The speech given Monday by President Reuven Rivlin in Poland demands that we stop and ask for explanations. But it isn’t clear whom, if anyone, there is to ask. Rivlin, as is his wont, chose not to twist history and wasn’t deterred from making some harsh statements that seemed rather impolite to make against the country providing the platform.
“We also remember, in great horror, that it [Nazi Germany] received significant aid in its murderous actions throughout all of Europe, and this too requires accepting responsibility,” he said. And then after mentioning “the courage of the righteous among the nations, among them thousands of Poles who risked their lives to save Jews … noble people who risked their lives and the lives of their families,” he made sure to add that they “were few, too few.” And after saying that “the Polish people fought with courage against Nazi Germany,” he added, “Quite a few of the Polish people stood aside and even aided in the murder of Jews.”
It’s worth examining every word of that last sentence. When Rivlin states that “Quite a few” Poles were indifferent at best, and active participants in Nazi crimes at worst, he is contradicting what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in the joint statement signed with his Polish counterpart, Mateusz Morawiecki, in 2018. That controversial document describes Poles who collaborated with the Nazis as “some people” who “revealed their darkest side at that time,” and did so “regardless of their origin, religion or worldview.” There’s a far cry between that description and “quite a few of the Polish people.”
Rivlin is closer to the version of Yad Vashem’s historians, who also denounced the joint statement and issued a statement of their own in 2018, which said, “Attacks against and even the murder of Jews were widespread phenomena” in occupied Poland, and that “The latest research has shown that at least tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Polish Jews perished during the war due to actions of their Polish neighbors. Accordingly, Poles’ involvement in persecuting Jews was in no way marginal.”
Later they noted, “Broad swaths of Polish society were complicit in the murder of the Jews throughout the war and even wider segments improved their situation and even enriched themselves from the ‘disappearance’ of the Jews.”
Given the gap between the Israeli president’s version, which is backed by three senior Yad Vashem historians, and the Israeli prime minister’s version, the spirit of which got support at the time from Yad Vashem’s chief historian, Prof. Dina Porat, it isn’t clear whom the typical Pole in Warsaw, Krakow, Gdansk or Poznan is supposed to believe. Nor is it clear how to accept Rivlin’s more conciliatory comments about “reaching out to the Polish people, to return to a path that we’ll march on together, a path on which we will shape the future of the next generations out of respect for history.”
Given Rivlin’s desire to stick to the historical truth and not to beautify it, one wonders why he agreed to distort history with his sponsorship of last week’s event at Yad Vashem, which was decidedly “pro-Russian” in that it only praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Soviet Union, without mentioning the other side of the coin, as Rivlin knew how to do when it comes to his Polish counterparts. The Russians, who are despised by the Poles for massacring them and occupying their country, were presented at Yad Vashem as heroes and the liberators of Europe.
Is it because it’s easier to openly criticize Poland and risk a dispute with it than to anger the czar from Moscow?
Header: Israeli President Reuven Rivlin speaks in Poland with Polish President Andrzej Duda, January 27, 2020. Amos Ben Gershom / GPO
A plane which U.S. officials described as a small U.S. military aircraft crashed in a Taliban-controlled area of central Afghanistan on Monday, and the insurgent group claimed to have brought it down.
The U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said there were no indications so far that the plane had been brought down by enemy activity. One of the officials said there were believed to be fewer than 10 people on board.
A USAF E-11A ’11-9358′ which is an Airborne battlefield communications aircraft has crashed in Ghazni, Afghanistan #Afghanistanpic.twitter.com/RCdtehTtCb
Pictures and a video on social media purportedly from the crash site showed what could be the remains of a Bombardier E-11A aircraft.
The U.S. military said it is investigating the reports. U.S. Army Maj. Beth Riordan, a spokeswoman for U.S. Central Command, said that it remained unclear whose aircraft was involved in the crash.
Riordan declined to immediately comment further.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1221775610466439169
However, pictures on social media purportedly from the crash site showed what could be the remains of a Bombardier E-11A aircraft, which the U.S. military uses for electronic surveillance over Afghanistan.
U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said there were no indications so far that the plane had been brought down by enemy activity. One of the officials said there were believed to be fewer than 10 people on board.
“The plane which was on an intelligence mission, was brought down in Sado Khel area of Deh Yak district of Ghazni province,” said Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban in a statement.
Mujahid did not say how fighters had brought the plane down. He said the crew on board included high ranking U.S. officers. A senior defense official denied that senior American officers were involved.
The Taliban control large parts of Ghazni province. The militant group, which has been waging a war against U.S.- led forces since 2001, often exaggerates enemy casualty figures.
Local Afghan officials had said earlier on Monday that a passenger place from Afghanistan’s Ariana Airlines had crashed in the Taliban-held area of the eastern Ghazni province. However, Ariana Airlines told The Associated Press that none of its planes had crashed in Afghanistan.
The conflicting accounts could not immediately be reconciled. The number of people on board and their fate was not immediately known, nor was the cause of the crash.
Arif Noori, spokesman for the provincial governor, said the plane went down around 1:10 p.m. local time (8:40 a.m. GMT) in Deh Yak district, some 130 kilometers (80 miles) southwest of the capital Kabul. He said the crash site is in territory controlled by the Taliban.
Two provincial council members also confirmed the crash.
But the acting director for Ariana Airlines, Mirwais Mirzakwal, dismissed reports that one the company’s aircraft had crashed. The state-owned airline also released a statement on its website saying all its aircraft were operational and safe.
The mountainous Ghazni province sits in the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains and is bitterly cold in winter. The Taliban currently control or hold sway over around half the country.
The last major commercial air crash in Afghanistan occurred in 2005, when a Kam Air flight from the western city of Herat to Kabul crashed into the mountains as it tried to land in snowy weather.
The war, however, has seen a number of deadly crashes of military aircraft. One of the most spectacular occurred in 2013 when an American Boeing 747 cargo jet crashed shortly after takeoff from Bagram air base north of Kabul en route to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. All seven crew member were killed. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board investigation found that large military vehicles were inadequately secured and had shifted during flight, causing damage to the control systems that “rendered the airplane uncontrollable.”
Afghanistan’s aviation industry suffered desperately during the rule of the Taliban when Ariana, its only airline at the time, was subject to punishing sanctions and allowed to fly only to Saudi Arabia for Hajj pilgrimage.
