MIDEAST UPDATE: 3.13.21 - Biden abandons Middle East peace

Biden abandons Middle East peace Lip service aside, the administration’s moves make clear that for Biden and his advisers, Arab-Israel peace is an impediment to their ideologically motivated efforts toempower the PLO and Iran. The Trump administration was on the verge of securing a peace agreement between Israel and Indonesia in its final weeks in office, according to a former senior Trump administrationofficial involved in the efforts. The official divulged that the negotiations between Israel and the world’s most populous Muslim state were run by then-President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Jared Kushner and Adam Boehler, then-head of the InternationalDevelopment Finance Corporation. Israel was represented by then-Ambassador Ron Dermer and Indonesia by Minister Mohamed Lutfi. To secure peace, Boehler told Bloomberg News last December, the United Stateswould be willing to provide Indonesia with an additional “one or two billion dollars” in aid. Indonesia was interested in Israeli technology and even wanted the Technion to open a campus in Jakarta. It wanted visa-free travel to the Jewish state and Arab andU.S. investment in its sovereign wealth fund. Israel wanted Indonesia to end its economic boycott of the Jewish state. Direct flights from Tel Aviv to Bali were on the table. The advantages of peace between Israel and Indonesia for both sides are self-evident. But such a peace would also pay a huge dividend to the United States in its burgeoningcold war with China. An expanded strategic and economic partnership with the archipelago and ASEAN member would be a setback for China’s efforts to dominate the South China Sea, particularly with Indonesia playing a role in an Islamic-Israeli alliance ledby the United States. “We got the ball on Indonesia and Israel to the first-yard line,” the official explained. Unfortunately, the Biden administration has dropped the ball on the ground andwalked off the field. On the surface, the Biden administration is interested in promoting peace. President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have praised the Abraham Accords, as wellthey should. For 26 years, the Arab conflict with Israel was ignored and left to fester. Then suddenly, in Trump’s last year in office, the situation was reversed as four Arab statesrapidly normalized their ties with Israel. Expanding the accords to Indonesia, with its massive population and strategic location outside the Middle East, would have transformed a strategic regional shift into a game-changer throughout Asia. But despite the strategic logic of expanding the Abraham Accords and the praise Biden and Blinken have given them, starting in its first week in office, the new administration’sactions have served to undermine the accords by removing their American foundations. A week into the Biden administration, the State Department announced it was “placing a hold” on the $23 billion sale of F-35s to the United Arab Emirates. The move was presentedas “a routine administrative action typical to most any transition.” But suspending the sale was a strategic move, not an “administrative action.” The normalization deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates was a three-sided agreement.The Americans were full participants. The F-35 sale was America’s way to solidify the UAE’s membership in an American-led regional alliance of which the Abraham Accords were an expression. Suspending the deal indicated that unlike its predecessor, the Bidenadministration will not work to strengthen its alliance with the Sunni Arabs and Israel, and will not fulfill the commitments that the Trump administration took on to develop and maintain that alliance through Arab-Israeli peace. Biden’s abandonment of the Abraham Accords can be understood in the context of U.S. politics. In keeping with the expectations of Democrat voters, Biden and his team aremaking efforts in domestic and foreign policy to erase the entirety of Trump’s record in office. Although remaining a party to the Abraham Accords and expanding them to Indonesia and beyond would probably win Biden the Nobel Peace Prize, it would put him inthe partisan doghouse for the crime of failing to kill something Trump created. But while political logic exists, not everything is political. For Biden and his administration, ideology trumps politics. The Biden administration is the most ideologically rigid and radical administration in U.S. history. Hyper-partisan politics are a function of the administration’s ideologicalradicalism. As far as the Middle East is concerned, its ideological commitments drive it to empower the PLO-controlled Palestinian Authority and Iran. From their first days in office, senior Biden administration officials have pledged to restore U.S. funding of the P.A. There are significant