#MLA17 The boycott resolution fails (79 for, 113 against) and the anti-boycott resolution passes (101 for, 93 no). #MLABoycott17 For shame!

— MLAMJP (@MLAM4JP) January 7, 2017

#MLABoycott17 Considering how white that room was...I'm not surprised at how it turned out. Excluding bodies of color is an old tactic.

— BlaQ.Heart (@AgentMFReportin) January 7, 2017

This will not be an academic conference in any real sense of the word. It is, from the outset, a hate-fest of international anti-Zionist, anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric and distortion. It is totally without balance.
Some of those 45 participants will be more vehement in their criticism of Israel, but none, so far as is known, is wholly without some degree of association with bias. How do we know this? First, because a significant majority of the participants have made no secret of their support for the boycott of Israeli academics.
For more than 3,000 years, the "original 'aboriginal' inhabitants" were the Jews – along with Ethiopians, Nubians, Carthaginians, Phoeneicians, and eventually the Romans, Christians and eventually several Arab Muslim imperialists, culminating in the Ottoman Turks. The Jews were the people who inhabited Canaan; the Jews are why Judaea is named Judaea. An Arab "Palestine", bluntly, never existed. If the Jews do not belong in Israel, then the Europeans do not belong in New Zealand, Australia or North and South America.
Prominent at Southampton, and again planning to address the conference, were some of the leading academic activists working both in the universities and outside for the destruction of Israel, regardless of whether that means the expulsion or genocide of the country's Jewish population.
In "Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust," Richard Falk compared some Israeli policies with regard to the Palestinians to the Nazi record of collective punishment, warning (unbelievably) that Israel may be planning a Holocaust in the same way Nazi Germany did. It is arguable that he has done more than any other figure to inspire loathing for Israel worldwide.
This conference is an outright attack on everything academic work is about. Many are already protesting in the hope that UCC can be persuaded to recognize the threat to scholarship that such a conference poses for academic teachers and researchers everywhere.

Spain’s Valencia region reportedly adopted a boycott against Israel as its official policy.
A vote on Israel at the Provincial Council of Valencia, a semi-autonomous region with over 250 municipalities and 2.5 million inhabitants, took place during a general assembly on Dec. 29, according to the local faction of the far-left party València en Comú, which submitted the motion with other far-left factions.
“Today the Provincial Council of Valencia declared itself a free space from Israeli apartheid,” a party spokesman wrote on its official Facebook page.
The approved motion, the statement read, was co-written by the local branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, or BDS, and party deputy Roberto Jaramillo Martínez. Boycott promoters celebrated the vote as a major victory.
“It is a grand success for the Palestinian cause,” the statement also read, vowing to “keep on fighting until Palestine is free.” On Twitter, Martinez’s party also said the motion passed “unanimously.” It provided no additional information about the vote.

State Department spokesman John Kirby was grilled Friday by Associated Press reporter Matt Lee on why the U.S. abstained from a United Nations Security Council vote last month on a resolution condemning Israel rather than voting either for or against the measure.
“If you support the resolution enough to allow it go through, why didn’t you just vote ‘yes?'” Lee asked.
Kirby said that he did not want to reopen debate on the abstention but added that Secretary of State John Kerry still supported the decision.
“Why isn’t an abstention a cop out here?” Lee asked. “You allowed it to go through, yet you didn’t vote because you clearly, it would seem that you supported it because you didn’t veto it. So why not take a stand for what you apparently believe in and vote ‘yes,’ or ‘no’ if you disagree with it?”
Kirby referred to an explanation put out by the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power.
“You talk about leadership and taking an active role, and you essentially vote present. That doesn’t seem to be taking a leadership position,” Lee responded.

President Obama came into office determined to create more “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel. But, as was evident from his first days in office until his parting shot at the United Nations Security Council last month, he was particularly obsessed with Israeli settlements. Though defenders of the administration’s abstention on a vote declaring the Jewish presence beyond the June 1967 lines illegal claim there was continuity between this stand and those of Obama’s predecessors, the fact remains the president’s position on settlements was a departure from that of the man he succeeded. As Elliott Abrams wrote last week in National Review, the key difference between the last two presidents with respect to Israel was Obama’s decision to treat George W. Bush’s 2004 letter to Ariel Sharon as null and void.
The Bush letter was forgotten for the last eight years, but with an incoming Republican administration that wants better relations with Netanyahu, it now provides a clear path forward for President-elect Donald Trump.
As Abrams points out, the genius of the letter was matched by the stupidity of Obama’s substituted position. The letter conceded the obvious in that the U.S. acknowledged that any peace deal with the Palestinians must also recognize the changes on the ground since the 1967 Six Day War. The U.S. recognized that the major settlement blocs and Jewish neighborhoods built in East Jerusalem—most of which were decades old even then—would remain part of Israel. The letter assured Israel that Washington would not oppose growth in those areas either in the form of new housing projects, “natural” population increases due to births, or people moving into existing housing. In exchange for this and a U.S. declaration that the Palestinian refugee problem would have to be solved by a putative Palestinian state and not in Israel (the negation of the so-called “right of return”), then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon agreed not to incentive settlement outside of those areas.
The Bush letter not only set in motion the train of events that led to Sharon’s withdrawing every soldier, settler, and settlement from Gaza. It also put in place a blueprint for a peace deal in which the Palestinians could have their state in the rest of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, made just such an offer in 2008 and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas refused even to consider it.

Israel on Friday suspended about $6 million in funding to the United Nations to protest a Security Council resolution demanding an end to settlements in the West Bank.
The council adopted the resolution last month after the United States refrained from using a veto to block the measure in a break from its usual practice of shielding its Middle East ally.
The cut to Israel’s $40 million annual contribution to the United Nations represented the portion of the UN budget allocated to four committees on Palestinian issues, the Israeli mission said.
“It is unreasonable for Israel to fund bodies that operate against us at the UN,” Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon said in a statement.
“We seek to stop the practice where the UN is used solely as a forum for unending attacks against Israel.”
Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, holds up a Bible as he speaks to the UN Security Council after it passed an anti-settlement resolution, December 23, 2016 (Courtesy: UN)
Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, holds up a Bible as he speaks to the UN Security Council after it passed an anti-settlement resolution, December 23, 2016 (Courtesy: UN)
The announcement came a day after the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted in favor of a measure condemning the UN stance and chastising President Barack Obama’s administration for abstaining in the Security Council vote.

The Israeli government is in touch with the incoming Trump administration about the formulation of an American-proposed UN Security Council resolution that would “recognize Israel’s right to build in the Judea and Samaria regions as long as there is no peace deal” with the Palestinians, Israel’s deputy foreign minister said on Friday, according to the Hebrew news site nrg.
“The recent Security Council decision was very bad and put Israel in a not good position,” Hotovely was quoted as saying in reference to the anti-settlement Security Council resolution that was passed last month due to the abstention of the Obama administration. “Incoming President Donald Trump has made clear he does not plan to force agreements on us. Also, he has given us two promises. One is moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and we believe this will lead to other embassies being moved to Jerusalem. The second is the US will veto any anti-Israel matter. For us, this is a lot.”
The Israeli UN delegation did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday from The Algemeiner about the potential US-proposed Security Council resolution mentioned by Hotovely.

On Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to condemn the recent United Nations Security Council resolution targeting Israel, and implicitly rebuked the Obama administration for failing to veto its passage. By a tally of 342-80, including 60 percent of Democrats, the House declared that “The United States Government should oppose and veto future United Nations Security Council resolutions that seek to impose solutions to final status issues, or are one-sided and anti-Israel.” A similar bipartisan resolution is currently being circulated in the Senate.
“Allowing such a one-sided resolution to pass at this moment sent the wrong signal to our ally Israel, to Israel’s enemies and to the world,” Democratic House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer said. “It’s time to repair the damage done by this misguided hit job at the UN,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said in an impassioned speech. “It’s time to rebuild our partnership with Israel and reaffirm our commitment to her security. And it’s time to show all of our allies that, regardless of the shameful events of last month, the United States remains a force for good.”
These bipartisan congressional efforts—like AIPAC’s September letter signed by 88 senators calling on the administration to oppose “one-sided” U.N. action against Israel—signify that the traditional pro-Israel center continues to hold in American politics, despite eight years of strain from the right and left. As Politico put it, “That so many Democrats and Republicans joined to condemn the U.N. resolution once again underscored the depth of the bipartisan support for the Israeli government in Congress.”
Once again, however, the frayed edges of this consensus were also on display. On the one hand, some Republican lawmakers took issue with the House resolution’s commitment to a two-state solution. “I can’t vote for the resolution when we are advocating what Joel 3 says will bring judgment down upon our nation for trying to partition Israel,” said Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert. (Somewhat similar, if less biblical, objections were raised by some prominent Republican Senators who declined to sign AIPAC’s September letter.) On the other side of the aisle, the liberal Zionist lobby J Street lobbied hard against the House resolution, and two-thirds of its endorsees voted against it, including DNC chair candidate Keith Ellison.

Friends of Israel cheered a resolution passed yesterday in the House of Representatives condemning the most recent United Nations Security Council’s attack on the Jewish state. It sent an implicit rebuke of President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, who allowed the resolution to pass by abstaining rather than vetoing, and a warning to the international community that, in 2017, Washington was prepared to push back hard against any further anti-Israel bias at the UN. Even more importantly, the House resolution (like a similar Senate resolution that has yet to be voted on) had the backing of majorities of both Republicans and Democrats.
But there is still plenty for the pro-Israel community to be worried about. While Republicans backed the resolution by a resounding 233-4 margin, Democrats were split on it. In the final tally, 109 members of the minority party were in favor of the resolution and 76 opposed it. Though many, if not most of those who opposed it claim to be friends of Israel (including conservative Republican Representative Louie Gohmert, who felt its language was not pro-Israel enough to suit him) but would not vote for anything that could be construed as criticism of Obama, the schism within the Democratic caucus illustrated the current state of the party with respect to the Jewish state.
The most prominent “no” vote belonged to Representative Keith Ellison, who remains the leading candidate for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. Ellison tried to amend the resolution to say that Congress affirmed that it was the “longstanding practice” of the U.S. to stand against anti-Israel resolutions at the UN. But his version failed to condemn the one that did pass, which put the blame for the lack of peace on Israel and essentially branded several hundred thousand Jews living in the West Bank and Jerusalem as outlaws. UNSC 2334 was a betrayal that, if Israeli reports are correct, was not merely acquiesced to by Obama and Kerry but the result of their active plotting.
Though Ellison and leftist Jews who have become his chief apologists keep insisting that he’s a friend of the Jewish state, the House vote was a potential turning point in his effort to capture the post that would make him his party’s boss until it nominates a presidential candidate in 2020. By refusing to stand against a measure that was not only biased but removed any incentive for the Palestinians to make peace, Ellison’s DNC candidacy is now, more than ever, a referendum on how Democrats feel about Israel.

The Obama chapter in American foreign policy ends like the climax of an action movie—with a fireball growing in the distance and filling the screen as a man in silhouette approaches in slow motion and then veers off camera. Barack Obama has set the Middle East on fire, and now it's spreading.
The Obama administration's nuclear agreement with Iran has emboldened the world's leading state sponsor of terror, which now makes war openly in four Arab states (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen) and is a growing threat to Israel and Saudi Arabia. The deal with Tehran that Obama boasts of as his signature foreign policy initiative guarantees, as the president himself acknowledged, that Iran will have an industrial-scale nuclear weapons program within 15 years.
After a 40-year absence from the Middle East, Russia has returned to the region, where it bombs Syria's schools and hospitals as America and Europe watch helplessly. Washington's traditional regional allies are scrambling to adjust to the new reality, which for the likes of Israel, Jordan, and Turkey means an opportunistic power on their borders that is allied with their existential enemies.
For Europe, the millions seeking refuge from the conflagration are agents of potential instability on the continent in the years to come; some in their midst are terrorists plain and simple. In just four years, or one presidential term, a civil uprising that started in Syria became a great Middle Eastern war over a host of sectarian, religious, and political hostilities dating back centuries.
Critics and even admirers of the president say that Syria will be a stain on his record. But that's not how Obama sees it. The death and suffering of so many undoubtedly pains him, as he says. He says he wonders if he could have done anything else. Of course he could have, but he believed he had better reasons not to.

Theresa May was “blindsided” by the Foreign Office over Britain’s support for the United Nations resolution on settlements, a senior Tory MP has suggested.
The comments represent the latest twist in a diplomatic saga provoked by the Security Council motion describing the West Bank and East Jerusalem as “occupied” and settlements as having “no legal validity”.
The US and the UK, which abstained and backed the motion respectively, faced the brunt of Jerusalem’s anger – with Israeli officials claiming the latter helped draft the motion and then pushed for it to be brought back to the table when Egypt abandoned it.
Mike Freer, MP for Finchley and Golders Green, said the “drip-drip of anti-Israel bias” from the UN “legitimises those seeking to delegitimise Israel” and vowed to push for it to be overturned.
But writing in Jewish News, he speculated the latest resolution could end up doing Israel a “favour” by creating circumstances which “might just cause the UN to adopt a more balanced approach, to reassess what it’s purpose is” or risk the UK and the Trump administration joining forces to penalise the body they are major funders to.

Jewish groups, led by the Zionist Federation, are to mount a protest this weekend against the UK’s support for the United Nations resolution demanding that Israel stops building settlements in the Occupied Territories.
The ZF is calling for supporters to “come and stand against the UNcredible”, with the organisation labelling Britain’s vote for the resolution as an “endorsement of UN bias”.
The rally is planned to take place at 2pm at a location in London, on Sunday.
A spokesman for the ZF said that 300 people were expected to attend. Colonel Richard Kemp, a former UK commander in Afghanistan and a strong supporter of Israel, is due to speak.
Other speakers will include Jonathan Arkush, president of the Board of Deputies, Simon Johnson of the Jewish Leadership Council and Paul Charney, the chairman of the Zionist Federation.

Moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem would cause “an explosion” in the region and have a detrimental effect on Israel’s relationships with Jordan and Egypt, outgoing US Secretary of State John Kerry said over the weekend.
In an interview with CBS News on Friday, Kerry said the move promised by President-elect Donald Trump would cause “an explosion, an absolute explosion in the region, not just in the West Bank, and perhaps even in Israel itself, but throughout the region.”
It would also “have profound impact on the readiness of Jordan and Egypt to be able to be supportive and engaged with Israel as they are today,” he warned.
Kerry also said any alternative to the two-state solution “would be extraordinarily dangerous for Israel, our friend… The simple reality is you cannot be unitary — one state — with more non-Jews than Jews and remain a democracy or a Jewish state. It’s impossible. You can’t do it.”

Should the US embassy be moved to Jerusalem, the Middle East will enter a "crisis no one will be able to overcome," official Palestinian news agency Wafa quoted Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as saying Friday.
"We heard a lot of statements relating to moving the US embassy, which we hope are not correct and will not be implemented, but if implemented then the peace process in the Middle East, and even peace in the world, will be in a crisis we will not be able to come out from."
"We say to those who said it, and this is the US President-elect Donald Trump, we invite you to visit Palestine, especially Bethlehem, next year, and that this statement is not on your agenda because any statement or position that will disrupt or alter the status of Jerusalem is a red line that we will not accept it.
"Some people in the past talked about this subject and did not do anything,” he added. “So we hope the US administration does not move the embassy, and to implement UN resolution 2334, which it did not object to nor did use its veto against him, and thus it had approved the resolution, which had international consensus," Abbas stated.

One of Charlie Hebdo’s most outspoken journalists said on Friday she is quitting the French satirical magazine because it has gone soft on Islamist extremism.
Zineb El Rhazoui accused the weekly of bowing to Islamist extremists and no longer daring to draw the Prophet Muhammad.
Her parting shot comes on the eve of the second anniversary of the jihadist massacre that almost wiped out the controversial magazine’s staff.
“Charlie Hebdo died on January 7” 2015, the day the gunmen attacked the magazine killing 12 people, El Rhazoui said in a damning interview with AFP.
She said she felt Charlie Hebdo now follows the editorial line the extremists had demanded “before the attack — that Muhammad is no longer depicted.”

The year 2016 was the deadliest in the history of suicide terrorism, an Israeli think tank said, with 469 suicide bombings carried out by 800 perpetrators in 28 countries, causing the deaths of about 5,650 people.
Islamic State was the leading perpetrator of suicide bombings worldwide, being directly or indirectly responsible for approximately 70 percent (322) of the attacks, according to statistics compiled by the Terrorism and Low Intensity Conflict Research Program at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).
As the terror group loses territory, “it appears that suicide terrorism will be a key tool for the Islamic State in consolidating its image as invincible, creating deterrence against its enemies, and taking revenge for the international activity against it,” the think tank said Thursday.
“The Islamic State’s partners and other terrorist groups will also likely redouble their efforts to carry out mass casualty large-scale terrorist attacks.”

Israel on Friday returned to the Palestinian Authority (PA) the bodies of two terrorists who carried out attacks in Hevron four months ago, Army Radio reported.
One of the terrorists is 25-year-old Hatem Shaludi, who stabbed a soldier and lightly wounded him. The second is Mohammed Rajabi, a 16-year-old terrorist who tried to stab a soldier.
The two terrorist attacks occurred two days apart and both were shot by IDF forces.
The Israeli government had at one point promised to stop the transfer of terrorists’ bodies to the PA, though this would not be the first time that Israel has done so after promising to cease the practice.
The policy was an issue of contention between former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, who in the past argued that the return of terrorists’ bodies to their families prevents escalations, and Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan, who has opposed such transfers.

Around 1,500 Arabs attended on Saturday the funerals of two terrorists who were killed by IDF troops last year.
The funerals were held in the mixed Jewish-Arab city of Hevron.
The terrorists,Hatem Shaludi, 25, and Mohammed Rajabi, 16, were shot dead after carrying out separate stabbing attacks against IDF soldiers in Hevron.
Mourners attending the terrorists' funerals carried pictures of the deceased, Palestinian national flags and banners of various Palestinian groups,including the Islamist militant movement Hamas.
The terrorists' bodies were returned to their families on Friday, despite the fact that Hamas has not yet returned the bodies of IDF soldiers Lieutenant Hadar Goldin and Sergeant Oron Shaul, who were killed and kidnapped in Operation Protective Edge.

High-ranking Israeli officials and journalists alike have occasionally found themselves amazed at the waves of curses and vicious invective that Egyptian officials unleash when asked for their views on Hamas. In one recent encounter, a former IDF Southern Command chief had to calm one of his Egyptian counterparts, who was using particularly colorful language to express his views about high-ranking Hamas operatives in Gaza, replete with frequent allusions to their mothers.
The Egyptians have never troubled to hide their abhorrence of Hamas, particularly after President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi took office in the summer of 2013. The Egyptian army has since blocked hundreds of tunnels that were dug between Gaza and Sinai and waged all-out war against the smuggling taking place from Egypt to Gaza.
But in the new Middle East, everything is possible. It seems that the current Egyptian leadership, the bitter enemy of the Muslim Brotherhood (which it ousted, and of which Hamas is a subsidiary), has decided to change its behavior toward Hamas. This decision stems not from any sudden affection on Egypt’s part for Hamas, but rather from Egypt’s hatred of the Islamic State terror group.
This change in direction, which is already visible on the ground, has Israel concerned. Suddenly the Egyptians are opening the Rafah Border Crossing, including for the entry of merchandise. This week, high-ranking Hamas operatives said that former Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, the incoming chief of its political wing, was planning a visit to Cairo in the near future — a dramatically symbolic step.

The newly appointed vice president of Venezuela is suspected by American intelligence of drug smuggling as well as close ties to Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah, Business Insider reported Thursday.
The appointment of Tareck El Aissami, formerly the governor of Aragua state, means that if he could become the country’s president if the increasingly-embattled Nicholas Maduro is recalled or steps down.
While serving as interior minister under Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez, El Aissami reportedly participated in a program to provide Syrian terrorists with Venezuelan passports. Joseph Humire, the founder of the Center for a Secure Free Society think tank, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 2015 that El Aissami “developed a sophisticated, multi-layered financial network that functions as a criminal-terrorist pipeline bringing militant Islamists into Venezuela and surrounding countries, and sending illicit funds and drugs from Latin America to the Middle East.”

