Domestic Policy
Israel’s abortion policy is an all-too-rare example of a compromise that gives both sides something important
I don’t think something should be news just because the New York Times tries to make it so by publishing an accusatory op-ed. But if you want to write about a topic that almost never makes headlines in Israel, you have to seize any opportunity. And Israel’s abortion policy is worth writing about, because it’s an all-too-rare example of a compromise that gives something important to both sides in a case where Jewish and liberal values clearly conflict.
I admit I once thought otherwise. Raised on America’s abortion wars, in which both sides take absolutist positions, I initially scorned Israel’s policy as institutionalized hypocrisy. And in some ways, it is: Whereas the letter of the law declares abortion legal only in exceptional cases, its application in practice makes abortions available to virtually anyone who wants one. But that tension between theory and practice – or hypocrisy, if you will – is precisely what makes the policy one both sides can live with.
By law, abortions require the approval of a committee comprised of two doctors and a social worker. These committees (which all hospitals have) can approve abortions only in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy; after that, a special exceptions committee must authorize the procedure. And at any stage, approval is possible only if one of the following criteria applies: the woman is under 18 or over 40; the pregnancy stems from rape, incest or an extramarital affair; the baby is liable to be physically or mentally impaired; or the pregnancy endangers the woman’s physical or mental health.
But in practice, as Yair Rosenberg wrote in Tablet last week, 98 percent of all abortion requests are approved; these criteria – especially the one about the woman’s mental health – are flexible enough that some committee can always be found to say yes. Moreover, he noted, since abortions that meet the criteria can be approved anytime, they end up being easier to obtain here than in many liberal European countries, where limits on later-term abortions are much stricter.
The result is that while neither the liberal nor the Jewish side gets everything it wants, both get something important. Liberals get the fact that almost anyone who wants an abortion can get one, even in cases where Jewish law wouldn’t permit it; but they don’t get a legal “right” to an abortion, nor is the fetus deemed merely part of a woman’s body, subject to her full control. Religious Jews get a law which sends a clear message that destroying a potential life is justified only in exceptional circumstances; but in practice, they must accept many abortions that don’t meet that standard.
What Mairav Zonszein decried in her New York Times op-ed was the Jewish side of this compromise. Her own abortion was approved instantly. But because she sees abortion as “pertaining strictly to my own body,” she finds the very idea of needing approval objectionable. And that view is precisely what the law is meant to counter. By requiring women to obtain approval, it effectively says: “You may have an abortion if you want it, but you may not pretend that destroying a potential life is no different than removing a wart from your finger – something ‘pertaining strictly to your own body,’ to be done solely at your own discretion.”
And for most Israelis, the compromise clearly works; that’s why abortion is such a non-issue in Israel. It works for those who want abortions because they can get them. And it works for those who oppose abortions because its message about the value of life seems to be effective. At 117 abortions per 1,000 live births, Israel’s abortion rate in 2013 was lower than in any European country except Croatia. And its fertility rate, even excluding the Haredim, is the highest in the developed world; it’s the only Western country with a birthrate above replacement rate.
The compromise is possible because Jewish law doesn’t believe life begins at conception, and therefore doesn’t consider abortion murder. It’s hard to compromise over murder. But in Jewish law, a fetus is only a potential life – one that shouldn’t be destroyed without cause, but lacks the status of an actual life. Thus Jewish law actually mandates abortion if the mother’s life is endangered; an existing life takes precedence over a potential one. And some rabbis permit abortion if pregnancy endangers the mother’s mental or emotional health.
But similar compromises are possible in other areas where liberal and Jewish values clash, and we should be striving to find them. One possible example is the recent Shabus project to provide bus service on Shabbat in Jerusalem.
As an Orthodox Jew, I’d prefer no buses on Shabbat. Nevertheless, the Shabus project is as respectful of Orthodox sensitivities as any service that violates Shabbat could possibly be. It’s a private organization, so the state isn’t lending its imprimatur to violating Shabbat. It’s a co-op in which people purchase membership and then ride for free, so no money changes hands on Shabbat. And it employs non-Jewish drivers, so Jews aren’t working on Shabbat.
Granted, the organizers spoiled the picture by declaring that they hope to eventually eliminate all these restrictions. But as it stands, it’s precisely the kind of compromise that, like the abortion law, concedes something important to both liberal and Jewish values. For the liberal side, there’s transportation on Shabbat for those who want it, albeit not state-sponsored and more limited than the weekday bus service. For the Jewish side, there’s the effort to minimize Shabbat violations, and more importantly, the fact that Shabbat legally remains a day of rest rather than just another workday.
Both religious and liberal Jews would rather Israel conform fully to their very different visions. But since we have to live together in the same state, finding practical compromises that both sides can tolerate is infinitely preferable to fighting endless culture wars that never resolve anything. The abortion law is a model of what such a compromise should be, and shows just how much tension such compromises can alleviate. Our legislators should strive to imitate it on other issues.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on June 22, 2015
Regardless of the subject, some people would always rather divert the conversation to Israel’s “relentless and deliberate program of settlement expansion,” as J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami did in response to Michael Oren’s revelations about the Obama Administration’s conduct toward Israel. So let’s honor their wishes and talk about the settlements – specifically, about how much Israel’s government spends on this “relentless program of expansion.” Because according to new data released by none other than the leader of the opposition, government spending on West Bank settlements and their residents is actually about 40 percent less per capita than Israel spends on all its other citizens.
In an interview with Haaretz published last Friday, Labor Party chairman Isaac Herzog – who opposes the settlements – was asked what “the annual cost of the occupation” is. His response: “From 2009 to 2014, Israel invested 10 billion shekels [$2.5 billion] in Judea and Samaria. That’s a huge amount of the state budget.”
But math clearly isn’t Herzog’s strong point, because 10 billion shekels is actually a trivial amount of the state budget, which totaled 408 billion shekels in 2014. So even assuming (which I do) that he meant 10 billion a year, not 10 billion over the course of five years, that still amounts to only 2.5 percent of the state budget.
According to data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, however, there were 341,800 Jewish settlers in 2013 (the last year for which data is available), out of a total Israeli population of 8.1345 million. In other words, settlers account for 4.2 percent of the population.
Thus if the government is spending 10 billion shekels a year on the settlers, then their proportional share of the state budget is 40 percent less than their share in the population. And most of that money would be spent regardless of where they lived, since all Israelis are entitled to healthcare, education, defense and various other government-funded services.
Of course, one could claim that Herzog’s figure is simply unreliable. But his predecessor as Labor Party chairman, who also opposes the settlements, similarly concluded that the government actually spends very little on them.
In a 2011 interview with Haaretz, Shelly Yacimovich was asked whether “the billions … invested in the settlements” weren’t coming at the expense of her dream of a welfare state within the Green Line. She flatly denied it:
I am familiar with that well-known equation: that if there were no settlements there would be a welfare state within Israel’s borders. I am familiar with the worldview that maintains that if we cut the defense budget in half there will be money for education. It’s a worldview with no connection to reality. I reject it; it is simply not factually correct, even though it is now perceived as axiomatic. A school that is located in a settlement and has X number of students would be located inside the Green Line and have the same number of children at the same cost.
Two weeks later, she wrote a follow-up for Haaretz in which she doubled down on her “rejection of the mathematics of ‘if there will be no settlements, there will be money for a welfare state.’ I plead guilty: I too thought this, six years ago.” But after “six intensive years as a member of the [Knesset] Finance Committee,” she became convinced that this assumption is simply false.
For diehard anti-Israel types, the facts are never relevant. But for the rest of the world, maybe it’s time to finally admit what two successive leaders of the opposition now have: Far from Israel engaging in “relentless settlement expansion,” state spending on the settlements is actually minuscule.
Originally published in Commentary on June 18, 2015
Refusing to help would be a slap in the face to Israel’s most loyal non-Jewish citizens
One of the most disturbing things I’ve read in a long time was Haaretz’s report last Friday that the government has ruled out military aid to Syrian Druse, who are under serious threat from extremist Sunni groups like Islamic State and the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front. Maybe this is merely a smokescreen, meant to allow Israel to provide aid while retaining plausible deniability. But if the report is true, it’s a horrendous error, both morally and strategically.
