Today’s Top Stories
1. Israel has been carrying out secret air strikes on Sinai jihadists with Cairo’s blessings, the New York Times reports. We’re talking about more than 100 air strikes over the last two years:
Their collaboration in the North Sinai is the most dramatic evidence yet of a quiet reconfiguration of the politics of the region. Shared enemies like ISIS, Iran and political Islam have quietly brought the leaders of several Arab states into growing alignment with Israel — even as their officials and news media continue to vilify the Jewish state in public.
American officials say Israel’s air campaign has played a decisive role in enabling the Egyptian armed forces to gain an upper hand against the militants. But the Israeli role is having some unexpected consequences for the region, including on Middle East peace negotiations, in part by convincing senior Israeli officials that Egypt is now dependent on them even to control its own territory.
See Prof. Eyal Zisser‘s take.
2. While The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is indefinitely postponing a blacklist of companies doing business with Israeli settlements in the West Bank, it is still examining more than 200 companies doing business in the West Bank. The blacklist was simply omitted from a 16-page UN report that merely didn’t name names.
The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a long anticipated report that an initial review of 321 companies had identified 206 that were involved in doing business with the settlements, which are considered illegal under international law.
Of those identified, 143 were based in Israel and 22 were in the United States, the United Nations said. The remaining 41 companies were spread among 19 countries, mostly in Europe, including Germany, the Netherlands, France and Britain.
Israel called the review “fundamentally illegitimate” while US Ambassador Nikki Haley said it was “a waste of time and resources” that showed an “anti-Israeli obsession.” National Public Radio talked about it with Professor Eugene Kontorovich, who had this to say:
If the Human Rights Council thinks that doing businesses occupied territories as a human rights problem, why not make a list of companies doing businesses in occupied territories like Western, Sahara, Cyprus, Crimea? Put Israel on the list, too, if they want. But if it’s a problem only when done by Israel, then it’s not a human rights problem.
3. PA President Mahmoud Abbas will address the UN Security Council later in February. Moreover, the Jerusalem Post adds, “The Security Council is also scheduled to hold an informal meeting on the Middle East on February 22, with former US president Jimmy Carter invited to participate by the Kuwaiti ambassador.” According to Haaretz, the PLO will ask the Security Council to recognize Palestinian statehood and has “decided to formulate a plan for disengaging from Israel, in terms of security and economics.”
4. BBC News Kicks Israel in the Face: With an eye for sensationalism and false balance, Mideast editor Jeremy Bowen presents a disgraced, provocative Israeli politician as representing mainstream views.
HonestReporting will be submitting a formal complaint to the BBC. Please add your name to our complaint and let the BBC know the weight of anger and concern. Sign here.
5. Newsweek Makes Up News: Again. This is the third time we’ve caught journalist Tom O’Connor making up news.
Israel and the Palestinians
• At a security conference in Tel Aviv, Reuters noted some revealed startling daylight between Israeli and US views of military aid to the Lebanese army:
“We will sustain our efforts to support legitimate state security institutions in Lebanon, such as the Lebanese Armed Forces, which is the only legitimate force in Lebanon,” David Satterfield, acting assistant U.S. secretary of state, told the conference organized by Tel Aviv University’s INSS think-tank.
Satterfield added that the Lebanese army “could well serve as a counterweight to Hezbollah’s desire to expand its own influence there, as well as Iran’s reach in Lebanon”.
But taking the stage three hours later, Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman reiterated his view that the Lebanese army was under the command of the better-equipped Hezbollah.
• Beirut issued an offshore oil and gas exploration tender in disputed waters along the Israel-Lebanese maritime border. Israeli officials called it “provocative.”
One of the awarded blocks, Block 9, borders Israeli waters. Lebanon has an unresolved maritime border dispute with Israel over a triangular area of sea of around 860 sq km (330 square miles) that extends along the edge of three of the blocks.
Israel has not issued its own tenders for Block 9, with its officials saying they were focused on blocks that would not be disputed.
• The Media Line takes a closer look at rising tensions between Israel and Lebanon.
• European Union diplomats are wagging their tongues at Israeli tourism projects they say are designed to “legitimize illegal settlements.” A copy of an annual report by the EU Heads of Mission — a group of top European diplomats working in Jerusalem — was leaked to The Guardian.
• Will the White House unveil its peace plan even if the PA continues boycotting US mediation?
• The US classified Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh as a “specially designated global terrorist.”
• The Media Line takes a closer look at the Israeli-Palestinian battle for Africa.
• An Israeli who got lost and accidentally drove into the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Dis was nearly lynched when a mob of Palestinians pelted him with stones and torched his car. The Israeli motorist and two Palestinian policemen were injured by the rioters. More at Ynet.
