Israel, and its neighbors

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/403653?fbclid=IwY2xjawIXs45leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHa7XNW0_Khg3I0IR-ZPPrKM8txibNWMQqiVg3WwAJOOuo33i7lna8L20nw_aem_i4pvu_sMMvmxOj6fqqc3Fg

[Crafty_Dog]

HT BBG

Perhaps it’s too early to connect these dots, but:

@EYakoby

BREAKING: AXIOS reports that Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has issued a decree revoking the payment system to families of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prison or to families of Palestinian terrorists (AKA "Pay for Slay").

(Odd how this happens right after USAID funds drastically cut and Trump wants to clear out Gaza and the West Bank.)

[DougMacG]

X.com  Hillel Fuld @HilzFuld:

If the Gazans oppose Trump’s plan because it’s their land, then they are not refugees. You can’t be a refugee in your own home.

If it’s not their land and it’s an open air prison like they say, they should be happy to leave.

Whether it’s theirs or not, if I give you something and you abuse that thing and use it to cause me harm, well don’t be surprised if I take that thing back.

We gave them Gaza in 2005. All of it. Every last inch.

They could have had their Palestinian state. They chose to turn it into hell and put whatever innocent people are left there (like the ones in the photo below. “Innocent” Gazans) in harm’s way. They abused what we gave them and now they will pay the price.

[ccp]

https://www.newsmax.com/world/globaltalk/hostages-war-israel/2025/02/13/id/1198933/

 

at this rate it could take yrs to get the hostages out of there.

[Body-by-Guinness]

Preach it! Some real talk here:

The End of ‘Palestine’

Donald Trump reminds the world that ideas have sell-by dates

BY
LEE SMITH

FEBRUARY 05, 2025

Yesterday, President Donald Trump single-handedly collapsed the most destructive idea of the last hundred years—Palestine. During meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, Trump said he was going to move 1.7 million Palestinians out of Gaza. And just like that, he broke the long spell that had captured generations of world leaders, peace activists, and Middle East terror masters alike, who had paradoxically come to regard the repeated failure and haunting secondary consequences of the idea of joint Arab Muslim and Jewish statehood in the same small piece of land as proof of its necessity.

Palestine was a misshapen idea from the beginning, engendered by an act of pure negation. The Arabs could have gone along with the U.N.’s partition plan like the Jews did, and chosen to build whatever version of Switzerland or Belgium on the eastern Med in 1948. Instead, they resoundingly chose war. That’s the storied “Nakba” at the core of the Palestinian legend—the catastrophe that drove the Arabs from their land and hung a key around the neck of a nation waiting to go home. The Arabs chose the catastrophe; they chose war, based on the premise that they would inevitably win and exterminate the Jews.

Yet despite repeated military failures, and the increasing distance between the first-world powerhouse that the Israelis built and their increasingly war-torn, third-world neighborhood, the global conscience was always predisposed to rebuilding what the Palestinians destroyed. Accordingly, the Palestinian Arabs became a tribe of feral children whose identity was carved out of the relentless vow to eliminate Israel and slaughter the Jews en masse—despite repeated failures, each one more crushing than the last.

Trump said, enough, we’re not rebuilding Gaza. Time for a new idea—the Gazans have to to go, they can try to start again somewhere else, in a land where every building still standing isn’t already wired to explode.

Gazans waged an exterminationist campaign against Israel, and they lost. At any other time in history, save the last 75 years, they would be lucky to lose only territory and not have their legend and language permanently deleted from the book of the living.

What if they won’t go, or if the Egyptians and Jordanians won’t take them? They’ll take them, said Trump. Ah, he’s talking big, but it’s not real, say the experts—after all, he’s a real estate guy, and he’s pretending it’s just another property deal to pressure Hamas—Mar-a-Gaza. You can’t move a million people just like that, says an American electorate that elected Trump because he promised to deport tens of millions of illegal aliens who crossed the U.S. border in the last four years. He’s nuts says the D.C. foreign policy crowd: He’ll destabilize Egypt and Jordan, and undermine America’s best Arab friends and allies in the region.