legal roadblocks to implementingthat pledge because so long as the P.A. continues to pay the salaries of terrorists and advances war crimes allegations against Israel before the International Criminal Court, the United States is barred from funding it or reopening the PLO representativeoffice in Washington. But all the same, the administration is intent on moving forward. The administration’s intense desire to empower the P.A. despite the legal roadblocks indicates one aspect of its opposition to the Abraham Accords. The accords weaken theP.A. by removing its power to block Arab and Islamic states from making peace with Israel. For decades, as Israel’s Palestinian “peace partner” spurned peace and waged terror and political war against Israel, the Arab states accepted that peace between themselvesand Israel had to wait. By ignoring the U.S. obligations to Abraham Accords partners and pushing to restore U.S. support to the P.A. despite its illegality, the administration signals its desire to restore the Palestinian veto. The Abraham Accords represent an even greater problem for the administration’s efforts to empower Iran. In a speech on Monday, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo said, “The Abraham Accords would not have happened … without the United States changing its policy with respect to Iran 180 degrees from how the previous administration had addressed the issue.” Now that the Biden administration wishes to move U.S. policy 180 degrees back to reinstate the Obama administration’s policies, the Abraham Accords are a nuisance. Hours before Biden and his advisers accused Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of approving Jamal Khashoggi’s murder at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018,i24News reported that Israel, Saudi Arabia the UAE and Bahrain were forming a military alliance against Iran. While the events may or may not be related, both make clear why the Biden administration doesn’t want Arab-Israeli or Muslim-Israeli peace deals.Such deals impede the administration’s efforts to empower Iran. Biden’s declared goal vis-� -vis Iran is to restore Iranian compliance and U.S. participation in the 2015 nuclear deal forged by the Obama administration. The so-calledJoint Comprehensive Plan of Action places temporary limitations on Iranian nuclear activities in exchange for a massive inflow of capital. To convince Iranian leader Ali Khamenei to get on board, the new administration has provided a near-continuous streamof concessions to Iran and its Yemeni proxy, the Houthis. It removed the Houthis from the State Department’s list of foreign terror organizations and suspended arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The administration’s campaign against MBSis an obvious effort to unseat him and replace him with a less stridently anti-Iran leader. This week the administration’s green-lighted South Korea’s agreement to pay Iran some $7 billion in exchange for the release of a South Korean ship and its crew thatIran unlawfully seized and has held captive since early January. Not only has Iran rejected America’s gestures, but it is also expanding its regional aggression and sprinting to the nuclear finish line. In recent weeks the Iranians attackedthe Israeli embassy in New Delhi. They damaged an Israeli-owned ship in the Persian Gulf. And there is growing suspicion that the massive oil spill off Israel’s coast last month which caused massive ecological damage to marine life and to Israel’s coastlinewas an act of environmental terrorism carried out by a Libyan ship smuggling crude oil from Iran to Syria. Iran’s Houthi proxies have expanded their missile strikes against Saudi Arabia since coming off the U.S. terror list. And while the U.S. uses MBS’s alleged role in killingKhashoggi to justify downgrading its relations with Saudi Arabia, the Iranians are killing scores of democracy protesters in its Baluchistan province. Whereas Khashoggi was a former Saudi intelligence officer and ally of Osama bin Laden who was working withQatar to undermine the Saudi regime at the time he was killed; the Baluchis are innocent civilians whose sole crime is opposing the repressive regime. As far as Iran’s nuclear program is concerned, in recent days, the Iranians canceled snap inspections of their nuclear sites by U.N. nuclear inspectors. The InternationalAtomic Energy Agency released a report accusing Iran of carrying out prohibited nuclear work at multiple undeclared nuclear sites. Khamenei has threatened to escalate Iran’s uranium enrichment levels to 60 percent. And rather than respond by escalating sanctionsagainst Iran, the European Union—presumably with U.S. approval—scrapped plans to condemn Iran for its illegal behavior at the IAEA’s Board of Governors’ meeting last week. In a press briefing Monday, State Department Spokesman Ned Price said, “We seek to