Israel and the Middle East News Update

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Thursday, February 21

Headlines: ● Gantz, Lapid, Ya’alon and Ashkenazi Forge Election Alliance ● Netanyahu Makes Election Deal with Kahane Extremists ● US Jewish Leaders Slam Netanyahu over Kahanists ● Abbas Rejects Tax Funds Collected by Israel ● Joining Labor, Ex-General Endorses Two-State Solution ● In Likud Heartland, Supporters Ready to Turn on Netanyahu ● IDF Hits Hamas After Arson Balloons from Gaza ● The Disappeared Children of Israel

Commentary: ● Times of Israel: “Netanyahu’s Despicable Push to Mainstream Racists” − By David Horovitz, Editor ● Yedioth Ahronoth: “Give Peace Negotiations a Chance” − By Major General (res) Amos Yadlin, Director, Institute for National Security Studies

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 February 21, 2019

Jerusalem Post Gantz, Lapid, Ya’alon and Ashkenazi Forge Election Alliance The Yesh Atid and Israel Resilience Parties decided early Thursday morning to run merge their parties creating a bloc to compete with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud, ahead of Thursday night’s deadline. Israel Resilience Party leader Benny Gantz and Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid will alternate as prime minister, with Gantz taking the job for the first two and a half years. Former IDF chiefs of staff Moshe Ya'alon and Gabi Ashkenazi will also be on the list. The fate of Haredi Women’s College founder Adina Bar-Shalom remained undecided.

Reuters Netanyahu Makes Election Deal with Kahane Extremists Netanyahu forged an alliance with the far-right Jewish Home party on Wednesday that could give followers of the late anti-Arab rabbi, Meir Kahane, a stronger voice in Israeli politics. Netanyahu agreed to set aside two cabinet posts for Jewish Home if it merged with the Kahane’s Jewish Power party. Polls have shown that Jewish Home and Jewish Power might not garner enough votes on their own to win seats in the Knesset. Kahane advocated the “transfer” of Palestinians for a ban on intermarriage between Israeli Jews and Arabs.

Ha’aretz US Jewish Leaders Slam Netanyahu over Kahanists Netanyahu’s efforts were condemned on Wednesday by Jewish American rabbis, organizations and donors. Robert Wexler, a former Democratic member of Congress who was a strong supporter of Israel said, “This will complicate efforts to advocate for Israel, especially within the Jewish community. What are we supposed to tell our children?” Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro warned that if Kahanist leaders are elected, they may not be able to enter the US because it designates the Kahane movement as a terror organization.

Reuters Abbas Rejects Tax Funds Collected by Israel The Palestinian Authority will no longer accept tax revenues collected on its behalf by Israel following its decision to trim the sum over the PA's financial support of prisoners’ families, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said. Under interim peace deals, Israel collects taxes in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip and makes monthly payments to the PA after deducting payments for electricity, water, sewage and medical treatment services.

Ha’aretz Joining Labor, Ex-General Endorses Two-State Solution Tal Russo, a former general who was placed on the number two slot in the Labor Party's ticket on Tuesday told reporters that real security for Israel means "separating from the Palestinians." “Our vision and our interest is to part ways with the Palestinians, and the way there is a regional solution of neighboring countries as well as the two-state solution.” He added that “we must not allow the Palestinians to lead us to a single state with an Arab majority. That would be going against our grandfathers and grandmothers who came to build a Jewish state.” Russo’s roles in the army included commander of the Southern Command, and commander of the Depth Corps (which coordinates long-range Israeli army activity deep in "enemy territory").

Ha’aretz In Likud Heartland, Supporters Ready to Turn on Netanyahu In the right-wing stronghold of Ashdod, support for Netanyahu appears to be waning. Nelly, a Russian-speaker who works as a manicurist said she was “one million percent” certain she would not vote for Likud again. Florist Rosti agrees. “I thought Bibi was the future of Israel, that he would bring peace. But something about him has changed – it seems like he’s only interested in solving our problems abroad and doesn’t care about what’s happening inside the country.”

