Israel sees over 8,000 new virus cases for 2nd day in a row | Published: 01.06.21

Israel on Wednesday saw over 8,000 new daily coronavirus cases for a second day in a row, health officials said. The Health Ministry reported that on Tuesday 8,164 people tested positive for COVID-19, after 121,816 tests had been conducted, placing the contagion rate at 6.8%. Out of 59,229 patients battling the disease, 824 are in serious condition, with 207 connected to ventilators. The official death toll since the start of the pandemic now stands at 3,495. In the first five days of January, 139 coronavirus patients had passed away, with an average of 28 deaths per day. On Monday alone, 39 patients lost their lives. There are nine cities in Israel that each has more than 1,000 active virus patients. In there are 11,976 active patients, in Bnei Brak 2,758, in Modi'in Illit 1,988, in Tel Aviv-Yafo 1,718, in Beit Shemesh 1,653, in 1,585, in Ashdod 1,541, In Petah Tikva 1,421 and in Beitar Illit 1,166. In the meantime, Israel's much-praised, high-speed coronavirus vaccination campaign appeared to show signs of slowing on Tuesday as the country's first and second largest HMOs, Clalit and Maccabi, announced they were halting the delivery of first doses from next week. As a result, only 115,100 people received the first vaccine shot on Tuesday, much lower than the 150,000- average reported in the past few days. In total, over 1,485,000 Israelis have already received the first dose of the vaccine, meaning one in six Israelis were given the first jab.

In 'one final effort,' Israel headed for strict coronavirus lockdown starting Friday Ido Efrati, Judy Maltz | Jan. 5, 2021 |

The cabinet voted Tuesday to approve tighter lockdown measures, including shutting most schools and workplaces, amid Israel's ongoing third nationwide lockdown, which began on December 27. The new regulations, to be voted on individually in another meeting on Wednesday, will go into effect at midnight between Thursday and Friday and last 14 days. They will constitute "one final effort" as the country presses ahead with its rapid vaccine rollout, Prime Minister said on Tuesday. All schools will move to remote learning, apart from special education and at-risk youth programs. Only workplaces considered essential will remain open. Regarding travel abroad, the ministers decided that only those who purchased an airline ticket before the new measures go into effect would be allowed to fly, but that specific approvals to fly in certain cases would be granted by a special committee. All incoming travelers will be placed in a state-run quarantine facility, and would be released only after having tested negative for the coronavirus. All ministers voted in favor of the tighter measures, apart from Interior Minister Arye Dery and Religious Services Minister Yaakov Avitan, both from ultra-Orthodox party , who abstained from voting, as the measures include shutting synagogues and religious schools. ’s David Amsalem was the only one to vote against the measures, as they don’t bar protests. Gantz announced on Tuesday that he will not agree to harm the right to protest or to restrict the courts during the tightened lockdown. Health Minister described protests as an “epidemiological risk,” but said that any steps to limit protests will lead to media accusations of a “political lockdown, and some of the public will be persuaded of that.” Education Minister Yoav Gallant assented to the new measures, saying he hoped for a “short and tight” lockdown, amid widespread resistance to closing schools. 1 Earlier Tuesday, Edelstein called for a strict, full lockdown, following an emergency meeting with senior ministry officials regarding the steep rise in coronavirus infection rates. On Monday, 11.09 percent of all coronavirus tests came back positive. Israel is leading the world in COVID-19 vaccinations, having inoculated nearly 15 percent of its 9.3 million population. Officials hope Israel can emerge from the pandemic as early as February, should the program maintain its speed. But new cases have skyrocketed since the vaccination campaign began in late December, reaching a daily tally of over 8,300 on Tuesday, the highest in months. Meanwhile, the Clalit health maintenance organization announced on Tuesday that it will halt additional appointments for the first dose of the coronavirus vaccine until stocks are replenished, offering only the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The HMO said it will provide the first dose to those who already have confirmed appointments. Meanwhile, the Health Ministry cut off the vaccine supply to Ichilov Hospital, which runs Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square vaccination tent, after the city vaccinated most of its teaching staff in violation of the ministry's instructions. “This is a matter of national resources and we must address it as such,” Edelstein said when ordering the halt to supplies because teachers do not belong to the priority groups of those over age 60 or with preexisting conditions. The Tel Aviv Municipality said the closure of the vaccination tent is temporary. Even before the planned tightening, Israelis have been required to stay mostly at home, many shops have been shuttered and public transport has been limited. Public anger has risen over the government's perceived inconsistent handling of the crisis. Israel will hold an election on March 23, its fourth in two years, after constant infighting in Netanyahu's coalition.

