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Monday, March 22, 2021

From Ian:

Lee Smith: Biden Torpedoes Abraham Accords Summit
Plainly, the Obama-Biden team doesn’t care about interfering in Israeli elections or else Barack Obama’s State Department wouldn’t have funneled money to an NGO that campaigned against Netanyahu in 2015. Nor do Arab royals sitting atop petro-kingdoms have much theoretical or practical reason to worry about appearing to back one candidate against another. Smaller powers like the UAE make alliances not with factions but with states—and all parties in Israel support the Abraham Accords. Israel’s strategic class, its political, military, and intelligence echelons, as well as Israeli voters consider relations with Gulf Cooperation Council members a strategic boon. It is difficult to imagine any circumstances short of war under which an Israeli prime minister would think it politically wise to abandon a normalization agreement with any Arab state, never mind a major oil producer.

No, “election interference” is a staple of American political discourse. More particularly it is the rhetoric through which the Democratic Party now pushes information operations, like the Russiagate conspiracy theory holding that Russia interfered with the 2016 vote to put Trump in the White House. News of the canceled visit by the Israeli prime minister was eagerly pushed in the press and on social media by Obama’s Israel point man Dan Shapiro through his proprietary Israel wing of the echo chamber.

But there’s a bigger play here than interfering in Israeli politics by denying Bibi a preelection photo op with Israel’s peace partners in the Gulf. Their larger goal is to weaken or dismantle the Abraham Accords, which by assembling a treaty structure that binds Israel together with the Gulf states structurally interferes with the administration’s stated goal of realigning the United States with Iran—and therefore against Israel and the Gulf—by reentering Obama’s nuclear deal.

But isn’t peace in the Middle East the collective dream of the Beltway policy establishment, left and right? Trump, love or hate him, got Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan as well as the UAE to normalize relations with Israel, the first peace agreements with the Jewish state since Jordan signed in 1994—and Biden said he wanted to build on the Abraham Accords. But as it turns out, “peace” has a very particular meaning for American policymakers. For the Middle East hands in the Biden administration, what matters most is completing the project many of these Obama alumni helped initiate while serving under Biden’s former boss—realignment with Iran.

Trump didn’t just withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, which undergirded Obama’s realignment strategy, he also designed a strategic architecture to counter Iranian influence—the Abraham Accords. To bind Israel and the Arab Gulf states, the Trump White House had to bracket the issue that previously kept these traditional American allies apart—the Palestinians. That alone earned Trump the wrath of Washington’s wise men.

For decades the professional peace processors warned that there could be no stability in the Middle East unless there was a comprehensive settlement to the Palestinian issue. By giving the Palestinians unbridled veto power, the Beltway establishment also ensured their job security. As long as the Palestinians said no, the peace processors were still in business. Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner wondered why the wise men held them in contempt for making peace. What they didn’t understand was that making peace meant the wise men were fired.

The alliance between Israel and the Gulf states is an impediment to the dream of a reempowered, nuclear-armed Iran backed by the United States, which was Obama’s main foreign policy aim—and an affront to peace processors convinced of their own never-ending importance. The Biden administration apparently aims to sink the accords by penalizing Israel and its peace partners for getting too close, and returning the Palestinians to center stage—in order to prepare the ground for reentering the Iran deal.
Caroline Glick: Netanyahu – Israel's indispensable statesman
According to The National's report, the new administration intends to cancel the Trump administration's policy regarding Israeli exports to the US That policy determined that exports from Area C of Judea and Samaria, which are under full Israeli control, will be marked as "Made in Israel."

The new administration intends to reinstate US financial support for UNRWA and the Palestinian Authority and will pressure Israel to permit Jerusalemites to vote in the Palestinian elections. It will undertake to reopen the US's diplomatic mission to the PA. The memo also makes clear that the Biden administration will reinstate the Obama administration's policy of pressuring Israel to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines "with mutually agreed land swaps and agreements on security and refugees."

As to the Abraham Accords, despite the memo's deliberately vague diplomatic language, it is clear that the Biden administration intends to subvert the accords in a way that will indirectly reinstate the PLO's veto over Arab-Israeli ties.

The contents of the memo, as described in The National report are not surprising to anyone who paid attention to statements made throughout the 2020 presidential campaign and since by President Joe Biden and his advisors. But the report does make clear the magnitude of the challenge Israel will face in managing and maintaining its alliance with the US in the coming years.

This challenge grew even more daunting last Wednesday and Thursday as Biden torpedoed US-Russian relations by calling Putin a "murderer" and threatening him; and Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan got into an ugly public fight with their Chinese counterparts on live television.

The need to steer Israel's ship of state between a hostile ally and two rival superpowers with whom Israel enjoys relatively reasonable if limited ties may well be the most difficult challenge facing Israel's prime minister in the coming years.

On Tuesday, as Israelis go to the polls, they should pause a moment and ask themselves, "Which candidate is most capable of competently protecting Israel in the regional and international arenas in the coming years?" The answer isn't hard to ascertain.
Israeli Minister Exposes the Truth About the Palestinian People

David Singer: Netanyahu’s feats merit his being Israel’s next Prime Minister
The country’s relatively small size and electronic health records that cover more than 99% of residents were two important reasons for siting the study in Israel, Pfizer Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla said in an interview late Thursday with Israel’s Channel 12 news. But what tipped the scales in Israel’s favor was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s persistence, which Bourla termed an “obsession.”

“He called me 30 times,” Bourla said. “He would ask me about the variants, what data we have. And I would say, ‘Prime Minister, it’s three o’clock.’ And he said, ‘No, no, don’t worry, tell me.’ Or he would call me to ask about the children, ‘I need to vaccinate the schools.’ Or to ask about pregnant women. So he convinced me, frankly, that he would be on top of it.”

On advancing the personal safety and security of every Israeli citizen – Netanyahu has overseen:
- The United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco establishing diplomatic relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords.
- Kosovo - one of the few Muslim countries in Europe - establishing an embassy in Jerusalem.
- The UAE announcing the setting up of a $10 billion fund to invest in Israel
- Israelis visiting Dubai in their tens of thousands
- Several more Arab countries reportedly being on the brink of joining the Abraham Accords -including Oman, Qatar and Mauritania.
- Normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel beginning with Saudi Arabia granting overflight rights to Israel and - most recently - allowing an Israeli racing team to participate in the Dakar Rally.
- An offer of Gaza, 70% of the West Bank and areas of Israel’s sovereign territory being made to the Palestine Liberation Organisation for the creation of a second Arab State – in addition to Jordan – in the territory formerly comprising Mandatory Palestine.

Denigrators and detractors contesting Netanyahu’s re-election face an uphill battle.

Saturday, March 20, 2021

From Ian:

The whole of the Middle East will pay the price for Biden’s Iran appeasement policy
Since the Biden administration’s decision to reverse the designation of Yemen’s Houthi militia as a foreign terrorist organisation (FTO) on February 12, drones and ballistic missiles have targeted Saudi Arabia 48 times.

The latest attack, on Saudi oil facilities in Ras Tanura, in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, on Sunday, did not come from the direction of Yemen, a royal court adviser told the Wall Street Journal; declining to comment on whether the projectile was launched from Iran or from Iraq.

The removal of the Houthis from the US government’s FTO list was meant to reduce tensions, but it achieved the opposite result. At the heart of the Biden administration’s Middle East policy is a fallacy: that the region’s politics should be understood as a contest between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a conflict between two states that is also a sectarian struggle.

Seen from Tehran, the central contest in the region is between the American alliance system and Iran’s self-styled “resistance alliance”.

Biden’s misconception leads to a number of erroneous ideas: that the United States can play a neutral, mediating role between Riyadh and Tehran; that by distancing itself from Saudi Arabia, it creates opportunities for regional stability and understanding; and that it is the Saudi role in Yemen – and not the Iranian role – that has perpetuated the conflict in that country.

