President Trump is the Gift that Keeps Giving

JEWS CHOOSE TRUMP

1.Trump to List ‘Jerusalem, Israel’ on Passports of Jerusalem-Born Americans

2.US acts on declaration settlements are legal, extends deal to West Bank

By Hana Levi Julian, The Jewish Press    October 28, 2020,

The Trump administration is expected to announce Thursday that US passports of Americans born in the Israeli capital will be able to state “Jerusalem, Israel” as the place of their birth.

The policy, reported Wednesday by Politico, is the latest of a steady list of pro-Israel actions by President Donald Trump that will remind his Zionist and evangelical supporters why they must make sure to get to the polls and vote in the lead-up to Election Day.

Up to this point, American citizens who were born in Jerusalem fell into a no-man’s-land when it came to stating a country of birth on their passports. One US administration after another proved unwilling to take on the issue of deciding the status of Jerusalem….

Until the Trump administration, all US governments ruled that until a final status was negotiated directly between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Jerusalem had no status. Americans born in Jerusalem were allowed only to list the city, and not the country of birth.

The Trump Middle East Peace Plan states the final borders of Jerusalem should be decided by the two sides with direct negotiations, but places support behind a Palestinian Authority capital in the Arab neighborhoods surrounding Jerusalem currently separated by an Israeli security barrier.

According to a report by The Hill, “Trump’s move to allow American passport holders to list Jerusalem, Israel, as their city and country of birth follows a decision by the Supreme Court in 2015 that says the executive branch has the power to grant recognition of sovereign states.”

The new policy follows Wednesday’s announcement that restrictions for US investment with Israel were officially lifted this week by the US government, enabling investment in new research, technology and science projects to move forward in Judea and Samaria.

2. By LAHAV HARKOV, JPOST  OCTOBER 27, 2020,

The US is set to turn its declaration that settlements in Judea and Samaria are not necessarily illegal into action for the first time on Wednesday, expanding a set of scientific cooperation agreements with Israel to include those areas and the Golan Heights.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman plan to sign the revised agreements on Wednesday in Ariel, in Samaria, at which point there will no longer be any agreements between Israel and the US with territorial limitations.

The first agreement, signed in 1972, was the Binational Science Foundation (BSF), followed in 1976 by BIRD, the Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation, and BARD, the Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund in 1977. All three had large endowments that provided grants to American and Israeli academics and companies for research and technology.

The original agreements state that “cooperative projects sponsored by the Foundation may not be conducted in geographic areas which came under the administration of the Government of Israel after June 5, 1967, and may not relate to subjects primarily pertinent to such areas.”

In November of last year, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the US was returning to the position of former president Ronald Reagan’s administration that “the establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not per se inconsistent with international law.”

In light of that policy, the Trump administration moved to delete the sentence limiting BSF, BIRD and BARD to Israel’s pre-1967 lines.

Prof. Eugene Kontorovich of George Mason Law School and director of the Israeli think tank Kohelet Policy Forum was a major proponent of the policy change in recent years.

“This is really quite momentous,” he said on Tuesday. “It is the first time the US has adopted a policy that explicitly and clearly authorizes the use of funds across the green line… It’s a very strong recognition that settlements are not illegal. They announced that, but now they’re putting meat on the bones.”

Kontorovich also called the change an “explicit rejection of UN Security Council Resolution 2334,” which the US under former president Barack Obama allowed to pass, and states that settlement activity constitutes a “flagrant violation” of international law and has “no legal validity.”

Now, Kontorovich said, “the US is going in the exact opposite direction.”
Kontorovich also said the new agreements “send an important message that science has no borders and you can’t politicize science. The idea that scientific research shouldn’t be funded based on where it takes place is a problematic one; it holds progress hostage to politics.”