Since the overthrow of the Taliban’s religious regime, smaller private airlines have emerged, but the industry is still a nascent one.
Header: A U.S. Air Force E-11 Battlefield Airborne Communications Node at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan
Notes:
The Air Force has a total of four E-11As, including the one that has now crashed. These planes are based on the Bombardier BD-700 Global Express business jet, which are forward-deployed in Afghanistan assigned to the 430th Expeditionary Electronic Combat Squadron at Kandahar Airfield.
These aircraft carry the Battlefield Airborne Control Node (BACN) payload, which allows them to act as highly specialized aerial communications nodes that can rapidly shift information to and from a wide variety of airborne platforms and forces on the ground. There are also three EQ-4B Global Hawk drones that carry the BACN package.
The small number of BACN platforms makes them the very definition of a high-value, but low-density asset.
1. Benny on the jets: Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have arrived in Washington for their respective meetings with US President Donald Trump ahead of Washington’s expected release of its long-awaited peace plan.
While Trump had said last week that he planned on releasing his big plan “sometime prior” to his sit-downs with Netanyahu and Gantz, the White House has remained mum with just hours to go until those respective meetings, allowing Israeli media to continue to speculate regarding the proposal’s details.
Several Hebrew media outlets run unsourced reports ostensibly leaked by Israeli officials, stating that the Trump administration’s peace plan would curb Israeli settlement growth, initially hand Israelis and Palestinians about one-third of the West Bank each, recognize a Palestinian state in the Palestinian-held areas, and set in place a four-year “preparation period” during which Palestinians would — so Washington hopes — come around to the plan and possibly negotiate control of the remainder of the territory.
Impressively, the Kan public broadcaster’s Michael Shemesh is the only reporter to follow Gantz to Washington with the rest of the press corps sticking with Netanyahu and missing an opportunity for intimate time with the Blue and White prime ministrial candidate.
Gantz tells Shemesh that while he is prepared to accept the Trump plan, he hopes that no elements of it — i.e. annexation — will be implemented before the election.
After dodging a three-way meeting with Trump and Netanyahu that would have likely cast him as a second fiddle, Gantz’s next objective is to avoid any further trap that might be waiting for him in DC, Shemesh reports.
Haaretz’s Amir Tibon reports that Israel’s Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer had been behind that three-way meeting US Vice President Mike Pence had originally invited Gantz to last week. Recognizing that the envoy is in cahoots with Netanyahu, the Blue and White chairman bypassed Dermer in order to nail down his private meeting with Trump.
2. Race to get there first: Gantz initially appeared to have one-upped Netanyahu in announcing on Saturday night that he would be meeting privately with Trump today. But that victory was short-lived with the PMO quickly announcing that Netanyahu would meet with the US president both before Gantz on Monday and after Gantz on Tuesday.
Those details are confirmed by the White House, which releases the president’s schedule for today, showing that Netanyahu will meet with Trump at 11 a.m. (6 p.m. in Israel) for two meetings, including one without aides, and then Gantz will arrive at the White House at 12:30 p.m. (7:30 p.m.) for a 45-minute discussion.
Netanyahu and Trump are set for a higher-profile meeting Tuesday, which is expected to include the official roll-out of the plan, as well as a joint statement from the two leaders.
Reuters reports that Trump will tell Netanyahu and Gantz that they have until the Knesset elections to work on the administration’s long-awaited peace plan, potentially throwing the high stakes diplomatic gambit into Israel’s domestic political stew.
“You have six weeks to get this [plan] going, if you want it,” is what Trump will tell the two, according to a US official.
The US source, who is familiar with the administration’s deliberations on the matter, tells Reuters that by meeting with both Gantz and Netanyahu, it was hoped that Trump’s announcement of the proposal would not be seen as a political move.
“The rationale…is it depoliticizes this to the point that, no matter what happens on March 2, the two leaders of the two largest parties can potentially be supportive,” the source said.
3. You used to call me on my cellphone: Turkey’s Anadolu news agency reports that Trump sought to reach out to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas ahead of his Netanyahu/Gantz peace meetings but that the latter refused to take his calls.
While several senior Palestinian officials either denied or were unable to confirm the report, which if true would have likely included an invitation to the White House for the plan’s roll-out the Palestinians have yet to receive.
Analyst Shimrit Meir speculates that in avoiding the reported White House phone call, Abbas evades having to officially reject the invitation. Moreover, it allows him to remain in the dark regarding the details of the plan and prevents the Americans from claiming that they’ve updated the Palestinians.
However, Meir argues that not taking the phone call was a mistake as it would’ve been one last opportunity for Abbas to try and convince the president that the plan should be shelved.
4. Consequences be damned: Times of Israel’s Raphael Ahren addresses the possible reasons behind the Trump administration’s decision to move forward with its dead-on-arrival plan, but asserts that what’s more important is what the proposal will mean in terms of concrete changes on the ground.
“If the ‘Deal of the Century’ supports annexation, no Israeli party that wants to win the election can oppose it; no aspiring prime minister can be less pro-Israel than the American president,” Ahren writes, predicting that Gantz will support it.
On the diplomatic front, the consequences of an Israeli annexation would be far-reaching and mostly negative, with the EU likely to consider sanctioning Israel as it did when Russia annexed Crimea, he says. The United Nations Human Rights Council would no longer hesitate to release its currently-shelved “blacklist” of Israeli companies that do business in the settlements.
The International Criminal Court could feel emboldened to prosecute Israelis for the “war crime” of building settlements in occupied territory. Jordan and Egypt could consider downgrading their diplomatic ties with Jerusalem, or cancel their peace agreements altogether. The much-hailed rapprochement between Israel and the Gulf states would return into a deep freeze, Ahren says.
Jordan’s King Abdullah, whose support will likely be crucial for the plan’s success tells local politicians that Amman is against any parts of a US proposal that negatively affects his country.
Asked about aspects of the proposal that may come at Jordan’s expense, such as Israeli sovereignty in the Old City of Jerusalem, Abdullah said that the kingdom would oppose it. “Our position is very well known. Absolutely not. This is clear to everyone,”
Former US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro tells Army Radio that “Israeli citizens should take into account that in less than a year there could be a new, Democratic administration — if not in a year than in five years… Trump won’t be president forever. It is important to know that any Democratic candidate will oppose this plan and that no Democratic president will be bound by it.”
