Cementing UK-Israel relations

 This article appears in the Jerusalem Post of 28 March, 2023

   The UK-Israel relationship has never been closer, and the four days March 21-24 were chosen to consolidate it, culminating with a visit to London by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a meeting with his UK opposite number, Rishi Sunak. Top of the agenda was the Iranian threat.  

Just ahead of the visit, the UK announced sanctions on seven senior officials of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – five of them responsible for managing the IRGC’s investments, and two senior commanders. Still hanging fire, however, is Britain’s committed intention to designate the whole IRCG as a terrorist organization.  As far back as January 2023 the BBC reported Whitehall sources as saying it was "broadly correct" to say the government intended to proscribe the IRGC, but that many details remained to be sorted out. Action still hangs in the balance.

Although no joint statement was issued after the two leaders’ meeting, a government spokesperson summarized what they had discussed.  Foremost was "the UK and Israel's significant concern about Iran's destabilizing activity" and the risks posed by its advanced nuclear program.

Having discussed the war in Ukraine and developments in the Middle East, the statement noted, two rather more equivocal issues were raised.  While Sunak "expressed his solidarity with Israel in the face of terrorist attacks in recent months", he noted that unspecified actions risked undermining efforts toward a two-state solution.  "He encouraged all efforts to de-escalate, particularly ahead of the upcoming religious holidays."

The elephant in the room also received some attention.  Sunak is reported to have "stressed the importance of upholding the democratic values that underpin our relationship, including in the proposed judicial reforms in Israel."

The meeting was intended to consolidate the earlier meeting between Israel’s foreign minister Eli Cohen and UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly.  Cohen visited London on March 21, and together with Cleverly signed a document titled “The 2030 Roadmap for Israel-UK Bilateral Relations.” 

What is this 2030 Roadmap?  According to the British government, it contains “detailed commitments for deepening cooperation across the breadth of the Israel-UK relationship, including on trade, cyber, science and tech, research and development, security, health, climate and gender.”  It includes around £20 million (NIS 88 million) of joint funding commitments on technology and innovation.  In short, it binds the two nations together in a tight cooperative arrangement designed to optimize benefits for both.  Cleverly called it “a testament to the strength of our close and historic relationship.”

The flourishing UK-Israel trade relationship has delivered huge benefits to both economies. Now worth around an annual £7 billion (NIS 31 billion), there are more than 400 Israeli tech firms operating in the UK.  Over the past eight years Israeli investment into the UK added around £1 billion (NIS 4.5 billion) gross value to the UK economy and has created about 16,000 jobs in Britain. 

The idea of the roadmap was born in November 2021, which saw visits to the UK by President Isaac Herzog, then-prime minister Naftali Bennett, and then-foreign minister Yair Lapid.  Lapid’s purpose was to launch a new initiative aimed at even closer trade relations between Israel and Britain.  He found an enthusiastic ally in the UK’s then foreign secretary, Liz Truss, and together they signed a new “UK-Israel Strategic Partnership” agreement.   Lapid later described it as “a major moment in the relationship between the United Kingdom and Israel.”

That agreement has since been transformed into full scale negotiations for a new UK-Israel Free Trade Agreement (FTA) aimed at creating new opportunities for tech firms and professional services in both countries. To accompany the formal launch of negotiations, the UK Department for International Trade issued a 40-page document explaining the strategic approach to the proposed new FTA.

“The UK is proud of its deep and historic relationship with Israel,” it declares.  “As open, innovative and thriving economies, the UK and Israel are close allies and strategic partners.”  It goes on to explain: “Israel’s economy is growing rapidly, with its service sector growing by 45% over the last 10 years. A new FTA will allow us to take advantage of this growth, generating ever more opportunities for UK firms to export their goods and services. Upgrading our trade deal with Israel will help unlock a stronger, more advanced partnership.” 

A surprising number of UK companies have major operations in Israel, including Unilever, Barclays bank, pharmaceutical giants GlaxoSmithKline, and Rolls Royce.  Rolls-Royce was responsible for the UK’s largest ever export deal to Israel back in 2016, when it signed a £1 billion agreement to provide Trent 1000 engines for El Al’s new fleet of Dreamliner aircraft.

