RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274712/whos-funding-illegal-palestinian-settlements-area-edwin-black

Hundreds of millions of euros flow annually from European nations to fund illegal Palestinian settlements in Area C. Under the Oslo Accords, only Israel can issue construction permits. The current rapid expansion plan dispenses with any coordination with Israel.

According to Israeli activist watchdog groups, such as Regavim, during the last five years, illegal Palestinian settlements and infrastructure have sprawled across more than 9,000 dunams (9 square km) in more than 250 Area C locations, supported by more than 600 kilometers of illegally constructed access roads and more than 112,000 meters of retaining walls and terracing. This massive works project is being conducted in broad daylight. Palestinians no longer apply for permits in Area C; they deny Israel’s right to issue them. Now, they just start building, powered by millions of annual euros in joint projects with the EU.

How is the money routed? Among the many NGO recipients, one name keeps appearing:Union of Agricultural Work Committees.

A 2012 French Foreign Ministry report listing a €354,489 multi-year water development project states: “The first action proposed under this Action Plan is being carried out by the Union of Agriculture Work Committees,” adding, “UAWC … is responsible for project management.” Agence Francaise de Dévelopment (AFD) committed €130,000 to the UAWC, also in 2012, according to a 2012 Ernst and Young audit of the NGO Development Center. In February 2019, AFD also announced, “Union of Agricultural Workers Committees and relevant stakeholders … [would be] granted by AFD amounts up to 232,000 euros out of a budget of 650,000 euros.”

https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/135976/on-friday-they-buried-rina-opinion/

If ever there was a week that illustrated the dramatic difference between the lives of Israeli Jews and American Jews, this was it.

Over the course of the past week, Palestinian Arab terrorists stabbed and wounded an Israeli in the Old City of Jerusalem, drove a car into Israelis standing at a bus stop near Elazar, fired rockets into Sderot, set fields on fire in the western Negev, threw hand grenades at Israeli soldiers near the Gaza fence, and tried to stone Jews to death at the Tomb of Joseph.

And on Friday, they murdered 17 year-old Rina Shenrav, for the crime of hiking while Jewish. She had  just celebrated her 17th birthday the week before her murder.

That’s the reality for Israeli Jews. Surrounded by people who will use literally any weapon to try to murder them—a knife, a rock, a grenade, an incendiary balloon, a car.

It was a very different week for American Jews. It began with a lively debate over whether Israel should permit the entry of two indisputably anti-Semitic members of Congress.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/hebron-riots-1929-consequences-lessons/

Arab anti-Zionism runs deeper than disputes over borders, water, and settlements.

In 1929, Arab clerics and politicians provoked riots across Palestine by accusing Jews of plotting to take control of Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque. This month marks the 90th anniversary of those riots — but they are not a bygone. Palestinian Authority and Hamas leaders incite violence today using similar falsehoods and ideology.

The 1929 riots destroyed the Jewish community in Hebron. They persuaded Labor Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion that socialist fraternity among Jewish and Arab workers and peasants would not ensure peace. They impelled Palestine’s Jews to bolster the Haganah, their underground self-defense group. And they vindicated Zionist warnings against relying on foreigners for security.

To investigate the riots, the British government, which controlled Palestine at the time, appointed an inquiry board known as the Shaw Commission.

The commission noted that Arab objections to Zionism were ideological, comprehensive, intense, and inflexible. In its report, it nonetheless devoted thousands of words to minute details of specific Arab grievances. It plumbed complaints that Jews, on one occasion, brought a chair to Jerusalem’s Western Wall and, on another, set up a screen there to divide male and female worshipers.

All this brings to mind the story of a man who thoroughly detests his wife but makes his case for divorce on the grounds that she doesn’t put the cap back on the toothpaste tube. Obviously, what he gripes about is not what accounts for his detestation. Confusion on this score was characteristic of Middle East policy officials in 1929, and it still is.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/israel-iran-and-trump-behind-the-rhetoric/

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has had faith that Washington would be his key ally in any confrontation with the Islamic Republic. It was Trump, after all, who withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Referring to a Talmudic dictum relating to self-defense, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a video clip on Sunday morning, explaining the preemptive strike launched by the Israel Defense Forces in Syria on Saturday night.

“If someone rises up to kill you, kill him first,” he began, before uncharacteristically acknowledging that the IDF was behind the airstrikes, which were carried out after the Israeli defense establishment discovered that a special Quds Force unit was dispatched by Iran to Syria to murder Israelis on the Golan Heights with explosives-laded drones.

Standing next to a somber-looking IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Yaakov Dori, Netanyahu stressed that the “complex” military operation was undertaken to thwart a “very imminent” Iranian threat, and declared that Israel would continue to uncover and prevent further such plans by the regime in Tehran.

In a veiled reference to Lebanon—home base of the Iranian terrorist proxy Hezbollah—Netanyahu then warned, “Any country that enables the use of its territory for attacks on Israel will suffer the consequences.”

The significance of this remark, which was also aimed at the powers-that-be in Damascus and Baghdad, cannot be understated. During the 2006 Second War in Lebanon, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stated, reiterated and kept his word that only Hezbollah was the IDF’s target. Of course, since Hezbollah, like all terrorist groups, used innocent civilians and facilities as shields, this made Israel’s mission nearly impossible.

freebeacon.com

Never has a U.S. administration been so favorable to Israel. And Israeli Jews are full of gratitude—anything good earns a Trump comparison: “It’s No. 1, like Trump,” an Israeli grocer told me the other day, pointing to an especially well-regarded mango.

