ISRAEL AT WAR - DAY 426
Michael Bachner is a news editor at The Times of Israel
The Times of Israel liveblogged Monday’s events as they unfolded.
Former IDF general and politician Uzi Dayan was threatened by dozens of settlers in Hebron on Saturday, and reacted by drawing his gun, the Kan public broadcaster reports.
The report says that Dayan was attacked after he tried to separate Jewish teenagers and police officers on Saturday afternoon.
The report also says that Dayan is denying that he drew his gun, and cites an unnamed security source confirming that he did.
A Channel 13 survey shows that if national elections were held today, opposition chief Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party would surge, but still likely be unable to form a governing coalition.
The poll also finds that Merav Michaeli’s Labor party would significantly increase its power and that Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope would fail to pass the electoral threshold.
Elections are not currently planned, but could be triggered if the government fails to pass the state budget by November 14.
According to the poll, Likud would get 36 seats, Yesh Atid 20, Labor 10, Joint List 8, Blue and White 7, Shas 7, United Torah Judaism 7, Yamina 6, Religious Zionism 6, Meretz 5, Yisrael Beytenu 4, Ra’am 4, and New Hope 0 (2.6 percent of votes, below the 3.25% threshold).
Current coalition parties would get 56 seats — down from their current 61, the smallest parliamentary majority possible — while right-wing and Haredi parties supporting Netanyahu would also get 56 seats. The predominantly Arab Joint List would hold the balance of power.
The poll was conducted by pollster Camil Fuchs with a 3.8% margin of error.
In addition, the survey finds 51% want the current coalition to continue, 40% want elections now, and 9% do not know.
It finds 63% of the public do not want the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism (UTJ) parties to join the government after the budget passes, while 20% do.
However, among UTJ and Shas voters, 48% do want them to join and just 34% do not.
Asked whether Prime Minister Naftali Bennett should not honor his power-sharing deal that states Yair Lapid will become premier in August 2023, 62% say he should, 23% say he should break up the government in 2023, and 15% don’t know.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett meets with Italian premier Mario Draghi at the COP26 conference in Glasgow.
There are no details immediately available on the meeting’s content.
The Kan public broadcaster publishes testimonies of men who say that screenwriter and producer Gal Uchovsky, one of the most prominent LGBT rights activists in Israel, sexually assaulted them in recent years.
Uchovsky, a popular TV personality, reacts to the exposé by apologizing and saying he is stepping down as president of IGY – Israel Gay Youth, a prominent nonprofit organization.
According to Kan, an unnamed man says that a year and a half ago, Uchovsky assaulted him during a prearranged sexual encounter between the two, violating the boundaries agreed upon earlier.
“It happened from the first moment,” he says. “Some button was switched and he communicated like an animal, not like a human. More than five times, he tried to forcibly flip me over, to insert fingers, to touch and to reach that area in every way possible.”
He says he clearly stated his dissatisfaction but Uchovsky did not stop.
Another man says that several years ago, during a work meeting with Uchovsky, the latter suddenly “leaped at me and started kissing me.”
“I tried to shove him away. He forced himself on me despite my objection, until he climaxed,” he says.
Uchovsky says he did not know about the first man’s dissatisfaction and apologizes “out of understanding and sensitivity.” He says he did not receive sufficient details to comment on the second testimony, but “once that’s the feeling, he also apologizes to the second complainant.”
“As someone who has dedicated his life to the [LGBT] community, Gal has decided that his responsibility compels him to stop his service as president of IGY,” says a comment on Uchovsky’s behalf. “The organization is his life’s work, and he doesn’t want this great organization to be stained.”
Health Ministry Director-General Nachman Ash intends to file a police complaint after receiving threats, Channel 12 news reports.
The development comes after the ministry’s head of public health services, Sharon Alroy-Preis, received a security detail due to relentless online death threats by suspected anti-vaccination activists.
