From Women in Green

We are very moved and excited by the enthusiastic responses of so many of you to our new Sovereignty Journal. Responses that prove that the public is eager for setting up an alternative to the suicidal two-state solution of the Left.

The English version of “Sovereignty” is now up on our website and can be found by clicking on:
http://www.womeningreen.org/journal/1/bookflip2.php

To flip the pages click on top of screen on the “Next” button.
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BY STUART WINER AND LAZAR BERMAN October 27, 2013,

A ministerial committee headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved on Sunday the names of 26 Palestinian prisoners to go free on Tuesday. The planned release constitutes the second phase of a four-stage prisoner release deal, agreed to as part of ongoing US-brokered peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians.

A government statement said 21 of the inmates were from the West Bank and five were from the Gaza Strip. “A list of the prisoners is to be published Sunday night on the website of the Israel Prisons Service, after the bereaved families have been informed,” the statement said.

All of the prisoners committed their crimes before the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993.

The releases were expected to be accompanied by the announcement of new plans for West Bank settlement construction, a senior Israeli official said.
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Germany said to warn Israel over skipping UN human rights review

BY TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF October 27, 2013,

Israel has come under increasing pressure to attend a United Nations human rights review, scheduled for this Tuesday, and has reportedly been warned that a failure to attend would cause harmful diplomatic fallout.

The review, a Universal Periodic Review carried out by the UN Human Rights Council, is obligatory every few years for all UN members, but foreign minister Avigdor Liberman severed Israel’s relationship with the HRC in 2012 after the agency announced a probe into Israeli settlement activities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle on Friday sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urging Israeli to attend the review, Haaretz reported on Sunday. The letter acknowledged Israel’s difficulties with the HRC, but said not attending would have “serious consequences.”
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[See also: Germany to Israel: Attend UN Human Rights Council – Or Else]

By ANNE BAYEFSKY

Terminating support for the Council’s permanent agenda item on Israel, and Israel’s admission into the WEOG group in Geneva, are about addressing the credibility crisis facing the UN, not Israel.

The United Nations is gearing up for yet another attack upon Israel – even more outrageous on this occasion because it has been arranged in the name of equality. The so-called “Universal Periodic Review” (UPR), will take place in Geneva on October 29, 2013, under the auspices of the UN Human Rights Council. The label is intended to evoke the equal treatment of all UN member states, notwithstanding the actual treatment of the UN’s favorite whipping boy.

The UPR was concocted after the credibility of the Council’s predecessor – the UN Human Rights Commission – finally took a fatal hit. On March 15, 2006, with the United States and Israel voting against, the General Assembly pushed the Commission out one door and dragged the Council in through another. The “reform” of the UN’s top human rights body was fundamentally flawed, however, since American efforts to condition membership on some degree of actually protecting human rights, were totally rejected.
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COMMENTARY’S take on this article : Obama’s “Modest Strategy” Good For Putin By Jonathan S. Tobin

By MARK LANDLER, NYT

WASHINGTON — Each Saturday morning in July and August, Susan E. Rice,
President Obama’s new national security adviser, gathered half a dozen aides in her corner office in the White House to plot America’s future in the Middle East. The policy review, a kind of midcourse correction, has set the United States on a new heading in the world’s most turbulent region.

Ms. Rice and her team plotted America’s future in the Middle East last summer and held weekly briefings for top officials like Secretary of State John Kerry, second from right.

At the United Nations last month, Mr. Obama laid out the priorities he has adopted as a result of the review. The United States, he declared, would focus on negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, brokering peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians
and mitigating the strife in Syria. Everything else would take a back seat. Read more…

Dr. Mordechai Kedar..

Ever since the seventies, the world has become accustomed to the split in the Middle East, between those countries that support the West – Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco and Israel, and we might add Turkey to this list as well. This coalition was strong mainly because of the dangers posed by those countries that were members of the opposing, Soviet, coalition: Syria, Libya, Iraq and South Yemen. Lebanon was then between the democratic hammer and the Syrian anvil.

Despite the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of the eighties, there were no big shifts in political orientation, and the countries that were faithful to the Western bloc led by the United States remained faithful to it until recently, mainly because a new hostile bloc was formed, led by Iran and supported by Russia and China. The stronger the Iranian threat became, the more the pro-Western countries depended on America for support.
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I brought together a number of analysts to discuss Syria early in the war there. We all favoured partition. Ted Belman

by Gary C. Gambill
Foreign Policy Research Institute

http://www.meforum.org/3650/partitioning-syria

After two-and-a-half years of steadily metastasizing violence in Syria, the harsh reality is that the country isn’t going to become a stable, unified state again in the foreseeable future, let alone a remotely democratic one. It may be time to start thinking about alternatives.

