Tag: Jared Kushner

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Jared Kushner is in Israel, Is Peace Actually Happening?

Jared Kushner landed in Israel just under 24 hours ago and after rushing to visit the grieving Malka family over their daughter’s murder on Shabbat he wasted no time going to visit Bibi Netanyahu.

The purpose of Kushner’s visit is to push Trump’s “ultimate deal” to broker Israel-Palestinian peace.  To casual observers it appears that there is really momentum towards a peace deal.

Perhaps there is, but let’s look at five reasons this could all be just a show or even more importantly a deal that has nothing to do with the Palestinians:

  • Trump agrees with Israel’s rights as the sovereign in Jerusalem, “Palestinians” will never agree to that.
  • Trump does not really care about “settlements,” “Palestinians” believe they must go.
  • Trump has opted for regional normalization first before any agreement on final status issues.
  • If Mahmoud Abbas, the “Palestinian” strongman agrees to any deal he will be killed by his own people.
  • Trump agrees that Israel should have full security control over Judea and Samaria.

Given the above list, peace does not seem likely anytime soon.  So what’s really going on?

Interim Deal and Normalization

Trump’s team is pushing normalization first and then an interim solution leaving out final status issues for the foreseeable future. This is essentially a rendition of Education Minister Naftali Bennett’s Stability Plan. The interim deal will see some sort of non contiguous Palestinian State arise in Area A and B where they already have some sort of autonomy.  C will continued to be controlled by Israel.  “Settlements” will continue in two different capacities.  In the main blocks there will unrestrained building.  In the rest of the Jewish communities in Area C building will continue to allow for natural growth.

Furthermore, Israeli communities across Area C will be given the same political status as any other Israeli community.  This has already been established by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked earlier in the month.

So they would Abbas or the Sunni Arab world go for any of this?

Abbas doesn’t want a real deal for reasons mentioned above. He does want a long-term status quo with an upgrade for the territory he manages.

The Sunni world has never liked the Palestinians.  They have created a “cause” in order to push back on Israel.  Now they need Israel and they need the “cause” they created to quiet down.  The interim plan is the way for this to happen.

Look for Kushner to push the beginnings of an interim solution, a solution that will be so long-term it may just be permanent.

 

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TRUMP EMBRACES THE PLO FANTASY

The PLO is the Siren that drowns US administrations.

US President Donald Trump is losing his focus. If he doesn’t get it back soon, he will fail to make America great again or safe again in the Middle East.

After holding out for a month, last week Trump indicated he is adopting his predecessors’ obsession with empowering the PLO .

This is a strategic error.

There are many actors and conflicts in the Middle East that challenge and threaten US national interests and US national security. Iran’s rise as a nuclear power and regional hegemon; the war in Syria; Turkey’s abandonment of the West; and Russia’s regional power play all pose major threats to US power, security and interests. The Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic State, Hamas and other Sunni jihadist movements all threaten the US, Europe and the US’s Sunni allies in the region in a manner that is strategically significant to America.

None of these issues, none of these actors and none of these threats are in any way related to or caused by the PLO and its interminable, European-supported hybrid terror and political war against Israel. None of these pressing concerns will be advanced by a US embrace of the PLO or a renewed obsession with empowering the PLO and its mafia-terrorist bosses.

To the contrary, all of these pressing concerns will be sidelined – and so made more pressing and dangerous – by a US reengagement with the PLO .

And yet, over the past week, Trump has indicated that the PLO is now his focus.

Last Friday, Trump spoke on the telephone with Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas is head of the PLO and the unelected dictator of the corrupt, terrorism-sponsoring, PLO -controlled Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria.

According to media reports, Trump told Abbas – whose legal term in office ended eight years ago – that he views him as a legitimate leader. According to the official White House report of the conversation, Trump also reportedly told Abbas that he supports reaching a deal between Israel and the Palestinians. Such a deal, to the extent it is ever reached, involves expanding PLO control over Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem at Israel’s expense.

Trump also invited Abbas for an official visit to Washington. And the day after they spoke, the Trump administration moved $250 million in US taxpayer dollars to Abbas’s police state where for the past 25 years, Abbas and his cronies have enriched themselves while feeding a steady diet of antisemitic, anti-American jihadist bile to their impoverished subjects.

To build up his credibility with the PLO , Trump put his electoral pledge to move the US embassy to Jerusalem on ice. The real estate mogul ordered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deny Jews the right to their property and their legal right to use state lands in Judea and Samaria.

