Domestic Policy
For a Shas politico to consider teaming up with religious Zionists would have been inconceivable not long ago
The election campaign’s most interesting development to date has been the reports that former Shas chairman Eli Yishai is considering joining forces with Uri Ariel’s religious Zionist Tekuma party. This is interesting even if, as currently seems likely, it doesn’t happen – not because of how it might affect the election dynamics, but because of what it says about the way walls are crumbling in Haredi society.
True, Sephardi Haredim have always been less insular than their Ashkenazi counterparts. But even in Shas, jumping ship to join forces with religious Zionists would have meant certain ostracism not so long ago. And Yishai is no fringe figure; he was Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s handpicked choice to lead Shas for years until Aryeh Deri returned to politics, and the party leadership, last year. Thus it’s hard to imagine him even considering such a move if he didn’t think the Haredi world had changed enough that he could do so without severing ties with it.
Nor is Yishai the only prominent Shas figure to buck the Haredi consensus recently. Shlomo Amar, whom Yosef handpicked to serve as Israel’s chief Sephardi rabbi from 2003-13, successfully ran for the post of Jerusalem’s chief rabbi this summer as the candidate of the religious Zionist party Bayit Yehudi.
Clearly, thwarted personal ambition played a role in both developments: Yishai wouldn’t have considered leaving Shas had he not felt marginalized by Deri; Amar turned to Bayit Yehudi only following a feud with Shas’ powerful Yosef and Deri clans.
But the fact that both could contemplate leaving the Shas fold without fearing ostracism from Haredi society reflects the slow but deep change occurring within this society: Even if leading Haredi rabbis are still desperately pretending otherwise, ordinary Haredim increasingly understand that their community isn’t an island sufficient unto itself; it’s part of broader Israeli society, and it’s affected by what happens in that society.
Perhaps nowhere was this more evident than during the recent war in Gaza. Longtime observers of the Haredi world, both Haredi and secular, said the community’s outpouring of support for the army during the war – ranging from care packages for soldiers to “adopting” soldiers to pray for by name – was unprecedented.
Indeed, it went so far that Yated Ne’eman, the party organ of one faction of the Ashkenazi Haredi rabbinic leadership, felt compelled to run an editorial four weeks into the war urging its readers not to forget the real enemy – the Israel Defense Forces. Attempts to recruit Haredim into the IDF are “spiritual terror tunnels,” it declared, while “contact and connection between the Haredi camp and the secular is treif [non-kosher], especially at a time like this.” This reminder obviously wouldn’t have been necessary had Haredi rabbis not felt the walls were in danger of being breached.
This trend has been bolstered by the growing presence of Haredim in the workplace. Among men, the rise has been steady but modest. Among women, it’s been dramatic. According to the latest Central Bureau of Statistics data, the employment rate among Haredi women now exceeds that among Israeli women as a whole. Almost 80% of Haredi women work, an increase of nearly 30 percentage points in less than 15 years. And since the Haredi community doesn’t have enough jobs for them all, increasing numbers are working outside the Haredi community.
But Yishai’s flirtation with Ariel takes this grass-roots change up a level, into the ranks of the community’s official leadership. For Shas, like its Ashkenazi Haredi counterpart United Torah Judaism, always had two fixed principles. And the contemplated alliance with Ariel would violate both.
First, both Haredi parties shun involvement in larger political issues like, say, the peace process; they exist primarily to keep Haredi men out of the army, secular subjects out of Haredi schools and government money flowing to Haredi institutions. Thus after Yitzhak Rabin signed the 1993 Oslo Accord, for instance, Shas ventured no real opinion about the most important diplomatic question in decades; it abstained on the vote. But it did care about remaining in the coalition, with all the financial benefits that entailed, so it kept Rabin’s government from falling over the issue. Similarly, UTJ actually voted against Ariel Sharon’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza, yet in exchange for 30 million shekels for its yeshivas, it personally ensured the pullout would happen by saving Sharon’s government from falling over the issue. On its priority list, the disengagement was simply much less important than money for its institutions.
Ariel’s Tekuma, however, has a very clear diplomatic policy; it opposes the peace process and territorial concessions. No list of which Tekuma is part could acquiesce in uprooting settlements in exchange for 30 pieces of silver. Thus to even consider running together with Tekuma, Yishai would have to be comfortable adopting this policy in lieu of the traditional Haredi position of not having positions on diplomatic issues.
And in fact, he clearly would be comfortable with this; it’s been obvious for years that his personal views leaned right, despite his party’s official neutrality. That’s also true of many Shas voters, if you believe opinion polls. But until now, no leading Haredi figure has been willing to publicly deviate from the consensus that such issues aren’t Haredi business – that their job is to tend to their own institutions, and what happens to the country is other people’s problem.
Second, both Haredi parties have always viewed religious Zionists as inferior; indeed, their party organs often refuse to even dignify religious Zionist rabbis with the title “rabbi.” But even though Ariel represents the more “Haredi” wing of religious Zionism – meaning that Tekuma, like the Haredim, defers to its rabbis on all major political questions – the rabbis Tekuma takes orders from are religious Zionists. Thus for Yishai even to consider running with Tekuma means his rabbis would have to be willing to treat Ariel’s rabbis as equals.
Consequently, the fact that a Yishai-Ariel union could even be contemplated has a significance far beyond the personal; it represents another step on the road to fuller Haredi integration. And that’s a bit of election news we should all be happy about.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
We need a law reinstating the constitutional ground rules previous Basic Laws broke, not one that breaks them again
The past few weeks have witnessed seemingly endless debate over a proposed Basic Law defining Israel as the Jewish nation-state. But this debate has focused almost exclusively on the bill’s rather anodyne content, thereby ignoring a far more serious problem: Quasi-constitutional legislation is supposed to reflect a broad societal consensus. It shouldn’t be rammed through with a razor-thin coalition majority.
This might seem like an unreasonable quibble, given that the principle at stake has already been thoroughly gutted by the nation-state bill’s opponents. After all, many of these opponents vociferously defend the constitutional status of the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, which was approved by a mere quarter of the 120-member Knesset (the vote was 32-21); the nation-state bill will certainly be approved by a far larger majority – at least 61 MKs.