accomplish a great deal with the Saudis: To end the war in Yemen and ease Yemen’s humanitariancrisis; to use our leadership to forge ties across the region’s most bitter divide, whether that’s finding the way back from the brink of war with Iran into a meaningful regional dialogue or forging a historic peace with Israel.” In other words, the administration holds the Saudis solely responsible for the war in Yemen. It also blames Saudi Arabia (and presumably, Israel, the UAE and Bahrain) forbeing at “the brink of war with Iran,” rather than blaming Iran for bringing the region to the “brink of war” through its terrorist aggression and illicit nuclear activities. The order of Price’s “to-do” list made clear that reaching “a historic peace” between Israel and Saudi Arabia is the administration’s lowest priority. Price served as National Security Council spokesman during the Obama administration. There he played a key role in marketing the JCPOA and developing what his colleague,then deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, referred to as the information “echo chamber” for selling the deal to ignorant reporters in Washington. Last year, in a speech before the National Iranian-American Council (a group widely viewed as the Iranianregime’s unofficial lobby in Washington), Price said that a Biden administration would remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps from the State Department list of foreign terror groups. Taken together, the administration’s moves make clear that beyond paying occasional lip service to the Abraham Accords, ending the Arab and Islamic world’s conflict withIsrael and forging a wider peace between them is not a goal it wishes to pursue. Indeed, for Biden and his advisers, Arab-Israel peace is an impediment to their ideologically motivated efforts to empower the PLO and Iran. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Biden Slowly Erasing Trump's Recognition Of Jerusalem As Israel'sCapital � David Sidman - https://www.prophecynewswatch.com/article.cfm?recent_news_id=4596 Mordechai Kedar, Israel's top Arabic culture academic and lecturer at Bar-Ilan University published an article on Friday stating that US President Joe Biden is supportingelections for the Palestinian Authority's leadership not only in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza but in East Jerusalem as well. This move he explains, will "prove to the world that Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital is no longer valid." Kedar demonstrates that Biden is trying to woo the PA back to the negotiation table with Israel in order to hammer out a 'deal.' He explains that because it will be much more difficult to attract PA chairman Abbas back to the negotiating table, Biden is exhausting greater efforts to curry their favorthan he is Israel. He demonstrates his hypothesis with "three concurrent developments." The elections he explains are a type of show of demonstration that the Palestinian state that Bidenwould like to establish came about democratically via elections from all factions of "all sectors of the Palestinian people...even Hamas." He opines that "the idea to use the elections to produce legitimacy probably came from Washington." The second development according to Kedar is the Muslim Brotherhood's return to Washington's corridors and picking up where they left off with Obama. Hamas is connectedto the Muslim Brotherhood and having them participate in the elections will provide the terror organization with a stamp of legitimacy. Kedar also says that there appears to be overt collusion between the White House and Abbas on how the elections will be conducted. This can be evidenced by a "Declaration of Freedoms" document shared on the PA's Facebook page. The declaration is an elaborate constitution of Democratic freedoms thatare uncharacteristic of a dictatorship like the PA. The fact that the document was published in English as opposed to the native language of Arabic, points to the idea that Abbas is getting guidance from the White House forthese "constructive ideas." Kedar theorizes that the ideas could be coming from "either someone in the State Department whose pro-Arab tendency is known and documented or Maher Bitar, an actively anti-IsraeliPalestinian who is now serving in the key role of senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Prominent Rabbis Ask Netanyahu to Allow the Passover Sacrifice on Temple Mount � Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz - https://www.israel365news.com/188111/prominent-rabbis-ask-netanyahu-to-allow-the-pascal-sacrifice-on-temple-mount/ This day shall be to you one of remembrance: you shall celebrate it as a festival to Hashem throughout the ages; you shall celebrate it as an institution for all time. Exodus12:14 (The Israel BibleTM) A group of prominent rabbis sent a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu, requesting