Domestic Policy
The cabinet must make decisions while knowing only what prime and defense ministers choose to tell it
The frenetic pace of events in Israel often means that one day’s headlines are quickly eclipsed by the next. Yet it’s disturbing that one of last week’s biggest stories already seems to have vanished from the radar, because it’s one with long-term implications: During the recent war in Gaza, both the diplomatic-security cabinet and the full cabinet were repeatedly asked to make decisions while the prime and defense ministers were concealing potentially pertinent information from them.
The main antagonists in this story, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, disagree about many aspects of what happened. But they agree on three crucial facts. First, throughout the war, Bennett was supplying the cabinet with information unknown to any other minister except Ya’alon and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Second, Bennett’s information – obtained from his own sources in the army – was accurate. And third, this information was unknown to the other ministers because Ya’alon and Netanyahu intentionally kept it from them.
This inevitably raises ugly suspicions that Netanyahu and Ya’alon withheld certain information because it might have undercut the conclusions they wanted the cabinet to reach. But even assuming no such sinister intent, their behavior is unacceptable, because under Israel’s legal system, the entire cabinet bears collective responsibility for major decisions.
Granted, this responsibility is often delegated to a smaller forum, the diplomatic-security cabinet, which in turn often authorizes the prime and defense ministers to make certain decisions on their own. But even when decisions are delegated, the other ministers formally remain collectively responsible for what is decided in their names. And their responsibility is all the more obvious when they actually vote on these decisions, as they frequently did during the war on crucial questions ranging from whether to accept a cease-fire to whether to launch a ground operation.
Yet ministers can’t make intelligent decisions without receiving full information, which it now turns out Ya’alon and Netanyahu weren’t giving them. True, Ya’alon insists the withheld information was irrelevant. But at least one minister – Bennett – clearly disagrees.
Ya’alon also claims the information was withheld mainly for fear it would leak. That’s an understandable concern; some ministers are deplorably irresponsible about keeping secrets. But it still doesn’t justify withholding information ministers actually need to make a decision.
Such behavior would be particularly indefensible if the missing information related to the tunnel threat, as Bennett claims but Ya’alon vehemently denies. On this point, the available evidence is inconclusive. The diplomatic-security cabinet did vote overwhelmingly to accept a cease-fire on July 15, before a single tunnel had been destroyed; only Bennett and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman dissented. Two days later, after Hamas attacked Israel via one of these tunnels, a ground operation was suddenly launched with the explicit goal of destroying them. So it’s possible the ministers truly didn’t grasp the tunnel threat’s severity until that attack. But it’s equally possible that they simply felt Israel couldn’t afford to reject a cease-fire backed by both Washington and Cairo.
The most disturbing fact, however, is that this incident doesn’t seem to be a one-time lapse, or even unique to Netanyahu and Ya’alon, but standard governmental practice.
Former Shin Bet security service chief Yuval Diskin, who served under three prime ministers, wrote on Facebook last week that prime and defense ministers “have total control over the topics discussed, the agenda and the level of intelligence and information that cabinet members receive on different topics.” He consequently advocated creating some mechanism to ensure that all ministers have full access to relevant intelligence, but face stiff sanctions if they divulge it. Diskin, incidentally, loathes Netanyahu and misses no opportunity to smear him. So when even he defines this as a systemic problem rather than one specific to Netanyahu, it deserves to be taken seriously.
Nor is the problem confined to the cabinet: The Knesset, too, lacks independent access to information, making it virtually impossible for MKs to fulfill their duty to supervise the government. As Likud MK Yariv Levin noted earlier this month, “As opposed to other parliaments, we cannot impose significant sanctions on officials who do not appear. We cannot make them bring materials and information.”
Indeed, the Knesset even lacks the power to summon a specific government official to testify: By law, a minister can choose to testify in place of any of his subordinates, which effectively allows him to decide what information MKs do or don’t receive. The U.S. Congress, in contrast, can summon almost any government official to testify and demand to see almost any government document, with stiff penalties for noncompliance, including fines and/or prison terms.
Over the years, various efforts have been made to alleviate the information access problem. The National Security Council, for instance, was created to give the prime minister independent access to security information so he wouldn’t be totally dependent on whatever the army chooses to tell him. But even when the NSC actually does its job (which it hasn’t always), it still reports only to the premier. Thus the rest of the cabinet remains dependent on whatever the prime and defense ministers choose to divulge.
Similarly, the Knesset research center was created to give MKs an independent source of information. And it indeed supplies valuable independent research on many topics. But as Levin noted, it has neither the resources nor the power to monitor government ministries on an ongoing basis. And it’s particularly handicapped in dealing with security issues, where much relevant information is classified rather than open-source.
Levin, one of the Knesset’s most serious and effective legislators, is currently working on legislation to give the Knesset greater power to demand information from the government, similar to what other parliaments have. In light of last week’s developments, he ought to expand this bill to give the cabinet similar powers, along with appropriate sanctions for leaking.
