Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
Straight from the Jerusalem Boardroom #186, November 8, 2013
http://bit.ly/1dRle9F

1.  The US-based Asurion (mobile phone) acquired Israel’s Soluto for $100MN (Globes Business Daily, October 31, 2013).

2.  Israel’s Wix raised $140MN on NASDQ, determining a $600MN market value (Globes, November 7, 2013).  Israel’s Mazor Robotics raised $41MN on NASDAQ (Globes, Oct. 31).

3.  The $70BN Carlos Slim, from Mexico, led a $60MN round of private placement in Israel’s Mobli.  Slim’s investment was made via his America Movil Mexican cellular company.  In July 2013, Slim invested $40MN in Israel’s Shazam.  A September 2012 round of private placement was led by the Kazakhstan billionaire, Kenges Rakishev, the chairman of Mobli (Globes, Nov. 7).  The San Diego-based Qualcomm Ventures led a $13MN round – joined by the Silicon Valley-based San Disc Ventures and the Hong Kong-based Horizon Ventures – by Israel’s Magisto (Globes, Oct. 30). Read more…

By P. David Hornik, FPM

The Israeli-Palestinian “peace talks” have reportedly hit a rough patch. The talks on Tuesday were said to have “ended in a row, with raised voices and the exchange of verbal insults.”

It started last week when Israel released the second batch of Palestinian security prisoners, all of whom were serving time for murder or attempted murder. They were welcomed as heroes in Ramallah. Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas shook each freed prisoner’s hand, and they were awarded generous cash grants on top of the stipends they already receive.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to allay outrage particularly on the more right-leaning side of his coalition, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahuannounced the building of 3500 housing units for Israelis—all of them either in East Jerusalem or West Bank (Judea and Samaria) settlement blocs. Several Israeli officials claimed the Palestinian side had already consented to such construction as a quid pro quo for the prisoner releases.
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ARUTZ SHEVA

EU’s new ambassador to Israel tells Science Minister Perry that he’d like Israel to work with the EU despite its boycotting guidelines.

NRG/Maariv reported that during the meeting, which took place in Tel Aviv, Perry briefed the ambassador on his Ministry’s activities in the fields of science and space technology and on Israel’s collaborations with other countries in these fields.

Faaborg-Andersen reportedly praised Israel’s activities in science and technology and recommended that the EU and Israel continue to cooperate in these areas.

According to Maariv, Faaborg-Andersen also told Perry that he would like to see Israel participating in the EU’s multi-million dollar Horizon 2020 research program.
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Op-ed: Palestinians want full sovereignty; if Israel wants to live, it must knock over negotiating table

Elyakim Haetzni, YNET

When the 17 basic demands of the Palestinians became known, even impassioned peace camp followers were alarmed by them. If I were a Palestinian, I would respond with the following monologue:

“What surprises you? Our demand that the state of Palestine will control the border crossings rather than Israel? That Palestine will be free to sign international agreements, including military ones? That it will be the only one to control the airspace over it and the water reservoirs under it and will be the exclusive sovereign in the territorial waters off Gaza and in the Dead Sea? Is there a country in the world which these are not the basic components of its sovereignty?
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Former president to host fundraiser for Messianic Jewish Bible Institute, which trains people to ‘provoke Jewish people, save them,’ in order to bring about second coming of Jesus

Ynetnews

Next week, former President George W. Bush is scheduled to keynote a fundraiser in Irving, Texas, for the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute, a group that trains people in the United States, Israel, and around the world to convince Jews to accept Jesus as the Messiah, the American magazine Mother Jones reported.

The organization’s goal: to “restore” Israel and the Jews and bring about the second coming of Christ. Based in Dallas, the Institute claims that it acts like the Apostle Paul in helping to “educate Christians in their role to provoke the Jewish people to jealousy and thus save some of them (Romans 11:11-14).”
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The Case for Life in Israel

By Hillel Halkin, MOSAIC

By Jay Bergman, JPOST

By Seth Mandel, COMMENTARY

Lieberman’s political power does not stem from his job title; it’s the other way around. Yet his relative political independence has always been something of a barometer of his electoral strength, and the argument can be made that it’s on the wane, acquittal or no acquittal.

Lieberman started out managing Netanyahu’s campaigns in the early 1990s, and when Netanyahu became prime minister, Lieberman was arguably the Likud Party’s second most powerful member. Yet Lieberman had found a way to tap into the Russian immigrant community’s desire for authentic political representation–Lieberman was himself a Soviet immigrant–in a way that others, like Natan Sharansky, didn’t. In 1999 he formed his own party, Yisrael Beiteinu. As his domestic constituency grew in influence, prime ministers made it a point to find a place for him in their governments, until they started needing Lieberman more than he needed them.
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Algemeiner

The usually self-assured biologist, author and atheist Richard Dawkins expressed his bewilderment at the disproportionate amount of Nobel prizes won by Jews in a recent interview with the New Republic, saying he is “intrigued by” the “phenomenally high” number of Jewish laureates.