As the 50th annual CES gets underway today in Las Vegas, the world’s gadget-aficionados and tech devotees are keeping an eye on the newest technologies making debuts.
Once again, many Israeli companies are taking part in the world’s largest consumer electronics show, snagging top interest and media coverage for their novel technologies.
Intel demonstrated its Project Alloy VR headset to much hype at this year’s event – handing out barf bags to hundreds of reporters and analysts in case the gaming experience proved too much for them. The technology for the headset was created in Intel Haifa using RealSense (Israeli-developed 3D vision technology).
Consumer Physics, the Israeli makers of the SCiO device, teamed with China’s Changhong and US chipmaker Analog Devices to unveil the world’s first molecular sensing smartphone at CES.

As any pro-Israel activist will tell you, innovators from the Jewish state have invented products and technologies you use all the time, from instant-messaging technology to Waze, the crowdsourced traffic app.
Israel’s tech scene is famously thriving, with about 5,000 startups across the country. Nearly 1,500 of those are in Tel Aviv alone — that’s one startup for every 300 residents of the city, the highest ratio in the world.
A new wave of Israeli companies is inventing more technologies to improve day-to-day life, and 16 of these innovators are in Las Vegas this week to present at the Consumer Electronics Show, one of the world’s premier technology trade shows that draws more than 150,000 attendees.
From slouch-prevention technology to a device that turns any surface into a touchscreen, here are six remarkable Israeli innovations participating in the show.

As the folks on the next season of “Game of Thrones” might say, “Winter is here.”
That means it’s time to get under the covers and engage in the national pastime of binge-watching TV shows. Since Netflix pioneered the streaming model in the late 2000s, other streaming services have been popping up regularly, like Hulu and Amazon Prime, with relatively affordable streaming subscriptions and lots of viewing options.
There’s something really comforting about putting on a good show whenever you want and just relaxing — or you may want to obsessively consume an entire series in one sitting.
If you’ve already worked your way through HBO Go’s offerings and seen every Netflix Original, consider an offering from the Jewish state — Israeli TV has improved markedly over the years. Though Israel may be small in size, it has plenty of fodder for great TV: wars, terrorism, religious tensions.
These six shows draw on the inherent drama that just comes with being Israeli. Some are funny, some are painfully suspenseful, some are even terrifying — but they’re all worth watching.

The leading organization of historians in the United States won't be joining other scholarly groups harshly critical of Israel.

 A year after the American Historical Association was roiled by a controversy over resolutions that slammed Israel the Council decided not to take action on a petition filed by the same group led by historian Van Gosse.

The petition filed by Van Gosse on behalf of Historians Against War (HAW) asked the "Council to investigate the charges that academic freedom is widely violated in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories." The Council made its decision this weekend during the annual meeting of the organization.

This was the third year in a row that Historians Against War attempted to put the AHA on record against Israel's treatment of Palestinians.  The first time the group's resolution was dismissed on procedural grounds after organizers missed a deadline.  Last year a resolution was considered by the Business Meeting of the AHA and rejected in a decisive vote, 111 to 51, after a bitter fight complete with dueling advertisements in the AHA's magazine, Perspectives.

This time HAW leaders decided to bypass the Business Meeting and take the matter directly to the Council via a petition, but they met with no better success than they had in the past. The AHA has traditionally been leery of taking part in political activities not directly related to the organization's scholarly mission.

The AHA upholds the right of students and faculty to engage in nonviolent political action expressing diverse points of view on Israel/Palestine issues. We condemn all efforts at intimidation of those expressing such views. Specifically, we condemn the maintenance of blacklists, such as those on the anonymous "Canary Mission" website publicizing names, photographs, and contact information for hundreds of supporters of Palestinian rights, predominantly Arab American students.”

The AHA upholds the rights of students, faculty, and other historians to speak freely and to engage in nonviolent political action expressing diverse perspectives on historical or contemporary issues. We condemn all efforts to intimidate those expressing their views. Specifically, we condemn in the strongest terms the creation, maintenance, and dissemination of blacklists and watchlists—through media (social and otherwise)—which identify specific individuals in ways that could lead to harassment and intimidation.

For decades, the Arab world specifically and the Muslim world in general has used threats as its main leverage to get the West to bend to its will. The threats aren't usually direct; most often they take the form of "if you don't do what we want, the Arab street will erupt" or "the terrorists will have an excuse." In other words, if Arab thugocracies do not get what they desire from the West, then they will be powerless to stop the irrational forces within their borders from damaging Western interests.

Since the commencement of war between Russia and Turkey, the world has several times been startled by the announcement that the "Flag of the prophet" was about to be unfurled in the streets of Stanbul. Such an event, if it should happen (which may Heaven avert), would proclaim a crusade in which all true Musslemans would be bound to take an active part and to fight against Christianity in every part of the world. They may be in India, Arabia, Egypt or wherever else their scattered race has found a home; the raising of the green standard is a call in which none may disobey without, as the Koran lays it down, sacrificing all his hopes of Paradise.
This fearful appeal to all the worst passions of the Eastern races hangs like a menace over the Mohammedan world; and if the word was once uttered and the dreadful flag unfurled, there is no telling to what sanguinary excesses it might lead an enthusiastic people.

Documents show that after deciding that the move would upset Arab opinion, Britain decided to abandon the Jewish refugees to their fate.

“His Majesty’s Government asked His Majesty’s Representatives in Cairo, Baghdad and Jeddah whether so far as they could judge, feelings in Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia against the admission of, say 5,000 Jewish children for adoption… would be so strong as to lead to a refusal to send representatives to the London discussions. All three replies were strongly against the proposal, which was not proceeded with,” a Foreign Office report said.

[A] cross-section of Palestinians outside the Old City’s Damascus Gate on Wednesday expressed overwhelming apathy.

Indeed, more than two dozen Arab passersby of all ages entering or exiting the once volatile east Jerusalem entrance either said they were unaware of the proposal or simply did not care.

Asked his reaction to the possible relocation, Hasan, a Palestinian man in his 60s, who requested his last name not be published, responded: “It does not matter to me. Why should I care about where the US Embassy is located? It does not change my life one bit.”

Fadi Kiswane, 18, who sat with several friends on the stone steps outside the historic gate, said he was unaware where the embassy was currently located.

“The US Embassy is in Tel Aviv?” he asked with genuine incredulity. “And they want to move it to Jerusalem? So what?”

Donned in a scarlet hijab, Marrah Sofian, who is training to become a secretary at an area vocational school, also said she was unaware where the embassy was located, or that there is ongoing discussion about moving it to Jerusalem.

“This is news to me,” she said. “I don’t understand why it matters though. I don’t think most residents of east Jerusalem know or care about this.”

Meanwhile, a burly Palestinian cab driver in his 40s, who refused to provide his name, brushed off the question as “stupid.”

“Don’t waste my time with such unimportant things,” he said heatedly. “I have better things to think about.”

On Friday the issue was the chief subject of religious sermons throughout the West Bank, with Palestinian Authority leadership instructing mosques it controls to focus on the matter, Israel Radio reported.

Official Palestinian television also broadcast excerpts from several such sermons, in which clerics urged their followers to wake up to the danger. One warned relocating the embassy would be an attack on the Muslim faith and against history. Another said it was an assault on Islam’s holy place and on Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Jordan's government spokesman warned on Thursday of "catastrophic" repercussions if President-elect Donald Trump makes good on a campaign promise to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to contested Jerusalem.

Such a move could affect relations between the U.S. and regional allies, including Jordan, Information Minister Mohammed Momani told The Associated Press, addressing the issue publicly for the first time.

An embassy move would be a "red line" for Jordan, would "inflame the Islamic and Arab streets" and serve as a "gift to extremists," he said, adding that Jordan would use all possible political and diplomatic means to try and prevent such a decision.

Moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem would cause “an explosion” in the region and have a detrimental effect on Israel’s relationships with Jordan and Egypt, outgoing US Secretary of State John Kerry said over the weekend.

In an interview with CBS News on Friday, Kerry said the move promised by President-elect Donald Trump would cause “an explosion, an absolute explosion in the region, not just in the West Bank, and perhaps even in Israel itself, but throughout the region.”

It would also “have profound impact on the readiness of Jordan and Egypt to be able to be supportive and engaged with Israel as they are today,” he warned.

You know as well as I do that the US has every legal and moral right to move the embassy to Jerusalem and that it does not affect the chances for peace one bit. But you claim that your people cannot stop themselves from violence if the US does something that is fully within our rights. And you imply that you cannot stop this inevitable violence.

If that is the case, then by your own admission, your people are not mature enough to be trusted to uphold a peace plan or run a state of their own. Any violence of this type would set back your cause by years.

If in fact, as reports indicate, your leaders are the ones inciting the violence as a means to pressure me, I do not take kindly to such threats. I hold you and Mahmoud Abbas personally responsible for any terror attacks that occur while your own media and your own mosques and your own textbooks are supporting hate and terror. And in this case, the evidence that your leaders have been trying to incite your people against the US Government is pretty compelling.

I am a negotiator. I like to make deals. Threatening me by claiming that your people are irrational is a negotiating tactic, and I appreciate that. But keep in mind that it cuts both ways. 

You have a choice. You can continue to act as if your people are unable to act like human beings, or you can act as if your people are human beings with responsibility for their actions. If you continue to pretend and goad your people into acting like animals, then you belong in a zoo, not a state of your own. If, on the other hand, you can demonstrate a level of maturity that is consistent with being a leader of a people who truly want independence and you stop using threats of violence to get your way, the United States - and I presume Israel - will be only too happy to negotiate with you as normal adults do.

The choice is yours. Please relay that message to Mahmoud Abbas.

Good day.

We are voluntarily underwriting an institution that — with Obama having formally boarded the anti-Israel train — is joining the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. The General Assembly, which is steered by the sharia-supremacist Organization of Islamic Cooperation, has just created a BDS database to target companies that do business with Israeli settlements in what the U.N. has declared is “Palestinian territory.”
What else is new? As UN Watch has reported, in 2015–16, the General Assembly adopted 20 resolutions condemning Israel, compared to just three against the rest of the planet — including none against such favorite U.N. human-rights havens as China, Russia, Cuba, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia.
Now consider this: There is one reason and one reason alone why the U.N. is relevant: because the United States is in it. It is not our financial support that the U.N. needs; it is our participation. The U.N. is a corrupt institution that is hostile to our interests and system of government while living off our prosperity, banking on our rule of law, and luxuriating in the very society it so routinely condemns. And we continue to legitimize it.
Basta!
Of course the United States must have robust, vibrant international relations. We need friends with common interests, and we have to deal with the hostiles. We do not need the U.N. for any of that. We do not need the U.N. at all — it needs us. And if we were out of it, we could still deal with it and support what little good it does.
It is not enough to cut off funding from a bad organization. We should disassociate from that bad organization. We should stop helping it be a consequential bad organization by denying it legitimacy. Don’t defund the U.N. Just say, “Go!”

A lot has been written about the UN Security Council resolution declaring all Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem to be illegal. Even so, there is an important point I haven’t seen made.
The West Bank was “created” by the armistice agreement of 1949 that ended Israel’s War of Independence. The agreement was brokered and monitored by the UN. It did not require any Arab recognition of Israel, nor did it require either side to give up any claims to territory on the other side of the line. It reads: “It is also recognised that no provision of this Agreement shall in any way prejudice the rights, claims and positions of either Party hereto in the ultimate peaceful settlement of the Palestine question, the provisions of this Agreement being dictated exclusively by military considerations.”
It must be remembered that when this agreement was actually in effect, it provided no legitimacy or safety to Israel. No Arab country recognized these borders. It was only when they lost the West Bank after the 1967 war (which they started) that they supported this “border.” But a border has to work both ways if it is to mean anything at all.
The armistice agreement was with Jordan, not with the Palestinians. And only two countries (Pakistan and the UK) recognized the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank as legitimate. Yes, King Hussein gave the West Bank to the Palestinians in 1988. But it was never his to give.
In passing the latest resolution, the UN has clearly reneged on the armistice agreement. So why should Israel trust the UN or any government that voted for (or abstained from) this resolution? Every conceivable “solution” to this conflict requires Israel to give up something tangible for the false promise of security and peace. The UN has broken its word to Israel time and time again.
So if no one feels obligated to keep its word with Israel, then Israel has no reason to trust any promise that the world, or the UN, makes.

Here, hot on the heels of his previous must-read article (see previous post), is Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer's latest incisive contribution.
He writes:
The US Congress has swiftly moved to rebuff the efforts by President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry to reverse long-standing American policy in relation to Israel. By a vote of 342:80 Congress resolved on 5 January 2017:
“the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 undermined the long-standing position of the United States to oppose and veto United Nations Security Council resolutions that seek to impose solutions to final status issues, or are one-sided and anti-Israel, reversing decades of bipartisan agreement”
Congress’s decision goes a long way to restoring America’s reputation and integrity.
Congress now needs to rectify Obama’s abandonment of the written commitments made to Israel by President Bush in his letter to then Israeli Prime Minister Sharon on 14 April 2004 (“Commitments”)
Congress has a vested interest in seeing those Commitments restored - because it overwhelmingly approved Bush giving those Commitments to Israel by a massive vote of 502 to 12.
Among those voting to support those Commitments was Senator Hillary Clinton.
Senator John Kerry – whilst not casting a vote in the Senate – made his position very clear to moderator Tim Russert on Meet The Press on 18 April 2004:

Moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem would cause “an explosion” in the region and have a detrimental effect on Israel’s relationships with Jordan and Egypt, outgoing US Secretary of State John Kerry said over the weekend.
In an interview with CBS News on Friday, Kerry said the move promised by President-elect Donald Trump would cause “an explosion, an absolute explosion in the region, not just in the West Bank, and perhaps even in Israel itself, but throughout the region.”
It would also “have profound impact on the readiness of Jordan and Egypt to be able to be supportive and engaged with Israel as they are today,” he warned.
Kerry also said any alternative to the two-state solution “would be extraordinarily dangerous for Israel, our friend… The simple reality is you cannot be unitary — one state — with more non-Jews than Jews and remain a democracy or a Jewish state. It’s impossible. You can’t do it.”

Yet there’s at least one area in which the Times is still in need of improvement, and that is in its coverage of Israel. The US House of Representatives voted on January 5 to approve a resolution objecting to UN Security Council Resolution 2334 as “biased against Israel” and calling for it to be repealed or fundamentally altered. The approval came on a 342-80 vote that included majorities of both Republicans and Democrats.
The Times didn’t even assign a staffer to report that news. Nor, at least as far as I can tell, was the news published in the print newspaper. The Times instead handled it only on its website, relying on a couple of Associated Press dispatches (Lawmakers Vote to Rebuke U.N. for ‘Anti-Israel’ Resolution; Israel’s Netanyahu Thanks US House for Vote to Rebuke UN).
Contrast that to the second-coming-type coverage — top-of-the-front page headlines, long editorials, multiple ecstatic op-ed pieces, wave upon wave of staff-written news articles — that accompanied the UN Security Council vote. When Israel is condemned, the Times is all over the story. Yet when the condemnation of Israel is itself condemned by a wide bipartisan majority in Congress, the Times editors don’t consider it news “fit to print.” Here’s hoping that when it comes to their failure to cover the Congressional vote in response to the UN resolution, the Times editors attempt a make-up call like the ones they did on the yeshivas and the art exhibit. It’ll be a fine test of Mr. Baquet’s promise to listen to the paper’s readers.

In an otherwise fair interview, PBS' Judy Woodruff fails to challenge or correct Ben Rhodes, President Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, on his outrageous and completely false claim that Israel has built "thousands of new settlements."
In the Dec. 23 "Newshour" interview, Rhodes falsely states:
The fact of the matter is, though, I think if you look at the map of the West Bank, if you look at the future of the two-state solution, these settlements are encroaching further and further beyond the separation barrier that the Israelis themselves built, thousands of new settlements are being constructed and, frankly, if these trends continue, it will be impossible to realize a two-state solution.
After Woodruff raises bipartisan criticism of the Obama administration's decision not to veto United Nations Security Resolution 2334 asserting that Israeli settlements have "no legal validity," Rhodes digs himself into a deeper ditch, speaking of "tens of thousands" of settlements:
Well, look, we respect, of course, friends on both sides of the aisle who have expressed different views on this. Again, I think the question is going to be when history looks at these types of decisions, when people look back and they say, you saw tens of thousands of settlements being constructed, you saw as was addressed in the resolution, incitement to violence on the Palestinian side.
According to the anti-settlement organization Peace Now, there a total of 228 settlements, including established settlements founded by the Israeli government decades ago, along with wildcat outposts considered illegal under Israeli law, founded since the 1990s' without government approval.

A truck rammed into a group of soldiers on a promenade in the Armon Hanatziv neighborhood of Jerusalem, killing at least four of them, in a vehicle-ramming attack on Sunday afternoon, police said.
Police chief Roni Alsheich called the incident a vehicular terror attack.
The soldiers were getting off a bus at the promenade, a popular tourist spot in southern Jerusalem, when a large flatbed truck ran into them.
At least 16 more people were injured, two of them very seriously, according to Jerusalem hospitals.
The four soldiers — three women and one man — who died were in their 20s, the Magen David Adom rescue service said.
According to police, the terrorist accelerated as he struck the group.

The terrorist who carried out the deadly truck ramming attack in Jerusalem on Sunday afternoon was apparently a supporter of Islamic State, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu made his comments at the scene of the attack, where he received a briefing along with Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman. Soon after visiting the site, he was scheduled to convene a meeting of the security cabinet.
“We know the identity of of the attacker , and according to all the signs he is a supporter of Islamic State,” Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu said there may be a connection between this attack and similar attacks recently in France and Berlin. “We are fighting this plague, and will defeat it,” he said.
The terrorist, identified as Fadi al-Qanbar, came from the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Jebl Mukaber. Netanyahu announced that Jebl Mukaber has been cordoned off in light off the attack, and that “we are taking other actions that I will not detail here.”
“We will overcome this terror, just as we overcame overcame other attacks,” he said. “There are a number of actions that we will not specify at this time, which we will have to take to ensure that incidents such as these do not recur.”

Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan vowed Israel would never return the body of the terrorist who carried out the truck-ramming attack in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood on Sunday.
“This was an atrocious, painful and especially serious attack which could lead to other copycat attacks,” Erdan said. “We will not allow this vile terrorist or his family to hold a funeral where he is treated with honor, encouraging other attacks.
“His body will be buried but only by the security forces and in a place to which the family and his supporters will not have access.”
The attacker was identified in media as Fadi al-Qunbar. According to reports, he spent time in an Israeli prison and worked in construction.
Construction Minister Yoav Galant, told Army Radio that Israel must deal harshly with the terrorist and his family. “The price must be demolishing homes, expelling families – even if they are Israeli citizens,” he said, “and revoking citizenship of anyone who is connected to this incident.”

A terrorist truck-ramming in Jerusalem that left four soldiers dead was inspired by the upcoming Paris peace conference, Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely said Sunday, lashing out at the international community in the wake of the attack.
Hotovely, a hawk from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, said the attack, in which an East Jerusalem man drove his truck into a group of soldiers, was proof the Palestinians were not interested in peace.
“The world has received a clear answer from the Palestinians to the peace conference coming up in Paris: More terror,” Hotovely said. “I again call on the international community to demand an end to terror and the industry of education toward it.”
Paris is slated next week to host an international conference aimed at establishing Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Israel, which only backs bilateral peace talks, has said it will not attend and panned the summit as a misguided effort.

