Wednesday, April 06, 2016

JEWS POSE AS MUSLIMS TO PRAY ON THE TEMPLE MOUNT.

JEWISH KING JESUS IS COMING AT THE RAPTURE FOR US IN THE CLOUDS-DON'T MISS IT FOR THE WORLD.THE BIBLE TAKEN LITERALLY- WHEN THE PLAIN SENSE MAKES GOOD SENSE-SEEK NO OTHER SENSE-LEST YOU END UP IN NONSENSE.GET SAVED NOW- CALL ON JESUS TODAY.THE ONLY SAVIOR OF THE WHOLE EARTH - NO OTHER. 1 COR 15:23-JESUS THE FIRST FRUITS-CHRISTIANS RAPTURED TO JESUS-FIRST FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT-23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.ROMANS 8:23 And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.(THE PRE-TRIB RAPTURE)

LUKE 21:28-29
28 And when these things begin to come to pass,(ALL THE PROPHECY SIGNS FROM THE BIBLE) then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption (RAPTURE) draweth nigh.
29 And he spake to them a parable; Behold the fig tree,(ISRAEL) and all the trees;(ALL INDEPENDENT COUNTRIES)
30 When they now shoot forth, ye see and know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand.(ISRAEL LITERALLY BECAME AND INDEPENDENT COUNTRY JUST BEFORE SUMMER IN MAY 14,1948.)

JOEL 2:3,30
3 A fire devoureth (ATOMIC BOMB) before them;(RUSSIAN-ARAB-MUSLIM ARMIES AGAINST ISRAEL) and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.
30 And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke.(ATOMIC BOMB AFFECT)

ZECHARIAH 14:12-13
12 And this shall be the plague wherewith the LORD will smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem; Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet,(DISOLVED FROM ATOMIC BOMB) and their eyes shall consume away in their holes,(DISOLVED FROM ATOMIC BOMB) and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth.(DISOLVED FROM ATOMIC BOMB)(BECAUSE NUKES HAVE BEEN USED ON ISRAELS ENEMIES)(GOD PROTECTS ISRAEL AND ALWAYS WILL)
13 And it shall come to pass in that day, that a great tumult from the LORD shall be among them; and they shall lay hold every one on the hand of his neighbour, and his hand shall rise up against the hand of his neighbour.(1/2-3 BILLION DIE IN WW3)(THIS IS AN ATOMIC BOMB EFFECT)

EZEKIEL 20:47
47 And say to the forest of the south, Hear the word of the LORD; Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will kindle a fire in thee, and it shall devour every green tree in thee, and every dry tree: the flaming flame shall not be quenched, and all faces from the south to the north shall be burned therein.

ZEPHANIAH 1:18
18 Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the LORD'S wrath; but the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of his jealousy: for he shall make even a speedy riddance of all them that dwell in the land.

MALACHI 4:1
1 For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven;(FROM ATOMIC BOMBS) and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the LORD of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.

And here are the bounderies of the land that Israel will inherit either through war or peace or God in the future. God says its Israels land and only Israels land. They will have every inch God promised them of this land in the future.
Egypt east of the Nile River, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, The southern part of Turkey and the Western Half of Iraq west of the Euphrates. Gen 13:14-15, Psm 105:9,11, Gen 15:18, Exe 23:31, Num 34:1-12, Josh 1:4.ALL THIS LAND ISRAEL WILL DEFINATELY OWN IN THE FUTURE, ITS ISRAELS NOT ISHMAELS LAND.12 TRIBES INHERIT LAND IN THE FUTURE

THE ISRAELIS ARE SMART-PULLING A MUSLIM TRICK-DISQUISE THEMSELVES AS MUSLIM TO ACTUALLY GET TO PRAY TO JESUS ON THE TEMPLE MOUNT.

Jews pose as Muslims to enter Temple Mount, are stopped-Police detain 2 Israelis claiming to be Palestinian worshipers at entrance to flashpoint Jerusalem holy site-By Times of Israel staff April 5, 2016, 6:25 pm

Police on Tuesday detained two Jewish men who attempted to enter Jerusalem’s contentious Temple Mount compound in the guise of Muslim worshipers.The two, both aged 21, approached one of the gates to the holy site wearing traditional religious Muslim garb. After they raised the suspicions of nearby police, an officer approached the pair and asked them for identification.Despite claiming they were Muslim Palestinians, a statement from police said the on-duty officers soon determined the pair were in fact Israeli Jews.A statement from police did not indicate if they belonged to Jewish activist groups barred from the site. It was not clear why the two felt the need to disguise themselves.Under an agreement between the Israeli government and Islamic authorities at the site, Jews are allowed to visit but not pray at the site, which is revered as the location of both ancient Jewish temples.The site is so holy that Jews have traditionally refrained from praying on the hilltop, congregating instead at the adjacent Western Wall, a retaining wall of the ancient temple complex, which has become the top holy spot for Jewish prayer.Jewish visitors suspected of violating the Temple Mount prayer ban are routinely arrested by police.Clashes between Palestinian youths and Israeli security forces erupted at the compound in September amid fears among Muslims that Israel was planning to change rules governing the site.Muslims regard the compound — which today houses the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, known in Arabic as the Holy Sanctuary — as the third-holiest site in Islam.Israel has repeatedly denied there are any such plans.The clashes preceded a wave of Palestinian terrorism and violence, including stabbing, shooting and vehicular ramming attacks that have killed 29 Israelis, two Americans, an Eritrean and a Sudanese since October 1 last year. Some 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces in this period, most of them while carrying out attacks, according to Israeli officials.Israel captured the Temple Mount, site of the biblical temples, from Jordan in the 1967 Six Day War and later annexed the area, but it left Jordanian religious authorities in charge of the Muslim holy sites there. While Israel controls access to the holy site, Jews are barred from praying there.Israel and Jordan recently agreed to install video cameras throughout the compound in a bid to ease tensions.Though US Secretary of State John Kerry announced the video surveillance plan during a visit to Amman last year, disputes between Israel and Jordan over who controls the footage and what the cameras may or may not film are reportedly holding up the project.AP contributed to this report.

ISRAEL SATAN COMES AGAINST

1 CHRONICLES 21:1
1 And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel.

GENESIS 12:1-3
1  Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I (GOD) will shew thee:
2  And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:
3  And I will bless them that bless thee,(ISRAELIS) and curse (DESTROY) him that curseth thee:(DESTROY THEM) and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

ISAIAH 41:11
11  Behold, all they that were incensed against thee (ISRAEL) shall be ashamed and confounded: they shall be as nothing;(DESTROYED) and they that strive with thee shall perish.(ISRAEL HATERS WILL BE TOTALLY DESTROYED)

ISRAELS TROUBLE

JEREMIAH 30:7
7 Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble;(ISRAEL) but he shall be saved out of it.

DANIEL 12:1,4
1 And at that time shall Michael(ISRAELS WAR ANGEL) stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people:(ISRAEL) and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation(May 14,48) even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book.
4 But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro,(WORLD TRAVEL,IMMIGRATION) and knowledge shall be increased.(COMPUTERS,CHIP IMPLANTS ETC)

Kerry on Iran nuclear deal: If they’re cheating, we’ll know it-Secretary of state defends pact with Tehran ahead of expected grilling by angry Republicans in Congress-By Richard Lardner April 5, 2016, 6:26 pm-the times of israel

WASHINGTON (AP) — US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday defended the landmark nuclear deal the United States made with Iran ahead of a congressional hearing where Senate Republicans are expected to hammer the Obama administration for considering the easing of financial restrictions against Tehran.Kerry acknowledged the harsh criticism of the arrangement, which is designed to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, telling MSNBC there’s a furious debate even in Iran over whether Tehran should choose missiles over dialogue.“I think what you’re seeing there is tension” between moderates and hard-liners over Iran’s future course, Kerry said.Kerry’s remarks came just hours ahead of a scheduled hearing by the GOP-led Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the implementation of the nuclear accord. Thomas Shannon, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, will testify.The committee’s hearing comes amid reports that the administration may relax the prohibition that prevents US dollars from being used in transactions with Iran. Angry lawmakers, who contend the US was taken advantage of in the deal, have countered that Tehran would be getting more than it deserves from the international nuclear pact reached last year.While no final decision has been made, officials told The Associated Press the Treasury Department has prepared a general license permitting offshore financial institutions to access dollars for foreign currency trades in support of legitimate business with Iran, a practice that is currently illegal.Several restrictions would apply, but the change could prove significant for Iran’s sanctions-battered economy. It also would be highly contentious in the United States, where Republican and several Democratic lawmakers say the administration promised to maintain a strict ban on dollars along with other non-nuclear penalties on Iran after last July’s seven-nation nuclear agreement.The nuclear pact provided Iran with billions of dollars in sanctions relief for curtailing programs that could lead to nuclear weapons. But the Iranians say they haven’t benefited to the extent envisioned under the deal because of other US measures linked to human rights, terrorism and missile development concerns.Kerry told MSNBC that Iran “needs to make some clear decisions about the role that it intends to play in the region and the world.”Kerry added, “if they’re cheating, we will know it.”Members of the committee also may press Shannon on the need for stricter sanctions against Iran for what Republicans have called repeated violations of a UN ballistic missile test ban.A group of Republican senators last month unveiled legislation that requires the administration to sanction every sector of Iran’s economy that supports the country’s ballistic missile program. The bill, introduced by Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-NH, is a reflection of longstanding exasperation among GOP lawmakers who’ve complained that President Barack Obama has failed to properly punish Tehran for test-firing ballistic missiles.Iran’s Revolutionary Guard test-fired two ballistic missiles on March 9 and US officials said the launches were in defiance of the UN resolution, which calls for Tehran not to launch any ballistic missiles capable of delivering a nuclear weapon.The administration in January announced sanctions against Tehran for missile firings in late 2015, but Republicans called those measures tepid and weak.

US designates Paris attacks suspect a ‘global terrorist’-‘Belgian-born French citizen Salah Abdeslam is an operative for the Islamic State,’ State Department says-By AFP April 5, 2016, 7:17 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

WASHINGTON — The United States on Tuesday designated a leading suspect in last year’s jihadist attacks on Paris, Salah Abdeslam, as a “global terrorist” under US law.The order, announced by the State Department, freezes any assets held by Abdeslam in US jurisdictions and forbids Americans from doing business with him.“Belgian-born French citizen Salah Abdeslam is an operative for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” it said, using a former name of the Islamic State group.The US Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control separately confirmed that Abdeslam’s name has been added to its list of specially designated foreign nationals.The 26-year-old was arrested on March 18 in a police raid on a hideout in the Brussels district of Molenbeek and is due to be extradited to France.He is accused of being the sole surviving member of a gang that launched a series of attacks on civilian targets in Paris on November 13 last year that left 130 dead.“Witnesses identified Abdeslam as the driver of a car full of gunmen that killed patrons at numerous restaurants in Paris,” the US statement said.“Authorities found his DNA both on a discarded suicide belt and along with traces of explosives in a Brussels apartment,” it added.“Abdeslam stated after his arrest that he planned on conducting a suicide bombing outside of the Paris soccer stadium, but had ‘backed out.'”Four days after he was arrested, the Belgian capital was struck by coordinated Islamic State suicide bombings at an airport and a metro station.The suspects in these attacks are alleged to have links to Abdeslam and the Paris attacks cell.Khalid El Bakraoui, who blew himself up at the metro, rented a flat in Brussels where Abdeslam’s fingerprints were found.And one of the two airport bombers, Najim Laachraoui, drove to Hungary with Abdeslam in September.

