The plan is nonsense. Millions of tourists come to China annually, but none of them supports the communist regime. Apartheid South Africa was a major tourist destination, but suffered condemnation and sanctions. If anything, the tourists would support internationalizing Jerusalem.

It takes a psychiatrist to understand the Jewish longing to be loved by others.

The White House is demanding a construction freeze in extremely rude terms. The current crisis is attributable to the scheming Israeli president. Peres expected that Obama would force Netanyahu to formally abandon the construction, and that this decision would provoke a coalition crisis. Netanyahu, accordingly, would have to bring Kadima into the government to prevent it from falling apart, and Kadima would push for further concessions to the Palestinians.

For years, Egypt has run a low-profile military nuclear program. It cannot afford nuclear inferiority to Iran.

As in Bushehr, Egypt can use its reactor to harvest plutonium for nuclear bombs.

The rabbis are not monsters. Rather, they deeply mistrust the secular legal system—for good reason—and are not willing to give up one of their own for prosecution by atheists.

A possible solution to the problem of the religious community protecting its scoundrels from secular prosecution would be to allow rabbinical leaders criminal jurisdiction over their members.

The sergeants, who naturally wanted to live, forced Palestinian teenagers to open boxes that had possibly been booby-trapped by their elected Hamas government during the 2009 war in Gaza.

There is not the slightest doubt that the soldiers did the right thing according to Jewish religious law.

UNHCR also confirmed that the majority of illegals come from Eritrea. The UN people failed to come to the obvious conclusion: the Eritreans are not refugees.

Now that the Sudanese government has signed peace with the Darfur rebels, Sudanese immigrants in Israel have lost any claim to refugee status, and must be deported immediately.

After three months of enrichment, no Israeli attack will be able to eliminate Iran’s nuclear stocks.

Every sane person understands that sanctions are futile. Not only they are torpedoed by Russia and China, but even the strongest sanctions won’t break Iran’s back within the few months the ayatollahs need to finish their bomb.

Iran’s Russian S-300 SAM do not change the situation. In the current political climate, the Russians won’t man the batteries with their own personnel, and it would take Iranians months to learn to operate them reliably, if they ever do. Most importantly, the S-300 is too small to defend against a missile strike. Two S-300 will take out some 40 missiles, but Israel can launch about a thousand Tomahawk-type missiles.

Baradei is running on the same democratic reform/fight corruption platform as the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the only major Egyptian political group to publish his proclamations. Just as the Islamist revolution in Iran did thirty years ago, the anti-corruption platform in Egypt has brought together moderates, students, and Islamists. Once the Islamists triumph, even the limited democracy of the Mubarak era will come to an end.

Western diplomats have a fatal habit of supporting the foreigners they know rather than the proper foreigners. El Baradei, who has been talking to world leaders for many years, may gather more foreign support than Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal, or any other strong leader.

Once Baradei clears the road to democracy, the Muslim Brotherhood will surge to power in the first transparent elections. The Bush and Obama administrations have pushed Egypt for such elections.

The talks are utterly senseless. Abbas rejected Olmert’s offer on Jerusalem and refugees, saying that the “gaps are too wide,” yet Netanyahu offers even less than Olmert did.

Netanyahu is also demanding Palestinian security guarantees, which Abbas cannot deliver. Besides, security is impossible in a situation in which, for example, a plane landing in Palestine could attack Tel Aviv 9/11 style within about three minutes. By the time IAF recognized that the pilot did not err, it would be too late to shoot down the plane.

Historically, the issue is not clear. In numerous cases, the Turkish government attempted to protect the deported Armenians. Whatever the case, by now everyone believes the story, and the American government’s persistent refusal to recognize the affair as genocide is only meant to placate Turkey. To that end, the US forced Armenia to sign a humiliating accord with Turkey which glossed over the genocide.

The American appeasement of Turkey is worse than pointless. Many years ago, the silence signaled American support for Turkey’s secular regime, but today it shows American complacence toward Turkey’s Islamist policies. If the US keeps quiet on genocide, then certainly it will tolerate anything else Turkey does today.

