Arab Israel conflict
February 16, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The Palestinian Authority is a fundamentally disordered political regime. Earlier this year PA President Mahmoud Abbas, age 85, entered the fifteenth seventeenth year of his four-year term. Abbas recently made news of a kind. He issued a decree calling for new parliamentary and presidential elections within the next several months. Barak Ravid has a brief Axios item with relevant background here (or here via Yahoo News). Aaron Boxerman’s Times of
»
December 3, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Hudson Institute senior fellow Michael Doran interviewed Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu live on YouTube. This is an incredible — incredibly rich and and educational — discussion. Listen and learn. I hope readers will find it of interest and share it with friends and students with a mind open to the great subjects touched on by Netanyahu in the course of the interview. I will make sure that the whole
»
November 25, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Ivanka Trump credits her dad, President Trump, her husband, Jared Kushner, and presidential assistant Avi Berkowitz for the “fruits” of Trump’s diplomacy in the Middle East, now derided and disparaged by the clowns and fools appointed to serve in the prospective Democratic administration. Ivanka shares a video posted by Amit Deri, the CEO of the IDF Reservists on Duty organization from a supermarket in Dubai. President Trump has done great
»
November 23, 2020 — Scott Johnson
President Trump is one of the most consequential presidents in American history. He accomplished great good under constant attack, including from enemies at the FBI, the CIA, and the National Security Council from day 1 of his administration. I am referring to the Russia hoax, of course, and to the related impeachment hoax, but there is much more. It turns out that Trump’s diplomacy has unleashed previously unthinkable progress toward
»
September 16, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Thinking a bit more about the Abraham Accords signing ceremony at the White House yesterday, I want to salute President Trump. Hearing Arab officials refer to Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu in friendly terms before a worldwide audience is mind-boggling. Trump has done a good thing that continues his great undoing of the worst “achievements” of the Obama administration. In order to arrive at this destination, the Trump administration had
»
September 15, 2020 — Scott Johnson
C-SPAN has posted video of the Abraham Accord signing ceremony including representatives of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain at the White House today. I have embedded the video below. The Times of Israel has posted a brief account of the ceremony here. Everyone involved has an interest in hyping the importance of the agreement, but it is a great and historic day by any fair reckoning. The agreement
»
January 28, 2020 — John Hinderaker
That is how President Trump bills the Israeli-Arab peace plan that he unveiled today. You can download the entire proposal, titled “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People,” here. I haven’t had time to digest the entire plan, but the Jerusalem Post summarizes the high points: Borders: Trump’s plan features a map of what Israel’s new borders will be, should it enact
»
December 1, 2019 — John Hinderaker
The Palestinians want to be taken seriously as a political entity–or potential entity, anyway. And yet they are governed, apparently by choice, by lunatics–Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Thus we have this, coming from the supposedly saner part of the Palestinian polity: “Palestinian academics deny archaeological evidence of Jews in Israel.” Palestinian Media Watch has recorded three examples of Palestinian academics appearing on official PA TV in October and November
»
August 23, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is quite the historian. He received his Holocaust-denying Ph.D. from Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University, as it was then known, before he became Yasser Arafat’s right-hand man in the PLO. As Arafat’s successor in office, he is now rounding into the fourteenth-year of his four-year presidential term. The United States still has a debt of honor to settle with him for his role in the 1973
»
August 23, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Seventeen-year-old Israeli Rina Shnerb was killed and her father and brother were seriously injured in a terrorist bombing at a natural spring outside the central West Bank settlement of Dolev this morning. Her father Eitan, a rabbi in Lod, and brother Dvir, 19, were taken by military helicopter to a Jerusalem hospital in serious condition. The Times of Israel has the story here. Chaskel Bennett brings it back home in
»
August 20, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Paul Mirengoff wrote here about the vile group that organized and underwrote the trip Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib planned to take to “Palestine.” The Miftah factor (i.e., the nature of Miftah) of course remains a deep secret to readers who get their news from the mainstream media. Writing for the opinion page of the New York Times, Bari Weiss is the only prominent exception of which I am aware.
»
August 9, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Janna Jihad–her real name, apparently–is a 13-year-old girl who was born in Florida and now lives on the West Bank. She is the hottest thing in anti-Israel propaganda. Remarkably, we learn from her Twitter feed that she “present[ed] at the congressional briefing on Israeli treatment of US citizens on July 24th at … 1539 Longworth House Office Building.” Miss Jihad caught up with Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib for an interview
»
July 4, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Iraqi beauty queen Sarah Idan “passionately defended Israel in remarks at the 41st session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday.” I’m quoting the Jerusalem Post story here. Jewish Journal has more here, Algemeiner more here. I have posted the video of Miss Idan’s remarks via the UN Watch tweet below. As the Jerusalem Post explains, Miss Idan was speaking as UN Watch “ambassador for peace.”
»
March 11, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Unless one is familiar with the New York Times’s coverage of issues related to Israel (i.e., Alice in Wonderland style), one might wonder at what Michael Schwirtz is talking about in his story “Trump Envoy to Middle East Lashes Out at Palestinian Authority” (accessible here via Outline). Schwirtz asserts in the opening of the story: “One of President Trump’s lead Middle East peace negotiators lashed out at the Palestinian Authority
»
October 17, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Someone or other in Gaza seems to want to get a war on. This morning in Beersheba, Israel, a mother saved her three children’s lives by hurrying to their shelter as a Palestinian rocket fired from Gaza blew up their bedrooms. The IDF has posted the video below. Hillel Neuer adds via Twitter: “This morning in Geneva, Switzerland, I am at the UN Human Rights Council, and they couldn’t care
»
September 6, 2018 — Scott Johnson
We are approaching the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Oslo Accords this coming September 13. The accords of course resulted in the return of Yasser Arafat from his Tunisian exile to rule over the Arabs on the West Bank and Gaza. I think it is fair to say that they have proved to be a disaster, yet Israel has never had a public accounting for it. Shimon Peres was the Israeli
»
September 3, 2018 — John Hinderaker
This is good news that I missed a few days ago: U.S. halts funding to U.N. agency helping Palestinian refugees. I would say that headline is wrong in two respects. The United States on Friday halted all funding to a U.N. agency that helps Palestinian refugees in a decision further heightening tensions between the Palestinian leadership and the Trump administration. A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas denounced the decision
»
