The lockdown in Israel has partially ended, but the infection rate is expected to rise. There is no longer any restrictions on travel of more than half-a-mile from home, or allowing visitors into the house. Skeptics think one of the reasons for the sharp drop in the infection rate is that the ultra-Orthodox have decided not to be tested for Covid-19. Israel’s infection rate has dropped down below 3 % of those tested, with under 1,000 new cases within 24-hours, down from nearly 15,000 two weeks ago.
The corona cabinet also decided to allow business travelers from “green” countries to enter Israel without proof they were not carrying the virus nor requiring them to be in quarantine.
Speaking to Ynet news, Corona czar Prof. Ronnie Gamzu said today that the rate would rise again unless the citizenry take charge of their own lives, wear masks, keep a social distance and keep their hands clean. He also encouraged everyone to take the Covid-19 test if they want the lockdown lifted. He said that Israel could test up to 70,000 cases a day but so far only 20,000 a day have shown up. He said the lack of testing “is noticeable not only in the Haredi sector, disproportionately affected by the pandemic, but within the general population as well.”
Gamzu said that people “do not understand that eliminating coronavirus means finding a sick person who is seemingly healthy...just let me find them.” This would help isolate the sick and contain the spread of the virus.
Gamzu also recommended the reopening of barber shops, beauty salons and alternative medicine next week. Finance Minister Yisrael Katz also called for the opening of street shops and beauty salons on Nov 1. However, Gamzu said, “We want to be careful because I do not want to bring Israel back to where it was at the end of the first wave.”
Another opinion piece in Ynet saw the worrisome widening divide within Israel. “The majority must rise up against the Haredi minority. The leaders of the Haredi community have rewritten the rules of the game pretending to be the persecuted when they are the persecutors.”
A potentially toxic issue is still the sale of USA’s F-35 jet fighters to the UAE. Some thought the sale was dangerous since the planes could ultimately wind up in the hands of Israel’s enemies. Haaretz thought that Netanyahu had run up again against Blue and White’s Benny Gantz, Israel’s minister of defense, over the controversial sale of the jet fighters. Netanyahu, Gantz said, had not informed him of the impending sale of the F-35 fighter jets to the UAE in exchange for a normalization agreement. Netanyahu, in a press conference on Saturday night, called Gantz’s accusations “baseless.” Netanyahu said he’d agreed not to object to the sale only after the deal was signed, but others say he’d agreed in advance. According to Haaretz, Netanyahu was looking “increasingly rudderless,” since his decision about the F-35s and the submarine affair, a $3.2 billion sale of submarines and patrol boats by Germany’s Thyssenkrupp company to Israel, that was “still in the water.”
Israel’s High Court is to hear a motion that the vote in Israel’s Knesset that approved a parliamentary committee to investigate the submarine affair should not have been overturned by Speaker of the Knesset Yariv Levine, a Netanyahu supporter. Levine overturned the vote to form an investigative committee over a technicality. The high court has yet to rule if the initial vote was legal, although the Knesset’s attorney ruled that it was.
Also, in Netanyahu’s televised press conference Saturday night, the PM said he would not tolerate any group ignoring the regulations and that harsh fines would be handed down to those who ignored the rules. However, other reports showed that the Haredi schools had reopened and other than receiving a few fines their schools stayed open in spite of the rules. A TV report on Channel 12 showed 92-yr-old Rabbi Kanievsky hunched over a Talmud with an aide whispering in his ear. The commentator said that the Rabbi probably didn’t grasp the issues and was only asked something like, “should the schools be open so the kids can study Torah or should they be closed.” The rabbi, said the commentator, of course said, “open.” The rabbi is himself still recovering from the Covid-19 virus.
