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World News

Deliberate Israel Coalition Brings Palestinians Aid however No Rejoicing

Planned Israel Coalition Brings Palestinians Relief but No Rejoicing

The agreement on a coalition that would oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and include an Arab party in government has prompted indignation and relief in roughly equal measure among Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Indignation because Naftali Bennett, who will become prime minister until 2023 if Parliament approves the proposed eight-party coalition, is a right-wing leader aligned with religious nationalists in strong opposition to a Palestinian state.

Relief because Mr. Netanyahu, while sometimes courting Israeli Arabs of late, has often used their presence to generate fear among his base, famously warning in 2015 that they were voting “in droves.” He has fanned division where possible and declared that Israel is “the nation-state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.”

These provocations, and the passing of a nation-state bill in 2018 that said the right to exercise self-determination was “unique to the Jewish people,” contributed to the anger evident in violent confrontations in several cities last month between Arabs and Jews.

That a small Arab party known by its Hebrew acronym, Raam, agreed to join the government so soon after the clashes reflected a growing realization that marginalization of Arab parties brings only paralysis. It also suggested a desire among some Palestinians citizens, who account for 20 percent of the Israeli population, to exert more political influence.

Raam, with four seats in the current Parliament, would be the first independent Arab party in an Israeli government, although it would not have any cabinet members.

“I do not think that the two-state solution or reconciliation with the Palestinians will be achieved in the coming year or two,” said Jafar Farah, the director of the Mossawa Center, an advocacy group for Arab citizens of Israel. “But I do think that it is an opportunity for the Palestinian community in Israel to become a game changer.”

Others were more sceptical. “I have debated Bennett, and he says quite openly, ‘You are not my equal,’” said Diana Buttu, a prominent Palestinian lawyer based in Haifa. “Did I want Netanyahu out? Yes. To the extent of wanting Bennett as prime minister? No.”

Alluding to Mansour Abbas, the leader of the small Arab party that signed an agreement to join the government, she added: “He has done this to make his mark, but he will not get anything. He is effectively backing a government led by an ultranationalist who wants to expand settlements.”

How Mr. Bennett would exercise power in a coalition with many members well to the left of him, including the chief architect of the agreement, Yair Lapid, remains unclear. But Mr. Netanyahu’s hold on Israeli society and the Israeli imagination has been such over the past dozen years that his eventual departure inevitably seems synonymous with new possibility.

Commenting in the newspaper Yedioth, Merav Batito wrote: “Abbas’ signature is much more than a formal token of agreement. It symbolizes the possibility of a return to normalcy of Israeli society.” She added, “The first concrete wall built between Arabs and Jews by the Parliament deep in Israeli society has been breached.”

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Business

Mob Violence In opposition to Palestinians in Israel Is Fueled by Teams on WhatsApp

Mob Violence Against Palestinians in Israel Is Fueled by Groups on WhatsApp

Last Wednesday a message appeared on a new WhatsApp channel called “Death to the Arabs”. The embassy urged the Israelis to join a mass brawl against Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Within hours, dozens of other new WhatsApp groups appeared with variations of the same name and message. The groups soon organized a start time at 6 p.m. for a clash in Bat Yam, a town on the Israeli coast.

“Together we organize and together we act,” says one of the WhatsApp groups. “Tell your friends to join the group because this is where we know how to defend Jewish honor.”

That evening, live scenes were broadcast of Israelis dressed in black breaking car windows and roaming the streets of Bat Yam. The mob pulled a man they suspected was an Arab out of his car and knocked him unconscious. He was hospitalized in serious condition.

The episode was one of dozens across Israel that authorities have linked to a surge in activity by Jewish extremists on WhatsApp, Facebook’s encrypted messaging service. According to analysis by the New York Times and by FakeReporter, an Israeli surveillance group that investigates misinformation, at least 100 new WhatsApp groups have been formed to commit violence against Palestinians since the violence between Israelis and Palestinians escalated last week.

WhatsApp groups with names like “The Jewish Guard” and “The Revenge Troops” added hundreds of new members daily over the past week, according to the Times analysis. The Hebrew groups have also been featured on email lists and online forums used by right-wing extremists in Israel.

While social media and messaging apps have been used in the past to spread hate speech and incite violence, these WhatsApp groups go even further, according to researchers. This is because the groups explicitly plan and carry out acts of violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up around 20 percent of the population and lead a largely integrated life with Jewish neighbors.

This is far more specific than previous WhatsApp mob attacks in India, which calls for violence were vague and generally not directed at individuals or companies, the researchers said. Even the Stop the Steal groups in the US that organized the January 6 protests in Washington did not openly target attacks through social media or messaging apps.

