Speaking Out? Twofold Solution? Pomerantz. Delay! Bob Euker.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This Op Ed suggests those among the radical liberal male Israeli people have begun to speak. I believe the same is beginning to happen here in America with "We The People".  Our elections are too long and too costly.  They paralyze the nation, imprison our focus and turn off most American's.

Second, if Republicans had s--- for brains they would select Trump as Speaker, nominate both De Santis as their candidate along with Khristi Noem. She has made a fine governor, is physically attractive has proven a fantastic marketer and would soften De Santis' stiffness.

Furthermore, Trump would be wise to take the job. He could remain in office for quite some time and have the opportunity and power to give the party some backbone and serve the nation in what could prove an effective manner..

Are they both smart enough to solve several problems at one time?  Time will tell

+++

‘We the People’ begin to speak'

By Caroline Glick

Caroline B. Glick is the senior contributing editor of Jewish News Syndicate and host of the “Caroline Glick Show” on JNS. She is also the diplomatic commentator for Israel’s Channel 14, as well as a columnist for Newsweek. Glick is the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington and a lecturer at Israel’s College of Statesmanship.

In Israel the left seeks to create, Judaism will be no more than a kitschy accessory. Op-ed.

(JNS) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his family packed their bags Monday night for their vacation on the Golan Heights.

The police also made their routine preparations. They set up a water cannon outside the hotel where the Netanyahus are staying to prevent leftist rioters from getting near the premier and his family.

On the face of things, the left’s insurrectionists are as strong as ever. They have unlimited funds to spend on their activities. They are guided by Israel’s most talented PR executives. They receive wall-to-wall support from 95% of Israeli media outlets. And, acting on orders from Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, the police are prohibited from enforcing the law against them.

The insurgents’ current target is religious Judaism and religious Jews.

On Sunday night, a group of leftist male bullies stormed a movie screening for haredi girls and women in Jerusalem to block them from watching a film without males in the room.

Haaretz reporter Yael Freidson cheered them on, writing on X/Twitter, “Neighborhood men appeared at a [film] screening that was organized for women and girls, and prevented the same-sex event from taking place. For those who didn’t understand from the events of recent weeks, the contract has been reopened.”

Freidson’s allusion to “the contract” relates to Israel’s social contract, which permits autonomy and use of public spaces for various religious and social sectors in Israel’s multicultural society. The leftist insurrection now demands that freedom of access be blocked for people who aren’t like them.

Freidson’s mention of “the contract” was also an allusion to a new political party. In August, the heads of Brothers in Arms, the insurgency’s habitually violent paramilitary force, formed a political party called “New Contract.” It will run candidates in the municipal elections scheduled for Oct. 31. The goal is to win enough seats on municipal councils to prevent mayors from forming governing coalitions or otherwise cooperating with religious parties and Likud.

Public spaces

By making mayors dependent on Brothers in Arms and their shock forces-turned-city-councilmen, the hard leftists are certain they will be able to prevent the practice of traditional Judaism and ban traditional Jewish lifestyles from public spaces.

They may be right. To date, no liberal or leftist politician has given Brothers in Arms and its comrades from the Kaplan Brigades and the left’s other anti-government groups a reason to fear failure. When Brothers in Arms and its comrades rioted at Yom Kippur services in central and northern Tel Aviv, in Givatayim, Rishon Letzion, Zichron Yaakov and Haifa last week, not one center-left or leftist politician condemned them.

On the contrary, most leftist politicians supported the rioters and condemned the Jews who were trying to pray at public prayers. Opposition leader Yair Lapid’s underling Orna Barbivai, who recently left the Knesset to fun for Tel Aviv mayor, said in a radio interview last Wednesday that if she is elected, Orthodox Jewish outreach will be banned from the public square, and that anyone who doesn’t get with the program will be shown the door.

“I think that every resident of Tel Aviv needs to be asked what happened that in the base of liberalism, there is such a large group of Torah communities that managed to root themselves and come in from outside with agendas.”

If she is elected mayor, Barbivai pledged, “Anyone who doesn’t abide by the standards that I as a liberal mayor will lead—won’t be here.” (Barbivai recently moved to Tel Aviv from Afula. Orthodox communities in Tel Aviv predate the establishment of the state, ed.)

With that kind of support, and with an endless pile of cash to spend, what could go wrong for the insurgency?

