Once again Netanyahu is caving to extortion. He should not agree to release 1000 murderers from jail even though they have been there since before Oslo. After all, I don’t see the US releasing Pollard any time soon. He has been in jail for much longer and he didn’t kill anyone.
Effectively then, Abbas removes the precondition about borders which doesn’t mean that he won’t insist on the ’67 lines throughout negotiations. Netanyahu on the other hand releases many prisoners which is a tangeble concession and applies a freeze xcept for the settlement blocs which will last as long as the negotiations last.
Naft ali Bennett put it this way:
“I’ve participated in dozens of negotiations in my life; never have I paid a price for the simple right to negotiate. If you want to sit and talk, by all means. I’m not about to pay for this sacred right to sit and talk to .”
Ted Belman
Diplomats: Netanyahu ready to release Palestinian prisoners, Sources involved in talks with John Kerry say move would coincide with Abbas agreeing to back down from preconditions and return to the negotiating table
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prepared to release a limited number of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas dropping the return to the ’67 lines as a precondition to resuming peace talks, diplomatic sources said Monday.(Read more…)
By Gil Ronen, INN
About 58% of the Arab citizens of Israel say that the Palestinian Authority Arabs would be justified in starting a violent rebellion (“intifada”) if the diplomatic process does not advance. A similar percentage advocate an “intifada” by Israeli Arab citizens if their situation does not improve considerably, according to a poll, which was carried out by Prof. Sami Samoha of Haifa University, with the Israeli Democracy Institute.
The views are in line with the call Monday by an Arab Knesset Member, for an Arab intifada inside Israel.
(Read more…)
Egyptians are united once again by the single yearning to rid the country of its corrupting force, Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, and, unlike two years ago, actualize the dream of democracy. There is a sense that something very significant is about to happen with both fear and hope intermingled.
Revolutionaries, vigilant since January 2011, are today boosted by a motivated Egyptian populace of young, old, urban, rural, religious, atheist, rich, and poor in a fevered pitch toward removing Morsi from office.
(Read more…)
Even if I weren’t opposed to American intervention on the side of Sunni Islamic supremacists in Syria, I’d be inclined to agree with the bottom line of John O’Sullivan’s characteristically wise weekend
column: the United States should not act unless we are willing to act decisively. There is clearly no public appetite for doing so. I believe this is prudent on the public’s part.
John seems more agnostic on that point. He packs some telling observations in the thrust of his argument that are very much worth considering further:
President Obama seems to have reached the conclusions that American voters will go no further than supplying lighter and less advanced weaponry to the rebels. Others — Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham, and former president Clinton — argue that they would support a higher level of intervention once the president (any president, apparently) ordered it. But experience suggests that even if that were so, public support would evaporate unless the rebels looked like scoring a victory in reasonable time. And that would be a plausible outcome only if U.S. intervention were bold and substantial…
On February 4th, 2013, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, addressed the Duma, (Russian Parliament), and gave a speech about the tensions with minorities in Russia:
“In Russia live Russians. Any minority, from anywhere, if it wants to live in Russia, to work and eat in Russia, should speak Russian, and should respect the Russian laws. If they prefer Sharia Law, then we advise them to go to those places where that’s the state law. Russia does not need minorities. Minorities need Russia, and we will not grant them special privileges, or try to change our laws to fit their desires, no matter how loud they yell ‘discrimination’. We better learn from the suicides of America, England, Holland and France, if we are to survive as a nation. The Russian customs and traditions are not compatible with the lack of culture or the primitive ways of most minorities. When this honorable legislative body thinks of creating new laws, it should have in mind the national interest first, observing that the minorities are not Russians.
The representatives in the Duma gave Putin a five minute standing ovation.
Notice that he considers that America et al is committing suicide.
Also in law making he places the national interest first. The is what the right in Israel wants to happen. Being a Jewish state must take precedent over pure democratic values in our legislation.
Since he stepped down as head of the Yesha Council, Dani Dayan has been making the case for settlements in quarters that were once off limits to him: with foreign ambassadors, left-wing policy institutes and even in the pages of The Guardian.
Three and a half years ago
Dani Dayan, the head of the Yesha Council of
settlements, and his director general
Naftali Bennett sat with Dr. Dore Gold in his research institute in Jerusalem’s Katamon neighborhood and asked him for advice. This was after the Bar-Ilan University speech in which Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time expressed consent to the establishment of a Palestinian state, and at the height of the contacts with the U.S. administration to discuss a freeze on construction in the settlements.
(Read more…)
In an uncharacteristic action on June 13, 2013, the European Union belatedly earned its credentials for the Nobel Peace Prize it had been surprisingly awarded on December 10, 2012. The European Parliament (EP) passed a non-binding Resolution on the situation in Turkey [2013/26664(RSP)] stating that the Turkish police had used excessive violence in an effort to disperse a group of demonstrators that had been protesting against the planned felling of trees for a new construction project in Istanbul’s Gezi Park in the Taksim Square area.
It was of course well known by this time that the police intervention in Istanbul had led to clashes with the protestors, and that the protests had spread to more than 70 cities in Turkey. Using tear gas, water cannons, plastic bullets, and pepper spray, among other things, the police action had resulted in a number of deaths, thousands wounded, mass arrests, and severe damage to private and public property. Doctors and lawyers who helped the protestors had been detained. Police brutality had been reproved by media in Europe and the U.S., but the Turkish media had remained virtually silent about the excessive violence.
(Read more…)