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December 2016

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Facing Conservatives, Israel’s Leader Takes Harder Stance on Settlements Lawmakers led by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s rival have called for an end to the notion of a two-state solution By Rory Jones

By on December 27th, 2016

TEL AVIV—Israel’s settlement-building in disputed areas is accompanied by an edging away from support for a Palestinian state, thanks partly to domestic political rivalries—a trend that helped spur a United Nations condemnation of the country but also could limit the impact of that censure.

Conservative lawmakers, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rival, Naftali Bennett, and emboldened by the election of Donald Trump, have in recent weeks called for the annexation of most of the West Bank and an end to the notion of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The pro-settlement Jewish Home party, led by Mr. Bennett, has also proposed legalizing dozens of currently outlawed settlements in the West Bank.

In response, Mr. Netanyahu has shifted to a more hardline stance on the issue, hinting he could move away from his long-standing support for the two-state solution when Mr. Trump takes office next month. He has also spoken in recent weeks about his government’s “love for settlement.”

That rhetoric was a key reason the Obama administration abstained from the vote Friday in the U.N. Security Council, which allowed a censure of Israeli settlements to pass for the first time in 36 years, according to U.S. envoy to the U.N. Samantha Power.

“The Israeli prime minister recently described his government as more committed to settlements than any in Israel’s history and one of his leading coalition partners recently declared that the era of the two-state solution is over,” Ms. Power said Friday at the U.N. vote, referring to Mr. Bennett. “The prime minister has said that he is still committed to pursuing a two-state solution. But these statements are irreconcilable.”

The U.N. resolution vote comes as tensions between the White House and Mr. Netanyahu’s government have reached a new pitch.

Mr. Netanyahu accused the White House of colluding with Palestinians to put the resolution forward, a charge it denies. He summoned the U.S. ambassador on Sunday to protest while the foreign ministry summoned top diplomats from 10 countries that voted in favor of the resolution.

An Israeli official said Mr. Netanyahu had advised officials to limit travel to countries that voted in favor of the resolution, but hadn’t suspended relations. Following the U.N. vote, he recalled his ambassadors to New Zealand and Senegal. Israel also cancelled a meeting between Mr. Netanyahu and Ukraine’s leader. The Ukrainian government summoned the Israeli ambassador to Kiev as a result.

Israel also fears a speech by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, scheduled for as soon as this week, could lead to further action at the U.N. on the conflict. Mr. Kerry could lay out parameters for a future peace deal, which could then be enshrined in another U.N. resolution, Israeli officials fear. Such a resolution would increase international pressure on Israel, which worries it would embolden Palestinians not to compromise in any peace talks.

Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, suggested there was the prospect of a new resolution during an interview Monday on MSNBC. “We’re not sure that this is the end of it,” he said. “We may get a new U.N. Security Council resolution in the waning days of the administration.”

However, administration officials said Monday there are no plans for any additional U.N. resolution.

Friday’s U.N. vote was a stark reminder of the gulf between Israel on one side and the U.S. and international community on the other over how to approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict moving forward.

Mr. Netanyahu’s official policy is to pursue a separate Palestinian state. But he has also overseen an increase of more than 100,000 settlers since winning power for the second time in 2009. His diverging policy has caused Western diplomats to question his real goals and plans to solve the conflict.

Mr. Bennett has been much clearer in his approach. He advocates annexing the West Bank, giving Palestinians autonomy in their cities and increasing spending on infrastructure to benefit both Jews and Arabs living in the territory. However, this falls far short of longstanding Palestinian demands for their own state.

Mr. Netanyahu’s forceful response to the U.N. vote is aimed at placating the conservative members of his own government and is part of a one-upmanship with Mr. Bennett, said Yehudit Auerbach, a political scientist at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv.

