Israel

Israel And Morocco To Establish Diplomatic Ties

By Ben Sales

(JTA) — Israel will establish diplomatic relations with Morocco, which becomes the fourth Arab country to announce it will recognize Israel in the last year.

President Donald Trump announced the development Thursday on Twitter. He also said the United States would recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, a territory to Morocco’s south that the northwest African kingdom has controlled since the 1970s.

“Another HISTORIC breakthrough today!” Trump tweeted. “Our two GREAT friends Israel and the Kingdom of Morocco have agreed to full diplomatic relations – a massive breakthrough for peace in the Middle East!”

Morocco is the fourth Arab country to announce that it will be normalizing ties with Israel after more than 70 years in which Israel was almost completely isolated diplomatically in the Middle East. Israel is in various stages of establishing relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan. Israel also has relations with Egypt, the first Arab country to make peace with the Jewish state in 1979, and Jordan, which signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994.

Like the rest of the Arab world, Morocco opposed Israel’s creation in 1948 and did not recognize it thereafter — though like several Arab states, the kingdom maintained a clandestine relationship with Israeli intelligence.

An adviser to King Mohammed VI, Andre Azoulay, is Jewish, and the country opened a Jewish culture center earlier this year. There are approximately 3,000 Jews in the country, down from the 200,000 who lived there before Israel’s establishment. Morocco also has a centuries-old community of farmers who grow etrogs, the citrus fruit Jews use ritually on the holiday of Sukkot, and have exported them to Israel despite the absence of formal diplomatic ties.

Trump’s announcement came paired with American recognition of Morocco’s claim to Western Sahara, a territory that has been the site of decades-long conflict with local militants seeking to establish an independent state. In a resolution last year, the United Nations called for a solution that would “provide for the self-determination of the people of Western Sahara.”

Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, said the administration wanted to take a different approach to “break the logjam” in the Western Sahara conflict, according to PBS correspondent Nick Schifrin.

“This is an issue that’s been out there for a long time, and quite frankly there’s been no progress,” Kushner said regarding Western Sahara, according to a tweet by Schifrin. “It’s recognizing an inevitability.”

The recent agreements signal a major shift in Israel’s diplomatic standing in the Middle East, where it was long seen as an enemy interloper. In August, Israel and the UAE, with American support, announced they would be normalizing ties. Similar announcements with Bahrain and Sudan followed. Israeli-Emirati ties have particularly progressed, and Israeli tourists began visiting the Persian Gulf country in November.

Tying the Morocco announcement to Hanukkah, which begins Thursday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted that the announcement was “a great light of peace, today with Morocco.” 

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Yes, The New Federal Budget Includes $500 Million For Israel. No, That Isn’t A Surprise.

By Ron Kampeas

Alyssa Milano, seen on Jan. 15, 2020, was among hundreds of thousands on social media who criticized the $500 million allocation for Israel in the spending bill passed by Congress. (Rodin Eckenroth/WireImag)

(JTA) — The criticism began almost as soon as the text of the budget deal that Congress struck Monday became available: How could lawmakers give $500 million for Israel as part of a deal to support Americans struggling financially during the pandemic?

“We get $600 while they send $500 million to Israel lmao,” read one of the tens of thousands of tweets posted Monday and Tuesday about the line item in the budget. Some of the messages have been shared hundreds of thousands of times, including by prominent Twitter users such as the actor and liberal activist Alyssa Milano.

What those reactions missed was that the $500 million allocation was neither a surprise nor part of the $900 billion pandemic relief bill. It is included in the $1.4 trillion omnibus spending bill, a separate piece of legislation, passed at the same time in a desperate legislative effort to keep the government operating and get pandemic relief to President Donald Trump’s desk before the year is out.

To understand why the $500 million for U.S.-Israel missile defense cooperation — along with thousands of other items unrelated to pandemic relief — ended up in the budget document revealed to Americans Monday night requires a solid grasp on the way Congress always does its work. (Israel, under an agreement it concluded with the Obama administration since 2016, gets a total of $3.8 billion every year: $3.3 billion for defense assistance and $500 million for missile defense cooperation.)

The last days of any Congress are packed with must-pass spending bills. Often the measure —

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covering social welfare, defense and foreign aid, among other expenditures — are wrapped into a single omnibus bill.

The process is something like rolling a bunch of errands into a single afternoon: Walking your dog has nothing to do with the check you deposited at the bank on the same outing, however much someone watching you leave your house and return again might think you only made one stop.

Complicated budget deals can happen in the smoothest of times. But in moments like this, when Congress is divided, they’re even more likely: The sides resist getting along until they have to get along to keep the government running. That’s what happened this week, with a Republican White House and Senate and a Democratic U.S. House of Representatives in a showdown until the last possible moment to reach a deal before the Christmas recess.

The folks who follow Congress usually understand it well enough not to conflate the disparate expenditures that are being rolled into one or two votes for the sake of convenience.

But to armchair government observers, the result can make it appear that dealmaking resulted in unrelated expenses being bundled into an emergency package. And for critics of Israel and the U.S. support for it, that amounted to a perfect storm on Monday.

“The new COVID relief bill contains $500,000,000 for Israel,” Walter Bragman, a left-wing writer with 45,000 followers on Twitter, tweeted Monday afternoon. By Tuesday morning, his callout had generated 55,000 likes, nearly 30,000 shares and hundreds of comments criticizing U.S. spending on Israel.

“When Israeli missiles are worth more than American lives,” one representative response said.

Multiple responders also let Bragman know that he was mischaracterizing the legislation, and he added more tweets pointing to other expenses in the bill — including $2 billion for America’s new Space Force initiative — and explaining that the Israel spending was not part of the pandemic relief.

But Bragman did not delete his original tweet and, as is so often the case on social media, his clarifications drew only a tiny fraction of the engagement as his first comments.

When Milano shared Bragman’s erroneous original tweet, he had already walked it back two hours earlier.

“Between 30 and 40 million families are at risk of eviction, but Congress can only afford $600 per person,” she said. “I’m sure the $500 MILLION in arms and military aid to Israel and the $2 BILLION for Air Force missiles will help keep them warm when they are on the streets.”

Among those pushing back against the mistaken narrative was the journalist Yair Rosenberg, who writes about anti-Semitism for Tablet and other media organizations, and has 85,000 followers of his own on Twitter. He posted a thread on Monday explaining how Congress allocates funding and showing that he received hateful private messages as a result.

To conclude his thread, Rosenberg pointed to another item in the omnibus spending bill that was getting much less attention.

“Fun fact: There is also a historic $250 million fund for Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilding in the omnibus bill,” he wrote, “but that’s not sexy for Twitter so almost no one on here even knows it exists.” 