Otherwise, we’ll continue to face a situation in which cabinets are essentially just rubber stamps for decisions made by the prime and defense ministers, because they are deprived of any information that might call the prime and defense ministers’ wisdom into question.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
When courts can’t punish killers, societies lose their ability to divert revenge into legal channels
With the Gaza war finally over, attention is returning to a problem the fighting temporarily pushed aside: the worrying surge in anti-Arab violence, whose worst but by no means only manifestation was July’s horrific revenge killing of teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir by Jews. Education Minister Shay Piron has ordered schools to devote class time to coexistence and combating racism. President Reuven Rivlin is working on his own program to combat violence. Police are cracking down on anti-Arab incitement. All these are worthy initiatives.
Yet if Israel is serious about combating anti-Arab violence, there’s something else it has to do: stop giving Arab terrorists a get-out-of-jail-free card. Clearly, wholesale releases of Arab prisoners who murdered Jews don’t justify Jewish attacks on Arabs. But they do make such violence harder to prevent.
To understand why, I’d like to borrow an insight from Times of Israel blogger Gil Reich on a seemingly unrelated topic: the Torah’s prescriptions for dealing with the sotah, a woman suspected by her husband of adultery, and the eshet yefat toar, an enemy woman desired by a soldier during wartime.
The sotah’s husband is told to put her through a humiliating ritual that culminates in drinking a liquid which will supposedly kill her if she’s guilty, but help her become pregnant if she’s innocent. The soldier is told to put his female captive through a humiliating ritual that entails spending a month making herself ugly. In both cases, Reich noted, this outrages our moral sense: Instead of humiliating these women, we want the Torah to “just say no” – to tell the jealous husband he can’t abuse or kill his suspect wife and the soldier he can’t rape his captive. But in fact, the Torah already has: It clearly prohibits murder, assault and rape. So why does it also prescribe these rituals?
The answer, Reich argues, is that sometimes, in the face of a very powerful emotion – the rage and suspicion of a jealous husband, the lust of a soldier at war – just saying no isn’t enough: The emotion will overcome the legal prohibition unless it is channeled instead into some safer outlet. So the Torah prescribes detailed legal procedures into which the husband or soldier can channel his rage or lust, thereby giving the white-hot emotions time to cool. And in practice, it seems to work: In Jewish society, the product of this millennia-old tradition, “honor killings” and military rape are both relatively rare by comparison with many other societies.
Revenge is an equally powerful emotion that also needs a channel. And in most societies, this channel is the legal system, which seeks to replace revenge killings with courtroom proceedings.
That’s precisely why blood feuds are common mainly in places where the legal system is weak or distrusted. In 19th-century America, for instance, the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feud claimed dozens of lives. But feuds like that don’t happen in today’s America, except perhaps in inner-city gang wars – places where the law’s writ still doesn’t run. Elsewhere, as the justice system gradually penetrated the frontier and backwoods areas, blood feuds gave way to criminal trials.
Israelis, too, have long channeled the natural human desire for revenge into legal proceedings. I witnessed this process firsthand at a shiva call following a 2002 suicide bombing. The victim’s brother furiously announced that he wanted to avenge her by killing Arabs – a normal response for a grief-stricken teenager. But his father and the other men present insisted it was the wrong response: We have a state and an army, they said; her killers will be caught, and they’ll spend the rest of their lives behind bars. And it worked.
The problem is that it no longer works, because only the first half of that equation remains true. The security services still excel at hunting down terrorists who murder Israelis; I have no doubt, for instance, that the terrorists who kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teens this June will eventually be caught. But how could anyone still believe that these men, once caught, will actually spend their lives behind bars?
It was bad enough when Israel was only freeing terrorists in exchange for kidnapped soldiers. Since abductions are mercifully rare, this at least allowed hope – however delusional it often proved – that killers would remain in jail.
But in July 2013, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu destroyed even that faint hope by agreeing to free 104 murderers (in four batches) not in exchange for kidnapped Israelis, but merely for the privilege of holding negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. Unlike kidnappings, talks with the PA or efforts to restart them aren’t rare occurrences; one or the other is almost always happening. So by agreeing to pay for them in the currency of freed terrorists, Netanyahu raised the specter of prisoner releases becoming chronic. True, he swore never to do it again, but he’s broken too many previous promises not to release terrorists for this one to be believable.
Thus today, the legal process is no longer a credible substitute for revenge; it’s too obvious that any arrested terrorist will eventually be freed in some deal or another. And once this realization sunk in, all it took was the spark provided by the three teens’ abduction: Absent a credible legal outlet for the grief and anger all Israelis shared, a minority of hotheads, mostly teenagers, channeled it instead into random, vicious attacks on Arabs.
In short, it’s no accident that the worst anti-Arab violence in decades erupted this summer: Three prisoner releases in nine months, solely to keep the PA at the negotiating table, were the straw that broke the legal system’s back. And without a credible legal system capable of channeling the desire for revenge, the primitive rule of the blood feud has returned.
Teaching children that anti-Arab violence is unacceptable is obviously important. So is arresting people who engage in such violence. But against a powerful emotion like revenge, education and enforcement alone will never suffice. Israel also needs a credible legal process into which this emotion can be channeled – one in which murderers, once put behind bars, actually stay there.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
My vote for most outrageous remark of the war goes to an unnamed senior IDF officer who pooh-poohed southern residents’ anger at seeing rocket fire from Gaza resume just two days after the army said they could safely go home.
