Foreign Affairs and Defense
I usually leave American politics to Americans, on the theory that they know more about it. But as an Israeli, I feel uniquely qualified to comment on one of the two main concerns raised about presidential candidate Ted Cruz, because I’ve spent the last seven years living under a leader who shares the same flaw: an astonishing talent for making absolutely everyone who works with him loathe him. This flaw has undoubtedly made Benjamin Netanyahu a less effective prime minister than he could have been. Yet on balance, he has been quite successful.
The fact that “King Bibi” is widely loathed in Israel – and not just by left-wingers – may surprise many Americans. But Israeli politics is littered with former senior aides and colleagues of Netanyahu who abandoned his Likud party because they couldn’t stand working with him. Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, once Likud’s number two, quit because he loathed Netanyahu and now heads his own party, Kulanu. Education Minister Naftali Bennett, once a senior aide to Netanyahu, similarly left in disgust and now heads his own party, Jewish Home. Jewish Home’s number two, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, is another former senior Netanyahu aide who quit in disgust, as is former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who now heads his own party, Yisrael Beiteinu. Former Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar, also once Likud’s number two, quit in disgust and is now taking a “time-out” from politics. It’s hard to think of any other Israeli party with a comparable attrition rate among its most talented people, and it’s no surprise that dumping Bibi is reportedly a top goal for many politicians even within the governing coalition.
Nor is Netanyahu much more popular among his own voters. In a fascinating report in January, journalist Amit Segal described how Likud pulled off its stunning upset victory in last year’s election. The campaign began with focus groups among likely Likud voters in which person after person declared: We’re not voting Bibi again; we’re sick of him. Campaign strategists concluded that only one thing could persuade these voters to nevertheless vote Netanyahu – fear that not doing so would bring the left to power. The campaign successfully played on this fear, and in the end, Likud voters turned out for Bibi en masse.
There’s a reason why Netanyahu has disappointed so many voters: Pushing through major change, which many voters want in the socioeconomic sphere, requires cooperation from many other people, and especially legislators. Thus someone with a gift for alienating everyone he works with finds effecting major change very difficult.
Indeed, it’s no accident that Netanyahu made his most far-reaching reforms not as premier, but as finance minister under Ariel Sharon. Those reforms are widely credited with giving Israel several years of five percent growth and enabling it to weather the global financial crisis of 2008-09 with little damage. But as finance minister, Netanyahu only had to draft them; Sharon, a superb politician, took responsibility for actually pushing them through the Knesset. Since becoming prime minister, in contrast, Netanyahu hasn’t managed to enact any of his boldest ideas.
But here is what he has managed to do, despite his flaws: He’s kept Israel safe in a very dangerous region. Palestinian terror, even with the current stabbing intifada, has claimed far fewer victims than under most of his predecessors. Syria’s civil war, which has destabilized all its other neighbors, hasn’t touched Israel, in part thanks to quiet agreements with more moderate rebel groups that Israel will provide humanitarian aid, including hospital treatment for wounded Syrians, as long as they keep Islamist fanatics away from Israel’s border. Security cooperation with Egypt has reached an all-time high, as have under-the-table relations with other Arab states in the face of two common enemies – Iran and radical Sunni groups like Islamic State. Israel has survived seven years of a hostile U.S. president without being forced into any territorial concessions that would endanger its security.
Compare that to his predecessors’ record and it’s easy to see why Israelis, despite loathing Netanyahu, prefer his cautious stewardship to the left’s adventurism. As I’ve explained before in greater detail, Yitzhak Rabin’s Oslo Accord, Ehud Barak’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon and negotiations with Yasser Arafat, and Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza all significantly worsened Israel’s security situation and led to an upsurge in Israeli casualties. Netanyahu, by contrast, has perpetrated no major disasters; if he hasn’t dramatically improved Israelis’ lives, he has at least refrained from making them worse.
And even excluding security issues, where he shines, his record on other issues may not be stellar, but it certainly isn’t bad. The economy has grown modestly but steadily, and unemployment has remained at record lows despite a massive increase in labor force participation rates. There have been no dramatic reforms, but many smaller ones. Diplomatic relations with some traditional allies, like Germany, have soured, but relations with other countries have improved markedly, both in Europe (where several smaller states, including former hostiles like Greece and Cyprus, have surprisingly become Israel’s closest European allies) and in Asia, where relations with India, China and Japan have blossomed.
So if Americans want a revolution, Cruz probably can’t deliver; his lack of emotional intelligence virtually precludes major reforms. But as Netanyahu has proven, someone with terrible interpersonal skills can nevertheless do a pretty good job of steering the ship of state – keeping the country safe, avoiding major disasters and making modest improvements along the way. To my mind, that sounds infinitely better than what America’s had for the last seven years, or what it’s likely to get from either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Clearly, all this is moot if Cruz can’t overcome his other main problem: He has yet to prove he can match Bibi’s talent for winning elections. But based on the Bibi parallel, I don’t think Americans need to worry about how Cruz would do if he actually won the White House. As most Israelis could tell them, there are plenty of worse traits in a chief executive than an inability to get along with other people.
Originally published in the Jewish Press on March 23, 2016
I just returned from a few weeks in America, where the only thing from Israel that makes the news is the ongoing Palestinian violence. So it was a pleasant surprise to come home and discover that the peace process is actually progressing quite nicely. I don’t, of course, mean the one the West is fixated on, the consistently fruitless and currently nonexistent “peace process” with the Palestinians. I mean the far more important process of creeping normalization with the rest of the Arab world, which will not only improve Israel’s long-term security, but is probably essential for any progress on the Palestinian track.
As the Jerusalem Post reported last week, Israel is becoming an increasingly important player in the Arab world’s trade with Europe. Until a few years ago, the main overland route for this trade was through Syria. But with the Syrian civil war having made that impossible, a growing proportion now comes by ferry from Turkey to Haifa, then trucks across Israel to Jordan. This route is cheaper than the other main alternative, which involves shipping from Europe to Egypt.
