Israel and the Middle East News Update

Wednesday, May 4

Headlines:  IDF Fires at Gaza After Four Border Incident in 24 Hours  In Upgrade of Ties, to Open NATO Office for First Time  Pardo: I’m Worried We’re Reaching Point of No-Return  IDF Touts ‘Victory’ Over Terror Thanks to PA Coordination  Three Israeli Soldiers Wounded in West Bank Vehicle Attack  Gaza’s Sewage Poisons Coastline, Threatens Israel  Opposition Lawmakers Doubt Herzog Will Join Coalition  U.S.-Israel Aid Talks Stumble Over Missile Defense

Commentary:  Yedioth Ahronoth: “Racial Discrimination in Practice”  By Ronen Bergman, Senior Political and Military Analyst, Yedioth Ahronoth  Mauldin Economics: “Israel’s Ephemeral Power”  By Jacob Shapiro, Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University

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 May 4, 2016

Ha’aretz IDF Fires at Gaza After Four Border Incidents in 24 Hours The Israeli army fired tank shells at Gaza following four shootings and explosions along the border on Wednesday. No Israeli soldiers were wounded. Earlier on Wednesday, an Israeli tank fired a shell at what the IDF said was a "suspicious area" after a mortar bomb was fired from southern Gaza at an Israeli force near the border. Later, Israeli forces operating on the northern Gaza border heard in two separate incidents loud explosions believed to be the result of mortar fire targeting them from Gaza. In both incidents, the IDF responded with tank fire at positions in Gaza's Shujaiya neighborhood. See also, “As Gaza Border Heats Up, Explosion Hits Near IDF Soldiers” (Times of Israel)

BICOM In Upgrade of Ties, Israel to Open NATO Office for First Time In a significant upgrade of ties, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has recognized an official Israeli representative to the body and will give Israel a permanent office at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels. Israel is not a member of NATO, but enjoys military and security cooperation with the bloc. It is part of the Mediterranean Dialogue, a NATO outreach program involving 7 allied countries in the Mediterranean region. However, the new status brings Israel-NATO relations significantly closer. See also, “Israel to Open Permanent Office at NATO HQ, 5 Years After Turkey Blocked Move” (Jerusalem Post)

Walla News Pardo: I’m Worried We’re Reaching Point of No-Return Director Tamir Pardo was part of a panel discussion at Harvard University, along with CIA Acting Director Michael Morell. Pardo answered questions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the nuclear deal with Iran and fight against ISIS. He confirmed statements he had made in the past that the greatest threat to Israel was the Palestinian conflict and added: The declaration made years ago by Netanyahu that Israel needs to act to achieve the two-state solution was correct. I am worried the more time that passes, that opportunity is growing farther away and perhaps is no longer valid. Pardo said: if the implementation of that solution proves impossible, then at a certain stage we are liable to see our Palestinian cousins prefer a one-state solution. As a member of the second generation to the Holocaust, that is unacceptable. I am worried we are nearing the point of no-return.

Arutz Sheva IDF Touts 'Victory’ Over Terror Thanks to PA Coordination A report Tuesday night revealed the IDF has partially withdrawn from the West Bank’s Area A in a reduction in security coordination that may have helped cause Tuesday evening's terror attack near Dolev. But the IDF continues to tout the security coordination with the Palestinian Authority (PA) even as PA delegates continue to discuss cutting the security coordination completely. Israel’s security establishment on Wednesday praised the security coordination, saying that while the scope of arrests of terrorists conducted by PA Security Forces stood at around 10% at the start of the terror wave last September, it currently takes up roughly 50% of the burden in areas under its control. 2

