Racing Headlong into New Elections By Ben Caspit @ Ma'ariv – December 16, 2020

If the poll that was reported last night by Hahadashot doesn’t stop the mad race to a new election, nothing is going to be able to stop it. That poll ought to be enough to keep Binyamin Netanyahu—not to mention —unable to sleep at night. Both of them are liable to become history if the trend currently reflected by the recent polls proves to be real. But that mad race to elections has continued, nevertheless. The two leaders, who have kept their foot pressed down on the accelerator, are racing into what appears to be a head-on collision between them, after which both are likely to be defined as being “total losses,” and will be towed away to the political junkyard. Netanyahu never heads into a new election without first sewing up his future coalition government. This is going to the first time in the current era in which he might find himself doing just that. Gantz, at the pace of the current polls, isn’t going to run in the next election. If the alternate prime only knew how many of his ministers were negotiating behind his back their own political asylum in other parties, he would realize that his magazine is as empty of bullets as his column of seats in the polls. Despite all of that, the miscalculation is well underway. Both sides have sworn that they are not holding any talks with one another; the gaps between them appear to be unbridgeable; and new elections appear to be the most likely outcome. Having said all that, my working assessment is that Netanyahu and Gantz know how to communicate with one another without leaving even the slightest trace. The question as to which one of them is going to back down is moot. Gantz has nowhere to back down to. The only person who can still blink and save all of us from new elections is Netanyahu. He isn’t afraid of the alternating premiership arrangement anymore, on the assumption that he can lengthen his own term in office to two years. The one person who has truly gotten under his skin is , which proves that the is doing his job well. Gantz can’t remove Nissenkorn from the Justice Ministry. He knows that. The only solution is to reach an agreement about a work plan for the Justice Ministry and to reach understandings about the appointment of civil servants, creating a reality that both sides will be able to live with. It may be true that this reality was created by the last coalition agreement, an agreement that Netanyahu began to violate substantively from day-one when it became evident (to anyone still unfamiliar with his ways) that he had no intention of honoring the alternating premiership arrangement. But the conditions have changed since then. The changes on the right wing have made the alternating premiership arrangement the less bad option for Netanyahu. Then again, there is always the other possibility that the prime minister knows something that we don’t. That Netanyahu is hiding another ace somewhere deep up his sleeve, an unanticipated trump card of the kind that Netanyahu has played so many times in the past. A card that might explain his self- confidence ahead of the next election and his certainty that he will be better off after the election, and not worse off. Meanwhile, Gideon Saar has been executing a plan that he prepared long ago. Yifat Shasha-Biton was brought on board at the precise right moment in time. Now all that’s left is Gadi Eisenkot. But the former chief of staff appears to be determined not to decide. He isn’t in any rush, and he is right to feel that way. Saar and Eisenkot are in close contact with one another and speak with one another on a daily basis and sometimes more frequently than that. Eisenkot hasn’t demanded the second slot on the list. To the contrary, he believes the list should alternate between male and female candidates, at least in the top ten slots. I couldn’t say whether Saar agrees with him. Eisenkot has two guiding principles: he doesn’t want to top the list, and he doesn’t want to join the list on his own. He will have a problem being the lone dissenting voice in a decisively right-wing list. It is my impression that Eisenkot is put off by the exclusively right-wing nature of Saar’s list—at least in its current composition. Saar is going to have to show extraordinary acrobatic skills to keep his parking lot [a pervasively used metaphor by Israeli political commentators to describe disappointed centrist voters temporarily supporting a right-wing candidate as “parking” their support in that candidate’s “lot”], which replaced ’s lot, where they had been parked up until this week. The voters are parked in Saar’s lot, but none of them have pulled on the emergency brake and turned off the ignition yet. Saar is situated well to the right of Eisenkot, and Saar’s list currently does not have the correct balance that is going to be needed if he wants to hold the stick at both ends. I have the feeling that Saar would be prepared to give his right kidney to get , for instance, to join his party. To announce that he will serve as or in his cabinet, the first appointment that will be locked down in