The father of the driver of a truck that plowed into group of soldiers Sunday on a promenade in the Armon Hanatziv neighborhood of Jerusalem, killing four people and injuring 16 others, was arrested by Israeli security forces just after hours after the attack, Palestinian reports said.
Earlier, Hebrew media had reported that a large number of heavily armed Border Police officers had surrounded the terrorist’s house in the Jabel Mukabar neighborhood of East Jerusalem.
Israel Police Commissioner Roni Alsheich said there was “no prior warning” of what he labeled a vehicular terror attack.
He added that the driver sought a high victim count and had driven around the area in Armon Hanatziv to find a large group of people before plowing his truck into the group of soldiers.
Alsheich also said the terrorist was a resident of East Jerusalem.

Foreign dignitaries on Sunday afternoon rushed to condemn the vehicular terror attack in Jerusalem that killed four soldiers and injured several others.
Mere minutes after news broke of the attack, US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro tweeted, in Hebrew: “I harshly condemn the terror attack in Jerusalem in which IDF troops were killed. Condolences to the families of the deceased and prayers for recovery to those injured.”
The UK’s ambassador to Israel, David Quarrey, also took to Twitter to condemn the attack. There can “be no justification for terrorism anywhere,” he wrote, adding that his thoughts are with the victims and their families.
Australian envoy Dave Sharma condemned “unreservedly [the] vicious Jerusalem terrorist ramming attack targeting IDF soldiers.”
United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov also took to social media to express his outrage over the attack.

Security footage has emerged of the Jerusalem ramming attack in which four were killed and 13 were wounded on Sunday.
The footage shows the moments leading up to the the truck ramming into a group of Israelis visiting an observation post in the capital's Jewish neighborhood Armon Hanatziv.
Police have confirmed that the perpetrator was neutralized. Authorities suspected terror motives in the incident. Police Commissioner, Insp.- Gen. Roni Alsheich, identified the attacker as a resident of east Jerusalem.

The military trainer that shot and purportedly killed the terrorist who rammed his truck into a group of people killing four in Jerusalem's Armon Hanatziv neighborhood on Sunday claimed that IDF soldiers on the scene were hesitant to shoot due in part to the conviction of IDF soldier Elor Azaria on manslaughter charges.
The military trainer, identifying himself as Eitan, told Army Radio that "after rolling back on the grass, I saw the truck go in reverse, and then I realized that it wasn't an accident."
Eitan said, "I ran toward him and emptied my whole clip. He drove backward and onto the wounded again. I saw them quiet, some wounded and some scared. It wasn't a good scene."
Eitan said that he then began trying to evacuate the wounded and call for help.
He claimed that the soldiers who were on the scene were hesitant to shoot at the truck that slammed into the group of people. The fact that Elor Azaria was convicted of manslaughter for shooting a wounded terrorist was the reason for this hesitation, according to Eitan.
"There was hesitation to open fire. I have no doubt that this was a significant factor, because all they tell them recently is to be careful. It could be that a few minutes less of hesitation and the situation would have been better," he added.

The head of the IDF officers’ training school said that “at least two” of his cadets shot at the terrorist who rammed his truck into a group of soldiers in Jerusalem on Sunday, in the face of a claim made by a guide who opened fire himself that the troops hesitated to respond or entirely failed to do so.
The army also said there was no connection between the soldiers’ response to the truck-ramming and the recent Hebron shooting case, in which IDF soldier Elor Azaria was convicted of manslaughter for shooting dead a wounded Palestinian assailant many minutes after he was incapacitated.
After the attack, Col. Yaniv Alaluf, who commands the officers’ training course, visited the scene to conduct a preliminary investigation into the truck-ramming, in which four soldiers were killed and 16 more were injured, the army said.
Eitan Rund, a civilian tour guide who was with the soldiers and shot at the terrorist, said he felt the troops “hesitated” during the attack and blamed the Azaria case for their delay in responding.

The attack today on civilians in Jerusalem was terrible, of course, but that does not excuse Israeli soldiers from using excessive force in neutralizing the Palestinian driver. Instead of riddling him with bullets as he drove into the crowd of youths, they should have shot the truck out of his hand.
This profligate use of force by Israeli security personnel must end. I say this not to justify the alleged murders, which by the way took place on what the international community accepts as illegally occupied territory, and I am going to bring up that point at every opportunity, all the while insisting it is immaterial to the event, which of course the illegal occupation does not justify. But keep it in mind anyway.
Anyone who has been exposed to films about gun use has encountered the practice of shooting a weapon out of an attacker’s hand. It is disingenuous to argue that Israeli army and police cannot incorporate such skills in their training and engagement procedures. The fact that they have not done so raises suspicions that they care little for the human rights of a man driving a truck into a crowd, an act that I will not attempt to justify by reminding you all that Palestinians are under occupation. You just remember that on your own.
The conviction last week of an Israeli soldier in the shooting death of a disarmed and wounded Palestinian attacker further demonstrates my point. In that case, as well, if, as claimed by the soldier’s defenders and advocates, there was concern whether the disarmed man was wearing or carrying explosives, why didn’t the IDF soldier just shoot the explosives off of the man, instead of shooting him in the head? You could hardly ask for a clearer indication of this problematic dynamic than the events of the last several days. Also, remember this occurred in an area occupied by Israel since 1967.

An Israeli official in London has been caught on camera saying how he would like to “take down” anti-Israel MPs, including Foreign Office Minister Sir Alan Duncan.
Shai Masot, a political officer at the London embassy, was recorded by Al Jazeera speaking in a clearly undiplomatic manner about a number of British MPs, including Foreign Minister Boris Johnson, whom he called "an idiot."
Regarding Duncan, however, Masot said he was "doing [sic] a lot of problems," while his dinner partner said the comments "sounded like a conspiracy."
Masot was in conversation with Maria Strizzolo, a senior aide to another Conservative Minister, Robert Halfon, at a restaurant in Kensington, central London.
Strizzolo proposed "a scandal," however the pair did not elaborate in the footage released by Al Jazeera.

The Israeli ambassador to London has apologized to a UK minister after an employee was caught on film conspiring to discredit British politicians, notably Foreign Office deputy minister Alan Duncan, who is perceived as being unfriendly to Israel.
Ambassador Mark Regev had spoken with Duncan and made it clear that the remarks made in the video about UK lawmakers were “unacceptable,” embassy spokesperson Yiftah Curiel wrote in a statement posted to his Twitter account Sunday.
“The Embassy of Israel rejects the remarks concerning Minister Duncan, which are completely unacceptable; the comments were made by a junior embassy employee who is not an Israeli diplomat, and who will be ending his term of employment with the embassy shortly,” the statement said.
“Ambassador Regev on Friday spoke with Minister Duncan, apologized for the comments and made clear that the embassy considered the remarks to be completely unacceptable,” Curiel wrote.

The boastful chatter, in which Masot fished (unsuccessfully) for information on Sir Alan Duncan, Boris Johnson’s deputy at the Foreign Office, was turned into a something akin to a conspiracy to destroy Mr. Duncan by reports in the British media.
Indeed, despite the fact that Israeli embassy last night issued a formal apology and explained that his employment will end “shortly”, some media outlets framed the story as a dark Israeli “plot” against Duncan – which is quite ironic given that Duncan himself was widely criticised for a 2014 speech which evoked classic anti-Israel conspiracy theories.
As Stephen Pollard, the editor of The Jewish Chronicle, put it, “boastful idiots do not a plot make”.
The worst offenders were the Daily Mail and The Telegraph. The Daily Mail actually used the term “Israeli plot” in their headline, whilst one Telegraph report included a headline erroneously claiming that the “plot” was hatched by Ambassador Mark Regev himself.

Today’s Sunday Mail front page story is headlined “Israel plot to ‘take down’ Tory minister”.
It is based on the Al Jazeera ‘sting’ to be broadcast as part of four half-hour documentaries from 15 January.
The correct headline should be “Employee of Israel Embassy does job”. (UK Media Watch has complained). It is a non-story. But a non-story upon which the Mail’s Political Editor, Simon Walters, chooses to hang some truly vicious - but anonymous – barbs of bigotry from an ‘ex-Minister in David Cameron’s government’.
And the incident in question was not an “Israel plot.” It was a lunch where a temporary employee (not a career diplomat) of the Embassy talked to a Parliamentary aide. The type of encounter that happens every day in Westminster or Washington - or any capital city.
An Israeli employee of the Embassy – Shai Masot – is shown asking Robert Halfon’s aide to ‘take down’ Alan Duncan. ‘Take down’ is unfortunate phraseology – but all it means is to promote negative publicity about him. (Remember Masot is not a native speaker). The type of thing that happens in Westminster constantly. It is perfectly legitimate for foreign governments to attempt to lobby politicians and their aides to try to get more favourable treatment of their countries. Perfectly legitimate despite the Mail’s lame attempt to make out that Masot is working for Mossad as a spy (‘Ambitious Mr Masot’s CV has the hallmarks of a spy’).

The Daily Mail has taken a pretty big step for a UK Newspaper: they’ve run an anonymous opinion piece by a “Minister who served in David Cameron’s government”.
This comes at the end of their article unveiling the Al Jazeera hidden camera infiltration of the junior ranks of the Israeli Embassy in London.
The anonymous author claims: ”it is time to end the problem of Israel buying UK policy”. The anonymous Op-Ed begins:
Last month Theresa May, like David Cameron each year before her, spoke to the annual lunch of the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI).
She oozed praise for Israel as a democracy, spoke of the constant terrorist threat they face, and condemned the way that Palestinians supposedly incite violence and anti-Semitism.
Her own policy that considers Israeli settlements on Palestinian land illegal received only a passing mention.

The MLA, in addition to rejecting the motion, approved a separate measure that calls on the association to “refrain from boycotts.”
“It’s not only racism and anti-Semitism, it smacks of McCarthyism,” said one opponent of the boycott measure during the debate, according to Haaretz.
The decision was praised by the American Jewish Committee advocacy group.
“The MLA has firmly repudiated those who try to exploit American colleges and universities to delegitimize the State of Israel,” AJC CEO David Harris said in a statement.
“The MLA today has sent a message to the entire academic community that American and Israeli campuses benefit greatly from academic cooperation and that boycotting Israel, the only democratic nation in the region, and a country which has been seeking peace with its neighbors since its rebirth in 1948, will not be tolerated because it does not in any way advance peace,” he added.

The Modern Language Association (MLA) Delegate Assembly voted today on three resolutions: One in favor of a boycott of all Israeli universities (Resolution 2017-2); the second, opposing academic boycotts in general (Resolution 2017-1); the third, condemning the suppression of academic freedom at Palestinian universities by the Palestinians themselves (the Palestinian Authority and Hamas)(Resolution 2017-3).
An exhaustive discussion of the resolutions and history of BDS activity at MLA is set forth in our prior post, Israel Boycott vote at Modern Language Association on January 7. Opposition to the BDS motion was led by a group calling itself MLA Members for Scholars’ Rights, including Cary Nelson (U.Illinois), Russel Berman (Stanford), Rachel Harris (Illinois), Marty Schichtman (Eastern Michigan), Gabriel Noah Brahm (Northern Michigan), Jonathan Skolnik (UMass), Eric Aronoff (Michigan State), Yael Halevi Wise (McGill). The pro-BDS push was led by the usual cast of faculty who lead efforts at almost every faculty association in the Humanities.
The vote just took place, and the BDS resolution lost, and the anti-BDS resolution passed:
2017-2 pro bds: 79 yes 113 no
2017-1 antibds : 101 yes against 93
The third resolution vote is pending. (UPDATE: The third Resolution was table indefinitely at the request of the anti-BDS people who proposed it. It became superfluous to the anti-BDS fight once BDS was defeated.)
We will have a full write up from someone in the room, probably tomorrow, but here is a taste of how the debate unfolded.

On January 4th the BBC News website published two articles relating to the topic of the verdict in the Elor Azaria case: “Israeli soldier Elor Azaria convicted over Hebron death” and “Israeli PM Netanyahu backs pardon for manslaughter soldier“.azaria-art-1
The third version of the first article (which was promoted by the BBC in a push alert) included a quote from the political NGO Human Rights Watch and a link to a highly partisan report on its website.
“Human Rights Watch said on Monday that there had been more than 150 instances since October 2015 in which Israeli security forces fatally shot Palestinian adults and children suspected of trying to stab, run over, or shoot Israelis.”
The superfluous and misleading term “suspected” (a quote from the linked report) was later removed by the BBC

Steinmeier welcomed UNSC Resolution 2334,demanding Israel return to its 1948 indefensible ceasefire lines. Steinmeier, on the other hand, is part of a government that upholds Israel’s “right to exist,” whatever that means.
Ethnic cleansing of Jews is not democratic. Endorsing a ban on Jews in Eastern Jerusalem and their holiest site, the Western Wall, shames Steinmeier, both as a German and as a western foreign minister.
Steinmeier would do well to understand his own history that includes not only Augustine and Luther’s legacies, but also his predecessor, Walther Rathenau, the only Jewish cabinet minister in German history. He was murdered by fanatical German nationalists in 1922. As a Doctor of Law, Steinmeier could also read opinions of international jurists such as Stephen Schwebel and Jacques Gauthier about the Israeli occupation’s legality.
Having endorsed Kerry’s advice to Israel, Steinmeier should now hasten to return the honorary doctorate he received in 2015 from Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, which is partly in “occupied territory.”
Why would he flout the very resolution he supports?

A Pakistani man accused of spying on a German government official on behalf of Iran was reportedly part of a wider plot to assassinate pro-Israel activists in Europe.
German prosecutors on Monday indicted 31-year-old Pakistani student Syed Mustafa H. on espionage-related charges for allegedly spying on Reinhold Robbe, a former lawmaker and ex-head of the German-Israeli Society in 2015, a pro-Israel advocacy group.
The indictment accused Mustafa of spying for an unnamed Iranian intelligence agency from mid-2015 to his arrest in July 2016.
German security agencies believe Robbe was being eyed by Tehran as a possible assassination target in retaliation for an Israeli operation against Iran’s nuclear facilities, German media reported over the weekend.
According to the indictment, Mustafa in 2015 was recruited by the Iranian intelligence to follow Robbe, and complied a thorough “movement profile” of the former German-Israeli Society chairman.

Chairman of the Expediency Council Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani died on Sunday, IRNA reported Sunday. He was hospitalized due to heart attack in a state-run hospital in the Iranian capital earlier in the day.
Rafsanjani was sought by the Argentinian government for ordering the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires. This was based on the allegation that senior Iranian officials planned the attack in an August 1993 meeting, which included Ayatollah Khamanei, the Supreme Leader, Mohammad Hejazi, Khamanei’s intelligence and security advisor, Rafsanjani, then Iran’s president, Ali Fallahian, then intelligence minister, and Ali Akbar Velayati, then foreign minister.
In 1997, during the Mykonos trial in Germany, it was declared that Rafsanjani, then president of Iran, together with Ayatollah Khamenei, Velayati and Fallahian, directed the assassination of Iran’s opposition activists in Europe.

Islamic State called upon its supporters and recruits to set fires as a form of terrorism in the January 6 issue of its monthly print publication, Rumiyah. In the article, entitled "Just Terror Tactics," ISIS cited the most recent wave of fires that spread across Israel in November 2016 as an example of an effective use of fire as a terror method. Through arson, operatives can "impose terror on an entire country," the terror organization stressed.
"The whole world witnessed the devastating fires that ravaged Jewish settlements in Palestine, destroying around 700 Jewish homes," the English-language article said.
"Irrespective of the motive, this deliberate act of destruction demonstrated the lethality [sic] of such an effortless operation. The attacks likewise demonstrate that with some simple and readily accessible materials (i.e. flammables), one can easily terrorize an entire nation. This is just a quick option for anyone intending to join the just terror campaign," they added.
Recruits should target "ideal locations" such as "houses and apartment buildings, forest areas adjacent to residential areas, factories that produce cars, furniture, clothing, flammable substances etc., gas stations, hospitals, bars, dance clubs, night clubs, banks, car showrooms, schools, universities, as well as churches, Rafidi temples, and so forth," the article explains.
Detailed instructions on how to make various types of Molotov cocktails were then provided, noting "the gasoline can be acquired from any local gas station... the procedure should not arouse any suspicion."

Hamas on Saturday blasted Facebook’s administration after the social media giant blocked dozens of accounts and pages supporting the movement, the Ma’an news agency reports.
Facebook’s crackdown on Hamas-affiliated pages followed the launch of a social media campaign by the group promoting the actions of archterrorist Yahya Ayyash.
Ayyash, nicknamed The Engineer, was a Hamas terrorist who built the bombs used in a number of the group’s suicide attacks which killed dozens of Israelis in the 1990's.
Israel eliminated Ayyash in January of 1996 using an explosive-laden cellular phone.
Husam Badran, a Hamas spokesman, said on Saturday in a statement quoted by Ma’an that Facebook had closed more than 90 pages supporting Hamas, in addition to 30 personal accounts affiliated with the movement.

Ahmed and Tamam, a couple from the Arab village of Kfar Kassam 12 miles east of Tel Aviv, named their baby girl Ibtihaj (Joy) and it’s not hard to understand why.
Ibtihaj was born with a rare defect, omphalocele, in which the intestines and sometimes other organs develop outside the abdomen in a sac. The condition was noticed on a prenatal ultrasound and their local doctor advised them to have an abortion.
“We were devastated,” said Ahmed. “The doctors we saw in other big centers also recommended an abortion. While we were absorbing this news, we happened to see a TV program about a baby with a similar problem who had been saved at Hadassah Hospital. We drove to Jerusalem. Dr. Dan Arbell, a pediatric surgeon, showed us photos of children with worse conditions who were now preteens and doing fine. It turns out that our baby was not in such desperate straits as the doctors had said. He gave us hope.”
A month before Tamam was due to give birth, they came for a check-up at Hadassah’s Ein Karem campus. At the exam, the staff determined that the baby needed to be delivered immediately.
Only 17 hours after her birth, she underwent surgery during which Arbell and his team put the organs back in place. They had done this type of procedure before but this time they closed the wound with TopClosure Tension Relief System, a patch invented in Israel originally for wounded soldiers on the battlefield.

Supernatural actor Mark Pellegrino slammed the United Nations and the U.S. for the “unethical” Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements.
Pellegrino was visiting Israel for the first time last week with a group of fellow actors and other professionals from the entertainment industry. The trip, organized by Israel’s Ministry for Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy and America’s Voices in Israel, coincided with Secretary of State John Kerry’s controversial address on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The actor, who is best known for playing Lucifer in the Warner Bros. series, lambasted Kerry for condemning Israel in his speech.
“[Kerry] was on the wrong side of every historical event and this was no different,” he said in an interview.
He further slammed the United States for abstaining from the vote on Resolution 2334, which calls Israeli settlements a “flagrant violation of international law.”
“Leave it to the UN to do the absolute wrong thing and save it for posterity’s sake in the form of the resolution,” Pellegrino said.

Erekat: Draining the swamp of occupation is the key to stability and security in the region

Secretary of the Executive Committee of the PLO, Saeb Erekat, stressed that to drain the swamp of the Israeli occupation is the key to stability, security and guarantee to defeat terrorism in the region.

This came during a political forum, held on Sunday evening in Jericho,  on the importance of the history of the Palestinian revolution from historical, political and militant perspectives to get to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, as part of the celebrations of the fifty-second anniversary of the start of the Palestinian revolution and the Fatah movement.

Erekat stressed that the Palestinian national struggle was launched based on a set of rights and national principles seeking to achieve national self-determination and that the Palestine culture and civilization is a bridge that enhances security and world peace.

He pointed to the importance of the vote of 177 countries for the Palestinian right to statehood at the United Nations, as well as the political and national value of the Security Council resolution condemning settlements and calling for an end to occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

He added that this diplomatic and political victory in international forums is the result of the Palestinian struggle and the wisdom and statesmanship of President Mahmoud Abbas, alluding to his meeting which is scheduled to be at the Vatican with Pope to raise the flag of Palestine, followed the next day by the Paris International Conference on  the national rights of the Palestinian people and the need for a two-state solution.