The proliferation of these WhatsApp groups has alarmed Israeli security officials and disinformation researchers. Attacks have been carefully documented in the groups, and members are often happy to be involved in the violence, according to The Times. Some said they would take revenge for rockets being fired at Israel by militants in Gaza, while others cited various grievances. Many asked for names of Arab-owned companies that they could target next.

“It’s a perfect storm of people empowered to use their own names and phone numbers to openly call for violence and have a tool like WhatsApp to organize themselves into mobs,” said Achiya Schatz, director of FakeReporter .

He said his organization had reported many of the new WhatsApp groups to the Israeli police, which initially took no action “but are now starting to act and try to prevent the violence”.

Israeli police did not respond to a request for comment, but Israeli security officials said law enforcement began monitoring the WhatsApp groups after being alerted by FakeReporter. The police, Schatz said, believed attacks by the Jewish extremists were inflamed and organized by the WhatsApp groups.

An official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added that police had not seen any similar WhatsApp groups among Palestinians. Islamist movements, including Hamas, the militant Palestinian organization that controls the Gaza Strip, have long organized and recruited followers on social media but are not planning any attacks on the services for fear of being discovered.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Updated

May 19, 2021, 6:37 p.m. ET

A WhatsApp spokeswoman said the intelligence service was concerned about the activities of Israeli extremists. She said the company removed some accounts from people who participated in the groups. WhatsApp cannot read the encrypted messages on its service, she added, but it acted when accounts were reported to it for violating its Terms of Service.

“We are taking steps to ban accounts that we believe could cause imminent harm,” she said.

In Israel, WhatsApp has long been used to form groups so that people can communicate and share interests or plan school activities. When violence between Israel’s military and Palestinian militants in Gaza increased last week, WhatsApp was also one of the platforms on which false information about the conflict was spread.

Tensions in the region were so high that new groups seeking revenge on Palestinians appeared on WhatsApp and other news outlets like Telegram. The first WhatsApp groups appeared last Tuesday, Schatz said. By last Wednesday, his organization had found dozens of groups.

People can join the groups through a link, many of which are shared in existing WhatsApp groups. As soon as they join a group, other groups will be announced to them.

The groups have grown steadily since then, Schatz said. Some have grown so large that they have branched into local chapters dedicated to specific cities. To avoid detection by WhatsApp, the group’s organizers are asking people to screen new members, he said.

According to FakeReporter, Israelis have formed around 20 channels in the Telegram to commit and plan violence against Palestinians. Much of the content and messages in these groups mimics the content of the WhatsApp channels.

In a new WhatsApp group that reviewed The Times, “The Revenge Troops,” people recently shared instructions on building Molotov cocktails and makeshift explosives. The group asked its 400 members to also provide addresses of Arab-owned companies that could be targeted.

In another group of just under 100 members, people exchanged photos of guns, knives, and other weapons while discussing street fighting in mixed Jewish-Arab cities. Another new WhatsApp group was dubbed “The Non-Apologetic Right-Wing Group”.

After participating in attacks, members of the groups posted photos of their exploits and encouraged others to emulate them.

“We destroyed them, we left them in pieces,” said a person in the WhatsApp group “The Revenge Troops” next to a photo showing the broken car window. Another group uploaded a video of Jewish youths dressed in black stopping cars on an unnamed street and asking drivers if they were Jewish or Arab.

We have “defeated the enemy car for car,” said a comment below the video with an expletive.

Over the weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Lod, a mixed Jewish-Arab city in central Israel that was the site of the recent clashes.

“There is currently no greater threat than this unrest and it is important to restore law and order,” said Netanyahu.

In some WhatsApp groups, Mr. Netanyahu’s calls for peace have been ridiculed.

“Our government is too weak to do what is necessary, so we take it into our own hands,” wrote one person on a WhatsApp group dedicated to the city of Ramle, central Israel. “Now that we are organized, they can no longer stop us.”

Ben Decker contributed to the research.

Categories
Health

Israel giving 5,000 Covid vaccine doses to Palestinians is insufficient: HRW

A guide on what we know so far

Palestinian students wearing face masks stand in line to enter their school after personal training, interrupted as part of the new type of coronavirus (Covid-19) measures, resumed for elementary and secondary school students in the Gaza Strip today on January 13, 2021.

Ali Jadallah | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

Israel’s decision to give 5,000 doses of the coronavirus vaccine to frontline Palestinian health workers has been criticized by Palestinians and right-wing groups as inadequate and inconsistent with the country’s commitments.