Balad MK Mtanes Shihadeh tells 103 FM radio that Gantz can kiss the possibility of receiving support from his faction or any part of the Joint List goodbye due to his willingness to cooperate with the Trump plan. If he follows up on the threat, the Blue and White chairman will have a much more difficult time garnering more recommendations than Netanyahu following the March election.
5. Settling in for the ride: Netanyahu has invited a group of senior settler leaders to join him this week in Washington for today and tomorrow’s meetings, a Yesha settlement umbrella council spokesman tells The Times of Israel.
The West Bank mayors will stay at the same hotel as the premier, where they will be able to consult with him in person and receive updates in real time regarding the contents of the White House discussions, the spokesman said.
Israel Policy Forum analyst Michael Koplow speculates that “there are two possible reasons to do this, both very politically shrewd: Either Bibi expects the plan to be so tilted in Israel’s favor that he wants to capture the benefits in real time, or he wants to preemptively neutralize criticism from settler right.”
Uri Keidar from the Israel Hofsheet organization that promotes religious pluralism laments on Twitter that Netanyahu only invited right-wing settler leaders as opposed to mayors of towns in the Gaza periphery who will be no less impacted by the fall-out of the peace plan’s roll-out.
6. Losing a legend: Just about all major newspapers in Israel dedicate space on their front pages for coverage of the tragic death of former NBA superstar Kobe Bryant.
Header: US President Donald Trump, joined by the Easter Bunny, speaks from the Truman Balcony of the White House in Washington on April 22, 2019, during the annual White House Easter Egg Roll. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
President Reuven Rivlin met with Polish President Duda on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
At the end of their meeting Rivlin said: “We remember that during the war the Polish nation fought fiercely and bravely against Nazi Germany… [but we also remember that] many Poles stood by and even helped [assisted in the] murder [of] Jews in WWII.”
President Reuven Rivlin attends ceremony to mark the 75th anniversary since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
When Mark Chagall returned to France in 1949 after a lengthy stay in the United States, forced upon him by World War II, he eagerly engaged in his favorite biblical motifs, tirelessly working to develop and update the rich artistic language that he began to formulate in the late 1920s, when exposed to surrealism, and to fill his work with fantasy and dream motifs.
Chagall’s famous surrealist – symbolic – naïve style has become captivating and even more engaging and brash than before. One of the motifs that stood out in Chagall’s work towards the end of the 1930s, before the Nazi conquest of Paris and his hasty departure to the United States, was “Jacob’s Dream,” the centerpiece of which is the motif: “Jacob’s Ladder.”
This magical, biblical story, based on our Torah: the portion “Exodus”, Genesis chapter 11-13, re-captures the prolific and rich imagination of the greatest Jewish artist of all time and has become a recurring theme in a dozen of his paintings and drawings, at least, created over his 40-year career as an artist from 1937 to 1977 when he was 90 years old.
Jacob, “our father who sits in the tents”, is about to leave his house to seek and find a bride in the crowd of his relatives in Charan, but it is, in fact, to escape the terror of his brother Esau’s revenge. The road was long and difficult for Jacob and on his way, he found himself in a foreign and unfamiliar place. He was exhausted and therefore gathered some stones, made them his pillow and fell asleep. In his dream, Jacob saw a ladder stretching from the earth to heaven and on the ladder ascending and descending, continually, the angels of God.
According to the Bible, in Jacob’s dream, God renews his covenant with Abraham and Isaac. He promises Jacob that his descendants will inherit the land after he himself has safely returned from his wanderings in various lands. Jacob wakens from his sleep and soon understands that “the place” is “the house of God” and the ladder where the angels of God ascend and descend, is “the gate of heaven”. The next day he builds a monument. It is constructed from the stones of “the place” and he vows that he will give a tenth of his property and assets to God – if and when – he returns home safely. He calls the place he was promised, where he lay down to sleep- Beit El.
This biblical, important, subject was painted by many masters, including Rembrandt (1644). But the dozen paintings of this subject by Chagall, during some 40 years of work (led by the painting called “Jacob’s Dream”, which adorns the museum located in Nice, in the French Riviera , named after him), are considered by art critics, a series of masterpieces whose historical value is invaluable.
As Israel hosted dozens of world leaders last week for the World Holocaust Forum, the country’s cyber defense system fended off hundreds of cyberattacks targeting the country’s international airport and the planes of the world leaders.
Citing officials from the Airports Authority Cyber Division, Channel 12 reported Sunday that at least 800 distinct cyberattacks targeted Israeli aviation on Thursday while world leaders, including US Vice President Mike Pence and Russian President Vladimir Putin, were landing in the country.
All the attacks were successfully beaten back, officials said.
The attackers came from Iran, China, North Korea, Russia, and Poland, the report said.
The attacks “were directed at the airport and the planes,” the report said, “and were aimed at disrupting the flight paths of more than 60 planes carrying heads of state, kings and presidents.”
Officials said Israel was prepared for the onslaught because security preparations for the high-level diplomatic gathering included planning for just such attacks.
The announcement came just two weeks after a January 12 cabinet decision that placed Israel’s aviation infrastructure under the protection of the National Cyber Security Authority, a division of the Prime Minister’s Office that coordinates the country’s cyber defenses.
The growing ubiquity of networked systems in airports, control towers and planes has increased the danger of hackers successfully penetrating air traffic computers and causing chaos and devastation.
The US, Israel and other nations have all responded to the threat in recent years by dramatically increasing the investment in cyber defenses for these systems.
“Hercules,” a special project of Israel’s cyber security authority, was launched in 2017 to map out the dangers to aviation and develop solutions, including R&D, international cooperation, and new training for pilots and other related personnel for handling cyber emergencies.
The rocket engine erupted in flames during a “hot-fire” test of Firefly’s Alpha rocket, a booster designed for small satellite launches, on the proving grounds in Briggs, Texas. In the video, the fire is clearly visible on the left side, emerging from the engine at the moment of launch.
At 6:23 pm local time, the stage’s engines were fired, and a fire broke out in the engine bay at the base of the rocket’s stage,” Firefly representatives wrote in a statement.
Yesterday evening we attempted to hotfire test the Alpha first stage for the first time. Unfortunately, after the four Reaver engines ignited, an engine bay fire developed (flame jet to the left in video). The system immediately shut itself down and the fire was quickly pic.twitter.com/YGYcEshrd9
“The 5-second test was immediately aborted and the test facility’s fire suppression system extinguished the fire.”
