Israel and the Middle East News Update

Wednesday, January 16

Headlines: ​ ● PA to Bid for Full UN Membership Despite US Opposition ● Gantz Near Cementing His Election Ticket ● Kochavi Takes Reins as IDF Chief of Staff ● 5 IDF Soldiers Likely to Face Charges for Beating Detainees ● How E. Jerusalem Palestinians Are Denied Israeli Citizenship ● Gaza Landfills and Sewage Build Up Along Israeli Border ● Radical Settler Smotrich Wins National Union Primary ● Thousands of Palestinians Protest Social Security Law

Commentary: ● Times of : “Gantz’s Empathy for the Druze is Mainstream” − By Raphael Ahrens, Senior Columnist ● Forward: “I’m a Settler Who Opposes the Separation Barrier” − By David Haivri, Samaria Regional Council

S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace 633 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, 5th Floor, Washington, DC 20004 The Hon. Robert Wexler, President ● Yoni Komorov, Editor ● Aaron Zucker, Associate Editor ​ ​

News Excerpts ​ January 16, 2019

Times of Israel PA to Bid for Full UN Membership Despite US Opposition The Palestinians will launch a bid to become a full member of the United Nations in the coming weeks, even though such a move will be blocked by the United States, the Palestinian foreign minister said Tuesday. The Palestinians have the status of non-member observer state at the and full membership would amount to international recognition of Palestinian statehood. Any request must first be approved by the Security Council, where the US has veto power. The Palestinians presented a request in 2011, but the application never came for a vote.

Ha’aretz Gantz Near Cementing His Election Ticket , former army chief of staff and leader of a new centrist party, has chosen a dozen people to top his ticket in the April 9 general election, political sources said. Three names are expected to be on the ticket: educator Chili Tropper, former Yeruham Mayor , and , a former head of the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council. If Gantz’s predecessor as chief of staff, , joins the slate, he is expected to receive the No. 2 slot. Two possible additions could be Orli Levi-Abekasis, and former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon.

Times of Israel Kochavi Takes Reins as IDF Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi took over Tuesday as the 22nd commander of the , replacing outgoing chief Gadi Eisenkot, who ended his four-year term as the army’s top officer. Kochavi, until now the deputy chief of staff, takes over as Israel faces an array of challenges on its borders with Gaza and Lebanon along with an evolving campaign against Iran in Syria.

Times of Israel 5 IDF Soldiers Likely to Face Charges for Beating Detainees Five IDF soldiers, including a company commander and a squad commander, are likely to be charged with serious crimes and face lengthy prison terms for allegedly beating Palestinian detainees, according to a report Tuesday night. The Palestinian suspects were arrested last week in a search for the terrorist from an attack in December. The five servicemen are suspected of beating the two Palestinian detainees as a form of revenge for their fallen comrades.

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Ha’aretz How E. Jerusalem Palestinians Are Denied Israeli Citizenship Although in principle Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem may receive Israeli citizenship, there are many obstacles -- simply getting an appointment to present necessary documents takes three years. Then it’s another three to four years until there is a decision. Ground for rejection of applications include insufficient Hebrew, questions about loyalty to the country and suspicion of owning property in the . More than 95 percent of East Jerusalem Palestinians have residency status rather than citizenship. While the number of applications has grown from 69 in 2003 to over 1,000 today, very few receive a positive response.

Ynet Gaza Landfills and Sewage Build Up Along Israeli Border The residents of Israeli communities bordering Gaza, who have been dealing with Hamas rocket attacks and incendiary airborne devices, have found themselves facing another challenge -- polluted sewage is being pumped from Gaza into the Israeli side of the border after a collapse of the local wastewater treatment plant. Due to the dire economic situation in Gaza, the wastewater plant cannot undergo needed treatments, prompting Palestinians to drain sewage into the sea, polluting the groundwater in the process. Israel’s Water Authority has recently set up a pumping station near the Erez border crossing. Before the Israeli intervention, border communities suffered from an onslaught of mosquitoes and flies.

