Israel is in Good Shape Because So Many Others Decided Not to Be

Barry Rubin

The more I think about Israel’s security situation at this moment, the better it looks.  Obviously, this is counter-intuitive given the media bias, academic distortions, and campaigns for sanctions of various kinds. And, of course, Israel starts from a basis of facing far more security challenges than any other modern state. Still, by Israeli standards the outlook is good.

It’ll take a while to list all of the factors so let’s get started while the inkwell is still full.

On the surface, the “Arab Spring” along with the surge of revolutionary Islamism certainly looks bad but let’s examine the shorter-term implications. By reentering a period of instability and continuing conflict within each country, the Arabic-speaking world is committing a self-induced setback. Internal battles will disrupt Arab armies and economies, reducing their ability to fight against Israel.  Indeed, nothing could be more likely to handicap development than Islamist policies.

SETTLEMENTS ARE NOT ONLY LEGAL BUT THEY ARE NECESSARY

STEVEN PLAUT: SETTLEMENTS ARE NOT ONLY LEGAL BUT THEY ARE NECESSARY

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=277144

HERE IS A PICTURE THAT PROVES THE POINT….THAT’S TEL-AVIV AS SEEN FROM THE “WEST BANK” - AND RIGHT BEHIND TEL AVIV IS THE SEA…..RSK

Settlements are not just legal, but necessary

By STEVEN PLAUT

There are no alternative effective ways to prevent the conversion of the West Bank into Hamastan.

A fascinating development this week in Israel was the release of the report of a governmental commission whose assignment had been to define the legal status of the “occupied territories” for purposes of government policy. The commission was headed by Edmond Levy, an interesting former Supreme Court justice and one of the only ones who is not a judicial activist leftist.

The Obama people are upset with the report (an indication of how good it is) and Israel’s moonbat Left is positively wetting itself in anguish.

James Crawford: The EU May Ban Imports from the West Bank

Kevin Jon Heller The Independent has the story: European governments, including Britain’s, have received legal opinion from a leading international counsel who argues they would be fully within their rights to ban trade with Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The formal opinion from James Crawford, professor of international law at Cambridge University, is likely to inject fresh momentum into campaigns in the United Kingdom and elsewhere for a ban, at a time when some EU member states are examining ways of hardening their position on the imports of settlement produce. Israeli settlements in the West Bank are considered illegal under international law, a position upheld by all EU member states.

Samoa, the West Bank of the South Pacific

the Atlantic

Under the headline, "Send Jeff Goldberg to Samoa," the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto takes issue with my "left-liberal" assertion that classifying the West Bank as part of Israel proper, rather than as occupied territory, would be a very bad thing for Israel's future as a Jewish-majority democracy:

Goldberg errs in assuming that an assertion of Israeli sovereignty over the disputed territories would necessarily be the equivalent of incorporating those territories into "Israel proper." To see why, look at the American example.

The U.S. has several unincorporated territories--insular possessions over which America exercises sovereignty but which are not part of the U.S. They are, in declining order of population (and omitting unpopulated islands), Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands.

Residents of these territories do not have the right to vote in presidential elections. They have no representation in the Senate and only a nonvoting delegate or (in the case of Puerto Rico) resident commissioner in the House.

How Birthright Changed Us

Marc Tracy

A trip to Israel connected participants to our Jewishness. But it didn't make us more politically engaged.

No. 8765

Tablet Magazine

June 26, 2012

On the final evening of our trip—in the sleepy, slightly seedy coastal city of Netanya most famous stateside for the Hamas suicide bombing that killed 30 people in 2002—I asked several participants the following, deliberately open-ended question: How did the past 10 days change your opinions of, or attitudes toward, Jewishness or Israel—if it did at all? I also asked one soldier, my Jerusalem roommate Chen Mor—a Navy man who had managed to join us for drinks—how his experience had changed his perception of Israel and American Jews.

