Israeli military exports this year could decline to just 53% of their level in 2012 and “less desire for Israeli-made products” is a key factor, according to a letter from Israel’s four largest military companies.

Industry leaders are warning that military exports have steadily fallen since they reached $7.5bn in 2012. Sales in 2014 decline to $5.5bn and could drop to as low as $4bn this year, according to media reports about the letter.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has been running highly visible campaigns against military trade with Israel that have seen 12 banks and pension funds exclude Israeli arms company Elbit Systems from their investment portfolio. Israeli owned arms factories have been blockaded, and a growing number of political parties and trade unions have called for an end to military ties with Israel.

The governments of Norway and Turkey have both announced military embargo policies against Israel in recent years.

“I think it’s the center of Israeli sovereignty, the capital of Israel, the holiest place for the Jewish people,” Likud lawmaker and Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely said in an interview with the Knesset channel. “It’s my dream to see the Israeli flag flying on the Temple Mount."

Some have now called for Hotovely’s resignation. One Israeli leader said that she was “messianic” and threatening a holy war.

Next, there’s the video below, featuring prominent Israelis, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s minister of Agriculture, calling for the replacement of the Dome of the Rock with the third temple. The video is two years old but was linked in an article two days ago in Haaretz by Dan Caspi on the 20th anniversary of Rabin’s assassination. The piece and the video are in Hebrew. But you can see the temple’s planned outline in blue in the video; and Cantor Michael Davis sent along a summary and partial translations:

They use slick interactive graphics to imagine destroying the Muslim shrine in order to build a Jewish temple. The first speaker is Member of Knesset and Minister of Agriculture Uri Uriel. The second is Avshalom Kor who is a state radio personality – supposedly, as apolitical as you can get. The third is an archaeologist. It seems to me that, in light of the mainstreaming of the Jewish claims on the Haram el Sharif, this is very relevant right now. It used to be just a fringe group who talked about this. But Avshalom Kor is respectable. This production is slick.

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.682374?date=1445899669786

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that although he doesn't want a binational state, "at this time we need to control all of the territory for the foreseeable future."

MKs who took part in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting — where the prime minister spoke — told Haaretz that Netanyahu turned to the politicians and said, hinting at the anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination: "These days, there is talk about what would happen if this or that person would have remained. It's irrelevant; there are movements here of religion and Islam that have nothing to do with us." Netanyahu then turned to opposition MKs and said: "You think there is a magic wand here, but I disagree. I'm asked if we will forever live by the sword — yes."

Habayit Hayehudi MK Betzalel Smotrich asked Netanyahu: "Why do you even talk to (Palestinian President Mahmoud) Abbas? Why pull the world's leg?" Netanyahu responded by saying that Israel "is not talking to bin Laden or ISIS, but I will talk to whoever isn't calling for our destruction."

Netanyahu said that contrary to what many of his colleagues on the right are saying, he is ready for territorial concessions. He added, however, that the problem is that the other side is unwilling to go down that path. "Half of the Palestinians are ruled by extreme Islam that wants to destroy us; if there were elections tomorrow, Hamas would win."

Such sentiment has led to incidents like the death in East Jerusalem of Fadi Alloun, suspected of a knife attack but shot by police as they had him surrounded. Sometimes, it backfires: This month, a Jewish vigilante near Haifa stabbed a fellow Israeli Jew who he thought was an Arab. Late Wednesday, soldiers killed an Israeli Jew whom they mistook for a Palestinian attacker.

The low point (so far) was last Sunday night’s lynching of 29-year-old Eritrean asylum seeker Haftom Zarhum, mistakenly identified as a perpetrator of a terrorist attack in Beersheba. Zarhum was shot by a security guard then beaten to death by a mob of passers-by in a predictable response to the incitement from our own politicians to kill as revenge. And the increasingly intolerant, boiling, racist tone of the Israeli conversation is — there is no other way to put this — a result of 48 years of occupying another people: of Israelis receiving a message (or at least understanding it as such) that we are superior to others, that we control the fate of those lesser others, that we are allowed to disregard laws and any basic notions of human morality with regard to Palestinians.

The cumulative effect of this recent mindless violence is hugely disturbing. We seem to be in a fast and alarming downward swirl into a savage, unrepairable society. There is only one way to respond to what’s happening in Israel today: We must stop the occupation. Not for peace with the Palestinians or for their sake (though they have surely suffered at our hands for too long). Not for some vision of an idyllic Middle East — those arguments will never end, because neither side will ever budge, or ever be proved wrong by anything. No, we must stop the occupation for ourselves. So that we can look ourselves in the eyes. So that we can legitimately ask for, and receive, support from the world. So that we can return to being human.

Whatever the consequences are, they can’t be worse than what we are now grappling with. No matter how many soldiers we put in the West Bank, or how many houses of terrorists we blow up, or how many stone-throwers we arrest, we don’t have any sense of security; meanwhile, we have become diplomatically isolated, perceived around the world (sometimes correctly) as executioners, liars, racists. As long as the occupation lasts, we are the more powerful side, so we call the shots, and we cannot go on blaming others. For our own sake, for our sanity — we must stop now.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/middle-east/21875-israeli-self-inflicted-hate

Haftom Zarhum, a 29-year-old Eritrean, was lynched by Jewish Israelis simply because he looked different. After being shot in the legs, a mob circled him like hyenas over a bleeding prey throwing a bench over his head and chanting the unofficial Zionist’s anthem of hate: “Death to Arabs, Arabs out!” and “Am Israel Hai”.

Disowning culpability and playing the traditional victim, Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nashon blamed the incident on the “terrible situation we are in.”

