RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/could-his-protests-over-annexation-be-mahmoud-abbass-last-whimper-628910

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas needs new material. Even the flies on the wall at his compound in Ramallah must have yawned on Tuesday night when he announced – for the umpteenth time – that the PA is no longer bound by previous agreements with Israel.

The only twist to his tired mantra was the inclusion of the United States in the chant.

“We hold the American administration fully responsible for the oppression befalling the Palestinian people, and we consider it a primary partner with the Israeli occupation government in all its aggressive and unfair decisions and measures against our people,” he declared to PLO officials summoned to the emergency meeting to listen to his televised rant.

Though the honchos in attendance must have doubted that Abbas was actually going to make good on his threat to halt economic and security cooperation with the Jewish state, they couldn’t have admitted it aloud. In fact, as Khaled Abu Toameh reported on Wednesday, those who dared to inquire about a timetable for the action were warned by Abbas’s aides that if they didn’t shut up, they would be banished from the premises.

Naturally.

The last thing that Abbas wants, after all, is to put his money where his mouth is, except when it comes to funding terrorists. That is one policy he proudly upholds, no matter how often certain countries urge him to stop.

https://bit.ly/2LPFZKZ

The mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) – 3,000ft above the Jordan Valley and 2,000ft above Israel’s heavily populated coastal plain – constitute the “Golan Heights” of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, the key north-south transportation artery Highway 6, critical commercial and defense infrastructures and 80% of Israel’s population.

The eastern mountain ridge – facing Jordan and Iraq – is the most effective tank barrier in the war-ridden region.  The western mountain ridge could become a platform to intensified Palestinian terrorism, targeting Israel’s 9-15-mile soft belly along the Mediterranean, and dooming this congested area to worse terrorism than the one inflicted by the Gaza-based Hamas.

Israel’s control of the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria – rather than a Palestinian state – is a pivotal national security prerequisite in view of the 14-century-old intra-Arab Middle East reality: extreme volatility, violent intolerance, lack of peaceful-coexistence, repressive tenuous regimes, shifty policies and precarious agreements.

Such a tectonic reality requires Israel’s secure boundaries to respond to bad, worse and worst-case unpredictable scenarios. Therefore, Israel’s national security cannot be based on peace accords, which could be as fragile as the regimes which conclude them. Israel’s national security must be based on the capabilities to withstand unforeseeable and violent regime change (e.g., Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Iraq) and the potential abrogation of peace accords.  Thus, in 1979, Iran was transformed from a close ally of the US and Israel to their most ferocious enemy.  Similar turbulence in Jordan – which must be avoided with the assistance of the US and Israel – could transform Jordan into a chaotic platform of regional and global terrorism, which would critically upgrade the significance of the dominant mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/israeli-arab-citizen-indicted-iranian-spy-joseph-klein/

An Israeli Arab citizen, Ayman Haj Yahya, was indicted last month for meeting and cooperating with two operatives of Iranian intelligence with the intention of “assisting the State of Iran in its efforts to harm the State of Israel.” This would-be fifth columnist spy for the Iranian regime is alleged to have provided his Iranian contacts with information on a variety of matters affecting the security of Israel, which “could help Iran in its war against the State of Israel.” Yahya was allegedly sharing information regarding the Israeli military, potential targets for terrorist attacks, recruitment of more Israeli-Arabs to assist Iran and ways to sow division within Israeli society.

Khaled Yamani, a Palestinian resident of the Baddawi refugee camp in Lebanon and a senior member of the terrorist organization known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), reportedly recruited Yahya. After corresponding via Facebook, Yahya met at least twice in 2018 with Yamani, who reportedly revealed that he was working for Iranian intelligence. The PFLP-Iranian regime nexus is strong. For example, as documented by Joe Truzman, a contributor and analyst for The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “The PFLP’s military wing, Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, honored Hezbollah’s Nasrallah and former Qods commander Qasem Soleimani…The Soleimani poster says ‘In the Quds day, we pay tribute to the soul of martyr commader (sic) Qasem Soleimani.'”

