ISRAEL AT WAR - DAY 645
The Times of Israel liveblogged Tuesday’s events as they happened.
Germany’s main Jewish leader says he would advise people visiting big cities against wearing Jewish skullcaps, or kippot, following a street assault last week on two young men wearing them.
The attack in Berlin, in which a 19-year-old Syrian asylum-seeker is a suspect, added to growing concern in Germany about anti-Semitism.
Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council for Jews in Germany, tells broadcaster Radioeins on Tuesday that wearing a skullcap is right in principle, but that he is advising individuals “against showing themselves openly with a kippa in a big-city setting in Germany, and wear a baseball cap or something else to cover their head instead.”
Schuster suggested three years ago that Jews shouldn’t wear skullcaps in areas with large Muslim populations. But he stressed there’s increasing anti-Semitic sentiment also among non-migrants.
— AP
A top Iranian official on Tuesday welcomes European powers’ efforts to salvage a historic nuclear deal, but warns they should not simply hand over “a ransom” to US President Donald Trump.
Trump has threatened not to renew the 2015 accord, which curbed Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
His threats have prompted pressure from European officials ahead of a May 12 deadline for his decision.
“We have welcomed the insistence of the European Union on keeping America in the JCPOA (nuclear deal),” says Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council for National Security, in a televised press conference.
“But if this means degrading the Islamic republic of Iran or paying a ransom to Trump, the Europeans are making a strategic mistake,” he says.
— AFP
DAMASCUS, Syria — Syrian state TV is reporting that government forces have launched a new operation targeting underground tunnels used by the Islamic State group in the capital, Damascus.
The TV says the aim of the operation is to destroy dug-out trenches and tunnels in the Hajar al-Aswad neighborhood and the nearby Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk that is also mostly controlled by IS.
A group of journalists taken on Tuesday to the adjacent neighborhood of Qadam witnessed intense shelling and airstrikes on IS positions in the camp and Hajar al-Aswad.
The area in southern Damascus is the last part of the capital not controlled by President Bashar Assad’s forces. Other insurgents in the area, including an al-Qaida-linked group, have said they would relocate to rebel-held regions in northern Syria.
— AP
South Africa is set for a steep decline in wine production in 2018 as the country grapples with a water crisis ravaging Cape Town and surrounding areas, a Paris-based global organization says.
Africa’s top wine producer is set to produce 8.6 million hectoliters of wine this year, down 20.4 percent down from 2017, the International Organization of Vine and Wine (OIV) says in a statement.
The Western Cape region has gone without significant rains for more than three years, forcing South Africa’s second city to slash residential water consumption.
While cautiously welcoming the water shortage’s impact on improved grape flavors, South African winemakers have been struggling with the drought, which has sown panic across the Cape Town area.
— AFP
The EU and UN launch a two-day push to drum up fresh aid pledges for war-torn Syria and reinvigorate the faltering Geneva peace process as the conflict enters its eighth year.
Donor countries, aid organizations and UN agencies are gathering in Brussels for the seventh annual conference on Syria’s future as international inspectors probe a suspected gas attack in the town of Douma, highlighting the brutal nature of the war.
The meeting comes in the wake of strikes by the United States, France and Britain on Syrian military installations, carried out in response to the alleged chemical weapons incident in Douma which has been widely blamed on Damascus.
EU officials hope to beat the $6 billion pledged at last year’s gathering, as forces loyal to President Bashar Assad launch a new offensive against Islamic State jihadists entrenched in a southern district of Damascus.
Some 6.1 people are now internally displaced, more than five million have fled Syria and 13 million including six million children are in need of aid, according to the EU.
— AFP
A defense lawyer says an Egyptian military court has convicted the country’s former anti-graft chief of insulting the armed forces and sentenced him to five years in prison.
Hesham Genena was arrested in February following incendiary comments he made in a television interview in which he claimed that the former chief of staff Sami Annan was in possession of documents incriminating the country’s “leadership.”
Annan was arrested in January shortly after he announced his intention to challenge President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi in March presidential election. He was accused of incitement against the military and forgery.