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby apologizes for suggesting that the impact of climate change will be worse than Nazi genocide.
Welby, the most senior cleric in the Church of England and leader of the worldwide Anglican communion, made the comments in an interview with the BBC at the COP26 summit in Glasgow.
He said that national leaders will be “cursed” if they do not achieve the goal of the United Nations summit of urgently finding concrete ways to stabilize global warming.
Politicians who fail at this task will be spoken of by future generations “in far stronger terms than we speak today of the politicians of the (19)30s, of the politicians who ignored what was happening in Nazi Germany,” he said.
He added that this is because climate change “will kill people all around the world for generations” and “allow a genocide on an infinitely greater scale” that will “come back to us or to our children and grandchildren.”
Welby, a former oil executive before becoming a man of the cloth, later apologizes for offending Jewish people with the Holocaust analogy.
“I unequivocally apologise for the words I used when trying to emphasise the gravity of the situation facing us at COP26,” he tweets. “It’s never right to make comparisons with the atrocities brought by the Nazis, and I’m sorry for the offence caused to Jews by these words.”
A spokesman for Prime Minister Boris Johnson says of the comments: “It is up to individuals how they choose to frame the problem.”
Stephen Pollard, editor of The Jewish Chronicle newspaper, reacts furiously to Welby’s comments, tweeting that they are “so sickening that I simply cannot comprehend how Welby can remain as a priest, let alone Archbishop.”
He later relents, saying the archbishop made “a proper apology, not mealy-mouthed.”
UK Ambassador to Israel Neil Wigan tweets that he is “disturbed” by Israeli Energy Minister Karine Elharrar being excluded from the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, over wheelchair inaccessibility.
“I apologize deeply and sincerely to the minister. We want a COP Summit that is welcoming and inclusive to everyone,” Wigan says.
Energy Minister Karine Elharrar slams the “scandalous” behavior of the organizers of the UN climate summit in Glasgow, after she was unable to enter the compound for an entire day, due to wheelchair inaccessibility issues.
“This is scandalous conduct and it shouldn’t have happened,” Elharrar tells the Ynet news site. “I came with certain goals and I couldn’t achieve them today.”
“The UN calls on everyone to adhere to the international treaty,” Elharrar says, presumable referring to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. “So it is appropriate for there to be accessibility at its events.”
Elharrar’s Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid, the foreign minister, says: “It is impossible to take care of the future, the climate, and sustainability if we don’t first take care of people, accessibility, and people with disabilities.”
India’s economy will become carbon neutral by the year 2070, the country’s prime minister announces at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.
“By 2070, India will achieve the target of net-zero emissions,” Narendra Modi told more than 120 leaders at the critical talks.
India is the last of the world’s major carbon polluters to announce a net-zero target, with China saying it would reach that goal in 2060, and the US and the EU aiming for 2050.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has spoken with Energy Minister Karine Elharrar and told her it is “unacceptable” that she was left out of the COP26 climate summit for an entire day due to wheelchair inaccessibility, the premier’s office says.
Bennett has decided that tomorrow, Elharrar’s vehicle will arrive at the summit area as part of the prime minister’s official convoy and thus will be allowed in.
Energy Minister Karine Elharrar is in Glasgow, but hasn’t been able to enter the venue of the UN climate summit because it is inaccessible to people in wheelchairs.
For two hours, organizers refused to let her enter the large compound in the vehicle in which she arrived, and they eventually offered a shuttle that would transport her to the summit area.
The problem is that the shuttle vehicle isn’t wheelchair-accessible. So Elharrar, who has muscular dystrophy, remained stuck outside of the climate summit for the whole day.
She has returned to her hotel in Edinburgh after organizers refused to let her enter in any other way.
After giving his speech at COP26, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett meets Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez.
No information is immediately available on the content of the meeting.
US President Joe Biden offers a public apology to a UN climate conference over his predecessor Donald Trump’s move to pull the US from the Paris accord.
