LCCC ENGLISH DAILY NEWS BULLETIN
August 05/2018
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

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Tens of Thousands Attend Druze Rally Against Nation-state Law
من الهآررتس: عشرات من الآلاف شاركوا في المظاهرات الدرزية في إسرائيل احتجاجاً على قاننون يهودية الدولة العبرية
Bar Peleg, Noa Shpigel, Chaim Levinson, Oded Yaron and Noa Landau/Haaretz/August 04/18
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/66511/haaretz-tens-of-thousands-attend-druze-rally-against-nation-state-law-%D9%85%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%87%D8%A2%D8%B1%D8%B1%D8%AA%D8%B3-%D8%B9%D8%B4%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D9%85%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A2/
'We serve in the army... and in the end we are second-class citizens,' protester tells Haaretz ■ Right-wing activists spread fake correspondence announcing deal between Druze leaders and Labor party
Tens of thousands of people gathered in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square for a major protest led by the Druze community against the contentious nation-state law, which has stood at the center of dispute between the Israeli government and the Druze.
The Druze community's spiritual leader, Sheikh Mowafaq Tarif, together with Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai, will be among the key speakers at the rally.
A fake correspondence between right-wing activists in Israel's Labor Party regarding a deal in the works between the Druze community and party members circulated on social media on Saturday ahead of the protest.
Two young men from the northern Druze town of Peki'in, Russel and Hussein, came to the protest waving the Druze flag. "The entire village is coming today," Russel said. "We serve in the army, we do everything – and in the end we are [labeled as] second-class citizens."
Addressing the alternative legislation offered by the premier, Hussein said: "We don't need money, we need equality. He ought to cancel the law."
Protest organizers called on all Israelis to join the rally in order to "express our protest and stand by our Druze brothers in order to preserve the balance in the country's character as a Jewish and democratic state."
"This is a protest for any citizen who views the [nation-state] law as a complete distortion of the Declaration of Independence and wants to demonstrate against the erasure of the value of equality from the definition of the country's identity," the statement read.
"All Israelis are equal," protest organizers said in their statement. They also announced that among the people expected to attend the rally are former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo, ex-Shin Bet heads Yuval Diskin and Ami Ayalon and former IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi.
The demonstration is being held against the backdrop of the ongoing protest of the Druze community against the law as well as the separate legislation Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered Druze representatives in an attempt to appease the community.
The alternative legislation sought to enshrine the status of Israeli Druze after the latter claimed that the law discriminated against them. But many Druze claimed Netanyahu's offer was insufficient and called for an amendment to be introduced to the nation-state law.
Fake conversations
The fictitious deal spread by right-wing activists garnered the interest of many Israelis browsing their social media outlets after a meeting between Netanyahu and leaders of the Druze community was cut short Thursday night.
Screenshots of fake conversations between members of a WhatsApp group titled ''The Labor Party- Core Headquarters'' were posted to the Facebook pages of two Labor activists with a large social media following, and the made-up chats were shared by at least 1,000 people.
The main activist announcing the deal in the fake WhatsApp conversation was a man named Avi Yaron. However, Haaretz has learned that there is no Labor activist with that name.
In the feigned correspondence, activist Yaron claims to have met with Brig. Gen. (res.) Amal Assad, a former senior Israel Defense Forces officer who wrote a Facebook post in which he said that the nation-state law would turn Israel into an apartheid state.
The activist said in the fake chat that an understanding was reached with Assad that the latter would receive a spot in the Labor party's Knesset faction: "The subject was sealed with Avi (i.e. Avi Gabbay, the chair of the party)," Yaron was quoted as saying in the chat.
The non-existent activist was also quoted as saying that many Druze, "including the conservative right," will come to the protest against the nation-state law.
Assad was one of the key participants in Thursday's meeting between the prime minister and representatives of the Druze community. He told Netanyahu that he was not willing to accept his proposal for a separate legislation that would enshrine the status of Israel's Druze, saying that instead an amendment to the nation-state law should be passed.
