Domestic Policy
Attacks on mosques and churches rightly outrage Israelis. But why don’t attacks on Jewish sites?
Kudos to the Religious Zionists of America for choosing this particular moment – when Israel is in an uproar over a recent wave of anti-Arab hate crimes whose targets have included mosques and churches – to point out that attacks no less heinous are regularly committed against Israel’s Jewish holy sites. I doubt the organization’s petition, signed by over 100 Orthodox rabbis, will get much attention here, but it should. For there’s something morally perverse about the idea that in the Jewish state, of all places, Judaism should be the one religion whose holy sites can be vandalized without sparking a public outcry.
The anti-Arab vandalism, which has involved slashing car tires, spray-painting graffiti and even occasional arson, is unequivocally reprehensible, and the public uproar is fully warranted. But attacks on Jewish sites have been going on much longer and have frequently been more severe, without eliciting a fraction of the political and media attention recently devoted to the vandalism of Christian and Muslim sites. So are anti-Jewish attacks somehow less reprehensible?
Consider, for instance, the subject of the RZA’s petition: Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives Cemetery. This is the world’s oldest Jewish cemetery, containing the graves of three Biblical prophets, Talmudic and medieval sages, prominent Zionist leaders and generations of ordinary Jews. Yet for years, its graves have been vandalized repeatedly (like these back-to-back incidents in 2011), and visitors have been repeatedly attacked. In one well-publicized 2012 incident, for instance, a baseball-sized rock was thrown at two visiting Jewish congressmen.
At a Knesset Interior Committee meeting last November, police reported that Palestinian rock-throwers had attacked 24 people at or near the cemetery in the previous month alone – a frequency far outpacing that of the recent anti-Arab attacks (33 nationwide since the start of the year). Moreover, unlike slashed tires and spray-painted graffiti, rock-throwing can wound or even kill. Stone-throwers have killed several Israelis – see for instance, Asher and Yonatan Palmer or Yehuda Shoham. And though nobody has yet been killed at the Mount of Olives, a yeshiva student was hospitalized by a rock-throwing attack near the site just a day before the committee meeting. In contrast, the anti-Arab vandalism hasn’t produced any casualties, and most of the attacks (the handful of arson cases excepted) aren’t even potentially life-threatening.
Thus by any objective criterion – the number of attacks, their severity and how long they have been occurring – the anti-Jewish hate crimes at the Mount of Olives are worse than the recent anti-Arab crimes. Yet they have received only a fraction of the public, political and media attention.
The Mount of Olives attacks haven’t merited front-page headlines like those given anti-Arab crimes. There have been no cabinet meetings on the subject, the suspected perpetrators haven’t been declared an illegal organization, ministers haven’t demanded that suspects be treated as terrorists or put in administrative detention (demands the cabinet has so far sensibly rejected; vandals aren’t suicide bombers), and police haven’t created a special unit to combat these crimes – all things that have happened with regard to anti-Arab crimes. Indeed, as the Knesset meeting revealed, police haven’t even honored their promise to keep the station near the cemetery open round the clock.
The point isn’t that anti-Arab hate crimes don’t merit all this attention; they do. But why do anti-Jewish hate crimes not merit the same attention? Why, in a Jewish state, is protecting the world’s oldest Jewish cemetery and ensuring that Jews can visit their loved ones’ graves without being stoned not equally as important as preventing vandalism to mosques and churches?
Or take another site that the RZA letter didn’t mention: the Temple Mount, which is not only Judaism’s holiest site, but contains priceless Jewish relics dating back to the First Temple. The Muslim Wakf, which governs the site, has repeatedly carried out construction with relic-destroying mechanical equipment – in defiance of Israel Antiquities Authority directives – and tossed the excavated dirt into garbage dumps (where volunteers have patiently sifted it for artifacts ever since). Dr. Gabi Barkai, an expert on Temple-era excavations, termed this behavior “a crime” and “first-rate barbarity,” since it destroys irreplaceable archaeological artifacts. It’s also a crime literally, since it violates Israel’s antiquities laws.
By any objective criterion, the vandalism at the Temple Mount is far worse than the recent anti-Arab attacks: Graffiti, however offensive, can be removed, and even a torched mosque can be repaired or rebuilt, but millennia-old archaeological relics, once destroyed, can never be replaced. Yet neither the police nor successive governments have lifted a finger to stop this blatant destruction of a Jewish holy site, while the media rarely mentions the issue. Incredibly, at the government’s request, the Knesset even barred publication of a 2010 State Comptroller’s Report on the ongoing devastation, in a (successful) effort to minimize public and media pressure to halt it. So why, in a Jewish state, is preventing the irreversible destruction of priceless relics of the Jewish Temples not equally as important as preventing vandalism to mosques and churches?
The new fad among Israeli leftists is asserting that the ongoing failure to solve most of these anti-Arab crimes “proves” that Israel’s police, government and public are racist. But the police and successive governments have failed for years to do anything about anti-Jewish hate crimes beyond occasional lip-service denunciations, and neither the public nor the media seemed to care. So why would anyone expect them to treat anti-Arab crimes differently?
That both the police and the government have now finally decided to make combating anti-Arab hate crimes high priority seems to stem less from moral outrage than from fear of the practical consequences: Such attacks undermine Israel’s image overseas and could spark Arab violence. Since neither consequence applies to anti-Jewish crimes, they are unlikely ever to receive similar priority. The ironic result is that Jewish sites in Israel are being treated as less deserving of protection than Christian and Arab sites.
I firmly believe the latter deserve full protection; but Jewish sites deserve no less. The Jewish state should not be yet another country where Jewish sites can be vandalized without anyone seeming to care.
That has been Israel’s story for 66 years now – and it is in our power to ensure the progress continues.
