KOENIG

Prime Minister Yair Lapid confirmed Sunday that Israel has received a long-negotiated US proposal to resolve its maritime border dispute with Lebanon, and said that the plan would preserve Israel’s regional interests.

The United States handed over the written plan to Lebanese President Michel Aoun on Saturday.

Addressing ministers at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting, Lapid said that the emerging agreement secures Israel’s interests, according to a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office.

Former CIA Director and retired Gen. David Petraeus said the war in Ukraine “looks very dire indeed for [Russian President] Vladimir Putin” in that Ukraine has outmaneuvered Russia throughout the conflict. 

Petraeus told radio talk show host John Catsimatidis on “The Cats Roundtable” on WABC 770 AM that Putin has found himself in an “irreversibly desperate” situation. He said Ukraine has been much more successful than Russia in mobilizing its capabilities.  

He said that has led to Ukraine’s major counteroffensive, which has seen it retake thousands of square kilometers of its territory in the past month, and to Russia being on the defensive. 

“At the end of the day, the situation looks very dire indeed for Vladimir Putin,” he said. 

(October 2, 2022 / JNS) Arab ambassadors in London have sent a letter to newly minted UK Prime Minister Liz Truss urging her to scrap what they described as “an illegal and ill-judged” plan to move the British Embassy to Jerusalem, The Guardian reported on Friday.

According to the report, some Arab diplomats have warned that such a move could jeopardize negotiations on a free trade deal between the United Kingdom and the Gulf Cooperation Council which is slated to be completed this year. 

While the report noted that numerous Arab nations were expected to oppose the prospective move, it emphasized that both the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which two years ago normalized relations with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords, also endorsed the letter to Truss.

The United States and its allies hit back at Russia's annexation of four Ukrainian regions on Friday, slapping sanctions on more than 1,000 people and companies including arms supply networks as President Joe Biden warned Vladimir Putin he can't "get away with" seizing Ukrainian land.

The Russian annexation, though expected, escalated an already heated conflict that's become fraught with potential nuclear implications.

Biden said his administration would support any effort by Ukraine to retake the annexed territories by force, setting the stage for further hostilities. And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that his country would make an "accelerated" bid to join the NATO military alliance, a plan not endorsed by the US or other allies that could add fuel to the fire.

Ukraine said Saturday its forces were entering the key eastern town of Lyman, located in one of the four Ukrainian regions that Russia annexed despite international condemnation.

Israeli intelligence firm ImageSat International (ISI) has detected an “irregular presence” of Russian TU-160 and TU-95 strategic bombers deployed to the Olenya Airbase near Finland.

According to satellite images taken by the firm, four TU-160s were detected on August 21st and three TU-95s were detected on September 25th. There were no strategic bombers present at the airbase on August 12th.

PARIS/STOCKHOLM/MILAN, Sept 29 (Reuters) - Once unthinkable, mobile phones could go dark around Europe this winter if power cuts or energy rationing knocks out parts of the mobile networks across the region.

Russia's decision to halt gas supplies via Europe's key supply route in the wake of the Ukraine conflict has increased the chances of power shortages. In France, the situation is made worse by several nuclear power plants shutting down for maintenance.

US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield addressed the UN Security Council Briefing on the Situation in the Middle East Wednesday, during which she reiterated the Biden Administration's support for the Two-State Solution.

"From day one, the Biden Administration has been unequivocal in our support for a two-state solution. That has not changed. As President Biden made clear to the UN General Assembly last week, “A negotiated two-state solution remains…the best way to ensure Israel’s security and prosperity for the future and give the Palestinians the state...to which they are entitled,” Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield said.

She praised both Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas for endorsing the Two-State Solution during their speeches at the UN General Assembly last week: "And we are not alone in pushing for such a peace. In fact, the hall of the General Assembly was filled with calls for a two-state solution during High-Level Week. Prime Minister Lapid made a courageous and impassioned speech that articulated his vision of “two states for two peoples.” The significance of his appeal for peace between Israelis and Palestinians should not be underestimated. "

"And I also want to acknowledge President Abbas’s stated commitment to non-violence and reaffirmation of his support for a two-state solution.," she said.

