Fdd's overnight brief

Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fended off a challenge to his fragile coalition Monday as a key partner backed away from a threat to quit the government, staving off snap elections but leaving the embattled leader’s position so precarious that U.S. hopes to begin a peace process in the coming months could be thrown off course. – Wall Street Journal

On Monday, Airbnb, long under pressure from Palestinian officials, anti-settlement advocates and human rights groups to end its West Bank settlement listings, announced it would do just that. – New York Times

An Associated Press cameraman was shot and wounded Monday while covering a demonstration in the northern Gaza Strip, witnesses and medical officials said. – Associated Press

The Israeli military said it thwarted a terror attack near Jerusalem on Monday when it un

Following the political chaos of the past week, most Israelis do not believe Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s warning that the country faced a serious security crisis which justified maintaining the current government and pushing off elections, according a poll released Tuesday. – Times of Israel

There is no equivalence between the terror group Hamas and the legitimate State of Israel, US Ambassador Nikki Haley told the UN Security Council on Monday during its monthly debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She spoke out in response to a call on “all parties to exercise maximum restraint” made by UN Special Coordinator to the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov during his briefing to the council in New York through the help of a video hookup from Israel. – Jerusalem Post

Hamas claimed on Monday that it was Israel who had “begged” for last week’s ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. The claim came in response to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement to the effect that Hamas rulers “begged for a ceasefire and they know why.” Netanyahu made his statement at a memorial service last week for Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion. – Jerusalem Post

Palestinian terror organizations in the Gaza Strip are preparing for a possible military operation by Israel, the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar reported on Tuesday, following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hints at what he called the “second stage of the last round in the Gaza Strip.” – Jerusalem Post

The Quakers in Britain Church announced that it was the first church in the United Kingdom to divest from companies that derive profit from Israeli activity over the pre-1967 lines, noting that to do so was equivalent to benefiting from the 19th-century slave trade. The church published its decision in a press release on its website on Monday, the same day that the global vacation rental company Airbnb stated that it planned to stop listing sites in West Bank settlements.  – Jerusalem Post

Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding (FFEU), who maintains extensive ties with countries in the Persian Gulf, said he has recently seen a vast improvement in relations between Israel and the Gulf states. – YNet

Rioting broke out near the Palestinian Authority-controlled city of Bethlehem early Tuesday morning, as IDF units carried out an operation in the village of al-Dawha. – Arutz Sheva

A week after the Israeli cabinet accepted a controversial ceasefire deal with the Hamas terror organization, prompting Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman to resign from the government, polls show the Likud rebounding. – Arutz Sheva

Editorial: Here’s another test of the Democratic Party’s rush to new extremes: Will any other 2020 candidates join Sen. Cory Booker in support of the bipartisan Israel Anti-Boycott Act? So far, his fellow White House hopefuls in the Senate refuse, from New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand to Vermont’s Bernie Sanders to California’s Kamala Harris. With 57 co-sponsors, the bill would penalize attempts to cooperate with international efforts to boycott Israel. […]Problem is, the Democratic base has been steadily turning against Israel. – New York Post

Gulf States

Qatar has escalated a dispute against Saudi Arabia at the World Trade Organization, a WTO filing showed on Monday, with a request for adjudication of its complaint that Saudi Arabia had violated its intellectual property rights. – Reuters

The United Arab Emirates is fully complying with sanctions imposed this month by the United States on Iran even though it will mean a further drop in trade with Tehran, a UAE economy ministry official told Reuters on Monday. – Reuters

With its Persian restaurants and shop signs in Farsi, Murshid Bazaar, a dense maze of alleys in Dubai’s old quarter, has for decades been a center for small-scale trade with Iran. […]The Iranians who stayed say the fallout from U.S. sanctions has made their jobs harder. Dubai has long been one of Iran’s main links to the outside world, but trade between the two has slowed as sanctions approached. – Reuters

Anthony H. Cordesman writes: Such options may not create the pressures that will moderate Iran’s regime and change it conduct, put it is clear that rigid hardline positions – that have no clear options – so far reinforce Iran’s hardliners as well as make it hard to have any kind of productive regional dialogue and U.S.-Arab efforts that offer a clear alternative to those hardliners. – Center for Strategic and International Studies