While escalating by attacking Saudi Arabia via its proxies is a core part of Iran’s regional policies, we must not forget that Iran has waged a forty-year war to spread its control across the region — not to compete with Saudi Arabia, but to undermine the American alliance system. The Biden administration’s resurrection of the Obama doctrine in the Middle East has breathed life into one of its most inaccurate and damaging myths: the centrality of a Saudi-Iran rivalry to regional politics.

Iran’s imperial project in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon does not exist to reclaim influence from Saudi Arabia, but to upend the American security order in the Middle East. And, like Iran’s Foreign Minister, Iran’s network of terrorist groups in the region chant, “death to America,” not, “death to Saudi Arabia”.


Don't cut or condition US military aid to Israel
One of us is a member of Congress from Florida who serves on the House Armed Services Committee and used to work as a national security specialist at the Department of Defense. The other is also a former Pentagon official who now leads an organization that promotes strong U.S. defense policies, including close cooperation between the United States and Israel.

One of us is a refugee from Vietnam whose family fled a communist regime that seized power after the Vietnam War. The other is an American Jew whose ancestors fled virulent anti-Semitism in Europe. Just as the United States was a safe haven for our families, we recognize — on both an emotional and intellectual level — that the state of Israel, which reestablished ancient Jewish sovereignty over the Holy Land, has been a sanctuary for millions of Jewish families enduring persecution in their native lands.

Informed by our personal and professional backgrounds, both of us believe that U.S. military assistance to Israel — beyond helping our ally to deter conflict with aggressive state and non-state actors, to prevail if conflict occurs, and to protect its civilian population from persistent rocket and missile threats — directly advances America’s national security interests. It also promotes our shared democratic values in a region of the world where autocracy predominates.

We appreciate the fact that U.S. military aid to Israel — which currently amounts to $3.8 billion a year and is used to enhance Israel’s offensive and defensive capabilities — has long enjoyed broad support from the American public, from their Democratic and Republican representatives in Congress, and from presidential administrations of both political persuasions.

It is precisely because support in this country for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship has been bipartisan that it has also been enduring.

That’s why we’ve been troubled by recent calls from U.S. political leaders in some quarters to cut security assistance to Israel, or to condition that assistance on Israel making changes to policies toward the Palestinians that these U.S. leaders find objectionable. We believe this approach is counter-productive and dangerous. (h/t jzaik)
India Israel Relations – An Overview
India-Israel relations have always been an ongoing topic for academic research and journalistic reporting, as well as a fascinating experience for practitioners. Many generations of diplomats, scholars and reporters have witnessed the unique story of the Indo Israeli journey. As a young diplomat, during the early 1970s, I was attracted by what promised to be a special partnership but lacked, at the time, political feasibility. I thus felt privileged, years later, as Ambassador to India, to contribute to the long chain of dedicated diplomats from both the countries, who brought our relations to where they stand today.

Trade between the Jews and the Indians dating hundreds of years ago, the fact that Jews were always welcome in India, never suffering from racism or discrimination were the first threads in the fabric of today’s special relations between the governments and peoples of India and Israel. Both the nations also have much in common, with shared democratic values and interests, as two relatively young societies, proud of their respective historical, cultural roots, eager to embrace the future, innovation and technology.

While India officially recognized Israel in 1950, it took four more decades until a suitable political atmosphere and political will, allowed the recognition to be translated into diplomatic relations. A ‘wind of change’ reshaping global, regional and national paradigms, also led to a new global approach to Diplomacy. The stage was thus set for 1992 to be a turning point in the emerging relations between both the nations.

Looking back at the past 29 years, two notable trends come to mind in the Indo Israeli relations: Visibility and Scope. When full diplomatic relations were established, they were kept low-key, with a conveniently, discrete emphasis on Defence. The “zero sum game” perception prevailing at the time in many Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) capitals, including New Delhi, avoided admitting publicly good relations with Israel and the Arab world at the same time. As a leader of NAM, Delhi opted to stick with the Arab countries (NAM members by themselves). This “arrangement” did not last beyond the Cold War era, as the rationale behind the low-key approach was no longer acceptable, relevant, or needed. The low-volume relations paradigm slowly shifted by the end of the 1990s. It was dramatically replaced in 2014, when the Indian Government adopted a landmark “De Hyphenation” (or “No Zero Sum Game”) policy toward West Asia: Shortly after coming to power, on July 21, 2014, the Government of India’s External Affairs Minister (EAM), the late Sushma Swaraj, stated in the Parliament, that while continuing to support the Palestinian cause (which was the overriding policy element until then), India maintains good relations with Israel. This dramatic public departure from previous policy has since been reiterated numerous times by various Indian officials, in words and deeds. Dramatic as it was then, this new approach has since become part and parcel of our relations, as acknowledged recently by EAM, Dr. Jaishankar, speaking at the opening session of Israel’s Ambassadors to Asia-Pacific Annual Conference, “the (India Israel) relationship finally enjoys the stature and visibility it deserves”.

Friday, March 19, 2021

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Abdullah the Irrelevant of Jordan
This then brings us back to King Abdullah and his decision to prevent Netanyahu's trip to Abu Dhabi last week. If the raging success of Netanyahu's regional diplomacy causes ideological and political distress to Israel's rabidly political and ideological media, it presents a strategic challenge to Jordan and is a source of existential angst for the Hashemite regime.

The Hashemite royal house in Jordan is an artifact of Britain's colonial regime in the region a century ago. The Hashemites are a small minority of Jordan's population. And the country they control is poor, and resource-strapped. The principal source of the longevity of the Hashemite regime is Israel. Jordan is located between Israel and Iraq and shares a border with Israel and Syria. Its position has long made it a buffer state. And its (relative) moderation has served as a deterrent to Iraqi and Syrian aggression against Israel. As a consequence, Israelis – particularly Israeli military leaders – long viewed the Hashemite Kingdom as indispensable.

As things stand today, the threat of war between Iraq or Syria (or both) and Israel has never been lower. Both Iraq and Syria are failed states at advanced levels of decomposition. And as a result, today, Jordan's importance as a buffer state has never been lower.

So too, for many years, Jordan, which has long owed its financial survival to support from and the remittances of Jordanian workers in the Gulf states, served as a bridge between Israel and those states. It's been almost a decade since Jordan has been asked to serve in that capacity.

The Obama administration's decision to realign the US Middle East alliance structure towards Iran and away from Israel and America's traditional Arab allies spooked the Emiratis, Egyptians, and the Saudis sufficiently to convince them to develop defense ties with Israel. Once that happened, Jordan, which was close to the Obama administration, became more of a nuisance than a bridge.

Jordan's transformation into an irrelevancy was on display last Thursday. By blocking Netanyahu's flight to the UAE, Abdullah showed that far from a bridge, he is an obstacle to the Gulf States' ties with Israel. So too, Netanyahu's announcement – subsequently repeated by the UAE – that the Emirates intend to invest $10 billion in Israel showed that Abdullah's ability to serve either as a bridge or an obstacle to relations is a mirage.

No one cares what Jordan does.

This then brings us to the Palestinians. Aside from the PLO and its Palestinian Authority, the greatest Arab champion of the Palestinian veto over Arab-Israeli peace has been King Abdullah. Whereas Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi welcomed the Abraham Accords, Abdullah joined Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in condemning them. So too, whereas the UAE and Bahrain sent their ambassadors to the White House to celebrate when then-President Donald Trump presented his peace plan, which included Israeli sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria, Abdullah condemned the plan.

As Israel moved forward with its plan to apply its sovereignty to those areas of Judea and Samaria in accordance with the Trump plan, Abdullah let it be known that such an Israeli-US move would cause him to abrogate Jordan's peace treaty with Israel.

One of the regional developments that keep Abdullah up at night is the still-unofficial alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Abdullah lives in fear that in exchange for Saudi Arabia's official normalization of ties, Israel will provide the Saudis with an official position in managing the mosques on the Temple Mount at Jordan's expense. For its part, as the current custodian of the mosques on the Temple Mount, Jordan has torpedoed every Israeli effort to stabilize the situation at the holy site.