What makes this outrageous isn’t just the content, but the speaker: A senior officer of the army charged with protecting Israel against external threats has essentially declared that tens of thousands of Israelis have no right to expect such protection. Instead, they must continue living with daily rocket and mortar fire, playing Russian roulette with their families’ lives and watching their children develop post-traumatic stress disorder.
True, southern residents “did not leave” despite being “fired on for years,” but even heroes have breaking points. Southerners heroically endured for nine years in the belief that eventually, the government and army would restore security. The latest war shattered that belief.
Then came the discovery that the tunnel network was far more extensive than the IDF had thought. This intelligence failure left southerners with little confidence in the army’s assertion that all tunnels have now been destroyed, a concern they have voiced repeatedly.
The result of all this is that residents of southern communities are now openly questioning whether they should stay. During the war, these communities turned into ghost towns, and a poll published last week found that 20% of residents are considering making this exodus permanent.
“The residents of the area are exhausted,” added another. “We’re frustrated that no long-term, strong, stable solution has been reached. That’s why the residents want to leave the community – because of lack of confidence in the government, whose role is to provide us with security.”
Last Thursday, when 10,000 people – mainly southerners – demonstrated in Tel Aviv to demand that the government finally restore their security, Eshkol Regional Council head Haim Yellin put the issue in a nutshell: “A sovereign state must protect the security of its residents, even if they live in the periphery,” he declared.
Of course, the IDF isn’t primarily to blame for the senior officer’s attitude: The army of a democratic state is supposed to execute the government’s policies, and his remarks faithfully reflected the policies of three successive prime ministers: Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Binyamin Netanyahu.
Ordinary Israelis do seem to grasp the magnitude of the southern threat: In one poll last month, fully 87% of respondents opposed a cease-fire, saying the war should continue until Hamas is defeated. Unfortunately, our political and military leadership has demonstrated no similar understanding. And that means both must be replaced by people who do – before it’s too late.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
Even back in the middle of last week, when it still seemed as if Hamas might actually have ceased its fire, only a minority of Israelis thought Israel had won the war. In three different polls, sizable majorities – ranging from 59 percent to 78 percent – termed the war at best a draw, and perhaps even an Israeli defeat; only 21% to 41% deemed it an Israeli victory. Thus, one would expect Israelis to be angry at the prime minister who presided over this fiasco. Instead, Binyamin Netanyahu’s handling of the war was approved by 59% of respondents in one poll and a whopping 77% in another.
Analysts as diverse as the centrist Shmuel Rosner and the left-wing Haaretz’s Yossi Verter explained this anomaly as reflecting a recognition that defeating Hamas isn’t possible, so a tie was the best that could be achieved. Yet that explanation doesn’t jibe with another poll finding: A majority of Israelis wanted to continue the operation rather than ending it. That makes no sense if they actually thought the operation had achieved the maximum possible; who in Israel would want IDF soldiers to continue dying in Gaza for nothing? Indeed, respondents even told pollsters which additional goals they wanted achieved: eliminating Hamas’s rocket capabilities, topping Gaza’s Hamas government, targeting Hamas leaders.
Thus a more plausible explanation stems from the epiphany produced by one of the war’s defining moments: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s July 25 cease-fire proposal. This proposal, which incorporated most of Hamas’ demands but none of Israel’s, was rejected by Israel’s entire political spectrum in an unprecedented display of unanimity.
Four days later, a Channel 1 television report reinforced this epiphany: It described an angry phone call in which U.S. President Barack Obama demanded that Netanyahu declare an immediate, unilateral cease-fire and then let Turkey and Qatar negotiate a more permanent truce. When Netanyahu protested that Qatar and Turkey aren’t honest brokers, but Hamas’s main patrons, Obama replied that he trusts them, and Israel is in no position to choose its mediators.
Both men’s spokespeople denied the report, but many Israelis found it credible, because the message it sent was identical to that sent by Kerry’s cease-fire proposal: In this war, Washington was effectively siding with Hamas against Israel. That Israelis indeed reached this conclusion is evident from another shocking poll finding: By a margin of more than 2-1 (65% to 29%), Israelis don’t “trust the U.S. in the negotiations with Hamas.” By contrast, they do trust Egypt, by almost the same margin (66% to 23%). In 27 years in Israel, I can’t remember another time when Israelis trusted any country more than America, much less an Arab one. After all, the U.S. has long been Israel’s staunchest friend and ally – and still is, where the American public and Congress are concerned.
But in late July, Israelis were forced to face the unpleasant truth that Obama is not – and that consequently, for the first time since the 1956 Sinai Campaign, Israel was fighting a war in which the White House actively backed its enemies. Certainly, other U.S. presidents have opposed Israeli military operations and tried to limit their achievements. But Obama sought an actual Israeli defeat: a deal that would satisfy Hamas’s demands instead of Israel’s.
Once having recognized this, Israelis also recognized that Netanyahu may have done the most anyone could have in a nearly impossible situation. True, he was visibly loath to take any military action against Hamas at all, and once pushed into it, he seemed to have no effective military plan; merely destroying 32 tunnels is a pathetic accomplishment for a month-long battle against a terrorist group with only a fraction of IDF’s firepower and manpower. Thus under other circumstances, Israelis would have criticized him for wasting a golden opportunity to defeat Hamas. After all, they remember quite well that the IDF defeated terror in the West Bank just a decade ago, so while they understand that defeating Hamas would be harder and entail more casualties, they don’t buy the argument that it’s impossible.
