Foreign Affairs and Defense
When landlords no longer want to rent to Hamas, being a terrorist starts looking less attractive
Like many Israelis, I’ve been skeptical that this summer’s war in Gaza achieved anything more than a temporary calm. So I was encouraged to read the following tweet from Jerusalem Post reporter Khaled Abu Toameh Saturday night: “Gaza landlords refusing to rent out apartments to Hamas members and their families out of fear of being targeted by Israel in future.” His subsequent news story revealed that tenants are equally unenthusiastic about having Hamas neighbors.
This development doesn’t yet constitute victory. But judging from Israel’s experience in the West Bank, it’s an important step in the right direction.
To understand why, it’s worth recalling the early days of the second intifada, when an argument raged between the IDF and the Shin Bet security service over how to handle it. Many senior IDF officers then – like many today – insisted there was no military solution, because fighting terror was like trying to empty the sea with a spoon: No matter how many terrorists you arrest or kill, there’s a limitless supply of new recruits to replace them.
But then-Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter thought otherwise. While recognizing that the potential supply of new recruits is indeed vast, he argued that the actual supply could be dried up by making terror a business that doesn’t pay.
Any rational cost-benefit analysis would have concluded that during the intifada’s first 18 months, terror paid handsomely. The odds of being killed or arrested were low, and the rewards were high: Not only did terrorist organizations pay relatively well at a time when the hostilities had destroyed many other jobs and businesses, but terrorists were lionized as heroes throughout Palestinian society.
What Dichter understood, however, was that Israel could alter this cost-benefit analysis by arresting or killing enough terrorists. First, increasing the odds of being arrested or killed would increase the costs of terrorism. But perhaps even more importantly, it would reduce the benefits, because other Palestinians wouldn’t want to associate with people who were liable to be raided by IDF troops or hit with an airstrike at any moment. Thus instead of being lionized, terrorists would find themselves ostracized – which isn’t a price most people would be willing to pay.
And indeed, West Bank terrorists who subsequently abandoned terror routinely cited social ostracism as the reason for their decision. When they went into coffeehouses, they complained, everyone else fled, and the owners would kick them out, fearful their presence would bring the IDF. Taxi drivers wouldn’t pick them up. Barbershops wouldn’t cut their hair. And worst of all, they couldn’t get married. One former terrorist, for instance, said his fiancee’s family conditioned their marriage on him abandoning terror and obtaining an amnesty from Israel. Another girl’s father said he would never let his daughter marry a terrorist, because “I want her to have a good life, without having the army coming into her house all the time to arrest her while her husband escapes into the streets.”
Gazan terrorists, like their West Bank counterparts during the early days of the intifada, have until now enjoyed high benefits and low costs. After all, Hamas controls Gaza, so it can and does ensure that its members get the best of everything – including by seizing aid shipments meant for the needy and distributing them to its operatives instead. At the same time, they face little risk, since Israel largely leaves Gaza alone except during periodic wars, and then, Hamas personnel can retreat to their underground bunkers for protection. Indeed, according to Israel’s own estimate, only about 1,000 of the 2,127 Gazans killed during the latest war were terrorists, meaning that Hamas, Islamic Jihad and company lost less than 5% of their combined forces.
But because Hamas commanders’ houses doubled (according to Israeli intelligence) as command and control centers for the organization’s military operations, Israel could and did target them. Such strikes rarely hit the Hamas commanders themselves, since Israel’s policy of issuing warnings before attacking any target where civilians might be present, such as a house, gave them ample time to flee. Rather, the goal was simply to disrupt Hamas’ ability to command its men by disabling its regular command posts and forcing it to relocate to improvised ones.
Yet it turns out these strikes had a side effect no less important, if not more, than their immediate military purpose: changing the cost-benefit analysis of terrorism by imposing real costs on the terrorists. Hamas commanders not only lost their homes during the war, but are having trouble finding new ones, because landlords no longer want them around: The risk of having their property destroyed by an Israeli airstrike come the next war is too high. And for most people, the prospect of being permanently homeless would be a significant deterrent.
Of course, this effect won’t last: Because Hamas controls Gaza, it can impose its will on the population and has never hesitated to do so ruthlessly, including by putting political rivals under house arrest and then shooting those who violate this decree. Thus reluctant landlords will almost certainly be presented with offers they can’t refuse, along the lines of “rent these apartments to our people or we’ll kneecap you.”
