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https://worldisraelnews.com/

If the government refuses, Israeli planes will not be allowed to land in the United States.

The U.S. administration has issued an ultimatum to Israel to open its skies to American flights this week or see El Al banned from landing in the U.S., Channel 12 News reported Saturday night.

According to the report, officials in the Biden administration sent a message saying, “Why do you need a crisis with the new administration? Allow our planes to fly to Israel.”

Fearing the import of new, deadlier mutations of the Covid-19 virus, the government shut down Ben Gurion airport on Jan. 26 to all foreign airlines. El Al won a tender last Monday to bring home some of the thousands of Israelis stuck in the U.S. on so-called emergency flights.

Delta and American Airlines made runs into Israel during previous months of the pandemic and are looking to recoup some of their massive losses from last year’s major international travel ban. Along with other foreign airlines, they are now being allowed only to bring in cargo, not passengers.

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/biden-makes-history-first-president-in-40-years-to-punt-on-contacting-israel/

President Joe Biden is the first American leader in 40 years not to contact Israel’s leaders as one of his first actions in the White House, setting up what could be four years of chilly relations between America and its top Middle East ally.

Biden has already phoned multiple world leaders, including Russian president Vladimir Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping, but during his 23 days in office has yet to speak with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—making Biden the first president in modern history to punt on bolstering U.S.-Israel relations during his initial days in office. Every president going back to at least Ronald Reagan in 1981 made contact with their Israeli counterpart within a week of assuming office, according to a review of news reports.

Congressional foreign policy leaders slammed Biden’s Netanyahu snub, prompting a flurry of questions for White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who has declined to disclose when or if Biden will call the Israeli leader. Psaki also said on Friday the White House would not list Israel as a U.S. ally when asked about the relationship during her daily press briefing.

Modern presidents going back to Reagan made calls or overtures to Israel during their first days in office, sending a message the United States would continue to stand for the Jewish state’s security. Biden’s diplomatic slight comes as Israel faces encroaching terrorist threats and the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran. He also has hired several individuals with a background in anti-Israel activism, including Maher Bitar, a top White House National Security Council official who spent his youth organizing boycotts of the Jewish state. The State Department’s Iran envoy, Robert Malley, also has been a vocal critic of Israel.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/is_israel_an_ally_bidens_administration_is_unclear_on_that_one.html

Israel has been America’s staunch ally going back to the Cold War. Additionally, as a friendly nation that has been genocidally besieged by the anti-American, anti-Semitic bullies in its neighborhood, America felt the good guy’s responsibility to help Israel protect herself. Beginning in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution, Israel and America also shared a common enemy: radical Islam. But none of that matters to Joe Biden, who’s long been hostile to Israel and is following Obama’s delusional effort to make nice with Iran.

Biden has never liked Israel. Moreover, he shares Obama’s dislike for Netanyahu, something demonstrated by his refusing to talk to Netanyahu since entering office.

With Jews who are Democrats showing decreasing support for Israel, that made the campaign easier for Biden. Democrats, rather than supporting the Abraham Accords, which are causing peace to break out across the Middle East, resented the fact that Trump was able to broker the accords by circumventing the totalitarian and genocidal Palestinians, rather than pandering to them.

As the election drew near, confident that Democrat Jews’ loathing for Trump overrode any residual love for Israel, Biden became more openly hostile to Israel. In August, the Washington Post summed up Biden’s Israel policy as a morally muscular opposition to Trump’s unwavering support for Israel and the peace deals he was making by ignoring the Palestinians, who have proven themselves incapable of self-governance in both Gaza and the West Bank:

“The new UAE-Israel announcement does not just normalize bilateral relations between the two countries, which have existed barely under the table for many years,” wrote Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “For Palestinians, it also helps to normalize (if not actually reward) Israel’s occupation.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17042/palestinians-corruption-financial-aid

The assumption that renewed financial aid would lead the Palestinian leadership to make “concessions” has proven, over the past three decades, to be completely baseless. Anyone in the Biden administration who thinks that the Palestinian leadership would make real “concessions” to Israel in return for hundreds of millions of dollars is living under an illusion.

Last year, the Palestinians rejected Trump’s $50 billion Middle East economic plan that would create a global investment fund to lift the Palestinian and Arab state economies. The Palestinians dubbed it an “attempted bribe.”

The “innocent Palestinians” the Biden administration is talking about would undoubtedly be happy to receive financial aid from the US or the European Union. These Palestinians, however, are concerned that their leaders will continue to deprive them of the financial aid, and that the money, ever-fungible, would, as usual, just end up in the pockets of Palestinian leaders as well as to incentivizing murder for “pay-for-slay” terrorists.

A recent public opinion poll showed that a majority of Palestinians are still worried about the corruption of their leaders, especially the Palestinian Authority.

The majority of Palestinians believe that corruption is concentrated among senior public sector employees, particularly in the executive public institutions (the ministries, the presidency and the security services). The Palestinians continue to believe that senior employees are the most corrupt individuals among the Palestinians.

All this means that, if and when the general elections take place, Hamas is well on its way to score another easy victory.

The message that the findings send to the Biden administration and other Western donors: The funds you are sending to Palestinian leaders are being stolen. If you want to send money, you must ensure that the money does not end up in the private bank accounts of Palestinian leaders.

If, as the poll shows, a majority of Palestinians continue to see their leaders as corrupt, this means that Abbas’s rivals in Hamas are again likely to win the vote.

Ignoring rampant corruption in the Palestinian Authority (PA), the US administration of President Joe Biden says it is preparing to resume unconditional financial aid to the Palestinians.

“The suspension of aid to the Palestinian people has neither produced political progress nor secured concessions from the Palestinian leadership,” US State Department Spokesman Ned Price said at a press briefing earlier this month. “It has only harmed innocent Palestinians.”