Netanyahu causing cumulative damage to US-Israel ties

In a rare move, the US State Department called Israeli envoy Mike Herzog in to voice its displeasure at the Knesset vote the night before repealing the 2005 Disengagement Law in northern Samaria.

According to a brief readout of that meeting, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman conveyed Washington’s concern over the move, including the prohibition on establishing settlements in the northern West Bank. They also discussed the importance of all parties refraining from actions or rhetoric that could further inflame tensions leading into the Ramadan, Passover and Easter holidays.

There was no word regarding how Herzog responded, and neither the Foreign Ministry nor the Prime Minister’s Office statement. What Herzog could have reminded Sherman, but probably did not, is that this was a decision made by the democratically elected government of Israel and passed democratically by its parliament.

Why stress that point? Because the Americans over the last several weeks have expressed concern about the judicial overhaul proposal and the democratic direction of the country. Herzog could have said, “You want democracy? Well, this is democracy.”

Yet, not every decision made democratically is wise, nor the timing particularly opportune. And this is one of those cases.

Not for nothing did Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu block this type of bill from passing the Knesset in the past.

In March 2019, before the first of a cycle of five elections, then-justice minister Ayelet Shaked said that Netanyahu had blocked the cancellation of the Disengagement Law for political reasons, and that her New Right Party would work for the law’s repeal in the next coalition. The prime minister reportedly kept the bill from progressing on numerous occasions from 2015–2019 because he understood its sensitivity, including the impact in could have on his relations with Washington.

It’s a shame that Netanyahu, circa 2023, did not listen to Netanyahu, circa 2015-2019.

Had he done so, it could have spared Israel a reprimand from the US State Department which characterized the law as “provocative and counterproductive,” saying that it contradicted prior commitments given to America 20 years ago by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon, and just a few days ago by the current government.

While Israel can withstand US disapproval of one policy or another, when the disagreements come in quick succession there is a concern about accumulative impact.

The Knesset Disengagement Law comes hot on the heels of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s utterance that there is “no such thing as a Palestinian people.” And that followed his comment that Huwara should be erased. Both remarks were condemned by the US.

This is in addition to America’s stated concern about the judicial reform bill. President Joe Biden, who has pointedly not yet invited Netanyahu to the White House for a meeting, spoke with the prime minister by phone this week and, according to a US readout of that conversation, “underscore[d] his belief that democratic values have always been, and must remain, a hallmark of the US-Israel relationship, that democratic societies are strengthened by genuine checks and balances, and that fundamental changes should be pursued with the broadest possible base of popular support.”

The aggregate of all this is negative, and is coming at a time when Iran continues moving closer to the nuclear finish line and Israel will need US assistance – diplomatic or otherwise – to prevent it from crossing that line and gaining nuclear capabilities.

It is also coming as some in the Democratic Party, and not only the usual suspects of far-Left progressives, are speaking of the need to curtail aid to Israel.

For instance, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy said on Sunday that Washington should condition its aid to Israel. “I think the United States needs to draw a harder line with this government,” he said in a CNN interview.

“If we’re going to continue to be in the business of supporting the Israeli government, they have to be in the continued business of a future Palestinian state.”

Even if the prime minister disagrees with these sentiments, the Netanyahu of past governments would have been attuned to them and adjusted policy accordingly.

The current Netanyahu, however, is not similarly attuned, and the result – as the summons of Herzog to the State Department attests – is bad for Israel-US ties.

Courtesy: The Jerusalem Post

 

 

 

 

 

 

Republicans urge Biden to veto anti-Israel UNSC resolution on Monday

Republican members of Congress are calling on President Joe Biden to veto an anti-Israel resolution expected to be brought on Monday to the United Nations Security Council and to unequivocally declare that his administration opposes such unilateral moves at the international forum.

“As the UN Security Council once again moves to consider another one-sided, biased, anti-Israel resolution, it is imperative that the United States maintain its position that only direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians can yield progress,” Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy wrote in a letter to the president that was also signed by Steve Scalise, the Majority Leader and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul.

Members of the Security Council have been negotiating a draft resolution on Israeli settlements in the West Bank drafted by the United Arab Emirates in coordination with the Palestinians.