“It’s kind of a contest or competition about who will be the future leader of the right in Israel,” said Ms. Auerbach. “Is it Bibi Netanyahu or is it Bennett?” she added, using a nickname for the prime minister. CONTINUE AT SITE

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joe Morgentern‘Silence’ Review: Torturous Tests of Faith Martin Scorsese’s film follows two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who travel to Japan in the 17th century

By on December 27th, 2016

In the filmmaking world a passion project can be prompted by anything from cherished books first read in childhood to obscure oddities that no one wanted to finance. Martin Scorsese’s “Silence” redefines the category. It’s a film that Mr. Scorsese has wanted to make for almost three decades, and passion is its subject—the spiritual passion of two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who travel to Japan in the 17th century to find their mentor, a priest believed to be an apostate, and living as a Japanese with a Japanese wife. This is filmmaking as an act of devotion, and exploration—not just of the nature of faith but of faith’s obverse, abject doubt. The production is physically beautiful, and evokes the beauties of classic Japanese films, but the substance makes few concessions to conventional notions of entertainment. What the missionaries endure at the hands of their Japanese tormentors—torture, isolation and more torture—is almost unendurably violent, and, at a running time of 161 minutes, punishingly repetitive.

The film is based on the novel of the same name by Shusaku Endo; Jay Cocks and the director wrote the screenplay. Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver are the missionaries, Rodrigues and Garrpe. Their performances are obviously not meant to be entertaining, and never venture into so much as the outskirts of enjoyable. But they’re notable, all the same, for their intensity and focus—two modern movie stars giving themselves over entirely to roles that require steadfast self-effacement. (Liam Neeson is Ferreira, the mentor they seek.)

And though “Silence” is obviously not a genre film in the usual sense, the story functions as a search, or trackdown, if you will, through fascinating territory—and across land- and seascapes photographed with quiet elegance by Rodrigo Prieto. The feudal Japan that the missionaries discover is a savage place where Christianity is seen as something akin to the plague, an alien infestation to be stamped out wherever it’s discovered, and always by the same methods—threats of death, backed up by pitiless torture, that force Christians into public displays of apostasy. And the Christianity that Rodrigues and Garrpe discover is, as Mr. Scorsese portrays it, a re-enactment of the origins of the faith, with secret gatherings of congregants in caves. CONTINUE AT SITE

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PRIME MINISTER NETANAYHU ON THE UN RESOLUTION….SEE NOTE PLEASE

By on December 27th, 2016

Well said but will he now do the courageous thing and call the two state dissolution process null and void? rsk

From a Hanukkah message by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

All American presidents since Carter upheld the American commitment not to try to dictate permanent settlement terms to Israel at the Security Council. And yesterday, in complete contradiction of this commitment, including an explicit commitment by President Obama himself in 2011, the Obama administration carried out a shameful anti-Israel ploy at the UN.

I would like to tell you that the resolution that was adopted, not only doesn’t bring peace closer, it drives it further away. It hurts justice; it hurts the truth. Think about this absurdity, half a million human beings are being slaughtered in Syria. Tens of thousands are being butchered in Sudan. The entire Middle East is going up in flames and the Obama administration and the Security Council choose to gang up on the only democracy in the Middle East—the State of Israel. What a disgrace.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Obama’s Parting Betrayal of Israel Trump must ensure there are consequences for supporting U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334.By John Bolton

By on December 27th, 2016

Last Friday, on the eve of Hanukkah and Christmas, Barack Obama stabbed Israel in the front. The departing president refused to veto United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334—a measure ostensibly about Israeli settlement policy, but clearly intended to tip the peace process toward the Palestinians. Its adoption wasn’t pretty. But, sadly, it was predictable.

Mr. Obama’s refusal to use Washington’s veto was more than a graceless parting gesture. Its consequences pose major challenges for American interests. President-elect Donald Trump should echo Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s defiant and ringing 1975 response to the U.N.’s “Zionism is racism” resolution: that America “does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.”

Mr. Obama argues that Resolution 2334 continues a bipartisan American policy toward the Middle East. It does precisely the opposite. The White House has abandoned any pretense that the actual parties to the conflict must resolve their differences. Instead, the president has essentially endorsed the Palestinian politico-legal narrative about territory formerly under League of Nations’ mandate, but not already under Israeli control after the 1948-49 war of independence.

Resolution 2334 implicitly repeals the iconic Resolution 242, which affirmed, in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War, that all affected nations, obviously including Israel, had a “right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” It provided further that Israel should withdraw “from territories occupied in the recent conflict”—but did not require withdrawal from “the” or “all” territories, thereby countenancing less-than-total withdrawal. In this way Resolution 242 embodied the “land for peace” theory central to America’s policy in the Middle East ever since.