Assad also told Netanyahu that he stood behind his sharply-worded statement against the nation-state law. Netanyahu then said he wouldn’t accept such an “insult to the dignity of the prime minister of Israel and the dignity of the state.” The meeting was subsequently cut short.
The Labor party filed a police complaint against the two right-wing activists who posted the fake correspondence on their Facebook pages.
The party also released a statement saying that "in recent hours, an employee of the party has been spreading a fake WhatsApp correspondence attributed to Labor activists. This correspondence is entirely fake, 100% fake, every name, letter and message here are simply not real.
These are the sorts of things that the hate machine in Balfour [a reference to the Prime Minister's Office, which is located in Balfour Street in Jerusalem] churns out to damage this evening's protest."
"We will act in accordance with authorities in order to investigate those who spread the fake correspondence," the statement read.
The Labor Party's chair, Avi Gabbay, also released a statement in which he said that "the scared Balfour spirit is blowing all over the fake WhatsApp correspondence that the Likud has been spreading since this morning. It's a devilish, dangerous spirit that is disintegrating our society and tearing it to shreds. Everything is permissible in [Netanyahu's] path to the ballot box and away from the investigations."
Brig. Gen. (res.) Assad also responded to the fake correspondence, saying that he is "embarrassed to respond to this nonsense. I can't believe that they would descend to this level. I can't understand if this was done on the prime minister's behalf or not. I don't recognize any of the things that were written there."

Analysis/Netanyahu Cons Druze and Incites Jews to Protect Controversial Nation-state Law
نتانياهو يخدع ويتملق الدروز ويحث الإسرائيليين على على حماية قانون يهودية الدولة العبرية
Chemi Shalev/Haaretz/August 04/18
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/66514/chemi-shalev-haaretz-netanyahu-cons-druze-and-incites-jews-to-protect-controversial-nation-state-law-%d8%b4%d8%a7%d9%85%d9%8a-%d8%b4%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a7%d9%81-%d9%85%d9%86-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%87%d8%a2%d8%b1/
For prime minister’s minions, the protest against the controversial law transforms Druze from blood brothers to backstabbing leftists.
Even by Benjamin Netanyahu’s very high standards of skullduggery, the staged bust up of his meeting with Druze leadership on Thursday night was a beaut. The prime minister carefully prepared an ambush, blew up the meeting at its outset and then instructed his agents to spread a completely false account of what had transpired. The Druze leaders were flummoxed, reconciliation was shattered, and Netanyahu chalked up another one of his vile victories. The final result was Netanyahu 1, Israel 0.
A few minutes after the start of the evening prime time newscasts, reporters covering the meeting between the prime minister and the Druze delegation broke in with the story, exactly as it was concocted by Netanyahu’s distortion machine. A retired Druze general, Amal Asad, had incensed Netanyahu by asserting, out of the blue, that Israel was an “apartheid state.” A proud prime minister stood up for his country’s honor and stormed out of the meeting. Asad, by implication, had gone over to the dark side.
By the time the truth came out, it was too late: Netanyahu’s political acolytes and social media mob had gotten the message. The Druze were now the enemy. They were being funded and/or bamboozled by George Soros, the New Israel Fund and the perfidious left in general. The Druze, embraced only last week as blood brothers, could now go and live in Syria and see how they like it there, as countless tweets exhorted.
It no longer mattered that, in fact, it was Netanyahu who brought the loaded term “apartheid state” into the meeting. He came prepared with a Facebook post that Asad had written several days earlier – and which few people had heard of. Asad hadn’t asserted, either at the meeting or in his post, that Israel is an apartheid state, but rather that the new nation-state law would allow it to become one. Netanyahu had demanded that the group of former IDF officers led by Asad leave the room and leave him alone with established Druze leadership. They refused.
Netanyahu realized before the meeting that his efforts to get the Druze to abandon their planned Saturday night demonstration at Rabin Square was going to fail.
