Israel and the Middle East News Update

Monday, August 20

Headlines: ​ ● Fatah to Meet With Gaza Factions Next Week in Egypt ● Hanegbi: Erez Crossing Closure a Warning to Hamas ● UN Chief: UN Force Could Protect Palestinians ● Trump Said One-State Solution Would Lead to Arab PM ● Druze Politicians File Challenge Against Nation-State Law ● Bennett Defends New Israeli Medical School in West Bank ● Ariel Celebrates 40th Anniversary and Donald Trump ● Warrior for Peace Avnery Passes Away at 94

Commentary: ● Times of : “Why a Deal for Gaza Strip is Still a Long Way Off” − By Avi Issacharoff, Senior Analyst ● Bloomberg: “Palestinians Can’t Keep Living Like This” − By Hussein Ibish, Senior Resident Scholar, Arab Gulf States Institute

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 ​ August 20, 2018 Ha’aretz Fatah to Meet With Gaza Factions Next Week in Egypt A Fatah delegation will leave for Cairo next week to negotiate with Gazan factions, including Hamas, a Fatah official said Monday. The news comes after the delay in the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Gaza. Egypt reportedly pressured Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas last week to send a delegation to Cairo, but Abbas objected on grounds that a separate agreement was being drawn up between Hamas and Israel that would only deepen the divisions between Gaza and the West Bank. Meanwhile, Defense Minister accused Abbas of pushing Israel and Hamas to a confrontation because the two factions were unable to solve the crisis between them.

Ynet Hanegbi: Erez Crossing Closure a Warning to Hamas Regional Cooperation Minister Tzachi Hanegbi said Sunday that the closure of the Erez border crossing to Gaza was a warning to Hamas, after Palestinians staged violent protests on the Gaza border on Friday. “We have seen in the last week a dramatic decrease in the scale of the attacks,” said Hanegbi. “We are trying to strike [a deal] while on the brink of war, without it escalating into another unnecessary round of conflict,” he explained.

AFP UN Chief: UN Force Could Protect Palestinians United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday presented four options aimed at boosting the protection of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, from sending UN rights monitors and unarmed observers to deploying a military or police force under UN mandate. The proposals were contained in a report requested by the General Assembly in response to a surge of violence in Gaza. The UN chief stressed that for each of the options, cooperation by Israel and the Palestinians would be necessary. It remained unlikely however that Israel would agree to the proposals.

Axios Trump Said One-State Solution Would Lead to Arab PM President Trump told King Abdullah of Jordan that a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might lead to someone named Mohammed becoming prime minister of Israel, according to several sources briefed on the meeting. The king said that during their June 25 meeting, he warned Trump that "many young Palestinians don’t want the two-state solution anymore, but would rather live together with the Israelis in one state with equal rights for all." Abdullah reportedly said he asked Trump not to rush to present his peace plan "because there are too many difficulties at the moment."

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Ha’aretz Druze Politicians File Challenge Against Nation-State Law Two dozen Israeli Druze, led by Daliat al-Carmel Mayor Rafik Halabi, filed Sunday a High Court of Justice petition against the nation-state law passed by the in July. It was the seventh such challenge to the law, officially known as the Basic Law on Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. The petitioners argued that the law “creates race-based discrimination” and “excludes 20 percent of the country’s citizens and creates [different] statuses among Israeli citizens.”

Ha’aretz Bennett Defends New Israeli Medical School in West Bank Education Minister on Sunday participated in a dedication ceremony for the new medical school at Ariel University in the West Bank settlement of Ariel, alongside donors Sheldon and Miriam Adelson. Approval for the medical school in Ariel was criticized by many Israeli academics, who claimed it was rammed through at the insistence of Bennett, the head of the pro-settlement Habayit Hayehudi party, in violation of the usual academic standards. Bennett rejected this criticism, even after the council of university heads sent a highly critical letter on the subject warning that it would result in a “loss of trust.” Bennett responded at the time that the country’s other universities were behaving like a “cartel.”

Ha’aretz Ariel Celebrates 40th Anniversary and Donald Trump Deep in the heart of the West Bank, this settlement of nearly 20,000 residents is enjoying a building boom like never before. At the eastern edge of Ariel, construction of a new hospital, complete with its own medical school, has entered the final stages. Across from the huge complex, a new shopping center has started to sprout up. On a hill that overlooks the main population center, ground is about to be broken on a new neighborhood that will include 839 housing units — the largest project of its kind in many years. And several kilometers to the west, at the Ariel industrial zone, new factory construction is under way. “During the Obama years, everything here was frozen,” notes Daniel Kohavi, one of the original Ariel settlers. “But thanks to Donald Trump, we’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Jerusalem Post Warrior for Peace Avnery Passes Away at 94 Writer, former lawmaker, and veteran peace activist Uri Avnery died Monday at the age of 94, days after suffering a stroke. Avnery, for decades one of the Israeli left wing’s most prominent political voices, had served as a member of the Knesset and as editor of the Haolam Hazeh (“This World”) magazine. Avnery was perhaps the first prominent Israeli to call for the establishment of a Palestinian state, saying it was the only way to secure peace for a democratic Israel with a Jewish majority. He took on successive Israeli governments and once, in 1982, snuck across four battle lines in Israeli-besieged Beirut to talk to Israel’s then-nemesis, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat.

