By Victor Rosenthal

News item:

Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced on Wednesday that Israel would implement a series of measures intended to prop up the indebted Palestinian Authority and ease Palestinians’ daily life. …

Israel will provide the PA with a NIS 100 million loan ($32.2 million) on tax revenues Israel collects on Ramallah’s behalf, in an attempt to reduce the PA’s spiraling deficit. Ramallah, the PA’s seat of government, has seen dwindling foreign aid for years, and almost none from its biggest backers in 2021. …

According to another Israel official, Gantz told Abbas that a series of economic measures are being weighed, including lowering fees for purchasing fuel and a pilot program to allow shipping containers to enter the West Bank from Jordan via Allenby Bridge.

Such steps “would likely add hundreds of millions of shekels to the Palestinian Authority on an annual basis,” said Gantz, according to the official. …

Gantz and Abbas, in their Tuesday meeting, also discussed legalizing more Palestinian construction in the West Bank.

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T. Belman. This is a follow up to  What’s in it for the US in its “foreign aid” to Israel?

It is often claimed that Israel is the biggest recipient of US foreign aid. That’s a lie. What Israel receives from the US comes from the US defense budget and and is a miniscule part of it. It is a US investment that yields a big return to the US.

Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”

As 2022 begins, Israel is the most critical partner of the US in sustaining its edge over China, Russia, Europe and Japan in the development and manufacturing of game-changing commercial and military technologies.

In 2022, with merely 0.11% of the global population, Israel will remain second only to – and closely collaborating with – the US as far as the development of ground-breaking hightech innovations. Moreover, Israel’s brainpower has attracted 20% of the global investment in cyber technologies, while the number Israel’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) startups account to some 20% of the global total.

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Deputy Minister Abir Kara: “I will also dismantle the government over the evacuation of settlements. The days of land for peace are over.”

‘I wouldn’t invite someone who pays murderers to my home’

V. Sharpe. Abir Kara is correct. What Bennett, Gantz and Lapid are doing is totally unacceptable and a betrayal of the Jewish state. Dealing with the terrorist and Holocaust denier, Abbas, whose very own policy is to pay his terrorists to murder Jewish men, women and children is detestable.

It would be better to end this sell-out Israeli government once and for all than to allow its shameful policies of appeasement to the fraudulent Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.

Yamina and all true patriotic Israeli parties – which excludes the Arab anti-Zionist Raam party and all those on the Left – must topple any Israeli government which tries to sow the seeds of a looming repeat of the ‘land for peace’ disaster. Has Israel not suffered enough past betrayals from too many of its own leaders?

By Hezki Baruch , INN

Deputy Minister Abir Kara responded to the meeting held last night between Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas at Gantz’s residence.

Kara tells Israel National News that “Abu Mazen (Abbas) is the head of a Palestinian Terrorist Authority that pays money to terrorists. At the same time I trust the prime minister and defense minister and former chief of staff Ganz who are working for security coordination. I would like to mention that people in the previous government were also sent to meet with the Palestinian Authority.”

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Ury Weiss. Be scared, very scared. The Orwellian TOTALITARIAN, global government is being established in front of our eyes, under the disguise of protecting your health. Your health and wellbeing are the last concerns on the psychopathic minds of those who want to control all facets of your life in posterity. These bastards can now terminate your life, through an electromagnetic pulse sent to your phone. Why would they do it? Because they can…

https://rumble.com/vr8lvv-deep-dive-with-inventor-of-mrna-vaxx-technology-after-israel-ministry-of-he.html

SPECIAL FOCUS ON ISRAEL AND PFIZER\

Dr. Robert Malone is one of the key scientific professionals central to understanding our reality today with fighting the virus.

Twitter Suspends Key mRNA Vaccine Contributor Dr. Robert Malone

EPOCH TIMES

A. Hertz. The “world of States” is a nasty place where there are no permanent friends, just permanent interests. Thus, this new Epoch Times article is notably weak (almost politically correct?) in omitting a description of the very strong ideological and political tensions between 2021 Israel and the rabidly left-liberal Biden regime in the USA. Namely, this Epoch Times article fails to make the pertinent point that the USA (ostensibly under Joe Biden) has largely returned to (now Washington-based) Barack Obama’s twisted path of slyly betraying Israel, wherever and whenever it counts the most.

This places great strain on Israel’s current relations with the USA. This key omission from the Epoch Times article is to be regretted, because understanding the strong, anti-Israel inclinations of USA left-liberals is imperative for grasping how important for sovereign Israel is now maintaining enhanced relations with some other major powers like China, Russia, and India.>

https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-israel-a-close-ally-of-the-us-became-a-close-ally-of-china_4173534.html?utm_source=ChinaDaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2021-12-28

The “apartheid” that isn’t.

