Achieving the impossible, Trump may leave the Middle East worse than he found it Zvi Bar'el | Nov. 3, 2020 | Haaretz

One thing you can’t accuse President Donald Trump of is being boring. He knows how to put on a show, enthrall global audiences, evoke tragic laughter even when speaking broken English, and create tsunamis on social media better than any other leader. And he scrupulously avoids telling the truth. In the Middle East, he stormed into a junkyard, searched for and found all the parts that don’t fit together, and used them to build a horse with nine legs and five heads. Trump made friends with dictators and believed they were the only people he could and should do business with. Business, incidentally, is the term with which he replaced policy – as befits a man who termed himself a champion businessman, until it became clear he was mired in debt and “forgot” to pay his taxes. He burst into the Middle East with a much-ballyhooed “agreement” dubbed “the deal of the century,” which was signed by just one party: Trump himself. He dreamed of a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arabs, tens of billions of dollars flooding the desert sands and Trump Towers sprouting up in Gaza City, Hebron and Amman. No such vision had ever been seen before in this bloody region. Trump deserves praise for brokering normalization accords between Israel and the and Bahrain, and Sudan is the latest to join the list. In exchange, each country received a gift package suited to its needs: the UAE got F-35 fighters; Sudan was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism; and Bahrain will get what’s left over. But Israel is the biggest winner. This was indeed a historic turnabout – a paradigm shift that created a belt of Arab support for Israel without it having to pay any ideological, territorial or financial price. This is the achievement of the century. But a deal of the century that would end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it isn’t. Trump didn’t work any miracles; he didn’t resolve a bloody conflict between Israel and any Arab state. He’s neither Jimmy Carter nor Bill Clinton – the U.S. presidents who presided over Israel’s agreements with and , respectively. He gave a seal of approval to the continuation of the occupation and the annexation of the Golan Heights. He moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. And he destroyed Washington’s status as a mediator between Israel and the Palestinians, and thereby any hope of a diplomatic horizon for both Israelis and Palestinians. In the Middle East, Trump conducted a corporate strategy based on the view that state leaders are like CEOs who are subordinate to neither boards of directors nor workers unions. In this region, he thought, public opinion, national feelings, history and culture don’t matter. All you need to close a deal is a good personal relationship with the leader. He may be the only leader in the world who sees Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as an appropriate ally. “I get along with him and he listens,” Trump said last August. Even when this friend stuck a toothpick in his eye by buying Russia’s S-400 antimissile system and attacking the Kurds (America’s allies in the war against the Islamic State), Trump gave Erdogan his full backing. He even justified the S-400 purchase on the grounds that his predecessor, President Barack Obama, had refused to sell Turkey advanced missiles. No wonder Erdogan is anxious about the result of this week’s presidential election. He’s never before met a U.S. president he can yell at. Business is business But the crown jewel of Trump’s business doctrine was actually a liquidation: his withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran in 2018. He was certain his policy of “maximum pressure” would force Iran to bow its head and accept all his terms. Two years on, Iran is still alive and kicking. Its situation isn’t good; it’s experiencing one of the worst economic crises in its history. But it’s still supporting Hezbollah, funding Shi’ite militias in , training and funding the Houthis in Yemen, and holding Syrian President Bashar Assad’s hand. Oh, and it’s also increased the amount of uranium it enriches and restarted the centrifuges it had shut down.

