Israel and the Middle East News Update

Monday, May 23

Headlines:  Lieberman: Coalition Talks with Likud Have Hit a ‘Dead End’  Bennett Ultimatum to Bib: Fix Security Cabinet Defects or No Coalition Deal  PM: I’m Responsible for ’s Defense, ‘Stop the Crying’  Herzog Under Attack by Own Party After Failed Coalition Effort  In Scrapped Coalition Deal, PM Takes Positive Stance on Arab Peace Initiative  Bibi Urges France to Ditch Regional Parley, Set Up Two-Way Summit w/Abbas  New U.S. Defense Bill Includes $600 Million for Missile Defense  Israel Resumes Cement Shipments to Gaza for Reconstruction

Commentary:  : “Israel’s Army Goes to War with Its Politicians”  By Ronen Bergman, Senior Military and Intelligence Correspondent, Yedioth Ahronoth  Times of Israel: “Why Bibi Dumping Defense Minister Was No Ordinary Move”  By David Horovitz, Founding Editor, Times of 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 May 23, 2016

Arutz Sheva Lieberman: Coalition Talks with Likud Have Hit a ‘Dead End’ Yisrael Beiteinu chairperson Avigdor Liberman spoke about the coalition negotiations with Likud during a meeting of his party on Monday, and revealed the talks have hit a dead end. "Unfortunately we still haven't reached agreements in terms of the pension reform, and we are waiting for another offer," said Liberman, who was given his request to be appointed Defense Minister. Another condition Liberman had claimed last week was applying the death penalty for terrorist murderers, but he apparently has folded on that demand. See also, “Netanyahu Rejects Lieberman Claim That Coalition Talks Hit Dead End” (Ynet News)

Jerusalem Post Bennett Ultimatum: Fix Cabinet Defects or No Coalition Deal As the government scrambles to solidify coalition changes, Education Minister and Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett presented Prime Minister with an ultimatum on Monday, calling on him to fix what he said were problems within the cabinet in order to receive approval for Yisrael Beiteinu chairman Avigdor Liberman to join the government. Bennett said his call came "In light of the lessons learned from Operation Protective Edge and the Second Lebanon War, in which cabinet members did not share quality intelligence and weren't properly trained for their roles, when tested with the responsibility for the army."

Times of Israel PM: I'm Responsible for Israel's Defense, 'Stop the Crying' Seeking to assuage fears over the expected appointment of Avigdor Liberman as defense minister, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said he has the final word on Israel’s security operations. The prime minister also urged Israelis to stop their “crying and moaning,” over the dramatic political shake-up that saw former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon abruptly leave political life on Friday, with Liberman set to replace him and bring his five-seat Yisrael Beiteinu party into the razor-thin coalition. See also, “PM: Quit Crying and Moaning” (Ynet News)

Ynet News Herzog Attacked by Own Party After Failed Coalition Effort Opposition leader Isaac Herzog came under scathing criticism from his own party on Sunday in the wake of his failed attempt to join Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government. During a stormy faction meeting Herzog sought to explain his actions when he found himself under attack by his own supporters. Five MKs from the Labor party—Stav Shaffir, Shelly Yachimovich, Erel Margalit, Mickey Rosenthal and Yossi Yona—decided to boycott the meeting, signaling their opposition his actions. Justifying the boycott, Rosenthal said that “I lost faith in the chairman of my party and his abilities to lead the opposition against Netanyahu.” See also, “Herzog Declares Coalition Talks 'Over and Done'” (Times of Israel) 2

Times of Israel In Scrapped Coalition Deal, PM Took Positive Stance on API A clause in the scrapped coalition agreement between the Likud party and the Zionist Union stated that the government would “relate positively” to the idea of a regional reconciliation agreement between Israel and several Arab states, as well as to certain elements of the Arab Peace Initiative to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The clause in the document further stated that Israel would “express a readiness for the first time to enter a dialogue on the matter with the relevant Arab states.” The contents of the file were confirmed by the Prime Minister’s Office. See also “Netanyahu: Arab Nations Can Help Bring ‘Real Peace’” (Breaking Israel News)

