White House Gives Up on Mideast Peace

Today’s Top Stories

1. With Prime Minister Netanyahu having left for the US today, one of the items on the agenda is renewing a 10-year defense agreement (referred to as a memorandum of understanding). According to Reuters, Israel is asking the US for $5 billion in military aid to offset threats from Iran. YNet asks, Will US federal budget cuts and suspicious political games in Washington and Jerusalem undermine the package?

Meanwhile, Haaretz reports that Netanyahu will unveil unspecified confidence-building gestures. More at the Washington Post.

Question: Will the Bibi-Obama summit will be upstaged by a manufactured settlement crisis, as previously done by Peace Now and B’tselem in recent years? Any self-serving “embargoed press releases” and enabling journos waiting to stir controversy this week? You heard it here first . . .

2. According to the Washington Post, President Obama has concluded that there’s no chance of Israel and the Palestinians reaching a peace deal before he ends his term.

Rob Malley, the National Security Council’s senior director for the Middle East, said that for the first time in two decades, an American administration “faces the reality” that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “is not in the cards for the remainder” of a presidency. That, he said, has “led to a reassessment not only of what we can do but of what the parties can do.”

3. A historic lawsuit against the Bank of China for millions in terror financing was dismissed. The Jerusalem Post got the scoop on the end of a legal drama which played out over years, spoiling relations between Israel, the US and China.

Astoundingly, the case was actually dismissed on August 27, but its dismissal has been kept under wraps by the parties with no reports about its dismissal to date.

4. Podcast: CNN’s Warped Drive for Balance: Are there always two sides to every story?

5. What Terrorism Looks Like: Next time a headline simply tells you a Palestinian was shot, think of this video.

Israel and the Intifada

• This afternoon, a Palestinian stabbed an Israeli near the northern West Bank settlement of Alfei Menashe. Earlier in the morning, a Palestinian woman stabbed a security guard at the entrance of Beitar Illit in an attack caught on video.

• On Friday, a Palestinian stabbed an Israeli near Shaar Benyamin, in the West Bank. After fleeing the scene, the attacker, Bara’a Issa, posted a video of himself on Facebook taking credit for the attack and calling on others to “continue on this path of liberation and die as a martyr,” before turning himself in to the PA police. YNet explains why Issa and another Palestinian involved in a fatal hit and run turned themselves in to the PA:

Israeli police make formal extradition requests to the Palestinian Authority, including for terrorist suspects, but in the vast majority of cases in recent years the PA rejected them. But it did detain the suspects for extended periods of time, particularly when they are in the ranks of Hamas.

 

The main reason the Palestinians don’t extradite suspects to Israel – even those believed to have murdered or attempted to murder Israelis – is concern that Mahmoud Abbas’s security forces will be seen as traitors who collaborate with Israel.

• Three Israelis were injured in two shooting attacks in Hebron on Friday. Also on a Friday near Hebron, soldiers shot and killed a 72-year-old Palestinian woman who tried to run them over. A video of that incident presumably taken from one soldier’s helmet-camera was leaked and posted on Palestinian social networks, with claims the elderly Tharwat al-Sharawi was “executed.” And on Thursday night, a Palestinian was shot and killed trying to stab a soldier at a traffic junction in Gush Etziyon.

• Reuters: The PA shut down the Ramallah office of an Arab paper that accused it of jailing dozens of political prisoners.

• With so much of the recent violence taking place in the Hebron area, the Washington Post visited the roiling West Bank town.

• The State Dept. says the US expects public 24/7 live streaming of Temple Mount security cameras.

• After declining a request to open a criminal investigation into the Mavi Marmara affair, International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda was told by ICC judges to reconsider her decision. Excellent background at the Jerusalem Post.

• Heh: The PLO launched a Hebrew-language Facebook page.

Around the World

• Madrid jihadists planned to kill Jews in a terror attack mimicking Amedy Coulibaly’s storming of a Paris kosher market in January.

• Munich mayor snubs Israel’s request to cancel city-funded anti-Semitic BDS event.

• French supermarket chain rejects plea to boycott Israeli products.

• White House closes door on Jonathan Pollard aliya. Pollard, who spent 30 years in prison for passing classified information to Israel, is due to be released later this month. Under the terms of his release, Pollard will reportedly be banned from leaving the US for five years and giving interviews to the press. More at the Jerusalem Post.

Commentary/Analysis

• A New York Times staff-ed calls on the US to use military aid as leverage against Israel, especially against settlement activity.

Those steps need to include a halt to the construction of new and expanded housing units for Israelis in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem; new settlements have been pursued so aggressively by Mr. Netanyahu that the land available for a Palestinian state may already be foreclosed.

That prompted Elliott Abrams to call out the Times:

Secretary of State Kerry has made similar statements recently, and it is quite remarkable that such a fact question can be gotten so wrong. First, the term “new settlements” has a meaning: it does not mean expansion of existing settlements, nor the creation of a hilltop outpost of a couple of trailers. There has simply not been an aggressive creation of new settlements under Mr. Netanyahu, and in fact there have been close to zero new settlements.

 

Second, there has not even been an aggressive expansion of “old” or existing settlements. Settler populations have grown steadily, on both sides of the security fence, but the Netanyahu government has very clearly restrained that growth. Settler protests, and the fact that many settlers vote for parties other than Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud, attest to this, but more significantly so do the statistics released annually by the government of Israel. Consulting those statistical reports is apparently beyond the capacity of the Times.

• Credit Yair Rosenberg with the weeekend’s best tweet.

• Saeb Erekat got op-ed space in the Wall St. Journal (click via Google News). The piece is just an expanded version of 10 talking points recently issued by the PLO Negotiations Affairs Dept, which Erekat heads.

• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .

– Aaron David Miller: 4 reasons to expect smoother US-Israel relations
– Oren Gross: Denounce the hooligans who jeered guest lecturer at the U.
– Bassam Tawil: Palestinians: A world of lies, deceptions, and fabrications
– Nadav Shragai: The hand that wields the knife
– Norman Bailey: Israel can finesse global changes

Mavi Marmara via YouTube/Israel Defense Forces;

For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream and join the IDNS on Facebook.

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