Ha’aretz Radical Settler Smotrich Wins National Union Primary was elected leader of the National Union party, Israel’s furthest-right faction, on Monday night by the party’s central committee. Now Smotrich, 38, is at a crossroads: his continued climb up the political ladder depends on whether he can make the transition from being one of Israel’s most uncompromisingly divisive figures, to one who is capable of uniting. This skill will be crucial if he is to succeed in his next goal: replacing as head of the national religious camp’s “big tent” party, Jewish Home.

Ha’aretz Thousands of Palestinians Protest Social Security Law Some 2,000 Palestinians working in the private sector demonstrated Tuesday against a new social security law that went into effect after a few delays. The participants, who called the Palestinian Authority a “gang of thieves,” seemed to represent a prevailing mood of total distrust in the government. A strike called on Tuesday was observed strictly in Hebron and only partially in other places. The Palestinian Bar Association joined the strike, announcing that its members would not appear in court.

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Times of Israel – January 15, 2019 Gantz’s Empathy for the Druze is Mainstream By Raphael Ahrens, Senior Columnist

● When a politician doesn’t know if he’s left-wing or right-wing, he’s usually a leftist, Prime Minister said recently in reference to former army chief and current election season ostensible superstar Benny Gantz. The public still doesn’t know much about Gantz’s political positions, but on Monday he offered a first glimpse, not so much of where he stands on the various issues, but at least of the way he wants to be perceived by the public: as someone who’s at home in the heart of the Israeli consensus. Sympathizing with Druze protesters who came to his home in Rosh Ha’ayin to demonstrate against the Jewish Nation-State Law, Gantz vowed that he would try to “fix” the controversial legislation.

● His promised intervention on behalf of a community whose members serve in the IDF, and who argue that the law renders them second-class citizens because it does not specify full equality for all Israeli citizens, triggered a deluge of critical comments from Netanyahu’s party and New Right ministers Naftali Bennett and . The critics argued that the legislation needs no fixing. (Defenders of the law note that the commitment to full equality for all Israelis is enshrined in other legislation.) Gantz’s pledge to change it, they asserted, underlined what they had long suspected: that the former chief of staff is a leftist. The Likud party did not mince words. “When Gantz attacks the nation-state law and congratulates him for it, everyone knows the obvious: Gantz is left, just like [ head Yair] Lapid,” Netanyahu’s party said in a statement. One Likud MK, , went as far as suggesting (Hebrew tweet) that Gantz had joined the camp of veteran Arab lawmaker .

● But the Israeli left was also unhappy about Gantz’s first foray into political punditry. “The nation-state law does not have to be fixed” but should be scrapped entirely, carped head . To merely propose changes to the law’s wording constituted a “true victory of the right,” she argued. Applause came from the center-left, with both Labor party chairman Avi Gabbay and Hatnua chief Livni warmly greeting the former army chief’s comments. Centrist Yesh Atid boss Lapid, too, welcomed Gantz’s statement, adding that his party has long promised to amend the law in response to the criticism by the Druze and others.

● Gantz’s attack on the Nation-State Law — which, when passed in July, was celebrated by the Israeli right as a historic achievement for modern Zionism — turned him into an easy target for his political opponents. “All surveys” indicate that a large majority of the Israeli public, “including centrists,” support the legislation, and Gantz’s first political statement might therefore turn out to have been his “first political mistake,” Hadashot TV news’s political commentator Amit Segal tweeted.

● But the opprobrium from the right notwithstanding, Gantz did not dispute the non-contentious elements of the Nation-State Law, which, among other provisions, determines that Israel is the

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“national home of the Jewish people” and specifies what Israel’s flag looks like. He emphatically did not call for the law to be repealed. Rather, in showing solidarity with the Druze minority’s complaints about the legislation, he implied that he took issue with the law’s more controversial clauses, such as the apparent downgrading of the Arabic language and the clause stipulating that the “right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” and possibly with its failure to include phrasing about equality for all citizens.