Scientists a step closer to pig hearts for humans-5 baboons, primate cousins of humans, live a record 2.5 years after transplant of pig hearts, American and German scientists report-By Mariëtte Le Roux April 5, 2016, 7:03 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

AFP — One day, cardiac patients may enjoy a new lease on life with pig hearts beating in their chests, said researchers reporting a major advance Tuesday in cross-species organ transplantation.Given the dire shortage of organ donors, the use of animal hearts, lungs or livers to save human lives has long been a holy grail of medical science.But organ rejection has stood stubbornly in the way.On Tuesday, scientists from the United States and Germany said they had succeeded in keeping transplanted pig hearts alive in baboons, primate cousins of humans, for a record 2.5 years.Their method uses a combination of gene modification and targeted immune-suppressing drugs.“It is very significant because it brings us one step closer to using these organs in humans,” said study co-author Muhammad Mohiuddin of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Maryland.“Xenotransplants — organ transplants between different species — could potentially save thousands of lives each year that are lost due to a shortage of human organs for transplantation,” he told AFP by email.In experiments with five baboons, the hearts survived for up to 945 days, breaking previous records held by the same group of researchers.The hearts did not replace those of the monkeys, but were connected to the circulatory system via two large blood vessels in the baboon abdomen.The transplanted heart beat like a normal heart, but the baboon’s own heart continued the function of pumping blood — a known method in studying organ rejection.Donor organs are often rejected by a recipient’s immune system, which can recognize it as foreign, and thus a threat.In this trial, the donor organs came from pigs which had been genetically modified to have high tolerance to immune response, basically making them invisible to the recipient’s natural defense system.The scientists also added a human genetic signature to the pigs that help prevent blood clotting.The recipient baboons were given a drug that suppresses immune response.-Safe for humans? Scientists have been experimenting with the transplantation of primate kidneys, hearts and livers into humans since the 1960s. None survived beyond a few months.Given their genetic proximity to humans, primates were initially thought to be the best donor candidates. But there is no large source of captive-bred apes — which take long to grow and mature, and some like chimpanzees are endangered.Their genetic closeness also poses a higher danger of inter-species disease transmission, as well as ethical questions.Pigs have since emerged as better donors. Their hearts are anatomically similar to ours, they pose less of a disease transmission risk, they grow up fast and are already widely farmed.In these xenotransplant trials, baboons serve as human models.The next big test will be full pig-to-baboon heart transplants, said Mohiuddin, adding that porcine hearts could make their way into human chests “in the foreseeable future.”“In our opinion, this regimen appears potentially safe for human application for patients suffering from end-stage organ failure who might be candidates for initial trials of xenotransplantation,” wrote the study authors.The work was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Virus killing one of world’s most farmed fish, Israeli study finds-Tilapia a global food source worth $7.5 billion each year, annual yields from Israel down 85 percent-By AFP April 5, 2016, 7:57 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

International scientists said Tuesday they have identified a new virus that is killing both wild and farmed tilapia fish, an important global food source worth $7.5 billion each year.The culprit is related to a family of influenza viruses, and appears to kill fish by causing brain swelling in tilapia in Israel and liver disease in the fish in Ecuador, said the findings in the journal mBio.The newly identified pathogen, named tilapia lake virus (TiLV), affects tilapia, the world’s second most farmed fish.“Tilapia is one of the most important fish industries worldwide,” said co-author Eran Bacharach, a molecular virologist at Tel Aviv University.“Moreover, because they eat algae, they are ecological gatekeepers for freshwater and they are an inexpensive, important source of protein in poorer countries.”Scientists still know little about the virus’ biology, where it originated, or how it made its way into Israel in 2009 and two years later, to commercial ponds in Ecuador. A future research paper will describe its effects in Colombia as well, the authors said.In Israel, the virus affected both wild tilapia species in the Sea of Galilee, and fish in commercial ponds.Annual yields from Israel have dropped as much as 85 percent.Knowing more about the virus could speed efforts to craft a vaccine.“We are shifting our focus now to implementing diagnostic tests for containment of infection and to developing vaccines to prevent disease,” said co-author Avi Eldar of the Kimron Veterinary Institute in Bet Dagan, Israel.According to researcher Ian Lipkin of Columbia University, “building a vaccine would save billions of dollars and preserve an industry that ensures employment in the developing world and food security.”

2,200-year-old bronze artifacts found at biblical site-Incense shovel, jug from Second Temple era unearthed at Magdala, on Sea of Galilee, during recent excavations-By Ilan Ben Zion April 5, 2016, 5:04 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

An ornate Second Temple era bronze incense shovel and bronze jug were recently unearthed at the biblical site of Magdala, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Tuesday.The 2,200-year-old artifacts were found during excavations being carried out at the archaeological site on the western shore of the Kinneret. The town is known traditionally by Christians as the birthplace of Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus’s followers mentioned in the New Testament who witnessed his crucifixion and resurrection.They were resting one on top of the another on a stone floor in a storeroom near the fishing village’s pier and likely belonged to a local Jewish family, archaeologists said.Ritual shovels were used in Jewish cultic practice for burning incense in the Temple in Jerusalem. They are depicted in contemporary Jewish iconography as one of the articles associated with the Temple.Dina Avshalom Gorni, the IAA archaeologist heading the dig, said that the incense shovel was one of just a handful from the land of Israel during that period.“At the beginning of the study we assumed that the shovel was used only as a cultic object for treating coals and incense used in ritual ceremonies,” Gorni said in a statement. “Over the years, after incense shovels were found with no cultic context, it would appear that the incense shovel was also used as a tool of daily use.”Last year a Hebrew University excavation at Khirbet el-Eika found a duck-headed incense shovel from a pagan context.The IAA began extensive excavations at Magdala after construction of a new hotel brought to light ancient remains in 2009. In partnership with Dr. Marcela Zapata-Meza of Anahuac University in Mexico, the digs have uncovered the remains of a synagogue, ritual baths, streets, factories and a marketplace from the Second Temple-era town. Since then volunteers from around the world have taken part in the excavations.“The volunteers were absolutely thrilled,” Eyad Bisharat, an IAA archaeologist supervising the site, said. “Even we veteran excavators were extremely excited because it’s not every day that one uncovers such rare artifacts as these, and in such a fine state of preservation.”

Lawmaker backs segregated Jewish, Arab maternity wards-Bezalel Smotrich says he doesn’t ‘enjoy’ Arabs’ company because they’re ‘enemies’; Bennett: They’re ‘created in God’s image’-By Daniel Douek April 5, 2016, 4:57 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

Jewish Home MK Bezalel Smotrich took to Twitter Tuesday to support the separation of Arab and Jewish mothers in maternity wards in Israeli hospitals.“My wife is truly no racist, but after giving birth she wants to rest rather than have a hafla” — a mass feast often accompanied by music and dancing — “like the Arabs have after their births.”The tweet followed a report on Israeli Radio saying that hospitals have been separating between Arab and Jewish mothers in maternity wards when the mothers request it.After his tweet received negative replies, Smotrich went a step further, writing: “It’s natural that my wife wouldn’t want to lie down [in a bed] next to a woman who just gave birth to a baby who might want to murder her baby twenty years from now.”He then added that “Arabs are my enemies and that’s why I don’t enjoy being next to them.”His wife, Revital, later told Channel 10 that she had “kicked an Arab obstetrician out of the [delivery] room. I want Jewish hands to touch my baby, and I wasn’t comfortable lying in the same room with an Arab woman.”“I refuse to have an Arab midwife, because for me giving birth is a Jewish and pure moment,” she said.Lawmakers attacked Smotrich’s comments, including MK Abd al-Hakim Hajj Yahya of the Joint (Arab) List, who sent a letter to Knesset Speaker MK Yuli Edelstein imploring him to immediately suspend Smotrich.“This kind of racist incitement affects an entire population, and as such cannot be ignored,” Yahya wrote in his official letter. “This man’s remarks directly harm the status of the Knesset. For this reason the Knesset speaker is asked to immediately relieve the transgressing MK from duty.”Yoel Hasson of the Zionist Union also came out swinging against Smotrich.“Some of our best friends are Jews who celebrate with particularly pleasant haflas,” Hasson tweeted at him. “I suggest you erase [your] racist tweet.”Haim Jelin (Yesh Atid) also slammed Smotrich. “As far as you know, God created all beings equally human, not racist,” he said.Ahmad Tibi tweeted cynically that “Smotrich’s spirit hovers over maternity wards throughout the country.”Aida Touma-Sliman (Joint List) linked Smotrich’s comments to racism against the Mizrahi, or Sephardic, Jewish community in Israel.“Beyond the overt justification for a racial segregation policy clearly similar to that which existed in the southern United States in the last century, Smotrich reveals something deeper here,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “This dangerous racist trend is not limited to the Arab culture, but extends to Sephardic Jews, Ethiopians, Russians, non-religious Jews and anyone who differs from the [political] right’s view.”The leader of Smotrich’s Jewish Home party, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, also expressed his dissatisfaction, implying the comments were racist. He quoted a passage from the Mishnah, the first major written redaction of the Jewish oral traditions, stating that “every human created in God’s image is favored,” and stressing in his own words that the text speaks of “every human, Jewish or Arab.”He linked his tweet to a post of his from 2015, where he wrote of a Shabbat he spent alongside his father’s hospital bed.“In a hospital there is no significance to race, religion, skin color, sexual orientation or political views,” he had written in that earlier post, naming “Khaled from Umm el-Fahm,” who lay in the bed adjacent to his father’s, as an example. “Everyone is human, and every human was born in God’s image.”Minneapolis-based American public radio PRI published an article February 2016 underlining the drastic fall in deliveries at Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus Hadassah Hospital as an indicator of the detrimental effect the Israeli-Palestinian violence has had on coexistence.The hospital’s dedication to coexistence, which earned it a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, has always been a principle of the highest value, according to the article.Following the rise in violence since October 2015, the report said, both Jewish and Arab women have been reluctant to give birth in the mixed Arab-Jewish ward out of fear, and often opt instead to give birth in a more homogeneous environment.All the hospitals cited in Tuesday’s Israel Radio report denied separating between Jews and Arabs in maternity wards, though some admitted that if they are asked to do so by a patient, they accommodate the request.The Health Ministry also denied the existence of a segregation policy, saying that “no separation on a discriminatory basis is allowed in hospitals. Health Ministry guidelines state that no separation by population is to be made — not by race, ethnicity, country of origin or any other factor.”Smotrich has a history of controversial statements. In August 2015 an Israeli NGO filed a complaint to the Knesset Ethics Committee against him over an interview in which he said gays control the Israeli media and the public agenda.A month before, in an interview to the Knesset Channel, he offered to serve as an executioner should Israel pass a death sentence for Palestinian terrorists.Five months earlier, during a discussion panel at a Ramat Gan high school, Smotrich boasted about being a “proud homophobe,” saying that gay people are welcome to be “abnormal” in their own homes, but shouldn’t “make demands of the state.”Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.

