I Need To Be Even More Critical! Obama to Israel - Don't Build Houses Because It Is Destabilizing But I Will Allow Iran To Go Nuclear!

"Hi. This is the President. Is Senator Blumenthal in?"
"Not today, sir.  This is Yom Kippur."
"Well, hello, Yom.  Can I leave a message?"
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Should Israel kick the PLO habit?  Can Israel kick the PLO habit? Caroline Glick says yes to both.  (See 1 below.)
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Obama continues to bash Israel for building homes for its citizens but seems willing to let Iran go nuclear. Now that is what I call being a friend to an ally and important for the world 'tranquility.'

If America's affordable housing demand was equal to Israel's, our economy would be humming. But of course, some of this new housing is because Hamas terrorists have made living near the Gazan Border untenable.

I often ask myself am I too hard on Obama and then he goes and does another stupid thing that justifies not only my being hard on him but asking myself why I am not even  more critical.   (See 2 below.)

Obama does not give a damn what you guys think even if you are leaders! (See 2a below.)
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Dick
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1)  OUR WORLD: KICKING THE PLO HABIT
By Caroline Glick

The signs are everywhere that the time has come for Israel to abandon the PLO.

So long as the PLO remains in power, the lives of Israelis and Palestinians will only get worse.

PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas’s speech last Friday at the UN General Assembly where he repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide was not merely an abandonment of direct peace negotiations with Israel. Abbas abandoned the very concept of peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians.

Abbas called for the UN to pass a resolution that will require Israel to cede Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria in their entirety to the PLO within a set period of time. No Israeli consideration can be taken into account. No Israel concern can be attended to.

As he put it, “Palestine refuses to have the right to freedom of her people, who are subjected to the terrorism by the racist occupying Power and its settlers, remain hostage to Israel’s security conditions.”

As is always the case, the immediate victims of Abbas’s blood libels are the Israeli Left. The politicians and media elite that have hitched their horse to the PLO were again left stuttering by the wayside.

For some, like Meretz chair Zehava Gal-On, stuttering is a fine option. So she pushed out an endorsement of Abbas’s genocide speech.

Gal-On said, “Meretz supports Abbas’s international efforts to bring the end of the occupation and to get international recognition as a [Palestinian] state and member of the UN before and as a corridor to reaching peace in bilateral negotiations between equals,” And she joined Abbas in blaming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for Abbas’s rejection of peace.

As the center-left commentator Dan Margalit noted in Yisrael Hayom, Gal-On and Meretz are basically alone in their embrace of Abbas today.

But they are far from alone in maintaining their slavish devotion to the idea that the only way to improve the situation is by giving Abbas whatever he wants.

And here the circle of victims of Abbas’s hostility expands from the Left to the entire country.

In a Facebook post on Saturday, Opposition leader and Labor Party leader Yitzhak Herzog latched all of Israel to the Left’s position by seeming to condemn Abbas while insisting that he is Israel’s only hope.

Herzog wrote that Abbas’s remarks, “were disappointing but not surprising.

“I have met with [Abbas, aka] Abu Mazen dozens of times: He is not a friend or a sympathetic ally. He is someone we have to make a deal with,” Herzog insisted.

Herzog then repeated the same points he and his fellow leftists have made for decades: that Abbas is better than Hamas, that Israel’s security cooperation with the PLO is really great, and that he only way to get the world to be nice to us is by maintaining our allegiance to Abbas and the PLO.

Herzog concluded by joining Gal-On and Abbas in attacking Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and blaming him for Abbas’s open transformation into Israel’s enemy.

The first problem withvHerzog’s statement is that if it is true that he has always known that Abbas is our enemy, then he just told us that he is a liar.

Like all his friends on the Left, Herzog has continuously embraced Abbas and insisted that he is a man of peace and a moderate and interested in making a deal with Israel.

Yet far worse than his apparent serial dishonesty is Herzog’s insistence that Israel remain in the same policy straitjacket of embracing the PLO.