Israel turned 66 this week, but some things never change: It still faces multiple threats, as it has since its inception; they currently range from Iran’s nuclear program to the global delegitimization campaign. But if that sounds like an invitation to despair, consider the following comment by a veteran Israeli diplomat:
“Back in the 70s and 80s, my predecessors were hearing exactly the same warnings from our supporters in America and Europe. That the anti-Israel atmosphere on the campuses is poisonous, that an entire generation is being turned against us by the hostile media, that we will wake up one morning and find that Israel is isolated. And all these years have passed and Israel has diplomatic relations with dozens more countries, and our economic and cultural ties around the world have never been better. In the meantime we’ve built up this massive imaginary enemy, we have devoted resources to fighting it and not done anything to actually fix our country.”
There are at least three major inaccuracies in that statement, but the bottom line is indisputable: Despite the multiple threats it has always faced, Israel’s track record over the last few decades – and indeed, the entirety of the last 66 years – has been one of astounding growth and progress. And there’s no reason why the future can’t be equally bright.
The caveat, of course, is that our future will be bright only if we do what’s necessary to make it so. And that brings us to the diplomat’s three major errors.
First is the assumption that delegitimization is an “imaginary enemy,” and the resources devoted to fighting it have therefore been wasted. The threat of becoming an international pariah is no joke; Israel’s modern, open economy couldn’t long survive the kind of treatment meted out to countries like North Korea or Zimbabwe. Granted, our flourishing economy also serves as a bulwark against pariah status; other countries have more to lose by boycotting Israel than they do by boycotting North Korea or Zimbabwe. Nevertheless, it’s foolish to underestimate the power of public opinion in the democratic West; if public opinion turns against Israel sharply enough, it can trump even the West’s own self-interest.
The fact that this hasn’t happened yet despite decades of anti-Israel poison in the media and on campuses shows not that it cannot happen, but the efforts Israel and its allies have devoted to combating this poison – incompetent though they often are – have so far been enough to prevent the worst from happening. Clearly, this isn’t grounds for resting on our laurels; both in the media and on campuses, the situation is worsening, and Israel will need to improve its public diplomacy if it is to keep the delegitimization movement in check.
Yet at the same time, this history does provide grounds for encouragement: Given how incompetent Israel’s public diplomacy efforts have been over the last several decades, the fact that they nevertheless sufficed to keep the delegitimization movement in check shows how fragile and easily undercut this movement is. And in truth, this isn’t surprising: A movement founded on blatant lies (like the apartheid canard) is fragile by nature. But it’s important to remember this at all those times when fighting delegitimization feels like trying to empty the sea with a spoon.
The second major error is the claim that during these decades, Israelis didn’t do “anything to actually fix our country.” In reality, Israel’s burgeoning economic and cultural ties stem directly from efforts to fix some of the country’s major problems, such as the Economic Stabilization Plan of 1985, which ended hyperinflation; the liberalization of imports in the early 1990s; and the economic reforms of 2003, which helped end the economic crisis caused by the second intifada. Initiatives such as these are what made it possible for Israel to integrate so fully into the global economy, and in many parts of the world, economic ties have been the driver behind improved diplomatic relations.
Nevertheless, the diplomat is right that we haven’t done nearly as much as we should to fix our country. Far too often, Israeli governments address problems only when they become crises too severe to ignore (the 1985 and 2003 reforms are cases in point). Consequently, many problems that haven’t yet hit crisis point have been left to fester – deteriorating schools, an ineffective police force, rising inequality, the soaring cost of living, and more. And failure to address these problems means that for all its impressive progress, Israel isn’t making nearly as much progress as it could.
That brings us to the third major error: the implication that the main issue distracting Israel from fixing its problems has been its preoccupation with the delegitimization campaign. In reality, for at least the past two decades, by far the biggest distraction has been not the delegitimization campaign, but the peace process. Several Israeli governments have wasted the bulk of their time and energy on fruitless peace talks with the Palestinians. Others were forced to devote much of their time and energy to combating the terrorism these successive rounds of negotiations sparked. And still others had to devote large quantities of time and energy to repelling international pressure for dangerous unilateral concessions – something that has so far been true of both the previous and current Netanyahu governments.
But with the latest round of peace talks having collapsed a month ago, and the US having declared a “pause” in its mediation efforts, a brief window of opportunity may have opened for the government to devote serious attention to other problems. Granted, there’s a risk that its “cures” will be worse than the disease: See, for instance, the new enlistment law it passed in March. But on other issues, such as curbing economic concentration and increasing competition, the government has already taken some important steps forward, and now has a real opportunity to build on these efforts.
So my wish for the coming year is that it be a year in which we finally address some of our major domestic problems. And if that happens, we’re guaranteed to have plenty to celebrate come next Independence Day.
Alan Dershowitz has a blistering column in Haaretz today explaining why no self-respecting pro-Israel liberal should support J Street. Yet many genuinely pro-Israel liberals will likely continue doing so, for the same reason they continue giving to the New Israel Fund despite its track record of funding political warfare against Israel: They want an outlet for pro-Israel sentiment that also allows them to try to alter Israeli policies, whether foreign or domestic, with which they disagree. And absent a genuine outlet, it’s human nature to cling instead to groups that falsely purport to fill this niche, ignoring all evidence to the contrary. Hence an alternative model for pro-Israel liberalism is desperately needed.
The good news is that such a model exists. The bad news is that few people know about it–which is why Haaretz’s profile of philanthropist Robert Price earlier this month ought to be required reading for pro-Israel liberals. Price, who self-identifies as “toward the J Street side of things,” is a major donor to Israel, but on principle, he refuses to give to any Jewish Israeli institution: He focuses exclusively on the most disadvantaged fifth of Israeli society–the Arab community. Yet unlike, say, the NIF, Price doesn’t seek to “empower” Israeli Arabs by financing their leadership’s political war on Israel. Instead, he tries to promote Israeli Arabs’ integration, by focusing on educational initiatives that will ultimately improve their job prospects and earning power: early-childhood community centers in Arab towns and, more recently, an Arabic-language version of PJ Library. As he put it, “Arabs represent 20 percent of the population and have an opportunity, we think, to be productive citizens and to actually enrich the fabric of life in Israel if provided reasonable opportunities.”
