Caroline Glick, Author at Israel Rising

November 2, 2017November 2, 2017

From Meuller to Mandelbilt

In the Mueller probe and the incessant probes against Netanyahu we see the new face of the Left.

There are stunning parallels between US Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of alleged collusion between US President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia and the ongoing criminal probes against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara.

Monday, after a weekend filled with speculation due to an illegal media leak regarding sealed grand jury indictments, Mueller and his team indicted two former Trump campaign officials, Paul Manafort and Richard Gates, for offenses related to their business and lobbying actions allegedly carried out between 2006 and 2014.

Mueller also announced that George Papadopoulos, a junior campaign aide, pled guilty to lying to investigators about a meeting he tried to arrange between then candidate Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

As commentators across the political spectrum have noted, none of the charges against Manafort and Gates have anything to do with Trump’s presidential campaign.

As for Papadopoulos, his story exculpates rather than implicates Trump’s campaign in collusion with Russia.

Not only did Papadopoulos’s boss on the campaign reject his offer to arrange a meeting between Trump and Putin, the actions described in his indictment demonstrate that the Trump campaign had no significant ties to the Russian regime.

And yet, despite the apparent absence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, no one expects Mueller to close down shop. To the contrary.

The Manafort and Gates indictments and the Papadopoulos plea tell us that Mueller has abandoned the stated purpose of his investigation. Having found no evidence of collusion – criminal or otherwise – between the Trump campaign and Russia, he has decided to investigate the business dealings of Trump and his associates going back decades.

Mueller’s move demonstrates that he does not view it as his job to incriminate or exonerate Trump regarding alleged collusion with Russia. Indeed, he doesn’t view it as his responsibility to investigate Russian involvement in the 2016 elections at all.

If he thought that was his job, then Mueller would not be expanding his writ to include alleged crimes carried out by Trump’s associates that any US attorney could be investigating. He would be expanding his probe to include the growing mountain of evidence of collusion on the part of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee and their attorneys, as well as Mueller’s friend and successor as FBI director, James Comey, with foreign agents, including Russian government officials, during and in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Mueller’s apparent refusal to follow the evidence where it leads him regarding Russian involvement in the 2016 elections and his decision instead to investigate any and all suspicions against Trump and his associates whenever the events in question may have taken place tells us that he views himself as a hunter, not an investigator. His prey is Trump.

Mueller will continue to hunt Trump until one of three things happen.

Mueller may eventually find something – anything – to charge Trump with. Such a finding will precipitate an impeachment hearing in Congress that could lead to Trump’s removal from office.

His hunt may find nothing against Trump, but just as it netted Manafort, Gates and Papadopoulos this week, it may bring down other people related to Trump. At a minimum, his continued probe will keep those close to Trump under continuous investigation. In this case, Mueller’s probe will dominate Trump’s presidency and make it impossible for Trump to govern in accordance with the agenda he was elected to advance.

The third possible outcome is that Trump fires Mueller and ends his probe or that Congress defunds his probe or limits its duration. Such moves would require the unanimous support of congressional and Senate Republicans, which currently is not on offer.

The threat that Mueller’s investigation represents to US democracy couldn’t be clearer.

By making it clear through their actions to date that they will not stop their investigation until they get Trump, Mueller and his associates apparently view their investigation as a means to either overturn the election results or render them irrelevant. If Trump is either pushed out of office or denied the ability to govern in accordance with the agenda he ran on, then Mueller will have achieved that goal.

This then brings us to Netanyahu.

Netanyahu and the political Right won a massive electoral victory in 2015. For the first time in many years, the Right won indisputably. There are no coalition partners who place appeasing the PLO at the top of their governing agenda or even in the middle of their agenda.

Netanyahu and his political camp’s victory came as a shock to Israel’s elites. Led by the media, which was itself an adjunct of the anti-Netanyahu campaign, and assisted by the Obama administration, which siphoned US government funds into anti-Netanyahu political groups, Israel’s elites were flummoxed by the election results.

Shortly after the election, the anti-Netanyahu media, with the support of police investigators, went on a hunt to find something – anything – to force Netanyahu from office. In the end, all they could come up with were two otherwise absurd allegations.

First, that Netanyahu received too many gifts from his wealthy friends. Specifically, he allegedly received too many cigars from his friend Arnon Milchen. Second, Netanyahu taped himself discussing with his nemesis, Yediot Aharonot publisher Arnon Mozes, the possibility of winning less adversarial coverage from Yediot Ahronot in exchange for lobbying Israel Hayom, which is owned by Netanyahu’s friend Sheldon Adelson, to cut back its circulation and so diminish its competitive edge over Yediot. This discussion, which came to nothing, was discovered by police investigators during their investigation of Netanyahu’s former chief of staff for alleged crimes unrelated to Netanyahu.

