Free Republic

TEL AVIV – As the debate over Donald Trump’s proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border continues to dominate the presidential race, Israel is reportedly planning to move ahead with a massive above and underground concrete barrier along the entire border with the Gaza Strip. The barrier was revealed on Thursday in a story splashed across the cover of Yedioth Aharonot, Israel’s largest daily newspaper. The story was published with the approval of the country’s defense ministry. Yedioth’s affiliated website, Ynetnews, has the details:

British MPs on Tuesday debated their country's funding of radical anti-Israel NGOs, with several legislators questioning why the government's aid agency is spending so much on extremist organizations which undermine Israeli democracy. The debate on foreign aid at the UK House of Commons was prompted by a petition which garnered nearly a quarter of a million signatures - well over the 150,000 needed to force a nonbinding parliamentary discussion on the issue. That petition calls for the UK government to end its policy of spending a fixed 0.7% of national income on overseas aid, and was launched after an expose...

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1080695.html Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's candidate for Israeli ambassador to Washington, Dr. Michael Oren, supports a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and an evacuation of most of the settlements. Oren, a visiting Georgetown University professor, said in a lecture there last month, "The only alternative for Israel to save itself as a Jewish state is by unilaterally withdrawing from the West Bank and evacuating most of the settlements." Oren, a Middle East expert and senior researcher at Jerusalem's Shalem Center, gave a 90-minute lecture entitled "The Gaza Crisis from an Historical and Personal Perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."...

Orange County prosecutors next week are scheduled to argue against a defense motion to keep them from speaking in public about their criminal case against 11 student activists accused of disrupting an Israeli ambassador's speech at UC Irvine last year. The motion, filed in Orange County Superior Court's Central Justice Center in Santa Ana on Tuesday, accuses Deputy Dist. Atty. Dan Wagner, police and representatives from the district attorney's office of tainting the jury pool with public statements against the 11 defendants. Defense attorneys are seeking a court order that would keep prosecutors from talking publicly to the media or...

The efficacy and threat level of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel has heightened after Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, Former Israeli Ambassador to the US Dr. Michael Oren stated Monday—and allegedly justifies a withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. Israel’s economic, political, and cultural status has already been damaged existentially across the globe, Oren warned, due to the constant campaigns for “Israel Apartheid Week” on college campuses and European divestment from the Jewish state. […] Hamas consciously declared victory in its PR campaign against Israel several weeks ago, after it encouraged ordinary Gazans to become human shields,...

The Israeli Left has a serious flag problem. Well, a problem with the Israeli flag to be precise. The one with the six-pointed blue star. Not the ISIS flag. The Left intensely dislikes people who wave Israeli flags, although I think it would be okay with those radical anti-Trump protesters waving Mexican and Iranian flags. At the Israeli Left's own rallies, like one widely reported recently, one sees oodles of Stalinist red flags, lots of PLO flags, and sometimes one may see Hamas flags, but no Israeli flags. In a few famous cases, the Left's contempt for the flag goes...

Word is going around diplomatic circles that the Obama administration is planning a November surprise for Israel. Here’s what is said to be going on: The Paris peace conference last Friday, to which Israel and the Palestinians were not even invited, will end up exerting enormous pressure on Israel to create a Palestinian state. This renewed pressure will come despite evidence that a Palestinian state in the West Bank will quickly be dominated by genocidal Hamas, which is a threat to Israel and a disaster for the Palestinians. This will lead, in all likelihood, to a United Nations Security Council...

Palestinian tries to stab Israeli soldier, shot dead: army AFP Mike Smith June 2, 2016 Israeli security forces inspect the scene of a stabbing attack at a checkpoint near the West Bank city of Tulkarem on June 2, 2016View photos Israeli security forces inspect the scene of a stabbing attack at a checkpoint near the West Bank city of Tulkarem on June 2, 2016 (AFP Photo/Jaafar Ashtiyeh) More Jerusalem (AFP) - A female Palestinian tried to stab an Israeli soldier in the West Bank Thursday and was shot dead, the army said, the latest in a series of such incidents...

'Justice for Palestinians cannot be attained without the lifting of the occupation,' Cornel West was quoted as saying by 'The New York Times' on Wednesday. The Democrat party is facing a possible dilemma as supporters of the two candidates vying for the nomination gear up for a debate on what to do with its Mideast policy. The Israel issue is threatening to tear the party apart as Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who has mounted a considerable presidential campaign that has earned him greater clout within the left-wing camp, has tapped two individuals to a key committee who seek to...

Bent on destroying Israel, and gripped by vicious anti-Semitism, Baghdad ‘pauperized’ its Jews and forced them to leave for the nascent Jewish state in 1951-2. It believed Israel would collapse under the strain. But the immigrants ultimately helped Israel thrive, and it was Iraq that suffered After Adolf Hitler’s defeat in May 1945, many Nazis melted away from the Reich, smuggled out by such organizations as the infamous Odessa group and the lesser-known Catholic lay network Intermarium, as well as the CIA and KGB. They ensured the continuation of the Nazi legacy in the postwar Arab world. Egypt was a...