1 any coalition negotiations, an unbreakable campaign promise. Doing that would make the list far more centrist and would also increase the chances of Eisenkot joining it. Meanwhile, only one thing is certain beyond any doubt: is a country that has gone off the rails. As I’ve written in my columns countless times the pro-Bibi/anti-Bibi energy is currently the most powerful natural force on Planet Earth. It is so powerful that it has overcome every other force out there. There isn’t a right wing and a left wing anymore; there isn’t any ideology, any agenda or anything else anymore. There is only half the public that is convinced that Netanyahu is the anointed messiah, and the other half that is convinced that he is a menace that puts Israel’s very existence at risk. Only that could have had the power to make Gideon Saar—a talented and staunchly ideological right-wing politician—the ultimate anti-Bibi candidate. Multitudes of Israelis have been desperately moving from one option to the next, motivated by just a single solitary criterion: who might be able to defeat Bibi. That candidate currently is Gideon Saar. As opposed to all his predecessors, he intends to do that from the right. That is something that no one has tried to do before.

Gulf normalization isn’t about fearing Iran, it’s about embracing Israel By HAVIV RETTIG GUR TOI

“You think you have chutzpah? We have chutzpah.” It was an unexpected line from a senior Emirati official, delivered recently in an off-the-record video conference call between current and former Israeli and Emirati officials. The conversation had turned to business ties, innovation and the cultural differences between the two countries. The official wanted to explain something important about the new Israeli-Arab normalization agreements that Abu Dhabi had helped start: not only why they are happening, but why they seem so inexplicably warm and genuine. The United Arab Emirates is most visible in this regard, but it isn’t the only one. Bahrain, too, is investing in a warm peace. And Sudan, while agonizing over the step itself — a breach of decades of ideological commitments vis-à-vis the Palestinians — has shown signs of wanting the normalization to reap more benefits than mere diplomatic contact or its removal from the US terror sponsors list. There is no shortage of benefits that have accrued to the countries that normalized relations with Israel in the waning days of the Trump administration. The Emiratis asked for F-35s, the Moroccans recognition of their claim over Western Sahara, the Sudanese an end to their 27-year stay on the terror list and protection from lawsuits linked to the previous regime. These benefits all explain why each government might agree to establish full diplomatic ties with Israel. But they don’t explain, for example, the Emirati government’s order that hotels offer kosher food in time for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, or the eagerness of the UAE and Bahrain for direct flights to , or the decision by one sheikh to buy into Jerusalem’s controversial Beitar soccer club. They don’t explain Morocco’s move in recent weeks to introduce a curriculum about the history and culture of the country’s Jews into state school. There are costs to that warmth. The Palestinians are furious not only at the opening of diplomatic relations — Egypt and Jordan already broke that taboo — but at what they see as a gratuitous embrace of Israel and Israelis. Iran, Muslim Brotherhood-linked regimes in and Qatar, and the opinions of many Arabs and Muslims from Morocco to are against the move. If Israel had the population or economy of, say, , the economic factor might be sufficient explanation for the embrace. But it doesn’t. Israel’s population is roughly that of Honduras, its GDP roughly that of Ireland. Israeli tourists are not going to reshape Dubai’s economy, nor are Jewish pilgrims to heritage sites going to dramatically affect Morocco’s prosperity. What, then, explains the apparent warmth of the new normalization? Where did this sudden show of affection come from? There are two explanations for the unexpected openness. The first is often heard from Israeli officials, who have generally assumed that the new friendliness is meant to head off criticism. It’s a basic rule of politics both domestic and international: If you’re going to do something controversial, you’ll catch less flak by leaning into it than by apologizing for it.

2 The Emiratis believe they can neutralize more Arab criticism by embracing a warm peace with Israelis than by keeping their distance, the argument goes. But there is a second explanation for the new warmth, one suggested by the senior Emirati official to his Israeli colleagues in that call. At a superficial level, it has to do with the countries’ shared interest in fending off Iran. But the new interest in Israel isn’t about a narrowly conceived defense pact, arms sales or intel sharing. It’s about self-reliance. Sources of strength Iranian President Hassan Rouhani presented his government’s budget earlier this month. It’s a budget of some 8.4 quadrillion rials, a 74 percent jump from last year’s budget in rial terms — but a 13% drop in its dollar value because of the ongoing crash of Iran’s currency. The budget is fascinating for many reasons. It ups funding for the military and security forces, including the loyalist Revolutionary Guards. It assumes a $40 barrel of oil and an Iranian capacity to sell that oil in the coming year. It assumes, in short, that Iran’s economy will be liberated from crippling US sanctions once US President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January, and IRGC forces will be able to leap back into action throughout the Arab world. But the most interesting point about the budget is the bottom line. Iran’s state budget for the coming Persian year (which begins in March) is valued at $33.7 billion. Iran has a population of over 80 million people. Israel has barely 10 million. A fourfold budget for one-eighth the population means the Israeli government is spending, in extremely rough back-of-the-napkin terms, 32 times more per person than Iran Israel’s deadlocked parliament, on the other hand, has so far failed to pass a budget law for 2020 nor even propose one for 2021, but its 2019 budget carried a dollar value of some $140 billion when it passed into law. The stopgap spending bills that funded the government over the past year were also in that range.

