Foreign Affairs and Defense
In my last post, I explained some of the reasons why Israel’s diplomatic future looks promising despite the ongoing freeze in the peace process. But two other factors are also likely to have a positive impact down the road. The first is that the Arabic/Islamic world, which for years was at the forefront of pushing the notion that the Palestinian issue is the world’s number-one problem, is starting to get fed up with the Palestinians’ utter self-absorption at a time when so many Arabs and Muslims are suffering far worse. The second is a small but growing cadre of Israeli Arabs who are proud citizens of Israel and willing to defend its cause overseas.
For an example of the first development, consider the blistering interview with a Palestinian spokesman conducted last month by Orient News TV, a Dubai-based Syrian opposition station. Interviewer Dima Wannous relentlessly pressed her guest, Muhammad Masharqa, on why the Palestinian issue should be “the world’s number one cause.” Following are some of the points she raised with him, as translated by MEMRI:
In 1948, the years of the Nakba, the Palestinian people were driven out of their homes and their land. Approximately 750,000 people were displaced … 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, only 150,000 of whom were expelled from Palestine. The others remained in their historical homeland, although in different places. If you take the total figure of 750,000, this is equal to the number of people who fled Syria and Iraq in the past three months. I repeat the question in another way, because you did not answer me the first time. Why is the Palestinian cause the world’s number one cause…
How come yours is the world’s number one cause? With all the great crimes perpetrated by the Israeli enemy – how many people were killed in the Palestinian ‘Land Day?’ You know better than me. Six people were killed…
Saddam Hussein was idolized by the masses for firing 36 or 39 Scud missiles at Tel Aviv, while he was perpetrating crimes on a daily basis against his own people. The Palestinian greatly appreciated Saddam Hussein for this deed. If we want to talk about the Palestinians’ approach to the liberation of the peoples, is it conceivable for them to support a murderer, an arch-killer, a dictator … just because he fired missiles at Tel Aviv? What about the [Iraqi] people?
Nor was Wannous the least impressed by Masharqa’s attempts to justify Palestinian centrality on the grounds that Israel was a “colonialist” country. “In other words, you’ve benefitted from the enemy being Jewish and Israeli,” she retorted.
Granted, her attitude is far from being the majority position in the Arab world. But it’s no longer unique, either. Just two months ago, I wrote about a former senior Egyptian official who was similarly disgusted by all the attention lavished on fake Palestinian refugees when real Syrian refugees are in dire need of assistance.
The Palestinian cause didn’t become a Western obsession by mere chance; it became a Western obsession in large part because the Arab/Islamic world spent decades relentlessly telling Westerners that this was the Middle East’s biggest problem. By now, this view has become entrenched dogma in the West, and it clearly won’t lose that position overnight. But as Arab/Islamic countries start downgrading the importance of the Palestinian issue, this will eventually have an impact on the West as well.
Reinforcing this development is the increasing emergence of homegrown Arab advocates for Israel. Earlier this month, the Jerusalem Post profiled one such activist–Mohammed Ka’abiya, an air force veteran and university student who has been advocating for Israel on overseas campuses as a StandWithUs Fellow.
It’s relatively easy for anti-Israel activists to persuade ignorant young Westerners that Israel is an “apartheid state” when the main opposition to this canard comes from Jews, who can be smeared as “interested parties.” It’s much harder when a Muslim Bedouin comes up afterward and says, “My name is Mohammad, and I served in the Israel Air Force, and I’m preparing Bedouin guides to serve. I’m here to protect Israel from the BDS lies. You must know that Israeli Arabs have the freedom to live, work, worship and travel.”
Like Wannous, Ka’abiya is still very much in the minority, but again, neither is he unique. His best-known colleagues include diplomat George Deek, who argues that Israeli Arabs can and should “live as a contributing minority” in Israel just like “the Jews in Europe, who kept their religion and identity for centuries but still managed to influence,” and Father Gabriel Naddaf, who has been successfully encouraging his fellow Christian Arabs to serve in the Israeli army and has defended Israel at the UN.
In arguing that the Israeli-Palestinian status quo is unsustainable, both the Israeli left and its American Jewish counterpart rely heavily on fears that the ongoing conflict is eroding Western support for Israel, and that therefore, time is on the Palestinians’ side. But given the West’s growing and unhappy acquaintance with radical Islam, Israel’s improving status in other parts of the world (as detailed in my previous post), and the nascent change in Arab attitudes toward the Palestinian issue, it’s looking far more likely that time is on Israel’s side.
In the long run, these developments could also help solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by convincing Palestinians that Israel isn’t likely to disappear, so negotiating a reasonable peace deal is their best option. But whether or not that ever happens, there’s no reason for Israel to feel pressured to make hasty concessions for fear of diplomatic isolation. As recent developments make clear, Israel can afford to wait.
Originally published in Commentary on August 26, 2016
In a world where entire countries are collapsing, it’s not surprising that the collapse of a decades-old diplomatic axiom has been largely ignored. This axiom holds that Israel’s international relations are dependent on the fate of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Relations will improve if the government makes progress toward peace and worsen if the peace process stalemates. Yet Israel today, under a government widely (though wrongly) deemed its “most right-wing ever” and equally widely (though equally wrongly) blamed for the nonexistent peace process, has been expanding and deepening its diplomatic relationships at a dizzying pace, as the past week once again shows.
On Monday, on the way home from a visit to Guinea–a Muslim-majority country with which Israel resumed relations this summer after a 49-year hiatus–Foreign Ministry Director General Dore Gold stopped off in another African country with which Israel still has no formal ties. According to Haaretz, no Israeli diplomat has ever before been invited to this country. That same day, Kazakhstan’s defense minister came to Israel to meet with his Israeli counterpart prior to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned visit to this Muslim-majority country later this year. According to the Jerusalem Post, that will make Netanyahu the first sitting Israeli premier ever to visit Central Asia. And while Nigerian opposition has apparently stalled a bid by several African countries to invite Netanyahu to this year’s summit of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the president of Togo has announced that he will host a meeting between Netanyahu and ECOWAS leaders next spring, in yet another first. Nor are such developments unusual these days; just last month, I wrote a post listing several other such firsts.
Granted, the main impetus for this change has nothing to with Israel; rather, it’s the global upsurge in Islamist terror, which has spurred more and more countries to seek to benefit from Israel’s unhappily vast experience in combating such terror. Nevertheless, it’s no accident that these blossoming diplomatic ties are happening specifically under a “right-wing” government.
