Analysis from Israel

Monthly Archives: June 2013

Two recent developments show the extent to which the mainstreaming of rabid anti-Israel sentiment in Europe is harming Europe itself. One, a new exhibit glorifying Palestinian suicide bombers at one of France’s most famous museums, undermines France’s security. The other, a British union’s decision to effectively bar members from contact with another British workers’ group because the latter opposes boycotting Israel, undermines Britons’ civil liberties.

The exhibit at the Jeu de Paume Museum, which is funded by the French government, features 68 photos of Palestinian “martyrs” who “lost their lives fighting against the occupation.” For instance, there’s Osama Buchkar, who “committed a martyr mission in Netanya”–aka a 2002 suicide bombing in an open-air market that killed three people and wounded 59.

The danger here is that fame and glory are powerful motivators for terrorists. Indeed, one Israeli study based on interviews with failed suicide bombers (people caught before blowing themselves up) concluded that it was the leading motivator. But the Jeu de Paume is far more important to Frenchmen–even marginalized ones–than to Palestinians. Thus being lionized by one of France’s most famous cultural institutions is primarily an inducement to its own citizens.

Granted, the museum only intended this accolade for people who killed Israelis. But Islamic terrorists have proven remarkably impervious to the European view that killing Israelis and Jews (Islamists rarely distinguish between the two) is more acceptable than killing other people. Take, for instance, France’s own Mohammed Merah, who murdered three (non-Jewish) French soldiers in two separate attacks before going on a shooting spree at a Jewish day school in Toulouse. Thus by glorifying anti-Israel terrorism, France is inadvertently encouraging the homegrown variety.

But the decision by GMB, one of Britain’s largest unions, may be even more chilling: Last week, it voted to bar its chapters from visiting Israel on any trip organized by Trade Union Friends of Israel, a British group that supports cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian workers, or addressing any TUFI event. Nor was this just the decision of a few radical activists at the top. GMB’s leadership actually opposed the motion, but the union’s annual congress adopted it anyway.

Just consider how many different civil liberties this one resolution undermines: It restricts freedom of speech, as GMB members can no longer speak wherever they please. It limits freedom of association, since they can’t associate with TUFI. And perhaps above all, it constrains freedom of information: Union delegations can’t participate in trips to Israel that risk exposing them to information that might contradict GMB’s anti-Israel narrative. GMB chapters can still join trips organized by, say, the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign; they just can’t join trips organized by TUFI.

A GMB spokesman insisted that the ban didn’t apply to individuals, which appears to be technically true: A GMB chapter couldn’t send people on a TUFI trip, but an individual could theoretically join one on his own, as long as his chapter didn’t help in any way. Yet how many ordinary union members would risk doing so, knowing they would thereby incur the wrath of union leaders for flouting GMB’s ambition to “take a lead” in the anti-Israel boycott?

One has to wonder when Europeans will finally realize that their anti-Israel zealotry is exacting too high a price at home. Judging by the latest developments, it should have happened long ago.

Both were victories, but one is remembered as a disaster – an error that warps policy to this day.
Last week’s anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War recalled a question that has long puzzled me, and whose implications go far beyond mere historical interest: Why is that war considered a miraculous victory while the 1973 Yom Kippur War is remembered as a terrible disaster? After all, both ended with the enemy resoundingly defeated and the Israel Defense Forces threatening Cairo and Damascus.

Certainly, the 1973 war produced ample reasons for dismay: It killed 3.5 times as many Israelis as 1967 did, took Israel by surprise due to severe intelligence blunders and revealed serious dysfunction in the IDF. Nevertheless, the end result of both wars was identical – and 1973 was arguably a far more miraculous victory.

In 1967, Israel enjoyed the benefit of complete surprise (via a preemptive strike), a creative battle plan and a well-trained army that executed it superbly. And at no point after the fighting began was it seriously threatened with defeat.

In 1973, the enemy enjoyed the benefit of complete surprise, while Israel had a dysfunctional military leadership, a lousy battle plan (the Bar-Lev line of outposts in Sinai proved as useless as France’s Maginot Line did in 1940), and a poorly trained and maintained army. In his semi-autobiographical novel Adjusting Sights, author Haim Sabato, who served in a tank during the Yom Kippur War, described an exercise not long beforehand in which the tanks repeatedly broke down, and soldiers joked about what would happen if that occurred during a real war. It was no laughing matter when it actually occurred in 1973.

