Israel and the Middle East News Update

Friday, November 27

Headlines:  Ministers Hold Marathon Meetings on Possibility of PA Collapse  Ya’alon: I Don’t Know When the Terror Will Stop  Netanyahu: No Plans to Arm PA Security Forces  Six Soldiers Hurt in Car-Ramming During West Bank Protest  IDF Chief of Staff Flies Secretly to Brussels to Meet US General  Israel to Establish Formal Presence in Abu Dhabi  IAF Official: Israel Won’t Down Russian Warplane in Its Airspace  Israel Holds First Successful Operational Test for Barak 8 Missile

Commentary:  Ma’ariv: “Resistance Movement”  By Ben Caspit, Columnist, Al-Monitor's Israel Pulse  Al-Monitor: “Why Kerry Should Have Skipped His Stop in Israel”  By Akiva 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 27, 2015

Ha’aretz Ministers Hold Marathon Meetings on Possibility of PA Collapse The diplomatic-security cabinet held marathon discussions over the last two days about the possibility that the Palestinian Authority will collapse and how Israel would deal with such a development, according to three sources who either attended the meetings or were briefed on them. Several ministers argued that the PA’s collapse could serve Israel’s interests, so Israel shouldn’t try to prevent it. See also, “Cabinet Said to Hold Anguished Debate If PA Collapses” (Times of Israel)

Arutz Sheva Ya’alon: I Don’t Know When the Terror Will Stop Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon (Likud) spoke on Friday morning and said he can't anticipate when the Arab terror wave plaguing Israel will end. "We have a wave of terror that will accompany us in the coming days and apparently in the coming weeks, and we don't know if it will end soon or when," said Ya'alon of the terror wave, which has already left 22 Israelis murdered and hundreds others wounded in two months. See also, "Israel Plans Security Fence Between Hebron and Kiryat Gat Due to Spike in Terror" (Algemeiner)

Arutz Sheva Netanyahu: No Plans to Arm PA Security Forces Israel is not planning to approve arms for the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) security forces or any other “gesture” to the PA, including the release of terrorists, sources close to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told Arutz Sheva on Wednesday evening. The clarification came following reports that the IDF had issued a recommendation to the political echelon that the PA security forces be given armored vehicles, weapons and ammunition so as to let them enter terror hotbeds that they are more familiar with than the IDF.

Times of Israel Six Soldiers Hurt in Car-Ramming During West Bank Protest Six IDF soldiers were wounded in a second car-ramming attack Friday in the West Bank. The attack took place during an altercation between IDF forces and Palestinian demonstrators at the entrance to the village of Beit Ummar in the southern West Bank, north of Hebron. While soldiers held back the demonstrators to protect Route 60, the main north-south road that passes nearby, they were caught by surprise by a Palestinian vehicle that raced toward them and slammed into them. Four of the wounded were lightly hurt with wounds to their extremities. One was moderately hurt. A sixth was lightly hurt and refused to be evacuated to hospital. Two of the wounded were officers. See also, “Six IDF Soldiers Wounded Near Hebron in Second Vehicular Attack of the Day” (Jerusalem Post)

Times of Israel IDF Chief of Staff Flies Secretly to Brussels to Meet US General IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot flew secretly to Brussels this week for talks on the Continent’s security situation, according to a security source. Eisenkot met with America’s top general in Europe, Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, to discuss the current situation in the Middle East, the source said. Detailed information on what was discussed in Eisenkot’s meetings has been withheld. However, as Breedlove functions as both the head of America’s military presence in Europe, as well as the head of NATO, it is safe to assume that both the ongoing threats of terror in Europe and the conflicts in the Middle East, including the developing Russia-Turkey feud, were discussed.