Ordinarily, I don’t think Israel has any obligation to prevent potential Mideast massacres. Not only does it have no moral duty to rescue people who for the most part would happily kill us if they could, but even if it did, it lacks the capacity. Israel may be the Mideast’s strongest military power, but it has nowhere near the power necessary to be the region’s policeman.
Nor do I entertain fantasies about creating a friendly Druse statelet to our north, though that idea has some proponents. In an essay in Mosaic Magazine last year, for instance, Ofir Haivry argued that Israel should support “the Christians and Druse of both Lebanon and Syria, and above all the Kurds,” in an effort to forge a bloc of Mideast minorities that could counterbalance both Shi’ites and Sunnis.
But as Dr. Guy Bechor of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya noted last week, Israel’s experience with this idea – primarily in Lebanon in the 1980s – hasn’t been encouraging. The region’s other non-Muslim minorities are vastly outnumbered by their Muslim antagonists; they are hampered by being scattered among several different states; and aside from the Kurds, none have even shown any particular desire for independence. Thus just as Christian autonomy in Lebanon couldn’t survive without a continuous Israeli military presence, Druse autonomy in Syria probably couldn’t either, and such a presence wouldn’t be in Israel’s interests. So Syrian Druse would probably do what Lebanese Christians did after Israel left Lebanon in 2000: reach an accommodation with the dominant Sunnis and/or Shi’ites.
But if we can’t expect any lasting gain in the form of a friendly neighbor, why should Israel help the Druse? Quite simply, because their Israeli kinsmen want it, and because those kinsmen are Israel’s most loyal non-Jewish citizens. The community’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Maufak Tarif, the head of the Druse and Circassian Local Councils Forum, Jaber Hamoud, and senior Druse officers in the Israel Defense Forces have all issued pleas for help. Additionally, thousands of ordinary Druse demonstrated over the issue Saturday night.
Refusing to help their relatives – when everyone knows Israel would surely help Jews in a similar situation – would essentially tell the Druse that they will never be anything but second-class citizens, that their decades of loyalty to the state are worth nothing. And that’s not only a moral atrocity, it’s a massive strategic error.
Non-Jews constitute 25 percent of Israel’s population, so it is strategically vital for Israel that they be loyal citizens rather than an irreconcilable fifth column. And the Druse, precisely because of their decades-long loyalty, are seen by other minorities as the test case for whether such loyalty pays. As Tarif put it in a media interview in 2004, “Even the Arabs are constantly saying, ‘the Druse give everything, yet Druse villages are in even worse shape than Arab villages.’”
This doesn’t mean Israel should invade Syria for the Druse’s sake. But the Druse aren’t asking for that. All they have asked is that Israel provide their Syrian kinsmen with the weaponry needed to defend themselves. And that’s well within Israel’s power.
In contrast, Israel’s proposed alternatives are fatuous: According to Haaretz, it asked America to arm the Syrian Druse and hopes Jordan will do so as well.
But years of US promises to aid moderate Sunnis in Syria have produced only paltry amounts of weaponry, and even its aerial campaign against Islamic State has been half-hearted. Washington basically wants nothing to do with the Syrian quagmire, and it is unlikely to ditch this aversion for the sake of the Druse. As for Jordan, it is so averse to intervening in Syria that it initially refused to help even its fellow Sunnis, thereby infuriating its main financial patron, Saudi Arabia. Thus it’s hard to imagine it intervening now on behalf of the Druse, who have hitherto been allied with the Sunni rebels’ nemesis, Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Nor are any of the reasons advanced for not arming the Druse convincing. First, the fear that this would provoke extremist groups like Nusra or Islamic State to attack Israel is overblown. All these groups are ideologically committed to Israel’s destruction; they haven’t attacked Israel so far only because they’re too busy fighting on other fronts to want to tangle with Israel as well. And that would remain true even if Israel armed the Druse.
Second, Israel wouldn’t be tilting the Syrian balance of power in Assad’s favor, because the regime has essentially abandoned the Druse to focus on protecting its coastal heartland. Thus despite their former alliance with Assad, the Druse are now unlikely to use their weapons for anything beyond protecting their own villages, leaving Sunni rebels free to pursue their war against Assad as long as they leave Druse areas alone.
Finally, it’s highly unlikely that Syrian Druse would turn any weapons we gave them against us. With a few rare exceptions, Druse in Syria and Lebanon haven’t engaged in anti-Israel attacks the way both Sunnis and Shi’ites have; they allied with Assad and Hezbollah only because they considered the Shi’ite alliance a lesser evil than radical Sunnis.
It is possible that action is unwarranted because the danger to Syrian Druse is being exaggerated. On Saturday, Nusra said its members had violated orders by killing 20 Druse last week and would be punished accordingly; that may indicate that it doesn’t want conflict with the Druse right now.
But if the danger proves real, then Israel must help. To do otherwise would be to betray the trust of Israeli Druse, who have been loyal citizens for 67 years and never before asked anything in return. And that would be both a moral and a strategic catastrophe.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on June 17, 2015
This must have been a trying week for all the people who wrongly believe that Israel’s prime minister is an unabashed anti-Arab racist: Over the past few days, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has unveiled not one, but two major initiatives to benefit Israeli Arabs – initiatives that even the far-left Haaretz, which loathes him, deemed “praiseworthy” and even “revolutionary.”
Here’s how Haaretz’s report on the first initiative opens: “For the first time ever, an Israeli government team has documented the extent of the land and housing shortage in Israel’s Arab communities and proposed recommendations for ending it.”
Though the housing shortage has been one of the Arab community’s biggest gripes for decades, no other prime minister in Israel’s 67 years of existence has done much about it. But Netanyahu’s last government not only advanced the establishment of the first new Arab city in Israel’s history, it also created an interministerial task force to draft more comprehensive recommendations, which were presented to his current government this week.
Moreover, as Haaretz noted in a subsequent analysis, these recommendations are nothing less than “a revolution.” Inter alia, after decades in which the borders of Arab towns remained unchanged despite a sevenfold increase in population, the new proposal finally recommends expanding these borders to provide Arab communities with more land for residential construction.
The second initiative deals with education. Here, too, the previous Netanyahu government took significant steps, adopting a five-year plan to boost funding for Arab schools by a billion shekels (about $260 million). But many pundits predicted it would be scrapped by the new education minister, Naftali Bennett of the rightist Jewish Home party.
Instead, Bennett not only announced its continuation this week, but added an important new element. All preschools – Jewish and Arab – will henceforth be entitled to a second aide, rather than having only one teacher and one aide for classes of up to 35 children. But in well-off communities, the government will underwrite only 50% of the cost while, in poor communities, it will cover 90%. As a Haaretz analysis noted, most of the poorest communities are Arab, so this decision will give a huge boost to early-childhood education in Arab towns. That prompted the paper, which loathes Bennett as well, to headline its analysis, “Naftali Bennett: Unlikely champion of Arab education.”
These initiatives shouldn’t actually surprise anybody. While the far-right fringes may enjoy making Arabs miserable, mainstream conservative politicians, like Netanyahu and Bennett, are generally far more interested in ensuring that 20 percent of the country’s population will be productive, self-supporting citizens rather than wards of the welfare system. And that means ensuring they have access to such basics as quality education, jobs, and housing, which is why Netanyahu’s previous governments also invested heavily in Arab integration in other ways.
Yet there’s another reason why Netanyahu’s allegedly “hardline” governments are precisely the ones taking revolutionary steps to increase Arab integration: Politicians who remain under the delusion that Israeli-Palestinian peace is imminently achievable tend to view all other issues as lower priority, on the theory that once peace is achieved, many of those other issues will largely solve themselves. First, they expect peace to produce huge financial dividends, giving Israel much more money to throw at all its other problems. Second, they expect Arab-Jewish tensions within Israel to largely dissipate since they consider the lack of Palestinian statehood to be Israeli Arabs’ main grievance.
