RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/06/24/arson-balloons-from-gaza-spark-8-fires-in-southern-israel/

On Monday afternoon, explosives-laden balloons floated over the Israel-Gaza border spark eight wildfires in the space of an hour. Security coordinator for one of the communities near the Gaza border blasts government’s lack of response as a “disgrace.”

Israel announced early Tuesday that it was halting the transfer of fuel to the Gaza Strip’s only power plant until further notice. The decision was a response to a surge of incendiary balloons launched from the Hamas-controlled coastal enclave into Israel.

Explosives-laden balloons floated over the Israel-Gaza border sparked eight wildfires in the space of an hour on Monday afternoon as they landed in Israeli territory.

The fires broke out in farmland near Shaar Hanegev and the Eshkol Regional Council. Firefighters and employees of the JNF and Israel Nature and Parks Authority were successfully battling the blazes in the Eshkol region.

One of the fires erupted at a memorial to the late Staff Sgt. Asaf-Yaakov Siboni near Kibbutz Nir Am. Siboni was a Nahal Brigade soldier who was killed when two IDF helicopters crashed in northern Israel in February 1997.

Another incendiary balloon sparked a fire at a nursery school in Kibbutz Saad, which was luckily empty at the time.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14431/palestinians-money-bahrain-conference

The Palestinian strategy is clear: to incite the Arab masses against their leaders and governments. The Palestinian attacks are no longer directed against US President Donald Trump… Now the targets are the Arab heads of state, particularly those who are seen by Palestinians are being in collusion with Israel and the Trump administration.

As the Palestinians were condemning Arabs for agreeing to attend the conference in Bahrain, Palestinian leaders repeated their appeal to the Arab states for financial aid. On the one hand, the Palestinians are condemning Arab countries for attending a conference aimed at boosting the Palestinian economy and improving living conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. On the other hand, Palestinian leaders have no problem begging their Arab brothers for urgent financial aid…. The Palestinians are asking the Arabs to give them $100 million each month to help them “face political and financial pressure” from Israel and the US administration.

The Palestinians realize that some of the key Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, are no longer prepared to wait for them and have decided to board the train whose final destination is prosperity and economic opportunities for both Palestinians and Arabs.

The decision of six Arab states to attend the Bahrain conference despite the Palestinian boycott call shows that the Arabs have chosen to endorse a new direction – one that will leave the Palestinians to fend for themselves in a hell of their own making. For their choice to thumb their noses not only at the US but also at influential Arab states, the Palestinians are likely to emerge as the biggest losers.

In 2009, the late Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz announced his country’s decision to donate $1 billion to contribute to the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip.

The monarch made his announcement during an Arab economic conference in Kuwait. The Saudi pledge never materialized, mainly because of the continued dispute between the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip and Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank.

The king undoubtedly had good intentions and sought to help his Palestinian brothers, especially the two million residents of the Gaza Strip who remain in dire need of financial and economic assistance.

When King Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz died six years later, the Palestinians did not hesitate to show their contempt for the Arab leader who had offered to help improve their living conditions and ensure a better future for Palestinian children.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/palestinians_defy_trump.html

From the terrible squealing by the Palestinian leadership that greeted the unveiling of the economic component of Trump’s blueprint for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict one would be excused for thinking that Trump was planning to take from the Palestinians $50 billion over the next decade, rather than give it to them.

In the past, Palestinians were rather more enthusiastic about taking money. Over the decades, billions came pouring from the international community, funneled through the UN into various projects and services, with not a few crumbs landing in the pockets of Palestinian leaders themselves — after all, Arafat is rumored to have died a billionaire; nor is Abbas exactly a pauper. But this time around, there was a difference: Palestinians rejected the offer outright: “The mask has fallen, and attempts to liquidate the Palestinian cause in return for a handful of dollars have been made public!”

