Israeli Politics

JERUSALEM (AP) — Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, crippled by a series of corruption investigations, announced he would resign Sunday, clearing the way for his foreign minister to try to succeed him as Israel's next leader. The prime minister's office said Olmert would submit an official letter of resignation to President Shimon Peres later Sunday, freeing the president to formally tap Tzipora Malka "Tzipi" Livni to try to put together a new government. Weeks ago, Olmert promised to step down after his governing Kadima Party elected a new chief to replace him. Livni, a rival of Olmert's, won that race last week by a narrow margin, but that victory did not assure her the premiership. As prime minister, Livni would be expected to pursue a moderate and pragmatic course in peacemaking with the Palestinians and Syria. She will become Israel's first female prime minister since Golda Meir stepped down in 1974.

Israel

Israeli leaders have made a strategic decision not to allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, according to the Hebrew daily Ma’ariv, and preparations for an IAF long-range strike on Iran have shifted into high gear in case Western diplomacy fails to halt Tehran’s atomic quest. So far, Israel has not received American authorization to use US-controlled Iraqi airspace, nor has the defense establishment been successful in securing the purchase of advanced US-made warplanes which could facilitate an Israeli strike. The Americans have also offered Israel permission to use a global early warning radar system, implying that the US is pushing Israel to settle for defensive measures only. However, an internal government discussion concluded Israel has no strategic depth, and the country cannot take a 'wait and see' approach and only retaliate in case of attack; rather Israel has little choice – absent US-led military action – to use preemption to prevent an Iranian first strike.

Israel

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — Israel on Monday freed nearly 200 jailed Palestinians — including a militant mastermind from the 1970s — in a goodwill gesture just hours before U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was to begin her latest peace mission to the region. The prisoners returned to cheers and applause as they entered Palestinian-controlled territory before heading to a massive rally attended by thousands of people at the headquarters of President Mahmoud Abbas. Among the 198 Palestinians freed was Said al-Atba, who has served 32 years of a life sentence for carrying out a deadly market bombing in the 1970s. Al-Atba, 57, was the longest serving inmate held by Israel and he is widely seen by the Palestinian public as a symbol of all the prisoners. Israel said the release was a gesture meant to bolster Abbas and his western-leaning administration and give a boost to the slow-moving peace talks with the moderate Palestinian leader. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice returns to the Mideast this week amid dwindling hopes for securing an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal by a year-end target.

WorldNetDaily: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, completing a visit to the region today, has been pressing Israel to sign a document by the end of the year that would divide Jerusalem by offering the Palestinians a state in Israel's capital city as well as in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, according to top diplomatic sources involved in the talks. The Israeli team, led by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, has been negotiating the division of Jerusalem – despite claims to the contrary – but would rather conclude an agreement on paper by the end of the year that would give the Palestinians a state in the West Bank, Gaza and some Israeli territory, leaving conclusions on Jerusalem for a later date, the informed diplomatic sources told WND. The sources said the Palestinian team has been pushing to conclude a deal by January on all core issues, including Jerusalem, and has been petitioning the U.S. to pressure Israel into signing an agreement on paper that offers the Palestinians eastern Jerusalem.

• JJ Commentary: Dividing Jerusalem will pierce God’s heart and grieve the Holy Spirit, not to mention the curses that will be reaped from such ungodly dealings.

No Peace for Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday that it is unlikely a peace deal will be achieved with the Palestinian Authority by the end of 2008. Olmert's admission comes as Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was reported over the weekend to be resisting efforts by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to have Israel and the PA draft a joint summary of their positions on core issues in time to present to the United Nations General Assembly when it opens its fall session in September. "I don't believe we can reach an understanding this year that includes the Jerusalem issue," Olmert told the key Knesset committee in a regular briefing today. "There is no practical chance of reaching an overall understanding on Jerusalem." He added, however, that an agreement is more feasible on such issues as borders and the disposition of Palestinian refugees.

Israel’s Messianic Jews Under Attack

Israel's tiny community of Messianic Jews, a mixed group of 10,000 people who include the California-based Jews for Jesus, complains of threats, harassment and police indifference. A March 20 bombing using a booby-trapped gift basket was the worst incident so far. In October, a mysterious fire damaged a Jerusalem church used by Messianic Jews, and last month ultra-Orthodox Jews torched a stack of Christian holy books distributed by missionaries. Proselytizing is strongly discouraged in Israel, a state that was established for a people that suffered centuries of persecution for not accepting Jesus and has little tolerance for missionary work. At the same time, Israel has warm relations with U.S. evangelical groups, which strongly support its cause, but these generally refrain from proselytizing inside Israel. Even the Mormon church, which has mission work at its core worldwide, agreed when it opened a campus in Jerusalem to refrain from missionary activity.

