Dear Readers,

We want to thank everyone who participated in our petition, regarding the security threat on the roads of Judea and Samaria.

We just received the following communication from the Prime Minister’s office, and would like to share it with you.

To: Mr. Stephen Leavitt, Editor-in-Chief, JewishPress.com

Dear Mr. Leavitt,

We acknowledge receipt of your e-mail dated June 4, 2013, and the petition which you enclosed.

The Government of Israel’s primary responsibility is for the security of the people and State of Israel, and all the Prime Minister’s decisions are guided by this imperative. We will continue to take all necessary steps to protect the right of every Israeli citizen – including that of the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria – to live in peace, without the threat of violence and terrorism.

Kindly convey this message to all the signatories of the petition.

Sincerely,
Mark Regev
International Spokesman for the Prime Minister

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Yishai is joined by Jeremy Man Saltan to get an exclusive political analysis in English. They talk about Prime Minister Netanyahu’s budget & spending in Israel, Minister Yair Lapid’s approach to Finance, and finish with Minister Naftali Bennett’s approach to expanding Israel’s already hot Commerce engine.

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By now, the world knows that Benjamin Netanyahu is a sucker for pistachio ice cream (the financial website Kalkalit revealed recently that Netanyahu’s 2012 household accounts include close to $3,000 for pistachio and vanilla ice-cream. It means the Netanyahus and their guests (not sure Sara would let the staff have any) scarf down 30 lbs. of ice-cream a month. However do they maintain their girlish figures?)

But prime ministers do not live by ice cream alone: the Netanyahu family purchases food and household items worth close to $30 thousand a year, $2,500 a month—all of them tax payer shekels, mind you—at the Rami Levy supermarkets.

Rami Levy is known as Israel’s no-nonsense marketing tycoon. Rami Levy Hashikma Marketing is the third largest Israeli discount retail supermarket chain, 21 stores, 3,000 employees, annual revenues around $430 million. His aisles are a little less spotlessly clean than the competition, you won’t find fancy fruits and yuppie veggies there, and inquiries with the staff might not always yield useful advice, and the lines at the cashier are longer and less orderly – but everybody in Israel knows, Rami Levy gets you the best prices. Rami Levy also sells no-nonsense cellphones and a slew of other bare essentials goods at very good prices.

Rami Levy, whose company went public in 2007, and who is counted among the richest people in Israel, is also a dyed in the wool Likud supporter. And that explains why the fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu takes the household budget awarded him each year by the taxpayers and puts so much of it in the coffers of his sworn supporters – just doesn’t look so good.

Globes reported that the Prime Minister’s residence has been purchasing from Levi without a bid. That doesn’t smell great either, except for the fact that the regulations don’t require a bid in this case, only common sense.

That’s Rami Levy’s point, by the way. He told Globes: “You know why they started to buy from me? Because three years ago there was an article in a local newspaper in Jerusalem criticizing Netanyahu for not buying at Rami Levy’s, where everything is the cheapest, but instead preferring the fancy shops in Rechavia (Jerusalem’s high rent neighborhood).”

See? You can’t win with us media folks.

The same was true with the pistachio fiasco (that’s a fun word combo): after being slammed from every direction for buying hundreds of pounds of ice cream from a local, fancy parlor, at local fancy parlor prices – the Netanyahus switched to Rami Levy’s nutty delights. Now they’ll have to swear off that, too?

The prime minister’s office is yet to comment on the developing emergency.

For the past ten years, MK Moshe Feiglin (Likud-Beitenu) has been visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on the 19th of the Hebrew month, every month. But on Sunday, April 28, 2013, Feiglin received a phone call from Deputy Commander Moshe Barkat, Chief of the Israeli Police David Precinct, which includes the Old City of Jerusalem.

“He informed me that, on direct order from the prime minister, I would not be permitted to enter the Mount tomorrow,” MK Feiglin wrote in his Facebook page.