In this war, Israel faced a real threat of destruction. At one point, a tiny force led by Avigdor Kahalani held off a far superior Syrian force on the Golan Heights just long enough for reinforcements to arrive. Had the Syrians broken through, they would have had a clear path to Israel’s heartland.

The same was true in the south. In his autobiography, the IDF’s first chief rabbi, Shlomo Goren, recalled visiting Sinai early in the war, before the reserves arrived. The defensive line was stretched paper-thin, he wrote, and there was nothing behind them; had the Egyptians broken through, the path to Israel’s heartland lay wide open.

Yet despite this dismal start, Israel proceeded to win a stunning victory. The war ended with the IDF shelling the outskirts of Damascus in the north and poised to destroy the Egyptian Third Army on Egypt’s side of the Suez Canal in the south.

In Israel’s collective memory, however, this victory is recalled as an unmitigated disaster. And that distorted memory has shaped Israeli policy ever since.

First, it became the emotional cornerstone of the land-for-peace paradigm. The war proved that territory offers no protection, the argument went: Just six years after acquiring a huge territorial buffer in 1967, Israel was once again attacked, came within a hair’s-breadth of defeat and suffered heavy casualties. Therefore, only trading land for peace could ensure the country’s survival.

In reality, however, 1973 proved the vital importance of territory: that territorial buffer is what gave Israel time to mobilize its reserves and counterattack. Had Egypt and Syria achieved similar early gains starting from the 1967 lines, Israel would have been destroyed. And territory is no less important today.

Second, 1973 was a formative experience for most recent Israeli leaders. Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, Binyamin Netanyahu and Tzipi Livni ranged in age from 31 to 15 during that war, and it’s no accident that all repeatedly voice existential fears for Israel’s future of a kind never publicly heard from the previous generation of leaders: “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses … the State of Israel is finished” (Olmert); “it’s impossible to survive in the long run without a political settlement” (Netanyahu); without a Palestinian state, “Israel will not be the Jewish nation-state” (Livni). In short, Israel’s very survival depends on its enemies’ willingness to make peace.

This existential terror can’t be explained by facts alone, because the threat these leaders cite – Israel’s demographic situation – has, just like its military situation, actually improved substantially since 1948. Then, Jews comprised just 33% of the total population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea (and 58% in the area the UN allotted for a Jewish state). Today, depending on whose calculations you believe, Jews comprise somewhere between 50% and 58%, including Gaza, and up to 66% excluding it.

Yet this fear has several pernicious consequences: it undermines Israel’s morale, creates pressure for dangerous territorial concessions, and sabotages the very two-state solution these leaders claim to want. After all, if Israel itself says the Palestinians can destroy it just by refusing to sign an agreement, why should they save it by signing? And indeed, they haven’t: after rejecting three Israeli offers of statehood (in 2000, 2001 and 2008), they now refuse to negotiate at all.

Israel’s traumatized reaction to 1973 wasn’t inevitable. Just consider another country’s very different response to a genuine military defeat: in 1940, the German army trounced French and British forces and trapped them against the sea at Dunkirk. The one bright spot was the ensuing rescue, in which hundreds of ordinary Englishmen, often using their own boats, evacuated over 330,000 soldiers.

But Winston Churchill focused on the success rather than the failure: He used that heroic rescue to rally his people to fight on alone against the Nazis. And ultimately, the Nazis were defeated.

The Yom Kippur War could have inspired a similar lesson: that despite serious problems, Israel had the strength and resilience to overcome immensely difficult opening conditions. Instead, the lesson derived was that Israel is so fragile its very survival depends on its enemies’ willingness to rescue it by making peace.

In reality, Israel has survived and thrived without peace for 65 years now, and if necessary, it can continue doing so. But no less important, as the Palestinian example shows, is that our enemies won’t make peace until they are convinced they can’t destroy us. And we will never convince them of that unless we first convince ourselves.

Pro-Israel activists in Norway, where anti-Israel sentiment is rampant, assuredly don’t have it easy. So it was fascinating to read David Weinberg’s account of the issue they’ve found most successful in making Israel’s case–which, surprisingly, is one American activists generally ignore: the story of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

Norwegian activist Odd Myrland terms this tale, which most Norwegians have never heard, a “knockout punch” that “evens out the playing field, and forces people to think about justice for Israel.” As Weinberg explained, it reframes the conversation: Instead of being about Palestinian rights versus Israeli security–a nonstarter with many Westerners, for whom rights easily trump security–it “becomes a debate about a balance of rights: about Israeli/Jewish rights and Palestinian/Arab rights.”

