The upcoming international peace conference in Paris is a “rigged” effort intended to hurt Israel and its hopes of reaching peace, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday, adding that Jerusalem was not bound by any decision that would be taken there.
“It’s a rigged conference, rigged by the Palestinians with French auspices to adopt additional anti-Israel stances. This pushes peace backwards,” he said. “It’s not going to obligate us.”
During a meeting with Norwegian Foreign Minister Børge Brende, the prime minister called the planned conference, scheduled for Sunday, “a relic of the past.”
“It’s a last gasp of the past before the future sets in,” he said.
The conference comes just five days before the inauguration of US President-elect Donald Trump, who is widely expected to take a more friendly approach to the Netanyahu government’s policies.
Netanyahu also called the conference an effort that would “render peace hopeless,” comparing it to a terror attack.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Thursday that Secretary of State John Kerry is going to this weekend’s Middle East peace conference in Paris to defend Israel, despite the Obama administration allowing a resolution condemning Israeli settlements to pass through the United Nations Security Council.
Kerry is going to Paris for the conference on what will probably be his last foreign trip as secretary of state.
Associated Press reporter Matt Lee asked Toner if Kerry was going to the conference to protect the Jewish state from an anti-Israel conclusion.
“I think we feel obliged to be there, to be part of the discussions, to help make them into something that we believe is constructive and positively oriented towards getting negotiations back up and running and doesn’t attempt to in any way kind of dictate a solution,” Toner said.
Lee said Toner’s comments sounded odd after the U.S. abstained last month from a U.N. Security Council vote that critics say was anti-Israel, breaking with decades of American policy to defend the Jewish state at the U.N. and veto such measures. Kerry gave a speech on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict days after the vote that criticized Israel on multiple issues, particularly its settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Toner said that the Obama administration stands by its abstention vote.

In a strong message to Israel and the incoming Trump administration, dozens of countries are expected this weekend to reiterate their opposition to Israeli settlements and call for the establishment of a Palestinian state as "the only way" to ensure peace in the region.
France is hosting more than 70 countries on Sunday at a Mideast peace summit, in what will be a final chance for the Obama administration to lay out its positions for the region.
According to a draft statement obtained by The Associated Press on Friday, the conference will urge Israel and the Palestinians "to officially restate their commitment to the two-state solution."
It also will affirm that the international community "will not recognize" changes to Israel's pre-1967 lines without agreement by both sides.
The draft says that participants will affirm "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."

The last time Arabs ruled eastern Jerusalem and the Old City all but one of the Jewish Quarter’s 35 synagogues was demolished, a fact John Kerry prefers not to mention. Trump's pledge to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv would end the prospect of history repeating itself
Mahmoud Abbas no doubt likes the idea of reducing Israel’s control over Jerusalem. But neither he nor his successors would ever consent to a John Kerry-type scheme that detached the Old City from Arab-Palestinian rule. President Abbas’ fervently held view is that only a Palestinian-governed Old City can guarantee freedom of worship for all monotheistic religions, Islam, Christianity and Judaism: “It is the right of all religions to perform their religious rituals with total comfort in Jerusalem, our eternal capital.”
Would that it were true. The last time Arabs, in the form of Jordanians, ruled eastern Jerusalem and the Old City – 1949-67 – all but one of the Jewish Quarter’s 35 synagogues was demolished. The centenarian Bernard Lewis, in Notes on a Century, reminds us that Christian Israelis were only permitted to visit the Old City, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, once a year on Christmas Day (but not the Orthodox Christmas) – so much for performing non-Islamic religious rituals with “total comfort”. Even more despicable, the “inhabitants of the ancient Jewish Quarter were evicted and even dead Jews were removed from their graves in the ancient cemeteries.”
Mahmoud Abbas’s promise of peace and mutual respect is entirely bogus. We know through agencies such as Itamar Marcus’ Palestinian Media Watch that the leadership of the Palestinian Authority promotes violence, martyrdom and an anti-Israeli psychosis among the young. The lunacy of Islamic revivalism has reached a point where PA activists are now claiming the Western Wall, the most sacred site for the Jewish population in the Old City, is actually a part of al-Aqsa Mosque.
Tel Aviv was only ever meant to be an interim capital. In 1949, after defeating five Arab armies, the State of Israel established its centre of governance in the neighbourhoods and districts of West Jerusalem. No future Israeli-Palestinian agreement will change that. For the United States – and Australia, Foreign Minister Bishop – to move its embassy to a locale in western Jerusalem would do no more than catch up with the reality of 1949. And, yes, it might also demonstrate “unswerving support for Israel, as the Middle East’s only liberal, pluralist democracy.”

President Obama's decision not to use the US veto in the UN Security Council and to let pass Resolution 2334, effectively sets the boundaries of a future Palestinian state. The resolution declares all of Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem -- home to the Old City, the Western Wall and the Temple Mount -- the most sacred place in Judaism -- "occupied Palestinian territory," and is a declaration of war against Israel.
Resolution 2334 nullified any possibility of further negotiations by giving the Palestinians everything in exchange for nothing -- not even an insincere promise of peace.
The next act is the Orwellian-named "peace conference," to be held in Paris on January 15. It has but one objective: to set the stage to eradicate Israel.
In this new "Dreyfus trial," the accused will be the only Jewish state and the accusers will be the OIC and officials from Islamized, dhimmified, anti-Israel Western states. As in the Dreyfus trial, the verdict has been decided before it even starts. Israel will be considered guilty of all charges and condemned. A draft of the declaration to be published at the end of the conference is already available.
The declaration rejects any Jewish presence beyond the 1949 armistice lines -- thereby instituting apartheid. It also praises the "Arab Peace Initiative," which calls for returning of millions of so-called "refugees" to Israel, thus transforming Israel into an Arab Muslim state where a massacre of Jews could conveniently be organized.
The declaration is most likely meant serve as the basis for a new Security Council resolution on January 17 that would recognize a Palestinian state inside the "1967 borders," and be adopted, thanks to a second US abstention, three days before Obama leaves office. The betrayal of Israel by the Obama administration and by Obama himself would then be complete.

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the Permanent Mission of France to the United Nations in New York on Thursday to express their support for Israel ahead of an international conference on Middle East peace set to be held on Sunday.
The gathering was sponsored by the North American Coalition for Israel, which is made up of more than 50 organizations.
Under the banner “Shame on the UN,” public figures, clergy members and victims of terrorist attacks gathered together with members of the Jewish community, demanding that the United Nations “immediately cease its unjust targeting of Israel and focus on real issues such as Syrian Genocide and Global Islamic Terror.”
Event organizer Hillary Markowitz of the Amcha organization, told The Jerusalem Post ahead of the rally that it had several goals.
“The UN, [US President Barack] Obama and [Secretary of State John] Kerry have really been attacking Israel,” she said, slamming the recent Security Council resolution against Israel as an “abomination.”
“We are asking the US to stop funding the UN until it does what it’s supposed to do,” she said.

With more than 500,000 Syrian killed in a civil war that rages on, the European Union in turmoil after the Brexit vote, and terrorism markedly on the rise in Europe, diplomats around the world have chosen to focus their attention this week on creating a Palestinian state. Representatives from 70 countries are expected in Paris on Sunday for a planned Mideast peace conference doomed before it starts.
The fact that the meeting is taking place five days before a new administration takes over in Washington — one that appears to be more openly supportive of Israel — and two days before the U.N. Security Council is said to be voting on several anti-Israel resolutions, suggests that the international community is set on increasing the pressure on Israel. That’s no surprise. But since the U.S. abstained on last month’s Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements, there is increasing concern that the Obama administration may put forth its ideas on solutions, including borders, at the Paris meeting.
“Everyone knows, a priori,” that the conflict “can only be resolved by the parties themselves, no matter how many nations travel to Paris for the conference you are hosting,” AJC CEO David Harris wrote in an open letter to French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault this week. Harris pointed out that the conference is going forward even though Israel opposes the idea, Washington is undergoing a changing of the guard, and the French are less-than-honest brokers, given their votes against Israel in the Security Council and at a World Health Organization General Assembly in May when it “voted in favor of a measure that bizarrely singled out Israel by name as the only country in the world accused of undermining ‘mental, physical and environmental health.’”

The difference between the proportion of Republicans and Democrats who sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians is the largest it has been in surveys dating to 1978, according to a new report.
While 74 percent of Republicans sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinians, the number is 33% for Democrats, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted Jan. 4-9 and published Thursday.
Eleven percent of Republicans sympathize with the Palestinians over Israel, and 15% sympathize with neither, both sides or did not express a view. Among Democrats, those numbers were 31% and 35%, respectively.
The findings represent the first time in surveys conducted by Pew that Democrats were about as likely to sympathize with the Palestinians as with Israel. Among “liberal Democrats,” 38% of respondents sympathized more with the Palestinians while 26% sympathized more with Israel.
The proportion of Republicans sympathizing more with Israel has risen since 1978 while it has fallen for Democrats. In that year, 49% of Republicans and 44% of Democrats sympathized more with the Jewish state, according to data from the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations obtained by Pew.

American victims of Palestinian terrorism are applauding Secretary of State-designate Rex Tillerson’s criticism of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and are urging him to press the PA to take specific anti-terror steps.
During his Senate confirmation hearing Jan. 11, Tillerson said that while the PA has renounced terrorism, "it's one thing to renounce it and another thing to take serious actions to prevent it." He also said Palestinian leaders have to do "something to at least interrupt or prevent [terrorism]" before there can be "any productive discussion around [Israeli] settlements.”
Sarri Singer, who was seriously wounded in a June 2003 Jerusalem bus bombing, told JNS.org she is “encouraged” by Tillerson’s focus on the need for concrete Palestinian actions. She urged Tillerson to press the PA to honor the 36 requests Israel has submitted for the extradition of Palestinian terrorists. “And those terrorists who were involved in attacks that harmed Americans should be handed over to the United States for prosecution,” she added.
Singer, who is the daughter of New Jersey State Senator Robert W. Singer, is the founder of “Strength to Strength,” an organization that brings together terror victims from around the world to deal with the trauma they suffered.

Senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham hit the morning television circuit Thursday to unveil their new bill to defund the United Nations.
Standing shoulder to shoulder and smiling, the two national security-minded lawmakers appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and Fox News’ Fox and Friends to detail a plan that would block taxpayer dollars from funding the corrupt international body.
In citing last month’s egregious anti-Israel UN Security Resolutions as a major source of dismay in the senate, they drew a clear ideological line in the sand between the Obama administration and Congress.
"Twenty-two percent of the money to fund the U.N. comes from the American taxpayer. I don't think it's a good investment for the American taxpayer to give money to an organization that condemns the only democracy in the Middle East," Graham said Thursday.
Cruz first revealed his intention to pull US assets out of the UN in December, shortly after President Obama directed UN Ambassador Samantha Power to abstain from a vote that declared the Jewish Quarter, the Western Wall, and the Old City of Jerusalem illegally-occupied territory.

The heads of Moetzet Yesha – The Council of Judea and Samaria, received an invitation to President Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony in Washington D.C., according to a report in Makor Rishon. The invitation was passed on to them via the Chamber of Commerce of Orthodox Jews (US), who are connected to Trump’s special advisor Jason D. Greenblatt.
The settlement council will most likely be represented at the inauguration by Mayor of Efrat, Oded Revivi, who also heads the foreign desk for Moetzet Yesha, and Beni Kashriel, the Mayor of Maale Adumim.
In addition, several other people connected to Jewish life in Judea and Samaria have been invited, but according to the report, they prefer not to publicize their invitations.
This is the first time that settlement leaders have been invited to a presidential inauguration.

New Zealand’s Foreign Minister on Thursday defended his country’s vote in favor of the anti-Israel UN Resolution 2334, insisting the vote was consistent with New Zealand’s policy toward Israeli “settlements”.
New Zealand was one of the four co-sponsors of the resolution adopted last month by the UN Security Council. The resolution passed with a majority of 14-0, with the United States abstaining and thus allowing it to be adopted.
Reports following the vote suggested that New Zealand promoted the resolution and voted in favor of it due to pressure from the British government.
In an op-ed published Thursday in the New Zealand Herald and quoted by JTA, Foreign Minister Murray McCullay wrote, “For the whole of New Zealand's two-year term on the Security Council, the Secretary-General and his Special Coordinator have expressed alarm that the forces of incitement and violence and the relentless progress of the settlement program were undermining the two-state solution.”
McCullay continued, “At the heart of this whole debate is whether we will see a future in which two states, Israel and Palestine, live side by side in peace and security. This two-state solution has been the accepted basis for resolving the Palestinian question for many decades now, enshrined in various negotiated accords and UN Security Council resolutions, and the focus for several unsuccessful attempts to broker final agreement between the parties.”

South Africa’s two main political party traded barbs on Thursday over the visit oto Israel of the country’s opposition leader, with the ruling African National Congress party accusing its rival of supporting Israeli “apartheid.”
Mmusi Maimane, who heads the Democratic Alliance party, arrived in the country earlier this week on what officials called a private visit focused on fostering business ties. Accompanied by three senior DA lawmakers, he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, opposition leader Isaac Herzog and other Israeli officials.
The delegation was also scheduled to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, but the meeting was canceled due to scheduling difficulties. Maimane did meet with PA officials and Palestinian human rights activists in Ramallah and Rawabi.
“The ANC notes the anger and joins fellow South Africans in condemning the visit by the DA’s Mmusi Maimane to Israel and to Israel’s prime minister,” the party said in a statement released Thursday evening. “At a time when the world is increasingly standing up against Israel’s illegal settlements, including the United Nations Security Council, it is a pity that the DA is endorsing the Israeli regime instead of condemning its violations of international law.”

Palestinian terror group Hamas said Thursday that it “values” the recent statement by South African President Jacob Zuma discouraging travel to Israel, even as the head of the country’s opposition party visited Israel.
“Hamas values the stance of South African President Jacob Zuma, who called for citizens of his country not to visit the Zionist entity, showing solidarity with the Palestinian people,” the group, which rules the Gaza Strip, said in a statement.
Zuma, the leader of the ruling African National Congress party, reiterated on Sunday Pretoria’s longstanding travel directive urging senior South African officials against visiting Israel, an announcement that came days before Mmusi Maimane, who heads the opposition Democratic Alliance party, met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Wednesday.

Syria on Friday called on the international community to “punish” Israel for an apparent missile attack on a major military airport west of Damascus, and accused the US, Britain and France of supporting the assault.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry condemned the missile attack in two letters to the UN secretary-general and the president of the UN Security Council, saying such an attack would not have occurred had it not been for the “direct support from the outgoing American administration and French and British leaderships.”
The ministry said the Israeli assault on the Mezzeh military airport comes as part of a series of periodic Israel attacks that started with Syria’s war in March 2011. It called on the international community to “punish the Israeli aggressor.”
The attack was the third such incident recently, according to the Syrian government.
In a statement carried on the official news agency SANA, the Syrian military said several missiles were launched just after midnight from an area near Lake Tiberias.
The missiles fell in the vicinity of the Mezzeh military airport on the western edge of the Syrian capital. The statement did not say whether there were any casualties.

Amnesty International's Israel branch on Thursday sharply criticized the demolition of eleven buildings on Tuesday in Kalansuwa, saying that police behaved violently and that the operation was prompted by "flawed political motives."
Police did not directly respond to the allegation, while a government official denied there was any motive other than enforcing the law
Eleven buildings, including homes and homes under construction, were destroyed by government bulldozers accompanied by hundreds of police in one of the biggest demolition operations in the Arab sector in recent years. The demolitions came nearly a month after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quoted in media reports as calling for heightened demolitions of illegal structures in Arab towns, apparently to counterbalance the expected demolition of the illegal Amona settlement outpost in the West Bank.
Netanyahu wrote on Facebook after the demolitions."I am not deterred by the criticism and as I have directed we are continuing to implement equal enforcement in Israel." Arab leaders condemned the demolitions, blaming planning authorities for the absence of a detailed plan that would enable more legal building in Kalansuwa and arguing that because of this residents are forced to build on their own land without permits.

On Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily, SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam asked former U.N. ambassador John Bolton if the long-promised relocation of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem will finally happen under the Trump administration.
“Yes, I think it is,” Bolton replied. “I think Trump was serious about it when he said it. I think in David Friedman, who he’s nominated or will be nominating to be U.S. ambassador to Israel, he’s got somebody committed to it.”
“I think there are good substantive reasons for the United States to move its embassy there, in much the same way it was a good thing for Donald Trump to take the congratulatory call from Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen,” he said. “People should not tell the United States, certainly not its President, who he can talk to. They should not tell the United States where we place our embassy. There are a whole range of things we have limited ourselves to suit foreigners that really impairs the United States.”
“I really think there’s one other thing for Trump here, and it will show that he is not a typical politician. He said he was going to move the embassy, like almost every other presidential candidate, as you correctly pointed out, for several decades,” Bolton told Kassam. “Others have been elected, they haven’t done it. He’s going to do it.”

Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti on Friday branded plans by President-elect Donald Trump to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem an “assault” on Muslims across the globe.
“The pledge to move the embassy is not just an assault against Palestinians but against Arabs and Muslims, who will not remain silent,” Muhammad Hussein said in a sermon at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City.
On Tuesday, Palestinian leaders called for Friday prayers at mosques across the Middle East this week to protest Trump’s campaign pledge.
Meanwhile, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to help stop the United States moving its embassy to Jerusalem, a top Palestinian official said Friday.
Saeb Erekat said he had passed on the message from Abbas to Putin during a visit to Moscow during which he met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

About a month and a half after the lethal wave of fires that blazed across Israel has passed, a report conducted by the investigations department of the Israeli national Fire Services Authority and released on Friday officially determines: out of the 80 fires that were investigated by the authority, 71 were set on purpose by arsonists.
Ruling out other possible causes for the fires such as accidents or negligence, the report claims that the majority of the fires were set by arsonists who were motivated by criminal, ideological motives. Only a small number of the fires are still classified by the authority as "suspected arson."
The report provides details regarding the circumstances of the largest fires that were set in November 2016, citing the means with which the arsonists committed their crimes.

Assoiated Press have a very interesting and revealing report about Jerusalem’s “Afro Palestinians.”
Others came with The Arab Salvation Army, an army of volunteers that fought on the Arab side in the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation.
“We are originally Nubians from Aswan,” in southern Egypt, said 30 year-old Hanan Bersi.
Some still have their ancestors’ identification documents, like Ibrahim Firawi, whose grandfather came from Sudan’s western region of Darfur.
“We have documents and letters, and even tried to contact the Sudanese Embassy in Jordan to help connect us with family in Sudan,” he said. Showing off his father’s old passport, he said he has not been able to track down any of his relatives.
Historic Palestine was a crossroads for different cultures, and some Palestinians trace back their roots to a range of non-Arab groups, from Kurds to Indians and Afghans. Afro-Palestinians were denied Jordanian citizenship after the 1967 war, as they were not seen as Palestinians.
Notice how they are not indigineous to this area at all, yet consider themselves “palestinian.” Just because they choose to identify themselves in this way.
Which is pretty much the deal with all those who call themselves palestinian.

