Today’s Top Stories
1. A Lebanese beauty queen was stripped of title amid revelations she once visited Israel as a student.
Swedish-Lebanese Amanda Hanna won Miss Lebanon Emigrant 2017 earlier this month but was told she was no longer allowed to hold the position after organisers discovered she had previously visited neighbouring Israel using her Swedish passport on an academic trip in 2016.
At the 2015 Miss Universe pageant, a selfie posted by Miss Israel Doron Matalon on Instagram sparked an uproar in Lebanon because Miss Lebanon Saly Greige appeared in the picture along with two other contestants.
2. The PA spends far more on terrorists’ stipends than on real welfare benefits, according to a report by MEMRI picked up by Israel HaYom.
A review of the figures showed that the terrorist stipends are sometimes 20 times higher than the welfare benefits provided to needy families.
Most welfare benefits, paid out by the Palestinian Social Development Ministry, reach some NIS 600 ($170) per family, while the maximum monthly stipend paid to prisoners and terrorists’ families exceeds NIS 12,000 ($3,300).
MEMRI uncovered that the PA budget classifies the payments prisoners as a “monthly salary,” not social welfare. It also found that the prisoners’ salaries are based on the length of their incarceration and seriousness of the crime, not the prisoner’s economic needs or socioeconomic situation. But this particular finding floored me:
The PA also pays a monthly NIS 500 supplement to Israeli Arab prisoners. The Palestinian authorities are under no obligation to care for prisoners who are citizens of Israel. Thus, PA support for Israeli Arab prisoners is incentivizing Israel’s own citizens to carry out crimes that will land them in prison.
3. Huh: Amnesty International denounced Hamas and the PA for cracking down on free expression and the media.
4. Headline Fail: ‘The Jews Fighting For ISIS’: An inflammatory International Business Times headline falsely states that Israeli Jews are fighting for ISIS, even though most of those Israelis were Arabs and converts to Islam. HR gets the correction.
Join the fight for Israel’s fair coverage in the news
Israel and the Palestinians
• State Department: Endorsing a two state solution would make us biased.
“We are not going to state what the outcome has to be,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said. “It has to be workable to both sides. That’s the best view as to not really bias one side over the other, to make sure that they can work through it.”
• An Israeli-Arab was indicted as an accomplice in the murder of two policemen at the Temple Mount, which triggered weeks of Palestinian violence. Jerusalem Post coverage.
• Mohamed Fahmy, Al Jazeera English’s former Cairo bureau chief who was imprisoned in Egypt, told the Jerusalem Post that governments like Israel rightfully take a tough stance against Qatari network over its unethical methods:
“The Arabic channel and Qatar using this platform as a weapon against its neighbors left us English reporters as targets, and that is what Al Jazeera does, unfortunately, according to the research I conducted for the past two years.”
The network “continues to endanger lives of journalists because of dealings with Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood” and other groups, he says.
• UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon pushes back after US, Israeli criticism. AP updates the latest on Israeli and US efforts in the UN to beef up UNIFIL’s mandate.
• The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall St. Journal (click via Twitter) update the latest on White House adviser Jared Kushner’s efforts to jump-start Mideast peace efforts.
• Hamas denounces Sudanese minister’s call for normalizing ties with Israel.
• Qatar’s diplomatic standoff with Saudi Arabia took a new twist when the Gulf state restored full diplomatic ties with Iran.
Commentary/Analysis
• A month from now, Iraqi Kurds will vote in a referendum on whether to break away from Iraq and become independent. The Kurds’ immediate neighbors — Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran — all oppose Kurdish independence, as do the US and Russia. Anshel Pfeffer examines the pros and cons of Israeli support.
There are a number of advantages for Israel in an independent Kurdistan. Its location astride Iran’s route to Syria and Lebanon is just the most obvious one. Kurdistan would be a headache not just for Iran, but for other potential rivals including Iraq, Turkey and Syria. Israeli businessmen are already welcome in Erbil, and the development needs of a new emerging and potentially pro-western nation would be worth billions. But Israel is loath at this point to do anything without coordination with the Americans . . .
In the short-term, the Kurds can create a lot of problems for Israel’s rivals in the region but for any long-term prospect of a regional alliance which will keep Iran out, Israel needs Turkey and Kurdistan to come to an understanding. The referendum won’t help that happen and the Kurdish expectations that Israel will swiftly recognize their independence are probably unfounded for now.
• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .
– Noam Tibon: Can envoy Jason Greenblatt succeed where his predecessors failed?
– Aaron David Miller: Jared Kushner won’t find his job in Israel easy
– Ruthie Blum: Terrorists and tiaras
– Melanie Phillips: The Canaan falsehood
– Udi Dekel and Carmit Valensi: The Iranian threat in Syria: As bad as it seems?
– Alexandra Lukash and Nir Cohen: New Iranian threat ‘exposes the weakness of the nuclear agreement’
– Wall St. Journal (staff-ed): Did Iran poison Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman? (click via Twitter)
Featured image: CC BY Robert Couse-Baker; dollar CC BY-SA Dave Winer; Fahmy via YouTube/CBC News; Kurdish map via Wikimedia Commons;
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