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Times of Israel – August 18, 2018 Why a Deal for Gaza Strip is Still a Long Way Off By Avi Issacharoff, Senior Analyst

● Several thousand Palestinians gathered near the Gaza border Friday for the weekly “March of Return” protests. The Hamas-run health ministry reported that two people were killed and 270 injured in clashes with Israeli troops, 60 of them by live fire. Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar, who has not been seen in public for some time, visited one of the protest tents to encourage demonstrators. In other words, Friday was ostensibly business as usual in Gaza. But sources in the Strip have said that despite appearances, Hamas is not interested in hurting the prospects of an Egyptian-brokered long-term ceasefire agreement that is under negotiation. In fact, they note, Friday’s protests, though violent, had fewer participants than in previous weeks, and were generally more subdued.

● Still, even though both sides appear to want calm, there is a difference in understanding regarding the scope of the potential truce. Hamas does not view the ongoing “popular protests” along the border, or the kite and balloon arson attacks that have burned over 7,000 acres of southern Israeli land, as a violation of any such agreement. As far as Hamas is concerned, those attacks are part of the popular Palestinian struggle against Israel. If Hamas does reach a long-term ceasefire deal with Israel, the terror group insists it will be obligated to cease rocket and mortar fire, but nothing more.

● This perception may be at odds with the discourse in Israel, where many expect a ceasefire deal with the terror group to include a cessation of the months-long border clashes and arson attacks. Conversely, Hamas says it will not agree to such a truce unless Israel stops bombings its facilities in the Gaza Strip, which have caused considerable damage to its infrastructure in recent weeks. (It may also be more difficult for Hamas to repair this damage due to the financial crises currently being experienced by Iran and Turkey — countries which have helped in the financial department in the past.)

● Israel has carried out such strikes in response to arson attacks and particularly egregious violence at the protests, and is unlikely to accept an arrangement in which it would agree to halt such responses while Gazans remain free to riot and burn Israeli farmland. The bottom line is that, contrary to the portrayal by some media outlets, any potential arrangement with Hamas is not likely to be dramatic or all that significant. Yes, it would provide for a ceasefire, but one along the lines of the deal that ended the 2014 war in Gaza. It’s far too early to start talking about something more significant, something, for example, that might provide for constructing a seaport for Gazans in Cyprus, or a complete lifting of border restrictions.

● In other words, it would be a mini-ceasefire — an understanding, nothing more. And, both sides agree, nobody is going to sign any documents. Neither Prime Minister nor Hamas can afford to sign on to an agreement with a declared an enemy. Thus the mediating

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Egyptian officials are at the present stage only looking to stop the exchanges of fire between the sides. Only in a later stage could there be talk of easing the blockade on Gaza — something Israel simply will not do so long as Hamas remains a military threat — a maritime crossing, prisoner exchanges, and more. The problem with a mini-ceasefire is that reaching that next stage is critical in preventing it from falling apart. If the demonstrations continue and the death toll rises, it’s clear, even the most limited arrangement will not survive. And that second stage currently appears utterly out of reach, and not just because of Hamas and Israel: The Palestinian Authority is doing its part to torpedo any understanding between Hamas and Israel.

● On Friday, the Kan news broadcaster quoted a senior PA official as saying that if any deal were reached, the Ramallah government would stop all financial assistance it provides to the Strip. PA President Mahmoud Abbas made similar threats on Saturday. The Cairo talks on the potential deal have included various Palestinian factions, but not the PA’s Fatah. While their involvement may help stem the bloodshed, they don’t have the clout to reach a comprehensive settlement. Meanwhile, the reconciliation talks Egypt is also facilitating between Hamas and Fatah are going nowhere. Perhaps realizing the current state of things, senior Hamas leader Husam Badran announced Friday that negotiations were being put on hold for a week, to resume only after next week’s Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. Having spent many years in an Israeli prison with Jewish jailers, and understanding Hebrew well, perhaps he’s picked up that ultimate of procrastinatory Jewish phrases, “After the holidays.”