No Firefly employee or members of the public were injured by the fire, according to the company’s statement. Both the Alpha rocket stage and the test stand also remain intact. The company also published photos of the aftermath of the unfortunate event.
“Firefly is coordinating closely with local authorities and emergency response personnel as it investigates the anomaly and refines its contingency procedures,” Firefly representatives said.
Firefly is developing the Alpha rocket powered by Reaver engines to launch payloads, including satellites, of up to 1,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit. The 29 meters tall Alpha will launch from a Firefly pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The company is also working on the design of the Beta rocket, aiming to deliver up to 4,400 kg to low Earth orbit. Firefly was aiming for a debut launch of the Alpha booster by April, with a second flight to follow in June, however these plans most likely will be postponed due to the ongoing investigation.
“The cause of the anomaly is under investigation. Firefly engineers are reviewing test data from the stage to identify potential causes for the test failure, and Firefly will share results of that investigation once it is complete,” the company has said.
Notes:
Firefly is on track to deliver a US solution for the 1,000 to 4,000 kg payload class to LEO for a starting price of $15M. Firefly is committed to doing its part to restore U.S. leadership in the small to medium launch market, and is establishing international offices and strategic partnerships to effectively serve the global market.
In November 2018, it was announced that NASA selected Firefly Aerospace as one of nine companies able to bid at the Commercial Lunar Payload Services, where the company will be proposing a robotic lunar lander called Firefly Genesis.
In February 2019, the company announced that it would develop manufacturing facilities and a launch site at Cape Canaveral.
On 9 June 2019 it was announced that Firefly Aerospace signed an agreement with Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) that owns the intellectual property of the Beresheet lunar lander design. Firefly plans to build a lunar lander based on Beresheet that would be called Genesis. Genesis will be proposed to NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) to deliver payloads to the surface of the Moon. If selected, Firefly Genesis would be launched with a Firefly Beta rocket, or a Falcon 9 rocket in late 2021.
Bombshell footage of fundraising dinner also includes Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman giving president a gift in which rabbis in Ukraine and Israel compare him to the messiah.
US President Donald Trump inquired how long Ukraine would be able to resist Russian aggression without US assistance during a 2018 meeting with donors that included the indicted associates of his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.
“How long would they last in a fight with Russia?” Trump is heard asking in the audio portion of a video recording, moments before he calls for the firing of US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. She was removed a year later after a campaign to discredit her by Giuliani and others, an action that is part of Democrats’ case arguing for the removal of the president in his Senate impeachment trial.
A video recording of the entire 80-minute dinner at the Trump Hotel in Washington was obtained Saturday by The Associated Press. Excerpts were first published Friday by ABC News. People can be seen in only some portions of the recording.
The recording contradicts the president’s statements that he did not know the Giuliani associates Lev Parnas or Igor Fruman, key figures in the investigation who were indicted last year on campaign finance charges.
The recording contradicts the president’s statements that he did not know the Giuliani associates Lev Parnas or Igor Fruman, key figures in the investigation who were indicted last year on campaign finance charges.
The recording came to light as Democrats continued to press for witnesses and other evidence to be considered during the impeachment trial.
On the recording, a voice that appears to be Parnas’ can be heard saying, “The biggest problem there, I think where we need to start is we got to get rid of the ambassador.”
He later can be heard telling Trump: “She’s basically walking around telling everybody, ‘Wait, he’s gonna get impeached. Just wait.’”
https://youtu.be/khKMhuHi_Mg
A video released on Jan. 25 captures President Donald Trump appearing to say he wants to “get rid” of the then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. The recording, which was provided to the PBS NewsHour by a lawyer for one of the people who heard the original conversation, is said to be from a dinner in Washington, D.C., on April 30, 2018– a year before Yovanovitch was actually fired.
Trump responds: “Get rid of her! Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. OK? Do it.”
Ukraine came up during the dinner in the context of a discussion of energy markets, with the voice appearing to be Parnas’ describing his involvement in the purchase of a Ukrainian energy company.
The group then praises Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to which the president says: “Pompeo’s going to be good. He’s doing a good job. Already he’s doing a good job.”
At the beginning of the video, Trump is seen posing for photos before entering the blue-walled dining room. A voice that appears to be Fruman’s is heard saying that “it’s a great room” before a chuckle. “I couldn’t believe myself.”
Near the end of the dinner Parnas can be heard presenting what he says is a gift to Trump from “the head rabbi in Ukraine” and rabbis in Israel using numerology to draw a parallel between Trump and the messiah. “It’s like messiah is the person that’s come to save the whole world. So it’s like you’re the savior of the Ukraine.”
“All Jew people of Ukraine, they are praying for you,” Fruman says, as Parnas tells Trump to show the gift to Jared Kushner, the president’s Jewish son-in-law and senior adviser, to explain its meaning.
In the video, it appears Fruman is seated across the narrow part of the rectangular table and one seat over from the president.
Also visible in the video are the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. and former counselor to the president Johnny DeStefano. Jack Nicklaus III, the grandson of the golf icon, and New York real estate developer Stanley Gale also attended the event for a pro-Trump group.
Just a few minutes into the conversation, Trump can be heard railing against former President George W. Bush, China, the World Trade Organization and the European Union. “Bush, he gets us into the war, he gets us into the Middle East, that was a beauty,” Trump says. “We’re in the Middle East right now for $7 trillion.” He later says: “China rips us off for years and we owe them $2 trillion.” The president blames the WTO because it “allowed China to do what they’re doing.”
“The WTO is worse,” than China, he declares. “China didn’t become great until the WTO.”
Trump also seemed to question the US involvement in the Korean War: “How we ever got involved in South Korea in the first place, tell me about it. How we ended up in a Korean War.”
Trump provided the guests with an update ahead of his first meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, revealing that he’d settled on a date and location. One of the people in attendance sought to pitch a different location: Songdo, South Korea, which is 70% owned by Gale International and features a Nicklaus-designed golf course.
“You know that Kim Jong Un is a great golfer,” Trump is heard telling the guests, who roar with laughter.
Trump also discussed the border crisis and plans for a border wall with Mexico, insisting that he wants to build a concrete wall but had heard from law enforcement officials that it isn’t viable. “You do have to be able to see through the wall, I think,” Trump says. He says drug dealers would throw heavy bundles of drugs over the wall, which could kill Border Patrol agents.
