JNS news briefs: October 21, 2014

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Report: Obama seeks to bypass Congress, suspend Iran sanctions

(JNS.org) President Barack Obama “will do everything in his power” to prevent Congress from voting on a nuclear agreement with Iran if one is reached by the Nov. 24 deadline, The New York Times reported Monday.

“Even while negotiators argue over the number of centrifuges Iran would be allowed to spin and where inspectors could roam, the Iranians have signaled that they would accept, at least temporarily, a ‘suspension’ of the stringent sanctions that have drastically cut their oil revenues and terminated their banking relationships with the West, according to American and Iranian officials,” the report said. “The Treasury Department, in a detailed study it declined to make public, has concluded Mr. Obama has the authority to suspend the vast majority of those sanctions with-out seeking a vote by Congress, officials say.”

Reacting to the report, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) said Monday, “In July, I led a bipartisan letter to the president—signed by over 340 Members of Congress—calling for ‘greater consultation with Congress on a potential sanctions relief package that may be part of a final agreement.’ That extensive engagement hasn’t come, even as the administration is considering such hugely consequential national security decisions.”

Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) was quoted by The New York Times as saying, “Congress will not permit the president to unilaterally unravel Iran sanctions that passed the Senate in a 99 to 0 vote.”

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Ya’alon to U.N. chief: Israel won’t allow Gaza reconstruction if terror tunnels rebuilt

(JNS.org) Israel will not allow the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip if Hamas continues to use construction materials to build terror tunnels, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon told U.N. Secre-tary Ban Ki-moon during a meeting in New York on Monday.

Ya’alon and Ban discussed the outcome of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza and the continuing presence of U.N. peacekeepers in volatile areas along the Jewish state’s northern bor-der.

“We want the residents of Gaza to live in dignity and prosperity, rebuild their homes, and return to normal life,” Ya’alon said. “But, we are very worried. Just yesterday Hamas representatives said they intend to reconstruct the infiltration tunnels, instead of rebuilding the homes of Gaza’s residents.”

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Boy from Galilee issued Israel’s first Aramean birth certificate

(JNS.org) Yaakov Halul doesn’t know it, but on Monday he made history. The 2-year-old from the Galilee village of Jish became Israel’s first Aramean citizen.

Yaakov’s parents, Shadi and Oksana Halul, arrived at the Israeli Interior Ministry in Safed on Monday and received Yaakov’s birth certificate, the first in Israel that listed a baby’s ethnicity as “Aramean.”

Some 130,000 Arameans live in Israel, mainly in villages in the Galilee. Until recently, when a long public campaign ended in a decision by the Interior Ministry to recognize the Aramean people as a separate ethnicity, they were listed as Arabs on identification documents.

“Since the baby was born, my wife and I have refused to get him a birth certificate on which he’d be listed as an Arab,” Shadi Halul said, according to Israel Hayom. “He was a kind of alien. No document. No identity.”

Shadi, 38, served as a captain in the IDF Paratroopers Brigade and now chairs the Aramean-Christian Association in Israel.

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Hamas admits it is rebuilding terror tunnels

(JNS.org) Hamas’s Izz a-Din al-Qassam Brigades has openly stated that it is rebuilding the terror tunnels that were destroyed by the IDF during Operation Protective Edge this summer, accord-ing to a reporter from the Gaza-based newspaper Al-Resalah, who witnessed diggers at work during a visit to a tunnel site on Sunday.

The repairs to the tunnel had started “during one of the humanitarian cease-fires reached during the war,” the commander of the digging team told the reporter.

“Hamas did not wait a single moment after the last round of fighting, and began its rearmament in anticipation of another round,” a senior Israeli diplomatic source said, Yedioth Ahronoth re-ported.

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Israeli officials testify on Gaza war before U.N. forum

(JNS.org) Israeli officials testified before the United Nations in Geneva on Monday regarding the Jewish state’s compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, including during Operation Protective Edge in Gaza.

Along with Israeli ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva Eviator Manor, Israeli Ministry of Justice Director-General Emi Palmor, Deputy Attorney General for International Law Roy S. Schondorf, and Col. Noam Neuman—who heads the IDF’s International Law Department—defended Israel’s human rights record, particularly with regards to the Palestinians.

“At this stage it is the only U.N. forum to which Israel will provide information with regard to Operation Protective Edge,” a Justice Ministry spokeswoman said, the Jerusalem Post reported.

The International Covenant is managed by the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and its Human Rights Committee is a separate entity from the better-known U.N. Human Rights Council, which is holding its own investigation of Israel’s actions during this summer’s war with Hamas. The Rights Council probe is headed by Canadian human rights expert William Schabas, prompting Israel to refuse to cooperate over Schabas’s past anti-Israel state-ments.

During Monday’s questioning, when committee member Cornelis Flinterman brought up the death of about 2,000 Palestinians during this summer’s war, Manor noted that Israel needed to launch airstrikes on Gaza in response to hundreds of rockets fired by Hamas.

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Toyota ‘hackathon’ featuring Israeli entrepreneurs, Japanese executives

(JNS.org) A group of Japanese executives and officials from the Toyota car company will visit Israel this week for the purpose of finding technologies applicable for innovation in Japanese smart cars.

Japan had been reluctant to cooperate scientifically with Israel in the past, partly out of fear of the response of the country’s Arab oil suppliers. This week’s visit may indicate a change in the Japanese attitude on the issue.

“The Japanese finally realized that there is a Silicon Wadi in the Middle East that rivals California’s Silicon Valley, and they don’t want to get left behind,” said Vered Farber, director of the Asian Institute in Israel, according to the Times of Israel. “It took them a while to realize it, but they have finally begun to understand that Israel may have what it takes to keep their economy dynamic and growing.”

Toyota’s showcase event will be a “hackathon” on Thursday and Friday, in which Israeli programmers will develop projects for “connected cars”—automobiles that can upload and download data to and from the cloud, which according to Toyota will improve the driving experience and safety.

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