That’s why I remain skeptical about Israel’s ability to end terror from Gaza without reoccupying the territory and toppling Hamas: As long as the organization remains in power, it will probably be able to ensure enough benefits for its members (and costs for its opponents) to outweigh the costs Israel can impose by long-distance action. But I’d love to be proved wrong, and any progress toward the social ostracism of Hamas terrorists constitutes progress toward that goal.
Judging solely by the polls, one might have thought this summer’s fighting had the opposite effect: Opinion surveys indicate that the war dramatically increased support for Hamas. But what people do is far more indicative of what they really think than what they tell pollsters. And if Gazan landlords no longer want to rent to Hamas members, then the war has clearly persuaded at least some Gazans that today, the cost-benefit analysis favors keeping far away from terrorists.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
Ireland is one of the most consistently anti-Israel countries in Europe. So it was interesting to read in Ireland’s Sunday Independent yesterday that Israeli troops were instrumental in saving the lives of Irish peacekeepers on the Golan Heights last week. Citing “senior sources,” the newspaper reported that after the peacekeepers were attacked by a Syrian rebel group, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, “Irish soldiers would have been killed or taken hostage by Islamist extremists if it wasn’t for the military intervention of the Israeli army … The Israeli assistance was described as ‘decisive’ in the success of the mission.”
Specifically, the Israel Defense Forces used its precise intelligence about the area to guide the troops to safety along a route that avoided Nusra fighters. Additionally, there were “unconfirmed reports that the Israelis directed fire at the Islamists to stop them from attacking the Filipino and Irish soldiers.”
There’s nothing surprising about the IDF’s intervention. After all, Israel has consistently intervened to save Syrian lives even though it’s formally at war with Syria, providing food and other humanitarian assistance to besieged Syrian villages and offering medical care to everyone from wounded fighters to mothers in labor. (Safed’s Rebecca Sieff Hospital delivered its seventh Syrian baby earlier this month.) So intervening to save the nationals of a country it’s not at war with is a no-brainer.
What is surprising, however, is what this says about Ireland, and by extension, about Europe as a whole. For here you have the difference between Israel and its enemies in the starkest form: on one hand, radical jihadists who sought to kill or kidnap Irish soldiers; on the other, a stable country that intervened to save their lives. The choice between the two would seem self-evident. But in fact, Ireland has consistently chosen the jihadists.
Last year, for instance, Ireland led the opposition within the European Union to blacklisting Hezbollah’s military wing as a terrorist organization. This is the same Hezbollah that kidnapped European nationals for years; that murdered innocent tourists on European soil in 2012; and that’s currently helping the Assad regime in Syria slaughter its own citizens. True, Hezbollah is Shi’ite and the Nusra Front is Sunni, but beyond that, there isn’t much to choose between them.
Ireland also looks out for Hamas’s interests. It vociferously opposes Israel’s partial blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza, despite the obvious fact that lifting the blockade would let Hamas import vast quantities of arms without hindrance, and it even denies Israel’s right to intercept blockade-running flotillas–a right a UN inquiry commission upheld in 2011.
In contrast, Dublin is always at the head of the pack in attacking Israel. Before assuming the EU’s rotating presidency in 2013, for instance, it announced that it supports an EU-wide ban on imports from Israeli settlements, but had regretfully concluded it was unachievable, since too many other EU members were opposed.
Yet Ireland is merely an extreme case of a pan-European phenomenon: Rather than seeking to empower Israel against the jihadists, the EU consistently seeks to empower the jihadists against Israel. Indeed, the EU often appears obsessed with making Israel give up strategic territory along its borders, despite the fact that every previous Israeli withdrawal has merely further empowered jihadist groups (Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza), and that additional withdrawals are all too likely to do the same.
Not coincidentally, the Golan is included in the list of “Israeli-occupied territories” that the EU wants Israel to quit. One wonders whether Dublin appreciates the irony that had Israel complied with this demand, IDF troops wouldn’t have been on hand last week to rescue its peacekeepers.
But that, of course, is precisely the problem with seeking to empower your enemies rather than your allies: If you succeed, your allies will no longer be able to help you when you need them.
Originally published in Commentary
I realize it’s been a busy week, what with ISIS beheading journalists, Russia invading Ukraine, and deadliest of all (to quote the inimitable Sultan Knish), Israel threatening to build new houses. But it’s nevertheless shocking that one UN announcement last week should have attracted so little international attention: Last Friday, the number of registered Syrian refugees topped the 3 million mark. And those are just the ones who have made it out of Syria and registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The agency estimates that another 6.5 million are internally displaced, bringing the total number of displaced Syrians to almost half the country’s population.
