Israel and the Middle East News Update

Tuesday, November 3

Headlines:  70 Year-Old Man Stabbed in Netanya; 3 People Hurt in Rishon Letzion  Beilin Predicts Bibi Will Unilaterally Withdraw from Much of West Bank  Police Commander: More Difficult to Protect Terrorists from Mob  IDF Shut Down Palestinian Radio Station It Says Incites Violence  Former IDF Chief Gantz: We Will Always Live with Our Sword  Herzog to UK Envoy: Labeling Settlement Products ‘Rewards Terror’  Israel Hints at Air Force Cooperation with Jordan, Egypt  Lower Threshold for Terrorism Incitement Passes Knesset

Commentary:  Forward: “Israel’s Top Generals Split w/ Netanyahu on Roots of Terror Wave”  By J.J. Goldberg, Editor-at-Large, Forward  Al-Monitor: “How Will Jewish-Palestinian Relations Be Restored?”  By Shlomi Eldar, Israel Pulse Columnist, Al-Monitor

S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace 633 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, 5th Floor, Washington, DC 20004 www.centerpeace.org ● Yoni Komorov, Editor ● David Abreu, Associate Editor

News Excerpts November 3, 2015

Ha’aretz 70 Year-Old Man Stabbed in Netanya; 3 Hurt in Rishon Letzion Four people were wounded in two stabbing attacks in central Israel yesterday. A 70 year-old man was seriously wounded in a stabbing attack in the coastal city of Netanya, while a 31 year-old man and 80 year-old woman were critically injured earlier in the day in an attack in Rishon Letzion. A man in his twenties was slightly injured in the earlier attack. The assailants in both attacks were apprehended by police. A 22 year-old Palestinian man was shot by police on the scene in Netanya yesterday evening. The assailant, from the Tul Karm area, was in Israel illegally. See also, “Two Elderly Israelis Stabbed in Latest Palestinian Attacks” (CBS News)

Times of Israel Beilin Predicts Bibi Will Withdraw from Much of West Bank Former minister and veteran peace activist Yossi Beilin on Monday called for the creation of an Israeli-Palestinian confederation as a long-term strategic goal for the solution of the conflict. Such a solution will have to be preceded by an interim agreement that would create a Palestinian state in provisional borders, he said. However, he said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, anxious to avoid a bi-national state but unwilling to meet Palestinian demands, would wind up unilaterally withdrawing from much of the West Bank to ensure a Jewish majority in Israel.

Ma’ariv Police Commander: More Difficult to Protect Terrorists from Mob Commander of the Central District Police Cmdr. Motti Cohen spoke to Army Radio in the wake of the two attempts to attack terrorists, saying: it is getting more difficult to protect the terrorist from the mob than to protect the mob from the terrorist. Cohen: “In this case, several dozen people tried to take the law into their own hands and to attack the terrorist. The police coped with this, and removed the citizens. In this case, the activity [to extricate the attacker] was no less difficult, maybe even more complicated, than ending the incident.” See also, “As Terror Continues, More Angry Bystanders Attack Terrorists” (Arutz Sheva)

Huffington Post IDF Shut Down Palestinian Radio Station It Says Incites Violence The Israeli military raided a Palestinian radio station in the West Bank on Tuesday and confiscated equipment it said was being used to broadcast calls to attack Israelis. The military said it shut down the Al Hurria radio station in Hebron overnight and accused it of inciting violence in the volatile West Bank city. The station's director, Ayman Qawasmeh, said Israel troops raided the station after 2 a.m. destroyed equipment and confiscated transmitters. "This is a clear violent aggression on the Palestinian media," he said. "We didn't incite, we just reported the Israeli daily crimes against our people in Hebron. They want to silence our voice." See also, “Citing Incitement, IDF Shuts Down Fatah-Affiliated Radio Station in Hebron” (Jerusalem Post)

Jerusalem Post Former IDF Chief Gantz: We Will Always Live with Our Sword The security uncertainty that hovers over Israel will continue, and security challenges will not vanish overnight, but Israel is strong, and should strive to achieve diplomatic progress with the Palestinians, former IDF chief of staff Lt.- Gen. Benny Gantz said on Monday. Speaking at a security conference organized by the Institute for National Security Studies at the Sapir Academic College in Sderot, Gantz said, “Will we forever live by our sword? We definitely will live with our sword. I don’t think our children or grandchildren won’t be soldiers. We must make efforts to try and not live only by our sword, but we will always be with a sword.” See also, “A Year After Gaza War, Israel's Military Experts Wonder: Was It Worth It?” (Times of Israel)