Iran has a population of over 80 million people. Israel has barely 10 million. A fourfold budget for one-eighth the population means the Israeli government is spending, in extremely rough back-of-the-napkin terms, 32 times more per person than Iran. That economic strength means Israel can afford a sprawling, sophisticated $20 billion army, an $8 billion espionage agency that’s second in size only to America’s Central Intelligence Agency (according to unconfirmed reports), and the kind of research and innovation programs that grant it a decisive advantage over Iran in cyber, missile defense and many more technological fields. Replicating Israel Lacking natural resources until very recently, Israel achieved that wealth largely on the strength of its human capital. And most of that human capital, fully half of the Jewish population and the large Arab minority in the country, hails from the Middle East. There is a deep underlying thread of Arab-ness in Israeli Jewish culture There is a deep underlying thread of Arab-ness in Israeli Jewish culture that goes beyond the love of hummus and expressive Arabic epithets. Israelis’ assumptions about family, religion, and social and ethnic identity overlap profoundly with Arab-world cultural assumptions. Israel is the lone OECD member state whose birthrate is high and rising, and the rate is rising among the highly educated and secular. Families are tight-knit and large, politics are centered on cultural, religious, and social tribes rather than policy arguments, and religion is viewed as an arbiter of identity even by those who don’t observe or believe. Taken together, these characteristics set Israel apart from the West, but are shared by many of the Muslim societies that surround it. What is it about Israel, the most Arab-like people in the West — or perhaps the most Western of Arab-world peoples — that conferred on it its economic and political and military strengths? Jews speak of Israel’s accomplishments with pride, as a way of patting themselves on the back. Some in the Arab world are beginning to speak of those accomplishments, too, but in less sentimental terms. Their interest is diagnostic. What are the Israelis doing right, actually and specifically? And how do we replicate it?

3 The Emiratis are increasingly convinced that neither Israel nor America will come to their rescue in case of war. The lack of an American response to the Iranian missile assault on the Aramco facility in Saudi Arabia earlier this year drove that point home, but so did the decade-long drawdown of American deployments in the region under both Obama and Trump. They cannot help noticing, too, that while the Gulf Arabs are protected by a physical American military presence, Israel, for all the financial aid it receives, is not protected by American troops. Israelis alone defend Israel, and even when Israel buys expensive military technologies from abroad, it’s not because it is unable to produce its own. They need Israelis to bring their culture of innovation, their ‘chutzpah,’ to Abu Dhabi and Dubai There is a strategic shift underway in the Emirati and broader Arab thinking about Israel. It is no mere reconciliation nor in any simple sense a defensive alliance. To those now starting to look at Israel beyond the scope of the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts, here is a basically conservative, high-birthrate country that has managed to neutralize or even reverse the trends that plague Arab economies and societies, from their young, unemployed populations to their ethnic and religious sectarianism. Israel’s population is young but its unemployment is low — at least before the coronavirus pandemic — and its division into bickering sectarian tribes, as this writer and others have argued, is the source and main driver of its democracy. Some in the Arab world now seek to study and absorb those strengths, and through them win for themselves the safety and security Israel has managed to eke out in a chaotic, conflict-prone region. An Emirati gunner watches for enemy fire from the rear gate of a United Arab Emirates Chinook military helicopter flying over Yemen, September 17, 2015. (AP Photo/Adam Schreck, File) And for that, they don’t need Israel’s infantry or air forces, but its entrepreneurs and scientists. They need Israelis to bring their culture of innovation, their “chutzpah,” to Abu Dhabi and Dubai. ‘Second home’ It is no accident that even after the signing ceremonies were over and the news cameras gone, it was Bahrain’s industry and commerce minister who was sent to Israel to tour the length and breadth of the country and meet with business and tech leaders to hammer out agreements. Nor is it an accident that the Emiratis have invested so much in ensuring Israel does not carry out a West Bank annexation, and in buying up its most scandalously racist soccer club — investing, that is, in making Israelis more palatable to the Arab world. “You think you have chutzpah? We have chutzpah,” the Emirati official told his Israeli counterparts in that video call. In a conversation about what the two countries stand to gain from the peace, he explained: “We have a very young population. We have a lot of people who are interested in learning from these ties.” It remains to be seen if Arab states like the UAE can replicate Israel’s strengths. Israelis themselves have only vague notions about the sources of those strengths. Does democracy play a factor? Or can a monarchical state import from a democratic one its culture of innovation without any political adjustments? The Emiratis are betting that it can, as when a bewildered Israeli asked the Emirati official on the call: “What did ordinary Emiratis think of Israelis before the new ties?” The official answered: “We’re a country that has a deep respect for our leaders, whose responsibility it is to lead. Our people trust their leaders, so when they decided to make peace with Israel, everyone became very genuinely excited about it.” There are two ways to hold at bay an enormous and aggressive Iran perched on one’s doorstep. One can rely on stronger friends, or one can become one of those stronger friends. Emirati officials have insisted repeatedly to Israelis visiting the country in recent weeks that they should consider the UAE their “second home.” They mean it more emphatically than their Israeli visitors suspect.