How does Trump’s plan “liquidate the Palestinian cause?” The answer is simple: not only the Palestinians get the money under the plan, but Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon do too. And apparently, those moneys are allocated to absorb Palestinians who now live in the camps, deprived of the right to work and participate in the larger society. Currently, they are segregated and live on a UN pittance. Apparently, Trump plans to make them full-fledged, happy citizens of the host countries, to the horror of Palestinian leadership who are decrying the $50 billion investment as “the price for liquidating the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees [UNRWA] and the rights of Palestinian refugees.”

So here we have it: Trump’s plan apparently includes normalization of the lives of those who are now huddled in the camps, deprived of normal lives. What exactly is wrong with them living well? Well, per Palestinian leaders’ thinking, it is this: by getting absorbed by their host countries, they will become unavailable for the role assigned to them by the “Palestinian cause” — of eliminating Israel through exercising the “right of return.”

https://freebeacon.com/blog/pa-intransigence-makes-peace-deal-unlikely/

The Trump administration rolled out the economic details of its peace plan on Sunday ahead of its “Peace To Prosperity” Workshop which opens in Bahrain this week. The problem is that the intended beneficiaries, the Palestinians, are having a meltdown.

“The Trump team is trying to restrict the Palestinian economy with the chains of occupation,” the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates declared Sunday, calling the plan “the obnoxious Trump Declaration.”

The PA had already decided to reject it before they knew what was in it. “The deal of the century, or the deal of disgrace, will go to hell,” PA president Mahmoud Abbas said on May 27 at a ceremony in Ramallah. “The economic project they are working on for next month will also go to hell.”

It has been fighting to wreck the Bahrain conference since it was announced (the fact that it’s now being called a “workshop” indicates the PA has enjoyed some success). And it has announced its rejection of any projects coming out of the conference, even if they are “painted in Arabic,” that is to say, initiatives funded by the Gulf States, not America.

Labeling the conference “a Holocaust against the Palestinian people,” Abbas’s Fatah movement has urged violence against Israel on the days it is to take place. Fatah deputy chairman Mahmoud Al-Alous, cited as possible heir to Abbas, (now in the 14th year of his 4-year term) describes the called-for violence as “national activities of rage.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/take-the-palestinians-no-for-an-answer-11561316980

This week’s U.S.-led Peace to Prosperity conference in Bahrain on the Palestinian economy will likely be attended by seven Arab states—a clear rebuke to foreign-policy experts who said that recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the Golan Heights as Israeli territory would alienate the Arab world. Sunni Arab states are lending legitimacy to the Trump administration’s plan, making it all the more notable that the Palestinian Authority itself refuses to participate.

The conference’s only agenda is improving the Palestinian economy. It isn’t tied to any diplomatic package, and the plan’s 40-page overview contains nothing at odds with the Palestinian’s purported diplomatic goals. Some aspects are even politically uncomfortable for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Given all that, the Palestinian Authority’s unwillingness to discuss economic opportunities for its own people, even with the Arab states, shows how far it is from discussing the concessions necessary for a diplomatic settlement. Instead it seeks to deepen Palestinian misfortune and use it as a cudgel against Israel in the theater of international opinion.

This isn’t the first time the Palestinians have said no. At a summit brokered by President Clinton in 2000, Israel offered them full statehood on territory that included roughly 92% of the West Bank and all of Gaza, along with a capital in Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority rejected that offer, leading Israel to up it to 97% of the West Bank in 2001. Again, the answer was no. An even further-reaching offer in 2008 was rejected out of hand. And when President Obama pressured Israel into a 10-month settlement freeze in 2009 to renew negotiations, the Palestinians refused to come to the table.

After so many rejections, one might conclude that the Palestinian Authority’s leaders simply aren’t interested in peace. Had they accepted any of the peace offers, they would have immediately received the rarest of all geopolitical prizes: a new country, with full international recognition. To be sure, in each proposal they found something not quite to their liking. But the Palestinians are perhaps the only national independence movement in the modern era that has ever rejected a genuine offer of internationally recognized statehood, even if it falls short of all the territory the movement had sought.

https://bit.ly/2FmGedx
In 2019, the inherently unpredictable and violent Middle East has driven all pro-US Arab regimes – which face domestic and external lethal threats – to expand their strategic cooperation with Israel.

