Category Archives: Lands

Ayatollah Khamenei, backing Iran negotiators, endorses nuclear deal

The New York Times reports: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, voiced support on Saturday for his country’s nuclear deal with world powers while emphasizing that it did not signal an end to Iran’s hostility toward the United States and its allies, especially Israel.

“Their actions in the region are 180 degrees different from ours,” he said.

Speaking after a special prayer marking the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, Mr. Khamenei portrayed the nuclear agreement as a victory for Iran, not least because it does not require the country to completely stop enriching uranium, as some in the West had wanted. The speech appeared to remove a main obstacle to formal approval of the agreement in Iran.

“After 12 years of struggling with the Islamic republic, the result is that they have to bear the turning of thousands of centrifuges in the country,” Mr. Khamenei said, referring to the United States and its five negotiating partners. [Continue reading…]

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Iran is about to open for business

Azadeh Moaveni writes: Mobile phones in Tehran started beeping and buzzing well before Iran’s nuclear agreement with the West was finalized. They carried an important sentiment that couldn’t wait for the niggling details to be ironed out in the talks between Iran, on one side, and China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S. on the other. “Congratulations, the agreement is almost signed! Come dine with us for less,” read the text from a local pizzeria. Discounts and specials celebrating the coming end of the sanctions pinged around the capital.

In the offices of Takhfifan, Iran’s answer to Groupon, staffers interrupted their weekly meeting every 10 minutes to refresh the news on their laptops. “We’re all counting the seconds,” said Nazanin Daneshvar, the site’s founder, hoping “that we’ll get back to a better place after such a long, difficult time.” Daneshvar’s marketing platform is thriving: It boasts a million subscribers who grab daily deals on everything from concert tickets to swimming pool passes. An Iran reopened for global business could eventually bring in Western companies and investors, which might finally mean economic growth of a different scale. A normal scale.

Even normality — the most modest expectation — would be vastly different from the Tehran I last experienced in 2009, before that summer’s Green Movement uprising. Like many dual-national Iranian journalists, I haven’t dared to return since the violent suppression of the protests. (Reporter Jason Rezaian of the Washington Post has been detained on espionage charges for more than a year.) I’ve followed the country through family and friends, most of whom tell the same tale: six years of diminished hopes and sullenness, brought on by global economic ostracism. [Continue reading…]

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WikiLeaks shows a Saudi obsession with Iran

The New York Times reports: For decades, Saudi Arabia has poured billions of its oil dollars into sympathetic Islamic organizations around the world, quietly practicing checkbook diplomacy to advance its agenda.

But a trove of thousands of Saudi documents recently released by WikiLeaks reveals in surprising detail how the government’s goal in recent years was not just to spread its strict version of Sunni Islam — though that was a priority — but also to undermine its primary adversary: Shiite Iran.

The documents from Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry illustrate a near obsession with Iran, with diplomats in Africa, Asia and Europe monitoring Iranian activities in minute detail and top government agencies plotting moves to limit the spread of Shiite Islam. [Continue reading…]

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54 U.S.-trained fighters head into Syria to challenge ISIS

McClatchy reports: They arrived in Toyota Hilux pickup trucks, the favored vehicle of Islamist fighters in the Middle East and South Asia. But these men, the first graduates in the faltering U.S. train-and-equip program, were traveling into Syria to fight against an extremist insurgency, the Islamic State.

The U.S. military calls them the “New Syrian force” and disclosed that they are to coordinate with rebel forces already on the ground who have a different objective – to fight the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The goal, a spokesman said, is to expand the effectiveness of all moderate forces.

