Free Republic

The United States on Friday criticized Israeli policies in Judea and Samaria during a UN Security Council discussion on the issue. The meeting, titled "Illegal Israeli Settlements: Obstacles to Peace and the Two-State Solution," was informal and did not involve a vote. It was held at the initiative of Egypt, Venezuela, Malaysia, Senegal and Angola. The U.S. representative to the session, Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the UN David Pressman, said Washington is "deeply concerned and strongly opposes settlements which are corrosive to peace," according to Haaretz. Pressman added that Israeli activities in Judea and Samaria, primarily construction of new communities,...

The State Department is using American taxpayer dollars to finance Palestinian Arabs celebrating violent attacks on Israelis and advocating a boycott of Israel and the division of its capital city. Where’s the outrage? Not in the New York Times, which treats the topic as subject for a light-toned feature article about what it describes as a Palestinian “reality television show.” The show features contestants who “run” for the job of Palestinian president. The Times article reports that “the three finalists all had similar platforms: Boycott Israel. Designate East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine.” Later, the Times reports, almost in...

While the US State Department’s refusal to recognize Jerusalem as being part of the State of Israel is well-known and was even the subject of a US Supreme Court case, it seems that the official US visa information and appointment services website has erased Israel completely. […] Curiously, while the website lists dozens of nations around the world, including rogue states like Iran, with their flags, there is no mention of Israel or the Israeli flag. Instead, two separate listings are made under the Middle East section: one for Jerusalem and one for Tel Aviv. Israel is, in fact, the...

WASHINGTON--A former top US diplomat suggested Washington foment Arab Spring-style Palestinian protests as a method of pushing the Israeli leadership into making moves, a new batch of emails from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton shows. On December 18, 2011, Thomas Pickering, a former US ambassador to Israel who also served as undersecretary of state for political affairs under former president Bill Clinton, emailed Clinton a recommendation to spark Palestinian demonstrations, led by female protesters, to push Jerusalem into talks. Upon receiving the message, Clinton asked an aide to print it out. Without detailing how the US would spark these...

Palestinian Authority’s envoy to Canada was told to leave the country after she tweeted a link to a video urging a “war" to destroy Jews.” The Palestinian Authority envoy to Canada was told to leave the country after she tweeted a link to a video of an Arab girl calling for a “war to raze oppression and injustice to destroy Jews.” The PA official, Linda Sobeh Ali, told Canadian media that she had not seen the video which she sent on Twitter with the notation, ”Check this out.” She apologized but charged that the incident was "intentionally magnified and misinterpreted...

The continuing turmoil in the Middle East makes it crucial that Israel finds ways to communicate with other nations in the region if it's ever going to enjoy peace and stability, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned in a blunt assessment. Speaking to reporters on Sunday as he traveled to the Mideast and Europe, Panetta said the Jewish homeland is becoming increasingly isolated in the region. He said Israeli leaders need to restart negotiations with the Palestinians and work to restore relations with Egypt and Turkey. "There's not much question in my mind that they maintain that (military) edge," Panetta said....

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned Sunday that Israel was at risk of becoming isolated and more vulnerable if it did not take steps to repair ties with neighboring countries and restart negotiations with the Palestinians. The U.S. remains committed to helping Israel maintain its "qualitative military edge" in the Middle East, Mr. Panetta said. But he added that genuine security would not come through military hardware, but by returning to peace negotiations. "The question you have to ask is: 'Is it enough to maintain a military edge if you are isolating yourself in the diplomatic arena?'" he said. "Real...

The invisible economic war against Israel has already begun. Some countries are planning to impose new sanctions against Israeli products, while others will raise tariffs and make trade more difficult. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called this week for the nations of the world to “put pressure” on Israel to force them to make concessions in the name of peace. This is a deliberate attempt to destroy Israel’s economy. This is new warfare for the modern age—before the rockets fly and the tanks roll, and the boycotts and economic sanctions fall. The OPEC nations are using their vast oil wealth...

If nothing else, the Palestinians' UN statehood gambit goes a long way towards revealing the deep-seated European and US pathologies that enable and prolong the Palestinian conflict with Israel. In a nutshell, the Palestinian Authority - or Fatah - or PLO initiative of asking the UN Security Council and the General Assembly to upgrade its status to that of a sovereign UN member state or a sovereign non-UN member state is an act of diplomatic aggression. Eighteen years ago this week, on September 13, 1993, the PLO signed the Declaration of Principles with Israel on the White House lawn. There,...

The Palestine Liberation Organization's ambassador to the United States said Tuesday that any future Palestinian state it seeks with help from the United Nations and the United States should be free of Jews. "After the experience of the last 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated," Maen Areikat, the PLO ambassador, said during a meeting with reporters sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor. He was responding to a question about the rights of minorities in a Palestine of the future....

