Benjamin Netanyahu

The US representative to the council, Charles Blaha, warned it that a fact-finding mission would sap resources and time as well as push the Israelis and Palestinians further apart. He said the US was “deeply troubled by this council’s bias against Israel”. Italy and Spain issued a statement to the council in which they said they believed that settlements were illegal under international law. A fact-finding mission “will not help redress an overall scenario which advocates for, absolutely advocates for, serious negotiations and a clear political will to carry them on,” the statement said. Austria, however, supported the resolution even though it felt the proposal was not flexible enough.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu swiftly dismissed the council as a “hypocritical” body which had an in-built “majority against Israel.” He said: “This council ought to be ashamed of itself. Until today, the council has made 91 decisions, 39 of which dealt with Israel, three with Syria and one with Iran. One only had to listen to the Syrian representative speak about human rights at the council on Thursday to understand how detached from reality it is.”
Another proof of its distance from reality, Netanyahu added, was the fact that this week it had facilitated the lecture of a Hamas activist at an NGO side event in a Geneva building of the United Nations. Hamas was an organization whose ideology is based on “the murder of innocents.”

Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Friday that he was considering withdrawing the Israeli ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council and severing ties with the body, following its establishment of a fact-finding mission to probe the effects of settlements on Palestinian human rights. Lieberman added that he would convene a meeting to discuss the possibility that Israel will not cooperate with the council in their investigation.
During a meeting with president of Singapore, Tony Tan Keng Yam, Lieberman also said that he would try to persuade countries such as the United States to quit the Human Rights Council.


U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said last month that there is a “strong likelihood” of an Israel attack by June. If Prime Minister Netanyahu delivers an ultimatum, it would give the United States 2-3 months to act or face the reality of an Israeli attack that would almost certainly require the United States coming to its aid, if necessary.

Israeli officials have said that in several months, Iran will have buried so many of its nuclear facilities deep under concrete bunkers in mountains that an attack would not be effective.

The Israeli Prime Minister “has the upper hand,” claims the Telegraph’s correspondent Adrian Blomfield.

“Exuding confidence, Mr. Netanyahu effectively brings with him an ultimatum, demanding that unless the president makes a firm pledge to use U.S. military force to prevent Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb, Israel may well take matters into its own hands within months,” wrote Blomfield.

He quoted analysts and sources as saying that the year-long Arab Spring rebellion in Syria, on which Iran is dependent to maintain the “axis of evil” with Lebanon, Hizbullah and Hamas, has weakened Iran as well as Damascus.

One other factor he did not mention is that President Obama is running for re-election. Failure to back Israel, if necessary, could torpedo his campaign. Moreover, Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney will address the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) convention this week. President Obama, Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres also will speak.

The president and the Prime Minister are likely to show a unified stance in public, when they meet this week, but Prime Minister Netanyahu will tell President Barack Obama in private discussions that Israel cannot wait much longer for a military strike to stop or at least delay Iran’s unsupervised nuclear program.

President Obama ruined his already dimming pro-Israel image last year, directly admonishing Prime Minister Netanyahu for continuing to build homes in what the president called “illegitimate” settlements. In return, the Prime Minister gave President Obama a lecture on the facts of life in the Arab-Israeli struggle.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently has said that if the Netanyahu government attacks Iran, Israel can defend itself against an Iranian counter-attack.

“It won’t be easy,” a former senior Defense Ministry official told the London newspaper. “Rockets will be fired at cities, including Tel Aviv, but at the same time the doomsday scenario that some have talked of is unlikely to happen. I don’t think we will have all-out war.”

Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen)

Speaking at the International Conference for Defense of Jerusalem on Qatar, Abbas said “The Israeli occupation authorities are using the ugliest and most dangerous means to implement plans to erase and remove the Arab-Islamic and the Christian character of east Jerusalem.”

He accused Israel of surrounding Jerusalem with “an apartheid wall and a band of settlements in order to isolate the city from its surroundings in the West Bank.” Abbas added that Israel had made it “almost impossible to obtain” permits for PA Arabs to enter the city and said that visiting “occupied Jerusalem” was the goal of every Arab, Muslim and Christian.

“This is a harshly inflammatory speech from someone who claims that he is bent on peace,” Israel’s prime minister responded. “The time has come for the Palestinian leadership to stop denying the past and distorting reality.”

“For thousands of years Jerusalem has been the eternal capital of the Jewish People. Jerusalem, under Israeli sovereignty, will continue to be open to believers of all faiths. There is freedom of worship for all and Israel will continue to carefully maintain the holy places of all religions.

“Abu Mazen [Abbas -- ed.] knows full well that there is no foundation to his contemptible remarks, including his baseless and irresponsible claims regarding the al-Aqsa Mosque. The State of Israel expects that one who supposedly champions peace would prepare his people for peace and coexistence and not disseminate lies and incitement. This is not how one makes peace.”

