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Israel Sends Dozens of Drones to Gaza, Lapid Cancels his Vacation

Friday, 5 August, 2022

Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid canceled his vacation due to the security situation in the south of the country, according to the Hebrew Channel 14.

Lapid’s office said in a statement that the prime minister canceled his leave and will assess the situation at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv.

Israel sent dozens of drones into Gaza Strip amid the state of alert among its forces in the vicinity of the Palestinian enclave.

Tel Aviv is expecting a possible response after its brutal arrest and assault of the leader of the Islamic Jihad movement in Jenin, Bassam al-Saadi.

Hebrew media said that the Israeli Air Force attacked the Gaza Strip’s borders to “target armed cells” that might launch anti-tank missiles or rockets or carry out sniping operations toward Israeli targets.

Meanwhile, the Chief of the General Staff, Aviv Kohavi, visited the Gaza Division and held an operational-security situational assessment with the Commanding Officer, Nimrod Aloni.

Kohavi ordered the Israeli forces to increase readiness for escalation and expand defensive and intelligence efforts.

Israeli Broadcasting Corporation (Makan) announced that the area near the Gaza Strip witnessed a state of alert. Roads were shut and train stations were closed.

Israel closed Kerem Shalom commercial crossing and the Beit Hanoun crossing.

Based on a new assessment of the security situation, the Israeli army sent a letter to Gaza residents announcing the extension of the state of alert for another day.

According to Israel’s Channel 14, the army will not tolerate maintaining the state of alert in the Gaza Strip for a long time and may replace this with economic sanctions, such as banning fishing in the Gaza sea and keeping the crossings closed, in an attempt to put financial pressure.

The Israeli army confirmed it has a strong intelligence warning that Islamic Jihad plans to operate on the border between Israel and the Strip soon.

The Ynet website said these attacks might include anti-tank missiles, snipers, or missiles.

Islamic Jihad official Khaled al-Batsh said that the movement responded to the Egyptian efforts, given that attacks and arrests stopped in the West Bank.

Israel refused and arrested 20 Palestinians on Thursday.

Later, a Hamas delegation left for Egypt to contain the situation. The movement does not want an escalation from Gaza, but it will not prevent the Islamic Jihad if an agreement is not reached, according to Israeli estimates.

The Israeli Minister of Tourism, Yoel Razvozov, said that the relevant authorities are working at the military and political levels to end the current tension.

Razvozov stressed that the decision to restrict movement in the region was taken after carefully studying the situation and in consultation with intelligence agencies.

He made it clear that Israel wants to calm the situation and will not allow the Islamic Jihad to escalate the situation or impose its conditions, warning that Tel Aviv will continue to respond to any breach from the Strip.

The Israeli minister tried to calm the Jewish settlers in the communities surrounding the Gaza Strip, who expressed anger at the continued Israeli restrictions. The settlers demanded compensation from the Israeli government, and some had to leave their homes.

Source: Asharq al-Awsat.

Link: https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3799146/israel-sends-dozens-drones-gaza-lapid-cancels-his-vacation.

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Israeli president picks Netanyahu to try and form government

April 06, 2021

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s president on Tuesday handed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the difficult task of trying to form a government from the country’s splintered parliament, giving the embattled leader a chance to prolong his lengthy term in office while on trial for corruption charges.

In his announcement, President Reuven Rivlin acknowledged that no party leader had the necessary support to form a majority coalition in the 120-seat Knesset. He also noted that many believe Netanyahu is unfit to serve in light of his legal problems.

Nonetheless, Rivlin said that there was nothing in the law preventing Netanyahu from serving as prime minister. After consulting with the 13 parties in the newly elected parliament, Rivlin said that Netanyahu had the best chance of any candidate of forming a new government.

“No candidate has a realistic chance of forming a government that will have the confidence of the Knesset,” Rivlin said. But, he added, Netanyahu has a “slightly higher chance” of being able to. “I have decided to entrust him with the task,” Rivlin said from Jerusalem. Rivlin added that the choice was “not an easy decision on a moral and ethical basis.”

