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This feels to me more like President Trump supporting Bibi against his rightwing coalition partners pushing too far. [IsraelTimes] US President Donald Trump
...The tack in the backside of the Democratic Party...
on Thursday declared "Israel is not going to do anything with the West Bank," as officials from his administration leveled harsh criticism against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government after politicians advanced legislation to annex parts of the West Bank while Vice President JD Vance was visiting the country.
"Don’t worry about the West Bank," Trump told news hounds at the White House, in his first comments on the matter since the Knesset voted on the two bills Wednesday. "Don’t worry about it," he repeated. "Israel’s doing very well. They’re not going to do anything with it."
The measures were passed despite opposition from Netanyahu, in light of Trump’s vow last month that he would not allow Israel to make the controversial move.
"The Israelis can’t treat us like we’re Joe The Big Guy Biden
...46th president of the U.S. The very model of probity....
," a Trump administration official told The Times of Israel late Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity
... for fear of being murdered...
. Netanyahu regularly sparred with Biden during the Democratic president’s administration and was accused at times of seeking rifts with him for domestic political gain.
The decision by the senior US official, speaking on condition of anonymity
... for fear of being murdered...
, to draw a comparison to Biden also harkened back to another US-Israeli rift in 2010, under the B.O. regime, when the Interior Ministry announced that 1,600 housing units would be built in a Jewish neighborhood of East Jerusalem while then-vice president Biden was in town.
Another US official warned Thursday that Trump will "f**k" Netanyahu if the Israeli leader jeopardizes the Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response ...
ceasefire and hostage release deal, according to a Channel 12 report.
"Netanyahu is walking a fine line with President Trump. If he keeps going, he’ll f**k up the Gaza deal. And if he f**ks up the deal, Donald Trump will f**k him," the official reportedly told the outlet’s correspondent Barak Ravid.
"In English, it sounds even cruder," news anchor Yonit Levi noted at the end of Ravid’s report.
The source told Ravid that Vance, in Israel at the time, was shocked by the decision and said that Israel was acting in an "unsupervised" manner.
Netanyahu updated Vance about the Knesset vote during the vice president’s visit, assuring him that it was merely a "preliminary vote" and would "go nowhere," the public broadcaster Kan reported.
"This cannot happen while I am visiting here," Vance was said to have retorted. American officials reportedly warned Netanyahu that the vote could provoke a backlash and destabilize ongoing negotiations over the ceasefire.
Leaving Israel on Thursday afternoon, Vance said at the airport that he was told the initial passage of the bill was a "political stunt" and "purely symbolic," but that, if so, it was a "very stupid political stunt, and I personally take some insult to it."
Amid the mounting frustration in Washington, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio
...The diminutive 13-year-old Republican U.S. Senator from Florida, Secretary of State in the second Trump administration...
landed in Israel Thursday evening and met with Netanyahu in Jerusalem.
The two issued statements at a joint press appearance that lasted less than two minutes, and did not take any questions.
In his brief remarks, Netanyahu said that Israel now faces "days of destiny."
"We want to advance peace. We still have security challenges, but I think that we can work together... [to] both address the challenges and seize the opportunities," Netanyahu said, characterizing the carousel of senior Trump officials visiting Israel over the past week as being part of a circle of trust and partnership" between Israel and the US.
"We have more work ahead of us, but we feel very positive about it. We’re making good progress," Rubio said, referencing the Gaza ceasefire deal inked earlier this month.
"No one’s under any illusions. We’ve already done the impossible once, and we intend to keep doing that," said the top US diplomat.
Rubio noted that Trump has made building on the Gaza ceasefire a "top priority," as evidenced by his dispatching of senior aides Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, followed by Vance and the secretary of state.
"It’s a very important achievement, but there’s more work to be done and bigger achievements that lie ahead... We feel very positive and confident that we’re going to get there despite substantial obstacles," Rubio said, without elaborating on what those obstacles are.
While meeting on Wednesday with Vance, Netanyahu reportedly expressed willingness to assist in implementing the next stages of Trump’s Gaza ceasefire plan.
However,
some men learn by reading. A few learn by observation. The rest have to pee on the electric fence for themselves...
Israeli television reported that the prime minister has also outlined several red lines to the US over the past week, including absolute opposition to any Ottoman Turkish presence in the Gaza Strip and to the Paleostinian Authority or Hamas
..the well-beloved offspring of the Moslem Brotherhood,...
playing a governing role there "the day after" the war. He is also said to have insisted that a full IDF withdrawal would only take place after Hamas is fully disarmed and the Strip demilitarized.
ARAB AND MUSLIM COUNTRIES REJECT ANNEXATION
Meanwhile,
...back at the shootout, Butch shot Black Bart's other gun out of his other hand......
over a dozen Arab and Moslem countries signed onto a joint statement spearheaded by Saudi Arabia
 ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula, largely made up of sand and oil rigs. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual haj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. Formerly dictatorial and steeped in Olde Tyme Religion, deferring to Salafist holy men on all issues, it has now done a 180 and is making a serious effort to modernize, so as not to be left in the sand by its Gulf Arab neighbors. The holy men have been shoved to the background and the nation is now still dictatorial but somewhat rational. That doesn't make them trustworthy, but it's a start...
blasting the annexation votes as "blatant" violations of international law.
The countries said they "condemn in the strongest terms the approval [by the] Israeli Knesset of two draft laws aiming to impose so-called ’Israeli illusory sovereignty’ over the occupied West Bank, and on Israeli illegal colonial settlements as a blatant violation of international law."
Among the statement’s signatories were Jordan, Egypt, Qatar
...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi...
, Kuwait, Indonesia, Pakistain, The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire...
, Oman, the Paleostinian Authority, Qatar, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Egypt and Nigeria,
The issue of annexation is tricky for Netanyahu, whose hard-right base is broadly supportive of annexation. Many in Netanyahu’s coalition have been loudly calling to advance annexation as a response to the recognition of a Paleostinian state by Western powers last month.
Doing so, however, could deal a blow to Trump’s hopes for Saudi-Israeli normalization, a long-time goal of the American president seen as the next step in the Abraham Accords agreements between Israel and neighboring countries.
Trump: ‘I stopped’ Netanyahu from fighting Gaza war, ‘he would have just kept going,’ maybe ‘for years’
[IsraelTimes] US President Donald Trump tells Time magazine that he made Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stop fighting the war against Hamas in Gaza, and that it may have continued for years otherwise.
In the interview, published today and conducted on October 15, days after the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza took effect, Trump says he told Netanyahu the war could not go on without end.
“I said to Bibi, ‘Bibi, you can’t fight the world. You can fight individual battles, but the world’s against you. And Israel is a very small place compared to the world.'”
The US president continued, “You know, I stopped him, because he would have just kept going. It could have gone on for years. It would have gone on for years. And I stopped him, and everybody came together when I stopped, it was amazing.”
He calls Israel’s attempted strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar a “mistake” that was “terrible,” but says it created momentum toward the deal.
“And when he made that one tactical mistake, the one on Qatar, and that was terrible, but actually, and I actually told the emir, this was one of the things that brought us all together, because it was so out of joint that it sort of got everybody to do what they have to do.”
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