Israeli official confirms US nixed arms shipment

WSJ report of frayed relations between Washington and Jerusalem, including combative Obama-Netanyahu phone call

While Hamas fires rockets, and ISIS beheads unbelievers, the Kurds build the second non-Arab state in the Middle East

[..] By contrast, Kurdistan has played a positive role in the region. While paying the requisite lip service to the cause of Iraqi territorial integrity championed by the United States, many Arab countries as well as Turkey and Iran did not hesitate to turn Kurdistan into a major business and political partner. These states’ pragmatism and realism had told them that the specter of another non-Arab, non-Turkish, and non-Persian entity in the region pales against the real dangers emanating from their Arab and Sunni brethren. Paradoxically enough, the country that went the farthest in embracing the Kurdish entity was also the one that had been the most vociferous against it: Turkey, which has become the midwife for a Kurdish state in Iraq with oil and gas as foundations for a strategic partnership that Turkey seems to see as a stabilizing force on its own borders. Read more…

Israel left Gaza in 2005 and now finds itself under relentless attack by the terrorists who took over. It deserves international support; instead, it’s being abandoned

BY DAVID HOROVITZ, TOI
August 14, 2014, 4:36 pm

Shipment of aerial anti-armor missiles stopped after White House, State Department learned that IDF requested transfer directly from Pentagon without asking for their approval, according to Wall Street Journal report.

Yitzhak Benhorin, YNET, 08.14.14, 08:13

WASHINGTON – The US administration has halted a shipment of Hellfire aerial anti-armor missiles to Israel, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing government sources.

The sources noted that Israel had requested the transfer of ammunitions directly from the Pentagon, without receiving the approval of the White House or State Department officials.
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By Shlomo Pyotrkovsky, Ari Yashar, INN
8/14/2014, 1:00 PM

Mati Tuchfeld and Gideon Allon, ISRAEL HAYOM

National Post

PARIS — Calling the situation in Iraqi Kurdistan “catastrophic,” France said Wednesday it would start supplying arms to the Kurdish forces fighting Sunni extremists from the Islamic State group.

The sudden announcement that arms would begin to flow within hours underlined France’s alarm at the urgency of the situation in Iraq, where the Islamic State fighters are threatening the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

The shipment of French arms, which the government refused to describe, follows the United States’ increased role in fighting back the Islamic State extremists.
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IDF to expand counteraction for Hamas rockets

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report August 12, 2014, 11:18 PM (IDT)

The seventh truce in the ongoing Israel-Hamas passage of arms is generally expected to end Wednesday night Aug. 13, with a fresh outbreak of hostilities triggered by resumed Hamas rocket fire. The indirect Egyptian-brokered talks between the parties in Cairo have never got off the ground. From the start, all three realized that the gaps between Israel and the Palestinians were unbridgeable and, moreover, that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority were totally at odds on a common negotiating stance.

DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources report exclusively that Egyptian intelligence mediators presented separate papers to the Israelis and Palestinians, knowing – as they acknowledged informally – that the two papers were miles apart.
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By G Murphy Donovan, AMERICAN THINKER

[..] The so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) rampages through the created chaos in the Levant, a barbarian nightmare that has nothing to do with Jews and everything to do with American and European policy blunders. And now with the Arab and Muslim world aflame; a confederacy of the clueless in Washington and Brussels are picking a new fight with Russia too; a diversion to be sure.

Mister Obama may not be a Koran-thumping zealot, yet surely he creates as much suffering as any rabid Islamist. And just as surely, the Obama national security team is a milquetoast ‘ally’ of Israel.
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An expanded fishing zone, easier passage for people and goods between Gaza and Israel and other concessions have been offered, a senior Israeli official says.

HAARETZ

Israel has agreed to ease conditions in the Gaza Strip during the Cairo cease-fire talks, a senior official in Jerusalem said yesterday.

While no final agreement has been reached, Israel is prepared to ease conditions in a number of areas beyond those agreed to after Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, Israeli officials said.

They include:

1. Expanding the fishing zone off Gaza from three nautical miles to six. Israel made clear that if security conditions allow in the future it will consider expanding the zone to 12 nautical miles, as Hamas demands.
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Al Qaeda-Sinai targets US Negev military facilities

DEBKA

The Kurdish Peshmerga fight against encroaching Islamic State troops gained a broad new dimension Monday, Aug. 11, when the US began airlifting large quantities of military equipment, including ordnance, from Jordan and Israel to the semiautonomous KRG capital, Irbil. The US maintains 10,000 special operations and marine forces at the King Hussein Air Base in northern Jordan, with large stocks of ammunition that were originally destined for the rebels fighting Bashar Assad in Syria. They are now being redirected to the Kurdish effort to stop the rapid Islamist march on their republic, along with supplies from the US emergency stores maintained in the Israeli Negev.
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ALGEMEINER

Israel’s Foreign Press Association on Monday said it “protests, in the strongest terms, the blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods employed by the Hamas authorities and their representatives against visiting international journalists in Gaza over the past month.”

In a statement, the FPA said, “The international media are not advocacy organisations and cannot be prevented from reporting by means of threats or pressure, thereby denying their readers and viewers an objective picture from the ground.”
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When trying to access Israpundit go to israpundit.org and not israpundit.com

Details of agreement obtained by Ynet show Hamas to receive overdue salary payments, construction materials will enter under close supervision.

