Today’s Top Stories
1. Diplomats from more than 70 countries gathered in Paris for a peace conference lauded by the Palestinians and lambasted by Israel. The conference was still in progress when this roundup went to press, but France slammed the idea of relocating the US embassy to Jerusalem.
Diplomatic correspondents Barak Ravid and Raphael Ahren were live tweeting from Paris.
Officials in Jerusalem fear a fresh UN initiative two days after Paris conference, though John Kerry reportedly told Benjamin Netanyahu there would be no moves to follow up at the UN. Tuesday is the last meeting of the UN Security Council before the Trump inauguration.
Tweet of the day goes to MK Michael Oren.
Israel should hold summit on status of Mayotte, a disputed French territory, but without France or Mayotte, and declare outcome in advance
— Michael Oren (@DrMichaelOren) January 15, 2017
2. In Gaza, thousands of Palestinians demonstrated against the Strip’s electricity crisis. The BBC reports that Hamas warned journalists not to cover the protests. Indeed, Hamas police threatened an Associated Press reporter at gunpoint to turn over his phones and also beat up an AFP photographer and confiscated his memory card. The Foreign Press Association condemned the assaults.
Israeli media reported that the PA will grant Hamas a three-month tax exemption on diesel fuel the PA purchases from Israel and supplies to Gaza. YNet adds that “Israel will transfer electricity to Gaza in exchange for collateral for monthly payments,” and that Turkey will supply Gaza with enough fuel to keep the Strip’s only electricity plant operating for three months. Hamas’s sugar daddy, Qatar, also agreed to pony up $12 million.
The stopgap measures are all expected to give some respite to Gaza’s electricity crisis, but not resolve it.
3. The Jerusalem Post reports, “A regional court in Germany has decided that a brutal attempt to set fire to a local synagogue in 2014 was an act meant to express criticism against Israel’s conduct in its ongoing conflict with Gaza.”
Would the same court accept that torching mosques is an expression of criticism of Islamic State-inspired terror?
Join the fight for Israel’s fair coverage in the news
4. Newsweek: Israelis Ram Palestinians With Cars: The magazine provides an anti-Israel activist with greater credibility and legitimacy than he would ever have achieved on his own.
5. BBC, The Pope and Abbas the “Angel of Peace”: The BBC claims Pope Francis once called Mahmoud Abbas “an angel of peace” despite its own 2015 report clarifying that this wasn’t the case.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Members of Donald Trump’s transition team disavowed American Jewish billionaire Daniel Arbess, who recently met with Mahmoud Abbas, who was seeking to create a diplomatic back channel to the President-elect.
• IDF tanks fired on a Hamas post in retaliation after shots were fired at soldiers doing maintenance work on the Gaza border fence. No injuries reported.
Ruling out other possible causes for the fires such as accidents or negligence, the report claims that the majority of the fires were set by arsonists who were motivated by criminal, ideological motives. Only a small number of the fires are still classified by the authority as “suspected arson.”
The report provides details regarding the circumstances of the largest fires that were set in November 2016, citing the means with which the arsonists committed their crimes.
• The Syrian army says Israel fired missiles at an airbase near Damascus on Friday morning.
• In an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Jibril Rajoub, who heads the Palestinian Football Association, insisted he wouldn’t back down on getting six Israeli teams from settlements booted from FIFA.
• According to the Times of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have missed an opportunity to squelch UN Security Council resolution 2334 vote by not calling his British counterpart, Theresa May.
• Tweet of the day from Avi Mayer. This photo was posted on Fatah’s Facebook page on Friday.
Palestinian Pres. Abbas gives a boy a photo of himself with Dalal Mughrabi, who helped murder 38 Israelis, including 13 children, in 1978. pic.twitter.com/qmdLCfwn0S
— Avi Mayer (@AviMayer) January 13, 2017
• Mahmoud Abbas inaugurated a new Palestinian embassy in the Vatican and held talks with Pope Francis.
• The New York Times takes a closer look at the future of Israel’s offshore gas reserves.
Around the World
• The Jewish News and Jewish Chronicle unpack Al Jazeera’s continuing series purporting to expose the “Israel lobby” in Britain.
• Racist thugs chanting Heil Hitler threw a gas canister at a Jewish woman, her son, and two passersby in London.
• Police in Massachusetts are investigating the vandalizing of a Cape Cod area cemetery. Unidentified people spray painted swastikas and the words “Kill Jews,” and overturned several headstones. The Oak Grove Cemetery is not a Jewish cemetery.
Commentary/Analysis
• The UN Security Council should balance out resolution 2334 with another resolution forcefully putting to rest the so-called Palestinian “right” of return. Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz explain why in a Wall St. Journal op-ed (click via Facebook).
Conventional wisdom has it that the Palestinians have long ago abandoned their claims to Israel west of the Green Line. But those who have witnessed the chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” at anti-Israel demonstrations know how wrong conventional wisdom can be.
The most flagrant manifestation of these Palestinian claims is the insistence that the Arabs who were displaced during the 1947-49 war, and their millions of descendants, possess a “right of return” to the state of Israel. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his foreign minister have both expressed support for this position. Yet to insist on this “right” means to deprive the Jewish people of their state and subject them again to the status of an oppressed minority—their historical position in Arab lands. It means that when the Palestinian Arabs speak of the two-state solution, while still calling for the “right of return,” they are effectively calling for the establishment of two Arab states.
A new resolution must be clear that Palestinians do not possess a “right of return” to anywhere but east of the pre-1967 lines, in the “Occupied Palestinian Territory,” as Resolution 2334 describes them.
• An anonymous Palestinian lawyer describes A Life of Degradation and Bitterness Under Fatah Rule.
• Plenty of commentaries ahead of today’s Paris pow-wow and related diplomacy
– Prof. Eyal Zisser: France’s irrelevant initiative
– Marion Bernard: France, a legitimate actor in the peace process?
– Boaz Bismuth: Crises and croissants
– Amir Taheri: In Paris, another vanity confab on Palestine
– Matthew Lee: Paris meeting marks to Obama’s failed Mideast diplomacy
– Stuart Eizenstat, Dennis Ross: Here’s what Plan B in the Middle East should look like
– Bassam Tawil: The Palestinian strategy of lies and deception
– Angela Charlton: In long-shot Mideast peace bid, France sees nothing to lose
– Salim Mansur: The bigotry against Israel in the UN
– Rob Berg: NZ government stance on Israel smacks of hypocrisy
– Melanie Phillips: Perfidious Boris?
• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .
– Robert Fulford: Israel finds itself on the wrong side of a new, dark global axis
– Kenneth Lasson: Why Trump should move the US embassy to Jerusalem
– Yifat Ehrlich: Jerusalem is undividable
– Yossi Melman: What does Russia really think of Israel’s alleged airstrikes in Syria?
– Dan Diker: Understanding Israel’s assessment of ISIS-inspired terror
– Sam Westrop: How American charities fund Palestinian terror
Featured image: CC BY flash.pro; supertanker via YouTube/Times of Israel; flag map via Wikimedia Commons;
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