By contrast, Resolution 2334 refuses to “recognize any changes to the [1967] lines, including those with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations.” This language effectively defines Israel’s borders, even while superficially affirming direct talks. Chatter about Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is nothing but a truism, equally applicable to the U.S. and Canada, or to any nations resolving trivial border disputes.

There can be no “land for peace”—with Israel retroceding territory in exchange for peace, as in the 1979 Camp David agreement with Egypt—if the land is not legitimately Israel’s to give up in the first place. Anti-Israel imagineers have used this linguistic jujitsu as their central tactic since 1967, trying to create “facts on the ground” in the U.N.’s corridors rather than by actually negotiating with Israel. Mr. Obama has given them an indefinite hall pass.

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IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Suicide of Germany by Guy Millière

By on December 27th, 2016

Of the 1.2 million migrants who arrived in Germany in 2014 and 2015, only 34,000 found work.

Angela Merkel went to lay white roses at the scene of the Christmas market attack in Berlin. Thousands of Germans did the same. Many brought candles and cried. But anger and the will to combat the threat remained largely absent.

Nothing better describes the present state of Germany than the sad fate of Maria Landenburger, a 19-year-old girl, murdered at the beginning of December. A member of a refugee relief organization, Landenburger was among those who welcomed migrants in 2015. She was raped and murdered by one of the people she was helping. Her family asked anyone who wanted to pay tribute to their daughter to give money to refugee associations, so that more refugees could come to Germany.

The law that condemns incitement to hatred, presumably intended to prevent a return to Nazi ideas, is held like a sword over whoever speaks too harshly of the growing Islamization of the country.

The great majority of the Germans do not want to see that Germany is at war, because a merciless enemy has declared war on them. They do not want to see that war has been declared on Western civilization. They accept defeat and docilely do what jihadists want them to do: they submit.

If Angela Merkel does not see the difference between Jews exterminated by the Nazis, and Muslims threatening to exterminate Christians, Jews and other Muslims, she is even more clueless than it seems.

The attack in Berlin on December 19, 2016 was predictable. German Chancellor Angela Merkel created the conditions that made it possible. She bears an overwhelming responsibility. Geert Wilders, a member of Parliament in the Netherlands and one of Europe’s only clear-sighted political leaders, accused her of having blood on her hands. He is right.

When she decided to open the doors of Germany to hundreds of thousands of Muslims from the Middle East and more distant countries, she must have known that jihadists were hidden among the people flooding in. She also must have known that the German police had no way of controlling the mass that entered and would be quickly overwhelmed by the number of people it would have to control. She did it anyway.

When hundreds of rapes and sexual assaults took place in Cologne and other cities in Germany on last year’s New Year’s Eve, she said that the perpetrators should be punished “regardless of their origin”, but she did not change her policy. When attacks took place in Hanover, Essen, Wurzburg, and Munich, she delayed comments, then pronounced sanitized sentences on the “need” to fight crime and terror. But she still did not change policy.

She only changed her position recently, it seems because she wants to be a candidate again in 2017, and saw her popularity declining.

The comments she made immediately after the December 19 attacks were mind-numbing. She said that “if the perpetrator is a refugee”, it will be “very difficult to bear” and it will be “particularly repugnant for all Germans who help refugees on a daily basis.”

Such remarks could be considered simply naïve if someone were not informed, but Angela Merkel does not have that excuse. She could not ignore warnings from German and U.S. intelligence services saying that Islamic State terrorists hiding among refugees were planning to use trucks in Christmas-related attacks. The situation endured by Germans has been extremely difficult to bear for more than a year. Crime had “skyrocketed”; diseases extinct for decades have been brought in with no vaccines — long since discontinued — to treat them; second homes are seized by the government without compensation to shelter migrants, and so on. It did not take long to discover that the main suspect in the Berlin attack was an asylum seeker living in a refugee shelter.

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The UN Declares War on Judeo-Christian Civilization by Giulio Meotti

By on December 27th, 2016

How is it that Western jurisprudence, created after the Second World War to prevent more crimes against humanity, is now being used to perpetuate more crimes and against democracies?

