Loving Israel? 8 things to know for June 28

By JOSHUA DAVIDOVICHToday, 1:37 pm  0

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, left, gives a joint press conference with Bahraini Foreign Minister Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, center, United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, right, and their Egyptian counterpart, Sameh Shoukry, in Cairo, Egypt, July 5, 2017. (Khaled Elfiqi, Pool, via AP)

1. Me confab es su confab: You can bring all the peace conferences you want to the Middle East, but the Middle East is still the Middle East.

• Thus it was that the foreign minister of a country hosting Israelis, Arabs and Americans telling Israeli journalists that they should not be wiped out was a big enough deal to garner major headlines, celebratory praise from Jerusalem, condemnation from terrorists and riots in Baghdad.
• Israel’s Foreign Ministry welcomed the comments, tweeting out, in Arabic, quotes from the various interviews Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Shaikh Khalid al-Khalifa gave to Israeli outlets, including The Times of Israel.

في أول مقابلات له مع الإعلام الإسرائيلي (قناة ١١، ١٣ وصحيفة تايمز أوف إسرائيل) قال وزير الخارجية البحريني الشيخ خالد بن أحمد بن محمد آل خليفة إن “للشعب اليهودي يوجد مكان بيننا وإسرائيل جزء من تراث هذه المنطقة.. ونريد علاقات أفضل وسلام معها” pic.twitter.com/n83RLZ3VR5

— إسرائيل بالعربية (@IsraelArabic) June 27, 2019

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• Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon goes one step further, telling ToI’s Raphael Ahren that he would “be overjoyed to host a delegation of Bahraini journalists and show them Israel. Direct contact is the key to peace.”

2. He spoke to us! While the conference itself was seen as less than a success, the interviews given by Khalifa are celebrated in the media as the greatest thing since pumpkin spice hummus.

• “Finally, some good news,” reads a headline of a podcast about the interviews by the right-wing Clarion project.
• Daily Wire, also right-wing, calls the comments “stunning, unprecedented.”
• It’s not only those on the right taking notice. Neil Partrick, a London-based Middle East analyst, tells AFP that the Bahraini foreign minister’s comments “will be the main achievement” of the workshop “as far as the US and Israel are concerned.”
• “Perhaps the most striking sign of the warming ties between Israel and the Gulf came in an unprecedented round of interviews given by Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, Bahrain’s foreign minister, to Israeli media,” writes The Telegrpah’s Raf Sanchez, who notes that the small encounters between Arabs and Israelis were what made the conference something to write home about.

3. Manama kiddush club: That includes Bahrain opening up it’s rarely used synagogue for participants to pray in, an event engineered by ToI’s Ahren.

• Ahren gives a behind the scenes view of how he became the Manaminyan man, as well as his attempts to reach the island’s tiny Jewish community, and even find the synagogue, which a cab driver did not manage to do.
• “A quarter of an hour and probably two liters of sweat later, I finally managed to find the synagogue — an unassuming building that you would never guess is a Jewish house of worship,” he writes. “When we asked the employees at the hair salon next door what they thought the building was, they said it was some sort of mosque, but that, oddly, ‘We never see anybody going inside.’”
• But others know about it, and the government in Manama is making great efforts to stress its history of religious tolerance. Khalid bin Khalifa Al-Khalifa, who heads the King Hamad Global Centre for Peaceful Coexistence in Manama, tells Ahren the government wants to actively promote the local Jewish community.
• “We need a rabbi for the synagogue, a full-time, resident rabbi, so that the Jews can practice their religion,” he tells ToI.
• In Haaretz, Noa Landau writes next to all the coexistence and interfaith talk was a less bright and sunny undercurrent.
• “Every single Arab at the event made it clear in some way that the Palestinian issue still stands between them and full peace with Israel. The general message was that we are making progress in slow steps with Israel, despite – and not because of – the lack of a solution, but this progress also has limits,” she writes.
• And as for the foreign minister, while he said he would visit Israel if there is peace, “he also cooled down hopes that he would visit Israel soon without a change in the situation.”

4. Wheeling and dealing: Giving an even more downbeat behind the scenes look is The National’s Jack Moore, who lets loose with a twitter thread that starts with the White House trying to control his stories and goes downhill from there.

• “One guy tried to pitch to me his vertical farming business. My obvious reaction was ‘Great! Please continue! I will write about this instead of Palestinian prosperity & the conflab that awaits!’ This was a running theme. This was a networking opp. & not about the Palestinians,” he writes.