Israel election poll: Minor gains for anti-Netanyahu bloc, Tel Aviv mayor fails to takeoff Haaretz | Jan. 5, 2021 | 10:01 PM

2 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party has lost some support, according to a Channel 12 News poll published on Tuesday, going from 28 seats in a previous poll to 27. Meanwhile, former Likud lawmaker Gideon Sa’ar’s party, , is projected to gain a seat, taking it to 18 out of 120 Knesset seats. ’s , according to the poll, would be the Knesset’s third-largest party with 14 seats, followed by ’s Yesh with 13. The poll gives Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai’s The Israelis party six seats, two down from the previous poll, released last week, while ’s Kahol Lavan, which has seen many of its senior members leaving for other parties over the past week, is projected five seats. The Arab-majority four-way alliance continues its decline in the polls, with 10 projected seats. Israelis will return to the polls for the fourth time in two years on March 23. Labor, according to the poll, doesn’t pass the 3.25-percent electoral threshold, nor does the newly formed party of leading economist Yaron Zelekha. The former right-hand man of Yair Lapid, Ofer Shelah, who broke from to form his own party, Tnufa, also did not pass the electoral threshold. Far-right party Habayit Hayehudi also did not pass the quorum, as its chairman Peretz announced earlier on Tuesday that he will be exiting politics.

Does Netanyahu really think he can win over Israel’s Arabs? By HAVIV RETTIG GUR @ Times of Israel

Over the past week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has worked hard to showcase what his Likud party has called a new campaign reaching out to Israel’s Arab community. At first glance, the effort seems ludicrous. For years, Arab-led parties and Arab voters have been Likud’s favorite electoral bogeymen and punching bags. Now, Netanyahu claims large numbers of Arabs will vote for his party. “Just as I broke the Palestinian veto on relations with the Arab states, so I am breaking the Arab parties’ veto with the ,” he told Likud party officials on Saturday. “I believe in [Zionist Ze’ev] Jabotinsky’s doctrine that all rights need to be given to every citizen in the State of Israel. We’re reaching out to Arab voters — vote for us,” he said. On Friday, he told Channel 13, “For many, many years the Arab public was outside the mainstream of leadership. Why? There’s no reason. People contribute, people work. Let’s go all the way. Be part of the full success story of Israel. That’s what I would like to be exemplified in the election.” He isn’t just courting the voters. Netanyahu has been pounding the pavement in Arab towns, and has even begun to seek allies among the very political parties that have long represented Israel’s Arab citizens, especially the Islamic Ra’am party. It wasn’t so long ago, in the elections of April and September 2019, that Netanyahu was issuing dire warnings to his constituents that any government his political opponents might try to establish would depend on the support of non-Zionist Arab-majority parties — you know, like Ra’am. Back in 2015, on election day, Netanyahu warned his voters not only about the parties, but about Arabs themselves being “bused to the polls” in “droves.” The Likud campaign pushed out text messages on election day to party supporters with the ominous news that the terror group Hamas “has urged Arab Israelis to vote.” An Arab citizen’s right to vote was turned, in Likud’s messaging, into a threat to the country. In the April 2019 race, Likud even tried to sneak cameras into Arab voting stations, with the PR firm responsible for the initiative boasting on Facebook that its efforts had successfully depressed Arab turnout. (It later deleted the post, and Likud issued a statement denying that lowering turnout was the motive for deploying the cameras.)

