TIMES OF ISRAEL

Charlotte van den Berg was a 20-year-old college student working part-time in Amsterdam’s city archives when she and other interns came across a shocking find: letters from Jewish Holocaust survivors complaining that the city was forcing them to pay back taxes and late payment fines on property seized after they were deported to Nazi death camps.
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How, the survivors asked, could they be on the hook for taxes due while Hitler’s regime was trying to exterminate them? A typical response was: “The base fees and the fines for late payment must be satisfied, regardless of whether a third party, legally empowered or not, has for some time held the title to the building.”
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By GIL HOFFMAN, JPOST
 
Israel’s rebellious deputy defense minister, Danny Danon, says that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu can’t stay in the Likud and make concessions to the Palestinians.
 

 
[..]That leaves Danon, who is unquestionably the wicked son. If Netanyahu thought appointing him deputy defense minister would make him content, disciplined, or at least responsible, he had another thing coming. Danon has become a thorn in the side of the Americans, the chairman of the powerful Likud central committee, and the prime minister’s most vocal critic.
 
In an interview conducted Thursday morning, Danon explains why he has threatened to resign if a fourth round of prisoner releases takes place, takes credit for the current coalition crisis with Bayit Yehudi, and reveals how he intends to use the Likud institutions he heads to prevent Netanyahu from making diplomatic concessions.
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Ukrainian city’s separatist leader, whose alleged signature is on document, says he never signed it; ADL ‘skeptical of fliers’ authenticity.’

By Haaretz | Apr. 18, 2014 | 12:08 AM

Part of the notice as distributed on Twitter. Photo by Screenshot 

By MARTIN SHERMAN, JPOST

If the 2014 Conference can spur public brisk discussion on how to remedy the some of the policy deficiencies it exposed it will have made an enormous contribution to the long-term strategic well-being of the nation.

Dear Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman and the entire Netanyahu government, I asked you, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, a question this Sunday at the Jerusalem Post’s Annual Conference… Your response was nothing but loaded rhetoric downplaying the existential BDS threat and the attacks against me on my campus for being a Zionist. Perhaps worst of all, you downplayed the anti-Semitic attacks on students across the United States, Europe and soon the world.

– Justin Hayet, “An open letter to Foreign Minister Liberman” – The Jerusalem Post, April 10
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 By Caroline Glick, JPOST

In Europe, in Asia, in the Middle East and beyond, the America’s most dangerous foes are engaging in aggression and brinkmanship unseen in decades.

The most terrifying aspect of the collapse of US power worldwide is the US’s indifferent response to it.

In Europe, in Asia, in the Middle East and beyond, America’s most dangerous foes are engaging in aggression and brinkmanship unseen in decades.

As Gordon Chang noted at a symposium in Los Angeles last month hosted by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, since President Barack Obama entered office in 2009, the Chinese have responded to his overtures of goodwill and appeasement with intensified aggression against the US’s Asian allies and against US warships.
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By GIL HOFFMAN, JPOST

American mediators have been trying to broker an agreement in which Israel releases a fourth round of Palestinian prisoners.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu speaks to the cabinet,
 
Efforts to reach an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians on extending talks hit a snag on Thursday when Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu lost his majority for such a deal.

 
American mediators have been trying to broker an agreement in which Israel releases a fourth round of Palestinian prisoners. As a gesture to Israel for releasing Israeli Arabs as part of the deal, the US intended to commute the life sentence of Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard.
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By Tom Wilson, COMMENTARY

Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas has said that he wants the next round of negotiations to focus on the borders of a Palestinian state. Of course, Israel always has to be concerned about maintaining defensible borders, but the precise geographical parameters of a Palestinian state must be of less concern to everyone than the matter of the internal nature of that state. Indeed, if we could all be confident that a future Palestinian state would have the national characteristics of, say, Switzerland, then the question of the defensibility of Israel’s borders might be somewhat less critical. But because there is good reason to suspect that a future Palestinian state in the West Bank, like the Palestinian polity in Gaza, would have more in common with Afghanistan, the exact positioning of its borders should hardly be our most pressing concern.
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DEBKAfile Exclusive Report April 17, 2014,

Jordanian air strike destroyed combat vehicles

The Royal Jordanian Air force strike Wednesday, April 16, against a combat vehicle convoy from Syria destroyed an Al Qaeda raider force on its way to attack US military targets in the kingdom, DEBKAfile’s military sources reveal. Jordan’s first assault on a target outside the country took place on the Syrian side of the border opposite the eastern town of Ruwaished.
 