It is true that Israel gets some security cooperation from the Palestinian security forces. But it is also true that the only guarantor of Israel’s security is the IDF. Were the Palestinian security forces to disband tomorrow, Israel would be better off, not worse off.

This is the case because as Abbas showed, the PA views Israel as its enemy. For tactical reasons PLO militias do work with the IDF from time to time. But their strategic goal – Israel’s destruction – is unchanging. Any doubts that this is the case were dispelled by Abbas’s remarks in New York.

As for the PLO being preferable to Hamas, the PLO is Hamas’s coalition partner. Abbas staunchly expressed his commitment to the unity government he forged with Hamas in his UN speech.

Supporting the PLO in Gaza is the same as supporting Hamas.

Finally, Israel’s international position is continuously degraded, and has been since 1993 as a direct result of its embrace of the PLO. As Abbas showed yet again on Friday, the PLO is leading an international campaign to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist. By embracing the PLO, Israel is legitimizing the campaign against it.

Due to our adoption of the Left’s catechism, that Israel has no choice but to continue its embrace of the PLO, we find ourselves at this juncture — where the PLO no longer even tries to hide its rejection of peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state — unable to mount a concerted defense of our rights and legitimate concerns.

If we have no choice but to cut a deal with a group that openly seeks our annihilation in collaboration with Hamas, a terrorist group supported by Iran, then how can we defend ourselves and ensure our rights are respected and our interests are secured? The short answer is that we cannot. Since the PLO seeks our destruction, everything we do to strengthen it weakens us. Abbas made clear in his UN speech that he is playing a zero-sum game with Israel. Everything he gains comes at our expense.

Herzog and his comrades are right about one thing. Chances for peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians will increase in an environment where the Palestinians enjoy civil rights and economic opportunities. The problem is that the PLO has harmed, and will continue to harm both for as long as it remains in power.

In large part because the PLO recognizes that freedom and economic opportunity engender social happiness and peace, for the past 21 years they have taken active steps to repress freedom and strangle economic opportunities. Only a Palestinian society that is poor, immiserated and indoctrinated to hate Jews will agree to serve as foot soldiers in a perpetual war.

To this end, the PLO has stolen billions in international aid funds, imprisoned and tortured its critics, built an economy based on graft and protection, and brainwashed the Palestinians with a narrative of hating Jews and blaming Israel for the misery to which the PLO has reduced them.

Israel has two options going forward to secure its rights and protect its interests. Both options are preferable to remaining where we are. But to adopt either of these policies, we first need to abandon the pretense that the PLO is a credible, legitimate actor.

The first option is to adopt Economy Minister Naftali Bennett’s plan to apply Israeli law over Area C of Judea and Samaria – that is, the land lacking a significant Palestinian population, and agreeing to Palestinian self-rule in the Palestinian population centers.

For this option to work, Israel will have to cultivate a security and social environment among the Palestinians that is conducive to the emergence of a genuinely moderate leadership. This new leadership could replace the PLO and lead the Palestinians to a better, freer life based on peaceful coexistence with Israel and freedom in a self-governing territory.

The second option is to adopt the policy I set out in my recent book, The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. That policy involves implementing Israeli law over all of Judea and Samaria and providing the Palestinians with equal rights under Israeli law.

Palestinians will receive permanent residency status as the Arab residents of Jerusalem and the Druse of the Golan Heights received in 1967 and 1981. Like them, Palestinians will have the right to apply for Israeli citizenship. Those who abide by the criteria of Israel’s citizenship laws will receive citizenship.

Both of these options will improve chances for peace. Both policies will secure the lives of Israelis and Palestinians and foster their rights and prosperity.

Friday Abbas told us clearly that he is our enemy, and indeed the enemy of the Palestinians whose lives he insists on imperiling and embittering by locking them into a perpetual war for the destruction of Israel.

He told us to move on.

And move on we must, first and foremost by kicking our PLO habit.

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2) Netanyahu Slams White House on Settlements Criticism

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hit back at the White House after Washington criticised Israeli plans to build thousands more settler homes in east Jerusalem, Israeli media reported on Thursday.