3 Netanyahu’s relationship with Arab voters is no blank slate. He isn’t trying to overcome mere neglect or policy difference. Fear of the Arab voter has served as a mainstay of Likud’s political sloganeering and get-out-the- vote efforts for at least the past six years. Turning the corner For Netanyahu, siphoning two Knesset seats’ worth of Arab voters from one side of the aisle to the other is nothing to sneeze at in a close race. But if he can pull it off, it will deliver him a sorely needed push after three elections in which he and his right-religious allies fell just short of victory at the ballot box. And it seems that Netanyahu really believes he can draw the very voters he has maligned to cast their ballots for him. Yosef Maklada, a well-known pollster specializing in the Arab community, told Channel 12 news on Monday that his polls are finding Likud drawing 1.6 to 2.1 Knesset seats from Arab voters, or approximately 60,000 to 80,000 votes. Those figures seem to fit the new argument being made by some Arab politicians that parts of the Arab Israeli community are growing weary of seeing their politics consumed by the Palestinian cause, and are seeking a seat at Israel’s political table. They yearn for the kind of influence that can only be obtained by wheeling and dealing with those in power. If they seek to drive government funds to their communities, to rebuild dilapidated infrastructure, tackle soaring crime rates, and invest in schools and civil society, it’s time to put the Arab vote — so the argument goes — back in play. So it must be said: Netanyahu has reason to hope that a campaign among the Arabs can deliver some sorely needed seats. And as he noted repeatedly over the past week, it doesn’t hurt that Netanyahu helped deliver normalization deals that opened up new parts of the Arab world to Arab Israelis. An Israeli passport can now carry an Israeli tourist or entrepreneur to the Persian Gulf, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, and, soon, even Sudan. No wonder that Maklada also found that, just like the , Arabs tell pollsters that Netanyahu is the “most qualified” politician to serve as prime minister, by a wide margin. Unintended consequences and collaborations But there is another reason Netanyahu is now campaigning for an Arab vote he once denigrated. The past two years have seen an astonishing rally at the polls for the Arab parties. In the April 2019 election, the Arab parties ran on two separate slates that between them won 10 seats. In September 2019, as Likud’s anti-Arab campaigning reached a fever pitch, the parties united and won 13 seats. By March, the Joint List boasted 15 seats. The voter numbers are even more impressive. Arab-party votes rose from 7.8% of all valid votes cast in April to 10.6% in September to 12.7% in March. Or put another way: The Arab parties won 337,108 votes in April, then 470,211 in September – a 39% increase – then 581,507 in March – yet another 24% spike. Some (including this writer) have argued that the united run in a shared list was responsible for the rally. (A similar increase occurred in the 2015 election when the parties all ran together.) But MK , head of the Ta’al faction within the Joint List, had a simpler explanation over the past two years: “We were struggling to get out the vote,” he once said in the Knesset. “Then Netanyahu came and convinced everyone to rush to the polls.” Netanyahu’s anti-Arab campaign had backfired. It was that perceived marginalization by the ruling party, Arab lawmakers believe, that drove the astounding turnout for them at the ballot box in September 2019 and March of this year. Netanyahu believed Tibi. Ahead of the March race, he did something highly unusual: he asked - language media to interview him and used the interviews to detail all the support his governments had offered to the Arab community, from policing programs to school funding to infrastructure investments. Likud toned down (but didn’t entirely stop) its campaign rhetoric targeting Arab parties. It did stop warning its supporters about the dangers of Arabs voting.

4 The easing of the rhetoric in March didn’t help calm Arab anxieties or keep Arabs home on election day, as the 24% increase in votes for the Joint List from September to March demonstrates. If he’s going to convince Arab voters they don’t need to worry, Netanyahu will need something more convincing. Thus is born a Likud campaign actively soliciting the Arab vote. The Joint List falters The shift in Arab political discourse is real, but it still represents only a minority of the Arab vote. A Joint List that won 15 seats in March is now polling at 11, in part — say its lawmakers — out of a sense that it didn’t manage to translate its larger number of seats into increased Arab influence in government. Tensions are rising within the list as rumors circulate about Ra’am and possibly Ta’al splitting from Balad and to pursue a different kind of Arab Israeli politics more focused on obtaining that influence. The disappointment is measurable. An Israel Democracy Institute poll this week found that 69% of Jews said they were certain they would cast a ballot on March 23; among Arabs the figure was just 39%. Just 72% of Joint List voters from last March say they plan to vote for the party this time. If the slate splits, it’s likely to further depress Arab turnout — and see at least some of the votes, the ones cast for Ra’am, go to a party that has already declared its willingness to offer its support to Likud in exchange for funding and policy concessions for the Arab community. What Netanyahu could not achieve through ominous text messages and hidden cameras is now happening because of a widespread sense among Arab voters that their own leaders haven’t delivered the goods. Netanyahu’s new embrace of the Arab vote is a calculated attempt to accelerate that process. It is already showing early signs of success.

