Israel and the Middle East News Update

Monday, September 12

Headlines:  New Poll: Yesh Atid 27, Likud 22  Bibi's 'Ethnic Cleansing' Video Pushes Obama Closer to UN Security Council  US-Israel Defense Aid Deal to Be Signed Within Coming Days  Israeli Ministers Meet with Facebook to Remove and Bar Inciting Content  Thousands of Housing Units to Be Built for Arab Sector  Druze Call on Lieberman: Save Our Brethren in Syria  Syrian Cease-Fire Negotiated by US, Russia Set to Go into Effect  Work Starts on Two New Iranian Nuclear Reactors

Commentary:  Ha’aretz: “Bibi’s Ethnic Cleansing Claim Sets Guinness Record for Chutzpah”  By Chemi Shalev, Israeli Journalist, U.S. Editor, and Correspondent, Ha’aretz  Ma’ariv: “Permanent Postponement”  By Alon Ben-David, Military Affairs Commentator, Channel 10 Israel

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 September 12, 2016

Ma’ariv New Poll: Yesh Atid 27, Likud 22 The upward trend in Yair Lapid’s poll numbers has continued. According to a poll that was commissioned by Channel One from the Geocartographia Polling Institute, which is run by Professor Avi Degani, if elections were held today Yesh Atid under Yair Lapid’s leadership would be the largest party in Israel with 27 seats, followed by the Likud with just 22 seats. The poll was broadcast on Friday evening. A poll that was published last week by Channel Two News showed Yesh Atid overtaking the Likud for the first time, winning 24 seats over the Likud’s 22. See also, “Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid Pulls Further Ahead of Netanyahu's Likud in Latest Poll” (Ha'aretz)

Ha’aretz Bibi's 'Ethnic Cleansing' Video Pushes Obama Closer to UNSC On Friday, when senior White House and U.S. State Department officials saw the video Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted on YouTube and his Facebook page, they were livid. One of Netanyahu’s main arguments was that countries who oppose Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and call for settlement evacuation as part of a peace agreement are, in effect, supporting what he termed the “ethnic cleansing” of Jews. Senior administration officials said they viewed the remarks as directly targeting them. There is no other way to interpret the comments, they said. See also, “US Rebukes Netanyahu Over West Bank ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Remark” (Financial Times) See also, “Abbas Says Israel Carrying Out ‘Ethnic Cleansing’” (Jerusalem Post)

Ha’aretz US-Israel Defense Aid Deal to Be Signed within Coming Days A defense agreement between Israel and the US is expected to be signed in the coming days, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro said Sunday. Speaking to a conference at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Shapiro said the agreement would provide for Israel’s defense needs until 2029 and constitutes the largest aid grant the US has ever given a foreign country. Shapiro’s remarks were the first public comments on the aid package by any official Israeli or U.S. source in several weeks. In early August it looked like the details had been finalized, but after weeks, it has yet to be signed.

Yedioth Ahronoth Israeli Ministers Meet w/ Facebook to Remove Inciting Content Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan have demanded of Facebook executives that it remove from its platform words such as “Intifada,” “stabbing,” “Nazis,” and “shahid,” arguing that those words foment terrorism. The two ministers are scheduled to meet today with Facebook executives in Tel Aviv with the goal of reaching understandings about the removal of inciting content. In recent months, and particularly ever since the “lone wolf Intifada” erupted, talks have been held between representatives of the Israeli law enforcement agencies and Facebook representatives in hope of monitoring inciting content. In many instances Facebook agreed to remove the content in question, though there were other cases in which it did not. 2

Ynet News Thousands of Housing Units to Be Built for Arab Sector Minister of Construction Yoav Galant (Kulanu) traveled to Baka al-Gharbiya, where he signed an agreement to build thousands of units for the Arab sector. The agreement includes 15 heads of local municipal Arab authorities. Galant was accompanied to Baka al-Gharbiya by Minister for Social Equality Gila Gamliel (Likud), Deputy Minister Jackie Levy (Likud) and Construction Ministry Director General Eshel Armoni. According to the agreement, the Ministry of Construction will allocate 1.41 billion shekels to erect public housing for Israeli Arabs, in addition to it lifting restrictions from building on private land.