But buried about halfway through the announcement is a sentence that goes a long way toward explaining the international apathy: “Syrians are now the world’s largest refugee population under UNHCR care, second only in number to the decades-long Palestinian crisis.” In other words, even as it tries to solicit aid for distressed Syrians, the UN itself is telling people that another refugee crisis is even greater, and hence presumably more deserving of their money and attention. And it has peddled this nonsensical claim so successfully, for so long, that it now finds itself unable to meet the needs of a real crisis: The $2 billion it’s desperately seeking to keep Syrian refugees alive through the upcoming winter has already been squandered on five million faux refugees, most of whom don’t need it at all.
Of course, there are real Palestinian refugees–primarily the 500,000 in Syria, whose plight, like that of other Syrians, is dire. Moreover, though most of the Palestinians temporarily displaced by the Hamas-Israel war are now returning home, Gaza will need reconstruction aid.
But of the 5 million Palestinians registered as “refugees” with their own private UN agency, UNRWA, most aren’t displaced in any fashion: They have lived in the same places for decades, and have houses, jobs, extended families, friends, schools, health care, and all the other accoutrements of normal life. Moreover, most live in places that, by Mideast standards, are exceptionally safe and stable, including 2.1 million in Jordan and 750,000 in the West Bank.
Nevertheless, UNRWA’s staff and budget dwarfs that of UNHCR. It has 30,000 employees to deal with 5 million “refugees,” while UNHCR has 8,600 to handle 10.5 million refugees plus more than twice as many other “people of concern,” including 17.7 million internally displaced. UNRWA’s regular budget is $1 billion a year, bolstered by periodic emergency appeals ($300 million in 2013); UNHCR had a regular budget of $4 billion plus $1.3 billion in emergency appeals as of mid-2013, but for a population seven times as large–35.8 million “people of concern.”
Thus UNRWA has one staffer for every 167 Palestinians while UNHCR has one for every 4,163 non-Palestinians, and UNRWA has $260 for every Palestinian while UNHCR has $148 for every non-Palestinian. Yet the needs of the people UNHCR cares for–who have lost their homes, their jobs and their entire lives–are incomparably greater than those of the Palestinians, most of whom lead completely normal lives.
Much has been written, correctly, about how UNRWA helps perpetuate the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But to my mind, the greater outrage is the degree to which UNRWA diverts international money and attention from those who need it desperately–like the Syrian refugees–to those who don’t need it at all, like the many Palestinian “refugees” who became Jordanian citizens decades ago.
And unlike the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, this is a problem the West can easily solve. Western nations provide most of UNRWA’s budget, so all they have to do is reallocate this money–some to UNHCR, and some, at least initially, to Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, and perhaps Lebanon, to cushion the shock of suddenly having to provide health, education, and welfare services to millions of people who currently receive those services from UNRWA.
Then, with five million faux refugees out of the picture, perhaps the real ones will finally get the attention they deserve.
Originally published in Commentary
Writing in the Washington Post last Friday, Natan Sharansky argued that Western nations are quite right to hold Israel to a higher standard than its nondemocratic neighbors; the problem is that they hold Israel to a higher standard than they hold themselves. Many Westerners would doubtless deny doing so. But for proof, just compare the recent war in Gaza to the Iraq War.
According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2009, of the victims of U.S. airstrikes in Iraq whose age and gender could be determined, 46 percent were women and 39 percent were children. The study, based on data from Iraq Body Count, covered the period from March 2003 to March 2008, but specifically excluded airstrikes carried out during periods of intense fighting, such as the initial U.S. invasion and the 2004 battle of Fallujah. In other words, it excluded those periods when fire was likely to be heaviest and most indiscriminate due to the need to protect troops at risk.
By contrast, according to statistics published by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 12 percent of all Palestinians killed in Gaza were women and 23 percent were children (239 women and 459 children out of 1,976 fatalities). Thus even if OCHA’s numbers are accurate, the percentages of women and children killed in Gaza were far lower than the percentages killed in U.S. airstrikes in Iraq. Yet one would expect them to be higher, for at least three reasons.