Last year, some 13,000 trucks used the Israel route, up more than 25 percent from the previous year. And next month, a new shipping line between Turkey and Israel is slated to be inaugurated, enabling another 150 trucks per month. Israel’s Sheikh Hussein border crossing with Jordan is being expanded to handle the increase.
All this obviously benefits Israel’s economy, since Israel collects duties on every truckload. More importantly, however, it means that Israel – for virtually the first time since its establishment in 1948 – is playing a useful role in the broader regional economy rather than being largely isolated from it. And the more Israel’s Arab neighbors benefit from Israel’s stability, the more they will have an interest in trying to maintain that stability rather than disrupting it.
No less noteworthy was last week’s decision by an Egyptian parliamentarian and media personality to publicly challenge his country’s longstanding opposition to “normalization” with Israel. Though the two countries signed a peace treaty in 1979, Egyptian politicians, journalists, cultural figures and other elites have long opposed turning the cold peace into a “normal” relationship. Hence despite the exchange of ambassadors, bilateral relations have long been limited and kept largely under the radar, even as security cooperation has grown increasingly close over the last few years.
But last week, parliamentarian and television mogul Tawfik Okasha decided to shatter this taboo in the most public manner possible: He announced on live TV, on his own television show, that he had invited Israeli Ambassador Haim Koren to dinner. He even promised to take a photo of himself with Koren and send it to the media. Moreover, he announced that he had issued the invitation for an unprecedented purpose: to ask Israel to mediate between Egypt and Ethiopia in an explosive dispute over allocating water from the Nile River, on the sensible grounds that Israel has good relations with both countries.
Needless to say, an uproar ensued. Two other parliamentarians promptly demanded Okasha’s expulsion from parliament, and over 100 signed a statement rejecting normalization with Israel and demanding an investigation into his actions. (In the media world, he’s less vulnerable to repercussions, since he owns the TV station on which his show is broadcast.)
But when challenging a longstanding norm, someone always has to be first. And despite the inevitable backlash, pioneers like Okasha pave the way for others to follow.
Meanwhile, Okasha isn’t backing down. He did indeed have Koren to dinner, where he proposed various ideas for how Israel could help Egypt in the fields of water, agriculture and education – all areas where Israel excels and Egypt desperately needs to improve.
In the current Egyptian climate, Okasha’s proposal for Israeli mediation is an obvious nonstarter, and whether anything will come of his other proposals remains to be seen. But his willingness to buck the consensus in order to try is already a step forward.
Finally, there was last week’s fascinating Associated Press profile of Hossam Haick, an Israeli Arab professor at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and a global leader in the field of nanotechnology (yes, Israel has Arab professors at its top universities). In 2013, with the Technion’s cooperation, Haick launched one of the world’s first online courses in Arabic, a course in nanotechnology. Since then, he said, about 14,000 students have enrolled, from Syria, Yemen, Qatar and elsewhere. Some dropped out when they discovered that Haick is Israeli. But most didn’t care.
Haick said he sees the course as a way of building bridges between Israel and the Arab world. And he’s right; this is an online version of the Haifa-Jordan trade route. Just as that route for the first time enables the broader regional economy to benefit from Israel, Haick’s course for the first time enables the broader region to benefit from Israel’s world-class universities and high-tech expertise. And the more Israel’s neighbors benefit from its existence, the greater their interest will be in reaching an accommodation with it rather than destroying it.
All of the above may seem like baby steps. Yet the series of baby steps that have been taken over the last few years not only represents a major shift from the utter stagnation of previous decades, but is slowly adding up to significant progress, even if there’s still a long way left to go.
Ultimately, this progress is also crucial for any hope of Israeli-Palestinian peace. Barring the unexpected emergence of a Palestinian Anwar Sadat, Palestinians will need serious backing from the broader Arab world – and probably serious pressure as well – to make the kind of compromises any peace agreement with Israel would entail. So far, the Arab world hasn’t had any interest in applying such pressure. But if Arab countries become convinced that Israel’s continued existence and stability benefits them, they will finally have an interest in pressing the Palestinians to end the century-old conflict.
Originally published in Commentary on February 29, 2016
I can’t help noticing that the “siege of Gaza” has largely disappeared from the headlines. I’d like to think it’s because, having finally seen what a real siege looks like in Syria, many well-meaning folks who used to decry the “siege” of Gaza have realized that Gaza was never actually besieged at all. But for anyone who’s still confused about the difference between a real siege and a fictitious one, here are two simple tests: First, in real sieges, people die of starvation, because the besieger stops food from entering; in fake ones, the “besieger” sends in 2,500 tons of food and medicine per day even during the worst of the fighting. Second, real sieges get swept under the carpet by the UN; only the fake ones merit massive UN publicity. And if you think I’m joking, just compare the actual cases of Madaya and Gaza.
In the Syrian town of Madaya, which is besieged by the Assad regime’s forces, people were reduced to living on grass because no other food was available. Rice, a staple that costs $1.25 per kilogram in other war-ravaged Syrian towns, was so scarce in Madaya that it sold for 200 times that price – an astounding $256 per kilogram, according to a report by Roy Gutman in Foreign Policy. Women were so hungry their breast milk dried up, leaving them unable to feed their babies. At least 32 people have starved to death so far, and hundreds more are at risk of starvation. One man told Gutman everyone in his family had lost 45 pounds – and they are the lucky ones; they’re still alive.
In Gaza, in contrast, even when the “siege” was regularly making headlines, there were never any reports of people dying of hunger, living off grass or unable to feed their babies. That’s because in contrast to Syrian forces, which prevented food and other humanitarian goods from entering Madaya, Israel allowed thousands of tons of such goods into Gaza every day. Even during the 50-day war with Hamas in summer 2014, while Hamas was regularly firing rockets at the only border crossing between Israel and Gaza, Israel managed to get 122,757 tons of food, medicine and fuel into Gaza through that crossing; in normal times, the volume is much higher. Indeed, Gaza’s life expectancy exceeds the global median, surpassing that in 114 countries worldwide. In places that are really besieged, life expectancy tends to be low.