Biden is speaking in Glasgow, Scotland where world leaders are gathering to discuss implementing the agreement to contain global warming by mid-century.
He says: “I shouldn’t apologize, but I do apologize for the fact the United States, the last administration, pulled out of the Paris Accords and put us sort of behind the eight ball a little bit.”
Biden has frequently criticized the past administration’s approach to climate, but did not previously deliver a public apology to the world.
Biden reentered the agreement in one of his first official acts in office on January 20.
French President Emmanuel Macron calls on the world’s “largest emitters” behind on their plans to slash carbon pollution to boost their commitments during the crunch UN COP26 summit.
“The key over the next 15 days at this COP, is that the largest emitters whose national strategies do not align with our objective of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, to raise their ambition… that’s the only way of making our strategy credible again,” Macron tells world leaders in Glasgow.
Dozens of countries call for the UN Human Rights Council to host a special session on Sudan, following a deadly crackdown on mass rallies against last week’s military coup.
“A special session is needed because of the importance and urgency of the situation,” British Ambassador Simon Manley writes in a letter to the top UN rights body on behalf of 48 countries, including 18 council members.
“Israel is at the beginning of a revolution on climate change,” pledges Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in his address at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland.
The address, as well as the entire session, was delayed by hours.
Bennett says that Israel has started implementing its “100-step plan,” a $4.8 billion action plan submitted for government approval last week.
He also emphasizes that Israel is committing to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and to phasing out the use of coal by 2025.
But he says that as a small country, the biggest contribution Israel can make is through innovative technologies.
“We need to contribute Israel’s most valuable source of energy: the energy and brainpower of our people,” says Bennett.
Bennett calls on Israeli entrepreneurs to be “game changers”: “Instead of building yet another hyped-up app, launch startups that will help solve this global threat.”
He also announces a task force called the “Green Sandbox” to provide funds and to help entrepreneurs navigate bureaucratic hurdles.
“Israel is the climate innovation nation and we’re ready to lead the way,” he concludes.
Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh blames Israel for the difficulties Palestinians face in transitioning toward a green economy.
Addressing the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, Shtayyeh slams Israel and Israeli settlers for allegedly building settlements on what was green land, uprooting olive and other trees, and refusing to allow Palestinians to erect solar panels on their land in Area C of the West Bank.
Shtayyeh, who praises Saudi Arabia for announcing that it will set up a fund to help the Middle East transition toward a green economy, adds the “Israeli occupation is the main stumbling block to moving toward a sustainable future.”
US President Joe Biden tells the COP26 climate summit that the massive response needed to stop the climate crisis should be seen as an opportunity for the world’s economies.
“Within the growing catastrophe I believe there’s an incredible opportunity — not just for the United States, but for all of us,” he says.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett speaks with Canadian premier Justin Trudeau on the sidelines of the COP26 UN climate conference.
No information is immediately available on the content of their conversation.
Politicians and Jewish groups in Italy express outrage over a weekend protest in which campaigners opposing the country’s COVID-19 pass dressed up as World War II death camp deportees.
Activists opposed to the new pass demonstrated Saturday in Novara, a city in northwest Italy, wearing the vertically striped uniforms of those deported to the Nazi concentration camps. Some of the costumes also carried numbers, an apparent reference to the identity numbers many death camp inmates had tattooed on their skin. Demonstrators carried placards denouncing a “dictatorship” and government “blackmail.”
#novara
Perché nella serata di ieri un nutrito gruppo di ritardati ha manifestato per le strade della città vestiti da carcerati al grido di “Noi come i prigionieri di Auschwitz”.
Riportateli al manicomio, per cortesia pic.twitter.com/gUKne3T33k— Perchè cazzo è in tendenza? (@PercheCazzo) October 31, 2021
“These are images I would never have thought to see,” writes Noemi Di Segni, president of the Italian Union of Jewish Communities (Ucei).
They are as stupid and ignorant as they are dangerous, she writes in today’s edition of La Stampa newspaper.