Even assuming both propositions were true (which I don’t), they’re obviously irrelevant if peace isn’t imminently achievable. Thus a government that doesn’t believe peace is around the corner can’t afford to postpone addressing the country’s other pressing problems; it needs to do the best it can with the resources it has right now. With regard to Israeli Arabs, that means trying to address their real educational, employment and housing needs even while recognizing that tensions over the Palestinian conflict will persist – especially since repeated polls have shown that not only do Israeli Arabs actually consider these bread-and-butter issues their top priority, but that addressing them does boost their identification with the state. One survey last May, for instance, found that 65% of Israeli Arabs now declare themselves proud to be Israeli; another this February found that 55% identify with the Israeli flag.
But why let the facts disturb a longstanding liberal dogma? After all, we all know “right-wing” governments can’t possibly be good for Israeli Arabs – even when they’re taking unprecedented steps to rectify discrimination against them.
Originally published in Commentary on June 12, 2015
The prime minister’s Election Day faux pas has been deliberately misconstrued by omitting its second half
Two months later, that Election Day warning refuses to go away. Just last week, US President Barack Obama condemned it yet again; even actress Natalie Portman has joined the party. Yet Benjamin Netanyahu’s infamous remark has been widely and deliberately misconstrued by the simple expedient of omitting its second half.
Granted, the first half – “Arab voters are coming to the polls in droves” – was indefensible. Especially now, when Israeli Arabs are more interested in integrating than ever before, politicians should be encouraging this trend, not alienating them by painting them as enemies. But politicians nearing the end of an exhausting campaign often slip up and say stupid things they don’t really mean. Netanyahu retracted this part of the statement immediately. And in practice, his last two governments have invested heavily in Arab integration.
In contrast, he never retracted the statement’s second half; instead, he doubled down on it. Because that part wasn’t a slip of the tongue, but something he really meant – and which resonated deeply with his voters.
So what did he actually say? Here’s the initial statement: “Arab voters are coming to the polls in droves. Left-wing NGOs are bringing them in buses.”
And here’s his subsequent clarification: “There’s nothing illegitimate about citizens voting, Jewish or Arab, as they see fit. What’s not legitimate is the funding, the fact that money comes from abroad from NGOs and foreign governments, brings them en masse to the polls in an organized fashion, in favor of the left, gives undue power to the extremist Joint Arab List, and weakens the rightist bloc such that we’ll be unable to form a government.”
In other words, he was concerned about bolstering JAL, and legitimately so: Many of its MKs are indeed extremist (think Hanin Zoabi). But primarily, he was outraged that foreign governments and NGOs, via the Israeli NGOs they fund, were blatantly trying to influence the outcome of Israel’s election. And his voters shared that outrage, for three reasons.
First, it’s an affront to any citizen of a democracy to have foreigners trying to sway his country’s election, because it eviscerates democracy’s most fundamental right: the right to choose the government that rules you, rather than having it imposed from outside. Nor is this sentiment unique to Netanyahu voters: Israeli Druse were similarly outraged when Lebanese Druse leader Walid Jumblatt urged them to vote for JAL. The community’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Moafaq Tarif, demanded that Jumblatt “respect the right of Druse in Israel to vote as they please,” because they’re “an inseparable part of Israeli society” who “enjoy freedom of expression and freedom to do as they please.” Similar comments came from Druse supporters of both Labor and Likud.
But this sentiment resonates doubly with Netanyahu’s base, because it contravenes not only basic democratic rights, but also Israel’s raison d’etre. The Jewish state was created precisely so that Jews could finally control their own fate instead of having it controlled by others.
Second, foreign intervention stirs age-old Jewish fears, because the non-Jewish world’s track record on protecting Jews is lousy: See the Holocaust, Inquisition, Crusades, pogroms and expulsions from country after country. Even many Jewish holidays commemorate failed attempts to annihilate the Jews (including Passover, Hanukkah and Purim).
Consequently, this fear is ingrained in the psyches of all but the most secular Jews, and certainly in Netanyahu’s voters, who tend to be more traditional. So when he talked about “money from abroad” and “foreign governments,” his voters instinctively heard this as “people who don’t have our best interests at heart.”
Third and most important, however, was the track record of these foreign-funded NGOs themselves. Many Israelis would instinctively oppose anything these NGOs support, because they demonstrably don’t have Israel’s best interests at heart.
Take, for instance, B’Tselem, the Israeli NGO most frequently cited by the infamous Goldstone Report on the 2009 Gaza war. The Goldstone Commission was unabashedly created to be a lynch mob. First, it was set up by the viciously anti-Israel UN Human Rights Council, whose only country-specific permanent agenda item is condemning Israel. The HRC has condemned Israel 61 times since being established in 2006, compared to five for Iran, one each for ISIS and Boko Haram, and zero for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Hamas. Second, the commission’s explicit mandate was to investigate Israel alone, not Hamas. Finally, the very resolution that established the commission had already declared Israel guilty of war crimes, including deliberately targeting civilians. The commission’s job was merely to provide “evidence” for that predetermined conclusion, and it duly produced a report so biased that its own lead author later repudiated it.
Thus no NGO with Israel’s best interests at heart should have cooperated with Goldstone. But B’Tselem didn’t just cooperate; it eagerly plied the commission with anti-Israel libels liked inflated civilian casualty figures (compare its figures to this). Indeed, as B’Tselem unblushingly admitted in January, whenever it’s uncertain whether casualties were civilian or combatant, it labels them civilian – then accuses Israel of excessive civilian casualties.
Or take Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. Its stated goals include eliminating Israel’s Jewish majority by relocating millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees to it. That’s an explicit provision of Adalah’s proposed “Democratic Constitution,” which even terms this a necessary condition for an “equal and democratic” society. In other words, Adalah deems Israel an undemocratic, apartheid state unless it agrees to voluntarily self-destruct.
Nor are B’Tselem and Adalah unique; they are merely two of dozens of similar organizations – all virulently anti-Israel, and all funded mainly by foreign governments, either directly or via foreign NGOs. As NGO Monitor reported in 2011, European governments spend more money “promoting civil society” in the Mideast’s only democracy than they do in all other Middle Eastern countries combined – $75 million to $100 million a year.
This is what truly concerns Netanyahu’s base. It’s why his last two coalitions tried to pass legislation limiting foreign funding for NGOs, and why his current coalition is expected to try again. And all the talk about Netanyahu’s “racism” has merely served as a smokescreen to obscure this very real problem.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on May 28, 2015
After religious Zionists handed him victory, he spat in their faces – proving they really do need a party of their own
I’m not a big fan of small, sectoral parties and their extortionate demands. So despite being one of Bayit Yehudi’s natural constituents, a religious Zionist settler, I never considered voting for that party rather than Likud. Nevertheless, I cheered when Bayit Yehudi chairman Naftali Bennett put the thumbscrews on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last Tuesday – which is another way of saying that not only has Netanyahu squandered a golden opportunity to advance the cause of “big-tent” parties, he has actually set the cause back by years.
To understand why, start by comparing the election results to pre-election polls. For all the flak pollsters took afterward, their predictions were actually accurate to within a single seat for all but two parties: Netanyahu’s Likud and Bayit Yehudi. The former won 30 seats, seven more than even the best polls predicted. The latter won eight seats, roughly four less than pollsters predicted. In other words, about four seats worth of religious Zionist voters migrated from Bayit Yehudi to Likud on Election Day, thereby contributing significantly to Likud’s decisive margin over Zionist Union and its consequent appointment to form the next government.
This last-minute shift happened for two reasons. The first was a sense of national responsibility: Netanyahu spent the entire Election Day warning that if Likud didn’t outpoll Zionist Union by a significant margin, the left would form the next government, and many religious Zionists were convinced. So they decided to “sacrifice” their narrow communal interests in favor of what they saw as the greater good: preventing a left-wing government.
But the second reason is that they didn’t actually think they would be making such a big sacrifice. After all, Netanyahu had promised repeatedly before the election that Bayit Yehudi, Likud’s natural ally, would be his senior partner if he formed the next government. Moreover, Likud itself has many religious Zionist members and voters, as well as several religious Zionist MKs. So even if Bayit Yehudi shrank significantly, the last-minute floaters thought, Likud could still be trusted to look out for religious Zionist concerns.