Jerusalem Post Israel to Establish Formal Presence in Abu Dhabi The Foreign Ministry confirmed a Ha’aretz report Friday that Israel will in the coming weeks open an office in Abu Dhabi accredited to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). According to the report, also confirmed by the ministry, Foreign Ministry Director-General Dore Gold was in the United Arab Emirates capital this week taking part in IRENA's biannual meeting and also discussing the opening of the Israeli mission. While in the past Israel has had trade delegations in Qatar, Oman, Morocco and Tunisia, this would be the first time Israel would have any formal presence in the UAE. See also, “Israel to Open Representative Office in Abu Dhabi” (Reuters)

Jerusalem Post IAF Official: Israel Won't Down Russian Warplane In Its Airspace Israel will not take action against Russian fighter jets that encroach into its air space, a senior air force official said on Thursday. The issue of Russian sorties in Syria was magnified in recent days after Turkey downed a Su-24 fighter jet that it claims entered its air space near the border. According to Israeli military officials, such a scenario is not in danger of repeating itself in the skies over the Golan Heights. "The Russian military is a new, key player which we are not ignoring," a senior military official told reporters on Thursday. "There is a clear boundary here, and they are busy with their matters, and we are busy with ours." See also, “Senior Official: Israel's Air Force Can Topple a Country” (Arutz Sheva)

Ynet News Israel Holds First Successful Test for Barak 8 Missile Israel held the first operational test for the Barak 8 missile defense system on Thursday afternoon, successfully destroying an enemy target. The system is to serve as protection against sophisticated missiles held by Hezbollah, like the Russian-built Yakhont (P-800 Oniks) - an advanced cruise missile system that Russia sold Syria. Such missiles, the defense establishment believes, can paralyze Israel's coast by targeting not only Israeli ships, but also its natural gas fields. The Barak 8 system can be deployed on at sea or on land and was designed to destroy threats from the air such as drones, fighter jets, missiles, and rockets, including in the event of multiple simultaneous launches. See also, “Israel Tests Surface-to-Air Missile Amid Fears of Hezbollah Arms” (Newsweek)

Ma’ariv – November 26, 2015 Resistance Movement By Ben Caspit  In the past few weeks, a powerful collision has been taking place behind the scenes of our political-security-diplomatic theater between two conflicting worldviews. Two opposing forces are vying for leadership. The old, traditional, pragmatic and non-inflammatory force against the new, reactionary, feisty and battle-hungry force. This is a complex and volatile story, with significant political, social and security aspects. It reflects the radicalization process that is taking place in the world, the region, Israeli society, and consequently, on the political map as well. We can also see it as a reflection of the general fulmination that is washing over all of us. The balance of power still leans towards the old world, but the new forces are fresh, kicking and threatening. This battle has not been decided.  The levelheaded and responsible approach is embodied most accurately by Defense Minister Moshe (Bugi) Yaalon. He receives halfhearted and erratic backing from Prime Minister Netanyahu. The third and surprising minister who stands with the two of them like a brick wall is Shas Chairman Aryeh Deri. Anyone who remembers how Deri helped Yitzhak Shamir rein in the eagerness of then-defense minister Moshe Arens, deputy chief of staff Ehud Barak and IAF commander Avihu Ben-Nun to bomb Iraq in the first Gulf War against the American urging, is not surprised. Twenty five years have passed, and Deri has not changed.  This Bibi-Bugi-Deri triumvirate is on the same side of the fence as the security establishment, and especially the IDF. On the other side, the rebels stand defiantly: They are the security cabinet ministers of the Jewish Home, Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, Minister Gilad Erdan and other security cabinet ministers from the Likud such as Zeev Elkin. They wink to their activists, wink to their registered members and wink to the hardline right wing Likud grassroots, for whom life is simple: We have to hit the Arabs with full force, and then everything will be fine.  There was a hint of this battle in the past few weeks. This week it came to light, following a briefing to military affairs correspondents from OC Central Command Maj. Gen. Roni Numa. OC Central Command Numa, the sovereign in the territories, spoke candidly and from the heart. Between the lines, it was possible to discern the outline of the differences of opinion between the opposing worldviews. It was also possible to get a sense of the heavy pressure being brought to bear on the IDF by political figures, pressure that is currently being fended off bodily by top army and security officials.  The IDF refers to the current wave of terrorism as a “limited uprising” and realizes that dealing forcibly with despairing young people will not provide a solution. The army believes that [Israel] should act in the opposite manner: it should increase the number of work permits, not apply a heavy hand to the population, and try not to add the massive majority of the Palestinian public to the extremist minority that has declared a rebellion.