If Auschwitz was the capital of crimes against Jews, Ravensbrück was the capital of crimes against women-UK author exposes the oft-forgotten horrors of a Nazi death camp for women-In ‘If This Is a Woman,’ Sarah Helm goes inside Germany’s Ravensbrück, where up to 90,000 women perished during the Holocaust-By JP O’ Malley April 5, 2016, 4:06 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

LONDON — Lying 50 miles north of Berlin, Ravensbrück was the only concentration camp the Nazis built with the sole intention to house female political prisoners. Opening up its gates in May 1939, just four months before the outbreak of World War II, it was liberated by the Russians six years later.Over 130,00 women passed through its gates. During its busiest period, towards the end of the war, the camp had a population of 45,000. Estimates of the final death toll are debatable, ranging from 30,000 to 90,000.Why, therefore, is so little known about a camp that eliminated tens of thousands of women on German soil? The wholesale destruction of evidence partially explains for this historical vacuum. In Ravensbrück’s final days, before the liberation by the Soviet Red Army, most prisoner’s files were burned by the Nazis and then thrown in the lake beside the camp.If Auschwitz was the capital of crimes against Jews, under the Third Reich, Ravensbrück, it seems, was the capital of crimes against women.At least that’s the argument British freelance journalist and author Sarah Helm makes with compelling conviction in her latest book, “If This Is a Woman — Inside Ravensbrück: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women.”Backed up by a vast undertaking of research and interviews — including historical sources that were once locked behind the Iron Curtain — Helm’s book shows how one dedicated writer really can rescue history from the dustbin.Paradoxically, though, says Helm, when we begin chatting, the emergence of the Holocaust as a proper cultural global discussion, during the 1960s, was a contributing factor that ensured Ravensbrück became sidelined as a subject in the dominant historical discourse around Nazi Germany and its heinous crimes.“Obviously people had known about the Holocaust before [the 1960s],” says Helm. “But the consciousness had not taken a proper hold until after the Eichmann trial in 1961.”Understandably, then, says Helm, the sheer scale and horror of the Jewish Holocaust totally took over the narrative.“And so the story of the non-Jewish groups [that were exterminated] were treated as secondary.”Moreover, because these prisoners in Ravensbrück were all women, this important epoch of Nazi history was neatly dusted aside for decades hence, Helm explains. “Most mainstream historians at the time were men, so inevitably this subject was neglected.”‘Most mainstream historians at the time were men, so inevitably this subject was neglected’-It really wasn’t until the mid-1990s that female historians began to explore the stories of Ravensbrück with proper analysis. Before that, most women who passed through the camp were lucky if they got even a paragraph in the main history of the Holocaust, says Helm.Especially the German “asocials”: the homeless, the prostitutes, and the down and outs.“These women were sent off to gas chambers and were of no real interest to historians,” says Helm.Perhaps what’s most fascinating about the history of Ravensbrück is the way it transformed, over time, from an institution that housed political prisoners only, to eventually become the cruelest of Nazi death camps.“In the beginning Ravensbrück was very small,” says Helm. “It consisted largely of German women, who were either asocials or political prisoners. Basically anyone who openly opposed Hitler.”Many women in that particular group were Jewish says Helm. Although it appears they hadn’t at this early stage been placed there because of their racial status, but simply because of their political activity.By autumn 1944, Ravensbrück had become overcrowded. The vast numbers coming into the camp were the result of the enormous evacuation process in the East, where the Russians had begun liberating numerous camps, such as Auschwitz.Consequently, Hitler took the rather bizarre decision to take all the survivors out of these camps, and march them back to Germany.“Essentially, hundreds of thousands of destitute prisoners were being marched westwards,” Helm explains.The Hungarian exodus impacted massively on Ravensbrück too, especially the Jews of Hungary, many of whom were sent to Auschwitz. By October 1944 the Horthy government in Budapest had fallen, and Allied bombs had destroyed train lines.Thus transportation of people across Eastern Europe had become a major problem. Still, Hitler insisted that every last Jew be removed from Hungary before the Red Army arrived.Auschwitz was no longer operating after November 1944, so many [prisoners] began to be marched towards Germany,” Helm explains.“In this climate, [the Nazis] began taking the view that the only way to solve this problem was to kill more people.”Crucially, though, Helm makes clear, the killing that began at Ravensbrück during this time meant gassing ceased to be an ideological process of extermination. Instead, in the view of warped Nazi ideology at any rate, it became a practical way of controlling population numbers in horrifically overcrowded work camps.“The killing had to go up by 2,000 a month at Ravensbrück during this time,” says Helm. A way had to be found to speed up the killing process too. So a gas chamber was set up.“Parts of that gas chamber were said to have been brought directly from Auschwitz, which at that time had been dismantled,” says Helm.The title of Helm’s book may give the impression that the concentration camps in Nazi Germany were entirely Hitler’s brainchild, but almost every aspect of the camps were managed and planned with extraordinary detail by Heinrich Himmler.In her book Helm writes: “Adolf Hitler showed little interest in the concentration camps, but they lay at the center of Himmler’s empire; whatever went on behind their walls was signed off by his pen.”“Himmler was also behind the original idea of setting up the women’s camps too,” Helm insists.Although Himmler wasn’t the only person involved in the plans for the Final Solution, Helm claims that he did help oversee much of the process of setting up the camps in the East, which would eventually lead to the death of millions of Jews.Himmler was also a regular visitor to the camp in Ravensbrück too, says Helm. “He visited the camps because he wanted them to be as self-sufficient as far as possible.”Nor was Himmler’s decision to put the camps next to areas of natural beauty, such as lakes and trees, merely coincidental. Indeed, German forests played a central role in the mythology of the Heimat, or German soil. Take Buchhenwald, for example, one of the more famous Nazi concentration camps: its literal translation means Beech Forest.“Many of the camps were [purposely] located in places of great natural beauty,” says Helm.“Ravensbrück, for example, was located beside a lake. Other camps were similarly located in beautiful wooded areas. Himmler had read the literature on these historic sites. His idea was that nature would purify the German gene, and that the SS, and the Germans, would grow up pure and strong, like the trees in the woods.”“Himmler believed that the blood would be pure if the seed was planted near these very pure sites of nature,” adds Helm.‘Himmler believed that the blood would be pure if the seed was planted near these very pure sites of nature’In the epilogue of this meticulously detailed book — which runs to over 700 pages in length — Helm spends considerable time and ink dissecting at length why those in positions of authority involved in these horrendous atrocities at Ravensbrück were never brought to justice.The reasons are complicated. But one thing is certain: by 1948 the Allies had lost their appetite for punishing Nazis. Primarily because the Cold War had become the dominant theme on the intentional-political agenda.And, from 1949 onwards, the main responsibility for investigating Nazi crimes was handed back to German courts, many of whom, presumably, had been Nazis just a few years previously.Most notable among these perpetrators let off the hook were German industrialists. Especially, Helm argues, since their profits were needed to fight the Cold War.Siemens, the German electrical manufacturer, which had a factory located just at the edge of Ravensbrück, from 1942 onwards, is one company that notoriously got off scott free for its complicity in knowledge of war crimes. It has never publicly admitted it knew of the exterminations happening at the camp.“The gassing in Ravensbrück at this time was being kept secret,” says Helm. “But even still, Siemens continued to operate its factory.”The idea that the killing was being hidden from the Siemens management and guards is laughable, Helm believes. Moreover, the evidence clearly displays that prisoners knew perfectly well that Ravensbrück had become a death camp.“Siemens knew their own workers were prisoners, who at any given moment could be sent to their deaths,” says Helm.“And yet, not a single management figure, or director, from Siemens has ever been brought to account for what happened in Ravensbrück.”‘Siemens knew their own workers were prisoners, who at any given moment could be sent to their deaths’-Years later, though, as the extent of the Holocaust, and atrocities became clearer, there were strong moves — particularly with Jewish survivors based in Israel and international Jewish movements — for compensation to be paid out.However, the figures are paltry, Helm believes, “especially given the extent to which Siemens was complicit in these crimes, and the way it sided and collaborated with the Nazis.”The fact that the compensation only applied to Jewish victims too means the compensation paid out is not a true reflection of the crimes themselves either, Helm believes, especially since many of the victims were not Jews.“It’s unbelievable that Siemens is unable to come out in the open and confront the crimes it was deeply complicit in,” says Helm.Helm’s narrative concludes on a rather open-ended note. The story of Ravensbrück may have finally come out into the public domain after many years lying dormant, but this particular chapter of Nazi history, it appears, is not entirely complete.Of the estimated 3,500 women guards who passed through Ravensbrück, only a fraction have ever come under investigation in the German courts, mainly because Germany still doesn’t keep a proper record of the numbers they have charged, says Helm.“The system did not want to confront this subject. So very few of the guards from Ravensbrück were ever confronted or held to account for their actions,” says Helm.

Monday, April 04, 2016

NETANYAHU TO ABBAS I'LL BE THERE ANYTIME YOU WANNA TALK PEACE.

JEWISH KING JESUS IS COMING AT THE RAPTURE FOR US IN THE CLOUDS-DON'T MISS IT FOR THE WORLD.THE BIBLE TAKEN LITERALLY- WHEN THE PLAIN SENSE MAKES GOOD SENSE-SEEK NO OTHER SENSE-LEST YOU END UP IN NONSENSE.GET SAVED NOW- CALL ON JESUS TODAY.THE ONLY SAVIOR OF THE WHOLE EARTH - NO OTHER. 1 COR 15:23-JESUS THE FIRST FRUITS-CHRISTIANS RAPTURED TO JESUS-FIRST FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT-23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.ROMANS 8:23 And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.(THE PRE-TRIB RAPTURE)

LAND FOR PEACE (THE FUTURE 7 YEARS OF HELL ON EARTH)

JOEL 3:2
2 I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people(ISRAEL) and for my heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land.(UPROOTED ISRAELIS AND DIVIDED JERUSALEM)(THIS BRINGS ON WW3 BECAUSE JERUSALEM IS DIVIDED,WARNING TO ARABS-MUSLIMS AND THE WORLD).

THE WEEK OF DANIEL 9:27 WE KNOW ITS 7 YRS

Heres the scripture 1 week = 7 yrs Genesis 29:27-29
27 Fulfil her week, and we will give thee this also for the service which thou shalt serve with me yet seven other years.
28 And Jacob did so, and fulfilled her week:(7 YEARS) and he gave him Rachel his daughter to wife also.
29 And Laban gave to Rachel his daughter Bilhah his handmaid to be her maid.

DANIEL 11:21-23
21 And in his estate shall stand up a vile person, to whom they shall not give the honour of the kingdom: but he shall come in peaceably, and obtain the kingdom by flatteries.
23 And after the league made with him he shall work deceitfully: for he shall come up, and shall become strong with a small people.
24 He shall enter peaceably even upon the fattest places of the province; and he shall do that which his fathers have not done, nor his fathers' fathers; he shall scatter among them the prey, and spoil, and riches: yea, and he shall forecast his devices against the strong holds, even for a time.

DANIEL 9:26-27
26 And after threescore and two weeks(62X7=434 YEARS+7X7=49 YEARS=TOTAL OF 69 WEEKS OR 483 YRS) shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary;(ROMAN LEADERS DESTROYED THE 2ND TEMPLE) and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined.(THERE HAS TO BE 70 WEEKS OR 490 YRS TO FUFILL THE VISION AND PROPHECY OF DAN 9:24).(THE NEXT VERSE IS THAT 7 YR WEEK OR (70TH FINAL WEEK).
27 And he ( THE ROMAN,EU PRESIDENT) shall confirm the covenant (PEACE TREATY) with many for one week:(1X7=7 YEARS) and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease,(3 1/2 yrs in TEMPLE ANIMAL SACRIFICES STOPPED) and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.

JEREMIAH 6:14
14 They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.

JEREMIAH 8:11
11 For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.