BICOM Three Israeli Soldiers Wounded in West Bank Vehicle Attack Three Israeli soldiers were wounded Tuesday evening, one seriously, after a Palestinian man rammed a car into a West Bank roadblock they were manning. The Palestinian assailant is reported have to have sped up as he approached the Ein Arik roadblock, near the settlement of Dolev northwest of Ramallah, plowing into the soldiers on duty. Three were injured, one seriously, who was evacuated by helicopter and said to be in a life-threatening condition. The other two were transported by ambulance to hospitals in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the attacker, 36-year-old Ahmed Riyad Shehada, , was shot and killed at the scene by troops as the attack unfolded. Shehada’s body was returned to his family last night, despite Israel’s recent policy to withhold the bodies of terrorists killed. See also, “Lieberman: Netanyahu’s Behavior Encourages More Attacks, Calls for Resignation” (Jerusalem Post)

Ynet News Gaza's Sewage Poisons Coastline, Threatens Israel Each day, millions of gallons of raw sewage pour into the Gaza Strip's beachfront, spewing out of a metal pipe and turning miles of once-scenic coastline into a stagnant dead zone. The sewage has damaged Gaza's limited fresh water supplies, decimated fishing zones, and after years of neglect, is now floating northward and affecting Israel as well, where a nearby desalination plant was forced to shut down, apparently due to pollution. Environmentalists and international aid groups say that if the problem isn't quickly addressed, it could spell even more trouble on both sides of the border. See also, “Lieberman: Decision to Return Terrorist's Body ‘Encourages Terrorism’” (Ynet News)

Ha’aretz Opposition Lawmakers Doubt Herzog Will Join Coalition There is a growing feeling in the opposition that Zionist Union is unlikely to join the coalition, although some of the faction’s MKs said they did not believe chairman Isaac Herzog would stop trying. The fact that Herzog has not explicitly ruled out joining the coalition in this term under any circumstances, coupled with his keeping talks on the matter from his faction colleagues, are contributing to the feeling that Herzog has still not abandoned the idea. “I call on Herzog to start acting like the chairman of the opposition and announce clearly that he has not given up on the possibility of replacing the government and that he will not join a right-wing government,” Meretz chairwoman Zahava Galon said Wednesday at a meeting with students at Tel Hai Academic College.

Times of Israel U.S.-Israel Aid Talks Stumble Over Missile Defense Negotiations over a new U.S. security package to Israel have hit a snag, and the two sides are in disagreement not only over the size of the annual increase but also over a request from Israel that a separate sub-package for missile defense be enshrined in the deal. The current aid package stands at $3 billion annually, and Israel has demanded the amount for the next 10-year deal be raised to $3.7 billion. In addition to the extra $700 million per year, Israel is also asking the memorandum include a separate deal for missile defense spending, which could raise the total amount to over $4 billion annually. It would be the first time missile defense was addressed in a subsection of the deal. See also, “Differences Over Missile Defense, Fine Print Snag U.S.-Israel Aid Deal” (Reuters)

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Yedioth Ahronoth – May 3, 2016 Racial Discrimination in Practice By Ronen Bergman  For several reasons, the Knesset would do well to accept the norms bill that Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said she would promote, which would apply Israeli law to the settlers in the territories. First, because it makes Shaked’s vision for the country’s future very clear—the destruction of the Zionist vision by creating an Arab majority from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and destroying Israel’s moral backbone by creating a regime based on legal racial discrimination, where the Jewish minority would enjoy more rights than the Palestinian majority. Secondly, the Prime Minister’s Bureau would no longer have to waste words denying the harsh criticism by US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro, who said that Israel selectively enforces the law on settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank, since this would be clearly written in law.  Third, and most importantly, the bill would reflect the current situation in the territories in practice: the Palestinians are subject to military law, and Israelis are subject to Israeli law. In the resultant situation, which flagrantly contradicts international law, people living in the same unit of territory are subject to two sets of laws, with the only distinction being based on religion: one for Jews and one for Arabs [sic]. This is not, heaven forbid, a call to apply Israeli law to the territories, but the opposite—to apply military law to everyone living there.  The discrimination is particularly blatant in everything pertaining to the war on terrorism. The Palestinians are dealt with under military law, which grants draconian (and effective) counterterrorist powers to the IDF, police and GSS. Although military law is imposed on the entire occupied region, where most of the Jewish suspects of terrorist or violent activities live, they are subject to a completely different type of law—Israeli civil law, which is supposed to apply only to the territory within Israel’s borders.  The differences are vast. For example, if a GSS agent wants to tap the phone of a Palestinian resident of the territories who is suspected of involvement in terrorism, he just does it. If a GSS agent wants to wiretap a Jewish resident of the territories, he has to send a detailed request to the prime minister, and should the request be approved, it will be valid for only three months. Military law authorizes army commanders to arrest a person for a period of six months of administrative detention, without trial, and to extend their remand by another six months. Israel has used administrative detention against Palestinians thousands of times, but not against settlers until the murder in Duma.  The military judges that hear cases regarding Palestinian terrorism are officers with relatively limited judicial experience. The civil judges physically located in Israeli territory, before whom Jewish terrorists are brought, are professional and experienced judges who do not accept every argument or request by the prosecution as fact. Furthermore, hearings before judges in Israel almost always take place publicly, under media scrutiny.