Thousands of Gazans took the streets on Thursday evening to protest the ongoing electricity crisis in the small coastal enclave, as seen in photos and videos posted on social media.
The protesters gathered at the Jabalia refugee camp and marched to a nearby building of the Gaza Electric Company, where Hamas authorities shot bullets into the air and attempted to disperse the protesters, according to Ma'an, a Palestinian news outlet.
Gazans have suffered over the past several days from an enormous electricity shortage with most households receiving three to four hours of electricity a day, down from the average of seven to eight hours over the past year.
Gaza’s current electricity infrastructure has the ability to provide for only less than half of the strip’s electricity needs.
Walking down the streets of Jabalia, the protestors chanted a number of slogans, calling on authorities to resolve the electricity crisis.
“We want electricity, we want electricity,” protesters yelled.

Hamas blocked journalists from filming a major protest against power cuts in the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday, detaining an Associated Press journalist at gunpoint and badly beating an Agence France-Presse photographer who refused to relinquish his camera.
The journalists sought to cover a demonstration against chronic electricity shortages in Gaza, which the AP described as “one of the largest unauthorized protests in the territory since the Islamic militant group took power a decade ago.”
“Hamas forces blocked journalists from filming the gathering, and an Associated Press journalist was briefly detained at gunpoint until he handed over his mobile phones to plainclothes security men,” the AP reported.
According to the Foreign Press Association, the Hamas men “stuck a pistol in his chest and verbally threatened the reporter until he agreed to give them the phones.”
In its statement, the association added that “an AFP photographer was badly beaten to the head by uniformed policemen [and] required medical care after he had refused to give up his camera. The memory card of his camera was confiscated and he was placed under arrest. He was subsequently released and the memory card was returned.”

A panel of military judges voted to convict Israelite military personality David, son of Jesse, on First-Degree Murder charges after the latter beheaded a Philistine fighter despite the Philistine lying helpless on the ground.
Justice Maya Heller read the verdict out this morning in proceedings that followed a fraught period among the Israelites, given the security situation and the widespread, grassroots opposition to prosecuting any Israelite soldier for taking measures to defend himself and his people, regardless of the prevailing Rules of Engagement.
David incapacitated the Philistine champion Goliath with a slingshot stone to the forehead, striking him from a distance and embedding the stone in Goliath’s skull. The Philistine in his heavy armor fell and no longer presented a threat to David or the rest of the Israelite military camp, but David nevertheless beheaded the incapacitated enemy warrior, in violation of the Rules of Engagement.
A grassroots movement sprang up that called for the charges to be dropped, and vociferous demonstrations took place at which populist rhetoric railed against the military and political leadership for sending a soldier into battle to defend the nation, then betraying him by putting him on trial for that defense.
At the reading of the verdict, Colonel Heller spent two hours reading aloud from a scroll and refuting, one by one, each of the arguments put forth by the defense during the trial. Advocates for David called the move excessive, and criticized Israelite media for making the family of the slain Goliath into the victims of the incident. “The man was trying to kill us, and David saved us from him – now all of a sudden Goliath’s the victim?” challenged Azaria, an activist. “This is a travesty.”

A German regional court in the city of Wuppertal affirmed a lower court decision last Friday stating that a violent attempt to burn the city's synagogue by three men in 2014 was a justified expression of criticism of Israel’s policies.
Johannes Pinnel, a spokesman for the regional court in Wuppertal, outlined the court’s decision in a statement.
Three German Palestinians sought to torch the Wuppertal synagogue with Molotov cocktails in July, 2014. The local Wuppertal court panel said in its 2015 decision that the three men wanted to draw “attention to the Gaza conflict” with Israel. The court deemed the attack not to be motivated by antisemitism.
Israel launched Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014 to stop Hamas rocket attacks into Israeli territory.
The court sentenced the three men – the 31-year-old Mohamad E., the 26 year-old Ismail A. and the 20-year-old Mohammad A.—to suspended sentences. The men tossed self-made Molotov cocktails at the synagogue. German courts frequently decline to release the last names of criminals to protect privacy.
The attack caused €800 damage to the synagogue. The original synagogue in Wuppertal was burned by Germans during the Kristallnacht pogroms in 1938. Wuppertal has a population of nearly 344,000 and is located in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. (h/t Yenta Press)

PA TV took advantage of yesterday’s news update on the Kim Kardashian jewelry heist as an opportunity to spread Antisemitism.
An article in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot on the arrest of 17 suspects in the well-publicized theft noted that the brains behind the robbery in Paris were two Algerian immigrants. It further mentioned that her driver and his brother, who are also suspects, are reportedly Jews. This reference was embraced by PA TV’s “Israeli affairs expert” as an opportunity to generalize that all Jews are "thieves.”
PA TV chose not to mention that there were 15 non-Jewish suspects arrested. Nor did it mention or speculate about the religion of the two Algerian immigrants who were the masterminds behind the crime.
Palestinian Media Watch has documented that Antisemitic hate speech is fundamental to PA expression, including portraying Jews as enemies of Allah, descendants of monkeys and pigs, and allied with Satan.
PA TV's reporting demonstrates that Antisemitism is so fundamental to PA ideology that even a single mention of two Jews anywhere in the world in a negative context is all that is needed launch another PA Antisemitic rant.

The international community’s desire for Israeli technology trumps its concern over the stalling peace process, the director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office said this week, arguing that the recent UN Security Council resolution condemning the settlements was merely a “blip” on the radar.
“Countries are going to have to decide what’s in their best interest: to be with Israel, or without Israel,” Eli Groner told The Times of Israel in his Jerusalem office. “And I have no doubt that for the vast majority of the Western world — and perhaps more importantly, the less developed world that wants to become more Western — Israel is part of the solution, and they’re going to prefer the package deal with Israel to the package deal without Israel.”
Since joining the PMO in May 2015, Groner has participated in countless meetings Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has conducted with leaders of countries and multinational companies.
“I am of the strong belief, based on my two years here at the Prime Minister’s Office and my participation in many meetings, that these countries want to work with Israel, with all the risks that that entails. They prefer working with us than working without us.”

A top Texas state official, said to be a solid candidate for agriculture secretary in the incoming Trump administration, is launching a Texas-Israel trade initiative that will seek to do business with Israeli companies and ventures, including those based in the West Bank.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, a staunch Trump supporter who made international headlines before the November election for posting a tweet calling then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton a c*nt, is set to travel to Israel this March to meet with Israeli officials on the new venture, including Israeli Agricultural Minister Uri Ariel of the nationalist Jewish Home party and Yossi Dagan, head of the Shomron (Samaria) Regional Council in the West Bank.
According to a press statement sent by Miller’s office, he is set to have a preliminary meeting with Dagan in Washington next week at Trump’s presidential inauguration, which the prominent settler leader has been invited to attend — an invitation that further signals how differently a Trump White House will handle affairs related to Israel and its settlement enterprise compared to the Obama administration, under which any official ties to the settler movement would have been unthinkable.

Al Jazeera's documentary series was a fishing expedition in which its undercover reporter attempted to catch out British Jews
The Orwellian nature of Al Jazeera’s disgraceful set-up is plain to see.
These are not “revelations”, and this was not an “investigation”. It was a fishing expedition in which the channel, and its undercover reporter, attempted to catch-out young British Jews.
Broadcasting standards watchdog Ofcom's code states that programme makers "should not normally obtain or seek information, audio, pictures...through misrepresentation or deception", without adequate public interest justification.
There is no public interest in seeing a young Jewish activist left crying by the side of the road for doing her job.
But of course, three of the top five currently trending articles on Al Jazeera’s website relate to this “investigation”.
The channel, and its Qatari masters, provided their viewers with exactly what they want – the harassment of Jews dressed up as entertainment.
It is a disgusting project and should be stripped of any vestige of journalistic credibility to which Al Jazeera and its supporters lay claim.

Well there goes the credibility of Al-Jazeera’s investigation into the “Israeli lobby” and British Jews. Their new episode aired today defends Jackie Walker, who was famously suspended by Labour for saying that “Jews” were the “chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade”. Even the Corbynistas do not contest that Walker’s conduct has been unacceptable – Corbyn’s Labour have kicked her out. But Al-Jazeera journalists incredibly say she was a victim of an Israeli conspiracy:

Al-Jazeera also quote Electronic Intifada, a virulently anti-Semitic pro-Palestine website. Sad that a supposedly reputable news organisation has become The Canary in broadcast form…

The Jerusalem Center was contacted by a respected Palestinian attorney from a West Bank city. After personally interviewing him, we are publishing a letter he wrote. His identity will not be made public to ensure his safety.
The problem of governmental corruption is that it is not a personal matter but a public problem. The Palestinian Authority/Fatah has failed to learn any lessons from its embarrassing failure in the Legislative Council elections or its humiliating rout in the Gaza Strip. Unfortunately, the PA continues in its nefarious ways. For example, on the human rights issue, it took control of the Human Rights Authority, and the Rais [President Abbas] himself directly appointed the high commissioner and pays very high salaries to its officials so that they keep within the limitations set for them. This is the opposite of what the founder of the Human Rights Authority, Dr. Eyad Sarraj, intended. It actually resembles what was done by the great dictators of the World War II period, Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. The PA leaders forget that the people lean toward Hamas not because they love it, but because they hate what the Fatah movement does – which only gets worse by the day.

• The Palestinian citizen suffers from ugly terror if he expresses an opinion that is opposed to that of the PA, or insists on his rights before an official or has refused to pay a bribe to a senior official, his sons, or his bodyguards.
• The PA prevents citizens from appealing directly to court. It requires them first to submit appeals to the police or the prosecutor-general. The police, in tandem with the prosecutor, can then “handle” the complaints so as to dismiss them and turn the complainer into the target. This was not the case in the past, and now citizens are subjected to extortion.
• What can the citizen do if the police and the prosecutor collude to arrest him without justification or based on a false claim?
• When this happens, all the players – the police, people in the prosecutor’s office, the judges and lawyers, the PA officials – must be “dealt” with, and one must not shrink from dealing with them as there is no statute of limitations.

You might be wondering, what the hell does this Indian guy know about actually being Jewish? I know that being a marginalised, demonized minority who is exiled from your ancestral land and forced to live among those who would prefer you either assimilated or died sucks. I know that having to be better than everyone at everything just to be treated equally sucks. I know that people making fun of your “strange and mysterious and funny traditions sucks. I know that busting my ass to break stereotypes and be successful is hard and it sucks. I know that seeing the world through a European lens when you are not really European, really sucks. That’s what I know.
The truth is that I am not Jewish, but I am an indigenous person who has experienced a lot of similiar things. It motivated me to study your peoples history, culture and spirituality in order to understand my own, and I am hopefully intelligent enough to extrapolate my experiences and juxtapose them with yours in order to be more empathetic. The lessons I learned while continuing to unpack my own identity are helping me to help you unpack yours.
I am not trying to tell you how to be Jewish, I am telling you that YOU as Jew, have to decide what being Jewish means to you and to use JEWISH points of reference when doing it. Understand that your identity is YOURS, not your parents or your grandparents – they have their own identity to worry, about and while you may share many things, this is a path that only you can walk.
Anyway, don’t get hung up on language, or religion – those things are part of what you should understand but start with seeing yourself as who you are, through a lens that isn’t ruined by someone elses perspectives.

Following September 11, 2001, the federal government cracked down on Islamist charities that were diverting funds to various terrorist groups overseas. But the Obama administration has been notably less zealous in its efforts to shutter such charities. Sam Westrop explains the dangers:
Eight years of a more permissive attitude have afforded Islamist groups the chance for a resurgence. Islamist charities do not just provide a means to move money; they also offer legitimacy to American Islamist organizations struggling to free themselves from decades of allegations of extremism. Islamist charitable endeavors abroad serve to sanitize the Islamist agenda at home.
The most common terrorism link for American Islamist charities involves, unsurprisingly, the Palestinian territories. Where do charitable donations for the Palestinian territories end up? In the Gaza Strip, Hamas, which is designated a foreign terrorist organization, oversees every facet of society, especially the social services in which Western charities work. From the distribution of medicine to the running of schools, orphanages, and summer camps, Hamas rules the roost.
One example worth investigating is the Gaza-based Unlimited Friends Association for Social Development (UFA). At least eight prominent U.S. charities and, apparently, the taxpayer-funded United States Agency for International Development (USAID) are supporting this Palestinian group. A close examination of UFA shows that it is closely aligned with senior Hamas leaders, provides cash to the families of so-called martyrs in the Gaza Strip, and promotes virulent anti-Semitic rhetoric.

As President Obama’s tenure reaches its final days, Islamists in the United States are waging a furious lobbying campaign aimed at securing the freedom of five men convicted of illegally routing millions of dollars to Hamas.
An open campaign is currently urging the president to pardon five former officials from the defunct, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), casting them as victims of “anti-Muslim hysteria” triggered by the 9/11 attacks. In 2008, a jury convicted the five — Shukri Abu Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mohammed El-Mezain, Abdulrahman Odeh and Mufid Abdulqader — of using a network of Palestinian charities controlled by Hamas to funnel money to the terrorist group.
It is not clear whether the requests to pardon the five, or to commute their sentences and release them from prison, is being considered seriously. Obama’s pardons thus far have involved somewhat less serious crimes, including fraud, embezzlement and non-violent drug offenses.
But advocates are pushing social media campaigns and online petitions aimed at securing a pardon, or, short of that, a commutation of the five men’s sentences to set them free. The campaign also has enlisted support from at least one member of Congress.

The Arabic edition of a left-wing online media outlet has allowed an openly anti-Semitic blog to remain on the site, and refused to respond to calls for the blog’s removal.
The Huffington Post Arabi site, the Arabic version of the popular left-leaning news platform, includes a series of blogs, handpicked by the editor, for commentary and opinions.
But as the Anti-Defamation League noted in early December, one of the blogs approved by HuffPo Arabi’s editorial board regularly indulges in explicit anti-Semitism.
The blog in question, which was first titled “Arsenic: The Poison Which a Jewish Woman Put in the Food of the Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him”, was added to Huffington Post Arabi on November 29th, the ADL notes, and has since released a steady stream of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Despite being notified of the blog’s anti-Jewish bigotry by the ADL on December 7th, the editors of Huffington Post Arabi have failed to either remove the blog or explain its continued inclusion on the site.

A leader of one of the largest anti-Israel activist networks in the United States publicly praised the murder of four Israeli Jews in a terror attack in Jerusalem, hailing the killings as “the biggest ‘F you’” to Israel.
Nerdeen Kiswani, president of the New York City chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine took to Facebook to praise the slaughter of four IDF cadets on Sunday by an Arab terrorist from the Jabel Mukaber neighborhood in Jerusalem.
In her comment, Kiswani took fellow anti-Israel activists and supporters of the Palestinian Authority to task for condemning the murderous attack, saying terrorism was, in these circumstances, justified and indeed worthy of praise. Kiswani even referenced celebrations by Arabs in Jerusalem after the attack as positive examples to emulate.
“While Palestinians and ‘allies’ in the west [sic] scramble to condemn, apologize, explain, hide, rationalize, etc what happened this morning, Palestinians in Palestine are giving out sweets in celebration,” Kiswani wrote.
“I will not hide from this. I will not be ashamed or embarrassed by this. Those celebratory actions are what keep the resistance moving forward, they are what keep it alive. In a world that’s trying to quell our liberation and self determination, the biggest ‘F you’ to that are Palestinians celebrating actions that 1) remind settlers that there will never be peace on stolen land 2) remind the world we are still here 3) galvanize other Palestinians to fight. That’s your rationalization no apology needed.”

One of the positives of President-elect Donald Trump is that he caused leftist billionaire George Soros to lose $1 billion in betting against the market.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Soros, as he is wont to do, decided to go back to the Soros Management Fund for trading and use Trump's surprise victory to bet that the market would take a massive tumble. The market did tank at first, but stocks quickly rebounded and surged by 9.7 percent from the expectations of Trump implementing his pro-business policies.
According to the Journal, "some of Mr. Soros's trading positions incurred losses approaching $1 billion" and Soros had to exit from "many of his bearish bets late last year." However, the Soros Management Fund still had gains of five percent in 2016 due to other investments.
Ironically, Stanley Druckenmiller, who used to be one of Soros's top lieutenants, made the opposite of bet of Soros gained by more than 10 percent this past year.
It is still hilarious to see Soros to lose money in betting against the market under Trump, especially since Soros was an avid supporter for Hillary Clinton, donating at least $9 million to Super PACs supporting the former secretary of state.
Soros is also an evil man. The Daily Wire has explained how Soros is essentially the puppet-master of the Democrat Party, pulling the strings through his funding of various media outlets and left-wing organizations that promote policies that enrich himself. Soros has gloated about his role as a Nazi collaborator and is a convicted felon.

A few days ago, Palestinian-American journalist/comedian Ray Hanania wrote an interesting Facebook post. I didn’t know much about him, but I follow him on Twitter and never saw anything particularly offensive there, which is why I was so disturbed when I actually sat down to read what he posted on Facebook.
The post itself was a response to a message he received from an Israeli. So it would seem he is already more open-minded than the PA and most in the Arab world since he is willing to engage in “normalization,” that is, talk to Israelis like fellow human beings (something he did more publicly with the “Israeli-Palestinian Comedy Tour,” to his credit). But in his quest to “respond to these lies, or twisted propaganda” he shows that he is just as beholden to traditional Palestinian myths as any card-carrying member of Fatah.
But Mr. Hanania’s post was polite (mostly) and the eternal optimist in me would like to give him the benefit of the doubt. So I decided to – as dispassionately possible – respond to his points and explain where he went wrong and how his many omissions and falsehoods paint an inaccurate picture of our history. If nothing else, it should help others counter these myths.

I am not sure how old this video is, but the lies being peddled have certainly been around for a while.
You didn’t think I was going to let this stand, did you?

It’s become axiomatic that 2016 was a bad year, but the way I see it, 2016 was a year of miracles, two in particular.
The first miracle was that the American publishing house InterVarsity Press, and its England-based affiliate which goes by almost the same name — Inter-Varsity Press — stopped publishing the books of Rev. Dr. Stephen Sizer, an Anglican Priest who made a career of attacking Israel and its Christian supporters.
Sizer’s animus toward Israel stoked controversy after he posted a link on Facebook to an article that promoted the notion that Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, was responsible for the attack against the United States that took place on Sept. 11, 2001 and resulted in the deaths of approximately 3,000 people.
He later said he didn’t think there was any link between Israel and 9/11, but the denial was not very credible. It wasn’t the first time Sizer had suggested Israel was responsible for the 9/11 attack. He had done the same thing with a footnote in one of his books published a few years before.
To make matters worse, Sizer had previously gone to a Holocaust-denial conference that took place in Iran where he denounced Christians who supported Israel.
He also appeared on Iran’s PressTV and stated that because of their misdeeds, Jews might be thrust forth from the Holy Land. With rhetoric like this, Sizer, like a lot of other Christian commentators, was helping to pave the way for jihad against the Jewish state – all in the name of peace and reconciliation.

Poll question 13 asked, “How much have you seen, read or heard about a recent United Nation’s resolution regarding Israel settlements in certain territories, including the Palestinian territory and West Jerusalem?”
In fact, there are no Israeli “settlements”—Jewish communities—in “West Jerusalem.” West Jerusalem has been under Israeli sovereignty since the Jewish state was proclaimed in 1948. The poll evidently meant “East Jerusalem” which Israel captured in the 1967 war.
Similarly, question 14 asked respondents what they thought about “Israel’s creation of settlements for Jewish people in territories such as West Bank and Gaza….”
But Israel has no settlements in the Gaza Strip, which is ruled by Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group whose charter calls for a Jewish genocide. In fact, in the absence of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority (PA), Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

YouTube took down Legal Insurrection’s Channel without any prior notice based on “multiple third-party claims of copyright infringement,” but we never received any claims of infringement.
We have lost hundreds of videos, including a lot of original content on important news subjects. You now will see disabled videos in hundreds of our posts.
I have no idea what the supposedly offending videos are. We are pretty careful when it comes to copyright, so I’m suspecting that someone about whom we posted a video made the claims.
We’ve filed the appeal forms, but if anyone has a contact at YouTube, I’d appreciate the help. Please email me.
UPDATE 1-13-2017 9:50 a.m. — I just received notice from YouTube that the copyright claims were filed by the Modern Language Association based on excerpts of audio of pro- and anti-Israel speakers at the MLA Annual Meeting we reported on in this post, Massive DEFEAT for BDS at Modern Language Association.