And then the coalition talks began, and they discovered just how wrong they were.
It wasn’t just Netanyahu’s blatant personal contempt for Bennett, whom he loathes. It wasn’t just his ostentatious, weeks-long refusal to conduct serious talks with Bayit Yehudi, even as he lavished attention on other, smaller parties. It wasn’t even just the fact that “Likud sources” spent those weeks telling the media that Netanyahu’s preferred coalition would consist of Zionist Union, Kulanu and the Haredim, excluding Bayit Yehudi entirely. It was the fact that on issue after issue of importance to religious Zionists, Netanyahu didn’t merely capitulate to other parties; he capitulated without even putting up a fight, and without even giving religious Zionist concerns a hearing.
Thus, for instance, he gave Shas full control of the Religious Services Ministry and the rabbinical courts, refusing even to entertain Bennett’s proposal for some kind of power-sharing arrangement between Shas and Bayit Yehudi. He promised the Haredim to repeal a reform of the marriage registration process that not only made it easier for all Israelis to register their marriages, but had been prompted in part by the Haredi-dominated rabbinate’s effort to shut religious Zionist rabbis out of the marriage business. He backtracked on support for Bayit Yehudi’s flagship legislative initiatives, from judicial reform to a Basic Law declaring Israel the Jewish nation-state, because Kulanu objected. And on, and on, and on.
Until by last Tuesday, Bennett finally had enough, and issued an ultimatum: Either give us the Justice Ministry, or we’re keeping our eight seats out of the coalition, leaving you without the 61 needed for a government. And having no choice, Netanyahu capitulated.
But even then, he couldn’t stop flaunting his ingratitude toward the religious Zionists who returned him to power: Those same “Likud sources” promptly told the media that Netanyahu’s top goal now is to add Zionist Union to the government, after which his first move will be to kick Bayit Yehudi out.
The lesson for religious Zionists is clear: Bayit Yehudi was right all along when it insisted that voting Likud wouldn’t protect the community’s interests; only a strong religious Zionist party could do that – at least as long as Netanyahu heads Likud. As a result, not only will most of those last-minute floaters probably return to Bayit Yehudi next election, but other religious Zionists who have long been Likud supporters may well do the same.
Yet had Netanyahu made a reasonable attempt from the start to accommodate religious Zionist concerns, the outcome might have very different: Not only might many of those last-minute floaters have been happy that they voted Likud and seriously considered sticking with the party next time around, but other Bayit Yehudi voters might have entertained the idea of doing the same.
I’m a firm believer in big-tent parties. I’ve long thought there was no justification for the existence of a separate religious Zionist party, since religious Zionist concerns don’t actually differ greatly from those of mainstream Likud voters. Most of the latter are traditionalists who, like religious Zionists, oppose a strict separation of religion and state, but also don’t want a Haredi-controlled rabbinate that insists on applying the most stringent possible interpretations of Jewish law.
Thus I’ve always thought that someday, Bayit Yehudi should simply merge with Likud, creating a solid center-right bloc with enough clout not only to win elections, but to actually govern afterward. As a step in that direction, I’ve even tried to persuade religious Zionist friends to vote Likud rather than Bayit Yehudi.
But it’s pretty hard to make that argument now. Religious Zionist voters aren’t going to forget how Netanyahu spat in their faces after they handed him victory on a silver platter; he’s made the case for Bayit Yehudi’s existence better than Bennett ever could.
Netanyahu probably won’t go unpunished; next time he begs religious Zionist voters to save him from electoral defeat, he’s liable to come home empty-handed. But that’s cold comfort for the huge and completely unnecessary blow he has dealt the cause of big-tent parties.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on May 12, 2015
That’s the message from JAL’s decision to skip an Arab League meeting. And it’s good news for Israel
One of the more encouraging developments of the past few years has been the growing integration of Israel’s Arab citizens. The process has been halting, with frequent reversals and setbacks. Yet further proof that the overall trend remains positive arrived just in time for Independence Day last week: In an unprecedented move, the Joint Arab List declined an invitation from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to address the Arab League, due to pressure from the party’s own constituents.
In the past, Arab MKs have generally seized any opportunity to travel abroad and denounce Israel, even to countries with which Israel is formally at war, like Syria and Lebanon. And several JAL members were in favor of accepting the latest invitation as well. But they ultimately decided against it, Haaretz reported last Monday, because “party members were concerned that attending a meeting with the Arab League would draw criticism from their constituents for focusing on foreign affairs rather than urgent domestic issues.”
As I’ve noted before, polls have shown for years that Israeli Arabs would like their MKs to focus on domestic problems like unemployment and crime rather than the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But until now, Arab MKs have blithely ignored their constituents’ preference, preferring to devote most of their time to condemning Israel’s handling of the conflict. Now, however, the pressure from their constituents has evidently become so strong that they feel they can no longer afford to ignore it. And that’s good news for Israel, for two reasons.
First, in contrast to the Palestinian conflict, bread-and-butter issues are ones on which Israel can and should provide reasonable answers to Israeli Arab demands. Israel can’t withdraw from the West Bank and allow it to become a rocket-launching pad like Gaza, nor can it refuse to fight back when Palestinians attack it, even if war inevitably entails Palestinian civilian casualties. But it can approve master plans for Arab towns so that new housing can be legally built, set up industrial parks to provide employment opportunities in Arab communities, crack down on the rampant illegal weapons that contribute to high crime rates in these communities, and so forth. Indeed, all recent governments have invested heavily in trying to improve Arab educational and employment opportunities, and these efforts have already produced significant gains.
Clearly, much more remains to be done. But because these are issues on which the government can actually make progress toward satisfying its Arab citizens’ demands, they are issues that have the potential to draw Jews and Arabs together rather than driving them apart, as the Palestinian conflict does. Consequently, the more the Israeli Arab community focuses on these issues rather than the conflict, the more the integrationist trend will be strengthened, as long as the government also does its part.
Second, one of the greatest sources of Jewish antagonism toward Israeli Arabs has been the behavior of the Arab MKs. Since most Israeli Jews have little contact with Arabs, their views of the Arab community are naturally shaped by the statements and actions of community leaders, as reported in the media. And for years, Arab MKs have won media attention primarily for their vocal abuse of the country in whose parliament they serve. Arab MKs routinely accuse Israel of murder, genocide, apartheid and every other conceivable crime, while refusing to denounce anti-Israel violence and sometimes even openly praising it.
Since these same MKs are elected by their constituents year after year, many Israeli Jews have naturally concluded that such statements faithfully represent their constituents’ views. Hence if Arab MKs now feel constrained by their voters to focus more on actually improving Israeli Arab lives and less on attacking Israel from every possible platform, that will reduce a major source of Jewish-Arab friction. Most Jews would find it much easier to view Arabs as loyal citizens if their elected representatives weren’t loudly siding with Israel’s enemies at every opportunity.
In this regard, a second element of JAL’s decision to skip the Arab League meeting is also noteworthy. Though the Arab League is headquartered in Egypt, a proposal had been made to hold the meeting this time in Qatar. But even before it decided to skip the event altogether, JAL announced that it would come only if the meeting were held in Cairo rather than Doha, because, as one MK told Haaretz, “Qatar is perceived as a divisive element over which there is no consensus among the Arab Israeli public.” Given that Qatar is currently Hamas’s main financial backer while Egypt is currently Israel’s closest ally in the effort to contain Hamas, JAL’s concern that going to Doha rather than Cairo would upset its constituents is clearly encouraging news.
Granted, Qatar’s controversial status among Israeli Arabs stems more from its involvement in Syria’s civil war than its backing for Hamas: Israeli Arabs are divided between supporters of the Assad regime and supporters of the rebels, and the former obviously have no love for Qatar, which finances the most extremist rebel groups. But the fact that many Israeli Arabs now see Israel’s enemy as their own enemy, even if for their own reasons, and now view the financing of extremists as a pernicious habit rather than an admirable one, clearly enhances the prospects for their integration. The fact that Israeli Jews will be spared the sight of Arab MKs fawning on Qatar’s terror-financing leaders – a scene that has occurred far too many times in the past – is also a bonus for coexistence.
