1. Nearly two weeks after US President Donald Trump said Washington would exit the Iran nuclear deal, his top diplomat finally came out Monday to explain what that means, promising the toughest sanctions in history and laying out 12 things Iran must do if it wants a new treaty with the United States.
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately praised Pompeo’s “strategy,” and parts of the Israeli press seemingly cotton on to the plan, even as Western pundits and most American allies dismiss the laundry list as so much poppycock.
- Israel Hayom heralds Pompeo’s speech with a headline proclaiming that “the party is over.”
- “It’s worth remembering that some of the demands — like stopping the ballistic missile program and destabilizing activities in the Middle East — already came up during negotiations with Iran over the nuclear deal, but dissipated quickly enough thanks to the Obama administration’s and European Union’s obsession with signing a deal at any cost,” columnist Oded Granot writes in the paper. “Now the Trump administration is trying to turn the wheel back and impose harsher conditions than the signed deal.”
- Yedioth Ahronoth plays the news straight, but lists the demands on both its front page and inside the tabloid’s pages.
2. Yet a main question surrounding Pompeo’s laundry list is whether it represents a realistic set of demands vis-a-vis Iran. As Daniel Amir notes in Haaretz, Pompeo’s “US foreign policy shopping list … is a diktat, not an invitation to negotiate.”
- Others noted that Pompeo’s wish list didn’t include much in the way of how to achieve them beyond threats. “Mr Pompeo basically just created the argument for an ambitious and decades-long policy for rolling back Iranian hegemony without explaining how this is going to be accomplished except by threatening more sanctions,” analyst Michael Weiss tells UAE-based The National.
- In Foreign Policy, Jon Wolfhstahl and Julie Smith put Pompeo’s “wish list built on a pipe dream” in even starker terms.
- “The same administration that can’t do simple things like vet nominees, fill government positions, enact executive orders, or avoid alienating the United States’ oldest and closest allies is now going to recreate the most penetrating and effective sanctions system in human history? And they are going to do this with a president whom most U.S. allies don’t trust and who has proved that he will not abide by agreements negotiated in good faith?” they write.
- “The fact is: The Trump team does not have a plan or a strategy for how to get Iran to do any of the things that the United States rightly wants. And to make matters worse, the White House is less likely to get any of the cooperation it needs from Europe to apply ‘unprecedented financial pressure’ because of how the Trump administration handled the Iran deal in recent months”
How can these sanctions be strongest in history if Iran’s major trading partners don’t support them? https://t.co/ZmYHYGtSsc
— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) May 22, 2018
3. Israel and the world learned a lot more about what Israeli actions against Iran look like Tuesday morning, as Israeli Air Force commander Amikam Norkin revealed new details about the cross-border exchange between Israel and Iranian forces in Syria on May 11.
- The main takeaway in Israel’s press is that the country was the first to put the American-made F-35 stealth fighter to use, with Norkin showing off pictures of the Israeli planes zooming over Beirut, likely meant to send a message to Iranian proxy Hezbollah.
- Some note that on Twitter, the Israeli air force wrote in Hebrew that it was the first to use the F-35, while in English it reported that Norkin only said Israel might be the first to use it in the Middle East.
- However, if the United States or any other country has used the F-35 before, it has not said as much, so Israel is at least the first to admit flying it in operations.
- Norkin also reveals that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ al-Quds Force launched 32 rockets at Israeli bases on May 10, not 20 as the army had initially said. However, the number is still below the 55 claimed by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
- In addition, Norkin says that during Israel’s reprisal raid, Assad regime air defenses fired more than 100 surface-to-air missiles at the Israeli fighter jets.
- Some sleuths claim they already knew Israel had used the F-35 in sorties over Syria after remains of GBU-39 small diameter bombs, which were slated to be mounted on the stealth fighters, were supposedly found in wreckage.
- However, claims that the bombs necessarily point to F-35s being used, or were even GBU-39s, are far from credible, Famzn News military correspondent Judah Ari Gross notes.
4. Yedioth Ahronoth reports that the army is also set to release numbers showing difficulty in absorbing minorities into the IDF, with members of the Ethiopian community dead last according to a score assigned by the army to incoming recruits that grades their capability, based on a series of physical and mental criteria.
- The paper writes that the numbers show the army has a long way to go in its drive to achieve equality among recruits.
- A member of the army’s personnel division tells columnist Yossi Yehoshua that the military cannot handicap the score for certain minorities, but is working on changing the way the tests are administered to try to correct for inherent biases, based on schooling.
5. Palestinian officials spent much of Monday attempting to put rumors of PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s demise to rest, portraying the ailing leader as doing anything but resting and very much on the mend from a bout of pneumonia.
- Israeli MK Ahmad Tibi said he accompanied Abbas up and down a hospital corridor, and a Palestinian official told Famzn News’s Avi Issacharoff he was going to the bathroom on his own.
- To top it all off, the Palestinians released a picture to the media showing Abbas looking hale and healthy in a hospital gown as he strolls down the hallway.
- Yet rumors are continuing to fly, like a subheadline in Israel Hayom asking whether the PA “is hiding a serious deterioration in Abbas’s health,” despite having no proof to backup the allegation.
6. Just in time, Israel’s Health Ministry releases the results of a 1- year study showing the leading causes of death in the country from 2000 to 2015.
- Not surprisingly, the leading cause is cancer, with heart disease a faraway second, and all other causes far behind that, though results vary based on age and gender.
- Interestingly, 17.8 out of 100,000 males die from accidents, whereas among females, the number is only 8.3.
- However, rates for all major causes of death are down when comparing 2013-2015 to a decade earlier, except sepsis, which sees a major jump.
- The numbers show that Israel’s mortality rate of 874.7 out of 100,000 people is among the top in the OECD, and beats the global group’s average of 907.9 deaths.
- Somewhat surprisingly, the area where Israelis have the least chance of dying is in the West Bank, whereas those in the north and south have much higher death rates.