Attila Somfalvi

Palestinian delegation in Cairo

Israel has agreed to ease the closure on the Gaza Strip, according to information obtained by Ynet regarding an apparent agreement between Hamas and Israel, achieved via Egyptian mediation at the negotiations currently underway in Cairo. In contrast, there is no agreement to demilitarize Gaza, as demanded by Israel.

Ynet has learned that Israel will agree to transfer the Hamas government salaries through a third party – facilitating the payment of Hamas officials’ salaries. It was further agreed that Israel would gradually expand the fishing area off the Gaza coast, initially expected to be six nautical miles. It was also decided that construction materials will enter Gaza under close supervision. Read more…

“Quiet for quiet” was just not a strategy for Gaza, it was also a strategy for Judea and Samaria where Bibi did such things as “occasional concessions, maintenance of security cooperation with the PA, and the minimizing of friction with the local Palestinian population.” Perhaps this strategy explains why he has not embraced the Levy Report, or prevented the encroachment of Area C by the Arabs and supported by the EU or failed to demolish Arab homes for which demolition orders had been attained or built more aggressively east of the greenline. And so on. It is the antithesis of leadership. Ted Belman

By Avi Issacharoff, TOI

The policies that Netanyahu and his associates have followed assume that while there is no solution to the Palestinian issue, it can be managed. The commander’s intent, as signaled by the Prime Minister’s Office, also influenced the defense establishment, which sought to maintain quiet with the Palestinians in the West Bank by almost every possible means: occasional concessions, maintenance of security cooperation with the PA, and the minimizing of friction with the local Palestinian population.

And then there was quiet again here, for a moment. Quiet again in Tel Aviv and Ashdod, quiet in Yehud and Beersheba. There were no sirens wailing in the center, in the south, or in the north. Even in Gaza there were no explosions, shelling, or Israeli attacks. For three days. “Just” burying the dead and pulling corpses out of buildings.

But then, at 8 a.m. on Friday morning, it was over.
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By Daniel Greenfield, FPM

People are more likely to rally behind those with conviction in their own righteousness. The Muslim Goliath has carried off his imitation of David through the degree of his conviction. Israel and its defenders have strived for reasonableness over conviction, trying to prove their humanitarian credentials through a willingness to see both sides.

But as the conflict has become a war of ideas, it has become clear that wars of ideas are no more won by those who see both sides than wars of force are won by those who fight on both sides.

Empathizing with the underdog is a natural human instinct. When we see a little David facing off against a mighty Goliath, our hearts go out to the little guy. But what happens when Goliath pretends to be David and then accuses David of really being Goliath?

That is the situation that Israel finds itself in and it is also the topic of Joshua Muravchik’s new book, Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel.
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By David Horowitz, FRONTPAGE MAG

Barack Obama deliberately set out to lose the war in Iraq, and he did. He defied the advice of his joint chiefs of staff to secure America’s formidable military presence and keep 20,000 troops in country, and left Iraq to its own devices and the tender mercies of Iran. In doing so, he betrayed every American and Iraqi who gave his life to create a free Iraq and keep it out of the clutches of the terrorists.

Iraq is now a war zone dominated by the terrorist forces of the Islamic State, whose rise Obama’s policies fostered. Both his secretaries of state praised the animal Bashar Assad as a “reformer” and a man of “peace,” helping him to thwart his domestic opposition. The Islamic State was born out of the Syrian chaos that ensued.

Far worse was Obama’s open support for America’s mortal enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood, spawner of al-Qaeda and Hamas. During the “Arab Spring,” Obama essentially put America’s weight behind the legitimization of this murderous organization that had been outlawed for 40 years for its assassinations and conspiracies against the Egyptian regime. Secretary of State Clinton gave totally unfounded assurances to the world that the Brotherhood was ready to become part of the democratic process and give up its 90-year holy war against infidels, Jews in particular but also — and explicitly — America. During the Brotherhood’s brief tenure as the government in Egypt Obama gave these genocidal zealots more than a billion dollars in American aid and F-16 fighter-bombers that could easily reach Israel’s major population centers, which for 60 years the Brotherhood had sworn to destroy.
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By Anne Bayesfsky, FOX NEWS

As the terrorist organization Hamas breaks yet another ceasefire, it operates with the firm belief that it will be protected on the international stage. That’s because the modern United Nations has become an instrument of war, just seven decades after it was founded “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

It is time to face an ugly truth: The U.N. encourages terrorism. U.N. enablers on the ground in Gaza and U.N. broadcasters in the diplomatic comfort zones of Geneva and New York are partners in incitement to genocide against Israel, the Jewish state.

Think back to Rwanda, where a radio station broadcast that Tutsis were “cockroaches.” The message received was that killing was justified, that Tutsis deserved what they got. Such broadcasts were criminal. Read more…

By Vic Rosenthal

But one thing is as bad or worse than ever: what Israelis call hamatzav — the (security) situation.

It is true that we haven’t come under rocket fire yet. Yesterday the most recent ceasefire was broken by a barrage of about 60 rockets, but they didn’t come as far north as Rehovot. For people in the towns and kibbutzim near Gaza, as well as the cities of Ashkelon and Beersheva, it was back to the shelters. In fact, the army told residents that had left some of the locations closer to Gaza who had temporarily left their homes that it was safe to return; but when what should have been predictable happened, they found themselves spending the day (and night) in shelters.
Read more…