1 THESSALONIANS 5:3
3 For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.

ISAIAH 33:8
8  The highways lie waste, the wayfaring man ceaseth: he hath broken the covenant,(7 YR TREATY) he hath despised the cities, he regardeth no man.(THE WORLD LEADER-WAR MONGER CALLS HIMSELF GOD)

JERUSALEM DIVIDED

GENESIS 25:20-26
20  And Isaac was forty years old (A BIBLE GENERATION NUMBER=1967 + 40=2007+) when he took Rebekah to wife, the daughter of Bethuel the Syrian of Padanaram, the sister to Laban the Syrian.
21  And Isaac intreated the LORD for his wife, because she was barren: and the LORD was intreated of him, and Rebekah his wife conceived.
22  And the children (2 NATIONS IN HER-ISRAEL-ARABS) struggled together within her; and she said, If it be so, why am I thus? And she went to enquire of the LORD.
23  And the LORD said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels;(ISRAEL AND THE ARABS) and the one people shall be stronger than the other people;(ISRAEL STRONGER THAN ARABS) and the elder shall serve the younger.(LITERALLY ISRAEL THE YOUNGER RULES (ISSAC)(JACOB-LATER NAME CHANGED TO ISRAEL) OVER THE OLDER ARABS (ISHMAEL)(ESAU)
24  And when her days to be delivered were fulfilled, behold, there were twins in her womb.
25  And the first came out red, all over like an hairy garment; and they called his name Esau.(THE OLDER AN ARAB)
26  And after that came his brother out, and his hand took hold on Esau's heel; and his name was called Jacob:(THE YOUNGER-ISRAELI) and Isaac was threescore (60) years old when she bare them.(1967 + 60=2027)(COULD BE THE LAST GENERATION WHEN JERUSALEM IS DIVIDED AMOUNG THE 2 TWINS)(THE 2 TWINS WANT JERUSALEM-THE DIVISION OF JERUSALEM TODAY)(AND WHOS IN CONTROL OF JERUSALEM TODAY-THE YOUNGER ISSAC-JACOB-ISRAEL)(AND WHO WANTS JERUSALEM DIVIDED-THE OLDER,ESAU-ISHMAEL (THE ARABS)

ISAIAH 28:14-19 (THIS IS THE 7 YR TREATY COVENANT OF DANIEL 9:27)
14 Wherefore hear the word of the LORD, ye scornful men, that rule this people which is in Jerusalem.
15 Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves:
16 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste.
17 Judgment also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet: and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding place.
18 And your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then ye shall be trodden down by it.
19 From the time that it goeth forth it shall take you: for morning by morning shall it pass over, by day and by night: and it shall be a vexation only to understand the report.

DANIEL 8:23-25
23 And in the latter time of their kingdom, when the transgressors are come to the full, a king (EU DICTATOR) of fierce countenance, and understanding dark sentences,(FROM THE OCCULT) shall stand up.
24 And his power shall be mighty, but not by his own power:(SATANS POWER) and he shall destroy wonderfully, and shall prosper, and practise, and shall destroy the mighty and the holy people.
25 And through his policy also he shall cause craft to prosper in his hand; and he shall magnify himself in his heart, and by peace shall destroy many: he shall also stand up against the Prince of princes;(JESUS) but he shall be broken without hand.

DANIEL 11:36-40
36 And the king shall do according to his will;(EU PRESIDENT) and he shall exalt himself, and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak marvellous things against the God of gods, and shall prosper till the indignation be accomplished: for that that is determined shall be done.
37 Neither shall he regard the God of his fathers,(THIS EU DICTATOR IS A EUROPEAN JEW) nor the desire of women, nor regard any god: for he shall magnify himself above all.
38 But in his estate shall he honour the God of forces:(HES A MILITARY GINIUS) and a god whom his fathers knew not shall he honour with gold, and silver, and with precious stones, and pleasant things.
39 Thus shall he do in the most strong holds (CONTROL HEZBOLLAH,AL-QUAIDA MURDERERS ETC) with a strange god, whom he shall acknowledge and increase with glory: and he shall cause them to rule over many,(HIS ARMY LEADERS) and shall divide the land for gain.
40 And at the time of the end shall the king of the south(EGYPT) push at him:(EU DICTATOR PROTECTING ISRAELS SECURITY) and the king of the north(RUSSIA) shall come against him like a whirlwind, with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships; and he shall enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass over.

Netanyahu responds to Abbas invite: ‘I’ll be here, any day’-PM reiterates willingness to meet PA leader, but says they must discuss Palestinian incitement before any peace talks-By Raoul Wootliff and Raphael Ahren April 4, 2016, 6:28 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday he was willing to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas “any day,” after the PA leader called for a meeting during an interview last week on Israeli television.Netanyahu also stressed that he had made the offer before, and was standing by his invitation.“I’m inviting him again. I’ve cleared my schedule this week. Any day he can come, I’ll be here,” Netanyahu told journalists in Jerusalem ahead of a meeting with visiting Czech Foreign Minister Lubomír Zaorálek.Abbas told Channel 2’s “Uvda” program last week that he was willing to meet the prime minister to reach a peace agreement.I heard President Abbas say that if I invite him to meet, he'll come. So I'm inviting him. I've cleared my schedule.https://t.co/jXEdWR8n3n— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) April 4, 2016-“I still extend a hand to Mr. Netanyahu because I believe in peace. I believe that the people of Israel want peace and that the Palestinian people want peace,” Abbas said.Abbas called Netanyahu “the partner” for peace, and called on the Israeli premier to meet with him “at any time.”But Netanyahu said Monday that before peace talks, the first thing the two needed to discuss was ending Palestinian incitement against Israelis.“My door is always open for those who want to pursue peace with Israel,” the prime minister said.Israel has accused Abbas of failing to condemn the wave of Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians and security forces that erupted in mid-September, and says his PA hierarchy presides over incitement to violence against Israel.The attacks, mostly stabbings but also shootings and car-ramming assaults, have killed 29 Israelis and four non-Israelis. Over the same time, at least 188 Palestinians have died by Israeli fire. Israel says most were attackers, and the rest died in clashes with security forces.Abbas told Channel 2 news that if it were not for his forces, the violence would be much bloodier now. He denied that he is encouraging Palestinian youth to stab Israelis and said that Israelis are unaware of his security forces’ efforts to prevent stabbings.Netanyhau’s comments came hours after President Reuven Rivlin made similar statements saying he was willing to meet Abbas.“We need to find a way to build trust between us,” he says. “I am ready to meet with [Abbas] with whatever coordination with the Israeli government of course.”Rivlin, also speaking alongside Zaorálek, said he was somewhat heartened by Abbas’s interview but that the PA leader needed to back up his words by distancing himself from fundamentalists like the Hamas group who would prefer to see a temporary agreement that allows for the future destruction of Israel.

Holy Moses!-Satellite image of red River Nile evokes biblical legend-Photo uses infrared technology to map heat created by vegetation surrounding the Egyptian river-By Times of Israel staff April 2, 2016, 5:25 pm

A newly released satellite image of Egypt’s Nile river shows the river colored deep red, bringing to mind the biblical first plague in which the waters of the great river turned to blood.But, this time at least, it is not the wrath of god that is responsible for the river’s crimson hue: The European Space Agency’s Sentinel-3A satellite, which took the picture, uses a radiometer to measure infrared energy.The heat radiated by vegetation around the river is therefore responsible for the red color.The satellite, launched in February, is designed to monitor environmental changes. It is the third of more than a dozen “eyes in the sky” that make up the Copernicus program, which the ESA describes as the most sophisticated Earth observation system ever launched.Two satellites already in orbit are equipped with radar and high-resolution cameras, to which Sentinel-3A adds instruments for measuring sea and surface temperatures, among other things.The satellite will be able to spot upcoming droughts by detecting subtle changes in surface color that suggests crops are failing.One of Sentinel-3A’s greatest advantages is its ability to scan the entire planet in just over a day and send back data within hours, giving scientists and policy-makers detailed information on environmental changes in close to real time. By measuring sea temperatures it will boost short-term weather forecasts and help track the impact of climate change.AP contributed to this report.

Israel cuts power at second Palestinian city over unpaid debt-PA, Israeli officials say they weren’t informed in advance of Bethlehem outage, which comes days after similar move in Jericho-By Raoul Wootliff and AP April 4, 2016, 8:22 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

Israel’s state-owned electric company on Monday continued to scale back its electricity supply to Palestinian cities due to almost two billion shekels in unpaid debt, limiting its supply to the city of Bethlehem and vowing to do so in other places across the West Bank over the next two weeks.The Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) said Monday it was halving its supply to Bethlehem, after taking a similar, short-lived step in the city of Jericho last week.It was not stated when the power supply to Bethlehem will be restored.The company says the Palestinian authorities have racked up a debt of 1.74 billion shekels ($460 million). Israel has thus far continued to provide electricity out of concern for the Palestinian population, but the IEC said it could no longer absorb the debt and was taking measures to stop it from growing further.Palestinian officials claim that Israelis gave them no prior warning of a power cut to Bethlehem, saying they were only told about pending power cuts to Ramallah and el-Bireh, according to the Ma’an news agency.Bethlehem Mayor Issam Juha told Ma’an that the municipality was not warned that the cuts would take place.Israeli government officials also said they were not informed by the IEC of the planned cuts, according to Army Radio. The IEC also cuts power to Israeli homes over unpaid debts.The cuts in Jericho, which began last Thursday, led to blackouts, but full supply was restored later the same day, according to Mansour Nassar of the Jerusalem District Electricity Company (JDECO). The cut affected up to 30,000 people in a total population of around 50,000 in the city and surrounding area, according to Jericho Governor Majed al-Fityani.The Palestinian Authority is struggling financially and depends largely on foreign aid. It relies heavily on Israel for electricity supplies, which also provides electricity to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.Ongoing talks with the IEC and PA have so far not resolved the debt problem. In January 2015, the IEC cut power to Palestinian cities for a number of hours every day over a similar debt, only to renew it a few weeks later.A year earlier, the company and the Palestinian Authority struck a deal to resolve an outstanding debt after the IEC had cut electricity to the West Bank cities of Nablus and Jenin over unpaid bills of NIS 1.9 billion ($482 million).Under an economic agreement signed with the PA in 1994, Israel collects around 600-700 million shekels each month in customs duties levied on goods destined for Palestinian markets that transit through Israeli ports.It transfers the money after deducting approximately 100 million shekels for expenses such as Palestinian hospitalizations in Israel, sewage treatment and covering part of the electricity debt, which has remained largely stable in recent months.Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.

Air France’s female staff can opt out of Iran flights over headscarf-Resumption of route, announced in December, leads to row over Iranian law obligating women to cover hair in public-By AFP April 4, 2016, 7:20 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

Women employees of Air France will be allowed to opt out of working on its upcoming resumed flights to Iran to avoid having to wear a headscarf, a company official said Monday.The airline will appoint a “special unit” to replace those who do not want to fly to Tehran, he said.“Any woman assigned to the Paris-Tehran flight who for reasons of personal choice would refuse to wear the headscarf upon leaving the plane will be reassigned to another destination, and thus will not be obliged to do this flight,” human resources official Gilles Gateau told Europe 1 radio.On April 17, Air France will resume its Paris-to-Tehran service, which were suspended in 2008 because of international sanctions against Iran over its nuclear ambitions.Unions say company executives sent staff an internal memo regarding flights to Tehran, saying that female cabin crew would be required to wear trousers with a loose fitting jacket while on board, and must cover their hair with a scarf when they leave the plane.The headscarf rule is already in place when flying to certain destinations such as Saudi Arabia.French labor unions, who held talks with the human resources chief on Monday, argued that an escape clause was already in place for flights to Conakry in Guinea during the Ebola crisis last year and for services to Tokyo following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Police nab would-be attacker in West Bank arrest-Caught up in ‘stop and search,’ Palestinian from Ramallah admits he planned to plow stolen Israeli car into IDF soldiers-By Stuart Winer and Judah Ari Gross April 4, 2016, 6:47 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

The Israel Police said Monday that officers arrested a Palestinian in the West Bank who was planning to carry out a car-ramming attack against soldiers.The 23-year-old Ramallah man was detained Sunday morning at a West Bank checkpoint, where police from the Binyamin district were conducting a “stop and search” operation.A quick inspection revealed the man did not have a driver license and was driving a car stolen from central Israel a month earlier. The suspect was taken for questioning at Binyamin station, where he confessed that he was planning to carry out a car-ramming attack against IDF soldiers “because of the occupation of Palestinian lands.” He also told investigators that he hoped to become a “martyr” by dying in the attack.The unexpected checkpoint surprised him, he said, and disrupted his plans.Police did not say exactly where the incident happened or on which road the checkpoint was deployed.According to police, the man also declared he was a supporter of Fatah, the Palestinian political party headed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.After being questioned, the suspect was transferred to Ofer Prison near Ramallah.On Sunday, a 30-year-old Israeli woman in the central Israeli city of Rosh Ha’ayin was lightly injured in a stabbing attack. The attacker, a young Arab Israeli woman from the nearby village of Kfar Kassem, was subdued by a security guard and taken into custody without shots being fired.That stabbing ended a nine-day stretch without attacks in Israel and the West Bank.In the past six months since the ongoing wave of terror began in October 2015, 29 Israelis and four foreign nationals have been killed. Nearly 200 Palestinians have also been killed, some two-thirds of them while attacking Israelis, and the rest during clashes with troops, according to the Israeli army.Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.