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Bloomberg – August 18, 2018 Palestinians Can’t Keep Living Like This By Hussein Ibish, Senior Resident Scholar, Arab Gulf States Institute

● In a tiny West Bank village not long ago, a teenage girl slapped a heavily armed soldier outside her home. The prevailing sense among 7 million Jews was that she was a violent renegade, a kind of apprentice terrorist. But almost 7 million Palestinians saw her act as effectively, or at least relatively, nonviolent. They viewed her as fully justified and, indeed, heroic. This clash of completely irreconcilable perceptions reveals the fundamental realities between Israel and the Palestinians. This week, Israel released Ahed Tamimi, a 17-year-old Palestinian, after she had served eight months for “assaulting” an Israeli soldier. Her 15-year-old cousin was allegedly shot in the head with a rubber bullet by Israeli occupation forces during a demonstration, after which there was a confrontation with the soldiers outside her home. That’s when the slap occurred.

● Why would a teenager slap a soldier? Why would she be lionized and vilified internationally for doing so? Because her people and the Jewish population of Israel do not operate on equal ground. One side has every reason to try to change that, but many on the other side are content to ignore the disparity. If the 20th century taught us anything, it is that people cannot long abide living in a condition in which they have no power, no agency and no self-determination. This is why the European colonial project broke down so completely. It’s why segregation in the American South could not survive. It’s why apartheid in South Africa simply collapsed.

● In the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, variously known as Eretz Yisrael, historical Palestine or mandatory Palestine, two peoples live in equal numbers. However, one group in it has all the power. A small group of Palestinians are Israeli citizens, making up a manageable minority of about 20 percent. They face lots of official and unofficial discrimination, but they have many of the basic rights of citizens. The overwhelming majority of Palestinians, however, are not citizens of Israel or any other country. They do not have any say in the government that effectively rules them, or any influence on the laws, regulations, bureaucracy or courts that determine their fate. They cannot travel more than a few miles in any direction without the permission of a hostile occupying army. They have no vote. They have no passport. They have, simply, no meaningful rights.

● In a world of citizens, Palestinians are the only remaining large group of stateless people. This is particularly striking because most of them are not refugees and are living in their own towns and villages. Young Palestinians like Tamimi have never known another reality. They have grown up in an environment where they know that another people control their lives completely and that they are utterly powerless. Their parents have no real authority. Their fathers are routinely subject to all manner of arbitrary humiliations in front of them. Some try to rationalize these realities. They blame the Palestinians themselves, the Arabs or others. And yet this fundamental reality of basic empowerment for Jews versus near-total disempowerment for

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Palestinians is still the essence of lived reality. This is the basis of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. That no one can deny. No people disempowered to this extent will ever be able to accept that status. Nor should they be expected to.

● Yet, increasingly, many Jewish Israelis and Americans are beginning to assume that Palestinians can and should remain effectively powerless for the indefinite future. Not because they have any substantive rebuttal to anything I’ve said about the inhumane treatment of the Palestinians. But simply because they see it as convenient for Israel. Practically speaking, there are only two ways for Palestinians to gain any structural authority over their lives. They could have an independent state. Or they could become full and equal citizens of Israel or some other entity. There is no third path to basic human rights. The alternative to those options is the formalization of Israeli apartheid. Yet this is what many are now openly promoting.

● The Wall Street Journal this week responded to Tamimi’s release by printing a sort of Rosetta Stone for this perspective. In it, Daniel J. Arbess, an American investor, presumes to offer her “advice.” Dismissing this brutal reality as a “so-called occupation,” he effectively offers her and other young Palestinians a deal: They can enjoy some measure of integration “into Israel’s thriving economy and culture of innovation” with “self-determination” for “local communities” (whatever that means). Here’s the catch: The “Jewish character of the state” will be guaranteed under “any demographic circumstances.” So even if Palestinians become a majority, as they probably soon will, they will still somehow have to live in a “Jewish state.” Arbess clarifies that a central feature of any such arrangement will be sustaining “Jewish control of immigration and other policies of national identity and security.” Again, apparently under any demographic conditions.

● Arbess isn’t hiding his demand for perpetual, guaranteed, Jewish supremacy in all of the land, with or without a Jewish majority. In effect, Palestinians can get some secondary economic benefits and localized political crumbs if they surrender any hope for dignity or self-determination. This sounds a lot like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s notorious, and preposterous, vision of “economic peace” with Palestinians receiving a “state minus.” In effect, of course, it means Palestinians will agree to live as “humans minus.” There are disturbing signs from the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, Jared Kushner, and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, that the Trump administration shares such a vision, and that any administration “peace plan” will, in effect, embody it as well.

● But “economic peace” is an absurdity because this is a political conflict, not a squabble over money. Even disputes about land hide what lies, very obviously, directly underneath: power. It’s no good saying Jews should know what it means to live without power, and under someone else’s whims and control. People don’t work like that; suffering is rarely ennobling. As ever, the powerful do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. But the same dynamics of fundamental human psychology mean that Palestinians, alone among all the peoples of the earth, will not uniquely agree to live in a formalized, fundamental, structural condition of radical disempowerment. Would Arbess, Netanyahu or the others ever agree to that for themselves or

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their families? Would they ever dream of asking Jewish Israelis to? To ask the question is to answer it — possibly with a slap.

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