“They have a catapult and they throw it over the wall, and it lands on the other side of the wall and it can hit people. Can you imagine you get hit with 100 pounds?” the president says. “The whole thing is preposterous. I would’ve loved to have seen to see a concrete wall, but you just can’t do that.”
Toward the end of the dinner, the discussion turns to the upcoming election and media.
“Magazines are dead,” Trump says.
“I think cable TV is OK. If we ever lost an election, cable TV is dead,” he says, the party goers laughing. “Can you imagine if they had a normal candidate? It’s all they talk about. If they had Hillary, crooked Hillary, their ratings would be one-fifth.”
Trump says that he believes he would have had a harder time in 2016 if Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic nominee.
Trump also tells the assembled guests that it is “ridiculous” and “wrong” that he can’t hold political fundraisers inside the White House, saying it would save the government money compared to driving him the four blocks to his hotel.
Header: Lev Parnas arrives at court in New York on December 2, 2019. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)
Following TV visit to Dead Sea gorge carved out by briny waste from Dead Sea factories, call is issued for works there to stop, site to be opened to public.
The channel can be seen on this Google Earth image entering the northern section of the Dead Sea, at the top of the picture, where there is a promontory bordered by salt.
There has been much ado on Israeli social media since the beginning of last week following two episodes of a bizarre television report claiming the discovery of an “unknown” canyon and “river” that is actually the toxic effluent channel of two mineral extraction companies known well to geologists and the Ministry of Environmental Protection.
On Monday and Tuesday, Kan news broadcast dramatic footage of waters swirling along the bed of a 20-meter (65-foot) -deep gorge in the desert close to the Dead Sea — the lowest point on earth — and the Israeli-Jordanian border.
Lior Enmar, described as a geologist and guide, led Kan’s reporter and others along a path strewn with deep pits and unexploded mines to the water’s edge. In and around the area, viewers were treated to extraordinary images of salt formations in different shapes and colors.
When everyone reached the gorge, they whooped in amazement. The reporter enthused that it was Israel’s answer to the Grand Canyon, while Enmar said it was one of the most beautiful “parks” in the world.
The truth — clearly explained in the report but somewhat eclipsed by its eureka framing — is that the river actually carries salty sludge from the evaporation pools of the Dead Sea Works run by Israel Chemicals Ltd and the Ofer family and from the Jordanian Arab Potash Company, just next door.
Both factories pump water out of the northern section of the Dead Sea into evaporation pools in the southern section that are visible from the Ein Bokek hotels along the Israeli section of the Dead Sea shore.
The water evaporates, leaving potash, a potassium-rich salt, and halite for the factories’ use, while the remaining effluent — which is very dense and salty — is channeled back to the lake.
Half a century ago, the Dead Sea was one body of water and it was easy to direct the effluent back from the evaporation pools.
But since 1976, the lake’s surface area has almost halved and its elevation has dropped more than 40 meters (130 feet) — from 390 meters (1,280 feet) below sea level to minus 434 meters (minus 1,425 feet) today.
“The virus’ transmission ability has become stronger,” National Health Commission Minister Ma Xiaowei said at a press briefing on Sunday.
Ma said that the previously-unknown coronavirus, which has already killed 56 people in China, is spreading faster, while the outbreak is entering a “more serious and complicated phase.”
The official noted that the government’s knowledge of the new virus remains limited and they remain puzzled about the risks posed by its mutations. Beijing will dispatch additional teams of medics to assist patients and study the virus, he added.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1220730476303962112
Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention head Fu Gao said that there were no signs of clear mutation of the virus so far, but further surveillance is needed.
Local media has reported about the shortage of basic protective gear, like goggles and masks, in Wuhan, the capital of the central Hubei Province, which has been hit hardest by the outbreak.
Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology Wang Jiangping said that Hubei needs about 100,000 protective medical suits per day but the factories across the country are making only 30,000 of them daily.
The authorities have ordered an increase in production and have diverted millions of masks, along with scores of hazmat suits, gloves and goggles, to Wuhan. The local office of the Red Cross has set up a 24-hour hotline for accepting donations of equipment.
E-commerce giant Alibaba, laptop-maker Lenovo, and the world’s largest gaming company Tencent have all pledged to donate large sums of money to purchase medical supplies.
Wuhan and nine other major cities in Hubei were partially quarantined in an effort to contain the outbreak.
Ma said that the week-long Lunar New Year vacation provides the best window for the “isolation and disinfection” of the area.
The World Health Organization decided against declaring the outbreak a global emergency for now. The declaration can increase resources to fight a threat but its potential to cause economic damage makes the decision politically fraught.
A pair of Stanford scientists have used physics to explain why American presidential elections since 1970 reflect a society barely holding itself together. Innovative science or study into the biases of the researchers themselves?
The paper, which appeared last week in the journal Nature Physics, is by Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, and Alexander Siegenfeld, a PhD student at MIT. At a glance, it is not obvious what insights into electoral politics physics may offer, although their paper is full of complicated equations and impressive-looking graphs.
But admittedly, the power of physics is that it can reach useful conclusions without necessarily needing all details of the underlying mechanisms. This is how physicists can make accurate predictions of the movement of planets and the mass of atoms, without understanding the fundamental nature of matter in the universe.
According to their paper, until 1970 US presidential elections had been working pretty well as a way of reflecting the political preferences of the majority. But something changed during the era of Richard ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon. After him, very small changes in voter opinions have led to major swings towards more extreme candidates on both ends of the political spectrum. Bar-Yam says “What happened in 1970 is a phase transition like the boiling of water. Elections went from stable to unstable.”
Whether it’s down to changes to the party primary system, scandals like Watergate or the Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton affair or to complex sociological trends, America has gotten more polarized in recent decades.
“Our country seems more divided than ever, with election outcomes resembling a pendulum swinging with ever increasing force,” Siegenfeld says. In this regime of “unstable” elections, he says, “a small change in electorate opinion can dramatically swing the election outcome, just as the direction of a small push to a boulder perched on top of a hill can dramatically change its final location.”
And the physicists show how shifting public opinion actually pushes election outcomes in the opposite direction. They imagine an election in which there are two candidates, one far-right and one center-left. If general public opinion has shifted to the left, then many far-left voters may dislike the centre-left candidate. They might opt not to vote in an election at all, and the far-left candidate may then sweep to victory.
