Top Obama Advisors Say Time for Israel To Surrender Jerusalem
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A Washington-based think tank that is viewed as one of the primary sources of foreign policy advise for US President Barack Obama is recommending that Israel surrender control of Jerusalem to an international body.
The Center for American Progress (CAP) correctly determined that the issue of Jerusalem is the primarily obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
As such, in order to move forward with the land-for-peace process as a whole, CAP has suggested that a third party administer and police the city while both Israel and the Palestinians maintain their claims to sovereignty until an agreement can be reached.
CAP expects that agreement would take a very long time to reach, if ever, but that in the meantime the rest of the conflict could be concluded.
There are concerns in Israel that Obama will adopt the recommendation considering his close ties to CAP and his overriding determination to oversee an Israel-Palestinian peace agreement.
Bloomberg News reported that “CAP has been an incubator for liberal thought and helped build the [Democratic party] platform that triumphed in the 2008 campaign.”
It was also noted that Obama adopted many of CAP’s policy recommendations while he was still president-elect.
via Source
Thousands March In Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade
June 29, 2009 by admin
Filed under Moral Decay
About 2,000 participants in a gay pride parade have marched peacefully through Jerusalem.
In past years, the gay pride event in the holy city provoked violent protests, even stabbings, by ultra-Orthodox Jews and extremists. But this year, except for one egg-throwing incident, there were no clashes.
Police said they arrested the egg-tossing protester. Others put up signs and demonstrated in an ultra-Orthodox section of Jerusalem, far away from the parade.
The marchers waved rainbow and Israeli flags and donned rainbow dresses, shirts and headbands.
The parade was more restrained Thursday than a gay pride march in more secular Tel Aviv earlier this month. One marcher scolded another for removing his shirt, saying, “This is Jerusalem.”
Police sources said Wednesday that this year the parade is not expected to stir violent protests.
Police believed the controversial event would run smoothly as leaders of the ultra-Orthodox community - who in past years have led anti-gay protests - decided not to protest to avoid exposing their young people to the issue of homosexuality.
As a result, only 1,600 police officers were assigned to the parade, compared with 12,000 in 2006.
Can 3rd Temple Be Built Without Destroying Dome Of The Rock?
A new Jewish interfaith initiative launched last week argues building the Third Jewish Temple in Jerusalem would not necessitate the destruction of the Dome of the Rock.
“God’s Holy Mountain Vision” project hopes to defuse religious strife by showing that Jews’ end-of-days vision could harmoniously accommodate Islam’s present architectural hegemony on the Temple Mount.
“This vision of religious shrines in peaceful proximity can transform the Temple Mount from a place of contention to its original sacred role as a place of worship shared by Jews, Muslims and Christians,” said Yoav Frankel, director of the initiative.
The Interfaith Encounter Association at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim’s Konrad Adenauer Conference Center in Jerusalem is sponsoring the program, which includes interfaith study and other educational projects.
According to Islamic tradition, the Dome of the Rock, built in 691, marks the spot where Muhammed ascended to Heaven.
But according to Jewish tradition, Mount Moriah, now under the Dome of the Rock, is where the Temple’s Holy of Holies was situated.
Until now Jewish tradition has assumed that destruction of the Dome of the Rock was a precondition for the building of the third and last Temple.
However, in an article that appeared in 2007 in Tehumin, an influential journal of Jewish law, Frankel, a young scholar, presented a different option.
His main argument is that Jewish doctrine regarding the rebuilding of the Temple emphasizes the role of a prophet.
Facts About Jerusalem’s Holiest Site
An inter-faith project launched in Jerusalem hopes to find a new way to share one of the city’s holiest, and most fought over, sites.
Following are some facts about the complex, known as the Temple Mount by Jews and al-Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) by Muslims, in the heart of Jerusalem’s Old City:
* It is home to the gilded 7th-century Dome of the Rock, a fixture of the Jerusalem skyline, and built over the spot where Jews and Christians believe Abraham was about to sacrifice his son Isaac to God before an angel stayed his hand.