The top secret that could seal Netanyahu's political future: How many vaccines does Israel have? Amos Harel | Jan. 6, 2021 | Haaretz

The country’s deepest secret over the past week has nothing to do with the Dimona nuclear reactor or plans for a possible attack on Iran’s nuclear program. Rather, it’s exactly how many doses of coronavirus vaccine Israel currently has. Health Ministry director general Chezy Levy, whose skill at giving media interviews has improved recently, is careful to avoid answering direct questions on this issue. He and other interviewees from the health-care system justify their refusal on the grounds that Israel has signed secret agreements with the vaccine manufacturers. The implication is that the latter don’t want to arouse the wrath of other countries crying out for vaccines. According to various estimates, Israel has so far received about four million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. But the Health Ministry refuses to give detailed information. Before dawn on Tuesday, Moderna announced that the Health Ministry had approved its vaccine for use in Israel and that, as agreed in advance, it would supply six million doses, enough to vaccinate another three million people. Moderna said the first shipment would depart shortly, though it didn’t specify when. Levy and Health Minister Yuli Edelstein have offered conflicting assessments of when it would actually arrive. The timing is important, because if additional doses aren’t received from either Pfizer or Moderna this month, Israel is likely to find itself temporarily out of stock. Based on conversations with the health maintenance organizations, they’re like to stop giving the first dose of the vaccine early next week. The number of doses remaining is almost identical to the number of people in high-risk groups who haven’t yet been vaccinated. By next week, the HMOs and hospitals will have vaccinated just over two million people.

5 They will then spend about three weeks administering the second dose of the vaccine. The inventory needed for this dose is untouchable, because it has to be given on time to everyone who has already received the first dose. This leaves the health system with little room to maneuver until additional doses arrive. According to Health Ministry data, as of Tuesday morning, almost 60 percent of people aged 60 and older – the group at greatest risk of serious illness – have been vaccinated. Around 75 percent of the vaccines administered to date have been to people in risk groups (the elderly or people with certain preexisting conditions). But response rates among these groups are expected to gradually decline, and it will be hard to reach some of the elderly who remain unvaccinated. The difficulty of closing these gaps has created vaccine surpluses every day. Since the doses must either be used or destroyed, this has resulted in the remainder going to younger people, and sometimes to professional associations that exert pressure. Edelstein said Tuesday that Israel plans to vaccinate 70 to 80 percent of the population – meaning almost everyone older than 16 – by April or May. That means the government is counting on getting all the promised doses from Moderna plus additional doses from Pfizer in the coming months to reach the requisite total of around 14 million doses. Such calculations raise the heretical thought that the deliberate fog around the number of doses may be connected to political considerations. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has built a significant portion of his campaign for the March 23 election around getting the vaccines to Israel quickly and inoculating a significant portion of the population, so as to create the impression that Israel is ahead of most other countries in extricating itself from the coronavirus crisis. Israel is reaping the fruits of sensible negotiations with the manufacturers and an understanding of the need for an early, accelerated vaccination campaign. But Netanyahu is walking a fine line here. He is dependent on the swift arrival of additional shipments of the vaccine at a time when incidence of the virus continues to rise. On Monday, a record 112,000 coronavirus tests were performed, and 7.4 percent of the results were positive. If Netanyahu can’t control the pace of vaccinations and rein in the rate of infection, his plan of action may well be disrupted. Perhaps Netanyahu is saving the good news about the arrival of additional vaccines so he can announce it together with a tightening of the lockdown. The Health Ministry has been pushing for days for the cabinet to tighten the lockdown quickly, arguing that the high incidence of the virus will lead to a high death toll and could also endanger the quality of treatment coronavirus patients receive in hospitals. As the number of seriously ill patients rises, some hospital directors have begun projecting a mood of crisis in their coronavirus wards and intensive care units. Some doctors have been doing the same on social media. On Tuesday, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced that they had reached an agreement on tightening the lockdown and closing schools. The tighter lockdown will apparently take effect on Friday and will initially last 10 days to two weeks (though usually, lockdowns end up lasting longer than initially planned). Given the rise in incidence of the virus, the Health Ministry’s demand that all schools except special education be shut down was accepted. Over the past week, there has been a lively debate with the Education Ministry over the number of infected children and teens, but this debate misses the main point: Incidence of the virus in ultra-Orthodox schools is more than double the rate in state secular schools and state religious schools. To date, the government has completely failed to enforce the lockdown regulations on ultra-Orthodox schools. In practice, it has let these schools continue operating as usual even during times when all other schools were shut down completely. With the election just two and a half months away and Netanyahu utterly dependent on his ultra-Orthodox partners in the governing coalition, there’s no reason to think this time will be any different.

