By Caroline B. Glick, JWR

It is a testament to the weakened state of the US in the region that in his hour of distress, Abbas opted to turn to Hamas.

On Monday afternoon, the Palestinians destroyed officially whatever was left of the concept of a peace process with Israel.

When PA Chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas signed a deal with Hamas terror-master Khaled Mashaal in Doha, Qatar, the notion that there is a significant segment of Palestinian society that is not committed to the destruction of Israel was finally and truly sunk.
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By Yoel Meltzer, AMERICAN THINKER SEPT 2011

The recent disclosure by WikiLeaks of cables sent by the American Embassy in Amman back in 2008 has created a storm in Jordan. The King has accused the Americans of meddling in domestic affairs by trying to force an unsolicited change in his kingdom whereby the Palestinians relinquish the “right of return” in exchange for being fully incorporated into Jordanian society. This perceived affront caused supporters of the King to stage an unprecedented protest against America at its embassy in Amman. This in turn was followed by calls for a “million-man protest” at the Israeli Embassy in Amman, despite Israel having no connection to the cables.
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A LOOK INSIDE WASHINGTON BY A DEVOUT JEWISH LEFTIST.
Counterpoint: Now is the time for a determined course of action on Iran by JINSA

Will AIPAC and Bibi get their war?

by MJ Rosenberg, Foreign Policy Matters

These are strange times for those of us who follow the debate about a possible war with Iran. It is clear that the Israeli government and its neoconservative camp followers here in the United States are increasing pressure on President Obama to either attack Iran or let Israel do it (in which case we would be forced to join in). But the idea of another war in the Middle East is so outlandish that it seems inconceivable it could actually occur.

Still, the conventional wisdom holds that it can, because this is an election year and the assumption is that no one will say no to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
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Moshe Dann, INN

At a meeting of over 40 diplomats and ambassadors held at Bar Ilan University last week, devoted to a discussion of “UNRWA, Refugees and the Peace Process,” three panelists, all supporters of the Two-State Solution focused on the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) as a major obstacle to any resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Without changing UNRWA, MK Einat Wilf (Azmaut) warned, the two-state solution and the peace process was in danger. Wilf unveiled a plan to restructure the controversial UN organization which has been caring for Arab Palestinian refugees and their descendants exclusively for over 60 years.
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National water company predicts that increase desalination will create substantial surplus of water within eight years

Zvi Lavi, YNET

Israel may face a happy predicament within a decade – a water surplus. Mekorot, the national water company, said Wednesday that the increased desalination of seawater will eventually enable Israel to rehabilitate all of its fresh water reservoirs.

The heads of Mekorot briefed the Knesset’s Economics Committee on the situation of Israel’s water market, in a meeting marking the company’s 75th anniversary.
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At the Herzlia Conference I spoke with one of the speakers who was with Brookings Doha based in Doha. He told me that he was one of the people who drafted the Roadmap for the State43 Department. I told him that you probably drafted the Saudi Plan for them also. He asked me why we didn’t talk to Hamas. I said that we have nothing to offer them. Not the answer he was expecting. He then pushed the Saudi Plan for our acceptance. I said nothing doing, we want all the land and we are entitled to it. He quoted international law as recited in R242 as prohibiting us from acquiring land by force. I said that was never the law because you can acquire land in a defensive war. He didn’t challenge me on that.

A day or two ago there was a news item reporting that Qatar was promoting Wahabbism in Europe. This guy was probably behind the US embrace of the MB. He kept saying how they were moderating. Pure State Department BS. Ted Belman

Elior Levy, YNET

Hamas Politburo Chief Khaled Mashaal will not be returning to Damascus at this time and is expected to temporarily carry out Hamas activities from Qatar, Asharq Al-Awsat reported Thursday.

Mashaal was quoted by the London-based Arabic newspaper as saying he cannot receive visitors in Syria due to the volatile security situation there. The Hamas leader mentioned that last January he was forced to meet Swiss envoy to the Middle East Jean-Daniel Ruch in Cairo because the diplomat refused to visit Damascus.
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The Peace Index: January 2012 –

At the same time, the majority (54%) of the entire Jewish public does not agree with the claim that continued rule in the territories will result in a state that does not have a Jewish majority.

Moreover, 54% believe that continued control of the territories will not prevent Israel from remaining a Jewish and democratic state.

The Peace Index: January 2012
Date Published: 08/02/2012

The Peace Index is a project of the Evens Program for Conflict Resolution at Tel Aviv University and the Israel Democracy Institute www.peaceindex.org Email: info@peaceindex.org

Summary of the Findings
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By Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY, PRAVDA.Ru

2009

Receiving Brazil’s President Lula yesterday in the editing room of Die Zeit newspaper, ex-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt stated that he agreed with his guest in his position that the international community should treat Iran like any other sovereign nation. Why does the international community apply two sets of measures in its foreign policy?

The last time the ex-Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany Helmut Schmid, now 90, and President Luis Inácio da Silva (Lula) of Brazil had a meeting was back in 1979 when the former, as Chancellor, visited Brazil and expressed his support for Lula, who had been forced to leave the Metalworkers’ Union by the military dictatorship.
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By LYN JULIUS, JPOST

Contrary to recent misleading press reports, no Jew seeks a “right of return” to Arab states.

Some years ago, a daughter of the wealthy Jewish Castro family from Egypt heard Anwar Sadat’s widow Jehan deliver a talk in New York. Congratulating her afterwards, the Egyptian Jewess exchanged pleasantries with Mrs. Sadat. “But you must come back to visit [Egypt] and to show it to your children,” Mrs. Sadat said, adding the traditional Egyptian courtesy, beti betak – “my house is your house.”