The established leadership was inclined to accept his promises to “anchor” the “special status” of the Druze and to grant new benefits to those who serve in the army, but it faced stiff opposition from younger and more militant Druze who described Netanyahu’s offers as hush money. The Druze stuck to the one demand that Netanyahu refuses to meet: The amendment if not annulment of the Jewish-centrist nation-state law.
So Netanyahu decided that when the Druze went high, he would go to the gutter. He would stain the Druze and their demonstration with his favorite paintbrush of treason. He would rally his base to accost Asad, besmirch the Druze and portray the Kikar Rabin demo as a subversive putsch. He would divide and split Israeli Jews between those who stand with the Jewish nation and those who aid and abet its enemies. He would push all the right buttons that he’s mastered over three decades of incitement and pave the way for another triumph of Jewish nationalism over the depraved, cosmopolitan, Jew-hating, terrorist loving left.
Will it work? Perhaps. Netanyahu’s rabble-rousing has done the trick for him in the past, from “Netanyahu is Good for the Jews” that enabled his first election triumph in 1996 to “The Arabs are moving to the ballot boxes” that gave him his last. As any American who lives with Donald Trump knows all too well, one can never underestimate the ability of the mob to embrace falsehoods, their insatiable craving to denounce subversive enemies from within and their willingness to follow their leader, no questions asked, down the road of hatred and strife. And that a great many more people are fully cognizant of Netanyahu’s chicanery and of the dangers posed by the rising tide of Jewish nationalism, but they nonetheless cast their lot with the rightwing rabble for fear of being identified with the supposedly treasonous left.
But perhaps, this time around, Netanyahu has bitten off more than he can chew. Asad, after all, has consummate Israeli credentials: A 26-year army veteran, a brigadier-general who served as combat commander of infantry battalions and brigades, a paratrooper who risked his life on the front lines, from the bloodiest battle of the 1973 war through the Lebanon War to the Kasbah in Jenin during the first intifada. In his brief sojourn in politics he opted to join, you guessed it, the Likud. If Netanyahu can brand someone like Asad as a turncoat, absolutely no one, including the IDF’s most decorated heroes, can feel himself immune.
The same is true of the Druze community itself. For decades it has been portrayed as the most loyal ally of the Jews, living proof that Zionism can recruit local, non-Jewish minorities in a common front against Palestinians and radical Islam. Netanyahu’s minions need only his word, but for many Israelis it will require a radical leap of faith to forget everything they knew about the Druze and to start treating them with the same disdain and suspicion hitherto reserved for the Palestinians.
Saturday night’s demonstration will test Netanyahu’s success. A sparsely attended protest will delight his followers, who will be convinced that Netanyahu ingeniously defused his opponents. A mass demonstration, on the other hand, would signal that, on the contrary, Netanyahu has stirred up a hornet’s nest. That he not only angered the Druze but ignited the Jews as well, unwittingly forging a new Israeli coalition. Such a show of strength would galvanize Israel’s despondent left and alarm the arrogant right. Netanyahu will be forced to dig even deeper into his bag of dirty tricks, turn up the volume of his incitement and try even harder to divide and rule. Whether this is “good for the Jews”, as Netanyahu is supposed to be, is debatable.

Opinion/Israel and Iran Will Both Lose if They Go to War
الحرب بين إسرائيل وإيران هي خسارة للفريقين
David Rosenberg/Haaretz/August 04/18
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/66517/david-rosenberg-haaretz-israel-and-iran-will-both-lose-if-they-go-to-war-%d8%af%d8%a7%d9%8a%d9%81%d8%af-%d8%b1%d9%88%d8%b2%d9%86%d8%a8%d8%a7%d8%b1%d8%ba-%d9%85%d9%86-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%87%d8%a7%d8%a2/
The short conflicts Israel has grown used to are a thing of the past: A conflict with Iran will almost certainly cost the economy dearly.
What’s on the collective Israeli mind these early days of August? The incendiary balloons that are wafting over from Gaza, Druze army officers resigning in protest over the Nation-State Law, LGBT rights, and how to survive the last weeks of summer vacation until the kids head back to school.