Turkish news media said 54 fighters crossed in Sunday in a convoy of 30 vehicles, commanded by an ethnic Turkman colonel who’d defected from the Syrian army. McClatchy obtained photos from an anti-regime activist in Syria that showed the trucks were Toyota Hiluxes. [Continue reading…]

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The Libyan political dialogue: An incomplete consensus

International Crisis Group: The preliminary political agreement that emerged from UN-led talks between Libyan rival factions at a signing ceremony in the Moroccan coastal resort town of Skhirat last week was a critical first step toward ending the Libyan civil war. Yet one side’s refusal to come on board without further amendments to the text potentially makes the agreement stillborn. Under the leadership of UN Special Representative Bernardino León, Libyan, regional and international actors should therefore put all their efforts into reaching a broader consensus on the text before proceeding to the next mileposts on the political roadmap, first and foremost the establishment of a national unity government, as well as security arrangements in Tripoli to support it.

On 11 July 2015, eighteen out of the 22 participants of the UN-facilitated Libyan Political Dialogue signed a preliminary framework agreement in Skhirat, Morocco, that charts a way out of a conflict that has divided Libya into two rival sets of parliaments, governments and military coalitions since July 2014. The Political Dialogue includes four representatives from each parliament – the internationally recognised House of Representatives (HoR) in Tobruk and its predecessor, the General National Congress (GNC) in Tripoli – as well as boycotting members from both sides and a number of independents, mainly former bureaucrats. The GNC delegation stayed away from the final talks in Skhirat and refused to sign the agreement, demanding further changes based on its perception that the text effectively sidelines its camp from the proposed political arrangement. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt ISIS affiliate claims destruction of naval vessel

The New York Times reports: A militant group affiliated with the Islamic State said it destroyed an Egyptian naval vessel on Thursday, posting photographs on social media of a missile exploding in a ball of fire as it slammed into the vessel.

An Egyptian military spokesman said that the crew of the unnamed ship “exchanged fire” with militants off the coast of the northern Sinai Peninsula, causing a fire on board that did not result in any fatalities.

But the militant group, which calls itself Sinai Province, claimed that the missile was guided and had killed everyone on board. [Continue reading…]

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Watchdog blasts Turkey’s record on press freedom

McClatchy reports: Turkey remains the top jailer of journalists in Europe and should “reform the laws criminalizing freedom of expression” as well as the way courts implement those laws, the leading European human rights watchdog said Thursday.

Turkish jails currently hold 21 media representatives, according to the report from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. That number appears to be a significant improvement on 2012, when 95 journalists were being held.

But in addition, “many more journalists and social media users face trials that could result in prison sentences,” said Dunja Mijatovic, the OSCE representative on Freedom of the Media. And many journalists are now on trial – “so many that it would be hard to oversee,” she told McClatchy in a separate interview. [Continue reading…]

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Max Blumenthal: The next Gaza war

We’ve just passed the first “anniversary” — if such a word can even be used with such a catastrophe — of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s third invasion of the Gaza Strip in recent years. That small bit of land has now suffered more devastation than just about any place on the planet. In the wake of the third war since 2008, more than 100,000 displaced Gazans remain homeless or crowded in with relatives. Whole neighborhoods, destroyed in the conflict, have yet to be rebuilt. A year later, there is still next to no electricity, the area’s sole power plant having been taken out by Israeli air strikes, and the situation when it comes to sewage and potable water, is disastrous. Blockaded and devastated by repeated wars, Gaza’s manufacturing sector has almost disappeared, while its economy is “on the verge of collapse,” according to the World Bank. In short, by any standard, Gaza is not a livable place and yet 1.8 million people (more than half of them under 18 years old, 43% under 15) are crammed into it with nowhere to go and in most cases nothing to do. After all, Gaza now has what may be the highest unemployment rate on the planet at 44%, with youth unemployment reaching 60%.

The great Israeli reporter Amira Hass, author of the classic book Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege, recently put the matter this way: “In practice, Gaza has become a huge, let me be blunt, concentration camp… This is not a novelty… This did not start, unlike what many people think, with the rise of Hamas… This policy of sealing off Gaza, of making Gazans into… defacto prisoners, started [in 1991]… So if I want to sum up the reality of Gaza: it is a huge prison… It is an Israel-meditated, pre-meditated, pre-planned, and planned project to separate Gaza from the West Bank.”