The benefits to Israel are equally real.  In particular, perhaps, the proposed trade agreement for services, as well as encouraging mutual investments, will provide Israeli companies with access to UK government and public projects.  The ground-breaking UK-Israel FTA, focusing on tech and innovation, is expected to be ready for signing later this year.

One issue certainly discussed between Netanyahu and Sunak was the British prime minister’s intention to visit Israel to participate in the nation’s 75th anniversary celebrations.  Back in November 2021, he reiterated his “dedication to Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people… As a proud friend of Israel I will fight very hard for the security of people in Israel, and to continue the UK’s determined efforts to end the bias against Israel.”

Regarding the Abraham Accords, which he regards as “one of the greatest achievements in the history of diplomacy in the Middle East”, he made a positive commitment so far unmatched by any other world statesman. The UK, he said, “will continue to do all it can to leverage our strong ties with other Gulf states to expand the number of signatories to the agreement and enhance the already blossoming opportunities opened up by these ground-breaking agreements.”

          The British prime minister will be welcomed to Israel as a true friend.

Published in the Jerusalem Post, and in the Jerusalem Post online under the heading:"UK-Israel ties have never been closer", on 28 March 2030:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-735598

Published in Jewish Business News, 3 April 2023:
https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2023/04/03/cementing-uk-israel-relations/

Why is Iran obstructing the prisoner deal?

  

            Iranians are past masters in the art of negotiation.  Adept in hiding their real intentions and keeping their opponents in suspense, they often win the game of who blinks first. For example talks on restoring the Iran nuclear deal began in April 2021 and were prolonged time and again by Iran, until it became obvious that it was using the talks as cover while it ramped up work on its nuclear program.  After the penny dropped, US President Joe Biden was caught on camera in November 2022 saying that the nuclear deal with Iran was “dead”.

Iran is currently in the midst of a long-drawn-out negotiation with the US.  The regime is holding three Iranian American dual nationals in jail – businessmen Siamak Namazi and Emad Shargi, and Morad Tahbaz, an environmentalist.  On February 15 US State Department spokesman Ned Price said, for the umpteenth time, that they are being detained unjustly, on trumped up charges. 

Five days later his opposite number, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani, told journalists that a deal with the US involving their release, brokered by intermediaries, had been on the verge of agreement, “but then the US showed bad faith”.  Consequently Iran had broken off the discussions. 

The so far unidentified intermediaries were said, in media reports, to be the UK and Qatar, and the deal would have seen Iran free the US detainees in its custody while the US would release $7 billion (NIS 25.3 billion) of Iranian funds frozen by South Korea under US sanctions, a proviso being that the money could be used only for buying food, medicine and other humanitarian goods.

This, reports claimed, was the stage reached in the latest round of negotiations, but that in fact Iran and the US had been bargaining covertly for some time about a deal involving the lifting of some US sanctions in return for the release of prisoners charged by Iran with espionage.  A final agreement, part of the talks to restore Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal, had actually been close, but when discussions became deadlocked some months ago, attention turned to concluding the prisoner-sanctions deal separately.

Washington rejected the Iranian accusation of bad faith.  “I will not go into the details of any diplomatic efforts under way,” said Price. “As you can imagine such discussions are sensitive and highly consequential for the US nationals who have been wrongfully detained.  Iran unjustly detains citizens of the US and other countries around the world as an inexcusable tactic to gain political leverage, so for them to claim that the United States has somehow shown ‘bad faith’ in pursuing the release of our citizens is beyond the pale.”

Iran’s charge against the US may reflect growing Iranian fears that the UK, one of the Intermediaries in the delicate exchanges between Washington and Tehran, is about to declare the Iran’s IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) a terrorist organization. This has been on the cards for some time, but so far the UK government, known as a strong supporter of renewing the Iranian nuclear deal, has held off.  Britain’s position on the nuclear talks may have changed following the recent execution by Iran of a British-Iranian dual national charged with espionage.