Netanyahu and his cabinet have been able to exploit this opening to the fullest precisely because they never bought the diplomatic axiom so beloved of the Israeli left. Had the government actually believed diplomatic success depended on progress in the peace process, it wouldn’t have invested much effort on trying to expand Israel’s ties with the traditionally pro-Palestinian non-Western world at a time when the peace process was stalemated because it would consider such efforts doomed to failure. And in fact, before Netanyahu took office in 2009, Israeli diplomacy did focus almost exclusively on the West.
But Netanyahu and certain other key cabinet ministers (most notably former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman) have toiled for years to improve ties with non-Western countries. Thus when changing geopolitical circumstances provided an opportunity, they were fully prepared to seize it, with a skill that won admiration even from diehard critics like Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit.
Yet despite the growing evidence to the contrary, many Israeli pundits still insist that further progress is impossible without movement on the peace process, seemingly oblivious to the possibility that circumstances can change. And it isn’t just leftists; even intelligent center-rightists like Yaakov Amidror have joined the recent chorus proclaiming, to take one example, that formal ties with Saudi Arabia are impossible without an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. In the short term, of course, they’re undoubtedly right. But to declare it impossible in the longer run, given how fast things have been changing recently, is sheer folly.
For instance, had anyone predicted, as recently as six weeks ago, that a Saudi delegation headed by a former senior government official would openly visit Israel–a move experts widely agree would be impossible without Riyadh’s approval–they would have been dismissed as crazy. And yet, it happened. Had anyone predicted a few years ago that under-the-table Saudi-Israeli defense cooperation would become an open secret, they would also have been dubbed crazy. But that, too, happened.
Or to take another example, had anyone said, as recently as last week, that an Egyptian foreign minister would tell Egyptian high-school students that Israel couldn’t be accused of state terrorism and had legitimate concerns about self-defense, they would have been dubbed crazy. And yet, that also happened, according to Arab media reports, which were lent credence when Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry issued a “denial” that didn’t actually deny either of those statements (he merely denied that dead Palestinian children were mentioned in either the student’s question or his response).
Indeed, it’s far more likely that such “firsts” will continue, because not only has rising Islamic terror made Israel a more desirable ally, but attitudes toward the Palestinian issue are also slowly changing, even in the Arab world. As I’ve noted before, the collapse of several Arab countries (Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen) has prompted a growing realization that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is far from the Middle East’s worst problem. And as that realization sinks in, the argument for continuing to eschew potentially beneficial relationships with Israel becomes less convincing.
Still, one might ask, what about the West, where the Palestinian issue actually seems to be growing in importance? It’s true that, being more insulated from the impact of the Middle East’s collapse, many Westerners have been slower to abandon the theory of Israeli-Palestinian centrality. But the West’s insulation is fraying, as the flood of refugees and rising terror show. And though in the short term, as I’ve explained before, that may make Europeans even more anti-Israel, over the long term, reality tends to become hard to ignore.
When you add in the fact that Israel already has strong bases of support in the West – even in hostile Europe, as activist Ariel Bolstein discovered on a recent tour of British pubs – there’s no reason to think Israel’s relations with the West will remain hostage to the Palestinian issue forever. The real mistake would be for Israel to throw up its hands and insist no improvement is possible rather than preparing to take advantage of new opportunities if they arise. And that, based on its record, doesn’t seem like a mistake this government will make.
Originally published in Commentary on August 25, 2016
In my last post, I discussed how Palestinian culture encourages suicidal youngsters to kill by offering a simple bargain: Murder a Jew, and you instantly become a hero. While the West has long turned a blind eye to this behavior, its refusal to look reality in the face is now coming back to haunt it. For today, the Islamic State is making the very same tempting offer to distraught Muslims in Western countries–murder a Westerner, and you can instantly become a hero instead of a failure.
It’s no accident that several recent terror attacks in Western countries have been carried out by people who apparently had histories of mental illness, including Nice, Orlando, and several attacks in Germany. Nor is it any accident that the Islamic State is cultivating such people. As with many other terrorist techniques pioneered by the Palestinians, ISIS has copied this one precisely because it proved successful–and not just as a means of recruiting assailants.
This tactic also serves two other important purposes. First, it encourages an already strong Western tendency to ignore the terrorists’ true aims. I discussed this with regard to the Palestinians in my previous post; a classic example concerning the Islamic State was Kenan Malik’s op-ed in the New York Times on Tuesday. “In the past, groups employing terrorism, such as the Irish Republican Army or the Palestine Liberation Organization, were driven by specific political aims: a united Ireland or an independent Palestine,” Malik wrote. “Jihadists are different. They have little or no explicit political aim but are driven by a visceral hatred of the West.”
In reality, Islamic State is quite open about its aims: It wants to destroy the West and establish a global Islamic caliphate. Indeed, being open about its goals is part of how it attracts new recruits, just as Palestinian organizations attract support by boasting of their efforts to destroy the Jewish state. But at the same time, both the Palestinians and ISIS would prefer that the West not take their goals too seriously since, if it did, it might stop supporting the Palestinians or actually get serious about destroying ISIS.
The use of emotionally distressed recruits is an ideal way for terrorists to foster confusion about their aims because it makes it even easier for well-meaning Westerners to reassure themselves that Islamist death cults, which exploit such distress to turn people into killers, aren’t actually the problem. The real issue, they tell themselves, is mental health or social alienation.
Second, this tactic helps divide the West and turn it against itself, because it reinforces another existing tendency of many well-meaning Westerners–blaming the victim for having driven the attacker to such a dreadful deed. Westerners have been blaming Palestinian terror on Israel for years, and now, many are blaming themselves for ISIS.
A classic example of this tendency emerged the day after deadly attacks killed 129 people at the Bataclan concert hall and other venues around Paris last November. Anshel Pfeffer of Haaretz visited the 11th arrondissement, one of the neighborhoods where attacks took place and discovered that people “aren’t angry, at least not at the perpetrators.”
The terrorists are “stupid, but they aren’t evil,” a woman who works at one of the district’s theaters told him. “They are victims of a system that excluded them from society, that’s why they felt this doesn’t belong to them and they could attack. There are those who live here in alienation, and we are all to blame for this alienation.”