Yedioth Ahronoth Druze Call on Lieberman: Save Our Brethren in Syria The Druze community in Israel is anxious about the advances that Jabhat al-Nusra has made towards the Druze villages on the Syrian side of the Golan border. Yesterday MK Akram Hasson (Kulanu) posted a call on Facebook to Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman to come to the defense of the Syrian Druze beyond the Golan border. “In another moment Jabhat al-Nusra is going to massacre our brethren in Syria, and we have no intention of sitting by quietly. Lieberman must wake up.” Hasson claimed that Jabhat al-Nusra militiamen had steered clear of the Druze villages up until several months ago because they were afraid of the IDF’s response. Hasson’s Facebook post received thousands of likes and was broadly shared. See also, “Israeli MK: IDF Helping Al-Qaida in Syria at Expense of Druze” (Jerusalem Post)

NPR Syrian Cease-Fire Negotiated by US, Russia Set to Go Into Effect A Syrian cease-fire is due to go into effect at sundown on Monday, at approximately 11:45 a.m. EDT. Just hours before the start of the planned cease-fire, Syrian President Bashar Assad announced on state media that he plans to "reclaim every area from the terrorists." Assad's government had earlier indicated it would abide by the negotiated truce. The planned week-long cease-fire is part of a deal negotiated between the U.S., which supports opposition forces, and Russia, which supports Assad's government. After the cease-fire, if aid successfully reaches besieged areas, Russia and the U.S. intend to work together to coordinate air strikes on extremist groups, including the Islamic State. See also, “Russia and the United States Reach New Agreement on Syria Conflict” (New York Times)

Hurriyet Daily News Work Starts on Two New Iranian Nuclear Reactors Russian and Iranian firms began work on Sept. 10 on two additional reactors at Iran’s nuclear power plant on the Gulf coast at Bushehr. Project manager Mahmoud Jafari said construction of the two 1,000 MW reactors, which is being carried out jointly with an Iranian firm, would take a decade and cost up to $10 billion. “When these two units become operational, 11 million barrels of oil will be saved per year and emission of 7 million tons of greenhouse gas will be avoided,” he said. Some 8,000 workers are involved in the project, which is being led by Russia’s Rosatom with Iran’s Nuclear Power Production and Development Company. See also, “Iran Began Construction on 2nd Nuclear Power Plant; West: Not a Proliferation Risk” (Wall Street Journal) See also, “Iran Launches Construction of Second Nuclear Power Plant” (Voice of America) 3

Ha’aretz – September 10, 2016 Bibi's Remarks Set Guinness Record for Chutzpah By Chemi Shalev  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim in a Facebook video on Friday that the Palestinian demand for the evacuation of Jewish settlements from the West Bank constitutes “ethnic cleansing” belongs in the same league as “Arabs are coming to vote in droves” and “the Mufti persuaded Hitler to exterminate the Jews.” It’s the kind of statement you can’t believe he really said until you see he really said it. Then come the aftershocks, when all sorts of people in the know laud the utterance as a brilliant gambit of a grandmaster strategist.  He wanted to divert the public agenda from the recent crisis over railroad construction on Shabbat, which tainted him, to rebuffing the expected backlash of leftists over his right wing assertions, at which he excels. He is distracting attention from the ongoing police investigation of potential corruption charges. He wants to humiliate Mahmoud Abbas a bit more, after the Palestinian leader was forced to agree to a Moscow summit without preconditions, and perhaps to scuttle the meeting altogether. He wants to show Yair Lapid, who has been breathing down his neck in the polls after assuming a more right wing position, how a consummate rabble-rouser can muster up the nationalist mob without even breaking a sweat. He wants to stick it to U.S. President Barack Obama while he still can, just for the fun of it - or to show what a ferocious war he'll wage against the prospective UN Security Council resolution on the conflict.  But whatever the rationale, it’s hard to decide whether Netanyahu’s statement was more off- putting than off the wall or vice versa. International jurists are at loggerheads whether ethnic cleansing should be considered a form of genocide, but all agree that it is a crime against humanity. Netanyahu apparently thinks that Abbas and the Palestinians are all potential ethnic cleansers, along with the rest of the world, which is egging them on. Not only are U.S. presidents from Jimmy Carter onward inciters, aides and abettors of an abhorrent crime, but, according to Netanyahu’s logic, former Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin, who evacuated settlements in the Sinai, and Ariel Sharon, who removed settlements during the Gaza disengagement, belong in the same rogues gallery as Stalin, Milosevic et al.  Netanyahu asserts in his video that the nearly two million Arabs in Israel are living proof that there is no need to remove Jews from Judea and Samaria in order to achieve peace. Does Netanyahu mean that Jewish settlers will become Palestinian citizens, pay taxes to the government in East Jerusalem or Ramallah or that their children will sing, “Palestine is my revenge and the land of steadfastness” from the PLO anthem? Of course not. In his vision of peace, the Jewish settlers will continue to be Israeli citizens, will enjoy the protection of the Israel Defense Forces even if they reside deep inside Palestinian territories and will sing “As long as the Jewish spirit is yearning” out of Hatikvah. This doesn’t even bear a passing resemblance to the status of Arabs in Israel, but what won’t Netanyahu do in the service of false equivalents and cheap propaganda.  It was Abe Lincoln who supposedly coined the definition of a hypocrite as someone who kills both his parents and then pleads for mercy from the court because he is an orphan.

