A flagship of the settler enterprise, Amona is becoming a test of how far Israel’s right-wing government will go to avoid a clash with its constituency and how vested it is in more than 100 outposts built without authorization across the West Bank.
.. Mr. Netanyahu’s government has been working to retroactively legalize dozens of settler outposts that sit on public land. But Amona was built on privately owned Palestinian land, where Israel’s own judiciary insists the state cannot simply rubber-stamp construction.
.. Leafing through a bound folio of maps, photographs and documents from the outpost’s early years, Mr. Buaron pointed out how the state helped provide its infrastructure: a high-voltage power line, Housing Ministry plans to prepare 40 plots for permanent homes, a road.
.. The settlers are pushing for legislation that would force Palestinian owners to accept compensation rather than get their land back, arguing that the current legal strictures could be applied to thousands of settler homes beyond Amona. The attorney general has already ruled out that option, but 25 of the 30 Parliament members from Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party nonetheless signed a petition backing it last month.
.. Mr. Buaron, the Amona leader, said there was nothing stopping Palestinians from coming to work their land, but Mr. Hamed’s wife, Nihad, 56, expressed a widely held fear.
“They would shoot us,” she said, noting that an unarmed man from Silwad was killed by Israeli soldiers in August. “I wouldn’t send my sons.”
.. Abdallah Abu Rahmeh, a Palestinian Authority official who focuses on settlements, saw the Israeli debate as hairsplitting that obscures the depth of the occupation. “It is not up to Israel to determine where each piece of land is going to go in our own country,” he said.
Shimon Peres: Not Just a Man of Peace
Mr. Peres certainly would have liked to enter history as a peacemaker, but that’s not how he should be remembered: Indeed, his greatest contributions were to Israel’s military might and victories.
.. In the early 1950s, just a few years after Israel declared independence, he concluded that Israel must develop its own nuclear option. He established secret contacts with France to obtain nuclear technology. The nuclear reactor that now sits near the town of Dimona in the Negev Desert is largely thanks to these efforts.
.. Mr. Peres was courageous and imaginative. He was willing to consider and often to risk almost all political, diplomatic and military options, regardless of how fantastic and unrealistic they might be. In 1967, he sought to avoid the Six Day War, anticipating heavy losses for the Israeli army. He reportedly suggested that instead of going to war, Israel should detonate a powerful and extremely noisy device that would scare Egypt, Jordan and Syria out of their plan to attack Israel.
.. In 1975, when he was defense minister, Mr. Peres granted permission to one of the first groups of Israeli settlers to remain in the West Bank. Later, he supported the establishment of several other settlements, laying the first obstacles to the so-called two-state solution.
.. The right called Mr. Peres a defeatist for ceding some control of the West Bank, the left called him an expansionist because the agreement didn’t end the occupation. Both sides were not entirely wrong. In fact, Mr. Peres was trying to please everyone, settlers and peace activists alike. That was the story line of his political life.
.. But in reality he was motivated not by a lust for power or by greed, but by an outsider’s desperate quest for his people’s love.
.. It was ironic that Mr. Peres gained in popularity at a time when Israel was losing many of its friends in the world. He remains perhaps the last Israeli many in the rest of the world can still admire as they once admired his country. He died at a time of apparent transition. Not long from now, Israel may once again have to face crucial and painful decisions regarding its future as a Jewish and democratic country. These decisions will require a truly great leader, someone who, unlike Mr. Peres, demands his people’s compliance, not their love.
Why Does the United States Give So Much Money to Israel?
The two countries just signed a new military-aid deal—the biggest pledge of its kind in American history. It have may seemed inevitable, but the record-setting moment is also rife with irony.
The pact, laid out in a Memorandum of Understanding, will be worth $38 billion over the course of a decade, an increase of roughly 27 percent on the money pledged in the last agreement, which was signed in 2007.
.. young Americans are far less sympathetic toward Israel than their older peers: A 2014 Gallup poll found that only half of those aged 18 to 34 favored Israel in the Israel-Palestine conflict, “compared with 58 percent of 35- to 54-year-olds and 74 percent of those 55 and older.”
.. Bernie Sanders, who was extremely popular among young people during the Democratic primary season, controversially criticized Israel, winning “applause and cheers” from the audience at one debate for saying, “If we pursue justice and peace, we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time.”
.. The new money is an attempt to pacify Israeli concerns about continued threats from Iran, she added.
.. The money is also an attempt to satisfy congressional Republicans... The deal also directs more money back toward the United States. It eliminates a provision in the previous aid agreement that allowed Israel to spend 26 percent of its Foreign Military Financing on weaponry and other resources produced within Israel, rather than in the United States—a provision intended to help Israel build its own defense industry.
How Benjamin Netanyahu Is Crushing Israel’s Free Press
In its annual report released this spring, Freedom House, an American democracy advocacy organization, downgraded Israel’s freedom of the press ranking from “free” to “partly free.” To anyone following Israeli news media over the past year and a half, this was hardly surprising.
.. For the past 18 months, in addition to his prime ministerial duties, he has served as Israel’s communications minister (as well as its foreign minister, economy minister and minister of regional cooperation).
.. Efforts to stifle freedom of the press can be seen as part of a broader attack by Mr. Netanyahu and his ministers on Israel’s democratic institutions, including the Supreme Court and nongovernmental organizations. Dissent from the official government line is consistently called into suspicion. In this climate, the news media has become a personal battleground for Mr. Netanyahu. Nahum Barnea, a pre-eminent Israeli columnist, said last year that Mr. Netanyahu’s “obsession” with the news media showed him to be “gripped by fear and paranoia.”
..Any objections that this move may have raised were pre-empted by Mr. Netanyahu, who had already required all members of his coalition to sign a “communications clause,” guaranteeing their automatic support for any decision made in the future by the communications minister — in other words, by him... many Israelis view Mr. Netanyahu’s battle for control over the news media as a long-overdue corrective after years of a liberal or left-wing bias... more than they are sick of him they despise the old leftist elites,”.. “At some point Netanyahu realized that his battle with the media makes him very popular among his base supporters,”.. most Israelis are getting their news from Israel Hayom or Walla News, and when the only remaining liberal bastion — Haaretz — struggles to stay afloat.