Israel halts cement to Gaza, to keep it out of Hamas’s hands-Freeze only temporary, COGAT says; UN stresses need for reconstruction, condemns ‘deviation of materials’ by terror group-By Judah Ari Gross April 4, 2016, 8:37 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

Israel halted the import of cement and other building materials into the Gazi Strip on Sunday after realizing they had been partially diverted to the Hamas terrorist organization that rules the territory, the Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) said.An undisclosed amount of cement, intended for the rebuilding effort of the beleaguered Strip, had been “taken by Amad al-Baz, deputy director of Hamas’s Economic Ministry,” COGAT announced on its al-Munasek — Arabic for “the coordinator” — Facebook page on Friday.This was in direct contradiction to reconstruction agreements between Israel and the Palestinians and, as a result, COGAT chief Maj.-Gen. Yoav Mordechai “froze the import of the inventory intended for the private sector,” according to the body’s statement.The information about al-Baz’s actions came to light through the international reconstruction effort in Gaza, COGAT said.“We are disappointed that Hamas continues to harm and take advantage of the Palestinian population, only to advance the personal interests of the organization,” COGAT wrote on its Arabic-language Facebook page.The United Nations also condemned the “deviation of materials” in a statement released on Monday, but refrained from naming Hamas as responsible.“Those who seek to gain through the deviation of materials are stealing from their own people and adding to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza,” said Nickolay Mladenov, the UN’s special coordinator for the Middle East peace process.“The people of Gaza depend on the entry of construction material to repair and reconstruct their damaged and destroyed houses following the 2014 conflict and to enable much-needed infrastructure and development projects,” Mladenov said, referring to the devastating 50-day war fought between Israel and Hamas in summer 2014.This freeze is not intended to be enduring, and will only remain in place until the issue can be more thoroughly explored, a COGAT spokesperson told The Times of Israel.“We are investigating, and will decide how to proceed,” she said.In the meantime, other goods and materials are being brought into the Gaza Strip as usual, the spokesperson said.One of Israel’s main concerns in the reconstruction effort of the Gaza Strip has long been that materials being brought into the coastal enclave will be employed to create tunnels and other infrastructure that can be used against the Israel Defense Forces in a future conflict with Hamas.

What role for Trump in his grandson’s Jewish circumcision? Is it going to be Donald the ‘Sandek’ at Sunday’s ‘bris’ for Theodore James? Probably not-By Andrew Tobin April 1, 2016, 6:45 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

JTA — It’s going to be a busy weekend for Donald Trump.Just ahead of what’s expected to be a close Republican primary in Wisconsin, Trump’s newborn Jewish grandson is to be circumcised.The GOP frontrunner anticipated Theodore James Kushner’s arrival in his speech to AIPAC last week, announcing: “My daughter, Ivanka, is about to have a beautiful Jewish baby. In fact, it could be happening right now, which would be very nice as far as I’m concerned.”It took a few more days, but Ivanka Trump gave birth Sunday. According to Jewish law, the bris will take place eight days later, this coming Sunday.Trump’s eldest daughter has said Judaism in important to her family’s life in New York, calling her family “pretty observant.” The celebrity businesswoman underwent an Orthodox conversion before marrying Jewish real estate investor and newspaper publisher Jared Kushner in 2009. She and Jushner belong to an Orthodox synagogue, observe Shabbat and in 2013 had a bris for their firstborn son, Joseph, now 3. They also have a 4-year-old girl, Arabella.Donald Trump has touted his daughter’s Jewish family to appeal to Jews in his campaign for president. But he’ll have to hustle to make it to Theodore’s first Jewish lifecycle event. The bris falls a day after Trump is to hold a town hall in Wausau, Wisconsin, and two days before the state’s primary.Assuming Trump manages to jet to New York for the occasion, what will his role be? USA Today tried and failed to get an answer from the Trumps.Here are some possibilities (and impossibilities):The mohel: Removing the foreskin is a job for a professional — and a Jew. Trump may have a degree from the Wharton business school — and know a thing or two about getting “schlonged” — but he’s never mentioned any mohel training. And giving his fondness for self-promotion, it’s fair to assume it would’ve come up by now.Plus, Trump’s allegedly small fingers could make scalpel work difficult.More to the point, Trump is not Jewish, though he was introduced to the Republican Jewish Coalition in December as a “mensch” with “chutzpah.”If Ivanka Trump and family don’t yet have a trained Jewish mohel picked out, JTA’s America’s Top Mohels special report in 2014 can recommend several options in the New York area: There’s Philip Sherman (wears a bowtie and sings). Emily Blake (a rare female mohel, she reads Native American poems and uses Manischewitz in her anesthesia). For more traditional options, there’s Mordechai Mozes or Paysach Krohn — or any of the combined seven sons in their families that also do circumcisions.The sandek: Usually it’s a grandfather who holds the baby during the bris, which would make Trump one of the two top options on Theodore’s big day. But the sandek traditionally is a Jew. That leaves Kushner’s dad, Orthodox Jewish real estate developer Charles Kushner, as the person most likely to have his lap used as an operating table.The kvater: The rules about who gets to bring the baby from the mother to the mohel are loose enough for Trump to qualify. However, it’s considered good luck for recently married couples who want to conceive children to perform the ritual schelp. So it might make more sense for the honor to go to Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump’s younger brother. The businessman, who runs Trump Winery, married Lara Yunaska under a chuppah at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in November 2014. The couple doesn’t yet have children.That leaves the Donald without a ritual role. But that doesn’t mean he has to twiddle his thumbs.Donald Trump might be of most service as a spokesman for the bris. Just image his post-op press conference at the bagel-and-lox spread: “It was yuge! I guarantee you there’s no problem, I guarantee.”

Bill Clinton brings Hillary’s message to leading rabbis-Participants won’t discuss contents of off-record NY meet-up, will only say it was ‘constructive’-By JTA March 31, 2016, 3:45 am-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

WASHINGTON — Former President Bill Clinton met with over 20 leading rabbis in the New York area to discuss his wife Hillary’s presidential campaign.The meeting Tuesday in Midtown Manhattan was off the record and lasted for two hours, twice the amount of scheduled time. Participants would not discuss the content.Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, the executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, called it “constructive” in a brief interview with JTA.“It’s important to have exchanges with candidates,” he said.Potasnik, like others attending, was there in a personal capacity and not on behalf of their affiliated groups. Many of the rabbis took selfies with Clinton.Among others attending were Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the former president of the Union for Reform Judaism; Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, the executive vice president of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly; and Rabbi Menachem Genack, the CEO of the Orthodox Union’s kosher division.Hillary Clinton, seeking to secure her delegate lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., her challenger in the run for the Democratic presidential nod, is stepping up her campaign in New York state ahead of its April 19 primary.

Exclusive / 'I would not as an Israeli be worried about the future of our relationship. I think it's going to strengthen'-Israel ‘our indispensable ally’ in war on Islamic terror, says Paul Ryan on visit to Jerusalem-House Speaker calls for ‘generational strategy’ to win over hearts and minds in the Muslim world; warns Iran will make supporters ‘rue the day’ they backed the nuclear deal; says nobody should try to force Israel ‘into an insecure position’By David Horovitz April 4, 2016, 1:28 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

