Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed an economic and research partnership agreement with California Gov. Edmund “Jerry” Brown.

The agreement will enhance cooperation between Israel and California in a variety of areas, with a focus on water conservation, alternative energy, cybersecurity, health and biotechnology, education and agricultural technology, according to a press release from Brown’s office.

The agreement also allows Israeli companies access to a variety of Californian technology research facilities, including technology incubators, research parks, federal laboratories and universities.

“Through this agreement, California and Israel will build on their respective strengths in research and technology to confront critical problems we both face, such as water scarcity, cybersecurity and climate change,” said Governor Brown in the statement.
Netanyahu said “the opportunities of our partnerships are truly limitless. They’re limited only by our imagination.” While in California, Netanyahu also met with Apple CEO Tim Cook, as well as with Jan Koum and Brian Acton, the founders of text message service WhatsApp.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ spokesperson said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “wasting time” with his demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state and was undermining the current peace negotiations.

“The intention of Netanyahu’s continued demand to recognize Israel as the Jewish state is to waste time and avoid reaching a true, just and viable peace agreement,” said Nabil Abu Rudeineh, Abbas’ spokesperson, according to reports.

In a speech at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Tuesday, Netanyahu emphasized his oft-repeated demand that the Palestinian Authority recognize Israel as a Jewish state in any Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

“President Abbas, recognize the Jewish state, and in doing so, you would be telling your people, the Palestinians, that while we might have a territorial dispute, the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own is beyond dispute,” Netanyahu said in the speech. “No excuses, no delays, it’s time.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to work for a “durable peace” with the Palestinians in the coming weeks and reiterated his refusal to accept a deal with Iran that included any uranium enrichment capacity.

Netanyahu, in his speech Tuesday morning to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference, embraced an optimistic vision of peace with the Palestinians as the key to broader regional stability.

“I’m prepared to make a historic peace with our Palestinian neighbors,” Netanyahu said.

“Peace would be good for us, peace would be good for the Palestinians, but peace would open up the possibility of establishing formal ties between Israel and leading countries in the Arab world,” he said. “Peace with the Palestinians would turn our relations with them and with many Arab countries into open and thriving relationships.”

Netanyahu repeated a number of his demands of a peace agreement, including Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and a long-term Israeli military presence on the Jordan-Judea and Samaria border, but he suggested that a deal could come soon.

“As we work in the coming days, in the coming weeks, to forge a durable peace, I hope that the Palestinian leadership will stand with Israel and the United States on the right side of the moral divide, the side of peace, reconciliation and hope,” he said.

He paused, waiting for the AIPAC supporters to applaud this vision, and when they did not, he explicitly solicited their applause.

“You can clap — you want to encourage them to do that!” he said.

Netanyahu’s message came a day after meetings he held with President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry.

Obama, before meeting Netanyahu, had told Bloomberg News that he would impress upon him the need to embrace the framework agreement Kerry hopes to unveil soon, and in Netanyahu’s AIPAC speech, he appeared to do so.

The two leaders also discussed the nuclear talks between Iran and the major powers, and in this area, Netanyahu did not appear to budge from his insistence than any deal include a total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear capability, including an end to enrichment.

“The leading powers of the world are talking about leaving Iran with the capability to enrich uranium,” he said. “That would be a grave error.”

Obama and officials in his administration have indicated that leaving Iran with a limited enrichment capability is the likeliest outcome of the talks.

Netanyahu said that Israel could not accept such a status.

“We will never be brought to the brink of extinction again,” he said. ”As prime minister of Israel, I will do whatever I must do to defend the Jewish state of Israel.”

Netanyahu also repeated his call for enhanced sanctions on Iran, something that Obama has rejected, saying they could scuttle the talks.

“You know how you get that agreement with Iran?” Netanyahu said. “Not by relieving pressure, but by adding pressure!”

A focus of Netanyahu’s speech was the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement targeting Israel, which he described as anti-Semitic.

“Those who wear the BDS label should be treated as we treat any anti-Semite and bigot — they should be exposed and condemned,” he said. “The boycotters should be boycotted!”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told President Obama that Israel cannot let Iran get a nuclear bomb and said an end to uranium enrichment is an Israeli demand of any agreement with Iran.

“If Iran is prevented from enriching uranium and dismantles fully its military nuclear capability,” Israel would accept the deal, the Israeli prime minister told Obama on Monday when they met at the White House in the Oval Office.

Obama and U.S. officials have said that Iran is likely to be left with a limited enrichment capability as part of any deal.

“Israel cannot permit such a state to have the ability to make a bomb,” Netanyahu said. “We just cannot be brought back to the brink of destruction. I as the prime minister of Israel will do whatever I must to defend the Jewish state.”

Netanyahu also appeared to push back against warnings from Obama in an interview published Sunday by Bloomberg View that Israeli settlement expansion and a failure to achieve a peace agreement with the Palestinians would lead to Israel’s international isolation.

“Israel has been doing its part, and I regret to say the Palestinians haven’t,” Netanyahu said, saying he expected an end to Palestinian incitement and recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

“That’s what the people of Israel expect me to do, to stand strong against criticism, against pressure.” he said.