Former Ambassador Friedman sifts through ‘transformative’ accords and their future success
U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman came to his position as an attorney without a background in politics or diplomacy. Not being allegiant to a particular point of view, he said, “gave us an open field to chart our own course which we are very proud of.”

Friedman served for four years under the Trump administration, which delivered a number of remarkable achievements for Israel, including recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel; moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem; recognizing Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights; and launching an ambitious and game-changing peace plan known as the Abraham Accords.

The “us”—meaning Friedman and his team, including Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt and Avi Berkowitz among others—thought the way that the United States and the rest of the world were looking at the Palestinians was that “they were giving them a pass on egregious human-rights violations, a pass on the inability of Hamas and P.A. [Palestinian Authority] to ever coalesce on anything, a pass on terrorism, a pass on pay-for-slay, a pass on not creating any of the institutions necessary for an economy … and yet people were talking about a Palestinian state.”

“This was putting the cart before the horse,” he said.

Sitting down in conversation with Martin Kramer, founding president of Jerusalem’s Shalem College, as part of this week’s Tikvah Fund’s Jewish Leadership Conference, Friedman said that when he came to office, “the Middle East was due for some unconventional thinking.”

The primary advantage of coming in without a diplomatic background, he said, was “not being wed to the past” and harnessing “problem-solving skills taken from past experience”as part of his career in the legal field.

Asked which conventional wisdom needed deflation, Friedman said “the most wrong was the indulgence of the Palestinian cause to the point where it negated the notion of accountability.”

“There would be this equivalence between building settlements and acts of terrorism. You can be pro or against settlements, but you cannot possibly equate the two,” he added.
Schrödinger's War: The Palestinian Redux
When discussing the Israel-Palestinian conflict, President of the Middle East Forum Daniel Pipes is fond of using the remarkable story of Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda of the Imperial Japanese Army as an analogy. Lt. Onada had been living on an island in the Philippines engaging in acts of a war that had, to the rest of the world, ended decades previously.

At the state level, Jonathan Schwarz in a 2006 Mother Jones piece aptly titled Schrödinger's War compared the schizophrenic nature of the Bush administration’s approach to the Iraq war to a well known physics conundrum:

“The famous “Schrödinger’s Cat” thought experiment posits a situation in which, according to quantum theory, a cat could be both alive and dead. Today, America is in much the same situation. We’re not at war, since the attorney general insists Congress has not declared it. Yet at the same time, we are at war, because the entire Bush administration says so as often as possible.”

Most people in the State of Israel and around the world believe the Israel-Palestinian conflict has ended and has been since 1993 with the signing of the Oslo Accords, but the conflict is very much alive at the same time. While there is no negotiated solution, and acts of murder and bloodshed occur sparingly, these are frequently seen as disconnected from the reality of war as Onada was from the end of the Second World War.

Unfortunately, for us, the Palestinian leadership still very much believes they are in a war that will end in Israel’s destruction.

This might be obvious for Hamas, but it also remains true for Fatah and other groups which rule or are active in Judea and Samaria.

According to Palestinian Media Watch, Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub has announced that Fatah urges “all the national activity factions” to run together on a joint list in the upcoming elections.

“[PFLP] emphasized its firm opposition to recognizing the racist Zionist entity, and its determination to continue with all forms of the struggle, and foremost among them armed resistance, in order to liberate every grain of the soil of Palestine,” PMW quoted Ma’an, a Palestinian Arab news agency, a day earlier.

In other words, Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, is happily embracing and officially calling to partner an organization dedicated to the end of the Jewish State through violence and terror.

It might be useful to try and bring a comparison to Israeli or U.S. politics, but no party exists which calls for the violent destruction of a whole nation.

Thursday, March 18, 2021

From Ian:

‘Israel Apartheid Week’ is a grotesque insult
Look around the Middle East. Syria still trapped in a brutal civil war. Libya in carnage, and Yemen in the grip of a fierce proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. How can anyone look at the Middle East and think the biggest problem is the region’s only democracy?

If the only country you campaign against, want to boycott or believe should be abolished is the only Jewish one, don’t tell me you’re not an anti-Semite. But the anti-Israel campaigners know what they are doing. They hope that demonising Israel with this grotesque insult will isolate the country and boost campaigns for boycotts and sanctions.

These campaigns are a barrier to a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because they drive people apart and make the prospects of negotiation and compromise more difficult. Worse still, they have a terrible impact in the Palestinian territories because boycotts and sanctions reduce economic opportunities for the very people they claim they are trying to help. This is why Britain’s role must be to promote trade, investment and economic development and to encourage dialogue, negotiation and compromise between Israelis and Palestinians.

The reality is that the pernicious boycott campaign is failing. Trade between Israel and the UK was worth a record £8 billion before the pandemic. Some 500 Israeli companies have invested in Britain, creating thousands of jobs across the UK. The country also makes a huge contribution to the NHS. One in seven of all prescription drugs is made by an Israeli pharmaceutical company, and UK and Israeli scientists are collaborating on research to develop treatments that will save lives in the UK and across the world.

Let’s celebrate and strengthen this partnership, tell the truth about this so-called Israel Apartheid Week and campaign to make sure its lies are no longer able to defile our universities and intimidate our students.


Israel Tops Resilience Index Among Middle East Countries, New Study Finds
Israel is the most resilient country in the Middle East, according to a study published on Wednesday by the Institute of Economics, Society and Peace in the Middle East Studies at the Western Galilee Academic College.

The study ranked Middle East countries based on six main criteria—economic, social, gender equality, the degree of openness to globalization, ethnic variance and religious variance—using quantifiable figures from sources such as the World Bank.

Based on these criteria, researchers from a wide range of fields found that Israel is the strongest country in the region, followed by Greece, Cyprus, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. The countries at the bottom of the list are Jordan, Syria, Sudan and Yemen. The strength index does not account for military might, rather which reflects the degree of overall welfare among the people of each country.

In terms of economics, Israel ranked fifth, behind Qatar, Turkey, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, in descending order. Israel also ranked fifth in the degree of openness to globalization, behind Turkey, Greece, Cyprus and Iran. Economics might take into account factors such as total Gross Domestic Product, GDP per capita, population size, the ratio of children and elderly relative to the size of the civilian workforce and other measures.

As for social strength, Israel, as one of the only democracies in the Middle East, ranked first by a wide margin over the other countries, the vast majority of which are ruled by totalitarian regimes or monarchies.

Another variable examined by the researchers was the degree of religious variance in the respective populations. In this category, Israel ranked sixth out of 33 countries, showing religious variance to a considerable degree.
Arab Israeli Life Has Gotten Better
There have been dramatic improvements in the lives of Israel's Arab citizens over the last 15 years.

Beginning in 2006, the government funded training programs, improved educational support, subsidized employment, expanded transportation networks and built industrial parks near Arab towns.

Funding to rectify imbalances between Jewish and Arab communities has meant that 85% of homes in Arab towns are now connected to modern sewer networks, up from less than 40% in 2015.

The employment rate among Arab Israeli women ages 25-54 rose from 21% in the early 2000s to 35% in 2016.

In the 2017-2018 academic year, Arab Israelis made up 16% of college students in Israel compared to 8.3% in 1999-2000. The Technion - Israel's MIT - reports that its proportion of Arab students increased by 200% since 2004.

Arab Israelis now comprise 17% of the country's doctors, 24% of nurses and 47% of pharmacists.
From Ian:

'The National' obtains US official document for Palestinian ‘reset’
The US administration is looking to 'reset' relations with the Palestinians with a plan that includes $15 million in Covid-19 assistance and a rollback of several Trump administration positions that favoured Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and did not prioritise the two-state solution, an internal memo reveals.

The official document, obtained exclusively by The National on Wednesday, was raised to US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on March 1, by acting assistant secretary of state for near eastern Affairs Joey Hood.

It was drafted by deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs Hady Amr and his team.

The memo, The US Palestinian Reset and the Path Forward, is the most detailed proposal so far by the Biden team to rebalance relations with the Palestinians after four years of Donald Trump, who cut ties with Ramallah.