By Hugh Fitzgerald, FPM

Bassem Eid is a Palestinian living in Israel who has had an extensive career as a human rights activist. His initial focus was on human rights violations committed by Israeli armed forces, but for many years he has broadened his research to include human rights violations committed by the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the Palestinian armed forces, on their own people. He founded the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group in 1996, which closed in 2011, for lack of any cooperation from the Palestinian Authority. He now works as a political analyst for Israeli TV and radio.

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By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS , The Unz Review     • DEC 27, 2021

Quietly without media attention, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has withdrawn the PCR process as a valid test for detecting and identifying SARS-CoV-2.

By Robert Kraychik, BREITBART

Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow sat down with historian and professor Victor Davis Hanson at the latter’s home in Selma, CA, for a wide-ranging interview examining how America is being undermined by a modern globalist aristocracy. Hanson drew from analyses in his latest book, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

Hanson warned of lessening governmental accountability to citizens via the dissolution of American citizenship. The concept of citizenship, he added, is an essential component of Western civilization.“The citizen is very rare,” he said. “Civilization is very old — seven thousand years old — but for nearly the first 4,500 years, there were no citizens. They were slaves, or subjects, or tribes, or residents.”

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A new interview, published in English here for the first time, reveals the political tradition at work in the Israeli leader’s thinking.

By Benhjamin Netanyahu,  Gadi Taub and Neil Rogashevsky, MOSAIC 

About the authors
Benjamin Netanyahu is the Knesset’s leader of the opposition. He served as the prime minister of Israel from 1996 to 1999, and from 2009 to 2021

Gadi Taub is a historian, novelist, political commentator, and screenwriter. He is a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Neil Rogachevsky teaches at the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University.

Benjamin Netanyahu by a portrait of Theodor Herzl on May 2, 2018. ABIR SULTAN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.

The following interview with the former Israeli prime minister was conducted by Gadi Taub as the 100th episode of his Hebrew-language podcast Shomer Saf. The original can be viewed here. Courtesy of Rotem Sella and Sella Meir Publishing, Mosaic is pleased to present to its readers an exclusive English-language translation of the interview, done by Avi Woolf and Neil Rogachevsky. The transcript has been lightly edited for content and clarity. An introduction by Neil Rogachevsky precedes Taub’s interview.
—The Editors Read more…

By Ted Belman.

Many people who visit Israpundit and who email me  are very intelligent and knowledgeable about Covid and the vaccines.  They have concluded that the Left is lying  about everything and acting criminally.  I have some reservations. So I wrote to them the following and received replies from many of them.

I watched the Trump interview also. I agree that the vaccine has been successful in reducing the number of deaths from corona. But I don’t necessarily think that the mandate is wrong. Sometimes freedoms must be shelved for the common good. SCOTUS will rule on the mandates by Jan 10/22 I believe. I will accept their judgement.. They will set the standard for approving Mandates. This standard will vary depending on what is being mandated. i.e., vaccines, masks or social distancing.

Also, I would expect a different standard regarding children because different considerations apply.

My problem with the current policy in Israel and the US is that they have banned therapeutics from being given as a preventive measure. They have waged a war against them. This is unpardonable.
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Refusing an Israeli request for a phone call between Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and US President Joe Biden, the White House clarified the rules of the game and what kind of relationship they expect between the two leaders.

By Ben Caspit, AL MONITOR Dec 28/21

The lesson that US President Joe Biden wanted to teach Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has been learned and the two leaders will probably talk soon. That, at least, is the hope in Jerusalem. “The Americans punched Bennett in the nose,” a very senior diplomatic security source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “This was a clear American signal about the rules of the game and the relationship they expect to see between the White House and the prime minister’s office. I think Bennett got the message.”

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AMERICAN THINKER

Omicron upends the class politics of Covid       Dec 28, 2021

Until Omicron came along, the official response to Covid served as an instrument of class warfare against blue collar workers and small businesses, on behalf of the tech oligopolists and selected big businesses such as Target, which were deemed “essential. Not coincidentally, blue collar workers and small businesses are the core of the GOP base, while Silicon Valley and the plutocracy are the cash cows and power base of the Democrats.”   

More

Reality is impinging upon the Democrats’ carefully constructed COVID tyranny       Dec 28, 2021

Whether it’s a federal response to COVID, insane quarantine periods, or vaccine mandates, Omicron is making it all fall apart.

 More

Videos posted to social media show huge explosions and fires raging across the port, likely from secondary explosions of Iranian munitions, in second attack on facility this month

By JUDAH ARI GROSS and TOI STAFF   DEC 28/21

In this photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, firefighters work at the scene of a missile attack, at the port of the coastal city of Latakia, Syria, Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2021. (SANA via AP)

Israeli warplanes fired a number of missiles at the port of the coastal city of Latakia early Tuesday morning, causing large explosions and fires, in the second alleged Israeli strike in a month on the key facility.