If the allegations were directed against any other politician, there is no doubt that they would not have led to police investigations. The late president Shimon Peres’s legendary use of the public trough to pay for his lavish parties and lifestyle were never the subject of investigation. Former prime minister Ehud Barak never faced investigation over his allegedly sketchy business dealings or his deeply suspect campaign financing operations. Former prime minister Ehud Olmert was never investigated for the massive collection of expensive pens that he was showered with by “friends” during his tenure in government.

And none the 43 lawmakers who voted in favor of a bill backed by Mozes to shut down Israel Hayom were ever investigated for their votes.

But with Netanyahu, with the prodding and active support of the media the police are pursuing multi-million shekel investigations around the world to find and interrogate Netanyahu’s friends and ask them about their gifts to him. Police Commissioner Roni Alsheich has hired Lior Horev, one of Israel’s top anti-Netanyahu political consultants, to serve as the police’s public relations representative.

As for the probes against Sara Netanyahu, every day the public is treated to yet more salacious, unsubstantiated tales of her alleged abuse of workers at the Prime Minister’s Residence.

While Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit did not initiate the probes against Netanyahu, he has done nothing to stop them. This despite their demonstrably prejudicial nature. Mandelblit is a product of the system that has turned the police, media and state prosecution into a political party united in their common goal of hunting the political Right. As a result, he can be expected to go along with whatever they do. If the police recommend indicting Netanyahu, Mandelblit can be counted on to dutifully indict him, even though the acts he is suspected of committing are not crimes.

Given the current dynamic, the only way for Netanyahu not be forced from office for actions that aren’t even criminal is for his political associates to rein in the out of control police and state prosecution by limiting their authority. So far, the media have cowed them into inaction.

In the Mueller probe and the incessant probes against Netanyahu we see the new face of the Left. Unable to win elections, they exploit their control over the bureaucracy and media to overturn election results.

There can be no greater threat to the health of a liberal democracy than that.

Two things must happen for this situation to be corrected.

First, we must recognize what is happening and what it means for our systems of governance. Second, lawmakers in Congress and the Knesset alike need to stand up to the media and the legal fraternities and bravely restore the power to govern to those in whom the public has vested it.

Originally Published on the Jerusalem Post.

October 24, 2017

American Jewry’s Necessary Moral Reckoning

The main source of American Jewish antagonism toward Israel is divergent views on the Palestinians.

It is no longer a secret that Israel and much of the American Jewish community are moving in different directions. Leftist American commentators like Peter Beinart and Roger Cohen, and the Jewish organizations that keep them on perpetual speaking tours insist that Israel no longer merits American Jewish support.

Aside from their pique at Israel’s refusal to equalize the positions of the Reform and Conservative movements to that of the Orthodox rabbinate in Israel and their refusal to recognize that so long as the Reform and Conservative movements have next to no following in Israel they cannot expect to receive the same consideration as Orthodox religious authorities, the main source of American Jewish antagonism toward Israel is divergent views on the Palestinians.

Specifically, Israel’s political leadership and the public that voted them into office rejects the American Jewish leadership’s positions on the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Labor Party leader Avi Gabbay’s statements last week proclaiming that he doesn’t support destroying Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria in the framework of a peace deal with the Palestinians made clear that it isn’t just the Israeli Right that rejects the position of the majority of the American Jewish community. The head of the leftist Labor Party also rejects their position that Israel should expel hundreds of thousands of its citizens from their homes in the framework of a peace deal and discriminate against them for as long as no deal has been reached.

Facing the likes of Cohen and Beinart and their supporters are Israel’s defenders who argue that the primary reason for the increased estrangement between Israel and the American Jewish community is the radicalization of the American Left, and the Left’s concomitant embrace of anti-Israel positions.

Since the 1920s, the American Jewish community has identified with the political Left. So long as the Left – and particularly the Soviet Union – supported the Jewish national liberation movement, Zionism and the Jewish state, the American Jewish Left was happy to be both leftist and Zionist.

The American Jewish movement away from Israel began after the Soviet Union cut off diplomatic relations with Israel in 1967. The cleavage grew wider in successive decades as Western Europe incrementally aligned its policies on Israel with those of the Soviets and after the Cold War, replaced the Soviet Union as the epicenter of anti-Israel political rhetoric.