Times of Israel IDF Hits Hamas After Arson Balloons from Gaza Arson balloon attacks continued for a second day on Wednesday, as at least three balloons launched from the Gaza Strip landed in Israel or exploded en route, according to one Gaza-bordering local council. In response, IDF aircraft fired at a group of Palestinians launching the incendiary devices, the Israeli military said Wednesday evening, calling the target a Hamas post from which the airborne devices were launched. No injuries were reported in the strikes east of the el-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.

The New York Times The Disappeared Children of Israel In the 1950s, a number of Mizrahi parents in immigrant transit camps were told that their babies had died. Known as the “Yemenite Children Affair,” there are over 1,000 official reported cases of missing babies and toddlers, but some estimates are as high as 4,500. Their families believe the babies were abducted by the Israeli authorities in the 1950s, and were illegally put up for adoption to childless Ashkenazi families. While the Israeli government is trying to be more transparent about the disappearances, it still denies that there were systematic abductions.

Times of Israel – February 20, 2019 Netanyahu’s Despicable Push to Mainstream Racists By David Horovitz, Editor

● The Jewish Home party, the current iteration of what used to be Israel’s National Religious Party, on Wednesday night voted in favor of a pre-election alliance with Otzma Yehudit, a racist successor to the banned Kach party of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. Kahane, who won a seat in the Knesset 35 years ago on a platform of revoking citizenship from Arab Israelis and a pledge to “transfer” out of the country those who would not accept this status, and who sought to outlaw sex and marriage between Jews and non-Jews, was banned as a racist from seeking re-election four years later.

● The platform of his disciples in Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) — “Kach” and a subsequent iteration, “Kahane Chai,” are banned in Israel (and the US) as terrorist organizations — envisages Israel not as a Jewish state and a democracy, but rather what it calls a “Jewish democracy”: The Land of Israel’s sovereign borders will extend from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River — that is, throughout the territory that was captured by Israel in the 1967 war. “Enemies of Israel” anywhere within those expanded borders — West Bank Palestinians, Arab Israeli citizens, et al — will be resettled elsewhere in the Arab world. Jewish sovereignty will be “restored” to the Temple Mount — where Israel already claims sovereignty, but where Muslim authorities maintain religious control, Muslims pray, and Jews do not.

● Interviewed on Army Radio on Wednesday afternoon, the party’s leader, former MK Michael Ben Ari, was asked to disavow Kahane’s racist ideology. He ridiculed the notion. Kahane, he said, was his teacher, his rabbi. Also at the party helm is lawyer Itamar Ben Gvir, who first made headlines in Israel in 1995 when he held up the stolen Cadillac symbol from prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s car and crowed to a TV camera, “Just as we got to this symbol, we can get to Rabin.” So too is Baruch Marzel, a former top aide to Kahane known for organizing parties in celebration of Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians at prayer in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994. And Benzi Gopstein, an ex-Kahane student and Kach activist whose Lehava movement works to prevent relationships — romantic and otherwise — between Jews and Arabs.

● Jewish Home’s leadership had been reluctant to join forces with the Kahanists, but, apparently for those at its helm, you gotta do what you gotta do — even when what you gotta do takes you beyond the pale. The original NRP was the emphatically mainstream representative of Israel’s religious Zionists, the Orthodox ally of Israel’s secular Zionist pioneers. Broadly centrist in political orientation, it gradually moved to the right in the decades after the 1967 war, dwindled away politically, and was subsumed into Jewish Home (itself a merger of various factions) a decade ago. When leader Naftali Bennett and his ministerial colleague Ayelet Shaked abandoned Jewish Home in late December and set up their New Right party, seeking to make their eventual way to the national leadership and feeling encumbered by the settler-rabbi imprint, Jewish Home was on the brink of disappearing altogether.

