Author hzPosted on January 14, 2017January 14, 2017Categories Articles

Employees of Noble Energy looked out the window of a helicopte

By Peter Baker: In the ship’s control room, facing four video screens, a driller from Mississippi in dark shades and a black baseball cap with a skull on it held what could be the future of Israel in his hands. The massive drill he controlled extended down 11,345 feet, more than two miles below the surface of a calm Mediterranean Sea, as it plunged deeper and deeper into one of the biggest natural gas fields discovered in the world in recent years.

Once a barren energy island in a part of the planet otherwise awash in resources, Israel is, after years of delay, finally pushing ahead with an ambitious strategy to tap offshore reserves that could transform its economy and, it hopes, its place in a historically hostile region. If all goes according to plan, Israel will not only become largely energy-independent, it will also supply neighbors that will have new reason to be friends.

There is no guarantee that all will go according to plan, of course. Israel struggled for years to develop regulations to manage its newfound wealth. The international energy firms that Israel is now courting have other options in an evolving global market. And the politics of a new era, as President-elect Donald J. Trump encourages assertive Israeli action in Jerusalem and the West Bank, could kindle fresh conflicts with Arab neighbors that make energy partnerships problematic.

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Author hzPosted on January 12, 2017January 12, 2017Categories Articles

By Sol Stern: After President Obama greased the wheels for the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s settlements policy, President-elect Trump tweeted that “things will be different after January 20th.” I didn’t vote for Trump, but for the sake of restoring some sanity to America’s Middle East policies, I fervently hope he fulfills that promise.

To make a real difference, our next president needs to understand how the United Nations’ hostility to the Jewish state is rooted in perverse institutions that have been abetted by previous U.S. administrations. The most glaring example of this is the inaptly named United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). With its $1.3 billion budget (30 percent of which comes from U.S. taxpayers), this agency actually perpetuates the refugee problem it was created to solve, while promoting Palestinian rejectionism and Jew hatred. Trump will soon have the means to drain the UNRWA swamp. If he does so, he would increase the chances of peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

The United Nations created UNRWA with the noblest of intentions. By the time an armistice agreement ended the first Arab-Israeli war in 1949, roughly 700, 000 Palestinians had fled (or were driven) from the territories governed by the new state of Israel. The prevailing view at the time was that refugee problems produced by war were best solved through resettlement in the countries to which the refugees had fled. In the aftermath of World War II, 7 million ethnic Germans in Central and Eastern Europe were the victims of brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns approved by the victorious allied powers. On the Indian subcontinent another 3 million people were uprooted in the violent creation of India and Pakistan. These destitute refugees had to make do in their new host countries with virtually no outside aid. Yet, within a decade, there was no longer a refugee problem in Europe or Asia to trouble the international community.

Unfortunately, the surrounding Arab countries that launched a war of conquest against the Jewish State—Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq—refused to accept any responsibility for the welfare of their Palestinian brothers who were the big losers in the conflict. That’s when the U.N.—led by the United States—generously stepped in. The 1949 General Assembly resolution establishing UNRWA called for “the alleviation of the conditions of starvation and distress among the Palestine refugees.” Yet the resolution also stated that “constructive measures should be undertaken at an early date with a view to the termination of international assistance for relief.” In other words, the new refugee agency’s mission was to be temporary, pending a peaceful resolution of the Middle East conflict.

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Author hzPosted on January 11, 2017Categories Articles

Brandenburg Gate in Berlin

By Cnaan Liphshiz: Is terrorism softening European attitudes toward Israel? When a Palestinian terrorist used a car to ram and kill an Israeli soldier in eastern Jerusalem in 2014, the European Union urged “restraint” and, without condemning the attack, called it merely “further painful evidence of the need to undertake serious efforts towards a sustainable peace agreement.” The statement by EU foreign relations chief Federica Mogherini was “a typical EU reaction, which blames the victim for getting attacked,” Oded Eran, a former ambassador of Israel to the European Union and a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, said at the time.