Today, anti-Israel activists are the rising force in the Democratic Party. Progressive politics have been so thoroughly suffused with anti-Zionism and its concomitant rejection of the civil rights of American Jewish Zionists that Democratic presidential hopefuls like senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker are abandoning their previously pro-Israel positions to ingratiate themselves with their party base.

While there is little doubt that the American Jewish Left’s increasing hostility toward Israel is a function of its membership’s abiding allegiance to their ideological camp, there is also something else at play.

In an article published this week in the American Jewish online magazine Tablet titled, “Why do American Jews Idealize Communism?” Prof. Ruth Wisse recalled the prominent role that American Jews played in the American Communist Party in the 1930s. Wisse cites the Jewish Women’s Encyclopedia Archive which notes that according to Communist Party historians, “almost half of the [Communist] party’s membership was Jewish in the 1930s and 1940s.”

This isn’t to say that almost half of American Jews were Communist. There were a mere 83,000 Jews in the Communist Party in 1943, while there were 4.7 million Jews in the US. But those 83,000 Jews – and their even more numerous fellow travelers – played a definitive role in dictating the terms of the political and social discourse in the US during those years.

Wisse quotes then Commentary magazine editor Robert Worshaw who wrote in 1947 that during the 1930s, “If you were not somewhere within the [Communist] party’s wide orbit, then you were likely to be in the opposition, which meant that much of your thought and energy had to be devoted to maintaining yourself in opposition…. It was the Communist Party that ultimately determined what you were to think about and in what terms.”

In other words, there was no way to set a public policy agenda or cultural agenda independently of the Communist Party. If the Communists determined that the public should be focused on subjugation of African Americans and should ignore the Soviet gulag, for instance, and if you felt that the gulag should be discussed, then you could find yourself accused of racism for speaking of the gulag rather than Jim Crow. If you wished to discuss neo-Classical rather than cubist art, then you were considered a throwback with no sense of art. And so on and so forth.

The only party with the power to determine what Americans would speak about, what “right thinking” Americans would think and what subjects were either irrelevant or beyond the pale, was the Communist Party.

And again, a portion of the American Jewish community played an outsized role in the Communist Party.

In her article, Wisse remonstrates with the American Jewish community for failing to conduct a moral reckoning with its historical affiliation with a party and a movement that murdered 30 million of its own citizens and was responsible for the spread of war and misery worldwide, through its totalitarian, inhuman ideology.

In her words, “We Americans and Jews ask nations that once succumbed to fascism and practiced genocide in its name to acknowledge their past evils. We do so not to perpetuate guilt, but because self-awareness alone prevents repetition of the same behavior. How then can Americans and particularly the Jews among them perpetuate the romance – or the innocence – of the Bolshevik regime?” Wisse continues, “We are… obliged to take seriously that many Jews supported one of the most murderous regimes in history and to see how and why and to what extent they went wrong.”

Wisse does not draw a connection between the American Jewish community’s growing antagonism towards Israel today and its avoidance of a moral reckoning with its Communist-supporting past. But it is important to connect the dots.

Earlier this month, the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria struck a “unity” deal with Hamas. Under the deal, Fatah agrees to support the Hamas regime in Gaza and take responsibility for the general functioning of governing structures in Gaza. Hamas, for its part, will continue to wage war against Israel and act as an autonomous governing authority, just like Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Hamas insists that it has not tempered its view of Israel. It remains committed to the annihilation of the Jewish state.

The deal paves the way for Hamas to join the PLO, and so replace Fatah as the largest faction of the PLO. Hamas’s leader Khaled Mashaal apparently views the deal as a vehicle for him to eventually replace Fatah and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas as Palestinian president.

In the face of this unity deal, there is no way to pretend that support for the Palestinians is anything other than support for terrorists who seek to annihilate the Jewish state. There is no way to pretend that support for Israeli land giveaways to the Palestinians constitute anything other than support for the empowerment of terrorists at Israel’s peril.

In other words, the Palestinian unity deal makes it impossible for Israel’s American Jewish antagonists to credibly claim that their disaffection with Israel owes to their commitment to peace and justice rather than moral sanctimony and self-righteousness.

It is difficult to avoid the sense that the American Jewish community’s decreasing support for Israel and increasing support for Palestinian terrorists is a natural extension of its past support for totalitarian Communism. It is equally difficult to avoid the conclusion that so long as the American Jewish community avoids a moral reckoning with that past, it will be incapable of reconsidering its present course.

