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Israel Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 18, 2013 20 Comments
Almost exactly one year ago reports surfaced that Valerie Jarrett was engaged in "secret" negotiations with Iran as Obama's personal emissary. The reports originated with Iranian bloggers, and was reported also by The New York Times. The Obama administration categorically denied the reports. Now Israeli television is reporting similar involvement, via the Times of Israel, ‘Geneva talks a facade, US-Iran worked secretly on deal for past year’:
The Geneva negotiations between the so-called P5+1 powers and Iran are a mere “facade,” because the terms of a deal on Iran’s nuclear program have been negotiated in talks between a top adviser to President Barack Obama and a leading Iranian nuclear official that have continued in secret for more than a year, Israeli television reported Sunday....

White House spokesman Bernadette Meehan was quoted by Haaretz as saying that the report was “absolutely, 100 percent false.”

The report, which relied on unnamed senior Israeli officials, said the US team to the secret talks was led by Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett. Her primary interlocutor, the report said, was the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi. The talks have been taking place in various Gulf states.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 15, 2013 13 Comments

Not sure I agree with the linkage of Obama's broken promise that you can keep your insurance plan and his promise that Iran will not get nukes. One he knew was false at the time he made the promise, the other was, um, ...

Posted by David Gerstman on November 14, 2013 4 Comments
Let's review some of the administration's diplomatic activity over the past week. Lee Smith:
Haaretz reports that the administration misled Israel regarding the terms of the proposed interim agreement with Iran over its nuclear weapons program. One senior Israeli official explained that on Wednesday Israel had seen an outline that the Israelis “didn't love but could live with.” Thursday morning French and British officials, and not the White House, told the Israelis that the terms had changed and were much more favorable than what they’d been shown previously. “Suddenly it changed to something much worse that included a much more significant lifting of sanctions,” said the Israeli official. “The feeling was that the Americans are much more eager to reach an agreement than the Iranians.”
Natan B. Sachs lays out some of the particulars.
On substance, the Israelis, like the French, appear very concerned about the provisions of the interim deal that: (a) permitted Tehran to continue some uranium enrichment; (b) allowed Iran to continue building the heavy water reactor in Arak (with only an Iranian commitment not to activate it), which would preserve the Iranian short-cut to nuclear capabilities via a plutonium — rather than uranium — track; and, most notably, (c) provided Tehran with incentives that the Israelis see as the beginning of the dismantling of the sanctions regime. Israel’s concern is that the proposed sanctions relief will not, in practice, be reversible, while the Iranian commitments could be easily reversed (and in the case of Arak will not even be halted).
The French objections to the deal led the P5+1 countries to demand more of Iran, so the Iranian team left without a deal to return for consultations.

Posted by 0387erp on November 13, 2013 9 Comments

I received the call in the late afternoon, “do you want to go to BDS 101 at The University of Washington tonight?”

BDS stands for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction of Israel and represents a radical movement bent on the destruction of the Jewish State. The D in BDS should stand for demographic destruction as the core demand of the BDS movement is the flooding of Israel with over five million hostile Arabs. Such an influx would mark the end of a Jewish majority in Israel and thus the end of Israel as a Jewish state. The Anti Defamation League, the American Jewish community’s central human rights and advocacy organization has identified BDS as an anti-Semitic movement .

The  BDS 101 program was held in a lecture hall filled with a mix of Muslim and Progressive students and a small handful of pro-Israel students and community members. The program  featured a four member panel anchored by Stefanie Fox of the anti-Israel group, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and included Cindy Corrie, mother of the infamous Rachel Corrie. Two co-ed hosts from the sponsoring group (SUPER-UW) opened the event by declaring their solidarity with all of the other righteous struggles on the planet “we condemn all injustice” they said.

BDS Poster U Washington

The panel members each on cue took their turn at demonizing Israel. The perky Ms. Fox educated the students that Israel is a rogue apartheid state run by war criminal olive tree killers that must be penalized until in compliance with basic civilized norms.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 10, 2013 8 Comments

NGO Monitor keeps watch on anti-Israeli non-governmental organizations, and provides valuable research contesting many of the outlandish claims made by these mostly left-wing groups financed by European governments. The NGOs, some of which are staffed by Israeli leftists, subject Israel to a microscope no society could...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 09, 2013 38 Comments
With a fevered and frantic breathless pace, Obama via John Kerry has been pushing to sign a sell-out deal with Iran that would ease sanctions without shutting down Iran's nuke program. Benjamin Netanyahu was furious when he found out that Kerry had misrepresented what the proposed agreement would be, not to mention Kerry running at the mouth to bash Israel on the talks with the Palestinians. Netanyahu was not alone.  France was uncomfortable with the deal Kerry wanted to sign, even as Kerry huddled with the Iranians trying to get 'er done. Thank you France for at least buying us some time to prevent the historic sell out of Israel that was in the offing as recently as early today. Via NY Times, Talks with Iran Fail to Produce a Nuclear Pact:
In the end, though, it was not only divisions between Iran and the major powers that prevented a deal, but fissures within the negotiating group. Earlier in the day, France objected strenuously that a proposed deal would do too little to curb Iran’s uranium enrichment or to stop the development of a nuclear reactor capable of producing plutonium.

