Israel Update Week Ending November 12
Diplomacy, Defense, Covid, Economy and More
Finally! A week when I can say it was relatively quiet in Israel. That's not to say there wasn’t any news, however. With the budget passed, the tension of a possible new election has receded, and the government -- whose main calling card has been a ‘return to normalcy’,-- is indeed seeing it happen. Ministers are dealing with the areas that are under their responsibility. They are not fighting with each other and seem to be conducting their work in a collegial manner. Amazing!
The "biggest" political story of the week was that the Ram party voted with the opposition on a law to build a hospital in Sachnin. Except for Nazareth, a mixed Arab-Jewish city, there are no hospitals in the relatively small Arab towns.
Diplomacy
With the conclusion of various international meetings, it has also been a relatively quiet week on the diplomacy front. The biggest news surrounded two Congressional Delegations: one, a bipartisan trip and the other from J Street. The J Street delegation engendered a bit of controversy since this was the first time in four years that Israeli government representatives met with a delegation from J-street. That would be Foreign Minister Lapid and Prime Minister Bennett. I appeared on ILTV to discuss the meeting. Click the link here to watch that discussion. Suffice it to say, while I fundamentally disagree with J Street, I do think the government should meet with them. Bennett actually tweeted that it had been a good meeting.
But the J-Street missions are inherently problematic in that they also visit Palestinians in the West Bank. The meetings themselves are not problematic -- it's the accompanying narrative. Most would agree that the Palestinians feel they are suffering in one form or another. Representative Jamaal Bowman tweeted from Hebron after meeting with Palestinians who live there, "End the Occupation." But understanding why you cannot just snap your fingers and ‘end the occupation requires a sense of history, and that level of understanding is not something you can acquire on a quick visit. So it's natural for an uninformed visitor seeing modern Israel on the one hand, and the contrasting despair in the West Bank on the other (as well as Gaza) to identify the Palestinians as living under oppression and Israel as the guilty party. Those feelings generate statements like Bowman’s. The true story is complex and nuanced; the Palestinian story seems simple at first glance. Hence, an oversimplification of the problem as seen through the prism of J Street.
Defense
According to various reliable reports, Israel twice attacked Iranian targets in Syria over the past week.
A major Air Force exercise is now over but it is now the Navy's turn. The Israeli Navy, the US Navy, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates are jointly conducting navy exercises in the Red Sea. According to high-ranking Israeli Navy officials, Israel and its allies must be prepared for Iran to try to establish itself in the Red Sea.
In the meantime, the Air Force has been almost regularly escorting US B-1 bombers across Israel on to the Gulf, another signal to Iran
Scorpius, a new electronic warfare system has been unveiled by the Israel Aircraft Industry. It is designed to simultaneously defend against multiple threat vectors with narrow beams that interfere with electronic signals.
COVID-19
Israel's numbers remain good and are slowly edging lower. In my view, it's concerning that the numbers have not dropped more. But because people are taking almost no precautions at this point, these facts should surprise no one. Four million Israelis have received a booster shot so far. On Wednesday, approval was given to begin vaccinating children ages 5-12 years, with overwhelming support of the medical board. On a negative note, for the past few weeks, there have been death threats against Dr. Sharon Elroi Preiss, head of Health Services in the Ministry of Health. Two people have been arrested for plotting to harm her, and she now receives round-the-clock protection. The reasons for the anger specifically at her are unclea
r other than the fact that she has been a vocal supporter of Israel’s laxly enforced “green pass” for those fully vaccinated.
Economy
The Israeli Monopoly Authority has detained for questioning -- and seized the computers and phones many of the food industry’s leading figures, including the CEO of Supersol Israel's largest supermarket chain and the CEO of Osem, one of Israel's largest food producers. The suspicion is these leaders conspired to raise prices. As far back as two years ago, I wrote that the prices of food in Israel are high. Everybody in the industry is blaming someone else, the farmers, the wholesalers, the supermarkets. One of the significant reforms passed by the government as part of the budget, was the free import of agricultural products. If competition works, that move should bring down prices. If, however, the industry's significant players are colluding, prices will remain high. Hats off to the Monopoly Authority for taking on some of the strongest players in the business world. Hopefully, there will be something positive to report in the coming weeks.