Max Blumenthal’s new book, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza, catches the nightmare of the third war in this tiny piece of land in the last six-and-a-half years in a uniquely gripping way. In its pages, you follow him directly into the devastation of the Israeli invasion. (He entered Gaza during the first extended truce of the war.) I doubt there could be a more vivid account of what it felt like, as a Palestinian civilian, to endure those weeks of horror, massive destruction, and killing. Today at TomDispatch, he looks back on that experience and forward to what he doesn’t doubt will be the fourth war of its kind. If he’s right, then sadly, in the years to come, some reporter will be writing yet another book on a Gaza war. Tom Engelhardt

The fire next time
Before homes are even rebuilt in the ruins of the Gaza Strip, another war looms
By Max Blumenthal

“A fourth operation in the Gaza Strip is inevitable, just as a third Lebanon war is inevitable,” declared Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in February. His ominous comments came just days after an anti-tank missile fired by the Lebanon-based guerrilla group Hezbollah killed two soldiers in an Israeli army convoy. It, in turn, was a response to an Israeli air strike that resulted in the assassination of several high-ranking Hezbollah figures.

Lieberman offered his prediction only four months after his government concluded Operation Protective Edge, the third war between Israel and the armed factions of the Gaza Strip, which had managed to reduce about 20% of besieged Gaza to an apocalyptic moonscape. Even before the assault was launched, Gaza was a warehouse for surplus humanity — a 360-square-kilometer ghetto of Palestinian refugees expelled by and excluded from the self-proclaimed Jewish state. For this population, whose members are mostly under the age of 18, the violence has become a life ritual that repeats every year or two. As the first anniversary of Protective Edge passes, Lieberman’s unsettling prophecy appears increasingly likely to come true. Indeed, odds are that the months of relative “quiet” that followed his statement will prove nothing more than an interregnum between Israel’s ever more devastating military escalations.

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Dealing with Iran post-deal

Frederic C. Hof writes: One may see the nuclear agreement with Iran as the product of a faulty premise and still respect the industry of US Secretary of State John Kerry and his team in arriving at respectable terms consistent with that premise. One may see the prospect of a regionally aggressive Iran soon to be flush with cash as alarming and still — given the positions of Washington’s closest allies and the international community in general — counsel Congress to show solidarity with the commander-in-chief. What really matters at this point is that the United States and its partners pivot from their exclusive focus on closing the nuclear deal to address Iranian behavior that makes the battle against the so-called Islamic State (ISIL or ISIS) something between difficult and impossible.

The premise has been that Iran, left to its own devices, will field nuclear weapons, and that a nuclear-armed Iran would be exponentially more dangerous to its neighbors and to the region than it is now. Two years of track two discussions with senior, well-informed Iranian interlocutors have convinced me that this is not the case.

My Iranian interlocutors — hardliners and pragmatists alike — were gratified by Tehran’s accomplishments in Syria and elsewhere, in particular the preservation in Damascus of a regime completely in the service of Iran’s Lebanese militia: Hezbollah. They noted that Iran’s successful intervention in Syria had been accomplished without a nuclear arsenal. They pointed out that having such an arsenal would encourage their enemies to go nuclear. A thoroughly nuclearized region could complicate an aggressive Iranian policy of armed intervention by potentially turning every intervention into a nuclear crisis. [Continue reading…]

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Russia plans fuel shipments to Syria from Crimea

Reuters reports: Russia plans to supply Syria with 200,000 tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) per year via the Crimean port of Kerch, two trading sources told Reuters.

The plans are a further sign of cooperation between the two countries despite hopes in the West that Russia might stop shielding President Bashar al-Assad from pressure to step aside.

Moscow had been shipping significantly lower volumes of LPG to Syria via Kerch before Russia annexed the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine in March 2014.