On the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange the mood has been bearish, but that’s because of the collapsing technology stocks on Wall Street and the latest Twitter salvo fired by Trump in his trade war with China.
What seems to be further from everyone’s minds is Iran, and the growing possibility that Israel could find itself in a war with the Islamic Republic.
We’ve been in a gradually heating up cold war with Iran in Syria, repeatedly hitting Iranian military targets without suffering the response likely to come.
Meanwhile, Tehran, feeling the sting of Trump’s sanctions and his trash-talking tweets, has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz and is reportedly readying to start proactive military exercises there.
In the Red Sea, Houthi militants allied with Iran fired missiles at two Saudi tankers last week, prompting the Saudis to suspend shipping and for Netanyahu to warn Iran that Israel would join an international coalition to prevent the Bab al-Mandab from being closed.
My guess is that this is tough talk aimed at mutual intimidation - rather than the lead-up to an actual military confrontation. Tehran has traditionally employed inflammatory rhetoric, and it’s now met its match with an American president who responds in kind.
The problem isn’t that anyone – Iran, the United States or Israel – wants this to spill into open fighting, but it could happen. If Washington or Tehran assumes that the other side doesn’t want war, leaders will feel freer to push the envelope a little further – a vague threat becomes more specific, an incident like a tanker is stopped in the Gulf or (as may have been the case in the Red Sea) you let a proxy do something provocative like fire off a few missiles.
Iran’s leaders may even feel that with their economy crumbling and the streets restless, a little war might be a way out – if not with the U.S., maybe with Israel. It would rally the masses of Iranians and maybe enable Tehran to enter into negotiations with Washington with some honor.
There are so many possible scenarios for how this could happen and in what form, but in any case, the risks for Israel are huge. Since the 2006 Lebanon war, we’ve gotten used to the idea that missile wars are not an existential threat to Israeli lives or to the economy, especially with Iron Dome there to defend us. But as the army explained to the cabinet a few weeks ago, the next missile war is likely to be on a much bigger scale than the ones that preceded it.
The most likely scenario isn’t a direct attack by Iran but one by Hezbollah, which is estimated to have as many as 130,000 missiles in Lebanon, 90% of which are capable of reaching as far south of Haifa. Most homes in Israel don’t have effective defense against a missile strike, nor does most critical infrastructure. The army knows that Iron Dome cannot provide an effective defense against hundreds of missiles launched in a single day. And, if Hamas decides to open a second front from Gaza, the home front situation becomes more dire.
Civil defense in such a war will mean evacuating hundreds of thousands of people within missile range, causing huge economic disruption.
It will also mean shutting down the Tamar offshore oil rig that supplies a critical of the fuel used to generate Israel’s electricity. Israel would have to resort to scheduled power outages to cope with the fuel shortage, creating more economic disruptions.
Economically, Israel could probably come out unscathed from a short war, assuming that it doesn’t result in heavy casualties or material damage. But a longer conflict would be much more problematic – it could not only do considerable direct damage but undo Israel’s reputation as a Teflon economy when it comes to war.
Investors would give second thought to putting money here and tourism would be dealt a fatal blow. The bill for cleaning up could weigh on the economy for years. For the world economy, there’s risk as well, if Iran chooses to bring the fight to the Gulf and/or the Red Sea. That would be logical as they are only places where it could expect to have a real impact: About a fifth of the world’s oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea accounts for another big chunk of the traffic.
Iran doesn’t have the naval capability to seal the straits for a prolonged period, but between its arsenal of speed boats and mines, it could close the passage for brief periods and create enough insecurity to deter tankers from risking the journey even when it is open. In the Red Sea, such tactics have already caused the Saudis to stop tanker traffic. If Iran manages to disrupt the flow of oil, prices could shoot through the roof, breaking the 2008 record $147 a barrel. Some of the most Gulf- dependent countries might not be able to get oil at any price. The world economy, which is already being shaken by the trade wars, could find itself spinning into a recession.