We will not dwell on the fact that Israel spends more on keeping the Gazans at bay than the UNRWA spends on keeping them alive.

Radar is good while the Gaza border is closed. If relations are normalized and tens of thousands of Arabs cross daily into Israel legally rather than through fence openings, there will be no way to intercept or check them properly.

The Israeli government was sufficiently foolish—or more probably, corrupt—to issue unrestricted concessions to private drilling companies. Free-market policies might be good for large countries with plenty of gas reserves, where many competing companies will assuredly supply national needs for centuries to come; but in Israel, Noble Energy has become a gas monopoly.

This private company will export the gas reserves of the Land of Israel, the field will be emptied in about a decade, and Jews will be left without gas again.

Jews discovered gas fields in Sinai—and gave Sinai away to Egypt; we discovered gas fields near Gaza—and passed the offshore reserves to Arafat; discovered gas fields near Haifa—and conceded them to a foreign company. God gave us good land with sufficient reserves, but we Jews have squandered them.

It is possible that Iran’s brazen defiance is rooted in its certainty that Israel won’t attack even under the best imaginable circumstances. Absent an attack now, Iran would reasonably feel safe in proceeding to enrich its uranium stocks to 80% and weaponize them.

But there is yet another possibility. As we suggested yesterday, Iran and Syria may be planning a preemptive strike on Israel; not a devastating strike, but sufficient to deter Israel from attacking Iran. In that case, Iran would expose its uranium stocks to provoke an Israeli attack against the compound—thickly defended with SAM batteries—and then counterstrike.

Obama’s error is his hallmark confidence-building approach, which calls for incremental steps. But in order to embrace Washington, Assad has to abandon Iran and Lebanon. Certainly, he would require much stronger incentives for that than ambassadorial relations. Obama can woo Assad away from Iran with really big money, but no money has been promised yet, while Iran continues to finance Syrian military expenditures.

Young Assad won’t give up his emotional ties to Nasrallah or his political designs on Lebanon for peanuts, or even for the Golan Heights, which are of little importance to him.

After the meeting, Assad proclaimed that Israel might attack at any time. Just the words he needs to say if Syria is looking to preempt.

Syria knows that it cannot defeat Israel, but it does not need to. Following Sadat’s 1973 example, Assad may be planning a surprise attack on Israel with mid-range missiles to deflect Israel from attacking Iran and force meaningful talks on the return of the Golan Heights.

One railroad would link Carmiel in the Galilee to Tel Aviv. A few Jews might benefit from the project, but it will mainly bring hundreds of thousands of Arabs from the Galilee into Central Israel’s Jewish towns.

Another railroad would connect Haifa and Afula in the Galilee with Beit Shean in the South, again benefiting mostly Arabs in the surrounding villages.

Billions of shekels will be spent to improve roads in the Galilee, even though Arabs there don’t even pay taxes.

The only good thing about this project is that the government won’t be able to budget that much money, and looking at other infrastructure projects such as Jerusalem’s light rail, a generation of Arabs will die before the first cars will ride on the new railroads.

One would think that Israel-Palestinian issues have nothing to do with the EU, which in its cultural isolation had refused to admit Turkey. But the parliament’s president said openly that the debate signals the EU’s growing interest in the Middle East.

And Israel is a pawn in European neo-colonialist expansion. Never mind the hypocrisy of ever-warring European nations judging Jews for an insignificant military operation.

As with other weapons, Israeli drone development suffers from small production scale. Much lower R&D costs so far have allowed Israel Air Industries to compete, but step by step the corporation is migrating abroad. Unless Israel breaks free from American export restrictions, drone production will go the way of Lavi jets, Merkava tanks, and Uzi guns.

UAVs, especially the large ones, are quickly becoming obsolete. They lack the active protection and maneuverability of manned aircraft, and are very easy to shoot down for an enemy who has even basic radar. Compared to mid-price-range Russian jets, they are not cheap, either.