Ha’aretz Bibi Urges France to Ditch Peace Confab for a Summit w/ Abbas Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged his French counterpart to ditch the idea of a regional peace conference in Paris and, instead, to set up a bipartite meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. At the start of his meeting with Manuel Valls in on Monday, Netanyahu reiterated his view that direct talks between the Israeli and Palestinian leaders would be more effective than a regional conference with many participants. Valls arrived in to Israel on Sunday and is also scheduled to meet with Abbas in Ramallah. The French peace initiative will be one of the main topics discussed during the visit. See also, “Netanyahu Rejects Paris Peace Bid, But Offers to Meet Abbas” (Times of Israel)

Ha’aretz New U.S. Defense Bill Includes $600 Million for Missile Defense A number of measures for Israel have been attached to a defense spending bill approved in the U.S. House of Representatives, including $600 million in missile defense cooperation. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Thursday welcomed the missile defense component of National Defense Authorization Act, the bill that outlines defense spending policies. The spending “will help Israel defend its citizens against rocket and missile threats, and contribute to America’s missile defense,” AIPAC said a day after the House approved the act.

Voice of America Israel Resumes Cement Shipments for Gaza Reconstruction Israel resumed cement shipments to the Gaza Strip on Monday, ending a 45-day-old ban it imposed after it accused the Palestinian enclave's Hamas rulers of seizing some of the stock meant for rebuilding homes destroyed in a 2014 war. Hamas has denied Israeli charges that it siphons off cement imports to fortify attack tunnels. Nickolay Mladenov, the U.N. Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, welcomed the resumption of the shipments, saying in a statement that "all sides need to ensure that cement deliveries reach their intended beneficiaries and are used solely for civilian purposes."

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The New York Times – May 21, 2016 Israel’s Army Goes to War with Its Politicians By Ronen Bergman  In most countries, the political class supervises the defense establishment and restrains its leaders from violating human rights or pursuing dangerous, aggressive policies. In Israel, the opposite is happening. Here, politicians blatantly trample the state’s values and laws and seek belligerent solutions, while the chiefs of the and the heads of the intelligence agencies try to calm and restrain them. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offer last week of the post of defense minister to , a pugnacious ultranationalist politician, is the latest act in the war between Mr. Netanyahu and the military and intelligence leaders, a conflict that has no end in sight but could further erode the rule of law and human rights, or lead to a dangerous, superfluous military campaign. The prime minister sees the defense establishment as a competitor to his authority and an opponent of his goals. Putting Mr. Lieberman, an impulsive and reckless extremist, in charge of the military is a clear signal that the generals’ and the intelligence chiefs’ opposition will no longer be tolerated. Mr. Lieberman is known for ruthlessly quashing people who hold opposing views.  This latest round of this conflict began on March 24: Elor Azariah, a sergeant in the I.D.F., shot and killed a Palestinian assailant who was lying wounded on the ground after stabbing one of Sergeant Azariah’s comrades. The I.D.F. top brass condemned the killing. A spokesman for Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, the chief of staff, said, “This isn’t the I.D.F., these are not the I.D.F.’s values.” But right-wing politicians backed Sergeant Azariah. “I.D.F. soldiers, our children, stand before murderous attacks by terrorists who come to kill them,” the prime minister said. “They have to make decisions in real time.” Mr. Lieberman, then still the leader of a small far- right opposition party, turned up in military court to support the soldier. Mr. Netanyahu also called the soldier’s father to offer support.  An I.D.F. general told me that the top brass saw the telephone call as a gross defiance of the military’s authority. The deputy chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Yair Golan, chose one of the most sensitive dates on the Israeli calendar, Holocaust Memorial Eve, to react: He suggested that Israel today in some ways resembles Germany in the 1930s. Mr. Netanyahu countered that General Golan’s words do Israel an injustice and “cheapen the Holocaust.” His defense minister, Moshe Ya’alon, a former chief of staff and a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s party, backed the army. He told a gathering of top officers to speak freely, even if it went against political leaders.  The prime minister summoned Mr. Ya’alon to an “urgent clarification discussion.” Shortly after, he invited Mr. Lieberman to join the government coalition with his small parliamentary faction and offered him the defense portfolio. In Israel’s short history, army commanders and the heads of the intelligence agencies have often advocated the use of force and in many cases showed contempt for the law and human rights. Political leaders have typically been more measured. In 1954, military intelligence initiated, out of sight of Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, a series of terrorist attacks in Egypt with the aim of causing a rift between that country and the United States and Britain. In 1967, the military urged Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to allow an offensive strike on Egypt and Syria. When he asked them to wait, they plotted to detain him in a basement until he gave in. 4

