Foreign Affairs and Defense
That has been Israel’s story for 66 years now – and it is in our power to ensure the progress continues.
Israel turned 66 this week, but some things never change: It still faces multiple threats, as it has since its inception; they currently range from Iran’s nuclear program to the global delegitimization campaign. But if that sounds like an invitation to despair, consider the following comment by a veteran Israeli diplomat:
“Back in the 70s and 80s, my predecessors were hearing exactly the same warnings from our supporters in America and Europe. That the anti-Israel atmosphere on the campuses is poisonous, that an entire generation is being turned against us by the hostile media, that we will wake up one morning and find that Israel is isolated. And all these years have passed and Israel has diplomatic relations with dozens more countries, and our economic and cultural ties around the world have never been better. In the meantime we’ve built up this massive imaginary enemy, we have devoted resources to fighting it and not done anything to actually fix our country.”
There are at least three major inaccuracies in that statement, but the bottom line is indisputable: Despite the multiple threats it has always faced, Israel’s track record over the last few decades – and indeed, the entirety of the last 66 years – has been one of astounding growth and progress. And there’s no reason why the future can’t be equally bright.
The caveat, of course, is that our future will be bright only if we do what’s necessary to make it so. And that brings us to the diplomat’s three major errors.
First is the assumption that delegitimization is an “imaginary enemy,” and the resources devoted to fighting it have therefore been wasted. The threat of becoming an international pariah is no joke; Israel’s modern, open economy couldn’t long survive the kind of treatment meted out to countries like North Korea or Zimbabwe. Granted, our flourishing economy also serves as a bulwark against pariah status; other countries have more to lose by boycotting Israel than they do by boycotting North Korea or Zimbabwe. Nevertheless, it’s foolish to underestimate the power of public opinion in the democratic West; if public opinion turns against Israel sharply enough, it can trump even the West’s own self-interest.
The fact that this hasn’t happened yet despite decades of anti-Israel poison in the media and on campuses shows not that it cannot happen, but the efforts Israel and its allies have devoted to combating this poison – incompetent though they often are – have so far been enough to prevent the worst from happening. Clearly, this isn’t grounds for resting on our laurels; both in the media and on campuses, the situation is worsening, and Israel will need to improve its public diplomacy if it is to keep the delegitimization movement in check.
Yet at the same time, this history does provide grounds for encouragement: Given how incompetent Israel’s public diplomacy efforts have been over the last several decades, the fact that they nevertheless sufficed to keep the delegitimization movement in check shows how fragile and easily undercut this movement is. And in truth, this isn’t surprising: A movement founded on blatant lies (like the apartheid canard) is fragile by nature. But it’s important to remember this at all those times when fighting delegitimization feels like trying to empty the sea with a spoon.
The second major error is the claim that during these decades, Israelis didn’t do “anything to actually fix our country.” In reality, Israel’s burgeoning economic and cultural ties stem directly from efforts to fix some of the country’s major problems, such as the Economic Stabilization Plan of 1985, which ended hyperinflation; the liberalization of imports in the early 1990s; and the economic reforms of 2003, which helped end the economic crisis caused by the second intifada. Initiatives such as these are what made it possible for Israel to integrate so fully into the global economy, and in many parts of the world, economic ties have been the driver behind improved diplomatic relations.
Nevertheless, the diplomat is right that we haven’t done nearly as much as we should to fix our country. Far too often, Israeli governments address problems only when they become crises too severe to ignore (the 1985 and 2003 reforms are cases in point). Consequently, many problems that haven’t yet hit crisis point have been left to fester – deteriorating schools, an ineffective police force, rising inequality, the soaring cost of living, and more. And failure to address these problems means that for all its impressive progress, Israel isn’t making nearly as much progress as it could.
That brings us to the third major error: the implication that the main issue distracting Israel from fixing its problems has been its preoccupation with the delegitimization campaign. In reality, for at least the past two decades, by far the biggest distraction has been not the delegitimization campaign, but the peace process. Several Israeli governments have wasted the bulk of their time and energy on fruitless peace talks with the Palestinians. Others were forced to devote much of their time and energy to combating the terrorism these successive rounds of negotiations sparked. And still others had to devote large quantities of time and energy to repelling international pressure for dangerous unilateral concessions – something that has so far been true of both the previous and current Netanyahu governments.
But with the latest round of peace talks having collapsed a month ago, and the US having declared a “pause” in its mediation efforts, a brief window of opportunity may have opened for the government to devote serious attention to other problems. Granted, there’s a risk that its “cures” will be worse than the disease: See, for instance, the new enlistment law it passed in March. But on other issues, such as curbing economic concentration and increasing competition, the government has already taken some important steps forward, and now has a real opportunity to build on these efforts.
So my wish for the coming year is that it be a year in which we finally address some of our major domestic problems. And if that happens, we’re guaranteed to have plenty to celebrate come next Independence Day.
As Jonathan Tobin noted yesterday, facts are irrelevant to the diehard anti-Israel crowd; nothing will change their views. But since they remain a minority (at least in America), I’m far more worried about the many well-meaning people who do care about the facts, but never hear them, because the journalists they rely on for information can’t be bothered to get their facts straight.
