NZ Friends of Israel Association Inc
Fighting racial intolerance in New Zealand and beyond
While Earth Day marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970, for indigenous peoples, living in close connection with the environment and being caretakers of the land is part of the culture, hence Māori are called tangata whenua, people of the land.
A special event organized by a Māori tribe in the north of Aotearoa New Zealand to welcome the new Israeli Ambassador also provided a unique opportunity to mark Earth Day.
Heartwarming stuff!
–NZ Friends of Israel
Israel will reopen the country to vaccinated foreign tourists in May, more than a year after closing its borders to most international visitors due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The Tourism Ministry said a limited number of tourist groups will be allowed to enter the country starting May 23, with individual visitors allowed at a later stage. All foreign tourists entering the country will be tested for coronavirus before boarding flights to Israel and must present a serological test to prove they have received a Covid-19 vaccine.
Israel suffered a major economic blow due to the coronavirus pandemic. In recent months, it has carried out a highly successful vaccination programme that has allowed it to reopen most sectors of the economy. But the tourism industry, limited only to serving Israelis, remains blighted.
Israel on Thursday said it would formally reject the International Criminal Court’s decision to launch a probe into potential war crimes against the Palestinians, denying that it has committed such crimes and saying the court lacks the jurisdiction to investigate.
A panel of judges at the ICC ruled in February that the court does have jurisdiction, allowing the investigation to proceed. Israel’s response to a formal notification sent out last month is not expected to reopen that debate, though judges may reconsider the issue of jurisdiction later in the process.
The court is expected to look at possible war crimes committed by Israelis forces and Palestinian militants during and after the 2014 Gaza war, as well as Israel’s establishment of settlements in the occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem that now house over 700,000 settlers. International law prohibits the transfer of civilians into occupied territory.
Israel was hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic – it reported over 831,000 infections. But in just a few months, after launching a mass vaccination campaign, life is “back to normal”.
As of March 15, according to the World Health Organisation, 9.7 million vaccine doses had been administered in Israel. A total of 5.18m people, which is over half the population, have received at least one dose. A “green pass” has since been introduced allowing vaccinated people exclusive access to gyms, hotels and theatres and concerts.
Kiwi expat Jeremy Ross, who moved to Israel in 2007, received his second vaccine dose in January, a month after the programme launched.
“This is the end of the road for us … we’re at the end of the tunnel, this is it, the light is here,” Ross said.
NZFOI: Wow!
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be able to form a government for the seventh time in his three-decade political career, according to exit polls on the three television networks Tuesday night.All three polls indicated that his bloc of Likud, Shas, United Torah Judaism and the Religious Zionist Party received enough support together with the Yamina Party of Naftali Bennett, who said during the campaign that he was ready to join a coalition with either political bloc.
For the fourth time in two years, Israel is holding an election.
And for the fourth time in two years, no one knows who will win or what will happen next. In many ways, the election on Tuesday feels like the last three — some of the same central issues, the same dysfunction and many of the same candidates.
In other ways, however, it feels radically different, opening up new possibilities and directions for Israel’s future, no matter who wins.
Israelis are voting on Tuesday in their fourth election in just two years. Many of them feel numbed by their endless election cycle — a mood that contrasts with the Palestinians, who are excited about a rare chance to vote, in elections in May.
The Israeli vote is the embodiment of political paralysis caused in part by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to remain in office while on trial for corruption. Mr. Netanyahu hopes the country’s successful Covid-19 vaccination campaign will help him win. But polls suggest that the outcome is unlikely to break the deadlock. Many Israelis are bracing for a fifth election later this year.
The Palestinian vote, set for May 22, will be the first since a violent rift in 2007 between Hamas, the faction that controls the Gaza Strip, and its rival, Fatah. More than 93 percent of Palestinians have registered to vote, illustrating an initial enthusiasm for the process. Young people want a clearer path to statehood and a more competent government.
Geopolitics: Mr. Netanyahu’s plans to visit the United Arab Emirates and his bombast about Emirati investments have turned into a diplomatic debacle. Emirati officials sent clear signals that the Persian Gulf country would not be drawn into Mr. Netanyahu’s re-election campaign.
Source: NY Times
Recent reports suggest that the United States is disturbed by aspects of the Israeli-Iranian shadow war raging across the region – in this case, at sea. It seems reasonable to conclude that Washington is trying to lower tensions it fears can spoil attempts to negotiate a new nuclear agreement with Tehran.
American sources told The Wall Street Journal in recent days that since 2019, Israel allegedly attacked 12 ships illegally carrying Iranian oil to Syria, using weapons such as limpet mines to damage the vessels.
The report came amid signs of a possible escalation between Israel and Iran on the seas, suggesting that the information was designed to send a signal to Israel to cool down the alleged maritime operations.
It also surfaced at about the time Iran accused Israel of attacking an Iranian container ship in the eastern Mediterranean Sea last week named the Shahr e Kord, causing a fire.