With that, Rivlin nudged forward the twin dramas over the country’s future and Netanyahu’s fate, giving Israel’s longest-serving premier a fresh chance to try to salvage his career. Netanyahu now has up to six weeks to try to cobble together a coalition during his trial.

Early reactions from the premier’s sworn rivals highlighted the difficult road ahead. Yair Lapid, leader of the party that won the second-highest number of seats, acknowledged that the law left Rivlin “no choice,” but in the same tweet denounced the development as “a shameful disgrace that tarnishes Israel.”

A court ruling could be months or even years away. The proceedings are expected to take place up to three days a week, an embarrassing and time-consuming distraction that will shadow Netanyahu’s appeals to his rivals.

Netanyahu holds the most support — 52 seats — in Israel’s Knesset. But that is still short of a 61-seat majority. He is likely to use his powers of persuasion to try to lure a number of opponents, including a number of former close aides who have vowed never to serve under him again, with generous offers of powerful government ministries or legislative committees.

Parties representing 45 members supported Yair Lapid, while Yamina, with seven seats, nominated its own leader, Naftali Bennett. Three parties holding a total of 16 seats made no recommendation. Rivlin’s decision merges questions of Netanyahu’s legal and political future in what’s perhaps the starkest political challenge of his career.

In court, he faces fraud, breach of trust and bribery charges in three separate cases. Proceedings resumed Tuesday, though the premier was not expected to appear in court. A key witness on Monday cast Netanyahu as an image-obsessed leader who forced a prominent news site to help his family and smear his opponents.

Netanyahu denies all charges and in an nationally televised address accused prosecutors of persecuting him in an effort to drive him out of office. “This is what a coup attempt looks like,” he said. Monday’s court session focused on the most serious case against Netanyahu — in which he is accused of promoting regulations that delivered hundreds of millions of dollars of profits to the Bezeq telecom company in exchange for positive coverage on the firm’s popular news site, Walla.

Ilan Yeshua, Walla’s former chief editor, described a system in which Bezeq’s owners, Shaul and Iris Elovitch, repeatedly pressured him to publish favorable things about Netanyahu and smear the prime minister’s rivals.

The explanation he was given by the couple? “That’s what the prime minister wanted,” he said.

Kellman reported from Tel Aviv, Israel.

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Israeli voters poised to send first Reform rabbi to Knesset

March 19, 2021

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — In years of going against Israel’s religious and political mainstream, Rabbi Gilad Kariv has learned to handle conflict. He has argued controversial civil rights cases before Israel’s Supreme Court. And as an activist, he has lobbied at the Knesset, the 120-seat parliament for a country facing its fourth election in two years.

So after locking up a spot that put him on the brink of joining the Knesset, it did not rock Kariv’s world when powerful Orthodox lawmakers responded by threatening to boycott him. The 47-year-old lawyer and father of three is poised next week to become the first Reform movement rabbi to hold a seat in parliament, a political ascent that marks a key victory for religious pluralism in Israel and for the millions of American Jews who practice liberal streams of their religion.

Kariv’s rise to the fourth-highest seat in the center-left Labor party would also put the Reform movement closer to the center of power inside Israel, rather than remaining a feature of the far-flung diaspora. The politically powerful Orthodox establishment has treated Kariv as a threat, suggesting he is the face of a “clownish” and “illegitimate” cult of pretenders.

Kariv shrugs off the hostility. “If an Israeli politician and politicians in general need to have the skin of an elephant, a thick skin,” Kariv said in an interview at Labor headquarters in Tel Aviv. “Then an Israeli Reform rabbi needs the skin of a mammoth.”

He spoke not far from the spot where, during the first Palestinian uprising in 1987, he said he and his fellow teenage activists demonstrated weekly for a two-state peace agreement with the Palestinians and were spit upon by passers-by.

Kariv himself was raised in a secular Tel Aviv family. Like most Jewish Israeli boys, he celebrated his bar mitzvah, and early on, he considered becoming Orthodox. He first encountered Reform Judaism during a high school trip to the United States. After returning home, he joined one of Israel’s first Reform congregations, rising to become its leader.

The Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism now lists more than 50 congregations, representing a still-small but growing slice of a country whose Jewish rituals are largely controlled by Orthodox leaders. About 3% of Israeli Jews say they belong to the Reform movement.

About a third of American Jews, about 2 million people, identify as Reform. Non-Orthodox American Jews also tend to hold much more liberal views on social and political issues than Israel’s increasingly right-leaning society. That has translated into rising tensions between the world’s two largest Jewish communities over issues like religious pluralism, West Bank settlement construction and how to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians.

Those differences were on display during the Trump administration, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s close ties with the former U.S. president alienated many American Jews. Just talking about “Western liberal democratic values, you’re losing big parts of the Israeli audience,” said Kariv.

But Kariv, who is both a rabbi and a lawyer, believes Israel’s Zionist ideals include respect for human rights and the LGBT community, assisting African migrants who have made their way to Israel and protecting the environment. He is a strong advocate of a two-state solution with the Palestinians, believes West Bank settlement construction should be frozen and borders should be worked out in negotiations.

Such positions will put Kariv at odds on many issues with Netanyahu’s religious and nationalist partners, if the Israeli leader wins another term in Tuesday’s vote. Even if Netanyahu’s opponents manage to form a more moderate coalition, Kariv isn’t likely to change much policy on his own as a new member of the parliament. But he’ll have influence and a louder microphone just for having a seat inside the government. That’s expected to raise his profile on volatile issues, such as a recent Supreme Court decision allowing people who convert to Judaism inside Israel through the Reform or Conservative movements to become citizens.

The March 1 ruling, 15 years in the making, only affects about 30 people a year. But like Kariv’s rise, the symbolism of the ruling challenged the Orthodox establishment’s monopoly on defining what and who qualifies as Jewish. Several members of the Knesset have vowed to challenge the decision via legislation.

As a lawmaker, Kariv would have a voice in the parliament’s debate. He’s said that if Israel wants to be the nation-state of the Jewish world, then it must recognize all the denominations of Judaism with equality.

“To be inside the Knesset means he’s at the table. He’s at the lectern, wearing a kippah as an Israeli,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, head of the Reform movement in the U.S. who has lobbied the Knesset with Kariv, his Israeli counterpart, for nine years. Now, Jacobs said, “instead of writing op-eds, he’s going to be standing at the plenum.”

This equal footing would give some added legitimacy to a movement the Orthodox leaders have dismissed. They see Reform Judaism as a threat unlike secularism, said one expert. “Reform Judaism conveys an alternative interpretation of Judaism,” said Shmuel Rosner, senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. Many Orthodox leaders “don’t want to have any discussion about it.”

United Torah Judaism, an ultra-Orthodox party, released a campaign video just after the court decision that cast non-Orthodox converts in Israel as akin to dogs wearing skullcaps. The ferocious blowback might work in Kariv’s favor.

Kariv “is a strong individual and he’s been very outspoken,” said Jay Ruderman, president of The Ruderman Foundation, a Boston-based group that educates Israeli lawmakers about American Jewry, and himself an Orthodox Jew. “In the Knesset, it will be a bumpy ride.”

But if Kariv’s critics keep up the hostility, Ruderman added, “they will make him more well-known.” And in a closely split parliament, pragmatism may end up prevailing. Rosner said the threatened, pre-election boycott of Kariv could easily fade if the Orthodox politicians need him in a tight vote.

“We should all remember that this is politics,” he said. “People can be enemies in public and still trade horses privately.”

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Secretive Israeli nuclear facility undergoes major project

February 25, 2021

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A secretive Israeli nuclear facility at the center of the nation’s undeclared atomic weapons program is undergoing what appears to be its biggest construction project in decades, satellite photos analyzed by The Associated Press show.

A dig about the size of a soccer field and likely several stories deep now sits just meters (yards) from the aging reactor at the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center near the city of Dimona. The facility is already home to decades-old underground laboratories that reprocess the reactor’s spent rods to obtain weapons-grade plutonium for Israel’s nuclear bomb program.