Two years later, however, European officials had a much different reaction to a similar attack in eastern Jerusalem, which killed four Israeli soldiers on Sunday. “The European Union condemns the murder of these four young Israelis, as well as any praise or incitement for terrorist acts,” Brussels said in a statement, which unlike the 2014 communique omitted any reference to the fact that the attack happened in an area of Jerusalem that it considers occupied. Unusually, following Sunday’s attack the Israeli flag was projected on the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and Paris City Hall, signs of solidarity with the Jewish state permitted by local authorities. Rotterdam City Hall flew the Israeli flag at half-mast.

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Author hzPosted on January 11, 2017January 11, 2017Categories Articles

Deadly fighting between Hamas and Fatah partisans in Gaza, June 13, 2007

By Reuel Marc Gerecht: Not long ago, I was talking to a Fatah official about Palestinian aspirations, especially his party’s sharp emotions about Hamas, the Palestinian fundamentalist movement that rules Gaza and would gladly overthrow the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. Fear, loathing, secular outrage (which may have been amplified to please Western ears), and a certain sadness about unrequited Palestinian fraternity in the face of Israeli oppression punctuated our conversation. When I finally tired of his urgent demand that America rectify Israeli transgressions or see violence rip the West Bank, I asked him how long he thought the Palestinian Authority could survive if Israel yanked its support to Fatah’s security apparatus. I suggested one month. He remonstrated: “We could probably last two.”

What has been lost, again, in Barack Obama’s final venting against Israel through his abstention in the United Nations Security Council resolution against all Israeli settlements on the West Bank and Jewish homes in East Jerusalem is how disconnected American foreign policy on this imbroglio has been from the larger issues riling the Middle East. The truth about Fatah’s security weaknesses is symptomatic of the truth about the Palestinians: They can exist as a non-Islamist polity only if Israel protects their attenuated nation-state. If the Jews pull back, then the militant Muslim faithful will probably recast the Palestinian identity, wiping away the secular Palestinian elite who have defined the Palestinian cause among Westerners since the Israelis and the Palestine Liberation Organization first started sparring with each other in 1964.

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Author hzPosted on January 10, 2017Categories Articles

Eli Lake

By Eli Lake: Since its founding in 2006, the country’s largest evangelical pro-Israel lobby, Christians United for Israel, has been a junior partner to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, when it comes to lobbying Congress. While there were a few times when the group pushed issues independent of Aipac, for the most part it has followed the more established lobby’s lead in Washington. With Donald Trump about to be sworn in as president, this is beginning to change. David Brog, the founding executive director of Christians United for Israel, or CUFI, and an active member of its board, told me last week that his organization is better positioned to drive the pro-Israel agenda in Trump’s Washington than Aipac, which has embraced a bipartisan approach for decades to its lobbying for the U.S.-Israel relationship.

This is important because Aipac is on the record in support of a two-state solution. CUFI, on the other hand, does not take a position on the matter. And while Aipac has opposed President Barack Obama’s efforts to publicly pressure Israel to end settlement activity in the West Bank, it has not supported legislation, for example, to defund the Palestinian Authority. CUFI on the other hand does support such proposals.”Aipac’s assets were most important during the Obama administration, unfortunately we learned the limits of those assets during the Obama administration too,” Brog said. “We believe we have great assets that will be most valuable during a Trump administration, this is not only connections, but speaking for a critical base. I can’t think of anyone else on this issue that better represents a base that voted for Trump.”

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Author hzPosted on January 8, 2017January 8, 2017Categories Articles

David Pollock, Kaufman Fellow

By David Pollock: A recent spate of reports in major Arab media about official and other contacts with Israelis — including very widely publicized Saudi and Egyptian visits to Israel in the past month — is generating renewed regional debate over the pros and cons of this phenomenon. Much of this debate, however, obscures one key point: Arab contacts with Israel, far from being brand new, actually have a very long history, with many ups and downs along the way.