A source close to Feiglin told The Jewish Press that the deputy commander told the MK that the Waqf, the Jordanian charity organization which runs the Temple Mount, warned the Prime Minister’s office that should Feiglin go up on the Mount on Monday, it would “start World War Three.”

No one wants that. Except that the same Waqf has been cautioning about new world wars frequently, and is often involved in organizing, rather than trying to prevent them.

According to Feiglin, the prime minister has no legal authority to give such an order, because it violates three basic laws:

1. Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, which gives each person freedom of movement, and requires the state to protect this right.

2. Basic Law: The Knesset, which grants every MK complete immunity in carrying out his duties.

3. Basic Law: Jerusalem, which says: “The sacred sites shall be protected from desecration and any other violation and from anything likely to violate the freedom of access of the religionists to the sites they hold sacred, or their feelings concerning those sites.”

Also: “Any and all authority applying to the area of Jerusalem that is granted by law to the State of Israel or the Jerusalem Municipality, shall not be transferred to a foreign entity, political or governmental, whether permanently or temporarily.”

“The only legal way to prevent me from going up to the Temple Mount tomorrow (without changing existing law),” says MK Feiglin, “is if, in the opinion of the officer in charge of the place there exists an immediate, clear and present danger.”

But, having given him the warning a full day in advance, Feiglin argues, security forces should have ample time—had the prime minister only told them so—to organize and prevent dangerous gathering and violence.

According to MK Feiglin, the Prime Minister’s decision “confirms what I was told by the police command when I asked to tour the Dome of the Rock, that the Temple Mount is under Muslim sovereignty.”

This unfortunate decision, writes Feiglin, can be added to reports this week about transferring broad supervisory authority to UNESCO in Jerusalem, as well as the reality of a de facto construction freeze in Jerusalem, as Housing Minister Uri Ariel warned last week.

The source close to Feiglin says the MK will obey Netanyahu’s directive, but that as of tomorrow Feiglin would no longer be voting the Likud-Beitenu party line.

“When, just before Jerusalem Liberation Day, the Prime Minister orders an Israeli Knesset member that—contrary to Israeli law— he not to go up to the Temple Mount, it means that the Prime Minister has officially and openly revoked Israeli sovereignty on the Mount and given it to the Muslim Waqf,” MK Feiglin wrote.

“This is an entirely new situation, more severe than before, and I must consider now how to force the Prime Minister to respect the sovereignty of the State of Israel in its capital Jerusalem,” he concluded.

After decades, perhaps centuries, in which we, Jews, have been able to count on the Arabs to rescue us from the catastrophic errors of our own leaders by committing even worse errors—as the late Abba Eban put it: The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity—we may be up against the first Arab who is a whole lot better than us at using opportunities, and how.

Mahmoud Abbas, whom Arabs and Israelis call by his nom de guerre Abu Mazen, has figured out how to outmaneuver his opponent, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and how to defeat the greatest democracy with the strongest army in the region. Frankly, the only real hope Israel has at the moment is that some Palestinian idiot would assassinate the crafty Abbas, and leave Netanyahu to deal with leaders to whom he can measure up.

Secretary of State John Kerry is coming to town next week, ready to twist Israeli arms, and we might as well face up to it: the Obama and Kerry visits have been planned as a one-two punch, with Abu Mazen being heavily prompted to let America do the job for him.

When Barack Obama was making nice with our children in Jerusalem, he made a statement that, at the time, sounded like a rebuke to the Palestinians, who had been insisting that the precondition to renewing talks on peace with the Israelis is a new settlement freeze.

That one was right out of Abba Eban’s book of missing opportunities. Netanyahu tried a settlement freeze early on in his second term. It didn’t bring the Arabs to the table, but it did create a fervent resentment against him among settlers, who responded by doubling Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home Knesset faction, all at the expense of Bibi’s Likud party.

Palestinian sovereignty and Israeli security are “the core issue,” Obama told Abbas in Ramallah. “If we solve those two problems, the settlement problem will be solved.”