It’s true that Israel maintains a naval blockade to prevent arms smuggling, and it also restricts dual-use imports to Gaza. Cement, for instance, is in short supply there, because Hamas has a nasty habit of using it to build cross-border attack tunnels rather than schools and hospitals for its people. According to Israel Defense Forces estimates, the tunnels uncovered during the 2014 war contained enough cement to build 2,580 homes, 180 schools or 570 medical clinics; today, Hamas is working hard to rebuild those tunnels. Thus Israel allows cement into Gaza only if a reputable international partner takes responsibility for ensuring it is used for civilian rather than military purposes. But import restrictions are not, and never were, remotely comparable to a siege.
If your only source of information is the UN, however, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking Gaza’s situation was much worse than that of Madaya – because the UN deliberately concealed Madaya’s situation, despite having known for months that the town was starving.
Gutman’s Foreign Policy report revealed that UN officials knew of Madaya’s dire straits as early as October, but kept mum until their hand was forced by “shocking images of starving infants” that began circulating on social media this month and were picked up by mainstream media. As late as January 6, a “flash update” on Madaya’s situation issued by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs was still marked “Internal, Not for Quotation.”
Moreover, even when the UN finally did go public, Gutman wrote, it insisted on downplaying Madaya’s situation by saying it was no worse than that of various towns besieged by rebel militias. Yet in contrast to Madaya, where regime forces were keeping all food out, food was entering the towns under rebel assault, making their situation far less dire.
One week after Gutman’s bombshell, BuzzFeed followed up with a report that OCHA had deliberately altered its humanitarian aid plan for Syria, including by “deleting references to ‘besieged’ areas such as Madaya where thousands of people are starving.” The plan also deleted any mention of removing landmines and unexploded ordnance and dropped all references to violations of international humanitarian law.
The changes in the aid plan, like the original decision to keep Madaya’s situation under wraps, were made at the Assad regime’s request. As BuzzFeed noted, “The UN’s Damascus office is reliant on the Assad regime for all their foreign staff visas, their security, and access to hard-to-reach areas,” which may be why it felt obligated to bow to the regime’s dictates. Nevertheless, the decision infuriated aid organizations, which accused OCHA of concealing the true scale of the horror to appease the regime.
Needless to say, no such considerations restrain OCHA when it comes to Gaza; UN agencies know they can say anything they please against Israel without risking their Gaza access. Thus, a Google search for “Gaza blockade” on OCHA’s website turns up 1,100 documents decrying it; searching for “Gaza siege” turns up another 310 (while OCHA itself generally uses the legally correct term “blockade,” many NGOs it partners with prefer “siege”). Nor is this coincidental: It’s only when a place is really besieged that access requires the besieger’s goodwill; when a “siege” exists only in media hype, legitimate aid agencies have free access.
So next time you hear people talking about the “siege of Gaza,” remember Madaya. And then tell them to stop wasting their breath on fake sieges when people are dying in real ones.
Originally published in Commentary on January 25, 2016
The global firestorm that has erupted over Israel’s “NGO transparency bill” can’t be understood without knowing one crucial fact: Israel’s leading left-wing “nongovernmental” organizations are actually wholly-owned subsidiaries of the European Union and its member states. This fact, which was incontrovertibly demonstrated by a new NGO Monitor study, explains both why the bill is so important and why it is so fiercely opposed by the organizations themselves and their European funders.
As I noted in Tuesday’s post, the study examined the financial reports filed with Israel’s registrar of nonprofit organizations by 27 prominent organizations from 2010-2014. The groups include B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, Adalah, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and many others actively engaged in trying to tarnish Israel’s name overseas. Overall, these groups raised more than 261 million shekels during those years; at current exchange rates, that comes to $66 million.
Of this total, fully 65 percent – some $43 million – came either directly or indirectly from foreign governments, primarily European ones. Foreign governments provided 20 of the 27 groups with over 50 percent of their funding, and three groups (Yesh Din, Terrestrial Jerusalem and Emek Shaveh) received over 90 percent of their funding from foreign governments. The largest donor was the EU, followed by Norway and Germany.
Moreover, this high level of European funding is absolutely unique, as demonstrated by a previous NGO Monitor report analyzing the years 2007-2010. That report found that the EU’s European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights spends more on promoting “democracy and human rights” in “Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories” than in every other country of the Mideast combined. Indeed, the EIDHR spends more in Israel alone – excluding all the grants given jointly to “Israel and the OPT” – than it does in every other Mideast country, every Asian and Pacific country, all but one African country and all but one American and Caribbean country; grants to “Israel and the OPT” together exceed those to every other country worldwide, by a very large margin.
The “transparency bill” would require any NGO that gets more than 50 percent of its funding from foreign governments to state this clearly on any report or publication it issues, and also in any written or oral contacts with public officials. The government-sponsored version would not require representatives of these groups to wear special nametags in the Knesset; that idea was raised in a private member’s bill, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said it won’t be in the final legislation.
The bill’s supporters say it is similar to America’s Foreign Agents Registration Act. The U.S. Embassy in Israel disputes this, insisting that FARA applies only when groups engage in activities “at the order, request, or under the direction or control, of a foreign principal – not simply by receiving contributions from such an entity.” That claim, however, is patently false.
FARA’s actual text says a foreign agent need not be directly controlled by a foreign principal; he can also be acting “under the direction or control” of a third party “whose activities are … financed, or subsidized in whole or in major part by a foreign principal.” In other words, he could be employed by a local NGO financed “in whole or in major part” by a foreign government. Moreover, FARA says explicitly that no formal contractual relationship between the agent and the foreign principal is necessary.