Yet Trump is right to see both Egypt and Jordan as paltry constructions with little-to-no ability to project force on America’s behalf, and whose survival depends month to month on American aid. Cairo is useful to the United States only insofar as it, one, makes sure the Suez Canal is open and, two, observes the peace treaty with Israel—i.e., continues its campaign of repression against a populace of 112 million people who can barely afford to buy bread, and many of whose dreams are filled with the same insanity that drives Hamas. The only antidote to this misery that Egypt’s rulers have found is blaming the Zionists next door for the ills of their own society, while torturing religious extremists in their prisons. Maybe when Elon Musk is finished fixing Washington he can conduct an audit of where American money goes in Egypt. Somehow, I doubt he’d get in the door.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s problem is that he allowed Hamas to smuggle arms through the Philadelphi crossing into Gaza, thereby violating Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel—which is what we nominally pay him for. From the perspective of Trump, an American president keen to enforce treaty obligations, Sisi has a new chance to prove himself as a friend of America and not a grafting liar by adding a million Gazans—who in the past have been ruled by Egypt and have family names like al-Masri (“the Egyptian”)—to Egypt’s existing population of 112 million, amounting percentagewise to roughly the same number of legal immigrants that the United States accepts per year. Sisi can deal with the Hamas members among the Gazan immigrants the same way he deals with Muslim Brotherhood militants in his own society—or he can give them all medals for their service. It’s up to him.

And if not? Well, he might remember that Hosni Mubarak’s regime collapsed not because of Muslim Brotherhood-led street protests during the 2011 Arab Spring but because Barack Obama withdrew his support from the longtime U.S. ally.

With money from the Gulf states, or even Israel, Sisi can afford to absorb Palestinians and might even volunteer to take all of Gaza—the average salary in Egypt at present being the equivalent of $5,000 per year. He can then leave Jordan’s King Abdullah responsible for the rest of the Palestinians in the likely event that Trump, as he did in his first term, encourages Netanyahu to annex the Jordan Valley, or goes a step further and acknowledges Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.

Since the CIA has long treated the Hashemite Kingdom as a key asset, we can expect within the next week The Washington Post’s David Ignatius to publish an article based on intelligence sources—i.e., U.S. and Jordanian spies—concocting a story about Trump’s rationale for “destabilizing Jordan.” The reality is that the Jordanians, with U.S. help, put down a Palestinian rebellion in 1970. The country of a little more than 11 million is already estimated to be two-thirds Palestinian, the rest Jordanian tribesmen, and it’s hard to see how adding another 500,000 Palestinians will make it harder for Jordan’s notoriously effective security services to contain their neighbors, especially if the offer includes a few dozen more Black Hawk helicopters. After all, no one will expect the Jordanians to allow Hamas to build a giant tunnel-city stuffed with rocket factories beneath their encampments while giving them billions in foreign aid to pay for it all.

Again, the key players here aren’t Jordan and Egypt but the oil rich Gulf Cooperation Council states, especially Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and of course Qatar. Trump might make Saudi largesse in resettling the Gazans a precondition for the much-hyped prospect of normalizing relations between Riyadh and Jerusalem. Given the fact that Israel regularly attracts nine- and 10-figure investments from Silicon Valley’s biggest funds, the reality is that the Saudis have little to offer Israel except for money applied to exactly this type of local purpose. Moving millions of Gazans who have repeatedly attacked their Israeli neighbors out of what is now a shattered war zone is a sensible investment in the kind of stability that helps rich people get richer.

The Arabs and Democrats are only the most vocal of the many opposed to Trump’s initiative. Left-wing governments from Europe to Australia are lining up to pledge their allegiance to the fantasy of a Palestinian state, in the hopes of propitiating Muslim and Arab constituencies at home—whose understanding of “peace” means eliminating Israel. But even leaving the patent bad faith of those professing “peace” aside, moving Gazans out of Gaza is the only sane option 14 months after they initiated a campaign of rape, murder, and hostage-taking that brought their own house down on their heads.