Some of the others blamed French or American foreign policy. But “no one wanted to talk about Islamists or the Islamic State, even after it took responsibility for the attacks,” Pfeffer wrote. “It was hard to find anyone at this gathering who would say a bad word about the attackers.”
Using assailants with a history of mental or emotional problems is an ideal way for terrorists to reinforce this tendency as well, because it enables people to focus on the assailant’s distress, and society’s failure to deal with it, rather than on the evil intent of those who incited him to kill by telling him he would thereby become a hero instead of a loser.
Yet both gambits are working for ISIS now precisely because Westerners were conditioned for decades to believe them by the way their own journalists, academics, and political leaders insistently treated Palestinian terror as Israel’s fault.
Some Westerners, like the young Parisians interviewed by Pfeffer, have so internalized this attitude that they simply transfer it to their own countries; asserting that their society, too, must be to blame for the attacks against it. Others, like Malik, perform a kind of inversion: Indoctrinated to believe that terror is the victim’s fault, yet unable to believe their own societies evil enough to merit such attacks, they resolve the dilemma by asserting that unlike Palestinian violence–which Malik deems “rational” and “governed by certain norms”– jihadist violence must be senseless than rather than purposeful. “It is the arbitrariness of jihadist violence and its disregard for moral bounds that make it terrifying,” he proclaimed (he evidently thinks murdering random civilians in Israel is well within moral bounds).
But whichever approach they choose, the one thing people like Malik and those young Parisians aren’t doing is putting the blame where it belongs: on the terrorist leaders who groom perpetrators to commit mass murder by indoctrinating them to believe that the road to glory runs through killing others.
Terror can never be defeated until Westerners recognizes the crucial role played by this glorification of murder. And that won’t happen as long as the West keeps giving it a pass among the Palestinians, for they are the ones who pioneered this culture of death and inspired all the subsequent copycats.
Originally published in Commentary on August 15, 2016
Wednesday’s announcement that Guinea is resuming ties with Israel almost half a century after severing them is a nontrivial piece of good news. Granted, Guinea is a poor and relatively unimportant African country. But it’s 85 percent Muslim, and few Muslim-majority countries have yet been willing to forge open relations with Israel; consequently, its decision could encourage others to follow suit. Guinea was also the first country in Africa to sever relations with Israel following the 1967 Six-Day War. For both those reasons, its renewal of ties underscores the degree to which a new Israeli strategy aimed at improving relations with the non-Western world has begun bearing fruit.
The Guinea announcement comes on the heels of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s successful trip to Africa earlier this month. Highlights of that trip included announcements by both Kenya and Ethiopia–two of Israel’s closest African allies–that they would push for Israel to receive observer status at the African Union, as well as Tanzania’s announcement that it planned to open an embassy in Israel, 21 years after renewing relations.
Israeli media outlets have also reported that officials from three other Muslim-majority African countries that don’t have relations with Israel–Mali, Chad, and Somalia–recently paid secret visits, indicating that the prospect of other Muslim countries following Guinea’s lead is far from inconceivable. Indeed, just last week, Foreign Ministry Director General Dore Gold visited Chad for a meeting with its president. This prospect is made more plausible by the warming of Israel’s relations with key Arab states. As several African leaders noted during Netanyahu’s trip, there’s little point in African countries continuing to give Israel the cold shoulder when some of the very Arab countries that originally pushed them to do so now have either overt or covert relations with it.
There are two reasons why Israel ascribes such importance to its warming ties with Africa, and both have more to do with the long term than the short term. The first is the need to diversify its trading partners. Currently, about a third of Israel’s exports go to Europe. But the combination of Europe’s slowing economy and its growing hostility to Israel make this heavy reliance on Europe a potential threat to Israel’s economic future. Africa is the world’s poorest continent, but it’s experiencing rapid economic growth, and many of Israel’s fields of expertise fit well with Africa’s needs, including agricultural technology, water conservation, and counterterrorism. Thus by expanding and improving its diplomatic relations with African countries, Israel hopes to eventually expand its trade relations as well.
The second, as Netanyahu said during his Africa trip, is the hope of ending the automatic majority against Israel in international forums. As he readily acknowledged, this could well take decades; long-entrenched voting patterns don’t change overnight. Nevertheless, change is far from impossible: See, for instance, the 2014 Security Council vote on setting a deadline for Palestinian statehood, which was defeated because the Palestinians failed to muster the requisite nine votes. Two of the five crucial abstentions came from Africa (Rwanda and Nigeria).
Even if African countries can’t yet be flipped into the minuscule camp of pro-Israel voters, just moving them from the anti-Israel bloc to the abstention column could ease Israel’s dependence on America’s Security Council veto. Since Security Council resolutions need a minimum of nine “yes” votes to pass, an abstention has the same effect as a “no” for countries without veto power. It should also be noted that reliably abstaining would suffice to make African countries better voting allies than about half the European Union and of equal value to most of the rest: EU countries almost never vote with Israel, and some regularly vote against it.
Israel’s burgeoning relations with Africa obviously stem partly from something beyond its control: the rise of Islamist terror. As several African leaders openly acknowledged during Netanyahu’s trip, counterterrorism assistance is currently the thing they most want from Israel. And if reports of the visits by officials from Mali, Chad, and Somalia are true, it’s a safe bet they were also seeking counterterrorism help; all three have serious problems with Islamist terror.
The improvement also stems partly from Israel’s longstanding policy of proffering aid even to countries it has no relations with, which sometimes bears belated fruit. For instance, Israeli officials said one factor in Guinea’s decision to renew relations was the medical aid Israel gave it during the Ebola crisis two years ago. A salient example from Asia, another continent with which Israel’s ties have recently blossomed, is Singapore. Singapore asked Israel to train its army in the mid-1960s, before the two countries even established relations, and then concealed that fact for decades. But last month, as Elliott Abrams noted, Singapore joined forces with India and Rwanda–the third country in the club of Israel’s closest African allies–to help Israel gain the Non-Aligned votes it needed to win the chairmanship of a key UN committee.
The third reason for Israel’s declining isolation, however, is a deliberate decision by successive Netanyahu governments that the country could not afford, either economically or diplomatically, to keep focusing almost exclusively on the West while largely ignoring the rest of the world. Avigdor Lieberman, now the defense minister, made a major push to improve Israel’s ties with Africa and Asia during his term as foreign minister, and since his departure, the ministry has continued this drive under the de facto leadership of Gold (Netanyahu is the nominal foreign minister).