Originally Published in the Jerusalem Post

October 19, 2017

THE OPPORTUNITIES AND RISKS OF TRUMP’S IRAN INITIATIVE

Trump lays the groundwork for a real strategy against Iran to begin.

On Friday, US President Donald Trump initiated an important change in US policy toward Iran.

No, in his speech decertifying Iran’s compliance with the nuclear accord it struck with his predecessor Barack Obama, Trump didn’t announce a new strategy for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, or stemming its hegemonic rise in the Middle East, or limiting its ability to sponsor terrorism.

Trump’s move was not operational. It was directional.

In his address Friday, Trump changed the policy dynamics that dictate US policy on Iran. For the first time since 2009, when Obama backed the murderous regime in Tehran, spurning the millions of Iranians who rose up in the Green Revolution, Trump opened up the possibility that the US may begin to base its policies toward Iran on reality.

Trump began his remarks by setting out Iran’s long rap sheet of aggression against America.

Starting with the US embassy seizure and hostage crisis, Trump described Iran’s crimes and acts of war against America in greater detail than any of his predecessors ever did.

Trump’s dossier was interlaced with condemnations of the regime’s repression of its own people.

By merging Iran’s external aggression with its internal repression, Trump signaled a readiness to drive a wedge – or expand the wedge – between the authoritarian theocrats that rule Iran and the largely secular, multiethnic and pro-Western people of Iran.

Trump then turned his attention to Iran’s illicit ballistic missile program, its sponsorship of terrorism, including its links to al-Qaida, its aggression against its neighbors, its aggressive acts against maritime traffic in the Straits of Hormuz, and its bids to destabilize and control large swaths of the Middle East through its proxies.

It is notable that these remarks preceded Trump’s discussion of the nuclear deal – which was the ostensible subject of his speech. Before Trump discussed Iran’s breaches of the nuclear deal, he first demonstrated that contrary to the expressed views of his top advisers, it is impossible to limit a realistic discussion of the threat Iran constitutes to US national security and interests to whether or not and it what manner it is breaching the nuclear accord.

This was a critical point because for the past two years, US discourse on Iran has focused solely on whether or not Iran was complying with Obama’s nuclear pact. By placing the nuclear deal in the context of Iran’s consistent, overarching hostility and aggression, Trump made it self-evident that no US interest is served in continuing to give Iran a free pass from congressional sanctions.

After accomplishing that goal, Trump turned his attention to how Iran is actually breaching the letter and spirit of the nuclear pact. Only then, almost as an afterthought, did he announce that he was decertifying Iranian compliance with the nuclear deal, setting the conditions for the renewal of congressional sanctions on Iran and opening the floodgates of congressional sanctions on Iran in retaliation for the full spectrum of its aggressive and illicit acts against the US, its interests and allies.

By empowering Congress to prohibit economic cooperation with Iran, Trump put the Europeans, Chinese and Russians on notice that they may soon face a choice between conducting business with the US and conducting business with Iran.

After putting them on notice, Trump discussed the possibility of improving Obama’s nuclear accord. Among other things, he suggested expanding the inspection regime against Iran’s nuclear installations and canceling the so-called “sunset” clause that places an end date on the restrictions governing certain components of Iran’s nuclear advancement.

Trump’s address has the potential to serve as the foundation of a major, positive shift in US policy toward Iran. Such a shift could potentially facilitate the achievement of Trump’s goals of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, containing its regional aggression and empowerment and defeating its terrorist proxies.

Unfortunately, it is also likely, indeed, it is more likely, that his words will not be translated into policies to achieve these critical aims.

Trump’s decision to transfer immediate responsibility to Congress for holding Iran accountable for its hostile actions on the military and other fronts is a risky move. He has a lot of enemies, and the nuclear deal has a lot of supporters on Capitol Hill.

Obama would have never been able to implement his nuclear deal if Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, hadn’t agreed to cast the Constitution aside and ignore Obama’s constitutional duty to present the nuclear deal to the Senate for ratification as a treaty.

Over the past week, Trump and Corker have been involved in an ugly public fight precipitated by Corker’s announcement that he will not be seeking reelection next year.

Today Corker has nothing to restrain him from scuttling Trump’s agenda. If he wishes, out of spite, Corker can block effective sanctions from being passed. And he may do so even though the implications for his Senate colleagues would be dire and even though doing so would render him an unofficial protector of Iran’s nuclear program.

What is true for Corker is doubly true for the Democrats.

Leading Democratic senators like Robert Menendez, Ben Cardin and Chuck Schumer, who opposed Obama’s Iran deal may now feel that as opponents of the Trump administration, they are required to oppose any change to the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act.

