Today’s Top Stories
1. With the clock ticking on nuclear negotiations with Iran, the New York Times raises a scenario sure to create Israeli anxiety. What if the White House reached an agreement allowing Iran to remain a “nuclear threshold state” and suspend most sanctions, while freezing Congress out of the process? Could President Obama make a bad deal with Tehran while balking at Congressional approval?
The Treasury Department, in a detailed study it declined to make public, has concluded Mr. Obama has the authority to suspend the vast majority of those sanctions without seeking a vote by Congress, officials say.
But Mr. Obama cannot permanently terminate those sanctions. Only Congress can take that step. And even if Democrats held on to the Senate next month, Mr. Obama’s advisers have concluded they would probably lose such a vote . . .
White House officials say Congress should not be surprised by this plan.
2. There’s a lot of anger at New York’s Metropolitan Opera’s current production, “The Death of Klinghoffer.” It debuts tonight, and a planned protest has drawn some big names. The opera’s about the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound American Jew executed by Palestinian terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985. Critics describe the production as romanticizing terror, creating false moral equivalencies, and distorting history. The Klinghoffer family denounced the production; their criticisms will be included in the playbill.
We were devastated by what we saw: the exploitation of the murder of our father as a vehicle for political commentary.
See also Phyllis Chesler, Efraim Zuroff, and staff-eds in the New York Daily News and New York Post.
3. The PLO is trying to create linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the fight against ISIS. Khaled Abu Toameh deconstructs the idea.
The thousands of Muslims who are volunteering to join Islamic State are not doing so because they are frustrated with the lack of progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. They are not knocking on the Islamic State’s doors because they are disappointed that the two-state solution has not materialized.
Kerry is anyway naïve to think that the jihadis believe in something called a “two-state” solution. The only solution the Islamic State believes in is the one that would lead to the establishment of a radical Sunni Islamic Caliphate across the Middle East where the surviving non-Muslims who are not massacred would be subject to sharia law.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Israeli hospital confirms it treated the daughter of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. Officials from Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital wouldn’t disclose the nature of the emergency treatment and Reuters notes that it’s unlikely Haniyeh was personally involved in obtaining the medical permit.
• Unpaid and still homeless, Gazans told the Times of London they have little faith in the Palestinian unity government. Reconstruction still isn’t happening, the first autumn rains left Palestinians huddling in wet misery, and Hamas officials must be worried about man on the street comments like this:
Khaled Salah sleeps beneath a makeshift lean-to outside the ruins of his family home. Two months after the war ended, the rubble has not been touched, and he has little hope that anyone will help him to rebuild.
“Hamas started this war because they believed they could fight Israel. They couldn’t,” he said. “I place full responsibility on them.”
• Hamas is already reconstructing a terror tunnel damaged during Operation Protective Edge.
• Germany gave Israel a nice $382 million discount on the purchase of three missile boats. They’ll be used to protect Israel’s offshore gas fields.
Media Angles
• Is Spanish media coverage of the Gaza war to blame for Spanish anti-Semitism? That’s what one Madrid-based watchdog asserts.
• Serena Shim, a Lebanese-born American citizen working for Iran’s Press TV was killed in a car crash after leaving the Syrian-Kurdish town of Kobani. Press TV claims Shim’s death was no accident and blames Turkish intelligence.
Commentary/Analysis
• The Gaza donor conference was a big charade, according to Laura Dean. Here’s why:
“You have to read the title [of the conference] very carefully,” said Tor Wennesland, Norway’s ambassador to Egypt. The implication was that the broadness of “The Cairo Conference on Palestine: Reconstructing Gaza” made it perfectly reasonable to announce money already allotted to the rest of the Palestinian territories.
In other words, a good amount of the aid is not new money intended for Gaza. Much of Sunday’s conference represented a re-announcement of money that’s already been given.
• When the UN Security Council meets in January, one-fifth of the members will be countries who have no ties with Israel. The Jerusalem Post assesses which members might be inclined to give Israel a fair hearing and who will cause the biggest headaches.
• Cabinet minister Yuval Steinitz got op-ed space in the New York Times to voice Israeli concerns about Iranian nuclear diplomacy.
Not reaching a nuclear deal at this stage must not be considered a failure. It can even be regarded a qualified success, since it would represent the integrity of an international community adhering to its principles rather than sacrificing the future of global security because it is distracted by the worthy fight against Islamic State terrorists.
• Amos Harel assesses the Hezbollah threat to Israel.
Featured image: CC BY-NC-SA flickr/Monika, Klinghoffer via YouTube/Metropolitan Opera, UN via flickr/Zack Lee
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