First, unlike the NEJM study, OCHA’s figures cover the entire war, including periods of intense fighting when soldiers’ lives were at risk. In other words, they include the battles involving the heaviest fire, which NEJM’s study excluded. Second, the NEJM figures referred only to airstrikes, which utilize precision weapons; OCHA’s figures also include people killed by non-precision weaponry such as artillery fire. Third, though the claim that Gaza is one of the world’s mostly densely populated places is nonsense, almost all the fighting took place in dense urban areas: Since Hamas’s strategy depends on massive civilian casualties, it locates its rocket launchers and tunnels mainly in such areas. In contrast, U.S. airstrikes in Iraq weren’t limited to dense urban areas.
In short, even if OCHA’s figures are credible, Israel comes off well by comparison with coalition forces in Iraq. But in fact, they aren’t. First, OCHA doesn’t say whether any of these “children” were combatants, though it’s hardly unheard of for 16- or 17-year-old Palestinians to bear arms. More importantly, however, it doesn’t say how many of these women and children were actually killed by Hamas rather than Israel.
As I’ve noted before, almost a sixth of all Palestinian rockets launched at Israel–475 out of 3,137–actually landed in Gaza, where, given the lack of either Iron Dome or civilian bomb shelters, they would have been far more lethal than they were in Israel. In one documented case alone, a misfired Hamas rocket killed 10 people in a park, including eight children.
Moreover, as I’ve also noted, Hamas’s practice of booby-trapping and storing rockets in houses, mosques, and clinics means that many Israeli strikes inadvertently set off massive secondary explosions. In other words, many Palestinian “victims of Israeli attacks” were likely killed not by the Israeli strike itself, but by secondary explosions caused by Hamas’s own bombs.
Americans rightly expect the world to understand that when U.S. airstrikes decimate a Yemeni wedding party or kill civilians in Iraq, it isn’t because the U.S. is bloodthirsty, but because mistakes happen in wartime, especially when fighting terrorists who don’t wear uniforms and operate from amid civilian populations. But Israel is entitled to that same understanding.
Instead, the White House, Pentagon, and State Department have all accused Israel in the harshest terms of doing too little to prevent civilian casualties. Given that Israel’s record on this score, as the NEJM study shows, is even better than America’s, that is the height of hypocrisy.
Originally published in Commentary
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
Last week’s incident in which two Palestinians were killed in the West Bank–allegedly by Israel Defense Forces soldiers who opened fire without provocation–is still under investigation. But the IDF continues to maintain that the video footage purporting to back this allegation was doctored.
As Jonathan Tobin noted on Wednesday, this isn’t inconceivable; such things have happened before. Even Amnesty researcher Donatella Rovera recently admitted that Palestinians have been known to falsify evidence (though it doesn’t seem to stop her organization from treating every Palestinian claim as gospel truth). Nevertheless, the IDF’s claim would undeniably be more credible if it could produce its own footage showing what really happened.
But of course, it can’t–because one of the most technologically sophisticated armies in the world has somehow proven incapable of equipping its soldiers with the kind of simple cameras found on every cell phone. And so, day after day, week after week, it’s confronted with Palestinian allegations to which the only response it can offer is its soldiers’ unsupported testimony.
A year ago, I thought the penny had finally dropped: The IDF announced with great fanfare that it had finally decided to train soldiers to film operations in the field. But it now turns out this vaunted project comprises all of 24 cameramen–24 people to provide round-the-clock coverage of the entire West Bank plus the Gaza border. It’s a joke. And not a very funny one.
There’s no reason why every single soldier couldn’t be equipped with a small, wearable camera that would operate automatically. This would have the additional benefit of cutting down on real abuses, from which no army is completely immune. Indeed, several Western countries have experimented with policemen wearing such cameras, and they have generally led to reductions in both real brutality and false claims of brutality.
But what seems like a no-brainer to me evidently isn’t so obvious to Israel’s chronically public-diplomacy-challenged government and army. Otherwise, they would have done something about it by now.
Consequently, this is an issue on which American Jewish help is badly needed. Jewish groups and individuals frequently meet with Israeli officials, both in the U.S. and in Israel, but it probably never occurs to them to raise a minor issue like IDF cameras at those meetings. If they thought of it at all, it would doubtless seem too obvious to need saying.
Unfortunately, it isn’t. And therefore, U.S. Jews would be doing Israel a big service if they started raising this issue at every single meeting with Israeli government officials or army officers. If Israeli leaders keep hearing about it from American Jews, maybe they’ll finally realize how important it is.
Or maybe they still won’t. But it’s worth a try–because waiting for them to figure it out on their own certainly isn’t working.