The United States and the European Union, which say the seizure of Crimea violates international law, have imposed sanctions on individuals and business in Crimea, which include restrictions on use of the Kerch port. [Continue reading…]

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‘I’m not a butcher’: An interview with ISIS’s architect of death

Der Spiegel reports: The heavy gate slowly opened, but only after the guards had called in to headquarters to confirm the identity of the SPIEGEL team and its 10 p.m. appointment. Inside was an obstacle course of four-meter-high concrete walls with Humvees, equipped with mounted machine guns, parked at two different corners. Only then did the actual prison gate appear.

The high-security facility is in Baghdad, but its name and exact location cannot be revealed. These were the conditions for an interview with its most prominent inmate: a gaunt man in his late 30s known by his nom de guerre, Abu Abdullah. For one and a half years, he was the head logistician for suicide attacks carried out by Islamic State in Baghdad. Abu Abdullah is one of the few Islamic State leaders to have been taken into custody alive. Most either blow themselves up or swallow the capsules of poison many of them carry so as to avoid capture. Or they die in a firefight. Being captured alive is not part of the terror group’s concept.

But Abu Abdullah was overpowered so quickly that he had no time to kill himself. He had been under surveillance for some time before he was arrested in late July 2014, and his bomb factory, camouflaged as an automotive garage, was taken intact by the authorities. Surprisingly, the man himself is also talking from prison.

His name repeatedly surfaced during months of research into the leadership structure of Islamic State. Furthermore, investigators from the Iraqi police, the secret service of the Interior Ministry and other officials all provided details from his testimony to SPIEGEL.

Those fragments were consistent with the image of Islamic State as an organization in which responsibilities are divided, and even sealed off internally. People only know as much about its operations as they need to — like numerous small gears on a piece of machinery that can immediately be replaced when they break. Even if they wanted to, most Islamic State members can provide but little information about its overall structure. Abu Abdullah, though, occupied a key position in Baghdad, one vital for the ongoing terror attacks in the city. He was the one who chose the locations for the attacks, who equipped the suicide bombers and who accompanied them up until shortly before their detonation. [Continue reading…]

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Wall Street’s role in Greece’s debt crisis

Chris Arnade writes: One of the first lessons I was taught on Wall Street was, “Know who the fool is.” That was the gist of it. The more detailed description, yelled at me repeatedly was, “Know who the fucking idiot with the money is and cram as much toxic shit down their throat as they can take. But be nice to them first.”

When I joined in Salomon Brothers in ‘93, Japanese customers (mostly smaller banks and large industrial companies) were considered the fool. My first five years were spent constructing complex financial products, ones with huge profit margins for us — “toxic waste” in Wall Street lingo — to sell to them. By the turn of the century many of those customers had collapsed, partly from the toxic waste we sold them, partly from all the other crazy things they were buying.

The launch of the common European currency, the euro, ushered in a period of European financial confidence, and we on Wall Street started to take advantage of another willing fool: European banks. More precisely northern European banks. [Continue reading…]

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Greek parliament passes debt agreement, but European democracy is on its knees

By Jonathan Hopkin, London School of Economics and Political Science

Almost as soon as the Greek deal was agreed, it began to come apart at the seams. Passage of the necessary legislation through the Greek parliament led to Syriza splitting in two as Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, drew on the votes of the right to force through a deal which is worse than anything that was on offer before the referendum on July 5.

Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, revealed that many in the German government actually want Greece to leave the euro, effectively admitting that the deal was deliberately designed to be as tough as possible to force Tsipras to reject it. The deal’s passage through the German parliament will not be straightforward, and Finnish politicians have also expressed deep scepticism.

Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been engaging in a propaganda battle against its European partners in the Troika, leaking a memorandum in which it argues that Greece’s debt is unsustainable and implying that the agreement will fail.

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Greece leaving euro seen costlier than write-off

Bloomberg reports: The hardliners who reject a Greek debt writedown to keep it in the euro are willing to pay much more to drive it out.