A vote on the resolution is expected to take place on Monday amid Palestinian fears that it would be vetoed by the United States.

Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote, “If the UN Security Council takes action on Monday to punish Israel, President Biden should stand beside them and block the ridiculous, politically-motivated measure.”

Congressman Max Miller, a new Jewish republican from Ohio, wrote, “This resolution is the UN’s latest attack on Israel’s sovereignty. Biden must veto this measure in the Security Council and reaffirm that the United States will always stand beside our ally.”

On Saturday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to discuss the upcoming Security Council session on the situation in the Middle East. 

During the phone call with Blinken, Abbas stressed the need to compel Israel to stop all its unilateral measures, including settlements, house demolitions, incursions into cities, villages, camps and Al-Aqsa Mosque, and killings, the PA’s official news agency Wafa said.

Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee said, "Rather than focus on grave threats posed by China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, the UN continues its anti-Israel obsession. Biden should stand with Israel and veto this resolution. Do not repeat the shameful Obama-Biden abstention on UNSCR 2334 in December 2016."

And Senator Jim Risch of Idaho said, “The Biden Administration must use its veto in the UN Security Council to defend our ally number one srael. This resolution will not lead to peace and only furthers anti-Israel actions at the UN."

 

Israel has already annexed West Bank

The UN General Assembly has referred the West Bank issue to the World Court. There are again rumblings about possible annexation, especially with Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-Right government assuming power in Jerusalem.

Annexation is viewed as something terrible Israel might do to the Palestinians. However the reality is that Israel has already incorporated the West Bank long ago.

It has not formally annexed this not-very-large area in order to avoid provoking the region and the world – and mainly to avoid having to extend the right to vote for the Israeli parliament to the region’s three million Palestinians.

This is a neat little trick that has worked well; it has fooled most people most of the time, including, amusingly, a few clueless Jewish nationalists who never got the memo and are now calling for annexation.

To understand that the West Bank is already part of Israel, consider the following:

By law, Israelis abroad cannot vote in elections unless they are diplomats or other envoys of the state; generally only citizens present in Israeli sovereign territory on Election Day can vote. Are the half a million West Bank settlers allowed to vote? You bet they are, and in impressive numbers they do. That is in contrast to Palestinians who may be living in a village just across the road.

Countries do not generally build towns and villages on territory that does not belong to them (and democratic countries certainly do not build anything for only one ethnic group only). Is Israel building Jewish settlements in the West Bank? It certainly has, and now it will again; there’s an accredited university there as well.

Israel controls all entry and exit to and from the overall West Bank, as well as passage between the Palestinian Authority autonomy islands. Israel controls the airspace and the water, natural resources and construction rights in most of the territory, and also provides the currency. Israel has the overriding security and justice authority, and even the autonomous islands are essentially subordinate.

Is there any other country with such a level of control on territory that isn’t part of it? Certainly not democratic countries; the US territories like Puerto Rico are an interesting case – and the locals there are US citizens. The situation is analogous mainly to the colonial era, which wound down in the middle of the previous century.

Defenders of the situation will say the occupation is necessary for security reasons, because otherwise the West Bank would fall to Hamas and terrorists would fire rockets from strategic highland at Israel’s major cities. That’s a very reasonable concern, given that this precise thing happened after Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005 – but it does not justify the settlements.

Apologists will argue that the occupation is temporary, until the Palestinians agree to Israel’s conditions for partition. But they will not agree to Israel’s terms. The excuse of temporariness is preposterous after 55 years, with no end in sight and the new government preparing to further deepen the settlement enterprise; it plans to legitimize illegal outposts deep inside the territory.

Some argue that most settlers live quite close to the old pre-1967 border, and incorporating them only, would usefully expand Israel’s narrow waist, which at its narrowest point is less than 20 kilometers (about 10 miles) wide. But this does not apply to the 100,000 settlers who live deep inside these territories – well beyond the security barrier established in the 2000s (and which eats into about 15% of the West Bank); the purpose of those settlements, and most of what the new government plans, is to make any partition impossible.