The Daily Mail reported on actress Meryl Streep’s reference to Natalie Portman being born in Jerusalem rather than clearly stating Israel in her Golden Globes speech.
While the arguments over the status of Jerusalem rumble on, there’s one fact that is indisputable – there has never ever been a “State of Palestine.”
But that’s not what the Daily Mail wrote:

We contacted the Daily Mail to inform editors of the error. The reference to the “State of Palestine” has now been amended to say “Palestinians.”

Back in 2012, HonestReporting fought a protracted legal battle against The Guardian for its policy of calling Tel Aviv Israel’s capital. The now defunct Press Complaints Commission (PCC) initially sided with The Guardian. Despite this we continued the fight until the PCC did an about-turn and The Guardian was ultimately forced to concede that Tel Aviv is not the capital of Israel, changing its own style guide.
So it was something of a surprise to read a Guardian editorial that included the following:

We contacted The Guardian to point out that its style guide states:
Jerusalem is the seat of government and Tel Aviv is the country’s diplomatic and financial centre.
The Guardian agreed and the article now includes this correction:

A staggering 85% of Jews around the world have witnessed or experienced anti-Semitism at some point, according to a new survey by the World Zionist Organization's International Center for Countering Anti-Semitism. The poll also found that around 50% of respondents from Europe and North America said they had either witnessed or experienced anti-Semitism in the past year.
The survey, of 702 respondents who identify as Jewish and do not live in Israel, was published Thursday, ahead of Israel's National Day to Combat Anti-Semitism and International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which are set to coincide on Jan. 27.
According to the survey, 67% of respondents witnessed or experienced anti-Semitic incidents involving abusive language and insults; 20% said they had witnessed or experienced anti-Semitism in the form of threats; 13% said they had either experienced or witnessed anti-Semitic violence.
Perhaps most troubling, 73% of respondents who either experienced or witnessed anti-Semitic violence said they did not report the incident to authorities.

Brick by brick, plank by plank, workers at the former Nazi German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau carefully clean its barracks to preserve the Holocaust symbol for future generations.
“This is the largest preservation project in the history of the museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It’s unprecedented,” museum spokesman Pawel Sawicki told AFP.
Along with the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria, the barracks bear witness to Nazi Germany’s killing of around 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, at this camp, which it built in 1940 in the southern city of Oswiecim after occupying Poland.
“Preserving a barrack requires a completely different approach than one used to preserve a church for example. There, the goal is to return the building to its original state, so its most beautiful state,” says site manager Ewa Cyrulik.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness, the first holder of his office to visit Israel, to Jerusalem on Thursday.
“I think this is the first visit ever by a prime minister of Jamaica to Israel, so it has a double significance for us,” Netanyahu said during their joint appearance.
Netanyahu also thanked Jamaica for not supporting “the absurd vote in UNESCO,” which denied Jewish historical claims to the Temple Mount, and said that he looked forward to greater cooperation with the Caribbean nation “in a variety of fields that relate to economy, to security, to technology. This is something that we eagerly are interested in doing with you.”
Netanyahu also spoke to Holness of the values shared by their two nations. “There is a natural affinity between us. We’re both democracies. We each have our own challenges but we flourish under challenge. And we’ll be able, I think, to provide a better future for our people if we cooperate, and this visit is a hallmark of cooperation,” he said.
Finally, Netanyahu thanked Holness for his invitation to visit Jamaica and indicated that he intended to do so “sometime in the future.”

Today, Neumann is a consultant to the outpatient clinic of the pediatric oncology department at Sheba. I decided to contact him to arrange another visit to his clinic.
Currently, 40% of his patients come from Gaza and the West Bank. I looked around at the parents with their children waiting to be seen – many of the youngsters’ faces were bloated by the necessity of steroids given following a bone marrow transplant – children without hair in the midst of treatment yet still able to smile.
For those requiring hospitalization, 24 beds are available in the pediatric malignant oncology unit. On average, 50% of the inpatients are from Gaza and the disputed territories.
Neumann introduced me to a mother from Gaza whose eight-year-old daughter had been diagnosed with an abdominal tumor at the age of one year and three months. The child was operated on at Sheba some three months ago and has remained hospitalized ever since for follow-on treatment. Her mother has been with her for the entire period. Hostel accommodation – at a minimal cost – is provided for the accompanying parents or grandparents.
While Palestinian patients from Judea and Samaria come for treatment and then return home, this is not the case with those from Gaza, which is why it becomes necessary to provide accommodation. Children from Gaza arrive in special ambulances, which are obligated to pass through three checkpoints – Fatah, Hamas and finally Israeli.
Unfortunately, Palestinian children arrive in a far worse condition than those from Israel, primarily because they are not sent here at an early stage of diagnosis.

In a moving ceremony in Palermo, Italy, on Thursday, the local archbishop announced that the site containing the ruins of the city's ancient synagogue was being returned to the local Jewish community. The community plans to build a new synagogue -- the first in the Sicilian city in 524 years -- near the ruins of the old one.
The Jews of Sicily were expelled on Jan. 12, 1493. The synagogue was destroyed, and the site on which it stood was taken over by the Roman Catholic Church and the monastery of St. Nicolo Tolentino. Since then, there has been no Jewish activity in Palermo.
Thursday's ceremony was held at the Historical Archives of Palermo, which like the monastery, was built on the ruins of the synagogue. The decision to return the site to the Jewish community was made in response to a request by the Shavei Israel organization, a group dedicated to helping "lost" Jews worldwide reclaim their roots and re-embrace Judaism, and the Sicilian Institute for Jewish Studies (ISSE). Hundreds of descendants of anusim -- Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity but continued to practice Judaism in secret -- interested in researching their Jewish roots were in attendance.
Archbishop of Palermo Corrado Lorefice said: "Locating the new synagogue on the ancient ruins of the Great Synagogue of Palermo makes this historic moment especially exciting."

Tel Aviv’s fourth annual Blues Festival kicked off Wednesday night, with 40 shows over four days in clubs across the city, and featuring an opening act by Grammy Award winner Alvin Youngblood Hart.
The blues and rock scene in Israel is small but growing quickly, said Gal De Paz, who is performing in the festival for the fourth year with her band, the Paz Band.
“There are a lot of people in Israel that in the past few years have inserted blues back into the music, the cultural vibe. We don’t really have blues here that much, like America, but in the past few years it has grown and we have a lot of great blues artists,” De Paz said.
The Tel Aviv native has seen a shift in Israel’s live music scene since releasing her first album in 2010. There were not many outlets for rock, blues and folk musicians in Israel at the time, but the genres are now popular in the concert and festival scenes, De Paz said. The mainstream media in Israel does not reflect this shift, though, and does not support indie musicians, said De Paz, who also sings with the hip hop group Lucille Crew.

Six-time NBA All-Star Amar’e Stoudemire made an unlikely move in August, when he retired from the NBA and signed a two-year deal with the Israeli basketball team Hapoel Jerusalem.
But it seems the choice was the right one for the 34-year old basketball player, who raves about his “adopted homeland” in a recent interview with Sports Illustrated.
“I’ve never felt more at home, more tied to a place where I’m playing,” Stoudemire told the reporter over a Shabbat meal during Hanukkah in his Jerusalem home, featuring chicken, lamb, fish — and dreidel spinning.
Stoudemire isn’t Jewish but identifies with the Hebrew Israelites, African-Americans who believe they are connected to the biblical Israelites. He doesn’t eat pork or shellfish — he has even searched Jerusalem for a kosher butcher selling turkey bacon — but the Sports Illustrated writer also noted that Stoudemire thanked Jesus in a blessing said before the meal.
The 6-foot-10-inch athlete, who lives in a four-story house just blocks away from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence, is helping to break down stereotypes about Israel.

Israel has the “best restaurant scene in the world,” a Forbes magazine contributor declared Thursday.
“Fine dining has given way to fun dining” in recent years, noted veteran world traveler Ann Abel, who explained that more and more people are favoring “informal joints that serve excellent food in a sophisticated setting, but don’t take themselves too seriously.”
“Some of the best restaurants today are ones where you sit elbow-to-elbow with others, dishes circulate family-style, and the progression of courses is interrupted for socializing, sunshine breaks outside, and dancing between — or atop — the tables. And that’s at lunch,” Abel wrote. “By that score, it’s hard to name a restaurant scene that’s more appealing than Israel’s. It’s the atmosphere that made me fall in love with eating Israeli-style.”
She described a number of her favorite eateries in the Jewish state, including a “beautifully cluttered old coffeehouse” in the north, and an organic goat cheese farm and restaurant hidden in the hills of the Galilee.
Abel also applauded the menagerie of North African, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern food traditions that influence Israeli cooking, noting that the “most pedestrian of eating excursion” through Tel Aviv’s Carmel Market turned into a “a grand [food] tour of countries Americans are no longer likely to visit.”
The “blissful simplicity” of Israel’s food “makes it rich in flavor” she wrote, describing the focus on fresh seafood, vegetables and grilled meat, and applauding the abundance of vegan choices.

The spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party on Saturday warned that if the Trump administration moves the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, it will “open the gates of hell.”

The Middle East is a more dangerous place after eight years of the Obama Presidency than it was before. The eight disastrous Obama years follow eight disastrous Bush years during which that part of the world became more dangerous as well. So have many other international hot spots. In sum, the past 16 years have seen major foreign policy blunders all over the world, and most especially in the area between Libya and Iran, that includes Israel, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey and the Gulf.
With regard to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, the Obama policies have made the prospects for a compromise peace more difficult to achieve. When Israel felt that America had its back – under both President Clinton and Bush 43 – they offered generous proposals to end settlements and occupation in nearly all of the West Bank. Tragically the Palestinian leadership – first under Arafat and then under Abbas – did not accept either the Barak-Clinton offers in 2000-2001, nor the Olmert offer in 2008. Now they are ignoring Netanyahu’s open offer to negotiate with no pre-conditions.
In his brilliant book chronicling the American-Israeli relationship – “Doomed To Succeed” – Dennis Ross proves conclusively that whenever the Israeli government has confidence in America’s backing, it has been more willing to make generous compromise offers, than when it has reason to doubt American support. President Obama did not understand this crucial reality. Instead of having Israel’s back, he repeatedly stabbed Israel in the back, beginning with his one–sided Cairo speech near the beginning of his tenure, continuing through his failure to enforce the red-line on chemical weapon use by Syria, then allowing a sunset provision to be included in the Iran deal, and culminating in his refusal to veto the one-sided Security Council resolution, which placed the lion’s share of blame on the Israelis for the current stalemate.
These ill-advised actions – especially the Security Council resolution – have disincentivized the Palestinian leadership from accepting the Netanyahu offer to sit down and negotiate a compromise peace. They have been falsely led to believe that they can achieve statehood through the United Nations, or by other means that do not require compromise.

UNSC Res. 2334 is an act of political aggression against foundation of the Judeo-Christian civilization and should be treated as such. The Jewish nation has every right to consider this attack as an act of war against it.
President Obama sometimes seems to have an indifference to historical truth that often borders on antagonism. Obama has again tried to re-write history by claiming that Greece, with the help of the winners of World War I, was an aggressive and imperialistic state that cared only to re-build its Empire against the Turks.
The notion that ancient non-Muslim nations are occupiers in their own lands, is repeated in the UN Resolution 2334.
Historically, Muslim forces began invading Syria in 634, and ended by conquering Constantinople in 1453. They invaded not only all of Turkey -- obliterating the great Christian empire of Byzantium -- but then went on to conquer all of North Africa, Greece, southern Spain, parts of Portugal and eastern Europe.
President Obama apparently did not learn about the Trojan War in school; he apparently never read Homer to know that the inhabitants of the Bosporus and much of Asia Minor were Greeks -- just as he apparently never read the Bible, or the Greek and Roman historic records of the Jewish people and their capital, Jerusalem.

Abbas here lied twice. First, it is a lie that he is prepared to return to the negotiating table with Israel. In the past few years, Abbas has repeatedly rejected Israeli offers to resume the stalled peace negotiations.
Abbas's chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, claimed this week that his boss was ready to resume the peace talks with Israel in Moscow....Indeed, Abbas had "earlier" voiced his readiness to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow. But Abbas once again outlined his preconditions for such a summit... This means that Abbas has not abandoned his preconditions for resuming the peace talks with Israel. The timing of Erekat's announcement in Moscow is clearly linked to the Paris peace conference. It is part of the Palestinian strategy to depict Israel as the party opposed to the resumption of the peace talks.
Abbas has in the past reluctantly condemned some of the terror attacks against Israel. But these statements were made under duress, after being pressured by the US or EU.
In fact, his "condemnations" are nothing but political pablum, a sop to the West.
The Palestinian terrorist who rammed his truck into a group of young Israeli soldiers last week was doing exactly what his president urged Palestinians to do.
The Germans and French should not believe Abbas when he says that he condemns truck terror attacks in their countries. The scenes of Palestinians celebrating carnage in Jerusalem should serve as a wake-up call to the international community. The message of the call? That the overall Palestinian strategy – like the jihad strategy - is built on lies. Both continue to feature terror as one their main pillars.

The consequences of Obama’s worldview and the policies he laid out in Cairo have been an unmitigated disaster for everyone. The Islamic world is in turmoil. The rising forces are those that Obama favored that day: The jihadists.
ISIS, which Obama allowed to develop and grow, has become the ideological guide not only of jihadists in the Middle East but of Muslims in the West as well. Consequently it has destabilized not only Iraq and Syria but Europe as well. As the victims of the Islamist massacres in San Bernardino, Boston, Ft. Hood, Orlando and beyond can attest, American citizens are also paying the price for Obama’s program.
Thanks to Obama, the Iranian regime survived the Green Revolution. Due to his policies, Iran is both the master of its nuclear fate and the rising regional hegemon.
Together with its Russian partners, whose return to regional power after a 30-year absence Obama enabled, Iran has overseen the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Sunnis in Syria and paved the way for the refugee crisis that threatens the future of the European Union.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s Islamist leader, was a principle beneficiary of Obama’s admiration of Islamism. Erdogan rode Obama’s wave to destroy the last vestiges of the secular Turkish Republic.
Now he is poised to leave NATO in favor of an alliance with Russia.
Obama and his followers see none of this. Faithful only to their ideology, Obama and his followers in the US and around the world refuse to see the connection between the policies borne of that ideology and their destructive consequences. They refuse to recognize that the hatred for Western civilization and in particular of the Jewish state Obama gave voice to in Cairo, and his parallel expression of admiration for radical Islamic enemies of the West, have had and will continue to have horrific consequences for the US and for the world as a whole.
Cairo is Obama’s legacy. His followers’ refusal to acknowledge this truth means that it falls to those Obama reviles to recognize the wages of the most transparent presidency in history. It is their responsibility to undo the ideological and concrete damage to humanity the program he first unveiled in that address and assiduously implemented ever since has wrought.

A German regional court’s affirmation of a lower court ruling that a July 2014 attempt by three Muslim men to burn down a Wuppertal synagogue constituted criticism of Israel, rather than antisemitism, was “disgusting and dangerous” and “legitimizes violent antisemitism,” an official with a leading US-based Jewish human rights organization said on Friday.
“It sets a legal cover to extremists and terrorists to ‘express’ their hatred the way that Hitler and company expressed their hatred of Jews,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper — associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles — warned. “Left unchallenged, this outrage could signal open season on German Jewry and their institutions by those who hate the Jewish state and everything it and the Jewish people stand for.”
According to a Jerusalem Post report, the lower court ruling that was affirmed found that the three German Palestinian perpetrators of the arson attempt wanted to “draw attention” to Operation Protective Edge — Israel’s 50-day military campaign against terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip — and were not motivated by hatred of Jews when they hurled Molotov cocktails at the synagogue, causing 800 euros worth of damage.
The men received suspended sentences.

I have already highlighted my concerns that outgoing US Secretary of State John Kerry, in his meandering 73-minute tongue-lashing of Israel, among other things, raises the spectre not only of of division of the city but the establishment of a form of internationalization regime of the holy sites of the three monotheistic religions.
The relevant section is here:
Now, Jerusalem is the most sensitive issue for both sides, and the solution will have to meet the needs not only of the parties, but of all three monotheistic faiths. That is why the holy sites that are sacred to billions of people around the world must be protected and remain accessible and the established status quo maintained.
I now see that Pope Francis is to have a private audience with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas this Jan. 14.
Abbas will inaugurate the new Palestinian embassy to the Holy See, one year after the Vatican recognized the State of Palestine.
Although at a recent Catholic-Jewish joint meeting, the Holy See backed a final document that implicitly criticized a UNESCO resolution that failed to call by their Hebrew names some of the most sacred places of Jerusalem, like Temple Mount, and called on world leaders to rescind UNESCO’s vote to deny the connection between the Jewish people and their holy sites in Jerusalem, it would be naïve to presume that Abbas would not put out feelers for Kerry’s initiative.
Abbas had already proven his ability to yield on the issue of the Temple Mount when he signed the agreement with Jordan’s King in March 2013 acknowledging his role as “custodian” over Jerusalem’s holy sites for Muslims and Christians. All this will be coordinated through the Palestinian Authority’s Higher Presidential Committee of Churches Affairs.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas warned Saturday that peace could suffer if the incoming Trump administration goes ahead with plans to move the US embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Abbas made the comments as he inaugurated the Palestinian embassy to the Holy See following an audience with Pope Francis.
Speaking through an Italian translator, Abbas said he had only heard of the proposal by US President-elect Donald Trump to move the embassy to Jerusalem, and couldn’t comment officially unless and until it happens.
But he added: “If this is the decision, to transfer the embassy to Jerusalem, it will not help peace and we hope it doesn’t happen.”
The Palestinians strongly oppose the move, saying it would kill any hopes for negotiating an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and rile the region by undercutting Muslim and Christian claims to the holy city.

Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas has asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to intervene in order to stop the United States from moving its embassy to Jerusalem.
Top PA official Saeb Erekat told AFP on Friday he had passed on the message from Abbas to Putin during a visit to Moscow during which he met Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
"The letter asks President Putin to do what he can about the information we have that President-elect Donald Trump will move the embassy to Jerusalem, which for us is a red line and dangerous," Erekat said, according to the news agency.
PA officials have in recent days continuously warned against moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a campaign pledge of President-elect Donald Trump.
Abbas last week wrote Trump a letter in which he warned the President-elect against moving the American embassy, saying that such a move would be crossing a "red line" and could jeopardize peace prospects.

