Free Republic

At the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919, in a flag-bedecked, battle-scarred but victorious Paris, the great top-hatted Allied men of vision and illusion gathered to remake the world and invent the post-Ottoman Middle East. At those fateful meetings, the Arabs and Jews formally agreed to mutually endorse both their national aspirations. This was the deal: The Jews could have an unrestricted Zionist state in Palestine. The British could have Iraq and its fabulous albeit still undrilled oil. The Arabs only wanted Syria and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the Arabian Peninsula. During the first days of...

  Palestine, a Land virtually laid waste with little population  A review of Palestine, before the era of prosperity began with the late nineteenth-century renewal of Jewish land settlement, shows that periodically Palestine was virtually laid waste, and its population suffered acute decline. An enormous swell of Arab population could only have resulted from immigration and in-migration (from Jordan and the West Bank to the coastal area). It is helpful to see the land that was virtually emptied-and why. Dio Cassius, writing at the time, described the ruin of the land beginning with the destruction of Judah: Of their ...

Taysir Kubaa, deputy head of the Palestinian National Council, on Thursday called on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to abandon the path of negotiations with Israel which, he said, does not lead to success for the Palestinians. Speaking in an interview with Hamas's Palestine newspaper, Kubaa said that the Palestinian reliance on false negotiations is wrong, since negotiations are “worthless”, as he put it, and “the only option we face is a return to national unity and enlisting our people to the forces of the struggle.” Referring to the French peace initiative which calls for an international conference to renew peace...

Obama will have left behind a superhighway littered with abandoned allies, broken promises and disdain. President Barak Obama will have only a few months left in the White House. Meanwhile, the Israeli government is waiting to hear if Obama will OK a new military package that would send billions to Israel in aid. This is exacerbated by the anxiety surrounding a possible UN vote on the status of a Palestinian state. November 2016 is the deadline posed on the United Nations regarding recognition, and the threat that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would exercise “other options” if his demands were not...

Divine message? Natural disaster declared, Louvre artwork evacuated as River Seine hits 1982 record - same day as French initiative talks. In an ironic twist of fate, the same Friday that the international conference of the French initiative to force peace talks on Israel was launched in Paris, floodwaters in the capital city reached peak levels in what has been declared as a natural disaster. The River Seine in Paris is set to reach six meters (19 feet) above its normal levels on Friday, causing the prestigious Louvre and Orsay museums to close as staff anxiously rushes to move famous...

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...

Israeli-Palestinian Peace Prospects Why the solution must be regional in nature. May 9, 2016 Joseph Puder    The Jerusalem Post reported (4/28/2016) that “Jerusalem Rejects French Peace Initiative.” It was a reaction to France’s recent announcement that “it would hold an international summit in Paris on May 30 (2016) to discuss the parameters of a peace deal (between Israel and the Palestinians-JP). The summit would include 30 countries and international organizations, including a number of Arab nations, and the Mideast Quartet of the US, Russia, the EU, and the UN, but not Israel or the Palestinian Authority.” Israel’s Prime...

Pushing the 2002 Arab Initiative whilst ignoring the 2004 Bush-Congress Initiative is destined to become an exercise in futility and certain failure The announcement by French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault that France will host a meeting of ministers from 20 countries in Paris on May 30 to try and relaunch the Israel-Palestinian peace process seems to be yet another flight of fancy that is destined to end up where the Oslo Accords and the Bush Roadmap presently find themselves after decades of fruitless negotiations. Who those 20 countries are that will attend such a meeting will make fascinating reading.

CAIRO — The Arab League labelled Shiite Muslim Hizbollah a terrorist organisation on Friday, Egyptian state media said, as tensions rise between Sunni and Shiite powers across the Middle East. Sectarian wars are raging in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, and the League has become a forum for the mostly Sunni Arab countries, led by Saudi Arabia, to air their grievances with Shiite power Iran, the major backer of Hizbollah and other Shiite groups in the region. "The Arab League foreign minister's committee has decided on Friday to consider Hizbollah a terrorist organisation," said a statement from the Arab League carried...

Israel said on Friday that it will reject any French initiative to re-start peace negotiations with the Palestinians. Israel said on Friday that it will reject any French initiative to re-start peace negotiations with the Palestinians. Jerusalem reacted shortly after French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said that his government will recognize a Palestinian state if its efforts in coming weeks to try to break the deadlock between Israelis and Palestinians fail. "France will engage in the coming weeks in the preparation of an international conference bringing together the parties and their main partners, American, European, Arab, notably to preserve and...