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s prime time press conference coincidentally broke into the Saturday night news coverage of the thousands of anti-Netanyahu protesters gathered near the prime minister’s residence on Balfour street as well as in hundreds of locations around Israel, all calling for the prime minister to resign. Netanyahu began his press conference with the headline news that Israel had reached an agreement with Sudan to begin talks on normalization. Netanyahu said this would lead to a peace agreement with a nation that had long been Israel’s enemy. According to observers, the first steps would be Israelis exporting drip irrigation technology to Sudan, a country that relies largely on agriculture and was doing poorly economically. Critics said that there was a long way to go before Sudan and Israel signed any agreements. Leaders of some of Sudan’s political parties have objected to any deals with Israel as have Sudan’s Islamic groups. Haaretz reported that “Israel Sudan normalization deal is more cause for caution that celebration.”
On the Army Radio’s Rino Tsror talk show, Giora Iland, formerly Head of the IDF's Planning Directorate (J5) and later Israel's National Security Advisor, said that Sudan agreed to stop enmity and agreed to start discussing agriculture and other things. Iland said that Sudan has only made a statement of intentions, nothing more. He pointed out that the present government of Sudan is transitional. “This is not a peace agreement like that with the UAE or normalization like with Bahrain. He said, “Lots of politicians talk about what’s going on but don’t know what’s going on and a few who don’t talk know a lot.” He said after the US elections there will be a different picture.
In the USA, President Trump made much of the Sudan Israeli talks and said other nations would soon follow. He hinted that Saudi Arabia would be one of them. But Dr. Nachman Shai, former Knesset Member and cabinet minister, now teaching at Duke University, said in an opinion piece in Ynet news, that these are only distractions from the real issue. That a Biden win will “mean a dramatic shift” for Israel. He wrote that Israel has been ignoring the US Jewish community and instead been supporting the Republican party. “Israel will have to go hat in hand” to the US Jewish community to get any support. He wrote that “The need for immediate achievements comes at the expense of any sort of long term vision.” He added, “Close association with Trump, the Republican Party, the evangelicals and their fervent supports...comes at the expense of similar ties to the democratic party and the diverse elements within it including the academic elite, workers’ unions, ethnic minorities and of course the Jewish community.”
Sands casino owner billionaire Sheldon Adelson, one of Netanyahu’s biggest supporters in the USA’s Jewish community, and a major Trump donor, appeared in a new HBO documentary, “The Perfect Weapon,” about cyber-warfare. According to the documentary, based on the book by NY Times reporter David Sanger, Adelson inadvertently began the cyber war when he told a televised talk at New York’s Yeshiva University in 2013 that the US should drop a nuclear bomb in the Iranian desert to display toughness in nuclear negotiations, “but without hurting a soul.”
The Iranians responded by launching a carefully planned cyber attack against Adelson’s Sands casinos requiring a $40 million fix. According to the documentary the cyber war was on, with the USA and Israel joining forces to attack Iran’s centrifuges that produce fissionable nuclear material. Then the Russians began their own attacks including those in 2016 when they tried to, and perhaps succeeded, in
influencing the USA election that put Trump in the presidency. And will probably try to disrupt the voting in the current election by hacking into computers counting votes or even changing names of voters so that when they appear at the poles to vote, or vote by mail, the votes will be invalid because the name on the ballots or presented to the election officials are different than those held by the voter.
A recent New York Times article says that Russia is still actively hacking nuclear plants and power grids. The article cites a hacking group called “Dragonfly” or “Energetic Bear,” a group traced to “a unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., targeting states and counties.” According to the Times, “Cybersecurity officials watched with growing alarm in September as Russian state hackers started prowling around dozens of American state and local government computer systems just two months before the election.” In the HBO documentary, Joe Biden told the camera, “Putin knows who I am and he doesn’t like me.”
The HBO documentary also mentions Russia and China hacking laboratories that were developing Covid-19 vaccines. With so many enemies, Israel needs to keep ahead of the curve to keep
up a level of preparedness should the various peace initiatives not prove to be enough. Iran has consistently tried to break into Israel’s security establishment’s computers. So far, at least the experts hope, the Iranians have been unsuccessful.