The first step toward correcting a problem is admitting you have one. The left isn’t there yet.
Take, for example, Kenneth Roth, the president of the advocacy group Human Rights Watch. On Thursday, he gave the left a headline over which it could not resist salivating: “Human Rights Group Portrays the U.S. as Major Threat, Citing Trump,” the New York Times blared. Dig into the article, however, and the basis upon which Roth has determined the U.S. represents a “threat” to global human rights is entirely speculative.
Citing Trump’s “misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist rhetoric,” Roth sees a grim future. “This is a more fundamental threat to human rights than George W. Bush after 9/11,” he said. “I see Trump treating human rights as a constraint on the will of the majority in a way that Bush never did.”
Roth fancies himself a soothsayer. He pores over the entrails and—omens, auguries, and portents dire—prophesizes dark days ahead. Roth’s prediction must be a bit speculative, of course, because Donald Trump hasn’t taken office yet. Nothing has happened. This minor point cannot get in the way of pique and melodrama. We’ve got a persecution complex to nurse!
HRW’s dire warnings are exposed as entirely hollow partisanship once one takes the time to read the complaint. There, Roth’s group cites the potential repeal of the Affordable Care Act and Trump’s pledge to appoint “pro-life” Supreme Court justices as evidence of the incoming president’s antipathy toward basic human rights. If those are violations of basic human dignity, than it isn’t Trump who represents a threat to human rights in HRW’s estimation but conservatism.

Yolande Knell displays her ‘half a story’ cred. Fisking Can Paris summit save fading two-state solution?
For many, the holy city of Jerusalem is meant to be a shared capital for Israel and the Palestinians – two peoples in two nations, living peacefully, side-by-side. At least that is the dream of the so-called “two-state solution” to end a decades-old conflict.
It’s hard to see how that can be reasonable interpretation of the leaked summary of this conference or the preceding UNSC resolution 2334, which specifically deny Israel any rights in those parts of Jerusalem recaptured in 1967. For 19 years the eastern part of Jerusalem was annexed by Jordan with no international call, whatsoever for sharing.
A summit taking place in Paris on Sunday is expected to try to signal to Israel and the next US president that establishing a Palestinian state is the only path to peace.
Some signal. I would suggest ‘demand’ is a more appropriate verb. What does it signal to the Palestinians? Victory?
The insistence on this, long after it is clear, that pushing Israel to this end is like standing on the bridge of the Titanic and directing the captain to steer towards that white fuzzy thing on the horizon, has meant that for decades no other approach could possibly even be discussed.
It is ironic that the last Paris Peace Conference 1919 (AKA Treaty of Versailles) was almost a century ago. As with this one many nations ganged up on one who had no part in the discussions and would be presented with a fait accompli that would reduce it in size. Lest we forget Versailles led to World War II. Still We’ll always have Paris

Israel’s UN ambassador on Friday raised concern over what he said were moves at the Security Council to adopt a new measure to build on the Paris Middle East conference.
Sweden’s Ambassador Olof Skoog, who holds this month’s presidency of the Security Council, said however that there were no immediate plans for council action.
“We are witnessing an attempt to promote a last-minute initiative before the new US administration takes office,” Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon said in a statement.
“Supporters of the Palestinians are looking for further anti-Israel measures at the Security Council.”
The council is planning to meet on Tuesday to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its first meeting since the adoption of a resolution demanding an end to the construction of settlements on territory the Palestinians claim for a future state.

Two months ago, after receiving a complaint about anti-Semitism, the editors of the student newspaper at McGill University clarified their policy on Israel with an unusually forthright announcement:
“The McGill Daily maintains an editorial line of not publishing pieces which promote a Zionist world view, or any other ideology which we consider to be oppressive.” In other words, McGill student journalists can comment on Israeli affairs only if what they write is negative.
An American commentator remarked that “This blunt statement is a reminder that hatred of the Jewish state is rapidly becoming the default position on many college campuses.” The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement hasn’t managed to cripple the Israeli economy, despite years of effort, but it continues to spread poisonous propaganda through the universities of North America and Europe, enhancing the belief of many that the state of Israel lacks legitimate standing. Students interested in political activism choose this organization above all others. Apparently it’s the only foreign policy that engages them, the moral failures of other countries being of no interest.
This is part of a gathering storm surrounding Israel in the opinion centres of the West. Prominent MPs in the Labour Party of the U.K. are often found among Israel’s harsh critics. The NDP in Canada toys with anti-Israel opinion. Across Europe, and especially France, similar opinions multiply. And all of these forces have been encouraged by the recently passed United Nations resolution 2334.

Algeria claims to have uncovered an international spy network operating for Israel, Arab media outlets reported on Friday.
The reports, according to the website of the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, said the network was made up of 10 members and was based in southern Algeria. The members allegedly included operatives from Libya, Mali, Ethiopia, Liberia, Nigeria and Kenya.
Algerian security forces also seized sophisticated radios used to transmit information by the spies, according to the Arab media reports.
Those spies arrested are being held in temporary detention under a court order that accuses them of espionage, creating anarchy in the country and harming national security.
Last month, Tunisia accused the Israeli Mossad of being behind the death of engineer Mohamed Zaouari, who was a member of the Hamas terrorist group.

Where's the coverage?
Despite such evidence, many Western news media outlets often omit the incitement to anti-Jewish violence that precedes and frequently follows Palestinian terrorist attacks.
For example, The Washington Post's report on the January 8 attack, while noting Hamas' praise, nonetheless failed to report Fatah's encouragement of vehicular homicides (“Palestinian rams truck into Israeli troops, kills 4,” Jan. 9, 2017). Similarly, the large-scale Palestinian street celebrations were also not mentioned.
USA Today managed to do even worse. In a noticeable omission, the paper—in contrast to its reporting of Islamist vehicular attacks in France and Germany—failed to offer any print coverage of the attack.
A terrorist commits a mass casualty terror attack in Israel—and “thousands” in Palestinian society celebrate his deed. Where's the coverage?

Prosecutors in Germany investigating the arrest of two men for possession of 155kg of explosives have said the pair used contacts within the right-wing scene.
The two men, aged 18 and 24, were detained in October last year for possession of explosives and were being questioned over possible links to the Neo-Nazi terrorist group Oldschool Society (OSS).
According to the report the teenager had confessed to a meeting with the OSS in the summer last year in a hut in Rhineland-Palatinate.
The report, seen by Die Spiegel, quoted the 18-year-old as saying a participant at the meeting had said: “One has to do something in Germany” and asked if anyone could produce 250kg of explosives for him.

It is the first time the depraved jihadi, believed to be the sole surviving member of the cell that killed 130 people in the November 2015 terror attacks, has spoken since his arrest last March.
The letter, which was destined for an unknown address Côte-d'Or, in northeast France, was handed over to counter-terror officials on October 11 - some 24 hours before the reclusive jihadist's lawyers announced that they would "no longer defend him".
Abdeslam has repeatedly exercised his right to remain silent and refused to talk during questioning.In the letter, the failed suicide bomber - who is being held in isolation and who is said to have become even more radicalised in prison - opened up about his warped religious beliefs, according to the French daily Libération.
He wrote: "I do not know where to start. I would not be able to tell you whether your letters bring me joy or pain. But what I do know is that they are my only link to the outside world.
"I am not afraid to speak out, because I am not ashamed of myself. People say horrible things about me, everything has already been said.

However, the main problem with Gaal's article is the egregious closing paragraphs:
While the students and organizers alike benefited from both excursions, some students were unable to participate due to travel restrictions imposed by the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Students from Gaza were not granted permission to travel to the meetings, which prevented one student from attending the school, and also prevented two scientists from giving their talks at PCMTMP-V. All three individuals are from the Islamic University of Gaza and requested they not be identified.
“Access to higher education is a human right, and it is deeply regrettable that this right is not respected by the ongoing Israeli occupation,” stated [David] Marsh [of Cambridge University, England, one of the international organizers of the school] in an email. A statement by Scientists for Palestine, released at the end of July 2016, asserted the organization's position is to ensure equality of human rights despite the restrictions.
Despite the hardships caused by the occupation, science in Palestine continues to grow and strengthen its international connections. Scientists for Palestine will be proud to continue to support this development,” the statement said. To overcome the imposed travel restrictions, Scientists for Palestine broadcast the school's program to the Islamic University in Gaza.
When contacted, the Israeli government refused to comment on the matter.
Refuting APS' anti-Israel propaganda
CAMERA has received well founded complaints from APS members concerning this material. It's disappointing that a prestigious organization such as APS would provide a platform for propaganda disparaging the Jewish state. First, it's virtually impossible to confirm the legitimacy of the victimization narrative since the three alleged victims are unnamed and the information source cited by Gaal for this material is an unreliable group named “Scientists for Palestine” which seemingly sprang into existence, ex nihilo, in 2016 in connection with the two West Bank meetings. The dubious origin of the group is revealed in a search of the Nexis journalism research data base and online Internet googling. And Gaal's claim, "When contacted, the Israeli government refused to comment on the matter," is ambiguous. What Israeli government office? What Israeli official(s)? When was the contact made?
Moreover, it's false, as charged here, that Israel simply intentionally obstructs the higher education of Gaza Strip Palestinians through use of travel restrictions. It's not simply a matter of visa or informal arrangement between countries at peace with one another (such as between United States and Canada) – what's involved is the entrance into Israel of members of a hostile population which has selected fanatical leaders, the Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) terrorist organization, committed by its founding charter to the destruction of Israel. Indeed, Hamas repeatedly orchestrates the firing of rockets on Israeli towns and creates terrorism tunnels into Israel in an effort to hurt and kill civilians. So, Israeli authorities regularly require travelers from the Gaza Strip to submit to security questioning before allowing them to enter. Did the three individuals in question refuse to submit to such questioning? It's worth noting that the Hamas rulers, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), impose severe external travel restrictions on the people of the Gaza Strip. None of this is touched on by the writer.

UPDATE: As of approximately 7:30 p.m. on January 13, 2017, our YouTube Channel was restored, though there are still legal battles to come over the videos.
————-
YouTube took down Legal Insurrection’s Channel without any prior notice based on “multiple third-party claims of copyright infringement,” but we never received any claims of infringement.
We have lost hundreds of videos, including a lot of original content on important news subjects. You now will see disabled videos in hundreds of our posts.
I have no idea what the supposedly offending videos are. We are pretty careful when it comes to copyright, so I’m suspecting that someone about whom we posted a video made the claims.
We’ve filed the appeal forms, but if anyone has a contact at YouTube, I’d appreciate the help. Please email me.

Unidentified perpetrators spray painted the words “kill Jews” and a white supremacist slogan on headstones at a cemetery in Cape Cod.
Several headstones were knocked over at Oak Neck, a 5.5-acre graveyard that is the only active cemetery in the village of Hyannis, 70 miles southeast of Boston, Fox25 reported last week. Oak Neck is not a Jewish cemetery.
Police in Barnstable are treating the investigation as a hate crime, Fox25 reported.
Some headstones were knocked off their bases, while spray paint was used to scrawl slogans on others. About a dozen or more tombstones were either kicked over or otherwise vandalized. Some of the graffiti was directed at police officers.
One headstone was defaced with the number 666, a number association with Satanic groups. Another featured the numbers “4.20,” ostensibly a reference to Adolf Hitler’s birthday.

Four haredi Orthodox Jews from London, including a mother and her 13 year-old son, were pelted with gas canisters by at least one man who yelled “Heil Hitler” at them from a moving car.
Police apprehended a suspect, 19-year-old Patrick Delaney, who admitted to participating in the attack last week in Tottenham in northern London, the London Economic reported Thursday. But charges were dropped against two individuals who were with Delaney in the car, including his brother.
Delaney acknowledged involvement in the attack, in which small canisters containing laughing gas were thrown at Cheya Stern, her son, her brother Simon Lemberger and a passerby, Abraham Law. According to reports, the men in the vehicle also shouted “Hitler is on the way to you, Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler,” according to The Jewish Chronicle.
Shulem Stern, from the Jewish defense group Shomrim, said: “They were just going about their daily life but they were scared about what would happen next. Jewish people have to face this anti-Semitism on a daily basis and visibly Jewish people are often targeted.”
Delaney admitted to racially aggravated harassment and will be sentenced at Wood Green Crown Court next month, The Chronicle reported.

Israeli software is being used by agricultural giant Monsanto and others to identify the plant traits that produce higher-yielding crops, Bloomberg News reported Thursday.
NRGene, an Israeli firm that developed the genomic big-data technology, is working with Monsanto and Syngenta, a Swiss seeds and pesticides group, to identify traits that can lead to more sustainable food production with less dependence on pesticides and more efficient water usage. It is also working Illumina, a genetics firm, to improve the breeding of cattle.
NRGene’s cloud-based platform was designed by computer scientists who served in Israeli military intelligence units and “never saw a DNA database in their life,” according CEO Gil Ronen.
The World Food Programme estimates that 795 million people do not have access to sufficient nutrition, a problem complicated by environmental degradation, climate change, and growing populations.
“Everyone knows that in 2050 every piece of land will have to produce twice as much, so breeding new varieties is a crucial part of that effort,” Ronen said. “If we speed up this process, we prevent hunger in the long term.”

A synagogue burning in Germany is perhaps among the most literal illustrations of anti-Semitism imaginable.

But apparently, not all synagogue burnings are equal.

This week a German regional court ruled that the 2014 firebombing of a synagogue in Wuppertal, a region just east of Düsseldorf, was an act of criminal arson, but not anti-Semitic. Instead, the court found it was a protest against Israel, even though the synagogue was obviously not in Israel and those who worship there are Jews, not Israelis.

The decision upheld that of a lower court, which stated the perpetrators, a trio of Palestinian-born German residents, wanted to “call attention to the Gaza conflict” when they prepared and then lobbed Molotov cocktails at the synagogue one July night in 2014. No one was injured, but the attack caused €800 in damages. The men were ultimately given suspended sentences.

The court’s decision is baffling — and deeply troubling. The men didn’t target the Israeli Embassy or one of its consulates. They attacked a Jewish institution. To conflate Israelis with Jews — and to say that a disagreement with the policies of the former somehow justifies attacking the latter — is by definition anti-Semitic. And if there is a line between anti-Israel sentiments and anti-Semitic ones, this attack definitely crossed it.

On Thursday evening, an Associated Press reporter covering a demonstration in the northern Gaza Strip was detained by plainclothes Hamas security men and forced at gunpoint to turn over his mobile phones to them. The men stuck a pistol in his chest and verbally threatened the reporter until he agreed to give them the phones.
In addition an AFP photographer  was badly beaten to the head by uniformed policemen required medical care after he had refused to give up his camera. The  memory card of his camera was confiscated and he was placed under arrest.

No journalists in Gaza — no matter how senior — would even think of criticizing the leaders of Hamas, and in the Palestinian Authority (PA), criticism of any kind against President Mahmoud Abbas, or exposure of corruption in the PA, could result in the journalist’s arrest.

“We all known there’s terrible corruption in the PA,” a senior veteran journalist from Ramallah, the seat of the PA in the West Bank, told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “We know hundreds of stories about senior PA officials and about Abbas’ sons, but we can’t publish them or even talk openly about them.”

“We saw PLO activists who arrived [in the West Bank and Gaza] from Libya and Tunisia [in the 1990s] with only the clothes on their backs, and a few months after the PA was established they were already driving around in Mercedes cars, wearing Italian suits and building ostentatious villas,” the journalist claimed. “To this day they are all rich, taken care of and no one can say a word or even ask where such wealth came from.”

European Union states that donate hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid to the PA have tried to establish supervisory mechanisms over the funds they provide, but according to Palestinian journalists who spoke with Al-Monitor, the top PA levels were more devious than all the oversight mechanisms, and they found loopholes through which to funnel some of the money into their own pockets.

The criticism discussed behind closed doors does not relate only to past malfeasance. A senior journalist who works for an Arabic language media outlet notes in a conversation with Al-Monitor that the sons of the Palestinian president are also mentioned among those making a fortune out of their family connection to Abbas.

The journalist said that reporters have learned not to ask “unnecessary” questions, lest they lose their jobs, at best, or are sent to jail in a worst-case scenario. The media learned the limits of what was permissible and what was not in the affair of Mahmad Hadifa, an independent journalist who published a series of investigative reports about the goings on in the Palestinian Ministry of Economy in Ramallah. Hadifa was arrested by Palestinian security forces after the stories ran and was threatened, even though no one claimed his reports were false. 

What is the point of this endeavor? According to the French, it is to show support for the two-state solution and urge both parties, meaning Israel and the PLO, to negotiate. That is a demonstration of bias, because it is the PLO not Israel that has been refusing negotiations and rejecting peace plans again and again for years—indeed decades. To treat the government of Israel and the PLO as if their desire for peace were identical is wrong and unfair. If the participants at the conference truly wished to advance peace, they would be pressuring the Palestinians to stop rewarding and inciting terrorism by glorifying terrorists, and pressuring them to start negotiating seriously. This will not happen. There is every reason to believe Mr. Abbas will leave Paris satisfied with the circus and feeling zero real pressure to do anything at all.
The other point, perhaps the real point, of the conference is to pressure Israel to stop all settlement growth. In this sense it is a follow-up to UN Security Council resolution 2334 of December, and shares its conclusion that the real barrier to peace is the increasingly rapid, uncontrollable, endless, limitless growth of Israeli settlements. But this is false, as the statistics show. Settlement populations are growing, at about four percent a year, but the notion that they are rapidly gobbling up the West Bank and making peace impossible is a fiction.
There may be a third objective for the conference: pressing President-Elect Trump not to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. We can expect language about leaving Jerusalem as a final status issue and doing nothing at all that changes the status quo. If you believe the President-Elect will be dissuaded by such a declaration from a conference such as this, well, I don’t agree.
So the conference will soon be nearly forgotten, and go down as yet another feeble effort to undermine Israel’s legitimacy. Of course if you ask the French, they will angrily deny that this was their purpose. I agree that it was not the purpose, but it is the effect, predictably. Like Resolution 2334, it is another diplomatic blow against the Jewish State, trying to isolate it and criticize it and undermine its ideological and diplomatic defenses. And meanwhile, this very month, we will see the PLO pay more money to prisoners convicted of terrorist acts and name more schools or parks or squares after murderers and would-be murderers. But there will be no Paris conference about all of that.

Yet while the change of administration in Washington may strengthen Israel’s diplomatic position for the immediate period, and while the Palestinians will have to get to the back of the line in terms of international priorities, the Palestinian question itself will not disappear. In many ways, it will find its status enhanced.
To begin with, there’s the public domain. And this brings us to something that the Europeans have never understood: The historic Palestinian strategy has never been about achieving statehood, but about preventing a negotiated solution in order to perpetuate the image of the Palestinians as the people to whom history has dealt the cruelest blow. It’s why the Palestinians make deliberately unrealistic demands, like the “right of return”—a goal the Palestine Liberation Organization originally pledged to achieve through violence—and suing the United Kingdom for the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
In terms of building up public support around the world, it’s a strategy that has worked. Hence, we can assume that if President-elect Donald Trump does a 180-degree turn on President Obama’s approach to the Israelis, the narrative of the Palestinians—ignored by America, facing 50 years of “occupation” under Israel—will become emblematic of public resistance to the foreign policies of the Trump administration. In the American context, the Democratic Party is now the most significant barometer of that process.
The Palestinians can also play power politics. They can carry on with their campaign to achieve membership in international bodies as an independent state. They can curry favor with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the next stage of his conflict with the West. And they can insert themselves into domestic issues—rising anti-Semitism, the political culture on university campuses, the legality of boycotts—in a way that few other foreign policy issues can do.
As I said, Netanyahu may well be right about the last gasp of Obama’s strategy to secure Palestinian independence. But none of us should believe that these battles are over.

