RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-trump-plan-political-wisdom-and-double-standards-opinion-631003

After having rejected the peace plan, the Palestinian leadership and the international community cannot, with clean hands, condemn Israel for declaring its aims to apply parts of the plan.

The long awaited Trump peace plan introduced in Washington on January 28, 2020 has thrown the Middle East and the international community into a maze of confusion, conflicting declarations and intense discussion as to its meaning and mode of implementation.

Regrettably, even before its conception, the peace plan was plagued by obstinate refusal of the Palestinian leadership to cooperate in its development and formulation. Their subsequent refusal to accept or even to consider it, despite the considerable political, economic and financial benefits that it proffered to the Palestinians threatens to undermine any possible return to a genuine mode of bona fide negotiation.This refusal emanated from an acute sense of betrayal felt by the Palestinian leadership, principally following President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city, and his decision to locate the US Israel embassy in Jerusalem. It also was the result of deep personal enmity by Mahmoud Abbas, head of the PLO, to Trump, to the point of serious and most undiplomatic public insults voiced by Abbas against him.

Palestinian principled opposition to, and practical obstruction of a realistic attempt to reopen the impasse in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, even before they were aware of the contents of the plan, represents a serious, ill-advised mistake on the part of the Palestinian leadership. This especially so since their opposition to the plan has never been based on any substantive reasoning or analysis of its content, but more on personal pique and animosity.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/intersectional-protests-strengthen-netanyahus-push-for-sovereignty-631168

If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is able to make good on his vow to begin extending Israeli sovereignty to Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria on July 1, he will owe a debt of gratitude to his enemies.

Foes abroad include extremists of all stripes. Some of these openly pray for the Jewish state’s elimination, without regard to its leadership at a given time. Others cloak a similar desire in hatred for Netanyahu specifically. Still others profess to take issue solely with Israeli “policies,” using this as a ploy and an excuse to delegitimize the country in every international forum.

Had any of the above been slightly less anti-Zionist, they would have been able to hoodwink all unsuspecting Western liberals, not just manipulate those with a mea culpa complex. Indeed, the more radical that Israel’s defamers become – through terrorism, UN resolutions or university lectures – the less sympathy they garner from people with half a brain and a pair of eyes.

The same applies to Israel’s homegrown critics of Zionism. Like their counterparts abroad, these local paragons of virtue-signaling fit into a few related categories. While all loathe Netanyahu in particular, they are none too fond of his predecessors either.

This includes the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose assassination by right-wing fanatic Yigal Amir elevated him to the kind of saintly status that leftists never attached to him when he was alive. It was only when he signed the disastrous Oslo Accords with arch-terrorist and PLO chief Yasser Arafat that they gave him a little grace.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/israel-annexation-plan-prime-minister-netanyahu-takes-long-term-risk/

Grasping for a short-term gain, Netanyahu takes a long-term risk.

Facing Israel’s plethora of political parties with different agendas, and with a narrow timeline before U.S. elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is attempting to pass a historic annexation of areas in the West Bank. It would reverse more than 50 years of Israeli policy and potentially damage Israel’s relations with European countries and the few Middle Eastern states it has relations with. Netanyahu is gambling on a symbolic move for his legacy — and taking a huge risk.

On June 8, Netanyahu met with leaders of Israeli communities in the West Bank and tried to spell out what his annexation plan looked like. There were no final maps, and a rushed schedule awaits before the July dates when the governing coalition wants to move forward. How did it come to this? How did Netanyahu, the “Mr. Security” of Israel, heralded as “King Bibi,” lead the country for ten years only to end up scrambling for this legacy?

Israel has annexed before. In 1980, it effectively annexed what was once Jordanian East Jerusalem, as a new law gave hundreds of thousands of Palestinians municipal residency but not citizenship. Israel also extended its laws to the Golan Heights in 1981, enabling members of the Druze minority who live there but are Syrian citizens to get Israeli citizenship. In the West Bank, however, where hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis live, Israel has been cautious to upset the status quo. Peace accords signed with the Palestinians in the 1990s were supposed to be a road map to a Palestinian statehood. But that never happened. Instead, wars followed and the Palestinians were divided between their institutions in the West Bank and Hamas-run Gaza.