Drones will not be employed in combat anytime in the near future. Drones are useful for reconnaissance, but they are not inherently preferable to ever-cheaper satellites. In the politically correct world, drones have become the weapon of choice for foreign missions: for some reason, affected governments find it easier to swallow if drones, rather than manned aircraft, violate their airspace.

Drones fit the videogame mentality of this generation: do not endanger pilots who, like any soldiers, are meant to be endangered. As fighter jets become prohibitively expensive for combat operations, and developed nations shrink from real combat anyway, we will see many more drones taking to the skies on quasi-military missions. With volumes soaring and competition increasing, Israel won’t be able to sustain her leading edge in drone development.

In the past, the Turkish military used to purge the government of leaders who had Islamic leanings with periodic putsches, but its desire to join  the EU and American pressure for democratization have led the army to accede to the current Islamist government. Pushed away by the EU and vying with Iran for influence in Islamic world, Turkey predictably has become more religious.

Once the government succeeds in weakening the Turkish army, the state may well erupt into violence among the numerous religious and ethnic groups. The divide between Turkey’s atheist and religious population is in itself deep enough to cause civil war. It remains to be seen whether Erdogan will succeed in installing his own commanders in the army. So far, all military graduates are staunchly secular.

Nation states were built on the promise of wide-scale security for their citizens, but it is clear now that the world has returned to the historical norm—every man must watch his own back.

In demographic terms, Galilee is no less a Palestinian territory than the West Bank.

Unless we expel the Arabs.

If true, the attack would mark another touch of genius, following the one we saw in the Gaza war. Commando raids so deep into enemy territory, with such wide goals, have never been tried before, and it would astonishing if Israel could accomplish them.

Such an attack would further confirm the changing rules of warfare: just as conventional warfare has become unacceptably destructive, states follow the terrorists’ lead and turn to low-profile operations: assassinations, the CIA drone wars, and now Iran.

By now, an Israeli strike on Iran seems unavoidable. The government has accepted the possibility of Iran procuring nuclear weapons from North Korea, but assumes that ayatollahs with a couple of A-bombs won’t risk a confrontation with Israel, which has some 200 of them.

But we see no basis for the conclusion that Al Qaeda was involved. Al Qaeda had no good reason to bomb a plane carrying Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders. They changed their tickets at the last minute.

It is also unlikely that Al Qaeda tipped Hezbollah’s people to change planes. They would rather call off the bombing than risk leaking their plans. Hezbollah would have informed the Ethiopians about the plan, since the terrorist group depends on Ethiopia for arms trafficking. Al Qaeda had no incentive at all to blow up an Ethiopian jet.

The bombing plot against Nasrallah might suggest Israeli involvement, but it is our long-standing policy to avoid huge collateral damage.

Wrong. Palestinian leaders are not stupid, and they understand that Israeli Arabs are their fifth column, a demographic time-bomb ticking underneath the Jews. They will fight Lieberman’s territorial exchange much harder than any other issue.

Israel’s only hope is to abandon the Arab towns unilaterally, just as Jordan abandoned the West Bank. There is nothing sacred about them being incorporated into Israel: the towns lie behind the 1948 armistice line rather than any internationally recognized border. If Israel can entertain abandoning the Golan Heights, which were annexed, we can even more easily abandon Israeli Arab towns that were never formally annexed at all.

In December, Hamas’s armed wing tried to kidnap an Israeli soldier near Gaza. The saboteur was arrested.

Hamas sees that Shalit alone is insufficient as a tool with which to bargain for the release major terrorist prisoners, and seeks more pawns. Hamas’s assumption is wrong: faced with more abductions, Israel will harden her prisoner-exchange policy to avoid an escalation in kidnappings. Kidnapping attempts delay negotiations on Shalit: the government sees little sense in bringing Shalit back at an astronomical cost if more abductions are to follow.