Human Dignity and Liberty also violated another fundamental rule: that constitutional legislation can only be adopted by people who actually know they’re voting on a constitution. As I explained last month, most of the MKs who voted on Human Dignity and Liberty never dreamed the Supreme Court would assign it constitutional status and then use it to invalidate subsequent legislation enacted by much larger majorities; if they had, the law probably wouldn’t have passed.
Thus the moment the Supreme Court decided to treat Human Dignity and Liberty as a constitution, it threw the rules of the constitutional game out the window. And by enthusiastically supporting this decision rather than protesting the imposition of a constitution by judicial fiat, many of the same people now protesting the nation-state bill actively collaborated in trashing these constitutional ground rules. So one could reasonably ask why the bill’s proponents should care about these rules now.
Moreover, ever since Human Dignity and Liberty was enacted in 1992, the court has used it to shred the former delicate balance between Israel’s universalist democratic character and its particularistic Jewish one, giving far more weight to the former than the latter. The nation-state bill, at bottom, is nothing but an effort to restore this balance. Thus one could argue that it’s merely a correction to the previous breach of the constitutional ground rules rather than a new breach.
I’m sympathetic to both these arguments. Nevertheless, I think there’s a better solution than creating a kind of constitutional war of attrition, in which each new government exploits its narrow majority to ram through Basic Laws of its choosing in an effort to counteract those rammed through by previous governments. Such a war would be deeply detrimental to Israel’s long-term interests, for two reasons.
First, a constitution is supposed to unify a country by reflecting broad common denominators. But Basic Laws enacted by narrow majorities would have the opposite effect: They would intensify existing divisions on fundamental issues by codifying them into legislation. Since use of the coalition majority would enable the opposition’s views to be ignored, each Basic Law would end up being loathed by a particular sector of society. And seeing laws they hate elevated to constitutional status would increase each group’s alienation from both other social groups and the state as a whole. For proof, just look at how many different groups have been alienated by the court’s abuse of Human Dignity and Liberty.
Second, a welter of conflicting Basic Laws would merely increase the court’s power to effectively run the country, since it would be responsible for resolving these contradictions. There would be endless court cases in which, say, someone claimed that a given law or cabinet decision violates Human Dignity and Liberty, and the government countered by citing the nation-state law, or vice versa. In all such cases, the ultimate arbiter would be the court.
And in exchange for these evils, the nation-state bill probably wouldn’t even achieve its goal of restoring the universalist-particularistic balance, since it would ultimately be interpreted by the same Supreme Court that twisted Human Dignity and Liberty into something it was never meant to be. Does anyone seriously think the court couldn’t “creatively interpret” the nation-state law in a way that similarly distorts its intention?
Thus it would be far more productive to address the root of the problem: the subversion of the constitutional ground rules that enabled a law passed by a quarter of the Knesset to obtain constitutional status to begin with. And this can’t be done by ramming through more “constitutional” legislation via narrow majorities; that would merely further undermine proper constitutional principles.
Instead, what’s needed is a law dictating the rules for passing constitutional legislation, one that would mandate a suitably broad majority. Such a law must also include a sunset provision stating that any preexisting Basic Law not initially enacted by the requisite majority would automatically expire after a given time period unless reenacted by the proper majority.
A law of this type could generate much broader support than the nation-state bill has. For instance, it would almost certainly be backed by the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties, which oppose the nation-state bill, and perhaps even the Arab parties, which have an interest in precluding the passage of Basic Laws like the nation-state bill.
Moreover, it would be virtually impossible for anyone to malign such a law as anti-democratic. I don’t actually think the nation-state bill is anti-democratic, but the fact that it’s something not every democracy has, makes it vulnerable to being misinterpreted as such. In contrast, every democracy requires constitutional legislation to be approved by super-majorities; what could possibly be undemocratic about Israel finally doing the same?
If such a law were passed, I suspect neither Human Dignity and Freedom nor the nation-state bill would survive as Basic Laws. Rightly or wrongly, both have become controversial enough that they could obtain the requisite super-majority only as part of a grand constitutional bargain, and I don’t think Israel is ready for a grand constitutional bargain; it’s still too divided over too many issues.
But since Israel muddled along without a constitution for decades until 1992, there’s no reason to think it couldn’t do so again. And no constitution at all would be much better than a pseudo-constitution rammed through by unacceptably narrow majorities.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
It’s a vital war, it’s happening now, and many of our national leaders are helping the wrong side
Former National Security Advisor Yaakov Amidror offered an interesting analysis of last week’s incident in which Israeli Arabs nearly lynched an Israeli Jew in the Galilee town of Taibe. On one hand, he wrote, it’s worrisome that the assailants had no qualms about perpetrating such an attack “in broad daylight in the heart of their city.” On the other hand, the Jew’s life was saved by another Arab resident of Taibe, who “is not afraid to appear in public and take pride in his action, and none of his neighbors has condemned him.” What this means, Amidror concluded, is that “we are witnessing a struggle within Arab society,” between those who want to build a life together with the Jewish majority and those who want only to destroy what has been built.
Nor is the Taibe incident the only evidence of this struggle. Also last week, vandals firebombed an 18th-century synagogue in the northern town of Shfaram. Just a few months earlier, that same synagogue had been lovingly restored by young Arabs and Jews seeking to set “a model for coexistence between our two peoples.” Its very status as an emblem of coexistence made it a natural target for the destroyers.
In this struggle, the destroyers have some obvious advantages. First, as I’ve noted before, longstanding police neglect has ceded control of many Arab communities to the thugs. Second, most national-level Israeli Arab leaders, whether political or religious, are on the thugs’ side: Arab MKs routinely spew incitement from the Knesset, while clerics like the Islamic Movement’s Sheikh Raed Saleh do the same from the mosque. Third, the leaderships of both Hamas and Fatah in the territories are equally inflammatory (on incitement, the two are indistinguishable). Finally, as Amos Harel noted in Haaretz last week, pictures of the slaughter perpetrated by the Islamic State and other groups in Syria and Iraq have recently been flooding local social media networks, thereby encouraging copycat attacks.
But in one of the most encouraging developments of the past few months, a local-level Arab leadership has emerged that openly opposes the destroyers. This has been evident in numerous episodes.
