The High Holy Days are a time to look back at what we did in the past year, and to hope and pray that the coming 12 months will be good ones.
On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we say the prayer “Unetanneh Tokef,” which describes God inscribing and sealing our fate in the book of life or death. We’re already starting this year with a plague, but it remains to be seen “who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted.”
These are generally related to individuals, their sins and their repentance, but these Days of Awe also seal the fate of the Jewish people for the coming year, according to tradition.
Which brings us to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. He only has the three months of his premiership to be evaluated by, but, if things go according to his and Alternate Prime Minister/Foreign Minister Yair Lapid’s plan, he has all of 5782 ahead of him as Israel’s leader, with a major impact on what happens to at least half of the Jewish people in the world.
One of the biggest changes since June was entirely out of this government’s hands, but remains the central challenge on the diplomatic and security front: Iran.
The indirect talks between the Islamic Republic and the US to return to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal have been on hold for as long as Bennett and Lapid have been in office. When Bennett came into the Prime Minister’s Office, it seemed to him and his advisers that the pause would be brief, because it would benefit Iran to rejoin. The US was determined to rejoin the deal, which would lift all post-JCPOA sanctions on Iran, which would have to agree to supervision and restriction of its nuclear program, but would get the much-needed relief for its economy.
Yet, the longer the break – ostensibly due to the election in Iran and the formation of a new government led by the “Butcher of Tehran” Ebrahim Raisi – continued, the greater the alarm in Jerusalem. Iran continued advancing its nuclear program, enriching greater amounts of uranium to 60% and developing uranium metals, neither of which has a credible civilian use.
Most recently, as an Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps-affiliated newspaper’s top headline read on Thursday morning, “The International Atomic Energy Agency is blind;” the mullahs’ regime has stopped cooperating with the IAEA, leaving it in the dark about further strides Iran is making towards a bomb.
As US President Joe Biden said in the Oval Office with Bennett present, Washington has not given up on diplomacy with Iran. But Bennett is acutely aware of the need to prepare for a reality in which there is no agreement even temporarily reining in the regime with genocidal intentions against Israel.
The prime minister already sought America’s cooperation on forever blocking Iran’s ability to break out to a nuclear weapon and to roll back its regional aggression. A senior Israeli diplomatic source said Biden, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin were willing to hear Bennett out last month and gave him the impression that the Iran issue is important to them.
However, for the US the Iranian threat is strategic, while for Israel, it is existential. Bennett presented the Americans with a broad Israeli strategy and asked for support – but Israel is already implementing that strategy against the Iranian threat. The public facet of that implementation is the sharp increase in the defense budget. In the coming year, Bennett’s challenge will be to put that money to good use to protect Israel from an Iran closer to attaining a nuclear weapon than ever before.
THE WASHINGTON TRIP crystallized a few more challenges Bennett will likely face in the coming years.
The China-US-Israel triangle is only growing more tense over time. In keeping with the Bennett and Biden administrations’ agreement to keep disagreements behind closed doors, there have not been any public comments from Washington, as opposed to the very heavy hints from the Trump administration. But Biden is just as focused on China as his predecessor – in some ways, even more so – and his administration is concerned about Israel allowing Beijing to invest in major infrastructure projects and hi-tech developments that are potential security risks.
Bennett and his political partner Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked opposed cracking down on Chinese investments when they were in former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, focusing mostly on the economic benefit of doing business with Beijing.
However, the prime minister returned from Washington understanding that Biden expects Israel to act on this front, and he plans to make some moves. The government already delayed a tender to build part of the Tel Aviv Light Rail, in which a Chinese company submitted a bid, due to the sensitivities. Bennett is also considering moving the committee overseeing major foreign investments from the Finance Ministry to the National Security Council, which is directly under his authority.
When it comes to the Palestinians, Bennett said nothing and Biden said very little in their public statements in the White House. But the briefings given to the press after their meeting gave very different ideas of what went on behind closed doors.
On the Israeli side, negotiations with the Palestinians towards a solution won’t happen anytime soon, construction in Israeli towns in Judea and Samaria will continue, albeit at a slow pace, even though the US opposes it, and the sides will “muddle through” the disagreement, without it being a dominant matter.
Issues in Jerusalem didn’t come up, except for the Biden administration’s goal to open a consulate for the Palestinians in Jerusalem, which they know Bennett opposes because it is akin to denying Israeli sovereignty throughout its capital. The Biden administration is “warm and friendly” and understands the “mosaic” of the Israeli government and doesn’t want to threaten it, the diplomatic source briefing the media said.