Average Jewish family has 1.5 children, and the number is much lower among atheists. Meanwhile, the average Arab family has 2.8 children. If the Arab birth rate is twice the Jewish rate, the ratio of Arabs to Jews in Israel will double within one generation.

Unless we expel them.

The United States continues to send major aid to the Lebanese army.

Faced with the Iranian threat, Saudi Arabia had to improve its relations with Syria, and reduced its involvement in Lebanon. As part of the deal, Hariri paid homage to Assad, who ordered Hezbollah to murder his father. Since then, Hariri has continually given in to Hezbollah.

Sixteen years after signing a peace treaty with Israel, 97% of Jordanians detest Jews. The situation has improved somewhat in Egypt; after 31 years at peace with Israel, only 95% of the population hates Jews.

Israeli Arabs are almost loyal: just 35% of them dislike their Jewish neighbors. Only half a million potential terrorists.

In nuclear Pakistan, Jews are resented by 78% of the population.

In Jordan and Egypt 56% and 52%, respectively, support Hamas. Among Palestinians, 44% support the terrorist group (the rest support Fatah, the second-largest terrorist group).

Israeli Arabs again proved loyal: only 21% support Hamas and 27% Hizbullah, which gives the terrorists only about 400,000 potential recruits.

Unless we expel them.

Police entered the Palestinian nest to arrest a few Arab criminals, but mostly to ensure the security of Jerusalem municipal workers who were due to enter Shuafat the next morning. The municipality maintains Shuafat’s infrastructure even though its workers fear for their lives when they enter the neighborhood.

Palestinian behavior regarding the municipality seems bizarrely self-destructive until we recall Rabbi Kahane’s words, “It was our [Arab] desert, and now it’s your garden.” Arabs will not sell their national pride for municipal services, and therefore we must expel them.

J Street is now in talks over acquiring Brit Tzedek. A tiny pro-Arab organization with a staff of just five self-hating Jews, Brit Tzedek boasts of 48,000 volunteers, only a few thousand of whom are real. The acquisition of Brit Tzedek would provide J Street with local chapters throughout the United States.

So far, Shiite groups have refrained from retaliating for various terrorist acts against them. The Sadr militia and other Iranian-backed groups have shown restraint in order to avoid prompting Americans to delay the withdrawal. But after August, they will act.

When everyone else lauded the US Army’s surge tactics, we said that the results would be short-lived.

Attacks on Shiites intensified somewhat after the Iraqi Shiite-led government banned 511 Sunni candidates from the elections over their connections with Saddam. Under American pressure, Iraqi judges overturned the ban, which leaves us wondering, are those people in the State Department really crazy? In the name of liberal democracy—which does not exist in this part of the world—they ensured a deadlocked parliament in Iraq. A proper solution would be to give Shia parts of Iraq back to Iran, allow independence for Kurdistan, and let Iraq persist as a Sunni state.

He unequivocally supported the Israeli war in Gaza, told Abbas to resume the fruitless peace talks with no preconditions, and remarked to journalists that he did not notice the separation wall, a symbol of the Israeli ‘occupation.’

Egypt shoots the illegals on its own territory, where they have committed no crime, but the Israeli government refuses to give IDF the commonsense order to shoot infiltrators in the Negev after they have already committed the major crime of crossing the border illegally.

Regrettably, there is no other way to stop the hordes.

In the meantime, the Knesset Internal Affairs Committee has derailed a bill which would allow Israeli soldiers to keep African illegals out of our country. In the Committee’s view, the bill did not provide sufficiently for asylum seekers. Never mind that no legitimate asylum seeker can enter Israel due to her geography: by the time the Africans reach Egypt, they have already reached asylum, and they only infiltrate Israel for economic reasons.

The Iron Dome was touted as the ultimate defense for Sderot, but we have pointed out all along that it cannot be used against Kassams for economic reasons: a $200,000 interceptor missile for a $100 projectile.

