EDITOR: Freedom of expression is too precious to allow it to Palestinians…

In the best tradition of Jewish democracy, the Israeli authorities have closed down the Kol Hashalom (“Voice of Peace”) radio station, a venture bringing together peace activists from both Israeli and Palestinian communities. The official line is that it is a piratical station…

One would have thought the pirates are the IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces) for raiding boats with peaceful protestors in international water, arresting them illegally and confiscating their cargo…

Read below to fully appreciate the depth of change the Israeli society is undergoing now. The war is waged on peace with every instrument of the state, and as this campaign against the future and against history is backed by the most powerful nations on earth, it is likely to be successful, at least in the short term. It is crucial for Israeli political leaders that not just the practices leading to a just peace, but the very idea of a peaceful and just solution be dead and buried, beyond reprieve. The continuation of a racist Israel, militarily controlling the Middle East and its mini empire is dependent on destroying any agenda for change through a just peace, an end to occupation, and a reversal of the Palestinian long exile and suffering.

So Israelis and Palestinians will be denied the voice of peace, the idea of peace, the danger of peace.

Ministry shuts down broadcasts of Israeli-Palestinian radio station: Haaretz

Communications Ministry demands an end to broadcasts, claiming that “Kol Hashalom” is a pirate station.

Israel Police and the Communications Ministry cut off the broadcasts of Kol Hashalom radio station on Saturday, claiming that they are pirate broadcasts. Kol Hashalom’s operators claim that their offices, which are located in the Palestinian Authority, are not subject to Israeli law, but Palestinian law, and therefore the Communications Ministry does not have the authority to shut it down.

Kol Hashalom has been broadcasting for the past seven years from East Jerusalem, using broadcasting equipment in Ramallah and an operating license from the Palestinian Communications Ministry. The station was established by Israeli peace activists working together with Palestinian peace activists.

The station is intended to replace the legendary Kol Hashalom radio station operated by Abbie Nathan, but a slightly different Hebrew spelling was chosen to differentiate between the two. The original station’s spelling translates to “The Voice of Peace” in English, while the new station’s spelling translates to “The Whole Peace”.

According to the station’s operators, for all its broadcast history, they were never asked to stop broadcasting or to acquire an Israeli license. Their first communication of the kind was received on November 4, asking them to stop broadcasting, claiming that their operations are illegal. The station denied the charges and requested time to form a reply.

Station manager and former Meretz MK Mossi Raz was called into a police station for interrogation regarding the matter on Thursday. While Raz was questioned under caution, he was asked to give orders to end broadcasts, or else he would be remanded by a judge and the police would raid the station’s offices.

Raz made clear to his interrogators that he did not intend to broadcast illegally and gave instructions by telephone to end broadcasts until further instructions. The station managers plan to turn to the courts in the days to come in order to overturn the decision of the Communications Ministry.

Raz is certain that the decision to close down the station is part of a general attack on left-wing organizations. The station provided a platform for left-wing groups that are now under attack by a new law that would curb their foreign funding.

“Of course there is an attack here that is not only on us. If someone came to the conclusion that this isn’t legal, then after seven years there are different ways to go about it,” Raz said.

The Communications Ministry responded, saying, “The Ministry carried out wireless supervisory activities in cooperation with Israel Police against a pirate radio station, just as it carries them out against all other illegal station.”

Likud MK Danny Danon recently turned to the Attorney General, demanding that he shut down the station, claiming that is broadcasting incitement.

On Saturday night, he announced, “Shutting down the station was carrying out justice. The content [broadcast by] the station were unacceptable and the fact that they were a pirate broadcast made it possible for Israel Police to close down the station.”

If you lived in Iran, wouldn’t you want the nuclear bomb?: Guardian

The best way for the US to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons is to dial down the rhetoric and adopt some diplomacy
Mehdi Hasan
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visiting the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility. Photograph: Ho New/Reuters
Imagine, for a moment, that you are an Iranian mullah. Sitting crosslegged on your Persian rug in Tehran, sipping a cup of chai, you glance up at the map of the Middle East on the wall. It is a disturbing image: your country, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is surrounded on all sides by virulent enemies and regional rivals, both nuclear and non-nuclear.

