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ISRAEL

White House Weighs Plan to Move Embassy to Jerusalem Administration considers future recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, breaking with international community By Felicia Schwartz Andrew Ackerman Rory Jones

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is considering a plan to formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the U.S. Embassy there in the future, U.S. officials said, steps that could trigger Palestinian protests and imperil the restart of a long-stalled peace process.

The Trump administration this week notified U.S. embassies overseas about the plan and a possible forthcoming announcement so envoys can inform their host governments and prepare for possible protests.

Officials said the plans weren’t final, however, and the U.S. was working through additional legal and policy considerations. A formal announcement could come as early as next week, the officials said.

“The president has always said it is a matter of when, not if,” a White House spokesman said when asked about moving the embassy. “The president is still considering options and we have nothing to announce.”

Officials said the administration is mulling laying out a long-term plan to move the embassy that would play out in President Donald Trump’s second term, should he be re-elected.

The disclosures about the potential move come as Mr. Trump faces an early December deadline under U.S. law to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem or sign a presidential waiver to keep it in Tel Aviv.

It was unclear what Mr. Trump would decide on the waiver question, but officials said one option would be to recognize Jerusalem as the capital and announce plans for the embassy move, but postpone the actual relocation for several years. In the interim, the U.S. ambassador to Israel could work from Jerusalem instead of Tel Aviv, the current site of the U.S. Embassy.

The administration also could choose to recognize Jerusalem as the “undivided” capital of Israel, one of the officials said.

Any U.S. move to declare Jerusalem as Israel’s capital would likely be taken as an affront by Palestinians, who consider East Jerusalem the capital of a future state. U.S. officials said they were weighing those concerns. CONTINUE AT SITE

Caroline Glick :The State Department drops the ball By Caroline B. Glick November 27, 2017 21:26 By reversing course on closing the PLO mission, and groveling to the threatening PLO, the State Department made a laughingstock of the US and President Trump.

Over the weekend, The New York Times published its latest broadside against US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for what the newspaper referred to as his “culling” of senior State Department officials and his failure to date to either nominate or appoint senior personnel to open positions.

But if the State Department’s extraordinary about face on the PLO’s mission in Washington is an indication of what passes for US diplomacy these days, then perhaps Tillerson should just shut down operations at Foggy Bottom. The US would be better off without representation by its diplomats.

Last week, in accordance with US law, Tillerson notified the PLO’s Washington envoy Husam Zomlot that the PLO’s mission in Washington has to close within 90 days because it has breached the legal terms governing its operations.

Specifically, Tillerson explained, PLO chief and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas breached US law when he called for the International Criminal Court to indict and prosecute Israeli nationals during his speech before the UN General Assembly in September.

Tillerson explained that under US law, the only way to keep the PLO mission in Washington open is if US President Donald Trump certifies in the next 90 days that its representatives are engaged in “direct and meaningful negotiations” with Israel.

The PLO didn’t respond to Tillerson with quiet diplomacy. It didn’t make an attempt to appease Congress or the State Department by for instance agreeing to end its campaign to get Israelis charged with war crimes at the ICC. It didn’t put an abrupt end to its financial support for terrorism and terrorists. It didn’t stop inciting Palestinians to hate Israel and seek its destruction. It didn’t disavow its efforts to form a unity government with Hamas and its terrorist regime in Gaza.

It didn’t join Saudi Arabia and Egypt in their efforts to fight Iranian power and influence in the region. It didn’t end its efforts to have Israeli companies blacklisted by the UN Human Rights Committee or scale back its leadership of the international boycott movement against Israel.

The Great Palestinian Shakedown: Have the Arabs Had Enough? by Bassam Tawil

Many people in the West are not aware that the Palestinians are trying to torpedo any peace initiative in order to blame others.

The Palestinians are crying Wolf, Wolf! — but only a few in the Arab world are listening to them. This, in a way, is encouraging and offers hope for them finally to be released from decades of repressive and corrupt governance.

These are just some of the challenges Saudi Crown Prince is facing. It is important to support him in the face of attacks by some Palestinians and other spoilers.

A young Saudi man has posted videos on social media in which he calls the Palestinians “dogs” and “pigs.” The man says that Saudi Arabia has provided the ungrateful Palestinians with “billions of dollars” during the past few decades. “The Palestinians,” the Saudi man charges, “have been milking us for decades.”