“Israel’s delivery of 5,000 doses of vaccine to Palestinian health workers pales in comparison to the nearly 5 million doses it has already provided to Israeli citizens,” Omar Shakir, Israeli and Palestinian director of Human Rights Watch, told CNBC after the announcement. Just over 5 million people live in the Palestinian Territories.

The office of Israel Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced that the broadcast was approved on Sunday. This was the first such step since the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine began shipping through the 9 million country in mid-December. Israel has since run the world’s fastest vaccination campaign in terms of shots per person, and says more than a quarter of its population has received at least the first dose of vaccine since December 19.

In this aerial photo, taken in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Monday January 4, 2020, people are queuing outside a Covid-19 mass vaccination center in Rabin Sqaure. Israel plans to vaccinate 70% to 80% of its population by April or May. Health Minister Yuli Edelstein has said.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The Palestinian Authority did not comment on the news. Until the last announcement, however, no vaccines had reached the Palestinians, except for those who lived in East Jerusalem or worked in the Palestinian hospitals there.

“Israel retains overall control”

For rights organizations and Palestinian interest groups, this was a breach of duty by Israel, which the United Nations has classified as an occupying state over the Palestinian territories.

“Israel retains overall control over land, over the population register, over the movement of people and goods and over the airspace. Under international law, this type of control is linked to obligations towards an occupied population,” said Shakir.

“Israel’s obligations under international law after more than 50 years of occupation, the end of which is not in sight, go far beyond the supply of some vaccines if they have the capacity,” he added, “but rather offer the Palestinians in the occupied territory equal access to the vaccine on par with what it offers its own citizens. “

A health care worker administers a Covid-19 vaccine at Clalit Health Services in the ultra-Orthodox Israeli city of Bnei Brak on January 6, 2021.

JACK GUEZ | AFP | Getty Images

The Israeli health and foreign ministries did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comments in response to these specific statements, but previously stressed that the Israeli coordinator of government activities in the territories had been working with the Palestinian Authority to provide ventilators, test kits and other medical devices to transfer “Donated by the international community.”

There was also joint training of some Israeli-Palestinian medical teams, COGAT told CNBC.

However, Israeli officials argue that ultimate responsibility for health care and vaccine acquisition rests with the Palestinian Authority, which the Palestinians have elected to be the government of the West Bank.

Human Rights Watch’s Shakir denies this. “The fact that Palestinians also bear responsibility does not negate the Israeli role. Ultimately, as occupying powers, they are responsible for the supply and well-being of the occupied population,” he said.

“The hospitals are full of patients”

Nouar Qutob, assistant professor and Covid-19 data researcher at Arab American University in the city of Ramallah on the West Bank, is concerned about the situation.

“Things are worrying. We have cases, cases we don’t know about, the hospitals are already full of patients. And the British variant is now in Palestine,” Qutob told CNBC, referring to a new strain of the first identified coronavirus in the UK and found to be 70% more communicable.

As a resident of East Jerusalem, Qutob has an Israeli residence and was able to receive the Pfizer vaccine. She commutes to work from home in Ramallah, which has a private Covid-19 testing center, but said the rate of people tested has decreased.

“People avoid testing because they don’t want to give up work,” she said.

A worker cleans the classes in preparation for school before teaching in person in specific classes at Taybe Schools in Khan Yunis, Gaza, October 4, 2020 on October 10, 2020.

Mustafa Hassona | Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The new variant of the virus that now exists in the Palestinian Territories is “really worrying because it means more cases – and we still don’t have the vaccine in the West Bank,” she said. Qutob spoke to CNBC ahead of the Israeli announcement on Sunday, but since the delivery of the 5,000 doses of vaccine is only for frontline Palestinian health workers, it won’t do much to change the infection situation for the general population.

The latest data from the World Health Organization shows 178,900 confirmed coronavirus cases among Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, with more than 2,000 deaths.

The Palestinians expect the first major vaccine shipments in March

The Palestinian Authority expects to receive its first shipments of independently sourced vaccines in March.

Yasser Bouzia, an official with the Palestinian Ministry of Health, told CNBC that the PA is currently in a bilateral agreement with AstraZeneca for 2 million doses of its UK-developed vaccine. An additional 2 million vaccine doses are expected to be received through COVAX, a global program established to ensure equitable access to vaccines around the world.

“That will cover almost the majority of the population. And after that we will look to other sources to get nearly 1 million more people vaccinated because we want to vaccinate nearly 5.2 million people,” said Bouzia.

Until then, the infections will still spread despite government restrictions.

“People don’t seem to want to abide by the closings and regulations, they just suffer from bad economic situations,” said Qutob. “I don’t see people following the rules and the virus is spreading, and it’s worrying.”