RUTHFULLY YOURS

There are iron rules of warfare. One of the most basic rules is that you have to know your enemy. If you do not know your enemy, or worse, if you refuse to act on your knowledge of him, you will lose your war against him.

This basic truth appears to have eluded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This week we have been beset by the bizarre and sudden appearance of Jason Greenblatt, President Donald Trump’s negotiations chief.

Greenblatt’s mission is apparently to reinstate the mordant peace process between Israel and the PLO.

The peace process that Greenblatt is here to reincarnate died 17 years ago.

In 2000, PLO chief and Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat killed the peace process when he initiated a massive terrorist war against Israel, right after he rejected peace and Palestinian statehood at the Camp David peace conference.

In rejecting peace, the architect of modern terrorism made clear that his claim seven years earlier that he was willing to reach a compromise with Israel, based on partition of the Land of Israel between a Jewish and an Arab state, was a lie. As the nationalist camp had warned at the time and since, the PLO was not remotely interested either in statehood or in peace. Arafat’s willingness to engage Israel in negotiations that led to its transfer of security and civil control over Gaza and the Palestinian population centers in Judea and Samaria to the PLO was simply another means to the only end the PLO ever contemplated. It was a means of weakening Israel as a step toward achieving the PLO’s ultimate goal of destroying the Jewish state.

In 1993, when then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin agreed to recognize the PLO, his implicit assumption was that if Arafat was lying, Israel would walk away from the peace process. It would retake control over the areas it had ceded to PLO control and things would go back to the way they were before he made the gamble, indeed they would be better. Whereas for years Israel had been under pressure from the Europeans and the Americans to recognize the PLO, if Israel recognized the terrorist group and the PLO responded by showing that it remained dedicated to Israel’s destruction, the world that had been pressuring Israel would end its pressure.

The Europeans and the Americans would rally to Israel’s side against the PLO.

In 2000, after Arafat blew up the negotiations table with his suicide bombers, then-prime minister Ehud Barak announced triumphantly that he had ripped the mask off of Arafat’s face.

Now everyone would recognize the truth about the PLO. Now the Europeans and the Americans would rally to Israel’s side.

Of course, things didn’t work out that way.

What Hamas says, day and night, in Arabic, tells the real story. In fact, Hamas officials are very clear and straightforward when they address their people in Arabic. Yet some Western and Israeli analysts do not want to be bothered by the facts.

Some reports have suggested that Hamas leaders Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh are the ones pushing for the changes in the movement’s charter. However, even if Mashaal and Haniyeh succeed in their mission, there is no guarantee that Hamas’s military wing would comply.

Hamas has also denied its intention to cut off its ties with the Muslim Brotherhood. “The reports are aimed at tarnishing the image of Hamas in the eyes of the world,” explained a top Hamas official. He also denied that Hamas was planning to abandon the armed struggle against Israel in favor of a peaceful popular “resistance.”

What does Hamas mean when it says that it “accepts” an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem without recognizing Israel’s right to exist?

Is this a sign of moderation and pragmatism on the part of the extremist Islamic terror movement? Or is it just another ploy intended to deceive everyone, especially gullible Westerners, into believing that Hamas has abandoned its strategy of destroying Israel in favor of a two-state solution?

Recent reports have suggested that Hamas is moving towards “declaring a Palestinian state over the 1967 borders.”

According to the reports, Hamas is also contemplating changing its charter so that it would no longer include anti-Semitic references. The charter, which was drafted in August 1988, contains anti-Semitic passages and characterizations of Israeli society as Nazi-like in its cruelty. The same reports also claimed that Hamas’s revised charter will also state that the terror movement is not part of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Some analysts in Israel and the West have interpreted these reports as a sign that Hamas is finally endorsing a policy of pragmatism toward Israel and Jews. They are particularly excited about Hamas’s purported intention to declare (in its revised charter) that its conflict is “only with Zionism and the occupation, and not with Jews around the world.”