Take, for instance, a New York Times report earlier this month about Islamic Jihad’s barrage of more than 60 rockets at southern Israel and Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes. The online version says, unexceptionably, that “the only reported injury was to an Israeli woman who fell while running for cover.” But the print version of the Times’s international edition–which reaches some 242,000 people–added a shocking comment: The lack of casualties, it asserted, is “a sign that each side wanted to make a forceful showing without risking further escalation.”
Anyone reading that would never know Islamic Jihad shoots rockets indiscriminately at Israeli towns (a bona fide war crime); they’d think Gazan terrorists, just like Israelis, carefully aim their fire to avoid civilian casualties. They’d also never know that this indiscriminate rocket fire causes so few casualties only because, as a new study shows, massive civil defense measures–even playground equipment in the border town of Sderot is designed to double as bomb shelters–have reduced Israeli fatalities by a whopping 86 percent. And because people don’t know all this, they are easily persuaded that Israel’s responses to the rocket fire, from airstrikes to the naval blockade of Gaza, are “excessive.”
Or take a Reuters report on Lebanon this month, which asserted as fact that “Israeli forces still hold at least three pockets of occupied territory which are claimed by Lebanon.” This isn’t a quote from a Lebanese official; it’s the Reuters reporter.
Anyone reading that would never know Israel withdrew from every inch of Lebanon in 2000; that this withdrawal was unanimously certified as complete by the UN Security Council; and that only afterward did Hezbollah, backed by its Lebanese puppet government, suddenly lay claim to additional territory to justify its continued war on Israel. They’d think Israel indeed continues to “occupy” Lebanese territory. And anyone who believes this is easily persuaded that Hezbollah is a legitimate political player that seeks only to regain “occupied Lebanese territory,” rather than a viciously anti-Semitic terrorist organization whose goal is Israel’s eradication, and which any civilized country ought to shun.
This steady drip of media falsehoods even permeates stories that ostensibly have nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict–like a New York Times review of Reza Aslan’s biography of Jesus, which casually refers to events in “first-century Palestine.” As the reviewer, a Yale professor of religious studies, certainly ought to know, there was no “Palestine” in Jesus’s day. The Roman province Jesus inhabited was called “Judaea,” a word whose linguistic similarity to “Judaism” is no accident; Judaea was a Jewish commonwealth. Only after the Bar-Kochba revolt more than a century later did the Romans rename it “Palestine,” after the Philistines, in a deliberate effort to obscure Jewish ties to the land.
But anyone reading this review would easily conclude that just like the Palestinians always claim, they–not the Jews–are the Holy Land’s indigenous people: Look, there never was a Jewish state there; “Palestine” existed even back in the first century! And if so, then Israel is indeed a thief who stole the Palestinians’ land.
All this means that many well-meaning people don’t know even the most basic facts, like the Jews’ historic ties to Israel or the indiscriminate rocket fire from Gaza. And unless pro-Israel activists tell them, they never will–because the media certainly won’t.
In craving something it can never obtain, Israel endangers both its democracy and its survival
To make the case that their preferred policies are essential to Israel’s future, both Israeli and American Jewish liberals frequently argue that Israel’s current policies – even if justified – are costing it Western and American Jewish support. Last week’s op-ed by Haaretz columnist and award-winning author Ari Shavit is a classic example: Though Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is right about Iran’s nuclear program, right about Palestinian recognition of the Jewish state and right about the essential justice of Israel’s cause, Shavit wrote, this is “yesterday’s message,” which young Americans, especially Jewish ones, don’t want to hear. Thus to avoid losing the future, Israel must remake itself into a country more attractive to these young Americans, whose “liberal” and “pacifist” worldview “utterly rejects the occupation, the use of force and human rights violations.”
Just consider the practical implications of Shavit’s prescription. Since these young Americans abhor “the occupation,” winning their love would presumably require withdrawing from the West Bank. But what if the West Bank then becomes a base for suicide bombings against Israel, as it did when Israel withdrew from parts of it in the mid-1990s? Or a base for launching rockets at Israel, as Gaza did after Israel left in 2005? Shavit certainly knows that’s possible; he’s not one of those fantasists who think territorial withdrawals will bring peace.
Yet by his own admission, these young Americans also abhor “the use of force and human rights violations.” Thus if Israel responds to such a terrorist onslaught militarily, they will immediately hate it again – especially since counterterrorism operations in urban areas inevitably produce civilian casualties, and liberal pacifists generally view all civilian casualties, however unavoidable, as “human rights violations.” Nor is this mere speculation: It’s how Western liberals in fact responded to Israeli counterterror operations in the West Bank in 2002-04 and Gaza in early 2009.
Thus Israel could retain the liberals’ love only by meekly absorbing suicide bombings and rocket attacks without responding. Such unchecked terror, as the past two decades amply showed, would also destroy the economy. And deprived of both personal and economic security, Israelis would flee in droves.