Reading the responses, including my own, I'm struck by the extent to which Birthright seems to have worked—up to a point. It created young Jews who say they are more likely to engage with their Jewishness, and also ones with visceral connections to Israel.

On the other hand, it doesn't seem that this feeling of connection translated into political awareness. In particular, the almost total lack of discussion of the Palestinian issue seems to have disarmed participants: I wonder what they will say when they are asked, back at campus or at work, about the issue; and I wonder what they (especially someone like the second respondent, Aimée) will decide for themselves in their own research. Birthright Israel is undeniably empowering, but it may not always empower in exactly the way some of its funders would wish. But, as our guide Yoav would say, that's what makes us Jews.

Calls to Destroy Egypt's Great Pyramids Begin

Raymond Ibrahim
FrontPageMagazine.com
July 10, 2012

http://www.meforum.org/3283/destroy-egypt-pyramids

According to several reports in the Arabic media, prominent Muslim clerics have begun to call for the demolition of Egypt's Great Pyramids—or, in the words of Saudi Sheikh Ali bin Said al-Rabi'i, those "symbols of paganism," which Egypt's Salafi party has long planned to cover with wax. Most recently, Bahrain's "Sheikh of Sunni Sheikhs" and President of National Unity, Abd al-Latif al-Mahmoud, called on Egypt's new president, Muhammad Morsi, to "destroy the Pyramids and accomplish what Amr bin al-As could not."

Has the sun finally set for Egypt's Great Pyramids?

This is a reference to the Muslim Prophet Muhammad's companion, Amr bin al-As and his Arabian tribesmen, who invaded and conquered Egypt circa 641. Under al-As and subsequent Muslim rule, many Egyptian antiquities were destroyed as relics of infidelity. While most Western academics argue otherwise, according to early Muslim writers, the great Library of Alexandria itself—deemed a repository of pagan knowledge contradicting the Koran—was destroyed under bin al-As's reign and in compliance with Caliph Omar's command.

"Touching Bases"

Later today I am attending a press conference, which I hope to write about. And so here I want to briefly touch a variety of bases -- as there is so much that is transpiring.