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 The Hebrew-Yiddish equivalent, in memory of the 19th century anti-Semitic marauders of the Ukraine and Russia, is “the robbed Cossack.” Many governments around the world view settlements in the West Bank as a violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids the transfer of an occupiers’ population into occupied territory, while others, including the United States, prefer to keep this question in a hazy grey area. But all agree that the settlements were established under the auspices of the occupying power and against the wishes of the local inhabitants. It’s one thing to now claim sovereignty over settlement blocs because facts on the ground have created a new status quo, but to then describe Palestinian demands to remove all settlers as “ethnic cleansing” breaks new records of self-victimization, chutzpah and lack of self-awareness. After years that Israel has toiled to prevent the loaded term “ethnic cleansing” from entering the Israeli-Palestinian lexicon, Netanyahu is now pushing it in himself, through the front door.  Netanyahu might be cheered by the Israeli right and by his Evangelical fans in America, and perhaps he is signaling with this video that this is where his heart truly belongs. The claim that evacuation of settlements is ethnic cleansing was brought to the fore, after all, by the militant orange-shirted opposition to the 2005 disengagement from Gaza. In most other eyes, however, Netanyahu’s statement only damages Israel’s image abroad and portrays it as more obstinate and hard line than it really is. If the prime minister did so by design as part of some Machiavellian machination or even if he was just swept away by his own rhetoric that’s one thing, but if it’s part of an escalating sequence of inexplicable, self-damaging moves on Netanyahu’s part, Israel may have much more to worry about than its image abroad. Chemi Shalev is an Israeli journalist as well as the US editor and correspondent for the Ha’aretz newspaper, in both Hebrew and English.

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Ma’ariv – September 12, 2016 Permanent Postponement By Alon Ben-David  Exactly one year has elapsed since the wave of terrorism began, one of the worst in recent years. It peaked in October, and the steady drop in the number of terror attacks and popular terror has continued ever since and has returned to the level that was in place before the last Jewish High Holidays.  But the phenomenon has not vanished entirely, and the IDF fears that the upcoming High Holidays are liable to again ignite an atmosphere of violence. In the meantime, it appears that the Palestinian Authority has wisely decided to postpone the municipal elections, which represented a potential for a clash between Fatah and Hamas as well as within Fatah.  What, actually, happened this past year? Ever since Alexander Levlovich was murdered in the stone-throwing terror attack on the eve of the last Jewish New Year, there were 235 major terror attacks, about half of them stabbing attacks. Forty people were murdered in these terror attacks, plus two who were killed accidentally. This wave of terrorism was carried out by about 300 terrorists, almost all of them from Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem, and the rest from Israel. A total of 120 terrorists were killed in the course of the terror attack or in the course of their arrest. Only a few had any sort of link to one of the known terror organizations.  Some tried to label this wave of terrorism as a third Intifada (the Intifada of the lone knife- wielders). I experienced the previous two Intifadas personally, and they were two utterly different events, but what the two shared, the one in 1987 and the one in 2000, was the fact that in both of them, an absolute majority of Palestinian society was against us. This is in contrast to the events of this past year, in which the majority of Palestinian society stood on the sidelines, praised the terrorists, but did not join them.  The terror attacks began during the High Holidays in East Jerusalem, with the Temple Mount being the agitating factor. From there they spread to Hebron and to the Etzion bloc intersection, to Binyamin, to the Tapuah junction and the Ariel region. About 75% of them were aimed against the security forces, but the ones that were aimed against civilians were the most lethal. In the background, the disturbances and the clashes with the IDF spread, which have also abated since.  As of October last year, terror became a daily occurrence. At its peak, the events sucked in about two thirds of all the IDF forces to the territories. But after a few months of a steady drop in the number of terror attacks, the IDF declared at the end of March that the worst was over.  The characteristics of the events also changed. At first, these were mainly what are known as “inspiration” terror attacks—young people aged 15-25, in which those of them who survived said when questioned that watching a media outlet had pushed them into taking action. They were influenced less by the Palestinian media and more by the atmosphere of regional violence spread by ISIS and the Islamist organizations in Syria and Iraq.

