Free Republic

America has no business dictating terms on issues of vital national security to Israel, US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a possible candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, said in the Knesset Monday. He placed the blame on the Palestinians for the recent failure of peace talks, saying “the principal impediment to peace is that, to date, the Palestinians have refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and have refused to renounce terror. “Unless and until the Palestinians can agree on those very basic starting blocks, no lasting peace solution is likely,” he stated. Cruz...

U.S. President Barack Obama sees Israel as being responsible for the failure of the recent peace talks with the Palestinian Authority (PA), according to a senior official in Washington who was quoted by the New York Times on Friday. The unnamed official told the newspaper that the president believes that Israel’s announcements of new construction in Judea and Samaria were to blame for the failure. “At every juncture, there was a settlement announcement,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “It was the thing that kept throwing a wrench in the...

A senior Fatah official said Monday that the Palestinian leadership has put forward seven terms by which they would extend peace talks with Israel beyond their April 29 deadline. Amin Maqboul, a member of the Fatah revolutionary council, told the Palestinian newspaper al-Quds that the Palestinian Authority would agree to an extension of negotiations if Israel agreed to: announce the basis on which future talks will be held; draw the outline of the borders of a Palestinian state within the next three months; halt settlement construction; withdraw Israeli troops from the West Bank’s Area C to the lines held before...

EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton called on Israel to reverse recent announcements regarding construction in Judea and Samaria in order to advance peace talks. Ashton said she viewed with “great concern” an Israeli decision to declare an area near the Gush Etzion Bloc south of Jerusalem as state land and the recognition of Jewish rights to the disputed Peace House in the Judean city of Hevron, a statement from her office said Friday. Ashton also lashed out at the “demolition of Palestinian property and the confiscation of EU humanitarian aid”. …

The brutal winter ebbs at last, giving way to the season of hope, deliverance and renewal. The celebrations of Passover and Easter, marking the beginning of spring, overlap this year, as they often do. Jewish children practice reciting the four questions and dream of finding the hidden Passover mazoh. Christian children celebrate the Resurrection of Christ, decorating eggs and hiding them for a hunt. Nature awakens, and suddenly all things look possible again. Just not for a lasting peace in the Middle East. President Obama, with Secretary of State John F. Kerry as his messenger and chief instigator, badly misjudged...

Blessed are the peace makers. But don’t confuse peace makers with peace processors. The latter think they can persuade the lion to lie down with the lamb. The former are realistic enough to grasp how perilous that is unless the lion has just had a big dinner and a couple of stiff drinks. Sad to say, Secretary of State John Kerry has proven to be a peace processor, one loath to acknowledge that the latest round of Palestinian-Israeli peace talks have come to a very dead end. Actually, they never moved off the starting blocks. Let’s stipulate that Kerry is...

Economics Minister and Jewish Home party leader Naftali Bennett has continued his calls to annex parts of Judea and Samaria, in response to the repeated failure of peace talks with the Palestinian Authority. Following a letter yesterday to Prime Minister Netanyahu, in which he urged the PM implement his "Plan B" alternative to a "two-state solution" with the PA, Bennett took his message to the international media last night, in an interview with CNN. Dismissing suggestions that Israel was responsible for the collapse of peace talks by building homes in Jerusalem, Bennett pointed out that the talks had already ground...

Jimmy Carter weighed in on Friday on whether Jonathan Pollard should be released from prison as part of current Middle East peace talks, saying he would support freedom for the spy if the Israelis were to fully accept the deal from Secretary of State John Kerry. Carter said in an interview that he would agree to the release of Pollard, the U.S. naval intelligence analyst currently serving a life prison sentence after a 1987 conviction for providing classified information to Israel, only if certain conditions were met. “If the Israelis would agree to accept John Kerry’s proposal, if Pollard was...

Ahead of meeting with Netanyahu, president says unprecedented ‘aggressive settlement construction’ detrimental to peace process Israel can expect to face international isolation and possible sanctions from countries and companies across the world if Benjamin Netanyahu fails to endorse a framework agreement with the Palestinians, US President Barack Obama cautioned on Sunday ahead of a meeting with the Israeli prime minister. In an interview with Bloomberg, Obama stressed that time was running out for Israel to achieve a peace deal, and added that he believed Netanyahu had the capacity to rally Israel’s citizens behind an agreement. But if Netanyahu “does not...

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced on Monday that he had canceled an offer for Iran to attend Syria peace negotiations after Tehran declared it does not support the June 2012 political transition deal that is the basis for the talks. “He (Ban) continues to urge Iran to join the global consensus behind the Geneva communiqué,” Ban’s spokesman Martin Nesirky said, according to the Reuters news agency. “Given that it has chosen to remain outside that basic understanding, (Ban) has decided that the one-day Montreux gathering will proceed without Iran’s participation,” added Nesirky. …

Not content to confine his most heinous mistakes to domestic policy alone, Barack Hussein Obama over the weekend reversed decades of foreign policy both for the United States and her allies by allowing Iran to continue work on its nuclear program. Nuclear non-proliferation has long been a principle of the world community. Today that principle is dead. And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup, which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a...