It works out that plenty can—and has—gone wrong. In the past two weeks, Brothers in Arms and its ilk have lost the center. Thanks to the media’s mobilization on their behalf, for months the post-Zionist radicals leading and funding the left’s insurgency were able to hide their anti-Israel agendas from the center-left and the soft center-right. But over the past two weeks, their mask came off.

This is the case for two reasons. First, they overreached.

Their efforts to discredit and demonize Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his trip to the U.S. two weeks ago backfired.

The leftist insurgents intended to leverage the Biden administration’s hostility toward Israel to undermine Netanyahu’s trip and discredit his leadership, in order to demoralize Netanyahu’s domestic and U.S. supporters and bring about the collapse of his government. (Needless to say, the Israeli media did not show the pro-Netanyahu demo organized by US Jewish Zionist groups.) Rather than feel demoralized, though, the Israeli public was appalled by the left’s efforts and voiced its revulsion to pollsters.

On the other hand, Netanyahu’s successful meeting with Elon Musk in Silicon Valley and his apparently coordinated presentation of the Saudi-Israeli normalization efforts with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman prevented Israel’s detractors in the Biden administration from using Netanyahu’s meeting with President Joe Biden as a means to diminish and discredit Israel’s leader. Indeed, Netanyahu’s triumph in the U.S. showed that he is Israel’s greatest statesman and a credit to Israel’s democratic system.

Then came Yom Kippur. The likes of the insurgency’s Svengali, former prime minister and failed Knesset candidate Ehud Barak, and Brothers in Arms members have been fairly open about what they seek to accomplish.

They want to reduce the Jewish character of Israel to the level of a kitschy accessory for the otherwise progressive, globalist plutocracy where they, as the enlightened elite, will hold all the reins of power. Their sword is intimidation. Their shield is the self-selected judicial oligarchy that shares their post-Zionist intuitions and holds unlimited powers.

All the same, the depth of their hostility toward actual Judaism and the Jewish character of the State of Israel was largely hidden behind the ocean of Israeli flags that their billionaire financiers have armed them with, in a fairly successful effort to appropriate patriotism to their side.

That all ended on Yom Kippur when members of Brothers in Arms, the Kaplan Force and the left’s other paramilitary groups used force and intimidation to ruin and break up public prayers on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar in central and northern Tel Aviv and in other liberal cities around central and northern Israel.

Although the media tried to present the events as a fight between two warring factions: the leftists working to protect the liberal character of their cities from far-right provocateurs, rather than real worshippers, no one was buying it. One clip, which immediately went viral, told the tale.

“You people”

A young Mizrahi Jewish man at the prayers at Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv, surrounded by Ashkenazic rioters screaming at him about “You people,” lost patience and shot back.

“I’m [at the demonstrations] at Kaplan Street every Saturday. I’m a secular, high-tech worker! I live here in Tel Aviv. So who is ‘You people’? When you say, ‘You people,’ who are you referring to? Is it the color of my skin? Is it my kippah? Who is ‘You people’!?

“Please explain to me, ‘Mr. Enlightened Left,’ who is ‘You people’! Because I’m at Kaplan, every Saturday, fighting for my democracy! And one day of the year, when I decide to put on a kippah, suddenly, I’m ‘You people’?!”

That young man was far from alone. A lot of the people who were blocked from praying had until then identified with the anti-government protesters. But after Yom Kippur, they realized that the protests aren’t about the balance of powers. They are about the nature of the Jewish state. The people they thought were on their side are actually using them to advance an anti-Jewish agenda they hadn’t signed on for.

For nearly a year, the leftist minority, which lost the elections, has been presenting itself as the majority. Barak, whose Meretz Party didn’t even get elected to Knesset, has felt comfortable referring to himself as “We the people” because for the past year, the media has backed his absurd claim, while castigating the democratically-elected government’s effort to democratically pass the judicial reform agenda it ran on, as “a regime change” and a “coup d’état.”

Barak and his lieutenants have organized groups of pilots and commandoes from elite IDF special forces units. They have mobilized the far-left physicians’ union, the universities, Israel’s business and banking elite, high-tech investors and workers, and other elite groups to present an image that all right-thinking members of Israel’s ruling class oppose the government and view it as illegitimate.

And the majority, for the most part, was intimidated by the onslaught.

No longer intimidated

But in recent weeks, the majority stopped being intimidated. Spearheaded by Shai Kallach, a peripatetic former IDF combat pilot, over the past several months, and at a much higher velocity, over the past several weeks, pilots, academics, physicians and business people have begun to stand up against Israel’s rebellious, hate-filled and deep-pocketed leftist elites.