The French initiative for a conference was made tempting with promises of incentive packages for both Israel and the Palestinians if agreement could be reached on a peace arrangement.
It is laudatory that each people understand the basic needs of the other party. But there is a basic asymmetry in the situation. There are legitimate disagreements on Israeli settlements, but the state of Israel threatens no other nation or people.
On the contrary it seeks satisfaction of its security needs and defense against unending terrorist attacks, most recently in the truck attack in Jerusalem. Israel is not reinforcing the worst stereotypes of Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims when it accuses them and responds to terrorist attacks.
It is time for the international community to consider the real nature of the problem. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict exists and has always existed because of the refusal of Palestinians to acknowledge the right of Israel, a Jewish state, to exist.
The US administrations, particularly Secretary of State John Kerry, have forgotten the statement of Madeleine Albright in March 1994 when she was US Secretary of State, “We simply do not support the description of the territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 war as ‘occupied Palestinian territory.’”
The solution can only come through negotiations between the two parties, bilateral talks, and not by statements or intervention by the US, the UN, or any other nation or international body.

Today in France 70 nations will come together in Paris and blindly ignore the legal ruling of a highly significant French court (Court of Appeal of Versailles) just a few years ago. They will most likely issue a statement which creates the impression that Israel’s activities in Judea and Samaria are illegal.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago that there hasn’t been a proper legal case to decide the legality of Jews living in the lands captured back from Jordan in ’67, specifically Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem. I was wrong! There was exactly such a case and, even though I’ve written about it, it has received almost no attention and been buried.
Here’s a very simplistic background on how western legal systems operate. In a Western country founded on Judeo-Christian principles, some form of elected body decides to pass and enact laws. Perhaps there is a foundational document (like the US Constitution) or centuries of history and a set of procedures and prior law on how stuff is done (the UK). One thing that unites all these systems is that new laws must be tested in court.
A law enters the books when the elected officials have all agreed on it, but until someone breaks the law or challenges it in some way, it isn’t fully tested.

An international peace summit, spearheaded by the French government, will be held on January 15, 2017, in Paris. In this report, NGO Monitor documents French government support of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that support discriminatory BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) campaigns against Israel and with alleged ties to terror groups. This type of financial support casts doubts on the ability of France to serve as an impartial host of a summit dedicated to peace.
Executive Summary

• The French government funds numerous French, Israeli, and Palestinian organizations that support and promote BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) campaigns against Israel, despite the fact that such boycotts are illegal under French law.
• The Platform of French NGOs for Palestine (The Platform) is one such grantee. One of the Platform’s government-funded projects is explicitly geared towards influencing elected officials, media, and public opinion regarding the conflict – an obvious abuse of taxpayer money. The Platform supports boycott campaigns targeting Israel and partners with organizations instrumental in BDS efforts.
• France directly and indirectly funds several other NGOs with alleged ties to the PFLP terror group.

Jerusalem is concerned that President Barack Obama – with just six days left in office – will use the conference to drive a final nail in the coffin of the so-called peace process. The scenario speculates that Kerry will urge the conference to approve a draft resolution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which could then be approved by the Security Council just before Obama leaves office on Friday.
A hint of this dire possibility is that, despite France’s declaration that the issue of dividing Jerusalem into two capitals would not be raised at the conference, the topic will be discussed at a last-minute meeting of senior officials before it convenes, where the parley’s concluding statement is expected to be finalized.
Conferences in Paris will not bring peace. That will only come from negotiations. For peace to happen, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas needs to first come to Jerusalem and meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The problem is that Abbas is a known rejectionist. He rejected the peace deal offered to him by Ehud Olmert in 2008 and has since remained intransigent in his refusal to even meet Netanyahu.
While France might be sincere in its desire to see peace come to the Middle East, holding a conference is misguided. Unfortunately, the more the international community supports Abbas’s unilateral diplomatic delegitimization campaign, the more stubborn he will become in his refusal to sit down for real and sincere negotiations.
Our suggestion – cancel the meeting in Paris.

The international diplomatic conference set to be held in Paris on Sunday and attended by outgoing US Secretary of State John Kerry will be a “reward to the Palestinians for continuing to avoid negotiations while promoting terrorism,” Israel’s UN envoy said on Thursday.
Ambassador Danny Danon sounded the alarm about potential moves against Israel at the UN next week before US President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Friday.
“We are witnessing an attempt to promote a last-minute initiative before the new US administration takes office,” Danon said. “Supporters of the Palestinians are looking for further anti-Israel measures at the Security Council.”
“The hypocrisy and the obsessive focus on Israel has reached new heights,” Danon went on to say. “These one-sided initiatives not only fail in bringing us closer to peace, but they actually encourage terrorism like we saw in last week’s horrific attack in Jerusalem.”

The Palestinian leadership is working with Western governments on a movement for European countries to unilaterally recognize Palestine as an independent state, a member of the PLO executive council told Breitbart Jerusalem.
He said that the Palestinians are working in conjunction with members of the European Union to advance a motion to recognize Palestinian statehood following Sunday’s Middle East summit in Paris. He added that some members of the Obama administration support the effort, although it was not clear that the Obama administration itself would make any public declaration to that effect.
“Its significance lies not only in the number of states that will recognize Palestine, but also in the fact that Palestine will become the world’s only state that is under occupation, which will pose a real challenge for the community of nations,” he claimed.
The PLO council member said the Palestinian Authority hopes to take the “Palestine” recognition campaign to the UN Security Council after the Paris summit, but he conceded that the White House does not currently back any move at the UN on the matter.
“We and our European partners, as well as some officials in the US State Department, hope that the summit creates some kind of leverage that will persuade the White House to throw its weight behind it,” he said. “Our stated goal is that the June 1967 borders will be reiterated as the future borders of the Palestinian State, including East Jerusalem. We also seek to set a deadline for the establishment of a Palestinian state which, if missed, the UN will impose sanctions on Israel just like the ones imposed on South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s and on Iran more recently. We have to establish a position whereby Israel is a danger to world peace no less that the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations.”

Hundreds of pro-Israel demonstrators marched in Paris on Sunday to protest against an international peace conference held in the French capital aimed at finding a fresh path to reaching a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
France hosted more than 70 countries at the summit in an effort to revive the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process, though Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has derided the summit as “pointless” and “rigged” against the Jewish state.
Protesters from France and abroad gathered outside the Israeli Embassy in Paris and waved the national flag of the Jewish state. Some carried banners with slogans of “500,000 killed in Iraq. Even one Paris summit?” and “The illusion of peace by sacrificing Israel.”
The conference is expected to condemn Israeli settlement building and urge Israel and the Palestinians “to officially restate their commitment to the two-state solution.”

The United States will oppose any efforts to codify any decree that may emerge from the Middle East peace conference on Sunday into a UN Security Council resolution, US Secretary of State John Kerry told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone conversation.
Israeli sources said that Kerry called Netanyahu from the conference on Sunday to brief him on the efforts the US was making at the conference to soften the language of the final resolution.
According to the sources, Netanyahu told Kerry that damage has already been done to Israel by the anti-settlement resolution that the US allowed to pass in the Security Council last month, and that no more harm should be allowed to be caused to Israel from the Paris summit.
Kerry, the sources said, assured Netanyahu that there would be no follow-up to the Paris conference in the Security Council.
Earlier on Sunday, Netanyahu said the conference in Paris was “futile” and the “final palpitations” of yesterday’s world.

The United Kingdom has reportedly refused to send a high-level delegation to the Paris peace conference in a bid to appease US President-elect Donald Trump.
Rather than sending a minister or the French ambassador to Sunday’s conference, which hosted representatives from 70 countries, the United Kingdom had junior diplomats attend, The Guardian reported on Sunday.
That move was designed to placate Trump, the report suggested. Trump has reportedly conveyed to French diplomats his disapproval of the conference, which Israel has rejected as “pointless.”
Representing the UK at the conference was the head of the Middle East desk of the Foreign Office, Michael Howells, as well as two advisers to the UK envoy to Paris, the report said.
The United Kingdom last month voted in favor of the UN Security Council resolution lambasting Israeli settlements, which passed after Washington refrained from exercising its veto.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault warned Sunday that moving the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would result in “extremely serious consequences.”
Speaking as representatives from 70 countries gathered in Paris to try to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, Ayrault told French TV he believed US President-elect Donald Trump would find it “impossible” to fulfill the pledge he made during his campaign to transfer the embassy.
“When you are president of the United States, you cannot take such a stubborn and such a unilateral view on this issue. You have to try to create the conditions for peace,” Ayrault said.
Trump hasn’t yet laid out a clear Mideast policy, but has signaled he will be more sympathetic to Israel’s hard-line right than previous US administrations.

US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power on Friday warned that cutting US funding to the United Nations would be “extremely detrimental” to American interests, one week before Donald Trump’s administration takes office.
Addressing her final news conference, Power told reporters that “countries like Russia and China” would benefit from Washington’s reduced standing at the United Nations if funding were withdrawn.
“We lead the world, in part, by leading at the UN,” said Power, who is stepping down next week after four years as President Barack Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations.
“If we were to tie our hands behind our back or strip this organization of programming” to support peace mediation or humanitarian work, “this would be extremely detrimental to US interests,” she said.
Power spoke after a bill was introduced in the US Senate that would slash all US funding to the United Nations until a Security Council resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlements is repealed.

In response to the recent United Nations Security Council resolution regarding Israeli settlements, Prime Minister Netanyahu announced Israel will be launching a space expedition from its Palmachim Airbase to find suitable land to build new settlements on.
Naturally, the Obama administration condemned the decision without really knowing why but mainly because of a nagging doubt that if Netanyahu wants to do it, it’s probably wrong:
“Jewish…I mean Israeli settlements, have no right to be there,” President Obama commented.
Across the pond in the European Union, key leaders said the decision is only likely to hinder peace: “Jews have the right to live anywhere safely,” a spokesman said, “Just not on the Moon, Europe and especially not in the West Bank. That prime spot is reserved for our settlements. We really don’t want to have to start expelling Jews again.”

The spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party on Saturday warned that if the Trump administration moves the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, it will “open the gates of hell.”
Fatah spokesman Osama Qawasmeh said Donald Trump’s campaign promise, if implemented, would negate chances for peace and stability in the region, and “the Palestinian people won’t allow that happen,” according to Israel Radio. To move the embassy, he said, would be to “open the gates of hell in the region and in the whole world.”
On Friday, Abbas told Le Figaro the Palestinians might revoke their recognition of Israel: If the embassy transfer takes place, “there would be several options for us, and we would discuss them with Arab countries,” Abbas said. “Reversing our recognition of the State of Israel is one of them. But we hope that it doesn’t reach that point, and that, on the contrary, we will be able to work with the next American administration,” he added.

President-elect Donald Trump intends to complement the move of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by arranging for a transfer in the opposite direction of a mosque that has become a flashpoint for sectarian violence, a member of his transition team announced today.
Spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway told reporters Sunday that Donald Trump will order the two moves to occur in parallel, within the first few months of taking office. Trump’s inauguration will take place this Friday.
Conway explained that the violence that various leaders have warned will result from moving the embassy to Israel’s declared capital will prove to be mere sound and fury, and that the incoming administration can kill two birds with one stone by cementing US recognition of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem through the embassy move and eliminating a point of friction between Muslims and Jews with the mosque relocation.
“Al Aqsa has been a rallying cry for Muslims since the 1920’s, based on the libel that ‘the Jews’ plan to raze the mosque and build their Temple,” she observed. “Even though Zionism, especially at the time, was a secular movement uninterested in the religious aspects of Jewish rebirth in the ancestral Jewish homeland. The same call to ‘save’ Al-Aqsa from the designs of the Israeli government – a government led by the secular Likud Party – has sparked the Second Intifada and the current wave of stabbing and automotive attacks by Palestinians. It has to go. Since we’re going to be repurposing our Tel Aviv facility once it ceases to function as an embassy, an obvious choice for its new designation is Al-Aqsa II.”

In 2016, Israeli security personnel prevented 1,226 attempts to smuggle illicit goods like drones and scuba gear into the Gaza Strip through the Kerem Shalom crossing, a significant increase over the previous year, the Defense Ministry announced Sunday.
On average, nearly 500 trucks entered the Strip loaded with goods each day in 2016, a 13 percent increase from 2015, according to the ministry.
In order to prevent the production of weapons and the digging of so-called terror tunnels, Israel’s Coordinator for the Government’s Actions in the Territories (COGAT) maintains a strict list of what goods may not be on those trucks.
For instance, certain chemical compounds, gas tanks and drilling equipment are not allowed into Gaza at all. But also some “dual purpose” materials, like electrical cables and cameras, which can be used for either benign or nefarious ends, are heavily regulated, if not outright forbidden, by Israel.

The IDF fired towards Hamas positions in the southern Gaza Strip in response to shots that were fired towards the IDF vehicle earlier Sunday, the IDF Spokesperson’s Office said.
According to the IDF, the rounds, fired by a tank, was in retaliation to gunfire which damaged an IDF vehicle working near the border fence earlier.
Farmers in the area were advised by the army to stop working in the fields and to remain in their homes.
A similar incident occurred in December when shots were fired at IDF troops near the southern Gaza Strip and IDF artillery returned fire.
The cross-border incident on Sunday occurred as civilians in Gaza organized demonstrations protesting against a serious lack of electricity and gas in the Strip. Hamas is reported to have threatened to resume rocket fire against Israel, blaming Jerusalem for the crisis.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said Saturday that Turkey has pledged to send large amounts of fuel to the Gaza Strip in an effort to end the crippling electricity shortage in the Palestinian enclave, which has sparked rare public protests.
Gaza’s Hamas rulers have detained hundreds of people in recent days in an effort to quell the protests that have rocked the Strip.
In a press release, Haniyeh said the deal for the emergency assistance from Ankara was struck after days of “extensive efforts” to end the power crisis.
The diesel fuel would help re-open Gaza’s sole power plant, which supplies electricity to some 2.2 million Palestinian residents of the Strip.
Haniyeh is also expected to meet with Qatari leaders in the coming days to discuss long-term solutions to the regular electricity shortages in Gaza.

Something is rotten in the city of Wuppertal in western Germany. The district court there recently ruled that the torching of a local synagogue in 2014, during Operation Protective Edge in the Gazs Strip, was not an anti-Semitic act. The three arsonists, of Arab descent, who, according to the judges, were simply trying "to draw attention to the conflict in Gaza," will not sit behind bars.
A lot of creativity -- or perhaps a disconnect from reality -- is needed to claim that vandalizing a synagogue is not anti-Semitism. And in Germany, where synagogues were a symbolic victim of Nazi anti-Semitism, this is a display of audacity of the first order. After all, the arsonists did not have a conflict with any of the synagogue's congregants. They chose the site because in their eyes -- in everyone's eyes -- a synagogue is a symbol of the Jewish people. They sought out a way to express burning hatred towards the people of Israel and their land. And so they torched a Jewish place of worship.
The delusional ruling whitewashes anti-Semitic violence. The judges are presenting the arson, which could have taken human life, as near-legitimate criticism. By the same distorted logic, one can justify any harm done and any act of terrorism. If the throwing a Molotov cocktail at a synagogue is nothing other than criticism of Israel, was the ramming of shoppers at the Christmas market in Berlin a way to criticize German society? And maybe the terrorists who flew planes into the twin towers in New York wanted to focus the public's attention on U.S. policy?

Following a ruling in which a German court refused to define an attack of a synagogue as antisemtism, instead seeing it as a protest against Israeli policies, the same body acquitted several members of a lynch mob that had attacked an African migrant, reasoning that such an incident merely reflected frustration with the policies of the West African country of Liberia.
Justice Helmut Upp-Majaß ruled today that a group of youths who had bound, beaten, and tortured a 24-year-old Eritrean man could not be charged with a hate crime, as subjecting Africans to such treatment falls well into the accepted German framework of legitimate protest against the policies of African government. Legal experts note that the ruling will help clarify the law regarding a spate of alleged hate crimes in Germany.
“It is crucial that in the aftermath of the synagogue ruling, the parameters of hate crimes be better defined,” explained Sieg Heil, a Berlin attorney. “The consistency with which this point of law is applied remains to be seen, but it is important, given Germany’s and Europe’s fraught history with Jews, that it not become just another way in which Jews are singled out. The lumping together of East African refugees and sovereign West African governments will go a long way toward demonstrating that Jews are not receiving discriminatory treatment in this regard.”

I spotted this and it piqued my curiosity:

In the past, we would have read "Israeli Arabs demonstrate...".
They are not "Arabs" but "Palestinians".
Their nationality, even if born in Israel, is not Israeli.

In a thorough column Friday, Getler sought and received a response from Rhodes, and ultimately upheld CAMERA's correction request, stating "it merits some kind of correcting or clarifying statement by the NewsHour on the air or online or both." An excerpt of his post ("The Mailbag: Settlements, Settlement Units, Settlers") follows:
But in the course of the interview, Rhodes’ grip on strategic communications failed him at two points when he talked about “thousands of new settlements are being constructed” and later on when he said, “…when people look back and they say, you saw tens of thousands of settlements being constructed…”
CAMERA Focuses
On Jan. 10, I got an email from the ever-vigilant, pro-Israel, Boston-based media watch organization known as CAMERA, for Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. It said, in part: “Ben Rhodes falsely claimed that Israel is constructing ‘tens of thousands’ of settlements in the West Bank. Zero settlements are under construction and there have been no new settlements in some two decades. The total number of settlements and illegal outposts combined, according to the anti-settlement watch group Peace Now, is 228. While Judy Woodruff did an overall professional job in this interview, she failed to challenge Rhodes on his completely inflated, false figure and to inform viewers that his figure was not even close. We urge PBS to broadcast a correction and post it online as well.”
I’ve asked the NewsHour about this and will post their response if and when I get one. For most people who have followed the seemingly never-ending Arab-Israeli dispute reasonably closely over the years, they will probably be aware that there are not tens of thousands or even thousands of Israeli settlements on the territories it occupied after the 1967 war. On the other hand, there are, in increasing numbers, several hundreds of thousands, of Israelis living within what are hundreds of settlements.
I contacted Rhodes and he responded quickly, saying in an email, “I assume I was referring to settlers/individual settlement units, rather than settlement blocs.” I asked what he meant by settlement units and he said he’d describe them as “housing, whereas settlements are generally used to refer to a cluster of houses (which can obviously take different forms—apartments, houses, etc).”
My Thoughts
So it seems clear to me that Rhodes misspoke when he talked about thousands and tens of thousands of settlements, but meaning what may be called settlement units or living quarters within established and official settlements. And it also seems to me that while this was a misstatement by a guest rather than the interviewer, it merits some kind of correcting or clarifying statement by the NewsHour on the air or online or both. I have some sympathy for both guest and interviewer on this because when one thinks about this issue, it is easy to slip in a live interview from settlements to settlers, and the focus usually is on the numbers of Israelis now living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Nevertheless, this is always a hot-button issue and worthy of keeping straight.

Yesterday, The Independent published an op-ed by Nadia Hijab (This is the one good thing about Obama’s legacy in Israel – and John Kerry might be about to destroy it, Jan. 14th) which included the same claim.
Here’s the relevant passage – which was also repeated in the strap line:
Kerry’s principles are full of internal contradictions. For example, saying that Israel must be a “Jewish state” in which the 1.7 million Palestinian citizens of Israel “must be able to live as equal citizens” is not grounded in reality: there are already over 50 laws that discriminate against them, and Kerry’s principles do nothing to address these.
As we noted in September, CAMERA and NGO Monitor have refuted Adalah’s claims of “50 racist laws” in Israel – a charge used so carelessly that even an Israeli public health law requiring that parents vaccinate their children is characterised as a “racist law”.

