Domestic Policy
That, it turns out, is exactly what the new, higher electoral threshold has done
In two weeks, Israel will conclude its first election campaign under a new law that significantly raised the electoral threshold. Previously, parties had to win 2.4 seats to enter the Knesset; now, they must win four. And judging by the polls, the result has been disastrous: Not only is the higher threshold keeping out parties we should want in, but it’s also letting in parties we should want out.
The salient example of the first problem relates to the Arab parties. A poll published in Haaretz last month found that Arab voters overwhelmingly want their MKs to focus on their own community’s socioeconomic problems rather than the Palestinian problem (70% to 30%). They also overwhelmingly want their MKs to join the government (61% to 36%), since coalition parties wield more influence than opposition parties do; this desire is so strong that almost half that 61% favor joining regardless of who becomes prime minister. Finally, since existing Arab MKs not only spend most of their time and energy supporting the Palestinians, but adamantly refuse to join any government (as MKs Masud Ganaim and Ahmed Tibi recently reaffirmed), almost half the respondents were, unsurprisingly, highly dissatisfied with their current MKs.
Israel has an obvious interest in facilitating the growth of new Arab parties that would reflect these respondents’ priorities. Arabs’ attitudes toward the state would presumably improve if their representatives could join the cabinet and produce concrete benefits for their community instead of being condemned by their own anti-Israel rhetoric to eternally shout empty slogans from the opposition benches. And Jewish attitudes toward the Arab minority would presumably improve if Arab MKs stopped attacking Israel night and day and instead started working for their constituents’ welfare.
Encouragingly, such parties even exist already, spurred by similar poll findings in 2012. In 2013, none of them got in, but this year, their prospects should have been better – not only because any new party needs time to earn name recognition and persuade people to change long-established voting habits, but also because of recent changes in Israeli Arab attitudes toward the state. After all, no new party could join the government without abandoning the existing parties’ pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel attitudes, and not long ago, that would have been an electoral nonstarter. But recent studies reveal a growing Arab identification with Israel: A survey taken in May, for instance, found that 65% of Israeli Arabs were proud to be Israeli, and another published last month found that despite the summer’s tensions, 55% of Israeli Arabs now identify with the Israeli flag, up from 37% last year.
All this should have made it easier for Arabs to support a new, domestically-oriented party. Instead, the higher the electoral threshold has made it impossible.
A low electoral threshold encourages people to risk voting for a new party, both because its chances of getting in are better and because fewer votes will be wasted if the gamble fails. But with a four-seat threshold, few voters will take the risk: The chances of getting in are too low, and the number of votes wasted by a failed bid is too high.
Moreover, the higher threshold has forced the three existing parties to unite lest they fail to enter the Knesset at all. Thus instead of a new party being just another entrant in what was already a three-way race, it would now be the sole focus of a united juggernaut’s attacks, and would be accused of destroying Arab unity to boot.
In short, by raising the electoral threshold, Israel has virtually eliminated any possibility of something it desperately needs: an Arab party that fosters integration rather than Jewish-Arab tensions.
The second problem caused by the higher threshold is exemplified by Baruch Marzel, a former Kahanist whose Otzma Yehudit party is running on a joint ticket with Eli Yishai’s Yahad. Otzma is a collection of far-right extremists that has repeatedly failed (under various names) to enter the Knesset. But this time, precisely because of the higher threshold, it looks set to succeed.
Why? Because though Yahad could easily have cleared the old threshold on its own, polls showed it missing the new, higher threshold by a few thousand votes. So to boost it over, Yishai was forced to ally with a party he previously wanted nothing to do with. True, he could have kept his hands clean at the price of his party’s defeat – but how many politicians would ever do that?
Clearly, Israel doesn’t benefit from having anti-Arab extremists like Marzel in the Knesset. In contrast, Yishai’s party actually serves two important functions. First, it has attracted Sephardi voters who aren’t ready to abandon identity politics, but would rather not support a convicted criminal like Shas leader Aryeh Deri. Polls currently show Shas losing about four seats, with many of those votes going to Yishai. And if Shas pays a real electoral price for reinstating the corrupt Deri, other parties may think twice about tolerating corruption within their own ranks.
Second, Yishai’s unabashedly rightist diplomatic stance is attracting significant support from religious Zionism’s hardal wing, which shares the haredi parties’ attitude toward religion but not their willingness to countenance territorial concessions. For years, hardalim have supported the religious Zionist Bayit Yehudi party or its predecessors, and in exchange, Bayit Yehudi largely toed the haredi line on religious issues. But if hardalim now leave in significant numbers, Bayit Yehudi might finally resume representing religious Zionism’s sorely missed traditional stance – a moderate Orthodoxy committed to finding halakhic solutions to national problems.
Thus the best outcome for Israel would be Yahad without Otzma. And under the old electoral threshold, that’s exactly what we would have gotten. Instead, by raising the threshold, we’ve virtually ensured that Otzma will get in on Yishai’s coattails.
I once opposed raising the threshold for fear of driving fringe elements out of the democratic game altogether and thereby increasing the risk of their resorting to violence. But it turns out the higher threshold has actually empowered Jewish extremists while disempowering Arab moderates – the worst of all possible outcomes. Thus the next Knesset’s first order of business must be reinstating the old, lower threshold.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on March 2, 2015
Why do people still back Netanyahu? Because in statecraft, as in medicine, the first rule is ‘do no harm’
The outcome of next month’s election is currently anyone’s guess. But if Benjamin Netanyahu ends up becoming prime minister again, it will have a lot to do with the attitude exemplified by Haaretz columnist Uri Misgav.