The Jewish lobby in the Soviet Union and former Russia is currently one of the largest and oldest lobbies in Europe and the eastern and western parts of the world, and can even be greater than those in North America.

This lobby, possibly through extortion, persuaded the Soviet Union in 1948 to recognize "Israel" and before that to vote in the United Nations in 1945 [sic]  as soon as World War II ended in favor of the decision to grant Palestine as a homeland for the Jews, and previously to support the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and before that paid  hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Ukraine and others to go to Palestine from Tsarist Russia starting from 1881. This lobby possibly engineered the Syrian situation and possibly other scenes.

This lobby, for example, is what drove Moscow in to become the Great Satan of the Muslim world and devote enmity between the Sunnah and Shiites in order to convince the Russian public opinion and even decision-making circles, that there is no ally in the Middle East, and Russia could only trust Israel. Many analysts say that this, developed by the Jewish lobby in Russia, is an explanation of air strikes carried out by "Israel" against targets in Syria, and certainly there was a green light from Russia.

Following the rapid escalation in violence between children and Israeli Security Forces (ISF) in East Jerusalem in October-December 2015, UNICEF undertook a rapid appraisal in five areas (Old City, Silwan, Issawiya, Jabal Mukaber & Shu’fat Refugee Camp). 80 children (61 boys and 19 girls), and 30 caregivers were interviewed and identified key drivers to violence as being priority humanitarian service delivery gaps: in order of priority  

1) retaliation and revenge response to alleged humiliation by ISF and settler violence,
2) role of social media in response to witnessed incident(s),
3) act of patriotism and
4) peer pressure and bullying 

were identified as main drivers within a context characterized by poor domestic conditions, boredom, and lack of playing spaces. 

Cappelaere also met with social workers at the Hebron Directorate of the Ministry of Social Development, with whom UNICEF works closely. They explained how they investigate suspected cases of child abuse and take appropriate action to protect the children, despite being overwhelmed with a growing number of cases.

On September 8, 2004, while my father with his friends were standing on Palestine Street in Jericho, two vehicles loaded with bags stopped. Gunmen in the uniforms of the occupation's "undercover forces"[?] emerged and asked my father and the group to place their weapons to the ground. My father refused and as he raised his pistol at the ready to fire, they shot four bullets in his chest and legs...My father was one of the founders of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the Al-Amari refugee camp, and most of his friends now among the martyrs and prisoners and wounded.

The families and friends of the four soldiers killed in a truck-ramming terror attack in Jerusalem expressed their shock and grief at their deaths ahead of funerals for the four taking place on Monday.
The four were identified late Sunday as IDF Lieutenant Yael Yekutiel, 20, of Givatayim, Cadet Shir Hajaj, 22, of Maaleh Adumim, Cadet Shira Tzur, 20, from Haifa, and Cadet Erez Orbach, 20, from Alon Shvut.
Seventeen people were injured in the attack, perpetrated by an East Jerusalem terrorist.
Sixteen others were injured, two of them very seriously, in the attack Sunday which occurred as a group of soldiers were getting off a bus at the promenade in Armon Hanatziv, a popular tourist spot in southern Jerusalem, when Fadi al-Qunbar drove a large flatbed truck into them.
The driver accelerated as he struck the group. After he hit the soldiers, he put the vehicle into reverse and began to run over them a second time.
The terrorist was shot by soldiers and a civilian tour guide, police said. He died of his wounds.

Erez Orbach, one of four soldiers killed on Sunday in a truck-ramming attack in Jerusalem, was laid to rest to Monday in the military plot of the Kfar Etzion cemetery. Thousands attended the funeral.
Orbach, 20, of Alon Shvut in the Etzion settlement bloc south of Jerusalem, had been exempt from army service for health reasons, but fought for the opportunity to volunteer and was in officers’ training school at the time of his murder.
Orbach and three others were killed when a terrorist from East Jerusalem rammed his truck into a group of soldiers at the Armon Hanatziv promenade in the capital Sunday.
He held US citizenship as the child of an American, the US Embassy in Israel said. Consular officials had been in touch with his family.

An Israeli soldier wounded in a deadly terror attack remains in a coma but doctors have managed to partially stabilize her, a doctor at her hospital said Monday morning.
The soldier, whose name has not been released, is still in life-threatening condition but has begun to improve, Dr. Ofer Marin, head of the trauma unit at Shaare Zedek in Jerusalem, told reporters.
She was one of 16 people injured in the Sunday attack, in which a driver plowed his truck into a group of soldiers standing near a bus on a popular promenade in the capital. Four people were killed — three officer school cadets and one officer.
Marin said the seriously wounded soldier is sedated and breathing with the help of respirator and will need to undergo additional operations until her condition stabilizes. He said she suffered multiple internal injuries.
No other victim is in life-threatening condition, and at least four soldiers were released overnight, the hospital said.

Addressing the UN Security Council to explain America's abstention on Resolution 2334, Ambassador Samantha Power stated, "Our vote today is fully in line with the bipartisan history of how American presidents have approached both the issue - and the role of this body." That's false.
While previous administrations have criticized settlements as bad policy, it is the Obama administration that deviates from longstanding American practice by maintaining that every last inch of the West Bank is lawfully Palestinian land.
In the very 1982 address on the Middle East that Power cites in defense of Resolution 2334, President Reagan declared, "In the pre-1967 borders, Israel was barely 10 miles wide at its narrowest point. The bulk of Israel's population lived within artillery range of hostile Arab armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again."
Moreover, the peace agreement that President Clinton negotiated at the July 2000 Camp David summit, as well as the December 2000 Clinton parameters, envisaged Israel retaining control of population centers beyond the Green Line.
So did President George W. Bush's 2004 letter of understanding to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, which explicitly rejected a return to the 1967 lines.
UN Security Council Resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973) both recognized that the 1949 lines were not sacrosanct.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, targeting the Jewish population in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, has given a new impetus to a discussion on violent conquest, occupation and colonization, which most of the international community rightly understands as immoral and illegal.
However, when taking into account 3,000 years of history and context, Palestinian Arabs, not indigenous Israeli Jews, become the offending party.
If one people violently conquered the territory of an indigenous people, forced them to declare allegiance to the conquering nation and creed at the point of a sword, foisted a culture, religion and language on the conquered people and treated those who refused as second-class citizens with far fewer rights, there would rightly be outcry, derision and, above all, condemnation.
If such actions are wrong and unconscionable in principle, it should not matter when they took place — whether it was a few decades or a number of centuries ago.
Nevertheless, this principle is not accepted by the United Nations. In fact, it is turned on its head.

The recently adopted Security Council Resolution 2334 and Secretary of State’s follow-up speech that doubles down on the lame duck Obama administrations’ support for it, as well as outlining a “framework” for an additional destructive Security Council resolution that Obama and Kerry are believed to be planning for their last days in office, are major obstacles to peace in the Middle East. They contain an extraordinary array of falsehoods and misconceptions that are themselves major obstacles to peace.
Cardinal John Henry Newman, in his classic autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua (“Apology for My Life”) explains how it is possible to slander a person in a single sentence, while it may require an entire book to refute the slander. It would take us an entire library of books to expose the scores of false and misleading statements in Secretary Kerry’s speech. So we will take up only a few of the worst falsehoods.
1. A two-state solution is the only solution. In reality, it is no solution at all. The PLO Ramallah regime, (which calls itself the “State of Palestine,” and is called the “Palestinian Authority” in the Oslo Accords), regularly praises terrorists who murder Israeli civilians and soldiers by calling them “martyrs,” gives them photo opportunities with “President” Abbas and other PLO leaders, and names schools, hospitals, roads and athletic competitions after them within days after they commit these murders. Worst of all, it pays these terrorists generous salaries and awards generous pensions to their families. The very idea that Israel could “live in peace” with a state ruled by such monsters of hate and duplicity less than a mile, and in some places only a few yards, from its main population centers, is absurd. Kerry even admitted all this while still maintaining it is a worthy “peace partner” for Israel.
2. The Israeli administration of Judea and Samaria (the so-called “West Bank”) is an “illegal occupation” that must be ended. This is nonsense. Two monumental and thoroughly documented studies by international lawyers Howard Grief, “The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law,” Mazo Publishers, 2008), and Jacques Paul Gauthier, “Sovereignty Over the Old City of Jerusalem: A Study of the Historical, Religious, Political and Legal Aspects of the Question of the Old City,” (Institut universitaire de hautes études internationales, 2007), conclusively demonstrate that the San Remo Conference of the victorious World War I Allies (Britain, France, Italy and Japan), and the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, approved unanimously by all 51 members of the League of Nations, decided that Palestine would become a Jewish state and the sovereign territory of the Jewish people.

• We need ensure that the Old City of Jerusalem, the heart of Judaism for more than 3,000 years and the seat of Christianity for 2,000 years, will not be allowed to be Islamic as part of what would soon be an Islamic country, and very likely a terrorist one. In such a state, all polls show that the next vote will be to install Hamas.
• Based on the Hamas Charter that denies Israel's right to exist, the vote could complete eliminating Jewish -- and Christian -- history and replacing it with Islam.
• What drives Western politicians to be servants aiding the destruction of Judeo-Christian culture in the Middle East and Europe? Why does the Paris peace conference prepare for the destruction of the Jewish State while Christians are murdered in Muslim countries in historically unparalleled numbers?
• Christians will not be silent when all these places will be voted to go to those who will destroy them -- as they destroyed Palmyra, Antioch, Nisibis, Niniveh, and in late 2014, Iraq's oldest Christian monastery, St. Elijah, leveled by the Islamic State.
• The streets of Paris must hear the protests against the attempted rewriting of history at the peace conference and any subsequent Security Council vote. Such protestors are like "a man who would built up the wall and stand in front of God in the gap on behalf of the Land" (Ezekiel 22:30) -- so that the only bastion of democracy, the very defender of Christianity, the last keeper of Judeo-Christian heritage in the Middle East and Europe will continue to prosper.

Journalist Douglas Murray told the event that support for UNSC 2334 was “a bad and embarrassing blot on diplomacy”, that he hoped would retreat into history. “Friends do not kick friends in the back”, he declared.
In a message read out by protest organiser Arieh Miller, UN Watch director Hillel Neuer questioned British UN ambassador Matthew Rycroft’s claim of having worked to secure a “balanced text”.
He said the resolution sent a message to Palestinians that it would be easier to rely on anti-Israel resolutions than to negotiate peace terms.
Retired British Army officer Colonel Richard Kemp revealed a “senior Foreign Office official” had privately told him: “They know these settlements are not illegal. The reason they say they are is to put pressure on Israel. That is duplicitous, dishonest and disgraceful.”
Kemp also warned of another anti-Israel resolution in the pipeline, masterminded by President Obama. He said the planned resolution, which could be voted on as early as 17 January, would lead to “recognition of a Palestinian state and a demand for the state of Israel to be defined on the 1967 borders”.
Britain would be able to stop this diplomatically if it chose to, but the intervention would need to come from Theresa May as the Foreign Office lacked “courage”, he said.

Retired British Army Colonel Richard Kemp on Sunday warned that "there is another anti-Israel resolution in the pipeline being planned" at the United Nations Security Council as he addressed some 200 people gathered before the Houses of Parliament in London to protest of the government’s vote in favor of the recent resolution condemning Israeli as illegal.
Kemp, Jonathan Arkush, head of board of deputies of British Jews, as well as other notable names from the UK Jewish community joined the demonstrators standing in solidarity with Israel.
UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which states that Israeli settlements have "no legal validity" and are "dangerously imperiling the viability of the two-state solution", was passed by a 14-0 vote after a rare and momentous abstention by the United States.
Kemp told the audience that the resolution was part of "nothing less than an international conspiracy against Israel," in which he said he was "ashamed to say the United Kingdom is playing a leading role."
He also predicted that the upcoming conference on Mideast peace scheduled to take place in Paris on January 15 would lead to the creation of a Palestinian state based on the borders before the 1967 Six Day War.

The former commander of Britain’s forces in Afghanistan blasted the anti-Israeli settlement Resolution 2334, passed last month by the UN Security Council, on the grounds that it “incites [Palestinian] violence against Jews and encourages BDS movements around the world that will encourage antisemitism.”
In a debate on Jewish Internet station J-TV‘s program “Current Affairs” — moderated by the UK-based Henry Jackson Society founder and executive director Dr. Alan Mendoza — Col. Richard Kemp also criticized his government for supporting the resolution and the Obama administration for abstaining from the vote, rather than vetoing it.
Kemp was debating Tal Ofer, a member of the British Labour Movement originally from Israel, who said that though “the resolution is really, really bad for the settlements, it’s actually really good for Israel, because it requires Israel to make a decision into what direction it wishes to go – whether it’s the one-state solution or the two-state solution.”

J-TV hosts a debate on the UN Resolution condemning Israel's settlements and occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Colonel Richard Kemp (Former Commander of the British Armed Forces in Afghanistan) and Tal Ofer (Member of the Board of Deputies Executive Committe and Jewish Labour Movement)

New Zealand’s role as a sponsor of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 and the resulting spat between New Zealand and Israel has sparked some intense debate in the New Zealand media. It’s also unleashed some particularly nasty and downright weird characters giving voice to their hatred of Israel.
For example, Patrick Smellie, in the Fairfax Media-owned Taranaki Daily News, opines that Israel may wage ‘war’ on New Zealand through cyber warfare targeting “key elements of New Zealand infrastructure – telecommunications and electricity networks, secure communications channels for diplomats and defence personnel, and the like.”
It doesn’t come as much of a shock that underneath the piece is a note stating that the “article has been edited for clarity since it was first published.”
Not much clarity there.
But worse is to be found in the New Zealand Herald affiliated Hawke’s Bay Today in an appalling opinion piece by Malcolm Eves.
“God’s chosen people”.
First, we have the reference to “God’s chosen people”:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas sent letters to a number of world leaders on Monday urging them to prevent the stated goal of the incoming administration of US President-elect Donald Trump to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
According to the official PA news outlet Wafa, Abbas sent letters to the heads of Russia, China, France, Germany, Britain, the European Union, the African Union, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the presidency of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Arab League secretary general, “asking them to spare no effort in preventing the US embassy from moving to Jerusalem”
The PA president on Monday also sent a letter to Trump, explaining what he believes are the pitfalls of fulfilling the president-elect’s controversial campaign promise.

Abbas' advisor on NGOs, Sultan Abu Al-Einein:
"Transferring the American embassy to Jerusalem will lead to bloodshed"
Head of the Supreme Muslim Council and head preacher at the Al-Aqsa Mosque Sheikh Ikrima Sabri:
"What this means is that America recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of the Jews, and in doing so America will declare a new war against the Palestinians and also against the Arabs and the Muslims"
Secretary-General of the PLO Executive Committee, Saeb Erekat
"If you transfer the embassy and agree to the annexation of the settlements in the West Bank, you will drag the region into a state of anarchy, extremism, and lawlessness"
Fatah Spokesman Osama Al-Qawasmi:

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat lashed out Saturday at a US House motion passed last week that demands the United Nations “repeal or fundamentally alter” a Security Council resolution that condemns Israeli settlements as violating international law.
In a fiery statement, Erekat implored Congress to “adhere to established US policy toward the illegitimacy of Israel’s settlement enterprise and annexation of Jerusalem, including the most recent position by the Obama administration.”
Last month, President Barack Obama chose to withhold the US veto from a resolution that was highly critical of the settlements, designating them both illegal and an obstacle to reaching a two-state solution between the sides. Resolution 2334 thus passed, by a vote of 14-0, with the US abstaining.
The resolution says the settlement project “has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.” It also calls for a complete end to all construction in areas Israel captured after the 1967 Six Day War, including East Jerusalem.

The Chief Palestinian negotiator aims to issue his one hundredth career threat this year to resign from the position, and voiced confidence this morning that with Donald Trump taking office this month, the situations that might warrant such threats will proliferate to the point that he will have no problem reaching the milestone.
Saeb Erekat, one of the most prominent spokesmen for the Palestinian political leadership, has invoked the prospect of tendering his resignation dozens of times in the last 15 years, by some counts more than thirty. On only one or two occasions has he made good on the threat, afterwards agreeing to assume the title once again within weeks or months. Each of the threatened resignations resulted from Erekat’s need to perform some dramatic act to attract attention to the Palestinian cause, which has been relegated to lower priority in recent years in the international community.
“If Trump begins the process of moving the US Embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, I will resign,” declared Erekat. “If Israel does not cease defending itself from the murderers our society and government glorify and incite, I will resign. If Hamas does not reinstate Fatah functionaries in the Gaza Strip, I will resign. I can resign as many times as necessary to achieve Palestinian national aspirations.”

The U.S. Department of State referred to the site of Sunday’s Palestinian terror attack against Israeli pedestrians as “Jerusalem,” even though the attack — which killed four Israeli soldiers — occurred in the neighborhood of East Talpiyot, which the Obama administration officially considers a “settlement” in the “occupied” city of “East Jerusalem.”
East Talpiyot is in eastern Jerusalem, across Hebron Road, which marked the heavily-fortified armistice line between Israel and Jordan at the end of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948-9. When Jordan shelled Israel in June 1967, Israel launched a counterattack and overcame Jordanian forces in eastern Jerusalem, which it unified with the western portion of the city.
Sunday’s terror attack took place at the Haas Promenade, known in Hebrew as the “Tayelet,” a popular overlook that offers sweeping views of the Old City of Jerusalem, and which is popular among Jews and Arabs alike for walks, wedding photos and family picnics. It is one of few public spaces where Arabs and Jews interact. Many American tour buses also stop there.
However, the Obama administration regards all Israeli neighborhoods built in eastern Jerusalem after 1967 as “settlements,” even if they are part of the city itself. In addition, UN Security Council Resolution 2234, which President Obama allowed to pass (by declining to veto), regards neighborhoods like East Jerusalem as a “flagrant violation under international law.”

Analysis: The Palestinian Authority started a blitz against the relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem and threatened violent repercussions; while it's not yet clear if Abbas and Erekat's pronouncements directly influenced the truck driving terrorist, we can certainly surmise that they set the timing; similar attacks in Europe provided a template to copy.
The vehicular attack on Sunday in which four soldiers were killed in East Talpiot is the continuation of a wave of isolated, spontaneous or partially planned terrorist attacks that began in that same border neighborhood in Jerusalem—the rock throwing that led to the death of 64-year-old Alexander Levlovich in September 2015.
The security services term this "popular terrorism." Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas prefers the whitewashed term "popular opposition." This allows him, in his public speeches, to call on Palestinians to refrain from using firearms and at the same time legitimize—and even encourage—throwing stones and Molotov cocktails and vehicular attacks in which many Israelis are also killed and wounded.
The "popular resistance" serves Abbas and Saeb Erekat well and carries out its purpose: It reinforces the Palestinian issue in the consciousness of the international media and helps the Palestinian "political intifada" strategy, as it creates a sense of urgency on the international scene.

“We should have full control over the education system in the east Jerusalem neighborhoods,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely (Likud), reacting to Sunday’s deadly truck ramming attack at the Armon Hanatziv promenade in Jerusalem.
Hotovely said the terrorist who carried the attack was exposed to incitement: “It is unacceptable that students living near our capital’s downtown will say that their dream is to be a shahid [martyr].
“The international community needs to demand the complete halt of terrorism, and the complete shutdown of the terrorism-education industry,” she added, referring to the Mideast peace summit in Paris next Sunday and the recent United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334.