And swift on the heels of that conversation with Abbas, Trump’s chief negotiator Jason Greenblatt was dispatched to Jerusalem to begin empowering the PLO at Israel’s expense.

According to media reports, Greenblatt intended to use his meeting Monday with Netanyahu was to reject Netanyahu’s commitment to build a new Israeli town in Samaria. Greenblatt was also reportedly intending to dictate the parameters for yet another round of negotiations with the PLO.

After meeting with Netanyahu, Greenblatt continued on to Ramallah to embrace Abbas.

Also during his stay, Greenblatt is scheduled to meet with IDF generals who are responsible for giving money and providing services to the PLO.

And Greenblatt doesn’t have the Palestinians to himself.

Following Trump’s conversation with Abbas, plans were suddenly afloat for Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump to visit Israel and spend an afternoon with Abbas in Ramallah.

If things develop as reported, then Trump is serious about embracing the PLO and intends to have his top advisers devote themselves to Abbas and his henchmen. If that is the case, then Trump is setting himself, his advisers, his daughter and the US up to fail and be humiliated.

The PLO is the Siren that drowns US administrations. It is to the PLO that America’s top envoys have eagerly flown, gotten hooked on the attention of the demented, anti-Israel press corps, and forgotten their purpose: to advance US national interests.

If Trump is serious about repeating this practice, then rather than repair the massive damage done to the US and the Middle East by his two predecessors, the 45th president will repeat their mistakes. Like them, he will leave office in a blaze of failure.

To understand why this is the case, three things must be clear.

First, the PLO will never make peace with Israel. There will never be a Palestinian state.

There will never be a peace or a Palestinian state because the PLO wants neither. This is the lesson of the past 25 years. Both Abbas and his predecessor Arafat rejected peace and statehood multiple times and opted instead to expand their terrorist and political war against Israel.

Why did they do that? Because they are interested in two things: personal enrichment – which they achieve by stealing donor funds and emptying the pockets of their own people; and weakening, with the goal of destroying Israel – which they achieve through their hybrid war of terrorism and political warfare.

The second thing that needs to be clear is that the Palestinians are irrelevant to the rest of the problems – the real problems that impact US interests – in the region. If anything, the Palestinians are pawns on the larger chessboard. America’s enemies use them to distract the Americans from the larger realities so that the US will not pay attention to the real game.

Iran will not be appeased or defeated if Trump empowers the PLO in its war against Israel and continues feeding PLO leaders’ insatiable appetite for other people’s money.

The Sunni jihadists will not beat their swords into plowshares if the US coerces Israel to cough up land to the PLO . To the contrary, they will be emboldened.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will not move his forces out of Syria or stop giving nuclear technologies to Iran if the US turns the screws on Israel. Putin will come to the conclusion that Trump is either weak or stupid to damage Israel, the US’s most serious ally.

And of course, Israel will not be better off if Trump decides to push it back onto the peace train which has caused it nothing but harm for the past quarter century.

Trump’s election opened up the possibility, for the first time in decades, that the US would end its destructive obsession with the PLO. For three months, Israelis have been free for the first time to discuss seriously the possibilities of applying Israeli law to all or parts of Judea and Samaria. And a massive majority of Israelis support doing just that.

On the Palestinian side as well, Trump’s election empowered the people who have been living under the jackboot of Abbas and his cronies to think about the possibility of living at peace with Israel in a post-PLO era. Polling results indicate that they too are eager to move beyond the Palestinian statehood chimera.

But now, it appears that Trump has been convinced to embrace the PLO obsession. The same entrenched bureaucrats at the State Department and the same foreign policy establishment in Washington that brought the US nothing but failure in the Middle East for a generation appear to have captivated Trump’s foreign policy. They have convinced him it is better to devote his top advisers to repeating the mistakes of his predecessors than to devote his energies and theirs to fixing the mess that Obama and George W. Bush left him with. They have gotten him to believe that it is better to empower the PLO than develop coherent strategies and plans for dealing with the problems of the region that actually endanger US interests and imperil the security and safety of the American people.

Originally Published in the Jerusalem Post.

