Foreign Affairs and Defense
The Egyptian president’s war on terror in Sinai is a daily reminder of why Israel shouldn’t leave the West Bank
On January 31, Egypt became the first Arab country to declare Hamas’s armed wing a terrorist organization. In so doing, Egypt aligned itself with America and the European Union, both of which have long deemed Hamas a terrorist group (the EU is currently appealing a December court ruling overturning its designation). Cairo is also fully engaged in the West’s battle against the Islamic State, though it’s focusing on the group’s Sinai-based affiliate, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis. All this begs an obvious question: Why does Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi seem to be the West’s least favorite Arab leader?
Granted, he’s an autocrat who brutally suppresses dissent, but so is every other Arab leader – and the West seems prepared to overlook their repression as long as it deems them sufficiently opposed to Islamist terror. Thus Western leaders flocked to Saudi King Abdullah’s funeral last month, though Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s most repressive countries, where women are forbidden to drive and bloggers can be sentenced to 1,000 lashes. And Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is feted in every Western capital, though he’s now in the eleventh year of his four-year term and his security forces routinely arrest and intimidate journalists.
Sisi, in contrast, has long received a cold shoulder. Congress froze American aid to Egypt after he took power in2013, finally lifting this ban only two months ago; thus he’s had to rely on the Gulf States and Russia for desperately needed military and financial aid. He has yet to visit Washington, though he did meet President Barack Obama at the UN in New York in September; in contrast, the State Department recently hosted officials from the Muslim Brotherhood, Sisi’s bitterest opponent. And his European trip in November didn’t include the key European capitals of Berlin and London.
So here’s my theory: The West dislikes Sisi’s war on terror because, unlike that of other Arab countries, it threatens the logic of one of the West’s most cherished policy goals – an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.
Hamas has abetted Sinai jihadists since long before Sisi took power; after a deadly attack in August 2012, for instance, Cairo accused three Hamas members of involvement and demanded their extradition from Gaza. But Sisi escalated the battle against Gaza-based terror dramatically. Last March, an Egyptian court banned Hamas activities in Egypt; in October, Egypt began razing hundreds of houses along the Gaza border to create a buffer zone to stem cross-border traffic in weapons and terrorists; and now, it has declared Hamas a terrorist organization.
Yet while Western countries also ostensibly oppose Hamas, Sisi’s war poses two problems for them. First, it refutes their fond fantasy that Palestinian terrorists are merely anti-Israel, and would abandon terror if Israel just “ended the occupation.” A group that’s been exporting mayhem to a neighboring Arab country for years won’t stop just because Israel cedes more territory.
More importantly, however, it refutes the very idea that further Israeli withdrawals would promote Mideast stability – because in fact, Israel’s 2005 pullout from Gaza was the direct cause of Sinai’s radicalization.
Until 2005, Israeli troops controlled the Gaza-Egypt border, limiting contact between Hamas and Sinai. But when the IDF left, that restraining influence disappeared. And the impact, as journalist Ehud Yaari noted in a 2012 study, was devastating:
As Bedouin political activist Ashraf al-Anani put it, “a fireball started rolling into the peninsula.” Illegal trade and arms smuggling volumes rose to new records, and ever-larger sectors of the northern Sinai population became linked to Gaza and fell under the political and ideological influence of Hamas and its ilk … In short, despite then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s quiet hope that Cairo would assume unofficial responsibility for Gaza affairs, the Israeli withdrawal instead allowed Hamas to export its influence into Egyptian territory.
Facilitated by the dramatic increase in the number of tunnels … the expansion of Hamas and other Palestinian activities in the Sinai was unprecedented. In fact, the arms flow was often reversed, with weapons going from Gaza to the Sinai. During the [Egyptian] revolution, for example, observers noted a huge demand for firearms in the peninsula…
Today, a significant number of Hamas military operatives are permanently stationed in the Sinai, serving as recruiters, couriers, and propagators of the Hamas platform. A solid network of the group’s contact men, safe houses, and armories covers much of the peninsula … In addition, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other factions have been moving some of their explosives workshops—which produce homemade missiles, rockets, mortars, improvised explosive devices, and so forth—from Gaza to the Sinai in recent months.
Nor was it just arms and ideology that Gaza exported to Sinai: According to Israeli intelligence, Palestinian terrorists also trained their Sinai counterparts – and jihadists from other countries as well.
