Haaretz: Netanyahu May Offer Putin: Remove Iran From Syria for Lifting of U.S. Sanction on Russia

Russia has told Israel on several occasions that it can’t make Iran leave Syria completely; the most it can do is try to get Iranian forces and Iranian-affiliated militias, including Hezbollah, to move a significant distance away from the Syrian-Israeli border in the Golan Heights. But Russia isn’t even managing to keep its promise to secure a partial withdrawal of Iranian forces.

According to reports from Syria, even during the Syrian army’s conquest of the Daraa district over the past few days, Iranian officers and observers and Hezbollah fighters participated alongside the Syrian troops. It also turns out that the Syrian army – which now controls most of the border between Syria and Jordan, including the Naseeb border crossing – is entering rebel-controlled areas in violation of an agreement it reached just last week. [...]

The American magazine The New Yorker revealed on Tuesday that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel had suggested to Trump that America offer to cancel the sanctions it imposed on Russia four years ago, following Russia’s war in Ukraine and occupation of the Crimean peninsula, in exchange for Russian action to remove Iranian forces from Syria. Reporter Adam Entous wrote that shortly before the U.S. elections in 2016, the UAE’s crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, met with an American mediator and told him Putin might be interested in solving the Syrian crisis in exchange for an end to sanctions on Russia. [...]

An American official who spoke with an Israeli minister close to Netanyahu told the New Yorker that the minister had tried to sell him on the idea of “trading Ukraine for Syria” – canceling sanctions on Russia in exchange for Iran’s removal from Syria. The Saudi and Emirati foreign ministers also marketed this idea.

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Haaretz: Intervention Against Apartheid Law Casts Rivlin as Brave Gatekeeper of Israeli Democracy and Morality

Rivlin has fiercely defended the Supreme Court, the rule of law, the Israeli army, the civil service and its gatekeepers, free speech and an independent media. He has stood against racism, Jewish terror and discrimination of Israel’s LGBT community. Last year, from the podium of the Knesset, he railed against the tyranny of the majority and the politicization of Israel’s most basic values. He has stood shoulder to shoulder with Israel’s Arab minority, as he had from his first days as a parliamentarian. He has lobbied on behalf of Reform and Conservative Jews, a position in sharp contrast with his approach before becoming president.

Rivlin knew full well that he would come under fierce attack from right wing loons and their parliamentary representatives after his dramatic intervention on Tuesday against legislation of the so-called Nation-State Law. The last time he expressed opposition to the law a few years ago, Rivlin was branded an anti-Semite and photoshopped in a Nazi uniform. On Tuesday, within minutes of the publication of his letter to the Knesset committee in charge of the Nation-State Law, Twitter erupted with a stream of expletives, including demagogue, charlatan, crook, Jew-hater and prisoner of the left, and these are just the descriptions that are fit to print. Right wing legislators, caught with their pants down, followed in the footsteps of the trolls.

It’s hard to understand how a right-wing coalition that wages eternal war against BDS and its activists is undeterred by the proposed Nation-State Law clause that would allow Jewish local councils to legally exclude Arabs, given the probability that it will provide a justifiable pretext to accuse Israel of apartheid. Even the more moderate members of the coalition are capitulating to the ugly tide of nationalism that is sweeping some parts of the Israeli public and bowing their heads to Netanyahu’s cynical, rabble-rousing machinations.

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openDemocracy: We must not forget Srebrenica

Along that way, they have found some measure of each. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has determined that genocide was committed in Srebrenica and convicted some of the war criminals that orchestrated and took part in it. And grass-root organisations are overcoming great obstacles to starting the difficult journey to reconciliation. [...]

They demand that their loved ones be found: but the slow identification process can only inflict additional suffering. They demand health care to treat their trauma, and they get substandard therapy. They demand accountability, but many war criminals still go free and unpunished. They demand recognition, but their suffering is ignored, vilified or denied. [...]