The Iron Dome will be deployed at IAF bases and other military installations to defend against Fajr rockets, which are still very rare. As for Sderot—who in the government cares about it?

Bennett is not religious and did not live in the settlements, and is thus unlikely to establish working relations with the settlers. His appointment takes the gloves off the government’s relations with settlers: no more pretense of the Council opposing the government’s policy of asphyxiating the settlements.

The probe is strictly forbidden under religious guidelines. Its members commit the high crime of informing gentiles on Jewish transgressions—a crime which will certainly lead to more Israel-bashing. The haters will reason that Israel is guilty of many more cases of using white phosphorus than it has admitted to. In Jewish religious law, the crime is punishable by death.

Who needs the truth? Why could the commission not simply confirm that IDF used white phosphorus shells properly, for lighting purposes only?

IDF prosecution had opened a total of 36 criminal cases connected to the Gaza war. We’ve yet to hear about a single criminal case opened by Hamas against its fighters.

Yemeni and Saudi Salafis presented their conflict with the Zaidi sect as a terrorist-related issue by trumpeting Zaidis’ ties to Al Qaeda. Never mind that the Salafis have similar ties, and indeed Salafist groups in Gaza are so tilted toward Al Qaeda that Hamas sees them as a political threat to its regime.

The fact that a handful of about 8 million of Yemeni Zaidis have acquired a terrorist franchise from Al Qaeda in no way justifies America acting as a Saudi mercenary in that conflict.

The warring parties signed a ceasefire, which was broken a few hours later.

Obama’s move is merely a show intended to balance Ahmadinejad’s achievements. The Iranian leader has promised that by early February his country will start enriching uranium to 20%. The same technology would allow Iran to enrich its stocks to weapons-grade. Iran’s Weapons Group had already conducted successful experiments on implosive warheads, and 20% enrichment capability means that Iran is three months away from manufacturing the bomb.

The T-50 is reportedly a re-engineered version of the American F/A-22. While puritans might decry the Russian habit of stealing foreign designs from the Kalashnikoff to the T-50, this is a cost-effective policy.

It will probably take at least five years for the Russians to introduce the first squadrons of T-50s, about the same time as would be required for F/A-22 delivery to Israel. The T-50 is rumored to be offered for export at $50 to 70 million, which would be a quarter to half the price of the F/A-22. Certainly, Russia will be more forthcoming than the US administration in allowing Jews to install our own avionics into the jets. Spending a few billion for Russian jets will do more to stop S-300 sales to iran and S-400 to Syria than any diplomatic pressure.

As usual, the Russian copy will be less reliable than the American original and will have the engine problems that plague Sukhoi’s currently manufactured models, but they are suprasuffcient for any of IAF’s operations against Muslims.

Erekat voiced Abbas’ “minimum” demands for restarting the peace talks. Israel must agree to admit any refugees who want to return to their long-gone grandparents’ homes, potentially doubling the Arab presence in Israel. Israel must also agree to dismantle all settlement blocs and give away Jerusalem.

Neither Abbas nor any other Palestinian leader can sign a peace treaty with Israel that forfeits the refugees’ right of return or does not include Jerusalem. There is simply no basis for peace talks with Palestinian Arabs.

Are we mad to subsidize the PA?

This behavior is normal for Arab MKs. Ahmed Tibi met with Arafat several times. After the Oslo negotiations started, he continued to meet with Arafat and Abu Mazen on behalf of Peres.

When the Israeli government openly negotiates with Syria over surrendering the Golan Heights—a high crime under Israeli law—it is somewhat hypocritical to prosecute Arab MKs for a lesser offense.

The illegals mostly take jobs that Israelis do not want. Indeed, there is no reason for Jews to accept the lowliest jobs for peanuts.

The plan will mostly target illegals from far-off countries, especially Asians and East Europeans. Arabs can easily retreat to the West Bank for a short while and escape sanctions.

In practice, the plan will clean tens of thousands jobs in Israel for our Palestinian enemies. Worse, they will be working legally, which means that Jewish consumers will reimburse their taxes.

