Foreign Affairs and Defense
As an explanation for Israel’s global unpopularity, this thesis simply doesn’t fit the facts.
When a theory unsupported even by minimal evidence becomes accepted as truth, it’s time to worry. And you know it’s happened when it’s cited as unchallenged fact even by people outside its political home base. That’s why I was appalled by Gil Troy’s Jerusalem Postcolumn last week, in which he attributed Israel’s unpopularity overseas partly to “Likud’s rise and Labor’s decline” and the existence of “ideological” settlements deep in the West Bank.
Troy is no radical leftist; he’s a political centrist, ardent Zionist and tireless defender of Israel. He’s also a professor of history at McGill University, which makes his lack of historical memory doubly distressing.
Take, for instance, his claim that “millions toasted” Israel’s victory in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, but subsequently, “The Likud’s rise and Labor’s decline made Israel less popular in Europe and with Social Democrats,” a trend exacerbated by “escalating the settlement project.”
Can Troy really have forgotten that during the Yom Kippur War, when Israel came perilously near annihilation due to lack of arms with which to continue fighting, not one European country would even allow American planes bearing these vital supplies to land in its territory for refueling? Nothing Europe has done to Israel in the 40 years since – including the recent economic boycott efforts – even comes close to this collective complicity in Israel’s attempted eradication. Yet back then, Labor was still the unchallenged ruling party (Likud took power only in 1977) and “ideological” settlement hadn’t yet begun. As then-Prime Minister Golda Meir complained bitterly at the next Socialist International meeting, the “good” old Labor-led Israel won no support from European social democrats, either.
Then there’s Europe’s longstanding relationship with the PLO, which dates to the “Euro-Arab Dialogue” of 1975 – long before the PLO officially (if insincerely) renounced “armed struggle” in 1988, and just a year after it adopted its famous “phased plan” for Israel’s ultimate eradication. France, Italy, Luxembourg and Ireland supported making the PLO a full partner in the newly launched dialogue. Other European Community members weren’t quite ready for that, but they did agree to the PLO’s inclusion in a pan-Arab delegation.
In short, far from cheering Israel’s survival in 1973, Europe promptly sought to undermine that survival by recognizing an organization whose 1968 charter made no secret of its genocidal goals. And this, again, happened while Labor was still firmly in power and no “ideological” settlements had yet been built.
Nor should we forget the UN’s infamous “Zionism is Racism” resolution of 1975. As delegitimization goes, it’s hard to beat having two-thirds of the world’s countries declare that while self-determination is laudable for other people, it’s “racist” when practiced by Jewish people.
Troy does mention this resolution, but fails to note that it, too, was adopted when Labor still reigned supreme and no ideological settlements yet existed. Indeed, as Yossi Klein Haleviperceptively noted, the first such settlement, Sebastia, was authorized three weeks after this resolution passed – and might not have been had many Israelis not been so revolted by the resolution that they saw Sebastia as a fitting “Zionist answer.”
The thesis that Likud and the settlements are responsible for Israel’s unpopularity has an equally counter-factual corollary: If Israel would just elect left-wing governments and evacuate settlements, its popularity would increase. Troy trots out that fallacy as well, declaring that the 2005 disengagement from Gaza “helped staunch” the “exorbitant military and diplomatic price Israel was paying for staying in Gaza.”
Really? Has he forgotten that three years and 6,000 rockets later, when Israel finally took military action to end Gaza’s nonstop bombardment of the Negev, it was slapped with the Goldstone Report accusing it of war crimes (including deliberately targeting civilians) and recommending its indictment in the International Criminal Court? That slanderous document, ultimately repudiated even by its lead author, won overwhelming backing not only in the UN Human Rights Council and General Assembly, but also in Europe: Only eight European countries voted against it.
Thus when a prime minister considered a super-dove – Ehud Olmert, the man responsible for Israel’s most far-reaching peace offer ever – launched a three-week incursion to stop rocket fire from territory Israel had fully evacuated three years earlier, Israel’s reward was the Goldstone Report. Yet nothing comparable occurred in 2002, when a premier then considered an uber-hawk (Ariel Sharon) permanently reoccupied much of the West Bank to stop the intifada. In short, far from being staunched by Israel’s pullout from Gaza and election of a left-wing premier, the diplomatic bleeding only got worse.
As even leftist Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit subsequently admitted in a moment of candor, “When Ehud Olmert’s Israel turns out to be less legitimate than [hardline Likud premier] Yitzhak Shamir’s Israel, there is no true incentive to continue to give in.” And there’s no intellectually honest way to keep blaming Likud and the settlements for Israel’s unpopularity.
One can certainly understand why leftists keep doing so anyway: Propagating the myth that Likud and the settlements are to blame furthers their goal of persuading Israelis to abandon both. One can even understand why many non-leftists buy this myth: Quite aside from the fact that anything people hear often enough starts sounding plausible, the delusion that it’s “only” Likud and the settlements the world hates – that if we just got rid of both, the world would love us again – is much less unpleasant than acknowledging that much of the world will hate us no matter what. Yet the evidence simply doesn’t support this theory.
