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A number of people have written to me to tell me Brzezinski, either is not on Obama's foreign team or is just one member of it. Ever since Brzezinski introduced Obama last summer, Brzezinski has remained in the background for fear of alienating Obama's Jewish support. It makes little difference because all the others on the team are generally in agreement with his policies. Now Lee Hamilton has officially joined the team. And as you know Hamilton and Brzezinski are joined at the hip. They both were on the Iraq Study Group and they both signed a letter among others,...

Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday warned of “serious implications” if U.S. President-elect Donald Trump follows through with his election promise to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. "Moving the embassy will have serious consequences not only for the Palestinian people, but also for the legitimacy of the entire international struggle against the occupation," he told a visiting delegation from the leftist Meretz party, according to Army Radio. At the same time, Abbas said he does not believe that Trump would actually follow through with the move. "We are acting with patience and...

Prior to the UN Security Council vote on anti-Israeli settlement resolution 2334, US Secretary of State John Kerry met with a Palestinian delegation in early December in Washington to discuss the draft, agreeing to cooperate, according to transcripts released by Egyptian daily Al-Youm Al-Saba'a. According to the report, Kerry along with US National Security Adviser Susan Rice, met with Secretary General of the PLO Executive Committee Saeb Erkat and Majed Faraj, head of the Palestinian Authority's General Intelligence Service. The reported transcripts reflect statements by numerous Israeli officials claiming that the resolution was orchestrated by the Obama administration. The source...

Over the Christmas weekend, Chicago surpassed the 750-murder mark for 2016. But as blacks lay dying on the streets of Chicago’s South and West Sides, a Black Lives Matter offshoot is more interested in traveling overseas to learn “resistance” from terrorists. The Dream Defenders bills itself as “an uprising of communities in struggle, shifting culture through transformational organizing.” But an investigation conducted by the Haym Salomon Center reveals the group’s embrace of anti-Semitism and collaboration with a State Department-designated terror group. In August, Black Lives Matter singled out Israel for condemnation, declaring it an “apartheid” state engaged in “genocide.” These...

As Newt Gingrich said in 2011, “The Palestinians are an invented people.” In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization was formed to liberate Palestine through armed struggle. But it took years for the notion of a Palestinian people to crystalize. In 1967, they were not recognized as such, nor were they considered a party to the conflict. Security Council Resolution 242 passed after the ’67 war, made no mention of them. The US as a matter of policy, promoted the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and forced Israel to accept them in peace discussions at the Madrid Conference...

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says he is willing to work with President-elect Donald Trump to reach a two-state solution to the conflict with Israel. Abbas spoke Saturday at an event marking the anniversary of his Fatah party. He said "We want to emphasize our willingness to work with the newly-elected American administration... to achieve peace... based on a two-state solution." Abbas thanked the U.S. for its U.N. abstention vote last week, which allowed the Security Council to adopt a resolution declaring Israeli settlements in territory claimed by Palestinians illegal.

Perhaps sensing that he would soon have to relinquish his position as America’s worst ex-president, Jimmy Carter reminded everyone last month how he earned the title with yet another call for the U.S. to recognize a Palestinian state. Carter’s call is a departure from American diplomacy, which insists, per UN Resolution 338, that an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement can only be reached through negotiations “between the parties.” Carter’s presidency was mired in bad foreign policy decisions, and his post-presidency has been marred with excusing terrorism, attempting to revise history, and meddling in the affairs of every subsequent occupant of the White...

Hanan Ashwari has for decades been the most recognizable face of the Palestinian government in the American media. As was clear this morning, she is also the face of Palestinian rejectionism of the very basis of the existence of the State of Israel. Ashwari appeared on CNN after David Keyes, Netanyahu’s spokesman, said that the real barrier to peace is Palestinian rejection of Israel as a Jewish state. Ashwari expressed that rejection in clear terms: “we cannot a accept religion for any state.” Emphasizing her point, she twice mockingly described Israel as wanting Palestinians “to become Zionists suddenly.” View the...

It took eight years of backbiting and pretending they got along for relations between President Barack Obama’s administration and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to finally hit rock bottom. Though they’ve clashed bitterly before, mostly notably over Iran, the two governments seemed further apart than ever after a speech Wednesday by Secretary of State John Kerry and last week’s United Nations resolution. The key question for the Obama administration, newly willing to air grievances with Israel on live television, is why now? …

BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union has joined the outgoing U.S. administration in defending the two-state solution as the best way to achieve lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. A spokeswoman for the 28-nation bloc reiterated the EU's support for the two-state solution on Thursday, the day after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry tore into Israel for settlement-building.