Obama refrained from pushing back in the Oval Office appearance, confining his remarks to pledging to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and commending Netanyahu for his commitment to the peace process.

The man who brought peace to Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and Syria (did I forget anything? Yes – Turkey!), our own President Obama, is about to throw his weight into the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, the NY Times reports this morning.

When he welcomes Netanyahu to the White House on Monday, tye White House leaked to the Times, Obama will press him to embrace the Secretary of State John Kerry framework for a “conclusive round of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations,” which is being drafted as we speak. Then, a few weeks later, Obama will meet with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, “to make the same pitch.”

By the end of April, if all goes according to plan, both sides will have a road map (didn’t we already have one of those?). In April the self-imposed 9-month time limit will expire, and in a television-driven political world, a date is a date, ergo the big gun.

“Now is a very timely opportunity for him to get involved,” a senior official told the Times, setting up the newest great expectation in a tone that didn’t convey much conviction: If the two sides agree to the framework, which would set out general terms on issues like Israel’s security and the borders of a future Palestinian state, the negotiations could be extended, with a new target of completing a treaty by the end of 2014.

Of course, should things not work out as expected, we could always come up with new shticks, rename the whole thing, possibly divide the topics of discussion into columns A and B and pick targets Chinese restaurant fashion, slap a new target date on it and go on with the show. The idea is to keep having a peace process—never mind the peace.

If they keep doing this through the 2016 presidential election, there’s a good chance Kerry could still get the Nobel Peace Prize even if he doesn’t get anything accomplished peacewise. After all, Obama got it just for being black and promising – couldn’t Kerry take one for being tall and lanky? Good teeth? No?

It is far from clear, notes the Times, that Mr. Obama can pull off what has so far eluded his secretary of state. Here’s another thing that’s been eluding the Americans – over the past several weeks, the Arabs and the Jews haven’t been meeting face to face. They talk to Kerry and to his special envoy, Martin S. Indyk, and that’s it. It means, “analysts say,” that there’s been no movement on anything.

If you ever sold cars for a living, or watched any sitcom or movie about selling cars, you know that the time to bring in the owner is after it’s been established that the customer really wants the car, he just needs to discuss terms. You bring in the boss, right away he knocks of two grand off the list price, everybody’s smiling – and you close. But to bring the boss in before both sides are buying anything, anything at all, that has desperation written all over it.

Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator who is a senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, told the Times that bringing the president in at this stage is admission of defeat on Kerry’s part. “What is it going to take to get to a comprehensive deal if the president has to do heavy lifting?”

It means Kerry has little credibility left with either side. And the Jews hate him for the boycott threats, which he has since been backtracking from so fiercely, you worry he’d hit his head on the end of the pool.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be visiting the U.S. next month, to meet with president Barack Obama.

In a meeting of the Likud Beitenu faction in the Knesset today, Netanyahu said his visit has four goals: continuing the political struggle to deny Iran a nuclear weapon; advancing the “peace process”; recruiting investors in Israel’s technology market; and encouraging tourism to Israel.

Netanyahu is expected to be a guest of honor at the AIPAC conference, to be held March 2-4 in Washington, DC.

EXCLUSIVE

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has issued a series of new demands during the latest round of negotiations with the Palestinian leadership.

In a leaked memo, Netanyahu has demanded that the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a legitimate independent State within secure borders, and that both parties agree to a cessation of hostilities.

“Unless the Palestinians finally recognize the legitimacy of the State of Israel, and our right to live within secure borders, then we will not be agree to give them their Palestinian State”, Netanyahu explains. “Not now, not ever!”

Advisers close to the Prime Minister noted that this demand has already been accepted by the Palestinians.

Yasser Arafat did this in the exchange of letters between himself, Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Norwegian Foreign Minister Johan Jorgen Holst on 9th September 1993.

Furthermore, due to lingering doubts, this recognition of Israel was endorsed by the Palestinian National Council in Gaza,  on 24th April, 1996.

And again in the Wye Memorandum.

And, sure enough, US President Bill Clinton himself attended the PNC central committee meeting in Gaza on 14th December 1998, where the PNC voted in formal recognition (again) of the State of Israel.

Clinton stated: I thank you for your rejection—fully, finally and forever—of the passages in the Palestinian Charter calling for the destruction of Israel. For they were the ideological underpinnings of a struggle renounced at Oslo. By revoking them once and for all, you have sent, I say again, a powerful message not to the government, but to the people of Israel. You will touch people on the street there. You will reach their hearts there.

It is unclear why Netanyahu is again demanding that the Palestinians recognize Israel, when they have done so, repeatedly, and “fully, finally and forever”.

Each time Israel has demanded formal Palestinian recognition, the Palestinians have used this to extract further concrete, strategic concessions from Israel.

Land, arms, sovereignty, money.

According to the leaked memo, this time Netanyahu has added important details to the previous Palestinian statements recognizing the State of Israel.

“This time, I want them to say that they recognize Israel as a JEWISH State.”

Netanyah claims this will change the “narrative” of the Palestinian history, and will be a statement recognizing The State of Israel’s legitimacy “fully, finally and forever”.