On your eastern border, the United States has 100,000 troops serving in Afghanistan. On your western border, the US has been occupying Iraq since 2003 and plans to retain a small force of military contractors and CIA operatives even after its official withdrawal next month. Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation, is to the south-east; Turkey, America’s Nato ally, to the north-west; Turkmenistan, which has acted as a refuelling base for US military transport planes since 2002, to the north-east. To the south, across the Persian Gulf, you see a cluster of US client states: Bahrain, home to the US Fifth Fleet; Qatar, host to a forward headquarters of US Central Command; Saudi Arabia, whose king has exhorted America to “attack Iran” and “cut off the head of the snake”.

Then, of course, less than a thousand miles to the west, there is Israel, your mortal enemy, in possession of over a hundred nuclear warheads and with a history of pre-emptive aggression against its opponents.

The map makes it clear: Iran is, literally, encircled by the United States and its allies.

If that wasn’t worrying enough, your country seems to be under (covert) attack. Several nuclear scientists have been mysteriously assassinated and, late last year, a sophisticated computer virus succeeded in shutting down roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. Only last weekend, the “pioneer” of the Islamic Republic’s missile programme, Major General Hassan Moghaddam, was killed – with 16 others – in a huge explosion at a Revolutionary Guards base 25 miles outside Tehran. You go online to discover western journalists reporting that the Mossad is believed to have been behind the blast.

And then you pause to remind yourself of the fundamental geopolitical lesson that you and your countrymen learned over the last decade: the US and its allies opted for war with non-nuclear Iraq, but diplomacy with nuclear-armed North Korea.

If you were our mullah in Tehran, wouldn’t you want Iran to have the bomb – or at the very minimum, “nuclear latency” (that is, the capability and technology to quickly build a nuclear weapon if threatened with attack)?

Let’s be clear: there is still no concrete evidence Iran is building a bomb. The latest report from the IAEA, despite its much discussed reference to “possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme”, also admits that its inspectors continue “to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at [Iran’s] nuclear facilities”. The leaders of the Islamic Republic – from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to bombastic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – maintain their goal is only to develop a civilian nuclear programme, not atomic bombs.

Nonetheless, wouldn’t it be rational for Iran – geographically encircled, politically isolated, feeling threatened – to want its own arsenal of nukes, for defensive and deterrent purposes? The US government’s Nuclear Posture Review admits such weapons play an “essential role in deterring potential adversaries” and maintaining “strategic stability” with other nuclear powers. In 2006, the UK’s Ministry of Defence claimed our own strategic nuclear deterrent was designed to “deter and prevent nuclear blackmail and acts of aggression against our vital interests that cannot be countered by other means”.

Apparently, what is sauce for the Anglo-American goose is not sauce for the Iranian gander. Empathy is in short supply. As leading US nuclear policy analyst George Perkovich has observed: “The US government never has publicly and objectively assessed Iranian leaders’ motivations for seeking nuclear weapons and what the US and others could do to remove those motivations.” Instead, the Islamic Republic is dismissed as irrational and megalomaniacal.

But it isn’t just Iran’s leaders who are unwilling to back down on the nuclear issue. On Tuesday, around 1,000 Iranian students formed a human chain around the uranium conversion facility in Isfahan, chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”. Their protest may have been organised by the authorities but even the leaders and members of the opposition Green Movement tend to support Iran’s uranium enrichment programme. According to a 2010 University of Maryland survey, 55% of Iranians back their country’s pursuit of nuclear power and, remarkably, 38% support the building of a nuclear bomb.

So what is to be done? Sanctions haven’t worked and won’t work. Iranians refuse to compromise on what they believe to be their “inalienable” right to nuclear power under the Non-proliferation treaty. Military action, as the US defence secretary Leon Panetta admitted last week, could have “unintended consequences”, including a backlash against “US forces in the region”. The threat of attack will only harden the resolve for a nuclear deterrent; belligerence breeds belligerence.