After all, what’s more fanciful, moving 1.7 million people out of Gaza, a large portion of whom would simply be required to board air-conditioned buses or walk across the nearby Egypt border, or compelling them to live in a giant rubble field booby-trapped by an Iran-backed terrorist group? Estimates vary as to how long it would take to clear Gaza of explosives—half a decade or more? Fifteen years? Twenty? Are the Gazans supposed to live quietly in tents for the next decade or two while their homes are rebuilt next door? Where? In “temporary cities” made of Dwell Magazine-like rehabbed shipping containers built by graduates of Birmingham University? In Hamas’ tunnels?

Regardless, should the Palestinians remain in Gaza, they would invariably return to war no matter how much munificence the Gulf Arab states, the European Union, and perhaps even the U.S. might shower on the toxic sand castle built over the past two decades with billions of Western aid money. Proof the Palestinians can’t and won’t keep the peace is that even after they won a reprieve when Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff forced the Biden administration’s cease-fire on Jerusalem, Hamas and its NGO-supported human shields celebrated in the streets as if the Hamas space program had successfully landed Palestinians on Mars. Even as Israel released jailed murderers, the Gazans paraded Israeli hostages through the ruins of Gaza like trophies of war.

The Saudis, Qataris, Emiratis and others who now rend their clothes while lamenting the likely fate of their ant-farm death cult might well have counseled: Quiet brothers, you have been spared. Don’t bring attention to yourselves. For the winds of Gaza shift on a whim and who knows if you are not next to be swept away by fate—or the American president.

Here is the stark reality: Gazans, not just the enlisted members of the Hamas brigades, waged an exterminationist campaign against Israel, and they lost. At virtually any other time in history, save the last 75 years, they would be lucky to lose only territory and not have their legend and language permanently deleted from the book of the living.

Trump’s generous offer to the Gazans therefore signals a return to history, but with a twist. Trump has not only spared them, but vowed to provide them with new lives, better lives, work, new homes, a chance to raise their families in peace, an existence not premised on total and permanent war with a more powerful adversary destined to rout them entirely, and would have already done so if not for the objections of other powerful global players.

Trump, in his innovative mercy, has offered to save the Palestinian people from their own history, and give them a new idea to live by. They should thank their maker for the chance to start anew—and give thanks as well to the American president, who realistically promises them a better future, backed by U.S. global power. Given the repeated failure of the multi-decade-long dream of eliminating and replacing the Jews of Israel, it seems unlikely that the Palestinians will receive a better offer.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/end-of-palestine

[ccp]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections

70 hostages all  men remain

Half are suspected to be  dead.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/16/egypt-gaza-reconstruction-plan-hamas

[Body-by-Guinness]

Those excusing and embracing terror and other counterproductive acts seek to control the language, too:

https://legalinsurrection.com/2025/02/the-myth-of-palestine-language-manipulation-and-historical-fabrication/

[Body-by-Guinness]

In the immortal words of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski aka Joseph Conrad: “the horror, the horror, exterminate the brutes.”

https://legalinsurrection.com/2025/02/idf-kfir-and-ariel-bibas-brutally-murdered-third-body-is-not-shiri/

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-828561
https://m.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-828561

[ccp]

did  we not get previous reports of Israeli's alerting higher ups of unusual suspicous activity warning of an iminent problem but was blown off as more or less fake news?

[Crafty_Dog]

I gather Israeli politics is at least as divided as ours, and I have no idea where the JP fits on the spectrum, but I gather it is a major paper.   As such I'm curious to see where it goes with this.

[ccp]

https://www.jpost.com/international/article-843275?dicbo=v2-EILBOBx

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14427093/Flyby-IDF-Hezbollah-leader-Nasrallah-funeral.html

[Body-by-Guinness]

Looks like Syrian Druse are carving out an area adjacent to Israel they will then seek to append to it, per a couple of posts I’ve encountered:

@hahussain
Druze took over Suweida airport and replaced Syrian revolution flag with their own. If true, the Druze of #Syria are engaged in a full secession effort, will likely join #Israel. This is self-determination as never seen before. The map of the Middle East is being redrawn by its own natives.