Vaccination Miracle Brings Israel Back to Its Roots By Daniel Gordis January 1, 2021, Bloomberg

In just under three months, Israel will head to the polls for the fourth time in two years. With parties still being formed, old alliances collapsing and new partnerships emerging, it is too early to predict the outcome. Nonetheless, most polls indicate that for the first time ever, the Labor Party will get no seats in the Knesset. 6 Labor was Israel’s founding party, the party of its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, the party that ruled almost absolutely for Israel’s first 29 years. Thus, Labor’s apparent demise is yet another indicator that the Israel of 1948 is all but gone. The image of Israel as a small country surrounded by enemies is giving way to a new Middle East in which Israel has peace with Egypt and Jordan, normalized relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, made progress with Morocco and, apparently, movement with Saudi Arabia. A country that barely held on in the face of what seemed imminent economic collapse in the 1950’s is now a technology powerhouse and boasts a formidable economy. Its population has grown tenfold since 1948, from approximately 800,000 in 1948 to 8.6 million now. While Israelis take pride in all they’ve accomplished, we are often wistful for the simpler, more innocent Israel of yesteryear. We miss that sense of social cohesion that once felt omnipresent, the sense of shared destiny that early socialist roots cultivated. Few would have predicted that the simple process of getting vaccinated against Covid-19 would restore, however briefly, the Israel we sometimes long for. Every Israeli citizen is a member of one of a handful of national HMO’s, so we are fairly easily reached. A couple of days before the vaccinations were set to begin — first for frontline medical staff and the next day for those 60 years old and above — we got emails inviting us to make an appointment. The demand was overwhelming, but after a few tries, I got us appointments for the end of the first day that the vaccine would be available to non-medical staff. As the vaccinations were being given in one of Jerusalem’s large sports arenas, I anticipated utter bedlam, the sort of Israeli chaos that I usually can’t stand, and drove to the arena with a bit of dread. But I was entirely mistaken. Inside, there was a hushed calm, even a sense of sanctity. We waited only a very few minutes, and as I looked at the eyes of other people waiting, their faces hidden behind their masks, I could tell that I was not the only one overwhelmed by a profound sense of gratitude for being part of this country. None of us knew — and still don’t — how exactly Israel managed to procure so many doses of a vaccine developed in part by an American company but still not easily obtainable in America. But we were deeply grateful that it had. The small army of nurses and medical techs injecting one person after another with utter efficiency was that old Israel, the Israel that knows how to come together when facing a mortal enemy. It’s a different sort of enemy this time, but the battle still evoked that abiding belief in our national resilience. When my family moved to Israel more than 20 years ago, we were astonished that our 12-year-old daughter and her friends would stay out with their youth group until 1 a.m. Parents didn’t worry about their daughters being out late at night, and for the most part, they still don’t. This is still a country that when a little kid is crying outside without an adult in obvious proximity, people scoop him or her up and wait for someone to show; it never crosses their mind that parents would object to their child being held by strangers, just as it rarely occurs to a parent that anything untoward is going to happen to their lost child. These past few weeks have evoked once again that Israel that sees itself as a family. Still, I was momentarily confused as we waited the required 15 minutes after the shot before leaving, as staff members walked around handing out copies of little booklets. “Games for children?” they asked quietly, offering people as many copies as they wanted. “What on earth are these for?” I wondered. “We’re not vaccinating kids, it’s nighttime and there isn’t a kid in sight. Except for the staff we’re all over 60. Who needs kids’ games?” And then it struck me, as people happily and gratefully took copies of the booklet — and then asked for another copy or two. The booklets weren’t for us — they were for our grandchildren. The HMO intuited why so many of us were there that night; we hadn’t hugged our grandchildren in almost nine months. Obviously, we were also relieved to reduce the possibility of getting sick, but somebody in an office somewhere, far from the arena, understood instinctively who would be getting on line first, and why. Friends of ours, just a few years too young to have been eligible for the vaccine, look after an elderly woman who lives not far from them. When she needs a ride or assistance with something, they’re there for her. She, of course, was eligible, and got an appointment; so they drove her downtown to her HMO’s location. Parking