This episode brought to the fore how dramatically the threat al Qaeda-Iraq poses to Jordan, the US forces based their and Israel has escalated.
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By Robert Spencer Apr 7, 2014

CAIR, MAS and their allied groups are so practiced in deception, and so many American voters are so ignorant and indifferent, that this group could gain real traction. Meanwhile, given that Muslims of various sects vote as blocs in Iraq and elsewhere, it is not hard to envision such a bloc emerging in the U.S., and ultimately transforming American politics. “Muslim Brotherhood Launches Own U.S. Political Party,” from Investor’s Business Daily, April 1 (thanks to Antony):
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Veteran demographer Yaakov Feitelson on recent trends in the Jewish world. MOSAIC

Is Israel about to experience a new wave of Aliyah? An examination of the various factors affecting Jewish communities around the world leads to just such a conclusion. On the one hand, there are the deepening economic crisis and rising anti-Semitism. On the other hand, Israel is enjoying great strides in economic growth and prosperity, as well as providing a sense of personal security increasingly lacking in Europe. These factors combined are leading many to choose Israel as their new home.
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David Horowitz the Editor of Times of Israel told the PM “Lead, Netanyahu, Lead”. He took him to severe task for releasing murderers and wrote:

It is frankly impossible to reconcile the clear thinking of Netanyahu 1995 with the muddled leadership of Netanyahu 2013 who, rather than facilitate peace talks by the simple and reversible expedient of freezing settlement expansion and acknowledging the indisputable fact that Israel is negotiating on the basis of the pre-1967 lines, as Mahmoud Abbas had demanded, chose to capitulate to the least palatable of Abbas’s preconditions: releasing pre-Oslo era Palestinian terror convicts. The four-phased deal to free some of the most evil killers was a terrible mistake from the start — and not only with the benefit of hindsight, with the peace process in tatters because Israel balked at the final hurdle, refusing to release Israeli-Arabs without at least Abbas’s confirmation that he’d deign to keep on talking past April.

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As I have written in the past, Netanyahu is negotiating without preconditions, in name only, but in reality has accepted negotiations based on ’67 with swaps.
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Nice to see such a prominent journalist agree with me.

??In Europe’s streets, fear and persecution are turning the Jews into ghosts without yarmulkes and the sounds of Hebrew. In Europe’s houses, Jews are opting for cultural and religious suicide.
 
Giulio Meotti, INN
 
The latest numbers on Europe’s Jews are Adolf Hitler’s dream coming true.
 
According to a Rabbinical Center of Europe’s research, over 85% of European Jews assimilate and intermarry with non-Jews, 80% do not attend synagogues, 75% of Jewish children in Europe do not receive a Jewish education, and over 90% of European Jewish students have no connections with the Jewish community. A memory, a community, a tradition, a liturgy, a history, a faith, a patrimony are all perishing as a result.
 
This is a most impressive report on the status of Europe’s Jews. Rabbi Shimon Elitov, a member of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate Council, rightly said that “assimilation in the shocking numbers that we see is worse that the physical Holocaust that we saw”.
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Fear replaced communal atmosphere in Donetsk’s Jewish community as armed men handed out a leaflet Passover eve calling on Jews register their religion and property with the interim pro-Russian government or face deportation and loss of citizenship.
 
Michal Margalit, YNET NEWS
 
A leaflet distributed in Donetsk, Ukraine calling for all Jews over 16 years old to register as Jews marred the Jewish community’s Passover festivities Monday (Passover eve), replacing them with feelings of concern.
 
The leaflet demanded the city’s Jews supply a detailed list of all the property they own, or else have their citizenship revoked, face deportation and see their assets confiscated.
 
Donetsk, a Ukraine province with 4.3 million people – 10 percent of Ukraine’s population – and 17,000 Jews, is home to much of the country’s heavy industry, and is thus the biggest prize of the eastern regions where pro-Russian separatists have captured government buildings in the past week.
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DEBKAfile Special Report

The US and Russia, while trading the blame for pushing Ukraine to the brink of civil war, are nonetheless tugging at the leashes of the two players in the field, each jockeying for advantage in the quadrilateral meeting of senior US, Russian, European, Ukrainian and UN officials scheduled to take place in Geneva Thursday, April 17, DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources report.
The five or six armored personnel carriers which rolled in the embattled town of Slavyanks with Russian flags Wednesday, April 16, turned out to be part of the Ukrainian military operation whose crews instead of cracking down on the pro-Russian militias joined them. According to some Western intelligence sources, a large number of regular Russian soldiers have crossed the border into Ukraine and they too are boosting the pro-Russian militias’ ranks. The Kiev government’s “anti-terror” operation in East Ukraine is accordingly breaking up.
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by ALEXANDER G. MARKOVSKY, FAMILY SECURITY MATTERS 

Part I is here – please click

Crimea turned its clocks to Moscow time literally and figuratively. And in case you didn’t notice, if you plan to spend your vacation on Crimean beaches you must now get your visa from the Russian Embassy. As I ruefully predicted in my first post, “Crimea, Ukraine and the Agony of Impotence,” Crimea has joined Russia, and regardless of Western sanctions and condemnations there is no turning back for this historic clock. The White House agreed. In its recent statement, “If Russia does not take any steps to further violate Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, a diplomatic solution remains possible,” Washington abandoned its devotion to revisionist history and acknowledged that Crimea is no longer part of any diplomatic settlement.