Israel's largest daily newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, reported on Wednesday that the Obama Administration is threatening Israel to either apologize to Turkey over its bloody interception of a Gaza aid flotilla last year, or risk strained ties with Washington. Israeli diplomats in Washington told the newspaper that they had received a communique from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insisting that the rift between Israel and Turkey was harming American interests in the region, such as affecting regime change in neighboring Syria. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan demands that Israel publicly apologize for intercepting a May 2010 "humanitarian aid" flotilla...

Dems Fret Over Being Seen as Anti-Israel By Arnold Ahlert May 30, 2011 So, what do you do if you’re head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and a Democrat president “suggests” Israel should retreat to its pre-1967 borders, which the prime minster of Israel considers “indefensible?” If you’re Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, you demand Jewish Republicans “pledge to refrain” from making an issue of it during the 2012 election campaign.Ms. Wasserman-Schultz pulled this little stunt during a meeting last week of representative delegates from the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC), and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu....

Here is an unusual press release from the U.S. State Department, first noted by The Weekly Standard and later Arutz Sheva: State’s Steinberg’s Visit to Israel, Jerusalem and West Bank U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE Office of the Spokesman May 18, 2011 MEDIA NOTE Deputy Secretary Steinberg's Visit to Israel, Jerusalem and the West Bank Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg visits Israel, Jerusalem and the West Bank May 18-19, 2011. In Israel, Deputy Secretary Steinberg met with Israeli academic and student leaders. In the West Bank, he met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and other

An Obama administration official, speaking anonymously to the Washington Post, said the administration is open to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood being in the government of Egypt that will likely replace the rule of Hosni Mubarak:The official said that while the administration was concerned about "some elements" of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and other non-secular groups participating in the demonstrations, it was "not ruling out their legitimacy" and place in a future government. Obama was aware that the Muslim Brotherhood and others were in the audience when he spoke of "a new beginning" in a 2009 speech in Cairo that was...

The U.S. State Department under Secretary Hillary Clinton claims that Israel violates religious freedom in the same way as Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and China. The department’s annual International Religious Freedom Report, released Wednesday for the year 2009, placed Israel in the same category as countries “where violators of religious freedom have been noteworthy” due to the Jewish State's emphasis on maintaining the status quo with regard to respect for Jewish legal standards.

Supporters of Israel were probably not surprised at the scolding Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shortly after Vice President Joseph Biden's March visit to Israel. Media reports said that Clinton chewed Netanyahu out over the decision to build new homes in the area that the Palestinians claim belongs to them and their future state, and she stressed that American officials saw this as "a major insult." A State Department spokesman related that Clinton told Netanyahu "she could not understand how this could happen, particularly in light of the United States' strong commitment to Israel's security."...

Shortly after Vice President Joe Biden's Israel visit ended on March 11 in high dudgeon over the approval 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem, US president Barack Obama ordered a consignment of Joint Direct Attack Munition- JDAM already on its way to Israel to be diverted to the US Air Force base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. This step, the pointer to a US arms embargo for preventing Israel attacking Iran's nuclear sites, is first revealed here by debkafile's military sources. US military sources describe the consignment as consisting of 387 JDAM kits for attachment to the...

JERUSALEM – The Obama administration has encouraged "resistance" by Palestinians to protest Israel's presence in eastern Jerusalem, a senior Palestinian Authority official claimed to WND. The senior PA official, speaking from Ramallah on condition of anonymity, said that in recent meetings with U.S. envoys to the region, the American diplomats supported and encouraged the concept of Palestinian protests to pressure Israel into evacuating eastern sections of Jerusalem. The PA official's claim follows a meeting in Jordan last week between PA President Mahmoud Abbas and George Mitchell, Obama's envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At a press conference immediately following the meeting,...

The decision of the Obama White House to pick a public fight with Israel over its interior ministry’s fairly routine announcement of progress towards approval of the construction (some years from now) of apartments in northeast Jerusalem has by now been subjected to sharp and justified criticism for its disproportionality; its bad faith in reneging on signed agreements with Israel; its mean-spirited spitefulness; its dogged attachment to the exploded assumption that “settlements” are the cause of Arab intransigence; its desire to keep intact the possibility of an apartheid state of Palestine that would not accommodate a single Jew; and its...

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has refused to buckle to US pressure to scrap a Jewish building project in East Jerusalem in a crucial telephone conversation with America's top diplomat. Mr Netanyahu ceded little ground to Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, as he finally responded to a series of conditions she set out to end a 10-day standoff between Israel and its superpower patron. The Israeli leader gambled that the Obama administration had lost its appetite for a prolonged diplomatic row by accepting just one of Mrs Clinton's demands in full as he agreed to make a...