I reported on this alleged speech in In Russia, national interest takes precedent over minorities.

Too bad. It would have been nice.

By Roger Boyes, The Times

The Arab Spring has failed. Angry crowds ransacked the offices of Egypt’s democratically elected President, Mohamed Morsi, this week just as they once forced their way into the marble palaces of the region’s dictators. The mob set the place on fire and if there had been a statue of the president they would surely have toppled it.

What is happening in Egypt is not just part of a global revolt against austerity or a protest against the yawning gulf between rich and poor. It marks the death of an idea: that greater political choice and free speech could swiftly transform the Middle East. That turns out to have been a Western mirage in the desert. None of the European points of reference, from the uprisings of 1848 to the toppling of communism in 1989, really applied to the modern Arab world, not to the teeming urban poor of Cairo, nor the frustrated medical students of Bahrain nor the warlords of Libya.
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Guns and games

A recent revelation claiming that Israel had supplied high-tech weapons to Pakistan has caused a flutter. Altho­ugh vehemently denied by the governments of Israel and Pakistan, the fact that the United King­­dom’s department for business, innovation and skills, which assesses ex­port licences, had listed Pakistan as one of the destinations to whi­ch Is­rael exported arms with British componen­ts in 2010 and 2011 has ge­nerated bewilderme­n­t­.

As Israel’s single lar­gest customer buying up to 50 per cent of its total weapons exports, India has reasons to be anxious if the allegations are true. The items mentioned by the British as transfers from Israel to Pakistan include electronic warfare suites, ra­dar and optical target acquisition systems and aero engines.
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By David Solway, FPM

A new meme or figure of speech has begun to circulate among conservative writers and thinkers with increasing frequency and appositeness—namely, that we are living in a world turned upside down, to cite the title of a major book by Melanie Philips, itself derived from Christopher Hill’s study of revolutionary 17th century in England. (The term “world” is used by these writers to refer primarily to the Western sociopolitical domain or provinces thereof.) Almost everywhere we look we see this trope corroborated by extensive empirical testimony, of which I will flag only a few significant instances.
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By TIMON DIAS, JPOST

In 1980, Turkish military cracked down on religious opposition that challenged secular state, and took power over the country.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas On September 12, 1980, the Turkish military cracked down on religious opposition movements that challenged the secular state, and took power over the country. It was a textbook coup d’état. What stood out during these events was that Western nations, whose political structures vigorously opposed military involvement in civil politics, were actually relieved by the military’s action. After all, one year earlier the secular and allied state of Iran had transformed into a theocratic and hostile nation.

But over time, a worrying dynamic revealed itself: The western view on Islamic religious political movements changed, while the core ideology and intentions of these movements did not change one bit.
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By Emmanuel Navon..
For the Sake of Zion..

For the European Union (EU), labeling Hezbollah as a terrorist organization amounts to a tough philosophical question. But labeling Israeli products from Judea and Samaria as non-Israeli entails no such travails.

While there is no question that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, defining Judea and Samaria as “occupied territory” is debatable at best.

In international law, a territory is occupied when it has been conquered from a sovereign country. The west bank of the Jordan River was neither a sovereign country nor part of a sovereign country when it was conquered by Israel in June 1967. During the 1948 War, and as a result of the 1949 Armistice Agreements, he Hashemite Kingdom conquered and annexed the hilltops of what was supposed to become part of an Arab state according to the 1947 Partition Plan. This annexation was never recognized by the international community (with the exception of Britain and Pakistan).
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In Egypt, Army Threatens Coup while U.S. Policy has backed the Regime

By Barry Rubin

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Egyptian demonstrators, waving a flag with the face and name of an activist who was killed in February, in Cairo on Sunday. More Photos »

CAIRO — Millions of Egyptians streamed into the streets of cities across the country on Sunday to demand the ouster of their first elected head of state, President Mohamed Morsi, in an outpouring of anger at the political dominance of his Islamist backers in the Muslim Brotherhood.

The scale of the demonstrations, coming just one year after crowds in Tahrir Square cheered Mr. Morsi’s inauguration, appeared to exceed even the massive street protests in the heady final days of the uprising that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. At a moment when Mr. Morsi is still struggling to control the bureaucracy and just beginning to build public support for painful economic reforms, the protests have raised new hurdles to his ability to lead the country as well as new questions about Egypt’s path to stability.
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By Rene Beres, INN

Nuclear strategy is a “game” that sane and rational decision-makers must play.

In the best of all possible worlds, Iran could still be kept distant from nuclear weapons. In the real world, however, any such operational success is increasingly unlikely. More precisely, the remaining odds of Israel being able to undertake a cost-effective preemption against Iran, an act of “anticipatory self-defense” in the formal language of international law, are incontestably very low.
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There can be little doubt that Netanyahu means what he says  when it comes to the peace process and that he is not just playing a game as many suggest or hope. When I read how far he is will to go just to get negotiations started, I am horrified. Ted Belman

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report June 30, 2013, 2:04 PM (IDT)

US Secretary of State John Kerry wound up his fifth peace shuttle trip for reviving Israel-Palestinian peace talks at the end of a fruitless third conversation with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah Sunday, June 30. Abbas turned down Kerry’s blueprint for both sides to forego preconditions and return straightaway to the long-stalled peace talks. The Secretary left Ramallah empty-handed after the Palestinians reverted to their three-point ultimatum: Israel must first accept 1967 borders as the basis for negotiations, release Palestinians jailed more than 20 years and freeze West Bank and Jerusalem construction.