For years, Israel avoided conducting strikes against the Latakia port due to the large presence of Russian forces nearby, despite Iran allegedly using the terminal to transport advanced munitions through it to its proxies in the region, notably the Lebanese Hezbollah terror group.

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The Webb Report

George Webb is an investigative journalist in the Washington, DC area that discovered the DNC blackberries and hard drives used by DNC Chairwoman’s IT assistant, Biden Awan. Webb produced a fact witness, a Marine named Andre Taggart, and Taggart confirmed the government marked blackberries and drives stashed by Awan in his home. Webb also interviewed a Capitol Hill staffer with a three decade relationship with Joe Biden that provided insider information about Biden Awan that was later confirmed in a House hearing. The House insider also left the phone with Webb which had Congressional markings, and the blackberry mapped to a DIA staffer on Capitol Hill in the Human Intelligence Services. A summary of his three years of reporting has been summarize in a five video playlist called The Webb Report and can be found here. 

 “Feds Investigated Birx & CDC Director for “Scientific Fraud & Misconduct”; Fabricated, Falsified HIV/AIDS Vaccine Trials”

Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC, and Dr. Deborah Birx — the Coronavirus Coordinator for the White House — were the targets of a damning Department of Defense investigation after colleagues in the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force blew the whistle on scientific fraud during clinical trials of a HIV/AIDS vaccine.

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T.Belman. I think it is a big mistake to suggest that maybe Israel can live with a deal if it is a good deal and if  the EU and the US will really enforce it. To my mind that shows weakness and undermines our  determination.. All he has to do is stress that Israel won’t be bound by it.

Prime Minister says Israel not opposed to Vienna nuclear talks with Iran, but laments current ‘dynamic’ of negotiations.

Israel National News 

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said Israel is open to reaching a new nuclear deal with Tehran, while lamenting that the current ‘dynamic’ of talks in Vienna between Western powers and Iran is unlikely to achieve a ‘good agreement’.

Speaking with Efi Triger on Galei Tzahal Tuesday morning, Bennett said Israel is not opposed to talks with Iran or to the signing of a new nuclear agreement with the rogue nation, but emphasized that the terms of such an agreement must be ‘firm’.

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by Nicholas Dawson, Forecast International.   Nov 29/21

Historically, multiple regions, including Alsace-Lorraine between Germany and France and Kashmir Province between India and Pakistan, have been contested by regional powers. And a regional rivalry in Eurasia has led to multiple armed conflicts. As recently as 2020, Armenia and Azerbaijan again engaged in a major conflict that culminated in an Azeri victory, with Armenian forces suffering heavy losses. In November, tensions between the two grew again as Azerbaijan began using its territorial gains from the 2020 conflict to create more outposts and checkpoints, impeding the transport of supplies and citizens. At the same time, Azeri soldiers have taken Armenian outposts while Armenian dissenters have attacked Azeri checkpoints and even used explosives against them.

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T. Belman. Turkey is in trouble financially and politically and so is reaching out to Israel. Although he said some nice things about Jews (antisemitism is a crime against humanity) he still underscores the need for Israel to accommodate Islam in Jerusalem.

HURRIYET DAILY NEWS

Turkey–Israel relations are vital for the stability of the region, President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an on Dec. 22 said at a meeting with members of the Jewish community in Turkey and the Alliance of Rabbis in the Islamic States (ARIS).

“We are ready to develop our cooperation and to better utilize our high potential. I attach importance to maintaining contact and dialogue,” Erdo?an said.

The president stressed that Turkey wants to see the Middle East as a place where societies from different religions, languages and ethnicities live together in peace.

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Turkey’s economic turmoil might challenge Ankara’s grip over opposition-held areas in Syria, where in-house rivalries among the armed factions over financial resources have escalated.

Fehim Tastekin, AL MONITOR

Syrians in protest climb atop a Turkish military infantry-fighting vehicle as they attempt to block traffic on the M4 highway, which links the northern Syrian provinces of Aleppo and Latakia, about 14 kilometers southeast of the city of Idlib on March 15, 2020.

With economic turbulence rattling Turkey’s economy, the question is rising of whether Ankara can maintain its grip on Syria’s opposition-held areas where the Turkish lira is the de facto currency.

The meltdown in the lira has heated up the in-house rivalries over financial resources between armed opposition factions and fueled public discontent in opposition-held areas. The turmoil threatens to erode Turkish-backed militia’s control in al-Bab, Jarablus, Azaz, Afrin, Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ain.

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