The US memo acknowledges new challenges in approaching the Palestinian situation.

“As we reset US relations with the Palestinians, the Palestinian body politic is at an inflection point as it moves towards its first elections in 15 years,” it says.

“At the same time, we [the US] suffer from a lack of connective tissue following the 2018 closure of the PLO office in Washington and refusal of Palestinian Authority leadership to directly engage with our embassy to Israel,” the memo says.

It mentions growing disparities between Israelis and Palestinians and outlines a “reset under way and the path ahead”.

The memo defines the US vision on the issue as one “to advance freedom, security, and prosperity for both Israelis and Palestinians in the immediate term which is important in its own right, but also as means to advance the prospects of a negotiated two-state solution”.


Internal Biden memo said to back 2-state solution along 1967 lines
The Biden administration will reportedly push for a two-state solution based on the pre-1967 lines, with mutually agreed upon land swaps, reinstating US policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to more traditionally held positions than those of former president Donald Trump.

A memo titled “The US Palestinian Reset and the Path Forward,” which was revealed Wednesday to the Abu Dhabi-based The National, also showed that the Biden administration is planning on announcing a $15 million aid package in coronavirus-related humanitarian assistance for the Palestinians as early as this month.

Drafted by Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr, the memo also details plans to roll back various Trump policies that Washington believes made reaching a two-state solution more difficult, such as US legitimization of the settlement enterprise.

Amr recommends in the memo that the White House back a two-state framework “based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps and agreements on security and refugees.”

While behind closed doors, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has participated in peace negotiations based on the 1967 lines, publicly the formula is not very popular in Israel, particularly among the right wing, which is expected to further expand in the Knesset after next week’s election.

The memo discusses “rolling back certain steps by the prior administration that bring into question our commitment or pose real barriers to a two-state solution, such as country of origin labeling.”

The memo was referring to a last-minute policy change announced by Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo, which requires all US exports from the settlements to be labeled as having been “made in Israel.”

Since 1995, US policy had required products made in the West Bank and Gaza to be labeled as such. That directive was republished in 2016 by the Obama administration, which warned that labeling goods as “made in Israel” could lead to fines. Prior to the Oslo Accords, however, all products manufactured in these areas were required to mention Israel in their label when exporting to the United States.

The Pompeo order went into effect in December, but manufacturers were given a 90-day grace period, until March 23, to implement the change.

“As we reset US relations with the Palestinians, the Palestinian body politic is at an inflection point as it moves towards its first elections in 15 years,” the new memo reads. “At the same time, we [the US] suffer from a lack of connective tissue following the 2018 closure of the PLO office in Washington and refusal of Palestinian Authority leadership to directly engage with our embassy to Israel.”

Wednesday, March 17, 2021


Malki Roth. This story should be about her, instead of the woman who planned and helped to execute her murder, Ahlam Tamimi. But Malki is dead and Ahlam Tamimi is not only alive and free, but celebrated in Jordan as a national hero. Malki’s parents, Arnold and Frimet, have worked hard to convince US officials to extradite Tamimi from Jordan to stand trial in the States, to no avail. But they’re not giving up, no matter how long it takes.

The latest setback in the Roths’ quest for justice occurred on March 11, 2021, when Interpol announced without warning that it had removed Tamimi’s name from its Red Notice database. Red Notice is an alert system that sends requests to law enforcement in member states to locate and arrest criminals like Tamimi, pending extradition. Arnold and Frimet Roth responded by pledging that very same day that they will not stop their efforts “to see this loathsome person—the embodiment of murderous bigotry—eventually brought to justice to answer for her crimes.”

Frimet Roth has recorded a personal plea to President Biden to help them in their quest for justice. We can only hope this mother’s pain and grief will touch the new president’s heart, and move him to action on Malki’s behalf.

I spoke with Arnold Roth to get a clearer picture on recent developments in this story. This will, in fact, be the third time that Roth has been gracious enough to consent to be interviewed in this space. (See here and here.) It is my hope that readers will become invested in the story of Malki and question why it is that four consecutive US administrations have done nothing to change an unjust reality in which an American citizen—a young girl just out eating pizza with a friend—is murdered for the crime of being Jewish, while her unrepentant murderer is celebrated as a hero in Jordan.

Varda Epstein: Why have successive American governments not pressed for the extradition of the woman who masterminded and assisted in the murder of your child? Wasn't Malki an American citizen? Weren't there other American citizens killed or injured in the Sbarro massacre?

​Arnold Roth: Malki, just 15 when her life was stolen, was one of two US nationals murdered in the Sbarro massacre. The other was a young Jewish tourist from New Jersey, the only child of parents who somehow found the strength to reach out to us during their shiva and ours to try to comfort us and especially my bereft wife. They are heroic figures in our eyes. Their murdered daughter was pregnant with her own first child. I deliberately don't mention them by name but can testify to how exceptionally heartbreaking is their loss.

Another young mother, also a US national but like Malki a resident of Israel, was in the pizzeria with her toddler daughter at the time of the attack and suffered horrific brain injuries. She doesn't get counted among the dead according to the rules of this awful narrative. But she has remained in a vegetative coma throughout the nearly two decades since Ahlam Tamimi delivered her satanic bomb to the center of Jerusalem.

I can speculate about why successive US governments have failed to press for the extradition of Tamimi, who orchestrated the attack and self-describes as the first female Hamas terrorist. But since no US official has ever explained this reality in public, it remains speculation and anyone can speculate. That includes me. So I say that it's all about a woefully misconceived sense that in pressing Jordan to live up to its bilateral obligations to its treaty partner and far-and-away largest benefactor, funder, supporter, and ally, the US will cause headaches for its king. Behind that statement is the reality that Jordan, more than any other country on earth, is overwhelmingly made up of Palestinian Arabs.

Varda Epstein: What do you think of the argument that America is invested in keeping Abdullah on the throne and that extraditing Tamimi would make him unpopular?  Do you think this is the reason behind the unresponsiveness of the State Department under the past four administrations?

​Arnold Roth: It's a reasonable argument in my opinion and a revealing one. The Jordanian leadership has done well in depicting itself as fragile, in danger of collapsing at any moment because of internal stresses and explosive resentments among its people. Jordan is a country in constant need of nurture and understanding which the US has provided for decades.

The world saw something similar, as my wife Frimet likes to point out, in 1960s South Vietnam. I think the expression "the tail wagging the dog" is a good title for this strategy. No one can deny it works. The real question is—why do so many governments and smart political figures fall in with this policy? To that question, I don't have any satisfying answers.

Varda Epstein: What do you think of the FBI putting Tamimi on the wanted list and offering a reward for information leading to her capture? Don't they know where she is? 

​Arnold Roth: To understand my answer, let me take you back four years.

When the US Department of Justice told us on March 14, 2017—a few hours before it happened—that they were unsealing terror charges against Tamimi in Washington later that same day, we actually didn’t appreciate the implications.

No one has said this to us. But it is clear that the delay in announcing federal terrorism charges against Tamimi four years after the judge had signed the papers was because Jordan refused to extradite the fugitive.

Throughout those years, she, Tamimi, was living a dream life, lecturing and advocating for terrorists and terror widely throughout the Arab world and having her own terror-centric TV show. She became a celebrity while Federal prosecutors and investigators from Washington, intent on seeing her stand trial, were being ignored and obstructed by Jordan’s most powerful officials.

On the day the criminal prosecution was announced, Tamimi was added to the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list. Only one other woman had preceded her there. But unlike the rest of the terrorists on the list, there was no multi-million dollar reward from US law enforcement for Tamimi’s capture.

When we discovered she was living at an address that everyone who needed to know knew—not hiding, not living under an assumed name, not concealing her daily movements—we were puzzled. Then it became clear there was no reward and that seemed to say there was no real desire to take her into custody and bring her in chains to a Washington court. A $5m reward was eventually announced nine months later. It seems to still be in effect, but it’s hard to understand why, given how she moves freely throughout Jordanian society without fear.