But with the White House on Hamas’s side, the lengthy war necessary to actually defeat Hamas simply wasn’t an option. Even extracting enough leeway for the limited task of destroying the tunnels required consummate diplomatic skill. So despite deploring the war’s meager military achievements, Israelis gave Netanyahu full credit for his adroit handling of its diplomatic side – credit he will retain as long as he refrains from accepting a bad cease-fire deal that lets Hamas rearm and rebuild its tunnels.
This, ironically, is the exact opposite of what Obama intended, as evidenced by his New York Times interview last week. In that interview, Obama declared that given Israel’s military capabilities, he doesn’t “worry about Israel’s survival.” But he does worry about Netanyahu having too much public support, because if the prime minister “doesn’t feel some internal pressure,” he’ll be “too strong” to be forced into making the massive concessions to the Palestinians Obama wants. In other words, Obama isn’tbothered by the prospect of an empowered Hamas capable of launching even more rockets and building even more cross-border attack tunnels; what bothers him is the prospect of an empowered Netanyahu.
Thus to Obama, siding with Hamas against Israel must have seemed like a twofer: It would advance his goal of rapprochement with Hamas’s long-time patron, Iran, while also weakening Netanyahu. After all, prime ministers who preside over unsuccessful wars usually lose public support. But as usual, Obama completely misunderstood the Israeli public. A classic example is the serial fights he picked with Netanyahu over construction in Jerusalem: He hoped Israelis would blame their premier for endangering the precious U.S. alliance, but by attacking a core Israeli interest, he instead forced even the left to rally behind Netanyahu. And now, he has done it again by siding with Hamas against Israel.
For he thereby gave Netanyahu the only possible legitimate excuse for what would otherwise be an inexcusable failure to finally eliminate Hamas’ ability to terrorize Israel.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
It often feels as if Israel can never win the public diplomacy war. After all, how do you compete with hundreds of dead Palestinians, other than through the one thing Israel will always do its utmost to prevent – even more dead Israelis? But while there’s no easy solution, two developments of the current war in Gaza offer hope that over time, this uphill battle can be won.
The first is a fascinating Gallup poll published last week on how Americans view the Hamas-Israel conflict. Unsurprisingly, most respondents deemed Hamas’s actions unjustified (70% to 11%). But they split almost evenly over Israel’s actions, with 42% considering them justified and 39% unjustified. At first glance, that doesn’t seem encouraging. But Gallup’s breakdown of the results is illuminating.
First, shockingly, the poll revealed that the more closely people follow “news about the situation,” the more they support Israel. Those who follow the news “very closely” overwhelmingly view Israel’s actions as justified, by a margin of 71% to 24%. Those who follow it “somewhat closely” consider Israel’s actions justified by a smaller but still significant margin, 51-42. Only among those who don’t follow the news closely did a plurality consider Israel’s actions unjustified (43-18).
The educational breakdown was equally surprising. The people most likely to consider Israel’s actions justified are those with postgraduate education (53% to 27%), followed respectively by those with first degrees (49-33) and those with some college (43-38). Only among people with a high-school education or less did a plurality consider Israel’s actions unjustified (45-34).
The first statistic is surprising because the media has focused overwhelmingly on the “disproportionate” Palestinian casualties, while blindly parroting the UN’s highly dubiousclaim that most are innocent civilians. Thus one would expect people who follow the news closely to be more convinced that Israel is massacring innocents than those who haven’t been deluged with daily pictures of dead Palestinians.
The second statistic is surprising because, like every other recent poll on American attitudes toward Israel, this one shows a clear partisan split: Republicans consider Israel’s actions justified by a 65-21 margin while Democrats consider them unjustified by a 47-31 margin. Thus one would expect traditional Democratic constituencies to tilt against Israel. But as Gallup noted, people with postgraduate educations “are the most likely education group to endorse Israel’s actions” even though they “tend to be politically Democratic.”
Granted, Jews are disproportionately represented among both people who follow the news closely and those with postgraduate educations. But at only 2% of the American population, Jews remain minorities even when they’re disproportionately represented. And while non-Jewish Israel supporters are also disproportionately represented among people who follow the news closely, so are Palestinian supporters. Thus even after adjusting for these factors, is seems likely that Israel is winning both among people who follow the news closely and people with more education because these are precisely the groups most likely to look behind simplistic comparisons of casualty statistics, whether by visiting Israeli news sites, listening to Israeli officials, exploring information available on social networks or any other means.
In short, the poll indicates that Israel’s justifications for its actions really can convince people who – despite the meager amount of time, effort and money Israel invests in public diplomacy – actually manage to hear them. Thus upping this investment in order to reach more people would likely pay handsome dividends.
The other stunning development has been the sea change in Egypt’s behavior. For 35 years, Israeli-Egyptian peace ranged from cold to frigid. But in the current war, Egypt has been acting like a real ally. Cairo coordinated its cease-fire proposals with Israel rather than Hamas, enabling a united Israeli-Arab front against the Obama Administration’s disgraceful pro-Hamas line. When America and much of Europe suspended flights to Israel last week, Air Sinai kept flying. Egypt’s military boasted last week of stopping two terror attacks against Israel (since when have Arab countries bragged about saving Israeli lives rather than taking them?). And many Egyptians are siding openly with Israel. “Thank you Netanyahu and may God give us more like you to destroy Hamas,” one journalist wrote. “May God make the State of Israel victorious in its war against the terrorist movement Hamas,” added an Internet commenter on a different Egyptian news site.