A “Grexit” would cost creditors almost 100 billion euros ($110 billion) more than keeping Greece in the currency union, reckons Alberto Gallo, head of macro credit research at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc. Zsolt Darvas at the Bruegel institute estimates that about 75 percent of the debt would not be paid to creditors following the return of the drachma.

“What this tells you is that policy makers are following politics instead of rational economics,” Gallo said. [Continue reading…]

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Israeli special forces assassinated senior Syrian official in 2008

The Intercept reports: On Aug. 1, 2008, a small team of Israeli commandos entered the waters near Tartus, Syria, and shot and killed a Syrian general as he was holding a dinner party at his seaside weekend home. Muhammad Suleiman, a top aide to the Syrian president, was shot in the head and neck, and the Israeli military team escaped by sea.

While Israel has never spoken about its involvement, secret U.S. intelligence files confirm that Israeli special operations forces assassinated the general while he vacationed at his luxury villa on the Syrian coast.

The internal National Security Agency document, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, is the first official confirmation that the assassination of Suleiman was an Israeli military operation, and ends speculation that an internal dispute within the Syrian government led to his death. [Continue reading…]

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What does the Iran deal mean for Syria?

Aron Lund writes: In the conspiratorial world of Syrian politics, speculation is rife about secret “Syria clauses” in the deal. The opposition fears an under-the-table deal benefiting Iran and Assad, while government supporters are afraid that Iran will now move to improve its relations with the West by sacrificing Assad. Neither seems very likely and negotiators are probably correct when they claim that the Vienna process focused exclusively on the nuclear issue. But it is no secret that there are those on both sides who would like to see a more comprehensive rapprochement, or at least improved coordination in the struggle against the extremists of the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

With the nuclear deal now signed and perhaps secure, there is suddenly room for new talks to begin. Or if they are already secretly under way, such parallel diplomatic tracks can be accelerated without fear of upsetting the nuclear talks. Whatever happens, Iraq and Syria will be top concerns for all involved, although the former may make for more fruitful discussions than the latter.

In pushing so hard for the nuclear deal, Barack Obama has seemingly wagered that some combination of trade and talks will be more successful at incentivizing U.S.-friendly Iranian politics than the isolation and military threats of the past decades. Whether he is right or wrong, it is not an unreasonable assumption. For Assad, too, today’s celebration must therefore be tinged with quiet concern over how an improvement in Iranian-Western relations might affect Tehran’s political priorities in coming years. A historic achievement this may well have been, but history has a way of unfolding at its own pace and in its own ways. [Continue reading…]

Rasha Elass writes: President Bashar al Assad appears heartened by the Iran nuclear deal, presuming that Tehran will continue to be his main backer. Many analysts say Assad would not have survived this long without Iran’s support, and would quickly falter without it.

Assad may be right, but not entirely.

While it is true that Iran will not abandon its hegemony over Syria, a hegemony that has grown to unprecedented levels in government-controlled areas from Damascus to Syria’s coastline, there is a flip side to this equation.

Bolstering Assad has become expensive for Iran, which has injected billions of dollars into Damascus, and has sent military and security personnel to aid Assad’s military operations in Syria. While it is difficult to know exact numbers, Iran has been public about the hundreds of casualties it is enduring in Syria so far, a cost that many Iranians may find pointless.

With Iran coming in from the cold, there might be political capital to be harvested if Tehran emerged as a real broker to a resolution in Syria.

One way of doing this is to keep the Assad regime somewhat in tact, but without Assad himself. For months, some Syrian opposition members have been floating this idea as well, preferring it as a way of moving forward while avoiding a post-Saddam scenario, when the US dismantled the military and the entire government in Baghdad. It is a workable solution if Syrian opposition is well represented in the new, transitional government. Iran may also prefer this solution because it puts an end to a seemingly endless war, yet it maintains Tehran’s leverage over Damascus.