This constituted a major shift in Israel’s strategy, and it stemmed from a simple realization: Relations with Europe are inevitably being frayed by the fact that what the EU seems to want most from Israel is something beyond Israel’s power to provide. Namely, a peace deal with people who have consistently refused every Israeli offer and are currently refusing even to negotiate with it. Europe’s attitude could change someday, but Israel can’t count on that. Hence it must develop alternative sources of trade and diplomatic support as an insurance policy.
The restoration of relations with Guinea is yet another sign that this strategy is starting to pay off. And that’s very good news for Israel.
Following last week’s terror attack in Nice, a Belgian Jewish organization issued a highly unusual statement charging that, had European media not spent months “ignoring” Palestinian terror against Israel out of “political correctness,” the idea of a truck being used as a weapon wouldn’t have come as such a shock. But it now turns out that European officials did something much worse than merely ignoring Palestinian attacks: They issued a 39-page report, signed by almost every EU country, blaming these attacks on “the occupation” rather than the terrorists. The obvious corollary was that European countries had no reason to fear similar attacks and, therefore, they didn’t bother taking precautions that could have greatly reduced the casualties.
The most shocking part of the Nice attack was how high those casualties were: The truck driver managed to kill 84 people before he was stopped. By comparison, as the New York Times reported on Monday, Israel has suffered at least 32 car-ramming attacks since last October, yet all these attacks combined have killed exactly two people (shootings and stabbings are much deadlier). Granted, most involved private cars, but even attacks using buses or heavy construction vehicles never approached the scale of Nice’s casualties. The deadliest ramming attack in Israel’s history, in 2001, killed eight.
Firstly, this is because Israel deploys massive security for mass gatherings like Nice’s Bastille Day celebrations, forcing Palestinian assailants to make do with less densely-populated targets, like bus stops or light rail stops, which greatly lowers the death toll. As an Israeli police spokesman told the New York Times, an Israeli event comparable to the one in Nice would entail “a 360-degree enclosure of the area, with layers of security around the perimeter,” including major roads “blocked off with rows of buses, and smaller side streets with patrol cars,” plus a massive police presence reinforced by counterterrorism units “strategically placed to provide a rapid response, if needed.”
Secondly, Israeli security personnel have no qualms about using deadly force against terrorists in mid-rampage if less lethal means would take longer to succeed because they understand that the best way to save innocent lives is to stop the attack as quickly as possible. This lesson was driven home by a 2008 attack in which a Palestinian plowed a heavy construction vehicle into a crowded Jerusalem street. A policewoman tried to stop him without killing him; she wounded him and then climbed into the cab to handcuff him. But while she was trying to cuff him, he managed to restart the vehicle and kill another person before he was shot dead.
Now consider the abovementioned EU document, first reported in the EUobserver last Friday, and its implications for both those counterterrorism techniques. The document is an internal assessment of the wave of Palestinian terror that began last October, written by EU diplomats in the region and endorsed in December 2015 by all EU countries with “embassies in Jerusalem and Ramallah,” the EUobserver said.
And what did it conclude? That the attacks were due to “the Israeli occupation… and a long-standing policy of political, economic and social marginalisation of Palestinians in Jerusalem,” to “deep frustration amongst Palestinians over the effects of the occupation, and a lack of hope that a negotiated solution can bring it to an end.” This, the report asserted, was “the heart of the matter”; factors like rampant Palestinian incitement and widespread Islamist sentiment, if they were mentioned at all, were evidently dismissed as unimportant.
The report’s first implication is obvious: If Palestinian attacks stem primarily from “the occupation,” there’s no reason to think anything similar could happen in Europe, which isn’t occupying anyone (at least in its own view; Islamists might not agree). Consequently, there’s also no need to learn from Israel’s methods of dealing with such attacks.
In contrast, had EU diplomats understood the major role played by Palestinian incitement—for instance, the endless Internet memes urging Palestinians to stab, run over and otherwise kill Jews, complete with detailed instructions on how to do so—they might have realized that similar propaganda put out by Islamic State, urging people to use similar techniques against Westerners, could have a similar effect. Had they understood the role played by Islamist sentiments—fully 89 percent of Palestinians supported a Sharia-based state in a Pew poll last year, one of the highest rates in the world—they might have realized that similar sentiments among some European Muslims posed a similar threat. And had they realized all this, the crowds in Nice might not have been left virtually unprotected.
No less telling, however, was the report’s explanation for Israel’s relatively low death toll. Rather than crediting the Israeli police for managing to stop most of the attacks quickly, before they had claimed many victims, it accused them of “excessive use of force… possibly amounting in certain cases to unlawful killings.”
If the EU’s consensus position is that shooting terrorists in mid-rampage constitutes “excessive use of force,” European policemen may understandably hesitate to do the same. In Nice, for instance, the rampage continued for two kilometers while policemen reportedly “ran 200 meters behind the truck trying to stop it”; the police caught up only when a civilian jumped into the truck’s cab and wrestled the driver, slowing him down. Yet even then, an eyewitness said, “They kept yelling at him and when he did not step out – they saw him from the window taking his gun out.” Only then did they open fire.
Not everyone shares the EU’s blind spot about Palestinian terror. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Africa earlier this month, the leaders he met with said openly that one of the main things they want from Israel is counterterrorism assistance. They understand quite well that anti-Israel terror isn’t some unique breed that other countries can safely ignore; terror is terror, and any tactic tried by Palestinians is liable to be quickly imitated by Islamist terrorists elsewhere—from airplane hijackings to suicide bombings and, now, car-rammings.
But European officials, entrenched in their smug belief that anti-Israel terror has nothing to do with the terror they face, are incapable of acknowledging that Israel’s experience might be relevant. And therefore, people died who might still be alive had the lessons of Palestinian terror against Israel been learned.
Originally published in Commentary on July 20, 2016
Israel-hatred isn’t the only reason for the Mideast’s current meltdown, but it has undoubtedly played a significant role. As an example, consider how Lebanon was rebuilt after Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel–and then consider how that reconstruction ended up enabling the bloodbath in Syria today.