4 An Automatic Vote By Ben-Dror Yemini @ – December 15, 2020

On the very day that we received the wonderful news about normalized relations between Israel and Morocco, the international community continued to go about business as usual. The UN General Assembly passed seven anti-Israel resolutions. Yes, there are other countries in the world. Yes, Israel isn’t in the top ten or even the top twenty of human rights’ violators among the countries of the world. Yes, millions of people around the world have been placed in reeducation camps; huge swathes of territory have fallen under military occupation; thousands of civilians have been killed; journalists have been imprisoned; and the list goes on and on. But the international community doesn’t care about any of that. Just Israel. One of the resolutions reaffirmed UN General Assembly Resolution 194 from 1948, which pertains to the Arab refugees from Palestine who subsequently became Palestinians. That resolution, which has become a matter of rote voting, reminds the world that every human being has the right not to be expelled from his or her native land, and that every Palestinian refugee has the right to have his or her property restored. But is that truly the case? Tens of millions of Europeans became refugees in the first half of the 20th century. Tens of millions of people were expelled from their native lands after World War Two, in the very same years in which the Palestinian Nakba occurred. Were any of them granted a right of return? Did any of them have their property restored to them? Out of all the Western countries, only and the —in addition to Israel, of course—voted against the resolution. Germany, disgracefully, voted in favor. And that’s interesting since out of the tens of millions of refugees from those years, at least 12 million were German-speaking people who had been expelled after World War Two from their homes in Czechoslovakia, Poland and other countries. They paid the price for the Germans’ aggression. They even formed an organization to represent them in Germany, the BvD. Is there any difference between the refugees from Palestine and the refugees from Poland or Czechoslovakia? None. Both the former and the latter identified with the aggressor. Both the former and the latter paid a price for that aggression, even if they personally hadn’t played any role in the war effort. The difference is that the BvD is considered to be an extreme right-wing organization, and even used to be considered to be neo-Nazi. Even the German government disavowed that organization and its demands for the restoration of property rights. After all, it is patently clear that if the Germans and the tens of millions of other people receive a “right” to return and to reclaim their property, Europe will enter into a third world war. But when it comes to the Israeli-Arab conflict, Germany, just like all the other European countries, automatically supports the demand for a “right of return,” even though the people who insist on exercising that right admit that it is effectively a demand to destroy Israel. That might not be the German, French and Danish decision-makers’ intention. But when those countries time and time again cast a vote that is thoroughly disgraceful and hypocritical—they aren’t helping the Palestinians climb down the tree. To the contrary. There is no chance in the world that the Palestinians are ever going to back down from their demand to destroy Israel if that demand has the support of Israel’s friends in Europe. It isn’t clear why official Israel doesn’t pose that simple question to the Germans: why do you support a “right of return” when the subjects are Palestinians, but oppose it when it applies to Europe? And why, whenever you talk about the Palestinian Nakba, do you forget and try to suppress the memory of the Jewish Nakba? The Jews didn’t declare war on the Arab countries. Yet they nevertheless were forced to flee and were expelled, and their property overwhelmingly was seized and confiscated. According to the working definition of anti-Semitism, which has been adopted by numerous countries, including Germany, anti-Semitism is “applying double standards to Israel by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” So, yes, Germany is behaving anti-Semitically. And there is no reason not to present it with that basic fact. Another resolution pertained to the that, according to the majority that voted in favor of the motion, is Syrian territory. There wasn’t a single word in that motion about the civil war that has cost the lives of half a million people. There wasn’t a single word about the fact that the residents of the Golan Heights enjoy peace and quiet. Not a single one of them was killed. What did the European countries do? They voted automatically along with the benighted majority. No one should be dismissive of the peace that was achieved with Morocco, and certainly no one should be dismissive of the peace that was achieved with the Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan. But we