@HAHazony
·
3h
Israeli PM Netanyahu laid out his vision for southern Syria:
1) IDF will remain indefinitely across on the Hermon Mt.
2) Syrian forces won't be allowed south of Damascus.
3) IDF will ensure safety for the Druze in Syria.
Establishing a de facto autonomous Druze zone.

[Crafty_Dog]

This has the potential to be quite significant on more than one level.

[DougMacG]

From Harris poll :
Rounds to 80/20 support in US:
 - Support Israel over Hamas.
 - Iran's nuclear facilities should be destroyed.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/02/americans-sometimes-misguided-but-not-completely-crazy.php

[Body-by-Guinness]

I read about the rumored muftis condemning Palastinian desecratons of returned hostage bodies and thought it might bode a wider embrace of sober thinking by the Arab world, though accoring ot this piece those gestures were a canard, which would certainly be par for the course:

Searching For Condemnations In The Muslim World

Daniel Greenfield

After Hamas paraded the coffins of 9-month-old Kfir and 4-year-old Ariel to the cheers and jeers of its supporters, before turning over the coffins, locked with keys that did not fit to Israel, people looked for something to restore their faith in the goodness of mankind in the Muslim world.

Millions thought they found it in fake quotes from the grand muftis of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

“What we say today in Gaza is a disgrace to Islam, an act of blasphemy against Allah,” Saudi Grand Mufti Abdulaziz bin Abdullah Al-Sheikh (pictured above) reportedly claimed in one viral social media post.

“Hamas has brought shame to Islam on a level never seen before,” Grand Mufti of Dubai Ahmed al-Haddad allegedly proclaimed.

Photos of the two Islamic religious leaders illustrated with these quotes racked up millions of views on social media. Some even found their way into news stories sourced from social media.

The problem was that the quotes were fake and never existed outside social media. The Saudi quote was soon disavowed while an Emirati journalist stated that the local media had “never heard of them” and that they were “mere rumors”.

Why did so many people spread and probably invent these fake social media posts? Because they wanted to believe that Muslim religious leaders would condemn Hamas mocking the bodies of the Jewish children it murdered and there was still some hope for decency left in the world.

But those condemnations don’t exist.

The only official statements out of Saudi Arabia and the UAE were vocal condemnations of Israel and proposals for an ‘alternative plan’ that would leave the PLO and Hamas in power under a fake ‘front government’ of technocrats.

Ahmed Al Yamahi, the UAE appointed ‘president’ of the Arab Parliament, accused Israel of a “genocidal war in Gaza” “unequivocally placed the blame for this escalation on the Israeli occupation authorities”, urged the UN to “hold the Israeli government and its settlers accountable for their crimes and violations against the Palestinian people” and and called for Arab unity to support the ‘Palestinian’ cause.

And unlike the fake grand mufti quotes, these were published directly on government sites.

The Saudi and UAE governments issued statements condemning terrorist attacks in their own countries and even some abroad, and many condemnations of Israel, none of Hamas for its treatment of the Bibas children.

Coverage in state owned media outlets sometimes read like outright Hamas propaganda.

A story in Al-Bayan, a Dubai state owned media outlet, described Hamas as having “handed over the bodies of four Israeli prisoners” while falsely claiming that they were “killed in deliberate Israeli airstrikes designed to kill them”.

Al-Bayan used the term ‘Asra’ to refer to the murdered children which in Arabic tends to refer to ‘prisoners of war’ as in Koran 8:67: “It is not for a Prophet that he should have prisoners of war (and free them with ransom) until he had made a great slaughter (among his enemies) in the land.”

While not every media story from the Saudis and Emiratis was this bad, the more sympathetic accounts tended to appear in English while the Arabic language coverage was muted or hostile.

I found no official condemnations from either Saudi Arabia or the UAE: all I could find was an interfaith panel discussion with Jewish and Muslim participants at the Dialogue of Civilizations in Abu Dhabi. The Muslim participants were veterans of dialogue with Jews and Israelis, and had expressed opposition to Hamas and Islamic terrorism against Israel.

At the panel, one Emirati participant called for a moment of silence for the Bibas children.

