Gloom in Kerry’s party over widening Israeli-Palestinian gaps. Jordan rejects Palestinian security on its border

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report January 5, 2014, 10:19 PM

US Secretary of State John Kerry returns Sunday night, Jan. 5 for another shuttle between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas after taking time-out for dropping in on Amman and Riyadh. DEBKAfile reports that Kerry has ordered his team to shelve the proposed framework accord he presented to Netanyahu in 12 hours of talks and eight with Abbas Friday and Saturday. He concluded that the gaps between them on the core issues of the dispute were getting wider instead of narrower.

The Palestinians reject any Israeli security presence on the West Bank. However, in Amman, Secretary Kerry found Jordan’s King Abdullah just as adamantly opposed to any Palestinian security presence on their common border along the Jordan Valley, or their participation in future security arrangements for the West Bank.
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By Edward Alexander, The Weekly Standard

In his ponderously titled book Contributions to the Correction of the Public’s Judgement Concerning the French Revolution (1793), the German philosopher and political leader Johann Gottlieb Fichte took time out from his defense of the Reign of Terror to compose what has been called by Daniel Johnson “the most notorious footnote in history.” It warned his German countrymen of the Jewish menace in their midst. The Jews, he told them, constituted “a state within a state. .??.??. I see no way of granting [the Jews] civil rights, unless it be by chopping off all their heads one night and replacing them with new ones in which there would be not a single Jewish idea. And I see no way to protect ourselves from the Jews, unless by conquering their promised land for them and sending them all there.”
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By Ted Belman

Kerry left Israel this morning for Jordan and Saudi Arabia.  His parting words were:

“I can guarantee all parties that President (Barack) Obama and I are committed to putting forward ideas that are fair and balanced, ..”

It sounds nice what can it mean?

Courts don’t make judgments based on what’s fair and balanced. They look to the facts and to the law.

Accordingly Kerry proposes to ignore the law and perhaps even the facts. Essentially his starting point is the demands being made by each side whether justified or not. He is saying that he will be fair and balanced in deciding where to draw the line between these demands.
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By Michael Curtis, American Thinker

In late December 2013, Abbas, in rejecting the proposals of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for negotiating the Arab-Israeli conflict, is reported to have rejected the Israeli stipulation that Israel be recognized as “a Jewish state.”

Whatever Abbas’ own interpretation of the term “a Jewish state,” he is apparently unaware that the concept has been long recognized by the international community. It may be tiresome always to go back to square one of a disputed issue, yet it is vital to make the historical background clear and relevant.
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Mordechai Kedar writes that Gen Sisi has given Obama and Kerry the finger as has Assad and that Netanyahu should do likewise.

The Americans will have to decide what they will do about the Egyptian determination: will they totally cut off the connection with Egypt and allow this country to switch over to the Russian camp, or perhaps swallow the frog and continue to support Egypt, mainly in the civil arena, in order not to push Egypt into returning to Moscow. In my opinion Obama and Kerry have capitulated and will continue to capitulate to Sisi and will accept – under protest – his policy.

The events in Egypt prove that Obama and his team of aides are helpless against the determination of Middle Eastern countries. That’s how it is with Iran, with Iraq and with Syria. They can not enter into a confrontation with governments that are determined and firm in their positions, and ultimately Obama accepts the decisions of Middle East regimes, even if he does not agree with them.
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By Michael Ordman

[THIS IS WHAT THE US AND THE EU SHOULD DO]

Waleed Abdul Rahman, Asharq Al-Awsat Saturday, 4 Jan, 2014

Cairo, Asharq Al-Awsat – As the Egyptian government continues to crack down
on the ousted Muslim Brotherhood, the Ministry of Awqaf (religious
endowments) took control of several mosques controlled by the Islamist group
on Friday.

The takeover comes three days after the government ordered the seizure of
the assets of hundreds of Brotherhood members on suspicion of “funding
terrorism.”

In place of Brotherhood preachers, Al-Azhar clerics delivered sermons at
mosques across Egypt, including Al-Jala, and Al-Tawheed in Cairo and Dawah
Al-Haq in Giza.
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Women in Green

What is a step by step approach to turning the vision of Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria into a feasible idea? The Deputy Minister of Transportation has an orderly plan and she is convinced that if they just take the trouble to market it well, it will turn out to be much more feasible
than the ‘Two-State’ vision.

When Deputy Minister of Transportation, MK Tzipi Hotovely is asked what the Right should present as a political goal and an alternative to the ‘Two-State’ plan she answers simply, “The goal is for Judea and Samaria to be under Israeli sovereignty. It is ours and it was acquired legally in a bloody, defensive war. We must now implement the vision of the Greater Land of Israel and begin to apply sovereignty in all of the territory. This is the vision reflecting belief in the holy precept that the Land of Israel is ours and we have no right to revoke this precept. It is fidelity to the ideology of the Right and the religious public, which believes that this is our land.”
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The West continues to fail to understand the nature of Muslim Brotherhood: to impose Shari’a by all means, if necessary by violence

By Zvi Mazel, JPOST

By Ted Belman

For many years I have been pointing out the dangers of unlimited return of the so-called Palestinian refugees to Palestine, should it be created.

Its nice to see FM Lieberman is raising the alarm.

