RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON — Sheldon G. Adelson, one of the most hawkish supporters of Israel among American Jews, has offered to help fund the construction of a new American Embassy in Jerusalem, according to the State Department, which on Friday said it was reviewing whether it could legally accept the donation.

The total price tag to build the new embassy to replace the current one in Tel Aviv is estimated at around $500 million, according to one former State Department official. While private donors have previously paid for renovations to American ambassadors’ overseas residences, Mr. Adelson’s contribution would be likely to far surpass those gifts — and could further strain American diplomacy in the Middle East.

Before the embassy is built, the Trump administration plans to open a temporary one in Jerusalem. On Friday, it said that it was accelerating the projected opening in time to mark the 70th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel on May 14.

Even some of Mr. Adelson’s allies expressed concern that if the administration accepts his offer for the permanent embassy, it could be seen as a well-heeled financial contributor effectively privatizing — and politicizing — American foreign policy.

Mr. Adelson, who has been a vocal supporter of the contentious plan to move the embassy, is not merely a philanthropist; he is one of the most prominent players in Israeli-American relations. He is a conservative force in American politics, a donor to President Trump, a longtime patron of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the owner of Israel’s largest-circulation daily newspaper.

“I’m concerned that people will think that this is being done because of a group of people — evangelicals and Jews — who care about it and not because it’s the U.S. government that cares about it,” said Morton A. Klein, who runs the Zionist Organization of America, a nonprofit group that is funded partly by Mr. Adelson. “It should be crystal-clear that this is the U.S. government making the decision to move it.”

Through a representative, Mr. Adelson declined to comment on Friday. His offer of a donation was first reported by The Associated Press.

Steve Goldstein, the under secretary for public diplomacy, said State Department lawyers began looking several weeks ago at whether it was legal to accept a private donation to build an embassy, a process that continues. He said the department was not currently negotiating with any private citizen for a donation, and that a new embassy building would take seven to 10 years to construct.

It was not clear whether private donors had ever helped with the financial costs to build an American embassy. Patrick Kennedy, who last year retired from the State Department, where he served as under secretary for management, said donors in the past had contributed millions of dollars to refurbish the palatial United States ambassadors’ residences in London, Paris, Rome and Tokyo.

“As long as a donor passes an ethics and background check, we’ll take their money if they’re willing to give it. There’s no problem there,” Mr. Kennedy said in an interview on Friday.

In a year and a few months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have spent more time at the helm of the Israeli government than any other man. The other man is David Ben-Gurion, the Socialist leader who repressed Zionist nationalist movements in Israel by fiat, by law and, as in the Altalena, by murder.

That factoid may not matter much to most people, even most Israelis, but it matters a great deal to the remnants of Ben-Gurion’s regime, the leftists who don’t win elections, but do control the government. Until ’77, Israel’s Prime Ministers came from the Labor Party. The last Labor Prime Minister left office in 2001. It’s not just that Netanyahu is eclipsing Ben-Gurion, but that Labor has become irrelevant.

But of course the Labor Party isn’t irrelevant. Its candidates may be a joke. Its base of support consists of Tel Aviv hipsters who never actually leave their leftist bubble except to visit Paris, New York or Berlin. Their burning social issue is how much more Daddy has to pay to get them a place in their trendy neighborhood. Not even Obama’s best people could help them get much mileage out of that one.

After the ’15 election, Haaretz, the paper of record for the Israeli anti-Israel left, had wailed, “Leftist, secular Tel Aviv went to sleep last night cautiously optimistic only to wake up this morning in a state of utter and absolute devastation.” Leftist secular Tel Aviv has been devastated for nearly two decades.

But Labor’s deep state still runs much of Israel the way it did when Ben-Gurion was still alive. It doesn’t just have the media and academia, the non-profits and the elites, the way most national ‘lefts’ do. It also controls the old machinery of government that it spent generations running and robbing.

Ben-Gurion’s tenancy may be a factoid to most, but it’s a sore insult to Labor. And its deep state is working overtime to force Netanyahu out of office using fake scandals, fake news and fake police.

Defense Secretary James Mattis said Israel exercised its “absolute right to defend itself” in shooting down an Iranian drone that entered the Jewish State’s airspace from Syria.

The UAV entry into Israeli airspace sparked a response from the Israeli Defense Forces that included striking a dozen Iranian targets in Syria just over an hour later.

The drone was reportedly a copy of an American model, the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel UAV, with an 85-foot wingspan that was captured by Iran in December 2011. IDF Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said the drone “was detected long before crossing Israeli territory.” It was in Israeli airspace for about a minute and a half before being shot down by an Israeli Air Force Apache attack helicopter.

That was at 4:25 a.m. At 5:34 a.m., IAF jets launched an assault against Iranian targets in Syria including three aerial defense batteries. Iran fired anti-aircraft missiles at the Israeli jet, striking one. Two pilots ejected and landed in Israeli territory; one suffered serious injuries.

At 8:45 a.m., the IDF launched a “large-scale attack” against “the Syrian aerial defense array and additional Iranian targets in Syria.” Sirens sounded in northern Israel because of the missiles fired at Israeli jets, and the attack was over just before 9 a.m.

En route to Rome on Sunday for an anti-ISIS conference, Mattis said the U.S. had no involvement in the operation “on a military basis.”

“It is interesting that everywhere we find trouble in the Middle East, you find the same thing behind it. Whether it be in Yemen or Beirut, or in Syria, in Iraq, you always find Iran engaged,” he added. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump’s Palestinian policy aims to avoid the critical errors of his predecessors, who joined the 1993 Oslo Process, which relocated 100,000 PLO members – headed by Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas –- from their terrorist headquarters and bases in Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, Yemen and Lebanon to Gaza, and the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria. It dramatically intensified the terror and hate-education infrastructures of these regions and misrepresented Arafat and Abbas as partners for peaceful-coexistence.

Therefore, it has failed to advance the cause of peace, while undermining US interests.
The Israeli architects of the Oslo Accord – and their US partners – genuinely aimed at extinguishing fire, but failed to realize that their pumps were filled with gasoline, not water.

Departing from the political-correctness of his predecessors and the State Department establishment, Trump has recognized the reality of hateful and non-peaceful coexistence nature of the Palestinian Authority, concluding that peaceful statements, on the one hand, and hate-education, incitement, the funding and heralding of terrorists and their families, on the other hand, constitutes an outrageous oxymoron. On May 23, 2017, he stated, in Ramallah: “Peace can never take root in an environment where violence is tolerated, funded and even rewarded.”

Contrary to previous US presidents and Secretaries of State, since 1993, Trump does not ignore the significance of the K-12 Palestinian hate-curriculum – which has been shaped since 1993/94 by Mahmoud Abbas – as the most authentic reflection (much more than Palestinian statements for Western consumption) of the Palestinian Authority’s long-term strategy and worldview, and a most effective production-line of terrorists.

In contrast to previous tenants of the White House and Foggy Bottom, Trump has identified Mahmoud Abbas’ inherent rejection of a sovereign Jewish State, as articulated by Abbas’ January 14, 2018 speech, which was consistent with the 1959 and 2007 constitutions of Fatah and the 1964 and 1968 Charters of the PLO – both ruled by Mahmoud Abbas. These documents highlight the Palestinian rejection of the existence – not the size – of Jewish sovereignty west of the Jordan River.