Already Turkey is calling on Iran to step up to this challenge. [Continue reading…]

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Iran deal viewed through the prism of Shiite history

Mohamad Bazzi writes: In early July, as his negotiators were working around the clock in Vienna to reach an agreement with world powers on limiting Iran’s nuclear program, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was back in Tehran recalling an event that happened nearly 1,400 years ago. In a speech, Rouhani invoked the historic compromise made in the year 661 by his namesake, Imam Hassan, Shiism’s second imam, to step down and prevent a new war between the then-emerging Sunni and Shiite sects. “Imam Hassan made an important decision during difficult circumstances that could have destroyed the Muslim community,” Rouhani said, “and led to a long period of bloodshed.”

Rouhani wasn’t alone in citing Imam Hassan’s legacy. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who has final say in all political and national security matters — also began to invoke the imam in setting the stage for Tuesday’s compromise, calling it a policy of “heroic flexibility.” By repeating this term several times, Khamenei reached back into Shiite history to offer theological rationales for the prospect of a rapprochement with Iran’s Western adversaries.

It is striking that, throughout the past 12 years of on-and-off negotiations with the West over Tehran’s nuclear program, Iranian leaders have used references to Imam Hassan and his younger brother Imam Hussein — and the two historical models for settling conflicts that these figures represent — to signal their intentions, both hardline and soft, and provide theological justifications for their actions. Hassan’s path emphasizes compromise (or, to its hardline critics, accommodation), while Hussein chose rebellion and martyrdom. These two trends defined Shiite history — and they are an important part of the religious and ideological debates within the Iranian regime. [Continue reading…]

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Shakedown: Israeli opposition leader heads to Washington to ‘demand’ more money and weapons

The Jerusalem Post reports: Amid news of the nuclear deal reached between Iran and the P5+1 group of world powers, opposition leader Isaac Herzog (Zionist Union) announced Tuesday that he will be leaving for the US in the coming days to “demand a dramatic package of security measures for Israel.”

Voicing his disappointment over the deal, Herzog noted that a country that “funds, trains and nurtures terrorist organizations,” was both detrimental to Israel and to its future.

“With regard to security, I am more extreme than Netanyahu,” Herzog remarked. “In light of the situation, we must do everything within our power to improve our security,” he said. [Continue reading…]

The Times of Israel reports on the response from another opposition leader: Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid said Wednesday the Iran deal was the country’s biggest foreign policy failure ever.

“We stand today facing the greatest foreign policy failure by any Israeli prime minister since the establishment of the state,” Lapid told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. “Netanyahu] is not [former British prime minister Winston] Churchill before the Second World War, he is [former Israeli prime minister] Golda [Meir] after the Yom Kippur War.”

The 1973 war, in which Israel was surprised by several Arab armies and needed urgent US airlifts of weapons, is considered one of the greatest strategic fiascoes in the history of the country. Then-prime minister Meir resigned in the wake of a commission of inquiry that analyzed Israel’s failure to see the war coming.

Lapid said that he would defend Israel to the world but added that a better agreement could have been reached:

“To the outside world, in English, we will support the government and explain to the whole world how dangerous this agreement is, and I have been doing this since yesterday,” he said. “But inside, in Hebrew, let’s face it – the prime minister failed in reaching a different agreement […] we could have had a deal in which the main issue is that of inspection. Sanctions could have been removed based on milestones [reached] and not according to a schedule, and then the deal would be different,” he said.

Lapid said Netanyahu has decimated Israel’s foreign relations: “Until yesterday the entire world was convinced the US and Israel always walk hand in hand. As of yesterday [the world] learned that the US will no longer listen to the prime minister, the Europeans won’t listen to the prime minister, the Chinese, the Russians, the Democrats [in the US], and he left scorched earth in Israel’s foreign relations. [Netanyahu] needs to go home after a failure of such colossal proportions. The prime minister cannot remain in office.” [Continue reading…]

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