This is a radical contrast to the NIF, which claims to promote integration but actually promotes Arab separatism. For instance, it’s a major funder of Adalah, an Israeli Arab NGO that actively promotes boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, terms Israel an “apartheid state,” and demands a “right of return” for millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees. It was also a major funder of Mada al-Carmel, another Israeli Arab NGO, whose flagship project was the infamous Haifa Declaration. This document, compiled by dozens of Israeli Arab intellectuals, terms Zionism a “colonial-settler project” that, “in concert with world imperialism,” succeeded in 1948 “in occupying our homeland and transforming it into a state for the Jews,” partly by committing “massacres.” Israel, it adds, can atone for this sin only by transforming itself into a binational state with an Arab majority (via an influx of millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees).
Needless to say, such activities by Israeli Arab NGOs not only undermine Israel, but also worsen Jewish-Arab tensions and exacerbate anti-Arab discrimination: Why would any Israeli Jew want to help or even associate with a community whose leadership actively seeks the Jewish state’s annihilation? Thus by funding such activities, NIF hurts both Israel and the Arab minority it ostensibly seeks to help.
By promoting integration, in contrast, Price is helping both Israel and its Arab minority, and working to reduce discrimination–which is precisely what one would expect a pro-Israel liberal to want to do.
There are numerous ways to promote liberal goals while also genuinely helping Israel. Examples include programs that help ultra-Orthodox Jews acquire secular educations and enter the workplace, or that promote the integration of Ethiopian-Israelis, or that foster Israeli-Palestinian cooperation. But by clinging instead to groups like J Street and NIF, while turning a blind eye to their reality, liberals aren’t just harming Israel. They’re also missing precious opportunities to genuinely make Israel a better, more equal, and more just society.
Originally published in Commentary on March 28, 2014
Getting aid takes so much time and energy that the poor have little left over to help themselves
An OECD report released last week found that Israel has the highest poverty rate in the developed world – 20.9%, compared to an OECD average of 11.3%. Granted, this number may be exaggerated: Only 9.3% of Israelis said they couldn’t afford adequate food, which is significantly less than the OECD average of 13.2%. Nevertheless, Israel’s official poverty rate has been persistently high for years, and the government consequently established a commission on how to fight poverty last year.
Unfortunately, based on media reports, the recommendations the Alalouf Committee is slated to issue next month seem unlikely to break much new ground: They center on time-honored measures like raising various types of welfare allowances. But Western countries have been throwing money at poverty for decades with limited success; thus there’s no reason to think more of the same will produce different results. What’s needed is a broader reform of Israel’s anti-poverty efforts – and a new study by Israeli-born Eldar Shafir, a psychology professor at Princeton University, offers useful insights.
Shafir, whose book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much came out last year, concluded that the pressure of poverty leads otherwise sensible people to make poor choices. In one of his experiments, for instance, volunteers at a New Jersey mall were presented with two scenarios – a car repair costing $150 and one costing $1,500 – and then asked to solve cognitive puzzles. Afterward, the researchers asked the volunteers about their incomes.
Rich and poor proved to be cognitively identical when presented with the $150 scenario. But in the $1,500 scenario, the poor scored significantly worse on the cognitive tests: Just thinking about how they would cope with such a bill reduced their cognitive function by the equivalent of 13 to 14 IQ points. That, Shafir noted in an interview last month, is the difference between borderline and normal intelligence, or between normal and gifted.
This has real-world consequences. For instance, college greatly improves earning power, yet only 30% of Americans eligible for financial aid actually take the money and go to college, Shafir said. Even people who take the trouble to get financial aid forms often don’t fill them out, he noted, because the forms are long and complicated, and the poor, preoccupied with the day-to-day pressures of survival, lack the time and mental energy to cope with them.
Here in Israel, a friend who used to run a charity told me she frequently saw people saddled with thousands of shekels in debt due to a single bad decision: Unable to pay a relatively small bill and uncertain how to solve the problem, they simply put it off – and meanwhile, the debt ballooned, thanks to interest, fines and inflation adjustments.
All this suggests an obvious conclusion: Reducing the bureaucracy of poverty, and thereby reducing the time and mental energy people must expend to obtain help, might leave them with more mental energy to make better decisions. And that would do far more to help them escape poverty in the long run than simply giving them a bit more money.
Currently, Israel’s poverty bureaucracy is enormous, with each type of financial aid handled by a different office: Welfare allowances are handled by the National Insurance Institute, housing assistance by the Housing Ministry, municipal tax discounts by municipalities, etc. Thus to get the aid to which they are legally entitled, people must spend dozens, if not hundreds, of hours running around to various government offices, in between trying to hold down a job, care for a sick child, do the grocery shopping and so forth. Not surprisingly, many people find this so overwhelming that they end up forgoing assistance to which they are entitled. Indeed, an NII official told the Alalouf Committee that in her office’s estimation, about half of all people eligible for welfare allowances never apply for them.
Moreover, for the working poor – of whom Israel has a growing number – time spent at government offices is literally money out of their pocket. Salaried employees can take a morning off for such purposes without reducing their monthly paycheck. But the poor are usually hourly workers, for whom every hour spent in government offices is an hour not spent on the job earning money.
So what if, instead, we turned the poverty bureaucracy into a one-stop shop – a single office where the poor could obtain all relevant types of financial aid with a single visit to a single clerk? With modern computerization, that’s certainly feasible: If, for instance, someone is eligible for a municipal tax break, the poverty office’s computers should automatically forward the relevant data to the municipality’s computers.
Additionally, our one-stop shop should provide help in filling out the paperwork. Many people find government paperwork beyond them; the difference, as Shafir noted, is that the poor can’t solve the problem the way other people do – by hiring professionals to deal with it. Aside from reducing the drain on applicants’ mental energy, such assistance would also reduce the number of people who forgo needed benefits because they can’t handle the paperwork.