What the construction is for, however, remains unclear. The Israeli government did not respond to detailed questions from the AP about the work. Under its policy of nuclear ambiguity, Israel neither confirms nor denies having atomic weapons. It is among just four countries that have never joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty, a landmark international accord meant to stop the spread of nuclear arms.

The construction comes as Israel — under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — maintains its scathing criticism of Iran’s nuclear program, which remains under the watch of United Nations inspectors unlike its own. That has renewed calls among experts for Israel to publicly declare details of its program.

What “the Israeli government is doing at this secret nuclear weapons plant is something for the Israeli government to come clean about,” said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association.

With French assistance, Israel began secretly building the nuclear site in the late 1950s in empty desert near Dimona, a city some 90 kilometers (55 miles) south of Jerusalem. It hid the military purpose of the site for years from America, now Israel’s chief ally, even referring to it as a textile factory.

With plutonium from Dimona, Israel is widely believed to have become one of only nine nuclear-armed countries in the world. Given the secrecy surrounding its program, it remains unclear how many weapons it possesses. Analysts estimate Israel has material for at least 80 bombs. Those weapons likely could be delivered by land-based ballistic missiles, fighter jets or submarines.

For decades, the Dimona facility’s layout has remained the same. However, last week, the International Panel on Fissile Materials at Princeton University noted it had seen “significant new construction” at the site via commercially available satellite photos, though few details could be made out.

Satellite images captured Monday by Planet Labs Inc. after a request from the AP provide the clearest view yet of the activity. Just southwest of the reactor, workers have dug a hole some 150 meters (165 yards) long and 60 meters (65 yards) wide. Tailings from the dig can be seen next to the site. A trench some 330 meters (360 yards) runs near the dig.

Some 2 kilometers (1.25 miles) west of the reactor, boxes are stacked in two rectangular holes that appear to have concrete bases. Tailings from the dig can be seen nearby. Similar concrete pads are often used to entomb nuclear waste.

Other images from Planet Labs suggest the dig near the reactor began in early 2019 and has progressed slowly since then. Analysts who spoke to the AP offered several suggestions about what could be happening there.

The center’s heavy-water reactor has been operational since the 1960s, far longer than most reactors of the same era. That raises both effectiveness and safety questions. In 2004, Israeli soldiers even began handing out iodine pills in Dimona in case of a radioactive leak from the facility. Iodine helps block the body from absorbing radiation.

Those safety concerns could see authorities decommission or otherwise retrofit the reactor, analysts say. “I believe that the Israeli government is concerned to preserve and maintain the nation’s current nuclear capabilities,” said Avner Cohen, a professor of nonproliferation studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, who has written extensively on Dimona.

“If indeed the Dimona reactor is getting closer to decommissioned, as I believe it is, one would expect Israel to make sure that certain functions of the reactor, which are still indispensable, will be fully replaced.”

Kimball, of the Arms Control Association, suggested Israel may want to produce more tritium, a relatively faster-decaying radioactive byproduct used to boost the explosive yield of some nuclear warheads. It also could want fresh plutonium “to replace or extend the life of warheads already in the Israeli nuclear arsenal,” he added.

Israel built its nuclear weapons as it faced several wars with its Arab neighbors since its founding in 1948 in the wake of the Holocaust. An atomic weapons program, even undeclared, provided it an edge to deter enemies.

As Peres, who led the nuclear program and later served as prime minister and president of Israel, said in 1998: “We have built a nuclear option, not in order to have a Hiroshima, but to have an Oslo,” referring both to the first U.S. nuclear bomb drop in World War II and Israel’s efforts to reach a peace deal with Palestinians.

But Israel’s strategy of opacity also draws criticism from opponents. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif seized on the work at Dimona this week as his country prepared to limit access by the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency amid tensions with the West over its collapsing 2015 nuclear deal.

“Any talk about concern about Iran’s nuclear program is absolute nonsense,” Zarif told Iranian state television’s English-language arm Press TV. “Let’s be clear on that: It’s hypocrisy.” The timing of the Dimona construction surprised Valerie Lincy, executive director of the Washington-based Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.