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered his housing minister to reconsider construction plans for more than 20,000 homes in the West Bank. He said the plans, announced by Housing Minister Uri Ariel earlier on Tuesday, would create unnecessary friction with the international community. The US had earlier said it was "deeply concerned" over the Israeli plans. The Palestinians had said they would appeal to the UN, warning that Israel's move would kill off peace talks. In a statement, Mr Netanyahu said he had asked Housing Minister Uri Ariel "to reconsider" plans for potential construction of new homes for Jewish settlers...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed the Palestinians for the apparent stalemate in their peace talks, accusing them of creating "artificial crises" and incitement. He spoke after talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry, who is attempting to revive the peace process. The direct negotiations launched in July have shown little sign of progress and are due to end next April. Mr Kerry will later meet Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The secretary of state has denied media speculation that he may propose a new interim peace deal. Kerry confident Mr Netanyahu said Israel stood by the terms...

The Israeli government has approved the release of another 26 Palestinian prisoners as part of a US-brokered deal for the resumption of peace talks. They will be the second round of prisoners to be freed since August. A statement from the Israeli prime minister's office said the inmates had all been jailed for violence committed before the 1993 Oslo accords. Israeli and Palestinian representatives began direct talks in Jerusalem in August after a three-year hiatus. As part of the process, Israel has agreed to release 104 long-serving Palestinian prisoners. Behind bars The names of the latest group of detainees set...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to meet Pope Francis and US Secretary of State John Kerry in Italy next week. Netanyahu will meet Francis in the Vatican Wednesday, ahead of the pontiff’s expected visit to Israel next year. In Rome, the prime minister will meet with Kerry to discuss the current nuclear negotiations between six world powers on Iran, and the peace process with the Palestinians, according to a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office. The first round of renewed nuclear negotiations between the so-called P5+1 powers and the Islamic Republic concluded Wednesday with cautious optimism from both sides....

The Palestinians might turn to U.N. bodies in response to Israeli settlement building even before their negotiations with Israel have run their course, a Palestinian spokeswoman said Wednesday, reflecting growing frustration over recent Israeli plans to promote more than 3,000 new settlement homes. If the U.S. is unable to halt Israeli construction on war-won lands, deemed illegal by most of the international community, the Palestinians may have to seek redress elsewhere, said Hanan Ashrawi, a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organization. "We are saying very clearly that if Israel does not stop, then we have to move," Ashrawi said...

JERUSALEM (CNS) — Coveted as a spiritual and political capital by both Israelis and Palestinians, the status of the city of Jerusalem has stood out as one of the pivotal topics in their ongoing peace negotiations. snip “Jerusalem is very critical to the negotiations,” said Bernard Sabella, associate professor of sociology at Bethlehem University and a member of the Palestinian parliament. “U.N. resolutions and even the United States recognize East Jerusalem as occupied territory. We are going to have to find a solution set-up which is acceptable to both parties. snip Rabbi Rosen said that although there are some fringe...

Once upon a time I was kindly asked to leave my Jewish high school. It seems that 15 year olds who wear kefiyehs on the anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre and question the legitimacy of Israel’s settlement policy pose an insurmountable obstacle to a parochial educational system based on ideological conformity. Years after my unceremonious expulsion, I attended a university whose student handbook calendar marked May 15th as “Naqba Day”. When Bibi came to speak on campus, riots erupted. My qualms about Israel’s policies towards its Abrahamic cousins were overshadowed by the desperate need to defend Israel’s right...

In what is being described as yet another example of Palestinian Authority (PA) denial of the Jewish connection to Jerusalem and the very legitimacy of the State of Israel, the Presidential Guard of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has claimed the Western Wall as an Arab and Islamic site. Last week, a picture of the Western Wall was posted onto the PA Presidential Guard's official Facebook page with a PA flag superimposed on it, along with the words "The Al Buraq Wall - Public Relations and Information - The Presidential Guard - Palestinian youth know their rights." The Western Wall...

Full title: "True believers: Bibi, Barry, Kerry, and the inevitable destruction resulting from fanaticism wound with fantasy" Standing next to US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday morning, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni gushed that through his indefatigable efforts to bring Israeli and Palestinian officials to Washington, Kerry proved that "nothing can stop true believers." As usual, the cognitively-challenged Livni told us something she hadn't intended to say. The term "true believer" was coined by Eric Hoffer in his classic work The True Believer from 1951, which Livni has obviously not read. Hoffer's epic study of the psychological roots of...