The videos, which have since gone viral, have understandably drawn strong condemnations from Palestinians, who say they would not have been made public without the tacit approval of the Saudi authorities. For the Palestinians, the abusive videos represent yet another sign of increased tensions in their relations with Saudi Arabia.

Further evidence of Saudi disdain for the Palestinians was provided in a video posted by Saudi Arabia featuring a Palestinian gunman as a terrorist.

Last July, the Saudi ambassador to Algeria, Sami Saleh, shocked many Palestinians when he described Hamas as a terror group. Hamas responded by saying that such remarks were “harmful to Saudi Arabia and its record and stances towards the Palestinian cause and the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.”

The apparent shift in Saudi Arabia’s position towards the Palestinians should not come as a surprise. Like most Arab countries, the Saudis too have finally realized that the Palestinians are ungrateful and untrustworthy. Saudi Arabia and most of the Arab countries are obviously fed up with the recurring attempts by the Palestinians to blackmail them and extort money from them.

Human Rights Hypocrisy By Lawrence J. Haas

Seventy years ago today, with the Holocaust still fresh in the minds of global leaders, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to partition Palestine in two, with the goal of establishing one state for Jews to reclaim their historic homeland and another for the Arabs who were also living there.

So, one must wonder what those global leaders would think of today’s United Nations – which operates a single-minded campaign of opprobrium against Israel for its alleged human rights transgressions against Palestinians, but which largely ignores the far more serious human rights abuses of regimes that stretch from Beijing to Moscow, Tehran to Riyadh and Havana to Caracas.

In the latest manifestation of the U.N.’s Israel obsession, its Human Rights Council (which is perhaps the U.N.’s most comically misnamed institution) is preparing in the coming weeks to release a “blacklist” of about 200 companies around the world that do business in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. The list is apparently designed to shame them into severing their business ties with those Israeli-run areas.

Some 130 Israeli and 60 international companies received letters recently from the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights – whom the Human Rights Council asked to create the list nearly two years ago – to inform them that they’re being “blacklisted” for “acting contrary to international law and U.N. decisions.” The companies reportedly include Israeli banks, supermarkets and restaurant chains as well as such U.S. companies as Caterpillar, TripAdvisor, Priceline.com, and Airbnb.

The request to create such a list not only reflects the Human Rights Council’s outsized focus on the Jewish state, but also reveals the rank hypocrisy of its membership, which includes some of the world’s worst human rights abusers.

The list will have no force of law, but it could still prove harmful to Israel if companies decide that doing business in those Israeli-run areas isn’t worth the risk to their corporate reputations. It’s another manifestation of the global campaign by public institutions and private activists to destroy Israel not by defeating it on the battlefield but by delegitimizing it in the court of public opinion. Among other things, the list would provide further fuel for the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement against Israel that’s popular in Europe and on U.S. college campuses.

ANOTHER ANNIVERSARY: RAEL JEAN ISAAC

The hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration has passed to mixed reactions. It has been celebrated, as it deserves to be—the achievements of the Jewish state that emerged from it are breathtaking—but also attacked and denigrated.

Some of the attacks are unsurprising. The “Foreign Minister” of the “State of Palestine” Riyad Malki said it was bringing legal proceedings against the British government in British and international courts, in his words, to “compel the British government to apologize and make reasonable reparations to make up for that tragedy [the Balfour Declaration] including recognizing the State of Palestine.” The UN is using the occasion to set aside $1.3 billion to fund Palestinian legal campaigns against Israel and to support creation of an independent Palestinian state.
Emily Thornberry

More unsettling are some British reactions. Melanie Phillips reports that Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn refused to attend the dinner celebrating the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, a dinner attended by Prime Minister Netanyahu as the guest of Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May. In his place he sent the Labor shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry who made no secret that she saw nothing to celebrate. In an interview with the Middle East Eye news site, Thornberry said: ”I don’t think we celebrate the Balfour Declaration but I think we have to mark it…and I think probably the most important way of marking it is to recognize Palestine.” Even more unsettling are the reactions of some hitherto respectable Jewish organizations. For example, the American Jewish Historical Society has clearly gone over to the dark side with its plan (only withdrawn under pressure) to “commemorate” Balfour with speeches by two anti-Israel activists, partnering with the viciously anti-Israel Jewish Voice for Peace.