“We thought Sinai was the source of all evil for Gaza, but it turned out that things were exactly the opposite,” a senior intelligence official told Haaretz in 2013. “We thought experienced global jihad operatives from Afghanistan and Iraq would come to Sinai, and from there to Gaza, but in practice, the operatives from Gaza are the ones who taught the operatives in Sinai everything they know.”
It doesn’t take an Einstein to realize that just as Israel’s departure from Gaza allowed Hamas free rein to destabilize neighboring Sinai, Israel’s departure from the West Bank would give it free rein to destabilize neighboring Jordan. True, the West Bank is currently controlled by Abbas, not Hamas. But so was Gaza when Israel left – until Hamas staged a military coup two years later. Would anyone seriously bet against a similar coup in the West Bank once the IDF, the main force keeping Hamas in check, was gone?
Thus Sisi’s war on both the Sinai jihadists and Hamas is a constant and none-too-subtle reminder that far from being stabilizing, an Israeli pullout from the West Bank would be deeply destabilizing. Yet after years of declaring such a pullout to be a top foreign policy priority, Western leaders don’t want to face this unpleasant truth. So instead, they’ve taken the easier route: simply shunning the man whose policies keep bringing it to mind.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on February 9, 2015
Courts seeking to expand their jurisdiction always start with ‘easy’ targets, then use that precedent against others
“If Israel falls victim” to the International Criminal Court, “any democracy around the world may find itself in the same danger,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned this weekend after the court announced a “preliminary examination into the situation in Palestine.” Netanyahu is entirely correct. Not only has Israel has done nothing in Gaza that America, Britain, France and others haven’t done in places like Afghanistan and Iraq (as I explained when issuing the same warning in 2012), but there’s strong evidence that Israel took greater care to prevent civilian casualties than any of these countries do. Consequently, they have a major interest in ensuring that this “preliminary examination” goes no further.
Given how frequently international institutions apply double standards to Israel, cynics might retort that other countries have no reason to worry. But activist courts desirous of expanding their jurisdiction always begin with “easy” cases that they know will arouse minimal opposition. Then, once the precedent set in the “easy” case has been accepted, they can apply it to more controversial cases.
That’s precisely how Israel’s Supreme Court gained the power to overturn Knesset legislation, which no law actually authorizes it to do. First, it asserted this power in principle while in practice upholding the law at issue, knowing that a purely theoretical claim would generate much less opposition than actually overturning a law. Next, it used this precedent to overturn one small section of a law regulating investment managers, which nobody outside the field cared about; that bolstered the precedent while still not generating much opposition. Only once the precedent was firmly established did it start making truly controversial rulings, like overturning the law enabling the detention of illegal migrants.
Thus for the ICC, a case against Israel represents a golden opportunity. The court has always aspired to worldwide jurisdiction, but until now, all its cases have involved African countries with weak legal systems. Extending its reach to countries with well-developed legal systems requires an “easy” case that will generate little opposition, and Israel fits the bill: Much of the world would be happy to see it in the dock. Then, once the precedent is established, it can be used to indict other Western countries.
The court’s eagerness to seize this opportunity was evident from the unseemly haste with which prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced her preliminary examination – almost four months before the Palestinians’ ICC membership even takes effect. That bolsters the likelihood that she intends to proceed to a full investigation and then actual charges.
America, France and Britain – the three Western countries most engaged in overseas military operations – thus had a clear interest in keeping the Palestinian Authority from joining the court and starting this process. Instead, France, Britain and the EU as a whole tacitly encouraged it by making it clear that no economic or diplomatic consequences would ensue: The EU will continue funding the PA and supporting it diplomatically. And though Congress may not allow it, the Obama Administration would clearly like to follow suit: It has threatened the PA with no consequences beyond an unspecified “review” of the “implications,” while defending US aid to the PA as benefiting Israel and lambasting Israel for freezing tax transfers to the PA.
Consequently, all three countries will now find themselves in the dock alongside Israel as an essential element of Israel’s defense. After all, the ICC’s jurisdiction is limited to “the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole,” and it’s hard to argue that Israel qualifies if Israel is actually more scrupulous about protecting civilians than other Western countries. And military professionals – as opposed to politicians, journalists, human rights groups and others with no military expertise – generally agree that it is.