It would be comforting to be able to say that all of this was explained to us and that we now know why things happened that way. But I cannot. The people who administer the State Department Rewards for Justice program which provides the rewards for the capture of the people on the FBI list, have never returned any of our calls or emails right up until today.

Varda Epstein: Why do you think Interpol took Tamimi off their Red Notice database?

Arnold Roth: I know that the Tamimi family and their lawyers say they fought for 18 months to have Ahlam Tamimi’s name removed from the Interpol Red Notice database. In the Arabic-language media, there are reports that this amounts to a vindication of her. None of their claims make any sense to me.

Varda Epstein: Why do you think the Biden Administration will take action when the last 4 presidents did nothing? Why didn't the Trump Administration take action?

Arnold Roth: When the Biden Administration’s people say theirs will be a principled approach to dealing with allies and rivals, eschewing the transactional approach of the Trump people, I believe them. If true, this is very encouraging. And when the Trump people said they would do everything to ensure justice is done in our case, I believed them too. As a matter of fact, when the Obama people said they would pursue the bomber with the full force of US law, I believed that and still believe it.

Why do politicians and officials say things and then do other, often very different, things? I wish I knew. Meeting and getting to know honorable officials in public life only deepens the puzzle. So much goodwill, and—in our case—so little to show for it.

We continue to hope for better. And to do whatever we possibly can to see it happen.

Varda Epstein: Why should Ahlam Tamimi be behind bars? How will this help you and your family personally? What can we do to help?

Arnold Roth: As a citizen of Jordan and celebrity media figure, Ahlam Tamimi has significantly increased the stock of lethal evil in the world. She is a lightning rod for bigotry-driven, explosive hatred, an articulate representative of some of humanity’s most hateful tendencies.

At the personal level, with her not only free but celebrated on a massive scale by admirers and supporters, I sometimes find it literally impossible to contemplate her rich life alongside the fact that Malki is dead. Malki, who was full of love for people and for life and for being helpful and empathetic, whose murder brought so much darkness into our lives, should be living a life of influence and accomplishment. The injustice is crushing.

Our failure to see Tamimi brought to trial in Washington weighs heavily on me. My wife and I have no intention of giving up but we know that if we succeed, it will only be brought by effecting real change. Support in the form of helping us to change things, by helping us influence lawmakers in Washington, by escalating the doing of justice so that it is not crushed into meaninglessness by expedient politicians—these are things that require outreach and input from Americans.

It is the United States and those who govern it who will determine the outcome of our efforts since 2012. I am always glad to hear from individuals and organizations who are able to take a role in that process with us. We are determined to see justice done. But it cannot be done by us alone.



Tuesday, March 16, 2021

From Ian:

A New Zionist Congress Is Born
Defiant Jewish undergraduates are forming their own national organization dedicated to combating anti-Semitism and promoting Jewish pride. Join us.

In this new world order, nobody is surprised when a majority of students at Tufts University vote to pass a referendum blaming racist police violence in the United States on the State of Israel. In this new world order, it’s not cause for alarm when an Israeli restaurant in Portland, Oregon, is forced to remove all mention of Israel from its menus and signs, but still gets vandalized with graffiti that reads “eat shit” and “falafel is from Palestine.”

In this new world order, no one blinks when the organizers of a rally against police brutality in New York City say it’s “open to all, minus cops and Zionists.”

In this new world order, the first draft of California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum listed the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions Movement as a domestic civil rights issue and defined the Jewish people through the lens of colonialism and whiteness.

In this new world order, a professor at the University of Bristol can accuse his own Jewish students of being henchmen in a Zionist plot to silence left-wing professors, and still win the support of hundreds of “progressive” colleagues around the world, including Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler.

In this new world order, a man can walk into a kosher supermarket in Michigan and taunt its Jewish customers by asking them to read “Free Palestine” on his phone, post the video to Instagram, and receive hundreds of thousands of likes and comments from adoring fans.

This is the insidious hatred students like me are dealing with on campus. Yet I’ve had professionals call me, their voices shaking, worried that they might get shamed on Twitter by college students if I use their platform to speak freely about what is actually causing anti-Semitism at school. This is all part of a desperate need to sit at the table with those who style themselves as fighting for justice. The adults in the room beg us to reason with them, to explain to them what Judaism means to us and why we have a connection with Israel. “Allyship,” they preach, because the only way we’ll be accepted is if we are conceived as oppressed.

I’m sorry. If a Jew is called a Nazi on campus, is it really his or her responsibility to invite the offending student to share a bagel on the quad? If someone bans me from their organization, is it really my responsibility to, as one individual put it to me recently, “internalize ways in which I am not welcoming, and strive for a more intersectional approach to dialogues about oppression and power”? What the hell does that even mean? What other minority community would be forced to endure this jargon-filled hellscape? Every time Jews speak out about anti-Semitism, we're immediately told to endure a corporate diversity training seminar, one which concludes that it's still our fault for causing all the drama.

And yet for many in the Jewish community, this is a tolerable price to pay to sit at the table. Well, I don't want a seat at that table. I don’t want to be anywhere near that table. I am in fact determined to flip that table over.
At 80 years old, human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler is busier than ever
Unlike most other activists, Cotler might be lucky enough to have a direct line to the person handling U.S. foreign policy. He had a decades-long friendship with U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s stepfather, Samuel Pisar, a Holocaust survivor. “When I was a law professor at McGill, we inaugurated the Raoul Wallenberg Lectureship in Human Rights,” Cotler recalled. The first person to give that lecture was Elie Wiesel; the second was Pisar, sparking a friendship in which Cotler visited him at his homes in New York and in France.

But human rights work is only half of Cotler’s portfolio — he also has another full-time job, as Canada’s antisemitism envoy. He took the job pro bono, he said, with practically no budget, to handle a huge portfolio that includes both domestic and global antisemitism, domestic and global Holocaust remembrance, and chairing Canada’s delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. (Canada has adopted the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, which Trudeau says is part of the nation’s “anti-racism strategy.”)

Cotler sees a straightforward connection between his two passions: the Jewish community and international human rights. “I take a human rights approach to combating antisemitism,” he explained. “While [bigotry] begins with Jews, it doesn’t end with Jews. So for me, all these things converge, and there’s a universal resonance, both of the lessons of the Holocaust and the combating antisemitism today.”

Some on the political left might call this framework intersectionality. But Cotler is not trying to apply a political ideology to his fight against antisemitism, and he says he feels fortunate that Canadians by and large do not politicize the issue. “People are not weaponizing antisemitism. You don’t have the right weaponize it against the left, and the left weaponizing it against the right,” he noted — unlike Canada’s neighbor to the south. “The big difference is Canada is not as polarized or as divided as the U.S.,” and “there still is a consensus.” His biggest concern is what he calls the “normalization” of antisemitism, where “it gets mainstream, and it doesn’t elicit the condemnation, or maybe the outrage, that it deserves.”

One of Cotler’s goals as Canada’s global antisemitism envoy is to address what he views as antisemitism at the United Nations, in the double standard he says the U.N. applies to Israel. “The rights of Israel deserve equal respect, not that human rights standards should not be applied to Israel. They must be. But these standards must be applied equally to everyone else,” Cotler said. He pointed out that Syria was recently appointed to a top position on the U.N.’s Special Committee on Decolonization, despite its well-documented history of brutal repression during the country’s civil war.

Cotler noted that some in the pro-Israel community who criticize the U.N.’s treatment of Israel simply oppose the institution entirely, but he is not among them. “If you’re Canadian, the United Nations is part of your DNA,” Cotler explained, noting that “human rights is a centerpiece of our foreign policy, [and] international law is part of my identity.”

His work truly is international: The cases currently in his docket include Badawi in Saudi Arabia, along with dissidents from China and Russia. During his conversation with JI, he received a call about a matter related to political persecution in Venezuela. “That’s another priority,” he said. For Cotler, every matter related to global injustice is a priority: “I get energized by the work.”
  • Tuesday, March 16, 2021
  • Elder of Ziyon
The Daily Beast has an exclusive!



They even show the details from a US government site that tracks expenses. 




Outrageous, right?

