Israel and the Middle East News Update

Monday, July 22

Headlines: • Shaked Takes Helm of Party She Founded with Bennett • Kushner to Travel to for Discussions on Peace Plan • Trump Congratulates Netanyahu for Becoming Longest Serving PM • Saudis, Iraqis Among Rare Arab Media Delegation in Israel • Iran Working to Arm Syria and Hezbollah by Sea

Commentary: • Ha’aretz: “On Eve of Existential Election, Israel’s Left on Verge of Implosion” − By Chemi Shalev • : “Generational Conversion” − By Hanoch Daum

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 ● Yehuda Greenfield-Gilat, Associate Editor

News Excerpts July 22, 2019 Ha’aretz Shaked Takes Helm of Party She Founded with Bennett Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked announced on Sunday that she will spearhead Hayamin Hehadash (The ) – the party she founded together with that failed to pass the electoral threshold in April's election. Calling on parties to the right of Prime Minister 's Likud to join forces, Shaked said they must put their differences aside. "A union is the ideological right wing's insurance certificate," she said. "Together, under my leadership, we'll become a significant and powerful force that will lead the State of Israel with courage and faith." See also, “Shaked Wants to Lead the Right. Netanyahu Will Do Anything to Stop Her” (by Yossi Verter, Ha’aretz)

Axios Kushner to Travel to Israel for Discussions on Peace Plan White House senior adviser Jared Kushner will travel to and several other capitals in the Middle East next week to discuss how to move forward with the Trump administration’s peace plan, senior U.S. officials told me. This will be an important trip for the progress of the U.S. peace plan — both the economic and political components. The White House is currently in discussions over the timing for revealing the political part of the U.S. peace plan, which has been thrown off as a result of new elections being called in Israel. One of the main items Kushner is seeking to promote during the upcoming trip is the establishment of a multinational fund that will bankroll and monitor the plan to boost the Palestinian economy through projects in the West Bank and Gaza. (by Barak Ravid)

Israel National News Trump Congratulates Netanyahu for Becoming Longest Serving PM US President Donald Trump on Sunday congratulated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for passing David Ben Gurion and becoming the longest serving prime minister in the history of Israel. “Under your leadership, Israel has become a technology powerhouse and a world class economy. Most importantly you have led Israel with a commitment to the values of democracy, freedom, and equal opportunity that both our nations cherish and share!” he tweeted. Netanyahu later thanked Trump, writing, “Thank you, President Trump, for your warm words, outstanding support and incredible friendship. I’m honored to have the opportunity to work with you. Under your leadership, we’ve made the alliance between our two remarkable countries stronger than ever. I know there’s more to come.”

Jerusalem Post Saudis, Iraqis Among Rare Arab Media Delegation in Israel A month after Bahrain allowed journalists from six Israeli media outlets into the country for the first time to cover the US-sponsored “Peace to Prosperity” workshop, a group of six Arab journalists – including for the first time from Saudi Arabia and Iraq – arrived on Sunday via the Allenby Bridge for meetings in Israel. The six journalists will tour Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Nazareth, as well as meet with members, Foreign Ministry officials, and academics. 2

Ha’aretz Iran Working to Arm Syria and Hezbollah by Sea Iran is working to transfer weaponry to Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon by sea, to avoid assaults that have targeted arms shipments, Israeli officials believe. According to their assessments, recent attacks, some of which attributed to Israel, that were designed to prevent Iran from entrenching itself in Syria and transferring equipment to Lebanon have led the Iranians to prefer shipping a portion of the weaponry by sea. According to Israeli defense officials, despite growing tensions at sea between Iran and the United States and Britain in the Strait of Hormuz, Israel has not been directly affected. However, officials have warned of the risk that precision missiles launched by Iran or its proxies in the region could hit Israeli naval and commercial vessels. SEE ALSO, “Hamas meets Iran's supreme leader during warm visit in Tehran” ( NEWS)

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Haaretz – July 16, 2019 On Eve of Existential Election, Israel’s Center-Left Is on the Verge of Implosion Peretz's merger with center-rightist Levi-Abekasis has enraged Labor’s base and could consign it to the dustbin of history, much to Netanyahu’s delight