Or consider Iran. Shavit has written repeatedly that Iranian nukes would be an existential threat to Israel. But what happens if all else fails, and only Israeli military action can prevent a nuclear Iran? Those liberal, pacifist Westerners whose love he seeks “reject the use of force”; they would never countenance a preemptive strike. Indeed, they overwhelmingly believe an Israeli attack would be worse than Iranian nukes, which they don’t actually consider much of a threat.
In short, liberal pacifist love can be bought only at a price most Israelis believe would endanger their very existence: letting Iran go nuclear, withdrawing to the 1967 lines even without a peace treaty and abandoning efforts to combat Palestinian terror. That’s hardly a convincing survival strategy.
Moreover, precisely because it requires overriding Israelis’ own policy preferences – as repeatedly expressed through both opinion polls and elections – it’s also anti-democratic. One recent poll, for instance, found that only four percent of Israelis favor withdrawing unilaterally from the West Bank. Another found that while 45% would support removing settlements if the IDF remained – which wouldn’t satisfy liberal pacifists, since it wouldn’t end “the occupation” – only 9% supported withdrawing the IDF as well. Polls also show majorities against withdrawing to the 1967 lines, even with a peace deal, and pluralities or majorities for bombing Iran if other efforts to keep it from going nuclear fail. And of course, in both 2009 and 2013, Israelis elected governments whose stated positions aligned with these preferences.
So courting the liberal pacifists would require Israel to eviscerate one of the most fundamental liberal values – democracy – by substituting the policy preferences of non-citizens for those of its own citizens. Granted, this might not bother many Western liberals, who seem to have little use for democracy when it doesn’t produce their preferred outcomes. But it ought to bother anyone who actually cares about liberal values.
Moreover, gutting Israel’s democracy in itself endangers Israel’s survival, because that survival has always demanded extraordinary commitment from Israel’s citizens. For instance, most Israelis devote three years of their lives to the army and do annual reserve duty for years afterward; without that willingness to defend their country, Israel wouldn’t long survive in a hostile region.
But most people would fight more willingly in defense of policies they – or at least their fellow citizens – chose democratically than for policies imposed by non-citizens who don’t bear the costs of their own choices. Similarly, they’ll pay taxes more willingly to finance democratically chosen policies than policies chosen by non-citizens who don’t bear the costs of their choices.
If Israelis are deprived of the chance to try to make this the kind of country they want, whatever that happens to be, then many might head for the exit. For what makes the price of living here worth paying is precisely the privilege of influencing the nature of the first Jewish state in 2,000 years. If instead, the nature of that state is to be dictated from abroad, why wouldn’t Israelis prefer to move overseas themselves, to countries with higher standards of living and no compulsory military service?
And if Israelis lose the will to maintain their own state, who will take their place – those young American Jewish liberals whose affection Shavit so craves, most of whom wouldn’t even consider Israel’s destruction a personal tragedy?
Yes, Israel needs supporters overseas. But above all, it needs the support of its own people. Thus its overseas supporters must be sought among people who share Israelis’ core values – not among liberal pacifists uncomfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state, and who reject the use of force even in self-defense. The chimerical pursuit of liberal pacifist love is nothing but a recipe for Israel’s destruction.
That Desmond Tutu once again accused Israel of apartheid yesterday is nothing new; he’s one of several Nobel Peace laureates who have made second careers out of Israel-bashing (think Jimmy Carter or Mairead Maguire). But it’s far more worrying when similar rhetoric is used by a sitting U.S. president – as Barack Obama did in the most outrageous but widely overlooked line of his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg earlier this month. Culminating a series of rhetorical questions about what Israel would do if no Palestinian state arises, he asked, “Do you place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel’s traditions?”
As Haaretz diplomatic correspondent Barak Ravid noted, “There is not much distance between this statement and an explicit warning that Israel is liable to turn into an apartheid state.” In short, even if Israel isn’t an apartheid state today, the U.S. president considers it perfectly reasonable to assume it will be someday soon – that instead of a democracy where all citizens are equal before the law, it will become the kind of state that imposes legal restrictions on certain citizens because of their ethnicity. But since Israeli Arabs haven’t been subject to special restrictions since Israel abolished its military administration in 1966, and no subsequent Israeli government has ever contemplated reinstating such restrictions, on what exactly does Obama base this assumption?
The logical conclusion is that he got it from the Israeli Arab leadership and radical Jewish leftists, both of which accuse Israel of apartheid ad nauseam. Yet believing these accusations requires willfully ignoring the facts.
This past December, for instance, one Ahmed Tibi wrote an article for The Hill accusing Israel of treating its Arab citizens like southerners treated blacks in the Jim Crow era. The analogy was a trifle marred by the tagline at the end, in which Tibi admitted he is currently deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset: Blacks didn’t occupy prominent positions in southern legislatures under Jim Crow, much less in South Africa under apartheid. It was further undermined when another Arab deputy Knesset speaker, Hamad Amar, wrote a riposte in The Hill the next week terming Tibi’s claims arrant nonsense. The spectacle of two Arab deputy speakers of parliament publicly dueling, without any fear of consequences, over whether their country discriminates against Arabs isn’t exactly an example of proto-apartheid behavior. But hey, who you gonna believe: Tibi or your lying eyes?