Finally, the current crazy quilt of disparate benefits should be simplified so that people must apply for only a few instead of many, and our one-stop shop should include experts who can tell the poor what these benefits are. Most people have no clue what benefits they might be eligible for, and trying to find out can consume enormous quantities of time and energy. That’s another reason why many forgo aid they should receive.
To its credit, the Alalouf Committee apparently does plan to recommend establishing special offices whose job would be to help the poor exercise their rights. But while such help would be beneficial, making people run to yet another government office definitely won’t be.
Simplifying the poverty bureaucracy is admittedly much harder than raising allowances, because it requires forcing numerous entrenched bureaucratic fiefdoms to cede power. And it clearly won’t eradicate poverty all by itself. But as Shafir’s research shows, it could make a significant contribution toward this end. Thus any government serious about fighting poverty must make reducing the bureaucracy part of its plan.
In craving something it can never obtain, Israel endangers both its democracy and its survival
To make the case that their preferred policies are essential to Israel’s future, both Israeli and American Jewish liberals frequently argue that Israel’s current policies – even if justified – are costing it Western and American Jewish support. Last week’s op-ed by Haaretz columnist and award-winning author Ari Shavit is a classic example: Though Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is right about Iran’s nuclear program, right about Palestinian recognition of the Jewish state and right about the essential justice of Israel’s cause, Shavit wrote, this is “yesterday’s message,” which young Americans, especially Jewish ones, don’t want to hear. Thus to avoid losing the future, Israel must remake itself into a country more attractive to these young Americans, whose “liberal” and “pacifist” worldview “utterly rejects the occupation, the use of force and human rights violations.”
Just consider the practical implications of Shavit’s prescription. Since these young Americans abhor “the occupation,” winning their love would presumably require withdrawing from the West Bank. But what if the West Bank then becomes a base for suicide bombings against Israel, as it did when Israel withdrew from parts of it in the mid-1990s? Or a base for launching rockets at Israel, as Gaza did after Israel left in 2005? Shavit certainly knows that’s possible; he’s not one of those fantasists who think territorial withdrawals will bring peace.
Yet by his own admission, these young Americans also abhor “the use of force and human rights violations.” Thus if Israel responds to such a terrorist onslaught militarily, they will immediately hate it again – especially since counterterrorism operations in urban areas inevitably produce civilian casualties, and liberal pacifists generally view all civilian casualties, however unavoidable, as “human rights violations.” Nor is this mere speculation: It’s how Western liberals in fact responded to Israeli counterterror operations in the West Bank in 2002-04 and Gaza in early 2009.
Thus Israel could retain the liberals’ love only by meekly absorbing suicide bombings and rocket attacks without responding. Such unchecked terror, as the past two decades amply showed, would also destroy the economy. And deprived of both personal and economic security, Israelis would flee in droves.
Or consider Iran. Shavit has written repeatedly that Iranian nukes would be an existential threat to Israel. But what happens if all else fails, and only Israeli military action can prevent a nuclear Iran? Those liberal, pacifist Westerners whose love he seeks “reject the use of force”; they would never countenance a preemptive strike. Indeed, they overwhelmingly believe an Israeli attack would be worse than Iranian nukes, which they don’t actually consider much of a threat.
In short, liberal pacifist love can be bought only at a price most Israelis believe would endanger their very existence: letting Iran go nuclear, withdrawing to the 1967 lines even without a peace treaty and abandoning efforts to combat Palestinian terror. That’s hardly a convincing survival strategy.
Moreover, precisely because it requires overriding Israelis’ own policy preferences – as repeatedly expressed through both opinion polls and elections – it’s also anti-democratic. One recent poll, for instance, found that only four percent of Israelis favor withdrawing unilaterally from the West Bank. Another found that while 45% would support removing settlements if the IDF remained – which wouldn’t satisfy liberal pacifists, since it wouldn’t end “the occupation” – only 9% supported withdrawing the IDF as well. Polls also show majorities against withdrawing to the 1967 lines, even with a peace deal, and pluralities or majorities for bombing Iran if other efforts to keep it from going nuclear fail. And of course, in both 2009 and 2013, Israelis elected governments whose stated positions aligned with these preferences.
So courting the liberal pacifists would require Israel to eviscerate one of the most fundamental liberal values – democracy – by substituting the policy preferences of non-citizens for those of its own citizens. Granted, this might not bother many Western liberals, who seem to have little use for democracy when it doesn’t produce their preferred outcomes. But it ought to bother anyone who actually cares about liberal values.
Moreover, gutting Israel’s democracy in itself endangers Israel’s survival, because that survival has always demanded extraordinary commitment from Israel’s citizens. For instance, most Israelis devote three years of their lives to the army and do annual reserve duty for years afterward; without that willingness to defend their country, Israel wouldn’t long survive in a hostile region.
But most people would fight more willingly in defense of policies they – or at least their fellow citizens – chose democratically than for policies imposed by non-citizens who don’t bear the costs of their own choices. Similarly, they’ll pay taxes more willingly to finance democratically chosen policies than policies chosen by non-citizens who don’t bear the costs of their choices.
If Israelis are deprived of the chance to try to make this the kind of country they want, whatever that happens to be, then many might head for the exit. For what makes the price of living here worth paying is precisely the privilege of influencing the nature of the first Jewish state in 2,000 years. If instead, the nature of that state is to be dictated from abroad, why wouldn’t Israelis prefer to move overseas themselves, to countries with higher standards of living and no compulsory military service?
And if Israelis lose the will to maintain their own state, who will take their place – those young American Jewish liberals whose affection Shavit so craves, most of whom wouldn’t even consider Israel’s destruction a personal tragedy?
Yes, Israel needs supporters overseas. But above all, it needs the support of its own people. Thus its overseas supporters must be sought among people who share Israelis’ core values – not among liberal pacifists uncomfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state, and who reject the use of force even in self-defense. The chimerical pursuit of liberal pacifist love is nothing but a recipe for Israel’s destruction.
