PM to hold first meeting with Bahraini, UAE ministers
Bennett heads to NY for UN speech • Abbas gives Israel one-year ultimatum to withdraw to ’67 lines
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett plans to hold his first meeting with senior ministers from Abraham Accords signatory countries during his three-day visit to New York, where he will address the United Nations General Assembly on Monday.
Bennett is scheduled to land in the United States early Sunday morning and will meet that evening with Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani and United Arab Emirates Minister of State in the Foreign Ministry Khalifa Shaheen Almarar.
It follows meetings he has already held with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah. President Isaac Herzog has also met the Jordanian king and, according to a Saturday night report on Channel 12, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid met with him last month.
The prime minister is also expected to meet with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, as well as to speak at a Jewish Federations of North America event, at which leaders of other Jewish Diaspora organizations are expected to be present.
The major focus point of his trip, however, is expected to his first ever address to the high level portion of a UN General Assembly opening session, at the 76th UNGA scheduled to take place Monday.
Bennett only entered office in May, so the General Assembly gives him an opportunity to introduce himself to the international community.
The prime minister plans to speak out against hypocrisy
and the double standards to which Israel is held in international forums such as the UN, which passes more resolutions against Israel than against any other country.
Contrary to his predecessor, current opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who often relied on props to add drama to his speeches, Bennett does not plan to use visual aids or other stunts.
Iran will also play a key role in Bennett’s address, but he does not plan to make Israeli intelligence findings public as Netanyahu had done. Rather, he will say that Israel will do all that it takes to stop the ayatollahs’ regime from attaining a nuclear weapon.
Bennett’s UN speech is scheduled to take place at 9 a.m. in New York and 4 p.m. in Israel, before the holiday of Simhat Torah begins on Monday evening. He will stay in the US for only one day of the holiday because he is Israeli; Diaspora Jews observe two days.
He will take the podium at the UNGA at the tail end of the event that opened on
Tuesday. A number of Arab leaders who addressed the forum spoke of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict including Sisi and Abdullah, who said that the status quo was dangerous and should not be maintained.
Most of the speakers at the event paid scant attention to the conflict. Bennett, who has rejected a two-state solution and who has said he would not meet with Abbas, is also not expected to focus on any peace initiative. US President Joe Biden told the UNGA on Tuesday that Israeli and Palestinians were a “long way” from a two-state solution.
At the assembly on Friday, however, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas attempted to push forward a peace process.
He delivered a one-year ultimatum to Israel to withdraw to the pre-1967 lines or risk the PA rescinding its recognition of Israel at those lines.
“Israel, the occupying power, has one year to withdraw from the Palestinian territory it occupied in 1967, including east Jerusalem,”
Abbas said.
“If this is not achieved, why maintain recognition of Israel based on the 1967 borders?” he asked.
Abbas warned that the PA could shift gear away from a battle over a return to the pre-1967 lines and focus instead on a demand for borders based on UN Resolution 181 of 1947, which had set aside land for an Arab state that included territory that is within the Green Line and is internationally accepted as part of Israeli’s sovereign borders.
Palestinians mock Abbas’s speech to Israel,
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Known as the Partition Plan, it was accepted by the Jewish leadership but rejected by Arabs nations, which then launched an attack against the nascent Jewish state in what Israelis refer to as the 1948 War of Independence.
Israel’s internationally recognized territory is based on the ceasefire lines from that war, which extend beyond what was offered under Resolution 181.
In referencing that history at the UNGA, Abbas skipped over initial Arab rejection of Resolution 181. “We remind everyone that Israel seized by military force half of the land dedicated to the State of Palestine in 1948,” Abbas said.
He called for a one year peace process with Israel to work out details of the withdrawal and a final status agreement based on the 1967 lines.
“We are ready to work throughout this year on the delineation of borders and solving all final status issues
cooperation with the militias.”
According to the intelligence center, he surrendered because of these ongoing ISIS Sinai hardships as well as a lack of weapons and ammunition, limiting attacks to the use of “simple weapons, especially IEDs, instead of wide scale attacks and raids. Their morale is low and there is no solution in sight, leading to tension among the operatives.”