The 8th-century al-Aqsa mosque also stands on the stone esplanade. Judaism’s Western Wall, a Jewish prayer site believed to be a perimeter wall of the second biblical Temple, is below.
* In Muslim tradition, Mohammad ascended into heaven from the rock at the center of what is now the Dome of the Rock.
* The Temple Mount is the most sacred site in Judaism. Jews believe biblical King Solomon built the first temple there 3,000 years ago. A second temple was razed by the Romans in AD 70.
* Muslims see al-Haram al-Sharif as the third holiest site after Mecca and Medina in modern Saudi Arabia.
* Christians believe Jesus taught at the temple during the Roman period and drove out money-changers.
Netanyahu Calls for Conditional Palestinian State
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed an independent Palestinian state beside Israel for the first time on Sunday, dramatically reversing himself in the face of U.S. pressure but attaching conditions the Palestinians swiftly rejected.
A week after President Barack Obama’s address to the Muslim world, Netanyahu said the Palestinian state would have to be unarmed and recognize Israel as the Jewish state — a condition amounting to Palestinian refugees giving up the goal of returning to Israel.
Netanyahu, in an address seen as his reponse to Obama, refused to heed the U.S. call for an immediate freeze of construction on lands Palestinians claim for their future state. He also said the holy city of Jerusalem must remain under Israeli sovereignty.
Senior Palestinian officials Saeb Erekat said the plan “closed the door” to negotiations.
Still, it was a dramatic transformation for a man raised on a fiercely nationalistic ideology and who has spent a two-decade political career criticizing peace efforts.
“I call on you, our Palestinian neighbors, and to the leadership of the Palestinian Authority: Let us begin peace negotiations immediately, without preconditions,” he said, calling on the wider Arab world to work with him.
Half of Israelis Back Immediate Strike on Iran
Just over half of Israelis back an immediate attack on the nuclear facilities of arch-foe Iran but the rest want to wait and see the results of US diplomacy, according to a poll released on Sunday.
Fifty-one percent support an immediate Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, while 49 percent believe the Jewish state should await the outcome of efforts by the US administration to engage with the Islamic republic, said the survey published by Tel Aviv University.
But 74 percent of those questioned said they believe that new US President Barack Obama’s efforts will not stop the Islamic republic from acquiring atomic weapons.
Israel, widely considered to be the Middle East’s sole if undeclared nuclear armed state, considers Iran its arch-foe after repeated statements by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the Jewish state to be “wiped off the map.”
Israel and Washington accuse Iran of trying to develop atomic weapons under the guise of a civilian nuclear programme, a charge Tehran has repeatedly denied.
via Half of Israelis back immediate strike on Iran.
Report: US Promises Jerusalem Will Be Palestines Capital
The Palestinian Authority (PA) has been assured that US President Barack Obama’s new peace plan includes a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem.
PA officials told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot that the US intends to stand by its policy that East Jerusalem should be the Palestinian capital. Obama is expected to roll out the peace plan in Cairo on 4 June.
The plan also calls for Israel to freeze settlement activity, and a clear timetable for the establishment of a Palestinian state, negotiated under the framework of the Arab Peace Initiative. The newspaper said the US is expected to ask Arab states also to set a timeline for establishing normalized diplomatic ties with Israel.
Meanwhile US Senators sent a letter to Obama asking him to take into account “risks [Israel will] face in any peace agreement.”
The letter, signed by 76 US senators, or more than three quarters of the upper chamber of the congress, urged Obama to “continue to insist on the absolute Palestinian commitment to ending terrorist violence and to building the institutions necessary for a viable Palestinian state living side-by-side, in peace with the Jewish state of Israel,” according to Yediot.
A similar letter is reported to have garnered 200 signatures in the House of Representatives.
On his two-day visit to Washington, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did face demands to halt construction of settlements in the occupied West Bank.
via Report: US Promised Jerusalem Will Be Palestine^s Capital.
Jordanian King Says US Pushing 57 State Peace Plan
The United States is promoting a peace plan for the Middle East involving a “57-state solution” in which the entire Muslim world would recognize Israel, Monday’s Times of London quoted Jordan’s King Abdullah as saying.