By Chemi Shalev

• The final deadline for Israel’s political parties to submit their lists of Knesset candidates for the September 17 election is in ten days. Center-left voters and their leaders depict the election as crucial, vital and even existential. Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection, they claim, could spell the end of Israel’s liberal democracy, as we’ve known it. • Nonetheless, as the clock nears midnight, the center-left is on the brink of implosion. The intensity of its aversion to continued Netanyahu rule is eclipsed only by the inability of its leaders to stand one another or work together. Barring a last minute Hail Mary or deus ex- machina, election that seemed eminently winnable for Netanyahu’s opponents could turn out to be their final Waterloo. • The mainstay of the camp, Kahol Lavan, is plagued by internal bickering and demoralized, perhaps shortsightedly, by the seeming timidity of its leader, Benny Gantz. ’s decision to join the fray hasn’t yielded the big bang that he and many analysts expected and his party Democratic Israel is now hovering dangerously close to the 3.25 percent threshold needed to gain entry into Israel’s parliament. The four main Arab parties, despite their clear understanding that united they’ll stand but divided they’ll fall and take hopes of ousting Netanyahu with them, are stymied by their own self-serving and competing demands for higher personal placements on a unified list. • All of this was bad enough before Thursday’s shock announcementby newly-elected Labor Party leader Amir Peretz that he had recruited center-right social firebrand Orli Levi-Abekasis to join Labor and was allotting her party Gesher, which fell short of the threshold in the April 9 ballot, three seats in Labor’s top ten. Worse, both Levi-Abekasis and Peretz fumbled and stumbled on the issue that is uppermost in their constituencies’ mind: Would they or wouldn’t they participate in a Netanyahu government, effectively stealing center-left votes and handing them over to Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition. • Peretz may have thought that his union with Levi-Abekasis was a stroke of genius that would reshuffle Israeli politics and shift moderate right-wing voters, especially North Africans in development towns, to a recalibrated Labor focused on social equality and led by two politicians of Moroccan origins. What he failed to take into account was that his last-minute realignment of Labor could alienate the party’s own electoral base, sending many of its members packing to seek alternatives and possibly precipitate the collapse of Labor itself. • Based on my own informal and unscientific poll of center-left voters I happened to encounter over the weekend at a wedding, the anger at Peretz is palpable and the flight from Labor is going strong. All of those who voted Labor in the last elections or were deliberating whether to 4

vote for it in the next said they were reconsidering; most declared their divorce from Labor to be final. • Some of the objections to Peretz’s move, concocted clandestinely in back rooms and without prior consultation with other Labor leaders, stem from Levi-Abekasis’s political history with Avigdor Lieberman and her support for some of the ultra-nationalistic laws passed by the Knesset. Others ascribe the antagonism toward the Peretz-Levi-Abekasis union to the inherent racism of Labor’s predominantly Ashkenazi voters, who could barely stomach being led by one Moroccan, let alone two. If Labor sinks in upcoming polls, this rationale is bound to be adopted by many of Levi-Abekasis and Peretz's supporters, pouring the high-octane fuel of ethnic tensions on a fire that’s already getting out of control. • In a worst-case scenario, and if things stay as they are, all three parties to the left of Kahol Lavan – Labor, Meretz and Barak’s Democratic Israel – could fall short of the 3.25 percent threshold. What was once considered a golden opportunity to reverse the results of the April 9 elections – especially after Lieberman decided to declare independence and abandon his automatic support for Netanyahu and the right – has now been supplanted by dread of a total rout that could decimate the center-left and designate the Labor Party and its illustrious past to the dustbin of history. • Cup-half-full types might point to similar disarray among Likud’s national-religious satellites on the right. Even after Sunday’s announcement that Ayelet Shaked and Naftali Bennett were back together after a trial separation – with Shaked on top this time around - the fate of their Hayamin Hehadash (The New Right) still hangs in the balance, with talks ongoing about a possible merger with Habayit Hayehudi to their right. • Netanyahu doesn’t seem too happy about a Shaked takeover of the entire religious right. A merger between Habayit Hayehudi and Hayamin Hehadash that will anoint the popular Shaked as leader of a big bad nationalist bloc could tempt traditional Likud voters who have tired of the prime minister’s alleged corruption or who view him as “too soft” on peace and territories. The prime minister’s fears are compounded by the fact that his wife Sara detests Shaked and views her as a mortal enemy, never mind the threat Shaked poses to her husband’s future career. Suffice to say that in such a scenario, Netanyahu’s troubles with his future coalition will pale in comparison to the tantrums he will endure at home. • And just as he did just before the previous ballot three months ago, Netanyahu is once again engaged in koshering the Kahanist Otzma Yehudit and using his influence to re-broker its inclusion in Habayit Hayehudi’s Knesset list. Theoretically, at least, Netanyahu is also facing the specter of parties to his right failing to meet the threshold – as Bennett-Shaked's Hayamin Hehadash did on April 9 – thus squandering hundreds of thousands of votes and crippling his chances of returning to the prime minister’s office. • Nonetheless, the left-right analogy is specious, mainly because the linchpin of the right, the Likud, is strong and united behind Netanyahu, out of sincere admiration or outright fear or both. Even if his personal worst-case scenario is borne out and Netanyahu is toppled because his allies didn’t pass the threshold, the Likud is sure to remain a strong and vibrant political entity, with hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic supporters. It will live to fight another day, and probably triumph soon after.