El-Sissi ran virtually unopposed, winning the election with 97 percent of the vote.
Defense lawyer Hossam Lotfy says Tuesday’s verdict against Genena will be appealed. Another defense lawyer, Ali Taha, confirmed the verdict in a Facebook posting.
— AP
Eighteen Jewish Democrats out of 21 in the US House of Representatives write to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to say they are “dismayed” and “disappointed” over his retreat from a plan that replaced his earlier proposal to deport tens of thousands of African migrants from Israel.
The letter says the lawmakers were “heartened” on April 2 when they learned that Netanyahu had worked out a plan with the United Nations to process half of the migrants through regularized refugee channels only to hear within hours that he had reversed himself.
“We were dismayed to hear that the agreement had been suspended, then canceled, leaving the Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers in limbo, with no clear next step,” says the letter sent Monday and initiated by four of the top Jewish lawmakers: New York Democrat Nita Lowey, the top Democratic appropriator; New York Democrat Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Florida Democrat Ted Deutch, the top Democrat on the House Middle East subcommittee; and Michigan Democrat Sander Levin, the longest-serving Jewish member of Congress.
The lawmakers said they were writing as Jewish Congress members and also on behalf of their constituents; the majority of the lawmakers represent districts with substantive Jewish communities.
Netanyahu dropped the UN plan after coming in for several hours of lacerating criticism from right-wingers in Israel, including in his own government.
— JTA
Forty Republicans and Democrats in the US House of Representatives urge appropriators to consider purchasing Iron Dome, the short-range missile defense system developed in Israel, for US Army use.
The request is in a letter to the top Republican and Democrat on the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee urging inclusion of $500 million for Israeli missile defense in the 2019 defense appropriations bill. Adoption of Iron Dome by the US Army would mean increasing the support for sustaining the missile defense system, developed by two Israeli companies, which Israel regards as critical in protecting its communities near its southern border with the Gaza Strip and and its northern border with Lebanon.
“Adoption by the Army of Iron Dome could provide an important near-term capability to US forces as well as a surge production capacity if we or Israel required the system in a time of crisis,” said the letter initiated by Reps. Grace Meng, D-New York, and Peter Roskam, R-Illinois. The letter was sent April 11 and released to the media by the offices of Meng and Roskam on April 20.
The $500 million for missile defense is already guaranteed to Israel under a $3.8 billion per year defense assistance package signed toward the end of the Obama administration, but the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is seeking formal congressional backing for the aid as a protective measure against any president reneging on the deal.
— JTA
For the second time today, a group of Palestinians are arrested as they cross into Israel from the Gaza Strip, the army says.
According to the military, four unarmed suspects breached the security fence along the border with southern Gaza, near the Eshkol region.
They were picked up shortly after they entered Israeli territory. No weapons were found in their possession, unlike the case this morning in which two Palestinian men were seen crossing the border carrying a grenade and a knife.
The four suspects are being questioned by the Shin Bet security service.
— Judah Ari Gross
Egypt tells Israel it will allow the passage of the body of Palestinian rocket engineer Fadi al-Batsh, assassinated in Malaysia over the weekend, into the Gaza Strip for burial.
Batsh, a “commander” in Hamas’s military wing, according to the terror group, is widely believed to have been killed by Israeli agents, though Israel has remained mum on the killing.
Israeli officials have asked Egypt not to allow the body into Gaza until Hamas releases the bodies of two IDF soldiers killed in the 2014 Gaza war and two mentally ill Israeli civilians currently being held in Gaza.
According to Hebrew media reports, Egypt is affirming that it remains committed to the return of the Israelis even as it decided to allow the transfer of Batsh’s body.
The Spanish island of Mallorca held its first Limmud program.
Some 85 participants out of a Jewish community of up to 200 participated in the day-long Limmud Mallorca, which offered 18 sessions on Jewish topics in Spanish, Catalan and English, including sessions for children and teens.