The Second Lebanon War began ten years ago this week, when Hezbollah killed three Israeli soldiers and abducted two in a cross-border raid, despite Israel’s withdrawal from every inch of Lebanon six years earlier. Yet Hezbollah paid no public price for starting a war that devastated southern Lebanon; instead, it became the darling of the Arab world for emerging undefeated (if also un-victorious) from a month-long fight against the hated Zionist enemy and achieving the then-unprecedented feat of launching some 4,000 rockets at Israel’s civilian population.
This halo effect was able to survive past the first flush of victory mainly because the devastation was quickly repaired, thereby mitigating the suffering of Hezbollah’s Shi’ite base. But Hezbollah couldn’t have done this alone; it didn’t have the money. And though its Iranian patron made cash payments to families left homeless, Tehran’s money went primarily toward rebuilding Hezbollah’s arsenal.
So who actually cleaned up the mess left by Hezbollah’s war? “With all due respect to Tehran, most of the rebuilding efforts were shouldered by wealthy Arab states such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, which donated hundreds of millions of dollars,” reporter Jack Khoury wrote in Haaretz this week. “Qatar alone donated more than $300 million and took charge of rebuilding houses in the 30 hardest-hit communities.” And those houses weren’t just rebuilt; they were made even bigger and better than before.
The Sunni Arab states didn’t shell out lavish reconstruction aid because of any fondness for Shi’ite Hezbollah or its Shi’ite Iranian patron. In fact, the Saudis openly condemned Hezbollah for starting the war. Nor were they motivated mainly by compassion, as evidenced by the cold shoulder they have given victims of the far greater devastation wrought by Syria’s civil war (the Gulf States are notorious for refusing to accept Syrian refugees).
Rather, given the Arab world’s loathing for Israel, these countries felt they simply couldn’t afford to appear unsupportive of “Israel’s victims”–especially since Hezbollah, despite starting an unnecessary war that wreaked havoc on its own population, had become an Arab hero for doing so. Consequently, they joined forces to rebuild Lebanon.
Had this not happened, the Lebanese might have turned against Hezbollah for causing them lasting damage, leaving it irreparably weakened. Instead, it became even stronger: Not only was it a hero, but it had the financial clout to get the country rebuilt. Within two years, it had become Lebanon’s de facto ruler, a position it retains to this day.
Now fast forward five years to the outbreak of Syria’s civil war in 2011. The war has so far killed over 400,000 people and displaced more than half the country’s population. This includes 4.8 million who fled to Syria’s neighbors, thereby destabilizing countries like Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon.
The war also enabled Islamic State to create its first territorial base in Syria, from which it later took over chunks of Iraq. These successes then enabled it to acquire affiliates in other Arab countries (i.e. Egypt and Libya) and to perpetrate or inspire deadly terror attacks around the world. In short, the civil war hasn’t just wrecked Syria; between the refugees and Islamic State, it has also destabilized much of the Arab world.
But a major reason why this war has dragged on for so long is Hezbollah. A few years ago, the rebels seemed close to victory. The Assad regime was steadily losing territory due to its shortage of reliable ground troops (most rank-and-file Syrian soldiers are Sunnis, like the rebels, so Assad’s Alawite sect doesn’t trust them). But then, Hezbollah poured thousands of troops into Syria, enabling the regime to win crucial battles and regain some of its territory. Consequently, there’s still no end in sight. And since the Arab states are backing the rebels while Iran backs the regime, Hezbollah’s intervention also denied these states a much-needed victory over their main rival, Iran.
The Arab world’s anti-Israel pathology prompted the Sunni states to rescue Hezbollah from the consequences of its own folly 10 years ago, and ensured Hezbollah would be capable of throwing the Assad regime a lifeline. A swift Assad defeat might have reduced the Syrian conflict’s destabilizing effects on other Arab countries while also dealing a setback to Iran’s growing influence in the region. Yet all these countries prioritized proving their anti-Israel bona fides over weakening Iran’s strongest military ally. And now, they are paying the price.
The Arab states may have learned their lesson: They aren’t rushing to rescue another Iranian-backed militia, Hamas, from the consequences of its own folly. Granted, they pledged billions of dollars to repair the devastation wreaked on Gaza by Hamas’s 2014 war with Israel. But as the Elder of Ziyon blog reported this week, very little has actually been paid.
Altogether, Muslim countries have paid only 16.5 percent of what they promised, compared to 71 percent for non-Muslim countries. And for the Gulf States, the figures are even lower: 15 percent for Qatar, 10 percent for Saudi Arabia, and zero percent for Kuwait. This is presumably not unrelated to last weekend’s assertion by former Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal that Iran is “spreading chaos” and destabilizing the region through its support of numerous militias, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad: If Riyadh views Hamas as an agent of Iranian destabilization, it has good reason not to throw it a financial lifeline.
The realization that their hatred of Israel has ended up hurting Arab states more than it has their intended victim is undoubtedly one of the drivers behind these countries’ budding rapprochement with Israel, as reflected most recently in Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry’s visit to Jerusalem this week. Unfortunately, that epiphany has come too late for battered, bleeding Syria, and for all the other countries now suffering the fallout from its ongoing civil war.
Originally published in Commentary on July 15, 2016
The Israel-Turkey reconciliation agreement announced this week is an object lesson in the importance of being willing to walk away from negotiations. For six years, the Israeli chattering classes and the international community urged Israel to simply accept Turkey’s terms, arguing that Ankara wasn’t going to soften its demands and that Israel desperately needed good relations with Turkey, whatever the price. But it turns out neither part of that argument was true: Turkey proved to need Israel far more than Israel needed it, and consequently, it eventually reduced its demands significantly. The current deal is thus much better than what Israel would have gotten had it caved in and signed earlier.
The biggest change is that Turkey capitulated completely on its longstanding demand for an end to the Gaza blockade, which would have badly undermined Israel’s security. Under the current deal, all restrictions meant to prevent Hamas-run Gaza from importing arms and exporting terror remain in place: The naval blockade will continue; imports to Gaza will still enter through Israel and undergo Israeli security checks, and movement restrictions aimed at preventing Gazan terrorists from entering either Israel or the West Bank will remain in force. Instead, Turkey will bolster its self-image as Gaza’s champion by building a power plant, hospital, and desalination facility–all badly needed humanitarian projects that Israel has long wished someone would undertake. It will also be allowed to send unlimited humanitarian aid through Israel’s Ashdod Port–a meaningless concession since Israel never restricted humanitarian aid shipments.