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 There is also an enormous difference in the powers to make a regular arrest for the purposes of interrogation, as well as the ability to prevent the detainee from meeting with counsel: 22 days for settlers, 60 days for Palestinians. One of the former directors of the GSS interrogations division told me, “These are huge differences. It’s no surprise that the GSS gets a confession from 80% of Palestinian suspects and close to zero confessions from Jews.”  The discrimination in favor of Jewish terrorists is particularly striking in terms of the “closest connection” principle, whereby if most of the accomplices to a terrorist act or the act itself are committed in occupied territory subject to military control, then all of the involved parties, even if one of them is an Israeli citizen, should be tried under military law. This principle has been applied over the years only in cases when Arab citizens of Israel were involved in terrorist activity. The principle is supposed to apply to Jews too, for in most cases the settlers live in the territories and the acts are perpetrated there, but the Justice Ministry consistently refused to apply it to them. GSS proposals to the State Attorney’s Office to deal with Jewish terrorism in the territories according to military law also met with a persistent refusal. Ronen Bergman is a senior political and military analyst for Yedioth Ahronoth, and is the author of several books on Israeli security. He is currently working on a history of the Mossad.

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Mauldin Economics – May 2, 2016 Israel’s Ephemeral Power By Jacob Shapiro, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University  There are four key regional powers in the Middle East: Turkey, Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. Yet, within this group there is a distinct division. Turkey and Iran are potential hegemons— they represent the heirs of the Ottoman and Persian empires. Israel and Saudi Arabia are key players, but they share a critical limitation: their strategic needs outweigh their capabilities, and they are limited in how much they can shape regional events. We have studied in depth the weaknesses inherent in the Saudi kingdom and how its power will wane with the diminution of its oil wealth. Israel, for different reasons than Saudi Arabia, also faces a gravely dangerous future. The danger is a ways off, but the eventual challenge Israel will face is no less potent.  Israel Is Secure -- Israel has never been stronger than it is today. On all of its borders, it is in a reasonably secure position. To the south, the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty remains firmly in place. That the treaty has held for 37 years can dull our sense of just how transformative it has been. From Israel’s founding in 1948 until 1979, Egypt was a mortal enemy. Today, relations between Egypt and Israel are so cooperative that as recently as 2014, Israel allowed Egypt to deploy infantry battalions and various attack aircraft in the Sinai Peninsula to fight radical elements operating there. To the east, Israel has maintained de facto security control over the West Bank since 1967, and in 1994, Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan. The acquisition of the West Bank dramatically improved Israel’s security. Before 1967, Jordanian forces held the high ground. From Qalqilya, they stood within reach of roughly 40 percent of Israel’s population, concentrated then, as today, in the greater metropolitan area. From Tulkarm, Jordanian forces needed to advance only 10 miles to reach the coast and, in effect, cut Israel in half.  Today, the Israelis cooperate with the Jordanians as much if not more than they do with the Egyptians, and there is no military force on the west bank of the Jordan River that poses a meaningful threat to Israeli security. Any attacking force would have to cross the Jordan River and fight through hilly, difficult terrain to reach Israel’s core. To the northeast, Syria’s civil war has left another historical enemy in complete disarray. Since 1967, the Israelis have controlled the bulk of the Golan Heights, and Syria’s various factions are so distracted with fighting each other that they do not have the time or the resources to threaten Israel in any meaningful way, nor will they for years to come. Israeli military planners consider their greatest threat to be Hezbollah operating out of Lebanon.  But Hezbollah has thrown its forces into the Syrian conflict to back Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its Iranian allies. Hezbollah still has missiles that it could use to make life in the north very difficult for Israel, but it has neither the will nor the appetite for conflict now. Even if it did, it would eventually run out of rockets, and Israel has the capability to go in on the ground and cripple Hezbollah. The Palestinians, meanwhile, have never represented an existential military threat to Israel and are arguably more politically fractured today than they have ever been. Israel maintains a blockade around the Gaza Strip, and Egypt is as invested in keeping Gaza quiet as Israel is. There are occasional conflicts with Hamas—including four major spasms in the last decade. 6