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The Monumental Merit of Family Kushner

For several months now I have been wondering about the great merit of Jared Kushner to influence the heart of an incoming American Emperor.  And Donald Trump’s ascension to the Presidency is the stuff of legend.  Not an ordinary President is he.  This is not a post on what Jared may actually do in the role of one of Trump’s Chief confidantes, but it IS a post about Why.    And this blog, dedicated to discussing the End of Days, is all about Why and not just a series of events which hopefully will climax nine months from now during the Feast of Sukkot.  The story starts with with his grandfather, Holocaust survivor extraordinaire Yoseph Kushner.  Here is Jared in his own words describing why his father-in-law is not an anti-Semite and how his grandfather survived the Shoah.  His writing style is direct and to the point and full of intense detail.  But it is not here will you will find the essential reason for his great merit, but it is part of the story.

One might mention that once Yoseph Kushner moved to America after the Shoah, he rather quickly became very wealthy because of incredibly hard work and the same street smarts that helped his survive the Shoah.  He worked hard and most of his investments paid off.  Like Yosef in Egypt, Kushner was truly blessed by G-d in terms of his personal prosperity after his years of excruciating pain in the Shoah.  When he passed away in 1985, he bequeathed over 4000 rental properties in New Jersey to his sons Murray and Charles Kushner.  Charles Kushner, father of Jared, then built two Torah intensive, Land of Israel loving day schools in New Jersey, The Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy in Livingston, New Jersey and The Rae Kushner Yeshivah High School on the same campus.  Rae Kushner was Joseph Kushner’s wife who survived the Holocaust with him after escaping from the Lithuanian/ Belarus Ghetto  Novogroduk.  From this I learned that Yoseph Kushner was likely a Litvak which plays a part at the end of this story.  So we see here that Charles Kushner, the father of Jared, built Torah schools in New Jersey.  Yes he plea bargained and admitted guilt to a felony which landed him in jail, but as we see from a famous recent plea bargain here in Israel, a plea bargain is not necessarily a guarantee of real guilt,  I will simply leave it to G-d to know if Charles Kushner committed the crime for which he plead guilty.  If he did the crime, then he did the time.  I am leaving it at that.  Yet, it is not in the merit of these Torah schools that Jared has the ear of Caesar at this time.  There is something else, a missing ingredient.  Many great Jews built Torah in America.  Not all of the have the ear of Caesar at this pivotal point in world history.  Something else is going on.

And then I saw it.  For several months I have been wondering about which ArtScroll publication was proudly sponsored by the entire Kushner clan who descended from the righteous Yoseph Kushner who survived by digging a hole in the woods near the Belarus/ Lithuanian border during the Shoah.  I checked the Schottenstein Gemorrahs to no avail.  The Kushners are not in the long list of donors to ArtScroll’s Talmud project.  It was only this evening that a friend of mine from Dallas, Texas brought it up in a conversation with him.  (He wants to remain anonymous.)  We were discussing the spate of lashon hara going around about the Kushner’s taking a ride on Shabbat from the Inauguration which can be easily explained by Jared Kushner’s new post as Donald Trump’s Mideast envoy.  For a committed Zionist Jew to have that position, which wicked hatefilled Jew hater on the planet would NOT want to assassinate him at this critical time?  All of them would.  The Kushners simply can’t stay in hotels anymore and expect to not be a target.  Kushner by virtue of his new position is likely one of the most hated and targeted people on Planet Earth for assassination before Trump announces his first move in the Middle East.  If I were in Jared’s shoes (which I am not), I would thank HaShem for the very tight and scrupulous protection of the Secret Service who drove him home on Friday night.  He likely owes them his life which HaShem has placed in their hands.  All this lashon hara about what Jared and Ivanka have to do to live through this simply has to stop.  We are not in their shoes.  We are not the target of every evil Jew hater on the planet.  From this past Friday, they are their target.

So what is it that I saw?  I took out My ArtScroll Nusach Ashkenaz (Litwak) SUKKOT MACHZOR!  And there it was.  The entire Kushner clan was the sole sponsors of this machzor, the machzor in whose pages we read about the final chapters of GogUMagog at the end of the nine months of the 70 nations, at least, trying to gather against Yerushalayim!  They named the Sukkot Machzor: Machzor Beit Yosef in the merit of their father and grandfather Yoseph Kushner zt”l.  Think of the Torah they are responsible for spreading in this Machzor which are contained in its very pages.