“We see Limmud Mallorca as an engine to grow the Jewish community,” Dani Rotstein, a Limmud Mallorca co-chair, says in a statement. Rotstein is a New Jersey native who moved to Mallorca in 2014 where he produces television commercials. “For starters, inspired by Limmud, we hope to launch a Jewish film series, Jewish cooking classes, book clubs, a hiking club, and sharing Shabbat dinner in each others’ homes. We also hope to create prayer spaces for each stream of Judaism.”
The Jews on Mallorca come from Argentina, France, Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Turkey. The local synagogue was established in the 1980s by British Jews. There is also a functioning Jewish cemetery on the island.
In the 1300s, the Inquisition forced Mallorca’s Jews to convert or live in Palma’s Jewish Ghetto as crypto Jews until the end of the 17th century. Their descendants became known as Chuetas. Roughly 20,000 people with Chueta last names live on the island. Some have converted back to Judaism and are among the most active Jewish community members.
Limmud, which was founded in the United Kingdom in 1980 to provide Jewish learning opportunities to communities, has spread to 84 communities in 44 countries on six continents.
— JTA
Thirty imams in France sign an open letter calling on their colleagues to help counter Muslim extremism.
The letter, which appears Tuesday in the daily LeMonde, expresses “compassion for all our fellow citizens who have been directly or indirectly affected by terrorism and by the anti-Semitic crimes that have blindly struck our country.”
It adds that the imams are “suffering from the confiscation of our religion by criminals.”
The letter is in response to a manifesto published on Sunday in LeParisien, the largest circulation newspaper in France, signed by 300 politicians, intellectuals and artists denouncing the “new anti-Semitism in France” driven by radical Islamists in the country.
The manifesto also suggests that verses of the Quran calling for the “murder and punishment of Jews, Christians and disbelievers” be removed on the grounds that they are “obsolete.”
The imams offer their “theological expertise” to help guard against radicalized Muslims. They say that Islam has fallen into the hands of “an ignorant, disrupted and idle youth. A naive youth, easy prey for ideologues who exploit this dismay.”
— JTA
The government tells the High Court of Justice that it has effectively frozen all deportations of African asylum seekers as it lacks any legal means to carry out the policy.
In a statement to the court, the state explains:
“At this stage there is no possibility of implementing a deportation to a third country without [the asylum seeker’s] agreement. Therefore, as of April 17, 2018, [the state] has ceased to hold hearings as part of the deportation policy, and no more deportation decisions will be made at this time. The existing deportation orders are canceled.
“Infiltrators whose residency permits expired will have their permits extended every 60 days, in keeping with the policy that was in place before the implementation of the deportation policy.”
US President Donald Trump pillories the Iran nuclear deal as “a disaster” and “insane” as he hosts French President Emmanuel Macron in the Oval Office Tuesday, puncturing a carefully choreographed display of pomp and camaraderie.
The US leader grouses that the accord — inked three years ago by the United States, Iran, France, Britain, Germany, Russia, and China — does nothing to tackle Tehran’s ballistic missiles program or support for terror groups across the Middle East.
Macron is in Washington in part to convince Trump not to walk away from the deal and scuttle what European leaders view as hard-won diplomatic gains.
Trump faces a May 12 deadline to decide on the fate of the accord.
— AFP
A defense lawyer for Beate Zschaepe, the only surviving member of a German neo-Nazi trio, Tuesday launched final arguments, signaling the end phase of a mammoth murder and terrorism trial.
Five years after Zschaepe, 43, first entered the dock, her lawyer Hermann Borchert calls the case against her “inadequate” and insists she was not involved in a string of racist murders, bombings, and bank robberies committed by the clandestine cell.
Prosecutors accuse Zschaepe of complicity in the bloody crimes carried out by Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt, the two gunmen of the self-styled National Socialist Underground (NSU) who died in an apparent 2011 murder-suicide.
Borchert placed the sole blame on the two men, who had been in a love triangle with Zschaepe since their teenage years and who between 2000 and 2007 shot dead eight men with Turkish roots, a Greek migrant, and a German policewoman. Zschaepe, who faces a maximum term of life in jail, has claimed she was an unwilling and horrified bystander to the crimes, not a strong-willed and active participant as charged by prosecutors in the Munich trial.