 These are horrible events for Israelis living in the cities around Gaza, but they do not threaten Israel’s security. Meanwhile, Mahmoud Abbas runs the Palestinian Authority from the West Bank and is weak politically. The recent spate of stabbings pales in comparison to the first and second intifadas, but even a third intifada would not change Israel’s overwhelming military supremacy on the ground.  On none of its borders does Israel face a force that can project an existential threat—Syria’s civil war removed the last potential contender for that title.  Three Looming Challenges -- From a regional perspective three challenges loom for Israel: Iran, the Islamic State, and Turkey. Each of these challenges demonstrates how Israel is secure in the short term but in the long term cannot guarantee its own security. Iran is the challenge most often mentioned, largely due to the fact that Israeli Prime Minister has built his political career around the notion that he is the only Israeli leader sufficiently aware of and capable of dealing with the threat Iran poses. That strategy has worked well so far for Netanyahu—he is the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history, besides founding father David Ben-Gurion. In the short term, however, Iran cannot be said to pose a meaningful threat to Israel. In 2010, Iran was building an arc of Shiite influence that extended from Tehran all the way to the Mediterranean Sea via Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Iraq is now in shambles, Syria is in a state of civil war, and pro-Iranian forces in Lebanon have been cut off from their direct link to Iran and are engaged in Syria.  Iran is 1,000 miles away from Israel, and rhetoric aside, it faces an existential crisis in the battle for influence in Baghdad and, to a lesser degree, in its fight to prop up Assad’s regime in Syria. The key outlier here, of course, is nuclear weapons, and herein lies Israel’s fundamental weakness. Our view has always been that Iran did not want to develop nuclear weapons so much as it wanted others to believe it was developing them so they could be used as a bargaining chip. But Israel cannot make such assumptions. It has long viewed an Iranian nuclear program as a threat yet has been powerless to do anything about it. In 1981, Israel struck and destroyed a nuclear reactor in Iraq in what was called Operation Opera. In 2012, Israel destroyed a suspected nuclear reactor in Syria in Operation Orchard. Iran poses a much more difficult challenge. It is too far away for the Israeli air force to attack without forward deploying (and thereby alerting the Iranians). Israel lacks the weapons necessary to attack underground sites, and gaining intelligence on where the facilities are and whether strikes have been successful would be extremely difficult. In sum, if Israel were capable of destroying the Iranian nuclear program, it would have done so.  Every time it has threatened to do so, it was bluffing. The Islamic State is another potential threat that does not get enough attention. The media is fixated on the fact that IS has lost territory in recent months. We, however, see a sophisticated fighting force that has again retreated to more favorable ground and is defending a core territory. In the short term, IS works in Israel’s interests. It has crippled a mortal enemy in Assad and is not in a position to threaten Israel directly. But if IS or some other entity rises from the Syrian civil war able to unite Arab power, effecting a rebirth of the United Arab Republic that the founder of modern Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser sought to build in the 1950s, that alliance would represent a fundamental threat to Israel’s interests. This is an unlikely scenario but not an impossible one, and Israel does not have the luxury of discounting the unlikely.