“The Geneva meeting allowed us to advance, but we were not able to conclude because there are still some questions to be addressed,” the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, told reporters.

The Times of Israel reports:

Posted by David Gerstman on November 08, 2013 10 Comments

Mideast Media Sampler 11/08/2013 -- Yasser, that's a conspiracy theory....

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 08, 2013 35 Comments

We are on the cusp of the most historic sell-out of Israel by any United States administration. We told you all along that in his second term Obama would impose a settlement on Israel according to what he viewed as reasonable: Obama will force his vision of a...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 07, 2013 37 Comments
John Kerry's public warning to Israel that it will face a 3rd Intifada and international delegitimization unless it relinquishes "illegitimate" settlements and a final peace deal does not leave a single Israeli solder in the West Bank, was a clear threat. The threat took place in an interview with Israeli and Palestinian television, as reported by The Times of Israel, Kerry slams Israel’s West Bank policies, warns of 3rd Intifada (emphasis added):
US Secretary of State John Kerry launched an unusually bitter public attack on Israeli policies in the West Bank Thursday, warning that if current peace talks fail, Israel could see a third intifada and growing international isolation, and that calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions would increase. Kerry made the comments during a joint interview with Israel’s Channel 2 and the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation.

“The alternative to getting back to the talks is the potential of chaos,” Kerry said. “I mean does Israel want a third Intifada?” he asked. “Israel says, ‘Oh we feel safe today, we have the wall. We’re not in a day to day conflict’,” said Kerry. “I’ve got news for you. Today’s status quo will not be tomorrow’s…” Israel’s neighbors, he warned, will “begin to push in a different way.”

The secretary went on: “If we do not resolve the issues between Palestinians and Israelis, if we do not find a way to find peace, there will be an increasing isolation of Israel, there will be an increasing campaign of delegitimization of Israel that’s been taking place on an international basis.”

Turning to settlements and Israel’s presence in the West Bank, he added: “If we do not resolve the question of settlements, and the question of who lives where and how and what rights they have; if we don’t end the presence of Israeli soldiers perpetually within the West Bank, then there will be an increasing feeling that if we cannot get peace with a leadership that is committed to non-violence, you may wind up with leadership that is committed to violence.”

The highlighted words have a lot of meaning in the context of the dispute, particularly with regard to BDS and delegitimization.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 05, 2013 14 Comments
Our examination of the shout-down of Ray Kelly at Brown University has moved from the events that day to examining reaction of faculty, including from Political Science Professor Marion Orr who apologized for inviting Kelly, and Biology Professor Ken Miller who issued a forceful denunciation of the shout-down. Something interesting happened along the way, as more faculty went on record supporting the protests, if not the shout down. Post doctoral fellow and instructor Linda Quiquivix, who spoke on a panel discussion in favor of the protests, turned out to be a zealous critic of Israel, to put it very mildly.  In light of Quiquivix's background, I suggested that there may be a connection between supporters of the tactics used against Israel on campuses and those used against Kelly. It turns out that another faculty member who supported the shout-down also has a background in the Israel divestment movement.  More than that, she sits on the University advisory committee on social investing, which has taken up the Israel boycott issue at the behest of Brown's Students for Justice in Palestine. Naoko Shibusawa is a professor of history, specializing in "U.S. cultural history." [caption id="attachment_69998" align="alignnone" width="436"]Naoko Shibusawa Syria Forum 3 (Naoko Shibusawa)[/caption] In the wake of the Kelly shout-down, Shibusawa wrote a Letter to the Editor of The Brown Daily Herald on November 1, fully supporting the events that took place (emphasis added):

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 04, 2013 3 Comments

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) is a valuable resource on which we frequently rely for news tips and information regarding the Middle East.  I'm not sure how I ended up on CAMERA's email update list, and I'm not even sure...