Times of Israel Herzog to Envoy: Labeling Settlement Products Rewards Terror Opposition leader Isaac Herzog tells British Ambassador to Israel David Quarrey that a European Union plan to mark products made in factories over the Green Line is “a prize for terror.” The EU will soon decide exactly how to label the products, after the European Parliament passed a resolution last month to approve the measure. Herzog says he “strongly opposes this harmful and unnecessary measure,” saying that “this is a measure that serves only one purpose – continuing the hate and regional conflict. Marking these products is an act of violence by extremists who want to further inflame the situation and the EU is falling into their trap.” See also, “EU to Publish Guidelines for Labeling Goods Produced in West Bank Settlements” (i24 News)

Ynet News Israel Hints at Air Force Cooperation with Jordan, Egypt Israeli fighter pilots recently trained with Arab counterparts in the United States, Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said on Tuesday, referring to a joint exercise that a US official described as involving Jordanian planes. The remarks by Ya'alon followed Israel's disclosure that its air force helped locate a Russian passenger plane that crashed in the Egyptian Sinai—both rare departures from a policy of keeping Israeli-Arab military cooperation under wraps. Bruised by an Iranian nuclear deal that it had lobbied against, and hoping to skirt deadlocked Palestinian peace talks through wider regional engagement, Israel has been hinting it enjoys burgeoning secret ties with some Arab powers.

Jerusalem Post Lower Threshold for Terrorism Incitement Passes Knesset Legislation creating a separate, easier-to-prosecute crime of incitement to terror, as opposed to general incitement to violence, passed a first reading in the Knesset overnight Monday. The penal code currently establishes that incitement to violence or terrorism, which carries a five year prison sentence, is when someone publicizes a call to an act of violence or terrorism, or praises, sympathizes with or encourages such acts, and the statements have a real chance of causing someone to behave violently or commit an act of terrorism. The new bill creates a separate crime of incitement to terrorism, which would not require the prosecution to prove the probability of the statements causing someone to commit an act of terrorism. See also, “Knesset Approves Minimum Jail Time for Rock Throwing” (Times of Israel)

Forward – November 3, 2015 Israel’s Top Generals Split with Bibi on Roots of Terror Wave By J.J. Goldberg  Benjamin Netanyahu probably thinks he got the last laugh after the international uproar he touched off with his “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews” speech on October 20. But he just might have opened up a whole new can of worms.  The Israeli prime minister was bombarded with criticism by everyone from Knesset opposition leader Isaac Herzog to German Chancellor Angela Merkel over his claim that the extermination idea was first proposed to Hitler by the Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem. The critics all said it was a historical untruth, a distortion of the Holocaust and a diminishment of the evil of Nazism. Merkel went as far as to rebuke Netanyahu and insist that Germans, not someone else, bore responsibility for the Holocaust.  Netanyahu, it turned out, was quick to concede the main point. He never meant to suggest that Hitler wasn’t responsible for the Holocaust, he said the next day. A week later he conceded further that the genocide idea hadn’t come from the mufti. He said he merely wanted to point out that Husseini, a founding father of Palestinian nationalism, was an enthusiastic accomplice of Hitler’s and that genocidal, Nazi-style anti-Semitism was the primary motivating force in his opposition to Zionism. And that today’s Palestinian leadership continues to revere Husseini and his legacy.  And with that, the subject was more or less closed. Critics around the world, it seems, were satisfied that Netanyahu understood the magnitude of Hitler’s crime. All he was really trying to say was that Palestinian nationalism traces its roots to genocidal anti-Semitism. And to world opinion such an imputation apparently isn’t a problem. So Netanyahu came out a winner from the seeming embarrassment. He discredited the current Palestinian leadership under Mahmoud Abbas as being politically descended from those who admired genocide. A good day’s work.  Coincidentally or not, however, voices have been raised in a most unlikely corner to insist that Palestinian hostility to Israel — including Palestinian terrorist violence — is at least partly a response to Israeli actions and policies, and not simply a deep-seated hatred of Jews. That corner is the Israel Defense Forces.  In the days after Netanyahu’s speech, two active-duty IDF generals who are among the army’s top experts on Palestinian affairs spoke out publicly to state that Palestinian violence is driven to a considerable degree by anger at Israeli actions. One of the two went a step further, warning that only a serious Israeli diplomatic re-engagement with the Palestinians will help to quell such violence over the long term.  This might seem like more of the same-old, same-old that we’ve been hearing for several years now: questioning of Netanyahu’s policies by senior figures in the Israeli defense establishment. But it’s not. This is something new.

