Today’s Top Stories
1. Overnight terror attack: Four Israelis injured in a West Bank drive-by shooting near Shvut Rachel. Security officials believe the attack was carried out by a terror cell and not an individual. Malachi Moshe Rosenfeld, one of the four victims, is in critical condition.
The Palestinian Authority has not condemned the attack.
2. The Swedish Gaza ship, Marianne of Gothenburg, arrived in Ashdod. No humanitarian aid was found on board.
Former Tunisian president Moncef Marzouki and European parliament member Ana Miranda were already deported. So were the New Zealand journalists. Israeli Arab MK Basel Ghattas was briefly detained. Knesset lawmakers may strip him of certain parliamentary privileges.
3. Are Israel and Jordan tinkering with the Temple Mount status quo?
4. HR Radio: Media Failures: The Flotilla, A Skewed Headline, and the New York Times: Yarden Frankl discusses the sunk Gaza flotilla, a botched headline, and the New York Times’s latest obsession with Israel. Click below to hear whole interview on the Voice of Israel.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Mary McGowan-Davis: Like it or not, according to international law, Israel and Hamas as equivalent.
• After the big ruckus over boycotting Israel, the French telecom giant, Orange, appears to have set up an exit strategy from Israel in the form of a new licensing agreement with it’s Israeli partner. Partner Ltd. They’ll likely part ways within the next two years, and Orange will pay a hefty price. Details at Globes and the Times of Israel. The latter writes:
The new agreement stipulates that Orange will pay up to €90 million to Partner, a sizable chunk of which will be used to help Partner rebrand itself in the wake of Orange’s departure.
• Obama signs anti-BDS bill into law
• Tweet of the day, from StandWithUs:
• Israel to build 30 km fortified fence along the Jordanian border.
• One year after Operation Protective Edge, Associated Press takes the pulse of Gaza. People are frustrated with Hamas’s entrenched rule, but what’s the alternative?
“Who is not angry about this difficult situation?” Firi said, waiting at a rehabilitation clinic to finally to be fitted with an artificial leg.
But the people of Gaza won’t rise up — some out of fear, he said. “If I say two words, I may go to prison,” he says, as Hamas has little tolerance for dissent and often detains critics. “So we stay silent.”
• I think this International Business Times headline says a lot about the Palestinian culture of victimhood and the standard of pity they set. Even Palestinians?
Mideast Matters
• The Wall St. Journal (click via Google News) describes some of the confidence building measures the US took to woo Iran to the negotiating table.
We’re talking about the US blacklisting Iranian opposition groups, boosting visas for Iranian students, and releasing a number of Iranian nationals imprisoned in the US and Europe for weapons smuggling.
• Papers are picking up on a Financial Times report (click via Google News) that Jordan is going to set up a buffer zone in southern Syria to block jihadi advances along the border with the kingdom.
But Jordan’s hand is being forced by the shifting military situation inside Syria, and concerns that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the group known as Isis, could grab territory on its border and threaten the Hashemite state . . .
Although an official no-fly zone is unlikely to be established in support of the Jordanian operation, warnings could be sent to the Assad regime that any attempt to strike at the area by air would be met with a response.
It is also unclear how much co-ordination has so far taken place to prepare southern Syria’s existing brigades of rebel fighters for the operation: senior figures in the southern brigades contacted by the FT said they were unaware of the plans.
Commentary/Analysis
• David Horovitz best articulates the irony of ex-Tunisian president Moncef Marzouki’s participation in the Gaza flotilla:
But on the very weekend that a young Tunisian man, poisoned by benighted zealots, gunned down dozens of innocents in the country Marzouki used to run, here he was sailing the high seas on behalf of an Islamic extremist organization, strategically engaged in poisoning young minds, and bent on dispatching its recruits to carry out murder. Does the president see the appalling irony? Probably not.
• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .
– Brian Monteith: Auntie Beeb has anti-Israel bias
– Jonathan Tobin: Why flotillas sail to Gaza,not Syria
– Elyakim Haetzni: Palestinians’ words kill too
– Khaled Abu Toameh: Why Salam Fayyad lacks popular Palestinian support
– Hussein Ibish: Qatar changes course
– Yaakov Amidror: Caving in to Iran
– Elias Groll: Pay no attention to the centrifuge in the corner
Featured image: CC BY-NC flickr/Australian Broadcasting Corporation with additions by HonestReporting; Jordanian soldier CC BY-SA Wikimedia Commons/Issagm;
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream and join the IDNS on Facebook.