That’s why the US army, for instance, sent a “lessons learned” team to Israel after this summer’s Gaza war, inter alia to study Israeli techniques for minimizing civilian casualties. As Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in November, “Israel went to extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties … In this kind of conflict, where you are held to a standard that your enemy is not held to, you’re going to be criticized … But they did some extraordinary things to try and limit civilian casualties.”
Similarly, Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, told the Knesset in September that “No army in the world acts with as much discretion and great care as the IDF in order to minimize damage. The US and the UK are careful, but not as much as Israel.” In fact, he said, the global average when fighting in densely populated urban areas is roughly four civilian fatalities for every combatant killed. In Gaza, the ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths was almost 1:1 – four times better than the global average.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2009 also supports this conclusion. The study analyzed victims of U.S. airstrikes in Iraq from 2003-2008 and concluded that of those whose age and gender could be determined, 46% were women and 39% were children. In short, at least 85% were civilians, which roughly matches Kemp’s 4:1 ratio.
By contrast, according to UN data on Palestinian fatalities during the Gaza war, 13% were women and 24% were children. So even if the UN data is credible – which, as I explain here, it almost certainly isn’t – only 37% of Palestinian fatalities were women and children, compared to 85% in Iraq. And that’s despite the fact that the NEJM study deliberately excluded the heaviest battles, when troops are most at risk and fire is likely to be most indiscriminate, whereas the Gaza figures include all the most intense fighting. Had NEJM included the heaviest fighting in Iraq, the comparison would have been even more lopsided in Israel’s favor.
In short, if the ICC prosecutes Israel, other Western democracies won’t be far behind – which means they should be taking the lead in trying to get the case against Israel quashed. Threatening the court’s funding, as Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman suggested on Sunday, might be one way to start.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on January 19, 2015
I was shocked and disturbed by one of the passages Seth Mandel quoted Wednesday from a book by a well-regarded scholar of comparative religion. According to Karen Armstrong, ascribing Islamist terror mainly to religious motivations is wrong; “Terrorism experts agree that the denial of a people’s right to national self-determination and the occupation of its homeland by foreign forces has historically been the most powerful recruiting agent of terrorist organizations.” As Seth correctly noted, that claim ignores some pretty glaring historical evidence. But it also ignores the latest hard data, published just this month by the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
According to INSS, only 3 percent of all suicide bombings in 2014 were carried out against foreign armies. The vast majority targeted home-grown governments, militaries, and security services or rival ethnic and religious groups. And needless to say, almost all were carried out by Muslim extremists.
Nor can Armstrong and her unnamed experts be excused on the grounds that the world has changed since her book was published. A decade ago, before the explosive rise of Sunni-versus-Shi’ite violence in places like Iraq and Syria, the collapse of several Arab states and resulting internecine violence in places like Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and the upsurge of violence by groups like Boko Haram in Nigeria or the Pakistani Taliban in Pakistan, perhaps their thesis might have been more tenable. But Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence was published in 2014–the same year in which “foreign occupation” accounted for a mere 3 percent of all suicide bombings.
One can understand why experts might prefer to view Islamist terror as a response to “foreign occupation,” because if that were true, the whole problem would be within the West’s power to solve: Withdraw all Western forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, Mali, and other countries; force Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, India from Kashmir, China from Xinjiang, and so forth; and presto, no more Islamist terror.
Nevertheless, this view has two big problems even aside from the fact that it belies the data. First, it denies Muslim extremists any agency, refusing to acknowledge that they could possibly have dreams and aspirations of their own. All the goals the extremists claim to desire–restoring the caliphate, imposing Sharia law, defeating the West, eradicating Israel, reconquering Andalusia–are dismissed as mere window-dressing.
Indeed, this view reduces Muslims to mere human versions of Pavlov’s dog, responding automatically to the stimulus of “foreign occupation” with no possibility of doing otherwise. And it ought to go without saying that any theory that reduces some human beings to puppets dancing on a string pulled by others–i.e., that ascribes agency to Westerners alone while denying it to Muslims–is liable to be a poor explanation of reality.
Second, because it is a poor explanation of reality, this theory not only precludes any possibility of dealing with the real problem posed by Islamic extremism, but is liable to lead to counterproductive solutions. For instance, if “foreign occupation” were really the problem, then withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan might be productive. But if the problem is that Muslim extremists want to restore the global caliphate, Western withdrawals are actually counterproductive. Withdrawing leaves behind weak governments that the extremists can easily topple, giving them control of more territory and resources; it also makes the extremists look like they’re winning, which attracts more supporters to their banner.
