Cabinet to vote on Sunday to approve Meron investigation

A government resolution to establish a state committee of inquiry on the Mount Meron disaster will be brought to a vote in the cabinet on Sunday, 52 days after the catastrophe took place.

Yisrael Beytenu leader and Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman wrote on Twitter on Thursday morning that the resolution was the result of joint efforts by Defense Minister Benny Gantz and himself, “which will do justice to the families [of the victims] and prevent the next such disaster in the State of Israel.”

On April 30, some 45 mostly haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men and boys died in a mass crush on Mount Meron, the site of the tomb of Talmudic sage Shimon Bar Yohai, where tens of thousands of pilgrims had gathered for the annual Lag Ba’omer celebrations.

The site suffers from deficient and unsuitable infrastructure, with past government, police and media reports having determined that it must be overhauled to avoid a disaster.

The outgoing government refused to appoint an independent state committee of inquiry, which is headed by a Supreme Court judge.

Haredi parties Shas and United Torah Judaism proposed the

establishment of a public committee of inquiry instead, which would have been controlled by government ministers and whose members would have been chosen by them.

When Gantz submitted his proposal to the cabinet earlier this week, he described the need for a state committee as “a basic ethical imperative vis-à-vis the families,” and “in order to prevent tragedies of this nature in the future.”

The resolution is almost certain to be approved.

The Forum of Families of Meron Victims welcomed Gantz’s submission of the resolution on Monday.

“As we have demanded from the outset, and together with MK Moshe Gafni in his letter a month ago on behalf of the United Torah Judaism faction, we hope that an investigative committee into the Meron disaster will be established immediately,” the forum said in a statement to the media.

“This is not a political matter,” it said. “We expect the entire political spectrum to support the establishment of an inquiry committee so that the haredi community will sense that the investigation is carried out with sensitivity and with

of the best strategic partners in these areas,” he said, adding that in Israel, “there is a lot of great technology and we think we can grow businesses.”

Israel’s tech sector remains strong and was not at all impacted by the political instability of recent years, Mnuchin asserted.

“It is as robust as anything I’ve seen in the sheer size and number of start-ups coming out of Israel and amount of capital being invested,” he stated. “We just heard a statistic that investments in the first six months of this year were as much as the investments of all of 2020.”

Friedman said that leading Mnuchin’s investment office in Israel is the rare job that combines business with working for a cause in which he strongly believes.

“I love this country, and the last four years have been just a blessing to be here, and I want to participate in the further growth of Israel,” said Friedman. “This is the growth of Israel. This is part of what makes the country great: it is a job creator, a growth creator, and an area about Israel that the world admires.”

As for working with Mnuchin, Friedman said: “I wanted to get involved with the smartest guys.”

Mnuchin would not say whether the rumors that former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen is joining his venture are true, saying that Cohen is “considering a lot of different things.”

But the former Treasury secretary had high praise for Cohen, whom he called a “terrific friend,” and said they worked closely together because the Mossad is one of the US’s closest intelligence-sharing partners. Mnuchin said that before the COVID-19 pandemic, about half of his time was spent on national security issues.

Prior to joining the Trump administration in 2017, Mnuchin was a senior banker at Goldman Sachs, a hedge fund manager, and a Hollywood film producer. Friedman was a bankruptcy attorney, whose clients included former president Donald Trump.

Liberty Strategic is expected to raise money from sovereign wealth funds across the Persian Gulf.

Mnuchin said he plans to open several offices across the Middle East, including in some of the countries that established diplomatic ties with Israel in the past year through the Abraham Accords. Friedman visited the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in recent weeks to that end, as well as for a documentary film he is preparing about the accords.

“Given our relationships here, the opportunity to bridge the economic transactions between different Abraham Accords member states is also a tremendous opportunity for us,” Mnuchin said. “The technology that is being developed here [in Israel] creates tremendous opportunities throughout the Middle East, and tremendous growth in the economy here as the result of the Abraham Accords doing business with other countries.”

Friedman said the Abraham Accords are “brimming with potential,” and after the governments of the countries involved took the steps to normalize diplomatic relations, “the people are

now taking over” and developing interpersonal and business ties.

Asked if they were satisfied with how the Biden administration is handling the continuation of the Abraham Accords, Mnuchin said he is “in a wait-and-see approach. Hopefully they’ll embrace it and participate.”

Friedman encouraged the Biden administration to use the Abraham Accords branding, which they have mostly avoided, because it is “deeply meaningful to the people involved.”

Both Trump administration officials avoided criticizing the current administration in Washington.

When it comes to the negotiations between Iran and the US to rejoin the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, Mnuchin, who played a large part in the “maximum pressure” sanctions against Iran, said that the goal of the sanctions was to come to a better agreement with Iran.

“That agreement needs to include and address all the significant issues, including the term [of the nuclear limitations]. If Iran is serious and doesn’t want nuclear weapons, it needs to be long enough term,” Mnuchin said. The current Iran deal would expire in 2030.

In addition, Mnuchin said that “other regional players” are especially concerned about Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and sponsorship of terrorism, and should be involved in the talks.

“Those issues, in my opinion, need to be part of regional discussions and not just between the US and Iran, because it is much

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effective than past premiers in enlisting American support and in securing a circle of European, African and Asian allies. Issues of Palestinian incitement and support for terror also gained prominence during his tenure.

Here is a list of 11 victories and losses during his 12-year prime ministerial reign that began in March 2009 and ended this week.