A young Jewish and homosexual activist was attacked at a park in Santiago, Chile by three men who carried neo-Nazi symbols.
Jorge Arce was walking Thursday at the Bustamante park wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the flag of Israel that his mother had given him recently. The attackers yelled “murderer” before punching him in the thorax and making several razor cuts on his arms and legs, reported El Mostrador news website.
“I had forty stitches on my arm. Some will be forever. Just for being Jewish. The pain overwhelms me,” he told the Movement for Integration and Homosexual Liberation, or MOVILH, which called the attack “an anti-Semitic and homophobic aggression.”
Arce is a member of the Hod Jews for Diversity, a Jewish group for sexual minorities and supporters of LGBT rights.

A recently unearthed ancient copper-smelting site, numerous sling stones, and the remains of a deeply fortified wall found in the Negev’s Timna region by archeologists may buttress the biblical story of King David’s military victory against the Kingdom of Edom.
The archeological team, led by Tel Aviv University’s Dr. Erez Ben-Yosef, first found a wall of the 10th century BC copper-smelting site near Timna Park, in the southern desert, where the world’s first copper mine is believed to have been.
Citing the biblical story about King David traveling with his soldiers to the land of Edom, where a major battle took place with the Edomites by the Dead Sea, Ben-Yosef said his team may have found evidence of the bloody conflict.
According to the Bible, Edom stretched from the Sanai Peninsula to the southern border of Canaan and Kingdom of Judah, and as far west as Eilat, where it maintained its seaport. As David expanded his reign, Samuel 8:13 states that his army vanquished 18,000 Edomites in the Valley of Salt.

The crisis in Syria hasn’t been ignored by Israel. Various Israeli youth movements, including the Youth Federation for Working and Studying, The Dror Movement, and the committed for the fight against genocide are leading a wide scale operation to collect winter clothes for Syrian refugees.
The operation, codenamed “Human Warmth,” has opened up 15 collection centers around the country where Israelis can go and donate winter clothes. The centers are in Druze, Arab, and Jewish communities.
The winter clothes will then go off to the Syrians who are in need of assistance.
A similar operation occured in 2014, seeing 30 tons of winter clothes being donated to Syrian refugees. It took 1,500 boxes to carry all of the clothing, and eight 18 wheelers to transport it all.
Organizers said that “this terrible tragedy has been going on for six years now. This terrible reality forces us to act and do everything we can to help these people.”
“The goal of this operation is to enable the Israeli public to donate unused winter clothing which is sitting in their house, and make a meaningful donation which might just save a life.”

Israeli officials on Sunday credited the efforts of the National Security Council and the Foreign Ministry for a “significant weakening” of the text of the final joint declaration issued by the participants of a peace conference in Paris.

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 Israeli-Palestinian 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, including continued acts of violence and ongoing settlement activity, and to start meaningful direct negotiations.

They reiterated that a negotiated two-state solution should meet the legitimate aspirations of both sides, including the Palestinians’ right to statehood and sovereignty, fully end the occupation that begin in 1967, satisfy Israel’s security needs and resolve all permanent status issues on the basis of United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973), and also recalled relevant Security Council resolutions. (Draft also mentioned 1397 (2002), 1515 (2003), 1850 (2008), the Madrid principles (1991) and the Quartet Roadmap (2003)).

They underscored the importance of the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 as a comprehensive framework for the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, thus contributing to regional peace and security.

They welcomed international efforts to advance Middle East peace, including the adoption of United Nations Security Council resolution 2334 on 23 December 2016, which clearly condemned settlement activity, incitement and all acts of violence and terror, and called on both sides to take steps to advance the two-state solution on the ground; the recommendations of the Quartet on 1 July 2016; and the United States Secretary of State’s principle on the two-state solution on 28 December 2016.
(Draft: "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 noted the importance of addressing the dire humanitarian and security situation in the Gaza Strip and called for swift steps to improve the situation. (This is new.)

They emphasized the importance for Israelis and Palestinians to comply with international law, including international humanitarian law and human rights law. (Draft:"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 political and economic incentives, the consolidation of Palestinian state capacities, and civil society dialogue. Those could include, inter alia:

– a European (Draft: special) privileged partnership; other political and economic incentives and increased private sector involvement; support to further efforts by the parties to improve economic cooperation; continued financial support to the Palestinian Authority in building the infrastructure for a viable Palestinian economy;

– supporting and strengthening Palestinian steps to exercise their responsibilities of statehood through consolidating their institutions and institutional capacities, including for service delivery; [Draft: "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, in order to enhance dialogue between the parties, rekindle the public debate and strengthen the role of civil society on both sides. (this is new.)

III) Looking ahead, the Participants;

– call upon [expect] both sides to officially restate their commitment to the two-state solution, thus disassociating themselves from[and to disavow official] voices that reject this solution;

– call on each side to independently demonstrate, through policies and actions, a genuine commitment to the two-state solutions and refrain from unilateral steps that prejudge the outcome of negotiations on final status issues, (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);including, inter alia, on Jerusalem, borders, security, refugees and which they will not recognize;

-(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 and other relevant actors to further the objectives of this Declaration.

(restate the validity of the Arab Peace Initiative and highlight its potential for stability in the region;)


As follow-up to the Conference, interested Participants, expressing their readiness to review progress, resolved to meet again before the end of the year in order to support both sides in advancing the two-state solution through negotiations.

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.

France's foreign minister says moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from its current place in Tel Aviv would be a "provocation" and a threat to efforts for a two-state solution to the protracted Mideast conflict.

Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault ...cautioned U.S. President-elect Donald Trump against moving the U.S. embassy before new peace negotiations can be held. The move could be seen as recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital after decades of insisting that the city's status must be determined by direct talks.

Ayrault said France would work to maintain good relations with the Trump administration but stressed French fears that an embassy move will unleash new Mideast violence. (AP)

The chief Palestinian representative to France says moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv would violate international law and adds that he does not think Donald Trump's new administration will make such a decision.
Salman Elherfi told The Associated Press that a Mideast peace conference Sunday in Paris sent a "very clear" message calling on everyone not to make any changes that would affect a final solution for the region, especially regarding the status of Jerusalem.
He says "I do not believe that the United States will violate international law because transferring the embassy of the United States into an occupied territory would mean admitting the annexation of this territory by Israel."

The chief Palestinian representative to France said moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv would violate international law and adds that he does not think Donald Trump's new administration will make such a decision.

Salman Elherfi told The Associated Press that a Mideast peace conference Sunday in Paris sent a "very clear" message calling on everyone not to make any changes that would affect a final solution for the region, especially regarding the status of Jerusalem.

He said,"I do not believe that the United States will violate international law because transferring the embassy of the United States into an occupied territory would mean admitting the annexation of this territory by Israel."

“What steps have been undertaken and what success has been noted in convincing anti-Semitic and anti-Israel Negroes, such as Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, and McKissick, to desist from their anti-Israel activity?... What would you say if you were talking to a Negro intellectual, an editor of a national magazine, and were told, as I have been, that he supported the Arabs against Israel because color is all important in this world? In the editor’s opinion, the Arabs are colored Asians and the Israelis are white Europeans. Would you point out that more than half of the Israelis are Asian Jews with the same pigmentation as Arabs, or would you suggest that an American Negro should not form judgments on the basis of color? What seems to you an appropriate or an effective response?”

On the Middle East crisis, we have had various responses. The response of some of the so-called young militants again does not represent the position of the vast majority of Negroes. There are some who are color-consumed and they see a kind of mystique in being colored, and anything non-colored is condemned. W e do not follow that course in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and certainly most of the organizations in the civil rights movement do not follow that course.

I think it is necessary to say that what is basic and what is needed in the Middle East is peace. Peace for Israel is one thing. Peace for the Arab side of that world is another thing. Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all of our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land almost can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality.

On the other hand, we must see what peace for the Arabs means in a real sense of security on another level. Peace for the Arabs means the kind of economic security that they so desperately need. These nations, as you know, are part of that third world of hunger, of disease, of illiteracy. I think that as long as these conditions exist there will be tensions, there will be the endless quest to find scapegoats. So there is a need for a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, where we lift those who are at the bottom of the economic ladder and bring them into the mainstream of economic security.

Anti-Semitism historically has been based on two false, sick, evil assumptions. One was unfortunately perpetuated even by many Christians, all too many as a matter of fact, and that is the notion that the religion of Judaism is anathema. That was the first basis for anti-Semitism in the historic sense. Second, a notion was perpetuated by a sick man like Hitler and others that the Jew is innately inferior. 

The conference in Paris belongs to the legacy of U.S. President Barack Obama's administration: A moment before it all falls apart, strike a blow at the Jews. Just before French President Francois Hollande's government falls apart (the candidates from his party are "hiding" their involvement in his administration), the French have remembered to strike a blow at the Jews. For one long moment -- too long -- the enormous massacre in Syria, in Aleppo, was forgotten. Also forgotten is the ongoing return of Arab states to tribal and clan structures and the dismantling of the nationalist structures forced upon them by Colonial France and England after the World War II. The crazed rise of jihadi Islam has been forgotten, too. The hundreds of murdered citizens of France and Germany, killed in bizarre manners by Muslim fanatics, have been forgotten. Everything has been forgotten, because the reason for all this chaos has been discovered: the settlements.
Hollande said that "the two-state solution is threatened by the continued building of settlements, by the weakness of the peace camp, by mistrust between the two sides, and by the terrorists who have always feared a peace settlement." We have grown far too accustomed to this intellectual disgrace, having heard it from U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in his last speech, from Hollande on Sunday evening and from other leaders (including the U.N. Security Council's scandalous resolution), according to which there is a correlation between the settlement enterprise and terrorism. We must not agree with this lie, which indirectly justifies the murder of Jews and ignores the reasons for the murder of Christians on European land. This approach is a recipe for the defeat of Europe at the hands of those seeking to destroy it.
We are focusing too much on the war against the Islamic State group, Hollande complained, and if we want to "stabilize the Middle East," we must not forget the "oldest conflict," the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Absolutely not, Mr. Hollande. The oldest conflict, which began several hundreds of years prior, is that between Islam and Christianity. The first Crusade left primarily from France toward Jerusalem some 920 years ago, at the encouragement of Otho de Lagery, or Pope Urban II.
Now, it has become clear that almost a millennium later, the French have submitted to the Muslims. They are seeking to liberate Jerusalem from its rightful owners and to transfer it to Muslim occupiers, in the hope that they will be spared and that the killing campaign in the streets of Europe will stop. What a shameful defeat.

Ahead of the Mideast peace summit held in Paris on Sunday, Associated Press correspondent Matthew Lee, known for his piercing questions at State Department briefings, indicated that the gathering of world representatives in the French capital would be the culmination of the “Obama administration’s eight years of unsuccessful Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy.”
Analyzing the reason for US participation in the conference, which he said “isn’t expected to produce any tangible progress,” Lee wrote:
At a time when President-elect Donald Trump’s administration is promising a fundamental shift toward Israel, the State Department said Kerry was only participating in the French-hosted event to ensure America’s interest in a two-state solution to the conflict is preserved. The blunt statement reinforced the dwindling hopes for a diplomatic breakthrough.
Lee said that because no representatives from either Jerusalem or Ramallah were among the diplomats from more than 70 countries attending the summit, “[T]he US is primarily focused on shielding Israel from unfair criticism and ensuring concerns about Palestinian incitement to violence aren’t ignored.”
However, he wrote, “[T]he administration may find its voice ignored. While the US received credit from close allies in Europe and elsewhere for abstaining” from the vote on the anti-settlement UN Security Council Resolution 2334 last month, “America’s partners have grown tired with its leadership on the peace process.”

My open letter to French President Francois Hollande in response to his speech at the Paris Middle East Peace Conference.
January 15, 2017
Dear President François Hollande,
In your speech thjs afternoon, after you cited the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and the struggle against the Islamic State, you sought to justify the focus of today’s Paris summit on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by saying the Middle East cannot “regain its stability” unless we address “the oldest of its conflicts.”
Are you not aware that today’s Middle East wars in the name of Jihad, and internecine conflicts such as the Sunni-Shiite schism, are 1300 years older than the Arab-Israeli conflict?
Do you really believe that increased world focus on the Israeli-Palestinian issue will cause Syria—a country that has disintegrated from Bashar Assad’s genocidal bombings of his Sunni population, backed by Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia—to somehow “regain stability”?
Do you really believe that what Israel does or doesn’t do will affect the Islamic State’s genocidal massacre, abductions and rape of Yazidis and Christians in Iraq?

"Illegality in international law" applies neither to the Israeli settlements that existed prior to Oslo II nor to any continued subsequent Israeli building that was confined to the official boundaries of those settlements (including Jerusalem in its entirety) on the day when Oslo II was signed, on September 28, 1995.
In negotiations over the final status, on the other hand, the Palestinians are not excluded from demanding a total Israeli withdrawal to the ceasefire lines of 1949, but Israel is likewise not excluded from demanding the retention not merely of the settlements but also of any other part of the Mandatory Palestine of 1947.
Almost all of Israel's settlement activity has not been illegal. Israel's Supreme Court has been vigilant in forbidding any violations.
In practice, no final status can be achieved unless both Parties abandon their claims to the whole former territory of the British Mandate, accept each other's minimal existential needs, and acknowledge the long-established current realities.

US President Barack Obama said in an interview broadcast Sunday that his decision not to veto a UN resolution against Israeli settlements did not rupture US-Israel relations and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu getting “fired up” over it was nothing new.
“I don’t think it caused a major rupture in relations between the United States and Israel,” Obama told CBS’s 60 Minutes. “If you’re saying that Prime Minister Netanyahu got fired up, he’s been fired up repeatedly during the course of my presidency, around the Iran deal and around our consistent objection to settlements.”
“So that part of it wasn’t new,” Obama said, noting that military and intelligence cooperation continues unabated. “We have defended them consistently in every imaginable way.”
The US abstention at the Security Council on December 23 allowed Resolution 2334 to pass, with a vote of 14-0. Netanyahu led a furious response that included summoning ambassadors of countries that backed the resolution for a dressing down on Christmas Day, and a one-to-one with US Ambassador Dan Shapiro.

Israel’s new Foreign Ministry chief on Monday hailed the lackluster outcome of Sunday’s Paris peace conference as a victory for Israel, saying Israel’s decision not to show up sent a message to the international community.
Director General Yuval Rotem took over as head of the Foreign Ministry at the end of December and gave his first interviews to the Israeli media a day after diplomats gathered in Paris to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and reinforce the need for a two-state solution.
“The fact that the Paris conference has no followup is from our perspective the most meaningful accomplishment,” Rotem told Israel Radio Monday morning.
As far as Israel is concerned, the most important outcome from Paris was that it imposed “no new obligations” on Israel and “finished without any mechanism to apply or follow up” on the provisions it laid out for achieving peace, Rotem said.
“We also succeeded to a certain extent in preventing any followup, any new enforcement mechanism and any new supervision mechanism,” he said.

A worthless and costly “peace” conference ended in Paris, and issued a joint declaration. Even the main organizer, the highly unpopular French President François Hollande, admitted at the conference that it was useless when he said, “the world cannot impose a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.
I am an Arab, lucky enough to be one of the few Arabs who live far enough, both physically and intellectually, from Arab thugs to be able to speak my mind. So I will speak my mind.
Let’s start with the ludicrous title – the “Middle East” peace conference, as named in official French government communiqués. Do the organizers realize that Israelis and Palestinians represent only three percent of the population of the Middle East? And do they realize that there are other places in the Middle East in much more desperate need for peace than Israel and the Palestinians? Syria and Iraq come to mind – perhaps the attendees have heard of those places…
The summit represented mostly countries that have always been hostile to Israel’s very existence, yet it was somehow expected to help resolve the 69-year-old conflict. Besides the fact that these people, who did not include Israeli or Palestinian representatives, have no business deciding or even advising on the future of the conflict, the conference is not anchored in reality but in a parallel universe.

So we hear it was a bust. I guess it’ll be a year before you try again? Or are you already preparing for another go against Israel?
This round failed because no matter how much honey you put on it, it still smelled like garlic.
Leaders from 70 countries came to Paris and departed without a deal to deny Jewish rights to the Jewish people in their Biblical and ancestral home.
You tried. Yes you did and generally I leave the Bible to my rabbis, but there is no way to forget Balaam, the prophet-for-hire who was hired to curse the Hebrews along their march to the Holy Land. Instead, every curse was turned into a blessing. Something like that happened in Paris.
Give me one more moment to get religion. So I say that it was a Hand from above that intervened and that gave us Donald Trump in the nick of time.
They’d have to answer to Trump.
John Kerry left the Big Conference hangdog and positively out of sorts. Things did not go as planned. They’d have to answer to Trump so the Paris conferees said, never mind.
Trump wanted no part of this and as you’ve noticed, Trump gets entire countries shivering in their boots as the result of a tweet.

J’accuse . . .!! I accuse the Israeli court of anti-Israelism and anti-Judaism in scapegoating Elor Azariya for definitively neutralizing a blood-thirsty Arab terrorist. However, today’s case of the 2017 Israeli government’s actions are a good repeat of the anti-Semitism practiced by the government of France in 1898 when Emile Zola published his famous article “J’accuse . . .!!” that exposed France’s anti-Semitism and unlawful jailing and falsely rigged trial of the Jewish French General Staff officer Alfred Dreyfus for espionage.
Today, in 2017, the Israeli Dreyfus-style actions are practiced by the Jews of Israel themselves against other Jews. What’s worse, Israel is falsely and unjustly imprisoning Jews who are on the front lines protecting the Jews of Israel from Arab terrorist monsters. The sad fact is with Jewish Israelis like the Israeli Two-Stater VIPs, who needs enemies?
Now, how did we get here? How did the Israeli government itself become the instrument of world anti-Semitism? The real Israeli security criminal is the entire Israeli “Peace” Two-State-Solution establishment including the late Peres, Rabin, Yossi Sarid and today's Uri Savir, Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni. These Israeli officials and their useful idiots have placed Israel into the historic arc that can only end in the annihilation of country of Israel-itself.
Through years of their holding Israel government positions, they filled the career government positions with Two-State-Solution Israelis. These former and current Israeli Two-State-Solution officials knew the Palestinian Arabs could and would easily smuggle katyusha rocket parts into any "West Bank" Palestinian State and fire those deadly rockets into the highly populated Tel Aviv/Netanya coast-line. Despite seeing tens of thousands of rockets fired from Gaza into Israel’s south, they still cling to the messianic Two-State Solution.

72 States and Organizations meeting in Paris on 15 January have repudiated Security Council Resolution 2334 (“UNSCR 2334”) just – three weeks after it was passed on 23 December 2016.
UNSCR 2334 had reiterated the Security Council’s
“vision of a region where two democratic States, Israel and Palestine, live side by side in peace within secure and recognized borders”
The final Paris communique dumped this “two democratic states solution” by reaffirming:
“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”.
The word “democratic” was in fact omitted in the Paris communique in nine places – signalling that Paris did not accept the definitive terms of the “two-state solution” proposed by the Security Council.

French President Francois Hollande on Sunday said the world cannot impose a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a lasting peace accord can only be clinched through direct talks.
Addressing a Paris peace conference in Paris with the representatives of 70 countries in attendance, Hollande also warned the international community not to forsake peace efforts as it focuses on the fight against the Islamic State, as the region cannot be stabilized without a resolution to the “oldest conflict in the Middle East.”
The French president noted in his address to diplomats that the “fight against ISIS has occupied the international community.”
“But how can you think that the Middle East can be stabilized if you don’t deal with its oldest conflict? The world must not resign itself to the status quo,” said the French president.