But such views were coming from a small group of young activists with a large presence on social media rather than from actual government officials and religious leaders. The Abraham Accords has made it possible for such views to be aired, even with government sponsorship, at interfaith events, but they are not by any means the actual position of their governments.

The single condemnation at an interfaith panel, like the fake quotes of the grand muftis, shows that there is no larger rejection of the Hamas coffin spectacle in the Muslim world. The distaste for Hamas in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as well as in other parts of the Arab world, have nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with hostility toward the Muslim Brotherhood.

The UAE offered an initial condemnation of the Oct 7 attacks followed by a long string of condemnations of Israel throughout the war including support for war crimes charges.

And the UAE was the least bad of them all.

The unfortunate truth is that there is very little opposition to Muslim terrorism unless it’s directed at fellow Muslims. ISIS has the highest margin of Muslim opposition not because it burned people alive and raped little girls, but because it declared a caliphate and treated all Muslims who refused to acknowledge its supremacy as heretics and infidels. Al Qaeda enjoyed wide support in the Muslim world when it was flying planes into skyscrapers, but once it bombed a hotel wedding in Jordan and began a civil war in Iraq, its popularity diminished among Muslims.

The UAE turned on the Muslim Brotherhood after it plotted to seize power. The Saudis joined the crackdown on the Brotherhood a year later. But a few years before all this, there had been an uproar over the Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in Dubai.

The Saudis and the UAE distrust Hamas because of its sponsorship by their enemies, Qatar and Iran, and its origins as a Muslim Brotherhood organization, but their objections have nothing to do with its killing of Israelis of whatever age or opposition to terrorism as a general principle.

After the atrocities of Oct 7, Saudi approval ratings for Hamas rose from 10% to 40%. 95% of Saudis polled did not believe that Hamas had killed civilians. The vast majority of Saudis opposed improving relations with Israel and believed that it would eventually be destroyed.

Expecting the Grand Mufti to condemn Hamas is a fantasy. As is Saudi normalization.

The Abraham Accords is at best a regional alliance against common enemies in Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, and not based on a deeper friendship or a recognition of mutual humanity. Those desperate to believe otherwise have been forced to invent fake condemnations to substitute for the real ones that should have been issued, but weren’t and never will be.

Americans and Israelis have spent too long living in a fantasy world when it comes to peace in the Middle East. Fake quotes are no substitute for dealing with the reality of Islamic terrorism.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

https://www.danielgreenfield.org/2025/02/searching-for-condemnations-in-muslim.html#more

[ccp]

very sobering.  like a cold splash of water on the face of drunk person.

[Crafty_Dog]

What Country Would Accept Relocated Gazans?
by A.J. Caschetta
Special to IPT News
February 25, 2025

https://www.investigativeproject.org/9387/what-country-would-accept-relocated-gazans

[Crafty_Dog]

second

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5HlrkLQWnc

[DougMacG]

Mars?

[Crafty_Dog]

https://x.com/RevolverNewsUSA/status/1894818548473553362

[ccp]

https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-844363

Very strategic location:

https://www.britannica.com/place/Azerbaijan

[Crafty_Dog]

This could be quite significant.   As I have previously mentioned, Israel had a landing rights deal (think refueling in the context of an air hit on Iran) with Azerbajian until Obama leaked its existence.

[Crafty_Dog]

Netanyahu's opposition. According to a recent poll, 60 percent of Israelis want Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resign. Some 31 percent of respondents would oppose his resignation. The poll also found that if parliamentary elections were held today, the opposition would win 67 seats, enough to form a government, while the parties of the governing coalition would win 54. This comes after Israel’s internal security agency released this week the findings of its investigation into the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.

============

Yesterday President Trump issued very strong statement of backing Israel to go hardass on the Hamassholes if hostages are not released. But here we see a lack of Israeli support for Bibi.

============
more GPF

Reforms. The incoming chief of staff for the Israel Defense Forces, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, said in a meeting with the military’s General Staff Forum that 2025 would be a “year of war” focused on Gaza and Iran. He ordered a shakeup of certain IDF units and appointed the former commander of the IDF Southern Command, Maj. Gen. Sami Turgeman, to lead a commission that will implement changes based on the Oct. 7 probe.

