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Israel and the Middle East News Update

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Israel and the Middle East News Update Israel and the Middle East News Update 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. 2 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. 3 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. 4 ● 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.
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