“We are offering a third of the world to meet them with open arms,” the king said. “The future is not the Jordan River or the Golan Heights or the Sinai, the future is Morocco in the Atlantic and Indonesia in the Pacific. That is the prize.” But he warned: “If we delay our peace negotiations, then there is going to be another conflict between Arabs or Muslims and Israel in the next 12-18 months.” The newspaper said the king had hatched the plan with President Barack Obama in Washington in April. Details are likely to be thrashed out in a series of diplomatic moves this month, including Obama’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington next week. “What we are talking about is not Israelis and Palestinians sitting at the table, but Israelis sitting with Palestinians, Israelis sitting with Syrians, Israelis sitting with Lebanese,” said the king. While Palestinians seek a state in their long-running conflict with Israel, Syria wants the return of the Golan Heights, seized by Israel in a
via Jordanian king says US pushing new peace plan.
Iran Deploys Missile Batteries Fearing Israel, US Attack
May 12, 2009 by admin
Filed under Stories Of Interest
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps has deployed mobile ground-to-air and ground-to-sea missile batteries in the Strait of Hormuz and other areas in the Persian Gulf, an Iranian source was quoted by Al Watan as saying on Tuesday.
The source told the Saudi-based newspaper that the move was made after Iran received reports that the US and Israel were preparing to attack the Islamic republic’s nuclear facilities.
Will Israel Be Forced To Face The World Alone?
As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu prepares for his visit to the United States next week, warnings abound that the Obama Administration’s policies will leave Israel to face Iran and Hamas alone.
The warnings are summed up in recent articles by the West’s two main pro-Israel female commentators: Melanie Phillips and Caroline Glick. Writing in the Spectator (United Kingdom) last week, Philips warns that “Obama is attempting to throw Israel under the Islamist bus.” She cites the report that Obama’s National Security Adviser told a European foreign minister that Obama will be ‘forceful’ with Israel, and plans to impose, with the EU and moderate Arab states, “a satisfactory endgame solution” upon Israel.
“This is all not only evil,” Phillips says, “but exceptionally stupid… The Arab states are beside themselves with anxiety about Iran. They want it to be attacked and its nuclear programme stopped. They are desperately fearful that the Obama administration might have decided that it can live with a nuclear Iran… A Palestine state will be Iran, in the sense that it will be run by Hamas as a proxy for the Islamic Republic. The idea that a Palestine state will not compromise Israel’s security is ludicrous.”
American Jewry: Spineless
After expressing incredulity at the American demands for further Israeli concessions in the light of the utter failure of the Disengagement, Phillips writes that U.S. Jews are reacting “with a total absence of spine… Almost eighty per cent of American Jews voted for Obama despite the clear and present danger he posed to Israel. They did so because their liberal self-image was and is more important to them than the Jewish state whose existence and security cannot be allowed to jeopardise their standing with America’s elite.”
Netanyahu must therefore take Israel’s message to “the ordinary American people,” she concludes: “They do value and support Israel. They do understand that if Israel is thrown under that bus, the west is next. And it is they to whom Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu must now appeal, over the heads of the politicians and the media and certainly America’s Jews and everyone else. He must tell the American people the terrible truth, that America is now run by a man who is intent on sacrificing Israel for a reckless and amoral political strategy which will put America and the rest of the free world at risk.”
Peres: Israel Supports Two-State Solution, Iran Engagement
Israel is on board with key elements of President Obama’s agenda in the Middle East, Israeli President Shimon Peres told reporters Tuesday after meeting with Obama at the White House.
He said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would support a two-state solution to achieve peace between the Israelis and Palestinians and that if Obama wants to engage Iran, the Israelis are willing to back him.
“Mr. Netanyahu said he will cooperate (with) the commitments of the previous (Israeli) government. The previous government accepted the roadmap (to Middle East peace). In the roadmap, you’ll find the attitude to the two-state solution,” Peres said.
He said Netanyahu is ready to “start to negotiate right away” and does not want to “govern the Palestinian people.”
The Tuesday sit-down was meant to lay the groundwork for a meeting later this month with Netanyahu which the U.S. president hopes will lead to a resumption of the Middle East peace process.