7 downtown is often impossible, so they went together — the wife would take the woman inside while the husband waited in the car. But a few minutes later, my friend told me, his wife called, told him to park the car and come inside right away. “They’re going to vaccinate us,” she told him. When he reminded the nurse that they weren’t really eligible because they were still too young, she simply said, “You brought in an elderly person who needed to get here? You deserve to get the vaccine,” and soon thereafter, the three of them walked out, vaccinated. It reminded him, he told me, of that Israel that so many of us miss. By submitting my information, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service and to receive offers and promotions from Bloomberg. At moments, in these recent weeks, the warmth of the past and the promise of the future seemed to meld. A prominent Arab physician from the Galilee told another friend of mine what these past months of being on the front lines have felt like to him. “Usually, when Israel goes to war,” he said to her, “we’re not in the army, we can’t help. But this time, Israel went to war again, and we Arabs got to be soldiers, too!” When she wiped a tear from her eye, she told me, his eyes also watered. Israel has now inoculated nearly a million people. Israel’s is a very young population, so almost a third are too young to get the vaccine anyway — which means that in two weeks, this country vaccinated just shy of 20% of eligible citizens. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political future looked precarious just a week or two ago, is hoping that a national sense of gratitude for this extraordinary accomplishment might just catapult him back into office — and things could well play out that way. After crises, Israelis often rip their governments apart; in the midst of the challenge, though, they often bond together, even at the ballot box. Israel, like most countries, still has enormous obstacles to address, many of them important, a few of them existential. But there are still moments here when we recognize that this is not a country like any other. It is a country that was founded to give sanctuary to a particular people that desperately needed it, one that has weathered more in seven decades than most countries do in centuries, and that has produced a sort of familial resilience that can’t be replicated anywhere else. For decades, Israelis have often gazed across the ocean at Americans, wondering when we could be just like them. These past few weeks, we’ve been profoundly grateful to be just who we are.

Georgia could be a big win for American Jews – and a big loss for Netanyahu Amir Tibon | Jan. 6, 2021 | Haaretz