At this year’s official Independence Day ceremony, one of the 12 torch lighters was Lucy Aharish, the first Muslim Arab news presenter on Hebrew-language television. She spoke mostly in Hebrew, but switched to Arabic toward the end to declare, “This is our country – we have no other.”
Judging by the pressure JAL MKs are feeling from their constituents, it seems many Israeli Arabs agree – and would rather their representatives work to make that one country a better place to live than spend their time and energy denouncing it overseas. And this, surely, is one of the best Independence Day gifts Israel could hope to receive.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on April 28, 2015
Nowadays, it’s become virtually accepted wisdom that Israel is becoming increasingly right-wing, and that this shift constitutes a major obstacle to peace. No less a figure than Bill Clinton made this claim at a Clinton Global Initiative conference in 2010. A 2011 study by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies similarly declared, “Today Israel’s Jewish population is more nationalistic, religiously conservative, and hawkish on foreign policy and security affairs than that of even a generation ago, and it would be unrecognizable to Israel’s founders.” A popular corollary of this thesis is that Israel, as it moves rightward, is becoming less democratic, less respectful of civil rights, and less tolerant of minorities.
Both halves of this thesis are wrong. In fact, Israeli politics have shifted sharply to the left; ideas once confined to the far-left fringe are now mainstream. And civil rights, democracy, and treatment of minorities have all been improving.
Twenty-one years ago, no one outside the far-left in Israel supported negotiating with the Palestine Liberation Organization or creating a Palestinian state. The mainstream left, represented by the Labor Party, certainly didn’t; when then–party leader Yitzhak Rabin was elected prime minister in 1992, he campaigned explicitly on promises of no negotiations with the PLO and no Palestinian state. And had he not done so, he wouldn’t have stood a chance of being elected. When Rabin violated that pledge by signing the Oslo Accord with the PLO in 1993, the move was hugely controversial, splitting Israel down the middle.
Since then, Israel has experienced 20 years of failed negotiations, in which Palestinians rejected repeated offers of statehood without even making a counteroffer. It’s experienced a terrorist war, the second intifada, which produced more Israeli casualties in four years than all the terrorism of the previous 53 years combined. It’s evacuated every inch of Gaza and gotten some 15,000 rockets in return. It wouldn’t be surprising if Israeli support for Palestinian statehood had declined. Instead, it’s increased. For years now, polls have consistently shown about 60 to 65 percent of Israelis supporting a Palestinian state.
Even Israel’s main center-right party, Likud, now publicly backs Palestinian statehood. Likud chairman and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced this about-face in a 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University and has repeated it many times since. This would be noteworthy even if Netanyahu didn’t really mean it. For the fact of the matter is that the leader of Israel’s center right publicly declared support for Palestinian statehood, and far from being ousted by an indignant center-right public, he has been twice reelected by his own party.
In moments of honesty, even leftists acknowledge the significance of this development. As Geneva Initiative director Gadi Baltiansky, whose organization has been promoting a draft two-state agreement since 2003, said in September: “It’s true that the public wants a right-wing leader to implement the left’s policies, but it’s also true that the ideological map has moved left. ‘Two states for two peoples’ was once the motto of the extremist Hadash [Party]. Labor never called for it. Now it’s been uttered by the leader of Likud, even if he doesn’t do anything to bring it about.”
All the prime ministers who followed Rabin actually moved far to the left of the vision he outlined in his final Knesset address in October 1995. For instance, Rabin envisioned Israel living alongside a “Palestinian entity….which is less than a state,” and in fact, neither of the two agreements he signed with the PLO mentions a Palestinian state. Yet today, even Netanyahu openly advocates such a state.
Rabin also declared that Israel’s final borders “will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six-Day War” of 1967, specifying in particular that Israel’s “security border…will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.” But according to both the New Republic and the left-wing Israeli daily Haaretz, even Netanyahu agreed last year to negotiate on the basis of the 1967 lines. And in 2008, his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, explicitly offered the Palestinians the equivalent of the 1967 lines (with minor territorial swaps), including the Jordan Valley.
Rabin envisioned a “united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev, as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty.” Since Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev are major West Bank settlements located respectively east and north of Jerusalem, this would mean a Jerusalem vastly larger than Israel’s current capital. Yet since then, two Israeli premiers—Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak—have offered the Palestinians most of East Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount.
Rabin vowed to retain the Gush Katif settlement bloc in Gaza, but since then, Israel has withdrawn from every inch of Gaza. Rabin also pledged “not to uproot a single settlement in the framework of the interim agreement, and not to hinder building for natural growth.” Since then, Israel has uprooted 25 settlements without a final-status agreement (21 in Gaza and four in the West Bank). And in 2009, the “hardline” Netanyahu instituted Israel’s first-ever moratorium on settlement construction, a 10-month freeze that then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton correctly termed “unprecedented.”
In short, not only has public opinion shifted to the left, but so have government policies, on both interim and final-status issues.
If so, why do many people nevertheless think that Israel has moved to the right? Presumably due to one seemingly anomalous fact: a change in how Israelis identify themselves. According to the Peace Index, a regular poll begun in 1994, only 12 percent of Israeli Jews self-identified as being on the left this past August, while 62 percent self-identified as being on the right—a dramatic change from the roughly even split of 20 years ago. This change was reflected in the last two Knesset elections, which gave a majority of seats to parties that self-identify as rightist or religious.
But this is misleading; because of the leftward shift of the past 20 years, the term “right” no longer means what it used to. Once, the right opposed any territorial concessions. Today, the right’s acknowledged leader, Netanyahu, publicly supports a Palestinian state. Many Israelis, therefore, now see no contradiction between supporting a two-state solution and self-identifying as “right” or voting for a self-identified center-right party such as Likud.
There is, moreover, one issue on which Israelis really have moved rightward: Due to the combination of two decades’ worth of failed negotiations, the massive upsurge in terror that followed the Oslo Accords, and the almost daily rocket barrages that followed the 2005 pullout from Gaza, polls have shown for years now that despite continuing to support a two-state
solution, about 70 percent of Israelis no longer believe it’s achievable anytime soon. And this has two important ramifications.
One is that since they no longer consider peace imminently achievable, Israelis are voting more than ever before on domestic issues. For instance, polls found that in 2013, roughly half the people who voted for Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home—the only Knesset faction that explicitly opposes a two-state solution—were actually two-state supporters. So why would they vote Jewish Home? Because the party campaigned almost entirely on economic issues, emphasizing Bennett’s record as a successful high-tech entrepreneur. And that attracted many Israelis who feel that if peace isn’t achievable, they’d at least like the government to lower the cost of living.
Even more important, however, is the fact that self-identified leftists—in the Knesset, the media, academia, and nongovernmental organizations—still insist that peace really could be achieved tomorrow if Israel wanted it. The fact that governments who put “peace” at the center of their policy goals have been elected twice over the past 15 years, most recently in 2006, and proved no more successful at peacemaking than their center-right rivals doesn’t faze them, nor does the dramatic increase in terror from every territorial withdrawal of the past two decades.
And so to many Israelis, the left increasingly looks delusional, because it’s propounding a conclusion that, in their view, contradicts the accumulated experience of the past 20 years. And since most people don’t want to identify themselves as delusional, Israelis are increasingly saying they’re on the right. This, coupled with their desire not to repeat the disastrous territorial pullouts of the past two decades, has also led many to shun parties that explicitly place themselves on the left.
But that doesn’t change the fact that Israelis still overwhelmingly support a two-state solution. Today’s “right-wing” Israel is a country where the majority hold political positions found only among Hadash, the Arab–Jewish Communist party, two decades ago.
The second half of the equation—that Israel is becoming more and more undemocratic and dismissive of human rights—is no less false. But before examining some of the ways in which democracy and human rights have expanded in recent years, it’s important to understand four reasons this canard has become so pervasive.