“I think the most puzzling thing is … you have a country that is very aware of the power of satellite imagery and particularly the way proliferation targets are monitored using that imagery,” Lincy said. “In Israel, you have one known nuclear target for monitoring, which is the Dimona reactor. So you would think that anything that they wanted to keep under the radar would be kept under the radar.”

In the 1960s, Israel used its claims about adversary Egypt’s missile and nuclear efforts to divert attention from its work at Dimona — and may choose to do the same with Iran now. “If you’re Israel and you are going to have to undertake a major construction project at Dimona that will draw attention, that’s probably the time that you would scream the most about the Iranians,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a professor also teaching nonproliferation issues at Middlebury.

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Israel is expanding Dimona nuclear facility

February 20, 2021

Israel is expanding its Dimona nuclear facility located in the Negev desert, news agencies reported, according to new satellite images released on Thursday.

Dimona is Israel’s nuclear research facility. It was officially renamed after late Israeli President and Prime Minister Shimon Peres in 2018. Israel developed the fissile material for its nuclear arsenal in this nuclear reactor.

The International Panel on Fissile Material (IPFM), an independent expert group, on Thursday released new images, pointing out that the area being worked on is a few hundred meters across to the south and west of the processing point at the nuclear facility.

As reported by The Guardian, Pavel Podvig, a researcher with the program on science and global security at Princeton University, explained: “It appears that the construction started quite early in 2019, or late 2018, so it’s been underway for about two years, but that’s all we can say at this point.”

The secretive nuclear facility built with French assistance in the 1950s has played a key role in equipping Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

According to The Guardian, The Federation of American Scientists estimated that Israel has about 90 warheads, made from plutonium produced in the Dimona heavy water reactor.

Source: Middle East Monitor.

Link: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210220-israel-is-expanding-dimona-nuclear-facility/.

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UAE delegation arrives in Israel to prepare for embassy opening

February 15, 2021

An Emirati technical delegation arrived in Israel today to arrange the requirements for the opening of the UAE Embassy in Tel Aviv.

The Israeli Broadcasting Corporation (Kan) said: “A technical delegation from the UAE arrived in Israel today, as part of preparations for the opening of an Emirati embassy in Tel Aviv.”

Yesterday Mohamed Mahmoud Al-Khaja was sworn in as the UAE’s ambassador to the occupation state of Israel, by Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid, Vice President and Ruler of Dubai, at a ceremony at Al Watan Palace in Abu Dhabi.

Israel opened its embassy in Abu Dhabi on 24 January.

The controversial move comes after the UAE and Israel agreed to establish full diplomatic, cultural and commercial relations following the signing of the Abraham Accords on 15 September at the White House.

Source: Middle East Monitor.

Link: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210215-uae-delegation-arrives-in-israel-to-prepare-for-embassy-opening/.

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Israel cancels trade delegation’s trip to UAE

February 15, 2021

Israel has cancelled its planned participation in a major defense expo in the United Arab Emirates next week due to COVID-19 curbs on air travel, Israeli officials said today.

Dozens of Israeli defense firms had been due to take part in the IDEX conference in Abu Dhabi from 21-25 February – a first for both countries, which last September established formal relations, Reuters reported.

But officials from Israel’s Defense Ministry and Regional Cooperation Ministry said the plan was cancelled. They cited Israel’s 26 January ban on international air travel, which is still in force as it tries to reverse a surge in COVID-19 contagion.

A Defense Ministry spokeswoman said it requested special permission for the firms to fly out to the UAE capital, but was refused by a Regional Cooperation Ministry authorization panel.

A Regional Cooperation Ministry spokesman said the request “had to be denied, despite the desire to … promote defense activity, and given the need to [make] unprejudiced decisions”.

The business newspaper Globes quoted an unidentified senior representative of an Israeli defense firm as saying that the cancellation would spell “huge” losses of deals to competitors.

“The Emirati hosts were supremely friendly and rolled out the red carpet. We were meant to have been the focus of the expo, with several top-of-the-line products and exhibits,” the representative was quoted as saying. “All that, for nothing?”

