Evelyn Gordon
Analysis from Israel

The West’s Shalit Test, and Israel’s

Published May 25, 2011

Alan Baker, a former legal advisor to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, made an important point in yesterday’s Jerusalem Post: Once Fatah and Hamas finalize their planned Palestinian unity government, the Palestinian Authority will no longer be able to disclaim responsibility for what happens in Gaza. Inter alia, that means it won’t be able to disclaim responsibility for Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas in a cross-border raid five years ago.

As Baker noted, this leaves the PA with three choices. One is to secure Shalit’s release. The second is to admit direct complicity in a war crime: Even if you buy Hamas sympathizers’ claim that Shalit is a legitimate prisoner of war, holding him incommunicado for five years, without even visits by the Red Cross, is a war crime by any standard. The third is to admit that, unity government notwithstanding, the PA still doesn’t actually control Gaza–in which case it fails to meet a basic requirement for statehood under the Montevideo Convention: governmental control over the relevant territory.

Where Baker is wrong, however, is saying this makes Shalit’s fate a crucial test for the new PA government, because the PA has no reason to believe the world will care. Why should the PA worry about complicity in a war crime if the European Union and the Obama administration will nevertheless keep giving it hundreds of millions of dollars a year? Alternatively, why should it worry about lacking de-facto control over Gaza if the vast majority of the world’s countries will recognize a Palestinian state in the pre-1967 lines come September anyway?

Thus rather than being a test for the PA, this is a test for the West. Both the EU and Washington have repeatedly condemned Shalit’s ongoing captivity. Will they now put their money–and their UN votes–where their mouths are and insist that the PA release him as the price of continued funding or recognition? Or will they follow the usual pattern of refusing to penalize the PA no matter what it does?

For the EU, the answer is self-evident: There’s no chance of its ever penalizing the PA. But the Europeans ought to at least be forced to confront their own hypocrisy on human rights instead of being allowed to sweep it comfortably under the rug. The Obama administration, in contrast, might act, but only if it feels sufficient pressure.

Yet neither the EU nor Washington will feel any pressure at all unless Israel and its overseas supporters make an issue of Shalit. And many Israel supporters won’t feel comfortable pressing this issue if Israel’s government seems indifferent.

Ultimately, therefore, this is a test for Jerusalem: Will it press the PA hard over this issue and lobby Western countries to do the same? Or would it rather choose between abandoning Shalit and tamely accepting Hamas’s terms–1,000 terrorists for one kidnapped soldier?

Originally Published in: Commentary
Original Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/05/25/the-wests-shalit-test-and-israels/
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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.

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