 Anyone who remembers the second Intifada can see that the IDF is currently learning its lessons. In 2001 it was revealed in this column, for the first time, that the IDF fired over 1 million bullets in October 2000 in order to eradicate the violence that broke out after Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount. These million bullets had the opposite effect. The Palestinians were routed by the trained army, and then they attacked our cities and neighborhoods in a great mass of suicide bombers.  It seems to me that Defense Minister Yaalon knows this story best, because he was the deputy chief of staff when the second Intifada broke out. Before that, he was OC Central Command and prepared the IDF for the Intifada. The IDF was never as prepared as it was then, in 2000. The first months of the Intifada ended in a resounding Israeli knockout. The problem was that instead of the Palestinians calming down and backing down, they became even more extreme and crazy, until Israel was forced to retake the West Bank and clean out terrorism from one house to the next. This took years and cost a great many fatalities on both sides.  Now, mainly in light of the fact that the current uprising is not yet a popular uprising and has not swept the great majority of the Palestinian public, the army believes that [Israel] should be cautious, handle the situation with a sensitive hand, reward quiet areas, not push the civilians into the arms of terror, carefully safeguard the security cooperation with the PA security services, hold a large stick in one hand and an equally large carrot in the other.  IDF officials are emphatically opposed to the measures proposed by the right wing branch of the political echelon, such as expelling families, mass arrests, imposing wholesale closures and blockades and collective punishment. The IDF’s position is a result of a careful study of the current events, in-depth research and experience that has accumulated in the field. To cool, not to heat, IDF officials say. Pour cold water, not gasoline. To be bad to the bad guys, and good to the good guys. That is the whole story.  The knock-out blow gang The other side is also not a bunch of suckers. The right wing camp, led by Bennett, Shaked, Erdan, Elkin and others, is not certain that the IDF’s security doctrine is delivering the goods. Their claim is not without merit.  The “pilot” they are talking about is what happened in East Jerusalem. Since the city is not under the control of the IDF, but rather handled by the police, a firm hand and a strong arm were applied there. This is the approach led by Erdan, with the precise implementation of Cmdr. Bentzi Sao, who will go down in history as the almost sole survivor of the generation of police commanders who dissipated into the offices of the Police Internal Investigations Department within two years. These ministers say that the firm hand that was employed in East Jerusalem achieved its goal. The fact is that the Temple Mount became calm and the city is gradually calming.  The police went in with full force, say the members of this camp, it restricted the population’s actions, it set up dozens of roadblocks, it employed Ruger fire, it carried out arrests on a vast scale, it exacted a high tangible price, and the situation on the ground became calm. This, as far as the right wing camp is concerned, is empirical proof.

