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US and Israeli diplomats announced the largest military assistance package in US history on 14 September in a $38 billion, 10-year package that will deliver an assortment of American-designed weapon systems, including Lockheed Martin F-35 and Boeing F-15 fighters to Tel Aviv. The agreement, which takes effect on 1 October 2018, pledges $38 billion to Israel over the next decade, including $33 billion in foreign military financing funds and $5 billion for missile defense, US national security advisor Susan Rice said. In a surprise move, Rice added to the F-15E to the mix of weapon systems on the agenda for...

As part of a 10-year U.S.-Israel security aid agreement, the Israeli government has signed a letter promising to give back any additional money that Congress appropriates, effectively preventing Congress from giving Israel any more money than President Obama wants it to have. The White House will sign today a new 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Israel that would increase U.S.-Israel security aid from $3.1 billion a year to $3.3 billion, starting in 2018. The deal would also include, for the first time, $500 million of annual missile defense funding, bringing the annual total to $3.8 billion. But Congress, in...

Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed the Israeli people this evening (Wednesday) ahead of the historic pact to be signed between America and Israel in which Israel is set to receive 38 billion dollars of military aid over the next 10 years. Netanyahu spoke in Hebrew and said that, "In one hour, an historic agreement will be signed between America and Israel. The agreement will ensure that an unprecedented amount of military aid be granted to Israel over the next decade. In his speech, Netanyahu noted that, "This is the largest package of military aide that the USA has ever granted to...

Hundreds of Israeli artists and intellectuals are urging world Jewry to challenge Israeli policy toward Palestinians. […] The 470 signatories include authors David Grossman and Amos Oz, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and 20 former Israeli ambassadors. The organization “Save Israel, Stop Occupation” seeks to end Israel’s control of territories it won in the 1967 Mideast war and to establish a Palestinian state. …

In October 2014, the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (a clearinghouse for the International Solidarity Movement, ISM) ended their Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) organizing conference against Israel in San Diego, California. At the conclusion of the weekend event, their lead organizer, Anna Piller, alias Anna Baltzer, a woman with a deceased Jewish grandmother but no foundation in or knowledge of Judaism herself, who makes her living promoting Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) for Arab terrorist groups, sent out an email blast. In it she urged her followers to descend on Ferguson, Missouri in 2015 and demonstrate with black...

Netanyahu’s statement flummoxed the administration because no Israeli leader has ever stated the obvious bigotry of the US position regarding the so-called settlements so pointedly. Sometimes, nothing is more infuriating than the truth. On Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu infuriated the Obama administration when he told the truth about the nature of the internationally supported Palestinian demand that Israel must transfer control over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians Jew-free. In a video address posted to his Facebook page at around dawn Washington time, Netanyahu said, “The Palestinian leadership... demands a Palestinians state with one precondition: No Jews. “There’s...

According to the AMCHA Initiative, a non-profit organization that investigates and reports on anti-Semitism at American universities, there was "an alarming spike" in acts of anti-Semitism on America's college campuses during the first half of 2016, and that spike was especially high at schools where there were groups like the SPJ [Students for Justice in Palestine]. The [boycott, divestment and sanctions] BDS movement is a radical, left-wing movement spouting inflammatory rhetoric, asserting that the Israelis are little more than modern Nazis or take after the South African apartheid movement. Because there is a big bad donor and a conservative activist...

Mahmoud Abbas and Other Soviet Ghosts What the revelation of Abbas’s KGB service tells us about the Russian game of subversion. September 9, 2016 Caroline GlickOriginally published by the Jerusalem Post.  Channel 1’s report Wednesday that in 1983, current Palestinian Authority Chairman and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas served as a KGB agent is hardly the story of the year, but it does remind us of certain half-forgotten facts about the Cold War that are becoming ever more relevant today. The PLO’s close and servile relationship with the KGB was first exposed in a systematic way in 1987, with the publication...

Iran’s Desert of Hate A water-starved country can’t turn to the one country that could help. September 12, 2016 P. David Hornik Iran’s pistachio farms are dying of thirst. That may not, in itself, seem like major news. But it has a greater significance. After crude oil, pistachio nuts are Iran’s biggest export, with only the United States producing more. Yet a drought lasting years, along with uncontrolled pumping of water by farmers, has created a situation where the pistachio crop is drying up. AFP reports that: In Kerman province in southern Iran, cities have grown rich from pistachios, but...

British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn turned down an invitation by Israel’s opposition chief to visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, a British newspaper reported. Corbyn responded to the invitation, made in the spring by Isaac Herzog, the head of Israel’s Zionist Union political list, several weeks later, saying his schedule was full and that he would send either Tom Watson, the deputy party leader, or Iain McNicol, the party general secretary, in November, according to the Guardian. The invitation from Herzog came in April after former London Mayor Ken Livingstone said Nazi leader Adolf Hitler supported Zionism. Already suspended...

