Speaking at the Two States for Two Peoples on Two Sides of the Jordan Conference, Mudar Zahran, a Jordanian-Palestinian pro-democracy activist, proclaimed, “When we talk about the situation, we must go back to the Ottoman occupation.” He explained that the Faisal-Wiesel Agreement of 1919 designated 77 percent of historic Palestine  to the Arabs, and that the remainder  was to become a Jewish state. He explained that by depriving Palestinians of their basic citizenship rights in Jordan, the current Hashemite Kingdom is denying the nation’s very raison d’être, which is to be a state that respects the democratic rights of all its citizens, including the country’s Palestinian majority.

“There was an agreement with the Hashemite to make Jordan the homeland of the Arabs. The Hashemites didn’t keep the promise,” Zahran proclaimed. “After 46 years, we are refugees.” Zahran said that most of the Palestinians living in Judea and Samaria have Jordanian passports, yet are prevented from exercising citizenship rights in Jordan. He noted that it is very difficult for Palestinians living in Jordan to do basic things, such as register the births of their children and get a driver’s license, explaining, “Hamas members have more rights in Israel than I have in my country.”

Zahran stated that if Jordan respects the human rights of its Palestinian citizens and offers Palestinians living across the world Jordanian citizenship, the Palestinian refugee crisis could be solved and a two-state solution that doesn’t jeopardize Israeli security could come into fruition. Israel could hold onto all of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as well as Jerusalem, while stateless Palestinians across the globe could make their home in Jordan. He views the Arab Spring as a catalyst for genuine peace between Israel and the Arab world.

Zahran stated that the Palestinian community in Jordan isn’t extreme and should they succeed in their revolution, they want to focus their emphasis not on building a strong army to destroy Israel, but on eradicating poverty. “We realize that we tried to destroy Israel twice and failed both times,” he said.

Zahran doesn’t believe the prospects for peace will be good if Israel continues to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority, which will “only bring about more violence.”  Zahran asserted that the Palestinian Authority is unstable and that once the elderly PA leader Mahmoud Abbas steps down he will have no replacement. Zahran expressed that Israel should be looking for alternative solutions to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and claimed that Jordan’s Hashemite dynasty is rapidly declining, with the Jordanian king himself predicting his own fall from power within the year. Without the Hashemite dynasty as a “buffer zone” between Israel and the pro-Iranian axis, Israel will clearly need a plan b.

Zahran stated that the Muslim Brotherhood is not popular in Jordan but has excellent media access and financial support. Zahran emphasized that it will be very difficult for the popular secular community in Jordan to win democratic elections without support from “all of those who care about peace in the Middle East.” If secular factions are succesful, Zahran envisions a Jordanian state for all its citizens that will solve the Palestinian refugee crisis and seek peace with Israel.

Currently, Zahran is more concerned that without the West’s support for secular freedom and democracy, Jordan will become “Hamas-stine” rather than Palestine. Furthermore, Zahran added that he could not help but admire the freedom and technological advancement in Israel, stating that someday he hoped his country would become like Israel.

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Jordanian Prime Minister Abdalla Ensour and his cabinet approved a new plan to trade water with Israel.  In a new Red Sea desalination project expected to cost $1 billion, Jordan will sell part of the resulting water to Israel in exchange for water from the Tiberias reservoir.

Middle East countries are known to face chronic water shortages.

“We will sell Israel water at a rate of JD1 per cubic metre and buy from them at a rate of JD0.3 per cubic metre. This process will save us the effort and cost of conveying water from the south to the northern governorates,” Ensour said, the Jordan Times reported.

According to Jordanian Minister of Water and Irrigation Hazem Nasser, the agreement is legal based on Article 2 of the peace treaty signed with Israel in 1994, and is of “strategic national interest” to Jordan.

The Israeli government issued an unequivocal travel advisory on Monday warning Israelis to avoid visiting Turkey, a popular vacation destination for Israelis over the summer and during the upcoming Jewish holidays, Israel Hayom reported.

The Prime Minister’s Office issued its routine semi-annual travel warning, formulated by the office’s Counterterrorism Bureau, stating that all non-essential visits to Turkey “should be avoided.”

The threat issuing from Turkey is defined as an “ongoing potential threat,” a mid-level threat on the bureau’s five-level scale. Turkey is now on the same threat level as countries where jihadi terror cells are known to be operating, including Nigeria, Kenya and Azerbaijan.

The travel warning is for the upcoming Jewish holidays in September. So far, over the summer months of July and August, tens of thousands of Israelis have visited Turkey.