Then there are all the other Arabs in prominent positions – college presidents, hospital directors, ambassadors, army officers, Supreme Court justices and more. The Elder of Ziyon blog has a must-see poster collection featuring these and many other examples that are the very antithesis of apartheid. But hey, who you gonna believe: Haaretz’s Gideon Levy or your lying eyes?
Indeed, on the issue that seems to concern Obama most – freedom of movement, which he highlighted in the rhetorical question immediately preceding the one on Arab Israelis – Arab citizens and permanent residents arguably have greater rights than Israeli Jews: For instance, they can freely visit the Temple Mount, which Israeli Jews can’t; they can also visit the Palestinian Authority, which Israeli law bars Jews from doing. In fact, their freedom of movement is precisely why terrorist organizations consider them prize recruits. It’s a sad day when Palestinian terrorists have a better grasp of Israel’s true nature than the U.S. president.
Obama, of course, is just a symptom of a much larger problem: Too many Western liberals willfully close their eyes to the truth when it comes to Israel, preferring to parrot the current bon ton. But for an administration that explicitly pledged to pursue “evidence-based policy,” a little more attention to the evidence on Israel would be a nice place to start.
On Tuesday, I discussed how Israel Apartheid Week, which is taking place this week and next, feeds off latent anti-Semitism. But it’s a truism that anti-Semitism never harms the Jews alone, and IAW is a classic example. To understand why, consider three news reports from the last two weeks.
Some 500,000 Syrian civilians, or perhaps even more, have fled Aleppo in response to the government’s aerial bombing campaign, “creating what aid workers say is one of the largest refugee flows of the entire civil war”–an impressive achievement for a war that’s already created 2.4 million refugees and caused 6.5 million to be internally displaced. Tens of thousands of Muslims are fleeing spiraling violence in the Central African Republic, “in what human rights groups and a top United Nations official characterized … as de facto ethnic cleansing.” And in South Sudan, where a fragile truce has broken down, almost 900,000 people have been displaced, while “millions could go hungry if fields remain unplowed before the coming rainy season.”
And those are just samples. Altogether, millions of people round the world are being killed, displaced, and/or facing starvation. Yet IAW activists are blanketing campuses throughout the West with a campaign aimed at persuading educated young people that the world’s biggest problem, the one they should focus on persuading their governments to solve, is a low-level conflict that isn’t generating mass slaughter, mass displacement, or mass starvation–one whose total casualties over 65 years are barely a tenth of those produced by Syria’s civil war in less than three. And because the miserable Syrians, Central Africans, and South Sudanese have no comparably well-funded and well-organized group to press their cases, a great many well-meaning Westerners have become convinced that Israel’s “oppression” of the Palestinians truly is the world’s most pressing problem, and are lobbying their governments to direct their efforts accordingly.
In democracies, governments tend to react to public pressure. A classic example is the “Kony 2012” video, which detailed the atrocities committed by Joseph Kony’s militia, the Lord’s Resistance Army, in Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan: The video went viral, and its popularity is credited with spurring Western governments to make hunting down Kony a higher priority, which in turn helped persuade the African Union to launch a mission to do so. Yet any government has only so much time, energy, money, and political capital to spend; thus a greater investment in one cause inevitably comes at the expense of other causes for which there is less public pressure.
Consequently, to the degree that groups like IAW succeed in generating public pressure for Western governments to make “Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians” a top priority, they inevitably cause these governments to devote less attention to real crimes happening in places like Syria, Central African Republic, and South Sudan. In other words, they are contributing directly to the ongoing slaughter, displacement and hunger in those countries by persuading Western citizens, and hence Western governments, that far more effort should be invested in trying to create a Palestinian state than in trying to ease the much greater distress elsewhere in the world.
Thus while Israelis are IAW’s main targets, they are far from being its main victims. The real victims are the millions being massacred, displaced, and starved while the West ignores them, because it’s too busy obsessing over Israel.
A new edition of the Book of Esther does much to explain liberal Jewish attitudes toward Israel.
It’s become fashionable in certain circles to say “the occupation” and Israel’s “right-wing” government are distancing liberal Jews from Israel. But a new edition of the Book of Esther published by the Conservative Movement’s Israeli wing offers a truer explanation for liberal discomfort with Israel.
The new edition includes an introduction that seeks to explain parts of the story liberal Jews find problematic – first and foremost, the killing at the end. “We felt it was important to explain what happened in the context of that period,” the Israeli movement’s executive director, Yizhar Hess, said in a media interview last week. “For that reason, the introduction we’ve written takes both a loving and critical approach.” In short, such bloodshed would be unacceptable today, but norms were different then.
Yet what Esther unambiguously describes is a war of self-defense against people seeking to annihilate the Jews, undertaken only after repeated efforts to avert the threat non-militarily failed. So if liberal Jews find the text problematic, either they’re not paying attention to what it actually says, or they’ve become so pacifist that any war, even one to preserve the Jews from annihilation, is unacceptable.