During the demonstrations that followed the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir in July, for instance, some two dozen Arab and Jewish mayors in the Galilee and the Negev banded together to publicly urge calm and restraint, while in Acre, “Arab public officials and community activists stood as a barrier between the demonstrators and the police, pushing back the demonstrators in order to avoid a confrontation,” Haaretz reported. In September, Arab mayors and other community leaders protested in Jerusalem to demand that police crack down on illegal arms in Arab communities – a far cry from the one-time norm of Arab leaders stormily demanding that police stay out of their towns. In June, the Aman Center, an organization that combats violence in Arab society, ran a conference together with the national forum of Arab mayors and other groups on how to improve relations between the police and the Arab community; the center’s head, Sheikh Kamil Ahmad Rayan, said inter alia that Israeli Arabs must start treating police with respect. Last month, when Yom Kippur coincided with the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, the chief imam of Acre’s Al-Jazaar Mosque teamed up with the city’s chief rabbi to pay joint visits to both Jewish and Arab schools the week before and urge students to show respect for each other’s holiday.
In short, an emerging Arab leadership of builders is challenging the veteran Arab leadership, which has long been on the destroyers’ side. Thus Jewish leaders have an obvious interest in supporting the former while combating the latter.
Some local-level Jewish leaders, as the above examples show, are trying to do exactly that. But at the national level, Jewish leaders across the political spectrum are largely doing the opposite.
On the left, Knesset members and civil-society activists often prefer to blame all problems on the government, thereby absolving arsonists like the Arab MKs and the rioters of responsibility, while treating the arsonists as the authentic and legitimate voice of the Arab public. By so doing, they are bolstering the destroyers rather than the builders. On the right, Knesset members and religious leaders too often lash out at all Arabs indiscriminately. By so doing, they are undermining the builders, who need to be able to show their community that a constructive approach will be reciprocated by the Jewish majority.
This isn’t just bad for Israel as a whole; ironically, it’s also bad for each side’s stated political goals. The left claims to champion equality, yet anti-Arab discrimination will never be eradicated as long as many Arabs, including the community’s most visible and vocal representatives, openly oppose the Jewish state’s very existence or publicly support terror; if Israeli Arabs act like enemies, most Jews will inevitably treat them accordingly. The right claims to oppose territorial concessions, yet more territory inevitably means more Arab citizens, and the larger the Arab minority, the more important integrating it becomes.
And if all this weren’t enough, one of the few national leaders who genuinely understands the issue’s importance – President Reuven Rivlin – has managed, in his few short months in office, to so antagonize the very people who need to hear his message most that he’s become useless. True, the left adores him. But as a veteran center-right politician, he was uniquely placed to bring his message of coexistence to the right as well. Instead, judging by the complaints I’ve heard personally from friends and neighbors, he has alienated even the non-extreme right by hurling sweeping insults of the very kind he claims to condemn: Israel is a “sick society”; thuggishness has “permeated the national dialogue”; etc.
So we have a war going on for the soul of Israeli Arab society – one of the most important Israel may ever fight – and our national leadership is at best sitting on the sidelines, and at worst actively abetting the destroyers while undermining the builders. It’s a sad day for a country when its best hope is for people to simply ignore their ostensible leaders.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
The new policy won’t solve all the city’s problems, but if maintained, it might reduce the violence
Amid all the bad news from Jerusalem last week, one report offered a glimmer of hope: According to Haaretz, police have begun enforcing the law against misdemeanors like urinating in public or littering the streets with sunflower-seed shells in Arab neighborhoods of the city. Unsurprisingly, some people are crying “racist harassment.” But this tactic draws on a theory of policing that has been spectacularly successful elsewhere.
The “broken windows” theory holds that when minor offenses are allowed to proliferate, respect for the law breaks down, thereby encouraging more serious crime. When then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani famously tested it in New York two decades ago, crimes rates plummeted a whopping 39% in three years.
Could a crackdown on petty crime bring similar benefits to Jerusalem, which has many problems New York doesn’t face? Quite possibly yes – because one major cause of the city’s violence is the fact that police have long treated Arab neighborhoods as no-go areas for almost anything short of a murder probe. And when the police aren’t present, there’s nobody to stop the thugs from taking over.
Nothing better illustrates this dynamic than the Shuafat refugee camp. Last week, security officials fingered this neighborhood as the source of many of the recent terror attacks in Jerusalem. And what makes Shuafat an ideal terrorist staging ground is that it’s effectively no man’s land. Being inside Jerusalem’s municipal borders, the army doesn’t operate there. But being outside the security fence, police don’t operate there either. The result, as Nadav Shragai reported in Israel Hayom in September, is that “armed gangs wielding handguns, AK-47 semi-automatic rifles, and M-16 rifles roam the streets.”
A “broken windows” policy, in contrast, requires police to be present in force. They can’t fine people for spitting sunflower seeds or urinating in public without being around to see them do it. And once police are present, it becomes much harder for armed gangs and terrorists to operate freely.
Moreover, according to that same Haaretz report, the new policing policy has been accompanied by stepped-up civil enforcement against suspected criminals. Granted, it would be better if government agencies simply enforced the law year-round against everyone. But since they don’t and never have, it makes sense to prioritize enforcement against people suspected of violence, as this bolsters deterrence.
For instance, Haaretz reported, the families of several Jerusalem residents suspected or convicted of involvement in terror recently had property confiscated to cover outstanding debts to the National Insurance Institute. Similarly, police have started giving the names of suspected stone-throwers to the Jerusalem municipality so it can check and see if their families have open files for building violations or unpaid taxes. This might well be even more of a deterrent than prosecution, since stone throwers, for instance, rarely face serious criminal penalties.
Granted, the new policies risk generating resentment. But if they enable police to significantly reduce the violence, Jerusalem’s Arab residents will be the prime beneficiaries, because they’re the ones who suffer most when daily battles with police take over their neighborhoods: People get hurt in the cross-fire; police roadblocks disrupt traffic; noisy riots prevent sleep; businesses suffer from lack of customers; infrastructure repairs are delayed; and so forth. That’s why postings on Palestinian social media, as social media analyst Orit Perlov wrote last week, show that “Most of the Palestinian public has no interest in violence, and calls are being heard to restrain the young people who are harming the entire population’s quality of life.”