The good news is that most Israelis seem to grasp this intuitively: In a 2010 poll, 77% of Israeli Jews agreed that “no matter what Israel does or how far it goes towards resolving the conflict with the Palestinians, the world will continue to criticize Israel.” The bad news is that this myth nevertheless continues to dominate the public discourse, thanks to the silent majority’s failure to challenge it publicly and consistently.
So next time someone tells you Likud and the settlements are to blame, challenge them to explain how this thesis fits the facts. Europe’s behavior in 1973 might be a good place to start.
It’s hard to rebut the Palestinian narrative without bringing up Jordan, yet doing so has real costs.
Writing in this paper on Friday, Martin Sherman correctly pointed out that “the origins of the assault on Israel’s legitimacy are rooted in the acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the Palestinian narrative.” Once someone is convinced that a) the Palestinians have a right to a state, and b) the West Bank and Gaza are “occupied Palestinian territories” that rightly belong to a Palestinian state, he will necessarily see any Israeli effort to impose conditions on this state’s establishment, or to curtail its territory, as illegitimate. In a clash between “rights” and “security needs,” rights will always win.
There’s no conceivable excuse for Israel’s failure to combat the second half of this Palestinian claim. But there’s a substantive reason for its historical reluctance to challenge the first half, and it can be summed up in a single word: Jordan. For the simplest rebuttal to the claim that the Palestinians have a “right” to establish a state is to point out the obvious but perpetually overlooked fact that a Palestinian state already exists: It occupies fully 80 percent of the original British Mandate for Palestine, and its population is roughly two-thirds Palestinian. It just happens to be called the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan rather than Palestine.
If a Palestinian state already exists, then the argument for creating a second one is obviously much weaker. Even the most expansive interpretations of the right to national self-determination don’t hold that given ethnic groups have a right to statehood on any patch of land where they happen to comprise a majority (as the Palestinians do in the West Bank and Gaza); if so, multiethnic states would fragment unendingly into ever smaller statelets. Hence no Western country, for instance, supports allowing Kosovo’s northern provinces to break away and either form their own state or join neighboring Serbia, even though these provinces are majority Serb. The generally accepted principle is that once a given national group has a state where it can exercise self-determination, group members living outside this state don’t need another one; they can move to the original if they wish to exercise their right of national self-determination – just as Jews wishing to take part in the Jewish national project move to Israel, or ethnic Germans wishing to take part in the German national project move to Germany.
Nevertheless, there’s a serious obstacle to making this argument: For Jordan to function effectively as a Palestinian state, a revolution would have to occur there. And not only would the ouster of Jordan’s Hashemite rulers create real security headaches for Israel, but even advocating such a scenario would do so.
Currently, Jordan is an undemocratic state ruled by Saudi Arabian exiles (the Hashemites), which actively discriminates against its Palestinian citizens. Palestinians are largely excluded from government, and thousands have even been stripped of their citizenship over the last decade. Moreover, Jordan stringently restricts Palestinian immigration from the West Bank and Gaza, even though many West Bank Palestinians held Jordanian citizenship until Jordan rescinded it overnight in 1988.
None of this changes the reality that Jordan is a Palestinian state. But Palestinians won’t be able to exercise full national self-determination there until the system of government changes enough to bring the Palestinian majority to power.
As the Arab Spring has shown, a revolution is hardly unthinkable. But neither would it be cost-free for Israel.
The Jordanian border is not only Israel’s longest border, but also its quietest one. That has been true for roughly four decades, even though a formal peace treaty was signed only in 1994. And today, it’s Israel’s only quiet border. Thus if this border heated up as well, it would clearly be a major security headache for Israel. And there’s no reason to think a Palestinian-ruled Jordan would keep the peace the way the Hashemite kings have done.
Indeed, even openly discussing the “Jordan is Palestine” option could exact a security price: The Hashemites have long considered a quiet border in their own interest, but their calculations might understandably change if they thought Israel were actively seeking their overthrow.
Any such discussion would also exact a significant diplomatic price. It would certainly shred the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, and might also endanger Israel’s peace treaty with Jordan’s ally, Egypt. Moreover, it could create substantial friction with Washington, since Jordan is an American ally.
For all these reasons, successive Israeli governments have consistently eschewed a Jordan-is-Palestine policy. In retrospect, I think this proved to be the wrong decision. A Palestinian state in the West Bank would be even more dangerous than one in Jordan, and the delegitimization campaign that resulted from Israel’s failure to counter the Palestinian narrative seems likely to exact higher costs than a Jordan-is-Palestine policy would. But even today, the arguments against such a policy are nontrivial; hence reasonable people can and do disagree about it.
No such justification can be advanced for Israel’s failure to rebut the claim that the West Bank and Gaza are “occupied Palestinian territory.” Combating that canard has no downside whatsoever, since even Israelis who favor creating a Palestinian state in these territories agree that any such deal must meet certain minimal Israeli requirements, and a state generously ceding its own territory for the sake of peace is much better placed to make demands of the other side than a state stubbornly refusing to return stolen land. Moreover, not only are all the facts are on Israel’s side, but they were universally accepted throughout the West until a few decades ago. That they have since been universally forgotten amounts to criminal diplomatic malfeasance by successive Israeli governments, which have spent the last 20 years pushing the Palestinian narrative instead of Israel’s own – a mind-boggling lapse that can’t be corrected too soon.
