Israel, Austria, Denmark launch joint vaccine project
US hesitation to place more air defense system leaves forces, coalition contractors at mercy of Iran
Israel, Austria and Denmark plan to work together on developing and producing vaccines for future pandemics and variants of COVID-19, the countries’ leaders announced together in Jerusalem on Thursday.
“Efforts for production of future vaccines is something we have to do, because we probably will need protection for the future,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We had SARS, Ebola and other diseases, and now we have COVID. We have to make sure we can protect our people and also help other countries and humanity at large.”
Joint investment in production facilities for vaccines, Netanyahu added, “reflects the respect we have for each other, and the confidence we have in working together to protect the health of our people.”
Netanyahu expressed pride in Israel’s “really excellent” health services, pointing out that Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, was ranked one of the top 10 hospitals in the world. He recounted a drug being developed in Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov) in Tel Aviv, taken with an inhaler, that has proven effective in treating COVID-19 in early trials.
“We want to have vaccines and therapeutic drugs for those cases when the vaccines don’t work,” he said.
The local vaccine production initiative has “galvanized the imagination of the world,” Netanyahu said. “We agreed that if other nations want to join us, we’ll discuss it among ourselves and welcome others to come.”
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said the three countries have a good starting-off point for the project, because they have highly developed life science industries.
“We can bring our knowledge together in a kind of a collective effort to secure better, more reliable access to vaccines,” she said. “We would like also to explore [together] possible cooperation in clinical trials.”
Frederiksen said the meeting “provided [her] with a lot of inspiration for how we can work closer together when it comes to research and production capacities.”
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz praised Netanyahu’s efforts in negotiating an early
and quick vaccine rollout for Israel.
“At the moment, the world is looking at Israel with admiration because under your leadership, Israel is the first country in the world vaccinating its population,” he said to Netanyahu. “Israel is the first country in the world that shows it’s possible to defeat the virus.”
Kurz recounted speaking on the phone with Netanyahu in early 2020: “He told me this virus will be a huge threat to the world… That’s maybe the main reason why we reacted quite early in Austria when the first wave hit us hard in the EU.”
Kurz and Netanyahu have had a close relationship since the former became chancellor at age 27 in 2013, and they speak often.
Kurz established a forum called “First Movers” last year, which includes Netanyahu and Frederiksen as well as the leaders of Australia, Norway, Greece, Czech Republic, Singapore and New Zealand, to discuss best practices in combating the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This pandemic can only be overcome through global cooperation,” Kurz said. “Vaccines will allow us to return to normality in the summer, but we have to prepare already now for the next stages of the pandemic after the summer.”
Earlier on Thursday, Netanyahu took Kurz and Frederiksen to a gym in Modi’in to show them how the “green passport” program works, allowing Israelis who have been vaccinated against COVID-19, or recovered from it, to return to engaging in certain indoor activities.
Kurz and Frederiksen have broken with the EU in planning to work with Israel on vaccine development and production,
as well as regulation.
Israel, which does not currently have its own, independent regulatory body, rolled out the Pfizer vaccine to its citizens after the US Centers for Disease Control approved it. The EU regulatory process has slowed down the distribution of vaccines in Europe, with the countries seeking to work together on a streamlined regulatory process of their own.
Netanyahu said last week that he has been in talks with Pfizer and Moderna – the first two COVID-19 vaccine producers – to begin local production, and has spoken with six other countries to build joint facilities.
The EU allows the use of vaccines made by Pfizer with German partner BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca, which are produced in Germany, Britain, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands.
There has been rising frustration in Europe over the slow rollout of vaccines that has trailed far behind Israel’s effort.
Kurz said it was right that the EU procures vaccines for its member states, but the European Medicines Agency (EMA) had been too slow to approve them, and the chancellor lambasted pharmaceutical companies’ supply bottlenecks.
“We must therefore prepare for further mutations and should no longer be dependent only on the EU for the production of second-generation vaccines,” Kurz said Tuesday.
The European Commission said member states were free to strike separate deals should they wish to. “It’s not that the strategy unraveled or it goes against the strategy, not at all,” spokesman Stefan de Keersmaecker said.
The International Criminal Court is a “politicized kangaroo court,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu charged on Fox News on Thursday, one day after ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced that she would open an investigation into alleged Israeli and Palestinian war crimes.