Source: Middle East Monitor.

Link: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210215-israel-cancels-trade-delegations-trip-to-uae/.

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Washington warns it will prevent Israel planes from landing in US airports

February 15, 2021

The US Department of Transportation has warned it would prevent Israel’s El Al flights from landing in American airports if Tel Aviv continues to prevent American planes from landing in Israel, Israeli media reported yesterday.

According to the Israeli TV Channel 12, the US Department of Transportation demanded that Israel allow US airlines to fly rescue flights for stranded Israelis in the country and not to allow Israel’s national carrier El Al to carry out the mission.

Washington, according to the report, told Israel that its decision to only allow the Israeli airline to move stranded passengers to their homes is a violation of aviation agreements between the two countries.

The Biden administration sent a message to Israel saying that both American and Israeli carriers should be allowed to fly the routes to prevent a potential crisis between the two sides.

The report pointed out that Israel is afraid that other countries, including the UK would take the same steps.

Israeli media said that the Transportation Ministry would have held an emergency meeting to discuss the matter yesterday.

Israel banned passenger flights in and out of the country from 25 January as part of a national lockdown to help stem the spread of coronavirus.

Source: Middle East Monitor.

Link: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210215-washington-warns-it-will-prevent-israel-planes-from-landing-in-us-airports/.

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Indonesia and Mauritania were ‘close’ to recognizing Israel, say Trump officials

20 January 2021

Two US officials have claimed that the outgoing Trump administration ran out of time before it could secure agreements with Indonesia and Mauritania to normalize relations with Israel.

The officials, who spoke to the Times of Israel, said that US President Donald Trump would have secured the deal if he were to be in office for another month or two.

“Mauritania and Indonesia are high on the list, but it changes based upon various circumstances,” one senior US official told the Times of Israel.

“You can put every country on the list, to the point where Iran will eventually join the Abraham Accords.”

Mauritania was apparently “weeks” away from finalizing a deal, claimed the officials after Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner identified the northwestern African country as a possible candidate to normalize relations with Israel.

One official also alleged that Trump was in “intermediate” talks with Oman to normalize relations with Israel and “less” advanced talks with Saudi Arabia, which would have taken longer.

Last year, Jakarta played down reports of normalization with Israel, after a senior US official told Bloomberg that Indonesia could receive $2bn in development aid from the US.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo told Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas it would not sign an agreement to recognize Israel until there was a viable Palestinian state.

Meanwhile, US President-elect Joe Biden during his election campaign said that he supported the Abraham Accords.

Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has also said that recognition of Israel is something he would support but not prioritize.

Source: Middle East Eye.

Link: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-normalisation-indonesia-mauritania-close.

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Netanyahu courts Arab voters in election-year turnabout

January 20, 2021

JERUSALEM (AP) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has spent much of his long career casting Israel’s Arab minority as a potential fifth column led by terrorist sympathizers, is now openly courting their support as he seeks reelection in the country’s fourth vote in less than two years.

Few Arabs are likely to heed his call, underscoring the desperation of Netanyahu’s political somersault. But the the relative absence of incitement against the community in this campaign and the potential breakup of an Arab party alliance could dampen turnout — to Netanyahu’s advantage. He might even pick up just enough votes to swing a tight election.

Either way, Netanyahu’s overtures have shaken up the Arab community. The Joint List, an alliance of Arab parties that secured a record 15 seats in the 120-member Knesset last March, is riven by a dispute over whether it should work with Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud at a time when less objectionable center-left parties are in disarray.

Its demise would leave the community with even less representation as it confronts a terrifying crime wave, coronavirus-fueled unemployment and persistent inequality. But given the complexities of Israel’s coalition system, a breakaway Arab party could gain outsized influence if it is willing to work with Netanyahu or other traditionally hostile leaders.

The struggle was on vivid display last week when Netanyahu traveled to Nazareth, the largest Arab-majority city in Israel, his third visit to an Arab district in less than two weeks. Outside the venue, dozens of people, including a number of Arab members of parliament, protested his visit and scuffled with police, even as the city’s mayor welcomed and praised him.