The NSU case deeply shocked Germany, where security services had previously only associated terrorism with far-left and Islamist militants and believed far-right thugs mainly committed random acts of street violence and arson.
It was only after the two men’s deaths in 2011 that Germany awoke to the news that the killings, long blamed on migrant crime gangs and dubbed the “doner [kebab] murders” by police and media, were in fact committed by organized fascists.
— AFP
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vows to pass legislation allowing the Knesset to overrule the High Court of Justice and to reopen the Saharonim prison, both in response to his own government’s decision to freeze the deportation of African asylum seekers after deals with Rwanda, Uganda, and (reportedly) other African nations to receive the migrants fell through.
In a tweet, Netanyahu writes, “After several third-party countries refused to receive the infiltrators according to the conditions Israel demanded, I decided together with Interior Minister Aryeh Deri to prepare immediately to reopen the jail facilities for infiltrators, to advance the supercession clause [legislation allowing the Knesset to override High Court decision] in order to allow us to operate [the prisons], and to advance other means for solving this problem.”
Yesh Atid’s Knesset faction chief MK Ofer Shelach slams Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the state told the High Court of Justice on Tuesday it would no longer pursue the policy of deporting African asylum seekers.
Netanyahu announced on April 2 that he had struck a deal with the UN refugee agency to deport half the 38,000 migrants living in Israel to willing western nations and would grant permanent residency to the remainder. Within hours, amid angry denunciations from right-wing politicians and advocacy groups, Netanyahu announced he was rescinding the agreement and would continue to seek legal ways to expel the asylum seekers.
“Just as I warned,” Shelach says Tuesday, “the residents of south Tel Aviv [where many of the migrants live] are the ones who will pay the prize of Netanyahu’s zig zag…Instead of a reasonable agreement that would have allowed the deportation of tens of thousands and a fair solution for those who remain, now no one will be deported and no problem will be solved.”
French President Emmanuel Macron says he is ready to work with Washington on a new nuclear deal with Iran, after US leader Donald Trump called the three-year-old accord “insane.”
“I can say that we have had very frank discussions on that, just the two of us,” Macron tells a joint press conference with Trump at his side.
“We therefore wish from now on to work on a new deal with Iran.”
— AFP
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday calls on North Korea to abandon its nuclear program, when pressed about his definition of “denuclearization” ahead of an expected summit with the North’s leader Kim Jong-un.
“It means they get rid of their nukes — very simple,” Trump tells a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron.
“It would be very easy for me to make a simple deal and claim victory. I don’t want to do that. I want them to get rid of their nukes.”
Kim has said he is willing to discuss “denuclearization” with Trump, but Pyongyang consistently defines the term as “denuclearization of the Korean peninsula” — code for the removal of America’s military presence in the South.
— AFP
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday appears to dial back a promise to withdraw US troops from Syria immediately, saying it is important to not allow Iranian influence to grow in the country.
Stating that troops would be coming home soon, Trump nonetheless says that the United States wants to “leave a strong and lasting footprint” in the country.
“We don’t want to give Iran open season to the Mediterranean,” Trump tells a joint press conference with his visiting French counterpart Emmanuel Macron.
“We’re going to be coming home relatively soon. We finished at least almost our work with respect to ISIS in Syria, ISIS in Iraq, and we have done a job that nobody has been able to do.”
“But with that being said, I do want to come home, but I want to come home also with having accomplished what we have to accomplish.”
— AFP
Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman will travel to the United States tonight to meet with senior American officials, including Secretary of Defense James Mattis and newly named National Security Adviser John Bolton.
According to the defense minister, his meetings will focus on “Iran’s expansion throughout the Middle East and on the Syria issue,” as well as Israeli-American security cooperation.
Liberman is also expected to meet with members of the US Senate Armed Services Committee, which oversees and has considerable influence over the US military and the country’s defense policy, his office says.
“I will also take advantage of the opportunity to thank our American friends for transferring the embassy to Jerusalem — the perfect gift for the 70th anniversary celebrations,” Liberman says in a tweet.
— Judah Ari Gross
