RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274197/remembering-historys-m

On July 4th, 1976, as America celebrated its Bicentennial, four Israeli Air Force C-130 Hercules planes carrying over 100 Jewish passengers, twelve Air France flight personnel, and their Israeli rescuers landed safely at Ben Gurion Airport. The safe landing of civilians and commandos marked the end of a week-long, nightmarish drama that gripped all of Israel.

The saga began on June 27, when a Paris-bound Air France commercial airliner took off from Tel-Aviv. The plane was scheduled for a stopover in Athens. Lax security at Athens International Airport enabled four terrorists with forged passports – two from the notorious West German Baader-Meinhof Gang and two from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – to board the flight with their guns, grenades and explosives.

Their hijacking adventure set into motion a sequence of events that would reverberate around the world. It would also ultimately serve to further enhance the prestige and reputation of Israel’s vaunted, specialized commando units and intelligences services.

After a brief refueling stopover in Benghazi, Libya, the terrorists flew their commandeered Airbus A-300 to Entebbe airport in Uganda where they were given a hero’s welcome by their mercurial Ugandan host, the cannibalistically-inclined dictator, Idi Amin. In addition to providing them with safe haven, the despotic Amin placed elements of the Ugandan army at the hijackers’ disposal. In addition to the Ugandans, the terrorists’ ranks now swelled to seven, having been joined by three PFLP operatives during the Benghazi stopover.

https://worldisraelnews.com/shin-bet-nabs-hamas-bomb-maker-who-snuck-into-israel

Israel recently thwarted a Hamas plan to establish an explosives manufacturing network in Judea and Samaria using a medical permit to sneak in a key terrorist.

By TPS

The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) recently exposed and thwarted a Hamas attempt to establish a bomb-making network in Judea and Samaria that relied on Israel’s humanitarian medical permits to sneak in terrorists, the security agency revealed Wednesday.

Fadi al-Sabah, a Hamas-trained bomb expert from the Gaza Strip, infiltrated Israel by taking advantage of a permit to receive medical treatment in the country. He was tasked with establishing a bomb lab that would supply suicide bombers with explosives.

The plans were exposed after a series of arrests among terrorists in Gaza.

Al-Sabah, 35, was arrested by Israeli forces in Teibe in May. He was recruited by Hamas operative Ashraf Sabah in July 2018 and underwent training in bomb building for several months. He was also trained on how to bypass Israeli security vetting and background checks.

Sabah was imprisoned for 12 years in Israel for his involvement in executing attacks against Israeli forces on the Gaza border.

Al-Sabah was recruited by Hamas after they learned that he was in the process of receiving a permit to enter Israel for medical treatment. Hamas decided to use him for terrorism purposes.

Some of al-Sabah’s trainers were released in the Shalit deal, the Shin Bet noted.

Before al-Sabah left for treatment in Israel, Ashraf Sabah sewed notes with code words into his jacket. The codes would have been used for communication between the various terror cells.

To obtain the proper medical records that would secure him an entry permit, al-Sabah got a Gazan doctor to provide him with a note that stated that he could not be treated in the Strip. After receiving the permits, he underwent training by Hamas.

In May 2019, Fadi entered Israel through the Erez Crossing with the message-containing jacket in his luggage. He was to be treated in a Hebron hospital, but never arrived there and instead met up with terror operatives.

He was arrested a few days later in Teibe in northern Israel and was recently indicted in a military court.

A senior Shin Bet official stated, “We are again witnessing Hamas’ exploitation of humanitarian permits provided by the State of Israel and its utilization of this medium to promote the organization’s hostile activities in Israel.”

Israel previously exposed several cases in which Hamas utilized Israel’s medical permits to promote terrorism.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274194/palestinian-authority-hated-bahrain-conference-caroline-glick

The Palestinian leadership didn’t boycott the Trump administration’s economic meeting in Bahrain last week because it denied them a future political horizon. They oppose the Trump Prosperity to Peace plan because it gives them an open road to success.

The footage of the administration’s workshop last week on developing the Palestinian economy made for surrealistic viewing. Sitting in Manama, Bahrain, were representatives of most Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman, Egypt, and Jordan. There were also leaders of international economic institutions, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. And there were business leaders from the U.S., the Arab world, and Europe. They were hosted by a U.S. delegation led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, as well as by President Donald Trump’s Middle East negotiations team, headed by senior presidential advisor Jared Kushner and senior presidential advisor for negotiations Jason Greenblatt.