Paul Ryan — Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mitt Romney’s 2012 running mate, and the Republican Who Didn’t Run for the Presidency this time — broadly holds to the principle of not being too critical of the US government when traveling abroad. But his very decision to come to Israel on Sunday and Monday — on the first days, that is, of his first foreign trip since taking the Speaker’s job last October — is an implied rebuke to President Barack Obama, and an overt reassertion of American solidarity with Israel.Talking to The Times of Israel from the balcony of his Jerusalem hotel room, Ryan’s first order of business is to make clear that he very deliberately chose to visit Israel now so as “to reinforce our alliance” and to underline his conviction that the US-Israel partnership should and will grow stronger in the future.The 46-year-old father of three from Wisconsin, who was last in Israel late in Ariel Sharon’s prime ministership in 2005, emphatically endorses Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s view that Palestinian terrorism directed against Israel is ultimately no different from the Islamic terror afflicting Europe and threatening the United States, and that the civilized world must unite to fight it. “They’re coming at Israel but they’re ultimately coming for us,” he says. “So we are partners in this war on terror, radical Islamic terrorism. Israel is an indispensable ally in that. Israel is on the front line in so many ways with respect to it.”Rather than wishing the Islamist extremism away, or seeking desperately to avoid calling it by its name, Ryan sets out an agenda for confronting it — not only militarily, when it rears its violent head, but at the grassroots level, where the brainwashing and indoctrination are taking place. “We need a generational strategy about winning hearts and minds in the Muslim world,” he argues, and specifies the imperative to form “a coalition of governments in moderate nations” to prevent the creation of the next generations of killers. “We don’t have a current strategy to deal with ISIS right now,” he laments, “let alone how do we prevent the five-year-old in Pakistan from becoming a radical.”Almost everything that Ryan says in our interview — on Iran, on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on fighting terror, and on US-Israel ties — will be music to Netanyahu’s ears.He endorses the goal of a two-state solution but believes that Israel doesn’t have a Palestinian partner at present, so “I don’t know how much progress can be made.”He is adamant that it is not for the United States, or for any other outside player, however well-intentioned, to try to coerce Israel into taking steps along the path to an accommodation. “I’d leave it up to your government,” he says, when asked about the Obama Administration’s encouragement of Israeli territorial compromise. “We shouldn’t try to force Israel into an insecure position.”As a prominent opponent of the President Barack Obama-led nuclear deal with Iran, furthermore, he remains adamant that it was a dreadful agreement, intent on holding Iran to its (albeit inadequate) terms, determined to resist any further concessions, and convinced that the regime in Iran will expose the foolishness of those who supported it. “I think the ballistic tests (were an early indication). I think what Iran is going to end up doing is going to make people rue the day they voted for that deal,” he says bitterly. “As we move forward in the future, I think people who supported the deal are going to regret that support.”And encouragingly for Netanyahu, he also takes the view that the prime minister’s lobbying against the deal, and essentially against Obama, in Congress in March 2015, has not alienated parts of the American political spectrum in the long-term, or turned Israel into more of a partisan issue in the United States. “I’m not a Democrat,” he confirms helpfully, but he says he believes the intensity of that battle was a passing “moment.” Overall, he advises, “I would not as an Israeli be worried about the future of our relationship. I think it’s going to strengthen.” The alliance with Congress is extremely warm and firm, he elaborates, and ordinary Americans understand “that our ties with Israel are deep and strong, and that they’re mutual… We need Israel for our own national security. We need Israel to keep ourselves safe as well.”Acknowledging the challenge of BDS, and anti-Israel activism on campus, Ryan is adamant, nonetheless: “There is a nasty strain of anti-Semitism. You read more about it in Europe. But (in the US) this is infinitesimal. The support for Israel is deep in America.”All in all, there’s no mistaking that a president Paul Ryan would be unstintingly supportive of Israel, and a far more comfortable White House partner for Netanyahu than the incumbent. Except, of course, that Ryan isn’t running. He says he has no regrets about that, even as the Republican race has turned so acrimonious and divisive. The GOP had a more than ample 17 contenders when the race began, he was enjoying his career on the Hill, and wanted to have enough time to be a good husband and father for his young family.Even now, Ryan says, should the Republican campaign deteriorate into still more vicious in-fighting at a contested convention, he’s not prepared to sally forth as the unifying savior. “I’ve already said that that’s not me,” he insists. “I decided not to run for president. I think you should run, if you’re going to be president. I think you should start in Iowa and run to the tape.”Ryan on Monday visited his Knesset counterpart Yuli Edelstein, and met with minimal fanfare with Netanyahu — the prime minister presumably anxious not to be vulnerable to allegations of partisan interference in the US presidential campaign. (Netanyahu hosted Romney in 2012, to no shortage of subsequent criticism from Democratic circles.) The Prime Minister’s Office on Monday afternoon sent out two photographs and issued a two-sentence statement on the visit, which was closed to the media: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this morning met with a bi-partisan Congressional delegation led by US House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan. The delegation expressed its firm support for Israel.”From here, Ryan is heading on to other parts of the region — visiting several nations that are partners with the United States in the fight against Islamic State.Our interview was conducted on Sunday evening. What follows is the lightly edited transcript:The Times of Israel: This is your first time here since 2005.Paul Ryan: Let me tell you why I’m here. It’s important for me to say this. It’s my first trip as Speaker. The first place I wanted to come, on the first day (of the first trip): I wanted to come to Israel. For very important symbolic reasons — to buttress and reinforce our alliance and my belief in a stronger alliance between our two countries.Because that needed doing? It’s something that needs to be done. It needs to be buttressed. I think there’s room for improvement.I was at AIPAC. I heard you speak. I heard some of your thoughts on the Iran deal. (Ryan’s full speech is here.) You think it’s “terrible.” That it legitimizes them as a threshold nuclear power.-Correct.-But how does it play out now? There are elections in the United States. There will be a new leadership in the United States. Can it be reversed? Will it be rolled back? What’s your best-case scenario? My thoughts are well known on the Iran deal. I fought it in the House. We did not prevail because of the way the vote was structured. The question now is one of enforcement — keeping Iran to its word. And making sure that we don’t backslide on any other sanctions. So, enforcing, monitoring and watching all the other sanctions — making sure there are no other sanctions that are being loosened. And that’s what brings me to concern about the clearing houses and the dollarization — giving (Iran) access to cash, to dollars, and to the US financial system. That’s not part of this deal, and it shouldn’t be. That falls into the category of concerns about backsliding or even giving more concessions and sanctions relief.The ballistic missile tests — ultimately, they’ve got away with it.Yes, so that was anther UN resolution (defied).My thoughts have not changed on the Iran regime. We need to have a stronger posture with our Iran policy. It’s a difference of opinion we have with the administration.Where we go from here is to make sure that we don’t backslide on sanctions. That we’re tougher on sanctions. We’re looking at other things in the House. The last thing we want to do is see backsliding.The speech Donald Trump gave at AIPAC (last month) included an internal contradiction. He said at one point that he’d dismantle the deal, and then he spoke about needing to enforce it very strongly. Those who think that it can be dismantled are (deluding themselves)? It’s going to be determined by circumstances in the future as to the conduct of Iran. Do they cheat? Do we catch them at cheating? Other things like that.I didn’t hear his speech. I spoke before him. I thought about saying in the middle of the speech, Is it me or is the room spinning? (Speakers at AIPAC’s main sessions addressed 18,000 in a basketball stadium from a central stage that rotated slowly — DH) I’ve given a lot of speeches, but I’ve never done anything like this before. (Laughs.)-Israelis are incredibly invested in the relationship with the United States. Israelis are really worried about Iran, and consensually think this is a bad deal, but many wonder if maybe Israel could have fought it without being quite so in your face — because of the danger of Israel becoming more of a partisan issue (in US politics).I don’t see it that way. I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.First of all, if you come to Congress, the bi-partisan support for Israel is very strong. Before I did this job, I chaired the Ways and Means Committee. I put in the Trade Promotion Authority Legislation, which is what you need to make trade agreements, (including) the anti-BDS language. No problems. Easy bipartisan win. I had support from both sides.So I do believe that our relationship is strong, will get stronger. Republicans disagree with the administration’s policy in this area. A lot of Democrats do.In this area: You mean the Iran deal? Yes.I would not as an Israeli be worried about the future of our relationship. I think it’s going to strengthen. Because I can speak for Congress, knowing that we have a very strong alliance. Again, that’s why I’m here (in Israel).And what about Americans generally? You mention BDS. We’re aware in Israel that there’s a battle on campus. And it’s nastier than it has been.It’s true. There is a nasty strain of anti-Semitism. You read more about it in Europe. But (in the US) this is infinitesimal. The support for Israel is deep in America. I don’t have a big Jewish diaspora in my district. But I have huge pro-Israel supporters in my district. The evangelical churches. The common American citizen understands that our ties with Israel are deep and strong, and that they’re mutual. We need Israel for our own national security. We need Israel to keep ourselves safe as well. That’s important.We have international terrorism that is threatening the civilized world. It’s threatening us. They’re coming at Israel but they’re ultimately coming for us. So we are partners in this war on terror, radical Islamic terrorism. Israel is an indispensable ally in that. Israel is on the front line in so many ways with respects to it. So (the alliance is crucial) just for security cooperation. (Additionally,) we share the same values. You are an oasis of democracy in a tough neighborhood. And it’s very important to us to keep these alliances.And you don’t think the battle over the Iran deal… You lost that battle in the House; Netanyahu failed to sway enough people (with his speech to Congress). There is a concern here that maybe Israel alienated some parts of the Democratic Party spectrum.I’m not a Democrat. I can’t necessarily speak to that. I don’t see that. I think that was a (passing) moment.I think the ballistic tests (were an early indication). I think what Iran is going to end up doing is going to make people rue the day they voted for that deal. As we move forward in the future, I think people who supported the deal are going to regret that support.You think reality is going to force…Yes. I won’t go any further than that. But I think people will regret it.So now let’s talk about this presidential race that you have.I’m neutral. (Laughs)-Of course you are. I’m used to coming to the US, with Israel in the midst of political battles and all kinds of chaos at home, and now I came to the United States…Yeah, I know.How do you think it’s going to play out? Actually in my state (of Wisconsin) on Tuesday, (there’s a crucial primary).Do you have some Wisconsin insight? Well, Cruz is doing pretty well. He’s pulling ahead in polls. Bernie might win it. The enthusiastic Democrat in Wisconsin is a pro-Bernie Democrat.Wisconsin is a fairly important signal as to whether we’re going to have an open convention or not. If Trump wins it, then he’s putting himself on a pretty good path to clinching (the nomination) — the 1,237 (delegates) before the convention. If he loses Wisconsin, there’s a two-three week gap. It makes it more likely — though I don’t know (for sure) — but it makes it more likely that it’s an open convention. Then we’ll see what happens. I’m the co-chair of the convention, so I’m perfectly neutral on this.That takes me out of the next two questions you were going to ask me. (Laughs.)-But it’s possible, isn’t it, that people might prevail upon you to…? No, I’ve already said that that’s not me.You’re not interested in being…? I decided not to run for president. I think you should run, if you’re going to be president. I think you should start in Iowa and run to the tape.So why didn’t you? Oh, lots of reasons. Phase of life: I have a young family. I thought I could make a meaningful difference where I was in Congress: At the time I was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. I focused on economic issues quite a bit. So I thought I could make a huge difference where I was, and still be the kind of dad and husband I want to be.And we had a deep bench., We had 17 people running. We had a deep bench of qualified people. So I thought we had that fairly well taken care of.What does it say about America that the Trump campaign has done as well as it has? And that the Sanders campaign has? The anti-establishment or non-establishment candidates.Deep anxiety. Our economy has been flat since the recession. We have been under 2% growth. We have 45 million people stuck in poverty. Wages are flat. And ISIS is on the rise.When we saw Paris and then San Bernardino, it really brought a wake-up call. People are really anxious on both national security and economic insecurity. They believe that the government is failing them. Because it has.I find myself giving a lot of civics lessons as I travel the country to my constituents. They think, why didn’t you stop this? Or why didn’t you do this? Which is the constitution: You know, you have to have enough votes to override a veto, to be able to pass things, to get to a filibuster. (People are unhappy) that we didn’t change or stop what had happened in the last four years.What would they have wanted done? Repeal Obamacare and fix national security.Tell us more about national security. That’s so resonant for us.I’ll give you an example. We passed a Defense Authorization Act. The guy who wrote it is here with me. Mac Thornberry, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. We passed it requiring a comprehensive plan to defeat ISIS. We still have yet to see one. That got people really anxious. Including ourselves. The Executive Branch executes foreign policy. We fund it. But we don’t think we have a comprehensive strategy to defeat ISIS and to keep us safe.That, plus our border is porous. And we have those concerns. That compounds people’s concern that the government is not keeping them safe and doing what it needs to do.Did America seek to pull away from the Middle East in the hope that it wouldn’t follow you home? Fortress America? Not intervening in Syria, for example. I don’t know how to fix Syria. But don’t be surprised a few years later when people try to flee because they’re being massacred in the hundreds of thousands.Of course, looking at the refugee problem. I’ve been fairly clear in my criticism of the administration’s policy on all of these issues. Syria, of course — the red line (which President Assad crossed by gassing his people in 2013, but which President Obama allowed to pass without a promised punitive response).What we’re witnessing in some respects — not all, but many respects — is the (consequences of the) administration’s foreign policy, which I’m a strong opponent of. They’ve got their foreign policy wrong. Normally, Congress doesn’t run on foreign policy. But we think it’s risen to the level of needing attention, that it’s one of the five points that we’re going to be running on this year: economic growth; health care entitlement reform; welfare reform; foreign policy; and restoring the constitution. On foreign policy, we want to have a foreign policy doctrine and a military equipped to carry out that doctrine, to keep us safe. We don’t think we have suitable foreign policy to advance America’s interests — which, chief among them, is protecting our national security.Do you have specific suggestions on tackling Islamist terrorism — things that need to be done; that are overdue to be done? I don’t think we have a comprehensive strategy. We need a generational strategy about winning hearts and minds in the Muslim world. How do we figure that out? Tony Blair has done some great work in this area: How do we embrace moderates. How do we lead a coalition of governments in moderate nations and win hearts and minds. And to confront the madrasas, to confront the extremism, while we have a much more effective national security policy, and a military that is not being drained. I can go on about the budget with the military. We need to improve our military strength; we need more ships, we need more brigades, we need more combat-ready brigades.(We need) a foreign policy doctrine — an actual strategy to defeat ISIS which is the current problem, and a long-term strategy to confront extremism, and an engagement plan with Muslims themselves and moderate Muslim nations. And our allies in Israel are our partners in that.Anti-Semitism is on the rise. Anti-Americanism is on the rise. Terrorism is on the rise. They’re kicking out generations of young kids — look at the knife intifada you have here.Our prime minister would say it’s all part of the same thing — we’re dealing with extremists; we’re dealing with people who are being brainwashed. This is all one and the same.Yes, I see it that way. I see that we have to have a long-term strategy. My kids will be working on this — their generation. (We need) a long-term strategy to deal with this. And we don’t do that. We don’t have a current strategy to deal with ISIS right now, let alone how do we prevent the five-year old in Pakistan from becoming a radical.What do you have to say on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — an area where the Obama administration made a lot of effort and ultimately failed to achieve any kind of substantive progress — not for a lack of good intentions, I’m sure? Every administration puts a very substantial effort. We agree with the two-state solution — we agree with the goal. But you have to have the kind of security situation that you need to put this together, and you don’t have that. It’s not my place to say, but you have to have the kind of partnership in order to have a lasting peace, and you don’t have that. So, until you do, I don’t know how much progress can be made.Whereas the current administration has sought to say to Israel, we think you can afford to take more risks.I’d leave it up to your government. What we should not do are premature resolutions at the UN, if that were to come. We shouldn’t try to force Israel into an insecure position.Do you see any realistic likelihood that in the last months of this administration there might be something nasty going through the UN that America wouldn’t veto? No… I pray that there isn’t. I don’t have any reason to believe that there is. And I do know that Congress the next day would be doing something about it. We would do whatever we could from our capacity to prevent such a thing from happening. I can’t imagine the administration would do that. Then again…You’ve been wrong in the past? … There is a concern here. There is so much mutual mistrust there, that nobody is completely sure.It’s justifiable. I get it.