Then, Biden administration officials briefing the press called for a two-state solution, said that Sheikh Jarrah – the Jerusalem neighborhood in which the property disputes between Israelis and Palestinians have become a symbol – was part of the conversation and that the Palestinian consulate in Jerusalem is a demand that they do not plan to drop.
One source close to Bennett shrugged off these statements, saying the Biden administration will say those things, because that is really their position, plus they have to keep the Israel-critical Left flank of the Democratic Party at bay, but that they realize there won’t be any movement.
The question is not so much whether lip service is paid to the Palestinians in briefings, but whether there will be real pressure on Bennett and concrete moves on the ground – like the increased funding to UNRWA that the Biden administration has already pledged.
And then there’s the pressure within Bennett’s government. Bennett’s Yamina and the New Hope Party represent the Right flank of the diverse unity coalition. They oppose a two-state solution and a settlement freeze. But the other side seems to be getting ideas of its own, with Regional Cooperation Minister Esawi Frej organizing meetings between Israeli ministers and their Palestinian counterparts.
Then, Defense Minister Benny Gantz met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Gantz played up the meeting, in a transparent attempt to boost himself politically, while both Abbas and Bennett tried to downplay it. This isn’t about diplomatic negotiations, it’s about day-to-day issues, the Prime Minister’s Office said. But it wasn’t that long ago when an Israeli cabinet member negotiated with the Palestinians behind the prime minister’s back and we got the Oslo Accords. Bennett will have to rein in the high-level overtures to the Palestinians if he still believes that negotiations towards two states would be bad for Israel.
MEANWHILE, GAZA is heating up. Bennett wants three things in Gaza: For the shooting at Israel to stop, for terrorist groups to not be able to amass missiles and for the captive civilians and soldiers to be released. The new government doesn’t seem to have any new solutions to the first two problems, and the killing of IDF soldier Barel Hadaria Shmueli only highlights that point.
Bennett put the kibosh on Qatar sending suitcases of cash to the Hamas leadership, while permitting Doha to transfer debit cards directly to impoverished families. Bennett eyes Qatar warily, because their funds help stabilize Gaza, but they are also aiding Iran and destabilizing the region through Al Jazeera. Yet, he’s still letting them be part of the solution for Gaza.
Bennett is expected to meet with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi in the near future; details of the planned meeting have been censored for security reasons. Sisi has been deeply involved in continuing ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas and is said to be taking seriously Israel’s demands for the return of the bodies of IDF soldiers Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, and mentally ill civilians Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, who have been held by Hamas since 2014 and 2015 respectively.
The Sisi-Bennett meeting comes along with a positive trajectory in relations between Israel and the broader region. Egypt and Israel’s ties have been warming in recent years, especially when it comes to energy matters, in light of Israel exporting natural gas.
Israel’s exports of gas to Jordan were not enough to help those ties; they started under Netanyahu, but only when he left office did King Abdullah agree to be more cooperative with Jerusalem.
Bennett already went to Amman to meet with Abdullah, and President Isaac Herzog did the same. Israel agreed to sell double the amount of water at a discount rate as stipulated by the peace agreement between the countries and to allow Jordan to increase exports to the Palestinian Authority. Israel will also import produce from Jordan in the coming year, a shmita year, in which, according to Jewish law, the Land of Israel must lie fallow.
The mainstream and left-wing Israeli press has almost unquestioningly praised these developments with Jordan, but they do raise some questions. It’s good to have stable relations with our neighbor at our longest border, but will the gestures only be one-sided? Jordan refused to renew Israel’s lease on the Island of Peace and Tzofar and blocked Netanyahu from traveling to the UAE in the recent past. Abdullah wouldn’t even allow photos to be taken at his meetings with Bennett and Herzog, which makes any concrete positive movement on the Jordanian side seem far away.
The one indication of a softening in Amman may be that small groups of Jews have been praying at the Temple Mount for the past year and a half with relatively little opposition from the Wakf, the Jordanian Islamic religious trust, which manages what is Judaism’s holiest site.
Meanwhile, Lapid has jetted to two Abraham Accords countries – the United Arab Emirates and Morocco. Bahrain’s ambassador arrived in Israel last week. Relations with Sudan are somewhat stuck, something this government will need to work on, likely with help from the Biden administration, to get them off the ground.
The momentum for the Abraham Accords is not what it was in January. The Americans are committed to the agreements already forged, but Israel will likely need their help if more countries are to join. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for the new coalition, to forge ties with even more countries in the region.
There are, of course, many more challenges to Israel in the region and beyond that Bennett and Lapid will have to face in 5782, contributing to the final accounting of whether we’ll have a harmonious or harried year, as the prayer says.