 Up to now, almost all public pushback from the security community has come from retired ex- service chiefs who are now private citizens and free to speak their minds. Their unanimity may well tell us something important about Israeli defense doctrine, as I’ve argued before. And indeed, many of them remain in close touch and intimately involved as reservists in current military and intelligence activity.  But there’s a difference when active-duty generals speak out. IDF generals — unlike, say, Israeli cabinet ministers — are not free to spout off publicly with opinions that contradict their immediate bosses. When they do speak out, therefore, their views can be assumed to reflect those of the IDF command. Accordingly, for a high-ranking, active-duty general to voice a view that’s at odds with strongly held views of the prime minister is nothing less than shocking, because it’s the voice of the IDF. And that’s what has started happening now.  The first general to speak out was Major General Nitzan Alon, currently chief of the General Staff Operations Directorate. He moved up last May after nearly a decade as commander of Israel’s military presence in the West Bank — first as commander of the Judea-Samaria Division, then as chief of Central Command. Alon testified on October 22 in a trial involving two settlers accused of incitement for publishing the Kahanist-leaning Jewish Voice website.  “Some of the motivation of the Palestinians to carry out terror attacks is due to the violence of right-wing elements in the West Bank,” Alon told the court, according to Ha’aretz and numerous other news sources.  “In my understanding there are many reasons for Palestinian violence, some of them related to the murderous behavior of the terrorists, some related to religious and nationalistic motives, and a certain part, not the main part, that is related to revenge activity due to the activity of Israelis against Palestinians,” Alon was quoted as saying.  He also said that “a significant part of Israeli violence against Palestinians stems from Palestinian violence against Israelis. Some of the incidents are revenge for terror or violence.” In other words, we are witnessing what’s known in the West — much to the displeasure of the Israeli and pro-Israel right — as a cycle of violence.  The second general to cause waves was Brigadier General Guy Goldstein, deputy chief of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories. That’s the IDF unit in charge of maintaining relations between the military, as legal sovereign in the territories (under Israeli law, the territories aren’t annexed to Israel but rather are held by the army), and Palestinian civil authorities.  Speaking October 28 at an academic conference in Netanya on rehabilitation of Gaza, Goldstein said that the wave of Palestinian terrorist violence plaguing Israel would not disappear — though it might rise and fall in intensity — “unless there is some significant change, partly if not mostly on the diplomatic front.”

 “What Israel is facing is not a wave of escalation,” Goldstein was quoted as saying. “but a confrontation that is expected to continue if not intensify and bring changes in the Palestinian arena. Even if there’s a certain calming in terrorism and disturbances, without a diplomatic process all the conditions for a continuation of the confrontation will remain and are expected to erupt again. The central challenge: the ability of the Palestinian Authority to control the confrontation. Over time the risk grows that it will lose control and stability will be undermined.”  Of the two generals’ comments, Goldstein’s caused the greater public uproar. As deputy chief of the Coordinator’s office, he can only say what his bosses say — his immediate superior, chief coordinator Major General Yoav “Paulie” Mordechai, and above him the chief of staff, Lieutenant General Gadi Eizenkot.  What Goldstein did was to give the public a rare peek at what the military and intelligence chiefs are telling the prime minister and the cabinet in closed sessions. Now we know exactly what the Netanyahu government is hearing from the people whom it pays to read and understand the events on the ground. Hearing — yet ignoring.  Rephrased in plain English (the comments above are my translation from Goldstein’s Hebrew), Goldstein is saying that force alone, the government’s current response to the unrest, will not bring calm. And by implication, that there are diplomatic options — viable options from the standpoint of Israeli security as the army reads it — that the government is choosing not to pursue.  But while Goldstein’s comments are more sweeping, Nitzan Alon’s may be more telling, if only because they signal the return one of the IDF’s fastest rising stars to the public eye for a moment. During his long tenure as the IDF’s chief face to the West Bank, he was enormously unpopular among the settlers. He was considered a leftist, hostile to the settlers, overly sympathetic to Palestinian rights. They grumbled, correctly, that his wife, Mor Nitzan, was active in the left-wing women’s peace group Machsom Watch. Settler activists occasionally held protest demonstrations outside his home.  When he was promoted from commander of the Judea-Samaria Division to chief of Central Command in December 2011 by then-chief of staff Benny Gantz, it evoked howls of protest. Commentators on the Israeli right viewed it, again correctly, as something of a declaration of independence, if not downright defiance, by Gantz, who had become chief of staff the previous February.  Gantz had been a compromise appointee, chosen after the army’s recommendation for chief of staff, Gadi Eizenkot, was vetoed by Netanyahu and then-defense minister Ehud Barak, and their own favorite was then disqualified over a minor real estate scandal. In appointing Alon, Gantz was laying down an early marker that he was part of the IDF consensus.  Last February Eizenkot, now 55, became chief of staff. In May he appointed Alon, 50, to be chief of operations, one of the top positions at General Staff headquarters. Alon is one of several young up-and-comers being groomed for the top spot in the next round or two. The other top name being talked about is Aviv Kochavi, 51, currently chief of Northern Command and previously chief of military intelligence — and chief of operations before that. What they all share is a reading of Israel’s security situation that’s at odds with the Likud consensus. 6