 

~~~~~~~~~~

 

Could we possibly have expected anything else?  State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell offered this statement at a press conference:

 

"Obviously, we've seen the reports that an Israeli Government appointed panel [the Levy Committee] has recommended legalizing dozens of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, but we do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity and we oppose any effort to legalize settlement outposts...We’re concerned about it, obviously."

 

Well, "obviously."  The US is going to be pressuring the Israeli government not to accept the report.  State Department officials are scheduled to be here.

 

And so my friends, it's time for making your voices heard, please! in great numbers. 

"A Matter of Great Import"

he findings of the Levy Committee, with regard to Israel's right to build in Judea and Samaria, made news here in Israel today.  See my post on this at:

 

http://arlenefromisrael.squarespace.com/current-postings/2012/7/5/july-5-2012-what-really-counts.html  

 

The focus was on the fact that this report was turned over to the Ministerial Committee on Settlements yesterday and has been made public in its entirety.  

 

In due course, the significance of the finding of the Levy Committee -- which was composed of former High Court Justice Edmund Levy; former Foreign Ministry legal advisor Alan Baker; and former deputy president of the Tel Aviv District Court Tchia Shapira -- may be considerable. 

National Jewish Democratic Council Doesn't Speak for Me on Adelson

Alan M. Dershowitz

David Harris, the President of the National Jewish Democratic Council, has asked Jewish Democrats to sign a petition demanding that Mitt Romney and the rest of the Republican Party stop taking campaign contributions from Sheldon Adelson, and return those already received. They claim his money is "tainted." This absurd allegation comes from a highly questionable, if not totally discredited, source—namely a former employee who was fired and is suing Adelson. He claims that Adelson approved of prostitution in his Macau casinos. Harris has apparently credited this claim even though no evidence has been submitted to support it and no finding has been made by any court. Has he never heard of "due process" or the "presumption of innocence?"

Will Israel Extradite a Citizen to a Show Trial in Muslim Bosnia?

Posted by Julia Gorin

Forty-two-year-old Alexander Cvetkovic, accused of Srebrenica-related war crimes, is an Israeli citizen who is ethnically Serb. The latter usually means his chances of avoiding extradition to a Bosnian show trial aren’t good. Political expediency has been the rule governing all world governments facing Bosnian-Muslim demands for war crimes extraditions, based on dubious howls of “genocide.” So dubious that laws have been enacted in Europe to enforce the belief that extrajudicial executions of Muslim soldiers are on par with the Holocaust. 

And so the world’s political classes sit on their haunches to see if Jewish Israel passes the test and gives Muslim Bosnia what it wants. Or if, as the alternative is likely to be interpreted, Jews “still think they have the monopoly on genocide.” But if Srebrenica is the barometer, they certainly do, as will be laid out here. For now, the question is: Will Israel try to join the world club that will never have it, a club in which due process is due to all but Serbs?

srael says it won't cooperate with UNHRC settlement probe

TOVAH LAZAROFF, JPOST.COM STAFF

Three jurists appointed to fact-finding probe into Israeli settlement activity and Jewish building in east Jerusalem; Israel calls probe a "hijacking of the important human rights agenda."

Photo: REUTERS
 

Israel reiterated Friday that it would refuse cooperation with a a UN Human Rights Council fact finding mission to probe Israeli West Bank settlement activity and Jewish building in east Jerusalem.
The Geneva-based council appointed three international jurists to the mission on Friday, eliciting a rebuke from Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor.

Related:

• Israel fears UN about to announce settlement panel
• UNHRC settlement probe team to be named soon

"The fact finding mission will find no cooperation in Israel and its members will not be allowed to enter Israel and the territories. Its existence embodies the inherent distortion that typifies the UNHRC treatment of Israel and the hijacking of the important human rights agenda by non democratic countries," he said.

The three jurists are: Christine Chanet of France, Unity Dow of Botswana and Asma Jahangir of Pakistan.

“I have appointed three highly distinguished individuals to carry out the Council’s fact-finding mission to investigate the implications of Israeli settlements on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the Palestinian people in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem,” said UNHRC President Laura Dupuy Lasserre.

Nationalists’ Knesset Strength Soars in New Poll

The National Union and Jewish Home parties would win 12 Knesset seats if elections were held today, according to a new independent poll.

By Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu

MKs Hershkowitz and Katz

 

The National Union and Jewish Home parties would win 12 Knesset seats if elections were held today, according to a new independent poll.

