Exit polls show opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing bloc achieving a parliamentary majority in the elections. Channels 11's exit poll gives Netanyahu 62 Knesset seats, Channel 12 has him at 61 and Channel 13 at 62.

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While encouraging for Netanyahu, exit polls are far from final, with voting tallies passing from local to regional election committees until finally ending up in the hands of the Central Elections Committee.

Interim results were announced Tuesday night, but official results won't be known until Thursday and likely not announced until Friday afternoon.

In the proportional representation system, which encourages a multiplicity of parties, no faction can alone win enough Knesset seats to form a parliamentary majority. They must form coalitions in order to govern. In Israel's case, the minimum number of Knesset seats required is 61 (out of a total of 120).

If the exit polls accurately reflect the final results, Netanyahu will have a fairly easy time reaching that goal. As he is the politician most likely to be able to form a government, President Isaac Herzog will grant him 28 days to build his coalition. If he needs more time, Herzog has the power to grant him a 14-day extension. During this period, coalition partners will wrangle over ministerial and other positions in the new government.

However, should the final results show that Netanyahu's "natural coalition" fall short of a majority, his job will prove especially difficult. He has become a polarizing figure, particularly among the political elite, where several one-time allies have joined the opposition.

In the last election in March 2021, ideologically right-wing parties garnered 72 seats. A Likud leader who controlled 30 of those seats should have had no trouble building a coalition. However, leaders of two of those parties were former Netanyahu allies turned adversaries who categorically refused to join him.

Then, the left-wing opposition, despite falling well short of 60 mandates, formed a government thanks to the unlikely support of Naftali Bennett of the right-wing Yamina Party, and Ra'am, an Arab Islamist party.

Some said that coalition, which included parties from across the political spectrum, spelled the end of ideological politics in Israel in favor of a more practical politics. Coalitions would form around what could be done – building better roads and policing – rather than staking out unbridgeable positions on settlements or a Palestinian state.

However, the breakup of the coalition over religious and Arab issues after only a year suggested the opposite; that parties holding opposite ideological viewpoints can't cohere despite the benefits of power and the success in keeping Netanyahu out of government.

The political deadlock over the recent elections reflected Israeli voter deadlock. Despite a series of elections – Tuesday's was the fifth in less than four years – the public didn't change its voting patterns, even though it doesn't appear to share the same animosity towards Netanyahu that the political elite does. Polls consistently show a large majority picking Netanyahu as the most suitable leader to serve as prime minister.

The public wasn't getting what it wanted. Last time around, it voted right and received a Bennett-Lapid coalition. To ensure a right-wing government, enough Israeli voters would have to choose Likud or one of its reliable religious partners. If the exit polls prove correct, the public has finally done that.

If the results of the exit polls prove transitory and the public hasn't made the necessary change, will its political leaders?

Benny Gantz tried it after the March 2020 election. As leader of Blue and White and head of the opposition with 33 Knesset seats, he surprised everyone by reaching across the aisle and joining with Netanyahu in a power-sharing agreement.

Yet, Gantz has become a cautionary tale. He quit the government after concluding that Netanyahu wouldn't fulfill his end of the bargain. In the next election, Gantz's party dropped to 8 seats and leadership of the opposition passed to Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid Party, who had refused to join with Netanyahu. The lesson politicians likely have drawn is that intransigence pays.

If nothing changes, Lapid continues as interim prime minister until the next election. That could be many months away.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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The West is missing a critical component of the story when it comes to the persecution of Middle East Christians, said Farhad Rezaei, a visiting lecturer at Toronto-based York University, during a Zoom presentation on Feb. 22. And that missing element is Iran.

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In the presentation – sponsored by The Philos Project, a Christian group advocating for pluralism in the Near East – Rezaei explained that Iran plays a central role in the destruction of Christian communities, specifically in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

The mainstream Western media narrative is that "only jihadists," such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, are behind the persecution of Christians in the region, said Rezaei, who is also a senior fellow at the Philos Project.

"The reality is much more complex than the simple image that jihadists came around and killed Christians," he said.

According to Rezaei, what distinguishes Iran when it comes to persecution of Christians is that it is pursuing a "strategy of eliminationism" – an organized, unrelenting, Nazi-like campaign to reduce the Christian presence in the Middle East. "Eliminationism" means shrinking the Christian communities by making life for them unbearable, including through confiscation of private property, arbitrary detention, torture, public incitement, abduction and killing, explained Rezaei, who spent seven months researching this subject and will be releasing a report with his findings in the coming weeks.

Rezaei provided an overview of the dramatic decline in the Christian population in the aforementioned countries.

In Iraq, before 2003, the Christian population stood at 1.5 million. It is currently between 141,000-171,000, or 0.3% of the population. He noted that most of the Christians were pushed out by Shi'ite militias. He described the Christians in Iraq as "the undisputed losers of the sectarian conflict."

In Syria, before 2011, the Christian population was 2.3 million. It's now 677,000. Before Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was forced to rely on Iranian help during the Syrian Civil War, he left his Christian minorities alone. Rezaei said it was the Iranians acting as military advisors to the Syrian army who introduced the eliminationist strategy into Syria. "In some cases, the Iranians and the Lebanese Hezbollah wore the uniform of the Assad regime army [to hide their identity], but the local people understood that they were from Hezbollah and Iranians by their accent," he said.

Rezaei noted that in Yemen, where the Iranian-supported Shi'ite Houthis have taken over large swaths of the country, the Christian population has dropped from 40,000 to 3,000. In Lebanon, where the Iranian-supported Hezbollah dominate, the Christian population has been reduced from 54% to 34% of the total population.

Rezaei cites two main reasons why the Iranians are implementing their eliminationist plan. One is strategic. Iran wants to build a land bridge to the Mediterranean, and Christian communities sit squarely along that route.