Another important change relates to Hamas operations in Turkey, where Hamas’s West Bank command–responsible for planning anti-Israel attacks from the West Bank–has long been headquartered. Ankara insisted for years that the reconciliation deal should include no provisions affecting its relations with Hamas. But the current deal requires it to end all Hamas military activity on its territory.
This falls short of Israel’s demand that it expel Hamas entirely; the Islamist organization will still be able to engage in diplomacy and fund-raising in Turkey. But if Israel refused to have relations with any country that let terrorist groups engage in diplomacy and fund-raising on its territory, it would also have to sever ties with the European Union, where the political wing of Hezbollah–a far more dangerous group than Hamas–is allowed to operate freely in all but a handful of countries. In other words, this is an acceptable compromise that genuinely improves the existing situation.
The third major provision requires Israel to pay $20 million in compensation to the families of Turks killed or wounded during Israel’s raid on a Turkish-sponsored flotilla to Gaza in May 2010. That provision offends many Israelis because it essentially rewards anti-Israel violence: No other Israeli interception of a ship to Gaza has produced casualties, and the only reason this one did is that the passengers, unlike passengers on other such flotillas, viciously attacked Israeli soldiers “with iron bars, staves, chains, and slingshots, and there is some indication that they also used knives.”
Nevertheless, this money would probably have to be paid at some point anyway, because the families have filed lawsuits against Israel both in Turkey and overseas. This way, the sum is at least capped: Before receiving this money, Turkey will have to pass legislation voiding all existing lawsuits, and has also promised to indemnify Israel for any future suits.
Turkey could have gotten these same terms six years ago, but it thought it could force Israel into conceding more. Had Israel’s chattering classes had their way, Ankara would have been right. But all the warnings of dire consequences if Israel refused to capitulate proved false.
The prophets of doom warned of economic consequences since Turkey is a major trading partner; in reality, bilateral trade has more than doubled over the past five years despite the diplomatic freeze. They also warned of diplomatic consequences, pointing out that Turkey had long served as Israel’s intermediary to the Muslim world. Instead, Israel is enjoying an unprecedented thaw in relations with key Arab states. Reports of behind-the-scenes contacts with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States have proliferated, and relations with Egypt, its most important Arab partner, have never been better. In fact, Israel currently has much better relations with Egypt than Turkey does.
But while Israel has done just fine during its diplomatic freeze with Ankara, Turkey has done less well. Half its former Arab partners are collapsing (i.e. Syria, Libya) and it has been flooded with refugees as a result; it has wrecked relations with other former partners (i.e. Egypt, Russia) with its own two hands; and the situation in its Kurdish regions is fast approaching civil war. All this drove Ankara to the reluctant conclusion that it couldn’t afford to remain at odds with one of the Mideast’s few remaining stable polities–one, moreover, that offers it many benefits; from providing a land bridge for exports to the Arab world in place of the now-unfeasible Syria route to potentially selling it natural gas that would reduce its dependence on Russia. Therefore, it swallowed its pride and reduced its demands to ones that Israel could meet without undermining its own security.
The lesson for Israel’s relations with the Palestinians ought to be obvious. In this case, too, Israel’s chattering classes insist that Jerusalem should simply capitulate to Palestinian demands because the Palestinians are never going to soften those demands, and Israel desperately needs peace at any price. But in reality, Israel is far better positioned to withstand years or decades of impasse than the Palestinians are; it has a much stronger economy, a much stronger military, and a much more stable and functional political system.
I’ve explained at length before why Israel can and should wait until the Palestinians are prepared to strike a reasonable compromise. The Turkish deal is simply further evidence that this strategy can work.
Originally published in Commentary on June 27, 2016
Whenever I express optimism about the incremental improvements in Israel’s relations with the Arab world, I always get the same question: How can I be optimistic about relations with countries whose populations overwhelmingly loathe Israel and are often anti-Semitic to boot; whose governments actively propagate such sentiments through school curricula and state-run media, while working against Israel in every possible international forum? My answer is that none of that is new. What’s new is the growing number of people in the Arab world willing to publicly challenge these attitudes. Indeed, in recent weeks, scarcely a day has passed without another example.
Perhaps the most remarkable was an offshoot of last weekend’s Egyptian-Saudi deal under which Egypt will transfer two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia. Those islands can effectively blockade access to Israel’s port of Eilat, and one such blockade was the proximate cause of the 1967 Six-Day War, during which Israel captured them. The 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty returned them to Egypt in exchange for a promise of Israeli freedom of navigation in the Red Sea – a promise threatened by the islands’ move to Saudi control, and consequently, a change in the peace treaty that required Israel’s consent.
Israel gave this consent because Riyadh provided a written pledge to honor the terms of the Israeli-Egyptian treaty. Moreover, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir reiterated this pledge publicly in an interview with Arab media: “The commitments that Egypt approved [in the peace treaty] we are also committed to, including the stationing of an international force on the islands… We are committed to what Egypt committed to before the international community.”
That’s a stunning shift for a country once so opposed to the treaty that it severed relations with Egypt for daring to sign it, and which still has no diplomatic relations with Israel itself: Saudi Arabia just formally committed itself to a peace treaty with a state it officially doesn’t recognize.
A few days later, a former Iraqi diplomat arrived in Israel as an official and very public guest of Israel’s Foreign Ministry. Hamad al-Sharifi served in the Iraqi embassies in Kuwait and Jordan and as an advisor to Iraq’s Defense Ministry. Before coming, he declared, “I consider myself a friend of Israel. At this time, Arabs need to understand that there is no conflict between Israel and Arab states, rather there is an Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” And after arriving, he told Israeli officials they should stop permitting secret visits by Arab officials, because “In order for the barriers to be broken, the visits should be done in full public view.”
Then there’s last week’s report from a Lebanese daily about an unprecedented initiative by a group of Lebanese schoolteachers: They want the country’s school curriculum revised to drop “animosity toward the oppressing Zionist entity” from the list of goals. They “do not want to educate our children to hate,” they explained. And besides, it’s silly to focus solely on Israel when there are other pressing priorities, like “the struggle against the religious extremism that threatens Arab states.”