● In this stance, Gantz joins many Israelis, including some with bona fide right-wing credentials. Likud MK , for instance, refused to vote for the bill, and former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo said that the law constituted an “injustice” to Israel’s non-Jewish population. “This is not about right or left. This is not an issue of which party you vote for. It’s a matter of values,” Pardo declared at a Tel Aviv demonstration against the legislation in early August, which was attended by several other senior security figures. Indeed, President Reuven Rivlin, a former Likud lawmaker, said in September that the law is “bad for the State of Israel and bad for the Jews.” Many Diaspora communities, including the umbrella Jewish Federations of North America, have also vocally opposed the legislation.

● Despite the right-wing’s efforts to portray Gantz as a bleeding-heart lefty for throwing his newly politicized weight behind the Druze, support for this community, and indeed for all Israeli non-Jews who are loyal, law-abiding, tax-paying and army-serving citizens of the state, extends almost all the way across the political spectrum. In a response late Monday to the New Right party’s attack on his comments, Gantz’s Resilience for Israel party highlighted this fact. It pointed to a tweet by Naftali Bennett from July 2018, in which the education minister said he had had many discussions with “our Druze brothers” that led him to realize that the law in its current form is “very damaging especially to anyone who has tied their fate to the Jewish state.”

● “This, of course, was not the intention of the Israeli government,” Bennett wrote, adding that it was now the government’s responsibility to find a way to “heal the wound.” Indeed, even Netanyahu has acknowledged that the law created a problem that needs fixing. He has firmly rejected calls for the law itself to be changed, but when tens of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to protest the legislation after it passed in July, he, too, determined that something had to be done. He established a “special ministerial committee” to advance the “deep bond” between Israeli Jews and Druze, and asked his aides to meet with non-Jewish local council heads and with relevant ministries, and to “submit to the committee feasible steps to remove the impediments especially regarding housing and employment.” The so-called Ministerial Committee on Druze, Circassian and Minority Community Members who serve in the Security Forces Affairs, met twice in August. It has not met since. “As we promised the heads of the Druze community, we will continue to work toward implementing the outline that we agreed upon and will conclude it as soon as possible,” Communications Minister Ayoub Kara (Likud), one of the few Druze who supports the Nation-State Law, said Monday, in response to Gantz’s comments.

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● It’s not clear whether Gantz planned carefully for his first public remarks as a politician to be focused on so sensitive an issue. Was it a savvy ploy to provoke the right wing into firing all its ammunition against him on a law even many potential Likud voters feel uncomfortable with? Maybe he chose this issue because it allows him to distinguish himself from Netanyahu without having to contradict the prime minister on other right-wing policies, for example regarding Iran or the Palestinians? Or was it happenstance that the activists from the “Staff for the Correction of the Nationality Law” chose Gantz as the first politician to approach this week? (Later this week, the group also plans to hold similar protests outside the homes of Justice Minister Shaked, Lapid, Netanyahu and other leading politicians.)

● If anything, rather than proving him a leftist (as the right claimed), or a rightist (as the left claimed), it suggested a centrist orientation. Because all he did on Monday was express solidarity with loyal and productive Israeli citizens who happen not to be Jewish, and vowed to “fix” a law aspects of which many Israelis, even on the right, consider flawed. For now, notwithstanding rivals’ efforts to categorize him elsewhere, he seems to be seeking to remain firmly inside the mainstream consensus. Those looking for a clear understanding of what kind of alternative to Netanyahu the political neophyte Gantz wants to offer, therefore, will have to wait a little longer.

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Forward – January 15, 2019 I’m A Settler Who Opposes The Security Barrier By David Haivri, Samaria Regional Council

● Entering Jerusalem from the Shomron area in the West Bank this morning, my navigation system took me on a new path that I had never driven down before. Although new to me, this road has been getting a lot of media attention, dubbed by some as “the Apartheid road” because it runs side by side with another road, separated by a wall. The street I drove down ends with a security check for Israeli citizens entering Jerusalem, and the other is a road for Palestinians moving around inside the West Bank. This separation is another manifestation of the wall that separates the West Bank from the rest of Israel. And I, a settler, am opposed to these separations.