The end of Israeli democracy? In the cacophony of grandstanding over Israelis’ endangered liberties, one of the most profound debates in the country’s history is being missed-By Haviv Rettig Gur April 4, 2016, 8:48 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

In a recent op-ed in the Forward, Daniel Sokatch, CEO of the left-leaning US-based New Israel Fund, laid out his widely shared aspiration to rehabilitate the Israeli left from afar by flooding it with cash.“The attacks on civil society and other democratic institutions continue from year to year,” he wrote, “with some right-wing victories such as passage of the boycott law [which allows civil suits to be brought against West Bank settlement boycotts], and some defeats at the hands of Israel’s underestimated and underfunded left.”Sokatch retells the narrative now commonly accepted overseas that sees Israeli democracy in decline, if not in full-blown collapse, as once-victorious Israeli progressives are pushed back in the face of a surging chauvinist right.The evidence most often cited for this decline in Israeli liberty is the raft of right-wing bills proposed in the Knesset in recent years, including the boycott law mentioned by Sokatch.Do the bills in question – the NGO bill, the MK suspension bill, etc. – prove that there is an assault on Israeli democracy? And is this assault, as Sokatch claims, held back by the heroic efforts of an “underestimated and underfunded left?”The debate over the wisdom or perfidy of the bills themselves is a hopelessly partisan one. But this last part of the left’s narrative — the claim that the bills are being stopped by the left — is eminently testable, and sheds a great deal of light on the meaning and purpose of the bills.Much ink has been spilled on Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked’s NGO bill, which dramatically (and critics say unfairly) ups the public disclosure requirements for nongovernmental organizations that receive a majority of their funding from foreign governments. Just about all the groups that fit that description belong to the political left.Whether the controversial bill is good or bad, democratic or anti-, it is undeniably a far milder attempt to deal with the issue than previous proposals. In the 18th Knesset (2009-2013), Likud MK Ofir Akunis (now the minister of science) proposed a bill that would have outlawed such funding altogether, all but shuttering many far-left groups.What happened to Akunis’s proposal? Was it defeated, as Sokatch suggests, by the left? A similar question arises regarding the rightist versions of the “nation-state bill” that drew so much opprobrium in 2013 and 2014, the ones that contained much-criticized stipulations demoting the de facto status of Arabic as an official language and granting West Bank settlements constitutional protections.Where did they go? The answer would surprise many who have opined on these bills in recent years. For it wasn’t the left that stopped Akunis’s bill. It didn’t have the chance — the bill never made it to a preliminary vote in the Knesset. It was killed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, together with other coalition leaders, and not in any dramatic parliamentary showdown, or even a debate. The bill was simply excluded from the agenda because it lacked the minimum support it would have needed to even hazard a vote.The story is much the same with the nation-state bills, but this time the left’s haplessness is proven by the fact that the bills did make it to a plenum vote – where they passed.They did not become law, to be sure. They only passed a preliminary vote, and only after Netanyahu struck a compromise with their authors, including three currently serving cabinet ministers (Shaked, Ze’ev Elkin and Yariv Levin), that saw the bills killed after the vote. Under this compromise, the authors were handed the symbolic victory of a successful vote on condition that they agree to cancel their bills in favor of a more liberal Netanyahu-proposed version, one which uses equal terms to describe Israel as “Jewish” and “democratic,” leaves out any demotion of Arabic’s status and avoids the settlement question altogether.The left had a rare opportunity to embarrass not only the bills’ far-right proponents, but the prime minister himself. It tried to muster the votes — and failed. The bills were formally canceled in a vote inside the Netanyahu cabinet, on Netanyahu’s express instructions.The point of this into-the-weeds examination of the fates of those bills is clear: it is the right, not the left, that is holding back the proverbial tide.And these are not cherry-picked examples. The list of right-wing bills defeated by the right is a long one. A bill proposed by the Yisrael Beytenu party that would have instituted a death penalty for terrorists – surely an easy win in terror-afflicted Israel – was defeated 94-6 (yes, 94 to 6) in a July 2015 Knesset vote. The left, however “underestimated,” could not summon 94 votes in the 120-seat Knesset even in its most indelicate fantasies.Sokatch’s own example of the controversial 2011 “boycott law,” which made the singling out of West Bank settlements a legally actionable act of discrimination under Israel’s anti-discrimination laws, ironically disproves Sokatch’s own narrative. Foreign pundits often point to it to sustain the democracy-in-decline narrative, if only because there are so few other examples of the successful passage of a distinctly right-wing law in seven years of emphatically right-wing rule. Yet the boycott law was so defanged by the time it actually passed, with criminal sanctions excised from the final version and a high bar set for proving even civil damages, that it has yet to be enforced.It is worth dwelling on that point: five years after its passage, the boycott law has not even been tested in court – and not for lack of Israelis who say they won’t conduct commerce with settlements.And it should not go unnoticed that even after the teeth were pulled from this controversial bill, Netanyahu himself still refused to support it in the final July 2011 Knesset vote that made it law, pointedly absenting himself from the plenum (together with then-defense minister Ehud Barak).The list grows tedious – and that’s the point. Ayelet Shaked’s longstanding proposal to add a “supersession clause” in the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, which would have enabled the Knesset to overrule High Court of Justice decisions, was dropped last summer, in her very first days on the job as justice minister. Her explanation: she lacked the votes to pass the measure, or even to make it worth fighting for.Just last month, Jewish Home MK Moti Yogev’s bill outlawing the broadcasting of the Muslim call to prayer on loudspeakers was withdrawn by its own author – because he could not obtain the support of the Ministerial Committee for Legislation, a cabinet committee overseen by avowed rightists (and West Bank annexationists) Shaked and Levin. A similar bill suffered a similar fate in 2014.Sokatch’s “underfunded and underestimated left” is a mirage. The left is just as ineffectual as its critics contend. And if it is the right, not the left, that holds the line against the anti-democratic surge, does that mean Israeli democracy is not, in fact, under threat? -Gimmicks-The right’s persistent habit of systematically toppling its own bills reveals the underlying gimmick that drives so much discussion about Israel on both left and right. For it is usually the rightist lawmakers, not their critics, who declare that their bills are meant to solve the supposed problem of “too much democracy,” or who say they prefer Israel’s “Jewish character” to its “democratic” one. To the left’s growing use of “democracy” as a catchword for its liberal politics, many on the right have responded by calling for “rebalancing” – i.e., weakening – that democracy.It is hard to criticize the left for its rhetoric when it is at least partly drawn from the right’s own descriptions of its intentions.In the end, the debate about Israel, both at home and among those overseas who take their cues from Israel’s domestic politics, is driven by the faux stridency of powerless demagogues, by rightists who propose unpassable bills to draw out the wrath of the left and so distinguish themselves in a crowded field — and leftists who simply have too much to gain from their hand-wringing, from foreign funders to a mobilizing ethos of victimhood, to subject it to any measure of self-criticism.Or, put another way, the frenetic rhetorical contest between left and right is essentially a media event, not a policy debate. The bills would not be proposed if the lawmaker could not be assured they would not be held responsible for their passage.On Wednesday night, September 2, 2015, in a plenum nearly empty of lawmakers, MKs Akunis of Likud and Israel Eichler of United Torah Judaism managed to inject an amendment into the new Broadcasting Authority bill that came up for a vote that evening that made it illegal for journalists in public broadcasters to express personal views on political matters. The law passed, and the unnoticed amendment became the of the law.When they noticed it the following morning, horrified political reporters took to calling it “the silencing law.”The amendment caused a triumphant uproar of victimization on the left and profound embarrassment on the right. It passed by accident, coalition leaders explained. By Sunday, when lawmakers returned from the weekend, it was Netanyahu himself who brought forward the amendment to reverse the measure. It was overturned within the week.Akunis and Eichler made weak attempts to defend the measure, but seemed more horrified that it passed than that it was overturned.These bills are intended as press releases, and it is no accident that their numbers usually swell in the run-up to right-wing primaries. They are not meant to pass. Lawmakers who propose them do not expect to find themselves responsible for the results of their passage.-Own goals-Israel’s far-left activists, who are often at the center of these left-right skirmishes, know all this – at least when they are speaking in Hebrew.In a statement emailed to reporters in January, B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence, two groups funded primarily by foreign governments and thus subject to the stipulations of Shaked’s NGO bill if it passes, called the bill “an own goal for the government.”“The law won’t hurt our activities in practice,” Breaking the Silence’s CEO Yuli Novak — whose group seeks out testimony from Israeli army veterans and serving soldiers relating to human rights abuses against Palestinians in the West Bank — boasted in the Hebrew-language statement.Hagai El-Ad, Executive director of B’Tselem, another group that documents human rights abuses in the West Bank, added: “The campaign of incitement against us…has had some positive results: we are finally talking about the occupation. Thousands of Israelis have joined the organizations [that stand to be affected by the bill] recently in order to learn, listen, volunteer and contribute to the fight against the occupation.”The bill’s “practical content is sparse,” the statement went on – apparently without coordinating its message with overseas supporters like Sokatch, who are arguing otherwise – “but its symbolic significance is far-reaching. Mainly, it undermines the claims of the Israeli propaganda machine that Israel shares the values of the democratic world.”One wonders if this last part about Israel’s values shouldn’t also have been coordinated with the likes of Sokatch, whose rhetoric speaks of protecting Israel’s values, while these advocates are telling the world (and boasting to Israelis that they are doing so) that Israel lacks such values altogether.There is a message in these gaps between the Israeli activists and their overseas supporters, between the left’s vision of its role in upholding Israeli democracy and the less complimentary facts on the ground in the Knesset, between the right’s own feigned militancy and the reliability with which it then kills its own bills.In these gaps is revealed a strange truth about this debate on democracy: that it is not really a debate about democracy, but about solidarity, kinship and the social compromises on which Israeli society is constructed.-Statist, intrusive, free-Israel boasts many of the features of highly successful democracies: an open and contentious public square, free and egalitarian parliamentary elections, robust judicial recourse and oversight.But no one quite knows why.Built by East European and Muslim-world immigrants with no actual experience of democracy, the Israeli state is, on paper at least, worryingly monolithic and intrusive. The local traffic cop, the school textbook, the neighborhood rabbi, even the local ritual mikveh bath, are all appointed and administered by watchful bureaucrats in Jerusalem.For the first 29 years of the state’s existence, one party, the center-left mainstay today called the Labor Party, never lost an election. This de facto one-party regime controlled not only the security services, but the country’s largest industries, which were state-owned and -run during those early decades.There are almost no formal checks and balances between the institutions of government. The prime minister is not chosen directly by the people, but in a complicated process of parliamentary coalition-building. He or she cannot govern without a parliamentary majority. The prime minister is thus not meaningfully constrained by any American-style opposition legislature.Nor does Israel possess any clearly articulated ideology of political liberty. There was no Philadelphia Convention at Israel’s founding, no Federalist Papers, no explicit public debate about the nature and structure of the country’s political institutions. The Declaration of Independence, which refers in broad terms to notions of freedom and equality, lacks the force of law. Only in 1992 were some key rights delineated in two pseudo-constitutional “basic laws,” yet even these are in an important sense only halfheartedly constitutional. The Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, which articulates fundamental rights such as bodily safety, privacy and freedom of movement, can be changed or overturned by a simple majority of MKs present in the Knesset plenum.Add to that Israel’s bitter history of near-constant warfare that gave the military a central role in the formation of national identity, and the heroicizing of military leaders that naturally flowed from this experience – indeed, add in the enormous number of generals who moved seamlessly out of uniform and into the highest elected offices in the land: Yitzhak Rabin, Moshe Dayan, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak – and one begins to feel that it is not the purported collapse of Israeli democracy that should surprise us, but the fact that so robust a democracy ever took root here in the first place.