Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — Lebanese media outlets as well as Saudi Arabia’s London-based Asharq Al-Awsat have reported that Israel’s freedom of action against Iran in Syria is dwindling as Russia makes changes to its policy vis-à-vis its relationship with Israel. But this so-called reversal of policy by Russia may be manufactured news and does not necessarily reflect reality. Micky Aharonson, former head of the foreign-relations directorate of the National Security Council in the Prime Minister’s Office and an expert on Russia at the Jerusalem Institute for Strat...
(JNS) — “Iran will never get a nuclear weapon on my watch.” At least this is what U.S. President Joe Biden told Israeli President Reuven Rivlin during his visit to the White House on Monday. Biden also reportedly said Israel has the right to decide how to proceed with Iran. This message was meant to assuage Israel’s fears over the U.S. approach to preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. But Iran’s recent announcement that it has started enriching uranium at 60 percent, and Tehran’s continued use of proxies to spread terror and instabi...
(JNS) — Qatar prides itself on its high level of education and yet its own textbooks clearly do not meet accepted international standards, according to a new report by IMPACT-se, a research institute that analyzes schoolbooks and curricula within the prism of UNESCO-defined standards on peace and tolerance. Its updated report evaluates the current Qatari curriculum in conjunction with the London-based think tank the Henry Jackson Society. Some of the key findings show that hatred towards Jews and clear anti-Semitism remain central themes of t...
(JNS) — If body language is any indicator, then last week’s meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken did not go as well as they intended during their joint press conference. While they openly discussed issues pertaining to Gaza and the Palestinians, it is without a doubt that in their earlier private meeting, they discussed the issue of Iran as well. Blinken’s remarks signal that the scolding and finger-wagging of the Obama administration is back after a four-year hiatus during the Tru...
(JNS) — The Biden administration has come under withering criticism in the United States and Israel for its poor handling of the current situation in the Middle East. On Tuesday, U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price failed to mention Hamas or Islamic Jihad as terrorist organizations targeting Israeli civilians in his statement to the press. “Israel has the right to defend itself and to respond to rocket attacks,” Price said in his daily briefing. “The Palestinian people also have the right to safety and security just as Israeli...
(JNS) — In a ground-breaking move and in response to the lack of change in the Palestinian Authority school curriculum and the continued insertion of anti-Semitism, hate and incitement to violence and martyrdom in its textbooks, the Norwegian parliament endorsed a cut last week in aid to the P.A. In 2018, the United Kingdom commissioned a report on Palestinian textbooks from the Germany-based Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, which then published a report that was found to be riddled with mistakes. The European Union t...
(JNS) - Hebron's Jewish residential section may finally witness new construction underway for more housing units. Pending a decision by the Jerusalem District Court, two areas of Hebron - the Hizkiyahu neighborhood on the site of the old central bus station and the site of the marketplace - are slated to undergo a facelift to make room for young couples. Predictably, there are those who don't want to see a growing Jewish presence in Hebron and have made an effort to prevent the project from prog...
(JNS) — With razor-thin margins separating U.S. President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, the contentious race for the White House has yet to produce a clear victor. Around the globe, all eyes are on the elections, but in Israel in particular, questions are being asked over what the next four years could look like with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israel’s new relationship with Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Sudan. Yonatan Freeman, an international relations expert at the Hebrew University of Jer...
(JNS) - Khartoum, Sudan, was the setting for the infamous Arab League summit in 1967 that produced the Khartoum Resolution known as "The Three Nos": no negotiations with Israel, no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel. Now, 53 years later, Sudan has agreed to change these negatives into positives, meaning three yeses. According to Ilan Berman, vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council, the Sudan-Israel agreement "is a significant development because it provides added momentum...
(JNS) - An astonishing level of criticism from Arab commentators, intellectuals and journalists has been leveled at the Palestinian leadership in recent weeks in response to its condemnations against countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, which have just signed normalization agreements with Israel. Five years ago, it seemed that the Palestinians could never fall out of grace with Americans, the Arab world or even the Europeans. These days, all this seems to have changed....
(JNS) - Israelis are, of course, just getting used to the idea of having friendly relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain after signing normalization deals with each country in recent days. Even more intriguing to many Israelis is the fact that these Gulf states have expressed their dissatisfaction with the Palestinians' behavior in vetoing every peace overture in the last 20 years. The Kohelet Policy Forum, Shiloh Forum and the Israel Hayom Israeli daily newspaper teamed up to host...
(JNS) - Palestinian textbooks are rife with blatant incitement against Israel, as has been reported for decades. And in the United States, for example, Palestinian children studying under the Palestinian Authority school curriculum learn Newton's Second Law through the image of a boy with a slingshot targeting Israeli soldiers. And Dalal al-Mughrabi, the perpetrator of the 1978 Coastal Road massacre - in which 38 Israelis, including 13 children, were killed, and 71 wounded - is celebrated in an...