BDS Flounders Amid String of Humiliating Defeats How anti-BDS legislation has neutered the group and hampered its ability to function. May 31, 2016 Ari Lieberman    It’s been a really bad month for the anti-Semitic BDS movement, a strange alliance of radical leftists and Islamists who advocate the destruction of Israel through economic and cultural boycotts.  The hate group suffered a number of major setbacks in recent weeks. Some of these reversals represent mere moral victories but others have far reaching consequences that may well spell doom for BDS’s future operations and ability to function.  In May, the Strasbourg-based...

n 2016, the frontline of the war against the legitimacy of the Jewish state isn’t Gaza or Israel’s northern border — or even the Golan Heights. It is the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to terminate the Jewish state by delegitimizing it in the world community. This ugly campaign plays out on our nation’s college campuses, including most recently at the University of California-Irvine, where campus police had to intervene to save (mostly) Jewish women from “activists” protesting a film about Israeli soldiers. BDS-ers, crafting their efforts as “pro-peace,” have had considerable success with mainline Protestant...

The Democratic party has revamped the way it appoints members of its platform committee, apportioning representation based on votes in the primary. As a result, Hillary Clinton has appointed six members of the platform committee, Bernie Sanders has appointed five, and party Chaircritter Debbie Wasserman Schultz ('I wear my support for Israel to work on my sleeve every morning') has appointed four. One of Sanders' appointees is longtime anti-Israel activist James Zogby. Sanders’s choices include James Zogby, a pro-Palestinian activist who is president of the Arab-American Institute in Washington and a frequent commentator on Arab-Israeli issues. On Saturday Zogby...

An angry anti-Israel mob at the University of California at Irvine chased a Jewish student into a building while chanting anti-Semitic epithets after she tried to attend a campus screening of an Israeli documentary last Wednesday, the Observer reported. Second-year Eliana Kopley was attempting to enter the showing of the Israeli documentary "Beneath the Helmet" about the IDF when a crowd of protesters physically obstructed her and chased her into an adjacent building. The angry mob proceeded to pound intimidatingly on the windows and doors while shouting "Long live the Intifada!" and "F**k Israel!" Kopley called the police, who escorted...

How is it that nearly fifteen (15) years after 9/11 none (ie ZERO) of the Islamic advisors to the United States government have shared with our leaders the Quranic concept of abrogation, the definition of “jihad” in sharia (Islamic Law), or the fact sharia obliges jihad until the entire world is under sharia? It is because sharia obliges Muslims to lie to non-Muslims when the goal is obligatory (eg Jihad), and makes it a capital crime for Muslims to teach other Muslims anything about Islam which is not a part of authoritative Islam. This means if American leadership wants to...

Pro-Palestinian activists turned violent last Wednesday night as they protested a pro-Israel movie screening at University of California, Irvine (UCI), and in the process hunted down a Jewish woman who was forced to hide and call for police rescue. At least 50 anti-Israel protesters from the Muslim Student Union and the group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at UCI physically blocked the screening of “Beneath The Helmet,” a documentary about the IDF shown in an event hosted by Students Supporting Israel at UCI as part of a series of Peace Week events. The protesters blocked the exits to the...

A bill that would have banned the Canadian province of Ontario’s public institutions from doing business with companies which support an anti-Israel movement was shot down Thursday, reports The Toronto Sun. The bill, co-sponsored by Progressive Conservative MPP Tim Hudak and Liberal MPP Mike Colle, would have prohibited the government from entering into contracts with businesses that support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. It was defeated by a vote of 18-39, with largely Liberal and NDP MPPs voting against the measure, according to The Sun. Hudak challenged the majority government to adopt the measure and accused Liberal MPPs...

Things didn't go quite as planned for a group of anti-Israel activists, who hoped to force the closure of an Israeli-owned shop in honor of "Nakba Day" - the day dedicated to mourning the failure of combined Arab armies to destroy the State of Israel at birth. Several dozen members of the London Palestine Action organization targeted the Sabon cosmetics store on Sunday, mimicking campaigns by other anti-Israel boycotters - belonging to the so-called Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) - to force the closure of businesses owned by Jewish Israelis. Among them was a Pamela Hardyment, a pro-Palestinian campaigner...

Two wars today are being waged against Jewish students on American university campuses. One is substantive, the other is institutional. The plight of the Jews at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island is emblematic of both. The purpose of the substantive war is to deny Jews their freedom as Jews. As the guarantor of Jewish freedom, Israel is the subject of a systematic, multidimensional assault, carried out everywhere on campuses. On a growing number of campuses in the United States, the only Jews who can safely express their views on Israel are those who champion Israel’s destruction. Those who support...

Perhaps the Carter administration was comparably hostile to Israel, but the passive-aggressive, honor-deficient Obama administration has both caused and acceded to greater danger to the Jewish State than any other U.S. administration since 1948.Yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that he would not be attending the Mideast conference to be held in Paris on May 30, which was organized by France's socialist President Francois Hollande.According to State, Kerry is simply too busy.As a result, Hollande has postponed the conference and no alternative date has been set.Eager to force Israel towards negotiations with the bifurcated, terror-supporting Palestinian leadership, Hollande had...