Posted by David Gerstman on November 04, 2013 4 Comments
As we've noted earlier, much of the media is obsessed with settlements, intent on portraying them as the main obstacle to peace. There's a tendency on the other side to take one of the most outrageous examples of Palestinian behavior and dismiss it. As Professor Jacobson noted last week, Israel, in order to entice the Palestinians to negotiate for a state of their own offered to release 104 prisoners from jail. These aren't just prisoners. Most, if not all, are remorseless murderers who are treated as heroes by all segments of Palestinian society, including their leaders. Jonathan Tobin made an apt observation about this phenomenon:
One group of people was happy as murderers went free while others wept. But the gulf here is more than emotional or merely, as the Times seemed to describe it, a difficult process that is part of the price Israel must pay for the chance of peace. In fact, the “emotional gulf” is indicative of a vast cultural divide between these two peoples that explains more about the absence of peace than any lecture about history, borders, or refugees. Simply put, so long as the Palestinians honor murderers, there is no reason to believe they are willing to end the conflict.
Consider the way the New York Times in the article cited by Tobin portrayed the Israeli reaction to the prisoner release:
In Israel, where the returnees are widely viewed as terrorists, the release on Tuesday, like the one in August, has stirred protests and anguish. Many said it was too heavy a price to pay for entering negotiations with no guarantee of a peace accord.
"[W]idely viewed?!?!" This statement is incredible. It's not only in Israel that they are "viewed as terrorists," but by definition. Only in the crazy New York Times worldview is the definition of terrorists subjective.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 03, 2013 31 Comments

I have been following various faculty reactions to the Ray Kelly shout-down, including from Political Science Professor Marion Orr who apologized for inviting Kelly, and Biology Professor Ken Miller who issued a forceful denunciation of the shout-down. So when I saw an article in The Brown...

Posted by David Gerstman on November 03, 2013 10 Comments
To read through recent news reports one could assume that the biggest obstacle to Palestinian Israeli peace are "settlements." To cement that impression the New York Times published an article, 1,500 Units to Be Added in Settlement, Israel Says. The caption of a photograph directly beneath the headline reads:
A Palestinian construction worker at a building site on Wednesday in the Ramat Shlomo settlement in East Jerusalem.
If there is an official "East Jerusalem," I am unaware of it, but perhaps the paper meant "east Jerusalem." However if you read down a few paragraphs you learn:
The 1,500 new apartments are to be added to Ramat Shlomo, a largely religious neighborhood of 20,000 on the city’s northern edge. They were originally announced during a 2010 visit to Jerusalem by Vice President Joseph R. Biden, causing a diplomatic crisis that dampened Israel’s relationship with the White House and Europe for months.
So actually, Ramat Shlomo isn't in the city's east but in its north (or northeast) and it's not a settlement but a neighborhood. And while the announcement led to a major diplomatic blowup, it was of the administration's making. The Vice-President, Secretary of State and President could have remained silent. Everyone expects sections of Jerusalem, even those illegally occupied by Jordan from 1948 to 1967 to be part of Israel in any final agreement with the Palestinians. The announcement had occurred during an Israeli ban on settlement building outside of Jerusalem. That settlement ban brought about no serious negotiations. (The PA returned to the table only a few weeks before the end of the freeze and, when the freeze expired, walked away.) If settlement freezes were so important to the Palestinians, why didn't they negotiate then? So "settlements" provide a convenient excuse for a Palestinian refusal to negotiate or concede anything to Israel. But should they?

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 02, 2013 2 Comments

But you knew that, because we have been following the antics of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for years. Erdogan blames the Jews for Egypt and he has video! (so do we) Turkish Deputy Prime Minister blames “Jewish Diaspora” for Gezi Park protests Turkish Prime Minister drops...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 01, 2013 12 Comments
Earlier this week three were unconfirmed reports of a very large explosion near the Syrian city of Latakia. There was relatively little media coverage to start, almost all from Israeli newspapers citing social media accounts. As in all these cases, Israeli officials were silent as to whodunit.  That's the dance that takes place to avoid a major war. Israel destroys game-changing weapons on their way to Hezbollah, Syria pretends it's not sure what happened, and everyone goes along with a major confrontation.  So long as Israel doesn't try to shift the balance of power within Syria and focuses on weapons headed to Hezbollah, Assad is under limited pressure to react. But not for the first time anonymous U.S. officials have told multiple U.S. media outlets that Israel was behind it. Which raises the question, why the leaks?

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 29, 2013 12 Comments

From Israel National News, A List of Monsters As Israel prepares to release 26 more terrorist prisoners as a "gesture" to the Palestinian Authority, Arutz Sheva presents a partial list of those slated for freedom. It reveals a catalogue of atrocities, the majority of which involved the...

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