A number of Israeli soldiers present at the truck-ramming terror attack in Jerusalem on Sunday shot at the terrorist within seconds of the attack starting, an initial IDF inquiry revealed, contradicting claims made by a guide who opened fire himself that the troops hesitated to respond or entirely failed to do so.
The probe also revealed that a group of soldiers, mainly IDF cadets, seen running from the scene were ordered to seek cover by an officer as the shooting began. Video footage from the attack, in which four soldiers — three cadets and one lieutenant — were killed and 16 were injured, showed members of the group scrambling to run away which sparked criticism for alleged failure to respond.
Earlier, the head of the IDF officers’ training school said that “at least two” of his cadets shot at the terrorist.
Col. Yaniv Alaluf, who commands the officers’ training course, visited the scene to conduct a preliminary investigation into the attack and the soldiers’ response.

Chairman of the Yesh Atid Party, Yair Lapid, commented today (Monday) on the deadly Jerusalem ramming attack at the opening of the Yesh Atid faction meeting.
"Yesterday in Jerusalem Shira Tzur, Yael Yekutiel, Shir Hajaj, and Erez Orbach, of blessed memory, were murdered. Our hearts and our prayers are with the families. We will fight terror without compromise, without hesitation, including house demolitions, including the expulsion of families who were involved in terrorism, including curfews and closures, including entrance to all terror nests, everywhere and at any time. But our struggle is not just against our enemies, but also about the future and the character of Israeli society," began Lapid.
Lapid also called for a stop to the attempts to drag the attack into the political debate, "while the wounded were fighting for their lives, while the security forces were there, while blood - innocent blood - was still on the floor, there were those who were quick to try to drag this terrible attack into the political debate. Abominable lies were spread, like that all the soldiers fled from the scene because of what happened in the trial of Elor Azariya. They called it 'the Azariya Effect'. They ignored the fact that the soldiers shot in real time and killed the terrorist. Instead of embracing them they again attacked the Chief of Staff, the person leading warriors into battle for almost forty years."

One of the first responders on the scene of today's tragic terror attack, who treated many of the injured: Israeli Muslim Abdullah Muhaissen.
A glimmer of hope on a very dark day. Thank you Abdullah.
Everyday, Muslims, Christians, and Jews come to together for one purpose at Magen David Adom: saving lives.

The Diplomatic-Security Cabinet on Sunday approved several security measures in the wake of the Jerusalem ramming attack that killed four Israeli soldiers and wounded 15 that day.
The terrorist was identified as Fadi al-Qanbar, 28, a married father of four from east Jerusalem. He had a criminal record, but had no known ties to any terrorist group, although he recently posted several pro-Islamic State posts on his Facebook page.
His cousin told Israel Hayom that Qanbar had been "very upset" by recent reports that the United States was considering relocating its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, saying the move would "spark a war."
After the deadly attack, police and Shin Bet security agency raided Qanbar's home in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber and detained his wife, parents and two siblings for questioning.
Qanbar's sister told Palestinian media she was "proud" of his actions and "grateful Allah has chosen him to die as a shahid ['martyr']."

Thousands of Hamas activists and supporters took to the streets of Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza on Sunday night to rally against Israel and praise the terrorist ramming attack in Jerusalem which killed four Israelis.
Earlier on Sunday, a Palestinian rammed his truck into a group of Israeli soldiers on a popular promenade in Jerusalem, killing four of them in an attack which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said had likely been inspired by Islamic State.
Chanting anti-Israeli slogans the protesters marched to the rally where sweets were handed out in celebration.
"The message of our Islamic party Hamas is a message of encouragement and support for every jihadi who carries out an attack that puts an end to the acts of the Zionist enemy," Hamas leader Fathi Hamad, who led the rally, told Reuters.
The Palestinian Islamist group routinely praises those who carry out street attacks against Israelis.

The United Nations Security Council condemned the truck ramming attack in Jerusalem that left four Israeli soldiers dead.
The statement released late Sunday “condemned in the strongest terms the terrorist attack in Jerusalem on January 8” and expressed condolences to the families of the victims and to government of Israel.
The statement was tweeted Sunday night by Sweden’s Mission to the United Nations. Sweden holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council this month.
“The members of the Security Council reaffirmed that terrorism in all its forms and manifestations constitutes one of the most serious threats to international peace and security,” the statement said.
The statement said that the council finds any acts of terrorism “criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation.”

Suspicions have arisen among police that several family members of the terrorist who carried out Sunday's deadly truck-ramming attack in Jerusalem were aware of his intentions to target Israelis.
Meanwhile, a Jerusalem court on Monday extended by seven days the remand of four brothers and a cousin of the perpetrator of the attack, Fadi al-Qanbar.
Israeli security forces arrested the terrorist's five relatives during raids as part of the investigation into the attack that killed four IDF soldiers and wounded 17 others. Following the attack, Israel sealed off the east Jerusalem neighborhood Jebl Mukabar, where Qanbar had been a resident.

When a Palestinian terrorist drove a truck into a crowd of Israeli soldiers Sunday morning the headlines from major media outlets pinned the blame squarely on the truck, avoiding headlining the story as a terrorist attack.
“At Least 4 Dead and 15 Injured in Jerusalem Truck Attack,” declared the New York Times.
The lede in the times read, “A truck plowed into a group of people as they were getting off a bus in Jerusalem on Sunday afternoon, killing at least four people and injuring about 15 others, the police said.”
The Associated Press mentioned the driver was a Palestinian, but headlined the story in a way that still called it a “truck attack,” not a terrorist attack.
The AP headlined the story, “Israel police: Palestinian truck attack kills 4 in Jerusalem.”

Today’s shocking truck ramming terror attack in Jerusalem carried out by a Palestinian ISIS sympathizer generated tremendous news coverage here in Canada.
The terror attack killed four Israeli soldiers and injured a dozen, prompting problematic coverage at the websites of CTV News and the Toronto Star.
Earlier this morning, CTV News published a shameful headline to an Associated Press article which made a truck terror attack seem like it was traffic accident, not intentional terror committed by a Palestinian Islamic State sympathizer. The headline stated only: “Truck plows into Israeli soldiers killing 4 in Jerusalem”.
Subsequent to HonestReporting Canada sending a complaint to several CTV News executives, CTV amended the headline to acknowledge that Israel claims the Palestinian terrorist was from the Islamic State and that it was a “truck attack” – not an accident.

Education Minister Naftali Bennett slammed the BBC for its coverage of Sunday’s terror attack in Jerusalem with a headline focusing on the death of the truck “driver” who “allegedly” rammed into pedestrians.
The BBC headline, which followed a vehicular terror attack that claimed the lives of at least four soldiers and injured an additional 15, originally read: “Driver of lorry shot in Jerusalem after allegedly ramming pedestrians, injuring at least 15, Israeli media report.”
The BBC’s main story on the attack now reads: “Jerusalem attack: Four dead after lorry driver rams soldiers.”
Bennett took the British news corporation to task for failing to mention the other deaths, for including the word “allegedly,” and for not labeling the driver as a terrorist.
“Yup, BBC. Driver–not terrorist–shot. He only “allegedly” murdered 4 Israelis,” Bennett, head of the Jewish Home party, tweeted.

The truck ramming terror attack in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood that has, so far, claimed the lives of four Israelis and injured many others, generated many headlines around the world.
Why do the headlines matter? As we’ve noted, most people simply skim headlines, both in newspapers and on social media, and do not read most of the actual articles that are presented to them. So for many casual readers who don’t closely follow the Israeli-Arab conflict, all they know about the latest in the Mideast is from the headlines and alerts of articles they don’t read.
In this case, many casual readers will simply be unaware of two salient points:
- A terror attack has taken place;
- It was carried out by a Palestinian terrorist.
Here are a selection of the worst cases of headline bias in the immediate aftermath of the attack. What they all have in common is the attribution of responsibility for the attack to a vehicle, truck or lorry despite the fact that a driver, in this case a Palestinian terrorist, was behind the wheel.

The BBC has a habit of attributing terror attacks to inanimate objects or vehicles. And so it was the case with an appalling truck ramming terror attack that took place in the Armon Hanatziv neighborhood of Jerusalem that has, so far, claimed the lives of four Israelis and injured many more.
The BBC broke the news with the following:
Jerusalem "lorry attack" Injures 15
This gradually progressed to the following:

The BBC appears to be confused as to who or what carried out the attack. Having removed scare quotes from the headline, did a lorry really attack the soldiers? That seems rather strange given that, according to the opening paragraph of the story, a “suspected terrorist” was responsible.
So which is it BBC? A lorry or a terrorist?
Eventually, the BBC appears to have acknowledged that there was actually a driver behind the wheel of the vehicle.

What is going on at the International Business Times‘ UK edition? The first write-up of the truck ramming terror attack in Jerusalem looked like this:
Besides the headline that places “terror attack” in scare quotes, exactly what has an image of Jewish women at the Western Wall got to do with the incident?
The attack happened at the promenade in Armon Hanatziv, not “at the walled Old City of Jerusalem” as the caption reads. The photo appears to be of Jewish women protesting in favor of egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall. Hardly an appropriate image to accompany a terror attack that occurred elsewhere.

This is our problem with the international press. The BBC rushes to put up a sympathetic interview with the the uncle of the terrorist who murdered four and injured many more in Jerusalem yesterday.

They have immediately inverted the story and made the family of the terrorist murderer into the victims of the story.
As of this moment the BBC has no video with the families of the murdered Israelis. They have Bibi speaking and an interview with an eye witness and another video with a title “Jerusalem lorry attack: ‘I fired until my magazine was empty’”.

As The Daily Wire reported Sunday, “a Palestinian man used a truck to ram into a crowd of Israelis, murdering three female soldiers, an Israeli man, and injuring at least 15 more soldiers. All of the dead were in their twenties.” The attack occurred in the city of Jerusalem. As Israel mourned its dead, the people of Palestine launched macabre celebrations:
These weren’t spontaneous celebrations by a few bad actors. Praise for the terrorist came from the top of the Palestinian leadership chain, placing a rubber stamp on a Jew-hating culture of death:
From circulating perversely satirical cartoons mocking dead Jews to passing out sweets to soon-to-be indoctrinated children, the Palestinian people welcomed the “martyrdom” of the terrorist who rammed his truck into unsuspecting Israelis with the kind of glee reserved for birthdays and weddings:

The news of Sunday’s truck-ramming attack in Jerusalem that left four Israelis dead and 17 injured has sparked outbursts of jubilation among Palestinian terrorist groups.
Hamas welcomed the attack, saying the carnage is a “natural reaction” to the “crimes of the occupation,” and what the terrorist group claimed was the infringement on the “Palestinians’ rights” and their holy sites.
Fawzi Barhoum, the movement’s spokesperson, lauded the attack as a “courageous act in defense of the holy sites and especially Al Aqsa mosque.”
He added that the attack proves that the “Jerusalem intifada [a series of attacks on Israelis that started in October 2015] continues to defend our lands and holy sites, and the Israeli oppression and aggression won’t be able to stop it. The oppression will only increase the determination of the Palestinian people to continue its heroic resistance in all its forms.”
The Iran-backed Islamic Jihad also welcomed the attack, and said in a statement that the deadly truck-ramming represented “a natural reaction to the crimes of the Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people.”

 Iran is to receive a huge shipment of natural uranium from Russia to compensate it for exporting tons of reactor coolant, diplomats say, in a move approved by the outgoing U.S. administration and other governments seeking to keep Tehran committed to a landmark nuclear pact.

Two senior diplomats said the transfer recently agreed by the U.S. and five other world powers that negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran foresees delivery of 116 metric tons (nearly 130 tons) of natural uranium. U.N. Security Council approval is needed but a formality, considering five of those powers are permanent Security Council members, they said.

Uranium can be enriched to levels ranging from reactor fuel or medical and research purposes to the core of an atomic bomb. Iran says it has no interest in such weapons and its activities are being closely monitored under the nuclear pact to make sure they remain peaceful.

Despite present restrictions on its enrichment program, the amount of natural uranium is significant should Iran decide to keep it in storage, considering its potential uses once some limits on Tehran's nuclear activities start to expire in less than a decade.

David Albright, whose Institute of Science and International Security often briefs U.S. lawmakers on Iran's nuclear program, says the shipment could be enriched to enough weapons-grade uranium for more than 10 simple nuclear bombs, "depending on the efficiency of the enrichment process and the design of the nuclear weapon."

The swap is in compensation for the 70 metric tons (77 tons) of heavy water exported by Iran to the United States, Russia and Oman since the nuclear agreement went into effect.

Pursuant to UN Human Rights Council Resolution 31/36, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, in conjunction with BDS activists, is currently preparing a discriminatory blacklist intended to defame and economically destroy companies doing business with Israel. The ultimate goal is to isolate, demonize, and harm the Jewish State.
The UNHRC’s discriminatory blacklist operates from the premise that business in occupied territory is “illegal settlement activity” and is barred by international law. In fact, there is no such prohibition and almost every country engages in and/or facilitates business activities in settlements in situations of occupation throughout the globe.
The discriminatory blacklist also targets companies providing security services to the State of Israel, by labeling legitimate security measures (undertaken everywhere in the world) as “illegal settlement activity”. The purpose is to disrupt efforts to protect civilians from Palestinian terrorism and is part of a decades-long UN campaign to minimize and justify Palestinian violence.
The discriminatory blacklist promotes the violation of the documents known as the Oslo Accords (1993-5), mutually agreed to by the PLO and Israel, and guaranteed by the UN and the international community. It seeks to punish activity necessary to carry out Israeli security and infrastructure obligations mandated by the agreements.
In contrast to actual international law, the interpretation of “settlement activity” used in Resolution 31/36 is so absurdly broad that the UNHRC may blacklist entities with any presence and for whatever purpose over the 1949 Armistice lines. Under the UNHRC’s inexplicable logic of Resolution 31/36, being the “wrong” person (as secretly defined by anonymous OHCHR bureaucrats) who is cleaning one’s hands in a sink over the line could be enough for inclusion on the blacklist.
The discriminatory UNHRC blacklist is meant as a “backdoor” means to impose sanctions. The UNHRC, however, does not have this power. Under Chapter VII, Article 41 of the UN Charter, the power to levy sanctions and implement enforcement mechanisms is solely vested in the UN Security Council. The creation of the blacklist is therefore an illegal usurpation of the Security Council by both the UNHRC and the OHCHR in violation of the UN Charter.

Jewish community centers in a widespread number of American states were evacuated due to bomb threats on Monday morning, while across the ocean, the same phenomenon was taking place in London, England as well.
Jewish schools across the United Kingdom were placed on alert after bomb threats were called into metro London Jewish schools in Roehampton, Ilford and Brent on Monday morning. The schools were “warned” that explosive devices had been planted on the premises. Thorough searches were conducted at all three sites and other schools were placed on precautionary lock-downs until the “all clear” was received.
Bomb threats were also called in to a few non-Jewish schools as well, according to the British Jewish Chronicle news site.
“Police were alerted at around 10:30am hrs on Monday, 9 January, to phone calls made to schools in Roehampton, Ilford and Brent in which bomb threats were made. Police officers attended the schools. All three incidents were stood down a short time later. An investigation into the threat will be conducted,” Metropolitan Police said in a statement.
Meanwhile, in the United States, bomb threats were called into Jewish Community Centers (JCC)s in Delaware, Tenafly, New Jersey; Miami Beach and Jacksonville, Florida; in Rockville, Maryland; in West Nashville, Tennessee, and Columbia, South Carolina. (h/t Jewess)

Dear Mr. President,
We are a group of former Heads of State, Heads of Government, Nobel Laureates, Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Defense, Military officers, Historians, Scholars and Business Leaders with a simple goal: to insist on a fair and reasonable debate about the State of Israel, the fate of which we see as intimately intertwined with the fate of our own nations in this troubled era.
In the spirit of the search for lasting solutions in the Middle East, we write to urge you in the strongest possible terms to call off the peace conference you plan to host on January 15. The conference will do nothing to accomplish peace and instead result in further harm to its very prospects.
We note with some alarm the narrative proposed by French diplomats in the media surrounding this endeavor, born no doubt of genuine concern but not of genuine opportunity, and framed in terms that are inaccurate and untimely.
Coming in the wake of UN Security Council resolution 2334, and U.S. Secretary of State Kerry's subsequent speech on December 28 of last year, both of which gravely misportrayed the realities underlying the conflict and have damaged prospects for peace, the Paris conference would undeniably also serve to reinforce currents of diplomacy that run directly counter to peace. A fundamental truth of the conflict remains that peace can only be achieved on the basis of direct negotiations between the parties with no preconditions.

The Jerusalem Center has released a video of Former Director General of the Foreign Ministry and former Ambassador Dore Gold explaining why the upcoming Paris conferences are dangerous to Israel's future.
"Some seventy countries are expected to attend [the Paris conference]," Gold said. "It's not at all clear if there will be any Palestinian delegation attending - they've given mixed signals. But Israel has been very firm that it will not attend and that it objects to the whole idea of the conference...
"Israel learned through many years of negotiations and diplomacy...is that the only way we resolve our differences with our neighbors is by sitting face to face at the peace table. That's how we reached peace with Egypt in 1979... That is exactly how we reached peace with Jordan... That is what works. Direct negotiations.
"What is being planned in Paris first and foremost gets us away from those direct talks at the peace table into a very complex world of multilateral negotiations with different places... That's not how we made peace in the past, and that's not how we'll make peace in the future..
"What could easily happen [without direct negotiations] is...they'll say they never actually decided they accepted the finality of diplomacy. And that could easily happen..
"Paris is setting Israel up for an international discussion of its future, without real reconciliation being reached. And Moscow is setting up a very disturbing meeting between Fatah and Hamas that will put internationally recognized terrorist organizations into the mix," Gold concluded.

Not long ago, I was talking to a Fatah official about Palestinian aspirations, especially his party’s sharp emotions about Hamas, the Palestinian fundamentalist movement that rules Gaza and would gladly overthrow the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. Fear, loathing, secular outrage (which may have been amplified to please Western ears), and a certain sadness about unrequited Palestinian fraternity in the face of Israeli oppression punctuated our conversation. When I finally tired of his urgent demand that America rectify Israeli transgressions or see violence rip the West Bank, I asked him how long he thought the Palestinian Authority could survive if Israel yanked its support to Fatah's security apparatus. I suggested one month. He remonstrated: "We could probably last two."
What has been lost, again, in Barack Obama's final venting against Israel through his abstention in the United Nations Security Council resolution against all Israeli settlements on the West Bank and Jewish homes in East Jerusalem is how disconnected American foreign policy on this imbroglio has been from the larger issues riling the Middle East. The truth about Fatah's security weaknesses is symptomatic of the truth about the Palestinians: They can exist as a non-Islamist polity only if Israel protects their attenuated nation-state. If the Jews pull back, then the militant Muslim faithful will probably recast the Palestinian identity, wiping away the secular Palestinian elite who have defined the Palestinian cause among Westerners since the Israelis and the Palestine Liberation Organization first started sparring with each other in 1964.
The Israelis have granted the West Bank Palestinians the opportunity to take a pass on the ongoing implosion of the Muslim Arab world. That pass also extends, with fewer guarantees, to the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan, which could have a much harder time surviving with a triumphant Hamas on its border. We assume that East Bank Palestinians prefer Abdullah II, with his Palestinian wife, to fundamentalists from either bank. That might be wrong.

An Israeli military court on Monday sentenced the terrorist who murdered Danny Gonen 19 months ago to two life terms, an IDF spokesman said.
The Judea military court also ruled that Mohammad Abu Shahin must pay Gonen's family 3.5 million shekels ($910,000, 860,00 euros) in compensation for the June 19, 2015 killing, a statement said.
Abu Shahin was also convicted of 13 counts of attempted murder for a series of shootings between April 2014 and July 2015 targeting Israeli civilians and security forces, the statement said.
The court said Abu Shahin targeted "soldiers and civilians solely because they were Jewish" and recommended Abu Shahin should not be pardoned and his sentence should not be shortened.
Israel's Shin Bet internal security agency said Abu Shahin belonged to an armed group linked to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party.
Gonen was hiking with a friend near the Binyamin region town of Dolev, and stopped to help out when a passing Arab asked for water. The Arab then shot Gonen and attempted to shoot his friend, Netanel Hadad, who was wounded in the attack.

