RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/the-state-department-lie-that-w

In his State of the Union address last week, President Trump declared, “Recognizing that all past attempts [at Israeli-Palestinian peace] have failed, we must be determined and creative in order to stabilize the region and give millions of young people the chance to realize a better future.”

It was painful to see the president – whose policies have given all pro-Israel Americans reason to be grateful – mention the tired old fallacy that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is the cause of the region’s instability. Peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority will not stabilize the region. Nor will absence of peace between them destabilize it.

For years, Arab regimes and pro-Arab propagandists have energetically promoted the “linkage” argument. It serves two purposes. One is a variation on the old blame-the-Jews thesis. Trouble in the Gulf? Blame Israel. Unrest in North Africa? Blame Israel. Civil war somewhere in the Arab world? Blame Israel.

These are the arguments that were made for years by Israel critics on the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, and it’s a way of distracting people from the real causes of those conflicts.

The other purpose of the original promoters of the linkage argument was frightening the West. It’s a threat. It warns that if the West doesn’t force Israel to agree to Palestinian demands, chaos and violence will erupt throughout the region, driving up oil prices or endangering American troops stationed there.

https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/02/14/us-zionist-group-unhrcs-blacklist-echoes-some-of-the-darkest-periods-in-jewish-history/

A leading US-based Zionist group slammed the so-called “database” of international corporations doing business with Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria, released by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on Wednesday, saying the UN was playing into the hands of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement.

“The publishing of this so-called “blacklist” of companies doing business with Israeli communities in the Settlements is not designed to provide information it was only created to have a chilling effect on the ability of working Israeli families to earn a living and to support boycotters of Israel,” Herut North America’s National Director Moshe Phillips said in a statement released Thursday.

The database, released Wednesday after years of delays, listed 112 companies operating in Judea and Samaria that the UN human rights office said are complicit in rights violations by bolstering Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. It included major banks, construction companies, supermarkets and gas stations. But it also includes a number of global brands, including American firms Airbnb, General Mills and Motorola Solutions.

Israel denounced the list and accused the UN rights office of collaborating with the boycott movement in compiling the names.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/the_twostep_solution_to_the_palestinian_problem_.html

Last week, the Trump team tabled  “Peace to Prosperity” otherwise known as The Deal of the Century, in which they set out their vision for achieving peace. It includes the creation of a Palestinian “state.”  The Palestinian leadership was quick to reject it as did the Arab League and many others, including many Israelis.

Nobody believes the “state” will come to be.

Surely the Trump team knows this. So, why did they table the vision?

In my opinion, the Trump team wanted to present a new vision to replace the old vision. During the next four years they will advance their vision and negate the old vision.

The old vision was based on the Oslo Accords signed in 1993 and 1995, and the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which demanded 100% withdrawal by Israel.  In addition, it demanded the right of return for all Palestinian refugees and the division of Jerusalem. 

This vision was premised on the Palestinian narrative that presented the Palestinians as indigenous and the Israelis as interlopers, oppressors and occupiers.

According to Peace to Prosperity,

“The Oslo Accords, however, left numerous key issues unresolved pending the completion of permanent status negotiations, including, among other items, borders, security, refugees and Jerusalem. Those agreements did not create an effective path for neutralizing the kinds of crises that emerged during the implementation of Oslo, including waves of terror and violence.”

The Accords became a permanent constitution articulating the division of powers between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) over Parts A, B and C as delineated by the Accords.

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-Wrong-The-real-source-of-Abbass-Swiss-cheese-revulsion-617528

At a session of the UN Security Council on Tuesday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas held up the map of US President Donald Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan and referred to the proposed borders of the state he has spent his career pretending to seek as “Swiss cheese.”

Abbas was altogether out of sorts that day, since he was forced to withdraw a resolution, introduced by Indonesia and Tunisia, to reject the “Deal of the Century” unveiled at the White House exactly two weeks earlier. Unfortunately for PA chief, who had grown accustomed to an American administration that bought his lies about Israel being to blame for his people’s plight, Team Trump entered the picture three years ago with an entirely different outlook.Suddenly, Abbas’s usual tricks were met with scorn from Washington. Even the new State Department was not engaging in diplomacy at all costs with the aging terror-master-in-a-tie. And when he made a public point of refusing to meet with Trump staffers, their response was not to coax and kowtow, but to shrug at his petulance and get on with the business of bolstering relations with Israel.

Yet despite the rebuffs – and proud “pay for slay” policy – Trump and his advisers were working arduously to craft a blueprint for a viable Palestinian state. That Abbas rejected the plan before having a clue what it contained was to be expected, which is why few people in Israel had faith in it either. Most Israelis were stunned, however, by Trump’s many measures to strengthen the security of the Jewish state and embrace its historical rights to its ancient homeland.