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 In the last few months, along with a drop in the number of terror attacks, the profile of the terrorists has also been changing. They are a little bit older (25-28), the number of women among them is increasing, and the factor of personal distress in their decision to carry out a terror attack has become more dominant. They are mainly people looking for an outlet for their personal frustration, and the option of becoming a shahid whose family is given economic support and social prestige, appears preferable to them than to living.  We are encountering more local shooting cells: two-three members of a village who obtain weapons and decide to act. The majority of them have no organization behind them. This is where IDF activity against weapon manufacturers is crucial. After raids on 29 workshops, which produce the popular submachine gun Carlo, the workshop owners realized that they should have their customers clarify what they intend to do with their weapons. As a result of the raids and the arrests, the price of a Carlo in the territories soared from NIS 1,500 to NIS 4,000; this is an amount that presents an obstacle to many potential shahids.  There has also been a devaluation in the status of shahid in the last few months. True, his family still earns a generous allowance from the Palestinian Authority and usually also from Hamas, but the Palestinian public is no longer in awe of the shahid, who in most cases is killed even before his knife touches anyone. The soldiers serving in the territories have long since realized that they must not let any Palestinian get within stabbing distance. Israel’s problem now is the shooting cells—more than 20 shooting terror attacks carried out this past year have still not been resolved. This means that there are still a number of armed cells on the loose, most of them in the Binyamin region.  After the Holidays  Contrasted with these positive developments, there are a number of dates on the calendar that spell bad news. The High Holidays are always a sensitive time in which there is a tendency to increase the violence, and the olive picking season in the territories comes at the same time, which also often leads to friction. And beyond these, the decision of the Palestinian court to postpone the municipal elections could also lead to friction between Fatah and Hamas.  When the PA decided to hold the elections to the local authorities in October, officials never imagined that Hamas was ready for or interested in taking part in these elections. But Hamas surprised them and very quickly came up with several candidates, some of whom will ostensibly run in the elections as independents. In comparison, Fatah is in more disarray than ever: on the one hand there is Abu Mazen, who acts as if the announcement of his death has yet to reach him, and on the other hand there is Mohammed Dahlan, who goes all over the territories with an open Qatari checkbook, and has been resurrecting the Shuhada el-Aksa brigades in the refugee camps.  It is clear to all of them that if local elections are held, there will be a general rehearsal leading up to two major clashes: the general elections for the Palestinian Authority and the election for the next leader of Fatah. It is in Israel’s interest to reduce as far as possible Hamas’s influence in the territories, and not to have its people elected as the mayors of Ramallah, Nablus and Hebron. That would make cooperation in these places very difficult. But instead of helping those who have worked energetically this past year to reduce Palestinian terror—the defense minister depicts the lame Abu Mazen as Israel’s “number one threat.”

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 Abu Mazen is no Zionist, not an Israel fan and as revealed last week by journalist Oren Nahari, he also has no problem working for a foreign intelligence agency. He is a Palestinian leader who rejected the most generous Israeli proposal ever offered to his people. It is very unlikely that he is a partner for peace, but in contrast to his predecessor, he had the courage to condemn terror publicly, not once but many times, and he does not hesitate to have his security forces act to prevent terror attacks in Israel. This is not out of love for us, but due to the recognition that terror does not serve the Palestinian struggle.  It is unlikely that Abu Mazen’s successor will be more friendly. The chances are that it will be just the opposite. But Israel’s behavior arouses the suspicion that the current government would prefer to see Hamas take over the territories. A Hamas terror entity in Judea and Samaria would increase the number of Israeli victims, but it would enable Israel again to assume the cozy role of victim and would spare the government from having to cope with questions about the future of the territories.  Responsible Israeli behavior, like the behavior displayed during most of this past year, mainly in regard to the Temple Mount, could help us get through the High Holidays in peace. Alon Ben-David is a journalist and military affairs commentator for Channel Ten Israel news.

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