It wasn’t a rebuke, it was golden advise, it was the kind of strategic thinking the Palestinians had not been able to generate, with the glaring exception of the UN assembly statehood vote – which was Abu Mazen’s brainchild, he managed to break the fundamental rules of the Oslo Accords and got away with it relatively unscathed.

Now the PA president has announced that he won’t be asking for settlements freeze as a precondition, he wants to see a map instead. Let Mr. Netanyahu bring to the first meeting of the new round of negotiations his version of where the new Palestinian state should be.

It sounds so harmless. After all, what’s more logical than starting the wheeling and dealing with each side showing where they think the new border should run in the future. One side wants this much, the other side wants only this much – and they’ll reach a compromise.

In reality, this demand robs Netanyahu of his entire arsenal of negotiation moves. In Netanyahu’s play book, you get to map drawing in the distant future, years from now, after a lengthy series of small moves, tweaks, minute gestures, back and forth. If he shows his map at the start, then the future borders become the one and only topic of negotiations, everything else is moot, the battle has been lost before it began.

Meanwhile, AFP reports, President Mahmoud Abbas will temporarily refrain from unilateral action against Israel at the UN and other international arenas, to give U.S.-brokered peace talks a chance to resume.

For a couple of months, the Palestinians will nobly “refrain from taking a case against Israel to the International Criminal Court,” an anonymous Palestinian source told AFP.

But the same official warned that if Israel failed to halt settlement building, the PA would immediately begin working through the international bodies again.

“Settlement building in E1 is a red line and erecting so much as one stone in the area … would destroy the two-state solution,” he said.

Speaking of stones, the PA has been utilizing those very well, along with firebombs, sending bands of angry, unemployed youths to literally get themselves killed by challenging IDF units all across Judea and Samaria. Two Arab teenagers have already been killed, and young Arabs in the Hebron area continued to clash with Israeli troops all day Thursday, protesting the death of Maysara Abu Hamdiyeh, who was serving a long prison sentence for attempted murder, in Israeli custody. Abu Hamdiyeh died from cancer which the Israeli prison system failed to cure.

“U.S. policy in the Arab world has long been widely unpopular, to put it mildly,” on Sunday Sarah Mousa wrote in Al Jazeera. Although President Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo were met with great enthusiasm, she continues, “the Arab uprisings transformed many peoples’ views on the role played by the US in their region. While Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did offer verbal support to most of the protest movements, hypocritical selective support, initial American hesitation in backing the uprisings and past policies bolstering dictatorships were not forgotten.”

Mousa, a graduate from Princeton University and a 2010-2011 Fulbright Scholar in Egypt, states: “More crucially, it became clear to many that the outcome of the uprisings was up to them, and not to U.S. policymakers. In the case of Egypt, U.S. statements only called for Hosni Mubarak to step down when it became entirely clear that it was inevitable. While the gesture may have been appreciated by parts of the Egyptian opposition, it was not viewed as a significant turning point.”

Obama’s visit to Israel and the PA were received coolly by Palestinians, writes Mousa. “Young activists referred to the speeches as ‘insipid’ and ‘sycophant.’ The part of Obama’s Jerusalem speech that many Palestinians paid most attention to was an interruption by Palestinian audience member Rabeea Eid: ‘Did you really come here for peace or to give Israel more weapons to kill and destroy the Palestinian people? Did you happen to see the apartheid wall on your way here? There are Palestinians sitting in this hall. This state should be for all of its citizens, not a Jewish state only.’”

We’ve all seen the clip where, as the noisy Eid was being dragged out of the hall, Obama referred to the interruption as a good display of “lively debate.”

Recordings of the incident quickly spread throughout the Palestinian Internet. Obama’s failure to effectively address Palestinian rage on the student’s points, just as Eid was being dragged away and handcuffed, made him a mockery in Palestinian eyes, argues Mousa.

“The U.S. is increasingly irrelevant to movements throughout the region,” she concludes. “In his March visit to Cairo, Secretary of State John Kerry extended invitations to meet with members of opposition parties. Many turned him down. Distour party member Gamila Ismail explained her rejection of the invitation in a scathing letter to Kerry, in which she criticized self-interested U.S. policy that has supported repressive regimes in Egypt for decades.”