 We can add to this the outlawing of the northern chapter of the Islamic Movement, an historic event in which a police intelligence assessment overrode a GSS recommendation, under the leadership of Gilad Erdan. The jury is still out on this initiative. It’s too soon to tell.  Conversely, some people say that signs of unbalance are evident in the right wing branch of the Israeli leadership. That the security cabinet has lost its brakes. That a group of young, borderline infantile ministers sits there, who are behaving childishly and seeking a “knock-out blow.” There is no knock-out blow in this story, say the people leading the pragmatic approach. That would be playing with fire. Force has its limitations. There is no reason to get into a second Operation Defensive Shield, there is no one to attack in such an operation, because the results of the first Operation Defensive Shield are still in effect. The IDF controls the entire territory and does what it wants in any casbah at any given moment.  Mistake, reply the opponents, if the IDF employs in Judea and Samaria the same scale of incursions into villages, arrests, restrictions on movement and firm action that was employed in East Jerusalem, there will be results. The policy of containment and weakness must end. There is a boss on the ground, and he has to go crazy. This wave of terrorism is evolving from stones and firecrackers to knives, from there to vehicle ramming attacks, and from there to shooting, and who knows where else. It has to be stopped with full force now, before it grows. Sometimes a disproportionate response can lead to immediate results. Like a fire in an oil well. Only an explosion will put it out.  This battle also includes secondary debates within the security establishment. For example, the GSS’s approach versus the IDF’s approach. Yoram Cohen versus Gadi Eisenkot. There is no personal rivalry between them, incidentally. On the contrary. The working relations are good and the professional esteem is mutual. But the worldviews are completely opposed. The GSS is opposed, automatically, traditionally, in a Pavlovian response, to all recommendations for relief measures presented by the army. The GSS care about not having a terror attack tomorrow morning, period. They have no overall picture, they have no broader front. The IDF looks at the overall situation, at the broader front, not only at tomorrow morning but also at the day after, next week, in two years’ time.  The GSS tries to hem in the [relief] measures while the IDF, with the powerful backing of Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, tries to be more expansive. The political echelon has its hand on the tap. At the moment, Netanyahu, Deri and Yaalon still set the tone, in the sane and lenient direction. One or two severe terror attacks, and that too shall pass. Ben Caspit is a columnist for Al-Monitor's Israel Pulse as well as a senior columnist and political analyst for Israeli newspapers.

Al-Monitor – November 26, 2015 Why Kerry Should Have Skipped His Stop in Israel By Akiva Eldar  If the Nov. 24 visit by US Secretary of State John Kerry to Jerusalem is to be judged by its contribution to advancing a diplomatic deal between Israel and the Palestinians, then Israeli news editors were right to push this non-event to the tail end of the news broadcasts and the back pages of the papers. The stories about the young women who were allegedly sexually harassed by Knesset member Yinon Magal (HaBayit HaYehudi) are far more newsworthy and interesting than another meaningless signature by Kerry on the attendance sheet at the prime minister’s office.  The affair is a reminder that even in the religious HaBayit HaYehudi party — the standard bearer of “family values” — there are those who neglect to obey the seventh commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery” (Exodus 20:14). Even the scandal de jour involving Oren Hazan, the contemptible Knesset member (Likud) who, metaphorically, runs red lights and doesn’t even stop to let a wheelchair pass, is more relevant to Israel’s citizens and the residents of the occupied territories. Hazan’s sleazy, victorious smiles are a reminder of the flimsy foundations propping up the Israeli government.  But Kerry’s visit should not be judged by its usefulness to the diplomatic process, and not even by its contribution to preventing further deterioration of Israeli-Palestinian ties. The importance of this visit lies in the additional proof it provides of the impotence of the world’s strongest power. This visit belongs in the lengthy annals of US initiatives that intensified the sense of despair and hopelessness among the Israeli and Palestinian peace camps regarding the diplomatic option. In the words of Brig. Gen. Guy Goldstein, deputy coordinator of Israeli Government Activities in the Territories, “Absent combined diplomatic steps by Israel and the Palestinian Authority [PA], the current clash will not end.”  Speaking on Oct. 28 at a conference at Netanya Academic College, the senior military officer added, “We are sitting on top of a kind of powder keg. Unless significant change occurs, mostly or entirely in the diplomatic arena, we will probably keep experiencing what we’re experiencing today.” His comments, the likes of which are being made behind closed doors by many defense officials, can be summed up in these words: Every piece of evidence pointing to the lack of significant change, such as another futile visit by an American secretary of state, pumps additional fuel to the fire burning under the powder keg.  Briefing reporters in Abu Dhabi on the eve of his stop in Israel, Kerry said, “We have ideas for how things could advance. But this street violence doesn’t provide any leader with the framework within which they could look their people in the eye and say, ‘There’s a reason we’re sitting down and talking.'” It is hard to overstate the importance of this sentence, spoken by the most important diplomat in the world. The US secretary of state replaced the message that peace is the right answer to violence, with words to the effect that violence delays peace. In fact, he supported the approach presented by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the following day at the start of their meeting, according to whom “there can be no peace when we have an onslaught of terror — not here or not anywhere else in the world.”