The simple fact is there is no alternative to diplomacy, no matter how truculent or paranoid the leaders of Iran might seem to western eyes. If a nuclear-armed Iran is to be avoided, US politicians have to dial down their threatening rhetoric and tackle the very real and rational perception, on the streets of Tehran and Isfahan, of America and Israel as military threats to the Islamic Republic. Iranians are fearful, nervous, defensive – and, as the Middle East map shows, perhaps with good reason. As the old adage goes, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Israel shuts down Palestinian groups in Jerusalem: The Electronic Intifada

18 November 2011
Israeli policies are pushing Palestinians out of East Jerusalem in favor of Israeli settlers. (Ryan Rodrick Beiler )
The recent forced closures of Palestinian nonprofit organizations in Jerusalem is an example of the Israeli authorities’ continued attacks on the city’s Palestinian identity and their attempts to maintain control over occupied East Jerusalem, according to local human rights groups.

“The purpose is to control and undermine the role of Palestinian civil society and [its] efforts in Jerusalem,” Rashad Shtayyeh, the activities coordinator at the Civic Coalition to Defend Palestinians’ Rights in Jerusalem (CCDPRJ), told The Electronic Intifada by email.

“Also, [this Israeli policy] tries to restrict anything that might help in protecting the Palestinian identity in Jerusalem, as a part of the Israeli Judiazation project in occupied Jerusalem,” Shtayyeh explained.

On 25 October, Israeli police presented closure notices to four Jerusalem-based organizations — Shua’a Women’s Association, al-Quds Development Foundation, Saeed Education Center and Work Without Borders — for a one-month period.

Given thirty minutes to leave
Dr. Nufuz Maslamani is the director of the Shua’a Women’s Association, a group that was founded in 2008 with the goal of empowering women in Jerusalem to achieve their social, political and economic rights. She told The Electronic Intifada that Israeli police gave volunteers at the association thirty minutes to leave their office before they locked the door.

“I said, ‘Why do you want to close it?’ I said that we are a women’s association and that we are working with women, with gender issues. [The police officer] said, ‘No, you are doing activities for the Popular Front [for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP],” Maslamani explained.

“As always, they have a lot of reasons to close any association, to stop anyone who is working in Jerusalem. They continue their policy to make Jerusalem empty of the Palestinian people. This is their policy. That’s why they closed the association,” she said.

Maslamani said that the closure has already had a negative impact on the Palestinian women and children who take courses through the association.

“This is really a problem because we now have women who are taking computer courses, and other courses. These women feel that they have a purpose and that they can do anything,” she said, adding that she feared the one-month closure order would be arbitrarily extended.

“The most dangerous thing is that the Palestinian people can’t live or do what is right for them. This is our right, to continue our lives in Jerusalem, as all women and people in the world.”

History of closures in Jerusalem
According to the Civic Coalition for Defending Palestinians’ Rights in Jerusalem (CCDPRJ), since August 2001, the Israeli authorities have closed approximately 28 organizations serving the Palestinian community in Jerusalem, including the Orient House, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) former headquarters in the city, the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce and the Arab Studies Society.

In 2009, the Israeli authorities also banned numerous Palestinian cultural and educational events scheduled to celebrate the declaration of Jerusalem as the “Capital of Arab Culture” for that year.

“The closure of these and other Palestinian institutions are part of a broader policy through which the Israeli authorities seek to stifle Palestinian development in Jerusalem and increase the strength of Israel’s occupation over East Jerusalem,” explained Shtayyeh. “These closures relate to the overarching policy that includes violations of housing rights, revocation of residency, and ultimately results in the forced displacement of Palestinians from Jerusalem.”

Most Palestinians living in East Jerusalem have residency rights, not full Israeli citizenship, since they refused to take Israeli passports on principle shortly after Israel began occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.