The best way to defeat an extremist ideology is to show its potential adherents that it’s a dead end incapable of producing any real-world gains. But to do that, the West must first recognize that the problem is the ideology, not the straw man of “foreign occupation.”
Originally published in Commentary on January 16,2015
One of the most insightful commentaries I’ve read about last week’s terror attacks in France was Ben-Dror Yemini’s column in Ynet yesterday. Yemini pointed out that someone who gets all his news from mainstream Western media would have no reason to believe Islamic extremism was a problem–not because the words “Islamist terror” aren’t used, but because the vast majority of the attacks themselves aren’t reported.
The handful of attacks on Western targets get extensive coverage, alongside a few particularly egregious attacks in non-Western countries, like last month’s assault on a Pakistani school. But the “routine” attacks that occur almost daily in the Muslim world, which have killed hundreds of thousands of people in recent years, go largely unreported.
Thus, for instance, the New York Times did report an exceptionally bloody Boko Haram attack last week that may have killed up to 2,000 Nigerians. But buried in the 12th paragraph is the shocking fact that Boko Haram killed around 10,000 people last year alone. How many of the thousands of attacks that produced those 10,000 victims did the Times report? Almost none.
Similarly, Al-Arabiya’s Hisham Melham noted last week that 74,000 people were killed in Syria last year, while in Iraq, the death toll averaged about 1,000 a month. But how many of the thousands of attacks that produced those grim totals did the mainstream Western media report? Again, almost none.
Yet the problem doesn’t end there, Yemini argued–because alongside its failure to report on Islamic terror, the mainstream media obsesses over Israel. And this has consequences not just for how people view Israel, but for how Muslims view the West.
To understand why, a brief illustration might help. On the Times’s website, the article about Boko Haram killing up to 2,000 people merited 540 words. By comparison, an article last month about a Palestinian who died at an anti-Israel demonstration (whether due to ill-treatment or a heart attack remains disputed) merited 1,040 words. Thus one Palestinian allegedly killed by Israel merited 4,000 times as many words as each Boko Haram victim–and the ratio would be much higher if you included all of the latter who never get reported at all. And every Palestinian killed or allegedly killed by Israel gets similarly extensive coverage.
Thus a Muslim who relies for information solely on the mainstream Western media would rationally conclude that Israel, not Islamic extremism, is the greatest source of death and destruction in the world today, Yemini argued. And in fact, though he didn’t mention it, listening to any Western leader would produce the same conclusion: All spend far more time condemning Israel than they do, say, Boko Haram or Syria’s Iranian-supported regime.
Yet when that same Western Muslim looks at his government’s policy, Yemini said, he sees that its actions contradict the rational conclusion he drew from the media. After all, Western countries are currently bombing ISIS, not Israel. And they imposed economic sanctions on Syria, not Israel. Thus the rational Muslim news consumer would conclude that Western governments are not only hypocrites, but anti-Muslim hypocrites: They engage in military and economic cooperation with Israel while employing military and economic force against Muslims, even though Israel, judging by Western media, would seem to be a far worse offender. And such anti-Muslim hypocrisy rightly makes this rational Muslim angry, Yemini wrote.
Of course, Western governments’ policies are actually far more closely aligned to reality than the distorted impression our hypothetical Muslim gets from the media. But he really has no way of knowing that, because the people he depends on for information–the media–consistently tell him the opposite.
Once upon a time, Western liberals understood the critical importance of truthful information. They genuinely believed, as the New Testament proclaims, that “the truth shall set you free.” That’s precisely why the West invested so heavily in media outlets like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe during the Cold War: Many Westerners genuinely believed that letting Eastern Europeans and Soviet citizens hear the truth, rather than the propaganda published in Soviet media, would help bring the Iron Curtain down. And history proved them right.
But today, it seems, Western liberals no longer believe in the power of truth. If they did, they would realize that the road to defeating Islamic extremism starts with reporting faithfully on all its victims, day in and day out. For only when people know the truth about the carnage this extremism has wrought might they begin to turn against it.
Originally published in Commentary on January 14, 2015
Overseas Jews are hungry to hear it. And if we don’t tell them, who will?
