehemia Shtrasler, HAARETZ

Finance Minister Yair Lapid as the treasury presented its 2015 draft budget, September 28, 2014.Photo by Emil Salman

The Finance Ministry’s farewell ceremony for MK Yair Lapid was interesting. The head of Yesh Atid outlined an impressive plan to bring down the cost of living, a plan with everything: “Reducing tariffs, doing away with quotas, reforming imports, increasing competition, dismantling of economic concentration…”

Lapid claimed the plan was “multiphased” and that it would have been set out soon, but when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed up the election, everything went down the drain, so we will not be able to enjoy its sweet fruits.
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HAARETZ

A leading London synagogue has cancelled a talk by an Israeli academic who said earlier this year that the only way to deter terrorists is by raping their female relatives.

Dr. Mordechai Kedar, of Bar-Ilan University, was due to speak at the Finchley United Synagogue on Monday night as part of a speaking tour in the United Kingdom organized by the local Zionist Federation, the Jewish Chronicle reported.

Finchley congregants were notified that Kedar’s appearance had been cancelled, but no explanation was given.
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DEBKAfile Special Report

High-ranking American military sources revealed Monday, Dec. 8, that Israel’s air strikes near Damascus the day before wiped out newly-arrived Russian hardware including missiles that were dispatched post haste to help Syria and Hizballah frustrate a US plan for a no-fly zone over northern Syria.

The advanced weapons were sent over, as DEBKAfile reported exclusively Sunday, after Russian President Vladimir Putin learned that the Obama administration and the Erdogan government were close to a final draft on a joint effort to activate a no-fly zone that would bar Syrian air force traffic over northern Syria.

The Kremlin has repeatedly warned – of late in strong messages through back channels – that the establishment of a no-fly or buffer zone in any part of Syria would be treated as direct American intervention in the Syria war and result in Russian military intervention for defending the Assad regime.
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See also: REPORT: Islamists taking over British public schools…

Settlement produce is being banned all over Britain
By Geulio Meotti, INN

Leicester city council is controlled by Britain’s main opposition party, Labor. Leicester is also the UK’s 10th largest city. That is why what happened there a few days ago will have serious consequences all over England and Europe.

Leicester just became in fact the first Western city to ban Israeli goods from its territory and jurisdiction. Even the Nazis, in their initial boycott of Jews, didn’t go so far as to cleanse a city of any Jewish goods.

A couple of years ago, a provincial council near Glasgow, West Dunbartonshire, banned Israeli books from local libraries. Recently, MP George Galloway has called for the British city of Bradford to become an “Israel-free zone”.
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By Alan Dershowitz, NEWSMAX March 2014

When President Barack Obama warned of “international fallout” if Israel fails to embrace the latest U.S. Middle East peace proposal, Newsmax asked noted author and Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz to comment on the growing talk of a European boycott against Israel.

Why are so many of the grandchildren of Nazis and Nazi collaborators who brought us the Holocaust once again declaring war on the Jews?

Why have we seen such an increase in anti-Semitism and irrationally virulent anti-Zionism in western Europe?

To answer these questions, a myth must first be exposed. That myth is the one perpetrated by the French, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Swiss, the Belgians, the Austrians, and many other western Europeans: namely that the Holocaust was solely the work of German Nazis aided perhaps by some Polish, Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian collaborators.
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Vilification of Israel is unjustified

White House, State Department reportedly met in secret to strategize about imposing sanctions on Israel

By Adam Kredo, FREE BEACON  DEC 5/14

Members of Congress are demanding that President Obama come clean about controversial reports that he is considering leveling sanctions on Israel, according to a letter sent Friday afternoon by lawmakers to the White House.

The Obama administration has found itself engulfed in controversy since reports emerged Thursday that the White House and State Department had met in secret to strategize about imposing sanctions on Israel for its continued building of houses in contested Jerusalem neighborhoods.

State Department and White House officials have continued to dodge questions from reporters on the matter, maintaining that they will neither confirm nor deny the reports.

The administration’s evasive position has prompted outrage among pro-Israel leaders and prompted Congress to demand that Obama start answering questions about the delicate issue.
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DEBKAfile Special Report

Israel’s air strikes near Damascus international air port and the Syrian-Lebanese border Sunday, Dec. 7, are depicted by Middle East military and intelligence sources as Israel’s first overt military clash with Russia in the course of the more than three-year Syrian war. Those sources assert that the strikes demolished components of Russian SA-25 or other types of top-line anti air missile systems that Moscow had destined for Syria and the Lebanese Hizballah terrorist group.

Russian transport planes are said to have shipped these consignments in the last few days to the military section of Damascus international airport. It was pointed out that the Israeli air strikes occurred less than 24 hours after Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, the Kremlin’s point man for the Syrian war, met with Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah Saturday in Beirut. The Russians for the first time insisted on widely circulating photos of the two officials shaking hands.
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