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Israel Tag

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 27, 2016 16 Comments
Liberal attorney and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz criticized President Barack Obama's foreign policy after the U.S. did use its veto power at the UN to end a resolution on Israeli settlements. He said:
“He will go down in history, President Obama, as one of the worst foreign policy presidents ever,” Dershowitz said during a Monday interview on Fox & Friends. “What he did to Syria, and what he was partly responsible for happening in Aleppo, creating a vacuum for Russia. …

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 27, 2016 6 Comments
We reported the other day how Pakistan's Defense Minister tweeted a nuclear threat at Israel based on a "Fake News" report that Israel had threatened to go nuclear on Pakistan, Pakistan Defense Minister tweets nuclear threat against Israel based on Fake News report: https://twitter.com/KhawajaMAsif/status/812370140507545600?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Israel had made no such threat, as the Israeli Defense Ministry responded on Twitter:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 26, 2016 14 Comments
We previously reported on the assassination of a leading Hamas drone engineer in Tunisia. Mohammed al-Zawari (also spelled Alzoari and al-Zoari), who also reportedly worked for Hezbollah, was killed in a hail of bullets while sitting in his car, not long after he had reportedly met with a woman claiming to be a Tunisian journalist living in Hungary. Tunisian authorities say the hit was planned abroad:

Posted by David Gerstman on December 26, 2016 13 Comments
President Barack Obama's legacy at the UN will be marked by the year 2016. The year was bookmarked by the passage of UN Security Council resolution 2231 in January, giving U.N. authority to the Iran Nuclear Deal, and resolution 2334 last week, purporting to declare illegal the presence of Jews in areas in which form a key part of Jewish history. In the case of the Iran deal, the United States led the Security Council and voted for the resolution enshrining the nuclear deal into what passes for international law. In the case of the more recent resolution, the United States abstained, according to some incoherent reasons spouted by US Ambassador Samantha Power, but it looks like, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu charges, that Obama orchestrated it. (Yesterday, Netanyahu spokesman David Keyes charged that Israel had "ironclad information" that Obama was indeed behind the maneuver.)

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 25, 2016 29 Comments
I've been warning that Obama's passage of the recent anti-Israel UN Security Council resolution was not necessarily the "final" jab at Israel. Obama still has three more weeks left in which time he can achieve substantial UN action. https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/812385481711357958 The Israelis have reason to be fearful, asserting they have ‘Ironclad Information’ the Obama administration both pushed and helped craft the prior Resolution.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 23, 2016 75 Comments
The UN Security Council has voted to pass the anti-Israel resolution. The U.S. went ahead and abstained to vote, not standing up for her only ally in the Middle East. This is the first time in 36 years the UN condemned settlements. As Professor Jacobson described:
The Resolution in question is pernicious. It declares any Israeli presence beyond the 1949 armistice line (the so-called pre-1967 line) illegal. That means Israeli control of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City would be illegal, as would the presence of Jews in the Jewish Quarter, which Jordan had ethnically cleansed of Jews and ransacked. It also would mean Israeli control of the Western Wall would be illegal. If Obama abstains, he will have allowed the UN to strip Jews of their history.
Trump promised change: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/812390964740427776?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 22, 2016 20 Comments
Back in February 2012, I wrote that I expected that in his second term Obama would force his vision of a "peace" deal on the Israelis. We've had several close calls, with the John Kerry negotiation fiasco and flirtation with various European and Arab initiatives through the UN. The mechanism would be a failure to veto a Security Council resolution setting the terms of a deal. Part of it is Obama hatred of Bibi Netanyahu, dating back to the beginning of Obama's presidency. The snubs and dislike was palpable long before Netanyahu's address to Congress opposing the Iran nuclear deal.