Perhaps as a direct result of Iran breaking off the US prisoner-sanctions negotiations, on February 22 the UK’s Daily Telegraph reported that US diplomats were pressuring the UK not to declare the IRGC a terrorist organization.  The US State Department, it was claimed, is arguing that if the UK goes ahead against the IRGC, its role as intermediary in the prisoner deal would be compromised.  This seems a classic case of “Do as I say, not as I do”, since the US has itself proscribed the IRGC as a terrorist group, a step taken in April 2019 by then-President Donald Trump.

   Meanwhile, to complete the complex jigsaw puzzle, Voice of America (VoA) recently discovered that the US has 16 Iranians in prison or on supervised pretrial release charged with federal crimes. They consist of eight Iranian-American dual nationals, four Iranian citizens with US permanent residency, and four Iranian citizens with no legal status in the US.  Then on February 10 a federal court in Brooklyn sentenced another dual Iranian-US national to 30 months in prison for smuggling export-controlled technology products to end users in Iran.

Kambiz Attar Kashani pleaded guilty to charges of violating the International Economic Powers Act between 2019 and 2021 by sending hardware and software to Iran through front companies registered in the United Arab Emirates.  In a sentencing memorandum the US Department of Justice (DoJ) claimed that Kashani began providing Iran with enterprise, security and data management software as far back as 2014.

The recipient of the smuggled technology was said to be the Central Bank of Iran, which FBI Counterintelligence assistant director Alan Kohler said is linked to Hezbollah and the IRGC, both US-designated terrorist groups. By supplying such software, said the DoJ, "Kashani and his co-conspirators enabled the Iranian banking system to operate more efficiently, effectively and securely." 

Kashani’s imprisonment can only have soured even further the atmosphere around the latest US-Iranian negotiations, but the truth, according to VoA sources, is that Iranian officials are not greatly concerned with securing the freedom of these detainees.  Their prime objective is to reacquire their desperately needed resources to help relieve Iran’s dire economic situation.  To discomfort your opponent is a good negotiating tactic.  Charging America with “bad faith” and suspending the talks for a while is no more than a ploy to conceal how anxious Iran is for the release of its frozen assets.  

Published in the Jerusalem Post, 8 March 2023:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-733637

Published in Eurasia Review, 17 March 2023:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/17032023-why-is-iran-obstructing-the-prisoner-deal-oped/

Published in the MPC Journal, 21 March 2023:

https://mpc-journal.org/why-is-iran-obstructing-the-prisoner-deal/

Netanyahu is warned: Don’t attack Iran

  

Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – known less formally as the UN’s nuclear watchdog – spent March 4 and 5 in Tehran as the guest of the Iranian regime.  After discussing nuclear matters with Iranian officials, he met foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, and then Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi.  

Despite abundant proof over the years of Iran’s duplicity and disregard for any agreement it might sign up to, Grossi, ever optimistic, told journallists he hoped to use his trip to “relaunch the dialogue” on Iran’s atomic work and to “reset the relationship at the highest level.”. He believed he was “paving the way for important agreements”..  He is on the record as calling for the revival of talks focused on limiting Iran’s nuclear program.

 “I hope to be able to reset, restore, reinforce that indispensable dialogue,” he has said.

The main purpose of his visit was to publicize Iran’s explanation for a discovery by the IAEA, first reported on February 19.  IAEA officials had detected particles of uranium enriched to 84 percent purity at Iran’s Fordow nuclear plant.  Uranium enriched to that level is frighteningly close to weapons grade, and international alarm bells had been ringing.

In the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and major powers, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), international sanctions against Iran were cancelled, and in exchange Iran undertook to restrict its nuclear activities.  There was always some doubt as to whether Iran ever kept strictly to the terms of the deal, and in May 2018 the US pulled out, and a few months later then-President Donald Trump reimposed sanctions.

Iran’s response was to cast aside any pretense at observing the JCPOA deal, which restricted its uranium enrichment to 4 percent and allowed none at all at the Fordow plant, built deep within a mountain. Ever since April 2021 Iran has been enriching uranium at up to 60 percent purity, and on November 22 Reuters reported that it had started doing so at the Fordow plant.

Now, following months of negotiation, the IAEA chief traveled to Tehran to receive Iran’s explanation of the uranium particles enriched to up to 84 percent purity found at its Fordow plant.  