In an op-ed earlier this month, Misgav wrote that he could understand voting for any other party, but “I find it very difficult to explain what is going through the minds of those who are planning to vote for Likud headed by Netanyahu … Despite serious efforts, I am unable to understand them, or even to imagine their ideological and emotional world … In the name of God: Who are you, Likud voters, and why?”
A week later, another left-wing Haaretz columnist, Kobi Niv, published a blistering retort. Too many “members of the broader Ashkenazi liberal Zionist camp” simply dismiss Likud voters as idiots, and that’s no way to persuade them to switch their allegiance, Niv wrote. Nor are any of the common variations on this theme: that people vote Likud “because they came from countries without a tradition of democracy … because their parents didn’t found the state, because they don’t know right from wrong,” etc.
But the problem goes much deeper than the patronizing attitude Niv correctly skewered. Because after all, Misgav is a journalist, and obtaining information is the essence of a journalist’s job. Thus if he truly wanted to know the answer to his question, one would expect him to make some effort to find it – for instance, by tracking down a few Likud voters and asking them. Yet his column offers no indication that he did so.
And that’s no accident; it’s the heart of the problem: Many Israeli leftists don’t want to know why people vote for Netanyahu, because confronting the reasons would force them to honestly confront the problems created by their own policy prescriptions. People who still believe in territorial withdrawals with religious fervor don’t want to admit that the results of previous pullouts could pose legitimate questions about their wisdom. Yet that’s precisely what most Likud voters would tell them if they asked.
None of the Likud voters I know – myself included – are big Netanyahu fans; we’d happily vote for a better candidate if we saw one. We all think he’s done some things he shouldn’t have done and failed to do some things he should have done.
But he also hasn’t perpetrated any major disasters on the scale that almost all his recent predecessors have. And in statecraft, as in medicine, the first rule is, “Do no harm.”
Over the last 20 years, several ambitious premiers who sincerely tried to radically improve our lives have ended up making them much worse. Yitzhak Rabin, for instance, signed the Oslo Accords, which handed most of Gaza and parts of the West Bank over to Yasser Arafat’s PLO. But under PLO rule, those areas became hotbeds of anti-Israel terror, culminating in the second intifada, which produced more Israeli casualties in four years than all the Palestinian terror of the previous 53 years combined. Most Israelis didn’t consider this an improvement; they’re glad the IDF subsequently resumed security control of the entire West Bank and thereby brought terror back down to pre-Oslo levels.
Similarly, Ehud Barak’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 enabled Hezbollah not only to effectively seize control of that country, but also to engage in a massive arms build-up. This terrorist organization now has an arsenal of some 100,000 missiles, dwarfing that of many countries in both quantity and quality, and they’re all pointed straight at Israel. Granted, the month-long Second Lebanon War of 2006 killed only about half as many Israelis as the IDF’s 15-year presence in south Lebanon. But defense officials unanimously say the next round will be much worse – and that it’s only a matter of time until it happens.
In addition, Barak insisted on conducting final-status negotiations with Arafat despite the latter’s reluctance, and unsurprisingly, the talks failed, leading directly to the second intifada.
Ariel Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 enabled Hamas to seize control of the coastal territory and conduct its own massive arms build-up. Over the ensuing decade, Palestinian terrorists have fired some 15,000 rockets and mortars at Israel from Gaza. Contrary to the oft-heard claim, the withdrawal did not save soldiers’ lives: The rocket attacks have already forced Israel into three wars, resulting in more IDF fatalities than policing Gaza ever did, even at the height of the second intifada. And here, too, defense officials say the next round is just a matter of time.
Netanyahu has embarked on no such grand adventures; he moves only cautiously and incrementally. So he produced no earth-shaking achievements, only modest ones. But he also, thereby, avoided making things dramatically worse.
He sought to manage the Palestinian conflict with a minimum of bloodshed, and overall, he succeeded. The economy didn’t roar, but it grew steadily during years when few other Western economies did; and unemployment actually fell to historic lows. No sweeping domestic reforms were enacted, but there were several smaller ones that ought to modestly improve living standards (the open-skies agreement, tenders for new ports, the expansion of state-funded daycare, etc.). Relations with Europe and the Obama administration – though not the United States as a whole – deteriorated, while relations with China, India and Japan improved markedly; but both developments stemmed at least as much from the internal dynamics of the countries concerned as they did from Netanyahu’s diplomacy.
Is this a stellar record? No. But neither is it a bad one. And I’d take it any day over the disastrous grand initiatives of Rabin, Barak and Sharon.
This, then, is the question leftists must answer if they hope to woo Likud voters: Why should we believe that the diplomatic initiatives and/or unilateral withdrawals you advocate today won’t make our lives significantly worse, just as those earlier ones did? I’ve yet to hear anyone provide a convincing answer.
And that’s why Misgav and his fellows would really rather not know why many Israelis still support Netanyahu. Because dismissing Likud voters as idiots is much easier than having to honestly confront that question.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on February 24, 2015
The left controls such centers because it invested decades of effort in doing so. The right doesn’t even try
One of the more perceptive responses to the recent uproar over the composition of the Israel Prize juries came from columnist Ariana Melamed. Responding to the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s complaint that these juries have become a “private playground of the radical Left,” Melamed retorted, “while it’s true that a huge number of leftists have won the prize, that [is] only because the right has failed to establish an alternative to an elite that began turning to the left way back when Begin was giving speeches in city squares.”