Haj Yahya, together with PFLP’s Khaled Yamani, allegedly met with two representatives of Iranian intelligence in Europe in both February and March of 2020. Yahya “received funds, training, encryption tools and codes in order to be able to maintain contact with them in an encrypted way after he returned to Israel,” the Shin Bet claimed. Yahya was attempting to do just that upon his return to Israel before being arrested by Israeli security forces.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/liberal-jewish-opposition-israels-sovereignty-daniel-greenfield/

The House of Saud, the oldest enemies of an independent free Jewish state, have at least temporarily abandoned their project to destroy it by replacing it with the Islamic terrorist colony of ‘Palestine’.

That’s more than you can say for liberal Jews.

It’s a sad day when Wahhabi Islam shows more aptitude for setting aside its fanaticism and adapting to reality than the alphabet soup organization leaders and non-profit newspapers that have been running the liberal Jewish community into the ground for over a hundred years without ever learning a thing.

This failed establishment is wringing its hands because Israeli law might be applied to parts of the West Bank filled with Jewish towns and villages that were liberated 53 years ago in the Six Day War. That means Israeli citizens living in cities like Ma’ale Adumim (pop. 38,193) would actually fully live under Israeli law, instead of a clumsy hybrid system of military law, antiquated regional law, and national law.

And, as Caroline Glick pointed out, “The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will benefit from the move because soldiers and officers will not be responsible for issues like directing traffic and providing building permits for everything from parking lots to kindergartens to neighborhoods.”

Please raise your hand if you want the military to be responsible for directing traffic. What the anti-occupation opponents of Israeli sovereignty are really fighting against is an end to the occupation.

Their weapons are terminology. They call applying Israeli sovereignty “annexation” and refer to cities like Ma’ale Adumim as “settlements”. They also insist that some Arab Muslim cities that are the same age and size are “refugee camps”. These walls of words have enraptured policymakers and NPR listeners for generations while completely ignoring the physical realities of life for Jews and Muslims.

Israel assuming responsibility for cities and villages, for territory that would remain its own, is Prime Minister Netanyahu’s plan and President Trump’s plan. What counter-plan do its opponents offer?

There is the endless peace process, which its proponents believe in almost as assiduously as religious Jews believe in G-d and the Bible, though their faith is in a much more intangible phenomenon because the peace process has never existed, has never been seen or experienced, and is taken entirely on faith.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/bloat-is-the-least-of-the-new-israeli-governments-problems/

The statements made by three new ministers upon receiving the proverbial keys to the offices from their immediate predecessors illustrate that Israel’s 35th government is in for a very bumpy ride.

Public criticism of the new Israeli government has focused on how “bloated” it is. Prior to and since the swearing-in on Sunday of the coalition’s 34 ministers, every headline in the print and broadcast media was and has been highlighting its unprecedented size.

In addition, each disgruntled analyst has bemoaned the exorbitant cost of maintaining dozens of ministries, many of which were concocted to satisfy the demands of coalition partners and party members fearing relegation to the backbenches of the Knesset. The main outcry over the high price of assuaging egos in this fashion is that more than 1 million citizens are newly unemployed, with businesses imploding all over the place, as a result of COVID-19 lockdowns.

It’s a valid argument, to be sure. But as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointed out in his speech during the four-hour plenary session that preceded the swearing-in ceremony, “If we had gone into a fourth election, the additional cost would have amounted to NIS 2 billion (approximately $284 million). The additional cost of a unity government [was roughly] NIS 85 million ($24 million) a year, infinitely lower than the cost of additional elections.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-palestinians-need-to-make-bold-moves-11589842737?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

I admire Mead, but Arafat’s example after Oslo was to engage in a concatenation of terror in every corner of Israel- in markets, buses, eateries, communal gatherings and leave mangled and bloody kiddie strollers in the wake. His argument is ludicrous….rsk

As speculation intensifies over possible Israeli plans to annex portions of the West Bank, the Palestinian movement faces its greatest crisis since Israel became a state. The underlying problem for the Palestinian Authority is that the balance of power has shifted massively in favor of Israel, and as other countries recalibrate their policies in light of this reality, Palestinian options are narrowing faster than the authority’s leaders can adapt.

