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ISRAEL

Abbas’s Precious Gift to Iran: Hamas by Khaled Abu Toameh

The Iranian-backed Hamas movement has welcomed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s latest threat to renounce all agreements and understandings with Israel and the US, including security cooperation.

“We hope that this time Abu Mazen’s (Abbas’s) decision is a serious one,” said Saleh Arouri, deputy head of the Hamas “political bureau.” Arouri added that the return of the “armed resistance” to the West Bank was now possible “and even closer than some may think.”

The Hamas official repeated his movement’s rejection of any peace agreement with Israel, including the Oslo Accords, signed between the PLO and Israel in 1993. “Since day one, we have rejected the Oslo Accords,” Arouri explained. “We have also strongly opposed all security agreements with the occupation, and therefore we welcome Abu Mazen’s decision to halt the security coordination [with Israel].”

Iran’s other Palestinian proxy, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), also seems to be satisfied with Abbas’s recurring threat to renounce all agreements with Israel, including security coordination.

“We take Abu Mazen’s announcement seriously and look forward to its implementation,” said PIJ Secretary-General Ziyad al-Nakhalah. “What is required of the Palestinian Authority is a big step towards unity.”

Why are Hamas and PIJ so happy with the Palestinian leader?

Abbas’s threat, which came in response to an Israeli plan to extend Israeli law to parts of the West Bank, is undoubtedly a precious gift not only to his Palestinian political rivals in Hamas, but also to Iran, whose leaders continue to talk about the need for “eliminating the Zionist regime.”

On the same day Abbas made his announcement, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, wrote on Twitter: “Eliminating the Zionist regime doesn’t mean eliminating Jews. We aren’t against Jews. It means abolishing the imposed regime and Muslim, Christian and Jewish Palestinians choose their own government and expel thugs like [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. This is ‘eliminating Israel’, and it will happen.”

In another comment on Twitter on May 19, Khamenei said that the West Bank, where Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are based, “must be armed, just like Gaza.”

The Iranian leader is actually saying that his country is seeking to turn the West Bank into a launching pad for terrorist attacks in order to achieve the goal of eliminating Israel. Bizarrely, he is promising to destroy Israel, but without killing Jews.

Khamenei evidently sees Abbas’s decision to renounce all agreements and understandings with Israel and the US as a positive development that would facilitate the mission Iran and Hamas share to export anti-Israel terrorism to the West Bank. The Iranian leader wants the West Bank to become like the Gaza Strip, from where Hamas and its allies have been firing rockets at Israel for several years.

If Abbas goes through with his threat to halt security coordination with Israel, that would mean an end to his efforts to prevent Iran’s Palestinian proxies, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, from proceeding with their ambition of extending their control to the West Bank. By halting the security crackdown on Hamas, Abbas would be paving the way for terrorists to kill him and his associates in the West Bank, as they already began to do in 2007 in the Gaza Strip, and possibly again in a coup in 2014.

In recent years Abbas’s security forces have arrested hundreds of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members in the West Bank as part of an effort to prevent these groups from undermining his regime. Israel, for its part, has been helping Abbas by routinely arresting Hamas members and officials who pose a threat to his government.

It is rare for a Hamas leader to praise Abbas. Hamas and Abbas have been engaged in a power struggle since 2007, when the Islamist movement, Hamas, staged a violent coup in the Gaza Strip, hurled members of the Palestinian Authority from high buildings and overthrew the Palestinian Authority regime, along with Abbas, who, since then, has not even been able to return to his house in the Gaza Strip. Like their masters in Tehran, however, the leaders of Hamas now apparently believe that Abbas may finally have decided to join the Iranian-led “axis of evil” by cutting Palestinian ties with Israel and the US.

Therefore the leaders of Hamas are now heaping praise on Abbas and urging him to “translate his words into deeds.” The message Hamas is sending to Abbas is, “Thank you for finally realizing that the armed struggle is the only way to destroy Israel. Let us join forces in the Jihad to eliminate Israel.”

Hamas does not recognize Israel’s right to exist; its charter states that “the land of Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or part of it. No Arab country and no Arab king or president have that right.”

The charter also makes it clear that [peace] “initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas]. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the movement educates its members to adhere to its principles and to raise the banner of Allah over their homeland as they fight their Jihad. There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad.”

For several years now, Hamas has been strongly condemning Abbas because of his perceived support for the two-state solution and contacts with Israel, including security coordination between the Palestinian Authority security forces and the IDF in the West Bank. At one point, when Abbas was quoted as saying that he was not opposed to the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri responded by announcing that the Palestinian leader’s statement did not represent the Palestinian people.

In 2014, Hamas went further by calling for removing Abbas from power and putting him on trial for “high treason.” Yahya Abadseh, a senior Hamas official in the Gaza Strip, said that Abbas should be toppled and brought to trial for “betraying the Palestinian people and endangering their interests by imposing sanctions on the Gaza Strip and collaborating with foreign parties.”

Three years later, another senior Hamas official, Marwan Abu Ras, called for “imposing [Islamic] sharia law against Abbas by hanging him in front of his people.” Abu Ras too accused Abbas of “treason” and “collaboration” with Israel.