● Though polling barely around the 3.25% Knesset threshold, its new leader, ex-IDF chief rabbi Rafi Peretz (who last week agreed to an alliance with the National Union faction) was still resisting pressure to merge with Otzma Yehudit… until Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spearheaded a personal campaign of phone calls, meetings, promises of ministerial posts, and — at a Wednesday afternoon meeting with Peretz — all manner of other complex political deals, to change his mind. Netanyahu had been scheduled to fly to a vital meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday; it was postponed so that he could tend to this evidently more crucial imperative. That a rival party to Netanyahu’s Likud would bow to his will, rather than stick to its own principles, indicates that, for the Jewish Home, antipathy to the center-left outweighs abhorrence of racism. The “technical” partnership was announced on Wednesday morning, and, backed by Peretz, was put to Jewish Home members and approved Wednesday night. By Thursday, all parties must submit their final slates for the April 9 Knesset elections.

● In a speech presenting his own Knesset slate on Tuesday evening, Benny Ganatz, the only realistic anyone-but-Netanyahu hope, issued a spectacularly personal attack on the prime minister. It was not spectacular by the standards of this election — Netanyahu and his supporters have been castigating Gantz as a weak leftist incapable of running the country; the prime minister on Monday accused Gantz of drawing up plans for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank while head of the army during 2013-2014 peace talks, when it was Netanyahu himself who reportedly gave Gantz the orders to do so; an anonymous smear campaign against Gantz promoted on social media was traced back to Likud.

● But it was out of character for Gantz, who was soft-spoken when in uniform, and who had promised to take the high road in his debut political speech last month. Gantz intimated that Netanyahu was less than fully Israeli — given that he spent years in school and working in the US, during which he changed his name. In a lower blow, Gantz lambasted the prime minister for having also spent years perfecting his English at glamorous American cocktail parties — a charge that missed its mark, since Netanyahu was working as an Israeli diplomat at the time. And in the lowest blow of all, Gantz compared that swanky US lifestyle enjoyed by Netanyahu with his own decades of military service, training generations of commanders and troops, sleeping rough in the muddy trenches on innumerable freezing winter nights, risking his life behind enemy lines. Netanyahu hit back, saying that this critique was particularly outrageous given that he had risked his own life many times as a soldier and officer in Israel’s most elite special forces unit (Sayeret Matkal). On election day in 2015, dishonorably and inaccurately, Netanyahu sought to get out the Likud vote by claiming that Israel’s Arab citizens were streaming in droves to the polling stations. Now, ahead of the 2019 poll, he has worked energetically — and successfully — to bring into the mainstream a group of racists who would deny Israel’s Arab citizens the right to vote at all.”

● Where Gantz’s vituperative fire was more damaging was when he charged that Netanyahu has “ruled the country through incitement, deception and fear,” stirring up internal divisions, and when he lambasted the prime minister for seeking to weaken the pillars of Israeli democracy as

he battles against indictment in the three graft investigations against him. Said Gantz, referring to Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, who must decide on whether to press charges against the prime minister who appointed him: “A legal adviser appointed by the ruler became a traitor and a leftist when he did not do what the ruler expected him to do.” Said Gantz on ex-police chief Roni Alsheich, another Netanyahu appointee, who oversaw the investigations: “The police commissioner appointed by the ruler was called a leftist and traitor because he dared to be loyal to the laws of the state and not to the demands of the ruler.”

● Gantz said nothing, however, of the then-looming Jewish Home-Otzma Yehudit merger that Netanyahu was so energetically and appallingly pushing. On election day itself in 2015, dishonorably and inaccurately, Netanyahu sought to get out the Likud vote by claiming that Israel’s Arab citizens were streaming in droves to the polling stations. Now, ahead of the 2019 poll, he has worked energetically — and successfully — to bring into the mainstream a group of racists who would deny Israel’s Arab citizens the right to vote at all. It is not Netanyahu the diplomat or the soldier that Gantz should be campaigning against. It is not Netanyahu the leader who has tried to keep Israel safe from external threat. It is the Netanyahu harming Israel from within.