1 Trump is now convinced he has a new winning deal to offer Tehran, and that if only he’s reelected, he’ll show the world how to deal with the Islamic Republic. But this is the same Trump who didn’t rush to respond to Iranian rocket fire on American, Saudi and UAE targets. And when asked for help, he was willing to give it – but only in exchange for payment. Business is business. Unlike Obama, Trump did attack after it used poison gas against civilians. But recently, he’s been negotiating with it over the release of imprisoned Americans. Who said you can’t negotiate with terrorists? Thrice, Trump promised to withdraw U.S. forces from the Mideast – one of his flagship policies. Once was in Afghanistan, where he signed an agreement with the Taliban, an organization responsible for killing thousands of Afghani civilians. The second time was when he announced the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria; and the third was when he agreed to pull American forces out of Iraq. The withdrawal from Afghanistan still hasn’t happened. The pullout from Syria melted away. And he’s negotiating over a continued U.S. troop presence in Iraq while leaving a string of bodies behind him. Afghan government forces are still fighting the Taliban, and the Kurds in Syria have lost faith in the president who protected them during years of fighting there. Even though the U.S. withdrawal from Syria was put on hold, the Kurds have started cozying up to Russia and are even willing to negotiate with Assad in order to survive a Turkish onslaught. The Kurds, Trump declared after announcing the planned withdrawal, are not America’s problem. “They’ve got a lot of sand over there,” he said. “So there’s a lot of sand that they can play with.” Iraq, which initially demanded that American forces leave, is now afraid of being left alone against a reviving ISIS in its northern provinces. And Turkey is already conducting S-400 tests. Shadow presence In short, Trump turned the United States into a shadow in the Middle East – a barely-there presence that’s not only incapable of resolving conflicts, but nourishes them and thereby helps prolong them. America’s most important Arab partner, Saudi Arabia, is ruled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who, after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, became persona non grata in the United States. He hasn’t set foot there for over two years, despite having promised to buy $110 billion-worth of U.S. arms and planes. But Trump is the only leader who has refrained from accusing the crown prince of direct responsibility for the murder, in defiance of the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusions. Furthermore, he personally thwarted a congressional decision to prevent arms sales to Riyadh. He did force the Saudis to negotiate with the Houthis in Yemen, but Saudi forces are still using American arms to attack populated areas of Yemen, in a war that has gone on for more than five years and killed over 100,000 people. Trump’s efforts to heal the quarrel that pitted Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE against Qatar, which hosts the largest U.S. base in the Middle East, also failed. The economic blockade that the Gulf states and Egypt imposed on Qatar resulted in the latter forging closer relations with Turkey and Iran, which have formed an alliance that seeks to replace the pro-American Arab axis. In the Libyan civil war, which pits the recognized government against the separatist Gen. Khalifa Haftar, Turkey and Qatar are spearheading the government’s forces, facing off against an alliance that includes Russia, France, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt. In this theater, as in Syria, the United States is making do with the status of an onlooker, as if this war didn’t affect it. American apathy on both the Syrian and Libyan fronts has given Russia a monopoly on the Mideast playing field. It has used this smartly and even expanded, as evidenced by its military ties with Egypt and economic ties with Saudi Arabia. There’s no doubt that Russia would like more of this American largesse. On Tuesday, American voters will decide whether to end a chaotic period that has bequeathed a flawed, strife- ridden inheritance. Yet as Trump himself has proven, there’s no such thing as an irreversible policy and no decision that can’t be corrected – or, alternatively, made even worse. We can only hope that the next U.S. presidential term will be a boring one, devoid of passions and without a clown running the world.

2 Who would Israelis be voting for today? By DAVID HOROVITZ 3 November 2020, TOI

In the only relatively credible survey I’ve seen here in the run-up to Tuesday’s US presidential vote, 70% of Israeli Jews and 63% of all Israelis told pollsters from the Israel Democracy Institute that “from the standpoint of Israel’s interests,” Donald Trump is the “preferable” presidential candidate. On the Israeli Jewish right, the figures were a vast 82%-6% for Trump over Joe Biden; in the center 62%-16%; even on the left, Biden could only manage a 40-40 split with Trump. Those findings stand in stark contrast to several polls ahead of the 2016 elections, in which Israelis favored Hillary Clinton over Trump. Indeed, the IDI’s figures, released late Monday, show a marked rise in appreciation for Trump even since its last such poll in June — when “only” 60% of Israeli Jews considered Trump to be the preferable candidate as far as this country is concerned. The additional boost, no doubt, is largely a function of the three normalization accords the Trump administration has sealed between Israel and Arab states in the past few weeks — with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and, most recently, Sudan. In the Israeli consensus — not wall-to-wall, but widespread — Trump has been an exceptional president for Israel. He recognized Jerusalem as our capital, moved the US embassy here and, most recently, allowed dual American-Israeli citizens born in Jerusalem to write “Israel” in their US passports as their place of birth. He endorsed Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights — ending the fiction that Israel should be required to relinquish the strategic high ground to Syria. Where the Obama administration had pushed an accord with Iran that failed in its originally stated purpose to dismantle the Islamic Republic’s nuclear weapons program — indeed, didn’t even freeze it — Trump’s administration withdrew from the accord, offered to negotiate a new one that would work, and meantime stepped up financial pressure on the ayatollahs. Where the Obama administration relentlessly pressured Israel over settlement expansion as a central part of a failed strategy to bring the Palestinians to the negotiating table, to the point of allowing a UN Security Council resolution castigating Israel over its settlement enterprise to pass, Trump’s White House was more realistic and ultimately more nuanced. It unveiled a peace proposal that provides for a demilitarized Palestinian state in most of the West Bank with land swaps from inside Israel, while allocating 30% of the West Bank to Israel, including all the settlements. After a lot of ambiguity and confusion, it blocked unilateral Israeli annexation of those areas, then brokered a deal with the UAE that took annexation off the table indefinitely, and continues to encourage the obdurate Palestinians to get on the peace train and negotiate.