In other words, as the electorate radicalizes, they would rather let the candidate from the opposite camp win than to support their own moderate. One could argue that Hillary Clinton was a victim of this – she did not appeal enough to the Democratic base, who saw her as being without principles and devoted to the status quo. Many stayed at home, and some even swung to Trump as a protest vote.
There is also an opposing scenario, in which a candidate favoured by a party’s base is rejected by the general public.
Take the American presidential primaries. A candidate must win over their party’s base in order to be nominated. But because the party members are concentrated at one end of the political spectrum, the winning candidate will likely be out of tune with the wider voting public.
Whether it’s down to changes to the party primary system, scandals like Watergate or the Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton affair or to complex sociological trends, America has gotten more polarized in recent decades.
“Our country seems more divided than ever, with election outcomes resembling a pendulum swinging with ever increasing force,” Siegenfeld says. In this regime of “unstable” elections, he says, “a small change in electorate opinion can dramatically swing the election outcome, just as the direction of a small push to a boulder perched on top of a hill can dramatically change its final location.”
And the physicists show how shifting public opinion actually pushes election outcomes in the opposite direction. They imagine an election in which there are two candidates, one far-right and one center-left. If general public opinion has shifted to the left, then many far-left voters may dislike the centre-left candidate. They might opt not to vote in an election at all, and the far-left candidate may then sweep to victory.
In other words, as the electorate radicalizes, they would rather let the candidate from the opposite camp win than to support their own moderate. One could argue that Hillary Clinton was a victim of this – she did not appeal enough to the Democratic base, who saw her as being without principles and devoted to the status quo. Many stayed at home, and some even swung to Trump as a protest vote.
There is also an opposing scenario, in which a candidate favoured by a party’s base is rejected by the general public.
Take the American presidential primaries. A candidate must win over their party’s base in order to be nominated. But because the party members are concentrated at one end of the political spectrum, the winning candidate will likely be out of tune with the wider voting public.
But the real question is, what form of “stability” exactly would the physicists prefer to return to?
“Instability” is a loaded term, implying that there is some immutable center-ground towards which we should all be steering.
They fear the swinging pendulum, and a politics careening from left to right and back again every five years, as if each swing threatens to destroy the mechanism to which it is fixed.
Their ideal is presumably a succession of polished, professional status-quo politicians wearing different-colored ties but disagreeing only on cosmetic issues. A sort of 1990s “End of History” Third-Way consensus. Clinton and Blair, or Cameron, Merkel and Obama.
Former US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro on Sunday denounced the timing of the unveiling of US President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan as political in nature, warning that no future Democratic administration would accept the plan and be bound by it.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his rival in the upcoming Knesset elections, Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz, will both meet Trump in Washington this week — separately — and the long-awaited peace plan is slated to be unveiled by Tuesday.
The ongoing political stalemate in Israel — two elections last year failed to produce a government — has delayed the release of the plan, and the administration’s plans to release it now, six weeks before an unprecedented third vote in a row, have been met by accusations that it constitutes political meddling.
“It is not a coincidence, the timing, that this is happening at the time of a Knesset discussion over immunity and at a time the [US] Senate is holding an impeachment hearing,” Shapiro, who was the envoy during former US President Barack Obama’s administration, told Army Radio in a Hebrew-language interview.
Shapiro, who has in recent days hinted that Trump’s move is interference in Israel’s elections since it’s seen as favoring Netanyahu over Gantz, said in the interview there has always been an agreement that the US doesn’t meddle in Israeli elections and vice versa.
Gantz is scheduled to meet Trump on Monday, while Netanyahu will meet with the US leader on the peace proposal on Tuesday. Netanyahu’s office, in a statement issued immediately after Gantz announced he would go to Washington, said the prime minister would also meet privately with Trump on Monday, in addition to the planned Tuesday meeting.
The plan, which Trump said he would release before Tuesday, is expected to strongly favor Israel, and is unlikely to garner any international support if it is seen as undermining the prospect of a two-state solution. Trump said his administration has talked briefly to the Palestinians, who reject the administration’s peace plan altogether.
According to various Hebrew-language media reports, the peace plan is the most generous US proposal ever for Israel, likely allowing Israel to annex all West Bank settlements and backing sovereignty throughout Jerusalem. According to the reports, the plan also offers potential eventual recognition of Palestinian statehood, provided the Palestinians demilitarize Gaza and accept Israel as a Jewish state — conditions the Palestinians would presumably reject.
“I think Israeli citizens should take into account that in less than a year there could be a new, Democratic administration — if not in a year then in five years. Trump won’t be president forever. It is important to know that any Democratic candidate will oppose this plan and that no Democratic president will be bound by it,” Shapiro said.
“A new administration will be committed to the two-state solution — the traditional, historic position of the United States — or at least to preserving the chance it could be achieved in the future,” he added. “If Trump is encouraging Israel to take unilateral steps such as annexing the Jordan Valley and the settlement blocs, that guarantees there will be a clash with a Democratic administration in less than a year. I don’t think this is a positive thing for the relations between the countries, and I advise against immediate actions that future administrations will oppose.”
However, Shapiro acknowledged that a Democratic president would probably not reverse Trump’s embassy move to Jerusalem, and said he didn’t know whether the recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights would be overturned.
Gantz originally balked at the prospect of meeting Trump alongside Netanyahu, according to reports, fearing he would come off as a bit player given the other leaders’ close relationship.
Header: Former US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro attends at a farewell session at the Knesset ahead of his departure from the role on January 17, 2017. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) on Saturday retweeted, then removed, a tweet falsely blaming Israelis for the death of an Arab child in eastern Jerusalem, JTA reported.
Tlaib retweeted a tweet by PLO official Hanan Ashrawi who was quote-tweeting an account which accused “Israeli settlers” of kidnapping, assaulting and throwing eight-year-old Qais Abu Ramila from the neighborhood of Beit Hanina into a well.
The body of eight-year-old Qais Abu Ramila, from the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina, who had been missing since Friday, was located early Saturday morning in a reservoir of rainwater.
He was evacuated to a hospital after residents attempted to resuscitate him. Initially, he was said to be in serious condition, but doctors ultimately pronounced him dead.
His body was found after hours of search efforts by police, first responders and hundreds of volunteers.