(JNS) - A joint statement by U.S. President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, announcing the "Abraham Accord," a peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, is the first since Jordan signed such an agreement in 1994. What does this deal include, and what does it portend for the future? Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told JNS that "the peace agree...
(JNS) — The anti-Israel movement in Ireland has suffered a major defeat. Earlier this month, the political parties working on forming the next government in Ireland eliminated a key bill that would have placed a boycott on products produced in Israeli settlements. Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, told JNS that the bill was “carefully drafted so as to pretend to be about ‘occupied’ territories generally, but in fact would apply to just one disputed territory in the world, which happens to be the heart of the ancient...
(JNS) - Despite facing one of the world's worst coronavirus outbreaks, Iran appears to be continuing its pursuit of nuclear weapons, as well as its aggressive regional behavior. Iran has already acknowledged that it has increased its uranium stockpile, which now stands at more than 1,000 kilograms, and is also using a greater number of advanced centrifuges for enrichment. Based on these developments, experts believe that Iran's breakout time to produce a nuclear weapon may have now been reduced...
JNS)—As the world’s attention has been focused on combating the spread of the coronavirus for the past two months, presidential primary campaign politics in the United States has been put on the backburner. Former Vice President Joe Biden has all but sealed the 2020 Democratic nomination, and has gained the endorsements of several Democratic and left-wing Jewish groups, such as J Street and the Democratic Majority for Israel. Initial polling indicates a close race this November. Nevertheless, given the uncertainty over the coronavirus pan...
(JNS)-The last several months have not been good for Lebanon, as it's been wracked by economic and political instability. Protesters upset over years of government mismanagement, sectarianism and deep-rooted corruption forced the resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri in October, which led to more political paralysis and put the country on the verge of a financial collapse. Seeking to address these imminent concerns, the country formed a new government in January under Prime...
(JNS)-The words were barely out of U.S. President Donald Trump's mouth-and the much-anticipated peace plan to resolve the century-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict for good was barely uploaded to the White House's website-when the doomsayers and naysayers launched their attacks, mocking nearly every aspect of the proposal and condemning it to failure. But the three Muslim ambassadors in the East Room-from the nations of Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates-stood quietly, their silence...
(JNS)—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has perhaps never looked more subtly elated on any previous visit to the White House than he did on Tuesday. He and U.S. President Donald Trump, the friendliest-ever president toward Israel in U.S. history, stood side by side in the announcement of the friendliest vision Israel has ever seen regarding its borders and its future. Relief that the long-anticipated diplomatic part of the peace plan was revealed to the public for the first time was palpable. So, too, was the fact that this as the f...
(JNS)—The announcement last month by U.S. Secretary Mike Pompeo that Israeli settlements are not illegal was either warmly welcomed or hotly rejected, depending on how you interpret international law. Indeed, recently 107 Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Pompeo expressing “strong disagreement” with the State Department’s new policy and urged Pompeo to “reverse this policy decision immediately.” Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, told JNS that Pompeo did a great service for Israel and for truth by stating tha...
(JNS)—As Iranians took to the streets this week to commemorate 40 years since the U.S. embassy takeover in 1979, Iran announced new violations of the nuclear deal it signed in 2015. The rogue Islamic Republic admitted that it now operates 60 advanced IR-6 centrifuges and is working on a new type of centrifuge that will work 50 times faster than what is currently permitted under the deal. This announcement comes after Iran has engaged in attacks on oil tankers and Saudi oil facilities, shooting down an American drone, and, of course, its ongoing...
(JNS)—The big news in Israel is not that Iran attempted to send kamikaze drones into Israeli territory last week or that Israel targeted that terrorist cell in Syria; these are not completely out of the ordinary or even unexpected. Rather, what was quite the unusual occurrence took place in central Israel when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered officials from the security establishment to brief his chief rival, former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, who serves as l...
(JNS)—Despite bringing together a historic number of Arab states and prominent world leaders, the Bahrain economic conference, which seeks to be the first step in the Trump administration’s efforts to bring peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, has been buffeted and vilified, especially by the Palestinians, who called the Trump plan “dead on arrival” and have boycotted the summit. Senior adviser to and son-in-law of U.S. President Donald Trump Jared Kushner, who spearheaded the initiative, opened the two-day summit on Tuesday by calling...
(JNS)-The formal recognition of Israel's sovereignty in the Golan Heights by the United States could not have come on a more sobering day for Israelis. As rockets were being launched deep into the central Israel by the terror group Hamas in Gaza, the importance of the Golan Heights for Israel's security was on full display. In his remarks at the formal signing of the presidential proclamation at the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told U.S. President Donald Trump that the...
(JNS)-After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the Golan Heights this week together with U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk set off a firestorm when he tweeted, "Like it or not, the Golan Heights are Syrian territory. Israel cannot give them up now given its legitimate security concerns. But to recognize Israel's annexation of territory that is not its own is to play with fire for partisan...