It has become almost routine: Not a week goes by without some foreign media reporting on an alleged Israeli strike against Syria. Usually, these attacks are under the cover of darkness to help Israeli aircraft, but also so as to minimize the potential harm to non-combatants. But they do happen in broad daylight as well because sometimes the intelligence is actionable only if it is acted upon immediately or if it is determined that Syria would get the message much more resoundingly if it were carried out during the day. 

The Israeli public has become used to these reports, some of which are no longer reported in the Israeli media or just get minimal coverage. But the other side is very much engaged on this issue. It is true for Syria, where the strikes take out many of its assets, and it is true for Iran, which is perhaps the only reason for Israel's intense involvement in the northern arena and in Syria in particular. 

The main objective of these reported attacks is to frustrate Iran's entrenchment in Syria through the militias it trains and arms, as well as to interdict the weapon shipments to its proxies in the region – chiefly Hezbollah.

As soon as it emerged that Israel’s acting Prime Minister Yair Lapid would tell the United Nations General Assembly this week that he supports the establishment of a Palestinian state, he was engulfed by outrage, incredulity and dismay. 

Critics charged that he was endangering Israel’s security by seeking to establish a terrorist state on land to which Israel is lawfully entitled. This, they said, would incentivize yet more Palestinian terrorism.

In his actual remarks, Lapid appeared to row back from an earlier briefing by an official that he would say, “Israel must move toward a two-state solution.” Maybe as a sop to his critics, he confined himself instead to bland support for a “peaceful” Palestinian state.

Nevertheless, this was the first time in many years that an Israeli leader expressed support for such a state at the U.N.—and at a time when Palestinian radicalization and terror attacks are increasing.

Of course, Lapid’s initiative has gone down well with the left, which believes the Arab-Israeli conflict is a dispute over territorial boundaries fueled by the supposedly extremist Jewish belief in a biblical entitlement to the Land of Israel.

(September 25, 2022 / JNS) Forty-nine percent of all Israelis, and 55% of those who are Jewish, strongly or somewhat agree that Israel should attack Iranian nuclear sites even without U.S. support, according to a survey by the Israel Democracy Institute.

The study also found that less than a third of Jewish Israelis (31%) want the next government in Jerusalem to advance the two-state solution as a means of resolving the conflict with the Palestinians. A full 36% of Israelis, including 58% of Jews, do not want this paradigm to be promoted following the Jewish state’s Nov. 1 elections (11% of Jewish Israelis said they were unsure how the next government should proceed). 

Regarding the upcoming Jewish New Year, which begins on Sunday at sundown, 29% of Israelis believe that next year will be better than the previous one; 30% think it will be about the same; 21% believe it will be worse; and 20% said that they don’t know.

This week has seen a continuation of the upward trend in the Netanyahu bloc, as the predictable effects of the breakup of the Joint List, a mostly Arab Alliance, were felt.

That bloc — Likud and the other parties allied with opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu — picked up 1.2 seats in our average over the course of the week, increasing to 60.6 seats – the biggest weekly change since the campaign began.

Following on from last week’s article about the impact of different polling companies, we should note that of the nine polls taken this week, the Netanyahu bloc hit 61 or more in only three of them – two from Direct Polls.

President Biden’s national security adviser said on Sunday that the United States had warned Russia that there would be “catastrophic consequences” for the country if Moscow used nuclear weapons in its increasing desperation to hold on to territory in Ukraine, adding that in recent days the United States has “spelled out” how the world would react in private conversations with Russian officials.

The adviser, Jake Sullivan, repeated the comments several times in three Sunday television interviews, though he left deliberately vague whether those consequences would be military, economic or diplomatic. Officials were quick to say they still had not seen any movement in Russia’s stockpile of 2,000 or so small tactical weapons — which can be launched from a short- or medium-range missile — despite President Vladimir V. Putin’s threats in a televised address last week that “this is not a bluff.”

But Mr. Sullivan’s use of the word “catastrophic” as a deliberately ambiguous warning of a major — if almost certainly non-nuclear — response to a Russian nuclear detonation illustrated how quickly the rhetoric has intensified as Russia has faltered on the battlefield in recent months.