Backlash In Israel

JERUSALEM (AP) — Orthodox Jews set fire to hundreds of copies of the New Testament in the latest act of violence against Christian missionaries in the Holy Land. Or Yehuda Deputy Mayor Uzi Aharon said missionaries recently entered a neighborhood in the predominantly religious town of 34,000 in central Israel, distributing hundreds of New Testaments and missionary material. After receiving complaints, Aharon said, he got into a loudspeaker car last Thursday and drove through the neighborhood, urging people to turn over the material to Jewish religious students who went door to door to collect it. The books were dumped into a pile and set afire in a lot near a synagogue, he said.

Peace, Peace When There is No Peace (Jeremiah 6:14, 8:11)

Gaza rocket squads barraged southern Israel early Thursday, after Israeli undercover forces killed four Palestinian militants in the West Bank. The new violence shattered a recent lull in Gaza fighting and highlighted the fragility of efforts to move Israel and the territory's Islamic Hamas rulers toward an informal truce. About a dozen rockets was fired late Wednesday and early Thursday, Israeli security forces said. Two of them struck a warehouse and soccer field in the rocket-weary Israeli town of Sderot, but no one was injured, Israeli officials said. Israeli aircraft struck a loaded rocket launcher early Thursday, but no Palestinian injuries were reported. The rocket barrage from Gaza was practically a given after Israeli undercover forces opened fire on a car in the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Wednesday, killing the local Islamic Jihad commander, Mohammed Shehadeh, and three other wanted men. The Israeli military said Shehadeh planned suicide bombings that killed dozens of Israelis.

On a tour of the Gaza border area on Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned IDF troops that the battle with Hamas will most likely “bring an escalation beyond what we have seen so far, before we reach a period of calm.” "We are not in a state of calm with Hamas, we are in ongoing activity meant to stop Kassam fire. There is no change in what we are doing," Barak said in comments that once again cast doubts on Arab media reports in recent days that Egypt has managed to broker a truce between Israel and Hamas.

IDF troops and elite police commandos operating in Bethlehem on Wednesday evening killed four top terrorists with the Islamic Jihad militia, including the planner of last week’s shooting massacre in a prominent Jerusalem yeshiva, Palestinian sources claim. While attempting to arrest the armed fugitives, who made up the Islamic Jihad's leadership in the city, the troops came under fire near Bethlehem’s main government building, and killed all four in a gun battle. The four-man terror cell was known to be in direct contact with Islamic Jihad's leadership in Syria as well as with Hizbullah. Shehadeh has been wanted by Israel for the past eight years for involvement in planning and executing terror attacks in which Israelis were killed and wounded.

• JJ Commentary: There will be no peace for Israel until Jesus returns. Any sounds of peace are inherently false as Islam continues to seek its total annihilation.

Israel's Unholy Policies

Did the Israeli police allow the Muslim custodians of the Temple Mount – Judaism's holiest site – to carry out illegal construction on the Mount last week that may have damaged antiquities and make it more difficult for archaeologists to find temple artifacts? That's the question being asked by Temple Mount activists and archaeologists here after it was discovered the Waqf, the Mount's Islamic custodians, last week used a heavy tractor to lay massive stone tiles over an area of the Mount some archaeologists believe a Second Temple wall was recently discovered. Pictures of the purported wall surfaced after Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last summer gave the Waqf permission to use tractors to dig a 1300-foot trench around the periphery of the Mount. The Waqf claimed the trench was necessary to replace electrical cables outside mosques on the site. Allowing the use of bulldozers at any sensitive archaeological site is extremely unusual, particularly at the Temple Mount, which experts say contains sealed layers of artifacts as shallow as two to three feet below the surface. The Mount has never been properly excavated. Heavy equipment could easily damage any existing artifacts, stress Israeli experts, who assert the area should be excavated slowly and carefully by hand.

• JJ Commentary: Secular Israel consistently turns its back on its godly foundations resulting in curses dictated in Deuteronomy 27-28.