Which brings us to the importance of another anniversary that went totally unremarked: the 24th year anniversary this September of the signing of the Oslo accords in Washington. There is a direct connection between the rampant, ever-growing hostility to Israel and the so-called “peace” agreement Rabin signed with Arafat. Until then, Arafat had been a terror chieftain whose fortunes were in sharp decline. Whatever the failures of Israel’s 1982 campaign in Lebanon, it had one major success, forcing the PLO, which had sowed havoc in both Jordan and Lebanon, to find refuge in Tunisia, a backwater where it remained weak and constrained. With Oslo Israel bestowed vigorous new life on the PLO—and on the worldwide assault on her own legitimacy.

As remarkable as Israel’s stupidity was the enthusiasm with which it was greeted by Israel’s supporters (a reminder—think catastrophic global warming—of just how wrong a “consensus” can be). As American Jewish organizations vied for a place on the White House lawn to witness signing of the “historic” peace agreement, AFSI was a lone pro-Israel organization in denouncing the agreement and in pointing out its inevitable disastrous consequences. There would be individuals who spoke out and indeed traveled to Oslo to protest the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Arafat, Rabin and Peres. These were the people who at the time we called “the real heroes of Oslo,” including Rabbi Avi Weiss, Ronn Torossian, David Kalb and Joshua Meisels of the Coalition for Jewish Concerns (AMCHA) as well as New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who brought a group of prominent New Yorkers to Oslo.

Move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem It’s the right thing to do, and it would be a political victory for the White House By Wilson Shirley

President Trump needs a win. Fortunately, one is within reach.

In 1995, Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, a law that mandated moving America’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to a “unified” Jerusalem by May 31, 1999. But that move never happened, and, as Ambassador John Bolton pointed out in his recent congressional testimony on the subject, the U.S. embassy to Israel remains the only American embassy not located in the host country’s capital.

How has the Jerusalem Embassy Act not yet been fully executed? One of the law’s provisions grants the president the authority to bypass its penalty for not moving the embassy by issuing a waiver, renewable every six months, which invokes “the national security interests of the United States.” The latest waiver was issued on June 1 of this year.

Every president since 1999, from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump, has kept up the unending string of waivers, declining to move the embassy to Jerusalem. Some of them have promised, as candidates, to make the move, but none have followed through. The next waiver is set to expire on December 1. On that day, Trump can break the streak.

Security concerns do not merit a waiver of this provision of the Jerusalem Embassy Act. It is true, as events across the Arab world in 2012 showed, that U.S. embassies and consulates are targets for attacks by violent extremists. That has been the case since at least 1998, when al-Qaeda terrorists blew up American embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya.The response of the United States to those attacks, however, was not to withdraw from Nairobi or Dar es Salaam. As Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law professor Eugene Kontorovich argued in his own congressional testimony, after these very attacks “the Executive undertook to hunt down and punish the perpetrators, while Congress appropriated extraordinary amounts for improved security at diplomatic facilities around the world.”

Recent events do not suggest that beginning to grant Jerusalem equal status with other world capitals would significantly endanger American security. Last April, Vladimir Putin’s Russia became the only country on Earth to actually recognize West Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state. The silence across a Middle East split on religious lines, riven by proxy wars, and aflame with extremism was deafening.

America’s policy of maintaining its embassy in Tel Aviv was born not of security concerns, but of legal deference to the U.N. General Assembly’s Resolution 181, a 1947 proposal that would have made Jerusalem into an international city governed by a “Special International Regime,” while partitioning the rest of Mandatory Palestine into Arab and Jewish sections.