The second is ideological – Khomeinism or "new Shi'ism" views Christians and Jews as "pollution," Rezaei said. While he said it is true that Shi'ism contains anti-Christian and anti-Jewish elements, it was "quietist" and minorities were largely left alone if they paid a jizyah tax, a yearly per capita levy on non-Muslims. This changed with Khomeini's rise. Khomeini and another important cleric, Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, were strongly influenced by Egypt's Sayyid Qutb, the leading member of the Muslim brotherhood and "father of Salafi Jihadism, or global terrorism," Rezaei said.

Mesbah-Yazdi opened the Haghani seminary. "Most of the senior members of the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) are disciples of Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazidi. They are all graduates of the Haghani school," he said.

Mesbah-Yazdi rejected the concept of universal human rights, considering it a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition. "He developed his own version of Islamic human rights and obligations. And according to this version of human rights, Muslims basically have the right to kill their religious enemies," Rezaei said.

He said the Iranians learned from the Nazis. "Although they deny the Holocaust, they have learned a lot from the Holocaust. However, they understood that they cannot destroy Christians and Jews by the same methods that the Nazis implemented in Germany, like using gas chambers and genocide, so they came up with a different scheme. And that was the strategy of eliminationism."

Raymond Ibrahim, a distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute and author of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, agreed that "we shouldn't focus too much on ISIS and the radical groups because they're just the tip of the iceberg," and that Iran is one of the worst actors. But he noted that when looking at the global picture, the lion's share of Muslim persecution goes on in Sunni countries, if for no other reason than that there are more of them.

Citing the recently released report "2022 World Watch List," by the pro-Christian NGO Open Doors, which ranks the top 50 worst countries for Christian persecution, Ibrahim noted that Iran ranks ninth. Most of those ranking higher are either Sunni countries or countries with large Sunni populations.

Rezaei said the purpose of his report isn't to deny the persecution committed in Sunni countries. "What I'm trying to say is that the Iranians persecute Christian minorities in an organized way, just like the Nazi Germans persecuted Jews," he said, noting that in Sunni countries like Pakistan, for example, the persecution may be intense, but it's not a top-down, nationally organized effort.

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Both Ibrahim and Rezaei agree that the larger, mainstream human rights groups fail to address the problem. Ibrahim suggested that one possible reason for this failure is that they're eager to prove that they're not "tribalistic," leading them to shy away from helping fellow Christians.

"Also, I think a lot of it is their internal animosity for their own heritage, upon which has been heaped all sorts of sins, both real and imagined. There's an animosity for Christianity amongst descendants of Christians," Ibrahim said.

Rezaei said there's still hope for the Christian communities plagued by Iran and its proxies, but a united effort by Western nations is essential. He expects that little headway can be made in the current climate, in which the Biden administration seeks to appease Iran, but "that said, it doesn't mean we should stay silent."

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Israel's government and a host of Jewish groups denounced Amnesty International's new report condemning Israel for "the crime against humanity of apartheid." As such reports by "human-rights groups" grow ever shriller in their denunciation of Israel, a question centers on how Israel and its allies can best counter the groups producing these reports, which carry moral authority even as they call for the extinction of the Jewish state.

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"Israel should start a department, maybe in the Foreign Ministry, for dealing with charges against Israel," Alex Safian, associate director and research director of CAMERA, said, noting that there once was a department in Israel's Ministry of Justice that, when Amnesty or similar groups would make accusations against Israel, would research the charges and work to refute them.

He hasn't heard anything coming out of Israel's Justice Ministry in some time and assumes that the department no longer exists. "It doesn't have to be 100 people," he said. "It could be five people. You could do a great deal. But you need a rapid response – to be able to quickly get the information out."

Israel must also go on the offensive, he said. Safian suggested organizing events, like a public debate with Amnesty's leader, would be effective and attract press, especially with a well-known name (Harvard Law School emeritus professor Alan Dershowitz, for example) representing the Israeli side. "You create an event. If they refuse, it makes them look very bad."

Safian said Israel needs to keep its arguments simple when putting the lie to Amnesty's charges – noting, for instance, that if Israel was an apartheid state, then how was it possible that a three-judge panel led by an Arab Israeli judge sentenced a Jewish Israeli president to prison, as happened to Moshe Katsav in 2011? "You make those kinds of simple arguments to demolish their claims and force Amnesty to back off," he said.

Legal adviser for NGO Monitor Anne Herzberg said that "the best thing Israel can do is expose the facts – to show that that they're making things up. I think the main thing is to expose their lies."

"Transparency is another big issue. I don't think anyone has revealed yet who wrote the report," she added.

In terms of concrete action, it gets a bit trickier. Herzberg said that while the United Nations is a hostile venue, it's possible that Israel might lessen the use of Amnesty and Human Rights Watch reports there. "Amnesty and HRW play huge roles in the anti-Israel reporting that comes out of the UN," she said.

Israel could also raise objections when Amnesty appears before government committees or when governments rely on Amnesty reports to make laws. She also suggested individuals and companies could sue Amnesty should they suffer material damages from BDS campaigns as a result of Amnesty's report, and US states could be encouraged to cut ties with Amnesty as its report calls for sanctions against Israel. (More than 30 US states have laws opposing boycotts of Israel.)

As for the possibility of expelling Amnesty employees – as Israel did with Human Rights Watch director Omar Shakir in 2018 for supporting BDS – Herzberg said she's unsure that method would work "because then they get to play the martyr, and they can still pretty much write the type of reports they want to write."

Amnesty enjoys a "privileged position" in the media, and people need to start holding them accountable, stressed Herzberg, who examined Amnesty's work in other countries and found the same shoddy reporting. Israel shouldn't cite Amnesty even when it might serve Israel's interests. (Amnesty has, for example, criticized Iran.) "It would be a huge mistake," she said. "They're not a credible organization. I started looking into what they're doing elsewhere. I noticed the same kind of flaws, especially when looking at armed-conflict reporting."

"The problem with Amnesty is organization-wide. It's not just Israel," she said. "They are totally driven by politics. The only reason they even started talking about Afghanistan was because the United States invaded. And even then, they were really only talking about US action in Afghanistan."