“Netanyahu came like a thief to try to scrape together votes from the Arab street,” said Aida Touma-Suleiman, a prominent lawmaker from the Joint List. “Your attempt to dismantle our community from within won’t succeed.”

Arabs make up around 20% of Israel’s population. They have full citizenship, including the right to vote, and have a large and growing presence in universities, the health care sector and other professions. But they face widespread discrimination and blame lax Israeli law enforcement for a rising wave of violent crime in their communities.

They have close familial ties to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, and largely identify with their cause. That has led many Jews to view them as sympathetic to Israel’s enemies, sentiments fanned by Netanyahu and other right-wing politicians.

On the eve of elections in 2015, Netanyahu warned his supporters that Arabs were voting in “droves.” During back-to-back elections in 2019, his campaign sent poll observers to Arab districts and pushed for cameras in voting booths, in what critics said was a ploy to intimidate Arab voters and whip up false allegations of election fraud.

Those moves backfired spectacularly. The Joint List, an unwieldy alliance of Islamists, communists and other leftists, boosted turnout and emerged as one of the largest blocs in parliament. At times, it looked like it might help deny Netanyahu a majority coalition or even emerge as the official opposition.

But last May, after three deadlocked elections in less than a year, Netanyahu formed a coalition with his main rival and the Joint List was left out in the cold. In the coming election, polls indicate a coalition of right-wing and centrist parties committed to ending Netanyahu’s nearly 12-year rule would be able to oust him without the Arab bloc.

No Arab party has ever asked or been invited to join a ruling coalition. In Nazareth, Netanyahu claimed his remarks in 2015 were misinterpreted — that he was merely warning Arab voters not to support the Joint List.

“All Israel’s citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, must vote,” he said. In other Arab towns, he has visited coronavirus vaccination centers, boasting about his success in securing millions of doses and encouraging residents to get inoculated.

Netanyahu’s Arab outreach seems to have given a green light to centrist and left-leaning politicians to do the same, with less concern that their right-wing rivals will use it against them. Opposition leader Yair Lapid, Netanyahu’s main center-left opponent, said over the weekend that he was open to forming a government with external support from the Joint List.

The Joint List is meanwhile showing signs of breaking up. Mansour Abbas, the head of an Islamist party, has expressed openness in recent months to working with Netanyahu to address issues like housing and law enforcement. An aide to Abbas declined requests for an interview.

A full-scale breakup of the Joint List could further reduce turnout and potentially leave one or more of its four parties with too little support to cross the electoral threshold. Thabet Abu Rass, the co-director of the Abraham Initiatives, which works to promote equality among Jews and Arabs, says Netanyahu may attract a small number of Arab voters, but that far more of them would simply boycott the election.

“They are waiting to see if there is going to be a Joint List or not, and if you ask me, it’s not going to happen,” he said. “There are a lot of deep differences this time.” A poll carried out in December forecast Arab turnout at around 55%, far lower than the 65% seen last March.

Although Arab parties have historically performed worse on their own, some feel the parties might be more effective individually. In Israel’s political system — which requires would-be prime ministers to assemble majority coalitions — small parties often wield outsized influence.

“When we speak about the Palestinian community in Israel, we don’t speak about one bloc, we have different ideologies,” said Nijmeh Ali, a policy analyst at Al-Shabaka, an international Palestinian think tank. “Sometimes you need to break up in order to gain power.”

Netanyahu appears to be focused on the margins ahead of a tight race that could determine not only whether he remains in office, but whether he secures immunity from prosecution on multiple corruption charges. With only a few seats, a pragmatic politician like Abbas could determine Netanyahu’s fate.

“This is the new thing in Arab politics,” said Arik Rudnitzky, a research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. “They are ready to hold direct negotiations with Likud.” He said it doesn’t mean they will be part of a governing coalition, but they could offer outside support to secure benefits for the Arab public. “It might be a win-win situation,” he said.

Associated Press reporters Areej Hazboun in Jerusalem and Ami Bentov in Nazareth, Israel, contributed to this report.

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