To understand the parallels to Israel’s situation today, a closer look at Esther is instructive. In the popular imagination, Haman’s plot to kill the Jews is foiled when Queen Esther reveals herself as a Jew to King Ahasuerus. But then, “the reveling Jews embark on a massacre,” as Hess’s liberal Jewish interviewer put it.
In the actual text, however, Esther’s dramatic revelation doesn’t save the Jews: Ahasuerus kills Haman, but ignores Haman’s edict that every Jewish man, woman and child be killed on the 13th of Adar. So two months later, Esther again risks her life by visiting him uninvited and reiterates her plea for the edict’s repeal. This time, Ahasuerus refuses point-blank. Do anything else you please for the Jews, he tells her, but “An edict written in the king’s name and sealed with the king’s ring cannot be revoked.”
Only then, lacking any other option, do Esther and her cousin Mordechai resort to war: They order the Jews “to gather and defend themselves” on the 13th of Adar and kill “all the forces of every hostile people and province.” The enemy casualties ultimately total 75,800 – a fairly modest number for multiple battles spanning 127 provinces “from India to Ethiopia.”
How is this relevant to modern-day Israel? Because on Israel, too, it often seems liberal Jews either pay no attention to actual events – just as they ignore Esther’s actual text – or simply oppose any defensive measures that involve harm to others.
Take, for instance, their insistent demand that Israel just make peace with the Palestinians already. Israel has thrice offered the Palestinians a state – in 2000, 2001 and 2008, the latter an offer so far-reaching US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice couldn’t believe she was hearing it – only to have them reject it without even a counteroffer. Yet to liberal Jews, it’s as if this never happened: They still blame Israel for the lack of peace.
Ditto for senior Palestinian officials’ persistent refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state or acknowledge any historic Jewish connection to this land; their insistence on flooding Israel with millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees (just last month, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared the “right of return” a “personal decision” that “neither the PA, nor the state, nor the PLO, nor Abu-Mazen [Abbas], nor any Palestinian or Arab leader has the right” to concede); their glorification of anti-Israel terror, repeated threats to resume it and payment of salaries to terrorists; their indoctrination of children to view Israel as the enemy who must someday be destroyed; their grotesque anti-Israel incitement (like accusing Israel of infecting Palestinians with AIDS). To liberal Jews, either none of this exists, or it’s dismissed as unimportant. The absence of peace is still always and only Israel’s fault.
Or take the fact that every previous Israeli withdrawal of the last 20 years – from part of the West Bank in 1993-95, Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005 – produced not peace, but suicide bombings and rockets targeting Israeli cities. Indeed, 20 years of “peace process” have produced twice as many Israeli deaths from terrorism as the 45 preceding years. But liberal Jews, if they know this at all, certainly don’t see it as justifying Israeli qualms about ceding even more sensitive territory, from which rocket fire could shut down all of Israel’s major cities and its only international airport. They’re sure this time will be different. Or perhaps “ending the occupation” is simply more important than protecting Israeli lives.
Then there’s the “siege” of Gaza, the “wall,” the checkpoints and military operations – measures that have saved countless Israeli lives. The security barrier and the reoccupation of the West Bank in 2002 together reduced Israeli deaths by Palestinian terror from about 450 a year to a handful. Similarly, military operations in Gaza reduced rocket launches from thousands per year to dozens (if only temporarily). Defending yourself against people who are trying to kill you inevitably causes harm: Even nonviolent measures like checkpoints cause hardship, and military operations kill. But to liberal Jews, harming others isn’t acceptable, even in self-defense. There must be a better way, they insist: Just make peace – whether the other side wants to or not.
Because Israelis have paid attention to events of the past 20 years, an overwhelming majority don’t believe peace is achievable anytime soon. Nor are they willing to take egregious risks on the off chance that it is, because if the effort fails, it’s their children – not those of liberal Jews overseas – who will pay the price in blood.
But liberal Jews don’t want to see these unpleasant truths or cope with their unpleasant consequences: They want to cling to their faith that all problems can be solved peacefully if we just try hard enough. So instead, they “distance” themselves from the pesky country whose experiences, if taken seriously, would undermine that faith – just as they distance themselves from the Book of Esther’s description of another time when that faith proved unfounded.
Bring opinion leaders here, provide data to friends abroad, and don’t put Foreign Ministry in charge.
Having long argued that bringing people to see Israel for themselves is the best way to change their view of it, I was delighted to discover that someone high up in the Foreign Ministry shares my view. Unfortunately, Gideon Meir has just retired after 45 years in the ministry – after failing utterly to secure funding even for the modest effort of bringing over 3,000 non-Jews influential on American college campuses, at a cost of $12 million (NIS 42.1 million). That’s pocket change in a government budget of NIS 408.1 billion – a mere 0.01%.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Meir pointed out what ought to be obvious: Public diplomacy is as critical to Israel’s security as fighter jets, because without it, we won’t even be able to buy those jets. Or as he put it, we buy American fighters for $35 million apiece, but we’re not investing a cent in ensuring that future Congresses – whose demographic make-up will likely differ substantially from today’s – will approve selling us replacements when the current planes die.
