7 Iyar 5780
1 May 2020
Photo of the Day:
A photo from the attack in Syria last night.
Israeli helicopters launched missiles attacking pro-Iranian militias near Quneitra and west of Dara’a last night–for the 5th time in the last month.
The News on the Israeli Street
The daily Corona update . . .
*As of 5 pm Friday, there are now 16.004 confirmed cases of Corona in Israel. 83 people are on ventilators. 223 Israelis have died. 8,758 have recovered. Check the breaking news ticker at the top of this page for updates.
*As we previously previously, the Health Ministry has authorized Israel grades 1-3 and 11-12 to open on Sunday. Today a survey asked parents: “Will you send your child to school?”
The answers:
9%: “haven’t decided”
19%: “yes”
72%: “no”
In short, the schools may open, but few students may show up.
*Boat owners at the Tel Aviv Marina organized a flotilla of 200 boats today to honor Israel’s first responders:
A few of the vessels in today’s flotilla.
Palestinian terror in the last 24 hours . . .
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Great news: the 62 year old woman stabbed in Kfar Saba several days ago was released from the hospital this morning. The IDF also mapped the home of the terrorist who carried out the attack in advance of destroying it.
Happy news on the population front . . .
An announcement today from the Population and Immigration Authority.
The announcement reads that there were 13,052 births in April: 6,328 of the new Israelis were girls and 6,724 were boys.
Not such good economic news . . .
The Israeli Treasury Department issued a gloomy projection today. According to its data, the government deficit will be 173 billion shekels (10.2%) in 2022, and the unemployment rate will remain at 9%.
TODAY’S BLOG
Sovereignty vs Annexation, Revisited
Way back on January 30, your humble servant wrote a blog titled “The Devious Deception of the Trump Peace Plan”. Among other things, I discussed the how Israelis are completely misinterpreting Trump’s plan as it relates to “sovereignty” and “annexation”.
This is what I wrote then:
“A day ago, U.S. Ambassador Friedman said that annexation and sovereignty were not the same thing and that he had never used the term ‘annexation’. He backtracked even further today by not even using the word ‘sovereignty’, preferring to use the phrase ‘an extension of Israeli jurisdiction’.”
We are not going to revisit all the distinctions in terminology today except to say yet again that Israel has never formally annexed anything–not the Golan Heights and not areas of eastern Jerusalem. It has applied Israeli sovereignty and law to both, but never annexed them. One might legitimately argue that extension of sovereignty and law are de facto annexation, but Israeli governments have never thought so.
However, the Israel media and Israeli politicians seem to have forgotten this, and for them there is no difference between sovereignty and annexation. When the new unity government signed its agreement last week, it was reported that one of the points was that on July 1 the government would begin the process of annexation.
I sincerely wish this was true. As regular readers of OneIsrael know, I have long advocated Israeli annexation of Area C of Judea and Samaria. However, I do not believe that the process of annexation will be initiated on July 1; instead, I believe that what will be initiated is the process of applying sovereignty.
Sovereignty remains what the Trump Administration is committed to–just as Ambassador Friedman stated in January. A U.S. State Department spokesman said this on Monday: “As we have made consistently clear, we are prepared to recognize Israeli actions to extend Israeli sovereignty and the application of Israeli law to areas of the West Bank that the vision foresees as being part of the State of Israel.”
What the Trump Plan envisions is sovereignty first; at some later date, following negotiations with the Palestinians based on the Trump vision, there might be annexation.
What your humble servant says is that sovereignty first is a huge step in the right direction–we can worry about formal annexation later.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.