Looking to Israel. The commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, Mazloum Abdi, indicated he would be willing to accept Israel’s support if it could prevent attacks on the Kurdish people. In an interview with a BBC journalist, Abdi noted Israel’s influence with the United States and throughout the West and the Middle East.

[Crafty_Dog]

Having offered the Gaza Riviera, Trump now offers "Or else"

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14466427/Trump-warning-Hamas-hostages.html

[ccp]

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2025/03/19/watch-police-respond-after-anti-israel-and-pro-israel-protesters-clash-at-gal-gadot-hollywood-walk-of-fame-ceremony/

CDs pick for the next James Bond  VD &

Gal could be his fellow agent.

They could be fighting Hamashole terrorsits and break up Cair and Soros funding.

[Body-by-Guinness]

Though the UK is hardly a neighbor, this depressing chronicle of UK/western adoption of Hamas lies and blood libels against Israel reveals major asshattery in the UK:

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/a-few-days-in-london?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/25/hundreds-join-protest-against-hamas-in-northern-gaza

[Crafty_Dog]

Residents of the strip are frustrated with Hamas.
By: Geopolitical Futures

Gaza protests. Gaza residents have launched rare protests against Hamas, expressing growing frustration as the war with Israel continues. Demonstrators accused Hamas of dragging civilians into the conflict and condemned Al Jazeera for what they see as pro-Hamas bias. As unrest spread, Israel sent mass text messages to Gaza residents blaming Hamas for Gaza’s suffering and urging them to rise against the group. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz reinforced this, calling for mass resistance and warning of imminent military operations. He urged Gazans to demand Hamas’ removal and the release of Israeli hostages. Hamas responded with a statement claiming to "support" the protests, which Israeli sources dismissed as an attempt to shift blame to Israel and tie the unrest to demands for humanitarian aid rather than internal opposition. Meanwhile, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps staged a naval parade in the Persian Gulf ahead of International Quds Day, an annual pro-Palestinian event on April 5.

[Crafty_Dog]

(12) ISRAELI MINISTERS WARN OF CIVIL WAR: Israeli opposition leader MK Yair Lapid warned last week that the Netanyahu government is “doing everything it can to ignite a civil war.” On Wednesday during a radio interview, a ruling party minister called for a civil war to drive out the opposition parties because they “don’t accept the legitimacy of the Likud government.”

[Crafty_Dog]

(9) IDF STRIKES SYRIA, ISRAELI MEDIA TALKS WAR WITH TURKEY: The Israeli Defense Force conducted airstrikes on Syria last night to harm “military capabilities that remained at the Syrian bases of Hama and T4, along with additional remaining military infrastructure sites in the area of Damascus.”
Israel’s Foreign Minister said that Turkey is playing a “negative role” in Syria and trying to turn Syria into a protectorate.
Israeli media is questioning if Israel is entering a proxy war with Turkey stating “Israel may find that it has traded one enemy in Syria for another.”
Israeli media is also running opinion pieces calling Turkey the “nerve center of Islamist resurgence” and stating that the Israeli-Kurdish alliance would enhance regional stability if U.S. support for Israel falters.

[Crafty_Dog]

Open to Gazans. Indonesia is ready to temporarily host Palestinians fleeing the Gaza war, President Prabowo Subianto announced. He has directed the foreign minister to coordinate with Palestinian authorities and other stakeholders on evacuation logistics. Indonesia, a Muslim-majority nation, is prepared to receive an initial group of 1,000 people, Subianto added.
Deepening partnership. Australia has donated 20 advanced drones worth $590 million to the Philippines, along with specialized training for their operators. The drones will boost the Philippines’ ability to patrol the West Philippine Sea, detect illegal fishing, intercept unauthorized vessels and respond to other maritime threats.