● It makes perfect cynical political sense for Netanyahu to encourage the return of Kahanists to the Knesset. A merged Jewish Home-Otzma Yehudit ticket could win at least four seats, surveys indicated before the deal was approved, while separately, Otzma Yehudit would not have cleared the electoral threshold, Jewish Home also might have failed, and all the votes they got would have gone to waste. Ben Ari is set for fifth place on the merged list, and Ben Gvir for eighth. In terms of Israel’s values, Israel’s character, Israel’s essence, by contrast, the prime minister’s tactic is reprehensible. Seen through to its likely conclusion, the merger of the two parties will find their representatives, the Kahanists potentially included, taking their seats in Netanyahu’s next governing coalition. At which point Israel — which boycotts far-right parliamentary parties in countries such as Austria, Germany and France, and which castigates the dangerous rise of racist politicians overseas — will itself have sunk, at Netanyahu’s insistent, self-serving instigation, to the very level it warns against elsewhere.

Yedioth Ahronoth – February 20, 2019 Give Peace Negotiations a Chance By Major General (res) Amos Yadlin, Director, Institute for National Security Studies

● After the failure of the Kerry initiative, the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians was pushed to the sidelines. It now appears that the five years of impasse are about to reach their end with signs of life coming from Washington, Warsaw, Moscow and Riyadh. The key to understanding the correct approach to the peace process is by recognizing the complicated reality. On the one hand, the [thought that the] status quo [can be maintained] is flawed, because the dynamics on the ground never stop. These dynamics, beyond having the ability to create a serious security crisis in Gaza or in Judea and Samaria in the short term, will ultimately and inevitably produce a single bi-national state. On the other hand, the illusions about being able to reach an Israeli-Palestinian agreement through negotiations are also unrealistic given the current situation in the Palestinian arena.

● The leak about the completion of Trump’s “deal of the century” was given a fairly weak denial by Special Representative for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt, who joined his teammate Jared Kushner in Warsaw, where they tried to enlist the pragmatic Arab states to support their plan. For now it seems that they are reluctant to accept the invitation. Abu Mazen, at the time, rejected the proposal that he come to Warsaw, and instead opted for three other tracks: in Gaza, he is trying to bring about a military clash between Israel and Hamas by stepping up his sanctions on the Gaza Strip; in Moscow, President Putin tried to reconcile Fatah and Hamas, which refuses to recognize even Israel in the 1967 borders; and in Riyadh, Abu Mazen met with King Salman in a desperate attempt to prevent the Saudis from joining the American initiative. On the other hand, while Netanyahu did go to Warsaw, this was only to address the only existential threat that he can see—Iran.

● Netanyahu’s tendency to address the Iranian issue is consistent and tenacious, but even he knows that the threat of Israel’s devolution into a one-state reality is no less dangerous for the future of the Zionist vision. He realizes that even to act on the signs of normalization seen in Warsaw between Israel and the Arab states, Israel must show major progress in its efforts to end the impasse in the peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

● It’s a shame that the attention to the Palestinian issue in Israel boils down to venomous and superficial propaganda films that focus on maligning the political rival. There is no serious debate. Instead of hurling accusations, the parties running in the elections should present to the public what their vision on the subject is. What kind of state do the leaders want to exist here in 2040 or in 2050? If no goal is set, Israel will be dragged, with no control, down a steep slope that will ultimately lead to the end of one of its vital components—a Jewish state or a democratic state.

● A real chance should be given to direct negotiations for peace that is based on Trump’s plan, even if the chances of success are slim. Israel, at the end of the day, will have to shape its future characteristics—geographical, security, demographic and moral—in the direction that approximately 70% of the Israeli public has supported consistently. There is no choice but to take the initiative and to coordinate as much as possible with the Americans and the Arab states that support it. That is the correct strategy, both for shaping Israel’s future as well for maintaining Israel’s strong diplomatic position versus the forces that seek to isolate it and to force problematic arrangements on it.

● This must be a controlled and independent course of action that is backed by a tough security envelope—with no illusions of peace, but rather for shaping the conditions for a future solution. On Election Day, when you go to the polls, give your vote to parties that share this aspiration and are willing to embrace a peace plan. Only by doing so will it be possible to ensure that the State of Israel will remain Jewish, democratic, safe and moral. The prime minister understands that very well too.