In doing so, she advances a process that has been six years in the making.
“I am going to fight this,” Netanyahu told Fox.
But what kind of a battle is he looking at, and what can Israel expect in the next round of its battle to stay out of The Hague?
What happens next?
The ICC will notify the relevant governments and states, in this case Israel and the Palestinian Authority, of its intention to open an investigation. Upon receipt of that notice, the governments will have a month to respond to the court and provide a reason why such an investigation should not move forward. At issue for the chief prosecutor would be whether domestic courts are already adjudicating the matter.
Who is at risk in Israel?
Bensouda will only be looking at major decision-makers and not individual soldiers. Netanyahu as well as defense ministers Moshe Ya’alon, Avigdor Liberman, Naftali Bennett and Benny Gantz could all come under ICC scrutiny.
What step? is Israel’s next
Israel has to decide if it wants to participate with the court proceedings or ignore them. While the final phase of the process will involve charges against alleged individual wrongdoers, the next phase will rise and fall in part on information from the state parties. Israel’s input here could carry weight.
In the past, Israel has consistently opted not to engage with international proceedings that it feels are particularly biased against it, such as refusing to participate in the 2004 proceeding before the ICC prior to its issuing an advisory opinion that Israel’s security barrier was illegal.
It has also boycotted United Nations Human Rights Council meetings under Agenda item 7, in which alleged Israeli human rights violations are debated. The UNHRC is mandated to hold this debate at every session, and there is no other country against which there is such a mandate.
Israel also withdrew from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) after it ascribed Hebron’s Old City including the Tomb of the Patriarchs to the “State of Palestine.” The vote followed a number of other controversial moves, including resolutions that ignored Jewish ties to its holiest site, the Temple Mount, and its 2011 vote to recognize Palestine as a state.
When it comes to the ICC, Israel has refused to directly engage with the court on the issue of a pending war crimes suit. But it has found creative ways to ensure that the court has the relevant information, including submissions to the ICC by countries supportive of Israel, which made arguments that Israel otherwise would have put forward.
How strong is the case on Gaza?
The possibility of a war crimes suit against Israeli defense ministers and chiefs of staff and/or soldiers for alleged wrongdoings in Gaza sounds dramatic.
Bensouda had already stated her intention to examine war crimes charges against Israel for its action in the 2014 Gaza War, and against rioters along its southern border with Gaza during the Hamas-led “March of Return” that lasted from March 2018 until December 2019.
It is a danger that could pose an existential threat to Israel, because Jerusalem views IDF action in Gaza a matter of self-defense. It worries that any war crimes suits for such military action would undermine the IDF’s ability to defend the state, which is under constant threat along three of its five borders.
But one of the factors the court will weigh is whether Israel has a domestic legal system that would investigate and/or adjudicate such issues. The ICC is considered to be an international tool that operates when no domestic court system exists, or when that system fails to deal with the issue.
But when it comes to Gaza, Israel has already held scores of preliminary investigations and criminal investigations. These would weigh heavily in Israel’s favor, and could be a reason for Bensouda or her successor to reject war crimes suits against Israel with respect to Gaza.
Conversely, the issue of war crimes suits against Palestinians for rocket attacks against civilians are more likely to be advanced, precisely because the Palestinian legal system either in Gaza or the West Bank has no history of dealing with that matter.
How strong is the case on settlements?
The specter of a war crimes suit against Israel for settlement activity in the West Bank and Jewish building in Jerusalem sounds less dramatic. But it is precisely this issue that is most likely to be advanced to the next stage.
The Israeli courts and the government have upheld the legality of settlement activity and Jewish building in east Jerusalem, so there is a strong case for ICC involvement on this issue.
The court would only be looking at settlement activity since June 13, 2014. The bulk of Jewish building over the pre1967 lines occurred prior to that date.
The Islamic Republic has accumulated more enriched uranium since Israel pushed for the annulment of the Iran nuclear deal, and is spreading its influence and power throughout the Middle East, outgoing deputy head of Mossad said in an interview with Israeli media in which he criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Our situation today is worse than it was at the time of the [2015] nuclear deal,” the official – who can only be identified by the first initial of his name, “A” – told Yediot Aharonot. “They didn’t stop their spread in the region for a moment. They are developing missiles… the deal we made wasn’t good; we are back to the same place.”