To understand the pointlessness of the nuclear negotiations now underway in Vienna between Iran and the so-called P5+1, it’s enough to read a new report leaked to Reuters earlier this week by the UN Panel of Experts that monitors nuclear sanctions on Iran. The report found “a decrease” in Iran’s efforts “to procure items for prohibited programs” since President Hassan Rouhani took office mid-2013 and optimistically declared this might stem from “the new political environment in Iran and diplomatic progress towards a comprehensive solution.”
Now let’s remove the rose-colored glasses and consider the facts: Under the “moderate” Rouhani–the man the world has declared it can do a deal with–Iran has continued trying to smuggle in parts for the illicit nuclear program it denies having; at most, it has decreased the pace a bit. And, as the report later admits, maybe not even that: It may simply have developed “more sophisticated” methods of “concealing procurement, while expanding prohibited activities.” Alternatively, it may have reduced its smuggling effort because, as the report further acknowledged, it has “demonstrated a growing capability to produce key items indigenously”–not a capability it would need if it were planning to give up its nuclear program.
In short, Iran has continued cheating its way to nuclear capability even while signing an interim nuclear agreement with the P5+1 in January and conducting months of “productive” negotiations on a permanent agreement. So even if a permanent deal is signed in the next few months, why would anyone imagine Iran would suddenly stop cheating and actually abide by the agreed-upon limits to its nuclear program? On the contrary, it would be able to cheat much more efficiently, unimpeded by the sanctions now in place.
Then there’s Rouhani’s own statement on Sunday that Iran’s nuclear technology actually isn’t “up for negotiation” at all; “We have nothing to put on the table and offer to them but transparency.” Even if one dismisses the first half of that statement as standard pre-negotiation posturing, there’s a real problem with elevating transparency from the status of a necessary precondition for a deal to a substantive Iranian concession equivalent to actually dismantling parts of its program–because, as also became clear this week, Iran’s idea of “transparency” doesn’t match that of the rest of the world.
Under an agreement signed with the International Atomic Energy Agency in November, Iran was supposed to answer various questions about its nuclear program by today. Iran says it has complied fully, but the IAEA doesn’t agree: It still wants more information about one of the most crucial issues of all–Iran’s experiments with explosive bridge wire detonators, which can be used to trigger nuclear bombs. The parties also haven’t reached any agreement on resolving other outstanding questions that weren’t covered by November’s deal. Due to these twin impasses, Monday’s meeting between IAEA and Iranian officials broke up without even an agreement on when to meet again.
Yet there’s no reason to believe Iran won’t stonewall any new agreement on transparency just as it has the previous ones–especially when it can do so with little fear of consequences, since the sanctions regime, once disabled, is unlikely to be reestablished for anything short of a nuclear explosion.
There are many other reasons for disliking the nuclear deal now under discussion, including those detailed by Michael Rubin and Jonathan Tobin earlier this week. But the simplest reason of all is that, as its past behavior shows, Iran can’t be trusted to honor any such agreement: It will simply continue merrily cheating its way to a nuclear bomb. And a sanctions-ending deal will make it easier for Tehran to do so.
Yesterday, I wrote about a crucial legal fallacy behind the “Israeli apartheid” canard. But you don’t actually need to know anything about the Geneva Convention or international law to know how ridiculous this slur is; it’s enough to ask yourself one simple question: How many black Africans in other countries spoke admiringly about South African apartheid as a model they’d like their own countries to follow? The answer, of course, is not many–and if Israel really practiced apartheid against Arabs, Middle Eastern Arabs would respond similarly to an equivalent question about Israel. Yet in fact, Arabs throughout the Middle East persistently cite Israeli democracy as the model they’d like their own countries to adopt.
Back in 2011, when the Arab Spring revolutions were at their height, Haaretz correspondent Anshel Pfeffer reported being stunned to hear from demonstrators in both Tunis and Cairo–neither of whom knew he represented an Israeli newspaper–that they wanted “a democracy like in Israel.” Just two weeks ago, the Middle East Media Research Institute published excerpts from articles in the Arab press over the last year that held up Israel as a model Arab states should learn from–in some cases, because of its economic, scientific, and democratic achievements, but in others, because of its democracy and even its morality.
Even the Palestinians themselves consistently voice admiration for Israeli democracy. From 1996-2002 (the last year the question was asked), Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki conducted annual polls of what governments Palestinians admired. “Every year Israel has been the top performer, at times receiving more than 80 percent approval,” the New York Times reported in 2003. “The American system has been the next best, followed by the French and then, distantly trailing, the Jordanian and Egyptian.” And that’s not because those years, in contrast to today, were a time of progress and optimism in the peace process: They were the years of Benjamin Netanyahu’s first government (1996-99), the collapse of the Camp David talks (2000) and the height of the second intifada (2000-03).
