Today’s Top Stories
1. Prime Minister Netanyahu visited President Obama to discuss Mideast peace, Iran, and ISIS. Once again, the summit was upstaged by “settlement crisis” manufactured by Peace Now (more on that below) over a week-old tender of 2,610 Israeli housing units in eastern Jerusalem.
Unhappy White House officials told the Jerusalem Post they were caught off guard by the housing plans and Bibi dismissed the criticism. More on the fallout and background at the Times of Israel.
[US] Officials chose to publicly admonish the Israeli government only an hour after its premier left the building, presumably deciding on the language as the two leaders met in the Oval Office.
Related reading from HonestReporting: How to Create a “Settlement Crisis”: Peace Now manufactured a perfect storm of eastern Jerusalem housing, a White House summit, and an Israel-obsessed press corps.
2. According to Israeli media reports, Secretary of State John Kerry is looking to jump-start Israeli-Palestinian peace talks “under the auspices of regional Arab powers.”
In a nutshell, Prime Minister Netanyahu would be expected to “publicly express a positive attitude” towards the Saudi peace initiative of 2002, while Mahmoud Abbas would hold off his UN statehood bid for several months.
3. Anti-Semitic Egyptian activist Abdel Alaa Fattah lost his Sakharov Prize nomination.
Announcing the withdrawal of the nomination, GUE/NGL Group President Gabi Zimmer claimed to have been unaware of Abdel Fattah’s lengthy record of anti-Semitic statements, including a tweet in which he called for the murder of “a critical number of Israelis.”
4. Daily Telegraph Refuses to Place Jerusalem in Israel: Editors hoped to avoid controversy over Jerusalem. They brought one on instead.
5. Freedom of Speech: Just Watch What You Say: Boycotts inherently contradict free expression, yet Israel makes for wacky campus discourse.
Israel and the Palestinians
• What’s it really like at the Bibi-Obama Oval Office grip-and-grin photo sessions? Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank weighs in on the media event, describing the awkwardness for the two “frenemies.” At least it wasn’t the worst of their 12 meetings.
• Haaretz: Bibi and Ban (Ki-moon, that is) clashed over the UN’s inquiry into attacks on UN sites during the Gaza conflict. Despite Hamas hiding rockets in UN schools and operating in close proximity to facilities, the Secretary General still blames Israel. So what would a stubborn Ban suggest Israel do?
Ban said UN facilities in war zones were supposed to be immune from attack. The civilians sheltering there were hostages of those who fired rockets, so it was wrong to fire back and endanger their lives, he said, adding that such attacks contravened international law.
• YNet: Two girls in Jerusalem were wounded by stones and bricks thrown at their car.
• In his first interview since the Gaza crisis, IDF chief of staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz called Operation Protective Edge a success and labeled Hezbollah a bigger threat than Gaza. Gantz is due to step down from his position in four months.
• Egypt confiscated all the copies of Al Masry Al Youm — the country’s largest private newspaper — possibly in order to preserve the intelligence community’s tough persona towards Israel. The New York Times explains:
The article, in the newspaper Al Masry Al Youm, was the latest installment in a serialized interview conducted with a senior spy before he died.
Although all the printed copies containing the article were seized, it was available through PressDisplay.com, an online newsstand, which evidently archived the edition before it could be confiscated. The headline quoted the former spy, Refaat Jibril, declaring that Egypt had never executed a single Israeli spy. “We used to return them to Israel in the context of deals to bring back our prisoners,” he said, according to the article, which may have undercut the intelligence agencies’ hard-line image.
Commentary/Analysis
• David Frum’s assessment of the Iranian nuclear in The Atlantic is must-read.
• Michael Oren warns that Mahmoud Abbas’s UN initiative is more dangerous than Hamas’s military threat. That’s because the international sanctions he seeks through diplomacy aren’t about jockeying for a better starting point in negotiations. They’re about “ending the Zionist enterprise.”
• What’s behind the crazy conspiracy theories about ISIS? Especially the ones tying Israel to the terror group? Frida Ghitis wonders.
• The world’s not buying Bibi’s Hamas/ISIS parallels, but this Pittsburgh Tribune-Review staff-ed may be an encouraging voice in the wilderness for the Prime Minister’s office.
But while the United States considers Hamas and ISIS terrorist organizations, “we obviously believe that (ISIS) poses a different threat to the United States,” says State spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
So, the Hamas thugs who recently executed suspected Israeli “spies” in Gaza are different from ISIS thugs who take prisoners into the desert and shoot them in cold blood?
Such absurd parsing provides cover, if not sickening legitimacy, for the collective scum of humanity.
• For more commentary/analysis, see Ari Shavit (Bibi and Obama may still have a bit of Churchill and Roosevelt in them), Dan Margalit (Obama and Netanyahu’s new Middle East), Mordechai Kedar (The Mideast masquerade ball), Ron Ben-Yishai (The only way to placate the Palestinians), Louis Rene Beres (The irony of endorsing Palestine while bombing ISIS), and Ira Sharkansky (Abbas’s outburst hurts Palestinians).
Image: CC BY-SA flickr/tedeytan, Givat HaMatos CC BY-SA HonestReporting, flickr/Philip Taylor, Gantz via flickr/Israel Defense Forces
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