Judging from the analyses published by some commentators and Palestinian affairs “experts” in the past few days, one might conclude that Hamas is on its way to making a dramatic change in its vicious ideology. Unfortunately, however, the facts suggest otherwise.

http://www.therebel.media/faithgoldy

Faith Goldy is a fearless journalist and devout Catholic who stands up for family values, freedom, and firearms.

http://www.therebel.media/it_s_crusade_o_clock_in_bethlehem March 11, 2917

BETHLEHEM

Gavin McInnes and I are in Bethlehem as part of the Rebel mission to Israel. We were shocked to see the town in which Jesus was born is now a Muslim majority city, where Islam is the official religion. Why aren’t Christians abroad told the sad state of affairs at one of their holiest sites?

http://www.therebel.media/from_the_west_bank_a_message_for_ignorant_leftists March 10, 2017
From the West Bank: A message for ignorant leftists

Don’t believe your liberal arts profs or the mainstream media when they discuss “Israeli Apartheid”. I’m at the front lines of the West Bank and can’t believe my eyes! See Video

In the nearly two decades since its founding, Jerusalem-based Mobileye NV has helped revolutionize two sectors: automotive safety and Israeli tech.

The firm was created by Amnon Shashua and Ziv Aviram when most cars counted seat belts, anti lock brakes and air bags as central safety components. They set out to create vision-based systems that helped cars see the road and communicate with critical systems—including steering and braking—to respond to situations that could lead to a crash.

Mobileye is now known for its chip-based camera systems that power automated driving features. A flood of auto makers are relying on the company’s army of engineers to help accelerate the move to self-driving cars by creating algorithms and affordable modules that can operate as the eyes, ears and brains of a car that can pilot itself.

As a result, Mobileye has grown into one of the hottest names in the autosupply industry and secured a significant portion of the industry’s contracts for technology known as advanced driver assistance systems, or ADAS. Its ascent helped spur dozens of other smaller upstart Israeli tech firms to enter a market traditionally dominated by automotive giants. CONTINUE AT SITE

Intel Corp. agreed to buy Israeli car-camera pioneer Mobileye NV for $15.3 billion, one of the chip maker’s biggest acquisitions ever and the latest bet on Silicon Valley’s vision of cars as turbocharged computers on wheels.

The deal, which amounts to a 34% premium over Mobileye’s closing share price Friday, would give Intel ownership of a widely used technology in the rapidly emerging business of computer-assisted driving. It also would give Intel a long list of customer relationships Mobileye has with auto makers, including General Motors Co., Volkswagen AG and Honda Motor Co.

Intel is joining a race to create autonomous vehicles that has accelerated recently as unconventional auto companies have jumped in, sparking bidding wars for companies that specialize in self-driving gear or software. Besides Intel, Tesla Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Uber Technologies Inc. also have made big bets on car technology. Their entry has created a complex web of relationships between Silicon Valley, Detroit and other automotive hubs that has shifted the center of gravity in the global car business.

The deal for Mobileye is the second largest in Intel’s 48-year history, after its $16.7 billion acquisition of Altera Corp. in 2015, and its size signals Intel’s strong desire to stake out a significant position in the market after the chip maker largely missed out on the smartphone boom.

Richard Gere has voiced his opposition to Israel’s presence in the West Bank and the ongoing construction of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.

“Obviously this occupation is destroying everyone,” the actor told Israeli newspaper Haaretz during a two-day visit to the country for the local premiere ofNorman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer. “There’s no defense of this occupation.”

But his strongest criticism was of the Israeli settlement program, a major source of debate between Israeli and other countries and a matter regularly used as a bargaining chip in negotiations.

“Settlements are such an absurd provocation and, certainly in the international sense, completely illegal — and they are certainly not part of the program of someone who wants a genuine peace process,” Gere said. “Just to be clear about this: I denounce violence on all sides of this. And, of course, Israelis should feel secure. But Palestinians should not feel desperate.”

More than 600,000 Jews live in around 140 settlements built since Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967. Having been increasingly criticized by the Obama administration as a barrier to peace, the inauguration of Donald Trump saw an immediate escalation of settlement activity. In February, a controversial law was passed in the Israeli parliament that retroactively legalized almost 4,000 settler homes built on privately owned Palestinian land.

Speaking of his visit to Israel, Gere said that, despite having been before, it was “more complex” to visit now than at any previous time.

“I had people on all sides — those who have been close friends and people I barely knew — telling me not to come,” he said. “I had people living here who told me, ‘Look, no good will come of this. The bad guys will use you’ — ‘bad guys’ meaning the policy-makers of this government. It was a complex month of going back and forth: ‘I’m coming….; I’m not coming.'”