Kallach entered the scene earlier this year in the first wave of Brothers in Arms’ campaign intended to tear apart the IDF by encouraging pilots and other elite combat operatives to refuse to serve in the reserves under the Netanyahu government. Kallach mobilized the flight mechanics against the rebellious pilots and so exposed the condescending elitism of Israel’s rebellious left.

Since then, Kallach organized a hundred pilots—retired and in active reserves—who have begun speaking out.

Immediately after Brothers in Arms’ poster girl, former helicopter pilot Shira Eting, falsely accused the government and the IDF of sending pilots on missions to “shoot bombs and missiles into houses knowing they might be killing children,” on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Kallach and his comrades released a video excoriating her and the Brothers in Arms group.

Legendary fighter pilots appeared one after another to condemn her lies and restore the term “Brothers in Arms,” to warriors who serve the State of Israel unconditionally. Kallach ended the video with a question addressed to “Brothers in Arms”: “If you’re our brothers in arms, why are you pointing your weapons at us?”

Kallach raised funds to put a massive billboard on the side of a building facing the Ayalon Highway in Tel Aviv, which repeats the question against the backdrop of Eting and her comrades’ sitdown with “60 Minutes.”

The left, for the first time, has been caught flat-footed. They are being beaten at their own game—because they aren’t the majority and the majority is no longer intimidated. It is repulsed.

Kallach formed a new movement called Netzach Israel (Eternal Israel), as an umbrella group to mobilize Israel’s silent majority. Aside from the pilots, Netzach Israel has organized hundreds of academics, businessmen and doctors and others to stand up to the insurgents besmirching Israel’s good name, its society and its Jewish character at home and abroad. The ground is shifting, quickly, and the leaders of the insurgency are feeling it.

With limitless funds and media support, it is likely that the riots will go on, perhaps for years. But the left’s mask of patriotism and liberalism has shattered.

And the majority—that actual “We the People”—is finally finding its voice, and using it.

And:

To Those Considering Leaving Israel: Don’t do it

• By SHERWIN POMERANTZ

The events of the last nine months in Israel which, sadly, seem to have coalesced in the disappointing and, yes, frightening events in Tel Aviv on the eve of Yom Kippur, have been the catalyst for many people here to think of leaving Israel to live in another country.

Imagine that? After 2,000 years of praying for the return to the land promised to us by the Almighty in “our” Torah (thankfully it is one of our historical possessions that none of our enemies has yet to claim is not ours) and having the honor to be the generation that lives out that promise, large numbers of our brethren are now considering leaving. How is that possible? How did we get here?

According to recent press reports, 40% of Israelis are either applying for second passports, if eligible to do so, or can easily leave for other countries and are considering doing just that. Even if that number is somewhat inflated, it needs to make all of us question what has happened to our sense of mutual concern for the good and welfare of this land and our history.

For sure, we are going through a difficult and challenging phase, yet again. But yet again, it’s not the first time, and sadly, probably not the last time either.

And where are all those who have left – or are considering leaving – going? Cyprus, Greece, Germany. Yes, Germany, which has the fastest-growing Jewish population in Europe. More amazingly, Berlin, the seat of the former Nazi government, is the German city that has the fastest-growing Jewish population. Can one even fathom that?

Further west, the US is also an attractive destination. That is particularly amusing as people who I deal with there regularly in my work, have said that if Trump retakes the presidency in 2024, upwards of 25% of the population will consider emigrating, with Canada and Costa Rica being prime potential destinations. Perhaps the Israelis who leave here can buy those potentially vacant homes, eh?

But why are we leaving? Because the present government is intent on making changes to our judicial system that many of us believe will weaken our democracy? So what? Governments do not stay in power forever, especially here. Does anyone even remember a government that served a full term? Laws altered by one government can be replaced by the next government. Do we really believe that the fault line created by the actions of this government is so deep that it is not bridgeable? Seriously?

 

CONSIDER THIS…

A country that can rightly claim that there is probably not a single piece of electrical equipment in use anywhere in the world that has not been invented or improved by Israeli technology cannot bridge that fault line?

A country that hosts 60% of the world’s investment in cybersecurity can’t find a path to political compromise?

A country that found a way to take a remnant of religious life that existed at its inception and in 75 years created the largest center of Jewish learning in history cannot apply Talmudic logic to solving the challenges that confront us?

Really? Are we not better than this?

