UAE nixes Netanyahu visit

Emirates trying to steer clear of ‘Israeli electioneering’

The United Arab Emirates rejected attempts by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to squeeze in his first trip to the Gulf state before Tuesday’s election.

Netanyahu had been working on visiting Abu Dhabi on Thursday – including a meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan – a week after a planned trip was postponed for the first time.

“From the UAE’s perspective, the purpose of the Abrahamic Accords is to provide a robust strategic foundation to foster peace and prosperity with the State of Israel and in the wider region,” former UAE minister of state for foreign affairs Anwar Gargash tweeted on Wednesday. “The UAE will not be a part in any internal electioneering in Israel, now or ever.”

The statement by Gargash, who left his position last month, was unusually candid for someone close to the decision-making in Abu Dhabi.

Netanyahu denied that a trip had been planned for this week, telling Radio Galey Israel: “I’m not going to Abu Dhabi before the election. It’s spin. I don’t know who spread it.” However, Emirati sources told The

otherwise on Tuesday, and Netanyahu’s schedule had been cleared of political events on Thursday. The Prime Minister’s Office and the Likud campaign did not deny reports the prime minister was planning such a trip, though neither did they confirm it.

Netanyahu has previously postponed four planned visits to the UAE since the Gulf state announced peace with Israel in August. Two postponements were because of COVID-19 lockdowns, and one was because bin Zayed had a scheduling conflict.

Last week’s planned UAE trip was canceled after Jordan blocked Netanyahu’s flight in retaliation for an incident in which Jordanian Crown Prince Hussein canceled a visit to the Temple Mount, after attempting to go with a cadre of armed guards, contrary to prior agreements with Israel.

Netanyahu then ordered that Jordanian flights not be allowed into Israeli airspace. Within several hours, before any Jordanian flights were actually blocked, Jordan agreed to allow Netanyahu’s flyover, but by then, Netanyahu had postponed his trip.

UAE’s Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology Sultan Al Jaber also distanced himself from Netanyahu’s political messaging.

After Netanyahu’s UAE trip was canceled last week, Abu Dhabi announced that it would establish a $10 billion fund from the government and private sector to invest in Israeli “energy, manufacturing, water, space, healthcare and agri-tech...[and] development initiatives to promote regional economic cooperation between the two countries.”

Netanyahu has repeatedly referred to the investment in recent days, saying that it is an expression of bin Zayed’s confidence in the prime minister’s economic policies.

In response to questions about the planned investment, Jaber told the UAE news site The National that the fund is “commercially driven and not politically associated.”

Jaber added that “these are very early days,” and that his ministry is studying Israeli laws with regard to investments.

Netanyahu said on Tuesday that he expects Israel to make peace with four more countries in the region.

“I brought four peace agreements,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Ynet. “There are another four on the way. I talked about one of them yesterday.”

Netanyahu said he received a call from “one of the leaders in the region” on Monday night, and they spoke for 45 minutes.

Israel’s state funding of election campaigns is the highest in the Western world, while the amount that private individuals are allowed to donate to their favorite parties is the lowest.

However, even as Israel prepares to go to its fourth election in two years on Tuesday, campaign financing structures are not going to change anytime soon, said Dr. Assaf Shapira, director of the Political Reform Program at the Israel Democracy Institute.

During most elections in the past decade, government expenditures for political party campaigning have totaled between NIS 180 million and NIS 190m., Shapira said.

After the political parties had exhausted their resources in the first two elections of 2019, MKs granted themselves a onetime budgetary increase of 30% for the March 2020 election, giving them NIS 240m. to use, he noted.

According to data cited by Shapira for the years 2010-2014, state funding comprised 81% of all Israeli election financing, the highest level in the world along with Hungary. In the 2015 election campaign, state funding accounted for as much as 97% of the total. The remainder comes from donations, membership fees, and occasionally from selling real estate assets.

Shapira described how each party’s share of the budget is calculated, based on the allocation of individual financial units worth about NIS 1.4m. apiece. A new party that wins seats in Knesset for the first time would be assigned the number of financial units per the number of seats it received, plus one more financial unit, such that a party with 10 seats would receive 11 units of NIS 1.4m. For parties that are not new, the state would take the average of its seats in the previous Knesset and in the new Knesset, and add one more financial unit.

If a party did not pass the election threshold but received more than 1% of the vote, it could receive one financial unit, but no money is given to parties garnering less than 1% of popular support, Shapira explained.

However, Shapira noted, this amount is almost never enough to cover the parties’ campaign costs, and most will go into debt in their efforts to outspend each other. To pay that off, they dip into a second source of government funding they receive, earmarked for ongoing party activities. That sum, which averages around NIS 83,000 per MK per month, is intended for events and general expenses, but there is no law preventing it from being used to cover campaign debts, Shapira said.

Ideally, Shapira said, the parties would use political donations to cover their debts, but they are limited in how much they can receive. The law allows each party to raise only up to NIS 1,000 per donor household per year, or NIS 2,300 in an election year. That’s the lowest amount in the world, and makes fundraising extremely difficult.

“We don’t want to be like the United States, where rich people have great power to influence politicians, but this is very extreme,” said Shapira.

Can this situation change? “Everyone in the political parties is very happy with this situation, receiving government money without having to go out and raise funds,” Shapira said. “It means no one is scared of going to an election, since they know they won’t have any problem financing it.”