Today’s Top Stories
1. Brussels Jewish Museum terrorist Mehdi Nemmouche planned to carry out a massive terror attack in Paris according to a report in the French newspaper Liberation. The attack would allegedly have taken place on Paris’s iconic Champs Elysees boulevard on July 14, the French national holiday marking the beginning of the revolution and would have been “at least five times bigger than the attacks in Toulouse.”
2. Hamas relations with the PA continue to deteriorate with the terror organization accusing Mahmoud Abbas of trying to sabotage a fragile reconciliation agreement after he accused them of running “a shadow government” in Gaza.
3. Palestinians riot in eastern Jerusalem following the death of a teenager allegedly wounded by Israeli border police last week.
4. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen asks if the conflict in Gaza was necessary. He doesn’t think so. It was a “war of choice” and Israel simply chose badly: Roger Cohen Drifting to Wrong Conclusions
5. UK-based Israeli academic Avi Shlaim whitewashes Hamas claiming “it is time to remove from Hamas the terrorist tag.”: Academic: Gaza War Started When Israel Fired Back
6. How a New York Times column on Obamacare can give us an insight into media misinformation on Hamas: The (Expanded) Conscience of a Liberal
Israel and the Palestinians
• A diplomatic spat has broken out after New Zealand officials claimed that their ambassador had been rejected by Israel because he is also an envoy to the Palestinian Authority.
• The Daily Beast claims that Israeli troops executed captive Islamic Jihad terrorists in cold blood in Gaza. The sources of this information? Islamic Jihad terrorists.
• The coming year, 5775 in the Jewish calendar, is a shmita, when Jewish-owned farms in Israel must be left fallow according to the Torah. The Times of London (behind paywall) takes a look at the implications for Israel’s agriculture, noting that vast tracts of land will be temporarily “rented” to Israeli Arabs:
A century ago, rabbis devised a system allowing Jewish farmers to sell their land to non-Jews for a year. The government organises the sale, typically to a single individual. Last time, it was Colonel Hamada Ghanem, a Druze army officer, who signed a post-dated cheque for £8 billion and took ownership of 430,000 acres of farmland.
• With over 4,500 Jews arriving in 2014, France is now the leading source of immigration to Israel.
• Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al- Sisi has denied an Israeli media report that Egypt will grant land in the Sinai Peninsula to the Palestinians.
Commentary/Analysis
• Writing in the New York Times, Shmuel Rosner laments the demise of the Israeli left – and blames the “international community” for undermining it:
International encouragement of Israel’s left was instrumental in killing it. The outside world promoted the unpopular views of an Israeli political minority, giving the left an inflated sense of its own importance domestically. This illusion led to despair, and then to alienation from mainstream Israeli society – all resulting in a further reduction of the left’s political allure.
Israelis can listen to the views of dissenters. They are used to it. But they also want to trust that their dissenters are still a part of the family.
• Former US Senator and Mideast envoy George Mitchell weighs in on the Mideast. Part 2 of his Boston Globe series argues why peace between Israelis and Palestinians is desperately needed now.
• Jeffrey Goldberg compares the attitudes towards Israel of Democratic Party potential presidential candidates Hilary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren:
I’m now glad to report—only because I’d rather be right than wrong, all things being equal—that Elizabeth Warren has confirmed for us that, on questions related to Israel, Clinton has nothing to fear from her, at least.
At a town-hall meeting on Cape Cod last month, Warren answered critics of her vote in favor of a Senate measure to send an additional $225 million in military funding to Israel during the war. Here is a report on the town-hall meeting from the Cape Cod Times:
“I think the vote was right, and I’ll tell you why I think the vote was right,” [Warren] said. “America has a very special relationship with Israel. Israel lives in a very dangerous part of the world, and a part of the world where there aren’t many liberal democracies and democracies that are controlled by the rule of law. And we very much need an ally in that part of the world.”
Warren said Hamas has attacked Israel ‘indiscriminately,’ but with the Iron Dome defense system, the missiles have “not had the terrorist effect Hamas hoped for.” When pressed by another member of the crowd about civilian casualties from Israel’s attacks, Warren said she believes those casualties are the “last thing Israel wants.”
“But when Hamas puts its rocket launchers next to hospitals, next to schools, they’re using their civilian population to protect their military assets. And I believe Israel has a right, at that point, to defend itself,” Warren said, drawing applause.
• Daniel Gordis recounts his visit to pay his respects to the family of murdered Palestinian teen Muhammad Abu Khdeir and leaves feeling manipulated.
Rest O’ the Roundup
• Islamic State terrorists want to fight Russian President Putin.
• Meanwhile, the head of the Arab League has called on member states to confront ISIS, calling it a threat to Iraq and its neighbors.
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream and join the Israel Daily News Stream on Facebook.
Image: CC BY-NC flickr/Megan Trace