As such, Palestinian Jerusalemites have the right to live and work in Israel yet are denied other provisions that come with full Israeli citizenship. For instance, unlike citizenship, permanent residency is only passed on to a person’s children if certain conditions are met, including most notably proving that one’s “center of life” is in Jerusalem.

Since 1967, it is estimated that more than 14,000 identification cards have been revoked from Palestinian Jerusalemites, who have thereby lost their residency rights and the ability to live in the city.

Widespread attack on human rights groups
The Jerusalem-area closures come as the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, is expected to pass two new bills that would make it harder for human rights groups in the country to receive funding from foreign governments.

On 13 November, the Israeli Ministerial Committee on Legislation voted in favor of two new bills. The first, officially known as the Associations Law (Amendment — Banning Foreign Diplomatic Entities’ Support of Political Associations in Israel), would bar human rights groups from receiving donations of more than 20,000 NIS (roughly $5,400) from foreign state entities.

The second bill, an amendment to the Israeli Income Tax Order, would make funding from foreign state entities to Israeli nongovernmental organizations subject to a 45 percent taxation rate. This is more than three times more than the taxation rate incurred by private organizations.

On 10 November, 18 human rights groups in Israel, including Adalah — the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Arab Association for Human rights, released a statement condemning the bills.

“This is not the first time Knesset members target foreign funding as a way to silence civil society and human rights organizations. The bills are a part of a calculated policy to silence voices of dissent and criticism and go hand in hand with attempts to restrict Israel’s judicial system, media outlets and activists,” the statement reads (“NGOs in Israel: Urgent call regarding severely restrictive funding bills,” 10 November 2011).

“A vibrant civil society is an essential part of a healthy democracy,” the statement adds. “These organizations promote transparency, public debate and accountability regarding government policy, and ensure essential protection of more vulnerable communities.”

According to the Mossawa Center, a group representing Palestinians in Israel, the bills would have the biggest impact on organizations working for the rights of Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

“Many Israeli NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] do not receive funding from the Israeli government because of their work with the Palestinian Arab minority. They are forced to rely on foreign state entities, like the EU and European government-sponsored organizations, for a majority of their funding,” Mossawa explained in a statement (“The Mossawa Center calls on the international community to condemn bills that restrict funding for human rights organizations in Israel,” 16 November 2011 [PDF]).

“While the NGO bills directly hinder the ability of Arab and human rights NGOs to operate independently within Israel, right-wing organizations that violate international law by supporting settlements in the West Bank are not limited in the proposed legislation,” Mossawa adds. “Most right-wing organizations are funded by the state and/or foreign private donations, which the bills’ sponsors do not consider foreign interference. It is clear that the proposed legislation would conceal the state’s human rights violations and advance the government’s right-wing agenda without impediment.”

Protected under international law
In Jerusalem, CCDPRJ’s Rashad Shtayyeh explained that “East Jerusalem is incontrovertibly recognized under international law as an integral part of the occupied Palestinian territory over which the Palestinian people are entitled to exercise their right to self-determination.”

Indeed, the Fourth Geneva Convention states: “Protected persons are entitled, in all circumstances, to respect for their persons, their honor, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manners and customs.”

Article 1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights also stipulates that “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”

In his email to The Electronic Intifada, Shtayyeh explained that these protected rights — as well as freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly — are regularly denied to Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

“We call upon the international Community, the United Nations and the European Union to take responsibility to uphold their obligations towards the protected persons under occupation in Jerusalem,” he said. “We demand that the international community obliges the Israeli government to refrain from closing the Palestinian institutions in East Jerusalem.”

Israeli writer questioned for helping Palestinians visit Israel: Haaretz

What began as a private initiative turned into a public protest against restrictions on Palestinian when Ilana Hammerman reported on her activities in Haaretz Magazine.
By Amira Hass
Author and translator Ilana Hammerman was questioned by the police for the third time this week on suspicion of bringing Palestinians into Israel without a permit.