However, the bias is "most acute with Israel."

She said that it's clear in the new report that the problem that Amnesty has with Israel is that it's a Jewish state. "It's OK to have a Christian country or a Muslim country, or a Buddhist or Hindu country. Only a Jewish country – that, to them, is illegitimate."

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"Under the [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] IHRA definition [of anti-Semitism], denying the Jews the right to self-determination is anti-Semitism. And the only way, in Amnesty's explicit writing in this report, that Israel can rectify the apartheid issue is if they get rid of the things that make it a Jewish country, like the Law of Return," she said.

Safian agreed that Amnesty doesn't want Jews to have a state. In that respect, he said, Amnesty's ideology is no different from that of Hamas. "They differ only in tactics," he said.

Herzberg noted that the reports about Israel coming out of human-rights groups have been progressively more extreme. "The next level, I would assume, would be to completely endorse violence," she said, noting that in the current report "they're already talking about popular resistance."

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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A relatively small event – a Jan. 22 protest by the Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in the Gaza Strip in support of another Iranian-proxy, the Houthis – revealed a burgeoning problem for Hamas as the march unleashed a torrent of anti-Hamas rhetoric on social media in Gulf States, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The reaction, analysts tell JNS, is further indication that the terror group is losing sway in these countries.

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At the Gaza demonstration, dozens of PIJ protesters marched in solidarity with the Houthis after the Yemen-based group attacked the UAE in a drone strike, killing three and wounding six. (It has launched two more attacks since.) The protesters shouted, "Death to the House of Saud." The Saudis are leading a coalition against the rebel group.

Although Hamas didn't participate and quickly distanced itself from the protest – announcing that the demonstration didn't "represent our position and policy" – it was nevertheless blamed for the action.

"I have never heard this level of hatred echoed on social media as I have immediately after this march," Orit Perlov, a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) who analyzes social discourse in Arabic-speaking countries, told JNS. "For two days, there was anti-Gazan, anti-Hamas anger on social media in Kuwait, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, even though the march was organized by Palestinian Islamic Jihad."

The social-media rhetoric revolved around themes of Palestinian ingratitude, hypocrisy and treachery. "Last Ramadan, they asked us for food and then they yell 'Death to Saud' and 'Death to the UAE,' " said Perlov, describing a typical message.

Hatred towards Hamas among Gulf States lay beneath the surface for some time, she said. What is new and what the Gaza protest brought to the fore is a willingness to speak about it. "What was once said behind closed doors is now said in the open. They didn't have a problem saying bad stuff about the Palestinians before, but it was behind the scenes."

Even in Kuwait, in which half the parliament are Islamists, the social-media hostility "escalated very fast" with people calling for the closure of the Palestinian embassy, said Perlov, noting that in Kuwait, social-media users tried to draw a distinction between the Palestinian cause and Hamas. However, in Saudi Arabia, the case was different. An informal Twitter poll by Saudi paper Al-Arabiya asking, "Do you still support the Palestinian cause?" found that 97%, or some 32,000 people, said "not anymore."

"Hamas made a huge mistake allowing this march to happen," said Perlov. "It absolutely relies on Gulf money."

'Unraveling of some of support'

Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president of research at the Washington, D.C.-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, agreed, telling JNS that "there are these moments of miscalculation that we see from time to time."

"Hamas is utterly reliant upon patrons in order to survive," and this recent miscalculation reminded him of when former Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat backed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in his war against Kuwait.

"When you throw your support behind the Houthis, what you're basically saying is that you support the violent activities, the bloodshed in Yemen, the attacks on Saudi Arabia, the attacks on the UAE and the overall relationship with Iran," he said. "A lot of these pragmatic Gulf states have had it with all of Iran's proxies. They've had it with the seemingly endless violence and the instability that these actors bring to the region."

Schanzer, author of a book on the 11-day conflict last May between Israel, and Hamas and PIJ in the Gaza Strip, said that anti-Hamas sentiments on social media were already making themselves manifest then, by what he said were likely state efforts to mute pro-Hamas hashtag trends. "One began to get a sense during the war that a number of these Gulf Arab states … were not willing to allow this issue to drive their foreign policy," he said.

"What we've been watching steadily now is the unraveling of some of the support that Hamas has traditionally received," he added.

Schanzer stressed that the main factor driving a wedge between Hamas and the Gulf States is the latter's antipathy towards Iran. That antipathy was a key impetus for the Abraham Accords, the agreement signed in late 2020 between Israel and several Muslim states.

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Perlov, who traces the widening splits now being seen in the region further back to the Arab Spring in 2011, said that the Abraham Accords made the Palestinians realize that their cause was no longer the top concern among Arab states. "In the past, all the Arab states said that until you find a solution regarding the Israel-Palestinian conflict, we can't normalize relations with Israel."

The accords also acted as a watershed on social media, she said, freeing Gulf State populations to express themselves more openly about Palestinians and Israel, something that set the stage for the current eruption of anti-Hamas rhetoric.

She noted that the change offers an opportunity for Israel to promote its narrative. "There is a vacuum now in which more are willing to be pro-Israel."

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Experts are expressing mixed reactions on whether the recent resumption of US-Palestinian economic dialogue actually serves Israel's interests.

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Renewing the US-Palestinian Economic Dialogue (USPED), US and Palestinian officials gathered virtually on Dec. 14 to discuss "future areas of economic cooperation." It was the first high-level dialogue between the two sides in five years after relations soured under the previous US administration.

The meeting brought together agencies and ministries from the US government and Palestinian Authority to discuss infrastructure development, access to US markets and other issues related to Palestinian economic development, according to a State Department press release.

"The US government outlined programs that could support the Palestinian Authority's efforts towards financial issues, trade, and promoting foreign direct investment," the release stated.

The Israeli defense establishment wasn't pleased when the economic dialogue was broken off under former US President Donald Trump "because the worse the economic situation is in the West Bank, the more frustration and the better it is for Hamas and those who want to use violence to change the status quo," Jonathan Rynhold, who heads the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University, told JNS.