From the Qabbalistic blessing that we say as we enter the Sukkah on the First night of Sukkot:

May it be your will, HaShem, my G-d and the G-d of my forefathers, that You cause Your Presence to reside among us; that you spread over us the Succah of your Peace — in the merit of the mitzvah of succah that we are fulfilling — to unify the Name of the Holy One, Blessed is He, and His Presence, in fear and in love, to unify the Name Yud -Key with Vav- Key in perfect unity, in the name of all Israel; and to surround us with the aura of Your honor, holy and pure, spread over our heads from above like an eagle arousing its brood; and from there cause an abundant outpouring of life for Your servant (Hebrew first name) son of (Mother’s Hebrew name) Your handmaid.  And in the merit of my leaving my house to go out – and I will enthusiastically pursue the path of Your commandments.  — May this be reckoned for me as if I have wandered afar.  Cleanse me thoroughly from my iniquity, and from my sin purify me.  From the exalted Ushpizim guests, the guests of faithfulness, may Your ears hear abundant blessings.  (To the hungry and the thirsty, may You give their food and their unfailing supply of water.)  May You endow me with the privilege to dwell and to take refuge in the sheltering protection of Your wings — at the time of my departure from the world — to take refuge from the Stream of Fire and the fiery rain, when You rain coals upon the (heads of the) wicked.  May this mitzvah of succah that I perform be reckoned as if I had fulfilled it in all its details, implications and speifications, as well as all the mitzvos dependent on it.  May You seal (The Book of Life) for our benefit, and allow us the opportunity to dwell many days upon the Land, the Holy Land, in Your service and in Your reverence.  Blessed is HaShem forever, Amen and Amen.  

The emboldened verse is what happens at the End of the Nine months on Hoshana Rabbah for which the flimsy Sukkah which one enters on the 15th of Tishrei provides protection as it says in Psalm 27:

5.  For He concealeth me in His Succah in the day of evil; {N}
He hideth me in the covert of His tent; He lifteth me up upon a rock.
כִּי יִצְפְּנֵנִי, בְּסֻכֹּה–    בְּיוֹם רָעָה:
יַסְתִּרֵנִי, בְּסֵתֶר אָהֳלוֹ;    בְּצוּר, יְרוֹמְמֵנִי.

That Day of Evil is not really evil at all, but it is a day of supreme judgement on the wicked nations of the world, the Great and Awesome Day of HaShem, the Hoshana Rabbah at the end of the 9 months.

At the beginning of this Nusach Ashkenaz ArtScroll Machzor for Sukkot we see the Dedication/ Approbation page:

This Machzor is dedicated to the memory of Joseph Kushner .ע”ה   which can either mean (Servant of G-d or Upon him is HaShem’s peace) Reb Yosef ben Moshe HaLeivi ע”ה
October 5, 1985 (the 6th day of Sukkot 5746)

Surviving the horrors of the Holocaust, he came to a new land to build a glorious future.  Success never compromised his integrity; nor did it cloud his vision of raising a loving, loyal family, and building a community whose centerpiece would be Torah, its values and its institutions.

In glowing memory, he remains the model of the Jew whose character and prosperity, the themes of Succoth and Koheles (Ecclesiastes), are a means to help others.

Signed all the Kushner children and grandchildren and his wife Rae.
Under Seryl and Charles Kushner we find the names Dara, Jared, Nicole, and Joshua.

So now we know why Jared Kushner has been chosen for a time such as this.  May he succeed in G-d’s endeavor for him to fulfill this role for his immediate future to sanctify HaShem’s Holy Name during these final contractions of the pregnancy of GogUMagog!.  

Addendum:  Notice when Yoseph Kushner zt”l passed away on the 6th Day of Sukkot, the Day of the Ushpiz of Yoseph HaTzaddik, and the very day on the Eve of Hoshana Rabbah.   From the 2nd War of GogUMagog in the forests of Belarus to the 3rd War of GogUMagog in and around Yerushalayim is the passage of only one day….

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Jared Kushner the Positive Force Behind Donald Trump’s Emerging Cabinet

After forcing Chris Christie and his cohorts out of the transition team, Trump son-in-law went to bat in getting Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus installed as Chief Strategic Adviser and White House Chief of Staff. It has become increasingly clear that President-Elect Donald Trump values his son-in-law’s opinion above all else.  The interesting thing about Jared Kushner, besides his being an Orthodox Jew (puts the anti-Semitic accusations on Trump to rest) is that he hides from the limelight whenever possible, preferring to advise from behind the scenes.  This attests to Kushner’s positive attribute of shying away from attention and focusing on putting his family first.

Although there has been some interesting picks early on, Jared Kushner’s influence may be what is behind the march towards unity in trying to bring Mitt Romney on-board as Secretary of State. If so, then Israel and its supporters will not only have a very friendly President, but his son-in-law who has his ear.

lev-haolam-building-israel

 

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