RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/pompeo-declares-golan-heights-part-of-israel-in-first-visit-by-u-s-secretary-of-state/

Pompeo also became the first secretary of state to visit an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
 

GOLAN HEIGHTS — In a show of support for Israel’s sovereignty, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday visited Mount Bental in the Golan Heights, the territory that Israel has controlled since seizing it from Syria during the Six-Day War in 1967. He is the first U.S. secretary of state to visit the territory.

“This is a part of Israel, a central part of Israel,” he said, during joint statements with Israeli foreign minister Gabi Ashkenazi.

The Trump administration in 2019 recognized Israeli sovereignty over the territory, though much of the world condemns Israel’s claim as an illegal occupation. Israel and the United States maintain that Israeli sovereignty over Golan is justified because it was taken in a defensive war and that it is a crucial part of Israel’s national security.

Pompeo spent the day touring the country, where he unveiled several post-election initiatives to bolster U.S.-Israel ties. Stopping at the settlement of Psagot, he also became the first secretary of state to visit an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-to-formally-declare-bds-anti-semitic-pompeo-say

Speaking in Jerusalem, US secretary of state vows Washington to immediately take steps against anti-Israel boycott activists; Netanyahu hails move as ‘simply wonderful’

The United States government will formally designate the anti-Israel boycott movement “anti-Semitic” and immediately start cracking down on groups affiliated with it, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Thursday during a visit to Israel, calling BDS a “cancer.”

“Today I want to make one announcement with respect to a decision by the State Department that we will regard the global anti-Israel BDS campaign as anti-Semitic,” he said, standing next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a joint statement to the press.“I know this may sound simple to you, Mr. Prime Minister, it seems like a statement of fact, but I want you to know that we will immediately take steps to identify organizations that engage in hateful BDS conduct and withdraw US government support for such groups. The time is right,” Pompeo declared.

https://unitedwithisrael.org/made-in-israel-us-rejects-discriminatory-settlement-labeling-policy/

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announces policy shift that most settlement products labeled ‘Made in Israel’ are now kosher in the U.S.

By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday that the United States was ending its policy of forcing the removal of “Made in Israel” from Israeli products produced in settlements under direct Israeli control in Judea and Samaria.

“Today, the Department of State is initiating new guidelines to ensure that country of origin markings for Israeli and Palestinian goods are consistent with our reality-based foreign policy approach,” Pompeo said in an official statement.

“In accordance with this announcement, all producers within areas where Israel exercises the relevant authorities – most notably Area C under the Oslo Accords - will be required to mark goods as “Israel”, “Product of Israel”, or “Made in Israel” when exporting to the United States,” the statement said.  ”This approach recognizes that Area C producers operate within the economic and administrative framework of Israel and their goods should be treated accordingly.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/occupation-made-me-beat-my-wife-pseudo-science-and-richard-l-cravatts/

“It is a vicious and ugly trope in the centuries-old history of the world’s oldest hatred: that Jews still harbor murderous, sadistic, and inhuman impulses against non-Jews and wish to injure or murder them — in the current day with the Palestinian Arabs as long-suffering victims of the Jew of nations, Israel.”

Jews have been accused of harming and murdering non-Jews since the twelfth century in England, when Jewish convert to Catholicism, Theobald of Cambridge, mendaciously announced that European Jews ritually slaughtered Christian children each year and drank their blood during Passover season.

That medieval blood libel, largely abandoned in the contemporary West, does, however, still appear as part of Arab world’s vilification of Jews—now transmogrified into a slander against Israel, the Jew of nations. But in the regular chorus of defamation against Israel by a world infected with Palestinianism, a new, more odious trend has begun to show itself: the blood libel has been revivified; however, to position Israel (and by extension Jews) as demonic agents in the community of nations, the primitive fantasies of the blood libel are now masked with a veneer of academic scholarship and published as politicized scientific study.

At a November 12th session at the UN’s annual assembly, for example, The World Health Organization (WHO) used the gathering to again bash Israel and accuse it of compromising the health rights of Palestinian during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even Iran—where gays are still hanged from cranes and women are stoned to death—chimed in, asserting that Israel’s pernicious role in Palestinian health conditions was worse than the fall-out from the pandemic in all other countries, and that Israel’s “chronic occupation has profound implications for the health of Palestinians. More than 12 years of inhuman blockade has had a profound effect on the health sector, worsening an already dire situation.”

http://www.settimananews.it/informazione-internazionale/a-new-role-for-israel-in-the-middle-east/

The present effort for religious dialogue between the Holy See and parts of the Muslim world, with the declaration of Dubai for instance and the wave of diplomatic normalizations between Israel and some Arab states, is changing the political geography of the Middle East.

Israel is no longer the outcast of the Middle East, the isolated bulwark of a Western invasion, or the modern reinvention of the old Christian crusaders.

With vanishing hostility in the whole Muslim world and growing dialogue between the Holy See and moderates in the Muslim world, Israel is set to become something new.

The waning antagonism with Israel seems to spring from a few converging trends. Oil revenues of rich Muslim countries are declining, as de facto oil and gas are no longer rare commodities held by a handful of states, but they are cheaper than mineral water. Oceans of shale gas and shale oil are available thanks to new drilling technology. This has brought back the US as a large oil-producing country, limiting the bargaining position of traditional oil producers.