Assisting the PA,  Rynhold said, "helps advance several American goals. They want to keep alive the two-state solution. They want to keep the Palestinian Authority going. They don't want the PA to collapse and for there to be chaos, which would mean violence with Hamas." He noted all of these aspirations are "ways of being positive towards the Palestinians without being negative towards Israel."

"It's really a win-win action," he said, because Israel also wants to preserve the PA's authority as "the alternatives are much worse" – namely, Hamas.

Yet Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president of research at the Washington, DC-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, doesn't view renewed US-Palestinian economic dialogue as the best of bad alternatives. He said he would like to see the US pressure the PA for a change of leadership.

"Political life in the PA is moribund. There are few options for expressing one's discontent. People are arrested, poorly treated for criticizing the government. Abu Mazen (PA leader Mahmoud Abbas) has become a traditional autocrat in the Arab world," he told JNS. "And so, if they're trying to inflate the street value of the PA, so to speak, then throwing money at it and trying to legitimize it through international fora – it's putting a band-aid on the problem."

Schanzer said trying to bolster the PA through economic development isn't a long-term solution. "It may score points in terms of weakening Hamas and strengthening the PA in the very short term, but medium to long-term, the problems will persist," he said.

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The USPED meeting was driven by two factors, Schanzer explained – first, the Biden administration's determination to reverse all Trump-era policies, and second, the desire to "buoy" the PA in the aftermath of Operation Guardian of the Walls in May during which "Hamas sought to reassert itself through violence." Schanzer, who has written a book on that conflict, said Hamas, a rival to the PA, was successful in making itself the focus of attention.

Given well-documented issues of corruption in the PA, there is also concern whether economic benefits meant for the Palestinians will actually reach them. "The question is whether the Americans are, in return for the money, able to have some influence on the structure of how it gets spent," Rynhold said.

Rynhold noted that the US has successfully monitored aid to the Palestinians in the past, especially during the period when Salam Fayyad was the PA prime minister from 2007-2013. "In Salam Fayad's time, aid actually led to the development in the economy, to economic growth … It was one of those rare islands of success," he said.

Schanzer said he expects the PA's political echelon to be the chief beneficiary. "Corruption continues to be the number one complaint when we look at polls coming out of the West Bank. And I think that is a reflection of reality. So, you know, the idea that the PA can be transformed is hard to fathom."

"Does that mean no money will trickle down? I don't think we can go that far. But I think the overwhelming likelihood is that the elite continue to prosper in a system designed to favor the connected and powerful," he said.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Israel, Greece and Cyprus held its eighth trilateral meeting in Jerusalem on Tuesday. It was notable for being the first to feature a new Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, who said during a joint press conference with the heads of Cyprus and Greece, that the alliance is "good for our people, good for our countries and good for the region."

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Among topics on the agenda were the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and the major energy projects undertaken by the three nations, including the $7 billion EastMed gas pipeline that will run from Israel through Cyprus and Greece to Europe and the $9 billion Euro-Asia Interconnector, the world's longest and deepest undersea power cable.

"We saw that on the Greek side, there have been changes over the years, but on the Israeli side, it has only been Netanyahu," she said, noting that "now there's this new element" in the person of Bennett.

Julie Fishman Rayman, senior director of policy and political affairs for the American Jewish Committee, agreed. "The relationship between Greece, Cyprus and Israel now is so strong and so coordinated, it's easy to forget that it hasn't always been that way. And for a long time, the relationship was pretty contentious," she told JNS.

The AJC played a key role in helping to develop the Congressional Hellenic Israel Alliance Caucus, among whose main issue is to strengthen the Eastern Mediterranean partnership between Israel, Greece and Cyprus. The United States seeks to nurture the trilateral alliance as it reinforces a number of key American interests in the region, among them, deepening Israel's strategic depth.

Other US interests include countering Russia and Turkey's moves in the region. "Countering Russia's longtime hold on energy in that part of the world – that's a big piece of it. Addressing the ongoing, if not increased aggression by Turkey, as it relates to Greece and Cyprus, and their exclusive economic zones … all of those types of things are critical," said Rayman.

Turkey has ignored the internationally accepted exclusive economic zones in the maritime waters of both Cyprus and Greece after large deposits of natural gas were found in the eastern Mediterranean.

At the Dec. 7 press conference, Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades referred to "Ankara's aggressive policy" vis-à-vis its incursion into the maritime economic zones claimed by his island country. He also sharply criticized Turkey for its actions in northern Cyprus, which it has occupied since 1974. He said Turkey was flouting "international law and norms" in "pursuing a revisionist policy, according to which might is right."

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis supported Anastasiades at the press conference, also speaking against Turkey.

Of the three players at the summit, Lindenstrauss said Cyprus is "under the most pressure" from Turkey. In July, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited the northern part of the island and called for a two-state solution to the problem rather than the internationally accepted view that there should be a reintegration of the Turkish-occupied area into Cyprus.

Bennett remained silent on the issue during the press conference as Lindenstrauss said that navigating between the two sides "is a big dilemma for Jerusalem." She said the alliance with Greece and Cyprus has strengthened but Turkey remains a "major actor in the region," one that Israel doesn't want to antagonize unnecessarily.

Both Lindenstrauss and Rayman view the trilateral alliance as a major success. "The discovery that we have close neighbors in the West with whom we can really strongly cooperate – I think that's the element that is very clear in this trilateral alliance," said Lindenstrauss.

"The fact that Cyprus is basically as close to Israel as Cuba to Florida, and that Greece and Cyprus are this force of stability and safety along the Mediterranean really fundamentally changes Israel's neighborhood," agreed Rayman. "Suddenly, Israel has the strategic depth, a friendly border that didn't necessarily exist before."

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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It was as remarkable as it was unexpected. More than 300 Iraqis, both Sunnis and Shiites, gathered at a conference in a hotel ballroom on Sept. 24 in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Erbil to demand their country join the Abraham Accords and forge ties with the Jewish state.