Some right-wingers now want Israel to stand supposedly strong by formally annexing so-called Area C, which is the 60% or so of the West Bank that surrounds the autonomy areas – an unwieldy map created by the 1990s Oslo Accords.

It is doubted that people know the map. Such an annexation, which would leave islands of non-annexed Palestinian areas surrounded by Israeli territory, would not produce what a reasonable person would consider a partition. If anything, it would invite comparisons to South Africa’s apartheid-era Bantustans. It is only slightly less childish than suggesting Israel annex everything except the homes of Palestinians.

If the current government actually lasts four years and deepens the settlement project, the situation will gradually escalate. The Palestinian Authority is likely to collapse – or at least move on from 87-year old leader Mahmoud Abbas. There may well be a renewed Palestinian uprising. And before long, there will be a growing Palestinian demand for Israel to really annex the West Bank – all of it, giving the Palestinians the same voting rights enjoyed by the two million Arab citizens in Israel proper.

This is the likely outcome of an occupation that includes colonization of the kind that is taking place. This is the only formal annexation scheme that will actually mean anything, and it will be backed by the entire world, probably with economic sanctions.

The result will be a country of some 13 million that is barely over half Jewish – and you can expect further conflicts, including between secular and religious Jews, that will cause mass emigration among the sector currently responsible for Israel’s economic and high-tech miracle.

The result will be a new country called Palestine, not Israel. This understanding of demographic reality (and the leverage it bestows) is why the Palestinians have not made things easy for Israel by seriously engaging with previous peace and partition offers made by more intelligent governments.

An Israel that wants to survive in the long term should freeze all settlement activity beyond the security barrier line – and project to all audiences that its strategic imperative is a secure way to separate from most of the West Bank.

In the wake of last week’s UN decision, the World Court could do peace a major service by expediting procedures and nudging Israel in this direction.

Annexation is not something Israel should threaten – but something it should strenuously seek to avoid. Instead, under the new government, it is headed off a cliff in a way that can only leave its enemies incredulous with joy. It is a genuine failure of democracy – and a very flawed one at that, because millions of Palestinians are effectively residents who cannot vote.

Israel about to separate West Bank from Jerusalem

Israel has reached the final stage of separating the West Bank from Jerusalem, European Union Representative to the Palestinian Authority Sven Kuhn von Burgsdorff warned on Sunday. He was talking to The Jerusalem Post along with the representatives from more than 20 European and like-minded countries at the site of the former Kalandia airport.

He voiced concern over two Israeli projects which they fear would destroy any prospects for a future Palestinian state. The first is the construction of close to 3,500 settlement homes in an unbuilt area of the Ma’aleh Adumim settlement, known as E1.

The project has been largely frozen for decades, but former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu advanced the project during the last elections and allowed for the deposit of its building plans with the Higher Planning Council for Judea and Samaria.

The council is now in the process of hearing objections to the projects, with the next hearing date set for December 13, 2021, the last obstacle to the E1 project’s final approval.

The second project of concern to the EU is the pending construction of 9,000 homes in the Atarot area of east Jerusalem on the site of what was once the Kalandiya airport, which opened in 1924 and closed in 2000. It is presumed to be designated mostly for Jewish Israelis.

The Jerusalem District Planning Committee is scheduled to hold a December 6, 2021 hearing on the matter.

Burgsdorff and his delegation visited both sites, where they were briefed by the left-wing NGO Ir Amim. They paused to speak to reporters in Atarot. Behind the delegation was the construction site for a new bypass road with a tunnel that will go underneath the projected homes.

To the delegation’s left stood the security barrier that separated Atarot from apartment buildings in the east Jerusalem Palestinian neighborhood of Kafr Akab.

“We are here at the very last stage of completely cutting off Jerusalem from the West Bank, which makes it impossible to discuss between the parties a future, independent, contiguous, viable Palestinian state with Jerusalem as the capital of both, based on negotiations on that matter,” he said.

He told reporters that the plans run contrary to statements the Israeli government has made about shrinking the conflict and maintaining the status quo.

“The current Israeli government clearly said we do not want to jeopardize the status quo, but the things we are seeing on the ground seem to suggest something else,” Burgsdorff said.

