Today’s Top Stories
*** Breaking news *** After this roundup was published, YNet reported that the Israeli Navy intercepted a Palestinian smuggling boat en route to Gaza. After the Navy opened fire, the vessel was destroyed by secondary explosions caused by weapons on board. Developing . . .
1. Is the International Criminal Court maintaining back-channel contact with Hamas? And if so, why?
2. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan popped a gasket on Israeli TV, accusing Israel of ‘barbarism.’ The interview was scheduled to coincide with Ankara and Jerusalem re-normalizing ties.
“I don’t agree with what Hitler did and I also don’t agree with what Israel did in Gaza. Therefore there’s no place for comparison in order to say what’s more barbaric,” Erdogan said when reminded of his 2014 comments.
The Turkish president dismissed categorizing Hamas as a terrorist organization, calling it a legitimate political party, and a “refugee movement born out nationalism” that must be part of any future peace deal. He called for Palestinian elections, saying Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah party has been ineffective. He placed the onus for the failure of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks squarely on Israel, saying he would be willing to broker talks, but that Israel has refused such overtures.
3. “Switzerland’s Jews need to fund their own security costs even though doing so is really the government’s responsibility, a Swiss government agency said in a report on anti-Semitism.”
Join the fight for Israel’s fair coverage in the news
4. What Would It Take to Spark Media Introspection Over Mideast Coverage? The news industry’s post-Trump soul-searching is a welcome development, but for Israel, expect more of the same. Here’s why.
Israel and the Palestinians
• AP previews the upcoming long-overdue Fatah party congress. The political feud between Mahmoud Abbas and Mohammed Dahlan is fueling rising West Bank unrest. Call it an intrafada?
While the internal elections are being held to revive the flagging appeal of Fatah and the PLO, organizations seen as stale and ossified, the upcoming convention is whipping up the tensions that have sparked waves of internecine violence around the West Bank. Clashes have spread to Jenin, another city in the northern West Bank, and to the Amari refugee camp near Ramallah.
“The fighting in the streets is a sign of the fighting within the movement, and it’s a small scenario of what will happen if the succession battle takes place,” said Jihad Harb, a Palestinian analyst.
• Breaking with longstanding military doctrine, the IDF is drawing up plans to evacuate 78,000 people from northern communities in the event of a war with Hezbollah. Haaretz explains:
It relates to the communities in the range of up to four kilometers from the border with Lebanon, more or less congruent with the range of the heavy Burqan rockets, and to a number of additional locales that are considered relatively vulnerable. The plan covers about 50 communities, home to about 78,000 people. Twenty-two of the locales are within only one kilometer of the border . . .
A senior officer in Northern Command told Haaretz that evacuating the locales “could knock the ground out from under Hezbollah’s moves. Even if a Radwan unit manages to penetrate into a community, it will find the place empty of inhabitants and will have to deal with IDF fighters.
• A Palestinian trying to stab a guard at the Qalandiya crossing north of Jerusalem was shot and killed this monring.
• The Washington Post visited Amona, the illegally built settlement at the heart of the latest political storm.
• IDF general to engage Palestinians’ questions on Facebook
• Israeli President wrapped up his India tour with a visit to Mumbai, where he met with survivors of the 2008 terror attack and declared that Israel and India “stand shoulder to shoulder” in fighting terror.
Commentary/Analysis
• Worth reading: Assistant Professor Nikki Usher‘s critiques the media’s shallow election campaign infographics and interactive features. Same principles apply to our criticisms of the MSM’s infographics and interactive content during the 2014 Gaza war.
Visualizing data as if it represents certainty is a serious problem. People consume information more quickly and effectively if it is visualized, but poor presentation and lack of context can lead to misinformation . . .
You’re going to see more and more of this. It’s addicting to users, perfect for Internet news consumption and beneficial to news organizations’ bottom lines. But it can also be dangerously unrepresentative of the actual complexity of the world around us.
• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .
– Ruthie Blum: Why Abbas does not emulate Sadat
– Avi Issacharoff: Palestinian leadership may choose Abbas’s successor, and tear itself apart
– Elliott Abrams: Fatah fades away
– Smadar Perry: Half a Turkish delight
– Max Singer: Moving the US embassy to Jerusalem: Trump’s opportunity
– Gershom Gorenberg: Israel should be very worried about President Trump
– Andrew Bolt: The Jews’ wall is, of course, always worse
– Eran Lerman: How Israel works to keep old friends while reaching out to new ones
Image: CC BY-NC-SA flickr/Scott*; Erdogan via YouTube/Alper BIYIKLI;
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream and join the IDNS on Facebook.
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