Bennett’s latest plan: Star Wars laser that lets Israel strike back
V IN EVERY major round of violence between Israel and the Palestinian organisations in Gaza over the past decade, the jousting in the sky between incoming rockets and the Iron Dome missile interceptors has provided a spellbinding backdrop to the death and destruction. A future confrontation may look very different. The Palestinian rockets would still be intercepted but much earlier in their trajectory and without a deadly dance with the interceptors.
On Tuesday, in a speech at Tel Aviv University, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced that within a year, Israel will deploy its first laser interception system on the Gaza border. Which will be followed by more lasers, some airborne and others on ships out at sea.
The aim, he said, is to “enable Israel to surround itself with a laser wall that will protect us from rockets, missiles, drones and other threats and will in effect deny the enemy the strongest card it has against us”.
The lasers, assuming they work, won’t replace Iron Dome. They will be using the current radars and tracking systems to detect the rocket launches from Gaza, and Israel will still have the “Tamir” interceptor missiles as back-up.
But the laser will be much cheaper to use: just a pulse of electricity, rather than a 40-thousand pound missile, more readily available, as unlike the missiles, they won’t run out, and much quicker. So rockets can be intercepted shortly after launch, rather than being intercepted just before they land, spreading debris over towns. Sounds wonderful.
The only problem is that the technology, though decades in development, is still unproven in the field and while the first system is to be deployed in less than a year, it is unlikely to be fully operational before 2024.
Skeptical senior defence officials were busy briefing against the prime minister’s “over-optimism” within minutes of his speech.
Israel’s weapons wizards have defied time-tables in the past. Iron Dome took just an astonishing five years from the original concept to operational capability. Mr Bennett is gambling that it can happen again. He wants this to be his legacy, his game-changing strategy to confound Iran’s proxies. And since he’s scheduled to make way for his successor Yair Lapid in August 2023, he’s hoping he can still be the one to cut the ribbon.
It sounds amazing, but the question is when will it actually work
HUMAN RIGHTS GO WRONG
“We were really worried on Sunday when we only had ten confirmed journalists arriving,” admitted one of the organisers of the Amnesty press conference on Tuesday morning, as she looked across the packed meeting room at the St George Hotel in East Jerusalem. “But then the Israeli government began its campaign and thirty more confirmed.”
Israeli intelligence obtained an early copy of the Amnesty report accusing Israel of committing crimes of Apartheid against the Palestinians, weeks in advance. The government however was uncertain how to prepare for its publication. There were those who advised that they simply ignore it, and issue nothing more than a bland statement. After all, other human-rights groups, B’tselem and Human Rights Watch, had published similar reports last year and they had no lasting effect. But others, lead by Diaspora Affairs Minister Nachman Shai advocated for a much more forceful response. Mr Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid agreed and a PR blitz was prepared in which the report would be branded as “anti-Semitic.”
“It’s Amnesty, they’re a massive organisation, we couldn’t have let this go,” explained a senior official involved in the decision. Copies were distributed in advance to major Jewish organisations and leaked as well to the Daily Telegraph which plastered the “anti-Semitism” allegation on its front page on Monday.
As Amnesty came out with the report on Tuesday, some Israeli government officials were satisfied with “how we proactively came out in front of the story”, others were beginning to have second thoughts.
Despite the furore, the international media gave the report only scant attention. “It’s awful timing,” said a senior employee in an Israeli human-rights organisation who had worked with Amnesty on the report. “The media is interested only in Ukraine right now. No-one is interested in Palestinians.” Some Israeli officials were thinking the same thing and at least one major PR initiative they had planned against the report was cancelled. Perhaps it simply wasn’t worth the fuss.
MOGUL MAKING NEWS
This week saw the tentative, perhaps temporary, departure from the political scene of three key figures of the Netanyahu era. One departure was planned long in advance. A second was the result of legal proceedings and third came as a complete surprise.
Attorney-General Avichai Mendelblit’s six-year term in office ended this week. One’s view of Mr Mendelblit’s tenure very much depends on where one sits on the political spectrum. Supporters of the previous prime minister see him as a treacherous turncoat who, in the service of the left-wing State Prosecutor department, abandoned his values and betrayed his old boss by pressing corruption charges against Benjamin Netanyahu.
Supporters of the current government see Mr Mendelblit as a weak, deferential and ineffectual figure, still in awe of Mr Netanyahu whom he served for nine years, first as cabinet secretary and then as attorneygeneral. He did ultimately press charges but these could have been much harsher and he could have acted much earlier, instead of dithering with the files for years.
At 58, Mr Mendelblit wants to end his impressive public career as a Supreme Court judge, but he might find he hasn’t got enough friends on the Judicial Appointments Commit
tee. Another thing some of the committee members may hold against him was his fondness for plea bargains for politicians.
He didn’t manage to close such a deal with Mr Netanyahu, who will now have to negotiate with the next attorney-general, but he did sign one with Mr Netanyahu’s closest political ally – Shas leader and former interior minister Arye Deri. He has been in politics ever since Shas was founded in 1984, from 1996 has been Mr Netanyahu’s staunch ally, and has already made one comeback after serving time for bribe-taking.
This time, a lengthy corruption investigation has dissolved into relatively minor charges of tax irregularities, as Mr Mendelblit preferred to sign a deal where he resigned from the Knesset, paid a hefty fine and got a suspended sentence, rather than taking him to court.
Mr Deri resigned from the Knesset last week, and on Tuesday was in court to hear the sentence agreed upon. He is still Shas leader and will continue to direct his party’s MKs, even though he won’t be voting
himself. He has no rivals in the movement as yet, but it will gradually become harder for him to lead the party when he himself can no longer be an MK, or a minister whenever Shas make it back to government.
Just like his old friend whose stature is shrinking, now he’s no longer prime minister, Mr Deri’s departure from the Knesset could spell the beginning of the end to the major influence he’s had on Israeli politics. But that was expected as well.
What no-one expected on Monday was the announcement that Boaz Bismuth, editor-in-chief of Yisrael Hayom, was to leave his post immediately. Both Mr Bismuth and the owner of Yisrael Hayom, Miriam Adelson, insisted that this wasn’t a firing and he was leaving on friendly terms. But it was hard to believe that, given the suddenness of the announcement and the fact that he was leaving even before successor had been appointed.
Mr Bismuth has for years been Mr Netanyahu’s chief cheerleader in the Israeli media. Which worked fine for all parties as long as Mr Netanyahu was in power and Yisrael Hayom was backing him to the hilt. After all, Mrs Adelson, together with her late husband, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, founded Yisrael Hayom in 2007 and funded it to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars to support Mr Netanyahu. The freely distributed tabloid gave the Likud leader a safe haven from the rest of the critical Israeli media.
But now that Mr Netanyahu is out of power, and seeking a plea bargain which will spell the end of his political career, Mrs Adelson is casting around for a new champion. It could be Mr Bennett, who last week received a glowing interview in Yisrael Hayom. It may be another rightwing challenger. But it won’t be the man Mr Bismuth so admires. So he’s off to pursue “new challenge”.
The Israeli-born Mrs Adelson who spent the last 30 years with her late husband in Las Vegas intends to stick around. The Adelsons were among the top political donors to the Republican Party over the last couple of decades. In Israel political donations are limited by law but Yisrael Hayom has enabled the Adelsons to have that kind of influence in Israel as well. Even with Netanyahu gone, Mrs Adelson plans to keep the paper going.