Last year, Hammerman began bringing Palestinian women and children on visits to Israel. It began as a private initiative to enable her Palestinian friends to enjoy experiences usually barred to them, like going to the beach or visiting East Jerusalem. But it turned into a public protest against the restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom of movement when she reported on her activities in an article she wrote for Haaretz Magazine in May 2010. In response to that article, police summoned her for questioning in October 2010. Meanwhile, she continued to bring Palestinians into Israel.

On Wednesday, police questioned her for about two hours. Hammerman said that from her interrogator’s comments, she understood that her case has been transferred to the prosecution for a decision on whether to indict her. The May 2010 article, in which Hammerman described taking three Palestinian women to the beach, prompted the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel to file a complaint to the Attorney General against her. The Jerusalem District Attorney’s office passed on the complaint to the police, which summoned her for questioning.

After Hammerman received the summons, 12 other Jewish Israeli women published a paid advertisement in which they announced that they, too, had taken Palestinian women and children on visits to Israel. A similar ad was published following Hammerman’s first interrogation in October 2010, this time signed by 19 additional women. At that point, police summoned 28 of the signatories for questioning as well. But Hammerman is the only one who has been questioned more than once.

At Wednesday’s session, she was asked about another article that she published in Haaretz Magazine this July, in which she tells the story of Palestinian workers being smuggled to Israel. This was the first time she had been told she was suspected of bringing men as well as women into Israel illegally. Hammerman told the police that this article was a literary work, but that he could draw his own conclusions. She declined to say where the Palestinian women she took to Israel lived.

Israel effectively annexes Palestinian land near Jordan Valley: Haaretz

Separation barrier route in Kibbutz Merav area changed leaving 1,500 dunams on Israeli side; may be first transfer of Palestinian-owned land to community on sovereign Israeli territory.
By Akiva Eldar

Israel carried out a de facto annexation of Palestinian land northeast of the Jordan Valley and given it to Kibbutz Merav. Merav, part of the Religious Kibbutz Movement, is about seven kilometers northwest of the parcel.

The route of the separation barrier in the area was changed so that the plot in question, about 1,500 dunams (375 acres), would be on the Israeli side.

Israel has previously built roads on and given Palestinian land in the West Bank to Jewish settlements, but this is thought to be the first instance of Palestinian-owned land being transferred to a community on sovereign Israeli territory.

A spokesman for the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, Maj. Guy Inbar, confirmed that the property is in the West Bank and said, “Kibbutz Merav has been farming this land for decades.”

The issue of the land’s legal status and its transfer to Merav is clouded in mystery, and official statements have been contradictory. All efforts to locate documents explaining the situation have failed, Inbar said.

The kibbutz is in the Emek Mayanot Regional Council, whose jurisdiction is entirely within the Green Line. In a statement, council officials said the land is beyond its jurisdiction and that the Israel Lands Administration controls land allocations to the council’s member communities.

Ofer Amar, a spokesman for the World Zionist Organization’s Jewish settlement division said the tract is classified as farmland within the Emek Mayanot Regional Council. He said the settlement division had no authority over the parcel.

Kibbutz Merav’s secretary general, David Yisrael, confirmed the kibbutz has been farming the land for years, growing field crops including corn as well as citrus fruit. He said he had a lease with the ILA for it, but refused to show it to Haaretz.

An official in the Civil Administration said Yisrael refused to show the contract to his agency, too.

ILA spokeswoman Ortal Tzabar said the ILA had no knowledge of the matter, as it does not deal with land outside sovereign Israeli territory.

“There is a straight line from plundering these 1,500 dunams to Amona, Migron and Givat Asaf, outposts that were built years later,” said Dror Etkes, who has been researching construction in the settlements for several years and detected the annexed land in aerial photographs.

If the appropriation of the Palestinian farmers’ lands in the Jordan Valley had happened now, rather than in the 1970s, Israeli civil rights groups would have prevented it, Etkes said.

“This is an example of why it so important for MK Ofir Akunis and his wacky right-wing colleagues to conceal and silence leftist organizations and turn the High Court of Justice and the media into the government’s puppets,” Etkes said.