At a similar scene, a week earlier, a video showed a despondent Palestinian child lying in a pool of blood. A puzzled appearance engulfed the child’s face as he gazed at a Jewish racist who was screaming “Die, you son of a whore, die.”

Had Mr Zarhum been an innocent Palestinian bystander, it would have been a different story. Of the approximately 50 Palestinians, who were murdered by the Israeli army, police or Jewish vigilante in the last three weeks, at least 20 were allegedly threatening Israeli life.

http://972mag.com/the-real-problem-with-netanyahus-mufti-speech/113138/

By calling the Palestinians Nazis, the Israeli prime minister was saying they can never be negotiated with — that Israel must fight them to the bloody end.

Despite the festival of mockery taking place on social media, Benjamin Netanyahu clearly does not believe that Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini is more responsible than Hitler for the Holocaust. (Although that is exactly what the prime minister said in his speech at the World Zionist Conference on Tuesday.) Netanyahu is a smart guy who knows World War II history better than most of his critics. The idea that the mufti is responsible for the extermination of European Jewry is completely absurd, and Netanyahu knows that. Just like he explained the next day, he wasn’t even talking about the Nazis, and he certainly never meant to absolve them for the Holocaust. The prime minister was trying to make a statement about the Palestinians and that’s the real problem.

Saying that the Palestinians are Nazis — very much like the comparison between Israel and the Nazis — has no place in a fact-based or historically accurate discourse. That should go without saying. The only reason to do so would be to illustrate that it is impossible to negotiate, or even speak with, the other side — that they must be fought to the bloody end. That is the historical historical context and significance of comparing somebody to the Nazis. They are one of the few regimes in all of history whose illegitimacy is absolute — to everyone in the world. Even those who had the most remote ties with the Nazis, even those who tried to make deals with them to save Jews, were later classified as traitors. Because one wages only war against Nazis. Look at every WWII film ever made — there is no such thing as a good Nazi.

Last week, MSNBC aired a map (above) showing the loss of Palestinian land to Zionist settlers and then to Israel from 1946 to the present. Following criticism from Israelis and their supporters, MSNBC apologized and stated that the map was incorrect. But was it? The following is a fact check of MSNBC’s map and the criticisms of it.

Does the map accurately show the loss of Palestinian land since 1946?

Yes. The map accurately depicts the land that has been forcibly taken from Palestinians since 1946, two years before Israel was established and the accompanying expulsion of between 750,000 and a million Palestinians to make way for a Jewish state.

During and immediately following the state’s creation in 1948, Israel expropriated approximately 4,244,776 acres of Palestinian land. In the process, more than 400 Palestinian cities and towns were systematically destroyed by Israeli forces or repopulated with Jews. Most Palestinian population centers, including homes, businesses, houses of worship, and vibrant urban centers, were demolished to prevent the return of their owners, now refugees outside of Israel’s pre-1967 borders or internally displaced within them. (See here for interactive map of Palestinian population centers destroyed during Israel’s creation.)

Israel’s systematic dispossession of Palestinians is ongoing today, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel’s internationally recognized pre-1967 borders, where Palestinian citizens of the state and those living under occupation continue to be pushed out of their homes and off their lands – including entire towns – to make way for Jewish citizens and settlers. Today, there are approximately 650,000 Jewish settlers living illegally on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Israel’s settlement enterprise covers approximately 42% of the West Bank.

http://m.jpost.com/#article=6017MzBDQjY0N0E2RUNGQzlBMTVBM0Q4QzlBQTIxQzJBNEI=

WASHINGTON -- Comments made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier in the week, which implicated the former grand mufti of Jerusalem in the decision to proceed with the Holocaust, amount to inflammatory rhetoric stoking tensions on the ground between Israel and the Palestinians, the White House said on Thursday.


In a speech on Tuesday, Netanyahu said that Palestinian Haj Amin al-Husseini was directly responsible for encouraging Adolf Hitler not just to expel Jews from Europe, but to exterminate them. Netanyahu has since clarified that he had no intention of absolving Hitler for the Holocaust.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters the Obama administration has no doubt who was responsible for the genocide, which involved the systematic murder of six million Jews.
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On Wednesday, the State Department declined to characterize Netanyahu's specific remarks as incitement, but added: "Scholarly evidence does not support that position," referring to the prime minister's historical account.

According to police, the incident began when two soldiers boarding a bus near the entrance to the capital were asked for identification by an unknown man. When the soldiers, in response, asked the man to identify himself and submit to a search, he began physically assaulting them and tried to seize one of the firearms they were carrying, according to a police account.

The soldiers opened fire on the man, who was pronounced dead at the scene.

The man did not have a knife on him, as previously reported. A search on his body revealed an Israeli ID card, and reports indicated he was Jewish. But police said they were still working to identify him.

The incident occurred on Yirmiyahu street, in the city’s Romema neighborhood, and came after another day of attacks against Israelis.

that Hitler didn’t want to kill the Jews, just expel them, till he was convinced to exterminate them by the Palestinian leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The criticism is so universal, and angry, that the remarks look to be a landmark in Netanyahu’s cynicism; they draw back the curtain for the world on his refusal to sincerely address Palestinians aspirations for freedom today.

Yet, in the face of the criticism Netanyahu is doubling down on his contention that Palestinians incited the holocaust. Here is what he said today before leaving to Berlin:

My intention was not to absolve Hitler of his responsibility, but rather to show that the forefathers of the Palestinian nation, without a country and without the so-called ‘occupation’, without land and without settlements, even then aspired to systematic incitement to exterminate the Jews.

Meanwhile, Germany says it has no idea what Netanyahu is talking about.