Life here is generally good with a high standard of living for most of the population and freedom to travel almost anywhere in the world without a problem. Add to that the fact that the majority of the world’s Jews now live here in Israel, which has created a dynamic where Diaspora Jews, frankly, could no longer easily thrive as Jews without a productive and buoyant Israel.

And of course, needless to say, but when the doors of the world shut us out again at some point, this time there needs to be a successful and functional country to which our brethren can return. And we do not need to create that, it is already in our hands.

In short, those of us living, working, and contributing to the success of this society that has made us a model for what a country can accomplish in just 75 years, have an obligation to remain here and continue to till the economic and social soil of Israel in order to give functional meaning to the words “never again.”

Almost 100 years ago, Menashe Oppenheim wrote a Yiddish song that began with the following words, “Vi ahin zol ikh geyn, az farshlosn iz yeyder tir?” loosely translated as:

To where shall I go? Who can answer me?
To where shall I go if every door is locked?
The world is big enough, but for me it feels quite small
But in a flash we are back, every brick in disarray, to where shall I go?

TODAY WE know the answer, we are already here. What we have is not perfect and still needs a lot of work. But we have never had it better as a people since the fall of Jerusalem. Do we even dare to be part of the generation that runs away from that, rather than continuing to make it better?

 

How dare we even contemplate that!!!!

Think what we will tell our grandchildren about what we did if we let that happen. I shudder to envision the look of disappointment in us that will be reflected in their faces – and so should everyone who is considering leaving.

Stay the course; the greener grass is slowly turning brown.

The writer is CEO of Atid EDI Ltd., an international business development consultancy, chair of the American State Offices Association in Israel, former board chair of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, and past national president of the Association of Americans & Canadians in Israel.

Republicans Cut Off Their Own Heads

Finally:

A gang of eight ousts a Speaker with no plan or replacement in mind.

The Editorial Board

Eight Republicans succeeded in ousting Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker on Tuesday, and we trust they’re happy. They now have the chaos they wanted, though it isn’t clear what else they hope to achieve. Their clever plan seems to cut off their own heads.

Mr. McCarthy lost his job, but he rose in our esteem in recent days by the way he has handled this threatened coup. He put the country first on Saturday in refusing to let the plotters shut down the government for no good purpose. Then on Tuesday he refused to ask Democrats for a power-sharing deal in return for votes to rescue his Speakership. He put his party above his job, and his reward is that he is the first Speaker ousted in history. The vote was 216-210.

In retrospect the die may have been cast at the start of this Congress when Mr. McCarthy conceded to a rule that any single Member could offer a motion to vacate his chair. He may have had no choice to win the job, and he did so assuming at least some goodwill among his critics. The reality is that they were always lying in wait to strike.

We refer to Reps. Matt Gaetz, Nancy Mace, Eli Crane, Andy Biggs, Matt Rosendale, Bob Good, Tim Burchett and Ken Buck. They united with Democrats to topple a Republican Speaker without a plan, a replacement, or even a policy goal in mind. Four percent of the Republican conference trumped the 96% who supported the Speaker.

Mr. Biggs argued on the floor that the House hadn’t passed the 12 annual spending bills on time, but that’s because of demands from Members like him. He and Mr. Gaetz offered mainly a list of grievances and supposedly failed promises that had no chance of being realized this Congress. Their real motive looks to be spite, personal and political, and the result is to sow chaos in their own ranks.

Democrats decided not to assist Mr. McCarthy, and no doubt they are enjoying the Republican turmoil. Their decision may have been made when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on the weekend that she would vote to oust Mr. McCarthy. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries would have jeopardized his own leadership if he had bucked the Democratic left.

But Democrats may come to miss the former Speaker if the chaos lasts for some time and leads to government shutdowns or failure to pass aid to Ukraine. The next Speaker might be weaker than Mr. McCarthy and even less willing to say no to the rejectionists.

Mr. McCarthy accomplished more than he gets credit for during his short tenure as Speaker. He negotiated a debt-ceiling deal that put a cap on domestic discretionary spending and clawed back some unspent pandemic money. He created the special China committee that is building a bipartisan consensus on how to defend Taiwan and respond to the Communist Party’s ambitions. He also moved to restore some bipartisan comity to the Intelligence Committee after Adam Schiff’s partisan manipulation.

The ouster captures the degraded state of the Republican Party in this era of rage. Members in safe seats can fuel their own fund-raising and careers by claiming to “fight” against all and sundry without doing the hard work to accomplish what they claim to be fighting for. Mr. Gaetz is the prototype of this modern performance artist, as he raises money for a potential run for Florida Governor.