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 Israel has thus far stayed out of the Syrian civil war because chaos in Syria works directly in its interest—but also because Israel doesn’t have the capability to shape the conflict. Israel’s military is well equipped, but it can’t manage a protracted conflict where it must fight over extended supply lines. Such a conflict would cripple its economy and put the military at risk of casualties it cannot afford. Though the Syrian civil war may continue for years, it will eventually end. Then Israel will face to the northeast a new reality it cannot define that will thrust new challenges on Israel’s security establishment. Israel benefits from Syria’s chaos, but Israel was not the architect of Syria’s situation and cannot control Syria’s future. The country that can dictate Syria’s future is Turkey.  Turkey is the strongest of the region’s powers, and however much it does not want to intervene in the conflicts raging around it, Ankara cannot permanently accept ongoing chaos on its southern border. In terms of GDP, Turkey has the largest economy, and it also has the largest military force. By the end of the 1960s, Israel and Turkey were in the U.S. Cold War camp, and despite strain from 2010, cooperation has continued behind the scenes. We believe the most likely scenario for the Middle East in the next 20 years is that Turkey will be forced to take a deep interest in Syria and insert itself into the conflict to prevent the rise of potentially hostile states. Here again is a strategic challenge the Israelis cannot predict or shape. If Turkey decides that projecting power into the Levant is in its interest, Israel can do nothing to stop it. If Turkey decides it wants nuclear weapons, Israel can do nothing to stop it. There is no telling how Turkey’s rise will affect the future of Israeli–Egyptian or Israeli–Jordanian relations. The Middle East today is in a state of chaos, and such chaos serves Israel’s interests. This chaos, however, will not be interminable. Order will eventually return in the form of a strong Turkey, a united Arab entity, an overachieving Iran, or some other as yet unimagined scenario. And in that future world, Israel’s relative power and security will quickly evaporate.  Closing Thoughts -- Throughout its history, Israel has depended on a great-power patron. In 1948, it was the Soviets. Until 1967, it was the French. Since then, it has been the US. The US– Israel relationship, however, has frayed as it was grounded in a strategic partnership to combat the Soviet Union and Arab allies in the Cold War. After the Soviet’s collapse, there was something of a honeymoon phase, but Israel’s relatively secure position now allows it more independence from the US. And the US move to establish a balance of power in the Middle East has rendered Israel less important to U.S. strategic interests. That balance of power strategy is what led to the Iranian nuclear deal. Ironically, the US’s balance of power strategy is one of the best things that could happen to Israel. It injects a modicum of strategic necessity back into the relationship. The US is more focused on Iran and Turkey now—despite some friction, the US considers Turkey an important ally. But while the US is seeking to establish order by letting the region proceed on its own, the US has no interest in allowing any one power to dominate the region. Israel cannot dictate strategic American interests, but it can serve as an insurance policy to ensure no power dominates the region. Israel, throughout its ancient and modern history, has existed at the whim of other powers. As it did during the the Davidic and Solomonic monarchies, Israel today lives in a perfect storm that gives it strength and security. The last 68 years have not been the norm in the Middle East, and neither have the last five in which Israel has become more secure than at any other point. There are geopolitical reasons why Israel did not exist for a period of over 2,000 years. Those reasons haven’t gone away, and they will reassert themselves. At that point, Israel will have to depend on foreign backers, the skills of its leaders, and the unity of its state. None of those are sure bets. 8