Under the headline “Obama’s Dangerous Game With Iran,” the article revealed what many have assumed – that the United States and Israel have different red lines on Iran; that President Barack Obama’s speech against a Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria tipped the scales of distrust from Jerusalem; and Israel and the United States are sharing intelligence – but not all of it.

Not to be forgotten is that President Barack Obama wants to be re-elected, and all-out war might get in his way, although a few pundits have observed that it might actually be an advantage for him if it restores the United States’ stature as a world leader for peace and freedom.

Since President Obama moved into the White House, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu increasingly felt that when the president “spoke about Iran and his opposition to the nuclearization of Iran … the Israeli factor did not play prominently,” according to Newsweek.

Washington and Jerusalem have been in constant contact with each other, and the Obama administration has made it clear it wants to count on economic sanctions to stop Iran’s race for a nuclear weapon. “Above all, the White House doesn’t want Israel to start a war – not yet, anyway,” the magazine reported.

Regarding what the magazine called “mysterious assassins,” one of whom killed an Iranian scientist last month one day before President Obama called Prime Minister Netanyahu, the magazine stated, “Israel has no qualms about assassinating Iranians involved in nuclear research, for instance; U.S. law forbids it [because] drone strikes against jihadist leaders are considered acts of war.”
“A senior U.S. intelligence official says that both sides performed a kind of ‘Kabuki dance’ on the assassinations and industrial ‘accidents’ that have increased in Iran during the past year: ‘The Israelis don’t want to say and we don’t want to know…”
‘”They knew that if we gave them certain kinds of information we’d run the risk of breaking the law. We often held things back from them—satellite imagery and other kinds of intelligence that could have helped them with their activities.”

Mossad chief Pardo’s visit to Washington was aimed at taking “the pulse of the Obama administration and determine what the consequences would be if Israel bombed Iranian nuclear sites over American objections,” Newsweek added.
It has been clear that Israel and America’s “red lines” are not the same because the United States, unlike Israel, has the military capacity and distance from Iran that allows it to wait until Iran has a nuclear weapon, a luxury Israel cannot afford.
Israeli officials have concluded that President Obama has come to realize that Iran simply is playing charades and has no intention of cooperating with inspection of its nuclear facilities.

Sources told Newsweek that it took the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad‘s brutal suppression of protests three years ago and the discovery of a new underground nuclear facility near Qom to convince President Obama to ratchet up sanctions.
He has allowed the CIA to continue its policy of covert operations while he carries out harsher sanctions to punish the Iranian economy.

Israel is more optimistic than before, and the magazine quoted a close aide to Prime Minister Netanyahu as saying, “The rhetoric from the United States today is different from what it was a year ago. Today, when you listen to Obama … you get the feeling the Americans are ready to attack if worse comes to worst.”

The sticking point for Israel is President Obama’s refusal to promise to act militarily if sanctions fail.
“If Israel will miss its last opportunity [to attack], then we will have to lean only on the United States, and if the United States decides not to attack, then we will face an Iran with a bomb,” a former Israeli official told the magazine.

Looking back at the year 2011, the popular business news website chose to sum up the year with a listing called “The 19 Smartest People The World Has Ever Seen” – and put Netanyahu in seventh place.

The list includes chess grandmasters, kid geniuses and mathematicians.

The top three smartest people, according to Business Insider, are business magnate and co-founder of Microsoft Paul Allen, physicist Stephen W. Hawking and chess grandmaster Robert Byrne.

Netanyahu, the website said, has an IQ of 180.

Naturally the individuals for whom these organizations — which have very little indigenous Israeli support — constitute a meal ticket, are screaming bloody murder. Now the US Secretary of State has joined the crowd:

Hilary Clinton slamming Israel

Clinton, a longtime advocate for women’s rights, noted she was shocked at the fact that some Jerusalem buses have assigned separate seating areas for women. “It’s reminiscent of Rosa Parks,” she said, referring to the black American woman who refused to give up her seat to white passengers in the 1950s.

Referring to the decision of some IDF soldiers to leave an event where female soldiers were singing, she said it reminded her of the situation in Iran. [my emphasis]

It should be made clear that neither of the phenomena related to women mentioned are government-sanctioned or widespread like bus segregation was in the US. They are confined to ultra-observant communities (in one case, observant IDF soldiers and the other, hareidi neighborhoods in Jerusalem). Israel’s government and legal system operate on secular principles, and feminism is a powerful force in Israel. I think we can depend on Israelis to solve this one by themselves.

As a feminist and secularist, Clinton should be concerned about the appearance of an association for “the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” that is being organized in newly-’democratic’ Tunisia. Or perhaps she could comment on the report of a ‘high-level advisory group’ in Saudi Arabia that allowing women to drive would “threaten the country’s traditions of virgin brides.”