The Palestinian track record

In the Arab Middle East, unlike Western democracies, historical memory is very long. Nothing is forgotten, nothing is forgiven.

Therefore, Arabs are aware of the direct correlation between the scope of Palestinian freedom of action in Arab countries, on the one hand, and the level of anti-Arab Palestinian terrorism, on the other hand.  

This harsh correlation was demonstrated in Egypt and Syria during the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, as well as in Jordan.  The latter experienced the 1970 civil war as a result of the unprecedented self-rule provided to Mahmoud Abbas’ PLO in Jordan. It was manifested in Lebanon, which was plagued by a series of civil wars during the 1970s and early 1980s, ignited by the extraordinary autonomy accorded to Mahmoud Abbas’ PLO in Lebanon.  

Also, in 1993/94, the establishment of a ground-breaking Palestinian Authority in Judea & Samaria triggered a massive Christian flight from Bethlehem, Beit Jallah and Beit Sahour.  Consequently, this Christian dominated area was transformed into a tiny enclave of a 12% Christian minority.

Simultaneously, notwithstanding Palestinian verbal commitments to desist from incitement and violence, Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority embarked on an unprecedented wave of anti-Jewish hate education and terrorism.   

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/olmert-and-abbas-laughing-and-crying/2020/02/12/

“Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas will hold a joint press conference in opposition to US President Donald Trump’s peace plan,” according to Channel 12 News. Unbelievable, right? A former Israeli prime minister and a one-time star of the Likud party allied with Yasser Arafat’s heir and protégé? It must be fake news. But, alas, it is not.

Perhaps more than any other leader in the State of Israel’s history Olmert believes that his personal opinion of what Israel’s borders should be set as is always correct.

When he was a hawk and advocated the retention of all of the lands liberated in 1967 and later, when as a dove when he showed a full desire to retreat from all of those same exact lands. The one thing that Olmert never wavered on was that his view of what to do with Judea and Samaria was the right way. Olmert’s political journey from one camp to the other had been the story that dominated the public view of him at least until he was convicted of corruption in 2015.

At the time it was happening, Olmert’s political metamorphosis was given nearly the same intense news coverage as former PM Ariel Sharon’s was at the time. Was Olmert’s story as straight forward as the media portrayed or was there something that the news outlets missed?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/israeli-sovereignty-and-fate-trump-plan-caroline-glick/

On Wednesday morning, NeverTrump propagandist Bill Kristol told his MSNBC audience that Democratic chances of victory over US President Donald Trump will rise if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is defeated in Israel’s elections on March 2.

Along the same lines, if Netanyahu fails to apply Israeli sovereignty to the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria before the election, not only will he almost certainly lose those elections, his defeat will bury Trump’s peace plan and harm Trump’s reelection chances.

To understand why this is the case it is first necessary to understand the nature of the Blue and White party and its relationship to Trump and his peace plan.

After Trump’s peace plan was published, Israelis discovered significant problems with the map attached to the plan. Among other things, the map places large sections of Highway 60, which crosses Judea and Samaria from south to north outside Israeli jurisdiction. If left uncorrected, the designation will endanger the security of tens of thousands of Israelis whose communities will be rendered isolated enclaves. Since ensuring Israel’s ability to defend itself and its citizens on a permanent basis is a major goal of the plan, this omission was obviously an oversight. Netanyahu announced this week that he has assembled a team to work on the map.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-israeli-left-vs-palestinian-and-arab-world-pragmatists/

Hearts that bleed for the enemies of Western democracy who subjugate their own people and terrorize everybody else are attached to heads in need of psychiatric examination.

In an attempt to downplay the role played by U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the attitudinal Arab-world shift—due mainly, but not exclusively, to a shared mission to halt Iran’s race to obtain nuclear weapons—the Israeli left had a gleeful “we told you so” moment at the beginning of the month, when the Arab League unanimously rejected the “deal of the century.”

At an emergency meeting held in Cairo on Feb. 1 at the behest of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, the pan-Arab bloc declared that Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan “does not meet the minimum rights and aspirations of Palestinian people,” and vowed not to cooperate with the United States to implement it. Among the nay-saying countries at the summit were the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Bahrain, each of which had sent representatives to Trump’s joint press conference with Netanyahu at the White House on Jan. 28.

To clarify the above about-face, an anonymous Arab diplomat told the left-wing Israeli daily, Haaretz, that Abu Dhabi, Muscat and Manama had been misled by Washington with a document stating that the plan included the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital as the basis for peace negotiations.

In other words, they were duped into accepting an invitation by the White House. Yeah, right.