“Israeli settlements are in clear violation of international law and constitute a major obstacle to a just, last[ing] and comprehensive peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” he explained. The EU can’t “close its eyes” to such actions, he added.

The EU and much of the international community believe in a two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the pre-1967 lines with Jerusalem as the divided capital of the states.

Israel has been blunt about its belief that Jerusalem must remain the united capital of the Jewish state and that projects like those in Atarot and the E1 area play an important role in protecting a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty.

It has also been argued that such projects, which provide access roads that would improve traffic flow, do not cut off Palestinians from the West Bank.

Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum said that “Jerusalem is a living, breathing, growing capital city of the State of Israel.”

Due to work already done in the area of Atarot, the municipality had turned Atarot into a thriving industrial zone with it’s first-ever [shopping] mall for aast Jerusalemites, with factories and workplaces providing hundreds of jobs.

“The housing project will provide thousands of much-needed housing units,” Hassan-Naboum said. “The European Union should stop talking in the language of the past and join the development of the future catering for Jews and Arabs alike and providing opportunity and not empty rhetoric and false hopes.”

Arabs will take time to understand Naftali Bennett

After more than a decade under Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has a new prime minister, Naftali Bennett. Netanyahu’s years in power have been extremely significant for country’s relations with the Arab world. Most notably, with the aid of former US president Donald Trump, Netanyahu signed normalization agreements with four Arab and African countries.

Bennett, head of the right-wing Yamina Party, has been a part of Israel’s political system for 15 years, but his regional and international presence has been relatively minor. Now, the Arab world, which has complicated relations with Israel, is crafting its image of Israel’s new premier.

The Qatari-based media giant Al Jazeera published an article about Bennett shortly after he was sworn in, calling him “Netanyahu’s student.” The article took note of that fact that Bennett is the first prime minister to come from what Al Jazeera called “the hard-line religious right,” and said that he is “one of the strongest opponents to the founding of a Palestinian state.

The Saudi-financed Al-Arabiya news website notably does not mention Bennett’s position on the Palestinian-Israel conflict. In an article that can almost be called flattering, Al-Arabiya tells of the new premier’s success in business, his background in Israel’s elite military forces and his various political exploits in recent years.

Oraib Al Rantawi, Founder and Director General of the Al-Quds Center for Political Studies in Amman, told The Media Line, in light of the recent political upheaval, “First of all I think there is a deep feeling of relief, among most of the Arab countries – especially in Palestine and Jordan – at seeing Netanyahu depart.”

In terms of how Bennett is viewed in the Arab world, Rantawi said, what matters is his approach to the Palestinian-Israel conflict. He’s in the far-right camp.” Bennett, he adds, is seen as opposing the two-state solution and a Palestinian state, as well as supporting Jewish settlements in the West Bank. This, and statements perceived as hawkish in the past, have built his image as a hard-line leader in Arab eyes, which Rantawi calls a cause for pessimism.

At the same time Bennett is seen as a weak leader, lacking the international status and personal charisma to rival Netanyahu, Rantawi says. 

“He has no charismatic personality, no connection with the international scene – this will make it easier to counter the Israeli narrative, especially in the US decision-making institutions. We don’t think that Bennett can fill the vacuum of Netanyahu or succeed in establishing strong influence in many international capitals. Not only in Washington and European countries, but also with Russia,” he said.

 “Some countries... are not happy to see Netanyahu depart the scene, especially the Emiratis, and the Saudis to a certain extent,” he also said. “For them, Netanyahu, together with Donald Trump, was a strong ally” regionally and, most notably, against a mutual enemy, Iran. Others such as the Jordanians and the Palestinians often termed ‘The Resistance Axis’ – Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, are happy.”

Many Arab voices in the media are saying that Bennett and his partners will be a continuation of the same policies because Netanyahu’s legacies will outlast his presence as prime minister.

The new government notably includes an Arab Israeli minister from the left-wing Meretz Party and an Arab-Israeli party, the Islamist Ra’am (United Arab List) Party, headed by Mansour Abbas. While this may be seen as something that would help ease relations between the Jewish state and its Arab neighbors, Rantawi believes it will have little to no influence.