UNITED NATIONS — UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has invited Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to a meeting this month of the Middle East Quartet seeking a diplomatic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The foreign ministers of the three Arab countries will join their counterparts from Russia, the United States and EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini for the talks on September 30, the UN spokesman said Friday. The secretary general of the Arab League will also attend the meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly gathering of world leaders. The invitation follows a decision by the Quartet in...

NBC, MSNBC AND NEWS SERVICES RAMALLAH, West Bank, March 29 — Israeli tanks surrounded Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s headquarters in the West Bank early Friday as the Israeli cabinet met in an all-night session to debate a military strike designed to drive him into exile. The attack came only hours after Arafat made a last-ditch promise to work for “an immediate cease-fire” with Israel and after Palestinian security forces began arresting militants in the West Bank. NBC NEWS correspondent Dana Lewis, reporting from Ramallah, said he could hear heavy machine-gun fire and blasts similar to tank rounds. Some of the...

All other aspects… due to the UN are not becoming any better. I will tell you all that in details. First, let’s talk about weapons. The development of long-range ballistic missiles continues. Only recently there were tests of long-range new missiles with the capacity to carry nuclear weapons. So in this area, the progress of Iran continues. The subversive activity of Iran in the Middle East continues, augmented by the Russian intervention Iran succeeds to keep Bashar al-Assad in power. Iran took control over Iraq. Shias militias trained by the Revolutionary Guards are spread out all over Iraq. The government...

“The Americans and Europeans won’t stop this intifada, which will continue to strike at the heart of the occupation.” Indeed, they won’t stop the jihad murder of Israelis or the genocidal incitement on “Palestinian” TV. They will more likely press the Israelis to make more concessions to the “Palestinians.”

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is boasting over the “achievements” of the current terror wave, which Palestinian Arab terrorist groups have named the “Al-Quds Intifada”. The Gaza-based Al-Quds Center on Thursday published statistics regarding the wave of terrorism against Israel for the month of February 2016. According to the Arab organization, during the month of February there were 30 stabbing attacks (and attempted attacks), 13 shooting attacks, five car attacks (and attempted attacks), over 11 firebomb attacks and 10 attacks involving explosives. The Center further listed the following “achievements” of the “intifada”: The torching of a synagogue in Gush Etzion, the...

Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday reiterated his opposition to recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, and also referred to the current terror wave as a “legitimate peaceful protest”. He made the comments at the start of a meeting of the Revolutionary Council of his Fatah organization, attended by members of the Fatah Central Committee. In his speech at the meeting, Abbas once again expressed his support for the French political initiative which seeks to convene an international peace conference. France, which announced the peace conference initiative in January, has threatened to unilaterally recognize the “State of Palestine”...

The wave of attacks lacks not just a name and an ending but also a definite starting point. The violence stretches back so far it has no beginning. The Palestinian terror attacks are endless," a friend moaned recently. The media and general public are struggling to come up with a name for what is often just referred to as "the current wave of violence" - "the knives' intifada" and "the lone wolves' intifada" are two terms that are competing for the dubious honor in the Hebrew press, the Palestinian media preferring "The Jerusalem intifada." But the wave of attacks lacks...

Representatives of major Palestinian Arab organizations call for a continuation of the current wave of terror against Israelis. Representatives of the major Palestinian Arab organizations gathered on Monday in Ramallah to discuss how to escalate the current terror wave against Israel, which they are calling the "Al-Quds Intifada". In a statement released at the end of the meeting it was noted that "the assassinations of our people (Palestinians) in the streets amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity". The Palestinian organizations called for a continuation of the intifada in all points of friction, military checkpoints in Judea and Samaria,...

Like a good politician, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) repeatedly proves adept at inserting itself into national debates. When presidential candidate Ben Carson said he could not support a Muslim president, CAIR gathered reporters to express outrage and call on Carson to drop out of the race. When a 14-year-old Texas boy was detained for bringing what he said was a homemade clock to school that a teacher feared might be a bomb, a CAIR official expressed outrage and sat by the boy's side during news conferences and interviews. And in the immediate aftermath of the December 2 mass...

Deputy Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Sunday once again praised the current terror wave against Israelis, which Hamas calls the “Al-Quds Intifada”, referring to it as "the greatest strategic development in the region" in recent years. Speaking at a conference of religious leaders in Gaza, Haniyeh said the “intifada” has "changed the equations for anyone who believed that the time for the intifada was over, because the struggle and the intifada are not over and our people have the power to impose other equations." He added that the intifada succeeded in less than two months in pulling the rug from...