that a Passover offering be allowed on the Temple Mount. LETTER TO NETANYAHU: PASSOVER IS TIME FOR FREEDOM To the esteemed Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, We bless you that you should have great success in the upcoming elections. May it be the will of the Lord of all, whose Holy presence dwells in Zion and whose chosen cityis Jerusalem, that you should continue to lead the State of Israel and the people of Israel in the coming years for good. The harassment of you personally and the people of Israel in general by internal and external parties such as the criminal court in The Hague requires that harassment ofall types be put in its place. This can be done through a statement and action that signals to all governments, friends, enemies, and all parties competing in the elections where Israel has been heading since the dawn of history. We are going to worship God, the God of Israel, the Creator of the world in the place that God has chosen. From there comes light and instruction to the whole world. Law, justice and law, love and kindness. The duty of worship and the right of worship of the people of Israel as in the days of the Exodus from Egypt is the clearest expression of the Exodus of the people of Israelinto the world of freedom. With this message, all the harassers will be silenced. Therefore, we ask you to allow us, as the representatives of the Jewish people, to carry out the Passover sacrifice this year and every year from now on to illustrate andobserve the freedom of worship on the 14th of Nisan in the evening. We ask that you speak out about this publicly in the coming days, stating openly that the State of Israel, the state of the Jewish people, intends to allow Jews, by virtueof their religious and national rights, to maintain a measured and modest freedom of worship on the Temple Mount. This message is especially important in the days before Passover, our time of freedom, and to give time to properly prepare one Passover sacrificethat will be for all of the nation of Yisrael while signaling to the whole world that the God of Israel has granted us the Exodus from Egypt and commanded us to perform the Torah commandments intended to bring Israel and all nations to freedom To do this,we must perform the main national mitzvah; the Passover sacrifice! Sincerely and with great respect The United Temple movements for the Temple and the Temple Mount, in the name of the whole house of Israel Rabbi Israel Ariel President of the Temple Institute Rabbi Baruch Kahana, head of the priestly watch Rabbi Aryeh Lipo, Secretary BLAME IS ON THE GOVERNMENT Rabbi Hillel Weiss, the former spokesman for the Sanhedrin, emphasized that a Temple structure is not needed in order to bring the Passover sacrifice and a temporary altarthat can be assembled and disassembled in one day would suffice. �Despite various issues of Jewish law, such as ritual impurity and lack of a high priest, Jews are still required and technically able to bring the sacrifice,� Rabbi Weisssaid. �The only thing preventing the Jewish People from performing the Passover sacrifice is the Israeli government.� Rabbi Weiss suggested the possibility that the guilt of preventing the Passover sacrifice may have led to the political troubles plaguing both Trump and Netanyahu over thelast year. The Sanhedrin performed an intense study concerning the current status of the Passover offering and concluded that at this juncture, one sacrifice made at the Temple Mountbrought in the name of the entire Jewish people would suffice. These rabbis made an identical request last year. The request was considered and denied but had it been honored, it would have marked the first time since the destructionof the Second Temple in 70 CE that a Passover sacrifice would have been performed on the Temple Mount. Israel law requires freedom of religion to be allowed at all places for all religions but security concerns based on organized Muslim violence prevent freedomof religion from being expressed on the Temple Mount. In the letter to the Prime Minister submitted last year, the rabbis noted that the Pesach offering has special significance as there are only two mitzvot (Biblical commandments)for which non-compliance receives the most severe punishment mandated by the Torah, karet (being cut off from the community, or excommunicated): brit milah (circumcision) and the korban Pesach . The rabbis emphasized that the korban Pesach and the Temple service were a means of stopping plagues. For this reason, the decision to begin the Temple service would benefitthe entire world in this time of a pandemic. King David purchased the Temple Mount, built and altar, and offered a sacrifice to stop a plague. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- VISIT: PROPHECY WATCHER WEEKLY NEWS: HTTP://PROPHECY-WATCHER-WEEKLY-NEWS.BLOGSPOT.COM