The Counterterrorism Bureau also recommended that Israelis avoid visiting the two countries with which Israel shares a border and a peace agreement: Egypt and Jordan. In those two countries, the threat facing Israelis was defined as a “basic concrete threat,” one level higher than the threat facing Israelis in Turkey. For Morocco, another popular destination for Israelis, an “ongoing potential threat” warning was issued.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has finally discovered that Israel is a sucker for a pat on the head and has admitted that the Israeli-Palestinian Authority conflict has been so dominant that it has caused Israel to have “suffered from bias and sometimes even discrimination.”

His earth-shaking confession in a speech at an Israeli college scored big points in headlines. He even said that Israel actually should be treated as an equal to all other countries in the undistinguished body.

Isn’t that great news?

That is just the kind of ego booster that makes so many Israelis feel really proud to be an Israeli. More important for U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, it is ammunition for President Barack Obama’s personal Jewish lobby to use to convince Israel that it really is worth to shrink the country back to the tiny strip that existed until seven Arab nations circled the Jewish wagons in 1967.

The United Nations no longer is berating Israel. It now is stroking it with a soothing massage before sticking the goodwill knife in the back.

After Ban Ki-moon removed any concerns that the international body might be a just a smidgen anti-Israel, he jumped on the illusion that the Palestinian Authority and Israel have resumed “direct talks” to declare, “I have never been this optimistic.”

The “direct talks” are a stage show mediated by the United States.

But The U.N. chief insists, “This time, I expect real peace. The Israeli and Palestinian people are neighbors and have no choice but to live in harmony and peace, side by side.”

Of course, that is exactly what they were doing from 1967 until Yasser Arafat came along. Egypt treated Arabs in Gaza with malign neglect before then, and Jordan did nothing to advance to social, education and economic standing of Arabs in Judea and Samaria.

Along came Israel, and the level of education, standard of living reached unprecedented levels for the Arabs, who been living third-world lives.

The along came Yasser Arafat, who promised them a nation,and even provided the terrorists to hurry along the process while manufacturing the concept of a Palestinian people, which never existed and still does not exists

The United Nations has played a major part on the assembly line, creating 5 million “Palestinians” by changing the status of “refugee,” as it used in every other place in the world, to include offspring as “Palestinian refugees,” even if they are third and fourth-generation Syrian, Lebanese and Jordanians.

That is how the grandniece – not even the great grandchild, mind you – of an Arab  who once lived west of Jerusalem in what is now the Jewish community of Zecharia, had the audacity to tell the Christian Science Monitor Sunday,  ”I am from Zakaria [sic], not Dhaishe, and to anyone who asks me where I’m from I answer Zakaria. “ This is the village of my grandparents [sic] and we are hoping to return back to it. This is our right and our dream…This is a question of justice and dignity.”

That is why Ban Ki-moon is being so nice to Israel, which he wants to change from a state of Jews to one of Good Samaritans.

It is a gimmick that has worked time and time again. Israel was loved by the entire world for kicking 9,000 Jews out of Gaza in 2005 and withdrawing every IDF soldier and intelligence officer.

Hamas also loved Israel, and thanked it by attacking half of the country with missiles and rockets until this very day.

When Ehud Barack, arguably Israel’s worst-ever prime minister, gave up the security zone in southern Lebanon and hastily withdrew the IDF in 2000, Israel bathed in praised. Hezbollah exploited the power vacuum and Israel’s relaxing under the glowing sun of praise  to attack the other half of Israel with nearly 4,000 missiles in 2006, but that does not matter.

And the world really patted Israel’s shoulders until they were too sore to move for being so Christian as to turn the other cheek and free terrorists time and time again. So what if only a few hundred out of several thousand returned to terror and killed several hundred Israelis?

The important thing is that the world applauded Israel and Ban Ki-moon will continue to do so – until the very end.

There’s a real dangerous emergency situation going on in Egypt.  It started with the “Arab Spring” there not long ago which was celebrated by United States President Obama and other Leftist peace groupies.

 At least 15 people are reported to have been killed as Egyptian security forces moved in to clear two protest camps occupied by supporters of deposed president Mohammed Morsi in Cairo. But the Muslim Brotherhood, which backs the protests, put the number of casualties much higher. Bursts of gunfire were heard and armoured bulldozers moved in. Security forces fired tear gas. BBC

Poets love to describe “spring” as the sweet smell of flowers and freshly cut grass in the spring, but this spring smells more like the sickly stink of a lot of broken bottles of cheap perfume in a closed space. There has been a lot of blood spilled, too.

