…For years, women in Iran have been arrested and imprisoned for refusing to wear the mandatory headscarf and even for protesting its use…As women in Iran protested the regime and the mandatory hijab, women in Sweden — who are represented by “the first feminist government in the world” — were championing the hijab on several recent occasions, illustrating the curious cultural transformations there. In January, readers of the Swedish edition of Elle magazine picked Imane Asry, a hijab-wearing social media influencer with 150,000 Instagram followers, as winner of its “Look of the Year” competition.READ MORE
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced on Saturday that he has decided to severe all relations with Israel and the US in protest against President Donald Trump’s recently unveiled plan for Mideast peace. “We have informed the Israelis and Americans of this decision through two letters,” Abbas said in a speech at an emergency meeting of Arab League foreign ministers in Cairo. The first letter, he said, was delivered to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while the second one was handed to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. READ MORE
FRONT PAGE MAG Why the Palestinians Rejected Trump’s Peace PlanThe refusal of analysts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to face the role of Islamic theology in the conflict is astonishingly naïve and ethnocentric. The Palestinians and their supporters will never accept the Trump peace plan because of Islamic imperatives that mandate that Islam must dominate and not be dominated, and that any land that once was ruled by Islamic law must be ruled by Islamic law forever. Unless and until these facts are taken into account, every peace plan is foredoomed.
…The problem with Bernie Sanders isn’t Bernie Sanders. It’s the way that the 78-year-old socialist, who has already suffered one heart attack on the campaign trail, is being used by an assortment of anti-Semitic frauds and weirdos who have glommed onto his campaign, using Uncle Bernie like an ATM that dispenses free passes for anti-Semitic bigotry (and campaign cash)…With Sanders being the most high-profile Jewish politician in the country and the most successful Jewish presidential candidate in American history, that his campaign has become a vessel for such ugliness is a phenomenon worth exploring.READ MORE
ALGEMEINER Ex-VP Joe Biden Is Preferred Candidate of US Jewish Democrats, New Poll ShowsFormer Vice President Joe Biden is the preferred candidate of US Jews in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, according to a new Pew Research Center poll. The results of the national survey published on Thursday showed that 31% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters who identified as Jewish backed Biden as their choice to take on Republican President Donald Trump in the Nov. 3 general election.
When Israel embarked on the Oslo peace process it accepted Oslo’s foundational assumption that Israel is to blame for the Palestinian war against it. From the first Oslo agreement, signed on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, through all its derivative deals, Israel was required to carry out “confidence-building measures,” to prove its good faith and peaceful intentions to Arafat and his deputies. Time after time, Israel was required to release terrorists from prison as a precondition for negotiations with the PLO. The goal of those negotiations in turn was to force Israel to release more terrorists from prison, and give more land, more money, more international legitimacy and still more terrorists to the PLO. On Tuesday, this state of affairs ended. READ MORE
An 8-year-old boy goes outside for shopping. On the way, he tragically slips and drowns in a pool of rainwater, where he is found dead the following day. Some observers accuse Jews — without any evidence — of having murdered the boy. Leaders echo the charge, and locals march toward a nearby Jewish neighborhood seeking “vengeance.” The story is a classic type of the medieval blood libel, according to which Jews murder Christian children and use their blood for religious rituals. However, these events didn’t transpire in 12th-century England. It happened last weekend. And an American lawmaker echoed the latter-day blood libel. READ MORE
A certain buzz has attached itself to “Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947” (Scribner), by London-based author, journalist and broadcaster Norman Lebrecht, if only because the role of Jews in world history is always a fraught subject. The author himself is quick to disavow any intention “to make a case for Jewish exceptionalism,” and he denies any belief in the proposition that “Jews are genetically gifted above the average in mathematics, entertainment, and money, as is often claimed, usually with malice.”..So the author’s cast of characters includes the usual gang of world-changers — Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka — but he also calls our attention to such high achievers…READ MORE
Regarding President Trump’s peace plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the instant conventional wisdom is that it’s a geopolitical nonstarter, a gift to Benjamin Netanyahu and an electoral ploy by the president to win Jewish votes in Florida rather than Palestinian hearts in Ramallah. It may be all of those things. But nobody will benefit less from a curt dismissal of the plan than the Palestinians themselves, whose leaders are again letting history pass them by. The record of Arab-Israeli peace efforts can be summed up succinctly: Nearly every time the Arab side said no, it wound up with less.READ MORE
…The Guardian’s silence in the op-ed [“The Guardian view on Trump’s ‘peace plan’: a con, not a deal“]on the question of what Palestinian leaders CAN do to advance peace is characteristic of their coverage of the conflict since as along as we’ve been monitoring them: reporting and commentary which myopically and obsessively focuses on every Israeli sin, real and (mostly) imagined, whilst ignoring Palestinian behavior. Such questions are rarely if ever asked, likely because, in order to pose such queries, you first must impute moral agency to Palestinians – a principle inherently at odds with their rigid ideological orientation, one which views them as merely victims. READ MORE
TIMES OF ISRAEL Backing Abbas, Arab League unanimously rejects Trump’s Middle East peace planThe Arab League on Saturday unanimously rejected US President Donald Trump’s controversial Middle East plan, calling it “unfair” to Palestinians. The pan-Arab bloc said in a statement that it “rejects the US-Israeli ‘deal of the century’ considering that it does not meet the minimum rights and aspirations of Palestinian people.” Arab leaders also vowed “not to… cooperate with the US administration to implement this plan.”
Former US President Jimmy Carter on Thursday dismissed President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan, claiming it would violate international law. In a statement quoted by AFP, Carter urged the United Nations to stop Israel from annexing “Palestinian land”. “The new US plan undercuts prospects for a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” he said…The 95-year-old Carter has made controversial statements related to Israel in recent years. In 2013, he called on the European Union (EU) to label products coming from “illegal Israeli settlements“. READ MORE
Borders: Trump’s plan features a map of what Israel’s new borders will be, should it enact the plan fully. Israel will retain 20% of the West Bank and will lose a small amount of land in the Negev near the Gaza-Egypt border. The Palestinians will have a pathway to a state in the vast majority of territory in the West Bank, while Israel will maintain control of all borders. This is the first time a US president has provided a detailed map of this kind. Jerusalem: The Palestinians will have a capital in east Jerusalem based on northern and eastern neighborhoods that are outside the Israeli security barrier – Kafr Akab, Abu Dis and half of Shuafat. Otherwise, Trump said Jerusalem will remain undivided as Israel’s capital.READ MORE
JNS Ruthie Blum: Netanyahu pulls the rug out from under his rivalsHours before the ceremony in Washington with U.S. President Donald Trump to present the Mideast peace plan, including a map of the borders of the proposed demilitarized Palestinian state, the Israeli premier announced that he was withdrawing his request for immunity.
TIMES OF ISRAEL TV: Abbas sent Netanyahu handwritten note warning of consequences of Trump planPA Civil Affairs Minister Hussein al-Sheikh, met with Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon in order to tell Israel that the PA views the plan presented Tuesday in Washington as voiding the Oslo peace accords and that the Palestinians now felt free to break their commitments, including security cooperation.
ArchitectGuy on Israel 