Though her explanation of this failure is ludicrous (she essentially argues that great artists and intellectuals almost by definition vote left), the failure itself is undeniable. Because an intellectual or cultural elite isn’t just a random collection of individuals who produce intellectual or cultural output; it’s a power center. And while Israel’s center-right produces both intellectuals and artists, not only has it failed to mobilize these resources to pose any real challenge to the left’s cultural dominance, but for the most part, it hasn’t even tried. Instead, it makes do with whining about the leftist elites’ lock on intellectual and cultural power centers, from universities to the legal establishment to the media to the Israel Prizes.
Last week brought a classic example of this willful refusal to contest control over such power centers: Prof. Asher Cohen’s ouster as head of a professional advisory committee on the school civics curriculum because he ran in Bayit Yehudi’s party primary.
Leftists have always understood that control over the civics curriculum is vital, because it shapes students’ views on critical questions like whether Zionism is essentially just or inherently unjust, whether a “Jewish and democratic” state is a reasonable goal or an oxymoron. Consequently, they have made great efforts to influence this curriculum. Thus, for instance, Cohen’s predecessor, Adar Cohen, approved a civics textbook which not only termed the Law of Return a violation of civil rights (the law exemplifies “a clash between civil liberties … and Israel’s purpose as a Jewish state”), but even claimed that Judaism was originally only a religion, not a nationality (a blatant contradiction of Judaism’s formative text, the Bible, which refers to the Jews repeatedly as “the nation of Israel”).
Former Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar, one of the few rightists who do understand the importance of cultural power centers, consequently braved a storm of opposition to replace Adar Cohen with Asher Cohen in 2012. That put the latter in a unique position to shape the views of generations of schoolchildren. But instead, he threw it away for a chance to enter the Knesset, where his influence on future generations would have been incomparably smaller even had he not fared so poorly enough in the primary that he certainly won’t get in.
For another example, consider columnist Emily Amrousi’s extended whine about the New Israel Fund in Israel Hayom last month. Inter alia, she complained, the NIF is “actively trying to insert its own people into government — just look at the success of the New Israel Fund’s law fellowship, which has been operating for three decades with the express aim of ‘cultivating legal leadership to promote human and civil rights and social justice.’ Dozens of the fellowship’s alumni have gone on to serve in the State Prosecutor’s Office and the Justice Ministry. Some have them have been appointed judges and as such, proven their commitment to the spirit of the New Israel Fund in their legal work.”
My reaction on reading this was, “What a brilliant idea. Why hasn’t the right created legal fellowships to groom its people for influential positions in the legal establishment?” After all, whoever controls the legal establishment controls a major power center. The NIF understands this, which is why it puts money and effort into these fellowships. But not only has the center-right created nothing equivalent, it has done nothing whatsoever to contest the left’s legal dominance.
Thus, for instance, successive center-right governments have consistently quashed bills to alter the way Supreme Court justices are chosen, even though changing the selection process is crucial to ending the left’s hammerlock on the court. Similarly, right-leaning members of the Bar Association frequently back left-wing candidates for the Judicial Appointments Committee in exchange for getting “their” candidates on the panel that appoints religious court judges, not understanding that the former – which chooses the Supreme Court – ultimately has far more impact on Israel’s Jewish character than the latter.
The picture is identical in the media. Rightists complain bitterly that the left dominates radio and television, but during decades in power, center-right governments have repeatedly refused to enact legislation opening the airwaves to competition. Thus the two state-owned radio stations (Army Radio and Kol Yisrael) continue to monopolize the national news agenda, because no other station can legally broadcast a nationwide news program.
Incredibly, center-right governments have even rushed to rescue failing left-wing broadcasters instead of letting them collapse. For instance, the left-leaning Channel 10 television has repeatedly been on the verge of losing its license in recent years because it hasn’t met its financial commitments. Yet instead of letting it fail and auctioning its license to someone else, Netanyahu’s government has repeatedly bailed it out.
Even in the world of print media, Israeli rightists correctly complained for years about the left-wing slant of Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth, but made no serious effort to launch a rival paper with a different editorial viewpoint. It took an American Jew, Sheldon Adelson, to finally step up to the plate and do it for them by founding Israel Hayom.
It’s true that the left exploits its control of Israel’s cultural power centers to systematically exclude people of the wrong political persuasion. But leftists didn’t achieve their dominance of these power centers by divine decree; they achieved it through decades of intensive effort. So if the right wants to contest left-wing domination of the intellectual and cultural elite, it needs to invest equivalent effort. If it just keeps waiting for the left to share this power of its own accord, it will be waiting until the Messiah comes.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on February 16, 2015
Bloomberg released its annual Global Innovation Index this week, and Israel was ranked fifth worldwide. Given Israel’s reputation as the “start-up nation,” that may not seem surprising (in fact, it should, but that’s a topic for another post). Yet “start-up nation” has become such a cliché that it often obscures one of the most important–and admirable–qualities behind Israel’s tech successes: a consistent determination to turn lemons into lemonade.
This is true in many walks of Israeli life. Back in 2007, for instance, I wrote a column about the astounding fact that after losing a child in a war or terror attack, Israeli parents had repeatedly responded not with a desire for revenge, but with a desire to commemorate their child by doing something to make the world a better place. Consequently, bereaved parents in Israel have set up everything from public parks to foundations that help families care for special-needs children.