Indeed, given the rise of radical forces in their party it is likely that they would rather give Iran a free pass for its anti-American aggression and nuclear proliferation than work with Republicans on Capitol Hill and in the White House.

Then again, by framing the issue of Iran’s threat to America as he did, and by transferring responsibility for reinstating sanctions and passing further sanctions on Iran to Congress, Trump opened up the possibility that Congress will conduct substantive – rather than personal – debates on Iran.

And the more substantive those debates become, the further away the US discourse will move from the mendacious assumptions of Obama’s Iran policy – that the Iranian regime is a responsible actor and potential US ally, and that there is nothing inherently aggressive or problematic about Iran’s illicit nuclear weapons program.

The second major risk inherent in Trump’s approach is that he will get his way; that the Europeans, Russians and Chinese and the Iranians will agree to improve the nuclear deal. The problem here is not obvious. Clearly, it is better if the deal is amended to delete the sunset clauses and expand the inspections regime.

Yet even an amended, improved deal will still serve as a shield to Iran’s nuclear program. An improved deal won’t destroy Iran’s centrifuges.

It won’t take away Iran’s enriched uranium. It won’t destroy Iran’s nuclear installations. And it won’t bring down the regime which by its nature ensures all of these things will remain a menace to the US, its allies and international security as a whole.

So long as the US continues to maintain a policy based on the false view that all that is necessary to destroy the threat of a nuclear armed Iran is a combination of the nuclear deal and economic sanctions, it will continue to ensure that Iran and its nuclear program remain a major threat. Distressingly, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, the most outspoken supporter of decertifying Iranian compliance in the Trump administration, told NBC on Sunday that the US intends to remain in the nuclear deal.

To understand what must be done we must return to Trump’s speech and its strategic significance.

By taking a holistic view of the Iranian threat – grounded in a recognition of the inherent hostility of the regime – Trump opened up the possibility that the US and its allies can develop a holistic policy for confronting and defeating Iran and its proxies. If the Iran deal and sanctions are two components to a larger strategy rather than the entire strategy, they can be helpful.

A wider strategy would target Iran’s regional aggression by weakening its proxies and clients from Hezbollah and Hamas to the regimes in Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. It would target the regime itself by empowering the ayatollahs’ domestic opponents. It would pin down Iranian forces by arming and otherwise assisting the Iraqi Kurds to defend and maintain their control over their territory along the Iranian border while strengthening the ties between Iranian Kurds and Iraqi Kurds.

Friday, Trump created the possibility for such a strategy. It is up to members of Congress, and US allies like Israel and the Sunni Arab states to help Trump conceive and implement it. If they fail, the possibility Trump created will be lost, perhaps irrevocably.

Originally published the Jerusalem Post.

October 7, 2017

IN THIS ROUND OF RECONCILIATION TALKS, HAMAS IS THE GREAT VICTOR

Fatah’s surrender to Hamas.

On Tuesday, a delegation of 400 Fatah officials from Ramallah, led by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, arrived in Gaza to officially surrender to Hamas.

No, the ceremony isn’t being portrayed as a Fatah surrender to Hamas. But it is. It’s also an Egyptian surrender to Hamas.

How is this the case? Ten years ago this past June, after a very brief and deadly assault by Hamas terrorists against US-trained Fatah forces in Gaza, the Fatah forces cut and ran to Israel for protection. Fatah politicians also headed for the border and then scurried into Fatah-controlled (and Israeli protected) Ramallah. Ever since, Hamas has served as the official authority on the ground in Gaza. Its personnel have been responsible for internal security and for Gaza’s borders with Egypt and Israel.

Despite their humiliating defeat and removal from Gaza, Fatah and its PA government in Ramallah continued to fund Hamas-controlled Gaza. They paid Gaza’s bills, including the salaries of all the PA security forces that were either no longer working or working double shifts as stay at home Fatah gunmen and up and coming Hamas terrorist forces.

The PA paid Hamas’s electricity bills to Israel and it paid Israeli hospitals which continued to serve Gaza.

Internationally, the PA defended Hamas and its constant wars against Israel. The PA and Fatah, led by President-for-life Mahmoud Abbas, continued to use Israel’s defensive operations against Hamas as a means to ratchet up their political war against Israel. The latest victory in that war came last week with Interpol’s decision to permit the PA to join the organization despite its open support for and finance of terrorism.

