Foreign Minister Yair Lapid on Sunday told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Jerusalem has ‘serious reservations’ about Washington’s stated desire to re-enter the nuclear deal between Iran and world powers; this, as negotiations continue to this end in Vienna. “We believe the way to discuss those disagreements is through direct and professional conversations, not in press conferences,” the new foreign minister qualified.
Like the previous government under Benjamin Netanyahu, the new one led by Prime Minister Bennett and Lapid is strongly opposed to the Biden Administration’s efforts to rejoin the nuclear accord, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). However, Lapid — and reportedly Bennett as well — have stressed that whatever their disagreements with the White House, they plan to address them behind closed doors and not through public skirmishes.
Regarding Iran, Blinken said: “We have the same objectives, but sometimes we differ on the tactics, and I think we are very clear and direct with each other when that is the case, and that is exactly the way it’s supposed to be.”
America’s top diplomat also underscored Washington’s support for expanding the Abraham Accords that saw Israel normalize ties with several Arab countries, but added that they are not a substitute for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Following his tete-a-tete with Blinken in Rome, Lapid met with Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Abdullatif al-Zayani, marking the first high-level direct diplomatic engagement between an official in the new Israeli government and a Gulf country.
Israel and Hamas have reportedly reached a basic ceasefire agreement via Egyptian mediators. According to the deal, Qatari money will be transferred to the Gaza Strip as early as June 30. Meanwhile, shipments of Qatari-funded fuel into Gaza was on Monday slated to resume for the first time since last month’s 11-day war between the Jewish state and the Hamas terrorist group.
However, Israeli officials said that despite agreeing to permit the entry of fuel, Jerusalem had still not signed off on allowing Qatari funds into the Gaza Strip. The Israel Defense Forces said that the delivery of goods was “conditional on the continued maintenance of security stability.”
Doha has provided hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas in recent years to help pay for electricity and the salaries of civil servants. Qatar has also funded the construction of new roads and hospitals in the Palestinian coastal enclave.
But the delivery of Qatari aid is controversial in Israel since critics say it rewards terror. When he was education minister in 2018, current Prime Minister Naftali Bennett described the funds as “protection money.”
Poland on Sunday confirmed that it had summoned Tal Ben-Ari Yaalon, Israel’s charge d’affaires, after the latter slammed a new Polish law that experts say could block World War II restitution claims. Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski said Warsaw would like to set the record straight about the legislation passed in parliament late last week.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry similarly summoned the Polish ambassador, Marek Magierowski, reprimanding him for the Polish government’s stance. The Israeli embassy in Warsaw tweeted that “this immoral law will seriously impact relations between our countries” and will “prevent the restitution of Jewish property or compensation requests from Holocaust survivors.”
The legislation, which passed with 309 votes in favor, zero votes opposed and 120 abstentions, sets a 30-year deadline for Jews to recover property seized by Nazi German forces, essentially preventing any World War II-era compensation claims or appeals of past decisions. The bill must now be approved by the Polish Senate after being okayed by the Sejm, the lower house of Poland’s parliament.
Poland’s Foreign Ministry said that the introduction of time limits would “lead to the elimination of fraud and irregularities, which occurred on a large scale,” and noted that it did not restrict the timeframe for civil cases seeking damages.
Six million Poles, half of them Jewish, were killed during Nazi Germany’s 1939-45 occupation of Poland during World War II.
The Scientific American magazine retracted an opinion piece that accused Israel of war crimes and human rights abuses against Palestinians. Specifically, “Health Care Workers Call for Support of Palestinians” condemned the Jewish state for carrying out what it termed “vaccine apartheid.”
The article, written by research fellows and medical students from Harvard, the Seattle Children’s Hospital, the Mayo Clinic and other institutions, was reportedly removed after three Nobel Prize winners and 100 other scientists called it out.
In addition, at least one senior editor of the magazine has allegedly been caught expressing antisemitic sentiments online.
“In publishing the cited article, Scientific American’s editors jettisoned appropriate editorial standards and ignored easily verified facts that counter the authors’ one-sided invective,” the letter submitted by the Nobel Prize winners and scientists read.
In response, Scientific American Editor in Chief Laura Helmuth claimed the magazine would be “revising [its] internal review process,” although she did not specify why the article was removed.
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Recommended Reading
- No, Israel Is Not an Apartheid State (Yoseph Haddad, Ynet)
- American Scholars Feature Prominently in Palestinian Terrorist’s Conference (Abha Shankar, Algemeiner)
- Israeli Startup Wins IBM Top Prize to Zzapp Out Malaria by Mapping Water Sources (Shoshanna Solomon, Times of Israel)
- A Red Beret and a Stethoscope (Michal Yaakov Yitzhaki, Israel Hayom)
- New Prehistoric Human Unknown to Science Discovered in Israel (Rossella Tercatin, Jerusalem Post)