In the high-tech field, this same quality has led Israel to respond to a horrendous security environment by creating products that not only serve immediate defense needs, but have the potential to benefit humanity as a whole. And this response has played a major role in fueling its tech boom.
Take, for instance, the Iron Dome anti-missile system, which was born of the grim need to deal with nonstop rocket fire from Hamas-run Gaza. Though the system proved spectacularly successful during last summer’s war, it initially seemed to have limited application; few other countries routinely suffer rocket attacks from their neighbors.
Now, however, an Israeli-Canadian partnership is busy turning the technology behind Iron Dome into a system for smart electrical grid management. As the Jerusalem Post reported last month, “The same algorithms that help Iron Dome respond to complex inputs quickly and efficiently were applied to monitoring and controlling the electric grid,” which will both save energy and help reduce blackouts. The new technology “has the potential to change grid management in North America and beyond,” according to Henri Rothschild, president of the Canada-Israel Industrial R&D Foundation, which helped broker the joint venture.
Another example is a start-up that literally makes potable water out of thin air. Founder Arye Kohavi, whom Foreign Policy named as one of its 100 leading global thinkers last year, said he first began mulling this issue during his compulsory military service, when he discovered that supplying water to frontline troops in Lebanon or Gaza was a major logistical problem. Thus his original idea was a portable kit that soldiers could take into the field with them, enabling them to generate their own water supply with no input other than air–an idea he successfully pitched to Israel’s Defense Ministry, which enthusiastically backed the venture.
But with growing areas of the globe increasingly threatened by shortages of fresh water, Kohavi’s invention clearly has uses far beyond the military. After the Philippines suffered a severe earthquake in 2013, for instance, the Israel Defense Forces used one of his Water-Gen company’s devices on its disaster-relief mission there. Kohavi is currently working on other civilian applications for his product.
And there are numerous other examples. Just last week, for instance, Reuters ran a story about Israeli tech firms that had designed products to help disabled veterans and are now adapting them to the civilian market.
Israel isn’t the only country in the world that has been at war for decades. But few other countries have taken this obvious drawback and leveraged it into a spate of high-tech development that is benefiting people all over the globe. That determination to turn lemons into lemonade is a major source of Israel’s success–and not just in high-tech.
Originally published in Commentary on February 5, 2015
That depends on how you define democracy – which is why the ‘Jewish vs. democratic’ debate has become so fraught
In response to my column last month on the false choice between Israel’s Jewish and democratic characters, a reader asked a logical question: You yourself argued that Israel has no raison d’etre if it isn’t a Jewish state; being just another Western democracy isn’t enough. So why do you think “Jewish” and “democratic” deserve equal weight, instead of prioritizing Israel’s Jewish character?
Answering that requires defining “democracy,” because in recent years, two almost antithetical concepts have been sloppily – or perhaps maliciously – subsumed under this term. One of these concepts is frequently at odds with Israel’s Jewish character. But the other is as vital to the Jewish state’s continued existence as the body is to the soul.
Democracy’s original meaning, which today is sometimes called “thin” or “procedural” democracy, was a system of government in which governing requires the consent of the governed (though for practical reasons, such consent is usually granted via elected representatives). Consequently, its requirements are limited to those necessary to achieve this purpose, such as regular elections, checks and balances among different branches of government, and certain rights essential to enabling the democratic process to function, like freedom of expression or the right to due process.
Most democracies also grant rights that go beyond the bare essentials. But these additional rights acquire their validity only through the consent of the governed, granted via legislation or, more commonly, via democratically adopted constitutions. Procedural democracy doesn’t mandate the conferral of nonpolitical rights like, say, a “right to marry”; it mandates only those rights essential for democracy to function.
The newer version of democracy is sometimes called “thick” or “substantive” or “liberal” democracy. But despite that deceptive word “democracy,” this version is in many ways less a system of government than a religion.
Like any religion, it contains both positive and negative commandments that govern not only political, but also moral and social, life; the only difference is that these commandments are called “rights” instead. Thus, for instance, legalizing gay marriage is obligatory, because there’s a “right to marry,” but restricting abortion is forbidden, because a woman has a “right to control her own body.” These positions have nothing to do with the mechanisms of government and everything to do with dictating social and moral norms.
And like any religion, “substantive democracy” derives its commandments (aka “rights”) not from the decisions of the people’s elected representatives, but from a higher authority that trumps such decisions. In traditional religions, this higher authority is God, whose commandments are revealed in holy writ like the Bible or Koran. The origin of substantive democracy’s commandments is less clear: Sometimes, adherents simply assert that these are “fundamental human rights” known to and obligatory on everyone, however hotly contested they are. Other times, they cite the amorphous holy writ known as “international law,” which consists largely of pronouncements by unelected officials in UN agencies or organizations like the Red Cross, whose decisions were never approved by any elected government.
But whatever the source, disciples of substantive democracy clearly believe such a higher law exists. That’s why the High Court of Justice could rule in 2004, for instance, that people have a constitutional “right” to a “minimal dignified existence” guaranteed by welfare payments, with the court being authorized to decide whether existing welfare payments meet this standard. The fact that the only body in Israel actually authorized to enact constitutional legislation – the Knesset – had rejected proposed Basic Laws guaranteeing this and other “social rights” no fewer than 15 times was irrelevant.