For most of the past decade, the PA-Fatah has allocated more than half of its EU- and US-underwritten budget to Hamas-controlled Gaza. It has defended its actions to successive delegations of US lawmakers and three US administrations. It has defended its actions to EU watchdog groups. No amount of congressional pressure or statements from presidential envoys ever made a dent on Abbas’s strident devotion to paying the salaries of Hamas terrorists and functionaries.

But then, in April, Abbas cut them off.

Ostensibly he cut them off because he was under pressure from the US Congress, which is now in the end stages of passing the Taylor Force Act. Once passed, the law will make it a bit more difficult for the State Department to continue funding the terror- financing PA.

While the Taylor Force Act is the ostensible reason for Abbas’s move, Palestinian sources openly acknowledge that congressional pressure had nothing to do with his decision.

Abbas abruptly ended PA financing of Hamas in retaliation for Hamas’s decision to open relations with Abbas’s archrival in Fatah, Muhammad Dahlan.

From 1994, when the PA was established, until 2007, when Hamas ousted his US-trained forces from Gaza, Dahlan was the Gaza strongman.

Once one of Abbas’s closest cronies, since 2011 Dahlan has been his archenemy. Abbas, now in the twelfth year of his four-year term in office, views Dahlan as the primary threat to his continued reign.

As a consequence, he ousted Dahlan from Fatah and forced him to decamp with his sizable retinue to the UAE. There Dahlan enjoys exceedingly close ties with the Nahyan regime.

The UAE is allied with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi. Both view Hamas’s mother organization the Muslim Brotherhood as their mortal foe. As a result, Sisi and the UAE as well as Saudi Arabia sided with Israel in its 2014 war with Hamas.

Since May, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have been in open conflict with Qatar. Qatar, which sponsors the Muslim Brotherhood, has long sponsored Hamas as well.

Since the start of the year, the UAE has been interested in prying Hamas away from Qatar. And so with the blessing of his UAE hosts, Dahlan began building ties with Hamas.

Recognizing Dahlan’s close ties to the UAE and through it, with Sisi, Hamas, which has been stricken by Sisi’s war against it, and particularly Sisi’s enforcement of the closure of Gaza’s border with Egypt’s Sinai, was quick to seize on Dahlan’s initiative.

The talks between Dahlan and Sisi on the one hand and Hamas on the other were ratcheted up in April after Abbas cut his funding to Gaza.

In May, Hamas formally cut its ties with the Muslim Brotherhood.

In exchange, Sisi permitted the Rafah border crossing with Gaza to open for longer hours and permitted Gazans to transit Egypt en route to their religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, among other things.

To build its leverage against Abbas, beginning in the spring, Hamas began describing Dahlan as a viable alternative to Abbas. The UAE agreed to begin financing Hamas’s budget and to help pay for electricity.

Against this backdrop, it is self-evident that Abbas didn’t send his own representatives to Cairo to negotiate a surrender deal with Hamas because his aid cut-off brought Hamas to its knees. Abbas sent his people to Cairo because Hamas’s double dealing with Dahlan brought Abbas to his knees.

As for Sisi, Hamas has also played him – and the UAE.

Over the past few months, Hamas has been rebuilding its client relationship with Iran. A senior Hamas delegation visited Tehran last month for Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s swearing-in ceremony.

They met there with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and with senior Revolutionary Guards commanders.

A month earlier, senior Hamas terrorist Salah Arouri, who lives under Hezbollah protection in Beirut, paved the way for the reconciliation in a meeting under Hezbollah sponsorship with senior Revolutionary Guards commander Amir Abdollahian.

Following the meeting in Tehran, Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar extolled Hamas’s relations with Iran as “fantastic.” Sinwar also said that Iran is “the largest backer financially and militarily” of Hamas’s terrorism apparatus.

Concerned about Tehran’s growing influence in Gaza, and through it, the Sinai, where Sisi continues to fight against an Islamic State-backed insurgency, Sisi has an interest in tempering Hamas’s client-ties to Tehran.

So just as Abbas has decided to restore financing to Hamas to keep Dahlan at bay, so Sisi has decided to embrace Hamas to keep Iran at bay.

In all cases, of course, Hamas wins.

The fact that Hamas has just won is obvious when we consider the unity deal it just concluded with Fatah.

Hamas made one concession. It agreed to break up its civil governing authority – a body it formed in response to Abbas’s decision to cut off funding in April. In exchange for agreeing to disband a body it only formed because Abbas cut off its funding, Hamas receives a full restoration of PA funding. The PA will fund all civil service operations in Gaza. It will pay the salaries of all civil servants and security personnel in Gaza. It will pay salaries to all Hamas terrorists Israel freed from its jails.

