RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271456/abbas-deceit-joseph-puder

Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, has denied U.S. claims that the Palestinians have refused to enter peace talks with Israel according to the Associated Press (September 21, 2018). This is the same Mahmoud Abbas, who like his predecessor Yasser Arafat, walked out of peace negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. Mahmoud Abbas has done nothing but evade bilateral negotiations with Israel while incessantly repeating the longstanding irredentist demands.

Palestinians, it seems, have much greater concerns to attend to than worry about President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Mahmoud Abbas’ (Abu Mazen) leadership has been less than an inspiring. His presidency of the Palestinian Authority (PA) ended in January, 2009, and he has not called for elections since. January, 2019 will mark the 10th year that Abbas has held the office of President of the PA without a mandate from the people. Worse yet, Abbas’ Fatah party was kicked out of the Gaza Strip in 2007 by Hamas, which won a parliamentary majority in 2006. The autocratic Abbas, in the words of Palestinian civil and human rights activist, Bassem Eid, “represents only his wife and three sons.”

Mahmoud Abbas is responsible for failing to accept the generous peace deal offered to him in 2008 by the dovish Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In a New York Times article (June 11, 2011), former PM Olmert said that he and Abbas were very close to a peace deal two years earlier. Abbas however hesitated, and Olmert was then beset by legal troubles, as well as the Gaza war between Hamas and Israel, all which caused their talks to end.

In his memoirs published by Israel’s daily Yediot Ahronot, and in an interview with the New York Times, Olmert revealed that the two sides had agreed on key principles: the state of Palestine would have no military; an American-led international security force, not Israeli soldiers, would be stationed on its border with Jordan; Jerusalem would be shared, with the holy sites overseen by a multinational committee; and a limited number of Palestinian refugees would be permitted back into what is now Israel, while the rest would be generously compensated. The two agreed that Israel would keep some land in the West Bank on which settlements had been built, but disagreed on how much. Abbas failed to grab the best possible deal he was offered to make peace and establish a Palestinian state.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/six-palestinians-die-in-clashes-at-gaza-israel-border-1538158029

TEL AVIV—At least seven Palestinians were killed in clashes with Israeli security forces on the Gaza-Israel border Friday, after militant group Hamas issued calls for bigger protests amid growing frustrations over stalled cease-fire talks with its neighbor.

Among the dead were a 14-year-old boy, a 15-year-old boy and an 18-year-old man, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, which said at least 506 people were injured.

The Israeli military said none of its soldiers were injured by Palestinians who hurled grenades, explosive devices and stones at its soldiers across the fence. The military said it also carried out two airstrikes in the northern Gaza Strip in response to violence directed at its soldiers.

Around 20,000 Palestinians gathered in several parts along the border fence between Gaza and Israel after Hamas called for protests on mosque loudspeakers and the radio, according to Israel’s military. More than 10,000 had gathered on the fence last Friday.

Demonstrations on the Gaza-Israel border have picked up in the past two weeks, sometimes turning deadly as protesters have clashed with Israel’s security forces. More than a thousand Palestinians have participated in nightly demonstrations, rather than just the weekly Friday protests held over the past six months.

A fragile cease-fire in early August, which ended intense bouts of fighting between militants in Gaza and Israeli forces, has largely held as the United Nations and Egypt have mediated talks for a longer-term truce. Cairo is also pushing for a political agreement between rivals Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, which largely governs Palestinians in the West Bank.

Israeli security officials attributed the increased protests to a breakdown in negotiations between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Hamas officials said Israel is delaying any longer-term peace deal, but they also slammed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s speech at the U.N. on Thursday, in which he said he would not be responsible for the consequences if there is no agreement with Hamas. Many in Israel and the Palestinian territories interpreted Abbas’s statement as a veiled warning that he’d cut all funding for the embattled Gaza Strip, which he has threatened to do in past speeches.

Mr. Abbas said talks with Hamas could come to a close over the next several days.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271413/israels-lessons-two-historical-events-joseph-puder

This month (September, according to the Hebrew calendar) marks the anniversary of two major historical events in the Middle East. Both of these events have had major repercussions on the region and in Israeli-Palestinian relations. Forty-five years ago, on October 6, 1973, the armies of Egypt and Syria launched an attack on Israel during the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. Israeli military intelligence cautioned against a rush to war. Major-General Zaira, Israel’s Chief of Intelligence, with an over-confident attitude, dismissed reports of Egyptian forces concentrating along the Suez Canal front as the same old Egyptian maneuvers. Prime Minister Golda Meir, conscious of what might be the western reaction to Israeli military mobilization, and in particular, wary of a negative U.S. reaction, declined to order full mobilization, even when the Mossad Chief Zvi Zamir brought her a tip from an Egyptian double-agent (President Sadat’s son-in-law) that the Egyptians would attack on Yom Kippur. As a consequence of the delay in Israel’s mobilization, and Egypt’s surprise attack, the Israeli fortification along the Suez Canal fell, albeit after a heroic fight by the defenders. The lack of preparedness on the part of Israel as a result of over-confidence stemming from the Six-Day War, cost the lives of almost 3,000 Israeli soldiers. Ultimately, Israel triumphed in spite of the early setbacks.