The problem with treating democracy as a religion, however, is that no two religions are ever wholly compatible. One cannot, for instance, simultaneously be a practicing Jew and a practicing Muslim, because Jewish and Islamic law sometimes clash. So, too, do the commandments of Judaism and substantive democracy, and when that happens, many Jews will naturally prefer their own religion to the rival one. So if you believe that democracy can only mean “substantive democracy” – i.e., a rival religion – then prioritizing Israel’s Jewish character over its democratic one would make sense.
But procedural democracy isn’t a competing religion; it’s a system of government. And this particular system of government is essential to the Jewish state’s survival, for one simple reason: Any Jewish state, whatever else it is or isn’t, must be one where large numbers of Jews with often contradictory opinions and values – religious and secular, right-wing and left-wing, Sephardim and Ashkenazim, socialists and capitalists – can somehow live together. And no system of government is better at enabling people with wildly different opinions to coexist than democracy.
First, this is because democracy offers everyone the hope of ultimate victory – the possibility of persuading others to enact your ideas into law. In reality, achieving anything usually requires compromising. But the very existence of this hope is enough to keep most people working within the system instead of leaving in despair or turning to violence to impose their views.
Second, democracy excels at finding the kinds of messy compromises which, despite satisfying nobody, give each side enough that neither finds it intolerable. The current state of gay rights is a classic example. Liberal democrats consider gay marriage a fundamental right that the state must grant. Orthodox Jews consider homosexuality a serious religious offense that the state mustn’t endorse. The compromise is that Israel doesn’t permit gay marriage, but effectively grants gay couples the same rights as married couples. And since both sides get something (the de facto benefits of marriage for gays, no official sanctioning of religiously prohibited behavior for Orthodox Jews), both can live with it, even though neither is happy.
This brings us back to the body-and-soul analogy I began with. Judaism is Israel’s soul. As I argued last month, if Israel ever ceased to be a Jewish state, it would soon cease to exist at all. But democracy is Israel’s body – the framework that enables millions of contentious Jews to live together despite their disagreements, and without which the state would soon implode.
Like any living creature, the Jewish state needs both soul and body to survive. On its own, neither is enough.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on February 4, 2015
That’s the unspoken message of Amos Yadlin’s appointment as Labor’s candidate for defense minister
The most critical issue to be decided by the upcoming election came clear last week, yet it seems to have gone virtually unremarked. It isn’t tensions in the north, terror in Tel Aviv, Iran’s nuclear program, relations with America or any socioeconomic issue. Rather, it’s whether Israel will unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank.
There have been hints of this for a while. But the clincher was last week’s announcement by the Labor-Hatnuah joint ticket – the self-proclaimed “Zionist Camp” – that its candidate for defense minister, should it form the next government, is Amos Yadlin.
Yadlin is probably Israel’s leading advocate of unilateral withdrawal. He has used his current post as head of the Institute for National Security Studies to push the idea relentlessly, in forums ranging from briefings for Israeli reporters to articles in prestigious American journals. And it’s highly unlikely that someone of Yadlin’s stature – a former director of Military Intelligence who now heads one of Israel’s most prestigious think tanks – would agree to be any party’s candidate without assurance that his flagship policy would be on the table. Someone like Yadlin doesn’t enter government just to decide whether the IDF should add or cut another tank brigade.
Granted, both Labor leader Isaac Herzog and Hatnuah leader Tzipi Livni would prefer a final-status agreement with the Palestinians, so any government they form would first try to reach one. But every round of final-status talks for the last 20 years has ended in failure, and the Herzog-Livni effort is unlikely to fare better. And once the talks collapse, it would be time for Yadlin’s Plan B – unilateral withdrawal from 85% of the West Bank.
Indeed, Livni hinted as much in a Jerusalem Post interview last week. Asked why she thought yet another round of talks with Mahmoud Abbas would do any good, she replied, “The real question for me as an Israeli leader is not who is to blame, but how can we move forward in accordance to the vision of two states for two peoples, that represents the Israeli interest. Assuming that Abbas chose a strategy of going to the UN and International Criminal Court against Israel, as an Israeli leader we need to find a way to move forward – whether with him or in another direction.”
In other words, if an agreement with Abbas is unattainable, Israel needs to find “another direction” through which to advance toward two states. That’s Yadlin’s position as well – and in his view, that “other direction” is unilaterally quitting most of the West Bank.
Still, polls currently show Labor-Hatnuah winning only about 24 Knesset seats (out of 120), so it would need support from several other parties. And since polls also show that most Israelis oppose leaving the West Bank unilaterally, such a Knesset majority would surely be hard to find, right?
Wrong. It would be depressingly easy.
First, there’s Moshe Kahlon’s Koolanu party, whose diplomatic platform is being drafted by another leading advocate of unilateral withdrawal: the party’s number four, Michael Oren. Like Yadlin, Oren has pushed this idea in repeated articles and interviews in both Israeli and American media outlets. And someone of his stature – a former ambassador to Washington and acclaimed historian – is similarly unlikely to have joined any party, much less a brand-new, untested one, without assurance that his flagship policy would be on the table. So that’s another eight or nine votes in favor.
Meretz and the Arab parties will vote for any withdrawal, even if they’re outside the coalition; as evidence, see the 2005 disengagement from Gaza. That’s another 17 or 18 votes.
And United Torah Judaism can always be bought, just as Ariel Sharon did when his government was in danger of falling over the Gaza pullout. Then, UTJ’s price for rescuing the government was NIS 30 million. It would presumably demand more for the West Bank, but there’s no reason to think Labor-Hatnuah won’t pay. So there’s another seven votes.