Losses

1) ICC opens war crimes probe against Israel

Israelis were not in danger of war crimes suits at the ICC when Netanyahu entered office.

The accession of the PA to the Rome Statute in 2015 changed that, and allowed the PA to request a war crimes probe into Israeli actions in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem.

The ICC ruled this year that it had jurisdiction to hear war crimes cases connected with that territory, and has opened a probe. While it is examining the possibility of war crimes cases against Israelis and Palestinians, it is presumed that the focus will be on potential Israeli war crimes.

Should the ICC conclude that a probe could be conducted, then individual Israelis, most likely its leaders, could find themselves facing war crimes charges.

2) UNHRC creates permanent probe against Israel

The UNHRC during Netanyahu’s tenure launched at least six fact-finding missions against Israel in an attempt to prove it

had committed and continued to commit war crimes and serious human rights violations.

The most infamous was the initial probe headed by and named for South African jurist Richard Goldstone.

The Goldstone mission and two others explored potential Israeli war crimes during the three Gaza wars. One of the fact-finding missions probed alleged human rights abuses connected to West Bank settlements. The mission on the Hamas-led March of Return led to the creation of a database of IDF soldiers who potentially executed war crimes against the Palestinian participants.

This year the UNHRC created a permanent probe into potential Israeli human rights abuses, both within sovereign Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza, starting from April 13, 2021. Israel is the only country under permanent investigation for war crimes.

Separately it published a blacklist of companies doing business with Israeli entities located over the pre-1967 lines. It’s the only country against whom such a blacklist has been published.

3) UNESCO registers Tomb of the Patriarchs to Palestine

UNESCO became the first UN body to recognize Palestine as a state, in 2011. PA membership at UNESCO allowed the registration of three sites onto its World Heritage List: the Church of the Nativity, the Battir terraces and the Tomb of the Patriarchs. The registration focused primarily on the period when the Tomb was under Mamluk control in 1250 and through the Ottoman Empire period, rather than on the ancient and Biblical periods when it was in Jewish hands.

Israel withdrew from UNESCO in 2018 to protest its anti-Israel bias, after halting its annual payments to the organization in 2011 and losing its voting rights two years later.

4) EU product labeling

The European Union published guidelines in 2015 on how to place consumer labels on products from east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, to clarify that they were not produced in Israel.

The guidelines were voluntary. Four years later, however, the EU Court of Justice ruled that all Israeli products produced over the pre-1967 lines must be marked with such consumer labels.

Victories

1) Abraham Accords put a damper on BDS

The Abraham Accords, which normalized ties between Israel and four Arab countries, took some of the wind out of the sails of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The willingness of Arab countries to do business with Israel made it more difficult for BDS to argue that other countries should boycott it.

2) ICC ‘Mavi Marmara’ war crimes probe nixed

The International Criminal Court chief prosecutor rejected a request to probe Israel for war crimes relating to the IDF raid in 2010 against the Gaza-bound flotilla ship Mavi Marmara. The IDF forcibly boarded the ship as it attempted to break Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza. During the raid, 10 Turkish activists aboard the ship were killed.

3. Only one UNSC anti-Israel resolution passed

The UN Security Council condemned Israel only once during Netanyahu’s tenure, which is a record in the institution’s treatment of Israel. It was the direct result of Netanyahu’s ability to secure opposition to such resolutions from former US presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The only exception was in 2016, in the final weeks of the Obama administration, when the UNSC approved Resolution 2334 that condemned Israeli settlement activity and rejected Israeli sovereignty over any part of east Jerusalem, including the Western Wall.

4. Partial victory on the Jerusalem resolutions

The PA pushed for the UN to ignore Jewish ties to the Temple Mount by referencing that site and the Western Wall solely by their Muslim names of al-Haram al-Sharif and the al-Buraq Plaza. With the support of Arab states, it began to insert Muslim-only references in resolutions on Jerusalem passed by the UNESCO Executive Board at each of its bi-annual meetings. Those texts also disavowed Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem resolutions were neutralized at UNESCO through a compromise in which the controversial elements of the text were placed in an annex. The PA has been more successful with a similar drive at the General Assembly, where it has an automatic majority of support.

5. Agenda Item 7 boycott

Netanyahu made no headway in swaying the UN Human Rights Council to rescind its mandate that the 47-member body discusses alleged Israeli human rights abuses against the Palestinians at every one of its sessions under Agenda Item 7.

But it successfully swayed European countries that the existence of such a mandate against only one country was an example of anti-Israel bias. As a result, most of the European countries boycott Agenda Item 7 sessions, which take place three times a year.

6. Spotlight on Pay-for-Slay

Netanyahu made significant inroads in persuading European and Western countries, particularly the United States, to take the Palestinian Authority to task for providing monthly stipends to Palestinian terrorists and their relatives. Israel has dubbed the practice “pay-for-slay.”

The US took a strong stand on the issue, with Congress passing the Taylor Force Act that prohibits direct economic assistance to the PA until it halts the payments.

7. Condemnation UNRWA incitement

Netanyahu also succeeded in generating awareness of UNRWA’s failure to ensure that its textbooks did not include inciting material against Jews and Israel.

The Biden administration has promised to link future funding to UNRWA to its adherence to a zero-tolerance policy for material that promotes hate and antisemitism against Jews and Israel. The EU Parliament this year also condemned any use by UNRWA of