Tag Archives: Naftali Bennett

Inaugurating embassy in UAE, Israel tells region: “We’re here to stay”

By Lisa Barrington

DUBAI (Reuters) -Israel’s new foreign minister inaugurated its embassy in the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday and offered an olive branch to other former adversaries, saying: “We’re here to stay.”

Yair Lapid’s two-day visit is the first to the Gulf state by an Israeli cabinet minister since the countries established ties last year. He was due to sign a bilateral agreement on economic cooperation and open an Israeli consulate in Dubai on Wednesday.

The trip is also an opportunity for the two-week-old Israeli government of Naftali Bennett, a nationalist who heads an improbable cross-partisan coalition, to make diplomatic inroads despite long-stymied talks with the Palestinians.

“Israel wants peace with its neighbors – with all its neighbors. We aren’t going anywhere. The Middle East is our home,” Lapid said during the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Abu Dhabi high-rise office serving as a temporary embassy.

“We’re here to stay. We call on all the countries of the region to recognize that and to come to talk to us,” he said.

Brought together by shared worries about Iran and hopes for commercial boons, the UAE and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel last year under so-called “Abraham Accords” crafted by the administration of then U.S.-President Donald Trump. Sudan and Morocco have since also moved to establish ties with Israel.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, welcoming Lapid’s visit, said Washington “will continue to work with Israel and the UAE as we strengthen all aspects of our partnerships and work to create a more peaceful, secure, and prosperous future for all the peoples of the Middle East”, the State Department said.

The regional rapprochement was deplored by the Palestinians, who want their demands for statehood free of Israeli occupation addressed first.

President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed the accords as “an illusion” and asserted that colonial powers had “implant(ed) Israel as a foreign body in this region in order to fragment it and keep it weak,” according to a report on Tuesday by the official Palestinian news service WAFA.

Tuesday’s agreement will be the 12th between Israel and the UAE, Lior Haiat, spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, said. Lapid is also set to visit the site of Expo 2020 Dubai, a world fair opening in October where Israel has built a pavilion.

Lapid’s plane transited through Saudi airspace. Riyadh, although not having normalized relations with Israel, last year opened its skies to Israel-UAE flights.

The UAE formally opened its embassy in Israel, temporarily located in the Tel Aviv stock exchange, this month.

Israel’s Abu Dhabi embassy still has only three diplomats and a head of mission, Eitan Na’eh, who has yet to be confirmed as full ambassador. The consulate in Dubai is similarly located in temporary premises.

Lapid was conciliatory toward former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose attempts to organize a trip to the UAE while in office were scotched by COVID-19 restrictions and who has sought to cast his ouster by Bennett as illegitimate.

Thanking Netanyahu as “the architect of the Abraham Accords,” Lapid said: “This moment is his, no less than it is ours.”

(Reporting by Ari Rabinovitch and Dan Williams; Additional reporting by Nidal Al-Mughrabi’Writing by Lisa Barrington; Editing by Clarence Fernandez, John Stonestreet, Nick Macfie, William Maclean)

New Israeli government seals coalition deals as Netanyahu era approaches its end

By Ari Rabinovitch

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The new Israeli government set to end Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year tenure as prime minister signed its final coalition agreements on Friday, pointedly including term limits.

The coalition of parties from far-right to left is expected to focus mostly on economic and social issues rather than risk exposing internal rifts by trying to address major diplomatic issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader, will be succeeded on Sunday by a coalition that includes for the first time a party from Israel’s Arab minority.

Under a power-sharing agreement, Naftali Bennett, of the ultra-nationalist Yamina (Rightwards) party, will serve as prime minister for two years.

Bennett on Friday said the coalition “brings to an end two and a half years of political crisis,” although it was unclear how long the coalition’s disparate elements would hold together. He will then hand over to Yair Lapid of the centrist Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party.

Among the agreements outlined by parties in what Lapid described as a “unity government” are:

* Limiting the prime minister’s term of office to two terms, or eight years.

* An infrastructure push to include new hospitals, a new university and a new airport.

* Passing a two-year budget to help stabilize the country’s finances – the prolonged political stalemate has left Israel still using a pro-rated version of a base 2019 budget that was ratified in mid-2018.

* Maintaining the “status-quo” on issues of religion and state, with Bennett’s Yamina party to have a veto. Possible reforms include breaking up an ultra-Orthodox monopoly on overseeing which foods are kosher, and decentralizing authority over Jewish conversions.

* An “overall plan for transportation” in the Israeli- occupied West Bank.

* A general goal to “ensure Israel’s interests” in areas of the West Bank under full Israeli control.* Allocating more than 53 billion shekels ($16 billion) to improve infrastructure and welfare in Arab towns, and curbing violent crime there.

* Decriminalizing marijuana and moving to regulate the market.

($1 = 3.2529 shekels)

(Reporting by Ari Rabinovitch; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Arab Islamist helps clinch Israel’s new anti-Netanyahu government

By Rami Ayyub

RAHAT, Israel (Reuters) – It was a photo opportunity for the history books: An Islamist politician from Israel’s Arab minority grinning alongside a far-right Jewish leader and his allies, moments after endorsing him as prime minister and handing him a governing majority.

Common cause against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu helped bring Mansour Abbas into the political fold late on Wednesday, his tiny Islamist faction securing a paper-thin majority for Jewish parties hoping to unseat Israel’s longest serving premier.

The United Arab List would be the first party drawn from the country’s 21% Arab minority – Palestinian by heritage, Israeli by citizenship – to join an Israeli government, whose parliamentary approval is still pending.