At first glance, this seems bizarre. After all, what does Israel’s absorption of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab lands have to do with the issues anti-Israel activists usually target: “the occupation” and the settlements? But a clue emerges from an unrelated interview with Dr. Qanta Ahmed, a British-born Muslim who practices extensively in Arab lands.

Ahmed, who made her first visit to Israel last month, noted that throughout the Muslim world, she hears nonstop that “because of Israel, the Palestinians were dispossessed from their property and land.” That, of course, is also what many Westerners hear.

But Ahmed, whose parents became refugees when the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan sent 10 to 12 million people fleeing in both directions (the Ahmeds fled to Pakistan), isn’t quite so sympathetic. Though she understands how wrenching refugeehood can be, she’s seen her own parents create new lives–and “I also see how people came to Israel, some of them barely surviving the Holocaust, to a land where they were not used to the climate and where they had no family, and yet somehow managed to build this extraordinary, complicated nation.”

While she never says it explicitly, the implication is clear: The Palestinians’ current plight is due less to Israel’s creation than to their own insistence on living in the past, and Arab countries’ insistence on keeping them there. Instead of building new lives for themselves as other refugees have done, they clung to the dream of eradicating Israel and “returning” to its territory–a dream that has precluded peace for 65 years now, and shows no sign of dying. In 2011, for instance, the PLO’s ambassador to Lebanon asserted that a Palestinian state would still deny citizenship to all Palestinian refugees, even those already living there, in order to preserve the demand for their “return” to Israel.

Moreover, as Weinberg noted, this issue shows Israel to be “a just and moral actor,” in sharp contrast to Arab states: While it absorbed the Jewish refugees and allowed them to build new lives, Arab states refused to absorb Palestinians: They denied them citizenship and kept them in squalid camps to preserve them as a weapon against Israel.

Finally, it sheds new light even on “the occupation.” Ahmed, for instance, considers it unjustified, but admitted there’s no obvious alternative: “How do you relinquish control when there’s a virulent Jihadist ideology and many Muslin leaders outside the region who say that not only shouldn’t Israel be recognized, but it shouldn’t be there at all?” That’s a problem too few Westerners are willing to acknowledge. Yet the refugee issue highlights this ongoing desire to eradicate Israel.

Disgracefully, Israel seems to have abandoned this issue: Nobody in the current government is continuing the work of former Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who labored to bring it to global attention via everything from conferences to YouTube campaigns.

But American and European Jewish groups could step into the breach. Congress has already introduced bipartisan legislation to include the issue of the Jewish refugees in any Mideast peace effort, but most of the world remains ignorant of their existence. And as the Norway experience shows, that ignorance urgently needs to be rectified.

Livni has vetoed a crucial reform of the rabbinate even though it mainly helps her own constituents.
Justice Minister Tzipi Livni has successfully marketed herself as a champion of liberal values. But liberal values evidently come a distant second to personal pique: Otherwise, she wouldn’t be vetoing a bill to liberalize one of the most illiberal bastions of Israeli society – at the expense not of the party she is mad at, but of her own constituents.

The bill in question, sponsored by the Bayit Yehudi party, would significantly reduce the haredi (ultra-Orthodox)-dominated rabbinate’s ability to torment couples seeking to wed. Current law requires couples to register in the city where one of them lives, meaning they can at best choose between two municipal chief rabbis, and sometimes have no choice whatsoever. Some municipal rabbis have exploited this monopolistic power to make life miserable for applicants – especially, though not exclusively, converts (some haredi rabbis don’t recognize the state-sponsored conversion system) and immigrants from the former Soviet Union (who often have trouble producing sufficient proof of their Jewishness to satisfy more stringent rabbis).

Bayit Yehudi’s bill seeks to solve this problem by introducing competition: It would let couples register with any municipal rabbi in Israel, thereby allowing them to patronize those who offer the best service. Moreover, forcing municipal rabbis to compete for these couples’ businesses (and the attendant fees) would create an incentive for all of them to become more user-friendly.

But last week, Livni vetoed this bill in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation – solely because she was mad at Bayit Yehudi for blocking a bill her Hatnua party had sponsored.