Ashraf Madrasa, from the nearby village of Bardallah, showed Haaretz an ownership deed from 1961 for a 36-dunam tract of the land. He said the Israel Defense Forces seized the land, declared it a “military area,” drove out the owners and ordered never to return.

A number of landowners were given alternative plots belonging to “absentee” Palestinians who fled during the 1967 Six-Day War. Sami Rajab, whose family farms in the area, said that in exchange for several plots in the area he was evicted from, his father received a tract that belonged to his uncle, who emigrated to Canada.

Recently his cousin came to visit and demanded his lands back, Rajab related. “We told him he had to ask the Israeli government to give it back to him,” Rajab said.

According to international law Israel is the custodian of absentee property in the West Bank and is prohibited from giving it to settlers, not to mention to communities within Israel.

In an opinion issued in 1997, the Civil Administration’s legal adviser said: “The Custodian of Absentee Property in the West Bank is nothing but a trustee looking after the property so it is not harmed while the owners are absent from the area … the custodian may not make any transaction regarding the asset that conflicts with the obligation to safeguard the asset as stated, especially his obligation to return the asset to the owner upon his return to the region.”

The state comptroller wrote in a 2004 report that thousands of dunams of privately-owned Palestinian lands were given to Israeli communities in the Jordan Valley in the 1960s and 1970s, according to ILA and Custodian of Absentee Property documents.

The ILA continued “these allocations, defined in the above documents as apparently illegal, after that as well,” he wrote.

MAD ISRAELIS: Straight from the horse’s mouth

 

 

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EDITOR: The real danger in the Middle East is not the coming bombing of Iran by Israel, or the planned war in Lebanon, or even the continued occupation and subjugation of Palestine. No, the real danger is the voices of women which may send the IOF soldiers mad with sexual desire… Why bomb Iran, when Israel is adopting the main features of the Teheran regime?

Top settler rabbi: Soldiers will sooner choose death than suffer women’s singing: Haaretz

Rabbi Elyakim Levanon warns IDF of prohibiting soldiers from leaving events which include women’s signings, says hopes there are ‘wise’ people who would prevent such an order.

Israel Defense Forces soldiers should choose death before they remain at army events which include women’s singing, a top settler religious leader said in an interview on Thursday.

The comment made by Elyakim Levanon, the rabbi of the West Bank settlement of Elon Moreh, came after earlier this week, 19 reserve major generals sent a letter to Defense Minister Ehud Barak and IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, imploring them not to allow harm to come to women’s service in the army as a result of religious soldiers’ demands.

The reserve officers indicated that their appeal comes in response to a series of recent events, including the boycotting of military ceremonies by religious cadets due to women singing.

The petitioners warned in their letter about harm caused to the motivation of women to serve in the army, as well as to what they termed damage to “the fundamental values of Israeli society.”

However, in a radio interview on Thursday, Rabbi Levanon criticized a possible ruling that would forbid religious soldiers from leaving events over women’s singing, saying that IDF soldier should choose death before complying with such an order.

“[The IDF] is bringing close the day in which rabbis will have to say to soldiers ‘you have to leave those events even if there’s a firing squad outside, and you’ll be shot to death,” Levanin said.

The Elon Moreh rabbi said he hoped that there will be “some wise people who will thwart this horrible move, and if not we’ll have no other choice,” adding that he would “recommend anyone who asked me against joining the army.”

Women’s singing has been but one example of rising tensions between IDF top brass and religious leaders, after last month, following orders from IDF rabbis, female soldiers were asked to leave the central event and had to celebrate in a separate area during the traditional dancing that marks the end of the Simhat Torah holiday.

EDITOR: The real voice of Israel speaks from the USA!