Shas voters lean right, but party chairman and strongman Aryeh Deri leans left. It was Deri who, by all accounts, persuaded Shas’s founder and spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, not to oppose the 1993 Oslo Accord. Later, after Eli Yishai replaced Deri as party leader, Shas opposed the Gaza disengagement. But since then, Yosef has died, Yishai has been forced out and Deri’s control over Shas is absolute. Another six to nine votes.
Finally, there’s Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid. Before entering politics, Lapid avidly supported the Gaza pullout as a journalist. And in recent months, he has declared repeatedly that Israel must “separate” from the Palestinians and draw its own borders. In short, if another round of Israeli-Palestinian talks fails, he’ll back unilateral withdrawal. Another 10 or 11 votes.
Add it all up, and that’s 72 to 78 votes in favor of withdrawal – far more than the 61 needed. Thus if Labor-Hatnuah forms the next government, unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank is highly likely.
That’s grim news for the many centrists who are fed up with the current government but have no wish to repeat the disastrous experiment of the Gaza pullout in the West Bank, because it means such a pullout can be averted only if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains in power. And that means voting for one of the only three parties certain to back him to form the next government: Likud, Bayit Yehudi or Yishai’s new party. Even Yisrael Beiteinu – which probably wouldn’t support a unilateral pullout – has indicated that it would prefer Herzog over Netanyahu as the next premier, and most of the other small parties have hinted the same.
True, Labor-Hatnuah isn’t publicly touting unilateral withdrawal, and neither is any other party. But that’s because doing so would likely result in being trounced at the polls. So instead, withdrawal advocates are keeping quiet and hoping nobody notices that this is what’s at stake in the upcoming election.
But it is. And therefore, anyone who doesn’t want the West Bank turned into a missile-launching pad like Gaza must vote for a fourth Netanyahu government – even if they have to hold their noses and swallow hard to do it.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on January 26, 2015
The proportion of Jews who value both equally has plunged, due to years of being told it’s either-or
The 2014 edition of the Israeli Democracy Index, released last week, offers both encouraging and disturbing findings. The latter include a dramatic drop over the last five years, from 48.1% to 24.5%, in the proportion of Jews who accord equal weight to Israel’s Jewish and democratic characters. Though the figure has declined steadily since 2010, last year was the first time “both equally” failed to win a plurality. In fact, it dropped to last place, behind both those who prioritize Israel’s Jewish character (38.9%) and those who prioritize its democratic character (33.5%).
In part, this is because the Israel Democracy Institute’s researchers deliberately worded the question to minimize the number of people choosing “both equally.” The question asked was, “Israel is defined as both a Jewish and a democratic state. Which part of this definition is more important to you personally?” Thus respondents weren’t given the option of “both equally”; they were instructed to choose either Jewish or democratic, and were recorded as valuing both traits equally only if they volunteered that view despite it not being listed. Had “both equally” been offered as an option, more people would certainly have chosen it.
Yet the question’s phrasing reflects a far broader problem: Like the IDI researchers, a growing swathe of Israel’s Left increasingly insists that Israel can’t be both Jewish and democratic; it has to prioritize one or the other. And by so doing, the left is forcing people to choose.
An excellent example of the current left-wing bon ton appeared in Haaretz last month. In a 5,000-word article, Hebrew University sociology professor Eva Illouz dissected what she considers the old Left’s failings, including its definition of Israeli democracy “as both particularistic, designed for Jews, and universalist, granting equal rights to all its citizens.” This might have been justified initially, when Israel served as a refuge state for Jews, Illouz wrote, but “the very essential core of democracy … consists of the inculcation and institutionalization of universalism. All democracies have universalist social covenants – that is, covenants that enable in principle equality before the law of all their citizens … and in most liberal countries of the world, that universalism has become stronger with time.”
In point of fact, Illouz is wrong; many democracies see no contradiction between particularism and universalism. For instance, as Prof. Eugene Kontorovich noted in The Washington Post last month, seven EU states, including Latvia and Slovakia, “have constitutional ‘nationhood’ provisions, which typically speak of the state as being the national home and locus of self-determination for the country’s majority ethnic group,” while seven others, including Iceland and Greece, have established religions. And as professors Alexander Yakobsen and Amnon Rubinstein noted in a 2009 study, numerous European countries have laws that, like Israel’s Law of Return, grant “privileged access to rights of residence and immigration for ethnic-cultural kin groups,” including Germany, Ireland, Finland, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Croatia.
Nevertheless, the view that Israel’s Jewish identity somehow contradicts its democratic nature has become almost obligatory among a vocal segment of Israel’s left-wing intelligentsia. And after hearing this view endlessly reiterated by journalists, academics and politicians, ordinary Israelis have increasingly come to believe, as the IDI poll shows, that they indeed have to choose.
The Left wants Israelis to prioritize “democratic” over “Jewish,” and indeed, the proportion that does so has almost doubled since 2010, from 17.0% to 33.5%. But the proportion that prioritizes Israel’s Jewish character also grew, albeit more slowly (from 32.4% to 38.9%). Thus the Left’s gains came entirely from the shrinking pool of those who value both equally.
In short, by demanding that people choose, the Left has destroyed the old consensus that viewed Israel’s Jewish and democratic values as mutually compatible and equally vital. Now, many Israelis have been convinced these values conflict, requiring one to be elevated above the other. And that creates a growing risk of all-out kulturkampf between those who favor Israel’s Jewishness and those who favor its democracy.