-Why did it take root? -Runnymede-In “The Origins of Political Order,” the political theorist Francis Fukuyama offers a counterintuitive retelling of the story of the birth of English democracy. The Magna Carta, signed by King John in 1215 after he lost a battle with rebellious nobles at Runnymede, is usually depicted as the beginning of the end for absolutist royal rule in England. By placing limits on the powers of the king, the “great charter” is said to mark a dramatic first step in Britain’s inexorable and inevitable democratization.For Fukuyama, this version of English political history, this vision of history as inevitably arcing toward present-day liberalism, misses the most salient factor in England’s democratic development. Britons are free today not only because the king was weakened at Runnymede, but because he was also simultaneously strengthened.The monarchy that emerged after 1215 was startlingly powerful, centralized and legitimated by its sharing of political power. By the 14th century, the English state was largely professionalized, controlled its territory to the point that it could tax it effectively, and had imposed royal courts across the land that could overturn the decisions of local lords.That it had to share its decisionmaking powers on matters of war, taxation and the like with an ever-expanding circle of English elites represented in Parliament actually empowered the monarchy as an institution.For English democracy, Fukuyama explains, did not begin in the weakening of government, but in a more complex standoff exemplified at Runnymede. The nobles could sometimes defeat the king, but not topple the monarchy. The result was a tense centuries-long equilibrium between more or less matched opponents — king vs. nobles, monarchy vs. Parliament, with no side able to comprehensively quash the other. The rights and obligations each eked out of the other were initially extracted by force, then by implicit agreement, and eventually, over the centuries, by the institutionalization of these arrangements in the peculiar unwritten traditions of Britain’s monarchic democracy.And it would not have happened without a strong king, one to whom commoners could turn for redress of grievances against the nobility, one who could unite the country in war and serve in peacetime as an embodiment of a shared national identity.The love of the British for their unelected royals — that odd phenomenon of a robustly liberal democracy pretending with all the pageantry it can muster to be a theocratic dictatorship — thus articulates something profound about the origins of English liberty. When they celebrate their monarchy, the British are not celebrating kings and queens as such, but the rule-bound, peculiarly English sort of royalty that formed one-half of that primordial political balance from which their present-day freedoms, and those of so many other nations who learned from the English example in later centuries, originally flowed.The accident-From its earliest moments, the Jewish polity in Israel was divided not merely into political camps but into distinct social, ideological and ethnic groups that usually lived apart from each other and carried on separate cultural lives.To this day, these divides play an outsized role in Israelis’ identities and voting habits. Israelis are more likely to vote according to their ethnic origins or religious observance than any clear economic or political interest. In political terms, Haredim live apart from secular Israelis — even when they live among them, such as the many Haredi families who reside in the heart of secular Tel Aviv. Villages founded by Labor socialists fifty and even a hundred years ago continue to vote Labor, even when the village in question is a West Bank settlement that present-day Labor seeks to displace. The Ashkenazi-Sephardi divide returns in force each time Israelis go to the ballot box, and continues to serve as a key predictor of voting patterns in communities throughout the country.Yet the centrifugal forces of these identity politics are kept in check by an overpowering belief among Israeli Jews, forged in the still-living memory of the brutalities of the 20th century, that they share a common fate. Most Israeli Jews are the grandchildren of refugees, and for most of them, the state serves even today as a vehicle for fulfilling the original Zionist promise of a self-reliant refuge in a cruel world.This ethos of refuge lies at the heart of Israeli solidarity. It is responsible for another trait of Israeli Jewish identity: the deep-seated taboo against intra-Jewish violence. Amid countless wars and terror attacks, bordered on all sides by an imploding, war-ravaged Arab world, Israelis usually say they find the rare instances of Jew-on-Jew violence more unsettling and traumatic than even the largest and most frightening of the wars they have fought with outsiders. The sinking of the Altalena in 1948, the 1983 killing of Peace Now activist Emil Grunzweig or the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 — all instances when Jews killed other Jews — are better known to most Israeli high schoolers than the full-blown wars that took place in those years. They are studied as watersheds of the Israeli experience because they are seen by so many Israelis as events that violated the premise of collective responsibility at the heart of the Israeli Jewish narrative.The impact of this ethos of solidarity cannot be exaggerated. If one cannot violently repress fellow Jews, one is left with an exceedingly limited number of options for political regimes. If Prime Minister David Ben Gurion could not order Israel’s security agencies to rid him of the troublesome opposition leader Menachem Begin – not only because he didn’t want to do so, but because he didn’t believe the security services would have obeyed such an order – that fact alone means Israel could not help but develop an open, self-critical political discourse, open competition between rival political camps, and the free elections that enable that competition to take place fairly and without bloodshed.The essential elements at the root of Anglo-Saxon liberties, then, were all present at the dawn of the Israeli Jewish polity: an unwinnable competition among mutually antagonistic groups shackled to each other in a unifying ethos of solidarity, a simultaneous push and pull that forces on Israel’s Jews the compromises that are the content of what Israelis call “democracy.”Israel’s democracy, like Britain’s, is thus in a deep sense accidental, organic, rooted as much in the collectivist instincts of this refugee nation as in any self-conscious notions of individualism or political liberty.These compromises are evident everywhere in Israeli society and politics.When it comes to religion and family law, for example, Israeli Jews are subject to an explicitly illiberal rabbinic court system that unapologetically denies the right to marry to hundreds of thousands of Israelis. Yet the vast majority of Israeli Jews live free and unfettered family lives, marry whom they wish and even enjoy judicially recognized cohabitation rights for gays. They are able to do those things through the straightforward expedient of simply ignoring the rabbinate. In fact, there is an unspoken contract between Israel’s competing Jewish tribes that permits the rabbinate to be as stifling as it wishes on paper as long as it does not make the mistake of attempting to impose itself on Israelis’ lives in reality. The most illiberal family law system in the free world thus rests tenuously atop an essentially liberal and accepting society.Similarly, when asked to produce a detailed analysis of the “nation-state” proposals of 2014, one of Israel’s most renowned public intellectuals, the law scholar Ruth Gavison, recommended shelving the various bills and warned Israeli leaders against engaging so explicitly with the question of Israel’s national identity. Her reason: Israelis inherited from their founders a powerful vision for their country, but its power “lies in its vagueness. A Jewish nation-state law may upset the balance between elements crucial for maintaining the vision as a whole.”Israel’s identity, Gavison argued, should not be articulated too specifically. Such decisiveness risks upsetting the underlying social tensions from which the nation’s liberties ultimately flow.This analysis of the roots of Israeli democracy also sheds new light on the nature of the country’s political system. It is true that there is no meaningful balance of power between the executive and legislative branches, but within the Knesset itself, nationally elected party lists, each representing a social subgroup of Israeli society, have proven incredibly effective at holding each other in check, a skill helped by the fact that no group is large enough to wield power alone.So while it is true, as noted above, that the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty can be overturned by a simple majority in the Knesset plenum, that formal fragility hides the deeper resilience of Israelis’ rights. At the end of the day, the basic law has not been overturned. Too many camps in this fraught tapestry of a society see in the law a defense of their own rights, and so will not join any coalition that seeks to overturn it.Israel’s is a pragmatic democratic tradition, where democracy is seen as a solution to a specific and longstanding problem of social division and mutual dependence. It is more often viewed by Israelis as a mechanism for ensuring Jewish solidarity and survival than as a moral imperative in its own right.-The missing left-Beneath the demagoguery of the right’s purposefully offensive bills and the left’s self-righteous howls of oppression there is a second conversation as profound as any in Israel’s history.Many of the activists in groups such as Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem are engaged in an explicit challenge to the standing Israeli notions of “democracy.” For them, and for many others on the editorial pages of Haaretz or the rallies of the Hadash or Meretz parties, “democracy” has come to mean almost exactly the opposite of what most Israelis understand by the term: it is the very act of defying the Israeli Jewish ethos of solidarity.This far-left blames that ethos for the paralysis of Israeli politics on an untold number of issues, from the continued occupation of the Palestinians to the continued denial of formal religious liberties. Faced with these injustices, some of them only on paper and some of them very real indeed, these activists have little patience for “accidental” Israeli freedoms that flow from inchoate social compromises.They want explicit legal protections, constitutionally articulated liberalism and a universalist civic politics to replace the nationalist sensibilities that today drive the Israeli body politic.It is not hard to understand why they cause such furor in Israel, or why they are so reviled. For their opponents, especially on the right, this effort to dismantle Jewish solidarity amounts to an attack against the heart of Jewish survival — and of Israeli democracy as well. Solidarity, not liberalism, saved the Jews of Israel from the vicissitudes of the 20th century. Solidarity, not liberalism, lies at the root of both Jewish national independence and Israeli domestic liberties. For many Israelis, those who would shift the foundations of Israeli politics away from that solidarity are in an important sense dislodged from the Israeli experience.That their NGOs are mostly funded by foreign governments and so much of their advocacy is focused abroad — indeed, that they are so influential overseas despite being so utterly marginal at home — only reinforces this view. And, of course, it is no accident that the right, via the NGO bill and other measures, focuses its campaign on this estrangement and away from the content of their criticism.This branch of the left cannot win this fight, not because it is wrong – there is no claim being made here about which side is morally superior – but because its defiance of the underlying ethos of Israeli Jewish solidarity drives it inevitably away from the very body politic it seeks to change.Nowhere is this made clearer than in recent attempts by left-wing former security chiefs to defend Breaking the Silence.In December, retired IDF major general Amiram Levin took out an ad in Haaretz in which he insisted that soldiers must be encouraged “to speak out without fear, in the IDF and in Israeli society,” about their experiences in the West Bank. Levin then added in parentheses – the very presence of parentheses in such an ad speaks volumes – “(and only in the IDF and Israeli society).”Former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin expressed similar sentiments in a Facebook post that month, praising soldiers who come forward with their moral qualms, and praising Breaking the Silence, “even if they can make us angry, even if they are sometimes inaccurate or not doing their jobs correctly,” as providing an “important mirror to our actions.”He then took the trouble to note: “I don’t like their activity abroad.”Neither Levin nor Diskin was defending Breaking the Silence. They were defending the act of dissent. They share the right’s criticism of the group even in their defense of it, but spoke out because of a larger fear: that what Breaking the Silence is doing right — encouraging IDF combat veterans to tell their experiences — would become conflated with what Breaking the Silence is doing wrong in their view — its abandonment of Israeli solidarity for foreign shores.Here lies the danger for Sokatch, for opposition leader Isaac Herzog, and for anyone else who seeks to rehabilitate an Israeli left that has not won an election in 17 years. As a matter of political strategy, not merely of ethics, they cannot change Israel by scorning it. The left’s political prospects — and perhaps, ironically, Israeli democracy with it, for what is a democracy in which only one side can win elections? — are far more endangered by the prospect of being identified with the far left’s rejection of Israeli Jewish solidarity than by any rightist lawmaker’s propagandizing.Israeli democracy cannot be taken for granted. But those who would slander it as weak and tottering, or seek to reshape it in their own image, owe it – and us – the courtesy of first judging it on its own terms.