All of these leaders came together to discuss a detailed U.S. plan to bring $50 billion in grants, loans, and investments to the Palestinians in the West Bank, (i.e., Judea and Samaria) and the Gaza Strip, as well as to neighboring Arab states: Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon.

The stated purpose of the plan is to end Palestinian economic privation and suffering by transforming the Palestinian economy from a negative growth, high-unemployment economy into a prosperous high-growth, low-unemployment economy.

Yet despite the money involved and the power the participants packed, the Palestinians didn’t show up. The Palestinian Authority (PA) announced in May that it was boycotting the conference and appealed to all those invited to boycott the conference as well.

After the conference convened last Tuesday, the PA sent mobs out to riot throughout the West Bank. They burned effigies of President Donald Trump. The youth wing of PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction called for a renewed terror campaign against Israel. And together with Hamas, Fatah branded Palestinian businessmen who braved the boycott and travelled to Bahrain “traitors” and vowed to punish them “with full force” for their treachery. Indeed, at least one Palestinians businessman who participated in the Bahrain conference was arrested upon returning home. Others escaped arrest by running away from their homes when they were alerted that PA security forces were en route to arrest them.

It was a moment in time truly never to be forgotten–July 4, 1976.

I was watching those spectacular tall sailing ships from countries all over the world passing under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in salute to America’s two hundredth birthday. Tears of pride were in many an eye that day.

Arie and I were there together, but, at almost the very same moment that those ships were sailing by, something else was happening which would link Israel and America together in many a heart and soul forever after…

During the night before and the early morning hours of July 4, 1976, Israel launched Operation Thunderball–aka, Operation Entebbe—aka, Operation Yonatan.

On June 27, Air France Flight 139 had been hijacked by Arabs and some European soul mates. The plane was taken to Idi Amin’s Uganda, where the hijackers were met with open arms.

The passengers were soon asked to form two lines–one for Jews, the other for Gentiles. Most of the latter were freed, but the Jews became Idi Amin’s “guests.” Amin’s buddies next announced that the Jews would be killed if demands were not met.

I won’t go into all of the details, but it is truly an amazing story which sired books, movies, and so forth.

The bare basics, however, are that on July 4, 1976, while I was watching the parade of sailing  ships, Israel raided Entebbe (almost 2,200 miles away), freed the hostages, and showed the world that it was possible to defeat terror–a lesson many still need to learn today, especially when the chief enabler of much of the world’s terror is on the verge of becoming a nuclear power…the would-be atomic ayatollahs. Entebbe was also a wonderful gift, commemorating America’s own liberty as well.

https://worldisraelnews.com/watch-israels-foreign-minister-visits-united-arab-emirates

Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz visited Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, where he presented a regional economic plan linking Israel with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/ehud-barak-yair-golan-and-israels-new-left/

Only radical leftists in Israel and abroad believe that the IDF is ethically reckless, or that the Jewish state is not “very strict” when it comes to monitoring its own morality.

Maj. Gen. (ret) Yair Golan, former deputy chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, is a gift to the left that keeps on giving.

But don’t take my word for it. Just ask former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who proudly displayed Golan last week in a Tel Aviv press conference that he held to announce his formation of a new party to run in the Sept. 17 elections for the 22nd Knesset.

Barak’s recruitment of Golan to the yet-to-be-named party—whose campaign pledge is to “do whatever it takes” to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—was clear. Older-generation Israeli politicians, particularly failed peace-camp has-beens like Barak, continue to harbor the dated notion that having military men on their ticket is an electoral draw, if not a must.

The idea, from a left-wing perspective, is that a highly decorated IDF uniform serves as a shield against accusations of disloyalty or a lack of patriotism. It is a perfect cloak to enable selling the country down the tubes, as Barak himself nearly did at Camp David in 2000, by offering arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat the moon and the stars. Oh, and swathes of Israeli territory in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Arafat’s response—the launch of a suicide-bombing war against innocent Israelis going about their business on buses, in restaurants and at shopping malls—led to Barak’s ouster in 2001. Later, he would insist that his overly generous offer to Arafat had been calculated to call the PLO chief’s bluff. But nobody bought it. Or cared. The daily sounds of sirens wailing through the streets on the way to the latest blown-up bodies will do that.

At the time, Barak was the head of the Labor Party, which presented itself as the sane center-left. You know, the successors of the founding fathers of the state. The rightful heirs to the throne, which had been “stolen” from them in 1977 by Menachem Begin and the increasingly riff-raff, right-leaning public.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/07/01/bds-anti-normalization-is-a-m
Anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) promoters have long tried to stake out the moral high ground — depicting themselves as the champions of the oppressed, and positioning their movement as being on the right side of history.