As for Jordan, Israel should at the very least be preparing to leverage a Jordanian revolution if and when it comes, since if the Arab Spring has proven anything, it’s that sooner or later, it probably will. But Jerusalem should also give serious thought to starting a Jordan-is-Palestine campaign now – because given the pace at which delegitimization is progressing, waiting for the revolution may be too late.
The UN’s relentless anti-Israel bias, so aptly described by Anne Bayefsky in these pages last Friday, sometimes appears as inevitable as death and taxes. Yet a survey of the Security Council’s voting record over the last 15 years reveals that there has in fact been a slight, but potentially significant, improvement. And that improvement is largely thanks to a new policy adopted by U.S. President George Bush.
For years, the U.S. has vetoed resolutions that it deemed too biased against Israel. But during the late 1980s and 1990s, Washington was unable to sway any other council member to its side: With monotonous regularity, such resolutions failed by a vote of 14-1.
Over the last four years, however, there has been a shift: While no country has yet joined the U.S. in voting “no,” there have consistently been two to four abstentions – usually from Europe, occasionally from Africa as well. Since Security Council resolutions need nine votes to pass, this means that the council has been inching toward a situation in which anti-Israel resolutions could be defeated even without an American veto.
Bush achieved this shift by setting a clear, consistent standard for what constitutes bias: Condemnations of Israel are biased unless the resolution also condemns anti-Israel terror. And, more importantly, vague condemnations of “all violence against civilians” do not qualify: The resolution must explicitly condemn Palestinian perpetrators such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
That is such a simple and reasonable demand that some countries have found it impossible to ignore. Yet the Palestinians, and hence the Arab countries that sponsor Security Council resolutions on their behalf, have never once been willing to agree. The result is that a handful of nations that once voted consistently against Israel – England, Germany, Norway, Romania, Bulgaria and Cameroon – turned into frequent abstainers.
John Danforth, Washington’s current ambassador to the UN, provided an eloquent example of how the new system works during last week’s debate on the latest anti-Israel resolution, which would have condemned Israel’s current military operation in Gaza and demanded that it cease immediately.
Danforth did not say that the U.S. was unwilling in principle to condemn the operation, which began after Hamas killed two Israeli children in Sderot with a Qassam rocket launched from Gaza on September 29. That would have been unacceptable to every other Security Council member, and therefore counterproductive. Instead, he explained in detail why the resolution was unbalanced as it stood and what would have to be added to make it acceptable to the U.S.
The resolution, he said in addresses to the council on Monday and Tuesday, “tends to put the blame on Israel and absolves terrorists in the Middle East – people who shoot rockets into civilian areas, people who are responsible for killing children, Hamas. Nothing was said in this resolution about that problem.”
Specifically, he said, “it does not mention even one of the 450 Qassam rocket attacks launched against Israel over the past two years … It does not mention the two Israeli children who were outside playing last week when a rocket suddenly crashed into their young bodies. It does not mention the undisputed fact that Qassam rockets have no military purpose – that they are crude, imprecise devices of terror designed to kill civilians. It does not mention that Hamas took ‘credit’ for killing these Israeli children and maiming many other Israeli civilians … It does not mention that the terrorists hide among Palestinian civilians, provoking their deaths, and then use those deaths as fodder for their hatred, lawlessness, and efforts to derail the peace process. It does not mention the complete failure of the Palestinian authority to meet its commitments to establish security among its people. It does not mention any of these facts, nor does it acknowledge the legitimate need for Israel to defend itself.”
Bluntly accusing the council of acting “as the adversary of the Israelis and cheerleader to the Palestinians,” he charged that the resolution “would be a very terrible statement for the Security Council to make,” because it effectively acquiesced in terror against Israelis by failing to condemn it. “Silence indicates consent,” he said. “The silence here today is deafening.”
In essence, all Danforth asked was that the resolution not implicitly condone terrorism by failing even to mention the specific terrorist act that sparked the Gaza operation. That is a demand that would be difficult for any civilized nation to reject – and Britain, Germany and Romania, acknowledging its justice, therefore decided to abstain.
There are, as Saul Singer noted in these pages on Friday, other steps that the U.S. could and should be taking in an effort to reshape the UN’s attitude toward terror – and not only with regard to terror against Israel. Indeed, one need only look at the list of countries that had no qualms about voting “yes” on last week’s resolution to realize just how much remains to be done: They included two key European nations, France and Spain; two countries, Russia and the Philippines, that have themselves suffered devastating terror attacks, and could therefore be expected to understand how much is at stake; and two Latin American countries, Brazil and Chile, that, as democracies, could also have been expected to uphold basic standards of decency.
Nevertheless, Bush has made an important start with his new policy on anti-Israel resolutions. And for that, he deserves full credit.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on October 12, 2004