Elbit announced that it had received two significant contracts this week. The first to supply South Korea with $74 million in airborne munitions. The second is to provide the Royal Navy with electronic warfare systems. That deal is worth $100 million over 13 years.
Lusha, the crowdsourced data community for B2B sales and marketing professionals, announced today that it had raised $205 million in a Series B funding round, which values the company at $1.5 billion thereby achieving unicorn status. The round was led by PSG, a growth equity firm partnering with middle-market software and technology-enabled services companies, with additional investment by ION Crossover Partners, bringing total investment in the company to $245 million.
TriEye has raised $74 million to commercialize a sensing technology designed to help autonomous and driver-assistance systems see better under adverse conditions.
The technology uses short-wave infrared (SWIR), which refers to a wavelength range outside the visible spectrum. While SWIR sensing is not new, it has mostly been restricted to the aerospace and defense industries due to its high cost. However, TriEye reports it has made engineering breakthroughs that have driven down the price enough so as to compete with regular cameras (that can be found in a mobile phone or vehicle today and to outperform other types of sensors on the market). M&G Investments and Varana Capital led this latest round of funding, with Samsung Ventures, Tawazun SDF, Deep Insight, Allied Group, Discount Capital, and existing investors Intel Capital Porsche Marius Nacht, and Grove Ventures. The round brings TriEye's total funding to $96 million.
Steadicopter, an Israeli company that focuses on the field of rotary unmanned aerial systems (RUAS) industry, has unveiled the Black Eagle 50 Electric -- the newest model in its RUAV family, powered by electric motors and designed for a wide range of law enforcement, maritime, civilian and covert missions.
Addenda
This morning I had an interesting interaction that I would like to share. Every weekend, on Thursday evening and Friday morning, protesters opposite the Ministry of Defense set up a tent and show a video of settlers attacking Palestinians. This morning one of the protesters got my attention. He held up a sign that simply said, “talk to me”. So I did just that. He was a gentleman approximately my age, and my discussion with him was similar to most conversations with people protesting the occupation. I agree with the protesters that the occupation is terrible, but I am very pessimistic that anything can be done. That was not the interesting part of the discussion; however, a few minutes after we started talking, two young women soon to enter the army stopped and asked him what he meant by "Kibosh" conquering. He gave a long answer about what it means to control other people's lives and all the terrible things we are doing to the Palestinians. I simplified it a little by saying that it means that we agreed to the partition, and all the land we "conquered" in 67 without giving citizenship was occupied land. The most interesting part of the discussion was their answer. They agreed with everything he said; that the occupation is terrible and the settlers are doing bad things to the Palestinians. But they wanted to know how do we end it? He responded by saying, look what happened with Egypt and peace. He had opposed the agreement, and look; no soldiers have died in Sinai since. They answered, but that is a government and a nation; how do we get the Palestinians to agree to live with us in peace. In the end, he had no answer but to say, look, it worked in Northern Ireland; we can't live in a perpetual state of war. For me, the lesson was that two 17 years olds understood what I have come to the conclusion that there is no solution to our conflict on the visible horizon, which of course, leaves me as depressed as ever thinking about that aspect of our lives. Of course every time a left wing politician like Congressman Bowman tweets “end the occupation” I am not only depressed but angry that 17 year olds understand reality better than they do.
While of course there is no easy ending to the occupation nor is one in sight for the immediate future that does not equate to settlement and continued civilian presence in the area.
In fact, it could be argued, that there is a consensus among the majority of Israelis to never end the occupation, but to continue to entrench it by means of continued civilian settlement. As such, the settler movement have achieved their objective of creating a status quo which makes withdrawal from the West Bank impossible and de facto apartheid like conditions in the West Bank the acceptable, to Israel, status quo for the indefinite future.