Thus receiving substantial contributions from a foreign entity actually could be enough in itself to make someone a foreign agent, as long as he also engages in one of four actions specified by the law, of which the relevant one in Israel’s case is the first: engaging “within the United States in political activities for or in the interests of such foreign principal.”
The EU and its member states make no secret of the fact that getting Israel out of the West Bank is one of their top foreign policy goals. That contradicts the Israeli government’s position, which opposes further territorial withdrawals under the current circumstances.
The 20 NGOs in question similarly make no secret of the fact that getting Israel out of the West Bank is a top policy goal. B’Tselem, for instance, unambiguously titled one of its fundraising appeals “Help End the Occupation: Support B’Tselem.” Yehuda Shaul, the foreign relations director for Breaking the Silence, explicitly defined the organization in a 2014 article as “Israeli veterans who work toward ending the Israeli occupation.” And so forth.
In other words, these organizations are conducting political activity in Israel aimed at pressuring the elected government to adopt a key European policy goal, all while being financed “in major part” by European governments. That’s precisely the situation FARA’s provisions are meant to cover, and for good reason: When certain donors provide more than half an NGO’s funding, no explicit contract is needed to ensure the NGO’s compliance with its donors’ wishes; the threat of losing funding is sufficient.
But lest there be any doubt, even the explicit contractual relationship sometimes exists. Just this month, for instance, an EU-sponsored organization gave B’Tselem €30,000 to lobby the Knesset against the NGO transparency bill, which the EU openly opposes. In other words, it paid B’Tselem to lobby the Knesset to enact the EU’s preferred policies.
There’s also no doubt that these European donors are hostile to Israel. Norway – the largest individual government donor – is remarkably honest about this; its Foreign Ministry says explicitly, for instance, that it funds UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, because it is “a guarantor that the rights of Palestine refugees, including the right to return, are not forgotten.” The “right of return,” needless to say, is Palestinian code for eliminating the Jewish state demographically by flooding it with millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees.
But the rest of Europe isn’t much more subtle. For instance, the EU recently adopted discriminatory labeling requirements that apply only to “Israeli-occupied” territory, but not to territory occupied by any other country. It gives higher priority to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than it does to other conflicts that are not only far bloodier, but have swamped it with an unprecedented refugee crisis. And the funding it pours into Israeli NGOs – more, as noted, than it gives the rest of the Mideast combined – isn’t because it thinks a 67-year-old democracy actually needs more help with democracy promotion than the world’s dozens of dictatorships; it’s because this money isn’t aimed at promoting “democracy and human rights” at all, but at subverting the policies of Israel’s democratically elected government.
By now, I doubt there’s anyone in Israel who doesn’t know these NGOs are wholly-owned subsidiaries of European governments; indeed, the main reason they conduct so much of their activity overseas these days is that they have little credibility left in Israel. But abroad, these groups are still viewed as Israeli organizations representing an authentic Israeli perspective, and they also benefit from the NGO “halo effect.”
That is why the transparency bill is so critical, and also why both the organizations and European governments are fighting so hard to kill it: Once these groups are required to state openly, on everything they do, that they’re primarily funded by European governments, it will be possible to expose them for what they really are – not independent Israeli NGOs with Israel’s best interests at heart, but agents of a hostile foreign power that is obsessed by Israel, discriminates against it and wishes it nothing but ill.
Originally published in Commentary on January 22, 2016
I once thought the ongoing Mideast meltdown would make it obvious to all that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the least of the region’s problems. As the years went by, I began to despair of this notion; both Obama Administration officials and their European counterparts remained fixated on Israel, seemingly undaunted by the new reality. But two remarkably frank avowals of error by two very different people over the past week have restored my faith that eventually, truth will prevail.
The first is former CIA director and four-star general David Petraeus, who made headlines back in 2010 by telling Congress that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict impedes America’s “ability to advance our interests” in the Mideast. Last week, he gave a wide-ranging interview to Haaretz in which he was asked how important solving the conflict was to overall Mideast stability. His response was unequivocal:
I think it is increasingly clear that the old notion that the path to peace and stability in the Middle East runs through a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is mistaken. (And I acknowledge that I was one of those who shared that notion until a few years ago.) There are multiple interlocking conflicts unfolding across the region right now – and to be blunt, the Israeli-Palestinian issue is peripheral to all of them. Those who suggest that, if peace were to break out tomorrow between Israelis and Palestinians, such a development would stabilize, say, Syria or Libya or Iraq, are simply detached from reality.
Moreover, he said, his new understanding of the situation led to an obvious conclusion:
In my view, at a time when civilization itself is under siege from forces that wish to tear down the world we have helped to build, we would be wise to take a step back and focus on the big picture. The simple reality is that Israel and the United States are long-standing friends and allies in an increasingly dangerous world – and we ought to treat each other as such.
From an American perspective, Israel has proven itself to be an exceptionally capable, resourceful and valuable ally to the United States in a very important and treacherous region. We share many fundamental interests, and we face enemies that wish to do both countries harm.
Just as importantly, we share core values and we therefore wrestle with many of the same questions – about how to keep our people safe from the forces of terrorism that seek our destruction while preserving our respective democratic freedoms, rule of law, and respect for fundamental and eternal human rights, which define who we are.
A few days later, the man who heads both the Cypriot parliament’s Foreign and European Affairs Committee and the country’s center-right ruling party made a similar avowal of error, and drew similar conclusions, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post. Cyprus, said Averof Neophytou, was once one of Israel’s harshest critics in Europe, viewing it as an aggressor against the Palestinians. But now, it realizes that Israel is “a country of eight million fighting a struggle for survival and having to face hundreds of millions of Muslims and Arabs, part of whom don’t even recognize the right of the existence of a Jewish state. So which side is strong, and which side is weak? Which side is fighting for survival?”