Israel on High Security Alert in Wake of Jerusalem Massacre

Israeli security forces across the nation were placed on the highest level of alert Friday, following last night's terrorist shooting spree at a landmark Jerusalem yeshiva which left eight Jewish seminary students dead. Even before the shooting massacre, police were poised to raise their alert ahead of Muslim Friday prayers at the mosques in Jerusalem, after receiving intelligence reports that Palestinian worshippers may attempt to disrupt order. Only Muslim men over the age of 45 with a valid blue identity card were to be allowed to enter the Temple Mount for prayers. Israeli authorities are keen to smother signs of unrest in east Jerusalem and the West Bank and even among Israeli Arabs in the wake of last weekend's sharp escalation in fighting along the Gaza border. An Arab from an east Jerusalem neighborhood used his access as a driver for a prominent Jerusalem seminary to infiltrate the crowded library and halls of the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva on Thursday evening and spray hundreds of rounds from an automatic rifle at Jewish religious students, leaving 8 dead and up to three dozen wounded.

• JJ Commentary: Despite ongoing calls for peace negotiations, there will be no true peace for Israel. After increasing hostilities, a false peace will be ushered in by the Antichrist, which will allow Israel to rebuild their temple – without, however, the inner and outer courts which are overrun by the Genitles” as prophesied in Revelation 11:2 (i.e. the Dome of the Rock). But then, in the middle of the 7-year Tribulation period (Daniel 9:24-27), the Antichrist will commit the “abomination of desolation” and declare himself to be God and defile the temple with pagan sacrifices (Daniel 11:2, Matthew 24:15, 2Thessalonians 2:3-4).

Wrong Wavelength

ONE JERUSALEM.ORG: This afternoon President Bush made a public statement on the "peace process" at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. His statement is making headlines that are damaging to the State of Israel. For example, he said, "The point of departure for permanent status negotiations...seems clear: There should be an end to the occupation that began in 1967." By making this point, President Bush has let the Palestinians off the hook. While the President refers to the "Roadmap" he is simply giving the Palestinians a free pass on the central provision that the first stage of the Roadmap is the successful end to terror strikes against Israel.

Instead Israel is now the aggressor that must make the most important concessions. Israel must move its defense forces out of what Bush calls the occupied territories. Israel security concerns are skimmed over with statements calling on the Palestinians to control terror. Something they have never done. And to add insult to injury Bush clearly states that he believes Israel must loosen its control of Jerusalem. The Bush Administration has gone from treating Israel as an ally against our nation's common enemies to pressuring Israel to make dangerous concessions when there is no partner for peace.

• JJ Commentary: President Bush is clearly not on the Lord’s wavelength regarding Israel. So whose wavelength is he on?.

Slicing Up God's Heart

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Palestinian officials yesterday she would pressure Israel against initiating any Jewish construction in eastern sections of Jerusalem, a senior Palestinian negotiator involved in talks with Rice told WND. The Palestinian negotiator stated Rice singled out Jerusalem areas as becoming part of a future Palestinian state and told his negotiating team she would publicly blame Israel for the failure of next month's U.S.-sponsored summit slated to be held in Maryland if the Jewish state didn't agree to evacuate eastern Jerusalem neighborhoods.

• JJ Commentary: Rice and the Bush Administration are so far out of line with God’s will for Israel and Jerusalem that it will surely bring down curses on the good old USA.

Israeli Blasphemy

JERUSALEM (AP) - Senior Israeli officials expressed support Monday for the transfer of Arab parts of Jerusalem to Palestinian control, offering a concession on one of the most contentious issues in the Mideast conflict. The offer appeared to fall short of Palestinian calls for a full Israeli withdrawal from key areas of the holy city. The officials spoke as Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were to begin talks in Jerusalem to work out a joint document they hope to issue at a U.S.-sponsored peace conference next month. The meetings were closed.

Ahead of the talks, a confidant of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he has proposed in recent talks with Palestinian officials to turn over areas of east Jerusalem to the Palestinians. The Palestinians claim east Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war, as capital of a future independent state.

• JJ Commentary: If Israel were to forsake even parts of Jerusalem, it would break Yahweh’s heart and call down a curse upon His chosen people such as they have never seen before – all in sync with end-time prophecy.

Jewish Complicity

JERUSALEM – Security forces acting on orders from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert yesterday destroyed a synagogue used by Jews to worship near Joseph's Tomb, Judaism's third holiest site and the believed burial place of the biblical patriarch Joseph – the son of Jacob who was sold by his brothers into slavery and later became the viceroy of Egypt. Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, which granted nearby strategic territory to the Palestinians, Joseph's Tomb was supposed to be accessible to Jews and Christians. But following repeated attacks against Jewish worshippers at the holy site by gunmen associated with then-PLO leader Yasser Arafat's militias, Prime Minister Ehud Barak in October 2000 ordered an Israeli unilateral retreat from the area.The tomb is located near the modern day West Bank city of Nablus, or biblical Shechem.