5 need to bear in mind that the vote that was held on the same day that we learned about the agreement with Morocco is a disgrace. That routine pattern of voting in UN institutions is a failure of Israeli diplomacy that has been ongoing for decades.

Netanyahu's Residence tried to divert attention from lawmaker Yifat Shasha-Biton joining Gideon Sa'ar's party by naming a new police commissioner. It didn't work Yossi Verter | Dec. 16, 2020 | There was some nervousness over the weekend at the Balfour Street residence. Someone close to the royals, employed in a very rewarding job at the Prime Minister’s Office as a “consultant on the outbreak of the coronavirus,” had written an article. Its convoluted thesis was that the deserter Gideon Sa’ar was leading a move which has party, community and governmental implications, aimed at turning back the 1977 overthrow of the long-reigning Labor Party by . In plainer words: the Ashkenazi Sa’ar (only half, but why quibble?) is forming a party consisting exclusively of Ashkenazi Jews, with Ashkenazi leading figures such as and . Only the term hegemony was missing. The motive for this article was as transparent as glass and ridden with holes: to label the deserter and his faction as elitists. retweeted the essay (which referred in part to items appearing in Haaretz on Friday). On Tuesday, Sa’ar announced that MK Dr. Yifat Shasha-Biton, as expected, would be joining his nascent party. She will be given the second slot, after Sa’ar. If he is elected prime minister, she will be acting prime minister, when needed. Not a small price to pay. Sa’ar, a man with undisputed political skills, believes the price is worth it. Following him, Shasha-Biton is the most respected lawmaker among Likud members, due to her independence, her standing up for her opinions, and her refusal to dance to the tune of Netanyahu and coalition whip MK over the parliament’s handling of the epidemic. Opinion polls showed that a party headed by her would garner between five and eight seats. Besides, she’s a woman, of Mizrahi origins, born in the outlying town of Kiryat Shmona, and she’s highly educated. So, even at this early stage, the top level of Sa’ar’s party has 1.5 Mizrahi candidates. If former Israeli army chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot joins, they’ll have 2.5 Mizrahi candidates in the top three. The same spots in Likud are occupied by Netanyahu, and Yisrael Katz (all Ashkenazi Jews). This nonsense should have long passed from the world but, hey, the prime minister was the one who started it. Apropos Eisenkot: The agreement between Sa’ar and Shasha-Biton regarding her slot is unconditional. For the former chief of staff, waiting for the formal dissolution of the Knesset, it’s not an issue. He’ll consider joining only if he’s convinced, based on data, that his entry will make a difference and lead to a change of government. He’s not driven by honor, it’s not a motivator for him. One may assume that Sa’ar has pegged him as defense minister in his cabinet. Yes, something new is at hand. A Channel 12 poll on Tuesday gave Sa’ar 21 seats, five more than in a previous poll. They came directly from Naftali Bennett’s (which dropped to 13 seats, compared to 18 in the earlier poll). “” (a working title) is now projected to be the second largest party after Likud (with 27 seats in Tuesday’s poll). The rout of Bennett’s party, which lost 8-10 seats in one week, marks a full-on collapse. Yamina urgently needs a heart-lung machine so as not to hit the single-digit column. The counteractive Balfour machine worked hard on Tuesday. A few hours after the announcement about Sa’ar’s party, we were informed of a candidate for police commissioner. He is Maj. Gen. Kobi Shabtai. Such a coincidence. The intention was, of course, to take over the agenda (a commissioner trumps a Knesset member). However, it didn’t work. Acting Commissioner Motti Cohen, free of any restraints, finally said out loud what he has told many people in private and political forums: Public Security Minister demanded that he take strong, disproportionate measures against demonstrators at Paris Square, near the prime minister’s residence. Ohana, full of himself and not understanding the nature of his role, has not denied this. The bottom line was that Netanyahu’s intention to dominate the news cycle with the prospective police commissioner fell flat, due to the accusations of the acting commissioner, who also announced his departure. An angry, vengeful police major general is trouncing an unknown, reticent one. 6 A Winning American Formula By Sever Plocker @ Yedioth Ahronoth – December 15, 2020