Describing the protest as an “intolerable outrage,” she dismisses any attempt to characterize it as a demonstration of free speech.
Health Minister Roberto Speranza says he was “shocked by these people referring to the concentration camps.”
The mayor of Novara, Alessandro Canelli, a member of Matteo Salvini’s far-right League party, also condemns the stunt.
“To compare an ideological position on a vaccine or a health pass to the most tragic page of our history and to people who were deported, humiliated, tortured and killed is quite simply shameful,” he says. “They couldn’t have chosen a worse way to express a position on which one can be more or less in agreement.”
Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh meets British premier Boris Johnson and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at the climate summit in Glasgow.
In a tweet, Shtayyeh says: “We’re here today to tell the world that the Israeli occupation is the most critical long-term threat to the Palestinian environment.”
Just arrived in #COP26Glasgow. With leaders from across the world, we'll explore avenues of mutual cooperation to protect our precious planet. We're here today to tell the world that the Israeli occupation is the most critical long-term threat to the Palestinian environment. pic.twitter.com/xdhGQFd6UB
— Dr. Mohammad Shtayyeh د. محمد اشتية (@DrShtayyeh) November 1, 2021
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett sits with French President Emmanuel Macron for a private meeting on the sidelines of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.
The leaders speak about the NSO spyware scandal, after news emerged that Macron’s phone was hacked by the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, according to an Israeli official. They agree to continue addressing the issue in a quiet and transparent fashion.
Among other regional issues, Bennett and Macron discuss Iran’s nuclear program, and its continued enrichment of uranium.
This is the first meeting between the leaders.
Berlin’s police chief apologizes for an incident in which officers were pictured practicing push-ups on a part of the German capital’s memorial to the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust.
Pictures published by Berlin’s B.Z. tabloid showed uniformed policemen leaning on one of the slabs that makes up the Holocaust memorial to practice push-ups. The newspaper said they were stills from a video apparently taken by the officers themselves on a cellphone during a holiday weekend in May when they were deployed to the area because of demonstrations.
שוטרים גרמנים מבזים את אנדרטת השואה בברלין | תיעוד מביש של שני שוטרים ברלינאים לבושים במדים מבצעים שכיבות שמיכה דווקא באנדרטת השואה בבירה הגרמנית פורסם היום בבילד. מדובר בשוטרים מיחידה 26 שאחראית על אזור שרלוטנבורג ששירתו במרכז העיר באותו יום כדי לפקח על כמה הפגנות שנערכו שם. pic.twitter.com/BC34rhNLYE
— Antonia Yamin אנטוניה ימין (@antonia_yamin) November 1, 2021
The memorial, a field of 2,700 gray concrete slabs near the Brandenburg Gate that opened in 2005, is open around the clock and isn’t surrounded by any barriers. Visitors are supposed to refrain from activities such as running and jumping from one slab to another.
Berlin police chief Barbara Slowik says the service will examine the incident internally.
“The colleagues’ behavior disrespects what this memorial stands for” and also offends the memory of those who were murdered, Slowik says.
The GdP union, which represents police officers, also apologizes and condemns the “tastelessness” of the officers’ actions, adding that there must be “consequences” for those involved. “The Holocaust memorial is not an adventure playground,” it says.
The maternal family of Eitan Biran, a 6-year-old boy who was the sole survivor of a cable car crash in Italy that killed his parents earlier this year, files an appeal against a Tel Aviv family court’s decision to return the boy to Italy during a bitter custody fight.
The court last week ruled that the boy will be returned to his paternal aunt in Italy while a local court weighs which relatives will get custody over him. The court said Eitan’s place of living is Italy, from where maternal grandfather Shmuel Peleg whisked him away to Israel in defiance of local court orders.
The Peleg family, which wants the boy to remain with them in Israel, argues that he “is expressing his clear wish to remain with his maternal family and his voice is not heard,” as well as charging that paternal aunt Aya Biran-Nirko, who is now in Israel, is preventing them from meeting the boy.