Little did she appreciate the irony, but Jehan Sadat’s presidential villa had literally belonged to the Castro family, which was expelled by Nasser in 1956. Observers of the Middle East conflict frequently talk of trampled Palestinian rights, but suffer from a blind spot when it comes to the mass dispossession of a greater number of Jews across 10 Arab countries.
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BY NIALL FERGUSON, Daily Beast/Newsweek

Jerusalem— It probably felt a bit like this in the months before the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel launched its hugely successful preemptive strike against Egypt and its allies. Forty-five years later, the little country that is the most easterly outpost of Western civilization has Iran in its sights.

There are five reasons (I am told) why Israel should not attack Iran:

1. The Iranians would retaliate with great fury, closing the Strait of Hormuz and unleashing the dogs of terror in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iraq.

2. The entire region would be set ablaze by irate Muslims; the Arab Spring would turn into a frigid Islamist winter.
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VIDEO

By Richard Engel and Robert Windrem
NBC News

Updated: 11:14 a.m. ET — Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders.
ROCK CENTER EXCLUSIVE

The group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, has long been designated as a terrorist group by the United States, accused of killing American servicemen and contractors in the 1970s and supporting the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran before breaking with the Iranian mullahs in 1980.

The attacks, which have killed five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and may have destroyed a missile research and development site, have been carried out in dramatic fashion, with motorcycle-borne assailants often attaching small magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims’ cars.
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Obama must do something tangible for Syria
Danielle Pletka | CNN

Obama administration officials have labeled the United Nations’ failure to act on Syria as “outrageous” and a “travesty”. But that’s about all they’ve done about Syrian dictator Basher el Assad’s wanton murder of thousands of innocent Syrians.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the failure of last weekend’s weak Security Council resolution, more than 400 Syrians were killed in ruthless assaults. They had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Syrian opposition leaders have begged the international community to act, to do more than convene in contact groups and make rounds on the diplomatic circuit. But their begging has fallen on deaf ears.

Why care about Syria?
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BY: Adam Kredo -WASHINGTON FREE BEACON

An Iranian official closely tied to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has released a detailed plan to attack Israel, according to a Middle East media monitoring site.

Alireza Forghani, an Iranian politician and staunch ally of the regime, recently released an article titled, “Iran Must Attack Israel by 2014,” according to the Middle East Media Research Institute.

The article comes amid an ongoing media debate about whether the Iranian regime’s rhetoric against Israel is as homicidal as some claim. Forghani’s article offers definitive proof that Iran is determined to annihilate the Jewish state. (Read more…)

Is Netanyahu pretending?

Op-ed: Soon we will find out whether Bibi truly moderated his views or remained a staunch rightist

Eitan Haber, YNET

Benjamin Netanyahu was the big winner of the recent Likud primaries. However, he too realizes that the party that sent him to the Prime Minister’s Office is slipping through his fingers. Likud is distancing from him.

However, some politicians will respond to the above with a chuckle. For years they have been saying that Netanyahu has not changed at all, and that Likud is not distancing from him at all. Bibi is just like Moshe Feiglin, with a softer veneer, they say. The primaries’ results will force Netanyahu to rip the mask off his face.
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Flurry of protests hits Palestinian Authority as prime minister attempts to pass austerity plan

Itamar Eichner, YNET

The Palestinian Authority has been hit by a flurry of protests in recent weeks, with residents rising up against the state of the economy, the rising cost of living and a series of austerity measures that are being promoted by PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

Fayyad’s plan, which aims to cut the PA’s budget deficit, includes tax hikes, taxation of stock profits and forced retirement for 26,000 government employees, among other steps.
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James Lewis, American Thinker

It’s now quite clear that Obama is playing chicken with Israel on Iranian nukes. That is why Leon Panetta came out with a statement this week accusing Israel of planning to attack Iran. If that statement is true, it’s the worst kind of sabotage, undermining the advantages of surprise. If it’s false, it is intended to place Israel at the focus of Iranian rage. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

The goal of Obama’s nuclear brinkmanship is to drive Israel into making dangerous territorial compromises. This is a Carteresque policy: blame the victim, and arm her enemy. Jimmy Carter enabled Iranian radicalization starting with Ayatollah Khomeini, heedless of the disastrous and possibly genocidal consequences. Carter recently said that an Iranian nuclear weapon was no big deal, as if a nuke in the hands of a suicide-preaching Khomeinist ideology machine is just fine with him. Well, the Saudis know their Iranian enemies a great deal better than Jimmy Carter does, and they are sending their money to Switzerland.
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By Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, Forward Forum

Mark Yudof, president of the University of California, claims that two federal complaints against his university, alleging a hostile environment for Jewish students, are without merit. While expressing general support for the recent extension of the provisions of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include Jewish students, Yudof does not believe that the situation on UC campuses rises to the standards of the federal statute. He recently told the Forward: “I think it is about people engaged in abhorrent speech on our campuses. But I am skeptical at the end of the day that with those two instances we will be found to be in violation of Title VI.”
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Palestinian Authority-controlled Shechem is allocating 300 tractors to plow and claim land near Jewish communities in Samaria.
By Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, INN

Palestinian Authority-controlled Shechem is allocating 300 tractors to plow and claim land in 25 locations near Jewish communities in Samaria, according to the Bethlehem-based Ma’an news agency.

Shechem governor Jibreel al-Bakri said that helping Arab farmers to cultivate the land is an unprecedented action. The PA will provide farmers with fuel for their tractors.

The lands include areas the Israeli Defense Forces has declared to be closed military zones, al-Bakri added. “We decided to reach these lands…without any exceptions” and every acre will be plowed, he added.
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