Twenty five years ago, on September 13, 1993, the Oslo Accords were formally signed on the White House lawn, with a grinning President Bill Clinton overseeing the historical handshake between Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman. The signing of the Oslo Accords launched what we now know as the “peace process.”

https://bit.ly/2N1nMZ6

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Jewish State is not facing an Arab demographic time bomb; but, benefits from a robust Jewish demographic tailwind of births and net-immigration.

For example, between 1995 and 2017, the number of Israeli Jewish births surged by 74%, from 80,400 to 140,000, while the number of Israeli Arab births grew by 19% during the same period – from 36,000 to 43,000 births.

Moreover, contrary to conventional wisdom, the trend of Israeli emigration has slowed down. Thus, the number of Israelis staying abroad for over a year was expanded by 6,300 in 2016 (the lowest in ten years – a derivative of the growth of Israel’s economy), compared to 8,200 in 2015 and 14,200 additional emigrants in 1990. At the same time, Israel’s population surged from 4.8 million in 1990 to 8.8 million in 2018.

Since the end of the 19th century, the Jewish-Arab demographic balance has systematically defied the demographic establishment’s assessments and projections.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13029/hamas-rejection

When Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad talk about “paying a political price,” they are referring to demands that the Palestinian terrorist groups lay down their weapons, halt terrorist attacks on Israel, and abandon their dream of eliminating Israel. These are terms, of course, to which no Palestinian terrorist group could ever afford to agree.
Accepting such conditions would make them look bad in the eyes of their supporters, who would then accuse them of betraying the Arabs and Muslims by failing to fulfill their promise of destroying Israel. As far as these groups are concerned, keeping their weapons is tremendously more important than improving the living conditions of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
To be clear: when the Palestinian terrorist groups talk about “resistance,” they are referring to terror attacks on Israel. These include suicide bombings, launching rockets towards Israel, and hurling explosive devices and firebombs at Israeli soldiers and civilians. These groups do not believe in any form of peaceful and non-violent protests. For them, there is only one realistic option to achieve their goal of destroying Israel: the armed struggle.
Why are the Palestinian terrorist groups conducting indirect talks with Israel to reach a new truce agreement in the Gaza Strip under the auspices of Egypt and the UN? The answer is simple. They want a truce, or period of calm, so that they can continue preparing for the next war against Israel without having to worry about Israeli military operations.

What does Hamas, the Palestinian terror group that rules the Gaza Strip, mean when it says that it “won’t pay any political price” in return for a truce agreement with Israel? Answer: No to recognizing Israel, no to abandoning the dream of eliminating Israel, and no to disarming.

In recent weeks, several Hamas leaders and spokesmen have repeatedly been quoted as saying that their group will not make any political concessions as part of a truce deal with Israel. The statements came as Egypt and the United Nations continue their effort to reach a truce that would end the ongoing violence along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel.

“We want a decision to end the blockade on the Gaza Strip,” Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said in a recent speech marking the 30th anniversary of the establishment of his group. “Any understandings that are reached to end the blockade will not be in return for a political price.”

Haniyeh’s remarks were echoed by several Hamas leaders and officials belonging to Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ,) the second largest terrorist group in the Gaza Strip.

In an interview with the Gaza-based Al-Istiklal newspaper, senior PIJ official Nafez Azzam claimed that the Egyptians and the UN were recently close to achieving a truce deal that does not require the Palestinian terrorist groups to “pay a political price.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/a_tribute_to_the_israeli_defense_forces.html

The Israel Defense Forces are so much more than the picture of raw power perceived in news stories and war-centered history books. The IDF functions on a daily basis employing stealth and deception in the battle against Israel’s unremitting enemies.

Pre-1967, the state and military were perceived as underdogs fighting the good fight against all odds. The devastating effectiveness and efficiency with which the IDF knocked out and embarrassed Arab armies changed the perception of the IDF and the Jewish people into a conquering military machine. The success was so decisive that it altered the mindset of the Jewish people from ragtag refugees and the world’s piñata into a “don’t mess with me” poster child. Jews are now tough and invincible.

Centuries-long persecutions of the Jewish people, the Enlightenment culminating in the Holocaust, paved the way for implementing the revolutionary thinking called Zionism. A homeland by legal authority, defended by a Jewish army, morphed into a political ideology, then a state. Yet there is room for those who also believe in diplomacy, democracy, and prayer.

Security and safety are the central missions, but the IDF is also the vehicle to assimilate and acculturate refugees, immigrants, and native residents of other races and faiths. The IDF accepts people from disparate cultures arriving from the far corners of the world…white, black, brown, religious and secular, Jew, Bedouin, Arab, Christian, or Druze, educated and illiterate, survivors and sabras. They meet in IDF tents, on IDF training grounds. Their lives literally depend on one another.

It’s the IDF that is responsible for the Jewish condition today that among the world’s 65M refugees, there is not one Jew for the first time in 2,000 years. Yoav Limor and Ziv Koren offer the best examination of the IDF in their new book, Snapshot: The IDF as Never Seen Before. “Either [the IDF] is fighting, or else it is preparing for war.” In between battles, “the purpose of this state is to carry out quiet activity to eliminate the enemy’s capabilities and prevent an all-out war.” Special units travel the world and inside the country to fulfill this mission against unremitting enemies.