THE NEW ISRAEL FUND….BAD NEWS

The New Israel Fund (NIF) is headquartered in New York, and maintains offices throughout the U.S. as well as in Canada, the UK, Switzerland, and Germany. Since its founding in 1979, as a political framework following the 1977 Israeli elections which brought Likud to power, NIF has provided over $300 million to more than 900 Israeli organizations.
Shatil is the Israel-based “operating arm” of the NIF,” that creates and nurtures coalitions of NGOs, attempts to influence laws and bills in Israel, and holds workshops for staffers of NIF-funded NGOs.
Declared objectives: “to strengthen and expand the pro-democracy, progressive forces in Israel” and help “Israel to live up to its founders’ vision.” According to the NIF, the Israeli government and public have strayed from the vision of Israel as a “Jewish homeland and a democracy.”
A common theme of NIF fundraising and campaigning is the supposed “erosion of Israeli democracy.” In September 2016, the Israeli Ambassador to Switzerland refused an invitation to participate in an NIF event, titled “Is Israeli democracy in danger?” The Israeli Foreign Ministry explained that the “provocative” title and NIF involvement were the reasons for the refusal.
To achieve these goals, the NIF “brings the broad range of civil rights, social justice and religious tolerance issues to the attention” of individuals and institutions, including the media and the Knesset. It presents itself as the “only” group working on such issues, attempting to restore Israeli democracy to its founders’ vision.
In New York, NIF participation in the Celebrate Israel Parade is the subject of controversy and criticism.
Engages in intense confrontation with “rights wing” opponents, including Israeli government officials, MKs, and NGOs such as Im Tirtzu,.
Finances

Expenses in 2015 were $31 million, approximately the same as in 2014.
Total authorized grants to Israeli NGOs were approximately $13.8 million in 2015 (including donor-advised grants), a 5.8% decrease from 2014 ($14.7 million). (See Appendix 1)
Although NIF grants are for organizations based in Israel, the organization is not registered with the Israeli Registrar of Non-Profits.
NIF publishes a list of donors in its annual reports; some appear as “anonymous.”

U. Michigan students involved in BDS motion: ‘Jews not a nation,’ Zionism a ‘dirty ideology’

University of Michigan-Ann Arbor students involved in the finally-after-15-years-passed Israel divestment measure were caught on a clandestine recording rejecting the nationhood of Jewish people and preventing a Jewish student from joining a debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/39303/

Obtained by The Washington Free Beacon, the footage also shows students concurring that Palestinian activists should reconsider their “past nonviolent stance.”

Students Allied for Freedom and Equality’s Ahmed Ismail says repeatedly that “Jews are not a nation,” as well as “There’s no nation called ‘Judaism,’” and “Where on the map is there a country called ‘Jews’?”

Ismail continues with “Zionism is a dirty political ideology,” and adds “[a]ny person who is a Zionist believes in the State of Israel, even though it oppresses and kills millions of Palestinians—which I call terrorism.”

“Most Jews are Zionists,” he says.

From the story:

As proof, though, that Zionism has no inherent tie to Judaism, Ismail said there are more non-Jewish Zionists than Jewish Zionists. Ismail noted that he has “lots of Jewish friends,” and that “terrorism in Israel has nothing to do with it being Jewish.”

He said that his views were formed by literature given to him by SAFE, and his experiences growing up as a Muslim in Egypt. He said he has never taken a class on Zionism or the history of Judaism.

Israel’s Secret War Against Terrorism’s Financiers A new book explores Israel’s daring covert operations against terrorism’s enablers. Ari Lieberman

Harpoon
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner and Samuel Katz
Hachette Books, 308 pp.

Mohammed al-Ghoul had no idea that loading cash-stuffed, leather suitcases into the trunk of his sedan would be one of the final acts of his life. Al-Ghoul was Hamas’s money man, responsible for distributing cash to the terror group’s members.

It was August 24, 2014 and the Gaza War wasn’t going well for Hamas. The Israeli Army (IDF) was wreaking havoc on the terror group, systematically knocking off its field commanders with unprecedented intelligence and accuracy. Hamas terror tunnels, some of which had taken years to construct, were being uncovered and destroyed by the IDF while the terror group’s rocket arsenal was dwindling rapidly.

But of even greater import for Hamas was the fact that its operatives weren’t getting paid. Some of its members hadn’t been paid for a month. Those that weren’t killed, wounded or captured began contemplating desertion. It was an untenable situation for Hamas.

Wiring money to Gaza wasn’t an option. Banks were on notice that wire transfers to the terror entity was a venture that carried high risk and little reward. But al-Ghoul had a plan that would provide a lifeline for Hamas.

Thirteen million dollars, secured from a friendly Muslim country, would be wired to the account of a moneychanger in Sinai. Once the moneychanger received confirmation that the funds were safely in his account, he would give a courier the cash. The courier would then smuggle it into Gaza via one of the many smuggling tunnels connecting the Gaza Strip to northern Sinai. Once in Gaza, the cash could be distributed to the fighters to stave off sagging morale and desertion.

Everything went according to plan. The courier delivered the cash to al-Ghoul, who along with his bodyguards began loading the trunk. Unbeknownst to al-Ghoul however, Israeli intelligence had been monitoring the entire sequence of events.