Broken-windows policing does face one major challenge in Jerusalem that didn’t exist in New York: the presence of two influential parties – Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority in the West Bank – with a major interest in inflaming tensions.
A fascinating study by the Molad think tank found that over the past 15 years, there has been an inverse relationship between terror in Jerusalem and terror in the West Bank: When the West Bank is aflame, Jerusalem gets quieter; when Jerusalem is aflame, the West Bank gets quieter. Being doctrinaire leftists, the Molad researchers ignored the obvious explanation, but the past few weeks have been a textbook example of it: When Palestinian organizations are fighting Israel on their own turf, they can’t spare resources for Jerusalem. But when they want to fight Israel without embroiling their own turf, they target Jerusalem.
Thus PA President Mahmoud Abbas has worked hard recently to suppress violence in the West Bank, fearing that an eruption there would threaten his own rule. But at the same time, he has vociferously incited to violence in Jerusalem. Last month, for instance, he accused Jews of “desecrating” the Temple Mount and said they must be prevented from ascending it “in any way,” adding, “We must confront them and defend our holy sites.” Similarly, he implicitly praised last month’s attempted murder of Rabbi Yehuda Glick in Jerusalem, saying the would-be killer “will go to heaven as a martyr.”
As for Hamas, it fought a 50-day war with Israel this summer and isn’t interested in another. Yet it desperately needs to distract Gaza residents from a grim reality in which the promised reconstruction has stalled, Egypt has closed its border and talks on a long-term cease-fire have been suspended. So instead, it’s inflaming Jerusalem. As Shragai reported last month, the northern branch of Israel’s Islamic Movement, a Hamas affiliate, is paying hundreds of Hamas and Farah members to stay on the Temple Mount and provoke trouble if Jews visit. In addition, most of the city’s recent terror attacks have reportedly been perpetrated by people affiliated with Hamas, which has actively encouraged both the terror and the rioting.
The obvious conclusion is that Israel could facilitate the task of ending the violence in Jerusalem by making it clear to both Hamas and Fatah that continued efforts to inflame the city will have consequences in Gaza and the West Bank.
But whether or not this ever happens, there’s no way to end the violence without the police reclaiming Arab neighborhoods from control of the thugs. Thus even if it’s not a complete solution, a broken-windows policing policy is an excellent place to start.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
There’s been a lot written recently about how Israel’s “right-wing” government is “silencing” the leftist opposition. So it’s worth noting that for all the talk of the silenced left, the only media outlet Israel’s parliament has actually tried to silence–repeatedly–just happens to be the only major Hebrew-language media organ representing the center-right, as well as the only one that enthusiastically supports Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And the votes that allowed the latest version of this undemocratic legislation to pass its preliminary Knesset reading today came not from the “anti-democratic” right, but primarily from Israel’s self-proclaimed champions of democracy on the left.
To be clear, the bill won’t become law. Like other undemocratic bills proposed by irresponsible Knesset members in recent years, it will be quietly killed in committee by wiser heads after having gotten its sponsors the media attention they craved. But nobody on the “anti-democratic” right has ever tried to pass legislation shutting down left-wing papers like Haaretz or Yedioth Ahronoth; only on the “democratic” left is silencing newspapers you don’t like considered acceptable behavior.
The bill to shutter Sheldon Adelson’s Israel Hayom is just a particularly crude example of a broader problem: The Israeli left is all too fond of trying to silence others. And the false claim that it is really the one being silenced is one of its favorite tactics for doing so: After all, an “anti-democratic” government doesn’t deserve to have its views heard by the international community.
Noah Efron, himself a self-proclaimed leftist, dissected the absurdity of the left’s silencing claim in a thoughtful Haaretz piece in September. Left-wing newspapers and websites still publish, left-wing academics still lecture, left-wing NGOs still disseminate material, left-wing activists still demonstrate, and the specific individuals who were allegedly silenced actually “received hours of airtime and hundreds of column inches,” he wrote.
“We haven’t been silenced. We’ve just failed to make our case,” Efron concluded. “The answer is not to convince readers of the New York Times that Israel is no longer a democracy. The answer is to accept that Israel is a democracy, and that democracy demands that we speak to our fellow citizens … that we persuade them rather than dismiss them.”
But the claim of silencing isn’t just an excuse for left-wing failures; it’s also an effective tactic for ensuring that the non-left won’t be heard. The Israel Hayom bill is instructive because it exposes this desire to silence others, something the left usually tries to conceal.
The first attempt to shutter the paper was an unsubtle bill making it illegal for non-Israelis to own Israeli newspapers–a restriction chosen because it applied to one paper only. Its hypocrisy was underscored by the fact that the left evinced no objection whatsoever when another American tycoon rescued the left-wing Channel 10 television by becoming its majority shareholder.
The current bill, which aims to destroy Israel Hayom’s business model, is equally unsubtle. It would outlaw freebie papers–but only if they’re successful. Freebies that don’t compete with the mainstream media are fine, but any freebie that becomes one of the four highest-circulation papers would have to start charging at least 70 percent of what the cheapest of the other three charges. Needless to say, only one Israeli freebie makes the top four.
Leftists justify this undemocratic bill by claiming Israel Hayom isn’t a real paper, but a Netanyahu mouthpiece. Personally, I agree that the paper’s coverage of Netanyahu is excessively fawning–but not more so than, say, Haaretz’s coverage of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas or the New York Times’s coverage of Barack Obama. So should the Knesset ban Haaretz, too? Indeed, Haaretz and Yedioth unabashedly use their editorial freedom to support left-wing politicians; somehow, only editorial support for a center-right politician is illegitimate.
It’s also worth noting that on issues other than Netanyahu, Israel Hayom’s veteran journalists–most of whom previously reported for left-wing media outlets–actually provide interesting coverage of issues the other major media outlets prefer to ignore, like Palestinian groups’ deliberate instigation of the recent rioting in Jerusalem or the growing integrationist trend among Israel’s Christian Arabs.