The commander of Israel Navy Ship Eilat, a Sa’ar-5 class Israeli missile boat, was extremely displeased. For some time, INS Rahav, the navy’s latest Dolphin-2 class submarine, had been cruising in the waters beneath him, at fairly close quarters. The sub occasionally lunged up and trained its periscope on the missile boat. Observers on the boat, whose task is to spot such potential threats, hadn’t noticed the periscope’s tip, which is the size of a fist, on the surface. The sub was practicing intelligence gathering, using the missile boat and its surroundings as targets; it wasn’t spotted even when sailors...

The United States fired at back at Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Friday, after he released a video equating the Palestinian Authority’s demand that a future Palestinian state be free of Jews to ethnic cleansing. “[T]he Palestinian leadership actually demands a Palestinian state with one pre-condition: No Jews. There's a phrase for that: It's called ethnic cleansing,” Netanyahu said in the video, which was released in Hebrew and English, as well as in a version with Arabic subtitles. “And this demand is outrageous. It's even more outrageous that the world doesn't find this outrageous,” he added. “Ethnic cleansing for peace...

Israel is bracing for an Islamic State (Isil) terror attack along its southern border with Egypt within the next six months, a senior Israeli military officer has warned. Wilayat Sinai, the jihadist group’s affiliate in the Sinai desert, has been stealing armored vehicles and anti-tank missiles from Egypt’s military and Israeli expects the weapons will soon be turned against its forces on the Egyptian border. The Israeli officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told The Telegraph that Wilayat Sinai had stolen at least one Egyptian M60 battle tank and had amassed a supply of Russian-made Kornet missiles, which can...

A large Hezbollah force, backed by the Syrian army and pro-Iranian Shiite militias, is building up outside Quneitra, just over a mile (2km) from Israel's Golan border. The Lebanese Shiite fighters, under the command of Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) officers, are streaming into southern Syria, armed with tanks and artillery. Hezbollah, the "party of Allah," is the terrorist organization based in Lebanon. In a manner similar to Hamas in Gaza, it has virtually taken over the government there, especially in the south where it borders with Israel. Currently, Hezbollah, a known proxy of Iran, is engaged in fighting rebel groups...

ADL, Israel: Social Media Companies Must Eliminate Growing Online Hate, TerrorismBy Joel Leyden Israel News AgencyNew York — September 7, 2016 … Christopher Wolf, Chair of the Anti-Defamation League’s Task Force on Cyberhate, addressed the U.N. Forum on Global Anti-Semitism. Wolf joined Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon and several other human rights leaders at the UN demanding that the UN and social media companies take immediate action against online racism. “My name is Christopher Wolf and I thank you for the privilege of participating today in this very important Forum on Global Anti-Semitism. I am especially pleased to be able to...

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a Soviet spy in Damascus in the 1980s, Israel’s Channel 1 television reported Wednesday, citing information it said was included in an archive smuggled out of the USSR. According to Channel 1’s foreign news editor Oren Nahari, the famed Mitrokhin archive, kept by KGB defector Vasily Mitrokhin, revealed that Abbas was a Soviet mole in Damascus in 1983. The documents — obtained by Israeli researchers Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez — purportedly show that Abbas, code-named Krotov (mole), was involved with the Soviets while Mikhail Bogdanov, today Vladimir Putin’s envoy to the Middle East....

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a KGB agent in 1983, according to Soviet-era documents examined by Israel’s Channel 1. The Abbas revelation stems from documents in the archive of Vasili Mitrokhin, Channel 1’s Oren Nahari tweeted. Mitrokhin, a former Soviet intelligence archivist, defected to Britain after the fall of the Soviet Union. He brought with him a treasure trove of valuable info. Mitrokhin’s edited notes were released in 2014, but the unedited material remains classified by MI5, The Times of Israel, reported. Mitrokhin died in 2004. The Abbas news comes just a month before the first Palestinian elections in...

Prime Minister Netanyahu struck back after Dutch Parliament member Tunahan Kuzu refused to shake his hand earlier today. “We again saw today a clear example of who wants peace and who doesn’t. I will continue to represent Israel’s position with pride throughout the world and to strengthen its international standing. As Menachem Begin said, “he who snubs his nose will remain with a snubbed nose,” the Prime Minister said. Kuzu, a former member of the Dutch Labor Party, is aligned with the DENK immigrant advocacy movement. …

Yes, I’m voting for Donald Trump. And I’m proud of it. If anyone had told me two years ago that I’d be making that statement, I would have done a Jon Stewart eye roll and stare. What? The guy from reality TV? The “You’re fired” guy with the funny hair and New York accent? That guy?! But things have happened in the last few years that have made me —and many pro-Israel Americans in both countries—decide that this is not only our best but our only choice.

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Amid the carnage of Syria's civil war, well into its sixth year, Is­raeli military chiefs say that Iran and its prized proxy, Hezbollah, are surrepti­tiously seeking to establish a new front in an older conflict, the Iran-backed group's 30-year war against the Jewish state that until recently was waged almost exclusively from neighboring Lebanon. The center of this strategy, which Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasral­lah, has frequently espoused in re ­cent months, is the Golan Heights, a 1,000-meter-high volcanic plateau that overlooks northern Israel. It has been a battleground since bibli­cal times. Israel seized the western two-thirds of...