• Israel Hayom’s Ariel Kahana notes more buoyantly that “behind the scenes Israeli and Arab businessmen were busy forging ties of their own,” though only one person would actually speak to him about it on the record. “Common to both the Israelis and their Arab counterparts, was their desire to avoid the spotlight,” he says.

5. ‘A clear message’: Anger over Bahrain hosting the confab was front and center elsewhere in the Middle East, including in Baghdad, where protesters stormed the Bahrain embassy during the night to demonstrate against the country hosting the conference.

• While Iran wasn’t directly blamed for being behind the attacks, media reports pointedly note that militias they control in Iraq were believed to play a role.
• “We took down the Bahraini flag to send a clear message to all those who participated in the Bahrain conference, that we strongly reject normalizing relations with the Zionist occupiers and will never abandon our support of Palestinians,” one protester tells Reuters.
• The agency notes that the demonstrator identified himself as a member of the Islamic Resistance Groups, a term usually used by Iranian-backed Shiite militias.
• Some protests were even closer to home. Al Jazeera reports that some in Manama hoisted Palestinian flags to show their displeasure over the country hosting the conference, underlining tensions between the island’s Shiite majority and its Sunni rulers.

6. How dare he not actually say that: Hamas is also enraged, specifically against the Bahraini foreign minister’s comments to ToI.

• “The foreign minister of Bahrain calling on the Arab states through ‘The Times of Israel’ newspaper to recognize Israel as a state that will remain affirms that the goal of the workshop is to erase the Palestinian right and normalize the existence of the occupation as a part of the region’s fabric,” tweets Moussa Abu Marzouk, a member of Hamas’s politburo.
• Marzouk should check his facts, though. In the interview with ToI (or any of the other outlets) Khalifa did not explicitly call on Arab states to recognize Israel. (And to boot, ToI is not technically a newspaper.)
• In Gaza, Iran-backed Islamic Jihad isn’t going to war over Bahrain, but may get feisty if US-Iran tensions worsen.
• Speaking to al-Monitor, a member of Islamic Jihad, the other main terror group in Gaza, hints that the organization may strike Israel if the US and Iran go to war and Israel allies itself with Washington.
• “The Islamic Jihad will not abandon the country that supported it [Iran] in fighting Israel, if that party faces an attack,” an Islamic Jihad source says.
• Hassan Abdo, a political analyst close to the Islamic Jihad, tells the outlet that both Hamas and Islamic Jihad won’t hesitate to hit Israel, including launching thousands of missiles.

7. A truce named desire: In the meantime, Israel is having to contend with balloons with incendiary devices attached to them, as well as condoms and now erotic novels too.

• After several days that saw Palestinians launch enough balloons to start at least 100 brushfires on the Gaza border, Israelis awoke Friday morning to the unexpected news that Israel and Hamas had reached yet another truce agreement.
• “[They landed in] agricultural areas, residential neighborhoods and even a public pool filled with people,” reads a lede to a story in Yedioth Ahronoth, underlining public frustration with yet another uptick in violence.
• The so-called balloon terror continued after the truce was reached, though it took quite a racy turn, with Palestinians attaching a hardcover copy of a Hebrew erotic novel titled “Loving Stella,” and an explosive device to a bunch of balloons.
• The attack has some riled up, and not over the book’s content.
• “Until next time,” reads a headline in a local Gan Yavne publication.
• “There’s an agreement, but no calm,” complains Ynet.

8. Booby trapped: An official statement from local authorities says they believe the plan was for the book and explosive to detach from the balloons and lure in a randy passerby.

• But Globes’s Tal Schnieder wants to know how the recently released Harlequin romance found its way into the Strip.
• “So within Gaza they are importing Hebrew erotic novels? Do they have someone buying them from Book Week and bringing them in,” she asks on Twitter.
• Channel 13 correspondent Or Heller jokes that “I guess someone wasn’t able to get into the book.”
• Some eagle-eyed sleuths online note that in fact it appears to be a poorly faked slipcover that was printed out in Gaza and stuck on some other book, maybe this one.
• Author Orit Patkin confirms to Ynet that it’s not her book but a fake made to look like it: “When I say the picture, I asked myself why me? How did this get to me? Who knows, maybe they read my books in Gaza.”