It is a dreadful manipulation to try erase all Jewish and Christian history, to make believe that all the world was originally and forever only Islamic. That is what a jihad looks like. It is not just orange jumpsuits, beheadings and slavery. If one can erase and rewrite history, one can redirect the future.

If Palestinian men beat their wives, it’s Israel’s fault, argued UN expert Dubravka Simonovic, with a straight face.

A few days ago, the President of the UN General Assembly sported the famous keffiyah scarf, a symbol of the “Palestinian resistance” (read terrorism). This is simply the continuation of the cultural obliteration of Israel, which is supposed to justify next its physical obliteration.

The UN’s war on the Israel’s Jews is, at heart, a war against the West. The UN and its backers are briskly paving the way for the European Caliphate.

2016 has been a sumptuous year for the anti-Semites at the United Nations. The UN Security Council just targeted the only democracy in the Middle East: the State of Israel. The outgoing Obama Administration reportedly orchestrated what even Haaretz called a “hit and run” campaign in UN to denigrate the Jewish State and leave it to a fate where only conflict and hate loom. This is a cultural genocide that is no less dangerous than terror attacks. It is based on anti-Semitic lies and creates the atmosphere not for achieving “peace”, as disingenuously claimed, but for perpetuating war.

UNSC Resolution 2334 is the culmination of a dizzyingly fruitful year for anti-Semites. Last November, committees of the UN General Assembly in a single day adopted 10 resolutions against Israel, the only open society in the Middle East. How many resolutions have been approved against Syria? One. How many against the rogue state of North Korea? One. How many against Russia when it annexed Crimea? One.

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TRUMP AND JERUSALEM: By MORTON KLEIN, DANIEL MANDEL

By on December 27th, 2016

Why has the Embassy Act, passed by massive majorities in the Senate (93-5) and House (374-37), remained a dead letter for 21 years?
The media has been abuzz with reports that President-elect Donald Trump intends to honor his pre-election promise to act on the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act – whose implementation has been deferred by six monthly waivers invoked by successive presidents, most recently last week by President Obama – and move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Why has the Embassy Act, passed by massive majorities in the Senate (93-5) and House (374-37), remained a dead letter for 21 years? Fear of enraging the Arab street and the Muslim world, most of which has neither reconciled itself to Israel’s existence nor even the peoplehood of the Jews and thus the Jewish immemorial association and claim to the city, is the short answer.
This clamor and fixation on Jerusalem, quite recent in Muslim history, has led many to conclude that Jerusalem is holy to Islam; therefore any US move ahead of a peace settlement is premature.

As it happens, however, it is a propaganda lie that Jerusalem is holy to Islam or central to Palestinian Arab life. Though possessing Muslim shrines, including the Dome of the Rock and al-Aksa mosques, the city itself holds no great significance for Islam, as history shows.

Jerusalem is not mentioned even once in the Koran, nor is it the direction in which Muslims turn to pray. References in the Koran and hadith to the ‘farthest mosque,’ an allusion to which al-Aksa Mosque is named, and which has sometimes been invoked to connect Islam to Jerusalem since its earliest days, clearly doesn’t refer to a mosque which didn’t exist in Muhammad’s day.

Indeed, the site of the biblical temples is called Temple Mount, not the Mosque Mount, and – in contrast to innumerable Palestinian Authority statements today – was acknowledged as such for decades in the Jerusalem Muslim Supreme Council’s publication, A Brief Guide to the Haram Al-Sharif,’ which states on p. 4 that ‘Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute.”

(After 1954, all such references to the biblical temples disappeared from this publication.) During the illegal annexation and rule of the historic eastern half of Jerusalem by Jordan (1948-67), Amman remained the country’s capital, not Jerusalem.

Under Jordanian rule, Jews were entirely driven out, the Old City’s 58 synagogues destroyed, and Jewish gravestones used to pave roads and latrines. Jewish access to the Western Wall was forbidden, in contravention of Article 8 of the 1949 Israeli/Jordanian armistice.

