RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16029/palestinians-eating-with-jews

Economic cooperation does not serve the agenda of the terrorists. Terrorists want Palestinians to continue living in abject poverty so that they can go on blaming Israel for Palestinian misery. Unemployed Palestinians are much easier to target for recruitment as terrorists than Palestinians who are able to feed their families.

Many Saudis who are furious with the Palestinian threats and smear campaign against their country for its alleged rapprochement with Israel have responded through social media platforms by strongly condemning the Palestinians. Saudi pundits are now believed to be behind a trending hashtag on Twitter, entitled, “#The_Palestinian_cause_is_not_my_cause.”

The Palestinian smear campaign is taking place amid silence from the international community and media. They seem indifferent to a rather crucial question: if a Palestinian or Muslim cannot share a meal with an Israeli or watch a TV drama about the life of Jews in Arab countries without being labelled a criminal, how would any Palestinian leader dare to sign a peace agreement with Israel?

It is no secret that many Palestinians are opposed to any form of normalization with Israel. For the past several years, these Palestinians have been waging smear campaigns against any Palestinians and Arabs who have allegedly engaged in normalization activities with Israel, particularly meetings between the two sides.

It appears, however, that the bar has just been lowered. Recently, eating with an Israeli or even watching a television series that sheds a positive light on Jews has come to constitute the despised “normalization” and is considered a crime and an act of treason.

Sometimes it becomes necessary to look back at the not so recent history of a nation’s leader when evaluating successes and failures. The very fact that one of the first decisions that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made during his initial term as Israel’s prime minister. which began on June 18th, 1996, was to surrender the first capital of the Jewish faith to the fraudulent Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.

 Ruth King, once justifiably lamented in her blog, Ruthfullyours, about Netanyahu’s capitulation at the Wye Plantation to then Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, (aka Madeline Halfbright) who pressured him into betraying the ancestral Jewish holy city of Hebron.

It was Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin who had given away Jericho after the fateful signing of the Oslo Accords, which of course became the Oslo War. Jericho was the first city in the Promised Land that Joshua liberated some 3,500 years earlier after the ancient Jewish tribes had crossed the River Jordan.

Rabbi Yehudah Glick, a Temple Mount activist and former Member of Knesset once said, “Jericho was the beginning of that process of building up the Land of Israel, it also was the beginning of the Oslo Process that cut Israel into sections.

“The first stage of the 1993 Oslo Accords was a partial Israeli withdrawal from Jericho and the transfer of some powers and responsibilities on civil matters to the interim Palestinian Authority. After this step was implemented, the negotiations stalled and the process ended.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/could-his-protests-over-annexation-be-mahmoud-abbass-last-whimper-628910

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas needs new material. Even the flies on the wall at his compound in Ramallah must have yawned on Tuesday night when he announced – for the umpteenth time – that the PA is no longer bound by previous agreements with Israel.

The only twist to his tired mantra was the inclusion of the United States in the chant.

“We hold the American administration fully responsible for the oppression befalling the Palestinian people, and we consider it a primary partner with the Israeli occupation government in all its aggressive and unfair decisions and measures against our people,” he declared to PLO officials summoned to the emergency meeting to listen to his televised rant.

Though the honchos in attendance must have doubted that Abbas was actually going to make good on his threat to halt economic and security cooperation with the Jewish state, they couldn’t have admitted it aloud. In fact, as Khaled Abu Toameh reported on Wednesday, those who dared to inquire about a timetable for the action were warned by Abbas’s aides that if they didn’t shut up, they would be banished from the premises.

Naturally.

The last thing that Abbas wants, after all, is to put his money where his mouth is, except when it comes to funding terrorists. That is one policy he proudly upholds, no matter how often certain countries urge him to stop.

https://bit.ly/2LPFZKZ

The mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) – 3,000ft above the Jordan Valley and 2,000ft above Israel’s heavily populated coastal plain – constitute the “Golan Heights” of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, the key north-south transportation artery Highway 6, critical commercial and defense infrastructures and 80% of Israel’s population.

The eastern mountain ridge – facing Jordan and Iraq – is the most effective tank barrier in the war-ridden region.  The western mountain ridge could become a platform to intensified Palestinian terrorism, targeting Israel’s 9-15-mile soft belly along the Mediterranean, and dooming this congested area to worse terrorism than the one inflicted by the Gaza-based Hamas.

Israel’s control of the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria – rather than a Palestinian state – is a pivotal national security prerequisite in view of the 14-century-old intra-Arab Middle East reality: extreme volatility, violent intolerance, lack of peaceful-coexistence, repressive tenuous regimes, shifty policies and precarious agreements.

Such a tectonic reality requires Israel’s secure boundaries to respond to bad, worse and worst-case unpredictable scenarios. Therefore, Israel’s national security cannot be based on peace accords, which could be as fragile as the regimes which conclude them. Israel’s national security must be based on the capabilities to withstand unforeseeable and violent regime change (e.g., Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Iraq) and the potential abrogation of peace accords.  Thus, in 1979, Iran was transformed from a close ally of the US and Israel to their most ferocious enemy.  Similar turbulence in Jordan – which must be avoided with the assistance of the US and Israel – could transform Jordan into a chaotic platform of regional and global terrorism, which would critically upgrade the significance of the dominant mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/israeli-arab-citizen-indicted-iranian-spy-joseph-klein/

An Israeli Arab citizen, Ayman Haj Yahya, was indicted last month for meeting and cooperating with two operatives of Iranian intelligence with the intention of “assisting the State of Iran in its efforts to harm the State of Israel.” This would-be fifth columnist spy for the Iranian regime is alleged to have provided his Iranian contacts with information on a variety of matters affecting the security of Israel, which “could help Iran in its war against the State of Israel.” Yahya was allegedly sharing information regarding the Israeli military, potential targets for terrorist attacks, recruitment of more Israeli-Arabs to assist Iran and ways to sow division within Israeli society.