Something happened in US policy in the last year of the Trump administration. For the first time, America began to use its soft power, its persuasive power, to create a new formula for extending diplomatic, economic and military aid to Muslim countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The formula is as follows: any country that wishes to receive American aid must first normalize relations with Israel. Another essential condition for American support is a diplomatic peace with Israel; that is the price that must be paid for the American embrace. The new paradigm contradicts the traditional paradigm that was in used in the years of American involvement in our region. In the past, the US did not pressure on any Muslim Arab country to recognize Israel and to announce that it was normalizing relations with it; the US did not stipulate normalization as a condition for diplomatic or military aid. American interests always took precedence over Israeli interests and the two were strictly separated from one another. When the peace agreements were signed between Israel and Jordan, for example, it was Israel that asked the US administration to grant Jordan preferred trade state status and to exempt Jordanian products from high tariffs. The new concept began to take shape with the release of the plan for large American investment in the PA (Peace to Prosperity)—but only if and when the Palestinians abandoned their rejectionist position, as it was phrased by the author of the plan, Jared Kushner. The plan took the Palestinian leadership by surprise, and it was offended and reacted in anger: “We will not be bought with money,” Abu Mazen declared. It is quite possible that he, or at least other Palestinian politicians close to him, now regret that rejection. The term “deal of the century” therefore takes on an unexpected meaning: the “deal” refers to direct and indirect American aid to countries and regimes in exchange for their full normalization of relations with Israel. It is not Israel that is “paying” for normalization with it in American currency, namely using its well-known influence with the decision-makers in the White House. It is quite the opposite: Israel is receiving, America is giving and the regimes in the Arab and Muslim states are paying. Paying by normalizing relations with us. That said, even the only superpower in the world cannot act in a vacuum. The approach of “no aid without recognition” was able to succeed because Prime Minister Netanyahu was willing to bury the dreams of annexation, and because the leaders of the Arab and Muslim states with whom the Trump administration negotiated did not consider their recognition of Israel to be as either an excessively high price to pay or as posing a direct threat to their regimes. It seemed that they were just waiting for the opportunity to reveal their relations with Israel and to normalize them—and the generous American recompense granted the seal of approval and a public incentive. The American actions to promote normalization with Israel were preceded by a change in mindset and an ideological reversal: the majority of the Arab regimes no longer stipulate an Israeli- Palestinian arrangement as a crucial prerequisite for full recognition of Israel. They have become increasingly convinced that normalization will expedite and advance such an arrangement because Israel will have something to lose if it rejects the compromise initiatives and annexes territories, and also because it will open the Palestinians’ eyes to the fact that Israel is an accomplished fact. It will force them—and us—to deal with reality. That is the spirit of the times that is blowing strongly throughout the Arab and Muslim world. This is a derivative of the coronavirus pandemic and of the resounding failure of the protest demonstrations and civil insurgencies from a decade ago (the Arab Spring) and the eradication of most of the manifestations of the fanatical jihad movement. The future of this American policy is shrouded in fog at this time. While President-elect Joe Biden intends to appoint moderate and experienced people with a pro-Israel orientation to key positions in his administration, it is hardly certain that they will adopt the “Kushner formula” and will enthusiastically and resolutely advance it. Here in Israel, the hawkish camp that is far to the right of the pragmatic Netanyahu is gaining political strength. Israel has learned in the past how important normalization is with its close and more distant neighbors—and how quickly this can be reversed. If the Knesset elections are indeed moved up, safeguarding those achievements could be a weighty factor in voters’ preferences.

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