 Kerry, for his part, stressed that “there’s no justification for Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis.” Indeed, there’s no justification for the murder of parents in front of their children, or for stabbing people walking down the street in towns such as Kiryat Gat. But Kerry “forgot” to say that there’s no justification for the continuing occupation and for denying basic human rights to millions of Palestinians. He thus buttressed Netanyahu’s argument that there’s no difference between a 13-year-old Palestinian who stabbed a Jew in the settlement of Givat Ze’ev and a terrorist who fired indiscriminately at those sitting in a Paris cafe. All of them, Netanyahu told Kerry, are victims of “that same assault by militant Islamists and forces of terror.”  There was good reason for Netanyahu to greet Kerry with the words, “You are a friend in our common efforts to restore stability, security and peace.” The “stability” to which Netanyahu referred is acceptance of the status quo in the relationship between occupier and occupied. The “security” is the supply of additional state-of-the-art fighter jets to Israel. And there’s no point wasting time talking about joint “peace” efforts. The prime minister is actually trying to put together a package deal that would include US recognition of areas dubbed “settlement blocs” and agreement to construction in those areas. In return, Israel would grant building permits to Palestinians in West Bank Area C, which is under Israeli civil and security control, and additional “goodwill gestures” to strengthen the standing of the PA.  It almost goes without saying that there was no way the United States would sign off on such a deal. One can assume that Netanyahu himself assessed that the United States would not provide a stamp of approval to what it considers an uncontrollable criminal enterprise. The prime minister surely did not believe that Israel would throw the Palestinians a few bones and US President Barack Obama would become the first president to change the fundamental US policy on the settlements, in force since June 1967. And, in fact, Deputy State Department spokesman Mark Toner made it abundantly clear in a Nov. 24 briefing that the answer to Netanyahu’s demand was “a big no.” The spokesman took the opportunity to remind Israelis that Democratic and Republican administrations alike view the construction in the settlements and Israeli attempts to create facts on the ground as moves undermining the two-state solution.  It seems that even if Obama were to come to Israel to lay the cornerstone for a new neighborhood in one of the settlements of the Etzion settlement bloc, this deal would not have been consummated. Netanyahu informed Kerry that any measures supporting the PA would depend on a drastic reduction of violence and incitement by the PA. But even if he were to truly understand the connection between Palestinian violence and Palestinian despair, it is highly doubtful that Netanyahu would succeed in making any sort of gesture toward the PA.  Even a mere decision to temporarily freeze construction in illegal outposts would dump him into political oblivion. His political survival depends on Hazan’s whims and Magal’s voting mood, not to mention his rival on the right, HaBayit HaYehudi party leader Naftali Bennett. “Bibi [Netanyahu] spoke abroad about a unilateral move,” Bennett boasted to party activists, “and he retracted his remarks only because I put a bullet between his eyes.” Afterward, the minister tasked with the education of the children of Israel explained that of course, these violent words were just a metaphor.

 As long as Obama is not prepared to treat Netanyahu with the same determination and decisiveness as Bennett in order to make him overcome his recalcitrance on taking serious diplomatic steps, he would do well to leave Kerry home. Akiva Eldar is a columnist for Al-Monitor’s Israel Pulse. He was formerly a senior columnist and editorial writer for Haaretz and also served as the Hebrew daily’s US bureau chief and diplomatic correspondent. His most recent book (with Idith Zertal), Lords of the Land, on the Jewish settlements, was on the best-seller list inIsrael and has been translated into English, French, German and Arabic.