A long-simmering dispute between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority over who has to foot the bill for the fuel that powers the Gaza Strip’s power plant has severely curtailed electricity production. But for Palestinians left to deal with the bitter winter cold with just three hours of electricity a day, the excuses are of little consolation.
“Yesterday, I had only three hours and 15 minutes of electricity at home,” one Gaza City resident, who asked to only be identified by the first letter of his name, Y, told The Times of Israel. “That’s it. The rest of the day there is nothing.”
“Two, three months ago we still had eight hours of electricity [a day],” Y. said, adding that “now all of the Gaza Strip receives just a little over three hours of electricity a day. During the winter weather, this can be dangerous.”
Heating homes by means of indoor bonfires has become common in Gaza, as has the use of candles as lighting, which has led to several fatal fires.
The latest crisis surrounding electricity supply in Gaza did not start overnight. It is the outcome of a long-running disagreement between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas over the payment of excise taxes for the fuel that is used in the power station in Gaza.

Gaza is set to get its first comedy festival. And that’s no joke.
At a launching ceremony held Dec. 29 at Rotus restaurant, Maimas for Media Production formally announced the planning of Gaza’s first comedy festival to be held March 2017.
The ceremony, which the organizers offered as a positive end to a difficult year for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, included theatrical performances and comedy shows by five Palestinian comedians and live bands.
The ceremony featured a short performance by famous Korean stand-up comedian Wonho Chung, who speaks fluent Arabic. In a previously recorded video, Chung expressed his admiration for the residents of the Gaza Strip, praising their steadfastness in the face of the siege and harsh living conditions and saying that comedy and laughter are powerful ways to ease the pain and grief of everyday reality.
Chung said he will participate in the comedy festival and expressed hope that the shows will bring smiles to the sad faces of the people of Gaza.

A day after a Palestinian terrorist attack that killed four Israelis, Palestinian leaders have found themselves amidst vehement disagreement over today’s tactic: should they be embracing and lauding the attack and its technique while calling for more of the same, or should they be distancing themselves from the massacre?
Rival factions within the Palestinian leadership have offered a confused response that involves elements of both approaches, sowing uncertainty in the Palestinian street. While initial reactions in Gaza, Ramallah, Hebron, and elsewhere in Palestinian territory featured celebratory distribution of candy, even fireworks, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s declaration that the perpetrator of the truck-ramming attack was a Daesh supporter prompted a Palestinian announcement this morning that their security forces had arrested nearly two dozen ISIS members. The back-and-forth has left many Palestinians, including those in leadership position, unclear on which of the conflicting attitudes they are supposed to display today.
“So are we for or against Daesh today?” wondered Jibril Rajoub, the Palestinian Minister of Sport. “Am I politicizing and weaponizing sport today as a declared opponent of the Islamic State, and likening Israel to the Islamic State, or am I excusing our own use of Islamic-State-type brutality as a legitimate response to Israeli occupation? I need to know.”
Some of the confusion, explained Rajoub, stems from a timetable sent to all Fatah faction leaders at the start of the month with Monday and Tuesday of this week allotted to pro-ISIS rhetoric, but the announcement of the anti-ISIS arrests this morning caught most of the officials by surprise. “We’re not offering a coherent line here,” he lamented.

The Obama administration has paid Iran more than $10 billion in gold, cash, and other assets since 2013, according to Iranian officials, who disclosed that the White House has been intentionally deflating the total amount paid to the Islamic Republic.
Senior Iranian officials late last week confirmed reports that the total amount of money paid to Iran over the past four years is in excess of $10 billion, a figure that runs counter to official estimates provided by the White House.
The latest disclosure by Iran, which comports with previous claims about the Obama administration obfuscating details about its cash transfers to Iran—including a $1.7 billion cash payment included in a ransom to free Americans—sheds further light on the White House’s back room dealings to bolster Iran’s economy and preserve the Iran nuclear agreement.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi confirmed last week a recent report in the Wall Street Journal detailing some $10 billion in cash and assets provided to Iran since 2013, when the administration was engaging in sensitive diplomacy with Tehran aimed at securing the nuclear deal.
Ghasemi disclosed that the $10 billion figure just scratches the surface of the total amount given to Iran by the United States over the past several years.

The United Nations chief expressed concern to the Security Council that Iran may have violated an arms embargo by supplying weapons and missiles to Lebanese Shi'ite group Hezbollah, according to a confidential report, seen by Reuters on Sunday.
The second bi-annual report, due to be discussed by the 15-member council on Jan. 18, also cites an accusation by France that an arms shipment seized in the northern Indian Ocean in March was from Iran and likely bound for Somalia or Yemen.
Most U.N. sanctions were lifted a year ago under a deal Iran made with Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia, the United States and the European Union to curb its nuclear program. But Iran is still subject to an arms embargo and other restrictions, which are not technically part of the nuclear agreement.
The report was submitted to the Security Council on Dec. 30 by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon before he was succeeded by Antonio Guterres on Jan. 1. It comes just weeks before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who has threatened to either scrap the nuclear agreement or seek a better deal, takes office.

A US Navy vessel fired three warning shots at a group of Iranian ships that approached the destroyer at high speed in the Strait of Hormuz, Reuters reported.
US defense officials said the USS Mahan had called on the four Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps ships to slow down, but they continued to approach at high speed.
In response, the American destroyer fired flares and a helicopter dropped a “smoke float” signaling device, according to Reuters.
The Iranian ships had come within 800 meters (half a mile) of the USS Mahan, which was escorting two other ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran has previously harassed US Navy ships in the Persian Gulf and around the Strait of Hormuz, with the most notable case being Iran’s capture of 10 US Navy sailors last January who had drifted into Iranian waters after experiencing mechanical problems.
The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Indian Sea through which a fifth of the world’s oil supply passes.

Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran from 1989 to 1997, is dead, and the New York Times is inconsolable. Rafsanjani, you see, was a “reformer,” a “protector,” according to the Times, “of what was left of Iran’s marginalized reformist movement and others with more moderate views than the conservative hard-line clerics who hold sway in Iran’s security forces and judiciary.” As always, reality and what the New York Times reports couldn’t be farther apart.
Rafsanjani, said the Times, “supported Hassan Rouhani, the current president, who is now suddenly bereft of a powerful and influential background figure with Islamic revolutionary credentials that could not be questioned.” Without a trace of self-awareness, the Times’ longtime Tehran correspondent, Thomas Erdbrink, added in the very next sentence that “Mr. Rafsanjani” was also “a longtime comrade of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, although the two had their disagreements.”
Erdbrink didn’t explain how Rafsanjani could be simultaneously a “reformer” who supported Rouhani and a “longtime comrade” of the “hardliner” Khamenei, and with good reason: the whole idea of a “reformist movement” within the Iranian regime is a fiction, as Obama adviser Ben Rhodes revealed, to the administration’s embarrassment, in the Times in May 2016. That was when the Times published an effusive profile of Rhodes, in which Times reporter David Samuels revealed that “the way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented—that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country—was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal.”
The chief false and misleading aspect of Obama’s presentation of the deal to the American public was his claim that he was dealing with moderate elements of Iran’s Islamic regime—that, according to Samuels, was a “narrative that Rhodes shaped.” Rhodes propagated the falsehood that Rouhani was a “moderate” who was struggling against “hard-liners” within the regime. Samuels describes this as “actively misleading,” as is Erdbrink’s claim on Rafsanjani’s death that he was the chief supporter of this non-existent “reformist movement,” of which Rouhani was supposedly a part.

Venezuelan far-left President Nicolas Maduro tapped for his new vice president former minister Tareck El Aissami, who has been accused of antisemitism and ties to Iran and the terrorist group Hezbollah.
The appointment was announced last week, according to reports, including the Miami Herald.
El Aissami is a known entity in the world of US intelligence. He is allegedly a part of Venezuela’s state drug-trafficking network and has ties to Iran, Syria, and the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah. If Maduro is ousted, as his opposition is calling for, El Aissami will take the helm of the South American nation.
“Not only implicated in drug trafficking and relations with the Colombian terrorist FARC movement, El-Aissami has inherited Chavez’ hatred of Israel and Jews and can now pursue Maduro’s antiaemitism, further threatening Jewish lives in Venezuela,” declared the Wiesenthal Center’s representative in Latin America, Ariel Gelblung, on Friday.
“Indeed El-Aissami may transform antiaemitism into state policy and further the transplantation of the Middle East conflict to South America,” Gelblung added.
Maduro is the heir of late leader Hugo Chavez, whose socialist regime had ties to hard-line Islamists.

With EU labeling decisions and BDS pushing for international boycotts, West Bank industrial parks are seeing a boom, with a new park set to be built soon; regional council head: companies marketing to Africa, India, China.
Despite BDS calls to boycott goods produced in the West Bank, a recent report has revealed that West Bank goods are more in demand than ever before.
At the Shahak industrial park being built in the northern West Bank, over 100 dunams have been sold to developers. The Barkan industrial park outside of Ariel - which already has 160 factories and companies – has registered a further 60 companies who want to relocate to the area.
Due to this huge increase in demand, another industrial park is set to open. Called the Nahal Rabah – Gates of Shomron Industrial Park, it will be located next to Sha’ar Tikvah and Oranit, putting it within a 20 minute drive of Petah Tikvah.
The industrial park will include both manufacturing and hi-tech companies, and will be owned by the Shomron Regional Council in conjunction with the Oranit and Elkana local councils.

As reported extensively on this site, the Modern Language Association held its annual convention this weekend in Philadelphia.
At the meeting a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions was defeated and a resolution opposing academic boycotts was passed and is now before the general membership. For coverage see here and here.
I am an MLA member, and I was there. Unfortunately, for professional reasons, I am not able to write under my own name. Such is the nature of the BDS academic boycott. The under-the-radar boycott is for real, even as pro-BDS faculty push for a formal boycott such at that attempted at MLA.
Here’s what I observed, and what I think the implications are for the academic boycott movement – and the opposition.
The atmosphere was tense. The sessions were highly charged and emotional. Speakers compared each other to the Judenrat and the Spanish Inquisition. People were visibly nervous.
For the other 99% of conference attendees, on the other hand, the MLA was business as usual. The bar in the lobby of the Philadelphia Downtown Marriott was constantly packed, the atmosphere was social, festive, and gregarious. In the corridors just outside the rooms where the BDS focused sessions were taking place, you’d be hard pressed to detect that anything other than great fun. It’s not clear how many of the estimated 8,000 or so conference attendees even knew, much less cared, about the drama at the Delegate Assembly this weekend.

The condemnation of Israel, a country so advanced in its treatment of women and that is also struggling to improve their status and opportunities, is a disgrace — especially since the MLA has said nothing about the oppressive conditions under which many Arab women live in the rest of the Middle East. When will the MLA pass a resolution condemning genital mutilation, honor killings and other crimes against Arab women?
For this reason, I reject intersectionality. Intersectionality absorbs all groups and cultures into two categories: “oppressed” and “oppressors.” But this stigmatization just recirculates essentialist, fixed categories. The difference between women is erased, leaving a generalized group that blurs all histories, societies, cultures and politics into a stark and reductive binary opposition.
That Israel is the focus of this effort to protect difference and otherness is an utmost irony. Jews have been, and apparently remain, the “other” for centuries. The current anti-Judaism of the boycott movement — which calls for a boycott rather than pressuring both Israel and Palestinians to negotiate an agreement of mutual recognition — despicably tries to turn the Jew into the oppressor.
A much more powerful ethic would allow all voices to be heard — and recognize the difference and otherness of all groups — rather than attempting to erase one particular community through a boycott movement.

South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma is calling on South Africans not to visit Israel in order to show solidarity with “the people of Palestine”, the Africa News website reported Sunday.
Zuma’s comments came at the 105th anniversary celebration of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), during which he reiterated the party’s solidarity with the “oppressed people of the world”, citing “Palestine” as an example.
“The people of Palestine continue to suffer in their rightful quest for self-determination … We reiterate that we firmly discourage travel to Israel for causes not related to fostering peace in the region,” Zuma was quoted as having said in a speech heard by thousands of party supporters.
Zuma also said his party supported of UN Resolution 2334, which was passed last month by the Security Council and which condemned Israeli presence in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. He called on the Palestinian people to unite and achieve their goal, according to Africa News.
Zuma and other members of his party have continuously expressed anti-Israel sentiments in recent years.

The map shown in the image above appeared on TV screens on a Royal Air Maroc flight from Sao Paulo to Rabat. Instead of the State of Israel, the term 'Palestinian Territories' appears over the area and there is no mention of Israeli cities whatsoever.
This is not the first time an airline has erased Israel from its maps of the region. In 2015, Air France left Israel out of their in-flight maps, causing a passenger to send the misrepresentative map to the Facebook page of pro-Israel organization Stand With Us.
In a letter to Air France chairman and CEO, Frédéric Gagey, the Simon Wiesenthal Center director for international Relations, Dr. Shimon Samuels, noted that, “French members of our center have sent us reportedly captured shots from the English and French language of an Air France flight-path, taken last week between New York and Paris, and the locations ‘Israel’ and ‘Tel Aviv’ are glaringly absent.”
The letter noted that, “We are asking whether Air France has succumbed to the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions] campaign to delegitimize the Jewish State by literally wiping it off the map?” Air France issued an apology, saying they “deeply regret this incident, due to a map scale and display problem which is currently being resolved.”

This weekend (Jan. 7th), anti-Israel activists are forcing the Modern Language Association (MLA), a 25,000-member academic organization, to vote on a resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Similar proposals have been widely condemned and rejected by the MLA in the past. Indeed, a large group of Nobel Prize winners called the boycott against Israel “antithetical” to academic freedom and freedom of expression, and most likely a form of, “discrimination by virtue of national origin.” Meanwhile, supporters of the boycott have largely responded to critics by claiming that their actions are grounded in principles like social justice, human rights, and international law. This stated commitment to progressive values should be judged against a disturbing new fact which has come to light: the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) receives its funding through a hate group with a long history of promoting racism and violence.
USACBI is the leading organization pushing for academic boycotts against Israel in American academic associations. Numerous members of USACBI’s leadership are spearheading the campaign within the MLA, including one who was recently elected to the MLA’s executive committee. In its mission statement, the organization claims to stand up for, “equality, self-determination, human rights… and true democracy,” while espousing non-violence. And yet for years now, USACBI has received fiscal sponsorship from Al-Awda – a group which represents the very opposite agenda.
Al-Awda is an activist organization which traffics in racism and wild conspiracy theories, and whose leaders have celebrated the murder of innocent civilians. According to the ADL, Al-Awda has voiced support for racist terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah since its inception in 2000. In a series of protests sponsored by the group in 2006, Al-Awda speakers made statements such as, “we are all Hezbollah… I believe in armed struggle,” and “this will not come to an end until Israel is finished, until there is no Israel”. Meanwhile, the crowds at these protests chanted racist slogans like, “Palestine is our country and the Jews are our dogs!” (h/t Alexi)

Regular HP readers will need little reminder of the toxic nature of the Middle East Monitor site (“MEMO”), whose strapline is “Creating New Perspectives” and which claims to provide “carefully reasoned commentaries rooted in factual evidence”. In 2011, MEMO came to the defence of Palestinian hate preacher Raed Salah. More recently, it has helped to fund the conspiracy theorist David Miller. The Community Security Trust has more than once accused MEMO of promoting antisemitic canards (here and here; the original offending posts have been removed from MEMO’s site). Petra Marquardt Bigman has noted MEMO’s “open sympathies for Hamas.” MEMO’s director is Daud Abdullah; its senior editor is Ibrahim Hewitt; its researchers and writers include Ben White and Yvonne Ridley; its “honorary advisers” include Tariq Ramadan, Jenny Tonge and Lord Nazir Ahmed. In recent months, MEMO has given a platform to Asa Winstanley, to claim - in the face of all the evidence – that the Labour Party’s antisemitism crisis was “fabricated”; and to Ben White, to whitewash and justify the violent intimidation of Jewish students. You get the idea.
Even by MEMO’s standards, however, a recent, anonymous post on the scandal of missing Yemenite babies in Israel has plumbed new depths. The entire post (which also appears on the Palestine Chronicle website) is reproduced below (emphasis added):
400,000 Yemeni babies missing in Israel
Israel last week made public a database of 400,000 Jewish Yemeni children that have disappeared since the 1950s, the Times of Israel reported.

Yesterday’s Al Jazeera investigation focused on a covertly filmed private dinner conversation in London involving a diplomat at the Israeli embassy who was looking for information to “take down” deputy Foreign Minister, Sir Alan Duncan.
Though the Israeli ambassador quickly apologised for the comments by the low-level official, Shai Masot, and there was no suggestion of a coordinated Israeli effort to bring down Mr. Duncan, British news outlets immediately pounced, devoting significant coverage to the incident – more coverage, overall, than on the deadly terror attack later that same day.
Some of the coverage has addressed the question of why Masot seemed particularly keen on getting information on Duncan, and correctly pointed out his extreme criticism of Israel. Both the Guardian and BBC specifically noted Duncan’s critique of settlements in speeches and interviews made in 2014.

Thanks to an Al Jazeera sting operation, Shai Masot, an employee of the Israeli Embassy in London, was filmed using undiplomatic language concerning British parliamentarians regarded as unfriendly towards Israel.
While the story has been sensationalized by the British media to imply some kind of sinister “plot” and charges of undue influence on the part of Israel towards UK foreign policy (yes, the same UK that voted in favor of UN Security Council Resolution 2334), Israeli Ambassador to the UK, Mark Regev apologized and Britain’s Foreign Office has stated it now considers “the matter closed.”
The Telegraph, however, got its headline wrong.

A rally was held in Whitefish, Montana, to show solidarity with the Jewish community, which has been targeted by a neo-Nazi website.
The rally Saturday was sponsored by the Love Not Hate organization, which the Daily Stormer has accused of threatening white supremacist leader Richard Spencer’s mother, who lives in the town along with him.
Several hundred people reportedly turned out for the rally — billed as a block party — in sub-zero degree weather, according to Montana Public Radio. The rally included speeches from city and faith leaders, local singers and storytellers, according to the report.
“This is indeed a community where the voices that speak love and acceptance are so many more numerous than those that speak for hate and division,” Jessica Loti Leferrier, a Love Not Hate rally organizer, told Montana Public Radio.
The neo-Nazi website, the Daily Stormer, said last week that it had filed the paperwork for an armed neo-Nazi march designed to harass the Montana Jewish community of Whitefish.

Israeli defense electronics developer Elbit Systems announced Sunday that it has won a $100 million deal with the Brazilian military. Under the deal, Elbit's Brazilian subsidiary, Ares, will supply the Brazilian military with REMAX remote-controlled weapon stations.
A press release posted on the company's website said Ares had been "awarded a framework contract, in a total value of approximately $100 million, to supply 12.7/7.62 mm Remote-Controlled Weapon Stations to the Brazilian army. The contract includes associated equipment and services. The RCWS, named REMAX, will be supplied over a five-year period. An initial production order, valued at approximately $7.5 million, has been received."
The statement added that Ares' REMAX systems were designed specifically to meet the Brazilian military's requirements, and were successfully tested and fielded in Brazilian army Guarani 6x6 vehicles.
"REMAX is a stabilized weapon station for 12.7/7.62 mm machine guns and will be used in armored vehicles and logistics vehicles utilized in combat for troop transport, border patrol, and peacekeeping missions," the statement said.