PM tells cabinet after meeting Kerry that any accord with PA will be brought to referendum

By law, any deal involving giving up parts of Jerusalem must be approved by a 50% majority in a referendum. But no deal goes to a referendum unless the government approves of the deal.

But this statement by Bibi has a different ring. Bibi knows it is tougher to sell a deal to his own government than it is to sell it to the Israeli people. He’s hoping that the government will pass the buck to the people rather than split up over the deal.

I don’t like it.

Bibi says; “We will not compromise on security and there will be no agreement that will endanger the security of Israeli citizens,”. My concern is that he will endanger our rights not our security. If only he would guard our rights as he does our security, we would have nothing to worry about.

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By Elyakim Haetzni

The Left lives on slogans. Ever since the time of the Communist Manifesto, with the brilliant catchphrase, “You have nothing to lose but your shackles,” their flock yearns  for political sayings created by masters of brainwashing and psychological warfare. The Israeli Left, for some time now, has not been part of the social or socialist Left. It has become bourgeois and rich, but it has not lost its passion for ideology and for debate and controversy. Its spiritual homeland is no longer Soviet Russia but Palestine, and at the heart of its new argument is not the distribution of wealth  but the distribution of the land.  They also require, as always, someone who they can condemn as a reactionary, living in the past, who is the object of their hatred.

Formerly, it was the contemptible capitalist;  in our day it is the relentless settler, and the red ideology has been replaced by a new belief – the cult of “peace on our enemies’ terms.”
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Observation: American hypocrisy: refusal to release Pollard causes stalemate in talks to return Abbas to table

Dr. Aaron Lerner Date: 28 June, 2013

Ma’an, the independent Palestinian news agency, reported this morning that
secret talks are being held over the release of pre-Oslo prisoners. PA head
Mahmoud Abbas has insisted that 107 Palestinians detained before the Oslo
agreement must be released before the PLO will return to negotiations with
Israel.

First a technical note: when PLO chief negotiator Saeb Erekat told Ma’an
the release of prisoners detained before 1993 was part of the 1999 Sharm
el-Sheikh memorandum and that Israel was obliged to abide by it he was a
barefaced liar. And I say bareface liar because, unlike some of his Israeli
counterparts, Erekat actually knows the text of the 1999 Sharm el-Sheikh
memorandum, and that document in no way obligates Israel to release those
prisoners.
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[Martin Sherman has been warning about such a move for quite some time. Obviously if the “negotiations go nowhere, this is the Plan B. Ted Belman]

By David M. Weinberg, ISRAEL HAYOM

The music coming from the Prime Minister’s Office in recent weeks is anomalous. Prime Minister Netanyahu has been making uncharacteristically passionate statements about the diplomatic process; statements that go beyond the expected chatter about Israel’s desire to engage the Palestinians and negotiate a two-state solution.

One gets the sense that Netanyahu is desperate for diplomatic movement; that he has bought into the left-wing argument that the status quo is unsustainable; and that he is preparing to launch a unilateral Israeli initiative to concede significant parts of Judea and Samaria.
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By MARTIN SHERMAN, JPOST

The only thing more dangerous, delusional and disastrous than the Left’s proposal for a two-state solution, is the proposal now bandied about by the Right – for a one-state solution.

The nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things… constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received. – Ernest Renan, What is a Nation?

A portion of mankind… united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others – which make them cooperate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves or a portion of themselves exclusively. – John Stuart Mill, On Representative Government

Yes, I know I have cited these excerpts before. Last March to be exact – see “The New York Times versus the Jews” and “Israel’s imperative: Jewish and democratic.” The difference is that then, I harnessed them to debunk far-left anti-Zionist calls for a one-state approach to the Israel- Palestinian conflict. Now it appears I have to invoke them to debunk rightwing proposals, which call for almost exactly the same thing.
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By Barry Rubin, PJ MEDIA June 27th, 2013

“He who tells the truth is driven from nine villages.”– Turkish proverb

Has it become time that the absurd paradigm governing the Israel-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflict as well as the “peace process” be abandoned or challenged?

After all, this narrative has become increasingly ridiculous. Here is what is close to being the official version:

The Palestinians desperately want an independent state and are ready to compromise to obtain that goal. They will then live peacefully alongside Israel in a two-state solution. Unfortunately, this is blocked either by: a) misunderstanding on both sides or b) in the recent words of the Huntington Post, “the hard-line opponents who dominate Israel’s ruling coalition.”

Israel is behaving foolishly, too, not seeing that, as former President Bill Clinton recently said, Israel needs peace in order to survive. One aspect—perhaps a leading one—why Israel desperately needs peace is because of Arab demographic growth. The main barrier to peace are the Jewish settlements.

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Responding to Moshe Arens’ call for West Bank Palestinians to become citizens of Israel, Carlo Strenger says history shows such a state is a recipe for disaster.

Carlo Strenger writing in Haaretz takes issue with Moshe Arens who argues for a one state solution where Arabs have full civil and political rights:

I will argue that Arens is too optimistic about human nature. He believes that rational interests primarily guide human action, and disregards the profound human need to feel part of a culture they share with others, and the desire to be governed by people they identify with.

Let me start with Arens’ insistence that the Greater Land of Israel will continue to be the homeland of the Jewish people. Its dominant narrative and national cohesion will be based on a Jewish-Zionist perspective, to which Arens is profoundly attached, and which, for him, is Israel’s raison d’être.
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