Looking back at Obama’s speech:

The comments came in Obama’s most comprehensive response to date to the uprisings sweeping the Arab world. Speaking at the State Department, he called for the first time for the leader of Syria to embrace democracy or move aside, though without specifically demanding his ouster. As he addressed audiences abroad and at home, Obama sought to leave no doubt that the U.S. stands behind the protesters who have swelled from nation to nation across the Middle East and North Africa, while also trying to convince American viewers that U.S. involvement in unstable countries halfway around the world is in their interest, too. Obama said the United States has a historic opportunity and the responsibility to support the rights of people clamoring for freedoms, and he called for “a new chapter in American diplomacy.” “We know that our own future is bound to this region by the forces of economics and security; history and faith,” the president said. He hailed the killing of al-Qaida terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and declared that bin Laden’s vision of destruction was fading even before U.S. forces shot him dead. Obama said the “shouts of human dignity are being heard across the region.” The president noted that two leaders had stepped down – referring to Egypt and Tunisia – and said that “more may follow.” He quoted civilian protesters who have pushed for change in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen but noted that among those nations, only Egypt has seen the departure of a long-ruling autocratic leader.

If Israel has any questions, as it should, about American expertise in understanding the Arab mentality and culture of “democracy,” it should just consult with Egypt’s Morsi.

As of just a few extremely short years ago, Egypt was a bastion of stability in the Arab world.  That’s  why many Israeli politicians of the Right and Left agreed that PM Menachem Begin had done the right thing to give the Sinai to Egypt.  I davka disagree with them, as does Caroline Glick.

As the intervening 32 years since the treaty was signed have shown, in essence, the deal was nothing more than a ceasefire. Israel surrendered the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and in exchange, Egypt has not staged a military attack against Israel from its territory.

The peace treaty’s critics maintain that the price Israel paid was too high and so the treaty was unjustified. They also argue that Israel set a horrible precedent for future negotiations with its neighbors by ceding the entire Sinai in exchange for the treaty. Moreover, they note that Palestinian autonomy agreement in the treaty was a terrible deal. And it set the framework for the disastrous Oslo peace process with the PLO 15 years later.

For their part, supporters of the treaty claim that the precedent it set was terrific for Israel. The treaty cites the borders of the Palestine Mandate as Israel’s legal borders. And since the Mandate envisioned a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan River, at a minimum the peace treaty sets a precedent for a future annexation of the west bank of the Jordan. -Caroline Glick

But with the explosive situation in Egypt, things can get much worse once a ruler decides to distract the people from their own problems.

Considering that the American brokered “peace sic plan” hinges on the reliability and stability of an Arab terror state that doesn’t exist, and the precedent of a treaty that is on the verge of collapse, I think we should cut our losses and get on with building our country, the State of Israel.

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Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey landed in Israel Monday afternoon to begin talks with Israel and later with Jordan, where American troops are stationed.

Syria will top his agenda in Jordan, which has been flooded by Syrian refugees and where there has been a spillover in fighting in the Syrian civil war.

In Israel, Gen. Dempsey will meet with IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, with the Iranian nuclear program and instability in Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula high on the agenda.

Dempsey arrived immediately after U.S. Air Force Gen. Mark A. Welsh was in Israel for a secret four-day visit, which the United States had asked not be reported until it concluded.

On Tisha B’Av Prime Minister Netanyahu dramatically declared that Israel would not allow foreigners to interfere with our borders. This may have sounded like good news to local ears, but on the very same day the prime minister contradicted his own policy.

On the morning of Tisha B’Av, hundreds of Jews, among them three Knesset members, attempted to enter the Temple Mount – but were denied access. The next day Deputy Foreign Minister Ze’ev Elkin made a second attempt to enter the Mount but was turned away. When MK Yariv Levin asked about this fiasco in the Knesset plenum, Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovich answered, as usual, that there is no policy change regarding the Mount and that anyone who wishes to enter can do so. He said that Jewish visitors enter the Mount every day with no problem and that the closure of the Mount to visitors (including Knesset members) was the security decision of the local commander.

Aharonovich knowingly lied to the Knesset. Everyone involved with the Temple Mount issue knows that since Netanyahu acquiesced to the demands of the Muslim wakf and denied me access to the Temple Mount, police control of the holy site has rapidly deteriorated. The Temple Mount has become a staging ground for a vicious struggle, with cries of “kill the Jews!” becoming routine there. Jews are consistently distanced from the Mount and Israel’s police project unprecedented spinelessness, fear and defeatism in the face of the burgeoning brazenness of the Muslim wakf.

Israeli police have all the means at their disposal – if they choose to use it – to disperse the Arab rioters within minutes and to make it possible for the Jews to visit their holiest site. But, as it is wont to do, Israel’s police adopted the role of security fig leaf for the prime minister, who is giving the holy Mount’s sovereignty to Jordan and the Muslim wakf – while talking mightily about not allowing foreigners to interfere in Israel’s sovereignty.

Aharonovich claimed that the Mount was closed, due to security considerations, as per the decision of the local commander. But there is a truly reliable side to this story contrary to his version of events. Here is the relevant part of the Jordan News Agency’s July 16 report from Ramallah:

Israeli Police Prevent Jewish Extremists From Entering Al-Aqsa Compound Due To Demand By Jordan

Following the pressure exerted by [the] Jordanian government on the Israeli authorities, the Israeli police on Tuesday closed the Mughrabi Gate, one of Al-Aqsa Mosque’s doors, and prevented Jewish extremists from entering it.