Last week, I attended my first-ever Limmud conference in England, where I spent a significant chunk of time talking about why Israel is an admirable country and a force for good in the world. As regular readers will know, that’s not my standard practice; usually, I write about all the ways in which Israel still falls short of my aspirations. But my Limmud experience convinced me that talking about Israel’s good points is something all Israelis need to do far more often. There are Jews overseas – and presumably non-Jews as well – who still want to love Israel, and crave reassurance that this is a reasonable thing to do. And if Israelis don’t give it to them, who will?
Granted, there’s a reason why Israelis spend so much time dwelling on Israel’s problems: It’s one of the things that makes this country great. Israel could never have achieved what it has over the last 66 years if Israelis were content to rest on their laurels; it’s precisely because Israelis always want to make things better – even when they’re already pretty good – that Israel in fact keeps becoming better in all kinds of ways. Complaining about a problem obviously doesn’t solve it, but the fact that Israeli public discourse focuses relentlessly on identifying problems, drawing attention to them and discussing possible solutions does generate public pressure for improvement.
Nevertheless, this focus on the negative has a serious downside. I first realized this many years ago, when some friends and I were sitting around a Shabbat table indulging in the favorite Israeli pastime of griping about our country. The eldest of my friends’ children, who was perhaps 10 or 12 at the time, had heard many similar conversations. And suddenly she burst out, “Why do we have to live in such a horrible country?”
Shocked, we all rushed to assure her Israel was actually a wonderful country, and the only place we’d ever want to live. But how could she have known that, when all her life she’d heard us talk instead about Israel’s shortcomings?
And this is doubly true for overseas Jews. Unlike my friends’ child, who had ample opportunity to discover Israel’s good points for herself as she grew older, most Diaspora Jews know only what they hear. And because we take Israel’s strengths so for granted that we rarely feel a need to talk about them, what they hear from us is mostly negative.
This was driven home to me by the first question I received after one of my Limmud talks. Here, roughly, is what this conference-goer said: “I don’t really have a question; I just wanted to say thank you. All the news we hear from Israel is so depressing, and it was so encouraging to hear all the good things you told us!” And others who attended my presentations made similar comments.
That British Jews apparently aren’t getting much good news about Israel from their own leaders strikes me as a failure of the UK’s Jewish leadership. A Jewish leader’s job includes reminding community members of why they should care about the world’s only Jewish state, even when this means swimming against the tide. So especially now, when Israel is unfashionable, Diaspora Jewish leaders should try harder to seek out and share encouraging news from Israel.
Nevertheless, the primary responsibility is Israel’s. Even the most committed Diaspora Jews, those who follow news from Israel closely and visit here regularly, don’t know as much about Israel as Israelis do. And we need to find ways to share all the good things we know.
Perhaps, for instance, Israeli embassies should feature a daily “good news from Israel” section on their websites and social media accounts, so rabbis and educators would at least know where to find such information. Perhaps English-language Israeli papers and overseas Jewish papers should similarly feature a “good news” section on their websites and social media accounts. The question of “how” is really one for marketing and public relations experts, which I’m not.
What I do know, however, is that this is urgent, and that it needs to be proactive: We can’t rely on people seeking out good news on their own. Granted, my lectures weren’t the ideal test; I’m a little-known and not very dynamic speaker. Yet the fact remains that the people hungry enough for good news about Israel to risk attending my talks, simply because they did promise such news, were almost exclusively people over 50. The hundreds of younger people attending Limmud were far more likely to frequent lectures promising criticism of Israel.
And contrary to the accepted wisdom, this is not because of their liberal sensibilities; there’s plenty for liberals to love about Israel. Like the new study showing that 65% of Israeli Arabs are proud to be Israeli, and they trust the Israel Police (!) more than their own political and religious leaders. Or like most of what I discussed in my lectures, ranging from the significant narrowing of Jewish-Arab educational gaps over the last 15 years to Israel’s world leadership in water recycling.
Rather, it’s because younger people have never been given such information, and therefore don’t already love Israel enough to actively seek out more, as their parents and grandparents do. When they are told it, as an impressive experiment this summer in Massachusetts proved, their attitudes change.
For the idea that love of Israel can be inculcated via a “critical” approach is fatuous. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with loving Israel critically; Israelis themselves do so, which is precisely why they gripe about their country so much. But before you can love anything “critically,” you first have to love it.