Middle East & North Africa

Dozens of migrants are engaged in a standoff with Libyan officials, refusing for more than a week to disembark from a cargo ship that rescued them at sea because they fear torture at the hands of Libyan authorities, according to humanitarian groups. – Wall Street Journal

The Syrian army said on Monday Islamic State militants had been cleared from a rugged area in southeastern Syria, where they had been holding out for months against a campaign to defeat them. – Reuters

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu did not request a U.N. inquiry into the death of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi when he met with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday, a U.N. spokesman said, though they did discuss the case. – Reuters

MEI experts Rauf Mammadov, Charles Lister, and Gonul Tol provide analysis on recent and upcoming events including the Iraq-Kurdistan pipeline deal, how the YPG partnership affects US-Turkey ties, and the new Russia-Turkey gas pipeline. – Middle East Institute

Barak Barfi writes: The United States should encourage Egypt to repeal these measures, favoring quiet entreaties over threats of additional aid cuts. Given Trump’s cordial relationship with Sisi, such requests can be broached in one of their frequent phone calls. The pressure that Washington applied on the NGO law indicates that Egypt is still susceptible to U.S. influence. Such levers should be used to put Cairo back on the path to political liberalization. – Washington Institute

C.Meital writes: The issue of the Islamic dress code for women periodically comes up for debate in Egyptian society. This also happened several months ago after Egyptian actress Hala Shiha, who has been living in Canada for the last few years, announced that she would return to acting and appeared in the media with her head uncovered. […]This report reviews the debate sparked in Egypt by Hala Shiha’s decision to stop wearing the hijab. – Middle East Media Research Institute

Michael Knights writes: Front-loaded urgency in U.S. policy would not have guaranteed a better result in the 2017 crises, but it stood a better chance of saving everyone the grief of the post-referendum backlash and the Kirkuk military crisis. The direct and focused mobilization of a cabinet-level U.S. official, sitting nose-to-nose with the Kurdish leaders, would certainly have been a worthwhile investment of effort, in comparison to all the picking-up-of-the-pieces and hand-wringing that followed the referendum and Kirkuk crises. – Washington Institute

South Asia

Until now, Shiite Hazara communities in Ghazni had remained untouched. But as the Taliban, a mainly Pashtun and Sunni militant group, has expanded its territory across the country — leaving just 55 percent of Afghan districts under government control or influence — it has launched daring attacks to seize control of Hazara and Shiite strongholds in central Afghanistan. – Washington Post

Pakistan reacted angrily on Monday to criticism by President Trump that the country had not done enough in return for years of United States military aid and that the government had harbored Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda. – New York Times

A three-day meeting between the Taliban and the U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan to pave the way for peace talks ended with no agreement, the militant group said a day after the diplomat declared a deadline of April 2019 to end a 17-year-long war. – Reuters

The Maldives is reportedly planning to pull out of a free trade agreement with China as the island nation moves closer to India and the West after Ibrahim Mohamed Solih won the presidency in a September election. – Bloomberg

Police and security forces have stormed Papua New Guinea’s parliament over unpaid bonuses for last week’s Apec summit, lawmakers said. – BBC News

Russia

The Kremlin said it backed a veteran Russian Interior Ministry official to become Interpol’s president, a development that raises fresh concerns about the efficacy of the international police agency critics say authoritarian governments have abused. – Wall Street Journal

Russian prosecutors announced new criminal charges against U.S.-born Kremlin foe Bill Browder on Monday, days before a Russian police officer could become president of Interpol in a move that some Moscow critics fear might politicize the law enforcement agency.  – Associated Press

Russia clashed bitterly with the West Monday as it tried to block the world chemical arms watchdog’s new ability to attribute blame for attacks like those in Syria and Salisbury. – Agence France-Presse

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday the Kremlin would retaliate if the United States withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, Russian news agencies reported. – Reuters

Editorial: Now one of the current Interpol vice presidents, Alexander Prokopchuk of Russia, is reportedly the leading candidate to replace Mr. Meng. Throughout President Vladimir Putin’s years in power, Mr. Prokopchuk has worked in the security services, primarily the interior ministry, which has police functions, and he has been in the thick of Russia’s abuses of Interpol, as deputy and then chief of Russia’s National Central Bureau, a liaison group that exists in each country. […]To appoint Mr. Prokopchuk to the presidency of Interpol would be a colossal mistake and would imperil the organization’s integrity. – Washington Post