Egyptians don’t love Israel. But they’ve discovered that radical Islamist groups like Hamas are far more dangerous to them than Israel is. Not only did the Muslim Brotherhood – of which Hamas is a branch – subject Egypt to devastating misrule during its year in power, but Sinai-based jihadists, who receive training, weaponry and other assistance from Islamist groups in Gaza, have perpetrated numerous attacks inside Egypt. Egypt now views Hamas as its enemy, and is following the ancient adage that my enemy’s enemy is my friend.
I don’t know what critical mass of attacks is required to produce this mindset change. But with radical groups like the Islamic State posing an ever greater threat to other Mideast countries, and thousands of Western jihadists in Syria threatening to attack Europe once they return, it’s plausible to think other countries might experience similar epiphanies in the coming years.
In one of the most fatuous statements of all time, Shimon Peres once said that Israel doesn’t need public diplomacy, because good policies are self-explanatory and bad ones can’t be explained. Nothing better proves the fallacy of his argument than the current war. Virtually every Israeli, Peres included, considers Israel’s conduct justified, yet it’s far from self-explanatory; as the Gallup poll shows, Israel’s support comes mainly from those prepared to delve beyond the casualty statistics into complex explanations.
But the poll shows that Israel can convince people if it can get them to listen. And Egypt’s example shows that growing Islamic extremism may well make people worldwide more willing to listen. These two facts lead to an unequivocal conclusion: Israel must start investing far more resources than ever before in public diplomacy. The battle for international public opinion is no less important than the one in Gaza. And like the military one, it can’t be won without investing the requisite resources.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
Sovereignty poses tough problems, as last week amply showed; but lack of sovereignty poses worse ones.
By any standard, the past week has been terrible. We buried three kidnapped teens after 18 days of hoping against hope that they were alive. Rocket and mortar barrages from Gaza escalated to levels unseen since November 2012. An Arab teen was horrifically murdered by Jewish extremists, sparking the worst Israeli Arabs riots since October 2000. And the situation could yet deteriorate in countless ways.
Take, for instance, the Arab riots. Rumors about Jews abducting and/or killing non-Jews have sparked riots for centuries, and as recently as the first half of the last century, such riots routinely produced scores of dead Jews. Prominent examples include the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, which killed 47 Jews; the 1946 Kielce pogrom, which killed 42; and the 1929 Arab riots in British-ruled pre-state Israel, which killed 133.
Far more remarkably, however, no lethal anti-Jewish riots have occurred anywhere in recent decades – and that isn’t because the rest of the world has become so civilized; sectarian and ethnic massacres happen almost daily in the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia. Rather, it’s because there’s now a Jewish state ready to take in any Jew threatened by such violence.
Even today, when most Diaspora Jews live in “safe” countries, Israel’s role as refuge remains very much alive. Consider, for instance, this remarkable May 28 report by New York Times contributor Masha Gessen about her first visit back to Russia after emigrating to the US.
A new kind of conversational shorthand has appeared in Moscow: “What’s your month?” people ask one another. They mean the month for which you are signed up for an interview at the Israeli embassy to receive initial immigration documents. The nearest available slot for people booking an appointment now reportedly is in November, but most of my friends have appointments in August or September. Even getting an appointment is an ordeal: The embassy’s phone lines are so overburdened that getting through to the right department can take hours. And according to a recent, leaked picture, inside the embassy, it is a mob scene reminiscent of 1990-91, the peak years of the Soviet Jewish exodus.
This was at the height of the Ukraine crisis; if it dies down, most of those Jews will likely remain in Russia. But they want the reassurance of having somewhere to flee if necessary. And only Israel can give them that.
No country can promise 100 percent security all the time. America couldn’t prevent a neo-Nazi from murdering three people at Jewish sites in Kansas City in April; Belgium couldn’t prevent a jihadist from murdering four at Brussels’ Jewish Museum in May; France couldn’t prevent a jihadist from murdering a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012; and Israel couldn’t prevent Hamas from kidnapping and killing the three teens. Throughout Jewish history, some people have sought to murder Jews just because they are Jews, and as long as such people exist, sometimes, they’ll succeed.
We may wait far too long to exercise this option, or make a mess of it once we do; both are true of successive governments’ responses to the rocket fire. But these are our choices, which means we can change them. And even our abysmally inadequate response to date, consisting mainly of civil defense measures, is an improvement over millennia of powerlessness: Such measures have decreased rocket casualties by an estimated 86%; as a result, very few Jews are either fleeing or dying in southern Israel.
That Israel still falls so short of our aspirations isn’t surprising; 66 years old is young for a country. America at that age was rent by a bitter divide over slavery that ultimately produced a devastating civil war; Germany and Italy were under Fascist rule and preparing to launch World War II; Yugoslavia just seven years away from a civil war that tore it into five separate countries.
For the first time in 2,000 years, we have the ability to exercise self-defense and provide a haven for endangered Jews worldwide. True, sovereignty has brought a whole new set of challenges: Jewish hate crimes, terrorists launching rockets from amid civilian populations, international condemnations. But we should never forget how privileged we are to have these challenges rather than those of previous generations. They’re vastly superior to the choice between fleeing and dying.