This, I suspect, is the real reason why leftists loathe it. But admitting that they’d rather deprive the public of information that calls their political program into question wouldn’t sound any better than admitting they’ve failed to convince a majority of Israelis of this program’s wisdom. Much better to dismiss Israel Hayom as a mere propaganda organ and try to shut it down–all while loudly proclaiming that they are really the ones being silenced.
Originally published in Commentary
No other democracy worldwide has ever treated legislation passed by a minority of parliament as a binding constitution
The heated debate over a bill to let the Knesset override Supreme Court decisions that overturn laws drove home a shocking fact: An entire generation has now grown up believing a law approved by a mere quarter of the Knesset actually constitutes binding constitutional legislation.
Back in 1992, when the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom passed by a vote of 32-21, the idea that a law enacted with less than half the 120-member parliament even present and just a quarter voting in favor could be used by the court to overturn subsequent legislation passed by much larger majorities would have flabbergasted most Israelis. That’s precisely why so few MKs showed up to vote. On consequential votes, the entire house turns out. But few MKs in 1992 considered this bill terribly consequential.
Why? Because normal democracies – which Israel was until 1992 – understand that binding constitutions require approval by super-majorities, not minorities. No other democracy worldwide has ever treated legislation passed by a minority of parliament as a binding constitution.
Nor has any other democracy ever adopted a constitution “almost secretly,” as then-Supreme Court President Aharon Barak famously described Israel’s process. Normal democracies understand that constitutions must be adopted intentionally – meaning by people who know they’re voting on a constitution. In contrast, most people in 1992 viewed Basic Laws not as a binding constitution, but merely as candidates for inclusion in a future constitution. That’s why courts had consistently ruled that previous Basic Laws didn’t authorize them to overturn subsequent legislation. Thus few MKs imagined this law would be treated differently. If they had, they might well have voted it down.
This brings us to the oft-heard claim – repeated in a Jerusalem Post editorial last week – that the bill enabling the Knesset to override the Basic Law is “anti-democratic.” This would be questionable even if Israel had a valid constitution: Canada lets its parliament override the constitution, and nobody challenges Canada’s democratic credentials.
But it’s downright ridiculous when the “constitution” at issue doesn’t meet the two most basic standards for constitutional legislation: approval by a large majority, and approval by people who knew they were actually enacting a constitution. The Basic Law was enacted as just another ordinary law – and ordinary legislation can be superseded by any subsequent law, even without a special override provision.
What really is anti-democratic, however, is that an unelected Supreme Court has taken a law never intended as a binding constitution and turned it into one. Granted, the Knesset has cravenly acquiesced in this judicial power grab for 22 years, due to fears of being deemed “anti-democratic” by the legal and academic elites who cheered the court’s bloodless coup. But that doesn’t change the fundamental, anti-democratic fact that Israel is the world’s only “democracy” whose constitution was imposed by judicial fiat rather than knowingly adopted by the public’s elected representatives.
Moreover, as the Post’s editorialist correctly noted, few things endanger democracy more than undermining democratic institutions. Yet nothing has undermined Israel’s democratic institutions more than the court’s decision to impose this Basic Law as a constitution.
Over the past two decades, the court has repeatedly overturned government policies on issues that most democracies leave to their elected representatives – ranging from welfare policy to defense – by claiming that these policies violate the Basic Law. But controversial policy issues usually involve competing values, any of which could theoretically be subsumed under the Basic Law’s vague wording. Thus in many cases, the court has simply substituted its own value judgments for those of the public’s elected representatives. It has thereby made itself just another political player, no more worthy of respect than ministers or MKs, while also alienating sizable sectors of the public that disagree with its hierarchy of values.
This has had three pernicious consequences. First, public trust in the court has plummeted: Only 56% of Israeli Jews expressed confidence in the court in 2013, down from 80% in 2000. This undermines its ability to play the vital role courts normally play in democratic societies – as a trusted venue for resolving disputes peacefully, thereby reducing the likelihood of violence.
Second, the court’s behavior has damaged Israelis’ faith in democracy. Democracy rests on the premise that change can be effected peacefully by persuasion: Convince enough people that you’re right, and they’ll elect a government that will make the desired change. But that premise no longer holds if an unelected court routinely overrules government decisions by claiming they violate a “constitution” of the court’s own making.
Finally, it has undermined the very respect for human rights that elevating the Basic Law to constitutional status was supposed to reinforce. Nothing illustrates this better than the law the override bill is aimed at reinstating, which allows illegal migrants to be held indefinitely at the open detention center in Holot. I actually agree with the court that this law is problematic. But as I noted last year, after it overturned an earlier version of the law, the court forfeited its authority when it chose to become just another political player. Among large parts of the public, its views on human rights now carry no more weight – and sometimes less – than those of any politician.
Even worse, the court’s abuse of the Basic Law to impose its own value judgments on the government has gutted the very idea of “human rights”: Many Israelis – particularly younger ones, who have grown up in this world the court created – now see human rights not as a positive good, but as a term devoid of any real content whose sole purpose is to justify any policy the justices want to impose.
Thus the real problem with the override bill isn’t that it’s “anti-democratic” – which it isn’t. It’s that it does nothing to ameliorate any of these very real evils.
Undoing two decades of judicial overreach won’t be easy. But there’s only one logical place to start: Stop treating a Basic Law passed by a mere quarter of the Knesset as a binding “constitution.” If Israel is ever to have a constitution, it must be adopted the same way other democracies adopt theirs: openly, in full knowledge, and by a super-majority.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
Ascribing complex problems to simplistic causes exaggerates their scope and makes them harder to fix
Three news items over the last two weeks highlight the degree to which real problems, like poverty and discrimination, are often wrongly exaggerated by lumping several unrelated issues together. The well-meaning may hope to draw more attention to these problems by magnifying them; the malicious simply seek to make Israel look worse. But regardless of the motive, it’s deeply counterproductive.
Take, for instance, a Central Bureau of Statistics survey published last week which found that 14.5% of adult Israelis subjectively felt poor last year. That’s significantly less than the official poverty rate – 19.4% of families and 23.5% of individuals, the highest in the Western world.