Ever since they turned to the Arab countries to prevent the emergence of a Jewish state in the late 1940s, the Palestinians have needed the support of allies to even the scales against the Zionists. That need is more urgent and pressing today than ever, but allies are getting harder to find.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/05/18/the-unlearned-nakba-lesson-about-compromise/

Palestinian Arabs continue to learn the wrong history lesson. On May 15, as they do every year, they relive the sorrow of 1948, when they remind themselves of all the terrible things that happened to them as a result of the creation of modern-day Israel. Their narrative of a martyred people who were driven from their homes and made stateless victims is more than a political statement; it’s a faith that is integral to their identity. The yearly vow to “return” to all that they lost 72 years ago — to reverse the verdict of history — is so deeply embedded in their consciousness that it has made it impossible for any of their leaders to even consider formally giving it up.

This is an old story that has been retold so many times that even many of those who sympathize with the Palestinian cause have grown bored with it. Indeed, although talk of the nakba — the “disaster” or “catastrophe” of 1948 — is still enough to fire up radical foes of the Jewish state in the West, much of the Arab world has changed the channel and is more interested in cooperation with Israel than in relitigating the events of the war in which it won its independence.

But it is of particular importance in 2020 because with the debate about Israel extending its law to some settlements in the West Bank, the Palestinians are once repeating the mistakes that led to the nakba in the first place.

 https://bit.ly/2ZnY231

*Notwithstanding Saudi philo-Palestinian talk, Riyadh considers the Palestinian issue a low priority.  It ranks significantly lower than the clear and present lethal threat posed by Iran’s Ayatollahs; the potential tectonic eruption in Iraq; the lethal threat from volcanic Yemen; and the domestic powder keg in the oil-rich and Shia-dominated Qatif and al-Hasa areas. It is much lower than the imminent threats of ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood; the potential threat of Turkey’s Erdogan; the regional implications of the domestic upheaval in Syria and Lebanon; the vulnerability of all pro-US Arab regimes (e.g., Bahrain, Jordan and Egypt), etc.

*The House of Saud does not forget, nor forgive, the Palestinian track record of intra-Arab terrorism and treachery, most notably the 1990 Palestinian collaboration with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, which was the most generous Arab host of Palestinians.

*Riyadh is convinced that the Palestinian track record would yield a Palestinian state, which would constitute another rogue anti-Saudi regime. They consider the Palestinians (the Palestinian Authority and Hamas) a role model of subversion and treachery, and active and potential allies of Turkey’s Erdogan, Iran’s Ayatollahs, Hezbollah and the Moslem Brotherhood, as well as rogue elements in Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Libya and Yemen, which aim to topple the House of Saud.

*At the same time, Saudi ties with Israel (as has been the case with all pro-US Arab countries) have expanded substantially – militarily, commercially, technologically, medically and agriculturally – despite the lack of progress on the Palestinian issue, and in the face of mutual threats and challenges.  

*Irrespective of the warm pro-Palestinian Saudi talk, which welcomes every Western dignitary to Saudi Arabia, the Saudi walk has always been cold.

*Saudi Arabia has never flexed its military muscle on behalf of the Palestinians (nor has any other Arab country), while flexing very limited diplomatic muscle.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/05/17/idf-troops-thwart-terrorist-attack-in-eastern-jerusalem/

Three Palestinians were wounded on Friday evening during an attempted attack on an Israeli military post in eastern Jerusalem, according to the Israel Defense Forces. The suspects are being treated by the Red Crescent.

According to the military, troops stationed at an outpost at the “Governor’s House” compound in Abu Dis spotted the three suspects preparing to throw lit firebombs at the post and opened fire, thwarting the attack. No Israeli soldiers were wounded in the incident, according to the IDF.

This was the latest in a series of violent attacks perpetrated by Palestinians against Israeli soldiers in recent weeks.

Last Tuesday, IDF Staff Sgt. Amit Ben-Yigal, 21, a member of the Golani Reconnaissance Battalion, was killed by a rock to the head during a raid in a village in Judea and Samaria.

On Thursday, IDF soldier Shadi Ibrahim, 20, was wounded in a vehicular assault near Negohot, southwest of Hebron. As a result of his injuries, Ibrahim’s leg was amputated, and he remains in serious, but stable, condition, according to Ynet.