Remember how things in the Sinai are kind of getting worse, and how that represents a real threat for Israel? Yeah, so:
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group’s affiliate in Egypt has claimed responsibility for a rocket attack from the Sinai Peninsula into southern Israel on Friday.
“Three Grad rockets were fired at Jewish positions in occupied Palestine,” the “Sinai Province” group said in a statement on Twitter.
An Israeli military spokesman said earlier that two rockets fired from Egypt’s violence-plagued Sinai exploded inside Israeli territory on Friday without causing casualties or material damage.
ISIS’s affiliate in the area, Wilayat Sinai, wants to pull Israel into the crisis there both to complicate things for Cairo and because ISIS has designs on muscling Hamas out of Gaza and taking over there. The Egyptian military claimed to have killed a couple of dozen Wilayat Sinai fighters in airstrikes on Saturday, but it’s obviously going to take more than that to seriously get a handle on the unrest there.
Israel’s other problem at the moment appears to be more self-inflicted, in the sense that the paper-thin coalition that Benjamin Netanyahu was able to cobble together coming out of its recent elections already looks like it’s falling apart. Netanyahu is reportedly at odds with Naftali Bennett, whose Jewish Home Party (with 8 seats in the Knesset) is probably his most reliable coalition partner in an ideological sense, over concessions that Netanyahu apparently made to more Orthodox religious parties Shas and United Torah (combined 13 seats). Bennett’s secularism and the Orthodox parties’ religious conservatism aren’t great fits for one another in a coalition, which wouldn’t be so much of a problem if it weren’t for the fact that Netanyahu’s coalition only has a one-vote majority as it is. It looks like Netanyahu can’t even hold his Cabinet together with any assurance, and at one point several days ago threatened to call for a no-confidence vote in the Knesset before having to back off because it turns out that he probably would have lost.
A couple of Netanyahu’s coalition partners, Kulanu’s Moshe Kahlon and Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid, have tight relations with Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beiteinu, which used to be in the government but chose to go into opposition after the last elections. Netanyahu has good reason to suspect that the three of them would like to see him ousted as PM, and even if that’s not true the mere suspicion is enough to make the government untenable. Lapid is supposedly predicting in private that the government won’t last much more than a year before new elections have to be called.
Hey, thanks for reading! If you come here often, and you like what I do, would you please consider contributing something (sorry, that page is a work in progress) to keeping this place running and me out of debtor’s prison? Thank you!
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 