With the first round of the Ukrainian chess game Obama vs. Putin complete, it is time to recapitulate the outcome and see who is paying the “costs for invading any part of Ukraine,” as President Obama warned about in February.

Putin got Crimea and he got to keep the $15 billion he offered Ukraine earlier for not joining the EU. Furthermore, he will be getting billions of dollars in back payments for gas and market prices for the future gas supply (thus far Ukraine has been getting gas at a subsidized price). There is no more lease payment to Ukraine for the Navy base in Sevastopol. The downside: Western sanctions, condemnations, and a few F-16’s flying along the Russian border as a demonstration of NATO resolve.
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Although Dershowitz says some great things such as;

– “the Israelis and the Palestinians do not stand in equivalent positions — morally, legally, diplomatically or politically — when it comes to negotiating Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank”,

– “Israel captured this territory in an entirely lawful defensive war.”,

– “Possession is 9/10th of the law, and in this case, 9/10th of morality as well.”,l

– “The land at issue was never part of a Palestinian state. It was lawfully captured from Jordan in a defensive war.”,

– “The person who was lawfully in possession of the item need do nothing unless the person seeking it offers to negotiate.”,

So far so good, but questions remain.

– “The Palestinians deserve to have a state, but their claim is no greater than that of the Tibetans, the Kurds, the Chechens and other stateless groups.”

This is a good point, but why do they “deserve a state”? On what basis?

It also strikes me as strange that such a legal scholar as he, who is well versed on ME history should start out with proposals to divide the land in ’36 and ’47 neither of which created any Arab rights and were rejected in any event, fails to mention Israel’s legal rights to Judea and Samaria flowing from San Remo Resolution and the Palestine Mandate.

And why if he rightly feels that the Arabs have to come cap in hand and ask for a handout, did he not take issue with his idol, Obama, when he attempted to force Israel to pay for the privilege of talking to the Arabs and literally forced Israel to negotiate based on 100% withdrawal.

And why is he so totally in favour of a settlement freeze. Israel is in the dominant position as he acknowledges, so why does he not support them acting that way. If Israel were to freeze construction, there would be no pressure to negotiate a deal. The only thing that makes time on our side and sends a message to the PA is building more units as fast as the market will support. The message to the PA would be “the longer you wait to cut a deal, the more land it will cost you.”

Ted Belman

By ALAN DERSHOWITZ, JPOST

The burden is on the Palestinians to come to the negotiating table, not as equal partners, but as claimants, seeking to obtain something that they do not have.

Goldberg comes out against Bennett’s Plan and Glick’s/Wise’s Plan for reasons he states.He recommends instead that Israel “terminate all aid whatsoever not only to the Palestinian Authority, but also to the Palestinian Arab population.” and “To ameliorate the consequences of these measures, Israel can offer generous financial incentives to individual Palestinian Arab families (and Israeli Arab families) who elect to emigrate”. This is closer to Sherman’s plan. But I don’t see the Israel High Court approving such a deal for Israeli Arabs as it would discriminate against Israeli Jews who would like to to receive the same deal. Having said that, I do believe in the combination of both tightening the screws and offering incentives. Also I still believe we should first annex most of Area C and some of B so that we end up with a more practical border. Ted Belman

By Steve Goldberg, INN
George Orwell: “To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.”

Certainly there is no moral principle that requires Israel to coddle people who yearn for its destruction and who celebrate the murder of Jews.

Although it was not his intent, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has done Israel an enormous favor. Specifically, by obsessively pursuing the “peace process” to its unavoidable dead end, Kerry has demonstrated that the two-state solution is, and has always been, a mirage
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David Rubin recommends an amendment to Bennett’s Plan.

[..] While many Israelis believe that Israel should declare full sovereignty in all of the lands currently in its possession, there is a certain logic to a phased approach. After all, politics is “the art of the possible” and declaring Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria would, indeed, be an important first step.

The major flaw in this plan is in the automatic granting of citizenship to the Arab residents. Many Israeli politicians are rightly concerned about the ramifications of the inevitable “apartheid state” accusations that would accompany any declaration of Israeli sovereignty, without granting of full citizenship to all residents, and therefore, when formulating plans to move forward, are unnecessarily hasty in the granting of full citizenship with no strings attached.
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