That Desmond Tutu once again accused Israel of apartheid yesterday is nothing new; he’s one of several Nobel Peace laureates who have made second careers out of Israel-bashing (think Jimmy Carter or Mairead Maguire). But it’s far more worrying when similar rhetoric is used by a sitting U.S. president – as Barack Obama did in the most outrageous but widely overlooked line of his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg earlier this month. Culminating a series of rhetorical questions about what Israel would do if no Palestinian state arises, he asked, “Do you place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel’s traditions?”
As Haaretz diplomatic correspondent Barak Ravid noted, “There is not much distance between this statement and an explicit warning that Israel is liable to turn into an apartheid state.” In short, even if Israel isn’t an apartheid state today, the U.S. president considers it perfectly reasonable to assume it will be someday soon – that instead of a democracy where all citizens are equal before the law, it will become the kind of state that imposes legal restrictions on certain citizens because of their ethnicity. But since Israeli Arabs haven’t been subject to special restrictions since Israel abolished its military administration in 1966, and no subsequent Israeli government has ever contemplated reinstating such restrictions, on what exactly does Obama base this assumption?
The logical conclusion is that he got it from the Israeli Arab leadership and radical Jewish leftists, both of which accuse Israel of apartheid ad nauseam. Yet believing these accusations requires willfully ignoring the facts.
This past December, for instance, one Ahmed Tibi wrote an article for The Hill accusing Israel of treating its Arab citizens like southerners treated blacks in the Jim Crow era. The analogy was a trifle marred by the tagline at the end, in which Tibi admitted he is currently deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset: Blacks didn’t occupy prominent positions in southern legislatures under Jim Crow, much less in South Africa under apartheid. It was further undermined when another Arab deputy Knesset speaker, Hamad Amar, wrote a riposte in The Hill the next week terming Tibi’s claims arrant nonsense. The spectacle of two Arab deputy speakers of parliament publicly dueling, without any fear of consequences, over whether their country discriminates against Arabs isn’t exactly an example of proto-apartheid behavior. But hey, who you gonna believe: Tibi or your lying eyes?
Then there are all the other Arabs in prominent positions – college presidents, hospital directors, ambassadors, army officers, Supreme Court justices and more. The Elder of Ziyon blog has a must-see poster collection featuring these and many other examples that are the very antithesis of apartheid. But hey, who you gonna believe: Haaretz’s Gideon Levy or your lying eyes?
Indeed, on the issue that seems to concern Obama most – freedom of movement, which he highlighted in the rhetorical question immediately preceding the one on Arab Israelis – Arab citizens and permanent residents arguably have greater rights than Israeli Jews: For instance, they can freely visit the Temple Mount, which Israeli Jews can’t; they can also visit the Palestinian Authority, which Israeli law bars Jews from doing. In fact, their freedom of movement is precisely why terrorist organizations consider them prize recruits. It’s a sad day when Palestinian terrorists have a better grasp of Israel’s true nature than the U.S. president.
Obama, of course, is just a symptom of a much larger problem: Too many Western liberals willfully close their eyes to the truth when it comes to Israel, preferring to parrot the current bon ton. But for an administration that explicitly pledged to pursue “evidence-based policy,” a little more attention to the evidence on Israel would be a nice place to start.
Bring opinion leaders here, provide data to friends abroad, and don’t put Foreign Ministry in charge.
Having long argued that bringing people to see Israel for themselves is the best way to change their view of it, I was delighted to discover that someone high up in the Foreign Ministry shares my view. Unfortunately, Gideon Meir has just retired after 45 years in the ministry – after failing utterly to secure funding even for the modest effort of bringing over 3,000 non-Jews influential on American college campuses, at a cost of $12 million (NIS 42.1 million). That’s pocket change in a government budget of NIS 408.1 billion – a mere 0.01%.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Meir pointed out what ought to be obvious: Public diplomacy is as critical to Israel’s security as fighter jets, because without it, we won’t even be able to buy those jets. Or as he put it, we buy American fighters for $35 million apiece, but we’re not investing a cent in ensuring that future Congresses – whose demographic make-up will likely differ substantially from today’s – will approve selling us replacements when the current planes die.
An op-ed published this month by BBC journalist Lipika Pelham provides a timely reminder of what an impact seeing Israel first-hand can have. In it, the Bengal-born Pelham wrote of how her years here had changed her:
“It is impossible to explain fully the nuances of Jerusalem’s ethno-religious split to my old and new London friends. I had strayed too far from our past political adherences. I am worried about sounding too pro-Israel when, at the children’s school meetings, I want to share with curious parents that Jerusalem is a safer place than London for raising a family. Or while shopping at the local grocer, I cannot be bothered to check the kiwi fruit labels to check whether they came from Israel as has been de rigueur among my left-wing friends. I want to say it loud and clear that I do not care much about the boycott. Israel is not an apartheid state.”
Granted, she hasn’t become an outspoken champion. But for someone in her milieu, even publicly rejecting the “apartheid” canard is groundbreaking.
Yet bringing opinion leaders here isn’t the only elementary task the government is failing to perform. It’s neglecting something even more basic – simply providing information.
One of the gravest indictments I’ve ever seen of Israel’s nonexistent public diplomacy was published in this paper by Labor MK Hilik Bar earlier this month. Bar, who chairs the Knesset’s European Forum, reported that at a meeting with European parliamentarians belonging to the European Friends of Israel group, several complained of a basic problem: They “often lack the information necessary for them to help make the case for Israel in their own communities.” Providing such information to pro-Israel parliamentarians ought to be a staple of the Foreign Ministry’s work. Clearly, however, it’s not.
That became evident once again during European Parliament President Martin Schulz’s address to the Knesset last week. Granted, Schulz should never have thrown unverified slander into his speech: As David M. Weinberg noted, addresses to foreign parliaments are usually rigorously fact-checked; thus by inserting an accusation that he himself admitted he hadn’t checked, Schulz clearly violated diplomatic protocol.