There’s nothing wrong with playing hardball politics, nor is there anything wrong with insisting on a horse trade: Conditioning support for another party’s bill on its support for yours is standard political tactics. But smart politicians usually threaten to veto bills that primarily interest the other party, rather than their own constituents or the general public. That maximizes their leverage, since they have little to lose politically if the other party won’t play ball. 

Livni, in contrast, chose to veto a bill that primarily benefits secular Israelis – i.e., the very people her party ostensibly represents. After all, they’re the ones most likely to have trouble registering a marriage. The religious Zionists who comprise Bayit Yehudi’s base are much less likely to have their Jewishness questioned by the rabbinate to begin with, and usually know a rabbi who can help if they run into problems. Thus instead of punishing Bayit Yehudi’s electorate, she is punishing her own, and the broader Israeli public.

Moreover, Hatnuah’s bill was also aimed at liberalizing the haredi-dominated rabbinate: It called for expanding the panel that chooses the chief rabbis from 150 to 200 people and requiring 20 percent of them to be women, with the goal of adding new, non-haredi members to what is currently a Haredi-dominated panel. That’s certainly a worthy aim, and Livni is justified in fighting for it. But if liberalizing the rabbinate is her party’s goal, vetoing another bill that also furthers this goal is like cutting off her nose to spite her face.

Equally egregious was her failure to attempt negotiations before resorting to hardball, even though a reasonable compromise was almost certainly achievable. First, Bayit Yehudi explicitly promised to support Hatnua’s bill if an agreement could be reached on how to appoint the new members. Second, though nine of its 12 MKs voted against the bill in the Knesset, party chairman Naftali Bennett actually voted in favor, indicating that he would be a willing partner in finding such a compromise. Third, one of the bill’s main goals is to increase the chances of electing a religious Zionist as the next Ashkenazi chief rabbi, thereby ending decades of haredi domination; that’s a goal Bayit Yehudi shares.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, Bayit Yehudi has demonstrated a sincere desire to liberalize and improve the rabbinate: Just over two months have passed since the government took office, and it has already proposed two important reforms. One was the marriage registration bill. The other, unveiled last week, would gradually abolish the position of state-appointed neighborhood rabbi and instead give communities government funds to hire rabbis of their own choice.

This proposal won headlines mainly because it would for the first time let non-Orthodox communities obtain funding for their rabbis as well. But the implications are much broader than that; as with the marriage registration bill, the goal is to significantly improve service to the public by introducing competition. Before, neighborhood rabbis were appointed by the rabbinate bureaucracy and were paid regardless of whether or not they did anything useful for the communities they supposedly served. Now, they will be appointed by the communities themselves – meaning they will have to provide good service in order to get and keep their jobs.

Given Bayit Yehudi’s proven commitment to liberalizing the rabbinate, it shouldn’t be impossible to agree on a revised selection process for the chief rabbis that would further this goal, assuming Livni were willing to engage in good-faith negotiations. After all, she likes to think of herself as a master negotiator; indeed, her last election campaign revolved entirely around her self-declared ability to negotiate a final-status deal with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. But apparently, negotiating with a fellow Israeli politician is beneath her. Instead, she has chosen to punish all Israelis by vetoing a bill aimed at improving marriage registration for everyone.

With the Religious Services Ministry controlled for the first time in decades by a party that has shown real interest in reforming our ossified religious bureaucracy, it would be tragic if this opportunity were lost due to one woman’s petty spite. Unfortunately, the man who ought to be calling her to order – Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – appears to have gone AWOL, due largely to his personal loathing for Bennett. Having already sacrificed a golden opportunity for economic reform in order to undermine Yair Lapid, it seems that on this issue, too, Netanyahu would rather accomplish nothing than let a political rival claim an achievement.

Thus Livni’s small-mindedness may actually be serving Netanyahu’s interests. But it’s doing the rest of us a great disservice. 

