Netanyahu orders cabinet ministers not to cooperate with Palestinian counterparts, after Abbas’ request to join international conventions.

By Barak Ravid, HAARETZ

A senior Israeli official said that the ministers were updated by telephone over the course of the morning by Cabinet Secretary Avichai Mendelblit, who ordered communication stymied with Palestinian officials including ministers and director generals in response to the Palestinian unilateral actions. Only low-level field cooperation will be permitted, according to the Israeli official.

Netanyahu issued his order just hours after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry placed most of the blame on Israel for the recent crisis in peace talks during a Senate Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Tuesday.
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Ex Min Kahlon said Likud has lost its way:

“Likud for me was really the Likud of Menachem Begin, who also represented a social vision: reducing disparities between rich and poor, neighborhood renewal, social rehabilitation, and education reform. It was a pragmatic Likud that knew how to make peace when needed. That is Likud for me. But that Likud no longer exists today, and I struggle to accept some of the things taking place within the party.”

“Likud is a way of life, Likud is social awareness, Likud is compassion and carrying for the weak,” Kahlon went on. “But Likud is no longer there, it has strayed from the path. In recent years Likud’s social banner has been dismantled… for the sake of political-security gains.”

State Comptroller’s poverty report reveals bleak image of rampant hunger among Israel’s poor, places blame on government inaction.

Goel Beno, YNET NEWS

The State Comptroller’s poverty report revealed that 894,000 Israelis, of them 306,000 children, go for as long as an entire day without food, or are forced cut down the size of their meals because they can’t afford basic food products.
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By Jonathan S. Tobin, COMMENTARY

Today in testimony before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Secretary of State John Kerry performed a post-mortem on the recent collapse of the Middle East peace talks. According to Kerry, the Palestinian refusal to keep negotiating past April and their decision to flout their treaty commitments by returning to efforts to gain recognition for their non-existent state from the United Nations was all the fault of one decision made by Israel. As the New York Times reports:

Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday that Israel’s announcement of 700 new apartments for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem precipitated the bitter impasse in peace negotiations last week between Israel and the Palestinians.

While Mr. Kerry said both sides bore responsibility for “unhelpful” actions, he noted that the publication of tenders for housing units came four days after a deadline passed for Israel to release Palestinian prisoners and complicated Israel’s own deliberations over whether to extend the talks.

“Poof, that was the moment,” Mr. Kerry said in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

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By Michael Ledeen, PJ MEDIA

Somebody on Twitter posted an upbeat message saying the US delegation to the latest round of talks with Iranian officials was quite optimistic.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a born optimist and I love optimism, but I’d rather revel in victory than hope for good news, and the Iranians have every reason to revel.  The Obama crowd has just ok’d something the Tehran tyrants have desperately wanted since the eighties: spare parts ^[1] for their long-grounded American passenger aircraft.  Boeing and General Electric were given export licenses by the Treasury Department and everyone involved has been chanting “we take aircraft security very seriously,” in order to cloak this latest gift to the Khamenei-Rouhani regime in humanitarian hues. Read more…

In the end, Israel is going to have no choice but to annex Area C of Judea and Samaria,said lawyer and activist Elyakim Ha’etzni.

By Moshe Cohen, INN

Elyakim Ha’etzni

In the end, Israel is going to have no choice but to annex Area C of Judea and Samaria, according to attorney and former MK Elyakim Ha’etzni – and Israel would be better off doing it sooner rather than later.

With the Palestinian Authority filing applications to UN committees to accept it as a full member states, it’s just a matter of time before the UN recognizes “Palestine” as a state altogether. In response to the PA’s move, Israel has made a series of threats, the most serious a cutoff of aid to the PA.
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Analysis: Palestinians may soon be the ones to threaten US (and Israel) by inviting Russia to the negotiating table as a partner and mediator.

By Steve Plocker, YNET

Last week, the Palestinian Authority halted (until further notice) the talks with Israel and the United States. That is the proper definition for the decisions made by the Palestinian political echelon, which led to a deadlock in the negotiations.

The Netanyahu government did play for time and stutter in response to the initiatives of American Secretary of State John Kerry, but (most of the government) did not want to stop talking – if only because talking prevents another intifada-style popular outburst. And also because the Americans asked us to, both nicely and not nicely.
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It was clear to all but Kerry, Livni and some on Israel’s left that any unlikely agreement would only lead to further Palestinian terrorism.

By Moshe Arens, HAARETZ

With the breakdown of the talks so assiduously chaperoned by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, it first has to be said: Kerry put his heart into these negotiations, firmly believing that he was serving the best interests of Israel, the Palestinians and the United States. The interlocutors themselves, the Israelis and the Palestinians, may not have taken the negotiations as seriously.
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By Gideon Levy, HAARETZ | Oct. 23, 2012 |

Most of the Jewish public in Israel supports the establishment of an apartheid regime in Israel if it formally annexes the West Bank.

A majority also explicitly favors discrimination against the state’s Arab citizens, a survey shows.

The survey, conducted by Dialog on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, exposes anti-Arab, ultra-nationalist views espoused by a majority of Israeli Jews. The survey was commissioned by the Yisraela Goldblum Fund and is based on a sample of 503 interviewees.

The questions were written by a group of academia-based peace and civil rights activists. Dialog is headed by Tel Aviv University Prof. Camil Fuchs.
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INN

Shurat Hadin, a non-governmental organization that operates against Palestinian terrorists through the courts, said it would lodge ‘a tsunami’ of criminal complaints against senior Palestinians with the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is based in The Hague.