Indeed, the eastern half of the city became a backwater town, with infrastructure like water and sewerage scanty or non-existent, and its Christian population, denied the right to purchase church property in the city, also declined. No Arab ruler, other than Jordan’s King Hussein, ever visited. As Israeli elder statesman Abba Eban put it, “the secular delights of Beirut held more attraction.”

Significantly, neither the PLO’s National Charter nor the Fatah Covenant, drafted during Jordanian rule, even mention Jerusalem, let alone call for its establishment as a Palestinian capital.

This would never be obvious from the tenor and content of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim pronouncements on the city today, which are as emphatic as to the Arab, Muslim and Palestinian primacy of the city as they are in denying its Jewish provenance.

Conversely, Jerusalem, the capital of the biblical Jewish kingdoms, is the site of three millennia of Jewish habitation — hence the ‘Jerusalem 3000’ celebrations initiated by the government of Yitzhak Rabin.

The holiest of Judaism’s four holy cities, Jerusalem is mentioned 669 times in the Bible, and alluded to in countless prayers.

Major Jewish rituals, including the conclusion of the Passover Seder and Yom Kippur service, end with the age-old affirmation, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Jerusalem is the only city in the world in which Jews have formed a majority since the 1880s. Today, in addition to being home to Judaism’s greatest sanctuaries, Jerusalem is the seat of Israel’s government, the Knesset, the Supreme Court, the National Library and the Hebrew University. Its population is twothirds Jewish.

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Perfidious Obama’s Last Betrayal by Jed Babbin

By on December 27th, 2016

Our new president will have to make the UN pay for what his predecessor has done to Israel.

My college roommate Ed Atkins and I were commissioned second lieutenants in the US Air Force the day before we graduated in June 1970. My eyes were lousy and Ed’s weren’t, so our paths diverged. I went to law school and he went to flight school, the lucky dog. After all, the mission of the Air Force is “to fly and to fight.” He was going to do it, and I was being trained to risk only paper cuts in the law library. I was (and still am) jealous as hell.
Fresh from a combat tour in Vietnam, during which he accumulated a slew of Air Medals and a Distinguished Flying Cross, Ed was stationed in Germany when the 1973 Yom Kippur War broke out. Israeli forces were caught on the ground on the highest holy day of the Jewish year, and things went badly for the first few days. At that point the Soviet Union was moving to intervene on the Arabs’ side. President Nixon ordered our nuclear forces to DefCon 3 and our Air Force to prepare to fly into the fight. Ed and his squadron were arming and fueling their F-4 Phantoms to fly to Israel and engage anything — Soviet or Arab — that stood in their way when Israel turned the tide and won without our help.

That’s the way it’s been since 1948, when Israel became a nation. We’ve always been the big brother willing to deter or defeat Islamic aggression against the only democracy in the Middle East.

That lasted until January 2009, when President Obama came into office and began shunning Israel. Then came last Friday, when Barack Obama ordered our UN ambassador to abstain rather than veto a UN Security Council resolution that declared Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank illegal, and those territories illegally “occupied.” Israel was thus delegitimized and ordered to return to the borders it had before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

President Obama’s enmity toward Israel, though often denied, has been obvious since his inauguration. Through many meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his attempt to force a false peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and his nuclear weapons deal with Iran, Obama has made it clear to anyone who wanted to see that his hatred of Israel coincided with his intention to diminish our national security as well as that of the Jewish state.

The Friday resolution, first offered by Egypt, was withdrawn as a result of hard lobbying by Israel and the statement by President-elect Trump that it should be vetoed. New Zealand, Senegal, Venezuela, and Malaysia picked it up and offered it for a vote. The Obama administration denies orchestrating the resolution and vote, but the Israelis accuse it of doing precisely that. And therein lies an important lie.

Secretary of State John Kerry visited New Zealand in mid-November. In a meeting with New Zealand’s foreign minister, Murray McCulley, Kerry told him that the New Zealand government could play an important role in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

McCulley said, “It is a conversation we are engaged in deeply and we’ve spent some time talking to Secretary Kerry about where the U.S. might go on this. It is something that is still in play.” He added, “I think there are some very important decisions that the Obama administration is going to have to make in its lame-duck period on this issue.” That was the preliminary to Friday.