An op-ed published this month by BBC journalist Lipika Pelham provides a timely reminder of what an impact seeing Israel first-hand can have. In it, the Bengal-born Pelham wrote of how her years here had changed her:
“It is impossible to explain fully the nuances of Jerusalem’s ethno-religious split to my old and new London friends. I had strayed too far from our past political adherences. I am worried about sounding too pro-Israel when, at the children’s school meetings, I want to share with curious parents that Jerusalem is a safer place than London for raising a family. Or while shopping at the local grocer, I cannot be bothered to check the kiwi fruit labels to check whether they came from Israel as has been de rigueur among my left-wing friends. I want to say it loud and clear that I do not care much about the boycott. Israel is not an apartheid state.”
Granted, she hasn’t become an outspoken champion. But for someone in her milieu, even publicly rejecting the “apartheid” canard is groundbreaking.
Yet bringing opinion leaders here isn’t the only elementary task the government is failing to perform. It’s neglecting something even more basic – simply providing information.
One of the gravest indictments I’ve ever seen of Israel’s nonexistent public diplomacy was published in this paper by Labor MK Hilik Bar earlier this month. Bar, who chairs the Knesset’s European Forum, reported that at a meeting with European parliamentarians belonging to the European Friends of Israel group, several complained of a basic problem: They “often lack the information necessary for them to help make the case for Israel in their own communities.” Providing such information to pro-Israel parliamentarians ought to be a staple of the Foreign Ministry’s work. Clearly, however, it’s not.
That became evident once again during European Parliament President Martin Schulz’s address to the Knesset last week. Granted, Schulz should never have thrown unverified slander into his speech: As David M. Weinberg noted, addresses to foreign parliaments are usually rigorously fact-checked; thus by inserting an accusation that he himself admitted he hadn’t checked, Schulz clearly violated diplomatic protocol.
Yet the accusation in question – that Israel starves the Palestinians of water – crops up repeatedly, and various comprehensive rebuttals have therefore been published. Weinberg quoted one by a leading Israeli hydrologist, Prof. Haim Gvirtzman, that detailed the steep decline in the water usage gap over the last 40 years; the fact that Israel gives the Palestinians more water than required under the Oslo Accords; and the Palestinians’ own responsibility for the remaining shortfalls, due to wasteful irrigation methods and refusal to fix leaky pipes, drill new wells, use treated sewage or cooperate with Israel on projects to alleviate the problem. I’d also mention the Europeans’ own refusal to cooperate with Israel on such projects: They condition cooperation on the settlements not benefiting in any way, and since most waterways run through both Israeli and Palestinian controlled territory, that’s effectively impossible.
So how is it that Schulz, who occupies a very influential position and is considered a friend of Israel, had never seen Gvirtzman’s study? And why did none of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s aides know how to lay their hands on the relevant data so that he could rebut Schulz’s accusation in real time? Both lapses attest to a public diplomacy system so broken as to be nonexistent.
The obvious conclusion is that public diplomacy can no longer be left to the Foreign Ministry. Even the dedicated diplomats who sincerely want to make Israel’s case clearly lack the time, resources or skills to do it; otherwise, failures like those detailed above wouldn’t keep recurring. Moreover, some don’t even want to: As former ministry employee Dan Illouz revealed in another shocking Jerusalem Post column last month, some ministry officials actually support international boycotts aimed at forcing Israel into territorial withdrawals, and thus can hardly be trusted to conduct public diplomacy to avert such pressure.
The good news is that someone else wants to take over the job: Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz and ministry director general Yossi Kuperwasser have drafted plans for a major public diplomacy campaign and are seeking NIS 100 million to implement it. The bad news is that one of the cabinet’s most influential members, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, is trying to scuttle the proposal. Moreover, it’s not yet clear what the plan includes, aside from legal action against boycotts – which can be highly effective, but isn’t sufficient. No plan that omits the two key elements of bringing opinion leaders to Israel and providing essential information to friends overseas will be worth much, and NIS 100 million won’t go very far for one that includes both those goals plus legal action.
Ultimately, the decision will rest with Netanyahu – who forcefully advocated for more public diplomacy until becoming prime minister, but has neglected it shamefully ever since. Thus the question is whether he can be persuaded to return to his roots and authorize both the plan and the necessary funds. Anyone who cares about Israel should be urging him to do so.
One of the BDS movement’s greatest assets is the fact that its every success gets massive media coverage while its failures (ScarJo excepted) are largely ignored. That’s why anyone following the news in recent weeks would probably conclude that boycott, divestment, and sanctions were rapidly gaining ground. Yet in reality, BDS has suffered several major failures lately–and some of these failures bode ill for its future.
Just last week, for instance, Britain’s Supreme Court issued a major ruling against BDS when it upheld a trespassing conviction against four activists who chained themselves in an Ahava shop in London to protest the Israeli cosmetics firm’s West Bank plant. Far from being a narrow decision about trespassing, the ruling tackled the activists’ allegations against Ahava head-on.
First, the court rejected the claim that Ahava was “aiding and abetting the transfer of Israeli citizens to the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories],” and thereby violating the Geneva Convention. The company was doing no such thing, it said, but even if it were, “this could not amount to an offense by Ahava’s retailing arm.” That precedent will clearly be valuable for other Israeli companies fighting BDS.