In its response Tehran first repeated its traditional message to the world: it had no desire to acquire nuclear weapons, and no intention of doing so.  Accordingly, it denied it had made any attempt to enrich uranium beyond 60 percent purity.  It acknowledged, however, that “unintended fluctuations… may have occurred” during the enrichment process.  It did not mention that the highly enriched uranium particles had come to light only after Iran, without informing the IAEA., had substantially modified an interconnection between two centrifuge clusters engaged in enriching uranium.

It was at this point in the proceedings that Rafael Grossi turned his attention to the war in Ukraine, and his particular area of interest – Ukraine’s nuclear plant at Zaporizhzhia, the largest in Europe.  Russian forces captured it soon after the invasion a year ago, in March 2022, but it has continued to operate with its Ukranian staff. They have said Russian troops are using it as a military base and that workers are in effect held at gunpoint.  With Russia receiving increasing military backing from Iran, the plant has repeatedly come under fire, raising fears of a nuclear disaster. Each side blames the other for the shelling. The IAEA has been trying to set up a safe zone around the facility.

The volatile situation at Zaporizhzhia was clearly on Grossi’s mind when he said that any military attack on a nuclear facility was illegal.  Expanding on that statement, however, he added that the principle applied to all nuclear facilities around the world.

“I think any attack, any military attack, on a nuclear facility is [outside the law]…This is valid and applicable to every nuclear facility in the world.”

With the JCPOA in abeyance, and no restraints being applied to Iran’s nuclear development program (which Iran’s secret nuclear documents, captured by Israel in July 2018, showed to be active and advanced), Israel has not denied launching attacks on Iranian nuclear and military sites.  If Grossi intended his words to be an oblique warning to Israel’s new government, he was very quickly made aware that his meaning was abundantly clear to its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. 

At a Cabinet meeting the next day,Netanyahu asked which law forbade a nation attacking the facilities of a declared enemy that was producing nuclear weaponry designed to be used against it.  “Is Iran, which openly calls for our destruction, permitted to defend the destructive weapons that would slaughter us? Are we permitted to defend ourselves? It is clear that we are, and it is clear that we will do so.” 

With the festival of Purim on the horizon, he drew a parallel between events in the Persia of 2500 years ago and today’s Iran.  Enemies intent on destroying Jews arose in both.  They did not succeed then, said Netanyahu, and they will not succeed now.  Rafael Grossi, he said, was “a worthy gentleman who had said something unworthy.”

Despite the patent failure of international efforts to restrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and in the face of abundant evidence that the Iranian regime is prepared to do deals and make agreements that it has no intention of honoring, Grossi remains ever hopeful of curbing its determination to acquire a nuclear arsenal.  His dig at Israel may have been intended to smooth the path to discussions with his Iranian hosts about a renewal of the JCPOA deal, but constraining the ayatollahs' extravagant nuclear ambitions may require considerably more robust action than that - as Netanyahu more or less said, in his first ever address to the Iranian people, on March 9. 

Published iin the Jerusalem Post, 14 March 2023, and in the Jerusalem Post on-line under the title: "IAEA warned Israel: don't attack Iran"
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-734220

Published in the Eurasia Review, 25 March 2023:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/25032023-netanyahu-is-warned-dont-attack-iran-oped/

Published in the MPC Journal, 1 April 2023:

https://mpc-journal.org/netanyahu-is-warned-dont-attack-iran/

Where Jordan and the Palestinians part company

Published in the Jerusalem Post, 2 March 2023

On January 24, for the first time in over four years, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu  flew to Jordan to meet King Abdullah II, in an effort, no doubt, to start his new period in office with a clean slate.  He doubtless recalled the episode in 2019, toward the end of his previous term in office, when Abdullah declared to the world that relations between his country and Israel were “at an all-time low”.  Abdullah, too, may have wished to ensure no repeat of the previous public clash.

In one sense nothing much had changed.  As ever Abdullah focused, as the official Jordanian account of the meeting puts it, “on the need to respect the historical and legal status quo at the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram Al-Sharif and not to harm it.”

This was a covert reference to the visit by Israel’s new national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, to the Temple Mount on January 3 -­ a visit which did not breach the status quo in any way, but which led to furious condemnation from the Arab world.