Only if you don't act like a reporter and ask if this expense was excessive or normal. Which, of course, the Daily Beast didn't do.

Kushner's trip was to lead a delegation of Americans and Israelis to Morocco in the wake of the peace accords between Israel and Morocco. Sounds like a pretty important trip, not the frivolous way it is being described in the media.





I took a quick look at the same USASpending.gov website to see how much was spent on trips to Israel during the Obama era.

Here's one - a two day trip to Jerusalem by John Kerry on June 11-12, 2013. The trip is described as "IGF::OT::IGF GSO/TRAVEL - SECSTATE 11-12 JUNE PAY LODGING IN JLM."


It costs the US taxpayers $181,245. 

It sounds like the Kushner trip was a bargain! 

Where is the outrage at how much a Democratic administration spends on hotels? 

The media isn't interested in that story.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is media bias.




From Ian:

FDD Podcast: The UN and the Illiberal International Order
With the defeat of the Axis Powers in 1945, the United States emerged as the strongest nation on earth. But rather than emulate hegemons of the past, American leaders envisioned a new and different world order.

Their goal was to organize an “international community,” establish “universal human rights,” and a growing body of “international law.”

This project required new institutions, in particular the United Nations.

Three quarters of a century later, it requires willful blindness not to see that the UN and many other international organizations have become bloated and corrupt bureaucracies, increasingly serving the interests of despots.

To discuss what’s gone wrong and what might be done to prevent the UN and other international organizations from drifting further into the clutches of authoritarians host Clifford D. May is joined by Richard Goldberg, Orde Kittrie, and Emma Reilly.
Emily Schrader: Biden must abandon negotiating with Iran, UNHRC, UNRWA - opinion
Since President Biden came into office, he’s made it a goal for the United States to restore relations for diplomatic purposes with a host of entities, from the United Nations to the Palestinian Authority to UNRWA to the Iranian regime. Sadly, these well-intended initiatives are all misguided. The UN will not be any better for the United States being involved, the PA will not suddenly have a desire to make peace with Israel, and Iran is most certainly not going to stop its hostile actions in five – yes five – different countries, nor will they halt their booming nuclear program.

In 2018, the US officially withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council, a body plagued with corruption and anti-Israel obsession, whose members today include Russia, Cuba and even China. Ironically, China is simultaneously committing genocide against Chinese Muslims and violating the human rights of countless other Chinese, Tibetan and Hong Kong residents in the area. It is precisely because of sickening hypocrisy like this that the US withdrew its participation under former president Trump, and why even president Bush was hesitant about joining the council when it was established in 2006. While the intent of the Biden administration may be noble – to “work from within” to change the corruption of the UNHRC – US participation prior to president Trump did nothing to stamp out the corruption, so it is naïve to think that would be different today.

Similarly, the US cut funding to the UNRWA, the UN body responsible for Palestinian refugees (exclusively), due to the fact the mere existence of UNRWA is an obstacle to resolving the Palestinian refugee issue. UNRWA has faced criticism for perpetuating refugee status for generations and preventing Palestinians from resettling. Incidentally, the agency also has had numerous scandals with UNRWA textbooks teaching violence and terrorism in Palestinian schools. The agency itself is also the single largest employer of Palestinians in the Palestinian territories, meaning if they solved the refugee issue, these Palestinians would be out of jobs.

The US was the world’s single largest funder of UNRWA, amounting to over $360 million annually, until president Trump cut funding in 2018, calling the agency “irredeemably flawed.” Since then, throughout the pandemic, UNRWA was found once again to have incitement to violence in their textbooks teaching children in Gaza blood libels and glorifying “martyrs.” These textbooks were condemned by the European Parliament, among others. In a report issued at the beginning of 2021, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-SE) found that UNRWA materials are even more extreme than some of the textbooks issued by the PA itself. Yet at the same time this report confirms the problem of UNRWA, the Biden administration is talking about restoring $360 million in funding to it.
Josh Hammer: Israel’s New Election: No One Else but Bibi
For American friends of Israel buoyed by both the intrinsic moral dignity of an enhanced Israeli alliance and that alliance’s concrete national security benefits in repelling both Iranian hegemony and Sunni jihad, the thought experiment as to who ought to next lead Israel amounts to the following: “Which candidate for prime minister would be best in sustaining Israel’s marked geopolitical and diplomatic progress, centered around but hardly limited to the Trump-Netanyahu doctrine of Middle East peace, amidst the headwinds of what promises to be an anti-Israel administration redolent of the Barack Obama presidency?”

The question practically answers itself. Of course, Netanyahu is best-suited to continue leading Israel at the present moment.

Netanyahu’s now-decade-plus second stint as prime minister largely overlapped with the most anti-Israel U.S. administration in the Jewish state’s history, that of former President Barrack Obama. Netanyahu proved himself admirably adroit and courageous during those tumultuous years, developing a knack for when to strategically appease Obama (for example, the ten-month “settlement” freeze of 2010), mustering the fortitude to loudly confront him when need be (for example, Netanyahu’s spellbinding March 2015 speech before Congress, in opposition to the Iran nuclear deal), and prudently hedging his nation’s decades-long wager on the U.S.-Israel alliance by advancing the Jewish state’s diplomatic interests across Asia, Africa, and Central and South America to hitherto unforeseen heights. Netanyahu, in short, has already weathered the storm of an anti-Israel Democratic presidency without suffering serious blows to Israel’s geopolitical clout, and there is no reason to think he cannot ably do so again.

But the greatest diplomatic breakthrough for Israel over the last four decades, and quite possibly over the course of its national history, was undoubtedly the signing of the Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. Those peace agreements would not have been possible without the vision and leadership of Prime Minister Netanyahu, whose skill in selling Israel’s value as a diplomatic, geopolitical, and military ally on the world stage helped land the Jewish state not merely closer defense ties with New Delhi or a new Guatemalan embassy in Jerusalem, but affirmative normalization agreements (and all the beautiful accouterments such agreements necessarily entail) with the very heart of the Arab world itself.

Netanyahu has established himself as a transformative leader. He has overseen both unprecedented diplomatic success overseas and tremendous economic growth and technological innovation at home. In the annals of Israeli political history, he is surpassed by no one other than perhaps preeminent founding father David Ben-Gurion himself. That is not to say Netanyahu is flawless; on the contrary, despite his resoluteness on the Iranian threat, he has too often lacked the courage of his convictions as it pertains to Palestinian-related issues, such as sovereignty in Judea and Samaria and the perennial thorn in the side of the modern Jewish state that is the Hamas-run Gaza Strip. There have been missed opportunities, from a conservative Zionist perspective.

But there is simply no feasible alternative at the present moment. Some conservative Zionists and longtime supporters of Netanyahu’s, frustrated with the inherent political instability that comes with four national elections in just two years and the reality of Netanyahu’s legal travails at the behest of an opportunistic legal fraternity, have urged Netanyahu that now is the right time to finally step aside. But even ignoring the largely frivolous nature of Netanyahu’s specific legal troubles, to say nothing of the fact that it is puerile to necessarily expect awe-inspiring personal virtue from our political leaders, such speculation falls flat when one considers a blunt but crucial reality: There is simply no one else who can take Netanyahu’s place.
Israel Pursuing Four More Peace Deals, Bibi Says
Israel is pursuing four more peace deals with countries in the region and elsewhere, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday.

"I brought four peace agreements, and there are another four on the way," Netanyahu said. "I talked about one of them yesterday." He added that one such regional leader spoke with him by phone Monday night. The prime minister did not dispel rumors of other peace agreements in the works with nations such as Niger, Mauritania, and Indonesia.

The longtime Israeli leader also touted the four other agreements he forged last year with Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Africa—Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Sudan—which thawed decades of cold relations.

Israel is inching toward normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, a key partner in the coalition against Iran due to its size, wealth, and military force. Netanyahu met with Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in November. Under the Trump administration, senior officials hinted at prospects of budding relations between Riyadh and Jerusalem in the wake of the historic Abraham Accords signed in August 2020.