Second, the court rejected the claim that Ahava had mislabeled its goods by labeling them “made in Israel” when they were made in the West Bank–another precedent of obvious value. Moreover, its reasoning demonstrated a remarkably clear understanding of what BDS is about: The label isn’t misleading, it said, because “a consumer willing to buy Israeli products would be very unlikely not to buy Israeli products because they were produced in the OPT.” In short, the court understood that most boycotters aren’t just “anti-occupation”; they have a problem with Israel, period. That understanding is crucial to unmasking BDS for what it is.
Also last week, Holland’s largest pension fund–and the world’s third largest–took the unusual step of issuing a press statement announcing that it had no intention of divesting from Israeli banks, having “concluded that these banks themselves do not act in breach of international laws and regulations, and that there are no judicial rulings that should lead to their exclusion.” ABP’s statement was a direct challenge to Holland’s second largest pension fund, PGGM, which last month announced plans to divest from Israeli banks because of their involvement in financing the settlements. PGGM had claimed such activity was problematic from the standpoint of international law. Now its larger crosstown rival has just publicly termed that nonsense. Such a rebuttal from a major European financial institution is far more convincing than anything Israel could say.
Two weeks earlier, BDS suffered another loss in a French court. The French distributor for the Israeli firm SodaStream, which also has a West Bank plant, had sued a local pro-boycott group for claiming that SodaStream products were being sold fraudulently because they were labeled “made in Israel.” The court found the claim that the distributor was deceiving or defrauding customers to be baseless. It therefore fined the group and ordered it to halt its campaign. As with the British ruling, this precedent will be very useful to other Israeli companies.
Moreover, many recent BDS “victories” are actually optical illusions. Take, for instance, the announcement by Denmark’s largest bank that it’s divesting from Bank Hapoalim. But as Hapoalim pointed out, “Denmark’s Danske Bank has no investments, of any kind, with Bank Hapoalim.” Similarly, the Norwegian Finance Ministry recently ordered its sovereign wealth fund to divest from two other Israeli companies–but again, the fund had no investments in those companies.
Such “faux boycotts” are obviously still damaging, because they create the illusion that BDS is gathering steam. Nevertheless, they’re a far cry from real boycotts that do real economic damage.
In short, despite John Kerry’s warnings that if peace talks fail, anti-Israel boycotts will metastasize, BDS remains a fringe movement that can still be thwarted. It will grow to threatening proportions only if Israel and its allies make no effort to challenge it.
Herzl believed he could alter world opinion. Many Israelis today think we must simply bow to it.
A key insight bequeathed by Zionism’s founding father is that international legitimacy matters greatly. While others focused on creating “facts on the ground” (which also matter), Theodor Herzl devoted himself to international politics: He met with world leaders to mobilize support for a Jewish national home, wrote books and articles explicating this idea and created a political movement, the Zionist Organization, to promote his efforts. So confident was he of the value of this work that after the first Zionist Congress, in Basel in 1897, he wrote in his diary, “At Basel, I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.” And indeed, 51 years later, the State of Israel was born.
But if Herzl were alive today, he would be appalled at how his legacy has been distorted. True, some Israelis at least remember that international legitimacy matters: Politicians, journalists, businessmen and academics routinely cite this principle in explaining why Israel must make peace with the Palestinians, or alternatively, cede territory unilaterally. Yet the lesson Herzl derived from this principle was very different. Herzl concluded that since global opinion matters, he must work relentlessly to alter the world’s views. His would-be heirs conclude that since global opinion matters, Israel must meekly bow to every global demand, however unfeasible or even detrimental it might be – because changing world opinion is impossible, even if Israel is right.
It’s hard to overstate how radically Herzl altered world opinion. When he began his campaign, Jewish sovereignty hadn’t existed for 1,900 years, and to most of the world, the idea of reconstituting it was inconceivable. Yet within 50 years, Herzl and his successors had changed so many minds that in 1947, the UN voted to establish a Jewish state by a two-thirds majority.
Now consider a few developments from the past week alone:
• Foreign Ministry diplomats came out against Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz’s plan for a major public diplomacy campaign to combat the threat of anti-Israel boycotts. The diplomats, Haaretz reported, think a PR offensive would merely “play into the hands of boycott activists,” because what Steinitz terms “delegitimization” is really just “legitimate criticism from foreign governments and NGOs of Israel’s policy in the territories.” In short, changing the world’s mind is impossible, so we shouldn’t bother trying.
• Former Jerusalem Report editor-in-chief Hirsh Goodman wrote in a New York Times op-ed that having grown up in apartheid South Africa, he knows nothing resembling apartheid “even remotely exists in Israel or the occupied territories. But, increasingly, in the mind of the world it does,” and there’s nothing we can do to persuade it otherwise. We can never, for instance, make the world see the “apartheid wall” (aka the West Bank security barrier) as a legitimate security measure; the propaganda war is one “Israel cannot win unless it makes peace.”