Authorities had focused their search on the pool of water near Beit Hanina after tracking dogs picked up Abu Ramila’s scent in the area, speculating that he may have fallen in. Video footage from the scene showed first responders wading through the water with searchlights.
Police had asked the public for assistance in locating the boy and hundreds of volunteers helped comb the neighborhood.
His family initially said he was kidnapped on his way to the store, but later reversed that claim, according to the Haaretz daily.
Police believe the boy slipped and fell into the reservoir and was injured, resulting in him remaining there all night without being able to get out. Hundreds of residents of Beit Hanina took part in the search efforts, during which clashes broke out between police and the residents.
Tlaib subsequently removed her retweet, according to JTA, and Ashrawi eventually apologized for “retweeting something that’s not fully verified.”
Tlaib claimed in an interview in May that Palestinian Arabs living in the British Mandate prior to the establishment of the State of Israel “provided” a safe haven to Jews after the Holocaust.
In addition, when asked in a past television interview whether she would vote against military aid to Israel when she goes to Congress, Tlaib replied, “Absolutely.”
In August, Israel announced it would bar entry to Tlaib and fellow Muslim Congress woman Ilhan Omar over their support for the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Most recently, Tlaib appeared to blame the Jersey City shooting on “white supremacy” even though the attackers had been identified as members of an extremist “anti-white and anti-Semitic” movement.
In this case as well, Tlaib made the false claim on Twitter and then deleted the tweet after being called out on it.
Thirteen million people visit the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris every year, entering through massive wooden doors at the base of towers as solidly planted as mountains. They stand in front of walls filigreed with stained glass and gaze at a ceiling supported by delicate ribs of stone.
If its beauty and magnificence is instantly apparent, so much about Notre Dame is not. To begin with, we don’t know who built this cathedral—or how.
The bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully, commissioned the massive church complex around 1160. Yet the names of those who first constructed this masterpiece are lost to history. They left no records—only centuries of speculation—behind.
A former composer, would-be monk, and self-described gearhead—or, as he puts it, “tacklehead”—Tallon intends to make that history right. With the help of 21st-century laser scanners, he is teasing out clues hidden in the ancient stones of Notre Dame and other medieval structures—and revolutionizing our understanding of how these spectacular buildings were made.
[Andrew] Tallon, who died Nov. 18, 2018, at 49, wasn’t the first to realize that laser scanners could be used to deconstruct Gothic architecture. But he was the first to use the scans to get inside medieval builders’ heads.
”If I had texts at every point, I could look in the texts and try to get back into the heads of the builders. I don’t have it, so it’s detective work for me.” – Andrew Tallon, art historian.
“Every building moves,” he says. “It heaves itself out of shape when foundations move, when the sun heats up on one side.” How the building moves reveals its original design and the choices that the master builder had to make when construction didn’t go as planned. Tracking this thought process requires precise measurements.
For a long time, the tools used to measure medieval buildings were nearly as old as the buildings themselves: plumb bobs, string, rulers, and pencils. Using them was tedious, time- consuming, and error-prone.
“You can’t hang from a vault and measure it by hand,” says Michael Davis, an art historian at Mount Holyoke College who once spent nine weeks surveying two churches with these primitive tools.
Laser scans, with their exquisite precision, don’t miss a thing. Mounted on a tripod, the laser beam sweeps around the choir of a cathedral, for example, and measures the distance between the scanner and every point it hits. Each measurement is represented by a colored dot, which cumulatively create a three-dimensional image of the cathedral. “If you’ve done your job properly,” says Tallon, the scan is “accurate to within five millimeters [.5 centimeter].”
Two researchers at Columbia University—Peter Allen, a computer scientist, and Stephen Murray, an art historian—attempted one of the first laser scans of a Gothic building in 2001 at the cathedral in Beauvais, north of Paris, which Murray had once measured by hand with steel tape and wooden calipers.
Unfortunately, the scanner “actually went up in a puff of smoke. It really did emit smoke,” says Murray. “And at that point people didn’t know how to render [the data] into a three-dimensional model that was manageable.”
Point Cloud – The data are stitched together to form a “point cloud” containing more than a billion points, revealing structural concerns that otherwise would be hard to detect.
Photo Wrapping – To increase legibility, the point cloud is “wrapped” in a series of photographs; each data point is assigned the color of the pixel in the corresponding image.
Wire Frame – The laser point cloud data can then be modeled using planes and lines. The 3-D model makes it possible to show how the building looked in the past.
Rendered Model – A final rendered model with adjustable surface textures and colors can be generated. Adjusting light and shadows can make a more realistic structure.
Tallon figured out how to knit the laser scans together to make them manageable and beautiful. Each time he makes a scan, he also takes a spherical panoramic photograph from the same spot that captures the same three-dimensional space. He maps that photograph onto the laser-generated dots of the scan; each dot becomes the color of the pixel in that location in the photograph.
As a result, the stunningly realistic panoramic photographs are amazingly accurate. At Notre Dame, he took scans from more than 50 locations in and around the cathedral—collecting more than one billion points of data.
Tallon, says Murray, his Ph.D. adviser at Columbia, is “able to combine that astonishing grasp of technology with the big humanistic vision that one hopes that art historians have.”
The laser scans have led to surprising new information about Notre Dame’s builders. For one thing, they sometimes took shortcuts. Even though medieval builders strove to create perfect dwelling places for the spirit of God, Tallon’s scans reveal that the western end of the cathedral is “a total mess … a train wreck.” The interior columns don’t line up and neither do some of the aisles. Rather than removing the remains of existing structures from the site, the workers appear to have built around them.
That cost cutting could have been catastrophic. Based on stylistic changes, scholars have long suspected that work on the western facade stopped for a while before the towers could be built. When Tallon scanned it, he discovered why. The Gallery of Kings—the line of statues above the three massive doorways—was almost a foot (.3 meters) out of plumb. Tallon concluded that the western facade, built on unstable soil, began leaning forward and to the north. Construction had to be halted until the builders could be confident that the ground had compressed enough to resume. After an anxious decade or so, it had.
The builders were more sensible when it came to constructing flying buttresses, which some scholars have argued were added after the cathedral was built. After measuring the walls, Tallon determined that the flyers, as he calls them, were part of the cathedral’s original design. The vaults in the ceiling should push walls outward but “the upper part of the building has not moved one smidgen in 800 years.” The reason? “The flying buttresses were there from the get-go,” pushing the walls inward and creating a stable balance of forces.