A spokesperson for Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallström has hit back at a Jewish human rights organization ranking some of her comments among the most anti-Semitic or anti-Israel remarks of 2016. The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), which is headquartered in Los Angeles, lists the Swedish minister's comments in eighth place in its ranking of the “ten worst global anti-Semitic/anti-Israel incidents”. […] A spokesperson for the Swedish foreign minister hit back at the center on Wednesday. “The list is clearly not serious,” wrote Erik Wirkensjö in an e-mail to public broadcaster SVT. “It mixes up anti-Semitism and criticism of the State...

John F. Kerry was late to his own party. Staffers, journalists and other officials were gathered in the ornate Benjamin Franklin salon at the State Department on Dec. 14 for early Christmas festivities. But the secretary of State was nowhere to be seen. Kerry was on the telephone to various world leaders, trying to find out about a major diplomatic meeting — from which the United States had been excluded. The gathering, which sought to broker a resolution to the devastating Syrian conflict, took place six days later in Moscow and involved the foreign ministers of Russia, Iran and Turkey.

The Palestinian Authority's Central Bureau of Statistics says the number of Jews and Arabs will be equal in "historical Palestine" - the area between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea - by the end of 2017, according to Kol Yisrael government radio. The bureau's forecast is based on an estimated three million Arabs in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem, nearly two million in Gaza and 1.5 million within the 1949 Armistice Line....

On Dec. 21, amid his morning workout, an afternoon round of golf and a family dinner with friends, President Obama interrupted his Hawaii vacation to consult by phone with his top national security team in Washington. Egypt had introduced a resolution at the U.N. Security Council condemning Israeli settlements as illegal, and a vote was scheduled for the next day. The idea had been circulating at the council for months, but the abrupt timing was a surprise. Obama was open to abstaining, he said on the call, provided the measure was “balanced” in its censure of terrorism and Palestinian violence...

French MP Meir Habib called his country’s hosting a Paris “peace conference” next month to which neither Israel nor the Palestinian Authority were invited to be a “disgrace.” “This conference is a disgrace. It isn’t a peace conference. It’s an international disgrace. President Obama failed a thousand percent in everything he did in the Middle East. He left 400,000 people to die in Syria, and all of their murderers will go free. Now a few days before the end of his term, he wants to go to this conference to force Israel back to the ’67 borders, the ‘Auschwitz borders,’”...

Secretary of State John Kerry delcared Wednesday that Israel "can either be Jewish or democratic" but "it cannot be both." Here's a transcript: "The truth is that trends on the ground, violence, terrorism, settlement expansion and the seemingly endless occupation, they are combining to destroy hopes for peace on both sides and increasingly cementing any reversible -- an irreversible one state reality that most people do not actually want. Today, there are a similar number of Jews and Palestinians living between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea. They have a choice. They can choose to live together in one...

Report: Kerry met with Palestinian officials to orchestrate UN anti-settlement resolution in December (full title) Additional proof the Obama Administration orchestrated UN resolution released by Egypt; Transcripts of meeting between Kerry, Rice and Palestinian leadership; France claims no agenda in passing additional UN Security Council Resolution United States Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to lay out a framework for the peace process during a speech on Wednesday as the Obama Administration continues its efforts for pushing its agenda, while it can, ahead of a Trump administration. Kerry will deliver his address from the State Department ahead of the...

"I wish to bring before you King David's response to the Security Council's recent resolution regarding Judea and Samaria." So said Rabbi Zalman Melamed on Monday, speaking before hundreds of students and guests at a Hanukkah candle-lighting in the presence of Israel's President Reuven Rubi Rivlin.

The Swedish government has welcomed Friday’s UN resolution calling for Israel to end illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, with Foreign Minister Margot Wallström calling the decision “very positive”. […] In a statement, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the resolution “shameful”. Sweden is scheduled to join the security council for two years starting in January 2017, and will chair the council during that month. …

UNSC resolution was the removal of all Israeli claims to the most holy Jewish sites placing them at the feet of the Palestinians The UNSC vote was not about “settlements.” It was an Arab subterfuge, a trap into which the United States, the UK, New Zealand and other naïve or cynical diplomats took an active role. It was all smoke and mirrors, a con trick holding up the settlement issue to dazzle the voters while the real intent was to disown Israel of territories to which they have genuine claim and turn them into “illegally occupied Palestinian territory.”