First, both sides in Israel’s political debate have a bad habit of trying to paint any idea they oppose as fundamentally illegitimate. When rightists dislike an idea, for instance, they call it “anti-Jewish” or “anti-Zionist.” When leftists dislike an idea, they call it “anti-democratic” or “anti–human rights.” But that doesn’t mean it actually is.
Take, for instance, several bills in recent years aimed at giving the public’s elected representatives control over Supreme Court appointments, which leftists have consistently slammed as “anti-democratic.” Former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, for example, declared that this would “set Israeli democracy back several years” and even “turn Israel into a Third World country.” Yet in almost every other democracy worldwide, Supreme Court appointments are controlled by the executive and/or legislative branches. Only in Israel are justices instead chosen primarily by unelected legal officials. (Israel’s nine-member Judicial Appointments Committee include three sitting justices chosen by the Supreme Court itself and two lawyers chosen by the Bar Association.) And to claim that appointing justices the same way as all other democracies do would somehow be “anti-democratic” is absurd.
Or consider the firestorm that erupted when the Ministry of Education decided in 2011 that Jewish kindergartens should open the week by singing the national anthem, “Hatikva.” (Arab kindergartens were exempted lest they find this offensive.) A University of Haifa professor declared that members of the ruling Likud party were competing “to see who can push us faster into the arms of fascism.” An Arab nongovernmental organization called the new rule “part of a growing trend of inculcating nationalistic and militaristic values.” A lecturer at a leading teacher’s college termed the directive “reminiscent of education in a totalitarian society.” Yet the decision was essentially no different than America’s practice of having public-school students open the day by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. So here, too, Israeli leftists were absurdly claiming that a practice normal in other democracies was somehow anti-democratic.
Perhaps the epitome of hypocrisy occurred over several recent bills to declare Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people. The outcry was led by former Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who described her opponents as “dangerous, extremist parties that must be prevented from taking over and destroying the country.” Yet the most “extreme” version of the bill was a word-for-word copy of one that had been submitted by her own party, with her backing, in the previous Knesset. It morphed from being perfectly kosher to being “anti-democratic” solely because the sponsor was now a “right-wing” Knesset member.
A second reason for the canard relates to the nature of democracy itself: Anyone with an idea, however stupid or evil, is free to tout it and even try to enact it, and some of those people even get elected to public office. In any democracy, objectionable proposals periodically arise, and Israel is hardly unique in that regard: Consider last year’s proposal by the mayor of Borgaro, Italy, to run separate bus lines for gypsies and other town residents. What distinguishes a properly functioning democracy is the existence of self-correcting mechanisms that keep such ideas from being implemented.
So when private members’ bills seeking to deprive political nongovernmental organizations of foreign funding were submitted a few years ago, Israel’s own self-correcting democratic mechanisms solved the problem: Newspapers, civil-society groups, and other Knesset members vociferously objected, and the bills were iced. The same happened when it emerged, a few years ago, that certain bus lines serving ultra-Orthodox communities were making women sit at the back of the bus. Israel’s own democratic mechanisms—including media coverage, cabinet and Knesset discussions, and petitions to the High Court of Justice—soon got the practice stopped.
The problem is that such issues generally get massive media play when they first arise, and then very little once they are resolved. Anyone who follows the media inevitably hears about many objectionable initiatives that, precisely because Israel is a functioning democracy, never come to pass.
A third crucial factor is that news from Israel is invariably reported devoid of comparative context. Take, for instance, the wave of vandalistic attacks on mosques in recent years that is frequently cited as proof of Israeli “racism.” Such attacks are clearly abhorrent. But they are actually far less common in Israel than in many other Western democracies. During Israel’s worst years for such attacks, 2009–2014, Wikipedia lists a grand total of 24. By comparison, after a Muslim extremist assassinated filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in Holland, researcher Ineke van der Valk counted 117 “incidents” at Dutch mosques in 2005–2010, including graffiti attacks, vandalism, arson, and more. So Holland, whose population is twice that of Israel, had almost five times as many mosque attacks over a comparable time period, despite having suffered far fewer casualties due to Islamic extremism. In short, data that make Israel look racist when shorn of comparative context actually show it to be more tolerant and less violent than the Netherlands, generally considered a paragon of tolerance.
Another factoid cited to demonstrate a worsening problem in Israel’s treatment of non-Jews is the country’s infant-mortality rate. In 2011, it was 2.6 per 1,000 for Jews and 6.8 for Muslims, a gap of 4.2 births per 1,000. In isolation, that may sound like proof of shocking discrimination. Yet in Britain that same year, the majority-minority gap was significantly larger, at 4.8 births per 1,000 (3.7 for whites and 8.5 for those of Pakistani origin). And in neither country is the gap due solely, or even primarily, to discrimination. For instance, consanguineous marriages, which produce more fatal birth defects, are more common among Muslims than non-Muslims; additionally, infant mortality rates are higher among teenage mothers, and teenage mothers are more common in the Muslim community.
And that is the final factor behind the anti-Israel canard: As with infant mortality, differential outcomes don’t automatically indicate discrimination. They often stem at least partly from cultural differences. For instance, a study by Israeli–Arab researcher Dr. Rafik Haj found that Israeli–Arab towns have less money to spend on services than do equivalent Jewish towns in part because they collect taxes from only 27 percent of residents, while Jewish towns at the same socioeconomic level collect taxes from 63 percent of residents.
Similarly, the fact that no Arab party has ever served in a governing coalition doesn’t mean that Arabs per se are “excluded” from government; indeed, there have been several Arab ministers and deputy ministers from non-Arab parties. What excludes the Arab parties is their political positions, such as their consistent opposition to any and all counterterrorism operations. Since all non-Arab parties view counterterrorism as a core government responsibility, this essentially precludes their sitting in a coalition together.
In short, when evaluating news from Israel that sounds racist, anti-democratic, or discriminatory, four tests should always be applied: Is the “objectionable” proposal actually standard democratic practice? Have Israel’s own democratic mechanisms solved the problem? How does Israel compare with other Western countries on this issue? And to what degree is the problem due to factors that have nothing to do with discrimination?
But since no country in the world has yet figured out how to eradicate racism, discrimination, or gaps between population groups, there’s one final question that must also be asked: Are things getting better or worse? In Israel, the answer is that they’re getting better.
To appreciate the magnitude of the progress in Israel, one must understand that the pre-1967 “golden age” for which liberal Jews often seem so nostalgic was actually far from golden for many people. Anyone who belonged to the wrong political party (Menachem Begin’s Herut rather than the ruling Mapai) was systematically excluded not only from government, but also from the workplace: Much of the economy back then was state-owned, and state-owned companies wouldn’t hire anyone who couldn’t prove membership in the Histadrut, the labor union affiliated with Mapai. Jews of Middle Eastern origin, known in Israel as Mizrahim, were systematically excluded from the higher ranks of government, academia, state-owned companies, and any other institution affiliated with the state, all of which were dominated by Ashkenazi Jews. And Israeli Arabs weren’t just excluded; they were under military government until 1966. In short, the good old Israel may have been wonderful for the leftist, Ashkenazi founding elite, but it systematically discriminated against everyone else.
All that has since begun to change, especially over the past two decades. A study conducted by Momi Dahan in 2013 found that while the anti-Mizrahi discrimination of those early decades hasn’t been eliminated, the gaps have narrowed significantly. In 2011, the average Mizrahi household still earned 27 percent less than the average Ashkenazi one—but that’s down from 40 percent in 1995, a relatively steep decline in just 16 years. And among the economy’s top 10 percent, Mizrahim are now represented proportionally to their share of the total population.
Similarly, Dahan found, the percentage of Mizrahi 20- to 29-year-olds enrolled in higher education doubled between 1995–96 and 2006–07. Though it remained lower than the rate among Ashkenazim (13.7 percent compared with 20.7 percent), the gap shrank by over a third, from 11 to 7 percentage points, in those 11 years.
Mizrahim are also now routinely represented in the highest ranks of government and government institutions; they have served as senior cabinet ministers, Supreme Court justices, an IDF chief of staff, and more. In short, Israel has moved steadily from excluding half the Jewish population toward including it—a huge leap forward in terms of both democracy and human rights.