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Still more surprising, the participants weren't Kurds, as might be expected, given that the conference took place in the capital of Kurdistan and Kurds have a long history of cooperation with Israel. Instead, the participants came from six Iraqi governorates: Baghdad, Mosul, Al-Anbar, Salahuddin, Diyala, and Babel.

"They arrived in a fleet of 60 cars over 12 hours before the conference," Joseph Braude, founder and president of the Center for Peace Communications, the US-based group that organized the conference, told JNS.

While expressing his gratitude to the Kurdistan Regional Government for providing logistical and security support, he said the conference was about the parts of Iraq that haven't engaged with Jews and Israel, "where cultural change is most urgently needed now."

If the conference surprised many, the reaction to it did not – arrest warrants, death threats, and wanted posters the size of buildings targeting participants.

Few who listened to the conference speeches (some of which are available on YouTube with English subtitles) could doubt the courage of those who took part.

The best-known of the speakers, Sheikh Wisam Al-Hardan, who led the "Sons of Iraq Awakening" movement, the Sunni tribal fight against ISIS and Al-Qaeda, demanded "full diplomatic relations with the State of Israel."

He dismissed Iraq's anti-normalization laws that criminalize associating with Zionists, saying "we declare here and now that no power, be it foreign or domestic, has the right to prevent us from issuing this call and acting upon it."

'They want to join the winning team'

On the day of the conference, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Al-Hardan in which he repeated the call for Arab-Israel rapprochement, saying that the next step will be "face-to-face talks with Israelis."

However, the momentum the conference hoped to build hit a snag. With post-conference pressure mounting—Al-Hardan and other participants faced arrest warrants by the Iraqi government and death threats by Iranian-backed militias – the sheikh disavowed his participation, claiming that he'd been "duped."

Braude, who told JNS that Al-Hardan had informed him the day after the conference about his intention to recant, said: "Picture you're driving on the road and a billboard the size of a house has the photographs of the speakers at the conference and calls for their death. They knew that they were courting enormous risk."

Al Hardan's disavowal suggests that they didn't recognize just how great that risk was.

It was Iranian intervention, said Robert Greenway, executive director of the Abraham Accords Peace Institute, who was responsible for US government policy for the Middle East and North Africa on the National Security Council during the Trump administration. Iran saw it as an attack on its inroads into Iraq, he said.

"Speaking out for peace in the region and for peace with Israel is a way for the Iraqis to say, 'We're willing to make any choice to balance Iranian influence in the region.' I think that's the way it was interpreted. That's the way it was meant," Greenway told JNS.

There is "no question" that a rejection of Iran is a major reason for Iraqis' desire to partner with Israel, Braude acknowledged. "Iraqis naturally identify with people elsewhere in the region who also reject Iranian impositions on their lives."

But according to Braude, that's only part of the story.

There's "an emerging divide" in the region between failed states that have descended into chaos and stable states marked by development, he said. "Iraqis are looking around and seeing their country could go in one direction or the other, and they want to join the winning team."

'Baghdad is a city of Jewish ghosts'

For conference participants, Iraq's Jewish legacy, which dates back 2,600 years, also plays a role. "Aside from Israel itself, Jewish history runs deeper in the land of the two rivers than in any other country in the world," said Braude.

"Forty percent of the city of Baghdad was Jewish on the eve of the Second World War. It was a much more Jewish city than Brooklyn," he said. "Baghdad today is a city of Jewish ghosts. And it has proved impossible to excise them from the country."

It's that part of the story that gives Braude's efforts in Iraq a personal dimension. His mother, who watched the conference online, is an Iraqi Jew, forced to flee her Baghdad home at the age of 5. "I am proud to be the son of a mother born in Baghdad … she raised us with love for Iraq and its people," he told the conference.

Others at the conference condemned Iraq's mistreatment of its Jewish population, the majority of whom fled to Israel between 1950 and 1951. "This vile history of dispossession of the Jews also amounted in effect to cutting one of the principal veins of the body of Iraq," said Al-Hardan. "We acknowledge this injustice and denounce it with all our might."

Another speaker, Sahar Karim al-Ta'i, a senior official in Iraq's Ministry of Culture, said of Iraq's Jews: "They look to Iraq and are still looking to her, waiting for the eyes of their proverbial mother to show affection for her lost children."

Braude remains optimistic, despite Al-Hardan's forced about-face. The "vast trend" in Iraqi society is towards peace with Israel, he said, with one opinion poll finding that 42 percent of Iraqis favor immediate normalization.

As further evidence, he pointed to Iraqi interest in the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) Arabic social-media presence. "On Facebook, for example, it operates two pages. One is called 'Israel Speaks Arabic.' It has about 3.5 million followers across the region. The only country-specific MFA Facebook page is 'Israel in Iraqi Dialect,' which was created by overwhelming popular demand from Iraqis who followed the pan-Arab page," he said.

"A few months ago, the number following 'Israel in Iraqi Dialect' exceeded 500,000. In other words, there were more Iraqis following the MFA in Arabic than there are Jews living in Tel Aviv," he noted. Concerned by Iraqis' eagerness to connect with Israel, Iranian-backed militias began targeting individuals who followed the page, according to Braude.

For Greenway, the public silence in Iraq following the conference spoke volumes. Unpopular statements are "invariably" met with widespread discontent in Iraq; "if you were to denounce the soccer team, for example, you would hear about it," he said.

Another kind of silence about the conference, which Greenway said was unfortunate, was that of the United States. He noted that this was in part due to its concern not to appear to be injecting itself into Iraqi politics before an election (Iraqi elections took place on Oct. 10). Still, he said the United States should have demonstrated that it stood "side by side with those who are calling for peace."

Broadcasting that message was especially important after the Afghanistan pullout, he said, which has shaken faith among US partners regarding American commitment to the region.