As we went to press, the path forward for the House wasn’t clear. North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry becomes Speaker Pro Tem, per a list Mr. McCarthy had submitted to the House clerk. But the search for a permanent Speaker could be long and chaotic.

Mr. McCarthy said Tuesday night in classy remarks that he won’t run again. Other names will surface, but who in the world would want the chair knowing it comes with the constant peril of being ousted? Anyone courted for the position should refuse to accept without a change in House rules so the support of at least 20 Members would be required to vacate the Speaker’s chair. The House majority can’t be held hostage to the Jacobins on either side of the aisle.

Meanwhile, the House is essentially frozen. The putative GOP majority is weaker, and its ability to gain any policy victories has been undermined. Oversight of the Biden Administration will slow or stop. Republicans in swing districts who are vulnerable in 2024 will be especially wary of trusting the Gaetz faction, and regaining any unity of purpose will be that much harder. The crazy left and right are cheering, but no one else is.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

As I have said.  They should hold off normalization until Biden is gone.

+++

Israel-Saudi normalization has nothing to do with Biden

The administration’s motives for pushing a new deal have more to do with the president’s 2024 re-election campaign and his failed Iran policies than peace.

 

JONATHAN S. TOBIN -

 

During its first years in office, the Biden administration had difficulty saying the words “Abraham Accords,” let alone taking actions to follow up and expand upon the Trump administration’s foreign-policy triumph. That’s changed in the last several months. The Biden administration has taken up the cause of promoting a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. But if those two countries are moving ever closer to each other—something about which there is no doubt—it has little to do with the efforts of President Joe Biden or Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The evidence of that closeness was clearly on display in the past week as two Israeli ministers in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government visited the desert kingdom. Tourism Minister Haim Katz became the first member of Israel’s cabinet to be granted an entry visa by the Saudis when he attended a conference of the U.N. World Tourism Organization there for World Tourism Day. This week, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi arrived in Riyadh at the head of a 14-person delegation, including a fellow Knesset member and representatives of various other ministries. While there, they took part in a religious service for Sukkot.

Putting Biden in his place

The pictures of an Israeli politician visiting Saudi Arabia dressed in a tallit and holding a lulav and etrog were amazing, especially when considering just how unimaginable such a thing would have been only a few years ago. But it was probably not as shocking as the willingness of that country’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS), to speak openly of normalization with Israel.

During an interview held last month with Fox News Channel’s Brett Baier, MBS dismissed the idea that efforts to bring the two countries closer had stalled. “Every day we get closer,” he said.

Obstacles, of course, remain before the realization of a normalization agreement, including the exchange of ambassadors. Moreover, there are still reasons to believe that MBS and the Saudis may be perfectly happy to grow ever closer to Israel as a strategic military ally against Iran and a potential business partner without going all the way to a peace treaty. The symbolism that goes with such a decision remains tricky for a regime whose claim to legitimacy in the Arab world is that of the guardian of Islam’s holy places in Mecca and Medina.

Yet the main takeaway from this exchange is that the Biden administration was put in its place. Unlike the situation in 2020, when the Trump administration was the driving force behind the diplomatic momentum that led to the Abraham Accords, Biden and Blinken may be as much of a hindrance to the Israel-Saudi relationship as they are a help.

American diplomacy on this subject has highlighted how mired the veterans of the Obama administration who still run foreign policy under Biden are in failed policies of the past. Their insistence on including Israeli concessions to the Palestinians, coupled with reviving the dead-in-the-water peace process and the quest for a two-state solution to the conflict, indicate that they fail to understand why normalization is even possible in the first place.

The Arab states—and MBS, in particular—comprehend, as perhaps many in the U.S. foreign-policy establishment and media still do not, that the Palestinians have no interest in peace with Israel. As such, they are tired of having their security and national interests being held hostage by a Palestinian political culture that cannot let go of its century-old war on Zionism.

The American push to include the Palestinians in any deal is more about the Biden administration’s desire to topple Netanyahu’s government—since many of its members wouldn’t tolerate sacrificing the Jewish state’s rights in Judea and Samaria in order to buy an embassy in Riyadh—than any pure-hearted interest in peace.

That brings us back to what is driving Biden’s recent interest in Israel-Saudi peace. He has two main objectives.