Syria has already fragmented into increasingly well-defined enclaves. A multiplicity of Sunni Arab rebels control large swaths of the north and east, while the regime is dominant in the capital and major cities, the largely non-Sunni coastal provinces, and a corridor connecting them. Kurds control small border areas in the far northeast. The Druze, heavily concentrated in southwest Syria, have formed militias to fend off rebel incursions, while tending otherwise toward neutrality.
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I disagree with Gil-White’s conclusion.  Everyone involved with Oslo from the start knew of the Nazi connection and chose to ignore it.  I don’t see continuing it as treason but as stupidity or naivete.  Ted Belman

 Netanyahu’s speech at Bar Ilan University

An interpretation

by Francisco Gil-White, Historical and Investigative Research 

Eichmann’s deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, provided the following chilling testimony at Nuremberg:

“The Mufti played a role in the decision to destroy the Jews of Europe. The importance of his role cannot be ignored. . .  The Mufti was one of the initiators of the methodical destruction of the Jews of Europe and was a partner and consultant to Eichmann and Hitler on how to execute the plan. . .”

—Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking about Hajj Amin al Husseini, father of the Palestinian movement, at Bar Ilan University, (6 October 2013) Read more…

The E.U. ignored this powerful letter. Alan Baker was one of the lawyers who signed the Levy Report which was buried by Netanyahu, essentially ignoring the legal conclusions just as the E.U. is doing. Just imagine how much more impact the letter would have had, had Netanyahu accepted the Report. I am part of a team headed by Arlene Kushner and Jeff Daube who are beginning a campaign to get the government of Israel to accept and implement the Report. Ted Belman

Manfred Gerstenfeld interviews Ambassador Alan Baker: “”By its persistence in referring to the pre-1967 lines, the E.U. is undermining future negotiation on this issue…”

ARUTZ SHEVA

“The European Union issued a directive this year which calls upon its member states to cease all dealings with Israeli research institutions, companies and other bodies situated in what the E.U. considers to be the “occupied territories” and specifically in Israeli settlements, which the E.U. considers to be illegal.

“This directive illustrates an inherent bias by the E.U. against Israel and as such prejudices any aspiration by the E.U. that it can continue, with clean hands, to be involved in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
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You would think that Lapid would have had his speech corrected for English grammar since he was going to read it but he didn’t. His main message was effective, if you are going to talk about human rights, talk about all human rights and put it in historical context. On the other hand he said some stupid stuff like “We need to fight emotions with emotions. Where there is fear, let’s hope.” This has been the problem with leftist thinking all along. In other words he is saying let’s ignore reality and hope for the best. Ted Belman

The conflict with the Palestinians is about distrust more than anything else, Finance Minister Yair Lapid said at The Jerusalem Post Diplomatic Conference on Thursday.
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Israel: The Cause Of World War III

Gerald A. Honigman

Now, I’m not complaining, mind you…

There’s an expression, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” I get it. But it doesn’t make what I’m about to share with you any less aggravating.

Just within the last few weeks, while engaged in several different programs on the Middle East, I had three men come up to me with their explanation of all of the region’s woes.

All were intelligent individuals. I assessed this after long conversations with them.

Their conclusion…It’s all Israel’s fault.
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THE JERUSALEM REPORT

OCTOBER 25, 2013
Israel now has water to spare thanks to technologies ranging from water purification and desalination to improved water infrastructure.

In 1949, when Arie Schraiber, now 81, came to Kibbutz Nirim in the Western Negev just after the War of Independence, there was no running water. The young men and women of the fledgling frontline kibbutz, which had warded off Egyptian forces in a fierce battle, losing eight of its members, barely had enough drinking water for themselves, let alone for watering crops, and worked mainly for the Jewish National Fund, planting low-maintenance trees in the desert.Only in 1954 did the first water line from the Mekorot national carrier finally reach them down south, bringing water to the Negev from the Yarkon River in the center of the country.

“That suddenly allowed us to work in agriculture,” says the silver-haired great-grandfather, who looks younger than his years, as he strolls along between green clementine trees whose first fruits are budding. “Until the early 1950s, this was an empty land; nothing was growing here except for what we had planted and what had managed to survive with a little rain.
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Israel saved me

Amit Lewinthal, Israel Hayom,

Reverend Mulinda from Uganda and his friend Majed El Shafie from Egypt both converted to Christianity from Islam, and paid a heavy price for sticking to their beliefs. Today they fight against anti-Semitism and advocate human rights and a love for Israel.

These two men should never have met, but today they are close friends. They were born in two different countries at different ends of the world, but their life stories are very similar, and today, they both advocate a love for Israel.