Yet the Trump administration, like those before it, either doesn’t grasp, or won’t face, the truth about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Today, perhaps, the individual most voluble in telling the truth about the conflict is Prof. Mordechai Kedar, a lecturer on Arabic and Middle East studies at Bar-Ilan University.

His message is straightforward: Islam cannot accept a Jewish state in the Middle East, “not even a tiny one on the Tel Aviv coast.” It’s a theological threat. Jews and Christians do have a protected status under Muslim rule “by becoming subservient to Islam in what is known as dhimmi status, which means they are legally deprived of many rights including the right to own land and bear arms,” he writes.

Although this has been said many times, many ways, over the years, it fails to find an ear in America’s halls of power, partly because it’s foreign to modern Western ideas, partly because of well-oiled Arab propaganda and partly because it’s resisted by the conflict resolution industry (intractable religious problems leave it no part to play). And, partly, because Israel can’t face it either.

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/290029/bibis-peace-plan

Of late, a new “villain” was introduced into political discussions about the future of the Middle East. There are those who said that the responsibility for a thousand years of Middle Eastern obstinacy, radicalism, and fundamentalism has now been compressed into one person—namely, me. My critics contended that if only I had been less “obstructionist” in my policies, the convoluted and tortured conflicts of the Middle East would immediately and permanently have settled themselves.

While it is flattering for any person to be told that he wields so much power and influence, I am afraid that I must forgo the compliment. This is not false modesty. The problem of achieving a durable peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors is complicated enough. Yet it pales in comparison with the problem of achieving an overall peace in the region. Even after the attainment of peace treaties between Israel and its neighbors, any broader peace in the region will remain threatened by the destabilizing effects of Islamic fundamentalism and Iran and Iraq’s fervent ambition to arm themselves with ballistic missiles and atomic weapons. Let me first say categorically: It is possible for Israel to achieve peace with its Arab neighbors. But if this peace is to endure, it must be built on foundations of security, justice, and above all, truth. Truth has been the first casualty of the Arab campaign against Israel, and a peace built upon half-truths and distortions is one that will eventually be eroded and whittled away by the harsh political winds that blow in the Middle East. A real peace must take into account the true nature of this region, with its endemic antipathies, and offer realistic remedies to the fundamental problem between the Arab world and the Jewish state.

Fundamentally, the problem is not a matter of shifting this or that border by so many kilometers, but reaffirming the fact and right of Israel’s existence. The territorial issue is the linchpin of the negotiations that Israel must conduct with the Palestinian Authority, Syria, and Lebanon. Yet a territorial peace is hampered by the continuing concern that once territories are handed over to the Arab side, they will be used for future assaults to destroy the Jewish state. Many in the Arab world have still not had an irreversible change of heart when it comes to Israel’s existence, and if Israel becomes sufficiently weak the conditioned reflex of seeking our destruction would resurface. Ironically, the ceding of strategic territory to the Arabs might trigger this destructive process by convincing the Arab world that Israel has become vulnerable enough to attack.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274665/whos-funding-illegal-palestinian-settlements-area-edwin-black

“Area C,” which comprises some 60 percent of the West Bank, also known as Judea and Samaria, has become highly volatile again. In the past, debate has centered on Jewish settlements. Now, “illegal Palestinian settlements” sprouting across the region, are under the spotlight.

According to Israeli activist watchdog groups such as Regavim, during the last five years, illegal Palestinian settlements and infrastructure have sprawled across more than 9,000 dunams in more than 250 Area C locations, supported by more than 600 kilometers of illegally constructed access roads and more than 112,000 meters of retaining walls and terracing. This massive works project is being conducted in broad daylight, often heralded by tall announcement placards and proud press releases.

Israeli government officials contacted did not dispute the Regavim numbers. In exasperation, one military spokesman close to the Area C files estimated “close to 10,000” illegal construction efforts are now underway—adding they feel “powerless to stop them.” 

In the 1990s, after years of diplomatic wrangling, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords, envisioning a peaceful two-state solution. Under the complex Oslo Accords, the “West Bank” is divided into three separate administrative zones, Areas A, B and C.

https://worldisraelnews.com/idf-captures-terrorists-who-carried-out-attack-that-killed-17-year-old-teen/?utm_source=browser&utm_

Israeli security forces captured the terrorists who carried out the attack on Friday, killing 17-year-old Rina Shnerb.

Israeli security forces captured the terrorists who carried out Friday’s attack at Danny’s Spring near the Jewish town of Dolev. The IDF said the two terrorists are residents of the Palestinian village of Kobar.

The capture followed a two-day manhunt as the IDF gradually closed in on the killers, first discovering their getaway vehicle and then arresting and interrogating several suspects in the Ramallah area on Sunday night.

The attack at Danny’s Spring claimed the life of Rina Shnerb, 17, severely injured her brother, Dvir, 19, and lightly injured her father, Rabbi Eitan Shnerb, 46. Dvir is expected to make a full recovery.

The three family members were visiting a spring named in memory of terror victim Dani Gonen, who was murdered there by Arab terrorists in 2015.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujsJojWbNnI

IDF video showing attempted Iranian drone launch (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit)
The would-be terrorists were members of the Quds Force, an Iranian militia.

The Israeli military said on Saturday night that it foiled an Iranian drone attack against northern Israel from Syria.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed the operation on Sunday while touring the northern border of the country, saying that Israel will confront any country that allows would-be attackers to pass through its territory.