Moreover, he continued, “For decades Israel was blamed for creating the instability in the region, but can anyone credibly blame Israel for the instability in Syria, the threat of Islamic State, the Arab Spring that turned into an Arab winter, or the chaos in Libya and Iraq?”
The result is that whereas Cypriots once viewed Israel with hostility – “There were times decades ago, even in the 90s, when if during the public procurement process there was a consortium that included Jewish or Israeli participation, that would be a reason to exclude it,” Neophytou acknowledged – today, the “vast majority” of Cypriots consider Israel “a credible partner,” he asserted.
Clearly, there are still plenty of people who ignore reality in order to cling to the myth of Palestinian centrality. For instance, as veteran U.S. diplomat Dennis Ross pointed out last month, the theory that Washington’s relationship with Arab states would be improved by drawing away from Israel and harmed by cooperating with it has been disproven time and again, yet it remains accepted wisdom in American policy circles.
Some people will even rewrite history to salvage their belief in Palestinian centrality – like Oded Eran, a former top Israeli diplomat now serving as a senior fellow at a leading Israeli think tank. In an interview with the Times of Israel last month, he supported his theory that progress in the peace process is essential for improving Israel’s ties with the international community by claiming that the Oslo Accord and the peace with Jordan led to the establishment of relations with India and China. But in real life, Israel established relations with India and China in 1992, predating both Oslo (1993) and the Jordanian peace (1994). As with dozens of other countries that established ties with Israel in 1991-92, this rapprochement was driven not by anything to do with the peace process, but by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the consequent collapse of the anti-Israel line previously followed by both the Soviet bloc and the Non-Aligned Movement (which, despite its name, usually tilted toward the Soviets on foreign policy). And Eran, as a former top diplomat, should certainly have known all this. But his need to declare the Palestinian-Israeli conflict the axis around which the world revolves evidently trumps reality. And whether due to ignorance or similar commitment to this proposition, neither the reporter nor his editors called him on it.
Nobody likes admitting error, so perhaps it’s not surprising that it has taken so long for the current Mideast chaos to change anyone’s mind. But as Petraeus and Neophytou demonstrate, slowly but surely, that change is happening. It’s a small ray of light in what has otherwise been a gloomy start to 2016.
Originally published in Commentary on January 14, 2016
After Samir Kuntar was killed in Syria this weekend, allegedly by an Israeli airstrike, the Israeli media reported something surprising: The Lebanese terrorist, who had been sentenced to four life terms in Israel for particularly vicious murders but was released in 2008 to ransom the bodies of two soldiers from Hezbollah, was no longer working for the group that secured his freedom. Instead, he was working directly for Iran, setting up anti-Israel terrorist cells in southern Syria. In other words, Iran is no longer outsourcing anti-Israel operations to local terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas; it’s now running them directly, thereby increasing the risk of direct Israeli-Iranian clashes.
This isn’t the only way Iran’s behavior has changed for the worse since it began receiving Western sanctions relief in exchange for negotiating on the nuclear deal concluded this summer. It has also started recruiting child soldiers to fight in Syria. According to a horrific report published last week by an Iranian exile, who has spent the last two years working with refugees arriving in Greece, Tehran is exploiting Afghan teens who fled their own country’s war to provide cannon fodder for the civil war in Syria. They are bribed into fighting on the Assad regime’s behalf with the promise of a monthly salary plus a long-term Iranian residence permit after completing three tours of duty in Syria. Iran’s budget for this project also includes the cost of the drugs it gives the child soldiers before every battle; if they weren’t drugged, it fears they wouldn’t fight.
Altogether, Haaretz reported earlier this month, Iran has about 5,000 of its own soldiers in Syria plus another 25,000 under its command, including Hezbollah, Iraqi Shi’ite militias, and the Afghani and Pakistani refugees it exploits as mercenaries. But that hasn’t stopped it from also funding numerous terrorist groups outside the Levant. Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, an Iranian-American political scientist who works at Harvard and Columbia, told Al Arabiya this weekend that, of the more than 200 terrorist groups worldwide, fully a quarter “are funded, trained, or directly recruited by the Iranian government.”
All this costs money and, indeed, IHS Jane’s reported last week that Iran’s “defense” budget ballooned by 29 percent in 2015, the largest increase in the Middle East and the second largest in the world. Percentage-wise, the Iranian surge was three times the Mideast’s second largest increase (Israel, up 10 percent), while military spending actually fell in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, the Sunni Gulf States that are Iran’s main Arab rivals. Nor is Iran stopping there: In July, it approved a five-year plan that will ultimately boost its military budget by more than 50 percent, to be funded by the additional sanctions relief it will obtain once the nuclear deal takes effect next year.
In short, just as opponents of the nuclear deal predicted, Iran is primarily using its sanctions relief windfall not to invest in its own people, but to promote additional terror and strife throughout the Middle East.
Needless to say, this undermines America’s own stated foreign policy goals. Just last week, for instance, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter complained that Gulf Arab states aren’t doing enough to help America fight the Islamic State. But the Gulf States repeatedly told Washington that their biggest security concern was Iranian power projection. Having ignored this concern to sign a deal that significantly enhances Iran’s capability for military mischief, all while blithely insisting there was nothing to worry about because Iran would use the billions in sanctions relief for domestic purposes rather than military meddling overseas, the administration can hardly be shocked that the Gulf States are now ignoring its security concerns in favor of their own and therefore bombing Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen rather than ISIS in Syria. Empowering your would-be allies’ greatest enemy is no way to build a coalition.
But the deal also turns out to be increasing the risk of an Israeli-Iranian war – the very risk it was supposed to prevent. One of the main impetuses for the deal was the West’s fear that, if Iran’s nuclear program wasn’t curbed by agreement, Israel would end up bombing it. And given how blatantly Iran is already violating the deal, that could still happen. Yet with Iran now emboldened to operate directly against Israel from Syria instead of via local proxies, an additional risk has been added: Iranian-Israeli clashes in Syria could accidentally escalate into full-fledged conflict. Israel has already killed at least one high-ranking Iranian while shooting back at people targeting it from Syria, and the more Iran becomes directly involved in anti-Israel activity along the border, the more likely such incidents become.