Following the signing of 15 international treaties by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in order to be accepted into UN organizations, and the PA’s ongoing threat to join the ICC, Shurat Hadin has begin preparing charges against senior PA officials for involvement in terror attacks.
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INN

Yisrael Beiteinu, said party leader Avigdor Liberman, will not agree under any circumstances to another round of terrorist prisoner releases. If the government does go ahead and release more terrorists, Liberman will pull his party out of the government, most likely causing new elections.

“Yisrael Beiteinu will prefer to go to new elections than to see more Palestinian prisoners released, even in a ‘package deal’ in which Jonathan Pollard would be released as well,” Liberman said. “We cannot return to this kind of arrangement whereby we release terrorists to keep the talks with the Palestinians going, considering the moves they have made recently.” Liberman was referring to last week’s application by the Palestinian Authority for recognition as a member state in 15 UN agencies.

The PA, he said, wasn’t a real entity anyway. “Judea and Samaria are Fatahland, Gaza is Hamastan,” he said.

Liberman also criticized Naftali Bennett, head of the Jewish Home party, who suggested that Israel sue PA chief Mahmoud Abbas for war crimes. “Sometimes it is better to act quietly than to make too much noise,” Liberman said.

By Ted Belman

Israel could learn a thing or two from General al Sisi of Egypt. He recognizes that the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas are a threat to his regime because they resort to violent protests and terror. Accordingly he banned the Muslim brotherhood and arrested many of its leadership. He recognizes that they are at war with him and responds accordingly by taking the fight to them.

It is high time the Israel recognized that the PLO, Fatah and Hamas are also a threat to Israel because they likewise resort to violence and terror. Naftali Bennett declared that Israel is preparing to charge Abbas with war crimes which include honouring and praising terrorists and inciting to violence.
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By Steven Plaut, FPM

Israel is currently under a worldwide assault, one whose foundations are anti-Semitism. The campaign of demonization and delegitimizing has many forms, including the economic warfare of the “Boycott, Divest, Sanctions” movement or BDS. The goal of the campaign is the annihilation of Israel and its population, and victory for the movement of Arab terrorism and Islamofascism.

It is impossible to understand fully this assault against Israel and the Jews without an appreciation of the role of Israeli leftwing traitors, collaborating with anti-Israel Arab nationalists. From the beginning, the initiatives calling for worldwide boycotts of Israel have come from a small group of disloyal radical leftist Israelis, many of them holding tenured positions at Israeli universities. These lead the calls for boycotts against their own country and their own employers. They provide a figleaf of respectability for anti-Semites around the world who can claim that even “progressive” Israelis are endorsing their campaign to boycott Israel and Israeli institutions. The disloyal tenured radicals are also the inventors of the canard that Israel is an apartheid regime. They are the moral equivalents of Vichy French and other European collaborators with Nazi Germany during World War II. Their aim is to provide legitimacy, aid and comfort to the enemies of their own country.
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Am Yisrael Echad

By David M. Weinberg, ISRAEL HAYOM

A minor flap flared this week over the activities of a religious educational NGO in the Israeli secular school system. The controversy provides us with a fascinating and troubling insight into religious-secular relations in this country.

The “Am Yisrael Echad” (“One People of Israel”) NGO was accused by Haaretz’s education correspondent of proffering sex education with a traditional bent in secular high schools. Basing itself on the complaint of a parent, a Haaretz editorial even demanded that the students be “protected” from the NGO’s “religious indoctrination.”

Without knowing a thing about Am Yisrael Echad or the actual content of its educational programming, the critics accused the NGO of proselytizing and pushing a worldview that is misogynist and “excludes women from the public sphere.”
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DEBKAfile Exclusive Report April 5, 2014, 7:25 PM

UAE Crown Prince Gen. Sheikh Al Nahyan

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, nearing 80, has proved time and again in the last two decades that he will never put pen to paper on an accord for ending the dispute with Israel. If he really wanted an independent Palestinian state, he could at any time have followed the path to self-determination chosen by David Ben Gurion, when he declared Israeli statehood on May 14, 1948 in Tel Aviv. Had Abbas (known mostly as Abu Mazen) formally convened an assembly of Palestinian community and institutional leaders at the Palestinian parliament building in Ramallah and proclaimed statehood, there would have been very little Israel could have done.
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Israeli professor Gideon Greif lectures before thousands of German students a year. But even he is sometimes rattled by their questions.

By Ofer Aderet, HAARETZ  | Apr. 4, 2014 | 6:44 PM |  1

OrCam is a smart camera mounted on the frames of your eyeglasses, which ‘sees’ text, recognizes objects and ‘whispers’ in your ear.

HAARETZ

A new, camera-based product from Israeli start-up OrCam gives the visually impaired the ability to both “read” easily and move around a lot more freely than they have been able to until now.

Reading aids for the visually impaired and the blind are typically cumbersome devices that recognize text in restricted environments or smartphone apps with limited capabilities.

The OrCam device, on the other hand, is a small camera that clips onto glasses and connects to a very powerful wearable computer. The device uses a bone-conduction speaker to read aloud the words or objects pointed to by the user, according to Gizmag..
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The “Civil Rights” Group Hides Islam’s Denial of Civil Rights to Muslim Women.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/375098/print

Honor Diaries is an important film that explores the brutality and systematic inequality faced by women in Muslim-majority societies. It features both believing Muslim women, like Dr. Qanta Ahmed (whose compelling essay about the film was published here atNational Review Online yesterday), and former Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the renowned author and human-rights activist.The purpose of Honor Diaries is to empower women by shining a light on the hardships they endure — including “honor” killings (i.e., murders over the perception of having brought shame to the family by violating Islamic norms), beatings, genital mutilation, forced marriage — particularly of young girls – and restrictions on movement, education, and economic opportunity. The film highlights authentic Muslim moderates struggling against the dead-end of Islamic supremacism.