On December 24, 2011, Christmas Eve, Rev. Omar Mulinda addressed a congregation of 300 Christians at one of Uganda’s biggest churches. Mulinda is highly regarded as an impressive orator, and thousands come to hear his sermons. Read more…

Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: US-Israel initiative”
“Israel Hayom”, October 25, 2013, http://bit.ly/1a4LYhO

US House Members and Senators are increasingly approached by panicky leaders of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Oman and Kuwait, who have always considered the US global leadership and unilateral national security action to be their life insurance policy.  These leaders are concerned about the adverse ripple effects of the lowered US global profile on their own survival.  Moreover, they consider the US engagement with Iran their worst nightmare. They are puzzled by the US lack of awareness that a retreat from the trenches of Islamic terrorism bolsters the presence of terrorists’ sleeper cells on the US mainland.

Riyadh is aware that Saudi Arabia and other pro-US Arab oil-producing Gulf states – and not Israel – would be the prime target for a nuclear Iran, ravaging the supply and price of oil, which would devastate the economy of the US and the Free World.  The Saudis know that – unlike North Korea – Iran is driven by an imperialistic vision, encompassing the Persian Gulf as the first stage and then the Sunni Muslim countries. Read more…

The American-Saudi alliance is in danger of collapsing.

By Michael J. Totten, worldaffairsjournal.org,

The Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah axis is by far the largest threat to both Saudi and American interests in the Middle East now, yet the Obama administration is buddying up with Vladimir Putin on Syria and allowing itself to be suckered by the Iranian regime’s new president Hassan Rouhani.

Never mind the fact that Rouhani obviously isn’t a moderate and is powerless to negotiate sovereign issues in any case. The White House is so desperate to cut a deal with America’s enemies that the president will go along on even a farcical ride. As a result, the Saudi government is threatening to drastically “scale back” the relationship. Read more…

By CAROLINE B. GLICK, JPOST

Only be exposing the truth behind the lies will we strengthen our European friends and so increase the possibility that our relations with Europe may improve one day. Last month, the European Union pushed European- Israeli relations to a new low.

In mid-September, the IDF enforced a High Court of Justice order to destroy 250 structures built illegally by Palestinian squatters in the Jordan Valley.

The High Court acted in accordance with the agreements signed between the Palestinians and Israel. Those agreements gave Israel sole control over planning and zoning in the Jordan Valley and throughout the area of Judea and Samaria defined as Area C.
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By MARTIN SHERMAN, JPOST

Continued impotence and incompetence in the (mis)conduct of Israel’s public diplomacy is becoming not only strategic threat to the country but is beginning to imperil Jewish communities abroad. Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Today I saw the Israeli [consul] to Canada being interviewed. I cringed. He was trying to explain how Israel could counter the negative propaganda. He not only was clueless, but almost incomprehensible. He said that Israel should ignore negative criticism because that would make the general public seem that Israel is too combative.

When asked by the interviewers why shouldn’t Israel assert its rights, like referring to the San Remo Convention, he demurred and said that would damage Israel’s image. I was aghast at his utter incompetence. This an official representative of Israel. This is who Israel sends to fight the propaganda war.
– Walter44, an exasperated Jerusalem Post talkbacker, October 1.
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This problem should never have been allowed to become so massive. Similarly, the influx of illegals should have bee nipped in the bud rather than to allow 70,000 to enter the country. A third problem is getting out of hand, namely we are allowing the Palestinians to encroach illegally in Area C. We have also allowed to build throughout Jerusalem illegally. A stitch in time saves nine.

Yoav Unit set up ahead of expected Knesset approval of Bedouin resettlement bill; officers already razing illegal homes in Negev. Adalah: Unfortunately, Bedouins viewed as security risk, demographic problem

Ilana Curiel, YNET

“Large protests, stone-throwing and damage to infrastructure are possible scenarios, but no one wants to get to that point. The trick is to prevent rioting. If we do not – then we have failed,” said the commander of a special Israel Police unit in charge of the regulation of Bedouin settlement in the Negev – including the evacuation of illegal homes.

The Yoav Unit was set up ahead of the expected approval by the Knesset of the Prawer Bill, which is meant to relocate nearly 30,000 Bedouin to officially recognized communities in the Negev region, including Rahat, Khura and Ksayfe. Those who are moved are to receive financial compensation as well as new plots of land.
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[WHY DIDN’T THE U.S. DESTROY THE DRONE ONCE SHE LOST CONTROL OF IT?]

The Big Fraud: Tehran’s ScanEagle gift to Russia covered handover of secret US R170 drone technology

DEBKA

The Iranian media played up the presentation Tuesday, Oct. 22, of a copy of the US-made ScanEagle by Iran’s air force chief Farzad Esmayeeli to Lt. Gen. Viktor Bondarev, visiting Russian air force chief. Both used the ceremony to celebrate “Iran’s success in reverse-engineering and mass-producing” the American unmanned low-altitude reconnaissance drone, which it claimed to have captured in Dec. 2012.

The Russian air force commander examined the ScanEagle and admired the handiwork of the Iranian aeronautical engineers who he said had even upgraded the ScanEagle’s capabilities. Read more…

By MOSHE DANN, JPOST

Conflating security and defense costs with assistance to settlements distorts reality and masks more serious economic problems.