Ismail also wrote Kerry: “This is a revolution that will teach the world, as Obama, your president, has said. And we want to teach the world and be a model for it. And we will become different than what you see. Your embassy reports see that we do not deserve anything except this [limited] amount of democracy. And that this [limited] amount is ‘enough’.”

Interestingly, as America is achieving a steady decline in reliance on Middle Eastern oil, American foreign policy no longer views the region with the urgency it did only a decade ago – and the Arab intelligence gets it.

How I wish Benjamin Netanyahu would get it, too.

The negotiating teams of both Yesh Atid and Habayit Hayehudi did not arrive at what could be the final round of negotiations with the Likud-Beitenu team. It turns out the two parties received notices that, contrary to what had been agreed, Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett will not serve as deputy prime ministers.

According to Likud-Beitenu officials, the decision was made for reasons not directly related to the issues at hand, but, instead, to the prime minister’s wife’s refusal to allow the two coalition members to serve as her husband’s deputies.

The Yesh Atid and Habayit Hayehudi negotiating team told Ma’ariv that “something here doesn’t smell right. We are not looking to blow up the negotiations, we just want to return to what had been agreed with us.”

The position of Deputy Prime Minister is more than mere honor, as the Prime Minister is absent from the country an average of 50 days a year.

No one knows yet if this is a deal breaker.

Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid has agreed to drop his demand for the Foreign Office portfolio, and will decide this weekend whether he wants the Finance or the Interior ministries – and it is estimated that he is going for Finance, Reshet Bet reported Saturday evening. On Friday, Lapid met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his Jerusalem residence.

With Lapid’s demand out of the way, the PM will be holding the Foreign Office portfolio for his election partner Avigdor Liberman, until the latter concludes his business with the legal authorities. The case against him opens in mid-April. It has been noted that knowing that Liberman is coming back could intimidate Foreign Office employees and might change their minds about testifying against their boss—but that belongs in a different article.

Lapid also consulted with Habayit Hayehudi Chairman Naftali Bennett. Should Lapid opt for Finance, Bennett would be appointed Minister of Trade and Industry, with extensive powers.

Political circles are estimating that the next government will include only 24 ministers, in addition to the prime minister, which is more than the figure Lapid was pushing for, but a lot less than the previous government headed by Netanyahu, which at one point featured 30 ministers and 9 deputy ministers.

One of the key areas of conflict between Lapid and Netanyahu has been the number of government portfolios. Lapid was arguing that Israel cannot afford the expense of so many needless positions, each of which comes with office suites, staff, cars and security details.

The portfolios are expected to be divided as follows: 8 Likud ministers, 6 Yesh Atid, 4 Jewish Home, 3 Yisrael Beiteinu, 2 Tzipi’s Movement and 1 to Kadima.

Outgoing Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz confirmed in an interview on Israel’s Channel 1 News that Lapid is his likely successor. Steinitz, who holds a doctorate in Philosophy from Tel Aviv University, said: “I remember that when I was chosen there were doubts initially – a philosopher as finance minister? But, in the end, Israel’s economic results are the best in the West over the past 34 years.” He added: “I am convinced Lapid will position.”

Lapid, it should be noted, has not graduated high school.

The number two in the Jewish Home party, Uri Ariel, will get the post of Minister of Housing and Construction, according to the Army Radio, a post Netanyahu previously promised would remain in Likud hands. Yael German from Yesh Atid will serve as Minister of the Interior and Rabbi Shai Piron will be Minister of Social Welfare, although Shaul Mofaz from Kadima is also being mentioned as a candidate for that job.

Likud’s ministries will include Transport to Israel Katz, and Education to Gideon Sa’ar, both of whom held those same portfolios in the outgoing government.

Sa’ar said last week that he wanted to stay in the same office.

It is estimated that coalition talks will be completed by Sunday, and the next government will be presented by mid-week.