[ccp]

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/syrian-president-is-apparently-interested-in-joining-the-abraham-accords/

Will wait and see on this one.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://x.com/IhabHassane/status/1916532040360395254

[Crafty_Dog]

This deserves a close read

https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/the-establishment-slowly-wearies?publication_id=1351274&post_id=161349452&isFreemail=false&r=379fkp&triedRedirect=true

[Crafty_Dog]

second

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/05/12/trump-netanyahu-middle-east-trip/

Trump repeatedly bypasses Netanyahu, stoking dismay among Israelis
Benjamin Netanyahu has long trumpeted his ties to Trump. But the president is sidelining him on urgent issues like the Iran nuclear talks and the conflict with Houthi rebels.
May 12, 2025 at 2:00 a.m. EDTToday at 2:00 a.m. EDT

By Gerry Shih
JERUSALEM — During his first major overseas trip this week, President Donald Trump is set to visit three countries in the Middle East — Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — without stopping in Jerusalem.

It’s not the first time he has bypassed Israel — or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

From embarking on nuclear talks with Iran to attempting hostage talks with Hamas without Israel’s knowledge, Trump has increasingly sidelined Netanyahu, stoking anxieties in a country long accustomed to being consulted by successive U.S. administrations.

Last week, Israelis believed they saw more cracks emerge between the “America First” president and Israel, after Trump said he had struck a truce with Yemen’s Houthi rebels that curbed the group’s attacks on U.S. ships — but did not cover Israel. Days later, reports emerged that Trump was considering offering Saudi Arabia access to civil nuclear technology without demanding that the kingdom normalize relations with Israel, a precondition that had been set by former president Joe Biden.

On Sunday, senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya said the group would release Israeli American hostage Edan Alexander following direct talks with U.S. officials.

Now, many Israelis are wondering whether Israel is the next U.S. ally to be left behind by a president they considered, just months ago, to be the most pro-Israel in history.

“It’s disconcerting,” said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington.

“It’s total panic,” said Shalom Lipner, a former Netanyahu aide and a fellow at the Atlantic Council, describing the mood in Jerusalem.

Israeli concerns about Trump’s negotiations with Iran and other threats to Israel “are not being taken into account, or if they are, they’re dismissed,” said Dennis Ross, a former senior State Department official who served as a Middle East envoy under both Democratic and Republican presidents.

Voices in the Trump administration who advocate fewer U.S. military entanglements in the Middle East are in the ascendancy, Ross noted, while Trump is likely to put top priority on bringing billions of dollars’ of investments from wealthy Persian Gulf monarchies to the United States during his trip.

“What you’re seeing is that President Trump has an idea of what is in our interest, and that comes first,” Ross said. “He defines the nature of our interests abroad not through a geopolitical or security context, but an economic, financial and trade frame. I think President Trump might have the view that ‘We give them $4 billion a year in military assistance. I do plenty to support the Israelis.’”

In an interview that aired Thursday, the new U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, pushed back on the assertion that the administration was overlooking Israeli concerns and told an Israeli television channel that “the United States isn’t required to get permission from Israel” to reach a ceasefire with the Houthis. A day later, Huckabee took to his X account to denounce what he described as “reckless & irresponsible” media reports that suggested Trump and Netanyahu were “not getting along.”

In Israel today, the soaring anxieties mark a sharp reversal from November, when many celebrated Trump’s election. Netanyahu hailed it as “history’s greatest comeback.” Ministers in his far-right cabinet saw a green light for expansionism and immediately called for the annexation of the occupied West Bank, along with unfettered warfare and new Jewish settlements in Gaza.

But the mood began to shift even before Trump’s inauguration. Privately, some Netanyahu allies groused about Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, pressuring Netanyahu into a ceasefire agreement with Hamas and claimed that Witkoff was influenced by personal business ties with Qatar. Others began to fear that Trump’s preference for dealmaking would preclude a military strike on Iran or result in a nuclear accord that would allow Iran to keep some uranium enrichment capabilities.

In the Oval Office in April, Trump announced in front of Netanyahu and the assembled press that the U.S. would hold direct talks with Iran over its nuclear program. The Israeli prime minister, who has pushed U.S. leaders for more than a decade to use military force to dismantle Iran’s nuclear facilities, glanced away, appearing visibly surprised.