 That reading starts with the knowledge, which they experience daily and share with the government, that cooperation between the IDF and the Palestinian security services under Mahmoud Abbas’s command continues unabated. And that Abbas is doing his best to calm the current unrest. They know from their daily contact with their Palestinian counterparts that the steady diet of insults hurled at Abbas by Israel’s political leaders — from accusations of incitement to implications of Nazism — weakens him and makes their job harder.  They know that the Palestinian security services, from the leadership on down, cooperate with Israeli security in the hope and expectation that it will lead to Palestinian independence. And that removal of that hope — as Netanyahu seemed to do when he told a Knesset committee on October 26 that Israel needs to maintain full control of the territory “for the foreseeable future” — will lead to a breakdown of cooperation and threaten Israeli security.  Nobody but the most paranoid conspiracy theorists thinks the Israeli military would ever consider disobeying the orders of Israel’s democratically elected civilian government. But neither are its leaders planning to ignore the realities on the ground and pretend black is white and up is down in order to feed someone else’s fantasies. And as things on the ground get more and more out of hand, they’re less and less inclined to keep the facts secret. Jonathan Jeremy “J.J.” Goldberg is editor-at-large of the Forward, where he served as editor in chief for seven years (2000-2007).

Al-Monitor – November 2, 2015 How Will Jewish-Palestinian Relations Be Restored? By Shlomi Eldar  The line was crossed during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014 and resulted in the recent wave of terror attacks. The public discourse surrounding Israeli Arabs has become violent, racist and dangerous.  The rift was created despite the low degree of involvement of Palestinian Israelis in the recent wave of terror. Out of the 75 terror attacks perpetrated during the month of October, only two assailants were Palestinian Israelis: Alaa Raed Ahmad Ziwad, who carried out a stabbing and vehicular attack Oct. 11 in Gan Shmuel, and Mohannad Khalil Salam al-Okbi, from the Bedouin community near Hura, who on Oct. 18 carried out an attack in Beersheba. Asra Zidan Abed, from Nazareth, to whom an Oct. 9 attack in Afula was initially attributed, suffers, it seems, from a mental disorder. An investigation revealed that she was waving a knife at security forces because she wanted to commit suicide.  In light of the dozens of terror attacks in recent weeks, the Jewish public suspects, and rightly so, that everyone is a potential threat and might pull out a knife or some other sharp implement to carry out a bloody attack. “Anyone with Arab or Middle Eastern facial features is being very careful,” a floor manager at a Jaffa restaurant that only employs Arabs told Al- Monitor on condition of anonymity. He pointed to a young man walking down the street wearing a T-shirt that read, “I’m an Iraqi Jew. Don’t shoot me.”  “That’s not funny,” he explained. “Jews from North African or Middle Eastern origins with those facial features put on shirts saying they are Jews so that nobody will mistake them for Arabs. There are shirts like this for Moroccan, Tunisian and Yemeni [Jews]. Look what’s become of us.”  Whether the T-shirt makers were trying to be funny or simply taking advantage of the escalation in the security situation to make a fast buck, these shirts would not have become such a hit if so many Israelis were not rightly concerned about being caught in the middle of a terror incident or being injured in a case of mistaken identity, which has happened on more than one occasion.  Sweepingly calling into question the loyalty of Arab Israelis is the result of ongoing, unbridled incitement by Israeli politicians. Beginning with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s warning on election day, March 17, that “Arabs are voting in droves,” it moved on from there to right- wing Knesset members, chief among them former Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, who called Arab Israelis a “fifth column,” accusing them of trying to destroy the state of Israel. Not helping matters were Arab Knesset members from the Joint List, mainly from the Balad Party, who engender a hostile climate between the two communities.  When right-wing ministers and Knesset members lump together the involvement of the northern chapter of the Islamic Movement in Israel over the Temple Mount and the direct involvement of Arab Israelis in terror attacks, it means that the steps to allay concerns, mend fences and advocate reconciliation will not come from politicians.