In short, far from improving Iran’s bad behavior, the nuclear deal has exacerbated existing wars and heightened the likelihood of more wars to come. If that’s what a foreign policy success looks like, I’d truly hate to see a failure.
Originally published in Commentary on December 22, 2015
I admit to getting a kick out of seeing anti-Semites inadvertently help the very Jewish state they dream of destroying. And it happens more often than you might think, as was driven home by three very different news reports this week.
The first is that some 8,000 French Jews moved to Israel this year, topping last year’s all-time high of 7,000. Immigration is always good for Israel. Not only does each group of immigrants bring its own ideas and strengths that contribute to making Israel a better place, but the country simply needs a critical mass of people to survive as a Jewish state in an Arab region. Indeed, had it not been for the millions of Jews who immigrated since 1948, Israel might not have survived.
Most immigrants to Israel are Zionists; they genuinely care about the Jewish state. But even so, most of them wouldn’t have left comfortable lives elsewhere had there not been a push factor as well as a pull factor; that’s why most American Zionists still don’t come. And usually, anti-Semitism has been part of that push factor, just as it is for French Jews today.
So thank you, anti-Semites, for turning a country of 800,000 people into one eight million strong. It would never have happened without your help.
The second news item was the announcement of a planned trilateral summit between the leaders of Israel, Greece, and Cyprus. For most of its history, Israel’s relationships with Greece and Cyprus were chilly; in contrast, it had close ties with their longtime enemy, Turkey. It was only when Turkey, under the leadership of the virulently anti-Semitic Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, turned against Israel that a rapprochement with Greece and Cyprus began, since all three countries now had a common enemy.
In other times, this might have seemed a poor strategic bargain. Greece and Cyprus have weaker militaries than Turkey, offer smaller economic markets, and don’t provide diplomatic entrée to the Muslim world. But in a month where the West has just given Iran a pass on two major violations of its shiny new nuclear deal – failing to come clean on its past nuclear work and conducting a banned missile test – it’s a godsend.
Why? Because Iran now knows for certain that it can cheat its way to nuclear weapons with impunity, which means Israel will someday face a choice between bombing Iran or letting Iran get the bomb. But bombing will be harder than it would have been before the nuclear deal because the deal gave Russia a green light to finally supply Iran with its advanced S-300 aerial defense system. And Israel lacks experience with the S-300; the allies its air force traditionally trained with, including Turkey, mainly use American weapons platforms.
But Cyprus, which has long had close ties with Russia, bought an S-300 back in 1997, which it later transferred to Greece. And since Israel, Greece, and Cyprus are now friends that conduct joint military exercises, Greece reportedly let the Israel Air Force practice against its S-300 this spring to devise ways of defeating it.
So thank you, Erdogan, for enabling the IAF to get the training it will need if it ever has to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. It wouldn’t have happened without your help.
Finally, there’s the annual UN Human Development Index, which was published this week. Israel ranked 18th on this index, which is based on income, education and life expectancy; that puts it above both the EU average and the OECD average, and also above several individual countries (like France, Belgium, and Austria) that have higher per capita incomes, have been around much longer, and haven’t been at war for the last seven decades. Inter alia, Israel has the world’s second-lowest infant mortality rate (though since Belarus ranked first, I admit to wondering about the veracity of some of the UN’s data); it ranks fourth in life satisfaction; and it has the highest fertility rate of any country in the “Very High Human Development” category (2.9 births per woman), compared to fertility rates below replacement rate in every EU country, and even in America.
What do any of these statistics have to do with anti-Semitism? Two things. First, Israel has benefited tremendously from the generosity of overseas Jewry; in particular, many of its hospitals and universities were built with help from abroad. All these donors were obviously motivated by Zionism; they wanted to contribute to building the Jewish state. But the fact that Israel’s very existence has been under threat since its inception served as an additional spur. Helping fellow Jews in a very powerful Jewish impulse, and even today, overseas donations to Israel spike whenever there’s a war. In other words, had it not been for the constant threats, the Diaspora Jewish generosity that has helped Israel grow and thrive so impressively might not have reached the proportions that it did.
Second, precisely because of those constant threats, Israel simply couldn’t afford mediocrity in certain areas. To fight wars against enemies who were vastly numerically superior, for instance, it needed the very best military technology, and its investment in weapons development ultimately spurred a civilian high-tech boom. Similarly, for decades it was unable to import agricultural produce from its neighbors, so it had to be able to grow food despite having very little water; hence, innovations like drip irrigation and wastewater recycling (in which Israel is the undisputed world leader) were born.
In short, without the constant hostility, Israel probably wouldn’t have come as far and as fast as it has since 1948. So thank you, anti-Semites, for spurring Israel to become a pretty amazing place to live. We couldn’t have done it without your help.
Originally published in Commentary on December 17, 2015
Several commentators have pointed out recently that, had the West not spent decades treating terror against Jews and Israel as an “understandable” outgrowth of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it might have less of a terrorism problem today.
Liel Leibovitz of Tablet detailed links between people who perpetrated attacks on Jews and people who later perpetrated attacks on non-Jews in the same countries. His analysis suggests that, had the original attacks on Jews been investigated more thoroughly, the later attacks might have been preventable. Gil Troy argued in the Jerusalem Post that the West’s consistent response to Palestinian terror – capitulating to the terrorists’ demands and pressuring Israel to do the same – persuaded subsequent generations of Islamic terrorists that terror is an effective means of furthering their goals. But there’s a third way in which the West’s attitudes toward Israel have contributed to its terrorism problem: Its conviction – in defiance of all evidence – that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was the Mideast’s central problem led it to focus obsessively on this issue, at the expense of all the real problems that are coming back to haunt it now. And nothing better illustrates this than the seemingly trivial issue of NGO funding.