It’s possible to boost the Jewish birthrate without discriminating against Arabs. Here’s how and why
As I noted last week, there are three ways to alter demographic balances: immigration, emigration and natural increase. One might ask why Israel should even bother with the third: The Jewish birthrate has been rising steadily while Israeli Arab and Palestinian birthrates are falling, and Israeli Jews already have the highest fertility rate in the Western world – 2.99 children per woman, and 2.6 even excluding the Haredim. So why mess with success?
Yet a Bank of Israel study published in April provides grounds for concern. It found that young families, even middle-class working ones, often struggle to make ends meet, but the government gives such families very little assistance compared to other developed countries. And if this continues, rising fertility could easily reverse: Parents want to be able to provide for their children, so if they feel they can’t do so adequately, they’re likely to have fewer of them.
This isn’t mere speculation; it has been proven repeatedly. When Israel slashed child allowances for large families in 2003, for instance, birthrates fell in the two communities most likely to have large families – Muslims (dramatically) and Haredim (modestly). Conversely, countries like France and England have successfully boosted birthrates by increasing aid to families with children.
Clearly, financial aid won’t boost birthrates unless parents want more children to begin with. But for parents who do want another child, making it more affordable increases the chances of their having one. That’s precisely why in Israel, unlike most other countries, “upward socioeconomic mobility has been linked to a relatively higher number of children,” as one study put it: Israeli Jews generally say they want three to four children, so when they feel they can afford it, that’s what they have. And that holds even for secular Jews: Some years ago, for instance, a colleague from upscale north Tel Aviv told me that having a fourth child was the new “in thing” in her neighborhood.
Yet many Jewish families still have only one or two children. Thus the question is how to make them feel they can afford three or four.
One solution is bringing down the overall cost of living. Prices of food, housing and other necessities have soared in recent years, and that hits young families particularly hard. For instance, they are less likely to own their own home than older couples are, making them more vulnerable to rising housing prices.
But the high cost of living is a complex problem with no easy solutions. Efforts to lower housing prices, for instance, have often backfired, and even successful policies can take years to have an impact. Thus while the government must eventually address this problem, a simpler way to boost the Jewish birthrate is to aid young families directly.
Unfortunately, most Israelis reject this idea out of hand, because both approaches tried in the past have been justly discredited. First, Israel simply paid child allowances to Jews but not Arabs – an obviously discriminatory policy that the High Court of Justice ultimately nixed.
Next, it tried a truly bizarre tactic: paying small allowances for the first two children, somewhat more for the third and fourth and almost quadruple for the fifth child onward. Thus a family with six children would receive almost seven times as much as a family with two (NIS 1,981 versus NIS 288 per month), despite having only three times as many children. But since most Israelis didn’t want five or more children, this policy proved demographically counterproductive: It encouraged fertility mainly among Muslims and Haredim.
At that point, the government gave up. Now, it simply pays everyone NIS 140 a month per child – a sum too small to encourage anyone to have more children.
Yet it’s possible to encourage Jewish fertility in a nondiscriminatory way simply by giving more money to all young families, thereby making it easier for them to afford another child. This could be done by increasing the per-child allowance for all children, or even just for the first one or two (a justifiable distinction, since first children require outlays on items like cribs and strollers that can be reused for subsequent children). Alternatively, as the Bank of Israel report suggested, child tax credits could be made available to either parent instead of only to mothers. Currently, this credit often goes unused, because women are more likely to work in part-time or low-wage jobs and thus not to earn enough to be liable for taxes.
But wouldn’t higher benefits to both Jews and Arabs increase Jewish and Arab birthrates equally, thereby leaving the demographic balance unchanged? Surprisingly, probably not – because no amount of extra money will make parents have another child if they don’t actually want one.
Israeli Jews clearly do want more children; that’s why the Jewish birthrate has increased steadily in recent years despite the soaring cost of living and meager child benefits. Thus if children became more affordable, they would probably have more.
The question is why the Arab birthrate has fallen. If it’s because Arabs, who generally earn less than Jews, were more affected by rising prices, then bigger benefits might indeed boost their birthrate. But it’s more likely that Israeli Arabs are simply following the same pattern as the rest of the planet: As communities become more urbanized and women become more educated, they start wanting fewer children, so birthrates drop. And in this case, extra money has limited impact: In Britain and France, for instance, fertility rates remain below replacement level (2.1 children per women) despite the increase sparked by higher child benefits.
The fact that well-educated, urbanized Israeli Jews want larger families is a global anomaly: Birthrates have been plummeting throughout the West, the Far East and the Muslim world, often to below replacement level, confronting these countries with the problem of how shrinking work forces can support a growing elderly population. Thus Israel’s fertility is not only a demographic boon, but an enormous economic advantage. And we ought to be exploiting it to the fullest by making sure Israelis can afford the families they want, rather than forfeiting our demographic edge by starving young families of support.
A rational Palestinian policy needs demographic facts; but Israel hasn’t done the requisite research
In a Bloomberg interview earlier this month, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu observed that due to the stalled peace process, “the idea of taking unilateral steps is gaining ground, from the center-left to the center-right.” Prof. Efraim Inbar has a counter-proposal, succinctly encapsulated in the title of his May 15 column in Israel Hayom: “Let’s do almost nothing.”