The combined total of 12 seats is almost twice the current number and reflects a movement of nationalists from the Likud party after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu averted new elections by coaxing the center-left Kadima party to join a national unity coalition.

Rescue at Entebbe: An Interview With the Chief Pilot

idfspokesperson

Lt. Col. (res.) Joshua Shani was the lead pilot in Operation Entebbe, flying the first C-130 Hercules cargo plane with the entire rescue force on board. This week, for the 36th anniversary of the rescue operation on June 4th, he agreed to answer a few questions.

Lt. Col. (res.) Joshua Shani, Israel Air Force

Tell us a bit about your family background.

My parents lived in what is now Ukraine. Their small town was part of Poland at the time. They escaped the Nazis and ended up in Siberia, where I was born in 1945. We were refugees, wherever we were.

Soon after the war ended, my family lived in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp in Germany, which was run by the British. We were there for almost a year. And then we made our way from Germany to Israel, via France and Egypt.

My parents were lifelong Zionists and fluent in Hebrew, which they spoke to me as a baby. They were thrilled to arrive in Israel and begin a new life, never again to be refugees.

Did Arafat die of AIDS, poisoning, or something else?

http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=7066

by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik

Al-Jazeera reported this week that a Swiss lab hired to examine the clothes of Yasser Arafat found high levels of radioactive polonium. According to Al-Jazeera, while the findings are not conclusive, it could indicate that Arafat may have been poisoned. [http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/whatkilledarafat/2012/07/201273181058
734888.html]

Yasser Arafat died in November 2004 in a hospital in Paris after being treated for an unnamed illness. The French hospital never publicly disclosed the cause of death and the Palestinian Authority never released the medical records it received from the hospital.

In 2007, Ahmad Jibril, head of the PFLP-GC (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command) told Al-Manar TV (Hezbollah) that at a meeting with PA Chairman Abbas, he was told by one of the delegation that the French medical report concluded that Arafat died of AIDS:

"When [PA Chairman] Mahmoud Abbas came to Damascus, I asked: "What was found in the [medical] inquiry of the death of brother Arafat?" One [of the delegation] said: "Frankly, the French gave us the medical report, and the cause of Arafat's death was AIDS." 

Deadheads for Israel: What’s Your Problem?

July 04, 2012   Richard Landes   

The Times of Israel just ran a piece by Shaul Magid in which he berates the former counter-culture hippies of the 60s/70s who came to Israel and defend their adopted land without feeling guilty about the “Occupation” of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), of having betryaed their universalistic commitment to equality and justice into a mystical, romantic nationalism. He asks how anyone could justify such a thing?

Being one of those “60s” counter-culture types who has made Aliyah and do not feel that the “Occupation” represents an indelible moral stain on the character of Israel and its Jews, I welcome an opportunity to respond to such a challenge.

It’s the ‘spirituality,’ stupid
Shaul Magid, Times of Israel, July 2.
Some years ago I happened to notice on the “Political Views” of a Facebook “friend” living in Israel the following line: “Right on Israel, left on everything else.” The woman is a long-time ba’alat teshuva and an unreconstructed hippie from the ’60s. Her description stayed with me in part because I too was a baal teshuva and a hippie from the early ’70s who very much identified with her return to Judaism, her romantic ties to Israel, and her spiritual path, which was for the most part non-political. (I also happen to know her well and have great respect for her as a person.)

You can add me to the group. Spent over a year in the Pyrenees mountains in an abandoned farmhouse with no electricity or running water, guiding myself with Buba Rumcake’s Cookbook for a Sacred Life in the early 70s. And the Grateful Dead have always been my favorite group. (Indeed I’d say, my understanding of millennialism comes precisely from having participated in a [demotic] millennial movement, and dealt with the disappointment.)

The Authentic G-d Particle

David Wilder
July 04, 2012

This morning we were greeted with headlines explaining discovery of what is called the 'God particle.' Decades of research and millions of dollars were invested in this project, which according to an article in Fox explains that this particle 'gives things mass.' As elucidated, ""all elementary particles get their masses from their interactions with the [Higgs] field, kind of like being 'slowed down' by passing through a thick syrup,""

In other words, if I understand correctly, this syrup-particle is sort of like the glue of existence.

Interesting, significant and amusing. Why amusing? Because even a simpleton as myself, with almost no scientific background at all, could have come to the same conclusion and revealed it to the world without spending all that money. The glue of humanity, the precursor of the world as we know it, came into existence over 5772 years ago. As our Sages have taught, G-d looked into the Torah, and then created the world. The Bible, the word of G-d, is the syrup that all creation must pass through in order to have any kind of mass. For without the Torah, as is written in the above-mentioned article, "Without it, they — we — would zip around frantically at the speed of light, too foot-loose to form atoms." In other words, humanity would be lost, running around, chasing its shadow, so to speak, without being able to take any real, relevant, substantial form. That is what Torah, the Bible, the word of G-d, gives us.