Khaled Yamani, a Palestinian resident of the Baddawi refugee camp in Lebanon and a senior member of the terrorist organization known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), reportedly recruited Yahya. After corresponding via Facebook, Yahya met at least twice in 2018 with Yamani, who reportedly revealed that he was working for Iranian intelligence. The PFLP-Iranian regime nexus is strong. For example, as documented by Joe Truzman, a contributor and analyst for The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “The PFLP’s military wing, Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, honored Hezbollah’s Nasrallah and former Qods commander Qasem Soleimani…The Soleimani poster says ‘In the Quds day, we pay tribute to the soul of martyr commader (sic) Qasem Soleimani.'”

Haj Yahya, together with PFLP’s Khaled Yamani, allegedly met with two representatives of Iranian intelligence in Europe in both February and March of 2020. Yahya “received funds, training, encryption tools and codes in order to be able to maintain contact with them in an encrypted way after he returned to Israel,” the Shin Bet claimed. Yahya was attempting to do just that upon his return to Israel before being arrested by Israeli security forces.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/liberal-jewish-opposition-israels-sovereignty-daniel-greenfield/

The House of Saud, the oldest enemies of an independent free Jewish state, have at least temporarily abandoned their project to destroy it by replacing it with the Islamic terrorist colony of ‘Palestine’.

That’s more than you can say for liberal Jews.

It’s a sad day when Wahhabi Islam shows more aptitude for setting aside its fanaticism and adapting to reality than the alphabet soup organization leaders and non-profit newspapers that have been running the liberal Jewish community into the ground for over a hundred years without ever learning a thing.

This failed establishment is wringing its hands because Israeli law might be applied to parts of the West Bank filled with Jewish towns and villages that were liberated 53 years ago in the Six Day War. That means Israeli citizens living in cities like Ma’ale Adumim (pop. 38,193) would actually fully live under Israeli law, instead of a clumsy hybrid system of military law, antiquated regional law, and national law.

And, as Caroline Glick pointed out, “The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will benefit from the move because soldiers and officers will not be responsible for issues like directing traffic and providing building permits for everything from parking lots to kindergartens to neighborhoods.”

Please raise your hand if you want the military to be responsible for directing traffic. What the anti-occupation opponents of Israeli sovereignty are really fighting against is an end to the occupation.

Their weapons are terminology. They call applying Israeli sovereignty “annexation” and refer to cities like Ma’ale Adumim as “settlements”. They also insist that some Arab Muslim cities that are the same age and size are “refugee camps”. These walls of words have enraptured policymakers and NPR listeners for generations while completely ignoring the physical realities of life for Jews and Muslims.

Israel assuming responsibility for cities and villages, for territory that would remain its own, is Prime Minister Netanyahu’s plan and President Trump’s plan. What counter-plan do its opponents offer?

There is the endless peace process, which its proponents believe in almost as assiduously as religious Jews believe in G-d and the Bible, though their faith is in a much more intangible phenomenon because the peace process has never existed, has never been seen or experienced, and is taken entirely on faith.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/bloat-is-the-least-of-the-new-israeli-governments-problems/

The statements made by three new ministers upon receiving the proverbial keys to the offices from their immediate predecessors illustrate that Israel’s 35th government is in for a very bumpy ride.

Public criticism of the new Israeli government has focused on how “bloated” it is. Prior to and since the swearing-in on Sunday of the coalition’s 34 ministers, every headline in the print and broadcast media was and has been highlighting its unprecedented size.

In addition, each disgruntled analyst has bemoaned the exorbitant cost of maintaining dozens of ministries, many of which were concocted to satisfy the demands of coalition partners and party members fearing relegation to the backbenches of the Knesset. The main outcry over the high price of assuaging egos in this fashion is that more than 1 million citizens are newly unemployed, with businesses imploding all over the place, as a result of COVID-19 lockdowns.

It’s a valid argument, to be sure. But as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointed out in his speech during the four-hour plenary session that preceded the swearing-in ceremony, “If we had gone into a fourth election, the additional cost would have amounted to NIS 2 billion (approximately $284 million). The additional cost of a unity government [was roughly] NIS 85 million ($24 million) a year, infinitely lower than the cost of additional elections.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-palestinians-need-to-make-bold-moves-11589842737?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

I admire Mead, but Arafat’s example after Oslo was to engage in a concatenation of terror in every corner of Israel- in markets, buses, eateries, communal gatherings and leave mangled and bloody kiddie strollers in the wake. His argument is ludicrous….rsk

As speculation intensifies over possible Israeli plans to annex portions of the West Bank, the Palestinian movement faces its greatest crisis since Israel became a state. The underlying problem for the Palestinian Authority is that the balance of power has shifted massively in favor of Israel, and as other countries recalibrate their policies in light of this reality, Palestinian options are narrowing faster than the authority’s leaders can adapt.

Ever since they turned to the Arab countries to prevent the emergence of a Jewish state in the late 1940s, the Palestinians have needed the support of allies to even the scales against the Zionists. That need is more urgent and pressing today than ever, but allies are getting harder to find.