Mono-ethnic schools and the “two-schools-under-one-roof” system still characterises education in Bosnia and Herzegovina.It is also characterised by the ignorance of the past and manipulation of the facts about the recent war. [...]

Like the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide, the Srebrenica genocide was not an accident. It began well before it occurred.

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Financial Times: UK resignations and a crunch point for May's Brexit plans

After a tumultuous few days in UK politics, with the resignation of senior government ministers, the FT's Robert Shrimsley unpicks what this all means for the UK's Brexit negotiations and Theresa May's premiership.

The Economist: Women and the Saudi revolution

Saudi Arabia is one of the most conservative countries in the world. But a social revolution has begun. The Economist's editor, Zanny Minton Beddoes takes a road-trip around Riyadh to examine what a more moderate Saudi would mean for its women, and the rest of the world.

Quartz: The backstory of how Ethiopia and Eritrea found peace after 20 years

The first indication that these historic events might be possible came on June 4. Abiy declared that he would accept the outcome of an international commission’s finding over a disputed border between the two countries. It was the border conflict of 1998-2000, and Ethiopia’s refusal to accept the commission’s ruling, that was behind two decades of armed confrontation. With this out of the way, everything began to fall into place. [...]

Perhaps most important of all, the border will be demarcated. This won’t be an easy task. Populations who thought themselves citizens of one country could find themselves in another. This could provoke strong reactions, unless both sides show flexibility and compassion. [...]

For Ethiopia, there would be the end to Eritrean subversion, with rebel movements deprived of a rear base from which to attack the government in Addis Ababa. In return, there is every chance that Ethiopia will now push for an end to the UN arms embargo against the Eritrean government. [...]

Finally, behind the scenes, the UN and the African Union have been encouraging both sides to resolve their differences. This culminated in the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, flying to Addis Ababa for a meeting on Monday – just hours after the joint declaration. Guterres told reporters that in his view the sanctions against Eritrea could soon be lifted since they would soon likely become “obsolete.”

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Business Insider: NATO allies are talking about breaking away from the US, but Trump isn't their only problem

Trump's approach to the summit is unlikely to change the minds of European leaders who have called on their governments and alliance partners to adapt to a changing world order — in large part by augmenting their domestic defense industries.

In June, Jorge Domecq, the Spanish head of the European Defense Agency, said countries on the continent needed to work toward greater "strategic autonomy" by weaning itself off US-made weaponry. [...]

In mid-June, the parliament in Estonia — which plans a defense-spending increase amid high concern about its eastern neighbor, Russia — changed legislation to provide "a legal framework for Estonian companies to begin to manufacture, maintain, import, and export military weapons, ammunition, munitions and combat vehicles." [...]

A survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations found that members of the European Union — which does not totally overlap with NATO membership — viewed Russia as the second-biggest threat to Europe.

But within the EU, perspectives on Russia varied greatly. Seven countries viewed it as their biggest threat, and five members, mostly from southern Europe, saw it as almost no threat at all.  

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The Washington Post: Trump’s ‘populism’ is just a search for scapegoats

In Venezuela, the Maduro regime has accused companies that refuse to sell things for less than they cost — the result of how high the government has pushed inflation and how low it has set price controls — of waging an “economic war” against the so-called Bolivarian revolution. The government has nationalized factories in response and then sold things at a loss itself, which, of course, has only added to its money-printing needs.

In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has lashed out at what he calls the “interest-rate lobby” for trying to force the “mother and father of all evil”— higher interest rates — onto the country as a supposedly quack cure for Turkey's sagging currency and growing inflation. Erdogan, you see, believes against all evidence that lower rates actually cause lower inflation, rather than the other way around, and he has said central bankers would be guilty of “treason” if they didn't go along with that. [...]

But that's almost beside the point. The real story is that, like President Nicolás Maduro's inability to understand that price controls cause shortages or Erdogan's ignorance about the fact that lower interest rates actually lead to higher inflation, the Trump team seems actually shocked to find out that taxing imports so that they cost more makes things, yes, cost more.  

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