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• The left, on the other hand, could be facing total annihilation. Its leaders are egotistical enough and hate each other with a vengeance powerful enough to block collaboration, even at the risk of their own demise. Kahol Lavan, after all, is just a skeleton creature of convenience, fueled by the center left’s desperation to oust Netanyahu and bound to split apart if it fails and is faced with four years of tedious opposition. • Labor, according to its crushed supporters, has been hijacked by Peretz and Levi-Abekasis. Barak, whose past associations with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have overshadowed his comeback efforts, could soon fade away, as old soldiers do. Meretz is also considering possible last-minute mergers, but even in a best-case scenario, will remain a marginal player in the overall array. And if the Arabs fail to unite, as their voters demand, their already reduced representation in the Knesset could fall to an all-time low. • Nonetheless, there are still ten days left, which, in Israeli politics, is near eternity. Barak could actually recuperate from his current doldrums by attracting disappointed Labor voters and, more dramatically, by recruiting some of Labor’s bright young stars, including the popular Knesset member Stav Shaffir. The Arab parties could see the light at the very last minute and unite, despite their differences, failing which Meretz might consider a truly historic and pioneering venture by setting up a first-ever Jewish-Arab joint list with the former communist party Hadash. • But as things stand now, history will record that when faced with what its leaders describe as a do-or-die vote on Israel’s future, the center-left succumbed to vanity, ego, purism, dogmatism and political ploys gone wrong, such as the Peretz-Levi-Abekasis merger. History won’t forgive them, especially since, as a direct result of their own reckless shortsightedness, it will be written by Netanyahu and his adoring minions.

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Yedioth Ahronoth – July 19, 2019 Generational Conversion By Hanoch Daum • Rafi Peretz. The thing that saddened me about Rafi Peretz’s remarks about conversion therapy was the realization that a significant part of the sector I come from still has a long way to go until it understands something that the liberal world came to understand long ago, and to be prepared accept with love every human being as such. I wasn’t angry with Peretz because, regrettably, I know a lot of people like him, and I know that my anger isn’t going to get them to change their positions. Anger isn’t a work plan. “Captive babes,” is what that’s referred to in Halachic parlance [usually a reference to Jewish children who were raised in secular households so that they were unfamiliar with Jewish traditions and texts]. How can one be angry with a captive babe? Rafi Peretz belongs to a group of good people who are still stuck thirty years in the past, and the way to nudge them forward isn’t to yell at them, but to try to engage them in dialogue. To explain to them. To bring them closer, step by step, to understanding things that to some of you are self-evident. • Optimism. There is always going to be a national-Haredi group that is going to insist on spreading darkness, but the new generation that has grown up in the religious Zionist movement no longer holds the same worldview as its parents and do. Some parts of that generation are more with the times than others, but just as smartphones now are an issue that divides a lot of Haredim from their rabbis, so too does the attitude towards the LGBTQ community divide younger members of the religious Zionist movement, who have grown up in a liberal and inclusive world, from their rabbis, some of whom are still stuck on the dark side of the seventies. • The understanding that every person is created in the image [of God] will ultimately trickle down and prevail. The eternal people, after all, isn’t afraid of a long path. How do I know that? Because even Rabbi Rafi Peretz in the interview in question said things that no national-Haredi rabbi would have said a decade ago. He said that he would continue to budget IGI [the gay youth organization], and that any pupil who didn’t want conversion wouldn’t be offered that therapy and that he would embrace him, and several other such comments. Admittedly, those remarks can’t erase the disgracefulness of his other remarks, but they are ground-breaking in terms of what an Orthodox rabbi in Israel is prepared to say today, and which he wouldn’t have ever imagined saying in the past. • Lieberman. Now is the time to thank Avigdor Lieberman once again for having bodily prevented a government from being formed that would have been completely under the control of Litzman and the national-Haredi faction. A very narrow right-wing coalition in which Smotrich would have been the dominant voice, while Peretz served as the voice of moderation. Lieberman had no reason not to let that government be formed. He was already assured of being appointed defense minister. The truth is that he could have gotten his MKs appointed to any position he wanted. But Lieberman apparently realized that that coalition would be too extremist even for him, that it’s possible to be right wing without being in favor of religious coercion and being against LGBTQs—and he turned the steering wheel.