In such a battle, everyone would lose. But the people likely to lose most are precisely those doing their best to provoke it – the leftists who, overwhelmingly (72.1%), prioritize Israel’s democracy.
First, the demographics are against them. According to the survey, large majorities of “haredi,” “religious” and “traditional religious” respondents prioritized Israel’s Jewish character, as did a plurality of “traditional nonreligious” respondents. Only among the secular did a majority prioritize Israel’s democratic character. But thanks to higher fertility rates, the first three groups are all growing faster than the secular population – and as noted above, once people have decided to prioritize Judaism, very few switch to prioritizing democracy.
Yet even if, by some demographic miracle, the left did win, it would be a pyrrhic victory – because if Israel isn’t a Jewish state, it has no reason to exist at all. There’s no compelling argument for living in Israel, with its hostile neighbors, wars, terror attacks, mandatory conscription and high cost of living, if all you want is a Western democracy indistinguishable from any other; many Western countries still offer excellent quality of life. Israel’s unique attraction is the fact that it’s a Jewish democracy, the only place in the world where the Jewish people can determine their own fate. And it wouldn’t long survive the loss of that uniqueness.
Thus anyone who truly cares about Israeli democracy should stop demanding that people choose between the state’s Jewish and democratic characters and instead promote a return to the old consensus that both are equally important. Being both Jewish and democratic is no more oxymoronic than being Latvian and democratic or Slovak and democratic. And unlike the doomed effort to elevate democracy over Judaism, trying to persuade Israelis to return to valuing both equally has a good chance of succeeding: After all, it’s what most Israelis always preferred, until the Left convinced them it was impossible.
The IDI, as a self-proclaimed champion of “strengthening Israeli democracy,” should lead the way by offering a “both equally” option in this year’s survey instead of insisting on an either-or choice between “Jewish” and “democratic.” It might be pleasantly surprised at the results.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on Jan. 12, 2015
Yesterday, Jonathan Marks dissected the lie of the BDS movement’s alleged commitment to nonviolence–a lie underscored by the South African chapter’s launch of a “fundraising tour” starring Palestinian airline hijacker Leila Khaled. But another lie about the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement was also exploded this week: the lie that it is having an increasing impact on Israel. The truth, according to a new study released yesterday by the Knesset Research and Information Center, is exactly the opposite: Not only has BDS not dented Israel’s economy overall, but Israeli exports have surged even in places where the movement is most active, like Europe.
Overall, the study reports, Israeli exports rose by 80 percent from 2000 to 2013, with exports to Europe rising even more sharply, by 99 percent. But the bulk of this increase has taken place since 2005–i.e., in the years when BDS was most active. From 2005-2013, despite a sharp drop during the global financial crisis of 2009, annual exports to Europe averaged $15.6 billion. That’s almost double the preceding decade’s annual average of $7.8 billion.
Foreign direct investment in Israel has also risen steeply, posting an increase of 58 percent over the last four years alone–precisely the years when BDS was supposedly having its biggest impact.
Most surprisingly, exports from the West Bank and the Golan Heights, which are the primary focus of boycott efforts, rose even faster than exports overall. Consequently, they constituted 3.1 percent of total exports in 2013, up from 0.5 percent in 2000–and the overwhelming majority of that increase also stemmed from exports to Europe. A handful of industries, like Jordan Valley date farmers, have taken a hit, but the impact on Israel as a whole has been negligible.
As the report acknowledged, this is largely because “A major portion of Israeli exports are intermediate products, like electronic components, that sit inside the final products of well-known global companies.” That makes them hard to boycott: How do you boycott the insides of your computer or cellphone?
But it’s also worth noting that even in Europe, where BDS has gained most traction, the movement’s strongholds are found among academics, trade unionists, and unelected EU bureaucrats–i.e., people with no responsibility for the performance of national economies. In contrast, BDS has few champions among elected politicians in national governments, because these politicians are responsible for delivering economic growth to their constituents and view Israel’s innovative tech sector as a potential contributor to this effort.
Consequently, while BDS was making noise in the press, European governments were quietly working to deepen economic ties with Israel. A particularly notable example is the British Embassy Tech Hub, brainchild of British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould. Founded in 2011, the Hub essentially functions as a matchmaking service between British and Israeli firms, giving the former access to Israeli high-tech and the latter access to partners who can help them grow their businesses and enter new markets. It’s been so successful that other ambassadors in Israel are now consulting Gould on how to replicate his model at their own embassies.
The bottom line is that for all the hype about BDS, its efforts to strangle Israel have been a total failure. BDS may be thriving in the media and on college campuses, but out in the real world, what’s thriving is Israel’s economy.
Originally published in Commentary
It feels almost tasteless to be writing about good news while France is mourning a horrific terror attack. Yet there’s been so much good news from Israel over the last week that my biggest dilemma has been which item to pick. Having discussed immigration yesterday, it’s time to move onto Israel’s Arab minority–specifically, the stunning new Israel Democracy Institute survey in which 65 percent of Arab citizens said they were either “quite” or “very” proud to be Israeli in 2014, up from 50 percent the previous year.
To be fair, the poll was conducted between April 28 and May 29–meaning after the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian talks broke down, but before the summer’s war in Gaza, the shocking murder of an East Jerusalem teen by Jews, and other difficult events of the past several months. Thus had it been taken today, the number might well be lower.