Director of the Islamic Waqf in occupied Jerusalem, Sheikh Azzam Al-Khatib, told Petra [News] that the Israeli police closed the gate and prevented extremists and foreign tourists from entering Al-Aqsa compound today, “the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple,” after Jordanian pressure and intervention by the Department of Islamic Waqf and [the] Jordanian ambassador in Tel Aviv, Walid Obeidat.

He confirmed that the ban came as a result of the intensive communications undertaken by Jordan to prevent the desecration of Al-Aqsa during the holy month of Ramadan. Al-Khatib praised the vital Jordanian role in protecting Jerusalem and the holy sites.

This report, verified by additional sources, is nothing new. The prime minister has used the police, the attorney general’s office and the courts before in his quest to implement a political decision when wanting to cede sovereignty on the Temple Mount to the Muslims. And he’s done this without the Knesset’s authorization. This is how issues surrounding the Temple Mount have been disposed of since it was liberated. Netanyahu has simply expanded the practice.

The capitulation on the Temple Mount leads to the construction halt in Jerusalem. In other words, the organs close to the heart become infected with the same illness: the loss of sovereignty syndrome. In this manner, our existential legitimacy in the entire land is crumbling before our eyes.

What do we expect of the European Union? After all, for 46 years we have been saying that the land of Israel is theirs – not ours. We hurried to give the heart of Jerusalem and the nation, the Temple Mount, to the Muslim wakf. We refused to declare Israel’s sovereignty in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. We recognized another, conveniently invented “nation” as indigenous to the land, recognized its terrorist liberation movement, and armed it with Israeli weapons. We vowed to retreat so as to enable the establishment of a state for this make-believe “nation” in the heart of biblical Israel. We expelled and destroyed entire Jewish communities. We committed ourselves to the two-state principle.

But over the past 20 years not one of our leaders, at any level, has said that this is our land – no ifs, ands, or buts. This straightforward phrase simply does not exist in the lexicon of Israel’s political and military leadership.

So why are we surprised that the Europeans are tired of this entire subject? It took them 46 years to be convinced that we are serious that this really is not our land, that we are nothing more than foreign conquerors in Palestine. Perhaps the Arabs are not nice, they think, but they are very, very right on this issue. After all, Israel’s political Left and Right have both bowed to their claims and recognized the justice of their cause. Yitzhak Rabin shook the hand of their murderous leader, while Netanyahu hugged him with both his hands. So what can we expect: that after we have admitted that we are the problem, the Europeans will allow us to continue to threaten world peace?

We no longer have anywhere to run from the scales of justice. When you do not put your weight on one side of the scale, the other side is heavier. You can be prettier, nicer, more European – and even a peace seeker. But if you have abandoned your side of the scale, the other side will always win.

We lost the justice of our cause when we gave the Temple Mount to the Muslims. The only way to restore our justice is to remove the Muslim wakf from the Mount and to empower our holiest site as the center of holiness and exclusive sovereignty of Israel.

Excerpts from “Fighting Terrorism”, 2001 Edition, by Benjamin Netanyahu, page 119-120.

Understandably, many Israelis do not want to see that [Gaza] base expanded twenty times to include the West Bank, thereby having an Iranian-influenced Islamic domain hovering over its major cities, and within 10 miles of the sea.

Such a PLO-Hamas state would sooner or later threaten to topple the pro-Western Hashemite regime in Jordan, the majority of whose population is composed of Palestinian Arabs, many of them susceptible to the fundamentalist message.

A Palestinian-Islamic state on the West Bank of the Jordan River might soon expand to the East Bank as well (i.e. the present state of Jordan).

…

Above all, a PLO-Hamas state is likely to eventually deteriorate into a new avatar of the PLO terror state in Lebanon, which was responsible for the exportation of terror far beyond the Middle East…

It might take several years for such a state to reveal its true nature. It might first wish to build up its power, adopting a relative docile outward appearance to continue receiving Western aid and Israeli concessions. But the underlying irredentist and terrorist impulses are at the core of its political ideology and raison d’etre  are unfortunately not likely to disappear.

Even now it is possible to correct the mistakes which the Labor government has made in its efforts to appease Palestinian terror.

Stability may be achieved and terrorism put on the defensive if Israel reassumes responsibility for its own security and asserts a policy of local autonomy for the Palestinian Arabs instead of the independent terror-free zones (editor:  state) now being built.

It will take some time for the rest of the world to understand what many in Israel now know: that far from producing the durable peace all Israelis yearn for, the continued expansion if an armed Palestinian domain is merely a stepping-stone to the eventual escalation of conflict and the continued march of Islamic militancy in the Middle East and beyond.