Posted by Miriam Elman on December 17, 2016 5 Comments
What’s happening to Jewish and pro-Israel students on many American universities and colleges from coast to coast is horribly ugly. On “hotspot campuses” the problem is only getting worse. “Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus”, a new 70 minute documentary recently released by the organization Americans for Peace and Tolerance, chronicles the rampant anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activism prevalent on many of America’s institutions of higher learning. We featured the film’s trailer in a recent post and the movie premiered in NYC on November 30. Last week, I had the opportunity to watch the film in its entirely. In this follow-up post, I review the documentary’s central themes and take-home messages.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 17, 2016 7 Comments
Mohammed Alzoari (also spelled Zawari and al-Zoari) was the chief engineer for Hamas' drone program. Earlier this week Alzoari was assassinated in Tunisia. There has been initial reports that it was a local dispute gone bad, but Hamas is pointing the finger at Israel. AP reports:
Gaza's Islamic Hamas rulers say an aviation engineer who was shot dead in Tunisia this week was one of its members. In a statement Saturday, Hamas says Mohammed Alzoari had been a member of its military wing for the past 10 years. Alzoari was found shot dead in his car in the city of Sfax on Thursday.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 16, 2016 7 Comments
Weakness is not rewarded in the Middle East, as the Obama-Kerry fiasco in Syria is showing. It also is not rewarded in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Khaled Abu Toameh writing at The Gatestone Institute website, makes the point that Palestinian militants view Israeli concessions as weakness, and actually encourage more intransigence, The Palestinian Jihads against Israel:
Many Palestinians see Israeli concessions, gestures and unilateral moves as proof of capitulation, rather than positive signs testifying to Israel's peaceful intentions. These "concessions for peace" by Israel further increases Palestinians' appetite for launching armed attacks against Israel. Today, many Palestinians are convinced that they can achieve more through stabbings, vehicular rammings and shooting attacks than sitting with Israel at the negotiating table.
That phenomenon has also been evident in the repeatedly failed decades-long peace negotiations.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 05, 2016 12 Comments
It has not been a good couple of weeks for Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison in his quest for Chair of the Democratic National Committee. Ellison was fast out of the gate, with major endorsements from Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi and many others. But then some inconvenient facts came out about Ellison: His past support for Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam during college and after; once proposing a separate country for blacks; his flirting with tutherism by claiming 9/11 was Bush's Reichstag Fire; his cozy relationship with some of the worst anti-Israel groups at the Democratic National Convention last summer and generally being the go-to congressman for that segment of the Democratic Party; and most recently, release of a partial audio clip of 2010 comments at a Muslim community fundraiser in which he questioned why the U.S. has such a special relationship with Israel considering it's only 7 million people and the Arab world is 350 million. All of this was documented by many people, including by us in the following posts:

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on December 05, 2016 3 Comments
Today, Israel’s Science, Technology and Space Minister Ofir Akunis lands in India for a four-day visit aimed at strengthening bilateral cooperation in the field of science and technology. Minister Akunis is accompanied by a high-profile delegation comprised of several senior Knesset members and government officials, including the head of Israel Space Agency, Avi Blasberger. The ministerial visit comes less than a month after Israeli President Reuven Rivlin visited the South Asian country. Cooperation in technology and innovation has come a long way since both countries established full diplomatic ties nearly 25 years ago. In 2008, Indian space agency ISRO launched Israeli reconnaissance satellite TechSAR aboard its satellite launching vehicle (PSLV). A missile defense system (Barak 8) jointly developed by India's defense research agency (DRDO) and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) has already been successfully tested.

Posted by Miriam Elman on November 30, 2016 3 Comments
Today Israel marks a national day remembering the Jewish departure and expulsion from Arab and Muslim lands. In a series of events that spanned over three decades (from the 1940s through the 1970s) and have rarely been acknowledged until very recently, nearly one million Jews were expelled from their homes across the Middle East and North Africa, including Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, Libya, Algeria, and Iran. Thriving Jewish communities—many of them centuries old—were wiped out during these years as Jews were subjected to arrest, properties and assets were seized or set on fire, and draconian anti-Jewish laws were instituted. Violence against Jews was either instigated or tolerated by the authorities. The hostility led to waves of Jews being uprooted from their homes, and sometimes fleeing for their lives—typically with nothing other than the clothes on their backs.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 29, 2016 17 Comments
Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison was an early favorite for Chair of the Democratic National Committee. He quickly garnered top endorsements, including from Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. But then Ellison's past came back to haunt him, specifically his membership in and support for Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam and his more recent association with anti-Israel activists, as we explored in these posts:
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