The White House released a statement Tuesday noting that Peres and Obama discussed issues “including the pursuit of a comprehensive peace in the Middle East and Iran’s nuclear program” and saying Obama looks forward to the meeting with Netanyahu.
Peres, more moderate than Netanyahu, had been downplaying the new Israeli leader’s previous refusal to endorse the “two-state solution” that has been the foundation of U.S. policy since early in the Bush administration.
The push for a two-state solution was also at the heart of a political flap Tuesday over the tone the administration was taking with its top ally in the Middle East.
Netanyahu Considering Land-For-Iran
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly contemplating making a deal with the Obama administration in an effort to encourage a more forceful American response to the Iranian regime.
According to The Jerusalem Post Thursday, Netanyahu may agree to some form of implementation of the so-called Arab peace plan in exchange for an American pledge to more robustly oppose Tehran’s nuclear program.
This Arab plan calls for Israel to withdraw from all land it has controlled since the Six Day War - including Judea, Samaria, the Dead Sea/Jordan Valley and the Golan Heights - and the granting of blanket rights for all “Palestinian” “refugees” to “return home.”
In exchange for this abandonment of historical and biblical Jewish lands and the opening of the doors to an Arab deluge - acts which will mean national suicide - the Arab states say seductively, they will establish full, normal relations with what will be left of Israel.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has signaled Washington and Europe of the new Israeli government’s intention to revise the repeatedly-failed land-for-peace approach to the Israeli-”Palestinian” conflict.
Netanyahu is expected to face enormous pressure to change this stance when he visits Washington on May 18.
It is already in play: President Barack Obama and his state department have repeatedly if diplomatically rejected any Israeli questioning of the viability of the “two-state-solution.”
Pundits expect that Netanyahu will be accorded a frosty reception at the White House and that Obama’s gloves will come off. Administration officials answering journalists’ questions in this way, “assured” them that the president was looking forward to hosting the Israeli.
In part because of the widespread media speculation, Netanyahu’s policy review team is understood to be brainstorming ways to avoid any form of clash that could harden Obama’s heart towards Israel.
via Jerusalem Post: Bibi considering land-for-Iran.
Jordan: Israel Faces War If It Does Not Agree To Arab Terms
Israel faces all-out war within 18 months if it does not come to terms with the Arab world and allow the establishment of a new Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem, according to Jordan’s King Abdullah II.
The Hashemite monarch also declared on America’s Meet the Press television program Sunday that threats from Iran and Al Qaeda will fade away once Jerusalem is divided.
His position basically echoed the Palestinian Authority (PA) stand that its demands are a condition for peace and are not a matter for negotiation, despite diplomatic and media language about Israel and the PA each making concessions.
The king responded to virtually every question concerning the Middle East by pointing to Jerusalem. “In Arab and Muslim minds, the most emotional aspect is the Palestinian cause and that of Jerusalem. And from there leads all the other problems,” he argued.
When program host David Gregory asked if it’s not a “fantasy’ to think that the problem of Al Qaeda will disappear so easily, the Jordanian monarch answered, ”What — what is Al Qaeda’s platform is — is the plight of the Palestinians in Jerusalem under occupation.”
Abbas: No Mideast Peace Without Jerusalem as Palestinian Capital
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas Saturday called Jerusalem “the key for peace” and said justice and peace would not come to the Middle East without “an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”
Addressing an audience at the opening of an event celebrating Jerusalem’s role in Arab culture, Abbas reiterated calls for Israel to accept a two-state solution, vowing not to resume negotiations with Israel without an explicit Israeli recognition of previously signed agreements.
Abbas said that “any new Israeli government should reaffirm anew its commitment for peace by clearly accepting the two-state solution, the road map peace plan and all commitments reached in previously signed agreements.”
He also stressed that “without (Israel) halting all settlement activities, in Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied territories, there will not be serious and productive negotiations.”
Abbas stressed that the Palestinians want to reach “an effective truce” with Israel that would end bloodshed and hardships.
He called on Israel to stop the destruction of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Palestinian territories, describing this policy as one of “ethnic cleansing.”
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