 What caused the army and the intelligence agencies to become, relatively speaking, doves while the politicians have become the hawks? In the last three decades, the army and the intelligence agencies have become more cautious about breaking the law. The threat of prosecutions in the International Criminal Court has helped. Also, the defense agencies are motivated only by national interest, rather than ideology, religion or electoral considerations. Top army and intelligence officers are also intimately familiar with the nature of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories — and its price.  But above all, the clash between the political and defense establishments can be summed up in two words: Benjamin Netanyahu. Many of the military and intelligence officers who have served under him simply detest him. “I told Netanyahu that a chasm of non-confidence had opened up between him and them,” Uzi Arad, a former national security adviser, told me. “He is the worst manager that I know,” said Meir Dagan, the former director of the Mossad. “I quit the job because I was simply sick of him.”  In 2010, Mr. Netanyahu got into a serious fight over Iran with Mr. Dagan and his two colleagues, Yuval Diskin, the former director of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, and Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, the former I.D.F. chief of staff. The military and intelligence leaders believed that the prime minister’s plan to attack Iran’s nuclear installations was politically motivated by electoral considerations and would embroil Israel in a superfluous war. Moreover, they thought he was going about it illegally, bypassing the cabinet. “I have known many prime ministers,” Mr. Dagan told me. “Not one of them was pure or holy. But almost all had one common quality — when they reached the point where their own personal interest touched upon the national interest, it was the national interest that prevailed.” But, Mr. Dagan said, Mr. Netanyahu was a rare exception. Mr. Netanyahu has clashed with the security establishment over a number of issues, from proposals to improve conditions for Palestinians in the West Bank (the prime minister opposed them) to accusations that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas incites terrorism (the Shin Bet says he helps fight it) to Mr. Netanyahu’s proposal that the families of terrorists be deported (the Shin Bet discourages it, and the attorney general has said it would be illegal). Both the Shin Bet and the Mossad opposed the campaign against Hamas in Gaza in 2014, and the prime minister’s management of it. In some conversations I’ve had recently with high-ranking officers about Mr. Lieberman’s appointment as defense minister, the possibility of a military coup has been raised — but only with a smile. It remains unlikely. The biggest challenge to the relationship between the right- wing politicians and the top brass will come if Mr. Lieberman tries to get the army to do the kinds of things he has enthusiastically proposed in the past.  What would the army and intelligence chiefs do if the new minister issued instructions not to prosecute people who committed crimes like Elor Azariah’s in Hebron? Or if Mr. Lieberman demands, as he has done in the past, that Israel assassinate Hamas leaders if they do not return the remains of fallen Israeli soldiers, or “conquer Gaza” or “bomb the Aswan Dam,” as he has said Israel would do if it ever faced war with Egypt? Will they execute his orders, or refuse because they can grasp the dimensions of the catastrophe that such actions would bring about, and suffer the personal consequences? Ronen Bergman is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a senior correspondent for military and intelligence affairs at Yedioth Ahronoth. He is at work on a history of the Mossad. 5

Times of Israel – May 21, 2016 Why Bibi Dumping His Defense Minister Is No Ordinary Maneuver

On election day, Israelis ask themselves who is most capable of keeping their soldier-children safe. Netanyahu and Ya’alon were quite the team. Not so, Netanyahu and Liberman.