The 70 participants in the Paris peace initiative stressed the need for a two-state solution and rejected any unilateral moves by Israelis or Palestinians to prejudice a final peace deal.
In a joint declaration at the conclusion of the conference Sunday, the countries’ representatives restated that a two-state solution is the only one acceptable to the international community and called on both sides to act accordingly.
The participants “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, including continued acts of violence and ongoing settlement activity, and to start meaningful direct negotiations,” the declaration said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting, made the following remarks:
"The conference convening in Paris today is a useless conference. It is being coordinated between the French and the Palestinians. Its goal is to try and force terms on Israel that conflict with our national needs. Of course it pushes peace further away because it hardens the Palestinian positions and it also pushes them away from direct negotiations without preconditions. I must say that this conference is among the last twitches of yesterday's world. Tomorrow's world will be different – and it is very near.

Last week, a number of European capitals were kind enough to screen the Israeli flag in a show of solidarity following the vehicular attack in Jerusalem. While we were very excited to see our flag being raised, the Europeans unfortunately proved once again that they can only be trusted to do too little too late. Their empathetic gesture stands in complete contradiction to the destructive policy they are leading against Israel.
Only several weeks ago, the French and Brits raised their hands in favor of an anti-Israel resolution at the Security Council, and on Sunday they convened the world’s countries in Paris for another march of folly aimed at enforcing the resolution’s content under the misleading title of a conference promoting peace. The Paris conference is conveying the wrong message at the wrong timing and in the wrong place.
The message: The conference won’t change anything on the ground. Just like nothing changed on the ground after the United Nations General Assembly resolution which recognized the Palestinians as a non-member observer state. All it will do is raise the expectations, which will only increase the frustration and violence. Albert Einstein defined “insanity” as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. When will the international community finally realize that granting the Palestinians unilateral achievements, time and again, is simply the wrong way?

As we said repeatedly in the build-up to Sunday’s gathering in Paris of representatives of 70 countries to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian issue, AJC has long supported the search for an enduring peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians based on a two-state accord.
It is precisely in that spirit that we voiced our concerns about this conference, believing it would be irrelevant at best, harmful at worst, to the pursuit of a deal.
Our concerns, following the conference’s conclusions, can be summed up in five points.
First, as should have been crystal-clear by now, the Palestinians have avoided the only place where an agreement can be reached – the bargaining table with the Israelis. Therefore, every such diplomatic end-run only emboldens the Palestinians to believe, mistakenly of course, that they can achieve their goals without the tough negotiating required of face-to-face talks.

Instead of convening a summit on the ongoing civil war in Syria, or the migrant crisis threatening Europe, or the rampant anti-Semitism plaguing its own country, France on Sunday held a convention attended by over 70 nations to affirm the international community’s commitment to creating a Palestinian state.
At the end of the farcical display, and with neither Israel nor the Palestinian Authority in attendance, the Paris summit representatives released a brief concluding declaration unanimously agreed to after negotiations between the countries.
Reports here credited Israeli diplomats with helping to water down the anti-Israel language of the final declaration, calling the text a “significant weakening” and “less harsh than was initially expected.”
Still, the text was anything but fair. Here are five anti-Israel offenses in the 658-word final declaration:
1 – The text draws a moral equivalency between “violence,” which would include Palestinian terrorism targeting civilians, and “settlement activity,” meaning Israelis building homes in the West Bank or eastern sections of Jerusalem.
The text states:
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, including continued acts of violence and ongoing settlement activity, and to start meaningful direct negotiations.

French Jews decried Sunday’s Mideast peace summit in Paris, attended by diplomats from more than 70 countries, on the grounds that it encouraged Palestinian intransigence at Israel’s expense.
Yonathan Arfi, vice president of France’s umbrella Jewish organization Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF) – which, along with other groups, held a rally in front of the Israeli Embassy in Paris to express support for the Jewish state while it was being “singled out and marginalized by world powers” — called the conference “counterproductive for the peace process.”
Arfi told The Algemeiner that the summit “rewarded the continuous refusal of the Palestinian Authority to reach any final agreement with Israel. And by focusing on the settlements, the conference did not take into account the key role of Palestinian terrorism in the failure to achieve peace.”
He continued: “At a time when the Syrian crisis has killed more than 350,000 people, it is surprising that these countries and organizations from across the globe decided to focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which remains, thankfully, a very low-intensity conflict compared to other current disasters.”

Dramatically breaking ranks with participants from 70 other countries, the United Kingdom criticized Sunday’s Middle East peace conference in Paris, arguing that it might harden Palestinian negotiating positions and refusing to sign a joint statement issued after the summit that called for a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A Foreign Office spokesman said London had “particular reservations” about the Paris meeting taking place without Israeli or Palestinian representatives, especially since a new US administration is being sworn in later this week.
Indeed, the spokesman’s statement noted that the confab took place against Israel’s expressed wishes and “just days before the transition to a new American president when the US will be the ultimate guarantor of any agreement.”
“There are risks therefore that this conference hardens positions at a time when we need to be encouraging the conditions for peace.”

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is urging Britain to veto any new UN Security Council resolution critical of Israel.
Trump made the comments in an interview published Sunday with The Times of London and was quoted by the Reuters news agency.
In the interview, Trump also confirmed he would appoint his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to broker a Middle East peace deal. Last week Trump announced he would appoint Kushner as senior White House adviser who would, among other things, deal with Middle East related issues.
The interview with the Times of London was published on the day of the Paris peace conference, to which Britain chose to only send a delegation of junior diplomats.
Britain explained the move in the fact that hit had "particular reservations" with the nature and timing of the conference. The reservations given were the lack of representatives from Israel or the Palestinian Authority (PA) at the conference and it taking place "just days before the transition to a new American president."

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has distanced the Turnbull government from a communique agreed by ministers and diplomats of 70 nations, including Australia, concerning the pathways to peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
The concluding statement called on both sides to “take urgent steps in order to reverse the current negative trends on the ground”, including acts of violence and the construction of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories.
The communique specifically welcomed resolution 2334, passed by the UN Security Council last month, which declared the settlements violated international law and called on Israel to immediately cease all settlement activity.

The Palestinians on Sunday welcomed the closing statement from the peace conference in Paris calling on both Israel and the Palestinians to restate their commitment to a peace settlement and to refrain from unilateral actions.
“It’s a message to Israel, the occupying power, to abide by international law and international humanitarian law and to end its military occupation of Palestine towards the achievement of peace and stability in the region and the world,” said senior Palestinian official Saeb Erekat on Sunday night in a statement.
“It is time to stop dealing with Israel as a country above the law and to hold it accountable for its systematic violations of international law and the rights of our people,” he added.
The one-day summit came to a close on Sunday evening with a joint declaration, backed by the 70 countries, calling on Israel and the Palestinians to restate their commitment to a peace settlement and to refrain from unilateral actions.

The head of a Jerusalem-based organization that documents the activity and funding of non-governmental human rights groups explained to The Algemeiner on Sunday – at the close of the Mideast peace conference held in Paris – why he released a report ahead of the summit revealing the French government’s support for NGOs that promote anti-Israel BDS efforts and have alleged ties to terrorists.
Prof. Gerald Steinberg, president and founder of the research institute NGO Monitor, said that though France is not the only country whose “hypocrisy” at hosting a peace conference was worthy of highlighting – since Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, the European Union and others are just as deserving of scrutiny – “Its hosting of the event, while supporting some of the most immoral and viciously anti-Israel and anti-peace organizations,” made it the most urgent to expose.
The report, released Tuesday, revealed that:
The French government funds numerous French, Israeli, and Palestinian organizations that support and promote BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) campaigns against Israel, despite the fact that such boycotts are illegal under French law.

"[U]nlike America, Europe is inherently anti-Semitic. This anti-Semitism is spread more or less evenly across the political spectrum and, therefore, it translates into widespread hostility to Israel. Europeans hate the Jews. Consequently, they hate the Jewish state."— Robin Shepherd, A State Beyond The Pale: Europe's Problem With Israel.
No "Palestinian" leader has publicly disavowed jihad against Jews. Instead, every aspect of engagement by "Palestinians" with Jews and Israelis is considered an obligation for advancing this jihad until its final expected objective of pushing the Jews out of "Palestine" has been reached.
The doublespeak of the Palestinian leadership made no difference within the UN. Since the June 1967 war, the UN began to tilt away from being fair and balanced toward Israel, and extended support to Arabs of the "occupied" West Bank and Gaza as an indigenous "Palestinian" people supposedly wronged by Jews.
"The long march through the UN has produced many benefits for the PLO. It has created a people where there was none; an issue where there was none; a claim where there was none. Now the PLO is seeking to create a state where there already is one."— Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. ambassador to the UN (1981-85).
All of this occurred with the complicity of member states of the once-Christian West in the UN against one single and much maligned Jewish state, Israel, surrounded by hostile Arab and Muslim states in the Middle East.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked his Jamaican counterpart for his country’s refusal to participate in the UNESCO vote that ignored Jewish ties to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
“Our relations are always friendly. We appreciate the fact that you didn’t join the recent vote against Israel, the absurd vote in UNESCO,” Netanyahu told Andrew Holness during his three-day visit to Israel that ended on Sunday, reported the Jamaica Observer newspaper.
In a secret ballot, the resolution passed in Paris on October 26 with less than a majority of the World Heritage Committee’s 21 members — 10 states voted in favor and two were opposed, with eight abstaining and one absent — Jamaica. Among Latin American countries, Cuba voted in favor and Peru abstained.
Both prime ministers met Thursday in Jerusalem in the first such visit by a leader of the Caribbean nation to the Jewish state. They discussed possibilities for cooperation in water, agriculture and domestic security.
“I think this is the first visit ever by a prime minister of Jamaica to Israel, so it has a double significance for us,” Netanyahu told Israeli media, citing a “natural affinity” between Israel and Jamaica and stressing that the visit is a “hallmark of cooperation.”

US President-elect Donald Trump has confirmed that he intends to use his Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner to try to broker an elusive peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.
Speaking to The Times of London and Germany’s Bild just days before his inauguration, Trump “confirmed that he would appoint Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, to broker a Middle East peace deal,” the Times said.
Asked by Bild precisely what role Kushner would play, he replied: “You know what? Jared is such a good lad, he will secure an Israel deal which no one else has managed to get. You know, he’s a natural talent, he is the top, he is a natural talent. You know what I’m talking about – a natural talent. He has an innate ability to make deals, everyone likes him.” Trump said his daughter Ivanka, Kushner’s wife, would play no role in government.
Trump also urged the United Kingdom to veto any new UN Security Council resolution critical of Israel, said the US abstention on December 23’s Resolution 2334 was terrible, and that he wished the UK had vetoed it. “I would hope for a British veto (on any fresh resolution in the next few days). I think it would be great if Great Britain would place a veto, because I’m not sure if the US would do so – extraordinarily enough,” Trump told Bild, according to a Guardian translation. “They won’t do it, right? Do you believe the US will place a veto? I have Jewish friends who organised a donor event for Obama. I say to them: ‘What on earth are you doing? Okay – what are you doing?’”
Asked about whether he intended to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, he replied: “I’m not going to comment on that. But we’ll see.”

An Israeli minister said Monday the Palestinians had no way to block incoming US President Donald Trump from moving his country's embassy to Jerusalem.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has said such a move would have consequences as it was a "red line" whose crossing would ruin hopes for a two-state solution.
But regional cooperation minister Tzachi Hanegbi, of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, said the Palestinians were powerless to stop it.
"What can they do? What can they do?," he said in a briefing to reporters in Jerusalem.
"There are not going to be any consequences."
Trump -- who takes office Friday -- has pledged to acknowledge Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and relocate the US embassy there from Tel Aviv.

There are many unknowns about the approaching Donald Trump presidency. One of them is whether he will wear suits made by Martin Greenfield in the Oval Office. President Barack Obama wore them, as did other former White House occupants, so for connoisseurs of custom-made men’s apparel, it’s natural to wonder whether the new Commander in Chief will do the same.
Greenfield is a Holocaust survivor who built a thriving Brooklyn-based bespoke men’s clothing business after arriving as a post-war refugee in the United States. Having made suits for Trump in the past, he told The Times of Israel he would welcome the opportunity to do so again.
“We made some suits for him right before he decided to run, but we haven’t made any since he began the campaign. We’d be honored if he asked us to make him some more suits,” Jay Greenfield, Martin Greenfield’s son and vice president of Martin Greenfield Clothiers told The Times of Israel.
According to the younger Greenfield, the family-owned and run company focuses on making people look good, without regard to partisan positions.
“We make clothing for people. We don’t care about political affiliation. We are pleased to make people look good on both sides of the aisle,” he said.

With just days left in office, President Obama has reversed course on one of his major policies, deciding to intervene decisively against President Bashar al Assad after the Syrian leader passed a controversial “bathroom bill.”
The law, vehemently opposed by Democrats and the Obama administration, would require Syrians to use the bathroom based on the gender listed on their birth certificate. While the US had refrained from military action even as Assad’s government killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, Obama said he could no longer stay silent following the latest outrage.
“While I may have been willing to look the other way when President Assad was gassing his own people, there comes a time to draw a line in the sand,” Obama told The Mideast Beast. “I warned them not to cross my red lines.”

Palestinian Cleric Abu Taqi Al-Din Al-Safafi in Al-Aqsa Mosque Address: Columbus Stole the Manuscripts of Islamic Scholars
In an address delivered at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Palestinian cleric Sheikh Abu Taqi Al-Din Al-Safafi said that Islamic scholars had preceded the West in great scientific achievements and that the 16th-century Ottoman seafarer Piri Reis had drawn a map that "astonished NASA" and had revealed that he had discovered the Americas prior to Columbus. Columbus, according to Sheikh Al-Safafi, had "stolen the manuscripts of the Muslim scholars," . He further said that the West "are nothing but so-called 'thieves'," and that their contribution to science "has no spiritual, humanistic, or moral dimension" but is "utilized only in order to serve their devils - human and jinn - and in order to destroy humanity."A video of his address was posted on the Internet on December 31.

Supporters of Israel have marshaled two pieces of evidence to demonstrate that the great civil-rights leader shared their commitment to the Jewish state: first, that he was among a number of prominent Christian theologians who signed a strongly worded pro-Israel statement that was published in the New York Times on the eve of the 1967 Arab-Israel war; and, second, that he once rebuked someone in a private conversation, “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!” Critics of these positions have found sufficient reason to question whether the New York Times statement accurately reflects King’s views, and whether he ever made the second remark at all. Having thoroughly investigated the matter, Martin Kramer concludes that King did in fact equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism (although it is unclear whether he had in mind anti-Zionism in general or specific anti-Zionists) but also had regrets about signing the public declaration in support of Israel. From here Kramer offers some general thoughts about King’s positions:
King’s careful maneuvering before, during, and after the Six-Day War demonstrated a much deeper understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict than critics credit him with possessing. . . . Palestinian-Americans who sought to dismiss the [anti-Zionism] quote suggested that the conflict “was probably not a subject he was well-versed on,” and that his public statements in praise of Israel “surely do not sound like the words of someone familiar with both sides of the story.”
Not so. King had been to the Arab world, had a full grasp of the positions of the sides, and was wary of the possible pitfalls of favoring one over the other. He struck a delicate balance, speaking out or staying silent after careful assessments made in consultation with advisers who had their ears to the ground. .

A new song from Ari Lesser in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day today and celebrating MLK's embrace of Israel, Zionism, and the Jewish people:

After a year when Jewish and African-American relations were strained by the Black Lives Matter’s denunciation of Israel and other uncomfortable incidents, it’s worth recalling a little-known episode that points to the kind of intergroup relations that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. worked so hard to foster.
In the autumn of 1946, Zionist activists known as the Bergson Group sponsored a Broadway play called “A Flag is Born,” which was authored by the Academy Award-winning screenwriter and playwright Ben Hecht. Starring a young Marlon Brando and Yiddish theater luminaries Paul Muni and Celia Adler, “Flag” depicted the plight of Holocaust survivors in post-war Europe, and the fight for Jewish independence in British Mandatory Palestine.
The London Evening Standard expressed horror that large audiences were flocking to what it called “the most virulent anti-British play ever staged in the United States.” American publications took a different view: Time called the play “colorful theater and biting propaganda,” while Life complimented its “wit and wisdom.”
After a successful 10-week run on Broadway, “Flag” was scheduled to be performed in various cities around the country, including the National Theater in Washington, DC. When the Bergson Group realized that the National barred African-Americans from attending, they quickly looked for an alternative venue.

"The Way to Peace: Israeli Victory, Palestinian Defeat," my article in the current issue of Commentary, has provoked criticism mainly with regard to two points: my accepting the existence of a Palestinian people and my belief that it can be defeated. My arguments:
(1) There is no such thing as a Palestinian people: Indeed, as readers note, no such people existed through the centuries. Palestine (Arabic: "Filastin") as a political unit only came into use as a Zionist triumph when imposed by the British occupiers following the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Palestinians (Arabic: "Filastiniyun") also came into use only in the twentieth century. Jerusalem never served as capital of a sovereign Muslim state. All true.
But, starting in 1920, with the imposition of a geographical unit later to be called the British Mandate for Palestine, the Arabic-speaking Muslims of that territory understood they had to adopt the Palestinian identity. In 1948, when Jews abandoned the term Palestine in favor of Israel, the word Palestinian became exclusively Arab. With the foundation of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, this identity acquired political expression. The Palestinian Authority in 1994 gave it official status. At this point, it is futile, even silly, to deny the existence of a distinct Palestinian Arab people.
That said, the Palestinian Arab identity that emerged so quickly from political necessity may not last forever; as I noted back in 1989, "the primacy of Palestinian nationalism could eventually come to an end, perhaps as quickly as it got started."

The latest example of this egregious misuse of its humanitarian mandate is the “In Between Wars” exhibition that the NGO presented in Dubai last November. Following installments in France and Jordan, the piece purported to provide visitors with a view into the lives of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, “In Between Wars” served as a mouthpiece for incitement and radicalization.
The exhibition – also available online – refers to the founding of the state of Israel as a catastrophe — the “Nakba” — delegitimizing the very existence of the Jewish state. It goes further and asserts, “The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is rooted in the history of colonization in this part of the world, entwined with the world zionist [sic] movement,” presenting Jewish Israelis as unwelcome and illegitimate foreigners who belong elsewhere.
MSF does not limit itself to attacking the legitimacy of Israel and Zionism. It also romanticizes deadly Palestinian violence by referring to images of “armed soldiers face[ing] young stone throwers or Molotov cocktails” as “icons symbolizing the struggle of the Palestinian people against the Israeli occupation.” Similarly, one of the exhibits displays the living rooms of Palestinian homes, identifying them as a place to pay tribute to “martyrs” – a term that whitewashes the murderous terror attacks carried out against innocent civilians.