Team8, a cybersecurity think tank and venture fund that strives to create companies to tackle cybersecurity threats, said Monday that Microsoft Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and Citigroup would join its partnership of international supporters.
Founded by veterans of the IDF’s Intelligence & Technology Unit 8200, Team8 said that Microsoft Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures would join its so-called “global cyber syndicate” as strategic investors and that it has signed a strategic partnership agreement with Citigroup as well, but without a financial investment from the bank.
The Microsoft and Qualcomm investments, whose figures were undisclosed, brings the total funds raised by Team8 to date to $92 million, the company said.
The international companies in the cyber syndicate work closely with Team8 to explore, set up and validate the creation of new startups in the cyber security sector. Microsoft Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and Citigroup will join current Team8 cyber syndicate members Cisco, AT&T, Accenture, Nokia, Temasek, Mitsui, Bessemer Venture Partners, Marker LLC, and Innovation Endeavors, owned by Google co-founder Eric Schmidt.

Israeli startup VocalZoom has developed a sensor that it says allows “near perfect” voice control performance, even when there is a lot of background noise, like a car with an open window.
“VocalZoom’s sensor can hear your voice inside your mouth, so it is not contaminated by background noises, ” VocalZoom CEO Tal Bakish in a phone interview. This is done by measuring the vibrations on the skin of the people who are talking, he said.
“The challenge was to make something accurate and low cost,” he said.
The aim is to improve on existing voice recognition technologies and voice by metric systems — in which people can be recognized based on their voice. The voice recognition systems in use today, by Google and Apple’s Siri, for example, “are not good enough, they are used by geeks but not anyone else,” he said, because the system does not always manage to correctly interpret the voice commands.
VocalZoom’s technology is an optical sensor that is immune to acoustic noise. It measures the vibrations that are created only when a person is speaking — from the throat and face of the speaker — and converts the data into an audio signal.

The recent intensifying of Israel’s relationship with China is promising for both countries, although its long-term implications remain unclear. China desperately needs the sort of high-tech innovation that Israel offers in order to transform its giant economy into one that leads in ideas and not just manufacturing efficiency. And China’s population of nearly 1.4 billion people is growing wealthier each year, offering a lucrative market for Israeli products. In addition, the growing interest in Israel among China’s population is significant in terms of public diplomacy.
But as China’s power grows and worries increase that the American-dominated world order is changing, there is much uncertainty as to what this all means for Israel, especially given the fact that China has strong ties to Persian Gulf oil powers and a history of military cooperation with Iran.
But Israelis involved in academic and cultural exchange programs say that the current situation makes their work more important than ever for Israel. “The foundation of people-to-people relationships leads to better international relations,” Witte said. “We are striving to bring an accurate understanding of Israel to China.”

I) Following the Ministerial meeting held in Paris on 3 June 2016, the Participants met in Paris on 15 January 2017 to reaffirm their support for a just, lasting and comprehensive resolution of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. They reaffirmed that a negotiated solution with two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security, is the only way to achieve enduring peace.
They emphasized the importance for the parties to restate their commitment to this solution, to take urgent steps in order to reverse the current negative trends on the ground and to start meaningful direct negotiations.
They reiterated that a negotiated two-state outcome should meet Israeli security needs and the rights of Palestinians to statehood and sovereignty, end the occupation that began in 1967, and resolve all permanent status issues on the basis of United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 (1967), 338 (1973), 1397 (2002), 1515 (2003), 1850 (2008), the Madrid principles (1991) and the Quartet Roadmap (2003). They also underscored the Arab Peace Initiative as a vision for a comprehensive resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, thus contributing to regional peace and security. They welcomed the adoption of United Nations Security Council resolution 2334 on 23 December 2016, which clearly condemned settlement activity, incitement and violence, and called both sides to take steps to advance the two-state solution on the ground.
They took note of the report of the Quartet of 1 July 2016 and its recommendations for both sides to take concrete steps to preserve the two-state solution and to create the conditions for final status negotiations.
They noted with particular interest United States Secretary of State's remarks on 28 December 2016, in which he stressed that no solution could be imposed and outlined his vision of principles for a final status agreement.
They further emphasized the importance for both sides of complying with international humanitarian law and international human rights law, including accountability.
II) The Participants highlighted the potential for security, stability and prosperity for both parties that could result from a peace agreement. They expressed their readiness to exert necessary efforts toward the achievement of the two-state solution and to contribute substantially to arrangements for ensuring the Sustainability of a negotiated peace agreement, in particular in the areas of economic incentives, the consolidation of Palestinian state capacities, and civil society dialogue. Those could include, inter alia:
- a European special privileged partnership; other economic incentives and increased private sector involvement; support to further efforts by the parties to streamline economic cooperation;
- concrete support to the implementation of the Palestinian Statehood Strategy, including further
meetings between international partners and the Palestinian side to that effect;
- convening Israeli and Palestinian civil society fora, and rekindling the public debate.
They called for these different strands of work to be pursued diligently.
III) Looking ahead, the Participants:
- expect both sides to restate their commitment to the two-state solution, and to disavow official voices on their side that reject this solution;
- call on each side to independently demonstrate, through policies and actions, a genuine commitment to the two-state solution and refrain from unilateral steps that prejudge the outcome of final status negotiations, in order to rebuild trust and create a path back to meaningful direct negotiations, in line with the recommendations of the Quartet report of 1 July 2016;
restate the validity of the Arab Peace Initiative and highlight its potential for stability in the region;
reaffirm that they will not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations; also reaffirm that they will distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967;
welcome the prospect of closer cooperation between the Quartet and Arab League members to further the objectives of this Declaration and enhance, if necessary, existing mechanisms;
welcome the readiness of interested Participants to review progress and further the set of incentives; their findings could be conveyed to the United Nations for the reporting under OP12 of UNSCR 2334.
France will inform the parties about the international community’s collective support and concrete contribution to the two-State solution contained in this joint declaration.

The PLO logo, today, erases Israel

Call on each side to independently demonstrate, through policies and actions, a genuine commitment to the two-state solution and refrain from unilateral steps that prejudge the outcome of final status negotiations, in order to rebuild trust and create a path back to meaningful direct negotiations, in line with the recommendations of the Quartet report of 1 July 2016.

What possesses a father of four with most of his life still ahead of him to get behind the wheel of a truck and embark on a vehicular murder spree that will almost certainly end in his own demise?
Fadi al-Qanbar, 28, the man who plowed his truck into a group of IDF cadets on Sunday, was not considered a security risk by the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), though he had served time in prison. He had no known connections with a terrorist organization. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said al-Qanbar identified with ISIS. But why? Why would a resident of Jerusalem’s Jebl Mukaber neighborhood launch a suicide mission to murder Israelis knowing that his wife would be widowed and his two sons and two daughters would be orphaned in the process?
A saying attributed to Golda Meir comes to mind: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
We agree. If al-Qanbar had cared for himself, his children and his family - not to mention the soldiers he rammed into - he never would have carried out his attack on Sunday.
While we still don’t know what pushed al-Qanbar to carry out his attack, the incitement that comes out daily from the Palestinian Authority plays an important role.
The failure by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to condemn the attack by Monday night – more than 36 hours since it took place – is part of a culture of hate, violence and intransigence. A “peace partner” does not remain silent when innocent 20-year-olds are deliberately run down by a truck on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem. A real peace partner speaks up, shouts and condemns.

Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate was lit with the Israeli flag Monday night in a show of solidarity following a terror attack in Jerusalem Sunday in which four IDF soldiers were killed.
Like the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower and other landmarks, the gate is often used as a screen for national colors to show support in the wake of attacks and other incidents.
The landmark was illuminated with the Turkish flag last week following the Istanbul New Year’s attack.
East Jerusalem resident Fadi el-Qanbar drove a truck into a group of soldiers at the Haas-Sherover Promenade in the Armon Hanatziv neighborhood of Jerusalem on Sunday.

Lighting up Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate with an Israeli flag is a form of ceremony. Israel is entering the family of nations. Until now, in the Western public opinion and mainly in the elites’ opinion, Israel has been seen as the cause of terror. That has been expressed occasionally in editorials, or by figures such as former US President Jimmy Carter and Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom, following the terror attacks in Europe. The Israeli flag on one of the most important symbols in Germany somewhat changes the picture.
Is this also a step towards a change in awareness? Possibly. Because in the past few years, Europe has been going through a certain change. Until less than a decade ago, Israel was perceived—both in comments and in public opinion polls—as one of the biggest threats to world peace. That was false consciousness, the product of successful poisonous propaganda.
But something is changing. The Europeans, who are not involved in any occupation or in any oppression, are becoming the victims of terror. Brussels, Paris, Nice and Berlin have joined Madrid and London as jihad targets. The Europeans are afraid of the radicalization of part of the Muslims. They are still failing to understand that it’s not the occupation that causes terror in Israel. But they are beginning to understand.

The murderous legacy and personality of Yahya Ayyash, a Hamas mass murderer who masterminded a wave of suicide bombings, are being glorified not only by his Hamas supporters, but also by the "moderate" Western-funded Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by Mahmoud Abbas.
Ayyash won his reputation on the murdering and maiming of hundreds of Israelis, most of them innocent civilians. Had he fought for peace and coexistence, Ayyash would have been condemned as a "traitor" and gone down in history as a "defeatist" and "surrenderist."
"The mosque that produced the mujahed [warrior] Ayyash is continuing to produce heroes."– Sheikh Yusef al-Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.
It is in these mosques that Ayyash was taught that Islam permits people like him to build bombs and dispatch suicide bombers to blow up buses. It is also in these mosques where he was taught that devout Muslims are best engaged in spilling Jewish blood.
Children and youths who attend prayers at these mosques are being fed the same hate-speech rhetoric that their hero Ayyash was exposed to in his childhood. Hence it is no surprise that the mosques in the West Bank and Gaza Strip continue to this day to churn out new terrorists, many of whom aspire to become like Ayyash – mass murderers.
These European leaders wrongly image that if they get rid of Israel, it will be only Israel. They fail see that Israel is just the first course. They imagine that if they accede to Muslims' wishes, they will be safe. What they fail to see, as in France, Germany, Sweden, Belgium and Britain, is that they will be next.

Although AIPAC condemned the Obama administration’s refusal to veto 2334, it continues to fervently support the PLO and Palestinian statehood. Indeed, just days after 2334 passed, AIPAC officials and missions were meeting with Erekat and other PLO operatives in Ramallah, as if there is anything pro-Israel about meeting with people who just got the Security Council to resolve that Israel is a criminal state.
AIPAC’s continued support for the PLO no doubt stems in part from its desire to keep the Democratic Party inside the pro-Israel tent. Unfortunately, that ship seems to have sailed.
Nearly 40% of House Democrats including minority leader Nancy Pelosi and assistant leader Jim Clyburn voted against the PLO state supporting resolution.
Rep. Keith Ellison, who is the front-runner to be elected Democratic National Committee chairman later this month, also voted no. Two thirds of the 95 Democrats supported by J Street opposed the resolution.
Most of the Democrats that supported Resolution 11 may well have supported it even if it had left out the goal of giving the PLO a state. It cannot be credibly argued that Reps. Elliot Engel and Steny Hoyer would have opposed Resolution 11 if it had simply stated that 2334 was antisemitic.
Certainly it is hard to argue they would have opposed it if the vote was delayed until January 21. Indeed, it is hard to understand why it was necessary to pass the resolution while President Barack Obama – who partnered with the PLO to pass 2334 – is still in office.
Resolution 2334’s passage must be viewed as an inflection point. It is no longer possible to credibly argue that the PLO is remotely interested in peace with Israel. Sunday’s murderous terrorist attack Jerusalem was further testament of this truth.
The time has come for Israelis and Israel’s supporters in the US to demand that our leaders – from Prime Minister Netanyahu to AIPAC to members of Congress – finally recognize and act of this truth. The whitewashing of the PLO must end.

The Jordanians were, of course, no friends of the Palestinians. Indeed, in September 1970 there was a fierce conflict, known as Black September, in which the Palestinian Liberation Organization forces led by Yasir Arafat were defeated by the Jordanian forces led by then-King Hussein, and were forced into exile after the death of thousands. Just what would have happened to Palestinian national ambitions if the territories had been returned to Jordan so that the Fourth Convention would no longer apply? We shall never know the answer to that question because Jordan never sought to regain the territories and indeed in 1988 renounced all claim to the West Bank in part to clear the path to Palestinian claims. Note that the Jordanians did not—nor could they have—transferred their claims to Palestine which did not (and still does not) have statehood status. At this point, we have the novel situation in which the stripping away of the initial sovereign leaves Israel without a genuine competitor for sovereignty over the territories. Nothing in the Fourth Convention covers these unique circumstances. And it is a political, not a legal, issue that governs the implementation of any potential two-state solution.
Nor is the situation made any clearer by the 2004 Advisory opinion, which addressed the legality of the wall that Israel erected around the West Bank to protect itself against widespread Palestinian terrorist attacks. Clearly the wall separated the West Bank from the rest of Israel, and it was condemned for that reason as illegal by the ICJ, which heavily relied on notions of customary international law that have never been supported by a consistent practice that requires nations to remain immobile in the face of systematic terror threats. To be sure, Resolution 2234 condemns terrorist activities, but only in a disembodied sense that makes no reference to the constant activities of Hamas or the active support for terrorist activities that is fully institutionalized by the Palestinian authority, which offers financial support for individuals and the families of those who kill or maim Israelis. Generalized pronouncements make it appear that Israel and the Palestinian Authority are equal offenders in the commission of terrorist acts, when it is highly likely that the Israeli security measures would be vastly curtailed if there were credible assurances that the bombings, shootings, and stabbings would come to an end.
The one-sided treatment of these legal issues is consistent with the general UN approach that obsessively condemns Israel while mostly overlooking the atrocities that have ravaged the greater Middle East. In light of these issues, it is somewhat odd to treat the settlements as though they were the major obstacle to the two-state solution. Remove them tomorrow, especially in response to the UN resolution, and the most likely outcome is that the PA and Hamas would intensify their activities to destroy the Jewish state, just as they did in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 when Israel fought wars of survival, knowing full well that the first defeat would be the last one, even if the 1949 Geneva Convention places strict limitations on how occupying powers have to behave toward conquered people.
The Israelis know this all too well. They also know that the lesson of the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza led to the rise of Hamas and to repeated military actions and missile attacks between 2006 and 2014. Any unilateral surrender of lands in the West Bank to a new Palestinian state opens up the possibility that greater hostilities could be launched against an Israel weakened by successive rounds of fatal concessions. The Israelis claim that the only path to peace is through bilateral negotiations between the parties, backed by the US and the UN. Those negotiations were apparently close to success in 2000 and 2008, but the deal was never closed because of the Palestinians.
At this point, Resolution 2234 has killed the prospects for any negotiated peace in the foreseeable future. The Palestinian Authority will treat compliance with a ruinous Resolution as a precondition for further negotiations. The Israelis cannot live in a world that requires them to surrender territories under their control before 1967. The terms of the UN Resolution thus have put an effective end to all negotiations between the two sides. The Israelis are likely to continue the dangerous game of expanding settlements in the West Bank, as the only credible way of punishing the Palestinians for their continued delay. Whether this strategy will work, or should work, is a hard call. But much of the blame for the current impasse lies at the feet of Secretary of State John Kerry who never did understand the political dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

Would a Palestinian state serve the cause of Mideast peace? This used to be conventional wisdom, on the theory that a Palestinian state would lead to peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
Today the proposition is ridiculous. No deal between Jerusalem and Ramallah is going to lift the sights of those now fighting in Syria, Iraq or Yemen. Nor will a deal reconcile Tehran and its terrorist proxies in Lebanon and Gaza to the existence of a Jewish state.
Aren't the Palestinians entitled to a state? Maybe. But are they more entitled to one than the Assamese, Basques, Baloch, Corsicans, Druze, Flemish, Kashmiris, Kurds, Moros, Native Hawaiians, Northern Cypriots, Rohingya, Tibetans, Uyghurs or West Papuans - all of whom have distinct national identities, legitimate historical grievances and plausible claims to statehood? What gives Palestinians the preferential claim?
Comparisons aside, would a Palestinian state be good for Palestinian people? A June 2015 poll by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion found that a majority of Arab residents in east Jerusalem would rather live as citizens with equal rights in Israel than in a Palestinian state.
But isn't a Palestinian state a necessity for Israel? Can it maintain its Jewish and democratic character without separating itself from the Palestinians?
In theory, Israel would be well-served living alongside a sovereign Palestinian state that lived in peace with its neighbors. But Israelis don't live in theory. They live in a world where Israeli prime ministers made good-faith offers of Palestinian statehood and were met with rejection and violence.

President Obama has gone rogue and only one man can protect American democracy in the next few days: the President-elect.
On January 15, 2017, with only five days left after 2,917 days in office, President Barack Obama is planning once again to feed Israel to the international wolves. The move is intended to tie the hands of President Donald Trump and is a direct repudiation of the will of the American electorate who rejected Obama’s calamitous foreign policy and a repeat performance by his secretary of state.
On Sunday, France is scheduled to hold an international conference to unleash an international mob on Israel. The meeting is taking place with Obama’s direct connivance. Seventy-states have been lined up to impose their preferences on the Middle East’s only democracy. Israelis are still dying in Israeli streets after seventy years of unending Arab terror – and the folks sitting in Paris munching on croissants know best how to protect Israeli national security.
The bare-faced power-grab by France and its Arab allies – with the blessing of President Obama – raises unavoidable questions: Who will attend? If they attend, how senior a representative will be sent by the main players on the Security Council: the U.S., Russia, and the United Kingdom? Will attendees sign on to an outcome document imperiling Israel that is already circulating? Will the Middle East Quartet – composed of the U.S., the EU, Russia and the UN – approve of the outcome document? Will a UN Security Council subsequently approve of the outcome document before January 20, 2017?
The French meeting follows on President Obama helping to ram through a UN Security Council resolution on December 23, 2016 that was clearly intended to unleash a legal and economic pogrom against the Jewish state. It didn’t take long for Palestinian terrorists to get the message: sidelining a negotiated solution between the parties by strong-arming an Israeli villain at the UN was a greenlight for the enforcers in Gaza City and Ramallah.

By approving the resolution’s absurd language that Israel’s claim to the Western Wall and Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter has “no legal validity,” and ignoring the Jewish people’s 3,000-year-old connection to Judea and Samaria, the Obama administration only encourages Palestinian jihadists to cling to their dreams of driving the Jews into the sea. No wonder Hamas and Iran-backed Islamic Jihad, who are dedicated to Israel’s destruction, have praised it.
In his speech about the resolution, Kerry said, “It is vital that we have an honest, clear-eyed conversation about the uncomfortable truths.”
Here are just a few of them: No agreement, including the Oslo Accords signed by the Palestinians, precludes Israel from building settlements in Judea and Samaria. In fact, even two-state proponents acknowledge Israel’s right to annex the major settlements as part of a land swap in the final peace agreement.
The “West Bank” territory is disputed – not occupied. It was never a sovereign Palestinian state. After the expulsion of Jews 2,000 years ago, the land was occupied by many nations, most recently by the Ottomans, British and Jordanians. Only in 1967, after Israel defeated Jordan in the Six Day War, did claims of “illegal occupation” become fashionable. After all, which legal entity did Israel illegally occupy it from? The Ottoman Empire? The British mandate? Certainly not from any state called “Palestine.”
What a tragedy for the legacy of Barack Obama, whose countless assurances of “having Israel’s back” have proven worthless.
Already tainted by the Iran deal, his legacy will be stained by this cowardly stab in Israel’s back in the fleeting days of his presidency.