Addressing the controversy surrounding a Tweet he wrote during the conferment of Nobel prizes earlier this month, Dawkins offered up something of a mea culpa, stating: “That was unfortunate. I should have compared religion with religion and compared Islam not with Trinity College but with Jews, because the number of Jews who have won Nobel Prizes is phenomenally high.”
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By Mati Tuchfeld, Israel Hayom

Within the Israeli political system, Avigdor Lieberman is thought of as someone who likes to surprise people. In December 1997, Lieberman shocked everyone with his sudden announcement that he was quitting his job as director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office. In 2006, Lieberman dropped another stunner when he decided to enter Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government and then threw people for a loop again just over a year later when he left it without any prior warning. Last fall, Lieberman and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dropped a bombshell when they announced that Likud and Yisrael Beytenu would run together on a joint list in the January 2013 Knesset elections. And in recent weeks, Lieberman and Netanyahu have been planning their next surprise.
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By Gilead Ini, TOI

Thomas R. Dew was a president of the College of William & Mary. He was also an eloquent defender of immorality. “Look to the slave holding population of the country,” he wrote in 1832 while a professor at the university, “and you every where find them characterized by noble and elevated sentiments, by humane and virtuous feelings.”

Clearly, even a professorship and some rhetorical skill don’t guarantee ideas that merit thoughtful debate. There is, after all, an entire website dedicated to “Scholars for 9/11 Truth,” and yet The New York Times has not once published an op-ed by the Texas A&M professor emeritus who expresses doubt that Boeing 767s were flown into the Twin Towers, or by the University of Colorado mathematics professor who similarly sees a conspiracy in the events of September 11. Their ideas are simply beyond the pale.

Nor has The New York Times offered space in its coveted opinion pages for debate about whether the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which is entangled in border disputes and burdened by extremism, should be annulled, folded back into India from which it was carved. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the newspaper promoting arguments in favor of the elimination of any recognized, democratic country. Such ideas, too, are beyond the pale. Except, of course, when it comes to Israel.
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In contrast to John Kerry’s remarks, Israel has legitimate legal rights to Judea and Samaria, as summarized below.

Amb. Alan Baker, ARUTZ SHEVA

The following points are reposted from Ambassador Alan Baker’s blog.

1. Upon Israel’s taking control of the area in 1967, the 1907 Hague Rules on Land Warfare and the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) were not considered applicable to the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) territory, as the Kingdom of Jordan, prior to 1967, was never the prior legal sovereign, and in any event has since renounced any claim to sovereign rights via-a-vis the territory.

2. Israel, as administering power pending a negotiated final determination as to the fate of the territory, nevertheless chose to implement the humanitarian provisions of the Geneva convention and other norms of international humanitarian law in order to ensure the basic day-to-day rights of the local population as well as Israel’s own rights to protect its forces and to utilize those parts of land that were not under local private ownership.
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By Daniel Pipes, Washington Times, November 5, 2013

The Republic of Cyprus has entered the maelstrom of the world’s most volatile region thanks to new-found gas and oil reserves combined with an erratic Turkish foreign policy and a civil war in Syria. Even as leaders of this Mediterranean island show skill dealing with these novel threats and opportunities, they need support from a strong U.S. Navy, something not now available.

Cypriot underwater gas and oil discoveries follow directly on ones found earlier in Israeli seas, located adjacent to them and uncovered by the same American (Noble) and Israeli (Delek, Avner) companies. The current estimate of 5 trillion cubic feet (tcf) as well as some oil has a value estimated at US$800 billion, a huge sum amount for a small country whose current GDP is a mere $24 billion.
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How an American woman escaped her Gaza husband

Steven Plaut. The Political Persecution of Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli “right-winger” whom the Left most Loves to Hate, has just ended in an acquittal and clearing of his name.  The panel of judges ruled unanimously to clear him completely.  It only took 15 years to do so.

The politicized Attorney General, who has never met a leftist he thinks needs to be prosecuted nor a rightist who does not, with the acquiescence of the Netanyahu team who thought that Lieberman was sapping away support for the Likud, failed.

To understand what the persecution of Lieberman was all about, here is a re-post of an older piece:

December 23, 2012

The Martyrdom of Avigdor Lieberman

By Steven Plaut

In 1999, Benjamin Netanyahu lost the Israeli election to leftist Ehud Barak to the squealing delight of Israel’s conscripted media and of many in its judicial system.  At the time, a criminal investigation was launched against Netanyahu for supposedly misappropriating property from the Prime Minister’s residency.   He had to leave it in a hurry to turn it over to his successor, and supposedly had absconded with some trinkets and gifts that had been given to him as Prime Minister but really belonged to the residency, not to him personally.  Nothing much came of the “investigation,” other than it serving as an illustration of how the judicial Left in Israel and the chronically politicized Prosecutor’s Office file politically-motivated indictments and open politically-motivated criminal investigations.

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