Lurking beyond visual range was an IDF AH-64 Apache Longbow armed with Hellfire missiles. A missile struck home instantly transforming al-Ghoul’s vehicle into a ball of flame and the car’s occupants into smoldering corpses. More importantly, most of the cash vaporized or otherwise became unusable. Hamas was unable to pay its fighters. Forty-eight hours later, Hamas, after losing 1,000 of its men, agreed to a ceasefire without a single of its demands being met.

Israel’s approach to combating terror has always been somewhat unorthodox but effective. The myriad of terror threats facing the Jewish nation is like no other in the world and compels those on the forefront of combating terror to adopt novel, cutting edge methods to defeat the threat. Harpoon, a new book co-authored by counter-terrorism expert Samuel Katz and human rights attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, of the Israel Law Center, provides us with intriguing insight as to some of those unique but very effective strategies.

In the early-1990s a few maverick-minded security officials understood that cash was indispensable to organized terror networks. They argued for the need to set up a special task force dedicated to identifying and tracking sources of terror financing and methods employed by terrorism’s financial enablers. In 2001, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sanctioned the creation of a special unit, code-named “Harpoon,” tasked to do just that. The unit was headed by Sharon’s old army buddy, Meir Dagan, who had held various security posts in the past and would end up becoming head of Israel’s vaunted Mossad intelligence organization.

Exclusive: What Trump Really Told Kislyak After Comey Was Canned • Howard Blum see note please

Vanity Fair Magazine is not the arbiter of veracity, but if this is true….if…..it is quite a nasty tale….rsk
On a dark night at the tail end of last winter, just a month after the inauguration of the new American president, an evening when only a sickle moon hung in the Levantine sky, two Israeli Sikorsky CH-53 helicopters flew low across Jordan and then, staying under the radar, veered north toward the twisting ribbon of shadows that was the Euphrates River. On board, waiting with a professional stillness as they headed into the hostile heart of Syria, were Sayeret Matkal commandos, the Jewish state’s elite counterterrorism force, along with members of the technological unit of the Mossad, its foreign-espionage agency. Their target: an ISIS cell that was racing to get a deadly new weapon thought to have been devised by Ibrahim al-Asiri, the Saudi national who was al-Qaeda’s master bombmaker in Yemen.

It was a covert mission whose details were reconstructed for Vanity Fair by two experts on Israeli intelligence operations. It would lead to the unnerving discovery that ISIS terrorists were working on transforming laptop computers into bombs that could pass undetected through airport security. U.S. Homeland Security officials—quickly followed by British authorities—banned passengers traveling from an accusatory list of Muslim-majority countries from carrying laptops and other portable electronic devices larger than a cell phone on arriving planes. It would not be until four tense months later, as foreign airports began to comply with new, stringent American security directives, that the ban would be lifted on an airport-by-airport basis.

In the secretive corridors of the American espionage community, the Israeli mission was praised by knowledgeable officials as a casebook example of a valued ally’s hard-won field intelligence being put to good, arguably even lifesaving, use.

Yet this triumph would be overshadowed by an astonishing conversation in the Oval Office in May, when an intemperate President Trump revealed details about the classified mission to Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and Sergey I. Kislyak, then Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. Along with the tempest of far-reaching geopolitical consequences that raged as a result of the president’s disclosure, fresh blood was spilled in his long-running combative relationship with the nation’s clandestine services. Israel—as well as America’s other allies—would rethink its willingness to share raw intelligence, and pretty much the entire Free World was left shaking its collective head in bewilderment as it wondered, not for the first time, what was going on with Trump and Russia. (In fact, Trump’s disturbing choice to hand over highly sensitive intelligence to the Russians is now a focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s relationship with Russia, both before and after the election.) In the hand-wringing aftermath, the entire event became, as is so often the case with spy stories, a tale about trust and betrayal.

And yet, the Israelis cannot say they weren’t warned.

In the American-Israeli intelligence relationship, it is customary for the Mossad station chief and his operatives working under diplomatic cover out of the embassy in Washington to go to the C.I.A.’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters when a meeting is scheduled. This deferential protocol is based on a realistic appraisal of the situation: America is a superpower, and Israel, as one of the country’s senior intelligence officials recently conceded with self-effacing candor, is “a speck of dust in the wind.”