Israeli public radio quoted Netanyahu as telling US President Barack Obama in talks in Washington Wednesday to "study the facts and details before making statements" about the settlement plan.
The approval of 2,610 new housing units in Israeli-annexed Arab east Jerusalem drew condemnation from Washington, with White House spokesman Josh Earnest warning that the move would "distance Israel from even its closest allies".

Netanyahu told Israeli journalists after the meeting that the plans had been in the pipeline for two years.
Housing Minister Uri Ariel also told Israeli army radio that 1,000 of the units would "go to Arabs," but did not elaborate.

Israel's settlement building in the occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem, which is illegal under international law, has caused the breakdown of several rounds of peace talks.

The settlements are built on land the Palestinians want for their future state, whose capital would be in east Jerusalem.
Some 200,000 settlers live in east Jerusalem neighbourhoods, as well as some 306,000 Palestinians, according to Jerusalem's municipality.
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2a) US Jewish Leaders Slam Obama Administration’s Attack on Israeli Residency in Eastern Jerusalem

A prefabricated home in Givat Hamatos. The Jerusalem municipality is building more than 2,000 new housing units in the neighborhood. Photo: Wikimedia.

Leading Jewish personalities in the United States  have reacted angrily to the Obama Administration’s blistering attack upon Israel’s announcement – based on a plan already approved by the Jerusalem Municipality two years ago – that it will construct 2,500 residential units in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Hamatos. The administration also expressed displeasure at the news that a group of Jewish residents had moved into property purchased from Arabs in the Silwan neighborhood.

“Anyone who thinks that Jews buying a few handfuls of homes in areas of Jerusalem in any way contributes to the problems in the Middle East just doesn’t understand the reality of how deep the antagonism is to the nation state of the Jewish people,” said the former Harvard University scholar and influential political commentator, Professor Alan Dershowitz.

Dershowitz, who has been generally critical of Israeli settlement policies in the West Bank, was responding to White House spokesman Josh Earnest’s comment about the “occupation of residential buildings in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in east Jerusalem – this is near the Old City – by individuals who are associated with an organization whose agenda, by definition, stokes tensions between Israelis and Palestinians.”

Earnest was referring to the Jewish nationalist Elad organization. On Tuesday, the Jerusalem Post reported that an official of the Palestinian Authority’s ruling Fatah party had declared that the Palestinian broker who made the sale to Elad deserved the death sentence.

“To focus on these events at a time when ISIS is beheading, when Iran is developing nuclear weapons, and when Hamas is preparing rocket attacks, is such a perversion of reality and such a false prioritization,” Dershowitz said in an interview with The Algemeiner.

Asked whether the White House’s criticism implicitly discriminated against Jewish residency rights on the basis of ethnicity, Dershowitz responded: “I see a failure to point the finger where it belongs, at Palestinian leaders who say, ‘no Jew will ever live on the West Bank.’ For the White House to object to Jews purchasing property, it reminds me of those who protested when Jews bought property in pre-Israel Palestine. This isn’t the old days when Jews have to live behind a ghetto wall.”

Rabbi Marvin Hier, Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, slammed the criticism from the White House concerning Jews moving into homes in Silwan freely sold by the broker. Describing the sale as “legitimate commerce,” Hier told The Algemeiner: “What does this have to do with the government of Israel? This is free commerce between the citizens of a free country. It seems to me ludicrous and out of place.”

“Of all the things that are a provocation, and that have led to disastrous consequences for the Middle East, I don’t think it’s the selling or exchange of apartments and homes,” Hier said.

In a statement released on Thursday afternoon, Abraham H. Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, questioned the administration’s “myopic, ill-timed and off the mark” intervention. “One need only to recall the complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and Israel’s unilateral ten month freeze on new settlement construction to understand that Israeli settlements are not and never have been the impediment to an Israeli-Palestinian agreement,” Foxman said.

Uri Ariel, Israel’s Housing Minister, pointed out in response to the American criticisms that around one third of the new homes in Givat Hamatos are intended for Arab residents of the city.

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