Today was the fourth and final installment of the Al Jazeera ‘documentary’ called ‘The Lobby’. The “undercover report exposing how the Israel lobby influences British politics”.
For those that haven’t seen it. The show came in four, 25 minute videos (1, 2, 3, 4). Highly repetitive, extremely drawn out, with about 5-8 minutes of content in each one. The sinister music and hidden footage feel, create the atmosphere you are watching something illicit. After a while you realise that despite the eerie music, the accusation itself is empty.
Viewing figures tend to agree with me. Whilst the first show on YouTube has already reached nearly 100,000 views. The Second sits at 24,000, the third 16,000 and currently the last show has only been viewed 3,000 times. Everyone soon realised there was no meat on this bone.
The antisemitic premise
Far too often, as I watched, I simply couldn’t understand what was wrong with what I was seeing. This difference, between my recognition of everyday political actions, and the attempt to suggest that we were witnessing the inside actions of a powerful conspiratorial story, highlights exactly what was wrong with the show itself.

Very Israeli, very sad:
This is a kid’s book entitled: Ticking Bomb.
The sub title is: The kid from the central bus station.When I first saw it, I was shocked there would be a kids book with that title, what with the fact that sometimes bombs go off here during terrorist attacks.
I read the back of the book for a short description: There’s a terrorist attack and one of the men stabbed by a terrorist in an attack lays unconscious in the hospital. Because he had no ID on him, police and the kids in the book search frantically for the injured person’s family.
A kid’s book in Israel. Sigh.
This is indeed very sad. And so is what many palestinian children are reading.

Israel and the Palestinian Authority signed an agreement Sunday to renew cooperation in water development after a six-year hiatus.
Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, head of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) office, and the Palestinian Authority’s Civil Affairs Minister Hussein al-Sheikh signed an agreement to restart the Israeli–Palestinian Joint Water Committee.
The committee is tasked with developing and modernizing the water infrastructure in the West Bank, allowing better water access to Palestinian towns and villages, maintaining existing infrastructure and approving new projects. It hasn’t met in six years.
Created in 1995 as part of the Oslo II interim peace deal, the committee was originally intended to be a temporary mechanism lasting five years.
Key topics under discussion include increasing water supplies to the West Bank and Gaza, as well as approving drilling new wells and updating water rates.

An East Jerusalem man who killed four soldiers in a truck-ramming terror attack last week in southern Jerusalem was killed by soldiers, not by a tour guide as he had claimed, a senior military official said.
Speaking to Israeli television immediately after the attack, tour guide Eitan Rund — who shot at the terrorist — asked why soldiers had apparently hesitated before turning their weapons on Fadi al-Qunbar, the truck’s driver.
“I have to ask why it took a 30-year-old civilian to fire first,” he said, “when there were well-armed officers” present.
Rund also insisted the January 4 manslaughter verdict for Sgt. Elor Azaria, who killed a disarmed, injured Palestinian assailant, was “definitely” a factor in the ostensible hesitation, leading many to lament that an “Azaria effect” caused the soldiers’ alleged failure to act.
Following the attack, Qunbar’s body was brought to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute for examination, where an initial autopsy showed that he had both 5.56 millimeter bullets fired from an army-issued M16 and nine millimeter bullets fired from Rund’s pistol in his body, the senior military official revealed to Yedioth Ahronoth on Monday.

Interior Minister Aryeh Deri said Monday he signed a ban preventing Sheikh Raed Salah from leaving the country, a day before the controversial Islamic leader’s release from prison.
Salah, head of the outlawed Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement, will be released Tuesday after serving a nine-month sentence for incitement to violence.
“His exit [from Israel] is likely to endanger the country and I will use all my power against anyone who tries to harm it,” Deri said in a statement.
The ban keeps Salah from leaving the country for six months.
Police last week recommended indicting Salah on a further suspicion of incitement to terrorism and violence, as well as supporting an illegal organization.

The Ministerial Committee for Legislation on Sunday postponed by three months the discussion of a bill that would enable the expulsion of terrorists' families, citing legal reasons.
The bill is sponsored by Coalition Chairman David Bitan (Likud), Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid, and Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz (Likud). It was also signed by two former Shin Bet security agency chiefs: Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Avi Dichter (Likud) and MK Yaakov Peri (Yesh Atid), along with other Yesh Atid and Habayit Hayehudi Knesset members.
It is designed to serve as an effective deterrent for so-called "lone-wolf" terrorism.
The bill makes possible to expel terrorists' family members who knew about, encouraged or in any way assisted in carrying out their relatives' plans to attack.

The Ministerial Committee for Legislation moved to postpone discussion of a bill which would enable the government to deport residents of Jerusalem, Judea, or Samaria from Israel who support or aid terror attacks against Israelis.
Dubbed the “Terrorist Family Expulsion Law”, the bill is intended to pressure relatives of potential terrorists who are aware of their plans to notify the authorities.
The proposal, sponsored by coalition chairman David Bitan (Likud) has found support from both coalition members and some opposition MKs, including members of Yesh Atid.
But on Sunday the committee voted to delay their decision on the bill by three months, angering supporters of the measure both coalition and opposition MKs.
“This is yet another wretched decision [caused by] the government’s weak, inconsistent policymaking over the past year and a half while confronting the ‘lone-wolf’ wave of terror attacks we’ve been suffering from,” said MK Mickey Levy (Yesh Atid). “In this government they say one thing but do another.”
“The ministers of this government use such strong rhetoric, but then refuse to give security forces effective tools to create an effective deterrence.”

Thirteen Hamas terrorists, including a member of the Palestinian Authority’s Legislative Council, were arrested overnight in a joint operation by the IDF and Shin Bet internal security agency.
The operation comes on the heels of the discovery of a regional headquarters of the Hamas terror group in the Ramallah district, north of Jerusalem.
The base is believed to have served as the center of operations for dozens of Hamas terrorists in Samaria, and may be part of a broader effort by Hamas to expand its influence in the Ramallah area. Payments to jailed terrorists and their families, outreach efforts to local Palestinian Authority residents, public demonstrations, and the operation of a Hamas student group were all managed from the headquarters.
During the raid of the facility overnight, IDF soldiers and Shin Bet agents confiscated cash, vehicles, and propaganda material used by Hamas for recruitment purposes.

Cooperation between Gaza’s Hamas rulers and Islamic State’s affiliate in Sinai has decreased noticeably in recent weeks, but documents seen by The Times of Israel show the two organizations continue to coordinate and help each other in many key areas.
Despite pressure from Egypt, which is battling an ongoing insurgency led by the so-called “Sinai Province” of IS, Hamas has refused to crack down on smuggling by IS through tunnels run by its members under the Gaza-Sinai border. Instead, the Palestinian terror group has looked to this activity as a source of income, and recently raised its taxes on goods brought into the Strip by IS smugglers.
This marks a shift in policy from recent months, during which Hamas arrested IS members in the Strip in a bid to curb the group’s activities. The crackdown led to the shuttering of the IS-operated smuggling tunnels. These tunnels, sources say, were recently reopened.
Hamas is now permitting IS members to run a media production operation inside Gaza, out of the reach of the Egyptian military, The Times of Israel has learned. This operation has produced propaganda materials that include messages claiming responsibility for terror attack in Sinai, Cairo and other sites within Egypt.
Egypt is aware of these activities, including the media office, but has apparently chosen to turn a blind eye to this cooperation.

Qatar pledged Sunday to send $12 million to the Palestinian Authority to pay for fuel for the Gaza power plant in an effort to mitigate the ongoing electricity crisis in the Strip.
“The Qatari emir ordered immediate action to implement practical steps to resolve the electricity crisis in the Gaza Strip,” a statement published on Hamas’s official website said, summarizing a meeting between the Qatari emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani and Hamas Politburo Deputy Chairman Ismail Haniyeh in Doha.
Gazans have suffered from an electricity shortage in recent weeks, with most households receiving three to four hours of electricity a day rather than the average of seven to eight hours they had received in recent years.
A shortage of fuel for the Gaza power plant and technical difficulties with the electrical lines coming from Egypt are the main causes of the dramatic decrease, according to PA Labor Minister Mamoun Abu Shahla.

A 20-year-old Gazan man set himself ablaze on Monday, to protest the current electricity shortage in Gaza.
Currently in severe condition, the youth is being treated in a Gaza hospital.
Additional protests against Hamas and the electricity shortage are expected take place on Tuesday night. According to Gazan sources, Hamas has warned hundreds of activists that the protests may become violent.
Hamas has used a variety of tactics, including shootings, to disperse the protests against them.

The Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in the city of Halle sparked international criticism because the pro-Hezbollah and allegedly antisemitic activist Norman Finkelstein is slated to hold talks on academia and Gaza on Monday and later in January.
“Finkelstein is not a scholar or academic. He is a polemicist who misuses sources and violates accepted standards of academic integrity," Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday. "That is why he was fired ( or not renewed) at universities at which he taught. It would be scandalous for the Planck Institute to lend its academic imprimatur to so non-academic a person,” he argued.
Dershowitz added:”Let me add that the Planck Institute would never seriously consider inviting an anti-Palestinian polemicist with a comparable lack of academic standing. He is invited because of his anti-Israel and borderline antisemitic polemics, not despite them."
Finkestlein told the Post that "DePaul University and I reached a private settlement of my tenure case. The joint statement issued after the settlement said that I was 'an excellent teacher and prolific scholar.'"
Max Privorozki, head of the small Jewish community in Halle, called on the MPI to cancel the lectures. He told the Post it is a "disgrace" that MPI is hosting the controversial activist.

Spoiler alert: he most certainly is antisemitic.
Writing in response to Dr Abelson, NSW Jewish Board of Deputies chief executive Vic Alhadeff said: “We are appalled that you would refuse to represent the Jewish constituents of your ward because of your views on the Israel-Palestine conflict.”
Mr Alhadeff’s letter accused the mayor of anti-Semitism, citing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition, a section of which defines the term as “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel”.
He also rejected Dr Abelson’s characterisation of Israel’s ­actions.
Dr Elton, who has invited nearby mayors and all NSW federal and state parliamentarians to the event, was shocked by Dr Abelson’s response: “Sometimes people decline with thanks, but to receive a reply with a stark message that attacked Israel’s policies … I’m astonished, really.
“The policies of the state of Israel is another discussion. To boycott a Jewish event in Sydney because of the actions of Israel, that’s a form of anti-Semitism.”
By the way, imagine the uproar if he boycotted a mosque because of Islamic terror attacks.

A British Member of Parliament has used Parliamentary privilege to accuse the Breitbart News Network of anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism, and misogyny.
At Foreign Secretary’s questions in the House of Commons on Tuesday 10th Liz McInnes, the Labour MP for Heywood and Middleton, quizzed Boris Johnson on his recent meetings with members of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team.
She asked Johnson: “On Sunday, the Foreign Secretary met Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief strategist, a man whose website is synonymous with anti-Semitism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, the hero worship of Vladimir Putin and the promotion of extremist far-right movements across the world.”
Mr. Johnson did not address Ms. McInnes’s accusations, merely describing the conversation he had with Mr. Bannon as “genuinely extremely productive”.
Breitbart London’s Editor-in-Chief Raheem Kassam has dismissed Ms. McInnes’s comments as “grotesque, out of step with reality, and supremely hypocritical”.
Kassam said of the claims: “Liz McInnes seems to be blissfully unaware of the overwhelming Jew-hatred in her own political party, including that of her boss Jeremy Corbyn.

The "improper interference into this country's democratic process" by an Israeli official should be investigated at once, UK Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn demanded in a letter addressed to Prime Minister Theresa May Sunday, according to The Jewish Chronicle.
The complaint came as accusations of foreign meddling reached a nadir this week following the revelation that an Israeli embassy employee was heard discussing the "take down" of a number of UK senior officials, including Foreign Office Minister Sir Alan Duncan
Shai Masot, who was secretly recorded last October as part of a four part documentary produced by Al-Jazeera, later resigned from his post.
The footage shows Masot describing UK Foreign Minister Boris Johnson as an "idiot," and commented that Duncan was "doing [sic] a lot of problems" for Israel.
Duncan has previously criticized Israeli settlement construction and has compared the situation in at least one West Bank city to "apartheid," according to The Independent.
Corbyn also urged that the UK prime minister treat the matter with the highest severity.
(Israel apologises over embassy worker's vow to 'take down' UK minister)
"This is clearly a national security issue," the Labour leader wrote. “It is only on [the basis of an investigation] that Parliament and the public will be reassured that such activities will not be tolerated by your government."

Earlier today, we heard back from Sky producers, informing us that they upheld our complaint and thanked us for bringing the information to their attention – particularly the AP correction. Sky deleted the video in question, and re-published it without the false information on the US view of settlements. Sky also revised the accompanying online article, and deleted the Tweets and Facebook posts linking to the original video.
Though we would have preferred an on-air correction or some other public admission of error, we’re nonetheless glad that the record regarding the US position on settlements has been set straight.

Since September 2015, Israelis have been the victims of 2,732 Palestinian terror attacks, including 51 car rammings.
Astonishingly, Newsweek’s Jack Moore attempted to justify this wave of terror in his latest article by repeating the false claim that Israelis do it too.
Quoting Yousef Munayyer of “The U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights,” Jack Moore raises the following claim:
This is a question of utility and opportunity and tactics more than it is about ideologies. Israeli settlers have used their cars to run over Palestinian civilians in the West Bank. It’s a tactic that can be used by lots of different people.
The problem with this article is not that Moore quoted an untrue statement from a biased source who has an anti-Israel agenda, but rather that he did so without providing any balance, context or research, all while hiding Munayyer’s agenda from Newsweek readers.
In effect, Moore made Munayyer’s personal opinion appear to be an unbiased, expert analysis. This is a disservice to news readers, and breaches a number of journalistic ethics. We’ll come back to this below.

An archaeological dig at site of the Sobibor death camp in what was once Nazi-occupied Poland has uncovered several personal items from victims that were apparently dropped as their owners were forced to undress before being sent to the gas chambers.
Among the articles found in foundations where a building once stood was a pendant bearing the date of birth and hometown of a girl who would have been a teenager at the time, the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum said in a statement Sunday.
The piece of jewelry bears a close resemblance to a pendant owned by Holocaust diarist Anne Frank, who was murdered by the Germans at the Bergen-Belsen concentration in Germany, some time in early 1945, when she was 15 years old.
In another link tying the girls together, they were both born in Frankfurt, Germany.
The dig was carried out at the site where victims were made to undress and their heads were shaved before being forced to walk along the so-called “Road to Heaven” — the grim name given to the path that led to the gas chambers where they were murdered.

The publication The Economist recently reported that the ‘Light-Up Nation’ is poised to become the global leader in medical marijuana technologies, with 36 companies doing medical research on the health benefits of cannabis.
Israeli innovation website NoCamels reports that Israeli farmers look forward to exporting hundreds of millions of dollars in medical marijuana every year. According to the report, Israel is some 60 year’s ahead of the United States as a result of Washington’s repressive anti-drug policies.
The War on Drugs has been so repressive that a black man arrested three times for selling marijuana in Missouri received a lifelong sentence without parole in 1993. He is only one of the many hundreds of thousands of victims of pointless laws.
Media coverage of drugs today little better than in the days of Reefer Madness
While many laugh at anti-drug propaganda, such as the 1930s movie Reefer Madness, today’s media coverage of other ‘dangerous drugs’ is no less preposterous.

Big data company Oracle said Monday it would open a Startup Cloud Accelerator program in Israel, the second of several it plans to open soon in a multimillion dollar global program. The center, based in Tel Aviv, will help promote local innovation in cloud technology, the company said.
“The next five to ten years promise innovations and growth that will drive new business ideas enabled by cloud,” said Oracle senior vice president of Product Development Reggie Bradford at a press conference at Oracle’s offices in Petah Tikva. “Oracle understands that startups are at the heart of innovation, and through this program we aim to give startups access to extensive resources and support when they need it most.”
The accelerator will help the company keep tabs on new developing technologies and at the same time get startups to use Oracle’s software and services early on for their platforms, he said, as Israel “is the second most important market for startups after Silicon Valley.”
Oracle, one of the world’s largest software developers, is vying for a lead position in the enterprise software segment, competing with the likes of Microsoft and SAP and Salesforce. All of these see the huge potential of “the cloud,” or the delivery of computing resources, from applications to data centers, on demand over the internet on a pay-for-use basis. Oracle is seeking to position itself as a global leader in this field, said Bradford.

One of the largest TED events in the Middle East, TEDxWhiteCity, will be held on January 25 in Tel Aviv, focusing on innovation with Destination: Unknown as a theme.
The event is expected to include about 1,500 participants who will juggle issues relating to the future of technology, education and arts through lectures and mingling with entrepreneurs, organizations, students and soldiers from technology units.
This is the second TEDxWhiteCity event. Among the speakers will be the judoka Ori Sasson, a Rio Olympics Olympic medalist; Yaron Schwartz, CEO and founder Tridom, which develops robots for construction of houses and buildings using three dimensional printing; Eran Katz, an Israeli writer, moderator and editor of workshops on the development of memory and intelligence; Galia Ben-Artzi, one of the founders of Mytopia, a social gaming company; Roy Deutsch, considered an expert in new media; Zaki Djemal, co-founder and managing partner of fresh.fund, the first student-run venture capital fund in Israel; and Rim Yunis, founder of the first high-tech company in the Arab sector, Alpha Omega, which develops and researches equipment for brain surgery.

As approximately 24 million people worldwide are expected to get cancer each year by 2030, according to Cancer Research UK, the race to find more effective and cheaper therapies has led to proton therapy, a type of radiation that uses protons rather than X-rays to treat cancer.
Like standard X-ray radiation, proton therapy is radiation therapy that is based on an external beam that painlessly delivers radiation through the skin from a machine to the cancer. The advantage over a standard X-ray treatment is that the therapy focuses the ray directly onto the tumor without damaging surrounding healthy tissue. The treatment uses 60 percent less radiation that normal X-rays, allowing for higher doses to be directed to the tumor and increasing the chances that all the tumor cells can be targeted, Cancer UK says.
However, this therapy requires highly specialized, expensive equipment: an accelerator to create the proton beams; a centrifugal machine, called a gantry, that is needed to treat the tumor from a variety of angles as the patient lies on a bed; and the room hosting the gantry, which has to be three stories high with walls that are two to three meters thick. Because of its high costs, just a few medical centers in the world can afford the equipment, and just one percent of eligible cancer patients globally have access to this therapy.
Enter Israeli startup P-Cure, which says it has devised a way to halve the costs of proton therapy by doing away with the expensive gantry.

A student at Alabama’s historically black christian Miles College told The Algemeiner on Friday about how she came to participate in a pro-Israel rap video that has been widely circulating on social media.
Keila Lawrence, among the writers and performers in the clip, created at a recent Christians United for Israel Student Advocacy Leadership Training (CUFI SALT) conference, said that her eyes had been opened to the need to advocate for the Jewish state.
“I never knew there was anything to support until I attended it,” she said. “And it makes me think of how many other people are unaware of Israel’s situation. I want to see Miles educate them.”
Lawrence said she discovered at the conference that Israel was a cause her religion encourages her to embrace, so she now wants to bring an official CUFI chapter to her school, which she described as neither “pro- nor anti-Israel, per se,” given its small Jewish population.
She also recounted the experience of bonding with fellow Christians during a conference scavenger hunt, one of whose challenges was writing a rap song about Israel advocacy, which resulted in the video in question, performed by Lawrence and her friends.
Its lyrics are:

In the middle of my campus university
SJP get that BDS away from me
They hate it ‘cuz I got that moral clarity
Now they mad ‘cuz they can’t put no fear in me
C.U.F.I. We CUFI…yeah…We CUFI
An we bout this
Shalom

A remarkable interview.
Besides her gushing over Israel, note her response regarding her reaction to the recent US elections, as well as her views on the conflict.
If only most world leaders had her modesty and wisdom.