The substantial US-Israel strategic common denominator, the growing role of Israel as a unique geo-strategic ally of the US, and the enhanced mutually-beneficial nature of US-Israel and Israel-Arab cooperation, have been a by-product of the following critical developments:

*The recent Iranian offensive as demonstrated by the June 2019 attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, and the May 2019 assaults on vessels in the Persian Gulf port of Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates;

*The mushrooming anti-US, pro-Muslim Brotherhood, imperialistic Turkish military buildup in Iraq, Syria, Qatar and Somalia (the largest since the 1922 demise of the Ottoman Empire);

*The proliferation of Shiite (Iran-related) and Sunni (Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, Al Qaeda, etc.) terrorism and subversion;

*The Iranian military, terroristic and subversive entrenchment in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Bahrain, the Al-Hasa oil region in Saudi Arabia, etc.

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/israel-ambassador-james-mcdonald/

Following Harry Truman’s recognition of the Provisional Government of Israel in early 1949, James McDonald was appointed the first US ambassador to the nascent Jewish state. In his memoirs, McDonald discusses Israel-Diaspora relations, which are as central today as they were in the early days of the State. This topic continues to be a source of division: witness the slanderous attacks made by Muslim Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar regarding American Jews’ “dual loyalties” and the State of Israel.

After the slanderous assaults on American Jews and on Israel by Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, there was a slew of condemnations from many sectors of the American political establishment and the Jewish community. Eliot Engel, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called on Omar to apologize and said: “I welcome debate in Congress based on the merits of policy, but it’s unacceptable and deeply offensive to call into question the loyalty of fellow American citizens because of their political views, including support for the US-Israel relationship. We all take the same oath. Worse, Representative Omar’s comments leveled that charge by invoking a vile anti-Semitic slur.”

James McDonald, who was appointed the first US ambassador to Israel in 1951, understood the vulnerability of American Jews to such slurs. He wrote in that year:

Israel, it must be remembered, is not only a nation among the nations but also a Jewish community among Jewish communities. Unique though it is in being a community not scattered but together, not a minority but a majority, not a factor in the State but its author and raison d’être, it is still one Jewish community among others. Because of its special position it has special problems in its relationships with the other communities…Against the extreme Zionist (or anti-Zionist) logician who holds that the Jew has a clear-cut choice – complete assimilation or return to Israel – stands the stubborn experience of history, which suggests that here again reality thrives on apparent inconsistency. Every available indication is that the Diaspora will continue to exist and will continue to face many problems in relation to Israel. One of these problems grows out of the old bogy of dual allegiance. Can one be a Jew and an American, a Jew and an Englishman? This problem is inherent, I think in the very nature of man as a complex being with diverse ends. All men have not single but multiple allegiances. If a Jew has an emotional sympathy for another State because in that State live other Jews, his attitude is no different from that of an American of Irish descent who has an affection for Ireland and interest in its welfare.

https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Rape-of-7-year-old-Jewish-child-shocks-the-nation-Palestinian-suspected-592809

A rape of a seven-year-old Israeli girl by a Palestinian man earlier this year has turned into a political football, with right-wing politicians calling it a hate-motivated “terrorist attack.”

The suspect, a resident of the West Bank town of Deir Qaddis near Modi’in Illit who was employed as a school cleaner in a settlement, was charged on Sunday for the alleged rape, assault and abduction of the child.

Police claim that the man met the child during his work as a school cleaner, offered her candy to inspire her trust in him, and eventually led her forcibly to a house near the school to assault her. The suspect claimed he didn’t commit the crime, and police have been unable to track down two other men who were allegedly present at the time of the attack.

The Military Advocate-General reported on Monday that there is no indication that the rape was motivated by nationalistic ideology, Maariv reported. However, the attorney for the family – which lives in the Binyamin area of the West Bank – from the Honenu National legal defense organization told Ynet that the suspect attacked the girl because she was Jewish.