Normalization with gulf countries has already borne significant fruit for Israel. Tourism and trade continues to grow apace between Israel and the UAE, with some even remarking that they feel safer wearing traditional Jewish clothing in Dubai than in France now.

The Trump administration furthered such agreements between Israel and regional partners as a senior broker by strongly backing Israel and pressuring Iran. The realignment in the Middle East was appraised by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger as "brilliant." He emphasized that the Biden administration must build on the progress made in peaceful regional ties by continuing Trump-era policies in the region.

Saturday, March 13, 2021

From Ian:

Only Arabs in Israel have true democracy
Which of the hundreds of millions of Arab citizens in the Middle East will be able to vote in free and fair elections this year?

It’s obviously not Syria. Even before a brutal civil war that killed half a million people and made almost half the population refugees, the country was a brutal dictatorship. Libya is in carnage and Yemen is still the world’s biggest humanitarian catastrophe.

Egypt is under a state of emergency and the President’s main opponents were banned from the last election. Whilst there are varying degrees of political development in the Arab monarchies, the unelected Monarch retains the final say in all of them.

The first election for nine years eventually took place in Lebanon in 2018, after being called off by the government three times. Elections also take place in Iraq but are marred by corruption and Baghdad comes down hard on anyone who really tries to exercise self-determination, as the Kurds found out with the military action and blockade they faced after their referendum in 2017.

Many won’t want to hear it, of course, but apart from Tunisia, the likelihood is that the only Arab citizens in the whole of the Middle East who will get to elect the people who run their country in free and fair elections live in Israel.

Almost 380 million Arab citizens live in two dozen countries stretching across five million square miles and the only ones who truly have a say in who runs their country are the 1.9 million in the tiny state of Israel.

Later this month, all nine million Israeli citizens, whatever their religion, race, ethnicity or heritage, will have exactly the same rights at the ballot box. All citizens of Israel vote on an equal basis and Arab voter turnout for the 2020 election reached 64.8%, its highest level in the last two decades.

Visit the Knesset and you will see one of the most diverse and disputatious legislatures in the world representing every shade of opinion from the far left to the extreme right.
MEMRI: Gaza Ceremony On International Women's Day Lauds Palestinian Women Terrorists Shadia Abu Ghazaleh, Leila Khaled, Dalal Al-Mughrabi
The Palestinian Authority's Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs held a ceremony in Gaza in honor of freed female prisoners on International Women's Day. It was aired on Palestine TV on March 8, 2021. The governor of Gaza Ibrahim Abu Al-Naja spoke on behalf of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. He condemned the new UAE ambassador to Israel and added: "Damn him and his country!"

Senior official of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) Maryam Abu Daqqa lauded Palestinian women and said that they have been an integral part of the armed-struggle and resistance against Zionism, from the early days of the "Zionist invasion" to the "modern-day Palestinian revolution." She said that Palestinian women are part of a "triangle of terror" threatening the Zionist entity – on land, at sea, and from the air. She gave the example of PFLP member Shadia Abu Ghazaleh who was killed while preparing a bomb in 1968, Leila Khaled who was the first female plane hijacker, and Dalal Al-Mughrabi who had participated in the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre in Israel.

Gaza Governor Al-Naja: "Palestinian Women Have Sacrificed Like No Other Women In The World; [They] Send Their Sons... To Go [Fight] For The Sake Of Their Cause"

Announcer: "And now to the speech by President Mahmoud Abbas, Abu Mazen, which will be delivered on his behalf by the governor of the Gaza Governorate, Ibrahim Abu Al-Naja, Abu Wael, please. "

Gaza Governor Ibrahim Abu Al-Naja: "Palestinian women have sacrificed like no other women in the world. Palestinian women are still role models, because they are seekers of freedom, they are mothers, they are sisters, they are fighters, they are martyrs and they are bereaved.

"Look at how these women send their sons, one after the other, telling them to go [fight] for the sake of their cause, for the sake of freedom in the world, and for the sake of human rights.

"This is the message that the world has ignored. This is the message that was rebuffed by the enemies of our nation and our people. This is the message that our [Arab] brothers do not want to understand. They want to erase our history. This is a disgrace. We reject and condemn this and we do not want this to be recorded in the annals of our nation's history.

"Yesterday, an ambassador of a country we used to call 'brotherly' presented his credentials...


French Jews Remember Anniversary of 2012 Terror Attacks That Culminated in Massacre at Jewish School
France on Thursday began commemorations for the ninth anniversary of a devastating Islamist terror spree that claimed the lives of seven people, including three children at a Jewish school and two soldiers in the French army.

The tributes to the victims — murdered in the Toulouse region by Islamist terrorist Mohamed Merah between March 11-15, 2012 — coincided with the Europe-wide national memorial day for the victims of terrorism. That event takes place on March 11 to commemorate the 2004 terror attack on the same day upon the Atocha train station in the Spanish capital, Madrid.

The French Jewish communal organization CRIF tweeted a tribute to the first of the seven victims, Imad ibn Ziaten, a parachutist in the French armed forces from a Muslim family of Moroccan origin. Ziaten was shot dead by Merah at point blank range after refusing to obey the terrorist’s instruction to lie on the ground.

“A few days later, six people including two other soldiers, three children and a father were also murdered,” the CRIF tweet noted.

On March 19, 2012, Merah launched a gun attack on the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse. He murdered Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, who taught at the school, together with his two sons, six-year-old Aryeh and three-year-old Gabriel.

Merah then grabbed another child, eight-year-old Miriam Monsonego, and shot her through the head before escaping. Following a 30 hour siege at his apartment building in which six agents were wounded, Merah was shot dead by a police tactical unit on March 22.

Friday, March 12, 2021

From Ian:

Stuart Force, Sander Gerber and Mike Pompeo: Is the Biden Administration Planning on Violating the Taylor Force Act?
The Biden Administration has signaled its desire to resume aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a way to jump start the moribund Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” The obstacle to peace, however, is not the absence of US assistance but the PA’s incentivizing of terrorism. The bipartisan Taylor Force Act blocks US funding for the PA until it changes this behavior. There is no indication that it has, making any resumption of US taxpayer aid a contravention of this important law and a further hindrance to peace.

The PA’s “pay-for-slay” policy was highlighted by the 2016 murder of an American tourist in Israel by a Palestinian terrorist. The tourist, named Taylor Force — a West Point graduate, US Army veteran, and son of one of the authors of this post — was in Tel Aviv on a school trip when he was stabbed to death.

Force was neither Israeli nor Jewish. Yet, the PA celebrated the killer repeatedly as a “heroic Martyr” and held a large, festive funeral where he was hailed as a national hero. The murderer’s family soon began receiving benefit payments from the PA.

The PA spends massively on these payments to terrorists and their families and treats this perverse benefits system as a sacred obligation. Codified in PA law, the system adds bonus payments for Israeli Arabs and Arab residents of Jerusalem who have Israeli IDs and therefore more freedom of movement to carry out attacks. The longer the prison sentence, the greater the payments — meaning the deadlier, the more lucrative. The PA employs some 550 people in its pay-for-slay bureaucracies and devotes over seven percent of its budget, or $350 million, to the program, compared to just $220 million for non-terrorist welfare programs.

To address this despicable system, Congress passed the Taylor Force Act (TFA) — a bill the ACLJ has long supported — cutting off US aid to the PA until the pay-for-slay bureaucracy is dismantled and the laws governing it are repealed. The logic is simple: since money is fungible, aid that supplants the governance responsibilities of the PA frees up PA money to reward terrorists.

The Taylor Force Act corrected a profoundly immoral policy that had American taxpayer funds being laundered unwittingly through PA accounts to incentivize murder. The bill also offered a simple litmus test of the PA’s seriousness about making peace: If the PA cannot revoke the laws and infrastructure conferring special treatment for terrorists, then the PA itself remains an obstacle to the “peace process.”

Yet, the Biden Administration claims renewed aid for the Palestinian people will not violate TFA, which bars aid programs that “directly benefit” the PA. And news reports indicate the PA believes it can satisfy the Administration by making terrorist compensation “needs based” rather than based on the success of attacks, as it is now.