In other words, the PA will now be responsible for keeping the lights on and picking up the garbage.

And Hamas will be free to concentrate on preparing for and initiating its next terror war against Israel. It can dig tunnels. It can build missiles. It can expand its operational ties with Hezbollah, Islamic State, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and Fatah.

In the wake of Hamas’s leadership’s meetings in Tehran, Sinwar told reporters that Hamas is now moving full speed ahead toward doing all of these things. Sinwar said that Hamas is “developing our military strength in order to liberate Palestine.” He added, “Every day we build missiles and continue military training.”

Thousands of people, he said, are working “day and night” to prepare Hamas’s next terror war against Israel. And indeed, two weeks ago, two Hamas terrorists were killed when the tunnels they were digging collapsed on them.

Tuesday’s surrender ceremonies tell us two things.

First, the notion that Fatah is even remotely interested in defeating Hamas is complete nonsense. For 10 years since its forces were humiliated and routed in Gaza, Fatah has faithfully funded and defended Hamas. Abbas’s only concern is staying in charge of his Israeli-protected fiefdom in Ramallah. To this end, he will finance – with US and EU taxpayer monies – and defend another 10 Hamas wars with Israel.

The second lesson we learn from Hamas’s victory is that we need to curb our enthusiasm for Sisi and his regime in Egypt, and for his backers in the UAE. Sisi’s decision to facilitate and mediate Hamas’s newest victory over Fatah shows that his alliance with Israel is tactical and limited in scope. His decision to side with Israel against Hamas during Operation Protective Edge three years ago may not repeat itself in the next war.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.

September 26, 2017September 27, 2017

A TEST FOR KING ABDULLAH

The terrorists were freed on condition that they did not engage in either terrorism or incitement of terrorism subsequent to their release.

Ahlam Tamimi is a mass murdering monster.

And today she is living the good life, as a “journalist,” inciting jihad in Jordan under the protection of the King Abdullah.

On August 9, 2001, in the service of Hamas, Tamimi led a suicide bomber to the Sbarro Pizzeria in central Jerusalem. It was summer vacation. The streets were filled with children and parents.

Sbarro was filled with children and their parents.

Tamimi had scouted out the location of the bombing ahead of time. She chose Sbarro because it was a popular destination for families with young kids.

Tamimi brought the bomber to the restaurant. His bomb, hidden in a guitar case, weighed 5-10 kilos. It was surrounded by nails to puncture the flesh and internal organs of the victims, maximizing their pain and bodily damage.

Fifteen people, including seven young children and a pregnant woman were killed in the blast.

Another 130 were wounded. Chana Nachenberg, today 47, was 31 at the time. She was torn apart by the blast, only to survive, hospitalized in a vegetative state ever since.

Tamimi was sentenced to 16 consecutive life sentences and 15 more years in prison for her crime.

She was released in 2011 as part of the ransom deal Hamas coerced the government to accept to secure the freedom of IDF Sgt. Gilad Schalit. Schalit had been held hostage and incommunicado by Hamas in Gaza since he was abducted from Israel in 2006.

Tamimi, like the other thousand terrorists she was freed with, was not pardoned. Israel’s release was a conditional commutation. The terrorists were freed on condition that they did not engage in either terrorism or incitement of terrorism subsequent to their release.

Dozens of terrorists released under the Schalit ransom deal have been returned to prison to serve out the remainders of the terms over the past five years due to their violation of those conditions.

Immediately upon her release, Tamimi began violating the terms of her commutation by inciting terrorism.

She has been able to avoid returning to jail to serve out the remainder of her sentence because she decamped to Jordan.

From the safety of King Abdullah’s capital city Amman, Tamimi has worked as host of a television program on Hamas’s television station. Hamas television, which exists for the explicit purpose of inciting terrorism and indoctrinating viewers to become jihadists, operates openly in Jordan, as does Hamas.

Indeed, in 2011 King Abdullah decided to embrace the jihadist terrorist group that controls Gaza and is allied with Islamic State and Iran. Hamas leaders have frequently visited Jordan in recent years and the terrorist group is able to openly operate in the kingdom.

Since her release, Tamimi has given countless interviews and as traveled through much of the Arab world, celebrating her act of mass murder. She has said repeatedly that she would commit her children’s massacre again if she could.

Three of Tamimi’s victims were American citizens.

Malki Roth was 15 when she was killed. Shoshana Yehudit (Judy) Greenbaum was 31 and five months pregnant.

Nachenberg is also a US citizen.

