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In light of unequivocal comments made over the last week by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calling for an end to all settlement construction, including for natural growth, as well as US and Israeli officials' failure to reach an agreement on this issue in London last week, there is a great deal of frustration over the matter in the Prime Minister's Office.
However, there is also a sense that Netanyahu simply cannot agree to the US demands. More
JERUSALEM – President Obama and his administration told Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during a meeting last week the U.S. foresees the creation of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, according to a top PA official speaking to WND.
"We were told from this new administration they will not allow a Netanyahu government to hurt their efforts of rehabilitating U.S. relations with the Arab and Islamic world, which is a high priority of Obama," the official said, speaking during a visit to Cairo. More
On Thursday, June 4, the day before the 42nd anniversary of the Six Day War's outbreak, American President Barack Hussein Obama will attempt to set in motion a process that will push Israel back to the armistice lines of 1949, if not to those of June 4, 1967.
Administration officials say privately that Obama has given himself two years for a diplomatic breakthough on a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians, despite the opposition of Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to America’s minimum demand for a freeze on all settlement building in disputed territory.
So if we can survive two years, he'll leave us alone? Maybe, if there's anything left. Within two years, Iran will be a nuclear power, and it is clear to all of us here that Israel will be left to confront that prospect alone. More
Your tax dollars at work. Forget about the unemployed.
US president Barack Obama has not yet decided whether his historic speech reaching out to the Muslim world will be delivered on June 4 from a lecture hall at Al Azhar University in Cairo or its main mosque, DEBKAfile's Middle East sources report. If the second, his address will take place in the presence of Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, the Sunni Muslim world's greatest religious authority. In any event, Al Azhar is the most eminent school of Islamic learning in the world and the US president therefore expects its impact to far outweigh his first address to Muslims from Istanbul. More
I mean, even the presidency he holds is a dubious legality. And it is said of him that he doesn't even control downtown Ramallah where his offices are.
So you’ve got a man who doesn't have anything in his control. And the reason that years of negotiations he held with the previous Israeli leader, Ehud Olmert, went nowhere is because when Olmert offered everything, Abbas had nothing he can offer to back it up. More
In salvaging the image of a beleaguered country like Israel, it's not merely the justice of the case which counts, and not only how convincingly it's made in private. The key is to ensure listenership. Even the most effective of arguments is useless without an audience.
Binyamin Netanyahu had that audience, and with it the opportunity to stress the most elementary facts of our existence, which are, alas, too often overridden by simplistic slogans and shallow conventional wisdom. He could have done more good than Israel's entire diplomatic corps and then some. Whatever he accomplished behind the scenes, Bibi missed the opportunity to sound the voice of sanity in obsessively kitschy and dangerously unrealistic America. More
Barack Obama is taking what he and his administration refer to as "a more balanced approach to Middle East policy."
Let me explain what that literally means in real terms.
It means the U.S. government is now using its clout with Israel to insist Jews, not Israelis, mind you, but Jews, be disallowed from living in East Jerusalem and the historically Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria, often referred to as the West Bank.
I want you to try to imagine the outrage, the horror, the outcry, the clamoring, the gnashing of teeth that would ensue if Arabs or Muslims were told they could no longer live in certain parts of Israel – let alone their own country. More
Khaled Abu Toameh, the Arab-born West Bank and Gaza correspondent for the Jerusalem Post in town as a guest of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy—doesn’t dismiss the idea for the same reasons as Hamas, which considers Israel a temporary, alien cancer to be mercilessly excised from the Muslim Middle East, not co-existed with. He dismisses it because, as those living in the territories well know, the Palestinians cannot even co-exist with themselves, let alone with Israel.
“I laugh when they talk about a two-state solution,” he said. “It’s unreal. It’s not going to work. But we all have to say we support it, maybe because that’s what [U.S. President Barack] Obama wants.” More
Last night, shortly after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told journalists that the Obama administration "wants to see a stop to settlements -- not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a confidante. Referring to Clinton's call for a settlement freeze, Netanyahu groused, "What the hell do they want from me?" according to his associate, who added, "I gathered that he heard some bad vibes in his meetings with [U.S.] congressional delegations this week." More
"This is a trip that he chose, not because of me I'm sure, but for political reasons,"Charles Payne told the German magazine Spiegel. "Perhaps his visit also has something to do with improving his standing with (German Chancellor) Angela Merkel. She gave him a hard time during his campaign and also after wards."
Payne told Spiegel that he was shocked to see his war experience, especially his "liberation" of a concentration camp, used in campaign commercials. He said he had never spoke with his nephew about the matter, nor did Obama ever express any interest in Payne's experience. More
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem Ps. 122:6 “The road map to peace
only moves in one direction and that direction is from the West Bank to
the Mediterranean Sea. The only thing in the way is Israel.” Anyone who doesn't recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Israel does not recognize the State of Israel.