Analysis/Druze Solidarity Rally Could Make or Break Netanyahu’s Election Campaign
تحليل سياسي من الهآررتس: اعتصام التضامن الدرزي اليوم بمواجعة قانون يهودية إسرائيل قد يبني لحملة انتخابات نتانياهو أو يحطمها
Anshel Pfeffer/Haaretz/August 04/18
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/66519/anshel-pfeffer-haaretz-druze-solidarity-rally-could-make-or-break-netanyahus-election-campaign-%D8%AA%D8%AD%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%84-%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%8A-%D9%85%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%87/
Netanyahu is already laying the toxic groundwork for his next election win. It worked in 2015, but it may not in 2018
Israel’s 2019 election campaign began in the early hours of July 19, the moment the Knesset passed the nation-state law. The coalition’s lawmakers had no doubt about it, once they understood how suddenly determined Benjamin Netanyahu was to pass a law he had allowed to languish for the better part of a decade in committees. A date for elections next year has yet to be set, but Netanyahu’s electoral calculus is now clear.
The Knesset was about to end its summer session. Netanyahu reckoned this was his last chance to move any serious legislation, as by the time the Knesset members reconvene in the autumn they will already be gripped by an upcoming election, and the coalition will start to disintegrate. Why did the prime minister-whose party seems to be doing well in the polls- reach for the most divisive and controversial law he could find? The most simple explanation is that Netanyahu, an insatiable consumer of opinion polls, was worried by surveys indicating that 70 percent of Israelis (even higher than that on the right) were unhappy with the lack of response of his government to the barrage of flaming kites and balloons coming over from Gaza.
One of the contradictions in Netanyahu’s character is that while he is a pyromaniac on the domestic political front – when it comes to making military decisions, he is the most cautious leader in Israeli history. He understood very well there is little Israel can do right now about the airborne arson attacks from Gaza. In fact, he was fully aware that a long-term cease-fire agreement with Hamas is in the works. He supports such a deal but fears, with good reason, that among his hard-right base, such a deal will not be popular, as it will not include in its first stage a return to Israel of the two civilians being held captive in Gaza and the remains of two IDF soldiers killed in Gaza in 2014.
To win an election, Netanyahu needs two things. First, to ensure that just enough voters are not tempted to vote for centrist parties, jeopardizing his right-wing-religious coalition’s majority, and secondly, that most of those voters who do vote for coalition parties, choose Likud. He is more worried about the second, and sees rival right-wingers - particularly Habayeit Hayeudi leader, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, who can almost surely be relied upon to criticize a Gaza cease-fire deal - as his main threat. By personally endorsing and pushing through the nation-state law, Netanyahu planned to both show the right-wingers that only he could be relied upon to further a truly nationalist agenda and to convince the small, but crucial section of the electorate wavering between a right-wing or centrist vote, that the opposition which voted against the law are both unpatriotic and anti-Zionist.
But hasty legislation always leaves loose ends untied. His much eroded team, which nowadays contains very few experienced aides, failed to predict the anger of Israel’s “model minority,” the Druze Israeli community. Netanyahu’s first reaction was to try and buy them off, but Israeli-Druze are both savvy and politically-diverse, and most of the leadership were not buying Bibi’s carrots
The way Netanyahu contrived on Thursday night to blow up the meeting with the local Druze leadership, claiming Brig. Gen. (res.) Amal Assad had called Israel an “apartheid state” on Facebook (he hadn’t, he had simply warned of it becoming one), proves Netanyahu is doubling down and is now resolved to using sticks against the Druze. The quote, coming from his inner-circle over the weekend that “once we’ve embarked on it, we cannot change even a word in the nation-state law and whoever doesn’t like it - there’s a large Druze community in Syria, and they’re invited to found the state of Druzistan there,” was proof enough.
Netanyahu had hoped to at least divide, if not buy off the Druze community, before Saturday night’s rally in Tel-Aviv against the nation-state law and in solidarity with the Druze.