Instead, the government should allow here any number of Asian workers necessary for our economy and push out all Palestinian workers. A liberal policy toward immigrant labor must be combined with unrelenting deportation of them once their work visas expire. Every person who applies for an Israeli work visa must sign a declaration forfeiting any future option for permanent residence in our country.

Though most commentators concentrate on the Palestinian demand for a construction freeze in East Jerusalem, their more important demand is that negotiations be resumed where they left off in December 2008, when Olmert offered Abbas the widest concessions ever, including the destruction of dozens of Jewish villages and abandonment of the Temple Mount to the Muslim enemy.

Abbas wants more than that.

The PA Ministry of Education openly checks East Jerusalem students’ exam papers, even though Israel funds schools there.

This week, Palestinian officials met Norwegian diplomats in an official ceremony in East Jerusalem.

The Israeli government has de facto accepted Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem, but wrongly resists Palestinian control over Israeli Arabs. That way, Israel will abandon East Jerusalem but accept the Arabs. It is far better to show on every occasion that Israeli Arabs fully belong to Palestine.

Typically of peace mavens, Abrahams grew dissatisfied with Fatah over Arafat’s unwillingness to implement the Oslo Accords, but drew the wrong conclusions. Instead of pronouncing the peace process dead, he turned to Hamas for its implementation.

Sensitive to Western media, Dweik announced that Hamas is ready to recognize Israel and renounce the provisions in its charter calling for our extermination. As if the divinely sanctioned Jewish state needs recognition from terrorists. Dweik forgot to say that this recognition would only follow Israel’ abandonment of Jerusalem and acceptance of millions of Palestinian refugees.

At $130 million a piece, the planes will be too expensive to risk in combat anyway. Israel sees the jets mostly as the only way to spend US military aid which must be used to purchase American armaments. Israel just does not need that many American weapons and routinely uses part of the aid for items which are only nominally military, such as packed foods.

The visiting secretary-general of the OECD brought us three demands.
Israel must fight corruption in her defense industry—in other words, it must stop paying bribes to third-world officials in charge of military procurement. That would leave Israel with no export markets, as bribes are part of the business there.

Israel must strengthen protection of intellectual property—in other words, extend protection for expired foreign drug patents. That would cause Israel’s Teva, the largest manufacturer of generic drugs, to incur major losses.

And finally, Israel must stop using data from Judea and Samaria in her statistical reports to OECD. Thus, Israel has to formally relinquish the settlement blocs.

It would be unthinkable for the police to raid a mosque whose members “merely” vandalized a synagogue, as muslims often do.

The subservient court ordered preliminary detention for one week, even though the students are clearly not going to vandalize another mosque in the meantime, nor do they pose a flight risk.

As we have seen in Palestine and elsewhere, politics eventually follow rhetoric.

Erdogan could not afford to embrace Barak after Israeli media trumpeted Ayalon’s humiliation of the Turkish ambassador. It is important to realize that Turkey was not reacting to the humiliation per se, but rather to Israeli coverage of it.

EU-funded ultra-left organizations brought Arabs from other areas of Israel to protest against the tent Jewish children had built near a spring a few meters outside the village’s fence. The Arabs and ultra-leftists burned the tent, and now stage regular provocations in the vicinity.

Afraid of their cameras, the army does nothing: no one would commend the soldiers if they stopped the rioters, but doing so would entail risking prosecution for the slightest mistake. If conservative Jews had attempted something similar near an Arab village, they would have been jailed by now for incitement.

Humiliatingly, Israel succumbed to Turkey’s undiplomatic threat to recall its ambassador. Turkey thus won on all counts: it got away with airing anti-Semitic TV shows, with Erdogan’s virulently anti-Israeli remarks in Lebanon, and with issuing an ultimatum to Israel. In the Muslim world, Erdogan became a new hero who had prevailed over Israel. “Israel understands only Turkish” is now a typical headline from Arab media.