Equally familiar during their meeting was Abdullah’s reiteration, for the umpteenth time, of his support for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian dispute.  He favors establishing a sovereign Palestinian state within territory captured by Israel in the Six Day War, including east Jerusalem.

On the face of it, this demand puts Jordan arm-in-arm with the Palestinian Authority (PA), both apparently seeking precisely the same from Israel.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Jordan believes that the active involvement of the US would be vital to any attempt to resolve the Arab-Israel conflict, and that Jordan would have a key role to play.  Abdullah met US President Joe Biden in Washington on February 3 when, according to media reports, Biden “reaffirmed his strong support for a two-state solution”, and recognized Jordan’s “critical role” in maintaining regional stability.

The PA leadership has a quite different view.  They broke off diplomatic relations with the US after then-President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in late 2017 and moved the US embassy to Jerusalem in May 2018.  That chasm remains as wide as ever.  The US now has no official diplomatic offices in the Palestinian territories, and provides no consular services to Palestinians.  Equally, the Palestinians have had no diplomatic representation in the US since the closure of the PLO mission in Washington in October 2018. Palestinian leaders maintain that they would refuse to engage in any peace effort in which the US was dominant.

Explaining the position of the PA leadership, Dr Abdullah Swalha, founder and director of the Center for Israel Studies in Amman, said: “They can count on the Europeans, Japan and other countries, as well as the halls of the UN and some international human rights platforms.”

That difference between Jordan and the PA over the role of the US is exacerbated by their different positions on the two-state solution.  For the Fatah-controlled PA public advocacy of partition remains the tactical ploy originally conceived by Yasser Arafat at Oslo in 1993 – a ploy which has proved remarkably successful in winning world support for the Palestinians. 

Not long after the conclusion of Oslo 2 in 1995, Arafat held what was intended to be a secret meeting with Arab leaders in a Stockholm hotel. 

To his embarrassment, both his tactical plans and his strategic objectives were leaked to the Norwegian daily, Dagen. Among much else, he told Arab leaders that the PLO intends: “…to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state.”  The failure of the PA over the years to sign up to any of the increasingly generous partition deals subsequently tabled has demonstrated the sham that the ploy is.  

The Hamas organization regarded the Oslo Accord of 1993 as a total betrayal of the Palestinian cause, and broke with Arafat completely. On 5 September 1993, shortly after the terms were announced, Hamas issued its Leaflet 102 condemning both the agreement and the PLO leadership: “We will therefore insist on wrecking this agreement, and continue the resistance struggle and our jihad against the occupation power… Arafat’s leadership is responsible for destroying Palestinian society and sowing the seeds of discord and division among Palestinians.”

Hamas controls the Gaza Strip, which contains some 40% of the Palestinian population. It  regards Israel as an illegal occupier of Palestinian land, and its purpose is to remove Israel through armed struggle and terror, and occupy all the land “from the river to the sea”.  It rejects the tactics of the PA leadership, and has consistently opposed Abbas’s apparent advocacy, in the UN and more widely, for a two-state solution, since one of the two states would be Israel.

Jordan, together with the majority of world opinion, fails to take account of the realities of championing a two-state solution.  Nobody acknowledges that the real long-term objective of the Palestinian leadership is to gain control of all of what was Mandate Palestine, and that any PA leader signing up to a two-state deal would be regarded as a traitor to the Palestinian cause. Which is why no Palestinian leader has done so.

However, even if the PA could be induced to do so, Hamas and the 40% of the Palestinian population occupying Gaza would never come on board.  They would never recognize Israel’s right to exist in the region.  So what sort of sovereign Palestinian state could it be, shorn of half the Palestinian population?

There is an uncomfortable truth that Jordan, the US and all genuine supporters of the two-state solution must eventually face up to.  An essential prerequisite to any two-state solution would have to be the disempowerment of the Hamas organization.

Published in the Jerusalem Post, 2 March 2023:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-733116

Published in Eurasia Review, 3 March 2023:

https://www.eurasiareview.com/03032023-britain-and-the-irgc-oped/

Published in Jewish Business News, 3 March 2023:

https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2023/03/03/the-story-of-britain-and-iranian-irgc/