• Addressing a high-profile conference, Finance Minister Yair Lapid asserted that if Israeli-Palestinian talks fail, Israel will suffer devastating boycotts from its major trading partner, the European Union. “If there will not be a political settlement, the Israeli economy will face a dramatic withdrawal that will substantially hurt the pocket of every Israeli,” he warned. He even claimed that Europe is considering canceling the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the foundation of our economic ties (something an EU spokesman flatly denied). In short, we must either capitulate to Palestinian demands or face economic ruin, because we can’t possibly persuade the world that our own positions are justified.
• A group of Israeli businessmen called Breaking the Impasse launched an ad campaign declaring that an Israeli-Palestinian deal is essential both politically and economically, so Israel must sign one. The campaign’s slogans – “Bibi [Netanyahu], only you can”; “A strong country signs an agreement” – put the onus for making peace squarely on Israel. The previous week, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the group similarly asserted that “We must urgently reach a diplomatic settlement,” because “The world is losing patience and the threat of sanctions is growing daily.” And of course, we can’t do anything to change the world’s mind.
But what if the Palestinians, who have refused every previous Israeli offer, once again refuse? Or what if they insist on terms that would gravely endanger the country? Then apparently, Israel is screwed – because Herzl’s heirs no longer believe it’s possible to alter global opinion.
Objectively speaking, this is arrant nonsense. Even if you believe Israel is an illegal occupier, plenty of other illegal occupations have existed for as long or even longer – think China’s occupation of Tibet, India’s occupation of Kashmir, Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus, etc. And Israel has done far more than these countries to try to resolve the problem, including repeated offers of Palestinian statehood and the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Yet these countries aren’t threatened with boycotts and sanctions; indeed, as Prof. Eugene Kontorovich has noted, the same EU that claims “international law” bars it from economic activity in the “occupied” West Bank actively promotes such activity in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus and Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. Thus it’s clearly possible to be embroiled in a long-running conflict without drawing international boycotts.
But not if you don’t even try to persuade the world of the justice of your claims. And Israel stopped trying long ago. Instead, its diplomats, journalists, businessmen and politicians all insist that changing the world’s mind is impossible, so our only choice is capitulating to its demands.
It’s a shocking betrayal of Herzl’s conviction that “If you will it, it is no dream.” Herzl showed that with enough effort, and belief in the justice of your cause, you can sell the world even a proposition as radical as reconstituting Jewish sovereignty after 2,000 years. By comparison, the propositions Israel must sell today are far more modest: that it has legitimate rights in its ancient heartland, and that, like other long-running conflicts worldwide, the Israeli-Palestinian one isn’t currently resolvable.
But many Israelis, it seems, have forgotten how to will anything. They know only how to bow to the will of others.
I have one question for National Intelligence Director James Clapper and his predecessors. As we all know, the infamous 2007 National Intelligence Estimate asserted with “high confidence” that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons development, and no subsequent NIE ever reversed that judgment. Yet fast forward seven years, and the latest annual intelligence assessment asserts that “Tehran has made technical progress in a number of areas … from which it could draw if it decided to build missile-deliverable nuclear weapons,” and consequently, it now “has the scientific, technical, and industrial capacity to eventually produce nuclear weapons” should it so choose. So here’s my question: If Iran stopped its weapons development effort seven years ago, how did it happen that since then, it has made precisely the kind of technical progress that now enables it to build a nuclear warhead whenever it chooses?
There are two plausible answers to this question. One, the work never really stopped, or resumed at some point in the last few years, and U.S. intelligence agencies simply missed it. That’s certainly possible; intelligence agencies aren’t omniscient, and it’s unrealistic to think they will never make mistakes. A more troubling possibility is that since intelligence rarely reaches the level of absolute certainty, the available information was misinterpreted due to political bias–a desire to avoid military action against Iran, and hence to avoid interpreting Iran’s behavior in a way that might necessitate such action.
But the answer offered by the Obama administration strains credulity: that Iran really did stop its weapons program and never resumed it, but somehow, mysteriously, nevertheless made major technical progress over the last seven years of precisely the kind that now enables it to build a nuclear warhead anytime it pleases. Even a two-year-old wouldn’t buy that.
The real problem, however, isn’t what this says about the past, but what it says about the future. After all, for years, opponents of attacking Iran’s nuclear program have argued that Tehran hasn’t yet decided to make a nuclear weapon, and if it ever does, the U.S. will know in enough time to stop it before it succeeds. Therefore, there’s no reason for either America or Israel to take military action now. Yet how can either Americans or Israelis have confidence that U.S. intelligence will detect a nuclear breakout in time if, for the past seven years, it has either missed all the signs that Iran was continuing to make “technical progress” toward weaponization, or deliberately ignored them out of a desire to avert military action–a desire that, judging by both words and deeds, remains the administration’s top priority?
The answer, of course, is that they can’t. And the lesson for Israel is clear: It cannot rely on U.S. promises to stop Iran from getting nukes, because these promises are based on the faulty assumption that U.S. intelligence will uncover a “smoking gun”–the kind of irrefutable proof that can’t be argued away–in enough time to take action. Hence the day is coming closer when Israel will have to make a fatal decision: attack Iran itself, or learn to live with a nuclear Iran.