Greenway, who worked with Al-Hardan and Sons of Iraq "before it was known by that name," said "we partnered with this man specifically, and his family and organization. He took huge risks. He's taking huge risks now. And I just think it's unfortunate that we're not vocally supporting him as we did when he took up sides with us against ISIS."

Braude said he doesn't pretend to know why the United States hasn't voiced support for the peace conference, though hopes that "the US government will stand with Iraqis who share its commitment to Arab-Israeli peace and the expansion of the Abraham Accords."

Greenway noted that those he spoke with regionally who are part of the Abraham Accords were encouraged by the conference. "We expect a lot more voices coming out for normalization and for peace," he said. "It's my hope in the coming days and weeks that [conference participants] will find out just how wide and far the support, friendship and encouragement is."

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Israel's government unanimously agreed on July 25 to adopt a low-carbon economy, "part of its commitment to the global effort" to reduce greenhouse gases. It is the first time that Israel has set a national goal to reduce carbon emissions. In doing so, it joins a host of countries that have made similar announcements over the last several years.

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Some praise the plan, saying Israel must act as the "science is in," and the world faces an imminent global climate crisis. Others scoff at the "so-called science" and say there is no justification for overhauling Israel's economy – that it will be "all pain, no gain."

The plan calls for an 85% reduction in carbon emissions from 2015 levels by 2050 and sets an intermediate goal of a 27% reduction by 2030. To hit those targets, it calls for major changes to the transportation, manufacturing and energy sectors.

There already appears to be disagreement within the Ministry of Environmental Protection about the plan. As presented on the ministry's website, the plan calls for natural gas to play an integral role. Natural gas has led to a "dramatic decline in local pollutant emissions," it said. "Thanks to these measures, Israel already meets about 75% of the target required for reducing CO2 emissions within the framework of its obligations under the Paris Agreements."

Yet Environmental Protection Minister Tamar Zandberg criticized natural gas on June 29 during a climate change panel at an Israel Democracy Institute conference. "I want to correct a common mistake … natural gas is as natural as coal. It is fossil fuel," she said.

Israel's timing was meant to coincide with a new report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which will underpin the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in November, where participating countries will likely undertake to curb their emissions more sharply.

"It was to show support of the IPCC and the UN in general and to say that we are concerned with climate change," Gideon Behar, special envoy for climate change and sustainability at Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told JNS.

The first installment of the IPCC's Sixth Annual Assessment Report, released on Aug. 9, lays the blame for global warming squarely on man-made emissions and for the first time (on the basis of what it says are improved models) links extreme weather to climate change.

"The evidence is clear that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main driver of climate change," the IPCC said in a press release about the report, painting a bleak future for the planet if global warming rises above pre-industrial levels by two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

While stating that "the climate crisis demands from us immense changes to our lifestyle, to our economy," Behar said he sees opportunities for Israeli technology. "Know-how and technologies are very much needed. Israel is outstanding in its experience and capacity in the field of climate innovation," he said, noting Israeli advances in areas such as water conservation and desalinization, innovative energy technologies and alternative proteins, which could free up land areas currently devoted to raising livestock.

Behar said no one should question climate change: "There's no place for doubt anymore. We need to move forward and if skeptics need more examples, they should look at the huge firestorms in Siberia, Greece, Turkey."

Pinhas Alpert, professor emeritus in atmospheric sciences in the department of Geophysics at Tel Aviv University, told JNS that climate change is the greatest threat humans are facing. For him, the most dramatic evidence is his own research showing the Fertile Crescent has been drying up over the last 20 years. He also cited his 2002 study of extreme daily precipitation over the Mediterranean Sea.

Alpert says that, if anything, Israel did not go far enough given other developed countries have adopted 100% carbon reductions versus Israel's 85%.

'Demonizing carbon dioxide is just crazy'

Nevertheless, questions are being raised about the conclusions of the latest IPCC report, as well as the wisdom of Israel's transitioning to a carbon-free economy.

Richard Lindzen, a leading atmospheric physicist and professor emeritus of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been fighting the scientific establishment on climate change for 30 years.

When asked his opinion of Israeli solutions to climate change, Lindzen said: "Solution implies there is a problem." The real question is if the plan's worth doing. To that, he replied: "Not at all."

"Demonizing carbon dioxide is just crazy," said Lindzen. "It means we have a population that's forgotten elementary biology. They don't remember photosynthesis. We've already benefited due to the increase in CO2 by probably over a trillion dollars increase in agricultural productivity. The earth is greening due to this."

"If you were to believe the worst scenarios of the IPCC," it still wouldn't matter what Israel did, he said, referring to Israel's tiny carbon footprint when compared to major polluters like China, the United States and European Union.

According to the reference website Our World in Data, Israel accounted for only a 0.17% share of global emissions in 2017, the latest year data is available.

Lindzen, who was the lead authort on the third report, dismissed the new IPCC report. "What people focus on is the 'Summary for Policymakers,' which is about 40 pages vs. the 3,500-page full report. He said politicians write the summary and "count on the fact that people won't read the report. It doesn't even have an index. But if you read the report, you realize it doesn't say what the summary says."

He pointed to recent tweets from Roger Pielke Jr., professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado who has gone through the full report, finding comments like, "No likelihood is attached to the scenarios assessed in this report," and "The socio-economic assumptions and the feasibility or likelihood of individual scenarios is not part of the assessment." (Lindzen likened this to what lawyers call plausible deniability.)

Pielke also found that "the scenarios IPCC admits are unlikely dominate the report" with the most extreme climate scenarios getting the most mentions (53%).

Lindzen argued that the field of climate science was politicized when it became flush with government funding in the 1990s. "Until then, it was a tiny field. In 1990, no one at MIT called themselves a climate scientist. You were a meteorologist, a geochemist, an oceanographer. Within those disciplines you had an interest in climate. Now they're all climate scientists."

'We have to pay the price of more expensive energy'

Nir Shaviv, a professor of physics at Hebrew University, told JNS that he feels many climate scientists are under pressure to produce alarming reports.