Earlier this month, the US Department of Justice unsealed a 2013 indictment of Tamimi regarding her role in the murder of US citizens. The Justice Department officially requested that the government of Jordan extradite Tamimi to the US to face trial.

The US signed an extradition treaty with Jordan in 1995. But, as Malki Roth’s father Arnold Roth wrote last week in a blog post regarding the extradition request, since 1997, Jordan has claimed that the agreement was not ratified by the Jordanian parliament.

Based on this claim, two courts in Jordan, including the supreme court of appeals, rejected the US extradition request claiming that it would be unconstitutional to respect it.

Roth scoffed at the argument, noting that in Jordan, the notion of constitutionality is entirely arbitrary.

In his words, “In a monarchy where the king changes prime ministers and governments more often than some presidents change their suits, there’s an inherent problem with paying so much respectful attention to a constitution. Jordanian law, and what is legal and illegal depends on one individual. If [King Abdullah] wanted to extradite her [Tamimi], she would be in the US today.”

And this brings us to Abdullah, and what he wants.

Last week, this column discussed the hero’s welcome that Ahmad Dagamseh received when he returned home from prison. Dagamseh, a former Jordanian soldier, was released this month from Jordanian prison after serving a 20-year term for murdering seven Israeli schoolgirls at the so-called Island of Peace in the Jordan Valley in 1997.

After the column was published, Mudar Zahran, a Palestinian Jordanian ex-patriot and regime opponent who serves as the secretary general of the Jordanian Opposition Coalition wrote to me to highlight the fact that Dagamseh’s release was widely and exuberantly covered by media organs controlled by King Abdullah.

Zahran wrote that an official envoy of Jordan’s Interior Ministry Ghaleb Zohbi greeted Dagamseh at the prison upon his release and that Dagamseh was driven from jail to his village in a Mercedes flanked by a convoy of police cruisers.

Zahran added that the standard practice is for released prisoners to be taken home in a police wagon.

In a subsequent email exchange, Zahran set out his case for replacing the Hashemite minority regime with a Palestinian majority regime.

Zahran argued that the number of refugees in Jordan has been purposely inflated, and that the massive Palestinian majority in the population has not been significantly degraded by the refugee flows from Iraq and Syria over the past decade and a half.

According to his data, which he contends is supported by US embassy in Amman cables published by Wikileaks, there are 6.1 million Palestinians in Jordan. The kingdom is host to 750,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees.

Zahran accused King Abdullah of deliberately fanning the flames of antisemitism and anti-Americanism among the Jordanian public in order to make himself appear indispensable to Israel and the West.

Dagamseh’s celebrated release, like the regime’s protection of Tamimi and its willingness to permit her to continue to incite jihad against Israel from Amman are examples of this practice.

Abdullah’s notion, Zahran argues, persuasively, is that by giving a microphone to jihadists, Abdullah convinces Israel and the US that they cannot afford to allow anything to happen to him or to his minority regime.

So convinced, Israel and the US say nothing as Abdullah stacks his parliament with Muslim Brotherhood members. They voice no objection as Abdullah empowers Hamas, gives safe haven to terrorist murderers of Israelis and Americans, and rejects extradition requests on fictional constitutional grounds that he himself concocted.

Zahran, who seeks to replace the Hashemites with a Palestinian majority regime, which would allow Jordan to serve as the national home of the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, argues that Jordan is a state run by the military and intelligence services, which themselves are controlled by the US military’s Central Command.

In his words, Jordanian forces cannot “relocate an armored vehicle” without first getting “permission from US Central Command.”

Zahran’s vision of a post-Hashemite Jordan is interesting. He envisions the US continuing to have overall control of Jordan’s security forces. The new regime would liberalize the economy and stop jihadist incitement while actually targeting jihadists rather than coddling them.

The regime for which he advocates would be dominated by the long-discriminated-against Palestinian majority. It would work with Israel to solve its conflict with the Palestinians. Zahran’s Jordan would restore Jordanian citizenship to the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria and give them voting rights in Jordan.

It is hard to know whether Zahran’s vision of Jordan is a viable one. Certainly it sounds a lot better than what we experience with Abdullah. And it deserves serious consideration.

By the same token, it is time for the US and Israel to test Abdullah, the moderate man we cannot do without.

The first test should be an ultimatum. Abdullah should be told that he must either extradite Tamimi to the US for trial or send her back to Israel to serve the remainder of her sentence. If he refuses, then either Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or US President Donald Trump, or both, should meet publicly with Zahran to discuss his vision for the future of Jordan.

Originally Published on the Jerusalem Post.