CRITICS DENOUNCE SOUTH CAROLINA'S NEW ANTI-SEMITISM LAW

Ne"TANYA"hu & Simitic Laws Columbia SC USC & Israel

obert Jeffress, a pastor who delivered an opening prayer at the embassy dedication in Jerusalem, has said that “you can’t be saved by being a Jew.”AL DRAGO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

In his opening prayer on Monday, he alluded to biblical prophecies about a Second Coming, referring to the founding of the modern state of Israel 70 years ago as a “regathering” of God’s people. Then he closed his prayer “in the name and the spirit of the Prince of Peace, Jesus our Lord,” a Christian flourish that troubled even some of the most active Jewish organizers of the evangelical alliance.

“You have this evangelical who ends his prayer knowing full well that it’s inappropriate, that the Jews there are going to be upset that he did that, and not able to answer ‘amen’ to his prayer,” said Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, founder of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Such an explicitly Christian prayer, he warned, revived old fears of many Jews that evangelical support for Israel is “a way to sweeten us up and get us soft to get Jesus through the back door.”

USA JEWS MOURN THE DEAD IN GAZA WHILE THE NEW EMBASSY IN JERUSALEM IS CELEBRATED (Should Jews feel shame?)

 A sentence from his December speech: “We are not taking a position on any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem or the resolution of contested borders.” Their interpretation is that Mr. Trump did not say Jerusalem consists of any specific physical area, and certainly not anything across the Green Line.

But that sentence does not mean what they claim. The president was leaving open “final status” borders—those that might be negotiated in the future. Mr. Trump was saying that American recognition of today’s Jerusalem, with its well-known municipal boundaries, in no way would prevent Israel and the Palestinians from later agreeing on different lines.

Most proposed peace plans contemplate Israel ceding parts of its undisputed sovereign territory to a future Palestinian state. In that sense, all of Israel’s “specific boundaries,” far beyond Jerusalem, are subject to change by a final status agreement. That possibility, however, does not negate American recognition of Israel’s current borders.

CRITICS DENOUNCE SOUTH CAROLINA'S NEW ANTI-SEMITISM LAW

SOUTH CAROLINA'S LAW (CLICK HERE)

AMERICA RECOGNIZES ONE AMERICA

Eugene Kontorovich

May 13, 2018 1:50 p.m. ET

The U.S. on Monday will officially open its new embassy to Israel in Jerusalem. This will correct a surreal policy whereby, since Israel’s independence 70 years ago, the U.S. and other nations have refused to recognize its sovereignty over its capital city. President Trump announced in December he would reverse the old policy. By moving the embassy he now translates words into deed.

The embassy’s exact location within Jerusalem has gotten much less attention, but it is equally consequential. It will be housed in buildings used by the American Consulate, as well as in an adjacent former hotel purchased by the State Department in 2014. Most of that complex is located on the far side of the armistice line that divided Jerusalem from 1949 to 1967. Thus the embassy site demonstrates that the U.S. not only sees Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, but also—consistent with bipartisan calls from Congress—recognizes the city as unified.

The “Green Line” was created in the wake of Israel’s 1948-49 War of Independence. Upon the country’s founding, Jordan and its allies invaded, with the goal of preventing the creation of a Jewish state. Although they failed at that goal, the Arab armies did occupy significant territory when the armistice was called, including what is now widely referred to as the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Jordan subsequently expelled all Jews from the areas under its control.

In 1967, during the Six Day War, Israel recaptured these places. But in the war’s aftermath the United Nations invested the temporary 1949 armistice line with talismanic significance. The U.N. claimed Israel was “occupying” the territory that Jordan had forcibly seized not two decades earlier. Thus the international community came up with a unique demand: Israel had to keep the areas under its control, including East Jerusalem and the Old City, free of Jewish inhabitants. Any move to unify Jerusalem would be considered a war crime.