 A decline in the number of attacks has been noted in recent days, but even when things quiet down completely, it will take a long time to undo the devastating damage to the charged relations between Jews and Arabs. The only way to rebuild relations, if that is even possible, is by taking conciliatory steps.  On Nov. 1, I grabbed a taxi in Tel Aviv. The driver, boasting that since the start of the stabbing attacks, he had not taken on any Arab passengers, told me, “All Arabs are collaborators. They can’t be trusted. They should leave, go away from here.”  He went on, “I’m not a racist, really I’m not. Many years ago my dad had Arab workers from Gaza who used to live with us. But today that’s it. It’s over. No Arab will get into my cab, not one. And I’m not the only one who thinks that way. Almost every cabbie I talk to says the same thing. We have an agreement between us that we don’t pull over for an Arab, regardless of whether he is a pharmacist, a doctor or a university professor. An Arab is always an Arab.”  The cab pulled up in front of a restaurant at the Tel Aviv port. Realizing that one of the waiters there was an Arab Israeli, the driver quickly covered his face. “Look he’s coming over here,” he said. “I used to be a regular here, but now they won’t see a penny out of me.” Tapping lightly on the window, the waiter said with a broad smile, “Hey Mordoch, where have you been? Come in bro, grab a bite.” Rudely rejecting the offer, the driver replied, “I have no time for you [all].” The smile instantly disappeared from the waiter’s face. It seems he understood what was going on. All the other restaurants in the area looked packed, except for this one, which mainly employs Arabs.  At a nearby cafe, I was approached by a waiter who recognized me as a journalist. Speaking quietly, he said, “I’m from Tira [an Israeli Arab town].” Requesting anonymity, he said that his Jewish boss supports him, but because of the current situation, he had had to change his name from the Arabic Yunis to the Israeli-Jewish-sounding Yoni. Yunis remarked, “Sometimes the waiters and the cooks call out, ‘Yoni’, ‘Yoni,’ but I don’t reply. I still haven’t gotten used to the fact that that’s my new name.” In response to being asked if his employer had urged him to change his name, Yunis smiled, but didn't say a word.  In another jam-packed restaurant, I saw a young couple. The woman, clearly pregnant, was wearing a burqa. Her husband was sitting by her side. Seated in the middle of the restaurant, they were surrounded by Jewish patrons. “You can print our names,” the husband told me. “I’m Nahed, and this is my wife, Nissrin. We’re from Jaffa, and we’re not scared. This is our country as much as it is yours. You and we have to get used to it.” Nissrin added that in the future, she would teach the daughter she is carrying to live in peace with everyone — Jews, Muslims, Christians.  There are some long-time Israeli businesspeople who especially at this time continue to insist on hiring Arabs and even increasing their numbers in their companies. One of them, the owner of a large supermarket chain who requested anonymity, explained to Al-Monitor, “I hire Jews and Arabs together, regardless of color, religion or sex. I do it all the time. Only this way, together, will they get to know each other and realize that generalizations are a terrible thing.”

 That’s what it’s really all about. There is no silver bullet. We need to get to know each other, but mainly, as the businessman observed, “not to be afraid at all,” a reference to Rabbi Breslov's saying that the main thing in life is not to be afraid. Shlomi Eldar is a columnist for Al-Monitor’s Israel Pulse. For the past two decades, he has covered the Palestinian Authority and especially the Gaza Strip for Israel’s Channels 1 and 10, reporting on the emergence of Hamas. In 2007, he was awarded the Sokolov Prize, Israel’s most important media award, for this work.