Though most of the structure is perfectly plumb, the great columns at the center of the cathedral were built ever-so-slightly outwards, and the choir doesn’t align exactly with the nave. To Goodyear, imperfection “was the secret sauce,” says Tallon, “that medieval folks sprinkled on their buildings to make them beautiful.”
Tallon believes the true “secret sauce” was faith. “There was a biblical, a moral imperative to build a perfect building,” he says, “because the stones of the building were directly identified with the stones of the Church”—the people who make up the body of the church.
“I like to think that this laser scanning work and even some of the conventional scholarship I do is informed by that important world of spirituality,” says Tallon. “It’s such a beautiful idea.”
Header:
Andrew Tallon has used lasers to scan more than 45 historic buildings, including this cathedral in Chartres, France – PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW TALLON
Notes:
Fortunately, there are incredible 3D scans of Notre Dame. The good news: we have a highly-detailed digital template for how to rebuild.
For his scans of Notre Dame, Tallon recorded data from more than 50 locations in and around the cathedral, resulting in a staggering one billion points of data.
Each scan begins by mounting the laser onto a tripod and placing in the center of the structure. The laser sweeps around the area in every direction, and as it hits a surface, the beam bounces back, recording the exact placement and surface of whatever buttress or column it landed on by measuring the time it took the beam to return.
Every measurement is recorded as a colored dot, combining together into a detailed picture, like the color pixels of a digital photograph.
Eventually those millions of dots form a three-dimensional snapshot of the cathedral, and the resulting images are meticulously precise; if the scan is done properly, Tallon told National Geographic, it should be accurate within 5 millimeters.
Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz on Saturday said he had accepted a personal invitation from US President Donald Trump to meet with him privately in Washington on Monday on the administration’s long-awaited Middle East peace plan.
Gantz had been invited to Washington alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the peace plan, dubbed the “deal of the century,” which Trump has said he will likely release in the next few days. The two rival Israeli leaders were to have met Trump on Tuesday.
But Gantz — concerned he would be a minor player in such a meeting, but not wanting to say no to the president — said Saturday that he would instead meet with Trump separately on Monday “as the leader of the largest party in Israel.” Gantz is Netanyahu’s main political rival. Elections last April and September ended in deadlock between the rival blocs they head; further elections are to be held on March 2.
The meeting will be closed to the press, Gantz’s office said on Saturday.
Netanyahu’s office, in a statement issued immediately after Gantz announced his move, said the prime minister would also meet privately with Trump on Monday, in addition to the planned Tuesday meeting.
Appearing on live TV, Gantz said he has answered an invitation from Trump to meet with him privately and thanked him for the invitation.
“In coordination with the US administration, I accepted the personal, separate, respectful invitation from President Trump, and will meet with him personally on Monday, as the head of the biggest party in Israel. And I thank him for this important invitation.”
At the end of that White House meeting, he said, he would “return to Israel in order to lead, from up close, the discussions on removing Benjamin Netanyahu’s immunity.” Gantz was referring to the process, which is set to start in the Knesset on Tuesday, of weighing Netanyahu’s request for parliamentary protection from prosecution in the three graft cases for which he has been charged.
Gantz called Trump “a true friend to Israel, to Israelis, and to American Jews” and said that under his leadership “the alliance between Israel and the United States has grown stronger, deeper, and more significant than ever.”
Prior to Gantz’s announcement, Netanyahu released a short video in Hebrew in which he called the invitation to Washington a “historic moment” and an “opportunity that should not be missed.
Reports had swirled prior to Gantz’s announcement Saturday that the opposition party leader would opt out of the trip to Washington altogether, fearing it to be a “trap.” A Channel 12 report on Saturday citing sources close to Gantz said that he did not know what role he would have in the “performance” in Washington and that it wasn’t clear what his standing would be.
The report said Gantz was also unsure about how Trump would treat him in relation to Netanyahu, who has a long and friendly history with the US leader.
“In Blue and White, they fear it will be more political than diplomatic, and that Netanyahu is bringing Gantz to Washington, not to praise him, but to embarrass him, or diminish him,” the report said. Blue and White was also reluctant to publicly cooperate with rival Netanyahu, the TV report added, as the party’s main campaign focus has been on the need to remove the prime minister from office.
Gantz and Netanyahu were invited to the White House next Tuesday, the day the Knesset is set to vote on establishing the committee that will weigh the premier’s request to be protected from corruption charges in three criminal cases. Netanyahu is set to fly out on Sunday.
Blue and White Party leaders told Channel 12 Friday that they could not “on the one hand work to remove Netanyahu’s immunity [from prosecution] and his legitimacy, but at the same time participate in this together with him, giving him the status of a leader heading these major diplomatic moves.”
Earlier Saturday, Yisrael Beytenu party chief Avigdor Liberman said the timing of Trump’s imminent release of his Israeli-Palestinian plan was “very suspicious” — implying it was being unveiled now to help boost Netanyahu’s chances in the March 2 election.
Netanyahu, he said, was “running away to the US to avoid his promise to extend sovereignty over the Jordan Valley. He’s running away from his obligations. Instead of driving 2.5 kilometers to the Knesset, he prefers to fly 9,500 kilometers to Washington.”
On Thursday, US Vice President Mike Pence confirmed that Netanyahu would visit the White House next week and said that Gantz was also invited, at Netanyahu’s urging.
Trump on Thursday said that he would likely release the plan before his meeting with Netanyahu and Gantz.
“It’s a great plan. It’s a plan that really would work,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One en route to a Republican Party meeting in Florida Thursday.
The plan is expected to strongly favor Israel, and is unlikely to garner any international support if it is seen as undermining the prospect of a two-state solution.
Trump said his administration has talked briefly to the Palestinians, who reject the administration’s peace plan before its release.
According to Channel 12, the peace plan is the most generous US proposal ever for Israel, likely providing for Israeli sovereignty over all West Bank settlements and sovereignty throughout Jerusalem. According to that TV report, which was unsourced, the plan also offers potential eventual recognition of Palestinian statehood, provided the Palestinians demilitarize Gaza and accept Israel as a Jewish state — conditions the Palestinians would presumably reject.
Header: Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz addressing press in Ramat Gan, on January 25, 2020. (Elad Malka/Blue and White)