In contrast, the report says that the Egyptian army “maintains stability in the northern Sinai Peninsula, [and] invests both funds and efforts in developing the infrastructure. In addition, its counterterrorism activities against the Sinai Province have been successful.”
This success can be measured by the removal of ISIS roadblocks, the killing of its operatives and the recent return of “the civilians kidnapped from the village of Baluza.”
In fact, the report states that recent Egyptian military victories over ISIS Sinai groups led to dozens of operatives surrendering.
Al-Qadi was born in Egypt in 1986 and arrived in the Sinai Peninsula in 2015, after having joined the ranks of ISIS in Syria, it said.
The report says that he was in command of enforcing the Sharia (Islamic religious law) in the Sinai Province, deciding important issues and promoting field operations.
“He authorized the attack on the al-Rauda mosque in the Bir al-Abd region at the end of 2017, in which 300 Sufi Muslims were killed, attacks on truck drivers from the al-Husna cement factory in the middle of the Sinai
Peninsula and attacks on other civilians,” the report said.
As Sharia enforcer in the Sinai Province, “he was known as a suspicious and cruel commander, who ordered the execution of operatives in the organization on suspicion of cooperation with the enemy, regularly abused his subordinates, and executed injured operatives to prevent their capture and interrogation by the Egyptian army,” it said.
The report suggests that Abu Hamza will probably be interrogated by the Egyptian army and then moved to an Egyptian jail.
Despite the optimistic trend against Sinai ISIS, the organization has shown a tremendous capacity to spring up in new places with new followers or return to old places where it was thought to have been stamped out.
Close to four years after ISIS lost most of its “caliphate” territory in Iraq and Syria, the group, which has managed to spawn a variety of new chapters and has morphed into new forms in weak and unstable nations across the globe, is far from defunct. • came out in favor of reestablishing the nuclear disarmament agreement with Iran, as long as the country fulfills its obligations. Most want tougher controls on foreign funding of mosques in Germany. When it comes to standing up for Israel in the UN, most said they would make decisions based on whether resolutions were fair and evenhanded.
Laschet said we will “clearly name and condemn attacks against Israel,” while Lindner wants Germany to “clearly
distance itself from unilateral, primarily politically motivated initiatives and alliances of anti-Israeli member states” in United Nations bodies. Green candidate Baerbock called out the number of UN resolutions dealing with Israel as “absurd compared to resolutions against other states.”
“What [the parties] write is fine and good,” commented Elio Adler, founder and head of the Values Initiative, “but what counts is what they actually do.”
And what they do is influenced by what they think voters want. That could spell trouble for the special relationship between Germany and Israel, said Charlotte Knobloch, vice president of the European Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress.
“The slide from a mostly neutral stance toward more openly hostile views of Israel among the German public has become more and more evident,” said Knobloch, who survived the Holocaust in hiding and became a leader of the post-war Munich Jewish community.
She fears that the gap between politicians and the electorate “will only grow wider” following the election.
Some left-wing politicians avoid tackling anti-Israel movements and antisemitism in their midst, and far Right politicians wrongly claim to be “a pro-Israel force and bulwark of Jewish life,” Knobloch argued. “We German Jews find ourselves between a rock and a hard place in this.”
Merkel disagreed with former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on some issues, including increased settlement construction, which she argued endangers her favored two-state solution. But she did not let those get in the way of a fruitful
relationship with Israel.
“Anti-Zionism is on the rise in all political parties,” Jewish German columnist Michael Wuliger told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an email. “Angela Merkel is probably the last leading German politician whose commitment to Israel was a matter of the heart.”
Antisemitism at home is a top issue. A 2018 European Union survey showed that 74.8% of Jewish respondents in Germany felt their government was not doing enough to combat the problem. One year later, a rightwing extremist tried to shoot his way into the Halle synagogue on Yom Kippur 2019, murdering two people on the street. •