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• You need to understand that that narrow coalition, had it been formed, would have endured for four years and would have passed immunity bills into legislation that would have allowed Deri and Bitan to avoid prosecution, and it would have made nearly half of all Israelis feel that this country was no longer theirs. I’m familiar with Lieberman’s weakness and problems. But the fact that he is the only person who bodily prevented the possibility that Smotrich might be allowed to run the country is something that no one can take away from him. • Moreover, Lieberman has to his credit not only his past actions. His very important and current assertion that he intends to insist on a unity government being formed with the Likud and Blue and White is the most mature and most responsible public statement that is currently being aired in the public debate. • Gantz. One of the worst accusations that have been made against Gantz is that he’s sleepy, that he isn’t fighting, that he isn’t being seen or heard. The people making those accusations are mainly journalists on Twitter, left wingers who are disappointed to see that Netanyahu isn’t being attacked sufficiently. They would like to see Gantz insult, disparage and otherwise pummel Bibi. That’s why they continually praise Ehud Barak, who talks about the need to “deliver blows” and all that BS. The problem is that all those journalists are tripping up their own camp. They are undermining the left wing’s chances of winning the election. Because the truth is that the people who engage in verbal violence make a lot of noise on Twitter, but the Israelis by and large don’t like that. Eldad Yaniv, who without doubt is one of the pioneers of that aggressive genre (oddly enough, I like the guy quite a bit), has tried to get elected to Knesset using that method three or four times, but the most he’s gotten out of adopting that strategy is to get himself invited to morning show panel discussions. Ehud Barak has been making noise for the past three years with mounting fury, and he currently stands on the cusp of the electoral threshold. • Gantz, alternatively, got a million Israelis to vote for him thanks to his germane criticisms, thanks to his sense of proportionality and thanks to his stateliness. But when placed before the choice of either winning at the polling stations or cursory catharsis, there are some journalists who seem to prefer catharsis. It’s fairly simple: if Gantz wants to win over voters, he needs to persevere with his stately approach, without disparaging his adversaries and without insulting them. If he wants compliments from three journalists on Twitter, only then should he sling mud. That won’t deliver victory, but he’s sure to get a few more “likes.” • In conclusion, another word about contradictions and the complex reality. When I praise Lieberman in conversations with friends and colleagues, people give me their featherweight arguments and I reply with my own featherweight counter-arguments. My arguments don’t cancel out their arguments and vice versa. How is that possible? Simply put, that’s life. It’s complicated and brimming with contradictions. • There’s a famous story about a rabbi who always knew how to make peace. A woman who had an argument with her husband came to see him and aired her complaints. The rabbi said to her: “You’re right.” Then her husband came and complained about his wife. The rabbi said to him: “You’re right.” The synagogue sexton asked him: “Learned rabbi, a woman came and said that her husband was to blame, and you said she was right. When her husband came and said she was to blame, you told him that he too was right. That doesn’t make sense.” The rabbi replied: “Do you know what? You’re also right.” 8