The main reason for this discrepancy is the Haredim. Only 22% of Haredi respondents told the CBS they felt poor, despite an official Haredi poverty rate approaching 60%, and only 15% of respondents in predominantly Haredi Bnei Brak, one of Israel’s poorest cities. That’s because their poverty results from a lifestyle choice that many deem worth the financial sacrifice.
Does this matter? Quite a bit – because if you subtract the people who are poor by choice, Israel’s poverty rate no longer looks anomalously high. If, as seems likely, the 14.5% who said they felt poor approximates the level of involuntary poverty, then Israel’s involuntary poverty rate is still higher than the OECD average (11.3%), but similar to that of Australia and South Korea and lower than that of Spain, Japan and the United States.
In other words, Israel’s anomalous poverty rate isn’t evidence of a uniquely unjust society; its stems from having a large community that’s poor by choice added to an otherwise normal Western poverty rate. Clearly, voluntary poverty is a problem that needs addressing, since its current dimensions make it unsustainable. But it’s a very different problem from involuntary poverty, and must be treated as such. By lumping these two completely distinct problems together, we not only make Israel look worse than it is, we hinder treatment of both problems by obscuring their causes and dimensions.
For another example, consider the persistent Jewish-Arab performance gap on standardized tests, which is usually blamed solely on discrimination. Budgetary discrimination against Arab schools certainly exists, and it does play a significant role in the performance gap. But a study published earlier this month found that even when educational and socioeconomic backgrounds are identical, Hebrew speakers can read their native language faster and more accurately than Arabic speakers can read theirs, due to two distinctive features of the Arabic language.
First, Arabic is diglossic, meaning its oral and written forms are so different that they are effectively two different languages. Thus while Hebrew speakers read in their mother tongue, Arabic speakers read in a second language, which is obviously harder. Second, the physical shape of Arabic letters makes them harder to distinguish than Hebrew letters, so Arabic readers need longer to decipher them and also make more mistakes. Both these factors affect the speed of comprehension.
Thus whenever students take Hebrew and Arabic versions of the same standardized test, the Arabic speakers are at an inherent disadvantage. And that explains part, though obviously not all, of the performance gap.
But to whatever degree this gap is an artifact created by differences in the respective languages, it says nothing about the quality of students’ education or their comprehension of the material. What it does say, as one of the study’s researchers suggested, is that perhaps standardized tests should be adjusted to account for the inherent linguistic differences, so as to give a better picture of what Arab students are really learning. And that problem is completely unrelated to the budgetary one.
Incidentally, studies also show that English speakers read their native tongue faster than Hebrew speakers do, both because the shapes of Hebrew letters are harder to distinguish than those of English letters and because written Hebrew has no vowels. That also explains part – though again, hardly all – of the gap between Israel and other Western countries on international standardized tests: Hebrew- and Arabic-speaking Israelis have an inherent disadvantage compared to countries that use the Latin alphabet, as all European languages do.
A third critical element of the Jewish-Arab performance gap was highlighted by data published last week on pass rates for the 2013 matriculation exams. The wealthy Jewish town of Kochav Yair topped the list, with a pass rate of 93.4%. But in second place – up from third the year before – was the impoverished Druze village of Beit Jann, with a pass rate of 92%. Several other Druze towns also showed impressive improvement, including Isfiya (up 20 percentage points, to 65.3%) and Yarka (up 18 percentage points, to 53.9%).
A 2013 Haaretz article on Beit Jann’s inspiring story noted that at the rate Druze schools are improving, the Druze pass rate will soon exceed the Jewish one. Much of this improvement stems from implementing a special program, which includes additional funding, that the Yeholot association runs in 100 disadvantaged communities – Jewish, Arab, Druze and Bedouin. But Druze educators also credited a sea change in community attitudes toward education.
In short, the Druze have begun viewing education as high priority – something Christian Arabs, whose pass rate already exceeds the Jewish one, have long done, but which many Muslim Arabs still don’t. That’s why pass rates in many Muslim communities still languish around 25% to 35%.
Again, this isn’t to deny the existence of discrimination or the fact that money matters; on average, wealthier communities have higher pass rates than poor ones. But as Beit Jann and other Druze towns show, cultural attitudes and local leadership also matter tremendously.
As with poverty, lumping together three completely distinct educational problems – budgetary discrimination, cultural attitudes and testing bias – and ascribing the entire undifferentiated mass to “anti-Arab discrimination” not only makes Israel look worse than it is, but also hinders treatment of all three problems by obscuring their true causes and dimensions.
The same is true for many other complex social problems. And we would do better at solving all of them is we stopped blaming them entirely on simplistic and inaccurate causes like “economic injustice” or “discrimination.”
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
Reforming politicians earn little positive press to offset the costs of angering powerful interests
Last week’s uproar over the price of Milky puddings died down quickly once the myth that Israelis were flocking to Berlin was debunked, but the high cost of living remains unchanged. Although Israelis across the political spectrum regularly deem this issue one of their top concerns, successive governments have done little to address it. Various players share the blame for this failure, including politicians, big business, public-sector unions and the defense establishment. But one major culprit consistently escapes scrutiny – the media.
To understand how the media thwarts efforts at reform, try asking yourselves one simple question: What’s the most important economic reform carried out by the current government, and which minister made it happen?
The correct answer, in my opinion, is the awarding of contracts for building two private seaports to compete with the existing Haifa and Ashdod ports, a reform tenaciously pushed through by Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz. Economists have been advocating this for decades and successive governments have talked about it for years, but until now, nothing has happened. So the fact that a Chinese firm signed a contract last month to build the new port near Ashdod, while the winner of the tender for the new Haifa port is slated to be announced imminently, ought to be big news. Instead, it’s been relegated to the bottom of the business pages, where most Israelis will never see it.
By giving such scant coverage to major reforms, the media create a massive political disincentive for politicians to make them. For such reforms often entail political costs, and positive media coverage is the only benefit that could compensate for these costs.
Granted, this isn’t an issue for those rare reforms whose benefits to the public are immediately evident. When competition was introduced into the cellphone market, for instance, Israelis’ cellphone bills promptly plummeted, making then-Communications Minister Moshe Kahlon an instant hero. But in many major reforms, the public benefits are neither immediate nor clearly ascribable to the reform.