• Yasser Arafat’s diaries confirmed Italian-PLO understanding in which Palestinian terrorists enjoyed free movement in Italy in exchange for not attacking Italian targets. The secret relationship allowed the hijackers of the Achille Lauro to escape justice after murdering Leon Klinghoffer in 1985. Excerpts from Arafat’s diaries were published by L’Espresso.
Following the hijacking, in which wheelchair-bound American Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer was killed, a standoff ensued between Italian and US authorities over attempts to have the attackers brought to justice.
According to the diaries, then foreign minister Giulio Andreotti allowed hijacking mastermind Muhammad Zaidan, who went by the nom de guerre Abul Abbas, to escape US extradition and flee from Rome to Yugoslavia.
• Israel HaYom: Jerusalem to start collecting $190 million in unpaid property taxes from 887 church and UN-owned facilities across the city.
The move will not apply to actual houses of worship, which are exempt from municipal property taxes, but to assets owned by the churches that are used for purposes other than prayer, some of them commercial.
• #MeToo, Palestinian style. And it’s not Israel’s fault.
• Israel foils smuggling of explosive materials to Gaza in medical crates.
Around the World
In the Halimi case, Traore was heard shouting about Allah and calling her “a devil” in Arabic. Halimi’s daughter said he had called the daughter a “dirty Jewess” in the building two years before the murder. But the examining magistrate in Traore’s trial, which opened this week, dismissed the aggravated hate crime charge before the trial actually began, Le Parisien reported Wednesday. Traore is pleading temporary insanity, though he has no history of mental illness.
On top of the Halimi case, French Jews concerned about a worrying spate of anti-Semitic incidents in January accuse the media of indifference following a brutal attack on an eight-year-old kippah-wearing boy in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles.
• Poland’s Senate passed legislation that would penalize suggesting Polish complicity in the Holocaust. Next step is for Polish President Andrzej Duda to sign it into law. Israeli politicians and Holocaust survivors denounced the measure.
• Orthodox Jew and his son narrowly escape suspected car ramming in Antwerp. Watch the security footage and judge for yourself.
• San Francisco State University faces a second lawsuit alleging discrimination against Jewish students.
• Smoke grenade hurled in Ukrainian bookstore during Holocaust lecture.
• Britain’s anti-Semitism watchdog said that Labour Party anti-Semitism helped fuel a record number of attacks on Jewish community. The Community Security Trust said that the 1,382 anti-Semitic incidents it recorded nationwide in 2017 was “unprecedented,” reports the Daily Telegraph.
• Lawmakers in Iceland are poised to ban circumcision. Very few Jews or Muslims live in Iceland, but European Jewish leaders are concerned with the precedent it sets against religious freedom.
Commentary
• Poles apart on the Holocaust?
– Herb Keinon: Poland’s Holocaust legislation: Have we crossed a diplomatic line?
– Jonathan Tobin: Jews and Poles don’t have to be enemies
– Anshel Pfeffer: Who owns Auschwitz?
– Anne Applebaum: The stupidity and unenforceability of Poland’s speech law
– Jonathan Freedland: Poland can’t lay its Holocaust ghosts to rest by censoring free speech
• Parsing the peace process:
– Amiran Levin: Pence let Netanyahu and Abbas evade negotiations
– Danny Yatom, Amnon Reshef: A dangerous course Israel should avoid
– Michael Oren: How to restore US credibility in the Mideast
– Alex Fishman: Is Israel headed towards an initiated war in Lebanon?
– Yaroslav Trofimov: For Saudis and Israelis, cost of open ties outweighs the benefits (click via Twitter)
– David Makovsky, Lia Weiner: Hamas failures in Gaza are changing Israel’s stance
– Yossi Beilin: Seize the day, end the conflict
– Gary Rosenblatt: Choosing between Trump the foe and the ally
– Dr. Nimrod Goren: Chinese option for Israel-Palestinian peace talks
• Here’s what else I’m reading this weekend . . .
– David Ignatius: Trump wants to attack North Korea? He should learn from Israel first.
– Khaled Abu Toameh: Palestinians: Arbitrary arrests, administrative detentions and world silence
– Kansas City Star (staff-ed): No Kansas, you can’t ban contractors from boycotting Israel
– Howard Feldman: The Cape Town water crisis — proudly brought to you by BDS
– Gavin Mortimer: France’s Jewish population has good reason to feel afraid
Featured image: CC BY-NC-ND greenzowie; Lebanon CC BY Eusebius@Commons; zebras CC BY-NC-ND Diana Robinson; Klinghoffer via YouTube/Arcturus aReaganDesignee; Auschwitz CC BY-NC-ND Yam Amir;
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