While Lebanon is just discussing changing its curriculum, another Arab country actually did so earlier this year: For the first time in the 37 years since the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was signed, Egyptian textbooks have started characterizing it as a positive development that offers Egypt numerous benefits, including “maintaining the Arab countries’ internal stability”; “advancing economic and social development and upgrading the state’s infrastructures”; “encouraging Arab and foreign capital investment in Egypt and in the other Arab states”; and increasing tourism. Also for the first time, the textbooks now note that the treaty called for establishing “friendly relations” with Israel rather than merely “normal relations.”
Further evidence of the thawing relationship came last month, when a major state-owned Egyptian bank for the first time published the official exchange rate between the Egyptian pound and the Israeli shekel.
Clearly, every such move toward normalization provokes a backlash, and it’s not surprising that the backlash sometimes works. Last month, for instance, a Dubai security chief made waves by launching a Twitter campaign for friendly relations with Israel, inter alia, calling for “a coalition with the Jews against the enemies of the Middle East” and urging his followers “not to treat Jews as enemies, rather as cousins with conflict over land inheritance.” But he soon reverted to the standard Arab diet of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel tweets.
The surprising part is how often proponents of change refuse to be intimidated. In February, for instance, I wrote about Tawfik Okasha, the Egyptian parliamentarian who publicly met with Israel’s ambassador and proposed that Israel be asked to mediate Egypt’s water dispute with Ethiopia. Soon afterward, his parliamentary colleagues overwhelmingly voted to expel him from the legislature for the crime of violating their anti-normalization policy. You’d think that would suffice to intimidate anyone sharing his views. But one month later, another Egyptian MP, Sayyid Faraj, announced that he wants to organize a parliamentary delegation to visit the Knesset so as to “learn from Israel’s economic development and in general learn from Israel’s experience.”
Obviously, all of the above are just the first baby steps on a very long road; it will take decades, if not generations, for these views to spread to the broader Arab public. But for most of the seven decades since Israel’s establishment, there has been no movement at all toward reshaping public attitudes; even major events like the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan were strictly government-to-government, and entailed no effort to change popular perceptions of Israel as a loathed enemy. The Egyptian textbooks’ treatment of the treaty is a perfect example; so, too, is the fact that for decades after the treaty was signed, Egypt’s military continued to train primarily for war with Israel.
Thus the fact that these attitudes are finally being challenged by Arabs themselves is of real significance. It won’t lead to any practical change in Arab-Israeli relations for a long time to come. But it’s a necessary first step toward such a change, and as such, constitutes genuine grounds for optimism.
Originally published in Commentary on April 15, 2016
Israel and its supporters have argued for years that many “human rights” organizations are far less concerned with human rights than with pushing a political agenda. But as long as that political agenda consisted mainly of attacking Israel, most Westerners remained convinced that these groups still deserved their credibility and moral haloes. Even initial forays into political issues unconnected with Israel – like Amnesty International’s controversial assertion last year that upholding human rights requires decriminalizing prostitution – didn’t destroy the halo. But by demanding that the European Union accept millions of Middle Eastern migrants rather than returning them to Turkey, these organizations have picked a political fight that millions of Europeans actually care about. And in so doing, they may be dealing their own credibility a long-deserved death blow.
The “human rights community” is outraged by the EU’s recent deal with Ankara, under which all migrants entering Europe via Turkey will be promptly returned there. The Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, Nils Muiznieks, declared that such “automatic forced return” is “illegal,” and the only acceptable solution is for EU countries to “ramp up the relocation of asylum seekers” into their own borders. Human rights groups similarly asserted that the deal violates international humanitarian law, inter alia, because they claim Turkey is unsafe for refugees. Amnesty, for instance, termed the deal “abhorrent.”
Then, angry over the EU’s refusal to accept their view, the organizations halted assistance to tens of thousands of migrants already in Greece. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Medecins Sans Frontieres, the International Rescue Committee, the Norwegian Refugee Council and Save the Children all suspended operations in Greek refugee centers to protest the deal.
There are numerous problems with the “human rights community’s” response to this deal, but let’s start with the biggest: the claim that it somehow violates international law, in the form of the 1951 Refugee Convention.
This convention was intended to ensure that anyone with a “well-founded fear” of persecution could find refuge somewhere, so as to prevent a repeat of the situation in which six million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis because no country would let them in. But it never guaranteed anyone, much less tens of millions of people, access to the country of their choice.
Turkey, understandably, isn’t most refugees’ first choice. It’s an authoritarian country where basic rights like freedom of the press are ruthlessly suppressed; it has suffered numerous terror attacks in recent years; and it’s less wealthy than Europe. But all this makes it no worse than much of the rest of the world.
The one thing Turkey isn’t is unsafe for most refugees. It has hosted millions of Syrian refugees for years; the current tally exceeds 2.7 million. And unlike Syrians in Syria – where a brutal civil war has killed some 470,000 people since 2011 – the refugees in Turkey have survived. Turkey also grants full access to UN officials, so UNHCR could process refugee applications just as well in Turkey as it could in Greece.
Thus, if Turkey is willing to continue hosting these refugees in exchange for benefits like billions of euros and visa-free access to Europe, there’s no earthly reason why those refugees should be entitled to relocate to the EU instead. Indeed, if Turkey’s drawbacks suffice to entitle refugees to resettle in Europe, at least half the world’s population would be similarly entitled.
On this issue, the usually inapt analogy between Syrian refugees and Jews during the Holocaust is instructive. Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe certainly preferred to go to America, but they willingly fled to any country that would take them – not only impoverished, authoritarian countries in South America and Africa, but even China — then under brutal Japanese occupation. And while they didn’t have it easy, their flight accomplished its purpose: Most of those refugees, even in Japanese-occupied China, survived and could later rebuild their lives.
Similarly, refugees in Turkey don’t have it easy, but they’re surviving. Thus, relocating them to Europe isn’t necessary to fulfill the refugee convention’s goals; it’s necessary only to achieve a political purpose: remaking Europe by flooding it with millions of migrants.
But if rewriting international law to serve their political agenda weren’t bad enough, “human rights” groups then compounded the offense by hurting real human beings in order to push this agenda. Suspending aid to refugee centers in Greece won’t kill the deal; it will only make the refugees more miserable. So these groups are sabotaging refugees’ right to humanitarian assistance – a right they themselves claim the refugees have – just to make a political point.