Both Europe and America, but especially the former, grant tens of millions of dollars a year to Israeli NGOs for the ostensible purpose of promoting “democracy” and “human rights” in the one Middle Eastern country that already does a reasonable job of protecting both. However, they spend far less on promoting democracy and human rights in other Mideast countries. A document obtained by the Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon, for instance, showed that in 2010, the British government gave £600,000 to Israeli NGOs; if you exclude Iraq, that’s six times as much as it gave NGOs in all other Arab countries combined. Nor does the West lavish this kind of money on NGOs in other fellow democracies: According to NGO Monitor, “No other democracy gets nearly as much foreign government funding” as Israel does.
Why this peculiar obsession with democracy and human rights in Israel, alone of all the world’s countries? The answer, of course, is that the donations aren’t primarily motivated by concern for democracy and human rights at all. They go almost exclusively to organizations dealing in some way with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – or, to be precise, organizations striving in some way to get Israel to adopt the West’s recipe for solving it: ever more concessions to the Palestinians.
After 20 years in which repeated territorial concessions have brought only more terror rather than peace, most Israelis can no longer be persuaded to buy this nostrum. So instead, these foreign-funded NGOs work to drum up anti-Israel sentiment overseas in the hope of generating international pressure and sanctions on it (see, for instance, Breaking the Silence, which travels worldwide to accuse Israel of “war crimes” but refuses to cooperate with Israeli law enforcement agencies so its allegations could actually be investigated, or B’Tselem, which eagerly cooperated in UN efforts to smear Israel as a war criminal, inter alia, by supplying inflated statistics about civilian casualties). In other words, this money goes mainly toward trying to circumvent Israeli democracy by forcing its government to do something most voters oppose.
Despicable though this is from a democratic standpoint, it’s understandable from a foreign policy standpoint. Western countries believed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was the Mideast’s main problem, so focusing their resources on it made sense.
The problem, as recent events have amply proven, is that this belief was simply false. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict had nothing to do with the Syrian civil war, which has flooded Europe with refugees and created a power vacuum that the Islamic State has now filled with its terror-exporting “caliphate.” The Palestinian-Israeli conflict had nothing to do with the Libyan civil war, which is also flooding Europe with refugees and created another power vacuum that Islamic State is similarly moving to fill. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict had nothing to do with the Iraqi government’s exclusion of its Sunni citizens, which led them to view Islamic State as a protector and provide it with the initial base from which it later expanded. In short, this conflict had nothing to do with any of the real problems now preoccupying the West.
But those problems might not be the metastasizing crises they are had the West not spent decades ignoring all the region’s other patent ills in order to obsess over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Consider, for instance, what else could have been done with the 100 million euros a year which, according to NGO Monitor, is what foreign governments give to NGOs involved in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (Israeli, Palestinian and international). What if that money had instead been going for decades to NGOs promoting democracy, human rights, and good governance in places like Syria, Libya, and Iraq? Perhaps it wouldn’t have made any difference, but maybe it would have produced enough incremental change that the current meltdown of the Arab world could have been avoided.
The past can’t be rewritten, but it’s not too late to change the future. As Leibovitz and Troy argued, that will require taking attacks on Jews seriously and ending Western appeasement of Palestinian terror. But it will also require finally abandoning the myth of Palestinian centrality and focusing instead on the Mideast’s real problems. Diverting those millions of euros from Israeli NGOs to all the countries that really do need help with democracy and human rights might be an excellent way to start.
Originally published in Commentary on December 10, 2015
Two news items over the past two weeks provide timely reminders of why Israel’s willingness to take military action in its own neighborhood makes it an unparalleled strategic asset for the West – including those Westerners who deplore military action and prefer to rely exclusively on diplomacy. At first glance, neither report has anything to do with Israel. Yet both underscore its vital role in Western security.
The first was a New York Times report on the Islamic State’s efforts to obtain red mercury – a material that, “when detonated in combination with conventional high explosives,” is rumored to “create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb.” Proliferation experts all say red mercury is a hoax, but it’s a hoax widely believed in many corners of the globe. The terrorist group was therefore willing to pay ‘‘whatever was asked’’ to procure it, as one Islamic State official told the arms dealer he tasked with the mission. Nor was this a passing fancy: The official “kept inquiring about red mercury for more than a year … pressing for results” until he disappeared (presumably because he was killed).
What the report shows is that while red mercury may be a hoax, the Islamic State’s efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction are in deadly earnest. And had it not been for Israel, the group might well have succeeded – because its Syrian conquests include Al-Kibar, site of the secret nuclear facility Israel destroyed just before it went live in 2007. Granted, the Syrian government would presumably have invested more in Al-Kibar’s defense if the reactor hadn’t been destroyed, but it has lost many areas it genuinely strove to defend. Thus the possibility that Islamic State could have captured the facility, and thereby acquired raw material for a nuclear bomb, is far from unrealistic.
Obviously, nobody foresaw Syria’s collapse in 2007. But that’s precisely the point: Though Western countries presumably would have taken military action to keep the world’s most vicious terrorist group from obtaining nuclear weapons, none of them was willing to do so merely to prevent a vicious dictator from obtaining nukes; the West preferred negotiations with Damascus. And had Israel bowed to this preference, it would have been too late for military action by the time Islamic State rolled in. You can’t bomb a live reactor.
But Israel wasn’t willing to risk nuclear weapons in Syrian President Bashar Assad’s hands, so it acted when other Western countries wouldn’t. And therefore, the nightmare scenario of Islamic State with nuclear weapons was prevented.