One Trump adviser, who described Trump’s treatment of Netanyahu as “one notch above” his fractious White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky three months ago, said influential MAGA voices have worked throughout the spring to resist efforts by pro-Israel lobbying groups and neoconservative Republicans to install Iran hawks and others seen as overly sympathetic to Netanyahu in key national security posts.

Former national security adviser Michael Waltz was removed from his position after he appeared to have engaged in intense coordination with Netanyahu about military options against Iran, which angered Trump, The Washington Post reported this month.


Michael Waltz, formerly White House national security adviser, reportedly engaged in discussions with Israel's prime minister about military options against Iran before being relieved of his duties. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
“In MAGA, we are not Bibi fans,” said the Trump adviser, using Netanyahu’s nickname. “Trump is adamant: He wants people to put the guns down.” The adviser, like several others cited in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly about relations between the two leaders.

The rise of an Israel-skeptic wing in Washington, particularly within a Republican Party that is traditionally seen as close to Israel, poses a new challenge, Israeli officials and analysts say.

For decades, when American presidents, from Republican George H.W. Bush to Democrat Barack Obama, have clashed with Israel on matters ranging from West Bank settlement policy to strategy toward Iran, Israel has depended on its supporters in Congress to push back. And yet even after Netanyahu and some of Israel’s supporters threw their weight behind Trump, a number of Republican lawmakers allied with Trump, such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), are increasingly turning away from Israel, leaving it without recourse in Congress.

“There is more and more criticism, with people saying: We put all our eggs in one basket and now we are empty-handed,” said Amit Segal, a prominent Israeli political analyst. “What will Israel do now? Call [Rep.] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? It’s a problem.”

For their part, Netanyahu allies have downplayed any rift between the U.S. and Israeli leaders. One member of Netanyahu’s Likud party said the anxieties in Israel were simply due to mismatched expectations.

“Many people were so happy it wasn’t Kamala Harris that they thought Trump would be an American president from the Likud party who would do whatever Israel wanted,” said that ally. “But those expectations were never realistic, and I think the prime minister has always understood that.”

Another Israeli official praised Trump for providing heavy munitions to the Israeli military and said that while Biden administration officials had frequently pressured Israel to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza, Trump made no such requests during the first few months of his term.

Still, even the perception of Netanyahu losing favor with Trump could dent a veteran Israeli premier who has staked his public image on being able to navigate — and influence — American politics better than any of his domestic rivals.


A photo from Sept. 8, 2019, shows a Likud party campaign billboard of President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv. (Oded Balilty/AP)
During hard-fought parliamentary elections in 2019, Netanyahu unfurled a massive billboard along Tel Aviv’s main highway showing him shaking hands with Trump above the tagline: “Netanyahu, in a different league.” A campaign video released by Likud showed Netanyahu pledging to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to historically contested Jerusalem — and then jump-cut to Trump announcing precisely that.

But a year later, Netanyahu angered Trump by announcing that he would annex parts of the occupied West Bank, contributing to the collapse of a Middle East peace plan that Trump had touted as the “deal of the century.” Netanyahu infuriated Trump further by congratulating Biden on his election victory while Trump was disputing the results, the president recounted in interviews with Axios in 2021.


In recent days, Netanyahu’s opponents seized on the moment to question his handling of U.S. relations. Yair Lapid, the centrist opposition leader, called the direct negotiations between the United States and Hamas over hostages a “disgraceful diplomatic failure” by Netanyahu and said “the responsibility for their return lies with the government.”

Yair Golan, the leader of a left-leaning party, said, “The Americans are moving forward on a deal with the Saudis, moving forward on a deal with Iran, moving forward on a new multibillion-dollar regional plan, but ignoring Netanyahu and Israel.”

Oren, the former Israeli ambassador, said many in Israel forget that Trump “is not a fan of settlements; he was against annexation of the West Bank and espoused a two-state plan” during his first term.

Some very influential pro-Israel voices are no longer in the White House, Oren added. “Let’s be realistic.”

Hazem Balousha in Toronto contributed to this report