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The surprise of the woman in black. In the past few months, MK Merav Michaeli has been in a nearly impossible situation. "Labor" had only three representatives in the Knesset. Two of them joined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government and she remained in the party, working in the opposition. Polls predicted that the Labor Party would soon see its demise, and it looked as if only a miracle could save her. And that miracle happened.
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It happened because of one unconventional (to say the least) woman, whose sentences are strung out because of her insistence on speaking in both the feminine and masculine, who doesn't put up pretenses, who speaks from the heart, who doesn't get carried away, who knows how to fire precision shots and hit her mark.
Everyone says that they entered politics because of ideology, because what matters to them is our collective and not their personal interests, but when Merav Michaeli says it, we believe her. She is intriguing, surprising, energetic, and the fact that the Labor Party decided to make her its leader after she forced it, by a High Court decision, to hold party primaries and not revert to the system of deals made in smoke-filled back rooms, soon led to a new vibe and a real chance for the veteran party to be reborn as a phoenix. The only woman who will be serving as a party head in the 24th Knesset could be the big surprise of this upcoming election.
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Kochavi warns Biden. In his speech to the Institute of National Security Studies, the IDF chief of staff declared that not only would it be dangerous for the US to return to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, but also that any "minor" changes to the deal would be dangerous and that the IDF was preparing options for an attack on Iran's nuclear program. He wasn't talking to the Iranians, or to commanders of other armies, or to an IDF commander. He was talking to the Biden administration. In Israel, officials wondered whether Defense Minister Benny Gantz had been aware of Kochavi's statements and whether the prime minister knew about his intentions. I'm not in the loop, but I'm willing to bet that they didn't have a clue what Kochavi was going to say, and if they had, they would have instructed him to refrain from making threats.
But that's not the main question. There is a new administration in the US. The defense establishment's foremost interest is in ensuring intimate cooperation with this administration. The administration wants to restart negotiations with Iran based on the existing agreement, and it is well aware of the damage Trump did when he pulled America out of the deal.
Instead of making headlines about grandiose statements, it would be better for Israel's political and security institutions to focus on dialogue with the US administration and tell them what is vital to Israel behind closed doors, with the understanding that renewing the Iran deal on better terms is a matter of national interest.
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She couldn't accept a "yes." Next week will be the 50th anniversary of the peace plan that then-UN Special Envoy to the Middle East Gunnar Jarring submitted to Golda Meir and Anwar Sadat. The late Egyptian president agreed, with some symbolic reservations, but Golda refused.
Anyone who reads the Jarring proposal will have a hard time finding the differences between it and the Camp David Accords that Sadat and Menachem Begin signed six years later, after the 1973 Yom Kippur War – a war that without a doubt would have been prevented had Golda agreed to the earlier proposal. When I met with Jarring during a visit to Sweden in the late 1980s, he told me he had been amazed by the "old lady's" response. He said she simply couldn't take "yes" for an answer.
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