The second news item was the International Atomic Energy Agency’s report on the history of Iran’s nuclear program, which gives ammunition to both sides in the debate over the nuclear deal with Iran. On one hand, the agency found no evidence that Iran’s work on nuclear weapons continued after 2009, which could indicate that it really ended – though only if you ignore the nontrivial possibility that Tehran simply managed to deceive the IAEA. On the other hand, the agency’s conclusion that Iran did work on weaponization prior to 2009 indicates that it lied about its program in the past, will probably lie in the future and may already have a shorter breakout time to a bomb than the agreement’s drafters assumed, making the deal’s ostensible safeguards less safe. But whichever view you favor, it underscores Israel’s strategic importance.
Though Israel vehemently opposed the agreement, supporters nevertheless owe it a vote of thanks, because the deal could never have been achieved without Israel’s proven record of willingness to use force. First, as I’ve explained before, the main impetus for the Western sanctions that ultimately brought Iran to the negotiating table was fear that Israel would bomb Iran if the West didn’t impose such sanctions; a senior French official stated this explicitly. In other words, absent a credible Israeli threat to bomb, there would have been no stringent sanctions, and hence, no deal.
But Israel was also crucial to obtaining the concession that experts consider one of the deal’s main achievements: the planned redesign of Iran’s heavy-water reactor at Arak so it won’t be able to produce plutonium. True, none of these experts actually gave Israel credit, but consider the following facts: First, Israel has never allowed a reactor capable of producing nuclear material to go live anywhere in the Mideast; it bombed such reactors in both Iraq and Syria shortly before they went online. Second, though Israeli defense officials were divided over whether Iran’s nuclear program was already advanced enough to warrant attacking despite Washington’s strident opposition, they all agreed Israel should attack if absolutely necessary to keep Iran from obtaining the bomb. Third, a plutonium-producing reactor can’t be bombed once it’s online, so preventing it from going online would have been absolutely necessary to preclude Iran from getting the bomb.
In other words, there’s no chance Israel would have let that reactor go live, and Iran almost certainly knew it; indeed, its own Intelligence Ministry recommended negotiations with the West explicitly to prevent the threat of a “Zionist” attack. Tehran was prepared to negotiate away that path to the bomb because it knew the Arak reactor was a dead end anyway.
So where does that leave opponents of the deal? For them, the lesson is even more obvious: That’s what happens when Israel capitulates to intense Western pressure and doesn’t play its usual role as the West’s forward defense. Nobody else will do the job, so you’re stuck hoping a dubious deal with Iran works better than the one with North Korea did – or else that Israel can somehow still take action before Iran cheats its way to the bomb.
Israel’s primary goal in taking military action is always to protect itself. But in protecting itself, it often ends up protecting the West, and in failing to protect itself, it often puts the rest of the West at risk. It’s too early to say which of those will prove true with regard to Iran. But it’s definitely past time for the West to say “thank you” to Israel for keeping Islamic State from getting the bomb.
Originally published in Commentary on December 4, 2015
The deputy prime minister of Vietnam visited Israel on Wednesday, prompting Jerusalem Post reporter Herb Keinon to delve into some fascinating trade statistics. Bilateral trade between Israel and Vietnam totaled almost $1.1 billion last year, a fivefold increase in just five years, and is now more than double Israel’s trade with Austria and four times its trade with Norway. In fact, Keinon later tweeted, Israel’s trade with Vietnam now exceeds its trade with 21 of the European Union’s 28 member states. And Vietnam is just one country; Israeli trade with other Asian countries has also burgeoned. All of which goes to show that one of Israel’s biggest Achilles’ heels – its economic dependence on an increasingly hostile Europe – is swiftly disappearing.
Taken as a whole, the EU is still Israel’s largest trading partner, but its lead has been shrinking rapidly as Israeli trade with other parts of the globe expands. Moreover, many of the European countries most hostile to Israel are among its least important trading partners. Norway, Sweden, and Ireland, for instance, would star in any list of the most hostile countries, yet each of them conducts less trade with Israel than Vietnam does. In other words, the countries that are most hostile to Israel tend to be those with relatively little ability to cause it economic harm.
Israel has long since ceased to count on Europe for diplomatic support. In international forums, many European countries reflexively back even the most outrageous anti-Israel resolutions, while even Israel’s best friends in Europe rarely do more than abstain. This past May, for instance, every EU country voted for a UN resolution declaring Israel the world’s worst violator of health rights (perhaps they think Israeli hospitals should stop treating Syrian war victims or cancer patients from Hamas-run Gaza?).
Nor does Israel depend on Europe militarily. As Haaretz reporter Anshel Pfeffer pointed out after Britain threatened to suspend arms exports to Israel during last summer’s Gaza war, such threats are so old hat that Israel long ago dropped Britain as a major military supplier. Ditto for most other European countries (the two exceptions being Germany and Italy). Today, Israeli defense imports from Britain consist mostly of spare parts that it could easily obtain elsewhere if necessary.
Thus, the one stick Europe still has with which to threaten Israel is economic. And as the recent decision to impose discriminatory labeling requirements on Israel shows, the EU bureaucracy is increasingly seeking to wield this stick.
Israel obviously can and should push back against such measures, and it has already scored some successes against the labeling decision. Hungary, for instance, flatly announced it will ignore the directive; Greece has also come out against it; Germany’s ruling party has denounced it, as has the president of the German parliament; and when German department store KaDeWe hastened to apply the new directive, the resultant outcry forced it into humiliating retreat a day later. All this fits a pattern I’ve noted before: Elected politicians, whose voters expect them to produce economic growth, tend to be much less enthusiastic about economic sanctions against Israel than EU bureaucrats, who aren’t answerable to any electorate.
Nevertheless, EU bureaucrats still wield a great deal of power, and they are likely to come up with more anti-Israel measures in the future. Thus over the long term, Israel’s best defense is to sharply reduce its economic dependence on Europe. And as the trade statistics with Vietnam show, Israel is making rapid strides toward doing exactly that.
Originally published in Commentary on December 3, 2015