The Command Center Makes All the Difference By Tal Lev-Ran Ma'ariv – November 4, 2020

This week the IDF officially inaugurated the Alon Coronavirus Command Center for breaking the chain of coronavirus infections. Defense Minister Benny Gantz and retiring Coronavirus Czar Prof. Ronni Gamzu visited the headquarters yesterday, noting that only three months after the decision to establish the command center, Israel’s ability to break the chain of infection is now one of the most advanced in the world. Security officials commented within a mere three months, Israel has progressed from having virtually no ability to run an effective program of contact tracing, to a situation in which it has the ability to question 4,000 people and perform some 100,000 tests per day. Even if these numbers are overstated and remain to be proven on the ground, this is an impressive jump in [the country’s] ability [to fight the pandemic]. When the army is given a clear goal and the political obstacles that prevented [the army] from taking responsibility [for combating the pandemic] are removed (despite a demand for receiving responsibility for this task by the previous defense minister) -- the results are predictable. Effective use of the Alon center by the professional and political echelons, lockdowns in ‘red’ cities and allowing more substantial economic re-opening in ‘green’ areas, alongside increased public trust and awareness of the need to get tested if there is a possibility that the person has contracted corona -- these will 3 all make a significant difference that would enable Israel to operate is as normal a manner as possible, without imposing lockdowns that cause economic damage and harm the quality of life. It is easy for the prime minister and Likud ministers to “blame” the hasty end of the first lockdown on high rates of infection, which led to the second lockdown. But they are making things easy for themselves. Yes, at the end of the first lockdown the number of confirmed cases was no greater than a few dozen, far fewer than we have today. The main problem was that at the end of the first wave, Israel had a serious dearth of any operational ability to deal both with the pandemic and maintain a normal routine. It’s not ‘lockdown or nothing.’ Even when numbers began to climb, the politicians’ inability to make decisions cried out to the heavens -- and eventually we reached the point of having to lock down again. At the moment, in contrast to the first time, Israel has the capability to deal with the coronavirus’s impact on health. This ability will also allow for [corona-related] risk management to be undertaken in a more measured, intelligent manner, without completely choking off the economy. Numbers at the start of this week seem to reflect that the downward trend in infection rates had halted. A closer look at the numbers and situation assessments ahead of ending [the first] lockdown show that there are no surprises -- the results correspond to the numbers. Re-opening the economy will bring with it a rise in infection rates. That is clear; there is no need to panic. That’s why they established this command center. And if they don’t use it wisely, the price that corona will continue to exact from us, even if the numbers are very low, will be very heavy and destructive -- economically, socially and emotionally.

Israel's COVID-19 vaccine administered to first trial volunteers Al Monitor Staff Nov 2, 2020

Israel has begun human trials of a COVID-19 vaccine that scientists hope to roll out to the public next summer, with the first two volunteers receiving doses of the vaccine on Sunday. A 26-year-old and a 34-year-old were injected with the BriLife SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, which the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) began testing on animals in March. The state-run laboratory has so far produced 25,000 doses of the vaccine to be used in human trials at the Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv and the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. “The true exit from the coronavirus crisis is in the development of vaccines,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after meeting with one of the trial’s volunteers on Sunday. “Therefore, this is a very important day, a day that gives a shot of encouragement. … We wish success during these and the latter stages. With God’s help, we will have a vaccine made here in Israel. This is a very big thing,” he said, according to The Jerusalem Post. The first phase of the trial will test 80 people between the ages of 18 and 55, with a second phase to include 960 volunteers in December. If the vaccine proves safe, the third and final round of testing will involve 30,000 volunteers and begin in April or May. Shmuel Shapira, head of the research institute behind the trial, said in an interview with Ynet News that he hopes the vaccine could be ready for use in the general population by July. Israel’s race to find a vaccine isn’t limited to its own research. The country will reportedly participate in two separate coronavirus vaccine trials in Australia and Europe. Israeli and Emirati drug companies are also collaborating on COVID-19 research. Since detecting its first case in February, Israel has reported more than 315,000 COVID-19 cases and 2,554 deaths from the virus. The number of active cases has fallen below 10,000. On Monday, the coronavirus Cabinet signed off on the Health Ministry’s plan to increase fines for schools and businesses that violate virus restrictions. The new fines still need approval from the Knesset before becoming law.

4