The votes in Georgia are still being counted, but as of Wednesday morning, the bottom line seems clear: In a surprising turn of events, Democrats are heavily favored to win back control of the Senate, on the back of two narrow victories in a state that, just a few years ago, was considered ruby-red Republican. If Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff hold onto their leads – which are both already larger than Joe Biden’s margin of victory over U.S. President Donald Trump in the state two months ago – the implications for American politics will be colossal. Democrats will have a slim Senate majority for the first time since 2014, President-elect Joe Biden will be able to enact at least some of his ambitious agenda and the feud inside the Republican Party between Trump loyalists and ordinary conservatives will grow and intensify. For most American Jews, the results in Georgia are cause for celebration and a promising start to 2021, if only for the incredible fact that a 33-year-old “nice Jewish boy” will effectively end Mitch McConell’s iron grip over the U.S. Senate. The liberal-leaning majority of American Jews, which once again came through in big numbers for the Democratic Party in the 2020 election cycle, couldn’t have asked for a happier ending than the one likely to be produced by Georgia’s 4.5 million voters. American Jews have been dreaming for years about patching back up the old Black-Jewish alliance from the 1960’s civil rights movement, symbolized by the famous photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr. marching against segregation arm-in-arm with leading . Warnock, the leader of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta where MLK was co-pastor during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, ran a de-facto joint campaign with Ossoff over the past two months, presenting to voters a 21st century version of that same Black-Jewish partnership. The two candidates, both 8 with no prior political experience, appeared together at campaign events and in advertisements, and each often reminded their supporters to vote for the other when they campaigned separately. When Warnock came under a disingenuous and misleading attack over his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ossoff offered his full support for the pastor, emphasizing the important distinction between criticizing the Netanyahu government and being anti-Israel. Warnock’s critics tried to turn legitimate criticism of Netanyahu’s annexationist agenda into some form of antisemitism, while the reverend himself spoke out against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and in favor of U.S. military aid to Israel. Ossof, who is likely to become the first ever Jewish senator elected out of Georgia, stood by his side and shot down the cynical accusations. Warnock’s embrace of Ossoff was even more crucial for the Democrats’ apparent victory. In the November elections, when Republican Senator David Perdue was just a few thousands of votes short of winning more than 50 percent and avoiding a run-off election, Ossoff lagged behind Biden’s margins of victory in several Black-majority parts of the state. Going into the run-off election, it was clear that without improving his numbers in the African-American community, Ossoff stood no chance. The joint campaign with Warnock was crucial in getting Ossoff to the benchmarks he needed. But the Georgia results could also be good news for some Jewish conservatives. Georgia represents the biggest price paid thus far by the cynical Republican establishment for its embrace of Trump. After losing control of the House of Representatives in 2018 largely due to an anti-Trump backlash in America’s suburbs, the party will now likely also lose control of the Senate, where Republicans have a built-in advantage that makes it much more difficult for Democrats to win a majority. This loss, coupled with the emerging split inside the GOP over Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, could potentially become a turning point. Up until now, many of the Republicans who loathe Trump cooperated with his agenda because it brought along electoral victories. Perhaps a new reality in Washington, with Democrats holding a trifecta for the first time since 2009, will give these Republicans the courage to finally speak up. A Republican party in which the far-right, nativist and conspiratorial faction led by Trump is getting weaker, and more moderate voices are gaining back some influence, would be good news for American Jews – including many Jewish Republicans. One Jewish politician who should be counted among the losers of this election, assuming the current results hold, is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His biggest hope out of the 2020 election was for a second Trump term. After all, Trump helped him immensely during Israel’s three election campaigns in the last two years, and Netanyahu surely could have used the help in the upcoming fourth round. But Netanyahu knows how to read polls, and he treaded carefully, refusing at one point to join Trump’s mocking of Biden during a televised phone conversation. The projected Republican losses will make it much harder for Netanyahu to pit one branch of the U.S. government against the other, as he had done before during the Obama and Clinton administrations. He would have to say goodbye to his longed-for consolation prize – a Republican Senate that could work with him against Biden’s foreign policy. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t repeat the Republican gesture from 2015, when Netanyahu was invited to give a speech before both houses of Congress just two weeks before that year’s Israeli election; but who knows, maybe McConnell and Ted Cruz would have passed the “Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu Stop-Iran- From-Gaining-Nuclear-Weapons Act of 2021.” The embattled prime minister will now find it much harder to work against Biden in the president-elect’s own capital. A few years ago, before all the bad blood of the Obama and Trump presidencies, Netanyahu could at least rest assured that Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, the leading candidate to become majority leader, is as close to AIPAC as any Republican. But even Schumer, who voted against the Iran deal in 2015 and was an original co-sponsor of the legislation to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, has grown tired of Netanyahu’s alliance with the Republican party. He will surely continue to promote military aid to Israel and legislation against BDS, but if Netanyahu is counting on him to help Likud’s upcoming election campaign, he is setting himself up for a major disappointment.

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