Currently, Jewish pilgrimage to Joseph's Tomb is legal only several times per year in convoys protected by the Israel Defense Forces. Still, some Jews regularly attempt clandestine visits to the holy site. Jewish students last year built a structure on the West Bank's Mount Gerizim, which is just outside the tomb area. The structure was used as a synagogue and was constructed on the Mount so Jews can pray and study Torah as close to the tomb site as possible. Dozens of Jewish students congregated daily at the makeshift synagogue. But Olmert's office and Israeli government officials deemed the structure – which they refused to call a synagogue – illegal since it was built without a government permit. Yesterday, under direct orders from Olmert, the Israel Civil Lands Administration destroyed the structure.

• JJ Commentary: Bad enough that the surrounding Arab/Muslim nations want to destroy Israel, but to have the Jews destroying their own legacy and giving away their God-given land is truly atrocious.

God-Given Land

The European Union supports Syria's goal of regaining the occupied Golan Heights from Israel, the EU foreign policy chief said after meeting President Bashar Assad on Wednesday, on a visit that ended a two-year freeze on high-level EU contacts with Damascus. "We would like to work as much as possible to see your country Syria recuperate the territory taken in 1967," Javier Solana told a joint news conference with Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem, according to Ynet News. Syria has made it clear that its cooperation to help end violence in Iraq was tied to Western, especially US, backing for its peaceful campaign to regain the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied during the Middle East war four decades ago.

• JJ Commentary: Notably missing from this dialogue is that God said this land belonged to Israel.

Last Days Temple

Using maps created in 1866 by a British explorer and passages from the Jewish Mishnah, an Israeli archaeologist and professor at Hebrew University says he has pinpointed the location of the sacred Jewish Temple, twice built and twice destroyed in ancient times. While popular consensus places the Temple, built by King Solomon in the 10th century B.C. and rebuilt by Jews who returned from Babylon in the 5th century B.C., on the site of the present Muslim Dome of the Rock, Prof. Joseph Patrich says archaeological remains show its exact location – and the consensus is wrong.

According to Patrich, the Temple, its corresponding courtyards, chambers and gates were oriented in a more southeasterly direction, sitting diagonally on what is the modern Temple Mount. The difference in orientation and the placement further eastward varies from the east-facing orientation of other scholars who believe the Temple was closer to today's Western Wall. However, that difference is why, Patrich says, the Temple did not sit over the rock believed by Jews to be the site where Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac and where Muslims believe Muhammad ascended into heaven.

Patrich's siting has the Temple further east and south of locations proposed by other scholars and diagonal, rather than perpendicular to the Temple Mount's eastern and western walls. It also leaves the rock in the Dome of the Rock outside of the confines of the Temple itself. Patrich said his research on the Temple's location is strictly academic, and political connotations should not be attributed to it.

• JJ Commentary: Since the temple is to be re-built during the latter days, but not the outer courts (Rev. 11:2), it makes sense that it would not be on the Dome of the Rock, because the “covenant with many” (Daniel 9:27) would presumably leave the holy Muslim site intact.

Israel's God-Given Land

Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Iraq Study Group also made the following recommendations to President Bush: 1) Divide Jerusalem and give Judea and Samaria to the PA, a terrorist regime; 2) Give the Golan Heights to Syria, a terrorist state; 3) Invite the terrorist states Iran and Syria to a peace conference, and exclude Israel.

• JJ Commentary: Not only does the so-called “Road Map to Peace” propose giving away Israel’s God-given land, but the Iraq Study Group takes this unholy plan several steps further from God’s plan and His heart

Rest in Peace

JERUSALEM — In a landmark ruling, Israel's Supreme Court ordered the government Tuesday to recognize same-sex marriages performed abroad. The lone dissenter on the seven-judge panel was an observant Jew, highlighting the controversy touched off among ultra-Orthodox Jews and other conservative groups. Moshe Negbi, a legal expert, said the court's decision is mostly symbolic because gay couples in Israel already had many of the rights of heterosexual partnerships. The significant changes are that they will now get the same tax breaks as a married couple and be able to adopt children, Negbi said.

• JJ Commentary: Any lingering notion about whether the Israeli government is secular or religious should be laid to rest with this report.