US police in Austin, Texas, are investigating a possible case of arson after a fire was lit outside a synagogue there last night.
The fire was discovered just one week after banners emblazoned with the words “Vax the Jews” were hung by a neo-Nazi group from an overpass near a number of synagogues and the Jewish Community Center.
The Austin Fire Department’s arson investigators responded to the fire at Congregation Beth Israel, located about five miles (eight kilometers) from the JCC. There were no injuries.
AFD on scene of a small exterior fire at Congregation Beth Israel 3901 Shoal Creek Blvd. fire is out. No injuries. Arson investigators responding to assist with cause determination. pic.twitter.com/hgMvJNAk5o
— Austin Fire Info (@AustinFireInfo) November 1, 2021
While it is not yet clear if the fire was intentionally set in an act of antisemitism, the fire follows a series of antisemitic incidents in Austin in recent weeks.
On October 24, Members of the Goyim Defense League, a neo-Nazi group whose name mocks the Anti-Defamation League, hung banners with the message “Vax the Jews” from an overpass near a number of synagogues and the Jewish Community Center, called Shalom Austin. Though officers from the Austin Police Department responded to the antisemitic banner demonstration, similar banners were hung from the same overpass just a few days later on October 26.
The banner incident came just a few days after racist and antisemitic graffiti was discovered at Anderson High School, about a mile and a half away from the JCC.
Shalom Austin had responded to the initial banner incident with a message to the Jewish community warning of possible further acts of antisemitism in the days to come.
Lebanon’s foreign minister calls for dialogue with Saudi Arabia to ease a spiraling diplomatic spat sparked by remarks made by the Lebanese information minister on the Yemen war.
“Lebanon invites Saudi Arabia to engage in dialogue to solve all outstanding problems and not just the latest spat, so that the same crisis is not repeated every time,” the minister, Abdallah Bou Habib, tells AFP.
Environmental Protection Minister Tamar Zandberg meets with Cypriot Minister of Agriculture, Rural Development and Environment Costas Kadis on the sidelines of the UN climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland.
“Israel and Cyprus are both located in an area that is heavily affected by the climate crisis and from human activity,” Zandberg says. “We will strengthen and broaden cooperation between the two countries.”
“Given the common challenges and similar climate, it is natural that we should cooperate in the fields of environment and climate change,” she adds.
After meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett embraces Indian premier Narendra Modi at the opening ceremony of COP26 in Glasgow.
No further information is immediately available on the content of the encounters.
Bennett is slated to speak in about an hour.
At least 22 people have been killed in a Houthi rebel missile strike on a mosque south of the strategic Yemeni city of Marib, officials say.
“Twenty-two people, including children, were killed and 19 others were injured in a Houthi missile attack on a mosque… in Al-Jawba district” last night, a pro-government military official tells AFP.
Yemen’s Information Minister Moammar al-Eryani says on Twitter that 29 people were killed in the attack.
Activists in costumes posing as world leaders are playing in a traditional Scottish bagpipe band as world leaders come together at the UN climate conference in Glasgow.
The Oxfam campaigners wear kilts and say that world leaders need to come up with more action and not only “hot air” to tackle the climate crisis.
“These leaders, instead of reducing emissions and putting the world on a safer path, they are just blowing hot air, and we have had enough of hot air and empty promises. What we are asking for is for concrete action,” Oxfam climate policy lead Nafkote Dabi says.
“We need climate finance, poor countries need climate finance, vulnerable communities need climate finance, and they need to be serious about this, to support vulnerable countries, to adapt to the worst impact of the climate crisis.”
The COP26 climate summit must act to “save humanity” and protect the planet, UN chief Antonio Guterres says, warning that currently “we are digging our own graves.”
“It’s time to say: Enough,” the United Nations Secretary-General tells world leaders gathered in the Scottish city of Glasgow for the conference.