The resolution, apparently orchestrated by Obama, passed only because the U.S. didn’t veto it to protect Israel as it has on similar resolutions on countless occasions. It was a huge victory for the Palestinians and the Muslim nations — and terrorist networks — which have Israel’s destruction as their principal foreign policy goal.

We were surprised by Obama’s perfidious action, but we shouldn’t have been.

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Obama’s self-defeating settlements policy Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on December 27th, 2016

President Obama’s collaboration with the December 23, 2016 UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2334, which condemns Israel’s settlements policy, has defied history and reality, injuring the peace process and US national security.

While President Obama greets the Jewish people upon Chanukah, which commemorates the victory of the Maccabees in a series of heroic battles in the crux of the Land of Israel, the mountain ridges of Judea and Southern Samaria – Beth El, Beth Horon, Hadashah, Beth Zur, Ma’aleh Levona, Adora’yim, Elazar, Beit Zachariya and Ba’al Hatzor – he contends that these are “occupied lands.” When Shimon the Maccabee (who succeeded Judah and Jonathan) was confronted with such a contention, he responded: “We have not occupied a foreign land; we have not ruled a foreign land; we have liberated the land of our forefathers from foreign occupation.”

President Obama’s and the State Department’s support of UNSCR 2334 undermines the peace process and US national security interests in the following manner:

1. It provides a tailwind to the UN demand to halt Israeli construction in Judea and Samaria, while encouraging the thirty-time-larger Arab construction there; an attempt to prejudge and force – not negotiate – a solution.

2. It dis-incentivizes Arabs to negotiate, since they expect further global pressure on Israel. Thus it undermines direct negotiation, which is the most effective way to advance peace, as documented by the Israel-Egypt and Israel-Jordan peace accords. On the other hand, the litany of US and international peace initiatives failed due to attempts to force a solution and by-pass direct negotiation.

3. Just like previous US and international initiatives, this too radicalizes the Arabs, forcing them to outflank the US and the globe from the maximalist side, escalating their expectations and demands; thus, further reducing prospects of resolving the highly-complicated peace process.

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CAROLINE GLICK; OBAMA’S WAR AGAINST AMERICA

By on December 27th, 2016

In 1989, following her tenure as President Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick described how the Palestinians have used the UN to destroy Israel.

Following outgoing US President Barack Obama’s assault on Israel at the UN Security Council last Friday, longtime UN observer Claudia Rossett wrote an important article at PJMedia where she recalled Kirkpatrick’s words.

In “How the PLO was legitimized,” published in Commentary, Kirkpatrick said that Yassir Arafat and the PLO worked “to come to power through international diplomacy – reinforced by murder.”

Kirkpatrick explained, “The long march through the UN has produced many benefits for the PLO. It has created a people where there was none; a claim where there was none. Now the PLO is seeking to create a state where there already is one. That will take more than resolutions and more than an ‘international peace conference.’ But having succeeded so well over the years in its campaign to delegitimize Israel, the PLO might yet also succeed in bringing the campaign to a triumphant conclusion, with consequences for the Jewish state that would be nothing short of catastrophic.”

As Rossett noted, in falsely arguing that Obama’s support for Friday’s UN Security Council Resolution 2334 is in line with Reagan’s policies, Obama’s UN ambassador Samantha Power deliberately distorted the historical record of US policy towards Israel and the PLO-led UN onslaught against the Jewish state.

In stark contrast to Power’s self-serving lie, neither Reagan nor George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush would have ever countenanced a resolution like 2334.

Obama’s predecessors’ opposition to the war against Israel at the UN was not merely an expression of their support for Israel. They acted also out of a fealty to US power, which is directly targeted by that war.

It is critical that we understand how this is the case, and why the implications of Resolution 2334 are disastrous to the US itself.

Resolution 2334 is being presented as an “anti-settlement” resolution. But it is not an anti-settlement resolution.

Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and neighborhoods in Jerusalem are being used – as they always have been used – as a means of delegitimizing the Jewish state as a whole, and legitimizing Palestinian terrorists and Islamic terrorists more generally. Resolution 2334 serves to criminalize Israel and its people and to undermine Israel’s right to exist, while embracing Palestinian terrorists and empowering them in their war to annihilate Israel.

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