One is a desire to keep the Saudis from turning to China for help with Iran and to ensure the flow of oil to an America that discarded energy independence for environmentalist ideology, but now faces shortfalls due to sanctions on Russia after it invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

The second is for some sort of a foreign-policy success heading into the president’s already shaky re-election campaign in which most national polls show that he is either tied with former President Donald Trump or actually trailing him.

No re-election year Israel charm offensive

This should not be confused with an election-year pivot on Israel that was comparable to the one that former President Barack Obama executed in 2012.

After three years of doing his best to create more “daylight” between the United States and Israel, as well as fomenting public spats with Netanyahu, Obama moved to quiet talk of a rift with the Jewish state as he headed into a tough re-election fight. What followed were speeches such as his address to the 2012 AIPAC Policy Conference, during which he pledged to ensure that Iran would never get a nuclear weapon.

We now know that he was already plotting to betray those promises by initiating secret talks with Iran. But in public, he stuck to the script even to the point of vowing in his 2012 foreign-policy debate with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney that any deal he struck with Iran would mean the dismantling of its nuclear program.

Those promises would be quickly forgotten once Obama was re-elected, but his Israel charm offensive shored up his hold on the Jewish vote, winning 69%. That was down from 78% in 2008 but was still deeply disappointing to Republicans, many of whom had wrongly assumed that a president who had made no secret of his antagonism for Israel would be punished at the polls by Jewish Democrats.

But liberal Jews still backed him, even when he spent much of his second term working to appease Iran, something that culminated in the 2015 nuclear deal.

Biden is not as worried about Jewish voters as Obama was.

In America’s current bifurcated political culture, the notion that a population as overwhelmingly liberal as the Jews would cross over to vote for a Republican, let alone Trump, over Israel or any other issue is pure fantasy. It’s a source of immense frustration to Trump, who never tires of venting his anger over the fact that most Jews didn’t consider his status as the most pro-Israel president ever to be a reason to vote for him. While politically conservative Jews and the Orthodox will support the former president, the Democrats know they don’t have to do a thing, especially with regards to an Israel led by Netanyahu that many on the Jewish left dislike, in order to equal the 68% of the Jewish vote that he received in 2020.

Nevertheless, Biden does want something he can call a foreign-policy victory. To date, his main accomplishments abroad involve his disastrous retreat from Afghanistan and the way his blunders helped lead to the war in Ukraine.

His priority coming into office was to revive Obama’s nuclear deal that Trump had abandoned. But knowing that the new president was bent on appeasing rather than pressuring them (a fact that was reinforced by the way Biden’s negotiating team was compromised by its pro-Iran bias), the Iranians refused to go along, and have sat back and watched sanctions go unenforced. They also saw Biden resort to a ransom deal that brought them billions while they chipped away at making progress towards building their own nuclear weapon. 

What the Saudis want

As we learned this past week, Iran’s nuclear program has now reached the point where it is now a given that the Iranians can assemble a bomb in less than two weeks, essentially ending in the failure of Western and Israeli efforts to prevent such an outcome.

As MBS told Fox News, the Saudis won’t sit by and allow their sworn enemies in Tehran to get a bomb without seeking one themselves. That’s why the wish list they handed the Americans earlier this year as the price for signing a normalization agreement included U.S. assistance to create a Saudi nuclear program.

That’s never going to happen. Most Democrats despise the Saudis and wouldn’t go along with a treaty guaranteeing their defense—another possible component of a normalization deal—even without helping the authoritarian monarchy in Riyadh go nuclear.

The Saudis are willing to pay lip service to the Palestinians. But it’s equally clear that MBS’s government has zero interest in efforts to create another independent Palestinian Arab state besides the Hamas-run terrorist enclave in the Gaza Strip. In his interview with Baier, MBS spoke of wanting to “ease the lives of Palestinians” but conspicuously left out any mention of two states or Israeli territorial concessions. The only ones talking about those dubious objectives are Biden’s team.

This leaves the president caught in an interesting bind. He’d like a diplomatic win to boost his re-election chances, but the Biden team is too interested in undermining Netanyahu and in trying to somehow salvage their desire for a rapprochement with Iran to return to a policy that weds the United States to its traditional Israeli and Saudi allies.

That leaves Biden’s Middle East policy a hopeless muddle. Nevertheless, as both Netanyahu and MBS have made clear, they don’t need Washington to hold their hands in order for the two countries to grow closer. These two once-unlikely friends were brought together by Obama’s pivot to Iran and the nuclear dilemma, as well as their national interests. That will continue to bind them in an informal alliance that can thrive even without a signed treaty.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Euker at his best!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++