Women, too, have made notable progress. They still earn less per hour than men, but according to a 2014 study by the Knesset research center, the pay gap is identical to the European Union average. And while women remain underrepresented in many institutions, their representation has grown steadily. For instance, the Supreme Court got its first woman president only in 2006, but its second took office in January. Similarly, the IDF has opened many positions to women, including the air force and frontline combat units, and appointed its first female major general in 2011.
Women have even made significant strides in the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community. Thirty years ago, for instance, women weren’t allowed to argue cases before the Haredi-dominated rabbinical courts. Today, women lawyers routinely appear before rabbinical courts. Haredi women are increasingly working in high-tech and even starting their own companies, and their employment rate now exceeds that for Israeli women as a whole. Last June, several Haredi Knesset members openly backed a woman, Dalia Itzik, for president of Israel. This is a dramatic shift from just a few decades ago, when Haredim held that a female president would violate Jewish law.
Perhaps most noteworthy, however, has been the progress toward integrating Israeli Arabs. In terms of the letter of the law, Israel’s treatment of minorities has long compared favorably with Europe’s. To cite a few salient examples, Israel doesn’t have a law banning minarets, as Switzerland does, or a law barring civil servants from wearing headscarves, as France does; nor does it deny citizenship to Arabs just because they can’t speak the majority’s language, as Latvia does to some 300,000 ethnic Russians born and bred there. But over the past two decades, successive Israeli governments have invested heavily in trying to create de facto as well as de jure equality. And while the job is far from done, the improvement has been impressive.
For instance, in 1996, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, only 23.7 percent of Arabs obtained a high-school matriculation certificate that met university entrance requirements, compared with 42.4 percent of Jews. By 2012, the gap had shrunk by a third even though the Jewish rate rose to 51.0 percent, because the Arab rate had risen even faster, to 38.2 percent. And while the improvement has encompassed the entire Arab community, it’s been particularly steep in places where local governments have made education a priority. The Druze towns of Isfiya and Yarka, for instance, boosted their matriculation rates by about 20 percentage points just from 2012 to 2013, while the impoverished Druze town of Beit Jann now has the second highest matriculation rate in Israel. As Haaretz reported in 2013, moreover, heavy investment in the construction of Arab schools has brought average class sizes in these schools down by 28.5 students, identical to the nonreligious Jewish state schools.
In higher education, Arab progress has also been significant. In 2005, according to the statistics bureau, only 4.2 percent of all master’s degrees were awarded to Arabs. In 2013, the figure was 8.6 percent—meaning it more than doubled in just eight years. During those same eight years, the proportion of Ph.D.s awarded to Arabs rose by 40 percent, from 2.5 percent to 3.9 percent. Clearly, these figures are still too low, given that Arabs constitute 13 percent of the workforce and 20 percent of the population, but the Jewish–Arab gap is steadily narrowing. The increase in Arabs with advanced degrees will presumably narrow the income gap as well, since people with more education generally obtain better-paying jobs.
The number of Arabs working in high-tech almost sextupled from 2009 to 2014, according to a Bloomberg report in November; the boost came partly from a government program that, as Haaretz reported, subsidizes starting salaries for Arab high-tech workers by up to 40 percent. And at Israel’s premier technology university, the Technion, Arab undergraduates now constitute 21 percent of the student body—slightly higher than their share in the population—thanks to a special program to recruit them and then give them extra support to keep them from dropping out.
Arab and Jewish consumption patterns, moreover—a good indication of living standards—have converged, as the online journal Mida reported in November. Average outlays per family in urban Arab localities are lower than in wealthy Jewish cities such as Tel Aviv, but higher than in other Jewish-majority cities such as Haifa or Ashdod. And on a few issues, Arabs actually surpass the Jewish population: For instance, 93 percent of Arab households own their own home, compared with 70 percent of Jewish households.
Ron Gerlitz, co-executive director of the Jewish–Arab organization Sikkuy (the Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality), summed up the dramatic advances in integration in a Haaretz column in August 2014. “In the past,” Gerlitz wrote, “if Israeli Jews did not go to Arab communities, they never saw Arabs, except for laborers. But now, if they go to a pharmacy they are likely to be served by an Arab pharmacist…. If they go to the emergency room, they are likely to be treated by an Arab doctor….Jewish college students in Israel often have Arab lecturers. There are Arab department heads and even one Arab college president. Former President Moshe Katsav was convicted of sex crimes and sent to prison by a panel of judges headed by an Arab.”
None of this means that discrimination doesn’t still exist; it does. But significant efforts have been made, and are being made, to reduce the gaps, and these efforts are working.
Nor, contrary to the accepted wisdom, is anti-Arab prejudice on the rise, according to Professor Sammy Smooha, of Haifa University, who has been tracking anti-Arab prejudice since 2003. “The data don’t support the view that there has been an ongoing radicalization of Jewish attitudes toward Arabs,” he wrote in the
annual report he published last May. “In fact, they indicate stability in Jewish attitudes over the last decade.” Smooha noted, moreover, that this stability was maintained even though Arab attitudes toward Jews and Israel really did become more extreme between 2003 to 2012, though the trend reversed slightly in 2013. And in some respects—such as the proportion of Jews who say they would be comfortable having Arab neighbors—Jewish prejudice has declined markedly in the past decade.
If Smooha’s conclusion sounds counterintuitive, the culprit might well be social media. Vile statements abound on both Jewish and Arab social networks, and while such sentiments always have existed, they used to be kept decently private. Now they’re out in the open for everyone to see, which creates the perception that racism has become more prevalent even though the data do not support it. Clearly, there’s a danger that seeing racist ideas constantly validated on social media could harden views on both sides. But it could also have the opposite effect, by spurring greater public efforts to combat prejudice.
Smooha’s finding that Arab attitudes truly have radicalized over the past decade also merits more attention than it usually gets. It’s an unavoidable fact that Palestinians have been at war with Israel since its inception, and many Israeli Arabs—including all their elected representatives—vocally side with the Palestinians in this war. Under these circumstances, it’s fantasy to think that all prejudice can be extirpated; the Palestinian–Israeli conflict creates a real source of mutual suspicion that can’t simply be waved away.
But by comparison with other countries in similar circumstances, Israel has done remarkably well. Not only has it consistently upheld Arab political and civil rights for decades—Freedom House awards it a top-flight ranking of 1 out of 7 for political rights and 2 for civil rights—but it has also managed to steadily increase Arab opportunities and integration and make most of its Arab citizens feel that despite the problems, Israel remains a good place to live. Indeed, an Israel Democracy Institute survey conducted last May found that 65 percent of Israeli Arabs were “quite” or “very” proud to be Israeli, while 64 percent said they usually felt their “dignity as a human being is respected” in Israel. And even after the difficult events of the past summer and fall, a Statnet poll taken in November found that only 23 percent of Israeli Arabs would prefer living in a Palestinian state, while 77 percent prefer to remain Israeli.
The irony, as Gerlitz noted in his Haaretz article, is that this growing integration might actually be exacerbating Jewish–Arab friction. He blamed this on a backlash from Jewish extremists, but the truth is that increased integration among any two population groups often initially exacerbates tensions, as people who previously had little to do with each other suddenly have to learn to live and work side by side. That happens everywhere, even in countries where the situation isn’t complicated by an ongoing war in which many members of the minority vocally identify with the enemy.
The very fact that Arab integration is advancing rapidly in some ways makes the situation in Israel now particularly flammable, and it clearly isn’t helped by the fact that certain parliamentarians, both Jewish and Arab, have been doing their best to fan the flames. Nevertheless, the kind of problems that stem from growing integration are infinitely preferable to the alternative—because ultimately, they bode much better for Israel’s future.
Originally published in Commentary Magazine, March 2015 issue
A man I once admired has begun subordinating vital security interests to the needs of partisan politics
As of this writing, the election is still too close to call. But there’s a reasonable chance that our next prime minister will be Isaac Herzog. And that prospect worries me far more than I would have expected when the campaign began, because he’s a politician I had previously admired and even publicly praised, despite our serious political differences. So although I expected to disagree with his policies, I didn’t expect to be concerned about his character.