Israel has gifted the world, sending its fascists around the globe, and especially to the Land of the Brave, where almost a million of them seem to prosper, in preference to living in their own beloved country. YNet can be trusted to give space to the madder representatives of this group, every weekend…

Don’t trust Barack Obama: YNet

Op-ed: Obama’s latest pro-Israel statements deceitful, aimed at winning Jewish vote
Shoula Romano Horing
By now, everyone is aware of the infamous open microphone incident in which President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy were overheard in a private conversation ridiculing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the G20 summit in Cannes. After Sarkozy was overheard saying that he” could not stand Netanyahu” and calling him a “liar,” Obama replied – ”you are fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day.”

Damage Control
White House on Obama-Sarkozy exchange: President committed to Israel / Yitzhak Benhorin
As part of damage control after US, French leaders overheard ridiculing Israeli premier, deputy national security advisor tells reporters ‘Obama has taken security cooperation with Israel to unprecedented levels’
Full story
Obama’s lack of defense at the character assassination of a supposed ally should awaken Jewish voters to the inescapable conclusion that President Obama is not a friend of the Jewish state despite his recent efforts to change this perception.

It seems that Obama’s recent strategy of publicly adopting pro-Israel stances while avoiding public confrontations, condemnations and humiliation of Israel’s PM has only been a temporary public relations ploy to hold on to Jewish votes and reelection campaign donations.

While publicly reassuring Jewish supporters of his commitment to Israel’s security and repeatedly pointing to the close cooperation with the Israelis, privately Obama has been undermining Israel by agreeing with European leaders that Israel’s prime minister is to be blamed for the lack of progress toward peace in the Middle East (while giving the Palestinian leader a pass.)

A reality check reveals that Obama‘s view of Netanyahu is distorted, whether by personal bias or selective memory. In fact, since Israel’s PM came to power three years ago, he has bent to Obama’s will on many occasions.

Netanyahu agreed to commit for the first time his Likud party to accepting a Palestinian state. He froze West Bank settlement growth as well as any buildup in east Jerusalem, Israel’s eternal capital, something no other Israeli leader has ever agreed to do, including dovish prime ministers such as Rabin and Peres. Netanyahu removed dozens of roadblocks, agreed to dismantle illegal outposts, and eventually accepted Obama’s territorial formula for a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 borders with land swaps.

Moreover, while Netanyahu accepted the Mideast Quartet’s call, which included France and the US, to return back to negotiations with the PA without preconditions, Palestinian leader Abbas said no. Moreover, Abbas has rejected numerous personal appeals from Obama not to take the Palestinian statehood bid to the United Nations, forcing the US to use its Security Council veto – which is something Obama seems to dread.

Erdogan’s buddy
For almost three years, until he began his reelection campaign, Obama has been involved in public confrontations, condemnations and humiliation of the democratically elected Netanyahu, while being silent and respectful to Mahmoud Abbas, a corrupt and undemocratic Holocaust denier, who has never ended the anti-Jewish incitement in Palestinian schools, mosques and in the media.

Jewish Obama supporters, who claim that despite his apparent personal dislike and disrespect to Netanyahu the president is still a friend of Israel and can be trusted to ensure its survival, delude themselves. Respect for and a cordial relationship with a democratic ally demands that the president accept the democratic selection of Israel’s leader and treat that elected leader with courtesy. Anything else is a slap in the face of the Israeli people.

It is even more humiliating when one witnesses the great personal rapport that Obama has created with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan. Turkish media outlets reported that after Erdogan‘s mother died last month, Obama was among the world leaders who called him and the two “spoke for 45 minutes about their feelings.” The Washington Post reported that since summer the relationship has been on the upswing and that the two leaders speak often and frequently agree on Mideast policy.

It would be interesting to know whether Obama agrees with Erdogan’s policy towards Israel. Since summer, Turkey has expelled the Israeli ambassador, downgraded diplomatic relations and suspended long-term military agreements with Israel. In September it even threatened that Turkish warships would accompany the next flotilla to Gaza.

Only fools will ignore the alarming signs of Obama’s animosity, and Jews are not fools. Each Jewish voter must decide if he or she can trust Obama with Israel’s survival for four more years.

Shoula Romano Horing was born and raised in Israel. She is an attorney in Kansas City and a national speaker