By David Horovitz, founding editor of .  Channel 2’s grizzled and gray-haired military correspondent Roni Daniel does not have the reputation of a bleeding-heart liberal. In Israel’s all-too frequent times of war, when he is not embedded with the troops out in the field, the former IDF officer, who was wounded in the Six Day War, is often to be found in the studio defending the army’s strategies and actions — including against more dovish, critical voices among his own TV colleagues. Nobody would claim that he seeks to minimize the enemy threat to Israel’s well-being. Few would question his patriotism.  And then came Friday night.  In the midst of the evening broadcast, during a discussion on that day’s resignation of Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and his imminent replacement by Avigdor Liberman, Daniel asked if his fellow panelists would keep quiet for a minute because there was something he wanted to say. He then declared, entirely unbidden, that he was “no longer sure” that he wanted his children to continue to live in Israel, because, he said, the “culture of government” was now so distasteful. He also reeled off a list of right-wing members to whom he took particular exception.  Jaws dropped around the studio. One of Daniel’s colleagues, Amnon Abromowitz, attempted to make light of the declaration, saying flippantly, “Before Roni leaves the studio and his children leave the country…” But Daniel was emphatically not in flippant mood. He banged his fist on the table, and protested that Abromowitz was not taking him seriously.  Later in the same broadcast, Daniel repeated his critique and, asked again why he was so unhappy with today’s Israel, he summed it up as follows: “It’s not a pleasant place to be… You can’t believe anything.” Daniel’s explanations may have been a little incoherent, but the emotion behind that last utterance, “You can’t believe anything,” was unmistakably plaintive and, I think, rather resonant.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brutal ousting of the defense minister who has stood loyally at his side for the past three years, in favor of an unpredictable populist with a track record of castigating the government even when he’s in it, has produced predictable reactions across the spectrum. The further right, the warmer the support for the change in personnel; the further left, the direr the warnings of fascism and extremism in the governance of Israel.  But like Ya’alon himself, Daniel is no lefty. Like Ya’alon himself, who hours earlier delivered a resignation speech dripping with despair, Daniel plainly believes that he is speaking for normal, ordinary Israel, for the people who want to believe that they can trust their government to act responsibly on their behalf. And like Ya’alon himself, Daniel evidently no longer thinks this is the case. “It’s not a pleasant place to be… You can’t believe anything,” may indeed have been a little incoherent, but it was emphatically damning. 6

 The loyalist and the demagogue The defenestration of Moshe Ya’alon, and the elevation of defense minister-in-waiting Avigdor Liberman, is no ordinary cabinet reshuffle.  Ya’alon had all the attributes Netanyahu could ever have wanted in this most prominent and sensitive of positions. As a military man, Ya’alon’s record is peerless. He was a veteran of the , a commander of the army’s most elite commando unit (Sayeret Matkal, in which Netanyahu also served), and, finally, the chief of staff who led the battle to suppress the onslaught of Palestinian suicide bombings in the . The son of a Haganah veteran father and a Holocaust survivor mother, he grew up working class in Haifa, and later moved to a kibbutz, but he shifted gradually to the political right, and chose the Likud when he entered politics in 2008.  Echoing Netanyahu, Ya’alon was horrified by the terms of the nuclear deal struck by the US- led world powers last year. Echoing Netanyahu, Ya’alon publicly contested the Obama administration’s assessment that Israel could afford to take the territorial risk of a West Bank withdrawal, memorably lambasting Secretary of State John Kerry as a messianist seeking a Nobel Peace Prize and condemning Washington’s security proposals as not being worth the paper they were printed on. Bitterly skeptical of Palestinian intentions, he also shares much of Netanyahu’s bleak worldview, and certainly subscribes to the prime minister’s guiding insistence that the Jewish state be able to defend itself, by itself, against any enemy challenge.  Ya’alon is also a man of steely moral principle, who immediately protested the breach of ethical norms that he saw in the alleged cold-blooded execution in Hebron on March 24, by IDF Sergeant Elor Azaria, of a Palestinian assailant who had been disarmed and was lying wounded. He also insisted, after Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan had warned this month of “horrifying processes” in today’s Israel that carried echoes of pre-World War II Germany, that the army’s commanders have the right and obligation to speak their minds.  Now Ya’alon, the military high-flier and the moralist, is to be replaced by former IDF Corporal Liberman, a man whose mediocre army career has never prevented him from prescribing one- sentence solutions to Israel’s various military challenges, and whose moral compass led him, far from condemning Azaria, to make a solidarity visit to the military court at which the soldier is being tried for manslaughter.  Perhaps in most striking contrast to Ya’alon, however, is the degree to which Liberman manifestly cannot be relied upon by Netanyahu. They have worked together on and off for some 30 years, and Liberman, set on becoming prime minister himself, has switched from Netanyahu loyalist to rival, from coalition partner to opposition critic, and back again, as and when he has spotted an opportunity for personal advantage.  Trump-style, he’ll say whatever he thinks it useful to his career to say. On Gaza, for instance, Liberman declared at the height of the 2014 war, when he himself sat in the inner cabinet, that Hamas must be smashed and the government was not going far enough. But later he decided that Gaza must be given over to the UN. And later still that the way forward was via the Strip’s economic development. When he deems the time ripe, he can be depended upon to ditch Netanyahu with the same ease that he ditched his Yisrael Beytenu party’s much-hyped social agenda in negotiating this coalition deal. 7