William Browder writes: Interpol plays a crucial role in tracking and apprehending fugitives around the world. To allow Interpol to be commandeered by one of the most criminal dictators on the planet serves the interests of no one but the Kremlin. – Washington Post

Eli Lake writes: Imagine an alternative history of New York City in which John Gotti becomes police commissioner and obtains arrest warrants for the U.S. attorneys who prosecuted the Gambino crime family. Something like that is on the verge of happening to the international law-enforcement organization known as Interpol. – Bloomberg

Edward Lucas writes: It is time to drop the fiction that Russia and China are normal countries with which we can conduct normal diplomacy. They should be seen as rogue states, akin to North Korea or Iran. […]They are not interested in playing by the rules of the international system. They are interested in exploiting and abusing those rules for political ends. Once we realize that, we have a chance of defending ourselves—and our allies. – European Policy Analysis

Africa

The secretive businessman known as Vladimir Putin’s “chef” for his Kremlin catering work is alleged to have helped Russia seize parts of Ukraine, turn the tide in the Syrian war and meddle in U.S. elections. Now he’s reaching deep into Africa with an army of mercenaries and spin doctors in tow to cash in on his newfound expertise. – Bloomberg

Niger Air Base 201, a future hub for armed drones and other aircraft, won’t be completed until the middle of 2019. The base was originally intended to be operational by the end of this year, but the region’s difficult weather and harsh environment is pushing completion back, an official with U.S. Africa Command told Air Force Times. – Air Force Times

An informant for Congo’s intelligence service and an army colonel on Monday denied involvement in the killing of two U.N. sanctions monitors last year, the prosecutor in the case said. – Reuters

Latin America

The Trump administration is preparing to add Venezuela to the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism in what would be a dramatic escalation against the socialist government of Nicolás Maduro, according to U.S. officials and internal government emails. – Washington Post

U.S. federal prosecutors charged a prominent Venezuelan media mogul closely tied to President Nicolás Maduro’s government with foreign corruption and laundering money through U.S. banks and real estate. – Wall Street Journal

A group of Canadian diplomats who left the embassy in Cuba after suffering unusual health symptoms say their foreign ministry has abandoned them, the Globe and Mail newspaper reported on Monday. – Reuters

The Mossad allegedly provided intelligence to Argentina which helped successfully thwart a Hezbollah plot to attack Jewish community centers in Buenos Aires, according to Channel 2. – Jerusalem Post

Defense

The Pentagon hasn’t released its official cost estimate to stand up a brand-new space service, but a top defense budget analyst has crunched the numbers and believes it may cost $550 million more per year for a Space Force — at most. – Defense News

National security technology company Peraton announced Oct. 30 that it has successfully completed the first phase of an initiative to expand its global critical communications network by adding four major metropolitan areas and two commercial satellite teleports to its existing network. – C4ISRNET

During recent testing of a new Army command post, soldiers said a new system, which is designed to provide a common picture of the battlespace, increased collaboration and would lead to faster operations. – C4ISRNET

Delays in maintenance have resulted in at least 1,891 lost operational days for the U.S. attack submarine fleet and cost the Navy about $1.5 billion to support boats that can’t go to sea, according to a Monday report from the Government Accountability Office. – USNI News

Joe Schuman writes: Most people may not realize that some of this country’s greatest military and political leaders had to overcome significant medical barriers to enter military service. […]Today’s highly qualified applicants, who are already asking what they can do for their country, deserve to know that there is something their country is willing to do for them. Such is the discontent that we can prevent, and the progress we need. – War on the Rocks

Maj. Mike Benitez writes: Change is hard, but required. Let purpose be the guide; task, mission, and culture will follow. Strategy is about choices, and the time before the Grail Knight has come. This time, let’s believe the Air Force will choose wisely, and the true grail will bring its culture back to life. – War on the Rocks

Todd Harrison writes: The size and budget of a new military service for space depends on how broadly its charter is defined and which existing space-related organizations it would incorporate. The three options evaluated in this analysis are: a Space Corps within the Department of the Air Force; a limited but independent Department of the Space Force (“Space Force-Lite”); and a more expansive Department of the Space Force (“Space Force-Heavy”). – Center for Strategic and International Studies