Nevertheless, I’ve become convinced that “doing almost nothing” is impossible unless Israel first does one big something – convinces Israelis themselves that time is not on the Palestinians’ side, but on theirs. Inbar, the director of Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, makes a start on this in his article, pointing out the conflict’s declining importance to Arab countries dealing with more urgent problems; Israel’s deepening relationships with numerous countries worldwide that care little about the Palestinians; and the waning influence of “the political actors most obsessed with the Palestinian issue, the Israeli political Left and the Europeans.” But he fails to address the issue that concerns Israelis most: demographics.
As Netanyahu keeps repeating, Israelis “don’t want a bi-national state.” Thus as long as most Israelis believe Jews will shortly become a minority in the land west of the Jordan River (Israel, the West Bank and Gaza), they will continue to find the idea of unilaterally shedding areas with large Palestinian populations attractive. Otherwise, they fear, Palestinians will be able to destroy the Jewish state simply by demanding to vote in Israel – a demand that would surely win massive international backing.
Hence the only way to avert this fate is to tackle Israelis’ demographic fears head-on – i.e., to determine conclusively whether the Jewish majority west of the Jordan is endangered or not. And that means conducting independent research rather than simply accepting Palestinian statistics as fact.
But while leading American demographers approved AIDRG’s methodology, leading Israeli demographers like Sergio Della Pergola and Arnon Soffer vehemently rejected it. Despite admitting that AIDRG had uncovered some errors too egregious to be ignored, like the double-counting of 210,000 East Jerusalem Arabs, they insisted the PA data was otherwise unimpeachable.
Moreover, AIDRG’s study was completed a decade ago. No demographer disputes that since then, Israeli Jewish birthrates have risen while Palestinian birthrates have fallen; so even if AIDRG were wrong, the demographic situation has presumably improved in the interim. The question is how much. While the Jewish fertility rate, currently 2.99, isn’t in dispute, the Palestinian rate definitely is: Some estimates show it converging rapidly on the Jewish rate; others believe the decline has been less drastic.
Thus the most useful thing the government could do right now is commission a blue-ribbon demographic research study – one that doesn’t simply accept the PA’s figures as gospel truth and gives due weight to how rising Jewish and falling Arab birthrates affect old assumptions about Arab demographic momentum. For unless Israelis are convinced that their country isn’t facing imminent demographic doom, they are liable to be seduced into disastrous unilateral moves rather than heeding Inbar’s sensible advice.
I’m a longtime fan of the Wall Street Journal. But I confess to mystification over why a paper with a staunchly pro-Israel editorial line consistently allows its news pages to be used for anti-Israel smear campaigns–and I do mean smear campaigns, not just “critical reporting.” A classic example was its assertion in an April 7 news report that Israel had agreed “to release political prisoners” as part of the U.S.-brokered deal that restarted Israeli-Palestinian talks last summer. The Journal was sufficiently embarrassed by this description of convicted mass murderers that it issued a correction in print, yet the online version still unrepentantly dubs these vicious terrorists “political prisoners.”
A more subtle example was last week’s report titled “On Middle East Visit, Pope Will Find a Diminished Christian Population.” While Israel is the glaring exception to this Mideast trend, reporter Nicholas Casey elegantly implies the opposite in a single sentence that’s dishonest on at least three different levels: “Syria has seen an exodus of nearly half a million Christians, and in Jerusalem, a population of 27,000 Christians in 1948 has dwindled to 5,000.”
First, while Casey never says explicitly that Jerusalem’s shrinking Christian population reflects the situation in Israel as a whole, it’s the obvious conclusion for the average reader–especially given the juxtaposition with Syria, which implies that both countries are treating their Christians similarly and thereby causing them to flee. This impression is reinforced by the only other statistic he gives about Israel: that Christians have declined as a percentage of the total population.
The truth, however, is that Israel’s Christian population has grown dramatically–from a mere 34,000 in 1949 to 158,000 in 2012, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. That’s an increase of almost fivefold. And while Christians have fallen as a share of the total population, that’s mainly because they have significantly lower birthrates than either Israeli Jews or Israeli Muslims.
Second, even his statistics on Jerusalem are dubious. Since he doesn’t source them, it’s not clear how Casey arrived at his figure of only 5,000 Christians nowadays. But the most recent figure published by Israel’s internationally respected statistics bureau, in 2013, put the city’s Christian population at 14,700 as of the end of 2011. It is, to say the least, highly unlikely that after remaining stable at about that level for 44 years (more on that in a moment)–decades punctuated by repeated wars, vicious terrorism and deep recessions–the Christian population would suddenly plunge by two thirds in a mere two years at a time of strong economic growth and very little terror.
Third, while Jerusalem’s Christian population has undeniably plummeted since 1948 even according to Israel’s statistics, Casey neglects to mention one very salient point: The entirety of that decline took place during the 19 years when East Jerusalem–where most of the city’s Christians live–was controlled by Jordan rather than Israel. By 1967, when Israel reunited the city, Jerusalem’s Christian population had fallen by more than half, to just 12,646, from Casey’s 1948 figure (which does roughly match other available sources). Since then, it has actually edged upward, to 14,700.