“Enough of brutalizing biodiversity. Enough of killing ourselves with carbon. Enough of treating nature like a toilet. Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves.”
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson opens the historic COP26 climate summit by warning world leaders that they face a damning verdict from future generations unless they act decisively.
“The anger and the impatience of the world will be uncontainable, unless we make this COP26 in Glasgow the moment when we get real about climate change, and we can get real on coal, cars, cash and trees,” he says in a keynote speech.
The COP26 UN climate summit is live, with world leaders speaking on one of the most pressing challenges facing the world.
Among them are US President Joe Biden, as well as Prime Minister Naftali Bennett who will speak around 2:30 p.m. local time (4:30 p.m. Israel time)
A week after advancing some 3,000 new settlement homes, Israel’s Civil Administration authorizes 1,303 Palestinian housing units in the West Bank, an Israeli security official says.
The authorized units lie in small Palestinian towns near the West Bank cities of Jenin and Bethlehem.
Israel rarely issues permits for Palestinian construction in the West Bank. Between 2016 and 2018, around 99% of Palestinian requests for permits were rejected by Israeli authorities, according to Defense Ministry figures.
President Isaac Herzog says at a journalism conference in Eilat that he is “frustrated” with the current political discourse, amid scathing attacks surrounding this week’s crucial discussions on the state budget.
“I have met all the party leaders and I am holding very frank conversations with them,” Herzog says, noting specifically that he has held such talks with opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who has voiced some of the most strongly worded diatribes against the current government.
Saudi Arabia has executed a man convicted of trying to shoot dead security forces as well as weapons charges, with alleged links to figures accused of terrorist activities, state media reports.
He is executed in Dammam in the Eastern Province, which has seen bouts of unrest since 2011 when mostly Muslim Shiite protesters emboldened by the Arab Spring uprisings took to the streets. The demonstrators demanded an end to what they called discrimination by the Sunni-dominated government, a charge Riyadh denies.
The Saudi man who was executed “took part in two shooting operations against security forces with an intent to kill” and “in dealing and possessing weapons,” the interior ministry says.
He was “linked to people wanted for terrorism-related activities,” the ministry adds in its statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.
Human rights group Amnesty International said in August that at least 40 people were executed between January and July in Saudi Arabia, more than for the whole of 2020. More than 60 people have been executed this year in the kingdom, according to an AFP tally based on official statements.
Saudi Arabia put 184 people to death in 2019, according to Amnesty, which has said it was the highest number recorded in a single year in the country.
Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia’s state-run Human Rights Commission said it had documented 27 executions in 2020, a decrease over the previous year due in part to a moratorium on the death penalty for drug offenses.
US President Joe Biden arrives in Scotland for a UN climate summit, flying in from Rome where he attended the G20.
Air Force One touches down in Edinburgh, with the US president due to address the COP26 summit in Glasgow within hours.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett meets with Australian premier Scott Morrison at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, speaking about the Iran threat in addition to climate issues.
Bennett urges Morrison to ensure that Australia pushes for a rebuke of Iran at the next IAEA Board of Governors meeting in November. Australia is one of the 35 board members of the UN atomic agency for 2021-2022.
Bennett also brings up the importance of recognizing Hezbollah as a terror organization. Australia currently recognizes only the Hezbollah External Security Organization as a terrorist group, and not the entire organization. In June, Australia’s Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) recommended blacklisting all of Hezbollah.
Returning to a recent theme he has been expressing, Bennett says that climate change should not be a political issue, and that Israel’s contribution to the global effort is its innovative potential.
Bennett is joined by Environmental Protection Minister Tamar Zandberg, National Security Adviser Eyal Hulata and Political Advisor Shimrit Meir.
The prime minister also invites Morrison for a visit to Israel.
The last time the two leaders spoke was in June, when Morrison called to congratulate Bennett on cobbling together a government coalition.