Yet the accusation in question – that Israel starves the Palestinians of water – crops up repeatedly, and various comprehensive rebuttals have therefore been published. Weinberg quoted one by a leading Israeli hydrologist, Prof. Haim Gvirtzman, that detailed the steep decline in the water usage gap over the last 40 years; the fact that Israel gives the Palestinians more water than required under the Oslo Accords; and the Palestinians’ own responsibility for the remaining shortfalls, due to wasteful irrigation methods and refusal to fix leaky pipes, drill new wells, use treated sewage or cooperate with Israel on projects to alleviate the problem. I’d also mention the Europeans’ own refusal to cooperate with Israel on such projects: They condition cooperation on the settlements not benefiting in any way, and since most waterways run through both Israeli and Palestinian controlled territory, that’s effectively impossible.
So how is it that Schulz, who occupies a very influential position and is considered a friend of Israel, had never seen Gvirtzman’s study? And why did none of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s aides know how to lay their hands on the relevant data so that he could rebut Schulz’s accusation in real time? Both lapses attest to a public diplomacy system so broken as to be nonexistent.
The obvious conclusion is that public diplomacy can no longer be left to the Foreign Ministry. Even the dedicated diplomats who sincerely want to make Israel’s case clearly lack the time, resources or skills to do it; otherwise, failures like those detailed above wouldn’t keep recurring. Moreover, some don’t even want to: As former ministry employee Dan Illouz revealed in another shocking Jerusalem Post column last month, some ministry officials actually support international boycotts aimed at forcing Israel into territorial withdrawals, and thus can hardly be trusted to conduct public diplomacy to avert such pressure.
The good news is that someone else wants to take over the job: Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz and ministry director general Yossi Kuperwasser have drafted plans for a major public diplomacy campaign and are seeking NIS 100 million to implement it. The bad news is that one of the cabinet’s most influential members, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, is trying to scuttle the proposal. Moreover, it’s not yet clear what the plan includes, aside from legal action against boycotts – which can be highly effective, but isn’t sufficient. No plan that omits the two key elements of bringing opinion leaders to Israel and providing essential information to friends overseas will be worth much, and NIS 100 million won’t go very far for one that includes both those goals plus legal action.
Ultimately, the decision will rest with Netanyahu – who forcefully advocated for more public diplomacy until becoming prime minister, but has neglected it shamefully ever since. Thus the question is whether he can be persuaded to return to his roots and authorize both the plan and the necessary funds. Anyone who cares about Israel should be urging him to do so.
The problem is the Education Ministry’s policy, which makes politicized civics education inevitable.
Despite deploring his opinions, I couldn’t help feeling some sympathy for civics teacher Adam Verete in recent weeks. After all, he was only following Education Ministry policy; how was he to know that doing so risked dismissal?
The ministry long ago adopted the 1996 Kremnitzer Report on civics education, which explicitly says “a teacher is permitted to take a stand on a controversial issue, as long as he doesn’t give his stand the status of an obligatory view.” Verete thus saw no harm in sharing his own far-left views with his 12th-grade civics class. But a student with far-right views complained to both the ministry and a Knesset member of feeling intimidated, and the school began proceedings to fire him, backtracking only after a public outcry.
Thus the fundamental problem is the ministry’s own policy – because when one party wields enormous power over another, it’s almost impossible for the powerful party to express opinions without the weaker party feeling pressured to acquiesce. That’s precisely why, for instance, most Western legal systems allow employers to be convicted of sexual harassment or assault even if an employee didn’t explicitly object: Employees terrified of losing their livelihood might be afraid to object. And high-school teachers wield enormous power over their students’ future: The teacher’s grade comprises 50% of the student’s final score on the matriculation exam in that subject, and matriculation scores affect not only what colleges students can get into, but even what subjects they can study.
Compounding the power-imbalance problem is the fact that people of all political persuasions often have trouble acknowledging opposing views as legitimate. Take Verete’s statement during his pre-dismissal hearing, as reported in Haaretz (in Hebrew): “If saying that acts against human dignity – whether it’s an African refugee or a Palestinian at a checkpoint, whose basic rights are being violated – is considered political, that’s a terrible situation … These are values that are supposed to be consensual across the spectrum of opinion in a democratic society.”
Well, actually, no, because in real life, competing values often clash. How to balance such conflicting values – for instance, Palestinians’ right to freedom of movement versus Israelis’ right to life (i.e., not to be killed by Palestinian terrorists) – is a quintessential political question that all democracies wrestle with; students shouldn’t be made to feel that only one possible answer is legitimate in a democratic society. Yet someone who believes as Verete does would find it hard to avoid giving students that feeling.
And this leads directly to the larger problem: Civics teachers, with at least the ministry’s tacit if not active encouragement, have come to believe their job includes showing students how classroom concepts apply to topical issues. But teachers aren’t automatons; even if they tried, most probably couldn’t completely conceal their views on controversial issues about which they feel passionately. And many don’t even try, believing that educators are obliged to teach their students “values”: As teachers from Jerusalem’s Leyada High School said in an open letter last month, it’s a teacher’s “duty” to share his opinions with his students. But teachers who do so will inevitably intimidate some students who feel differently.
In short, attempting to teach hot-button topical issues in high school is a recipe for disaster. Some students, those with truly exceptional teachers, may learn critical thinking and tolerance for opposing views. But many others will learn group-think – namely, whatever the teacher thinks. And still others will feel intimidated and discriminated against; the lesson they’ll learn is that those with power – in this case, teachers – get to impose their views on others.
To become active, engaged citizens, students need to learn three things. First, they need to learn how the system works: how governments are elected, how the legislative process functions, how the judiciary interacts with other branches of government, what roles the media and nongovernmental organizations play, etc. You can’t influence any system without understanding how it works.
Second, students need to absorb their own society’s common denominators – the shared history and broadly shared values that too many civics teachers (at least those quoted in the left-wing Haaretz) sneeringly dismiss as “the consensus.” For without that consensus, no society can long survive: Wrenching disagreements will always exist, and they can easily tear a country apart without some common basis that makes it worth holding together.