The ports are a prime example. According to a 2009 study by the Antitrust Authority, Israel’s ports are 30% less efficient than similar-sized ports elsewhere, costing the economy some NIS 5 billion a year. The Trajtenberg Committee on socioeconomic reform echoed this conclusion in 2011, writing that “inferior service and low production in Israel’s ports cost the economy, which depends heavily on the ports, hundreds of millions of shekels a year. This is before taking into consideration the indirect damage, stemming from the business uncertainty imposed on the economy by the disruptions [in the ports’ work] and delays in developing new port infrastructures.”
The main culprit is the all-powerful dockworkers union, which has exploited its ability to shut down the ports to obtain outrageous benefits. That’s why “on-call” port pilots receive full salaries to sit at home and do nothing; why dockworkers earn far more than people doing similar jobs in the private sector; and why strikes are repeatedly called over demands like additional meal vouchers or the union’s “right” to dictate the identity of the CEO’s personal assistant.
The additional costs imposed by our monopolistic, inefficient ports jack up the price of every single imported product in Israel. They also jack up prices of locally made products that depend on imported raw materials, and even of products that have no imported components, since the latter face competition only from imports whose prices have been artificially inflated.
Thus building new ports to compete against the existing union-controlled monopoly is likely to result in lower prices. But any such benefits will arrive long after Katz has left office; the new Haifa port will open only in five or six years, and the Ashdod port in seven or eight. And even then, the benefits won’t be obviously and directly linked to the new ports: If prices begin falling in another eight years, few consumers will think to credit Katz’s reform.
The political costs, in contrast, are direct and immediate: The powerful dockworkers’ union, furious over Katz’s effort to break their monopoly, has declared war on him. And not only does this union command a solid block of votes in Katz’s Likud party, which it intends to wield against him in the next party primary, but so do other public-sector unions with which it is allied.
Many other vital reforms also involve confronting powerful interest groups and thus entail similar political costs. Hence absent compensatory political benefits, politicians face substantial disincentives to reform. And the only body capable of providing such benefits is the media.
If the media relentlessly exposed unproductive politicians while giving prominent and favorable coverage to those who implement significant reforms, this would provide reformers with a significant political benefit to balance the political costs. But instead, the media lavishes most of its attention on politicians who make a lot of noise while accomplishing little. Childish insults in the Knesset consistently win headlines, whereas politicians who quietly work to get things done are ignored.
Consequently, reforms happen only when a politician is either so politically strong that he can afford the political costs, so precariously situated that the alternative to reform is certain political death, or so committed that he doesn’t care about the political consequences. Katz, for instance, appears to combine genuine passion for port reform with a strong enough political base in Likud that he can probably weather the dockworkers’ revenge. But that combination is rare.
Moreover, many reforms can’t be implemented quickly. Work on the port reform, for example, began during the previous government, and could easily have stalled had Katz not made the unusual decision to remain in his ministry for a second term so he could finish what he had started. Greater media attention, however, would increase pressure on incumbent ministers not to abandon half-completed projects in favor of more prestigious ministries, and also on new ministers to complete reforms started by their predecessors.
Absent clear political incentives, reforms of the kind the economy desperately needs will remain a rarity. And only the media has the power to create the necessary incentives. Unfortunately, it prefers to waste its time, and ours, on covering trivialities.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
As long as the thugs are in control, most Arabs will continue publicly assailing Israel even if they quietly support it, just because it’s the safest thing to do
The scene recurs with monotonous regularity before every Jewish holiday: Jews seek to visit the Temple Mount on the eve of the holiday, and Arabs stage meticulously preplanned riots to prevent them. But last Wednesday, on the eve of Sukkot, it ended differently than usual. Instead of police turning away the Jews to appease the rioters, they fought the rioters and let the visits proceed.
It’s not yet clear whether this represents a new trend: On Sunday, police closed the Mount to non-Muslims again due to fear of rioting; Monday, they fought the rioters and reopened it to visitors. Yet all Israelis should hope it becomes one, because the police’s longstanding reluctance to confront Arab thugs has negative consequences that go far beyond the Temple Mount. Large swathes of Jewish Jerusalem, facing what has been dubbed a “quiet intifada,” have suffered from this reluctance for months. Israeli Arabs nationwide have suffered from it for years. And all hope for improved Jewish-Arab relations in this country remains doomed as long as it persists.
I’ve written before about the dangerous consequences of police capitulation to Arab rioters on the Mount: It denies Jews the fundamental right to pray at Judaism’s holiest site, undermines Israel’s diplomatic case for retaining Jerusalem as its united capital and encourages the Arab belief that violence pays. But while the first two are location-specific evils, the third applies throughout Israel. Hence it’s no surprise that such thuggery has spread.
In Jerusalem, Arab attacks on Jews have skyrocketed in recent months. School buses and cars have been stoned, cars and gas stations torched, houses pelted with Molotov cocktails and even shot at with live bullets – not just in predominantly Arab neighborhoods, but in veteran Jewish neighborhoods like Gilo, Pisgat Ze’ev and French Hill. The light rail has been vandalized so often that over a third of the trains are out of service. Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus has been repeatedly pelted with rocks and firebombs, and vehicles drive to and from the nearby army base in convoys, as if through a war zone.
But this violence doesn’t only harm Jerusalem’s Jews; it also harms law-abiding Arab residents of the neighborhoods whence it emanates, like Issawiya and Shuafat. Long before the violence spilled over into Jewish neighborhoods, for instance, thugs were routinely stoning Israeli ambulances that entered Arab neighborhoods. Consequently, ambulances won’t enter without a police escort, and waiting for this escort can waste precious time on life-saving calls. Moreover, in many Arab neighborhoods, the police’s refusal to confront the violence has allowed the thugs to take over completely, leading to rising crime and plummeting personal security. In Shuafat, for instance, “residents said that armed gangs wielding handguns, AK-47 semi-automatic rifles, and M-16 rifles roam the streets,” Nadav Shragai reported in Israel Hayom last month.
And this isn’t true only in East Jerusalem; it’s true of Arab towns nationwide. Because police for years treated Arab towns as no-go areas, they are now awash in illegal weapons, resulting in soaring crime rates. For instance, Arabs constitute 50% of all murder victims and 67% of perpetrators, despite constituting only 20% of Israel’s population.