The issue of foreign funding for NGOs, however, is quite a serious matter, and it is very disappointing to hear the US echoing the frustrated, disenfranchised Israeli Left. After all, the US has a Foreign Agents Registration Act to ensure transparency of funding for organizations in the US.

Israel is a small country and a few tens or hundreds of millions of dollars here and there can have a strong effect on its conduct of foreign affairs and internal politics, and could even tip the balance in a close election (here are some examples of funding from European governments — note that it doesn’t include church organizations or the US-based New Israel Fund, major contributors to anti-state NGOs).

Another example of “anti-democratic” legislation is a bill which would increase the limit on penalties for libel without damage to $80,000 from its present limit of about $13,000. Proponents say that the present low limits are not a deterrent to media assassinations of public figures.

Finally, there is a bill which will change the way the justices of the Supreme Court are chosen. Today the 9-member selection committee includes three members of the Court itself, two cabinet ministers, two representatives of the Bar Association, and two Knesset members (one from the coalition and one from the opposition).

The Court members plus the Bar Association have managed to dominate the committee in recent history, leading to a self-perpetuating ideologically left-wing court. The bill wants to require that the Bar Association members also be split between the coalition and the opposition.

Whatever you think of these bills — and I think they represent a much-needed correction in the degree to which the unelected left-wing media and judiciary, along with foreign-funded NGOs, influence Israeli governance — they are not anti-democratic.

And they are most certainly not the business of the US State Department or the Obama Administration.
What is behind this sudden surge of concern for Israel’s democracy? In the past few days we’ve heard the Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, blame Israel for the lack of progress in the worse-than-useless ‘peace process’, and now Ms. Clinton gives aid and comfort to the left-wing opposition to PM Netanyahu.

My interpretation is that this is an effort to a) pressure Netanyahu to make more concessions to the PLO — anything to get an appearance of ‘progress’ to boost Obama’s pretension of being a successful leader in foreign affairs, and b) to keep Democratic Jewish voters and contributors in line despite his increasingly anti-Israel policies.
In other words, it’s all about November 2012.

NOTE: I get the updates from this group every day. Highly recommended.

Netanyahu received an average score of 52.3 in the poll, compared to only 51.5 which Obama received. PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas scored 26.8 while his rival Hamas received an average score of 19.5. The Lebanon-based Hizbullah terror group received an average score of 20.1.

Most of the respondents – 60% – said they believe Netanyahu is making efforts to achieve a peace agreement with the PA. Of these, 11% said that the Prime Minister is making enormous efforts to achieve peace.

Conversely, 52% of respondents thought that Abbas does not aspire to reach peace with Israel through negotiations. Of these, 15% said that Abbas has been making no attempt to negotiate with Israel and 39% said that Abbas is making efforts to reach a peace agreement.

The poll also found that Israel’s popularity has increased among Americans and is at its highest since 2007. The main factor which led to the increase in support for Israel was Abbas’ unilateral statehood bid at the United Nations in September. A majority of respondents, 60%, expressed warm feelings toward the Jewish state, while only 15% said they had cool feelings towards Israel.

The sympathy towards Israel increased more among supporters of Obama’s Democratic party. When asked if the United States should continue to support Israel or whether it should support the PA, 48% of respondents said that Israel should be supported, while only 13% said that the PA should be supported.
There was a slight drop in support for Israel among Republican supporters, despite the fact that the Republican party is generally considered to be friendlier to Israel. There was still a majority even among
Republicans, however, with 77% supporting Israel, down from 81% in a poll conducted last July.The poll was published just several days after it was revealed that in a recent open microphone incident, Obama appeared to show frustration with Netanyahu.

In a recent conversation between Obama and French President Nikolas Sarkozy, the latter said about Netanyahu, “I cannot stand him. He is a liar.”

Obama reportedly replied, “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day!”

The White House has been trying to stifle diplomatic fallout from the incident. On Wednesday, a top White House official insisted Obama had a good relationship with the Israeli prime minister.The Obama-Sarkozy incident was met with criticism from some members of the Republican party, who have long been critical of the president’s policy towards Israel.GOP nomination contender Mitt Romney said on Wednesday that Obama had proven his disdain for the ‘special relationship’ between Israel and the United States.

“President Obama’s derisive remarks about Israel’s prime minister confirm what any observer would have gleaned from his public statements and actions toward our longstanding ally, Israel,” Romney said.
“At a moment when the Jewish state is isolated and under threat, we cannot have an American president who is disdainful of our special relationship with Israel. We have here yet another reason why we need new leadership in the White House.”

Republican Senator John McCain, who ran against Obama in 2008, was also highly critical of the exchange between the two leaders, saying Obama’s remarks reflected his administration’s attitude towards Israel.