“A” retired last month after narrowly losing out on becoming the next Mossad chief to replace current director Yossi Cohen, who leaves his post in June.
Both “A” and “D,” who was Cohen’s deputy prior to “A” and who won the appointment, are highly respected and considered talented and apolitical candidates within the spy agency.
“A” said that one of the goals of the January 2018 Mossad raid on the Iranian nuclear archive was to help convince former US president Donald Trump to withdraw from the nuclear deal.
He said that the mission was carried out under the direction of the cabinet, and that a variety of other unreported operations were initiated to convince Trump to abandon the deal.
“How do we break the deal?” asked “A”. “Obviously, if we succeed in getting the Americans to leave it, it will start falling apart until it dissolves completely. We prepared accordingly, we started processes, the archive was one of them.”
Describing a lack of satisfaction with the policy results pursued and achieved by Netanyahu from these operations, he said: “If I look at today, March 2021, then we have a situation in which there is uranium enrichment in Fordow, there is activity in Kashan, there is work at Natanz, they have accumulated 2.5 tons of enriched uranium, and now advanced centrifuges, too. But we are in a democratic system,” appearing to suggest Netanyahu has been at fault.
In addition, “A” stated that the prime minister had set himself up “in complete opposition” to the Obama administration, and this reduced Israel’s ability to mitigate holes in the Iran deal.
Moreover, while the Iran nuclear program is an existential threat and should be viewed as the top priority, the government has wrongly mixed in issues about Iran’s role in the region and its program to smuggle precision guided missiles to Hezbollah and to its proxies in Syria.
Due to a mixing of these issues, “A” said that by trying to address them all, Netanyahu had lost focus and an ability to put primary pressure on reducing the nuclear threat.
Most details of the attack that targeted US forces stationed at the al-Asad base in Iraq on Wednesday have been revealed.
A truck was used,10 rockets were placed in the truck’s bed, and then a false bed was put on top to obscure them, a method previously used by pro-Iranian militias. The rockets were 122 mm. and are an Iranian type. Iran was likely behind the attack by activating one of its local militias.
But key questions remain over which militia carried out the attack, and what the militias expect will come next.
One source told Iranian media that the attack had three messages: one, to avenge the airstrike the US carried out in Syria in February that was itself a response to an attack on US forces in Iraq’s Erbil in mid-February; the second and third messages were designed to challenge the so-called US “occupation” of Iraq. The pro-Iranian “resistance,” led by Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq, was apparently sending these messages.
But the US is not being hasty in saying who perpetrated the attack. That is because naming names requires actually doing something in response.
If a person ordered it, or Iran, then just more airstrikes on warehouses and bases in Syria would not be an appropriate response. Yet the US knows
from experience that Iran uses Iraq as a kind of “near abroad” battleground to bleed the US.
Iranian-backed militias have killed hundreds of Americans
in Iraq since 2003, using the infamous “EFPs” – explosively formed penetrators – that exploded and killed Americans a decade ago. These roadside
bombs were later altered. Now Iran uses 107 mm. and 122 mm. rockets to attack American troops.
The questions facing the
Pentagon are also about force protection. The US withdrew from most facilities in Iraq, but wants to continue to have a footprint at Union III in Baghdad,
at al-Asad and in Erbil. It expected to be safe in Erbil, but America lacks many of the key components of a multi-layered air defense system to stop these rockets.
Iran is using the same kind of munitions it advised Hezbollah and Hamas to use against Israel. However, Israel developed Iron Dome and other systems to protect itself and stop those rockets. The US has Patriots for longer-range ballistic missiles, and it has C-RAM for shorter-range munitions. But Washington does not appear to want to move more air defense systems into Iraq. This leaves US forces and coalition contractors a bit at the mercy of the Islamic Republic.
The key questions linking Iran to the attacks, such as signal intelligence or some kind of courier that brings the orders to Kataib Hezbollah, and the planning structure or even the garage where the rocket trucks were assembled are key parts of Iran’s threats in Iraq. Finding those would require more cooperation from Baghdad.
So far, Tehran continues to have the plausible deniability it wants with the rocket attacks in Iraq. The US under the Biden administration appears hesitant to launch airstrikes the way Trump’s administration did.