Secretary of State John Kerry is still trying to restart Israeli-Palestinian talks, with another visit to the region expected “within days,” according to Jordan’s foreign minister. But nothing better illustrates the folly of this effort than last week’s comments by Israel’s ostensible “peace partner,” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

At an event marking the 49th anniversary of the PLO’s founding, Abbas (according to a translation by the Palestinian news agency Ma’an) declared that PLO founder Ahmad Shuqueiri “was asked to figure out what the Palestinians wanted, and he returned with the convention for the PLO.” In other words, according to Abbas, the PLO’s founding document is an accurate reflection of what Palestinians want. And lest anyone has forgotten the contents of that 1964 document, still available on the website of the PLO’s UN mission, here are a few choice quotes:

  • “The partitioning of Palestine, which took place in 1947, and the establishment of Israel are illegal and null and void, regardless of the loss of time…” (Article 17)
  • “The claims of historic and spiritual ties between Jews and Palestine are not in agreement with the facts of history … Judaism, because it is a divine religion, is not a nationality with independent existence. Furthermore, the Jews are not one people with an independent personality…” (Article 18)
  • “Zionism is a colonialist movement in its inception, aggressive and expansionist in its goal, racist in its configurations, and fascist in its means and aims. Israel, in its capacity as the spearhead of this destructive movement and as the pillar of colonialism, is a permanent source of tension and turmoil in the Middle East…” (Article 19)
  • “The causes of peace and security and the requirements of right and justice demand from all nations … that they consider Zionism an illegal movement and outlaw its presence and activities” (Article 20)

The 1964 version is actually tame compared to the amended version adopted in 1968, but as the above quotes show, it’s more than sufficient to preclude any chance of peace. How can Israel possibly make peace with people who consider its very existence “illegal and null and void”; deny that Jews are a nation with any right to “independent existence”; deny any Jewish connection to the land of Israel; consider Zionism, the national movement of the Jewish people, to be “colonialist,” “racist,” “fascist” and “illegal”; and believe that only by eliminating Zionism can “peace and security” and “right and justice” be achieved?

Nor has anything much changed in 49 years, as anyone who follows Palestinian Media Watch would know. Just last month, for instance, another senior PA official widely considered a “moderate” in the West, Jibril Rajoub, told a television interviewer, “We as yet don’t have a nuke, but I swear that if we had a nuke, we’d have used it [against Israel] this very morning.” PA officials and the official PA media still consistently deny the Jews’ historical connection to the land of Israel, teach their people that the ultimate goal is a world without Israel, and glorify those who murder Jews. And most Palestinians still think “the rights and needs of the Palestinian people cannot be taken care of as long as the state of Israel exists.”

Shuqueiri’s 1964 charter indeed reflects “what the Palestinians wanted”–and what they still want. And as long as that’s true, any “peace process” will be so much wasted time and effort.

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Why Israel Needs a Better Political Class

Note: This piece is a response to an essay by Haviv Rettig Gur, which can be found here

Israel’s current political crisis exemplifies the maxim that hard cases make bad law. This case is desperate. Six months after the coronavirus erupted and nine months after the fiscal year began, Israel still lacks both a functioning contact-tracing system and an approved 2020 budget, mainly because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is more worried about politics than the domestic problems that Israel now confronts. The government’s failure to perform these basic tasks obviously invites the conclusion that civil servants’ far-reaching powers must not only be preserved, but perhaps even increased.

This would be the wrong conclusion. Bureaucrats, especially when they have great power, are vulnerable to the same ills as elected politicians. But unlike politicians, they are completely unaccountable to the public.

That doesn’t mean Haviv Rettig Gur is wrong to deem them indispensable. They provide institutional memory, flesh out elected officials’ policies, and supply information the politicians may not know and options they may not have considered. Yet the current crisis shows in several ways why they neither can nor should substitute for elected politicians.

First, bureaucrats are no less prone to poor judgment than politicians. As evidence, consider Siegal Sadetzki, part of the Netanyahu-led triumvirate that ran Israel’s initial response to the coronavirus. It’s unsurprising that Gur never mentioned Sadetzki even as he lauded the triumvirate’s third member, former Health Ministry Director General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov; she and her fellow Health Ministry staffers are a major reason why Israel still lacks a functional test-and-trace system.

Sadetzki, an epidemiologist, was the ministry’s director of public-health services and the only member of the triumvirate with professional expertise in epidemics (Bar Siman-Tov is an economist). As such, her input was crucial. Yet she adamantly opposed expanding virus testing, even publicly asserting that “Too much testing will increase complacence.” She opposed letting organizations outside the public-health system do lab work for coronavirus tests, even though the system was overwhelmed. She opposed sewage monitoring to track the spread of the virus. And on, and on.

Moreover, even after acknowledging that test-and-trace was necessary, ministry bureaucrats insisted for months that their ministry do the tracing despite its glaringly inadequate manpower. Only in August was the job finally given to the army, which does have the requisite personnel. And the system still isn’t fully operational.

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