Further to the recent publication of “Ten False Assumptions Regarding Israel,” which addressed many of the widely-held and universally-disseminated false and mistaken assumptions regarding Israel, a number of additional false assumptions – some even more willful and malicious – are addressed.
1. “Israel is committing genocide, mass murder and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian People” – a false and malicious blood-libel.
2. “The Jews are not a people and have no rights in the Middle East” – False and Misguided
3. “The establishment of Israel was a catastrophe for the Palestinians” – False
4. “Israel prevents the supply of water to the Palestinian population” – False
5. “Israel violates its obligations in the Oslo Accords” – False
6. “Israel is denying the ‘right of return’ to millions of Palestinian refugees” – False.
7. “BDS is a progressive, non-violent movement in the best tradition of peaceful activism” – False and Deceptive
8. “Israel is undermining the ‘two state solution’”- False and Misleading.
9. “Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza Strip is illegal” – False.
10. Israel is conducting extrajudicial murders and is randomly and cold-bloodedly executing Palestinians – False and Malicious
11. “Israel committed war crimes in the Gaza Strip including the indiscriminate murder of children” – False

On January 20, however, Kerry will no longer be in charge of the U.S.’s Middle East policies, and Barack Obama will no longer be President. President-elect Donald Trump has created much ambiguity as to where the U.S. will stand on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, just as he did on most other issues, so I will offer my humble advice.
The Trump administration should do the only thing that will break the impasse, something that every U.S. administration has so far been afraid to do, and that is to support Israel in resolving the conflict unilaterally. Let Israel set the borders and the separation rules to suit its own demographic and security needs. Let Israel build the wall. Let Israel defend itself as it sees fit. Most importantly, oppose any UN Security Council resolution that might interfere with Israel’s plan.
Israel won the Israel-Arab war, and despite that, Palestinians have had seven decades to shape their own future rather than be dictated by the victor. But after 69 years of obstructionism, the Palestinian leadership no longer deserves a seat at the table. It is time for Israel to behave as the victor of the conflict, and to win the peace just as it won the war.>Can Trump break the impasse and help Israel finally enjoy the fruits of victory?

The UN Security Council’s Resolution 2334, carried on December 23 with the US abstaining, is related to the Arab-Israeli War that ran between June 5 and June 10, 1967.
The resolution condemns “all measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem”.
Australia appears to be the only Western democracy to indicate that it does not agree with the passing of the resolution. New Zealand was one of the sponsors of the motion.
In fact, there was no such entity as a “Palestinian Territory” in 1967. Following the creation of the State of Israel by the UN in 1948, the land between Israel and the Jordan River was controlled by Jordan. Jordan did not give independence to Palestinians before the Six-Day War. Large parts of the West Bank are administered by the Palestinian Authority.
Like many monumental events, the history of the Six-Day War is contested.
The conflict is well summarised, in a balanced way, by Eugene Rogan in The Arabs: A History. The Arab nations at the time did not recognise Israel’s right to exist, referring to the nation merely as the “Zionist entity”.

If, as the Australian newspaper implied this week, The Spectator Australia has played a minor role in the recent acknowledgment by the Jerusalem Post that Australia’s multi-faceted support for Israel is worthy of special commendation, then we wear such praise as a badge of honour.
‘Australia has emerged as one of Israel’s few true friends… We should not take this friendship for granted,’ the Jerusalem Post editorialised. Which, to be blunt, is something of an understatement.
With New Zealand shamefully sponsoring the odious and breathtakingly anti-Semitic UN Security Resolution 2334; with a ragbag collection of Islamic and failed fellow-travelers gleefully joining in like ‘a pack of jackals’; with Britain equally shamefully voting for this disgrace; and with the US abstaining (in effect voting for) the resolution as part of Barack Obama’s and John Kerry’s vitriolic lame duck death throes, it is unclear if Israel has any real friends outside of Australia.
As this week’s cover stories by David Flint and Daryl McCann make depressingly clear, 2334 is a grotesque attempt by the failed Obama administration not only to disguise a plethora of disastrous actions and inactions they are responsible for, that have fuelled global and Middle East instability and war, but worse, is a direct existential threat to Israel. Already, historical revisionism is being given succour by 2334. This week, for example, saw Islamic guards harrassing an Israeli archeologist for using the term ‘Temple Mount’ on, er, the Temple Mount.

Under article 80 of the UN Charter, these territories clearly remain legally subject today to the Jewish right of settlement established in the Mandate. The article was carefully drafted with precisely this in mind; no mere Security Council resolution can ever change this.
The opponents of Israel argue that the Fourth Geneva Convention introduced in response to Nazi atrocities in occupied territories outlaws Israel’s settlements. This is patently untrue; the convention only applies when the territory of a state party to the Convention is occupied which is clearly not the case with the West Bank. In accordance with the Mandate this remains part of the Jewish homeland. Israel alone can forfeit this, as she has to a great extent in Gaza.
The continual calls for a two-state solution, which would involve creating a tiny second Palestinian state smaller than Brisbane, have proved to be a smoke screen and have surely run their course. On the seven occasions when Israel or the Jewish community have agreed to these, her opponents have either backed away or imposed ridiculous conditions.
Their agenda remains. In the words of the Tehran mullahs, it is that agenda, unacceptable to the civilised world, of ‘Death to Israel’.

1. The Divided Jerusalem Plan
As US ambassador to Israel in September 2000, Martin Indyk first publicly urged Israel to “share the governance of Jerusalem and its holy sites” with the Palestinians. Now, in his January 2017 New York Times op-ed, Indyk has urged the incoming Trump administration to push for dividing control of Jerusalem between Israel and the PA, which Indyk contends would “open the way to negotiation on other final-status issues like the borders of a Palestinian state.”
Political historian Gil Troy, of McGill University, told JNS.org that the State Department’s plans regarding Israel often have been driven by appeasement rather than principle. Kerry’s recent warning against moving the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem “wasn’t a principled argument, but was simply based on fear of violence by extremists,” and “is exactly the kind of cowardice that comes from State, and which [incoming President Donald] Trump will abhor,” Troy said. He predicted that “the chance of a clash between a tweet-driven, populist, seat-of-the-pants Trump White House and the striped-pants types at the State Department is huge.”
Professor Troy is the author of a recent book about Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan’s fight against the UN’s “Zionism-is-racism” resolution, and Moynihan’s clashes with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Moynihan “feared that too many State Department bureaucrats were so concerned about how their actions would be perceived on the cocktail party circuit in Scarsdale, that it inhibited them from acting effectively; true then, true now,” Troy said. “Many State Department officials forget Moynihan’s essential lesson that diplomacy doesn’t just mean being nice, but requires using many different tools — because in a tough world, you can’t always play nice.”

President Barack Obama on Monday dismissed the notion that he betrayed Israel at the United Nations Security Council last month by opting not to veto a resolution that branded settlements illegal and called the West Bank and East Jerusalem occupied Palestinian territory. Speaking in an Israeli Channel 2 TV interview, Obama said he had an obligation as president “to do what I think is right.”
In an excerpt of the interview broadcast Monday evening, the outgoing president was asked about Israeli claims that he had orchestrated Resolution 2334, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s specific description of the move as a “shameful, anti-Israeli ploy.” Did he understand the Israeli “sense of betrayal”? interviewer Ilana Dayan asked.
“No,” Obama replied. “I’ll be honest with you: That kind of hyperbole, those kinds of statements, don’t have a basis in fact.
“They may work well with respect to deflecting attention from the problem of settlements,” the president continued. “They may play well with Bibi’s political base, as well as the Republican base here in the United States, but they don’t match up with the facts.”

The United Nations Human Rights Council is reportedly working on a "blacklist" of Israeli companies operating beyond the Green Line with aim of declaring them illegal.
The list, an initiative prompted by the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, is scheduled to be released in March, but a source familiar with the issue told Israel Hayom Monday it may only come out in June.
The move reportedly aims to bar the presence of any Israeli company beyond the Green Line. If adopted, the list could deem even private security firms protecting Israelis in Judea and Samaria from terrorist organizations, as illegal.
The list is said to be the brainchild of known BDS activist Richard Falk, formerly the U.N.'s special rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. Falk first came up with the idea for the blacklist six years ago, while in office, and he has been strongly advocating for it ever since, this time with the support of several Arab U.N. members.
In an effort to thwart this initiative, NGO Monitor, a watchdog group that promotes greater transparency among foreign-funded Israeli nongovernmental organizations, has recently sent the Human Rights Council a position paper explaining that such a list would be a violation of international law and the UNHRC's own guidelines against discrimination based on national origin, arguing that as no such blacklists exist for any other conflict zone in the world, it would in effect be targeting Jewish-owned businesses.

It is up to Israel to notify its friends, old and new, that hostile votes at the U.N. will not be met with understanding. Up until now, friendly states played the usual game: They displayed general sympathy toward the Jewish state, but did not vote in its favor, offering instead endless excuses. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's firm response to the Security Council's hostile vote is the beginning of a new chapter on this issue. Friends are supposed to support us in U.N. votes, and certainly not to vote with our enemies.
Everyone has gotten used to the fact that during an average year, some 80-90% of U.N. condemnations are directed at Israel (and at the infamous Human Rights Council, there is even more persecution of Israel).
The rise of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and a new U.N. secretary-general will provide a good opportunity to rewrite the rules of the game. Outgoing U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon found the courage to admit that his organization is biased, and we must demand that his successor take real action for change. If this is not done, the new American administration can allow Republican lawmakers to do what they have been hoping to do for a long while -- revoke financial support for the United Nations. In fact, interim steps (such as opposition to the continued existence of UNIFL troops) may also suffice. The important thing is to put an end, for once and for all, to the tradition of servility toward the anti-democratic majority at the United Nations.

The West Bank has seen a sharp rise in the number of violent attacks, primarily rock-throwing incidents, since an anti-settlement resolution was passed on December 23, 2016 by the United Nations Security Council, Israeli defense officials said.
The rise was recorded in the last week of December 2016 and the first week of January 2017, an increase security forces say is mostly due to exam season in Palestinian high schools. They note, though, that it is a larger increase than in the same period in previous years.
In September 346 rock-throwing attacks were recorded, in October 375, in November 420, and in December 344. Most of the December attacks occurred in the final week of the month. In the first week of January there were 169 recorded attacks, a pace that, if maintained, would lead to almost 700 attacks by the end of the month.
The rock attacks were also linked to a series of anniversaries taking place around now, including that of Fatah’s founding and first terrorist attack on January 1, 1965, and of the assassination of Yahya Ayyash, Hamas’s chief bomb maker, on January 5, 1996.

After bereaved parents complained that not a single government minister showed up to any of the four funerals for soldiers killed in Sunday’s terror attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered new rules drawn up to avoid a similar situation in the future.
The funerals of Lt. Yael Yekutiel, 20, of Givatayim, Lt. Shir Hajaj, 22, of Ma’ale Adumim, 2nd Lt. Erez Orbach, 20, of Alon Shvut, and 2nd Lt. Shira Tzur, 20, from Haifa, took place in quick succession on Monday. Hundreds attended each of the ceremonies, the first of which began at 11 a.m. and the last at 3 p.m.
The four victims were among a group of IDF officer cadets who were hit by a truck driven at them by Palestinian Fadi al-Qunbar in the Armon Hanatziv neighborhood of Jerusalem. Two of the soldiers, Orbach and Tzur, were American citizens.
Qunbar, 28, was shot and killed by soldiers and an armed tour guide at the scene.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday visited the IDF officers’ course cadets wounded in the previous day’s deadly truck-ramming attack at the Armon Hanatziv promenade in the country’s capital.
“It’s simply unbelievable,” Netanyahu — who was joined by Health Minister Yaakov Litzman — remarked from the Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center, where the young men and women are being treated for their injuries. “They [the wounded soldiers] told me one thing: Prime minister, we want to go back to the course; we want to return to service; we want to continue our mission as soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces.”
“This is the true secret of our country,” Netanyahu continued. “And this is why we will win, and this is why we’ve won until now.”
In Sunday’s attack, four IDF soldiers were killed and another 15 were wounded. According to the Hebrew news site nrg, five remained hospitalized on Sunday.
One female soldier who was seriously wounded was still in life-threatening condition at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center.

Moshe Orbach, whose grandson Erez Hy'd (may G-d avenge his blood) was murdered in the ramming attack at Armon Hanatziv, told Arutz Sheva about his grandson's character and referred to the fact that there were no government ministers at any of the funerals of those murdered in the attack.
"Erez had tremendous determination," said Orbach. "He fought sickness and the army which didn't want to recruit him. The professor (at the recruiting committee) asked him why he insisted on enlisting when 200 people outside were just waiting to get released and Erez answered that "I want to serve my country. It is my duty."
Orbach described other aspects of Erez's personality which were revealed after his death. "Erez was a very modest and humble person. Only now during the mourning period we are hearing from friends of his and from the army how dedicated and clever he was to the point that one of his commanders told us that Erez had begun to teach him things he hadn't known."

Lt. Maya witnessed yesterday’s terror attack – and acted fast to end it.
Yesterday afternoon, a terrorist from East Jerusalem carried out a deadly vehicle ramming attack in the Armon Hanatziv area of Jerusalem, where cadets in the IDF’s Officers Training School were taking a field trip. The terrorist plowed his truck into a group on the promenade, killing four IDF soldiers and wounding 17 others.
Lt. Maya, 22, of Haifa, is the team commander of the company of cadets who were targeted in the attack. “I got on the bus to put away some gear and get my jacket, and I was standing right at the front of the bus, and from there I saw everything. The attacker drove at a very, very high speed, and drove into a big crowd of cadets who were standing shoulder-to-shoulder.”
Lt. Maya
As Lt. Maya watched the attack unfold, she knew that she had to do everything in her power to stop it. As an officer, it’s her duty to protect her soldiers, and as a soldier herself, it’s her job to save lives. That meant taking charge in the moment. “I felt like I had to take responsibility. They’re my soldiers, they’re my company, and as part of that sense of responsibility, I knew I had to handle it.”

Minister of the Interior Aryeh Deri has decided to revoke the permanent resident status of 13 members of Jerusalem terrorist Fadi Al-Qunbar's family, including his mother, following consultations Monday with the Shin Bet and the Immigration Authority.
As a result of the terror attack, in which four IDF officers were murdered, Minwa al-Qunbar, a permanent resident of Israel who is also in bigamous marriage contrary to Israeli law, will lose her permanent residency and corresponding social benefits.
Such a measure has previously never been implemented and prevents the family from appealing to the High Court of Justice, as they are not Israeli citizens.
Minister Deri decided on the measure after discussions with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who supported the move.

Israeli police arrested four residents of the Old City in Jerusalem overnight Monday for spray-painting graffiti praising the terrorist who carried out a truck-ramming attack in the capital on Sunday, killing four soldiers and wounding 16.
The graffiti, which was found sprayed across shopfronts in the Muslim Quarter the night after the attack, praises attacker Fadi al-Qunbar, a resident of East Jerusalem, while also declaring that the truck-ramming was “resistance, not terror.”
The graffiti also mentions the name Mesbah Abu Sabih, who killed two Israelis in a shooting attack in October at Jerusalem’s Ammunition Hill light rail stop, with “We will not despair until you give up” and “There is no place for you [Jews] in Jerusalem” written in Hebrew under his name.
Also found written in Hebrew was the statement, “Yesterday’s attack is the beginning of 2017.”

Following Sunday’s truck-ramming attack in Jerusalem, an American academic took to Twitter to admonish journalists for calling “all acts of Arab violence terrorism,” when the target is Israeli soldiers.
Noura Erakat, assistant professor of international studies at George Mason University in Virginia and a Palestinian rights lawyer, wrote: “Journos, pundits show true colors when they [do this]. Don’t get it twisted. #Jerusalem.”
Calling it “irresponsible to elide distinction bw civilians & soldiers,” Erakat — the founder of the online magazine Jadaliyya, which focuses on the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — also criticized a Wall Street Journal headline that read: “Truck plows into pedestrians in Jerusalem, killing four.”

A Belgian daily newspaper fired one of its columnists following his praise for the slaying of four Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem.
De Standaard, a left-leaning Flemish-language daily, said Monday that it would no longer feature columns by Dyab Abou Jahjah, a Lebanon-born activist from Belgium who has called for violent attacks on Jewish Israelis.
A day earlier, Belgian Jews took to Twitter to condemn Abou Jahjah’s remarks, which included: “By any means necessary, #freepalestine,” following an attack in which a Palestinian terrorist plowed a truck through a crowd of soldiers visiting a popular tourist spot. The driver, who was shot dead, reportedly was a supporter of the Islamic State terror group.
He also wrote on Facebook that the attack was “not terrorism but resistance.”

Jeremy Corbyn was tonight accused of being a ‘cheerleader’ for a controversial fanatic who glorified the murder of British soldiers - after it emerged he twice hosted the Lebanese extremist Dyab Abou Jahjah in London.
The runaway Labour leadership favourite invited the ‘well-known thug’ to the UK in 2009 to speak against the Iraq war at two separate events.
Jahjah, who recently described the Labour MP as his ‘friend’, was invited to Parliament as Mr Corbyn’s special guest.
Corbyn, Islington North MP since 1983, has emerged as a surprise frontrunner in the Labour leadership race
The pair also addressed a second public meeting hosted by the then backbench MP for the Stop the War Coalition.
Just after the meetings Jahjah was banned from entering Britain by the then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith because of his extremist views.

Sunday’s deadly truck-ramming attack in Jerusalem is permitted by Sharia law, a Palestinian cleric claimed to Breitbart Jerusalem.
Ahmad Abou Aklein, a Gaza extremist imam, said the attack that left four Israelis dead and another 17 wounded is allowed under Sharia Islamic law because “it targeted an enemy that occupied Muslim land. None of the casualties was an innocent man who lives in a land that is his own. None of the dead could validly claim that occupied Palestine is his country of origin.”
Aklein referred to the entire state of Israel as “occupied Muslim land.”
“Compare it to a Chinese or an Iraqi soldier who comes to the United States or a European country and occupies it,” he added. “Will they let it happen? Will they not resist in every possible way? This is what the hero did today, he fought against the soldiers of the occupation and killed them, that’s all.”
“Palestine is occupied by an enemy that kills our sons and turns our wives into widows, that’s why our jihad is not only permitted by the Islamic Sharia, but by international law as well,” he said. “Even the UN allows the sons of a certain country to occupy those who occupy their land.”

Earlier today, the Decepticons released a statement claiming responsibility for the Jerusalem truck terror attack that left four Israelis dead. This comes after much confusion when the BBC, New York Times, and other outlets published headlines that made it seem like it was the truck that was to blame for the attack.
Indeed, as the attack was still in progress, the New York Times ran the headline “Truck Rams into Soldiers in Jerusalem” and the BBC described it as a “Lorry Attack” leaving many confused that might be a lone Wolf-Truck attack; the first of its kind.
The confusion was cleared up after Decepticon leader Megatron released a statement praising one of their members for the attack; he stated that the Decepticons believe that the Palestinian national struggle is intrinsically linked to their war with the Autobots and accused Optimus-Prime, and other Autobots, of transforming into caravans in illegal West Bank settlements between movies.

Jihadists around the world have begun to seek Palestinian citizenship as a way to avoid being considered terrorists when they engage in ideologically motivated violence against civilians.
Palestinian diplomats and bureaucrats in Belgium, West Africa, Somalia, Egypt, and elsewhere have noticed a marked uptick in the number of new applicants for citizenship, a development they attribute to the international community and media’s reluctance to describe Palestinian acts of terrorism as such, and those Islamist applicants seek to gain the Palestinian public relations advantage of rarely having their violent attacks referred to in those terms.
Since the 2014 increase in Palestinian attacks on Israelis, primarily involving vehicular homicide and stabbing attempts, Islamists across the globe have noticed that while their violent activities targeting enemies are referred to by governments and media outlets as terrorism, identical acts by Palestinians escape such designation. Almost invariably, they say, vehicular assaults, stabbing, stone-throwing, firebombings, rockets, bombings, and shooting attacks perpetrated by Palestinians are described in terms that studiously avoid direct use of the words “terrorist” and “terrorism,” invoking them only when attributing such words to Israeli security spokespeople.
In fact, notes Ali Figleef, a community activist of Pakistani origin in Antwerp, media coverage, and most governments’ treatment, of such Palestinian activities go out of their way to avoid assigning blame to the perpetrators, focusing wherever possible on the Israeli response and never mentioning the atmosphere of incitement to violence that saturates official Palestinian media.