Finally, there’s the fact that this political activism is aimed exclusively at the West. The UN and international aid organizations did not, for instance, suspend operations in government-controlled parts of Syria to protest the Assad regime’s refusal to grant them access to besieged rebel-held towns where people were literally starving to death – a far graver violation of international humanitarian law than returning asylum seekers to safe haven in Turkey. On the contrary, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs actively collaborated with the Assad regime to conceal the deadly impact of these sieges. In short, protesting Western “misbehavior” is so important that it even justifies withholding aid to people who need it, but far worse behavior by non-Western regimes doesn’t even merit verbal protests.
The response to the EU-Turkey deal once again proves the truism that what starts with the Jews never ends with them. With regard to Israel, the “human rights community’s” political agenda has long trumped concern with actual human rights. That’s why Amnesty, for instance, issued more than five times as many tweets one month last summer about the previous year’s Gaza war, which killed some 2,200 people, as it did about the ongoing Syrian war, which has killed 470,000: If Israel can’t be blamed, Amnesty isn’t much interested.
That’s also why Israeli organizations helping Syrian refugees in Greece discovered that while no Syrian ever refused their help, members of international “human rights” organizations did, even though the Israelis were among the few volunteers who spoke Arabic: These international “humanitarians” viewed boycotting Israel as more important than communicating with the refugees they ostensibly came to help.
Such politicization of human rights never bothered most Westerners as long as Israel was the only victim. But now that it’s being turned against Europe, perhaps the West will finally recognize the travesty that the “human rights community” has become.
Originally published in Commentary on April 4, 2016
Like every major Islamist attack in Europe, last week’s terror attacks in Brussels left many Israelis wondering whether Europeans will finally understand what Israel faces. Unfortunately, such attacks are more likely to intensify anti-Israel activity in Europe. To understand why, it’s worth reading an article from the Islamic State magazine Al-Naba that propounds a surprising thesis: Jihad against Israel doesn’t take precedence over jihad anywhere else.
The article, translated by MEMRI, argued that the “Palestine first” slogan, which has reigned supreme for almost seven decades, has led good Muslims to ignore all the other places where jihad is no less necessary, or even more so. Indeed, it said, Muslims’ top priority should be purifying lands already under Islamic control, for both religious and practical reasons. Religiously speaking, “The apostate [tyrants] who rule the lands of Islam are graver infidels than [the Jews].” And practically speaking, defeating Israel won’t be possible without first destroying neighboring Arab regimes that are its “first line of defense.” Consequently, “Waging jihad with the aim of replacing the rule of the Jews with a regime like that of those who currently rule Gaza and the West Bank is jihad that is null and void,” because it would just replace infidel Jews with infidel Muslims.
But fighting Jews also doesn’t take precedence over “fighting the Crusaders and all the polytheists in the world,” the article stressed. In fact, “Muslims everywhere should fight the infidels nearest to them,” since that’s where they have the best chance of succeeding.
That last sentence sums up why Islamic State’s approach is Europe’s worst nightmare. For decades, Europe had a cushy arrangement: All the world’s jihadists were so fixated on Israel that they were willing to overlook longstanding hatreds against “Crusader” Europe, as long as Europe would help them wage war on Israel. As Manfred Gerstenfeld pointed out this week, many European countries — including Switzerland, Germany, France and Italy — tried to take advantage of this offer: They sought deals under which Palestinian terrorists could operate freely in their countries – usually without fear of arrest, but with swift release guaranteed if arrests were necessitated by American pressure – and in exchange, the terrorists wouldn’t attack those countries.
Not only did this largely protect Europe from jihadist terror, but it even seemed to avoid the main pitfall of most appeasement deals. The usual problem with appeasement is that the aggressor, after gobbling up the prey the appeaser threw him, then goes after the appeaser from an even stronger position, since one enemy is already out of the way. That, for instance, is what happened when Europe gave Hitler first the Sudetenland and then the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1938-39, only to see him turn around and gobble up the rest of Europe a year later.
But Israel, against all odds, showed no sign of collapsing; it kept getting stronger despite decades of unrelenting attacks. So to Europe, it must have seemed the perfect solution: The crocodile could keep attacking Israel forever, and Europeans would be permanently safe. All they had to do was make sure the beast remained fixated on Israel by maintaining a steady drumbeat of anti-Israel outrage.
Yet now, suddenly, that tactic no longer works – and like any weakling confronted with a bully, Europe is cravenly trying to divert the bully’s attention back to his former victim.
That’s precisely why Islamic State’s rise over the last few years has coincided with an upsurge in anti-Israel activity by European governments, including the European Union’s discriminatory decision to start labeling settlement products, moves by several European parliaments to recognize a Palestinian state, and France’s recent push for both an anti-Israel Security Council resolution and an international conference conducted under threat of recognizing “Palestine” if Israel doesn’t capitulate completely. All these are frantic efforts to restore the jihadist status quo ante – first, by refocusing world (and especially Muslim) attention on Israel, and second, by weakening Israel enough that it once again looks like a tempting target for jihadists, rather than one too strong to be tackled without first bringing down several other countries.
Eventually, a new generation of European politicians might figure out that this won’t work. Even if Islamic State is eventually pushed out of Syria and Iraq, its ideas are now loose in the jihadist universe and can’t be put back in the bottle; thus Europe would do better to team up with Israel against the common threat rather than helping the jihadists play divide and conquer. But for older politicians, veterans of decades in which diverting the crocodile’s attention to Israel actually worked, this paradigm shift will probably prove impossible. They are far more likely to keep escalating against Israel in a desperate effort to bring back those halcyon days when jihadists believed, as Al-Naba put it, “that no other issue should be raised until Palestine was liberated.”
And this brings us to the left’s standard recipe for improving relations with Europe – quitting the West Bank. As I’ve noted before, all available evidence rebuts the theory that territorial concessions can buy European love. But that’s doubly true if Europe is now seeking to divert the jihadists’ attention to Israel because it won’t be able to stop at giving them the West Bank. It will have to move on to encouraging them to attack pre-1967 Israel, which the jihadists also consider “occupied territory,” for the same reason Europe had to give Hitler the rest of Czechoslovakia six months after giving him the Sudetenland. Appeasement requires keeping the crocodile fed, so once he’s gobbled up one juicy tidbit, you have to throw him another.
In short, Israel’s relations with Europe will probably get much worse before they get better, if they ever do. All it can do is protect itself from the fallout as best it can by continuing to bolster economic and diplomatic ties with the rest of the world.
Originally published in Commentary on March 30,2106