JPOST reports:

However, Lieberman also raised a “next-day” issue regarding the signing of any future peace deal that would lead to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

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Op-ed: ‘Quenelle’ gesture is not a popular sign of contestation; it is the indicator of a modern form of violent anti-Semitism building up in France
Riccardo Dugulin, YNET

As football players, basketball stars and national celebrities are crowding the ranks of a growing anti-social movement, France is put in jeopardy because of its inability to acknowledge the risk posed by revolutionary wave triggered by a group of populist stage performers.

Former football world champion Nicolas Anelka caught everyone’s attention when he used a well-known and already massively used anti-establishment salute in a national sport competition. The “quenelle” was invented in 2009 by a widely criticized anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist comedian, Dieudonné M’bala M’bala.
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[It should be noted that Dore Gold is now an adviser to PM Netanyahu.]

Dore Gold: 242 does not require land swaps

By Dore Gold, Israel Hayom Friday November 8, 2013

With unconfirmed rumors appearing in the press about what is likely to happen in the peace process in the months ahead, now is the time to recall exactly what Israel’s rights are in its territorial dispute with the Palestinians over the future of the West Bank.

Those rights were first enshrined in the most famous and important U.N. resolution in the peace process, U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. This month marks the anniversary of the resolution. The first draft was proposed on Nov. 7, 1967, while the final draft was adopted unanimously by all 15 Security Council members on Nov. 22 that year.
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By Ruth King, Mid East Outpost

Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion proclaimed: “History did not spoil us with power, wealth, nor with broad territories or an enormous community: however, it did grant us uncommon intellectual and moral virtue, and thus it is both a privilege and an obligation to be a light unto the nations.”

Where did that hubris-fraught term originate? From the Book of Isaiah. There are three references.

“Yea, He saith, ‘It is too light a thing for you to be My servant, to establish the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the scions of Israel, and I shall submit you as a light unto the nations, to be My salvation until the end of the earth’ (Isaiah, 49:6)
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By Martin Sherman, JPOST

True leadership is tested on the ability to uphold decisions, hard as they may be. We were not elected to lead the State of Israel in order to make easy decisions.

Politics in Israel is indeed stranger than fiction. It certainly is more grotesque and macabre than most literary plots of deceit and betrayal.

Beyond belief 

The spectacle unfolding before our eyes over the past several weeks in Israel’s theater of the politically absurd defies belief. We see an elected  government supported by a ruling parliamentary coalition composed almost entirely of  incumbent legislators, who built their political careers on opposing precisely the policy that they now seem powerless to prevent, and, in some cases, are even complicit in promoting.

So once again, a situation is emerging in which we have an Israeli government, whether willingly or unwillingly, embracing – or at least facilitating – the very policy its electoral constituency expected it to prevent.
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By Ted Belman

Secretary of State Kerry is back in Israel pushing for the acceptance of his Framework. It is reported that this framework requires Israel’s agreement that borders will be based on ’67 lines plus swaps among other things. The PA didn’t hesitate to reject it whereas PM Netanyahu is trying to find a way to live with it.

You don’t have to be a maximalist to argue that the framework deal, as reported, should be a deal breaker, for Israel.

Thankfully, Jewish Home agrees.  Naftali Bennett, its leader,  says they will leave the government if such framework is accepted , even if, with reservations. Israel’s fourteen reservations on accepting the Roadmap in 2003 simply greased the wheels of acceptance without having any traction thereafter. So Bennett is right to not buy that snake oil.
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By Charles Jacobs, The Boston Jewish Advocate

Two weeks ago, the American Studies Association (ASA) voted to boycott Israeli universities and asked American scholars to sever ties with Israeli academic institutions. Jewish mainstream organizations have responded with shock and anger, both on at the national level and in communities across the country. Here in Boston, Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP), the Jewish Community Relations Council ( JCRC), Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and American Jewish Committee (AJC) joined together to issue a condemnation.

But to those who’ve been paying attention to the growth of anti Israelism on campus, the ASA boycott was predictable.
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By Mazal Mualem, ALMONITOR,  December 31, 2013

Although Dani Dayan, the former head of the settlement umbrella organization Yesha Council, will not admit it, it turns out the settlers bet on the right horse when they decided to take control of the Likud Party. Slowly but surely, they accessed the institutions of the ruling party and became a significant element that must be taken into consideration when determining policy. In his own way, Dayan said the exact same thing when I asked him to assess Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political ability to implement a diplomatic agreement.

A Sunday New York Times article shows why Israel must never cede control of Judea and Samaria, according to Arutz Sheva analyst Mark Langfan.

The report cites a newly-published analysis by Theodore Postol, an MIT professor, and Richard Lloyd, a Telsascientist, which concluded that the rockets used in Syrian chemical attacks on civilians in August were likely “propelled by motors taken from a common family of 122-millimeter conventional artillery rockets known as the BM-21.” The BM-21s are Russian rockets commonly known by their newer name “Grad,” or by their earlier nick-names, “Katyusha.”

The study concluded that the chemical warheads that were used “contained a large volume, about 13.2 gallons, of sarin. The United Nations implicitly seconded that suggestion when it included a similar estimate in its own report in September… The assumption that the warheads contained a large volume of nerve agent” lead to the conclusion that the August 21 attack “implicated the Syrian government.”
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