Finally, students indeed need to learn to think critically, defend their own positions coherently and still be respectful of opposing views. But hot-button contemporary issues are the worst possible vehicle for teaching such skills, because many students feel too strongly about these issues to examine them critically, or to tolerate dissenting views without feeling personally attacked. Instead, students can and should be taught these skills in classes dealing with less emotive issues: for instance, by debating competing interpretations of a work of literature or different sides of a historical controversy. And once students form the habits of thinking critically and tolerating dissent, they’ll be able to apply them to current events on their own.
Verete’s behavior (for instance, telling students he shouted “Viva Palestine!” at an overseas conference) clearly crossed a line. But by expecting teachers to discuss current events in class and even encouraging them to voice their own views, the Education Ministry has created a situation where crossing the line is almost inevitable – and consequently, so is a backlash from students and parents. Indeed, many civics teachers complain of having suffered such backlashes; Verete’s case was unusual only in having made national headlines.
What’s needed, therefore, is a thorough revamping of the civics curriculum to take politics – aka “topical issues” – out of the classroom and put genuine education back in. Unfortunately, Education Minister Shai Piron seems unlikely to do anything of the sort: Despite promising last week to appoint a committee on the appropriate relationship between politics and education, he explicitly defended teachers’ right to voice their political opinions in class.
Thus grass-roots pressure for change is essential. And if, by exposing just how politicized civics education has become, Verete helps to convince ordinary Israelis of this need, he will have done his country a valuable service.
Herzl believed he could alter world opinion. Many Israelis today think we must simply bow to it.
A key insight bequeathed by Zionism’s founding father is that international legitimacy matters greatly. While others focused on creating “facts on the ground” (which also matter), Theodor Herzl devoted himself to international politics: He met with world leaders to mobilize support for a Jewish national home, wrote books and articles explicating this idea and created a political movement, the Zionist Organization, to promote his efforts. So confident was he of the value of this work that after the first Zionist Congress, in Basel in 1897, he wrote in his diary, “At Basel, I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.” And indeed, 51 years later, the State of Israel was born.
But if Herzl were alive today, he would be appalled at how his legacy has been distorted. True, some Israelis at least remember that international legitimacy matters: Politicians, journalists, businessmen and academics routinely cite this principle in explaining why Israel must make peace with the Palestinians, or alternatively, cede territory unilaterally. Yet the lesson Herzl derived from this principle was very different. Herzl concluded that since global opinion matters, he must work relentlessly to alter the world’s views. His would-be heirs conclude that since global opinion matters, Israel must meekly bow to every global demand, however unfeasible or even detrimental it might be – because changing world opinion is impossible, even if Israel is right.
It’s hard to overstate how radically Herzl altered world opinion. When he began his campaign, Jewish sovereignty hadn’t existed for 1,900 years, and to most of the world, the idea of reconstituting it was inconceivable. Yet within 50 years, Herzl and his successors had changed so many minds that in 1947, the UN voted to establish a Jewish state by a two-thirds majority.
Now consider a few developments from the past week alone:
• Foreign Ministry diplomats came out against Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz’s plan for a major public diplomacy campaign to combat the threat of anti-Israel boycotts. The diplomats, Haaretz reported, think a PR offensive would merely “play into the hands of boycott activists,” because what Steinitz terms “delegitimization” is really just “legitimate criticism from foreign governments and NGOs of Israel’s policy in the territories.” In short, changing the world’s mind is impossible, so we shouldn’t bother trying.
• Former Jerusalem Report editor-in-chief Hirsh Goodman wrote in a New York Times op-ed that having grown up in apartheid South Africa, he knows nothing resembling apartheid “even remotely exists in Israel or the occupied territories. But, increasingly, in the mind of the world it does,” and there’s nothing we can do to persuade it otherwise. We can never, for instance, make the world see the “apartheid wall” (aka the West Bank security barrier) as a legitimate security measure; the propaganda war is one “Israel cannot win unless it makes peace.”
• Addressing a high-profile conference, Finance Minister Yair Lapid asserted that if Israeli-Palestinian talks fail, Israel will suffer devastating boycotts from its major trading partner, the European Union. “If there will not be a political settlement, the Israeli economy will face a dramatic withdrawal that will substantially hurt the pocket of every Israeli,” he warned. He even claimed that Europe is considering canceling the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the foundation of our economic ties (something an EU spokesman flatly denied). In short, we must either capitulate to Palestinian demands or face economic ruin, because we can’t possibly persuade the world that our own positions are justified.
• A group of Israeli businessmen called Breaking the Impasse launched an ad campaign declaring that an Israeli-Palestinian deal is essential both politically and economically, so Israel must sign one. The campaign’s slogans – “Bibi [Netanyahu], only you can”; “A strong country signs an agreement” – put the onus for making peace squarely on Israel. The previous week, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the group similarly asserted that “We must urgently reach a diplomatic settlement,” because “The world is losing patience and the threat of sanctions is growing daily.” And of course, we can’t do anything to change the world’s mind.
But what if the Palestinians, who have refused every previous Israeli offer, once again refuse? Or what if they insist on terms that would gravely endanger the country? Then apparently, Israel is screwed – because Herzl’s heirs no longer believe it’s possible to alter global opinion.
Objectively speaking, this is arrant nonsense. Even if you believe Israel is an illegal occupier, plenty of other illegal occupations have existed for as long or even longer – think China’s occupation of Tibet, India’s occupation of Kashmir, Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus, etc. And Israel has done far more than these countries to try to resolve the problem, including repeated offers of Palestinian statehood and the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Yet these countries aren’t threatened with boycotts and sanctions; indeed, as Prof. Eugene Kontorovich has noted, the same EU that claims “international law” bars it from economic activity in the “occupied” West Bank actively promotes such activity in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus and Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. Thus it’s clearly possible to be embroiled in a long-running conflict without drawing international boycotts.