Nevertheless, given the torrent of accusations of “racism” and “apartheid” that have been hurled at Israel for years now from both inside and outside the country, it’s quite remarkable to discover that as of eight months ago, 65 percent of Israeli Arabs were “proud” to be citizens of that “racist,” “apartheid” Jewish state, and 64 percent said they usually felt their “dignity as a human being is respected” in Israel. This raises the obvious question of whether perhaps Israeli Arabs know something about Israel that its detractors don’t.
In this regard, it’s worth considering some of the survey’s other surprising findings. For instance, 57 percent of Israeli Arabs said they have faith in the Israel Police–second only to the Supreme Court (60 percent), and significantly higher than the proportion of Jews who said the same (45 percent). This reflects the fruit of a decade-long effort by the police to rebuild trust with Arab communities after the nadir reached in October 2000, when policemen killed 13 Arabs in course of suppressing massive, violent Arab riots. Since then, police have tried hard to recruit more Arabs to the force, open more stations in Arab towns, and maintain a regular dialogue with Arab community leaders. And as the survey shows, this effort is working.
Even more astounding is that 51 percent of Arabs expressed confidence in the Israel Defense Forces–aka the “occupation army” that, according to Israel’s detractors, ruthlessly oppresses their Palestinian brethren in the West Bank. This exceeds the level of confidence Israeli Arabs expressed in the Knesset, the media, or their religious leadership and suggests they don’t buy the canard of IDF brutality enthusiastically swallowed overseas. I also suspect the IDF–and Israel as a whole–benefited from comparisons with the real atrocities being perpetrated in Syria and the heavy-handed tactics used by Egypt’s military: The contrast with the meltdown in much of the Arab world can’t help but make Israel look more attractive.
Yet Israeli Arabs’ pride in Israel also reflects the concerted efforts to improve integration and narrow Jewish-Arab gaps that successive governments have made over the past two decades.
For instance, an affirmative action program launched in 2007 quadrupled the proportion of Arabs in the civil service over the space of just four years. It’s still significantly lower than their proportion in the workforce, but nevertheless constitutes dramatic improvement.
Similarly, a government program to subsidize employment of Arab high-tech workers helped quadruple the number of such workers between 2010 and 2013. And in Israel’s premier technological university, the Technion, Arabs now constitute 21 percent of the student body–slightly higher than their share of the population–thanks to a special program to recruit Arab students and give them extra support while they are there.
The gap between Jewish and Arab matriculation rates hasn’t disappeared, but it did shrink by more than a third from 1996-2012. Arabs remain underrepresented among master’s and Ph.D. students, but the percentage of master’s degrees awarded to Arabs more than doubled from 2005-2013 and the percentage of Ph.D.s rose by 40 percent. Concerted efforts to build more Arab schools have brought average class sizes down to the same level as in secular Jewish schools. And so on and so forth.
In short, while gaps and discrimination still exist, Israel has been working hard to reduce them, with considerable success. And Israeli Arabs have responded with growing pride in being citizens of the democratic Jewish state.
Originally published in Commentary
In many ways, the year that just ended was a difficult one for Israel–a war in Gaza, terror in Jerusalem, escalating international opprobrium, a slowing economy. Perhaps that explains why so little attention has been paid to the fact that last year also marked the achievement, for the first time in Israel’s history, of one of Zionism’s longtime goals: In a year where immigration to Israel hit a 10-year high, a majority of the immigrants, for the first time ever, came from the West. In other words, for the first time ever, most immigrants came to Israel not because they had no other options, but because they wanted to come.
Granted, rising anti-Semitism in Europe contributed to the immigration surge; Jews from France, where anti-Semitism has increasingly turned violent, constituted more than a quarter of the 26,500 immigrants. But there’s another factor as well, epitomized by the identical and completely unsolicited comments I independently received from citizens of two different European countries at last week’s Limmud UK conference: Europe, they said, feels dead. Israel feels alive.
And it’s worth noting that neither of the speakers came from one of the continent’s economic basket cases. They came from Britain and the Netherlands, two of Europe’s stronger economies.
Indeed, as Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky pointed out, until not long ago, even French Jews who wanted to leave Europe preferred to go to Montreal. Today, as many as 70 percent choose Israel–and the number is likely to keep growing. A year ago, the Jewish Agency ran one immigration information seminar a month in France, Sharansky said. Now, it runs two a day.
I don’t know whether Tel Aviv’s building boom really outpaces construction in European cities, or whether Israelis really smile more than Europeans–both factors my Limmud interlocutors cited as contributing to their impression of Israel’s vibrancy. But one thing they said is certainly correct: You see more children in Israel than you do in Europe. In fact, Israel is the only country in the Western world with a birthrate above replacement rate.
And in that sense, their assessment is literal truth: Europe’s aging, shrinking population condemns it to slow oblivion, whereas Israel’s relatively high birthrate (3.05 children per women) means it is constantly rejuvenating itself. The very fact that Israelis, unlike Europeans, are still bringing children into the world is a sign that they still believe Israel has a future.
And clearly, many Diaspora Jews do as well–because nobody, no matter how badly he wanted to leave Europe, would opt for Israel rather than another Western country if he didn’t consider Israel an attractive country with a bright future.
“Here you have for the first time, a clear thing,” Sharansky said. “There is a massive exodus from a community in the free world, which has all the doors open to them, and they are choosing Israel.”
It’s a Zionist dream come true. And a wonderful beginning to 2015.
Originally published in Commentary