While officially at least, the rally is not party-affiliated and is being organized by NGOs, Netanyahu’s proxies are right in saying that this is a political rally against the prime minister. Many of the leading opposition politicians will be there, and even though the main Jewish speakers are to be the ostensibly non-political former security chiefs – ex-IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and the former head of Mossad Tamir Pardo - the tone is clear.
The center-left is trying to challenge Netanyahu on the patriotism front. This isn’t a simple strategy, on the political or moral level. By focusing the rally on solidarity with the Druze, they are to some degree playing into Netanyahu’s hands, by ignoring the much larger Israeli-Arab community, the true targets of the nation-state law. But the Druze, who unlike the Arabs serve in the Israeli army, are much more popular among Israel’s Jewish mainstream.
Another ploy, this time by the Zionist Union party, to snatch back the patriotic mantle, was the announcement of its leaders Avi Gabbay and Tzipi Livni, that if they win the next elections, they will pass Israel’s Declaration of Independence (which contains some of the nationalist elements of the nation-state law along with a commitment to equality for all citizens) in to law, as the country’s constitution.
Toxic redux
Tonight’s rally is essentially the end of the first act of the election campaign. This is how the showdown between Netanyahu and his center-left opponents will be framed: It will be a toxic confrontation about who are the Jewish patriots and who are the anti-Zionists on the Arabs’ side.
Essentially, it will be a re-run of the 2015 election, with one major difference.
In 2015, both sides used similar tactics. Netanyahu incited against Israel’s Arab minority, with Likud sending millions of anonymous text-messages with lies such as “Hamas called on Israeli-Arabs to go and vote” and “turnout is three times higher in the Arab community”. And then on election day, Netanyahu himself made his infamous “the Arab voters are heading in droves to the polling-stations” Facebook video.
The center-left also held a grand rally the weekend before the 2015 election, under the slogan “Israel Wants Change”. The former security chief who spoke at that rally was the late Head of Mossad Meir Dagan. Dying from liver failure, he told me on the eve of the rally “I have to keep my last shreds of strength to push him (Netanyahu) out”. It was the only political speech of his life, in which he warned, in tears, that “for the first time in my life I’m afraid of our leadership.” It didn’t help. Netanyahu’s anti-Arab campaign won him enough votes.
But there is one main difference now. In 2015, Netanyahu broadcast his toxic message only on the very last days of the campaign. Now, he has let it out of the bottle before he even knows how long the campaign will last. Will it have a lasting impression and can the center-left counter it?
Netanyahu’s main advantages are the center-left’s weakness – split between Zionist Union, led by the mistake-prone Gabbay, and the opportunistic Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, which is widely expected to join Netanyahu’s coalition after election, should he win. But Netanyahu is also at a personal disadvantage: He’s running against time. He cannot predict whether the probable criminal indictments in at least part of the corruption investigations will come before election day and overshadow his campaign. Which is one of the reasons why he decided to go ahead with the nation-state law now, to try and make the campaign as much about his opponents' lack of patriotism, and less about his own personal corruption.
Will it work? The polling so far is inconclusive. One poll on the Walla website puts support of the nation-state law at 58 percent of the general public, which would mean it’s working so far for Netanyahu. But the same poll also put support for the Druze protest against the law at 58 percent, which indicates that at least some of the law’s supporters are less than certain. In an interesting analysis on the +972 website, political consultant Dahlia Scheindlin presented additional polling and results from focus groups, indicating that a large proportion of moderate right-wingers who support the nation-state law in principle, don’t think the law is actually necessary and view it as a “PR trick for Bibi”.
Tonight’s rally, and more important than that, how it is perceived in the media and by the wider public, could make or break Netanyahu’s opening move of the campaign. If the organizers, and the center-left parties, succeed in leveraging the support for the Druze community, in to articulating a powerful, patriotic message against the nation-state law, they will have gone some way to pushing back Netanyahu’s divisive narrative.