 In an interview with this writer less than a year ago, Liberman ridiculed Netanyahu as an empty vessel, incapable of protecting Israel, incapable of smashing Hamas, incapable of tackling the Iranian nuclear threat. “On Iran,” he said in Hebrew, “it’s all talk. It’s all talk.” And then he repeated “all talk” in five languages just to make sure we all got the derisory message: “Kalam fadi. Piste meisis. Hakol diburim. Parole parole. Just talk.” It was an assault that you might have thought would doom the prospect of Netanyahu ever agreeing to tolerate him in the future. But only if you were naive and quite unfamiliar with Israeli politics.  The beginning of the end, of what? Why did Netanyahu trade the loyal, moral, militarily expert Ya’alon for the disloyal, demagogic, and militarily inexpert Liberman? Ultimately because Netanyahu needed to expand his unstable coalition, and Liberman would not have joined if he wasn’t given the defense post. The alternative potential coalition partner, Zionist Union’s Isaac Herzog, was driving too hard a bargain, leads a disunited party and is reviled by the governing right. But self-evidently, too, Netanyahu was unfazed by Liberman’s defense of the Hebron soldier, and unperturbed to be shedding the irritatingly ethical Ya’alon. After all, Netanyahu himself has reminded the military court where Azaria is on trial that “the IDF backs its soldiers” and urged the court “to balance between the action and the overall context of the event.” After all, Netanyahu castigated Deputy Chief of Staff Golan for comments he called outrageous, erroneous and unacceptable.  For years, the most potent criticism of Netanyahu has been that his only real strategic goal is to retain the prime ministership, and that all means may be utilized to that end. Thus, on election day last year, in an effort to galvanize right-wing voters, he could warn that Arab voters were “streaming” to the polls. And apologize to the Arab community afterwards, once the premiership had been re-secured. Similarly, he could say in an election-eve interview that he would not be presiding over the establishment of a Palestinian state, and attempt to walk back that declaration a few days later. Skilled, cynical or both, Netanyahu has nonetheless become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister after David Ben-Gurion because, in a system that does not impose term limits, and in a region and an era fraught with fast-changing threats, it will take a particularly compelling and credible politician to persuade Israelis to forsake him. They know that even seemingly sensible decisions taken by Israeli prime ministers can have catastrophic, even existential consequences. Israelis may not much like Netanyahu, but he is the devil they know.  But on election day, Israelis ultimately ask themselves who is most capable of keeping them, their children and their country safe. Last March 17, with the memories of the bitter 2014 war with Hamas still fresh, Israelis placed their confidence in the pairing of Netanyahu and Ya’alon. Many voters doubtless concluded that those two leaders — neither of them military adventurers — were best equipped to keep alive the young combat soldiers. Our children. One wonders now whether the casual jettisoning by Netanyahu of his right-hand man Ya’alon will crack that public perception of peerless competence.  For Roni Daniel, in all his anguish on TV Friday night, Netanyahu’s short-term political gambit of bringing in Liberman apparently marks the beginning of the end for Israel. The less emotional question would appear to be whether it marks the beginning of the end for Netanyahu. 8