Throw in the de rigueur innuendos that the Palestinian Authority’s declining Christian population is mainly Israel’s fault, and Casey’s verbal Photoshop job is complete: The one country in the Middle East whose Christian population is growing and thriving–a fact increasingly acknowledged by Israeli Christians themselves–has been successfully repackaged to the average reader as a vicious persecutor that is driving its Christians out.
Corrupt officials who avoid jail pay no public price at all; until that changes, corruption won’t end.
The six-year jail sentence received by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week has been hailed as a great victory in the war on corruption, a sentence sure to deter other officials. Former Tel Aviv District Court Judge Amnon Straschnov begs to differ.
In other words, as long as a white-collar criminal avoids jail, he has nothing to fear from his crime being discovered: Investigation, indictment and conviction will affect neither his social life nor his job prospects. And even if he goes to jail, once he’s out, he’ll be welcomed back into society, the media, the job market and public life. As proof, Straschnov cited two jailed former MKs, Aryeh Deri and Shmuel Flatto-Sharon. Deri subsequently returned to the Knesset as Shas party chairman and will likely be a minister next time Shas enters the government, while Flatto-Sharon acquired his own radio show, broadcast on several different stations.
Straschnov’s analysis is a bit too pessimistic. But it contains enough truth to be deeply worrying.
Regarding the likelihood of conviction, the trend isn’t necessarily unpromising: There have been several high-profile corruption convictions in recent years, including Olmert’s bribery conviction, Bat Yam Mayor Shlomo Lahiani’s plea bargain earlier this month, former minister Shlomo Benizri’s bribery conviction in 2008 and former minister Abraham Hirchson’s embezzlement conviction in 2009. Granted, Olmert’s 2012 acquittal in another bribery case – despite the court’s finding that he received hundreds of thousands of unreported dollars in cash-filled envelopes – was a severe blow. But that verdict may well be overturned on appeal: Aside from its inherent legal absurdity, prosecutors now have new evidence from Olmert’s former bureau chief, Shula Zaken, who agreed to sing last week in exchange for leniency in the current bribery case.
Moreover, Straschnov underestimates the deterrent effect of jail time. Granted, the threat of prison is irrelevant as long as criminals believe they either won’t get caught or can beat the rap. But if convictions become common enough that white-collar criminals are forced to consider getting caught, jail is a serious deterrent: It’s a major comedown from their previous luxurious lifestyles.
The problem, however, is that any sentence short of prison results in white-collar criminals essentially suffering no consequences at all. And that’s not a problem the legal system can fix.
First, as Straschnov noted, corrupt politicians keep being reelected. He blames the voters and the media, but the true culprit, as I’ve written before, is the electoral system: Since voters elect party slates rather than individuals, they can’t oust a corrupt politico without dumping his entire party, which most voters won’t do. Granted, voters sometimes reelect corrupt politicians even when candidates are elected directly, as in mayoral races. But in national elections, they don’t even have the option of ousting individual politicians – a problem only electoral reform can solve.
Even worse, however, is that corrupt officials suffer no other public consequences either. And nothing illustrates this better than Olmert himself.
Back in July 2012, the same court that acquitted him of bribery actually convicted him of using his position as industry minister to funnel government grants to companies represented by a friend, attorney Uri Messer – aka Olmert’s “banker,” who stored the cash-stuffed envelopes until Olmert needed the money. In short, the court found unequivocally that Olmert received huge under-the-table donations (from another businessman), then doled out government funds to clients of the attorney who managed this illicit cash. True, it didn’t sentence him to jail. But its findings alone should have put Olmert beyond the pale.
Instead, he continued to be lionized both at home and abroad as a preeminent statesman. He received nonstop invitations to address prominent forums: an Institute for National Security Studies conference (December 2013), The Jerusalem Post’s annual conference in New York (April 2013), Dartmouth University students (November 2013), a Kinneret College conference (January 2013), a Tel Aviv University conference (October 2012), etc. Needless to say, such engagements generally pay hefty speaker’s fees.
Moreover, his every pronouncement at these forums won media headlines, and media outlets interviewed him regularly. Prominent journalists like former Haaretz editor-in-chief David Landau even published columns begging him to run for reelection.
Nor is Olmert unique. For another example, consider MK Tzachi Hanegbi. Aside from setting a record for political appointments – as a minister, he gave taxpayer-funded jobs to dozens of party hacks, for which he narrowly escaped criminal conviction – he was actually convicted of perjury in 2010. Nor could his perjury be considered an aberration: Earlier, as justice minister in 1997, he lied to the cabinet to secure Roni Bar-On’s appointment as attorney general (part of a larger scandal that never went to court, but resulted in Bar-On resigning after just one day). Yet not only is Hanegbi’s political career still going strong (he currently chairs the prestigious Knesset House Committee and will soon become deputy foreign minister), he is even regularly lauded in the media as a “responsible adult.”
Thus on this issue, Straschnov is absolutely right: We will never succeed in stamping out corruption until corrupt officials are shunned rather than lionized by their own social milieu – the journalists, academics, businessmen, defense officials, jurists, politicians and senior civil servants who constitute Israel’s elite. For as long as officials know corruption entails no social, professional or financial costs, they will have very little incentive to avoid it.