The Administration also appears set to endorse and empower the PA by giving it preemptive rewards, such as re-opening the PLO mission in Washington, DC, the office that directly administers the pay-for-slay program.


European, Arab diplomats attempt to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts
Leading European and Arab world diplomats announced potential “small steps” Thursday toward reviving Middle East peace efforts after upcoming Israeli and Palestinian elections.

The officials — from the UN, EU, Egypt, Jordan, Germany, and France — did not release any specific details, however. And the meeting came amid new tensions between Israel and Arab countries around Jerusalem.

There have not been any serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in over a decade and it is unclear what the diplomats can do concretely to create conditions to bring the two sides closer together, especially without the participation of the US.

The Biden administration has called on both sides to refrain from unilateral steps that could harm peace efforts but has yet to announce any major effort to resolve the decades-old conflict as it focuses on the coronavirus, the economy, and other domestic issues.

“We are going to initiate meetings with both parties within a timeframe built around the electoral calendar to identify, with them, the steps they are in a position to take to kickstart mutual trust,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said. He mentioned possible health and economic measures, without elaborating.

Any next moves will depend on the outcome of the Israeli election on March 23, as well as Palestinian elections later this year.

Thursday, March 11, 2021

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.


Predator droneSana, March 11 - Families of a man and woman hoping not to be dismembered by missiles from an American Predator aircraft at the celebration of their nuptials lamented this week that securing a venue that can accommodate such a preference will cost them a metaphorical arm and leg.

The Jabari and Hufri clans agreed last month to a marriage between Ahmad, a scion of the Jabaris, and Asma, of the Hufris, to take place in mid-March, but planning has bogged down and the event postponed twice already because all parties to the arrangement have agreed on at least one condition that catering halls and other facilities have declared all but impossible: no American drone strikes during the ceremony or party. The only available option, they discovered, involves an underground facility that must undergo significant modifications to attain the 200-person capacity that the event requires, and as such much charge more than ten times the prevailing rate for above-ground venues of similar size.

"We knew, in the abstract, that Biden's election would mean a return to the Obama-era phenomenon of drone attacks on weddings," acknowledged patriarch Hussein Jabari, the groom's great uncle. "But that was before Ahmad got engaged. Now it's real, and personal, and we have to address the down-to-earth details and implications. So far the drone strikes under Biden have been confined to remote areas of Syria, but the Americans are somehow both unreliable and entirely predictable, so at one point we even considered calling off the wedding. But the two of them are so cute together, and it's not fair to put life on hold just because lives are at risk. The Americans have made that mistake, too, with their excessive school closures and lockdowns, when less severe mitigation measures would suffice."

"Anyway," he continued, "we did finally find a guy with a bunch of caves on his property and the remnants of some tunnel, but it's going to take weeks of work to make it safe for our purposes, let alone hooked up to electricity and the proper kitchen facilities. And I don't even want to talk about how much livestock this is going to set us back. The security deposit alone cost me some of my finest ewes."

"It wasn't just the venue," agreed Fatima Hufri, who has taken charge of some of the other logistical arrangements for the affair. "Try getting a band that's willing either to risk its members' lives at an event prone to drone attack or to perform underground where the acoustics are terrible. And don't get me started on florists. Though since they do funerals, too, it was easier to persuade them to make a deal since they're getting our business either way."

From Ian:

Seth Frantzman: Why Saudi Arabia, MBS are important to Israel, regional peace - analysis
The crown prince has been the lightning rod of harsh human rights criticism in many US circles because of accusations, backed by the CIA, that he was involved in the killing of former Saudi insider Jamal Khashoggi. Others, however, point out that MBS has been key to Saudi Arabia’s shift toward a less repressive society.

They describe the crown prince – who has driven these changes – as “a visionary.” He is moving his country to a different place, say those who have met him. Therefore, Saudi Arabia should not be pushed into a corner by US policies that are critical of the kingdom.

It has already lost US support for offensive operations in Yemen, but it should be listened to regarding Iranian threats, even as Washington has been messaging a desire to recalibrate relations with Riyadh because of the Khashoggi murder. as well as taking a tougher line on human rights issues in Egypt.

It may be that a tougher line toward the Saudis from the US, and renewing the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, will accelerate Israeli relations with Riyadh. But Saudi Arabia has been cautious. Last year, when rumors spread that it might normalize relations with Israel, it waited.

Saudi Arabia is carefully assessing elections in the US and Israel. In recent days it has held high-level meetings with Jordan, Malaysia, Sudan and other countries. Unsurprisingly, this dovetails with other high-level meetings that link Israel and Egypt, Israel and several countries in Europe, and a growing relationship between Greece, Cyprus, France, Egypt, Israel and the UAE.

A constellation of broader questions mark Saudi Arabia’s relations with this regional realignment. These include Riyadh’s and Abu Dhabi’s views on Syria’s role in the Arab world, concerns about Lebanon’s stability, its relationship with Russia, patching up the aftermath of the crisis with Qatar, and keeping an eye on Turkey’s ambitions.

They involve finding solutions to the conflict in Libya and increasing Gulf influence in east Africa, in Sudan, and farther afield in Pakistan. Israel’s growing sense of being part of the region now puts it increasingly at the crossroads of these discussions as well. While Israel wants the US to stay vitally connected to the region, the overall trend binding Israel and the Gulf and partners from central Europe to India is visceral.
Middle East: The Ghosts of Sovereigns Past
The State of Israel continues to enforce Jordanian law [in the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria] -- despite its clearly racist and backward underpinnings.

No matter what side of the political divide you view it from, a legislative and legal time-warp has trapped the residents of these territories – Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians – in amber for more than five decades. The result: legal chaos, injustice and incessant conflict.

Ironically, Israel's legal reticence continues to fuel the endless conflict over the land itself... that could be avoided by simply completing the process of land survey and registration initiated by the Ottoman Empire and continued by the British Mandatory and Jordanian governments in turn.

Surveying and registering land ownership was not perceived as an act of sovereignty when the British caretakers undertook it; there seems no reason why it should be regarded that way now.

This same vacuum has made it impossible to formulate forward-thinking policy for land use, environmental protection, settlement policy, and perhaps most critically, a negotiated resolution of the status of the territory. Without establishing who owns what, it is impossible to proceed toward a just division of resources or a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

The time has come to banish the antiquated ghosts of Ottoman, Jordanian and British Mandatory rule, and to fill the legal void in Judea and Samaria with a modern, humanist, democratic system of law for everyone.
Netanyahu visit to UAE cancelled due to diplomatic spat with Jordan
Israel and Jordan were working to calm the waters on Thursday after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's scheduled historic first visit to the United Arab Emirates was cancelled following a diplomatic incident between Israel and Jordan.

Netanyahu's scheduled visit to the United Arab Emirates was held up on Thursday morning when Jordan announced it would not allow Netanyahu's aircraft to cross its airspace en route to the United Arab Emirates,.

Officials think that the Jordanian decision, which was announced only shortly before the flight was scheduled to take off, was a response to Israel's decision to cancel a visit to the Temple Mount that had been scheduled for Jordanian Crown Prince Hussein bin Abdullah on Wednesday over disagreements about security protocols.

Israel Hayom has learned that the prince intended to visit the Temple Mount to pray prior to making the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca.

Officials in the UAE told Israel Hayom on Thursday afternoon that it appeared that Netanyahu's visit would most likely not take place as originally scheduled.

A senior government official in Amman told Israel Hayom that "high-ranking Israeli political officials and former Israeli security officials cooperated with Amman to torpedo Netanyahu's visit to the UAE, after Prince Hussein's visit to the Temple Mount was called off."

The official added that "Jordan and Israel will need to find a way to lower the flames and end the diplomatic incident, which has embarrassed both sides. King Abdullah has taken many calls from Israeli officials, who argued that the instruction not to allow some of Prince Hussein's armed security detail to cross Allenby Bridge came from the Prime Minister's Office."

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