Moreover, the future of former oil-economy countries depends on the financial investments of their old returns. In this world, Israel has some weight, especially as many trends for future developments may derive from tools presently thought out and designed in the new Israeli technological areas and exported to America or other parts of the world.

http://www.romirowsky.com/24747/struggle-for-palestine

“The struggle for Palestine” has long been an axiomatic slogan in the Arab-Palestinian narrative and continues to be used to this day to galvanize the masses—but as the Middle East changes, the power of the phrase may be diminishing.

In his 1974 book Palestinians and Israel, the late Yehoshafat Harkabi wrote that following the Six-Day War,

The collision with the Palestinians is presented as the essence of the conflict, for this is allegedly a struggle for national liberation. Arabs explain, especially to foreigners, that the antagonism is not that of large Arab states versus a small state like Israel but of an oppressed people against a strong, colonialist oppressive state…The focus of the conflict has shifted. It is not between states but between a government and a people struggling for its liberation, which by definition is a just war that deserves support.

Over the years, the struggle became not only just but even divine.

A binary understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict has dominated thinking for decades. The conflict is presumed to be unsolvable as it is caught between demands for Israel’s total destruction and the inevitability of Arab-Palestinian exile and political oblivion.

But the paradigm may have shifted following the Abraham Accords and Israel’s normalization with the UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan. Even the Saudis have noticed the change, as illustrated by a recent statement by Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz. He openly criticized Palestinian leaders with these words:

The Palestinian cause is a just cause but its advocates are failures, and the Israeli cause is unjust but its advocates have proven to be successful. There is something that successive Palestinian leadership historically share in common: they always bet on the losing side, and that comes at a price.

This damning statement from a traditional Palestinian ally raises the question of the Palestinian endgame and, more importantly, the centrality of—and fatigue with—the Palestinian struggle in the Arab world.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/11/the-abraham-accords-transform-the-middle-east/

The Abraham Accords, officially ratified at the White House on September 15, have diminished the sway of the Palestinian political leadership in the wider Arab world. The concept of a future Palestinian state has not been abandoned, although the rejectionist policy of the Palestinian leadership has been emphatically discarded. The presence of the Jewish state in the region is now accepted by the vast majority of the twenty-two Arab states as an irrevocable reality—like it or not. In the case of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, at least, it is a case of accepted and liked. Already the attitude of the Emiratis and the Bahrainis towards Israel looks very different from the cold peace that has existed between the Egyptians and Israel since 1979 and between the Jordanians and Israel since 1994. The story of Zionism and the Arabs is taking an unexpected turn.

The anti-Israel brigade, from the BDS movement and the Palestinian Authority to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Republic of Iran, are right to be dismayed. Rapprochement between UAE/Bahrain and Israel constitutes a sevenfold triumph for the Zionist project.

In the first instance, it is a crushing blow to the rejectionist argument that the Jewish state, founded on March 15, 1948, is an alien entity imposed on the region. If the broader Arab Sunni world is happy to give its imprimatur to the existence of Israel, then who are we to disagree? The League of Nations formally accepted the right of a Jewish nation to exist in the “historical Land of Israel” in July 1922. No less significant was the decision of the United Nations, in November 1947, to recognise a Jewish state within the territory of Mandatory Palestine (Resolution 181). The Abraham Accords further affirm the legitimacy of Israel. Theodor Herzl, Zionist prophet and author of The Jewish State (1896), would be pleased.

There is a second reason why the Abraham Accords are a triumph for Zionism and a defeat for the political leadership of Palestinian Arabs. Normalisation suggests that Sunni nations are now less prone to being taken hostage by the most radical or maximalist wing of Palestinian nationalism, which either repudiates the lawfulness of Israel’s existence or professes acceptance of the Jewish state but thwarts every overture to establish a complementary Palestinian Arab state. For the Palestinian rejectionists, the practice of spurning UN Resolution 181 and the partitioning of British Palestine—starting with Haj Amin al-Husayni in 1947 and maintained by the likes of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas—remains in force. The PLO/PA has rebuffed offers of statehood (based on clearly defined borders) in 2000, 2003-04 and 2013-14. To this day it does not endorse Resolution 181. The UAE and Bahrain know it suits the Palestinian Authority  (PA) leadership to (a) perpetuate the unresolved Israel-Palestinian Arab dispute and (b) exploit this unresolvedness to slander Israel as an “occupier’, an “ethno-coloniser” and an “apartheid state” and, by so doing, prevent formal links between Israel and the wider Arab world.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-usual-suspects-against-jewish-construction-in-jerusalem/

A good way to evaluate a policy is by examining the identity of its critics. The controversy surrounding the tenders issued on Sunday by the Israel Lands Authority for the construction of 1,257 new housing units in the southeastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Hamatos is a perfect case in point.

Outrage at the building plan, which has been in the works for six years, was swift to emerge from the usual suspects: the Israeli NGO Peace Now, the Palestinian Authority, the European Union and the United Nations. It’s basically all one needs to know before forming an opinion about the move.

Let’s begin with Peace Now. In September 2014, the organization that serves as a kind of settlement watchdog—growling and barking about every balcony added to an apartment in an area of the Jewish state that they deem “illegally occupied”—alerted fellow Israel-bashers across the ocean to the fact that the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee had approved the construction of homes in Givat Hamatos.

Never mind that the neighborhood, originally filled with caravans for the housing of new immigrants from Ethiopia, is outside the so-called Green Line.