What’s truly astonishing about this admiration is that the Arab media is virulently anti-Israel, and routinely reports the wildest anti-Israel fabrications as fact. Hence most Arabs believe Israeli treatment of both Palestinians and Israeli Arabs to be much worse than the reality–and even so, they admire Israeli democracy.
As Pfeffer perceptively noted back in 2011, this is an ironic side effect of the Arab media’s obsession with Israel. Because Israel receives so much more coverage than other Western countries, Arabs end up seeing more of Israeli democracy in action than they do of other Western democracies: a president convicted of rape and a prime minister of corruption; hundreds of thousands of demonstrators taking to the streets (in the social justice protests of summer 2011) without suffering any violence from the police or military; a robustly free press in both Hebrew and Arabic; even the fact that Israeli hospitals offer first-class medical treatment to all, Jews and Arabs alike. And the Arabs like what they see.
So next time someone tells you Israel is an “apartheid state,” try asking them why Arabs throughout the region–unlike blacks in the days of South African apartheid–view the “apartheid state” as a model democracy to be emulated. You won’t convince the diehard anti-Israel crowd. But you might provide food for thought to the merely uninformed.
John Kerry’s infamous apartheid comment continues to make waves in Israel, eliciting pushback from some surprising places–like yesterday’s Haaretz column by Zvi Bar’el. Bar’el, whom nobody could accuse of being an Israel apologist (his column asserts Israeli control over the West Bank is even worse than the apartheid), points out that under apartheid, the legal regime discriminates between citizens of the same country. That’s fundamentally different from an occupation, under which the legal regime discriminates between the occupying power’s citizens and the occupied noncitizens. All occupying powers have given their own citizens more rights than the occupied noncitizens, from the British in India through the French in Algeria to the Americans in Iraq, he noted; yet none of these were ever labeled apartheid. Why should Israel be any different?
But Bar’el neglects to mention one important point: The legal distinction all occupations make between citizens and noncitizens isn’t just a whim of “racist” occupiers; it’s mandated by the Fourth Geneva Convention.
This convention largely bars occupiers from applying their own laws to the occupied population, requiring them instead to maintain the preexisting legal system except where alterations are necessary to ensure the occupier’s security. For instance, Article 64 states “The penal laws of the occupied territory shall remain in force”; Article 51 requires the occupier to uphold the “legislation in force in the occupied country concerning working conditions”; and so forth. One of the most discriminatory practices of all is explicitly mandated by Article 66, which states that if the occupier promulgates laws for its own security in the occupied territory, violators from among the occupied population shall be tried in “properly constituted, non-political military courts.”
Israel has never officially deemed the West Bank occupied territory; it considers it disputed territory to which Israel has a valid claim. But under pressure from the rest of the world, which insists the West Bank is occupied territory, Israel long ago agreed to voluntarily uphold most of the Geneva Convention’s provisions. The ironic result is that in many cases, West Bank Palestinians have fewer rights than Israelis.
For instance, Israeli labor law provides more protections than the patchwork of Jordanian and Ottoman law in place when Israel captured the West Bank in 1967. But the world views any application of Israeli law to “occupied territory” as a sign of annexation (see, for instance, the international outcry when Israel applied Israeli law to the Golan Heights in 1981). Thus for fear of sparking international protests, Israel has refrained from applying its own labor laws to the West Bank.
Similarly, human-rights organizations repeatedly slam trials in military courts as inherently inferior to those in civilian courts, and not without reason: Most democratic countries, Israel included, have laws requiring civilians to be tried in civil rather than military courts. That’s why Israeli civilians who commit crimes in the West Bank are tried in Israel’s civil courts rather than military ones–just as American civilians who committed crimes in Iraq were tried in American civil courts rather than military ones. But the Geneva Convention requires Palestinian civilians to be tried in military courts instead.
In short, it’s precisely all those people who insist the West Bank is “occupied territory” who have no grounds to complain about the discriminatory legal system in place there–because occupied territories are supposed to be governed by the Geneva Convention, which mandates this discriminatory regime. That such people are now accusing Israel of “apartheid” for having bowed to their demand to apply the convention is hypocrisy on a truly epic scale.