● Influential visitors to Israel are often invited to take part in tours of the separation barrier. These visits are accompanied by elaborate briefings with self-described “security experts,” who talk at length about the existential need for the barrier. They typically explain how Israeli cities faced an onslaught of Palestinian homicide bombers from the West Bank during the , from 2000-2005. The vicious and relentless attacks caused thousands of Israeli casualties and seemed at the time to threaten Israel’s very future. With the nation traumatized, a decision was made on the basis of broad political and security consensus — or so goes the narrative — to construct the barrier, which dramatically decreased Palestinian terror attacks, seemingly justifying its necessity.

● At the time of its construction, politicians declared that the barrier, which is more of a fence, was meant to be a temporary measure. Now, a decade after the trend of suicide bombings has passed, the barrier seems to have become a permanent fixture on our terrain. “Israel must defend herself,” the “experts” inevitably say. “We have no choice. We must separate ourselves from the threat of violence.” I can tell you that as a settler who lives side by side with my Palestinian neighbors, this narrative is manipulative and false. What’s more, the narrative justifying the barrier distorts the options for reducing the friction between Jews and Arabs, and improving the quality of life for all the residents of this land.

● In the briefings, the barrier’s proponents show us figures purporting to prove the necessity of the wall and the drop in violence since its construction. What these “experts” make it a point not to tell you is that hundreds of thousands of Israelis live in towns and cities on the east side of the barrier — in other words, outside of its protection. You know what else they conveniently leave out? The same statistics showing a decline of terror attacks west of the barrier, in Israel proper, hold fast on east side as well, where I live with hundreds and thousands of other Jews, without a wall separating me from my Arab neighbors. If the attacks against Israelis have dropped on both sides of the barrier at comparable levels, it logically follows that the barrier itself does not explain the decline in attacks.

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● Clearly, the drop in violence is the result of a range of factors, starting with changes in the tactics of the Israeli security forces, as well as massive military operations which uprooted the Palestinian terror infrastructure for a generation. One must also factor in the successful and ongoing intelligence and tactical efforts which deny terrorists the tools and opportunity to do harm. The security barrier is thus no such thing. Neither its construction nor its ongoing presence can be justified by the security argument. Its real purpose is indeed something entirely different: to provide a pseudo-political or psychological boundary behind which Israel could theoretically withdraw. The seeming permanence of this significant feat of engineering helps to shape a political reality of separation from the Palestinians, which some in Israel desperately wish to achieve.

● This is incredibly problematic. We know that Israel will never relinquish security control of the Jordan Valley, or deny security forces the freedom to operate in the West Bank when the need arises. This means that under any hypothetical peace agreement, the security situation would not really change. And as we see in the situation with Gaza, the barrier does not solve the security problem of rockets, mortars, tunnels, ladders, gliders, UAV’s, incendiary balloons, and all the other creative means of attack that terrorists have come up with. Another argument one hears is that the barrier helps Israel control the access Palestinians who live in the West Bank have to Israel, especially for the purposes of work and tourism. But this, too, is a facetious claim.

● Chronic macroeconomic mismanagement by the Palestinian Authority and rampant cronyism and corruption creates a situation whereby Israel regularly chooses to extend a large number of work permits to Palestinian residents of the West Bank in order to provide employment and ensure stability there. So it’s not clear what purpose controlling the entry points for these workers serves. Illegal employment could be addressed at the level of the tax authority or through business regulation. The final argument one hears from the experts in support of the barrier is that is has reduced crime, in particular, car theft. Well, you’ve got me there. According to experts in vehicle security and tracking, it does seem to be accomplishing this goal, and if they had sold this massive, expensive project, then or now, on the basis of protecting the Israeli car insurance industry or lowering theft premiums, I would have to admit that the project succeeded. Leftists complain that the “Apartheid Wall” separates Jews from Arabs, and thus must be torn down.

● They are wrong. There are very large numbers of both Jews and Arabs living on either side of the barrier. My own family and community resides about 16 miles east of the barrier. It certainly offers us no “security” benefit. In fact, just the opposite is true: I have less trouble visiting my Arab neighbors than any Israeli wishing to do so in Tel Aviv. The barrier should come down not because it separates Arabs and Jews, but because it separates we Jews who live among Arabs from the rest of Israel.

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