Lest there be any confusion, policy disputes are not the same as character flaws. For instance, I think unilaterally withdrawing from the West Bank would be far more dangerous than remaining there, while senior members of Herzog’s team publicly espouse the opposite view, but that’s a policy dispute: Each side genuinely believes his own position is right.
A character flaw is when a politician sacrifices something he himself considers vital to the country for personal or political benefit. And that’s precisely what Herzog did during this campaign: He publicly undermined Israel’s ability to present a united front on Iran, despite the fact that by his own admission, he has no substantive disagreements with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on this issue. Moreover, he did this even though thoughtful members of his own political camp publicly urged him not to, arguing that a united front on Iran was too important to sacrifice to partisan politics.
A brief recap of the facts: Netanyahu decided to give a highly controversial speech to Congress opposing the emerging nuclear deal between Washington and Tehran. Though many moderate leftists share Netanyahu’s concerns about the emerging deal, they thought the speech was a terrible idea. So they proposed that Herzog also publicly speak out against the deal, thereby emphasizing the unanimity of Israeli concern, while simultaneously making it clear that he doesn’t endorse Netanyahu’s tactics.
Here, for instance, is Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit: “In a place where there are no men, Herzog must be the man. He must make the appropriate, seminal speech about the Iranian nuclear threat in Jerusalem. He must call on Obama not to make an irrevocable move that will undermine world order. He must act now as a national leader and steer the international campaign against Obama and Khamenei’s disastrous deal.”
Or here is Jerusalem Post columnist Susan Hattis Rolef: “I cannot for the life of me understand why the Zionist Union in general and the Labor Party in particular has not been saying from every possible podium and on all the social media in Israel that they are in absolute agreement with Netanyahu that Iran poses a serious threat to Israel, and that the policy of the US and of Europe toward Iran, and especially on the issue of what sort of nuclear capability it should be allowed to maintain, and whether the economic sanctions on it ought to be lifted, is of great concern to Israel and liable to backfire … The speech in Congress is simply considered to be the wrong tactics.”
And then there’s Times of Israel editor-in-chief David Horovitz, who even proposed that Herzog accompany Netanyahu to Congress and give a speech of his own, thereby “underlining their common conviction that the regime in Tehran cannot be appeased and must be faced down … What better way for the US to show common cause with Israel, without taking sides in its election? And what better way to present a united front against Iran?”
But Herzog rejected all this advice. He refused to go to Washington. He refused to speak out on the Iranian issue from Jerusalem. To be fair, he did write one New York Times op-ed which, though mostly devoted to attacking Netanyahu’s speech, revealed at the tail end (if anyone read that far) that he actually agreed with all of Netanyahu’s substantive concerns. But that was overshadowed by a high-profile Washington Post interview in which he said exactly the opposite: Far from highlighting the emerging deal’s problems, he declared, “I trust Obama to get a good deal.”
In short, Herzog did everything possible to persuade Americans – and especially American Democrats, the party most attentive to his left-leaning Zionist Union – that concerns about the emerging deal weren’t a bipartisan issue in Israel, but solely the province of the right, and that Democrats should therefore dismiss everything Netanyahu said as mere partisan politics. And he thereby made it far harder to mobilize the necessary bipartisan consensus in America against a bad deal.
If Herzog did this simply because he was unwilling to publicly agree with Netanyahu on any issue during a campaign, then he was sacrificing a vital security issue – the Iranian nuclear threat – on the altar of petty politics. That would be bad enough. But his own statements give rise to a possibility that’s even more frightening: He’s simply unwilling to challenge the Obama Administration on any issue, even one of existential importance to Israel. He’s willing to “trust Obama” on this deal (Washington Post) despite warning that it’s one “we might live to regret” (New York Times).
I began this column by saying I used to admire Herzog. I admired him for a very specific reason: his four-year, almost single-handed battle to pass legislation granting citizenship and compensation to members of the South Lebanon Army who fled to Israel after it unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. Despite repeated failures, he never gave up; he kept trying until he succeeded. He invested sizable amounts of time, energy and political capital in a cause that had no real political constituency and would reap him no political rewards, simply because it was the right thing to do.
But the man I once admired just went AWOL on one of the most important issues Israel will ever face – the emerging nuclear deal with Iran. Instead, we got a petty politician who is either willing to sacrifice vital national interests for the sake of partisan politics, lacks the courage to stand up to the Obama Administration on a crucial national security issue, or perhaps both. And that doesn’t bode well for his performance in office should he become our next prime minister.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on January 16, 2015
If you believe the media, “human-rights” organizations, the Israeli left, and many American Jews, Jewish-Arab relations in Israel have never been so bad. And given the past year’s events, this conclusion certainly has legs to stand on: Jewish thugs have repeatedly beaten up Arabs and even horrifically murdered an East Jerusalem teenager; Arab residents of Jerusalem have committed several deadly terror attacks, including a horrific murder of worshippers at a synagogue; last summer’s war in Gaza sparked vicious social media outbursts in which Arabs and Jews openly called for killing members of the other group. Yet three new polls published over the last three weeks show that, like many popular narratives about Israel, this one seriously distorts the true picture.
The first poll, published last month, unsurprisingly shows that 77 percent of Israeli Jews and 68 percent of Israeli Arabs also believe last summer’s events worsened Jewish-Arab relations, and that negative stereotypes still abound. What it also shows, however, is that neither side considers this situation irreversible, and both are seriously interested in changing it.
For instance, a whopping 87 percent of Arab respondents said they still believe Jewish-Arab coexistence is possible. Even more astonishingly, the proportion of Arabs who said they identify with the Israeli flag shot up to 55 percent, from 37 percent last year, while the proportion that identifies with the Palestinian flag plunged from 34 percent to 8 percent.
Among Jews, the proportion who said they’d like to know the Arab population better shot up to 52 percent, from 38 percent last year. And this isn’t just talk: As Haaretz reported last month, both Jewish and Arab Jerusalemites are studying the other’s language in record numbers. New classes are filling “almost as fast as the courses can open”; waiting lists are long; and both sides say they could easily fill many more classes were it not for the shortage of qualified teachers.
The other two polls–conducted independently by Tel Aviv University and the Abraham Fund Initiatives, and released this week–show that Arab turnout in next week’s election is expected to hit a 16-year high. This is noteworthy, because the last time Jewish-Arab relations nosedived, following the Arab riots of October 2000, Arabs responded with a symbolic bill of divorce: boycotting the 2001 election. This time, they’re responding by turning out to vote in record numbers. As Thabet Abu Ras, co-executive director of the Abraham Fund Initiatives, told the Times of Israel, “Arabs are now taking their citizenship more seriously than any time in the past.”
Moreover, many of them now want to use this citizenship not to push a separatist Palestinian identity, but to improve Arab integration. According to the TAU poll, 44 percent of Arab respondents think their Knesset members’ top priority “should be dealing with the ailments of Arab society: unemployment, violence, women’s status, education and health.” Another 28 percent said the most important issue was “government treatment of the Arab population,” while only 19 percent prioritized the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A Haaretz poll last month similarly found that 70 percent of Israeli Arabs want their MKs to focus on their own community’s socioeconomic problems rather than the Palestinian problem.
In part, as I explained in detail in my article for COMMENTARY this month, this change in Arab attitudes stems from the fact that successive Israeli governments have invested heavily in trying to reduce anti-Arab discrimination and increase Arab integration, and though the job is far from done, the progress has been noteworthy. But another significant factor, as Abu Ras correctly noted, has been the events of the Arab Spring, which gave Israeli Arabs a new appreciation of Israeli democracy.
“Despite the discrimination that exists in Israel, which should be combated, people now tend to see the cup as half full,” he told the Times of Israel. “Arab political discourse used to emphasize the cup as half empty, but no longer.”
This clearly bodes well for Israel’s future. Yet if even Israeli Arabs now see the cup as half full rather than half empty, isn’t it time for the rest of the world to do the same?
Originally published in Commentary on March 12, 2015