With 61 Knesset seats, Netanyahu-led bloc can form coalition without Lapid
(JNS.org) Israeli Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan (Likud) stressed Jan. 24 that with the right-wing bloc led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earning 61 of 120 Knesset seats—just more than half—in the recent election, the Likud Beytenu-led bloc does not need to incorporate Yesh Atid and its leader Yair Lapid into its coalition.
“Following the movement between blocs and the right-wing bloc currently resting at 61 seats, we have the option now to form a coalition without Lapid,” Erdan said. “I recommend that everyone understands that we must make compromises in our negotiations. Therefore, I also say to Lapid’s people that they shouldn’t draw red lines and make lofty demands from which they won’t be able to backtrack.”
When the final 220,000 votes from the election were tallied Jan. 24, Naftali Bennett’s right-wing Habayit Hayehudi party ended up with 12 Knesset seats rather than its initial total of 11, breaking a 60-60 tie among the Knesset blocs.
Likud Beytenu’s share dropped from 42 to 31 Knesset seats in the election (previously, the Likud and Yisrael Beytenu parties were separate). Lapid and his new party, meanwhile, won a surprising 19 seats.
“We need to examine how this happened,” Yisrael Beytenu head Avigdor Lieberman said. “We shouldn’t ignore the drop in seats. I acknowledge that 31 seats is much lower than what my staff and I estimated.”
Netanyahu and Lapid reportedly met for about two and a half hours the night of Jan. 24 to discuss their potential coalition. Lapid has made equality in sharing the national service burden, particularly the drafting of haredim into the IDF, a precondition to his joining the coalition. At the same time, senior Likud sources told Israel Hayom that Netanyahu’s first task in coalition talks with Lapid is to agree on drafting haredim into the IDF in a way that the haredi parties will be able to live with and thus remain in the government.
Israel’s Shin Bet says it foiled 100 terror attacks in 2012
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) Israel’s domestic spy agency, the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), says it thwarted 100 “serious” terror attacks in 2012, of which a third were planned kidnappings, the agency revealed in a report published Thursday. The Shin Bet said it arrested 2,300 terror suspects, which led to 2,170 indictments.
Half of the planned kidnapping attacks were planned roadside bombs followed by small-arms fire. Four planned suicide bombings were thwarted, as well as five infiltrations from the Sinai. Twenty kilograms of high-grade explosives and triggering mechanisms were caught—all smuggled through the border with Lebanon by Hezbollah. Command and control centers operated by Hamas in Ramallah and Hebron were uncovered. Hamas used the centers to rehabilitate its military infrastructure in the West Bank to carry out attacks, with an emphasis on kidnappings.
Some 10 million shekels to be used for terror financing were intercepted.
For the first time in four decades, no Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks in Judea and Samaria in 2012.
Despite the lack of deaths, there was an increase in the number of attacks in Judea and Samaria, from 320 in 2011 to 578 in 2012. The number of Molotov cocktail attacks in Judea and Samaria in 2012 rose 68 percent, compared to the previous year.
Politicians from both parties, Jewish leaders oppose Hagel nomination in RJC ad
(JNS.org) Politicians from both sides of the aisle, as well as Jewish leaders, criticize President Barack Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense in a new video advertisement released Jan. 24 by the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC).
“It seems that there is some kind of an endemic hostility toward Israel, and I think in the sensitive post of Secretary of Defense, those are warning bells, those are red lights,” U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) says in the ad.
The ad, which asks viewers to call their U.S. senators to request that they vote against Hagel’s nomination, can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sPAeWe5rsf8
Recently retired U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) notes that Hagel “has consistently been against economic sanctions to try to change the radical regime in Tehran.”
The Washington Post editorial board, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center are among the other Hagel critics featured in the ad.
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) National Director Abe Foxman says, “The sentiments [Hagel has] expressed about the ‘Jewish lobby’ border on anti-Semitism.” In 2008, Hagel took a direct shot at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), telling former Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller in a quote that appeared in Miller’s book, The Much Too Promised Land, that “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people” in Washington.
“Chuck Hagel’s record on Israel, on Iran, and on other vital defense issues is cause for real concern,” RJC Executive Director Matt Brooks said in a press release. “President Obama’s choice of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense signals a weakening commitment by the President toward Israel in his second term. We strongly oppose this nomination and we urge members of the Senate to do the same.”
Middle East threats unite region’s Christians
(JNS.org) The difficulties of Christians in the Middle East have enabled the region’s Christian communities to unite and bridge their differences, according to the Catholic Church’s new ambassador in the Holy Land, who spoke at the start of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.
“As far as the ecumenical dialogue is concerned I must say that there has been a real improvement as compared to what I experienced here during my work in the early eighties,” said Archbishop Giuseppe Lazzarotto in an interview with the Catholic Charity Aid to the Church in Need.
“There’s not only a dialogue, but also a genuine community of life. The relations between the different Christian communities have really improved,” he added.
According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, 158,000 Christians reside in the Jewish state and constitute 2 percent of the population, up from 154,500 in 2011.
Of this Christian population, 80.6 percent are Arab, belonging to a variety of different Christian denominations, including Oriental Orthodoxy, Anglican, Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholic (Eastern and Western rites) and Protestant. Relations between these various denominations have been contentious at times during history, especially at Christian holy sites.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the most famous example, where fights sometimes erupt between priests and result in the calling of police. A ladder has sat in the window of the church for hundreds of years due to disagreements over church arrangements, and a Muslim family has had to open and lock the door each day for nearly a millennium.
Israel is one of the few countries in the Middle East that has seen its Christian community grow. An estimated 100,000 Christians have fled the civil war in Syria, while in Egypt Christians are fearful of the rise of Muslim Brotherhood. In the Palestinian Authority-controlled city of Bethlehem—the birthplace of Jesus—the Christian population has shrunk to a third of the town’s residents, down from 75 percent only a few decades ago.
Owner of international Jewish TV channel harassed in Ukraine
(JNS.org) The president of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress has accused Ukrainian authorities of threatening him and using violence against him in an effort to take away his Jewish News One (JN1) TV channel.
JN1 is a 24-hour international and independent television network covering world news with a special emphasis on Jewish and Israeli current affairs. Rabinovich founded the channel in 2011 with Jewish-Ukrainian billionaire and president of the European Jewish Union Igor Kolomoisky. The channel is based primarily in Brussels but has offices in Kiev and Tel Aviv. Plans for offices in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin and Moscow are underway.
“A senior official in the government visited Rabinovich on January 17 and threatened to harass him and physically harm him, should he not transfer the JN1 television channel to them within a week,” a statement released by Rabinovich on the website of the United Jewish Community of Ukraine said, according to the Jerusalem Post.
The man who visited Rabinovich has not been officially identified, but the local TV channel News One identified him as Boris Podolsky Evseevich, a Ukrainian businessman well known for close relations with the Ukrainian power elite.
“I believe that what is happening is an individual racketeering attempt by a single representative of the government,” Rabinovich also said. Ukraine’s Jewish community, however, recently appealed publicly to the international community regarding the broader rise of anti-Semitic incidents in their country.
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