“I also want them to recognise me, Benjamin Netanyahu, the democratically elected leader of Israel’s Jewish State as the sole legitimate representative of the Jewish State,” Netanyahu continues.

“But perhaps most importantly, there will never, ever be peace in our region, until the Palestinians formally recognize Israel as the Start-Up Nation.

“Without technology, Israeli technology, the Palestinians will be forever aspiring to third world economic conditions. I want them to say it, clearly, unambiguously, for all the world to hear, and for their own people to hear, fully, finally and forever: “Israel is the Start-Up Nation”.

The memo assures the Palestinian negotiating team that once they issue a formal statement, using the critical words “Start Up Nation”, Israel will recognize the State of Palestine, including “returning” the whole of Judea & Samaria, Gaza, Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and the Coastal Plane to “Legitimate Militarized Palestinian Sovereignty”.

“It will be a quid pro quo” – says Netanyahu.

Visit Tzedek-Tzedek.

This report is a gift from God. While our dubious representatives at the negotiations with the PLO are running around like chickens sand the heads warning about the terrible things that would happen to us if we’re dropped from the EU list of good Jews you can trade with – it’s looking like the entire EU itself is up for a major reupholstering, and maybe, just maybe, some of the folks making the loudest threats will see the inside of a barred cell.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it appears the European Union, the one with the charter on what’s legal and decent, is one of the most corrupt organizations on the planet.

There, I said it.

How corrupt id the European Union? Cecilia Malmstrom, the European commissioner for home affairs, says it’s losing at least 120 billion euros a year to corruption.

The EU Anti-Corruption Report warns that “Corruption seriously harms the economy and society as a whole. Many countries around the world suffer from deep-rooted corruption that hampers economic development, undermines democracy, and damages social justice and the rule of law. The Member States of the EU are not immune to this reality.”

Malmstrom said the commission’s estimate that corruption costs Europe €120 billion, or roughly $162 billion, annually was almost certainly too conservative. The figure is equivalent to about 1 percent of the €11.7 trillion gross domestic product of the 28-nation European Union.

Are you not surprised? Me neither. The intro to the report continues: “Corruption varies in nature and extent from one country to another, but it affects all Member States. It impinges on good governance, sound management of public money, and competitive markets. In extreme cases, it undermines the trust of citizens in democratic institutions and processes.”

You know what this means, right? It means that every decision, every effort, every suggestion coming out of the EU is suspected of having a hidden agenda, and a nefarious one at that.

Do you want these people helping us strike a peace deal with our neighbors?

Most Businesses believe EU corruption is widespread and that the only way to succeed in business is through political connections and almost half of the companies doing business in Europe say corruption is a problem for them.

“In a time of appalling economic and financial crisis, recovering for the legal economy the money deviated by defrauders is of utmost importance; those funds are very much needed to foster growth and jobs,” said Spain’s Juan Fernando López Aguilar, who chairs the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee.

Someone should tell Aguilar that almost all firms in Greece, Spain and Italy believe corruption is widespread.

Construction companies, which often tender for government contracts, are the most affected. Almost eight in ten of those questioned had complaints about corruption. The NY Times reported that a 2013 study for European Union anti-fraud authorities described a case in which an unnamed government entity invited companies to bid on a contract to build two buildings. The winning bid was €600,000, even though other companies had offered to do the work for €400,000.

Somebody pocketed that €200,000.

So, I say, don’t buy stuff from these people, you just don’t know where it’s been. Boycott the European Union because they’re gonnifs.

The key findings at European level are:

• The majority (76%) of Europeans think that corruption is widespread in their own country.
• Countries where respondents are most likely to think so are: Greece (99%), Italy (97%), Lithuania, Spain and the Czech Republic (all 95%), Croatia (94%), Romania (93%), Slovenia (91%), Portugal and Slovakia (both 90%). The Nordic countries are the only Member States where the majority think corruption is rare – Denmark (75%), Finland (64%) and Sweden (54%).
• More than half of Europeans (56%) think the level of corruption in their country has increased over the past three years (a surge compared to a previous study in 2011, when 47% perceived corruption to have risen over the same period of time).
• Spain (77%), Slovenia, the Czech Republic (both 76%), Italy (74%) and Portugal (72%) are amongst countries where respondents are most likely to think corruption has increased.
• 23% of Europeans think that their government’s efforts are effective in tackling corruption; 26% that there are enough successful prosecutions in their country to deter people from corrupt practices.
• 81% of Europeans think that too-close links between business and politics in their country lead to corruption; 69% that favouritism and corruption hinder business competition; 67% that corruption is part of the business culture in their country; and more than half (56%) that the only way to succeed in business in their country is through political connections.
• Around one in twelve Europeans (8%) say they have experienced or witnessed a case of corruption in the past 12 months. Yet only 12% of those who have encountered corruption say that they reported it.
• Respondents are most likely to say they have experienced or witnessed corruption in Lithuania (25 %), Slovakia (21 %) and Poland (16 %) and least likely to do so in Finland and Denmark (3 % in each), Malta and the UK (4 % in each).