Additionally, paying verbal respects after a death constitutes high treason in the eyes of Hamas. A year ago, the terrorist organization accused Abbas of betraying the Palestinians by offering condolences to Israeli President Reuven Rivlin over the death of his wife in June 2019. Hamas spokesman Abdel Latif Qanou said, “Abbas’s condolences to the President of the Zionist entity over the death of his wife is a betrayal of our Palestinian people, a stab [in the backs of] the families of the [Palestinian] martyrs, and a disregard for their noble feelings.”

If and when Abbas does suspend security coordination with Israel, he will be sending a message to Iran and its Palestinian proxies that the time has come to turn the West Bank into a center for Jihad against Israel and the “infidels.”

At the same time, Abbas will be signing his own death warrant: Hamas has apparently not relinquished its desire to “hang Abbas in front of the Palestinian people.” It appears to be decision time: Will Abbas ally himself with those who are protecting him or with those who execute him as a traitor?

Khaled Abu Toameh, an award-winning journalist based in Jerusalem, is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

Palestinians: Eating with a Jew is a Crime by Khaled Abu Toameh

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.

Democratic senators release letter warning Israel against annexation By  Melissa Weiss …See DPS note

https://jewishinsider.com/2020/05/democratic-senators-release-letter-warning-israel-against-annexation/

Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and six other senators sign onto updated version after not joining the initial draft

DPS Note:
Democratic senators release letter warning Israel against extending sovereignty over portions of Judea & Samaria which everyone knows will always be Israeli, & despite the Palestinians making it clear every day that no Israel is the only acceptable deal for them.

And additionally, keeping in mind that the areas in question were never “Palestinian.”
Nor Jordanian which illegally occupied them from 1948 until 1967 after forcing Israel to fight a defensive war against extermination. Jordan magnanimously bestowed up the “Palestinians” Jordan’s claims to there areas – which iseffectively giving them nothing since Jordan never had a legitimate claim to begin with.

The last sovereignty exerted over these areas was by the Ottoman Empire and it lost that after WW I. So these are at best “disputed” areas and some very smart legal minds have opined that Israel actually has the best legal claim to them, having acquired them fighting a defensive war – not to mention that they are the ancestral home of the Jewish people and there have been Jews living there ever since. 

If you care a whit about Israel – and if you are Jewish you should because its well being also keeps you safe – then the Democrat Party should be viewed as a hostile environment.

I grew up profoundly admiring Scoop Jackson, Pat Moynihan and Danny Inouye – all as strongly supportive of Israel as anyone can be. I promise you, they are all spinning in their graves right now. This is not their Democrat Party. DPS

A people are not “settlers” in their own land. By Victor Sharpe *****

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.

Could his protests over annexation be Mahmoud Abbas’s last whimper? Abbas is a one-trick pony who keeps himself relevant by pretending that his main mission in life is to obtain Palestinian independence from the “occupation.” By Ruthie Blum BLUM

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.

Israel’s Control of Judea & Samaria – a Prerequisite for Security Yoram Ettinger

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.

Israeli Arab Citizen Indicted as Iranian Spy Recruited by a member of a Palestinian terrorist group. Joseph Klein

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.

Liberal Jewish Opposition to Israel’s Sovereignty is Cowardly The Saudis stopped hating Israel. Wouldn’t it be nice if liberal Jews did too? Daniel Greenfield

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.

Ruthie Blum ‘Bloat’ is the least of the new Israeli government’s problems

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.”

Israel: The Settlements Are Not Illegal The annexation of lands in Judea and Samaria is not contrary to international law by Michael Calvo ******

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16032/israel-settlements-not-illegal

Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired (Art. 26.1) and that the exercise of these rights shall be free from discrimination of any kind (Art. 2). — UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), adopted by the UN General Assembly on September 13, 2007.

Among others, Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Israel and Luxembourg voted in favor of the Declaration. Since 2007, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, who voted against, formally endorsed the Declaration in 2010. In their relations with Israel, these states cannot claim that the Declaration does not apply to Israeli Jews, since such position would amount to blatant racial discrimination.

[I]t cannot seriously be contended, as the EU, France, Britain, Russia, China and other states do, that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal and that annexation is contrary to international law. This position is political, not legal.

Article 80 of the United Nations Charter (1945) recognized the validity of existing rights that states and peoples acquired under the various mandates, including the British Mandate for Palestine (1922), and the rights of Jews to settle in the Land of Palestine (Judea-Samaria) by virtue of these instruments. (Pr. E. Rostow). These rights cannot be altered by the UN.

“Except as may be agreed upon in individual trusteeship agreements…nothing in this Charter shall be construed in or of itself to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.” — Article 80, paragraph 1, UN Charter)

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), adopted by the UN General Assembly on September 13, 2007, by a majority of 144 states in favor, 4 votes against, and 11 abstentions, recognized that indigenous people (also known as first people, aboriginal people or native people) have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired (Art. 26.1) and that the exercise of these rights shall be free from discrimination of any kind (Art. 2).