That attack came days after Israel said Iran was behind an attack on an Israeli-owned cargo ship, the MV Helios Ray, in the Gulf of Oman.
Israel’s alleged covert campaign at sea is part of a much larger campaign, dubbed by the defense establishment as the “campaign between the wars,” designed to prevent the radical Iranian axis from building up its military and terrorist power in the region but to do so without crossing the threshold of regional war.
Israel and Iran are at war. Israeli strikes this week in southern Syria, western Iraq and eastern Lebanon—and possibly even Beirut—confirm it.
This war is a very 21st-century affair. For now it involves only small circles among the Israeli and Iranian populations. Parts of the air force, intelligence services and probably special forces are active on the Israeli side. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, its expeditionary Quds Force and proxy politico-military organizations in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon are engaged on behalf of Iran.
The war marks a hinge point in Middle Eastern geopolitics. For the past decade and a half, the region has been engaged mainly with internal strife: civil wars, insurgencies and mass protests. These are now largely spent, leaving a broken landscape along the northern route from Iran to Israel.
The three “states” in between—Iraq, Syria and Lebanon—are fragmented, partly collapsed and thoroughly penetrated by neighboring powers. Their official state structures have lost the attribute that alone, according to German sociologist Max Weber, guarantees sovereignty: “monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force.” These nations’ territory has become the theater of the Iran-Israel war.
The regime in Tehran favors the destruction of the Jewish state, but this is a longstanding aim, dating to the 1979 Islamic Revolution and before it, in the minds of the revolutionaries. What’s brought it to the fore is that Iran has emerged in the past half decade as the prime beneficiary of the collapse of the Iraqi, Syrian and Lebanese states. This has substantially increased its capacity to menace Israel, which has noticed and responded.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has no peer in the Middle East—and perhaps beyond—in the practice of irregular warfare. Its proxies today dominate Lebanon (Hezbollah), constitute the single strongest politico-military force in Iraq (Popular Mobilization Units, or PMU), and maintain an independent, powerful military infrastructure in Syria, in partial cooperation with the Assad regime and Russia. This nexus, against which Israel is currently engaged, brings Iran de facto control over much of the land from the Iraq-Iran border to the Mediterranean and to the Syrian and Lebanese borders with Israel.
Iran treats this entire area as a single operational space, moving its assets around at will without excessive concern for the notional sovereignty of the governments in Baghdad, Beirut and Damascus. Lebanese Hezbollah trains PMU fighters in Iraq. Iraqi Shiite militias are deployed at crucial and sensitive points on the Iraqi-Syrian border, such as al-Qa’im and Mayadeen. Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah personnel operate in southwest Syria, close to the Golan Heights.
Israeli attacks in recent days suggest that Israel, too, has begun to act according to these definitions and in response to them. If Iran will not restrict its actions to Syria, neither will Israel.
There is a crucial difference between the Israeli and Iranian positions in this conflict. Iran’s involvement in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon is deep, long-term and proactive. Tehran seeks the transformation of these areas into Iranian satrapies, and it has made considerable advances toward its goal. Israel’s involvement is entirely reactive, pushing back against Iranian domination and destroying the missile caches that bring it within Iran’s range. Israel has no interest in the internal political arrangements of Lebanon, Syria or Iraq, except insofar as these constitute a danger to Israel itself.
This imbalance defines the conflict. Iran creates political organizations, penetrates state structures, and seeks to make itself an unchallengeable presence in all three countries. Israel has been wary of entering the mire of factional politics in neighboring countries since its failed intervention in Lebanon leading up to the 1982 war. Jerusalem instead uses its superior intelligence and conventional military capabilities to neutralize the military and paramilitary fruits of the Iranian project whenever they appear to be forming into a concrete threat.
Israel is largely alone in this fight. The U.S. is certainly aware of Israel’s actions against Iran and may tacitly support them. Yet the Trump administration shows no signs of wishing to play an active part in the military challenge to Iranian infrastructure-building across the Middle East. This White House favors ramping up economic pressure on Tehran, but both its occupant and his voter base are wary in the extreme of new military commitments in the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia is targeted by the Ansar Allah, or Houthi, movement, another Iranian proxy closely assisted by the Revolutionary Guard. The Saudis’ interests are partly aligned with Israel’s, but Saudi Arabia is a fragile country, requiring the protection of its allies rather than constituting an asset for them.
So it is war between Israel and Iran, prosecuted over the ruins of Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. But it won’t necessarily stay that way. A single kinetic and successful Iranian response to Israel’s airstrikes could rapidly precipitate an escalation to a much broader contest. State-to-state conflict has returned to the Middle East.
Mr. Spyer is director of the Middle East Center for Reporting and Analysis and a research fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and at the Middle East Forum. He is author of “Days of the Fall: A Reporter’s Journey in the Syria and Iraq Wars.”