In fairness, police neglected Arab towns largely because they were unwelcome there; residents often greeted them with riots and barrages of rocks. But 95% of Arabs now deem violence their community’s biggest problem, according to a recent study, and have therefore changed their attitude toward the police. That’s why Arab mayors and Knesset members have been demanding a greater police presence in their towns, and also why Arab mayors and merchants took the lead in trying to quell riots that erupted after Jewish extremists killed teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir in July: The law-abiding majority has realized that they are the main victims when police cede control to the thugs; both their security and their ability to earn a living suffers.
Yet the police’s unwillingness to confront Arab thugs doesn’t just hurt Arabs and Jews individually; it also undermines their ability to live together. Clearly, when thugs control Arab neighborhoods, Jews are afraid to visit and patronize Arab businesses. But in addition, ordinary Arabs are afraid to challenge the thugs’ anti-Israel party line.
Last month, for instance, Israel Hayom reported that an Arab teen had been forced to flee the country by the death threats he received after courageously making a video denouncing the kidnapping of three Israeli teens in June. Father Gabriel Nadaf, a Christian Arab who supports Arab service in the IDF and defended Israel last month at the UN Human Rights Council, has seen his son attacked and hospitalized because of his views. In both cases, police failed miserably to protect them from the thugs. So why would other Arabs want to follow their example?
Few people are heroes; most just want to live a quiet life. Thus as long as the thugs are in control, most Arabs will continue publicly assailing Israel even if they quietly support it, just because it’s the safest thing to do.
It’s important to note that little of this Arab thuggery is spontaneous. In last Wednesday’s incident on the Temple Mount, for instance, the rioters built barricades in advance, stockpiled rocks, firebombs, fireworks, metal pipes and concrete slabs, then slept on the Mount Tuesday night to be ready to start rioting bright and early. The “quiet intifada” in Jerusalem is similarly well-organized, Shragai reported: In each neighborhood, a Palestinian faction like Fatah, Hamas, the DFLP or the PFLP is in charge; the rioters have been trained to resist interrogation; the Palestinian Authority pays their legal fees; and someone as yet unknown is providing the thousands of shekels spent on their newest weapon of choice, fireworks.
In short, this is organized crime. And for the sake of Jews and Arabs alike, it’s vital that police make a determined effort to stop it instead of seeking to appease the thugs by such tactics as barring Jews from the Mount or failing to enforce the law in Arab towns and neighborhoods. For only thus will Jews and Arabs alike be able to enjoy not only security, but genuine coexistence.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
Hateful graffiti targeting a minority have repeatedly been scrawled on cars and buildings, including houses of worship, yet police frequently fail to arrest the culprits. Innocent people have been viciously attacked and occasionally even murdered just because they belong to this minority. Clearly, this is a country awash in racism and prejudice that it’s making no real effort to stem, so it deserves harsh condemnation from anyone who cares about such fundamental liberal values as tolerance and nonviolence, right?
That’s certainly the conclusion many liberals leaped to about a similar wave of anti-Arab attacks in Israel. But what I actually just described is the recent wave of anti-Semitic attacks in the United States, and there has–quite properly–been no similar rush to denounce America. Since the American government and people overwhelmingly condemn such attacks, and America remains one of the best places in the world to live openly as a Jew, liberals correctly treat such incidents as exceptions rather than proof that the U.S. is irredeemably anti-Semitic. But somehow, Israel never merits a similarly nuanced analysis.
Consider just a few of the attacks I referenced in the first paragraph: This past weekend–on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year–swastikas were spray-painted on a Jewish fraternity at Emory University in Atlanta, and also on a synagogue in Spokane, Washington, on the other side of the country. In August, a Jewish couple was attacked in New York by thugs who shouted anti-Semitic slogans, threw a water bottle at the woman, and punched her skullcap-wearing husband. In July, pro-Israel demonstrators were attacked by stick-wielding thugs in Los Angeles. On August 9, an Orthodox rabbi was murdered in Miami while walking to synagogue on the Sabbath; police insist this wasn’t a hate crime, though they haven’t yet arrested any suspects, but local Jews are unconvinced, as a synagogue and a Jewish-owned car on the same street were vandalized with anti-Semitic slogans just two weeks earlier. And in April, a white supremacist killed three people at two Jewish institutions near Kansas City, Kansas.
A Martian looking at this list, devoid of any context, might well conclude that America is a deeply anti-Semitic country. And of course, he’d be wrong. Context–the fact that these incidents are exceptions to the overwhelmingly positive picture of Jewish life in America–matters greatly.
Yet that’s no less true for anti-Arab attacks in Israel. As in America, both the government and the public have almost unanimously condemned such attacks. As in America, culprits have been swiftly arrested in some cases, like the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir in July; also as in America, the failure to make arrests in other cases stems not from tolerance for such crimes, but from the simple fact that some cases are harder to solve than others.
Finally, as in America, these incidents belie the fact that overall, Israeli Arabs are better integrated and have more rights not only than any of their counterparts in the Middle East, but also than some of their counterparts in Europe. Israel, for instance, has no laws against building minarets, like Switzerland does, or against civil servants wearing headscarves, as France does. Arabs serve in the Knesset, the Supreme Court, and sometimes the cabinet; they are doctors, university department heads, judges, and high-tech workers.
Clearly, anti-Arab prejudice exists in Israel, just as anti-Jewish prejudice exists in America. But a decade-old tracking project found that it has been declining rather than growing. And successive governments have been trying hard in recent years to narrow persistent Arab-Jewish gaps: For instance, an affirmative action campaign almost quadrupled the number of Arabs in the civil service from 2007 to 2011. Indeed, as Ron Gerlitz, co-executive director of Sikkuy – The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality, argued in August, it’s precisely the Arab minority’s growing integration that has outraged the anti-Arab fringe and helped spark the recent rise in hate crimes.
So it’s past time for liberals to give Israel the same courtesy they extend America: Stop looking at hate crimes in a vacuum and start seeing them for what they are–isolated incidents that don’t and shouldn’t condemn an entire country as “racist.”
Originally published in Commentary