But not if you don’t even try to persuade the world of the justice of your claims. And Israel stopped trying long ago. Instead, its diplomats, journalists, businessmen and politicians all insist that changing the world’s mind is impossible, so our only choice is capitulating to its demands.
It’s a shocking betrayal of Herzl’s conviction that “If you will it, it is no dream.” Herzl showed that with enough effort, and belief in the justice of your cause, you can sell the world even a proposition as radical as reconstituting Jewish sovereignty after 2,000 years. By comparison, the propositions Israel must sell today are far more modest: that it has legitimate rights in its ancient heartland, and that, like other long-running conflicts worldwide, the Israeli-Palestinian one isn’t currently resolvable.
But many Israelis, it seems, have forgotten how to will anything. They know only how to bow to the will of others.
At key junctures, Israelis have made choices that averted problems suffered by other countries.
The news of the last few weeks hasn’t exactly been encouraging. The interim agreement with Iran has given it major sanctions relief in exchange for minuscule concessions that delay its nuclear breakout time by at most a month. Rocket attacks are once again occurring almost daily, which, as one analyst noted, means another military operation in Gaza probably isn’t far off. America is demanding dangerous concessions to the Palestinian Authority, while Europe is threatening boycotts.
Yet looking around the world, my overwhelming feeling these past few weeks has been one of gratitude. For many problems now bedeviling other countries could easily have been Israel’s as well, had certain Israelis not made different choices at critical junctures.
Take, for instance, the three-year-old nation of South Sudan, where bitter political rivals who cooperated uneasily to win independence have now turned on each other, killing thousands and displacing over half a million. Such a civil war could easily have erupted in Israel, too: Barely a month after declaring independence, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered his Haganah militia to fire on an arms ship belonging to the rival Irgun militia, killing 16 people.
But Irgun leader Menachem Begin rejected his members’ demand for vengeance, recognizing that civil war would destroy the new state. And the Irgun obeyed, sparing Israel South Sudan’s bloody fate.
Nor do the parallels end there. In South Sudan, as in many other countries, the civil war stemmed from a winner-take-all mentality that made the opposition fear discrimination and exclusion. In Israel, Begin’s Herut party indeed suffered such exclusion: For almost 30 years, until it won its first election, Herut’s members were barred from the civil service, discriminated against throughout the large swathes of the economy controlled by the state and publicly vilified as “fascists.” Like the Communists, Herut was branded beyond the pale by Ben-Gurion.
Yet throughout this time, Begin’s commitment to democracy never wavered: He insisted that his followers uphold the democratic rules despite the tilted playing field, thereby sparing Israel South Sudan’s fate.
But if Begin was the unsung hero of the state’s first three decades, no less noteworthy was the Left’s behavior after his party, by then renamed Likud, won the 1977 election. To understand why, consider Thailand.
In Thailand, as in Israel, the old elites controlled the state for decades – until suddenly, they didn’t. Begin gained power when Sephardi immigrants, scorned by the old elites, grew numerous enough to swing an election; Thaksin Shinawatra’s party gained power by winning over the rural poor whom the old elites had scorned. In both cases, this demographic factor made the shock doubly severe: Not only had the elites, who thought the state was theirs by right, suddenly been ousted, but the demographics meant their ouster could easily be permanent.
In Thailand, however, the old elites refused to accept democracy’s verdict. After Shinawatra was reelected in 2005, tens of thousands of demonstrators virtually shut down Bangkok. New elections were called, but when Shinawatra won again, the Constitutional Court, aligned with the old elites, invalidated the results. Then, before repeat elections could be held in October 2006, the army intervened to “save the country”: It deposed Thaksin’s government and installed one comprised of the old elites.
The following year, the Constitutional Court outlawed Shinawatra’s party and slapped an electoral ban on its leaders. When a successor party nevertheless won the 2007 election, the demonstrations resumed, even shutting down Bangkok’s international airport. The court then ousted the new premier and dissolved the successor party, along with two of its coalition partners, enabling the old elites to finally form another government. Unsurprisingly, Shinawatra’s supporters then paralyzed the capital with their own mass demonstrations.
Eventually, in 2011, new elections were held, and yet another Shinawatra successor party, headed by his sister, won. Now, the old elites are once again paralyzing the capital with mass demonstrations – to demand that democracy be abolished and replaced by an unelected “people’s council.” The government tried to pacify the demonstrators by cutting short its term and calling new elections, but the demonstrators have vowed to stop the vote from taking place. And the courts, once again, are supporting them.
Israel’s old elites never attempted anything remotely comparable. Granted, they have sometimes used the courts, or international pressure, to impose their agenda on the country in ways I find problematic and anti-democratic. But Likud victories never prompted a military coup, even though the old elites dominated the army. The courts, another bastion of the old elites, never dreamed of outlawing Likud or its coalition partners. And despite loudly mourning the loss of “their” country and voicing existential fears that demographic changes make the loss irreversible, the old elites have never suggested abolishing democracy. Instead, their parties diligently compete in every election – and sometimes win. Like Begin, at the moment of truth, they put the
good of the country first.
Then, finally, there’s the problem now preoccupying most of Europe and Asia, and even many Muslim countries, like Iran and Turkey: the dearth of children. Steep declines in birthrates, to below replacement levels, mean all these countries face a future where too few workers must support too many retirees, and they are wondering, desperately, how to cope. This issue is now “front and center” in Germany, as the New York Times reported last year, while Asia’s aging even made the agenda of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Israel is one of very few developed countries to have no such problem: The Israeli Jewish fertility rate is 2.99 children per woman, and even excluding Haredim, it’s 2.6 – far above the replacement rate of 2.1 (the Israeli Muslim rate is currently 3.37, but is expected to fall well below the Jewish rate by 2035). Unlike their peers in other developed countries, Israelis of every stripe – left and right, religious and secular – are still choosing to have children.
Thus not only has Israel successfully navigated many pitfalls in the past, but unlike much of the developed world, it also has a future. And amid all the very real problems it faces, that, surely, is reason to be grateful.