There is "such a large climate industry that people need to publish things that show a large effect [from man-made emissions], or they don't get grants," he explained.

Shaviv said the IPCC's scientists are not looking at all the evidence. "The thing that they're totally missing is the fact that the sun has a big effect on climate. We can simulate it in large-scale simulations. So I'm totally confident after 20 years that the link is there, the sun has a large effect on climate."

"It warmed between 1910 and 1940, then for 30 years, there was a cooling trend, and then it warmed from 1970 to 2000, and that explains a large fraction of the warming," he explained.

Asked by JNS about the feasibility of Israel's carbon reduction plan, Shaviv said: "These kinds of things are feasible if they're willing to pay the price. Obviously, you can fill the Negev Desert with photovoltaic cells if you want. But is it the smart thing to do? I think the answer is no."

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He noted the high energy prices in Europe, whose economy is just emerging from a decade of stagnation. "Industries are leaving Europe because they can't afford the price of energy and manpower. They always had the problem with expensive manpower. They now have energy price problems."

Bloomberg reported on Aug. 5 that "in Europe, utilities pay near-record prices to buy the pollution permits they need to keep producing power from fossil fuels."

Israel announced on Aug. 2 that it, too, will adopt a carbon tax that will go into effect in 2023. Paid by consumers, it is meant to act as a brake on fuel consumption. "The step we are taking today is historic and aligns with the developed countries struggling with the climate crisis," said Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

"They think the world is going to end. So we have to do something. We have to pay the price of more expensive energy," said Shaviv, who blames not politicians but scientists for pushing false scenarios. "They are fooling the media. They are fooling the politicians. They are fooling the youngsters who want to do good for the environment."

He said that most ignore a solution that is staring the world in the face. "If global warming was a serious problem – and it isn't – but even if it was, there's a clear solution which you can adopt which is cheap and can supply all the energy requirements, it's stable, it's everything you want, and it's called nuclear," he said.

If he could give advice to Israel's government, he would say "concentrate on real environmental issues," like smog in the Tel Aviv area. "There are a lot of things in the here and now as opposed to something which is mostly extremely exaggerated."

Lindzen agreed. His advice to Israel? "Ignore the climate crisis. Israel's already an outlier. Let the rest of the world commit [economic] suicide."

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Likud MK Galit Distel-Atbaryan, who says Facebook targeted her for her right-wing views, has introduced a bill to give citizens recourse should they find themselves out of favor with social networks.

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"The Social Networks Bill," in its explanatory section, says that while online networks like Facebook want to prevent undesirable phenomena such as radicalization and violence, "it seems that the removal of content and the blocking of users is done arbitrarily, without the users being given the opportunity to understand the reason for the blocking, and without the actual possibility of appealing it."

The bill requires social networks to clearly state their policies for removing content and blocking users by providing "an available response in the Hebrew language for the investigation of complaints" and to provide a way for users to query about removal policies.

The bill also clarifies when users can seek damages in court, permitting "litigation against the social networks operating in Israel under Israeli law, in order to prevent the situation of a legal vacuum in which damages are created without redress."

The proposed law is identical to one introduced by former Likud MK Amit Halevi in November 2020. Distal-Atbaryan decided to resubmit it.

"It's a very important law because what we see now is, on the one hand, privatization of the vehicles of speech, and on the other hand, monopolization of the vehicles of speech," Jerusalem-based attorney Itzhak Bam told JNS. Bam has built a reputation in Israel as an authority on free-speech issues, having represented many free speech cases in court.

Some argue social media networks are private companies and should be allowed to block whom they want, said Bam. However, he explained social media is an oligopoly, with a few companies, like Facebook and Twitter, controlling most of the market.

"If you have two or three major players that provide the playground and those players virtually control your ability to exercise your freedom of speech, and all the discussion of public issues is now happening on social media, blocking speakers on social media affects the democratic process," he said.

"If you had 1,000 different companies competing against each other, you have no justification for the government to step in. But when it's an oligopoly that rules the social-media market and the market affects civil rights, there should be a possibility for citizens, for a private person, to sue them if they silence him," said Bam.

Whether or not social media is specifically targeting those with right-wing views isn't possible to know for certain, he said, because only the companies have that information.  The information "is in the hands of Facebook and Facebook will never release it."

Distal-Atbaryan is certain that only one side of the discourse is in social media's crosshairs. At a June 21 Knesset meeting she organized for Israeli citizens, public figures and fellow Knesset members, she described how she had been warned by Facebook a week earlier that she had violated its "community standards" in a post two weeks beforehand. Her account was temporarily restricted.

JNS reached out to Facebook for comment, but the company didn't reply.

The post that led to the warning was a call in early June to protest at the home of Yamina MK Nir Orbach to convince him to vote against the Bennett-Lapid government. The post included Orbach's home address, which Distal-Atbaryan was informed was what led to the warning.

"What's surprising in this story is that both Left and Right protested in front of the home of Nir Orbach. The posts that advertised the Left's protest were not blocked. The posts that advertised the Right's protest were blocked," she said. "Here's an incident in which it's possible to see it in an almost mathematical way, almost scientific – the same content, blocked on the Right, continuing to run on the Left. This is no longer speculation. … This is real."

Avi Abelow, CEO of Israelunwired.com and Pulseofisrael.com, said that he favored any law that would make social media companies liable for their censorship. On July 1, he told JNS that everyone associated with his business had their personal accounts disabled. "I never received any explanation why we were all terminated. It wasn't like a notice of 'you're in Facebook jail' or 'this post violates this' – nothing. It's just 'you're suspended and you have 30 days to appeal. For what? No reason."

On July 7, he informed JNS that his account and those of his staff had been reinstated. Again, he says, "no reason."

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org

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A new report by pro-Israel NGO Im Tirtzu reveals that over the last five years, UN. encies have funneled at least $40 million to radical anti-Israel groups, some with terror ties. It also offers a prescription: a Taylor Force Act applied to the United Nations.

