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This Week:

• US Continues Talks with Iran, Prepares for War
• A Draft "Constitution" for "Palestine"
• Symposium on Antisemitism
• Short Takes
• Week's Best Tweets
• Upcoming Events

US Continues Talks with Iran, Prepares for War

The Trump administration is continuing talks with Iran. The Wall Street Journal reports that representatives from the US and Iran met in Geneva this week to negotiate a possible deal over Iranian enrichment of uranium. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said there had been "a little bit of progress" in those talks, but added, "We’re still very far apart on some issues."

At the same time, the Journal reports:

The US is sending significant numbers of jet fighters and support aircraft to the Middle East, assembling the greatest amount of air power in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

...The US Air Force has recently moved dozens of jet fighters and support aircraft to Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan and Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, according to flight-tracking data. These include additional F-35s, F-15s, F-16s, E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System and E-11 Battlefield Airborne Communications Node aircraft. More fighter aircraft are coming.

Meanwhile, the US Navy currently has 13 ships in the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean Sea to support a potential operation, including the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and nine destroyers capable of defending against ballistic missiles, according to a Navy official. A second aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, and the four destroyers in its strike group are on their way.

Lahav Harkov at the Jewish Insider reports that Israel is prepared for maximum defense, knowing that Israel will be a target if a military conflict between the US and Iran begins.

Israel's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Boaz Bismuth (Likud) said, "These are challenging days. There is not one [Israeli] who doesn’t ask himself several times a day when there will be a campaign against Iran. The entire population and homefront are preparing."

A Draft "Constitution" for "Palestine"

Seth Mandel writes at Commentary:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s constitution-writing committee has produced a draft of what would theoretically be the basic-law document of the State of Palestine. The document is a major blow to anyone’s hopes of a two-state solution, dwindling as those hopes already were. The "Palestine" "Constitution," as currently envisioned, seems to be Abbas’s way of burning everything down behind him.

In Princeton Professor Zaid Al-Ali’s English translation of the document, there is no mention of Jews or Israel. Reporting confirms the same is true of the Arabic original.

It’s not that other religions are excluded—there are specific mentions of the rights of Christians, for example. But the State of Palestine declares itself judenrein.

... There’s plenty more, but there’s no reason to go into it. To get caught up in other details is a mistake because the discussion should go no further beyond its status as judenrein. The Palestinians are “asking” for a genocidal state, one that is committed to the erasure of all Jews within its borders and also all the Jews in the one Jewish nation beyond its borders.

The draft also says that the "pay for slay" policy of providing funding to families of convicted terrorists and terror suspects would continue in the "State of Palestine."

Elder of Ziyon writes:

I read all 162 articles. What I found should alarm not just Israelis, but Europeans, Christians, and anyone who believes in the possibility of Middle East peace.

Beneath a surface layer of democratic provisions — separation of powers, free elections, human rights protections — the constitution contains an interlocking architecture of provisions that, taken together, constitutionalize permanent conflict with Israel, criminalize coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, create binding obligations that cascade through international law to nearly every country on earth, and make themselves virtually impossible to repeal.

This is not a constitution for a state that wants peace. It is a legal machine for permanent war — and Europe helped build it.

Read more of his analysis here and here.

Short Takes

Tobin: Jesse Jackson and the betrayal of the civil-rights movement

Rev. Jesse Jackson's connections to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his leadership in the civil rights movement earned him a place in history, writes Jonathan Tobin, but that's not the whole story:

"Rather, his principal contribution to American society as a whole, as well as to African-Americans, was something else. It was the way in which he guided what was left of that movement away from King’s vision and toward what we now know of as the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion that is the opposite of his mentor’s aspiration for a color-blind society. He paved the way for the illiberal rejection of the Western canon, without which such freedoms are not imaginable, and even worse, a version of civil rights that was nothing more than racial hucksterism. Along the way, he was also a forerunner of an effort to legitimize antisemitism and loathing for Israel that played a not insignificant role in helping fuel the surge of Jew-hatred that is currently raging.

"... Jackson wasn’t so much an early critic of the pro-Israel "lobby" as he was a forerunner of the sort of left-wing antisemitism that is commonly expressed by people such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and members of the congressional "Squad," such as Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)."

NY Post: City Hall boots Israel drone supplier from Brooklyn Navy Yard — after Mamdani took office

A NYC manufacturer that supplies drones to Israel to monitor the Gaza Strip border was booted from the city-owned Brooklyn Navy Yard six weeks after pro-Palestine Mayor Zohran Mamdani took office.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp. — whose board members serve at the pleasure of the mayor and manage the 300-acre industrial park — opted not to renew its lease with Easy Aerial, Councilman Lincoln Restler (D-Brooklyn) gloated on X Thursday.

... Besides assisting the Israel Defense Forces with border monitoring, Easy Aerial also has a longstanding relationship with the US Air Force and other federal agencies, and its spies-in-the-sky have been used to monitor suspicious activity along the Mexican border.

Its high-profile work also includes Super Bowl security.

Borelli: Ignore the doomsayers — Trump and Lee Zeldin’s green rollback is a breath of sanity

[EPA Administrator Lee] Zeldin’s cancellation of the Obama-era Endangerment Finding is sure to prompt warnings that the Earth’s polar ice will melt, wildfires will spread, rivers will overrun, locusts, frogs, slaying of the first-born.

If it’s hot outside, Zeldin, President [Donald] Trump and climate change will be blamed.

If it’s cold, Zeldin, Trump and climate change.

It’s all nonsense, of course. The globalist left has drunk the Kool-Aid of environmental fanaticism, and it’s led to some of the worst policy decisions of the last two decades.

... We need a reset of the balance between environmentalism and pragmatism, with reality taking a larger role.

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