Abbas, 47, has cast aside differences with prime minister-hopeful Naftali Bennett, a former leader of a major Jewish settlement organization and an advocate of annexing most of the the occupied West Bank – land Palestinians seek for a state.

A dentist by profession, Abbas says he hopes to improve conditions for Arab citizens, who complain of discrimination and government neglect.

“We decided to join the government in order to change the balance of political forces in the country,” he said in a message to supporters after signing a coalition agreement with Bennett and opposition leader Yair Lapid.

Abbas’s party said that the agreement includes the allocation of more than 53 billion shekels ($16 billion) to improve infrastructure and combat violent crime in Arab towns.

The agreement also includes provisions freezing demolition of homes built without permits in Arab villages and granting official status to Bedouin towns in the Negev desert, a stronghold for Islamist support, the party said.

“I say here clearly and frankly: when the very establishment of this government is based on our support…we will be able to influence it and accomplish great things for our Arab society,” Abbas said.

FRAGILE COALITION

Abbas is from the mixed Druze, Muslim and Christian village of Maghar, near the Sea of Galilee. His party is the political wing of the southern branch of Israel’s Islamic Movement, which was established in 1971 and traces its origins to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Before agreeing to a coalition deal, Abbas sought and received approval from the Islamic Movement’s advisory Shura Council, a religious body, which has guided the party’s past votes in parliament on LGBT rights and other issues.

Abbas’s party split from Israel’s main Arab coalition, the Joint List, before a March 23 election after advocating, unsuccessfully, that they work with Netanyahu and other right-wing factions to improve living conditions for Arabs.

Many Arabs criticize Abbas’s approach, asking how he could justify belonging to a government that imposes a military occupation over their Palestinian brethren in the West Bank and leads a blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza.

“He should be commended for trying something new, but if there’s another war with Gaza, and he’s in government, there will be pressure on him to abandon ship,” said Moussa al-Zayadna in the Bedouin town of Rahat in southern Israel.

Abbas’s Islamist party has “dramatically changed its historical political behavior” by joining with Bennett and other right-wing leaders, Joint List member Sami Abou Shehadeh said, calling it “a very big crime”.

“Bennett was the head of the Yesha Council (a settler umbrella group). We’re talking about dangerous people, and supporting them means that Mansour Abbas has chosen to stand with the extreme settler right against the interests of our people.”

Abbas temporarily halted coalition negotiations during an 11-day conflict between Israel and Gaza militants last month that also saw violent incidents between Jews and Arabs within Israel.

But the decision to join a coalition was a strategic, long-term view, said Arik Rudnitzky of the Israel Democracy Institute.

“He would not withdraw such a strategic option just because of violent events,” Rudnitzky said.

($1 = 3.2 shekels)

(Reporting by Rami Ayyub; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Angus MacSwan)

Out, but not down, Netanyahu could be tough opposition leader

By Jeffrey Heller

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Long the familiar face of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu is headed to the political sidelines after serving as prime minister for more than a decade.

But even as he battles in court against corruption charges that he denies, Netanyahu, as opposition leader, will be poised to pounce on a new governing coalition of right-wing, centrist and Arab parties with little in common other than a desire to unseat him.

In a likely taste of things to come, a stern-looking Netanyahu, 71, has decried the creation of a “dangerous, left-wing government.”

“Fraud of the century,” he declared indignantly after fellow right-winger Naftali Bennett turned against him on Sunday and opted to align with centrist opposition chief Yair Lapid despite a public promise that he would not do so.

Under a power-sharing deal that follows a March 23 election – Israel’s fourth in two years – Bennett, a former defense minister and a high-tech millionaire, will become prime minister.

He will later turn over the post to Lapid, who once served as finance minister in a Netanyahu-led government.

The diverse composition of the Lapid-Bennett alliance could make it particularly unstable in a country so riven by political divisions that “do-over” elections have become the norm.

That means that no one in Israel is ruling out a Netanyahu political comeback.

Already, the tone of his remarks has echoes of his closest international ally, former U.S. President Donald Trump, himself now unseated but still commanding loyalty from supporters.

For Netanyahu’s grassroots backers, dubbed “Bibists”, he remains a leader tough on security and a bulwark against pressure, even from Trump’s successor President Joe Biden, for any bold steps that could lead to a Palestinian state.

From the opposition benches, Netanyahu is likely to press on with a message that the new coalition will be hobbled by its left-wing members if military steps are needed against Israel’s enemies.

Claiming the spotlight even as Lapid was deep in negotiations on a change in government, a combative Netanyahu seemed to pick a fight with Biden on Tuesday over how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, again hinting at the possibility of Israeli attack.

“If we have to choose, I hope it doesn’t happen, between friction with our great friend the United States and eliminating the existential threat – eliminating the existential threat wins,” Netanyahu said in a speech.

BORROWED TIME

It has been a rocky few years for Netanyahu, whose stewardship of Israel’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout was not enough to halt his political decline.

A sense that he was living on borrowed time after 12 consecutive years in office was compounded by criminal charges over alleged favors to media tycoons and illegal receipt of expensive cigars and champagne.

Netanyahu has denied all wrongdoing and says, without offering any evidence, that he is a victim of a deep state conspiracy against him.

Popularly known by his childhood nickname, Bibi, Netanyahu is the son of a historian and attended high school and college in the United States, where his father taught.

Never lost for a soundbite, his booming baritone has resounded on the world stage since serving as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1984 to 1988.

Entering politics in Israel as a Likud legislator, he became party leader in 1993 and exerted hegemony for decades over Israeli politics.

The formation of the new government marked a rare defeat for Netanyahu: the last time he and his wife Sara had to pack their bags and move out of the prime minister’s residence was before the turn of the millennium.

(Editing by Angus MacSwan)