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Passed by Congress in 2018, the Taylor Force Act, named after a US war veteran and graduate student killed by a terrorist while visiting Israel, conditions US aid to the Palestinian Authority on its halting payments to terrorists. The PA puts such a high premium on these payments that its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, said in July 2018: "If we are left with one penny, we will spend it on the families of the prisoners and martyrs."

The law led the Trump administration to cut more than $200 million to the PA.

Eytan Meir, Im Tirtzu's director of external relations and development, tells JNS that a US law holding the UN accountable for funding malevolent NGOs will lead the United Nations to become more transparent and take greater care in its review of its "implementing partners," the UN's term of art for organizations to which it channels funds to carry out in-country projects.

The United States is the largest financial supporter of the United Nations, providing 22% of its financial support (China is a distant second with 12%). "Americans should know what their money is going toward. I think it would shock most Americans to learn that their tax dollars are going to terror-linked organizations," said Meir.

Ties to terrorism and the BDS movement

Anne Herzberg, legal adviser of NGO Monitor, said a UN Taylor Force Act is a "good idea."

"We've also suggested it in our reports that money to the UN should be blocked if it's going to be used for terror-linked partners," she tells JNS.

More than a third of the Palestinian groups (eight of 19) identified in the report, titled The United Nations' Funding of Radical Anti-Israel Organizations, have ties to terrorism. Virtually all of them support the BDS movement that calls for boycotts against Israel.

Meir notes that in July 2019, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution against BDS (398-17) with numerous US states passing their own anti-BDS laws. "It's the general consensus that BDS is not something that America supports. But then you have all this money going towards BDS."

To identify the nature of the NGOs receiving money, the report relied on work by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, whose February 2019 report Terrorists in Suits detailed the links between terror groups and anti-Israel NGOs. The ministry told JNS that it has brought attention to "the UN's financial support of Palestinian NGOs with ties to internationally designated terror organizations throughout the years. … The Ministry calls on the UN to cease any and all support it still provides to Palestinian 'human rights' NGOs which instead of protecting human life, seek to end it through their continued ties to terror groups."

Most of the NGOs on the list sound innocuous, like the Agriculture Development Association, Women's Affairs Center and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Yet all have been linked to promoting BDS. The last has ties to two terror groups, Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). These three NGOs alone collected more than $5 million from UN agencies between 2016 and 2020.

"They all have nice names, but then you look into what they do. One of these groups is an environmental group; you think, 'Great, they want to improve the environmental situation in Gaza.' Then you go on their website and see their videos, and they're all dedicated to attacking Israel, to accusing Israel of everything under the sun, and that's essentially what all these groups are doing," said Meir.

Herzberg noted that the groups listed in the report support a one-state solution – that is, "Palestine" in place of Israel, meaning the United Nations is channeling money to groups that contradict its own position. "The UN framework is two states for two peoples, and I don't think any of those groups support that."

The United Nations channels funds to the NGOs primarily via three agencies: the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) and UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund).

The agencies are not always transparent about where they're sending the money they receive from donors, stated Meir, noting that OCHA is "the worst in documenting where things are going." The report includes a screenshot of a 2018 OCHA grant. Under "implementing partners" it lists "N/A" (not available). In some cases, OCHA listed the implementing partners but not how much money each received.

JNS reached out to all three agencies for comment but received no reply.

'The bigger issue is the Europeans'

Herzberg said it's important to point out that the UN agencies are not supplying the money. The UN agencies act more as a "clearinghouse," directing money from a donor to an ostensibly humanitarian project within the region. Sometimes, the money comes from a country, like Canada or the European Union, "which I think is really important because the funders are the people who need to be held accountable."

In most cases, UN agencies aren't picking the projects either, said Herzberg. They rely on a group called the Humanitarian Country Team (HCT), described by OCHA as a "forum of humanitarian organizations operating in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt)." The HCT is comprised of UN agency heads and two NGO umbrella groups, one of which is the Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO). PNGO refused to sign an anti-terror clause, which is a condition of U.S. government funding. In 2007, PNGO launched a boycott against USAID when the group introduced updated anti-terrorism procedures. Nine of the 19 groups listed in the Im Tirtzu report are members of PNGO.

OCHA's website description of PNGO is at odds with reality: "The Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO) seeks to support, consolidate and strengthen Palestinian civil society on the basis of the principles of democracy, social justice and sustainable development."

The Palestinians are basically the ones choosing the projects, says Herzberg, and they have no trouble working with terrorists. "Almost all the so-called human-rights NGOs – they're part of the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine]. I think it was in the 1990s a deliberate strategy by the PFLP to set up these NGOs as a good way to do propaganda and perhaps also to funnel money to themselves."

Herzberg noted that the role of the United Nations is important because it gives the donor governments some plausible deniability: "Oh, it's a UN project" is a response to deflect criticism.

With the UN funding process ripe for reform, the question is whether the Biden administration will be open to a Taylor Force Act, particularly as it has rebooted funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the biggest source of humanitarian aid for the Palestinians and one that has been widely criticized for corruption.

Meir said it's unlikely, though Herzberg is more optimistic. "With UNRWA, they've wanted to increase the oversight. [US Secretary of State Antony] Blinken made a speech about that not too long ago. And certainly, it's an issue for members of Congress. So I do think they'd be amenable to it."

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"The bigger issue is the Europeans. You could have US legislation, but a lot of the money comes from Europe and from individual European governments," said Herzberg. Even in Europe, which is so "wedded" to the idea of NGOS that "they don't even look at the outcome or the product of what they're funding," progress can be made through "naming and shaming," she added.

"When you actually expose how the money is being used to the parliaments back in Europe, people are usually pretty shocked," she said. "They just had no idea their money was going to those types of programs or counterproductive initiatives, and oftentimes, they've been very embarrassed because many of the groups have ties to terror groups."

Following such exposure, she continued, "generally, they start taking a closer examination, and that's a good way to end the funding."

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org

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