But the reality is that BDS rarely acknowledges, or works to prevent, harm to Palestinians that is meted out by their own governments and societal extremists.

What’s even worse is that BDS leaders often egg on and incite these depredations with an anti-normalization campaign characterized by coercion and strong-arm tactics against peace activists and co-existence groups — along with just about any Palestinian who dares to cross the BDS picket line to cooperate with or even just talk to Israelis.

This strategy of anti-normalization, long a mainstay of the BDS movement, originated at the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa — an antisemitic hate fest where Jew-hatred became so ugly that the US delegation walked out. Ever since, BDS has opposed any contact between Palestinians and Israelis that fosters dialogue, so as not to “normalize” Israel’s existence.

 
The Roots of the Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace Lobby

I have been going through the archives of the pro-peace, pro-Jewish state (later Israel) lobby, and I’ve found some interesting…

Basically, BDS calls for the boycott of all Israeli-Palestinian projects and programs that don’t sufficiently emphasize Israel’s alleged brutality and wrongdoings. In fact, the only people-to-people engagements that PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) condones are those that support “resistance.” All others are rejected as undermining Palestinian rights and the national struggle.

Consider, for example, how the Palestinian Authority (PA), which strictly enforces an anti-normalization policy, reacted several weeks ago to the “heartwarming scenes of coexistence” between young religious Jews and Palestinian revelers dancing together at a wedding in the West Bank village of Deir Qaddis.

For Palestinian leaders, ultra-Orthodox Jews from the nearby settlement of Modiin Ilit celebrating at the wedding of the son of village council leader Radi Nasser was unacceptable. It didn’t take long for the PA to sack him, and for the Fatah party, the PA’s largest faction, to condemn Nasser and remove him from its ranks on account of his “harmful behavior” in “the shadow of … threats of normalization between the Arab world and the Israeli occupation.”

https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/07/01/we-need-to-take-advantage-of-trumps-time-in-office/
“The Trump administration is the most friendly toward Israel since the state was founded. In this administration, there isn’t a single official who is problematic for Israel,” says former Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren. “We haven’t lost bipartisan support, but it is being challenged when it comes to the question of what issue is being discussed,” he says.

There were plenty of difficult discussions between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former US President Barack Obama. In one of the last they held, Netanyahu asked for the US to recognize the Golan Heights as part of Israel. This was when the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran was being signed. Obama threw all his weight behind that deal, and Netanyahu was waging a war against it, the like of which had never been seen in the history of relations between the two countries. The battle ended with the deal being implemented but not ratified by the Senate, and a meeting was set for the two leaders in November 2015. Historian and former Israeli Ambassador to Washington Michael Oren prepared a “compensatory” list of demands for Netanyahu to present to Obama.

“At the time, I was no longer the ambassador,” Oren tells Israel Hayom.

“I was serving as an MK, but I suggested, among other things, that the US and Israel prepare a document in which they would jointly define what would be considered a violation of the nuclear deal and agree ahead of time on how the US would respond to any violations. At the end of the list, I included a request for American recognition of the Golan Heights as sovereign Israeli territory. Netanyahu brought the matter up, but Obama laughed in his face,” Oren says.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14466/palestinians-hamas-elections

New elections [the initiative of Mahmoud Abbas] are certain to result in the creation of another Hamas-controlled entity in the West Bank. The Palestinians would end up with two Hamas-run mini-states, one in the West Bank and one in the Gaza Strip.

If Fatah members are being systematically targeted and tortured by Hamas for expressing their views, how will they ever be allowed to conduct election campaigns that challenge the rulers of Hamas in the Gaza Strip?

“Hamas is not afraid of elections. In fact, it’s Abbas who’s afraid of elections because public opinion polls have shown that he and Fatah will be defeated by Hamas. Despite our mistakes, Hamas remains the conscience of the Palestinians because it does not conduct security coordination [with Israel] and does not steal the money of the people.” — Mohammed Nazzal, senior leader, Hamas.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says that he is ready to hold long-overdue presidential and parliamentary elections, and has even instructed the Palestinian Central Elections Commission to start preparing for the vote.

Abbas seems to be taking quite a gamble. There is a real possibility that his rivals in Hamas will manage to push him off the presidential throne he has been occupying so persistently for the past fourteen years.

Hamas leaders have responded by welcoming the initiative to hold new elections. The leaders say they are not afraid of elections: they are confident that their movement will win.

Hamas leaders are clearly hoping that if and when new elections are held, they would facilitate its takeover of the Palestinian Authority (PA) presidency and the Palestinian Legislative Council.