For decades Netanyahu has warned of the dangers of a Palestinian state that does not renounce terror.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/netanyahus_defining_moment_.html

Last weekend, thousands of Israelis protested Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to apply Israeli sovereignty to parts of Judea and Samaria beginning on July 1. The protest was organized by the far-left Meretz party and the communist wing of the Arab Joint List Party (Hadash). The heads of both parties called the sovereignty bid “apartheid.” In a video statement, Bernie Sanders opposed the plan and, again, falsely accused Israel of “occupation.” Sanders has an abysmal record when it comes to Israel.

Despite all the naysayers, Netanyahu has a clear mandate for applying sovereignty, which is Israel’s inalienable right. Israelis support this move in large numbers (50.1 percent according to an Israel Democracy Institute poll, versus 30.9 opposed and 19% not knowing/refusing to answer) and over 60 percent, according to a recent Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security poll. After three years of political deadlock, Netanyahu now leads a unity government that supports sovereignty. By boldly moving forward, Netanyahu can gain a legacy as one of the greatest Israeli prime ministers.

What the Greater Sovereignty Plan Should Look Like

Netanyahu should submit a bill containing the following to the Knesset:

A statement explaining why Israel’s claim to Judea and Samaria, the heartland of the Land of Israel, is not one of “occupation”;
A statement explaining why Israel has a right to build Jewish communities (known to many as “settlements”) in Judea and Samaria;
A statement explaining why Israel should apply sovereignty to most of Judea and Samaria;
A statement explaining why Israel should oppose a Palestinian state; and
A map delineating Netanyahu’s vision of what Israel’s borders should be.

J Street’s leader, Jeremy Ben-Ami, last week tweeted that the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which his group in not a member of, should follow the lead of some of the honchos of the British Jewish establishment and speak out forcefully against Israeli government plans to annex large parts of Judea and Samaria. That is, extend Israeli law formally over land Israel has controlled for more than 50 years and where hundreds of thousands of Israelis already live.

The timing of the announcement—just as Israel was preparing to mark two important historic anniversaries—begs for comment.

J Street is the controversial Washington, D.C.-based Jewish pressure group that was created specifically, and almost exclusively, to lobby for an independent Palestinian state. It was founded by Ben-Ami in 2007. He made his statement on the 53rd anniversary of the outbreak of the Six-Day War and days before the 39th anniversary of “Operation Opera,” in which Israeli fighter jets eliminated former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s under construction nuclear reactor in a daring raid.

Iraq was building a nuclear bomb. In 1981, 14 Israeli Air Force F-16s struck and destroyed the Osirak reactor, nearly 700 miles from Israel’s borders. The successful operation put an end to Hussein’s nuclear program. The United Nations adopted Security Council Resolution 487 criticizing Israel for the attack.
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The strike on Osirak established what has been called the Begin Doctrine (name for Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin), which unconditionally declared that the surprise raid was not a one-time thing. As Begin himself explained in a June 15 interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, “This attack will be a precedent for every future government in Israel. … Every future Israeli prime minister will act, in similar circumstances, in the same way.”

What very few J Streeters know is that Yitshaq Ben-Ami (Jeremy’s father) was a key organizer in the United States for support in the 1940s for Begin’s Irgun underground army.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/israelis-cant-mask-a-lack-of-anxiety/

Most Israelis are unlikely to accept another proverbial jail term, regardless of COVID-19 rates.

The reopening of the Israeli economy after nearly two months of COVID-19 closures was bound to lead to laxity on the part of the public. And it did, in spite of endless Health Ministry warnings that a release from lockdown bondage would require extra vigilance where social-distancing, mask-wearing and hand-washing were concerned.

This was inevitable.

Israelis’ initial anxiety about the contagiousness of the deadly virus—fed by predictions of mass casualties and other doomsday scenarios—made it relatively easy for the powers that be in Jerusalem to force the populace into weeks of virtual and actual quarantine.

In addition, the draconian measures appeared to pay off. The death toll and need for ventilators remained relatively low. The curve flattened. Life gradually began to resume a semblance of normalcy. Even some of the most stir-crazy among us felt, in retrospect, that perhaps the insanity had been worth the trouble.

Such people embraced their newfound freedom to stray as far from their residences as they pleased, meet with friends and visit family.

The millions of Israelis who lost their jobs, on the other hand, never really came to terms with having their places of employment shut down or businesses destroyed—all for a virus that killed fewer people than other diseases during the same period last year.