Who 'Lost' Egypt?

• Frank Gaffney
   

In the past, American presidential campaigns have featured bitter recriminations over foreign policy reverses. Harry Truman was charged with having “lost China” following the take-over of the Chinese mainland by Mao Tse-Tung’s communists. In subsequent years similar formulations were used to challenge those responsible for the loss to the Free World of Vietnam, Iran and post-Soviet Russia.

Today, the question for voters in the 2012 election to ponder might be posed as “Who lost Egypt?” To make matters worse, it is likely that the losses won’t stop there.


Indeed, before it’s over, we may well see nearly all the Middle East fall under the sway of the team President Obama has helped come to power in Cairo – the Muslim Brotherhood, to the grave detriment of the people most immediately affected, of Israel and of our interests, there and here.


To be sure, it is unclear at the moment exactly how things will shake-out in Egypt. The Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party succeeded in having its candidate, Mohammed Morsi, elected president in recent weeks and installed in that office on Saturday. But the Egyptian military continues to be very much a force to be reckoned with and the extent and timing of any formal relinquishing of its current control of virtually all aspects of the government – from the armed services to the many industries they own to the parliament and constitution-writing mechanisms – remains to be seen.

We're Unoccupied‏

MyRightWord


Reported in Hebrew (English later in the day but here's the gist):-

Superior Court Judge retired, Edmond Levy, who heads the Committee to examine the state of construction in Judea and Samaria, ruled yesterday the findings of the committee's report that "under international law, Israelis possess the legal right to settle in Judea and Samaria, and at the least in the areas under Israel's control by virtue of agreements with the PA and therefore the establishment of settlements in itself does not suffer from illegality".

In the findings of the report, transmitted to the Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, wrote Levi that "after examining the work of the Committee and considering all things heard and learned, the fundamental conclusion is that from the perspective of international law, the laws of 'occupation' do not apply, due to historical circumstances and legal details, to the Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria for decades . In addition, the Fourth Geneva Convention regarding the transfer of population does not apply and was not intended to apply for settlement such as that of Israel and Judea and Samaria ".

Al-Jazeera suggests Arafat poisoned by Israel

Every once in a while, the Arab media brushes off the blood libel that Israel poisoned Arafat and tries to make hay out of it. Al-Jazeera has done it again.

Arafat's widow provided Al Jazeera with his clothing and toothbrush for laboratory testing at the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland. “I can confirm to you that we measured an unexplained, elevated amount of unsupported polonium-210 in the belongings of Mr. Arafat that contained stains of biological fluids,” Al Jazeera quoted Dr. Francois Bochud, the director of the institute as saying.

According to the report, Russian spy-turned-dissident Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London in 2006 under suspicious circumstances, was found to have been poisoned with polonium slipped into his tea.

Egypt under Islamists

by Mudar Zahran
July 3, 2012

Since the US Administration insisted early on that the Muslim Brotherhood be invited to the Cairo speech and presented with the choicest seats there – all in direct violation of the wishes of then-President Hosni Mubarak, who ultimately refused even to attend the speech – all options but surrender seem to have been off the table, not only in the Middle East, but in Russia, China and South America as well.

When Mohammad Morsi, a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood, won the presidential elections in Egypt on June 24, he addressed the Egyptian nation, promising he would "be a president for all Egyptian, Muslims and Christian, men and women." As the Muslim Brotherhood has a history of double-talk and hostility against all forms of opposition, however, why would the Muslim Brotherhood president act any differently from the organization with which he is affiliated?

The Muslim Brotherhood is not only financially capable, but, according to Egyptian researcher Nadine Farag, has provided social services, such as food to the poor, in exchange for public support.
The same pattern might have continued as well during Morsi's campaign: according to CNN, Morsi's contender, Shafik, and his campaign members filed several complaints with Egypt's Supreme Presidential Election Commission, alleging that the Muslim Brotherhood's supporters had been bribing voters with "large sums of money and food" to back Morsi; accused him of using "intimidation, threats and violence" against supporters of the candidate Ahmed Shafik, and accusing the Brotherhood of ballot fraud.