In fact, official Arab-Israeli meetings and signed agreements date almost all the way back to Israel’s creation, with the Rhodes Armistice accords of 1949. For nearly two decades thereafter, there were periodic if generally low-level official meetings about security incidents, water, refugees, and other issues — along with many private, higher-level meetings. The 1967 war produced the famous “three no’s” of the Arab summit conference in Khartoum: no peace, no recognition, and no negotiations with Israel. But just a few years later, after the 1973 war, contacts resumed, culminating in the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979. Ever since, through all the turbulent decades until today, Egypt and Israel have maintained diplomatic, security, and economic relations.

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Author hzPosted on January 4, 2017January 4, 2017Categories Articles

Israeli flags

By Daniel Pipes: The US-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” began in December 1988, when Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat met American conditions and “accepted United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, recognized Israel’s right to exist and renounced terrorism” (actually, given Arafat’s heavily accented English, it sounded like he “renounced tourism”).

That peace process screeched to an end in December 2016, when the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2334. Khaled Abu Toameh, perhaps the best-informed analyst of Palestinian politics, interprets the resolution as telling the Palestinians: “Forget about negotiating with Israel. Just pressure the international community to force Israel to comply with the resolution and surrender up all that you demand.”

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Author hzPosted on January 3, 2017January 5, 2017Categories Articles

By Armin Rosen: At first blush, at least, a Trump presidency promises everything that AIPAC, America’s largest pro-Israel lobbying group, could ever wish for. After eight years of rocky relations between Jerusalem and Washington, Donald Trump promises that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will receive a much friendlier reception in the White House during his administration. The inclusion of Iran hawks such as CIA director Mike Pompeo, Trump’s nominee for CIA director, and defense secretary nominee James Mattis could even spell the end of the nuclear agreement with Iran, especially in light of Tehran’s repeated flirtations with violating the deal.

In reality, Trump poses a string of new problems for AIPAC. “There’s definitely no question that it was better and easier for [AIPAC] if Hillary won,” said one Democratic strategist recently. “Policy is only part of it. It would’ve been an opportunity or their best chance at hitting reset for Democrats.” Instead, after losing its fight against the Iran Deal, the lobbying group must try to stake out an unstable middle ground during an even more polarizing presidency than Obama’s while fending off challenges from its left and right. “In this new world where J Street really is a pro-Israel validator for segments of the Democrats and the Zionist Organization of America is a validator for segments of the Republicans, what’s AIPAC role?” the strategist wondered.

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Author hzPosted on January 2, 2017January 2, 2017Categories Articles

Shiloh

By Griff Witte: Through eight years of escalating criticism from the world’s most powerful leader, Israeli construction in these sacred, militarily occupied hills never stopped. Thousands of homes were built. Miles of roadway. Restaurants. Shopping malls. A university. Here in Shiloh, a tourist center went up, with a welcome video in which the biblical figure Joshua commands the Jewish people to settle the land promised to them by God.

Israeli settlements may be illegal in the eyes of the U.N. Security Council and a major obstacle to Middle East peace in the view of the Obama administration. But every day they become a more entrenched reality on land that Palestinians say should rightfully belong to them. As the parched beige hilltops fill with red-tiled homes, decades of international efforts to achieve a two-state solution are unraveling. And global condemnations notwithstanding, the trend is poised to accelerate.

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Author hzPosted on January 2, 2017Categories Articles

US Security Council voting 12/23/16 to Condemn Israel

The U.S. decision to allow a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements to pass was met with bipartisan condemnation, including from leading players in efforts to achieve a two-state solution, such as Democrats Dennis Ross and George Mitchell. Of course, the goal of the Obama administration was to box in President-elect Donald Trump’s foreign policy. The most direct way to reject the Security Council Resolution 2334 is to reject the opinions it expresses and act against its recommendations. Trump will likely seek to reverse the measure, not only because of substantial policy disagreements, but to reject the notion that a president can bind his successors more tightly through U.N. action than through statutes or executive orders.

Trump cannot directly reverse the resolution, but he and Congress can take action to negate its ideas, and to create a different reality from the one Resolution 2334 seeks to promote. Here are some ideas — most of which require no legislative action.

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