And aside from their children, people don’t usually love anything without reason. Not their spouses, not their friends, and not Israel. To love something, one must first believe that despite the inevitable imperfections, it has attributes worthy of being loved.
There are many good reasons to love Israel, not least its constant efforts to correct its flaws. But too many overseas Jews no longer know what they are. And if we don’t tell them, who will?
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
Israel spends much less than the PA on its foreign service, then wonders why it’s losing the PR war
The worst thing about elections is that for the next three months, the media will ignore all the really important issues in favor of trivialities such as daily updates on the prospects for a united center-left bloc. That’s why the bombshell released by the Foreign Ministry last week has evaporated without a trace rather than provoking the outraged debate it should have sparked.
At a conference launching a new Knesset caucus on foreign affairs, the ministry revealed the full dimensions of Israel’s underinvestment in diplomacy. According to the subsequent report in Israel Hayom, Israel spends less than half as much on its foreign service as does the Palestinian Authority – an entity whose per capita gross domestic product is less than a twentieth of Israel’s. And then we wonder why Israel is losing the diplomatic battle.
Moreover, as a percentage of its national budget, Israel significantly underspends most European countries, even though the latter – unlike Israel – aren’t engaged in a worldwide diplomatic battle crucial to their future. Israel devotes only 0.4% of its budget to the foreign service, compared to 1.7% for Britain, 2% for Sweden and Norway, 3.8% for Belgium and 4% for The Netherlands.
Clearly, no problem can be solved just by throwing money at it; without a workable diplomatic strategy, Israel will lose the diplomatic war no matter how much money it invests. But the reverse is no less true: Even a brilliant diplomatic strategy will fail if it’s starved of the requisite resources.
For instance, Israel has diplomatic relations with 159 countries, but it has embassies in less than half of them – only 76. So what happens when the Palestinians bring a hostile resolution to the UN Security Council – as they’re planning to do right now – and Israel has to round up enough votes against it to avoid the need for a US veto? Obviously, Israel needs to lobby every Security Council member with which it has relations. But how effectively can it lobby one of those 83 countries in which it doesn’t even maintain an embassy?
Not having an embassy means not having Israeli diplomats on the ground to make Israel’s case on an ongoing basis and build ties with a country’s leadership. As a result, there’s no groundwork on which to build a last-minute blitz against a Palestinian resolution. And the problem is only compounded if the PA does maintain a diplomatic mission in the country in question – which isn’t inconceivable; the tiny PA maintains some 100 embassies and consulates worldwide.
Granted, Israel’s foreign service sometimes seems to do more harm than good. In a shocking Jerusalem Post column earlier this year, for instance, former Foreign Ministry employee Dan Illouz reported hearing some of Israel’s own diplomats quietly advocate anti-Israel boycotts as a way of pressuring the government into diplomatic concessions, because they see their goal not as defending the elected government’s chosen policies, but as forcing the government to instead adopt their own preferred policies.
Yet Israel also has some truly outstanding diplomats, like UN Ambassador Ron Prosor or Deputy Ambassador to Norway George Deek, a Christian Arab who garnered worldwide attention in September with his moving speech about his own family’s experiences in Israel. Thus instead of dismissing the entire foreign service as a bad investment, Israel would do better to figure out how to recruit more such people, and also how to get rid of the deadweight.
Ultimately, this requires devising a coherent diplomatic strategy. If the country doesn’t have a strategy to begin with, it’s impossible to screen job applicants to ensure they’re suited to carrying out this strategy. It’s also harder to make the case for diverting scarce resources from other needs to the foreign service, because without a coherent strategy, the return on this investment will necessarily be much lower.
But the lack of a diplomatic strategy is itself a symptom of an even bigger problem: Successive Israeli governments still don’t seem to have grasped the fact that Israel is engaged in a diplomatic war no less critical to its future than the military one.
As Yair Frommer, chairman of the Foreign Ministry’s union, noted at last week’s conference, Israel could open 20 new embassies for the price of just one F-35 fighter jet. Or as Gideon Meir, who retired earlier this year as the ministry’s director-general for public diplomacy, put it in a parting interview with the Jerusalem Post, Israel spends billions of dollars on buying the most advanced fighter planes from the US, but refuses to spend even a few million on public diplomacy programs aimed at ensuring that future U.S. Congresses will agree to sell it replacements when the current planes die.
If Israel did understand that it was fighting a war, investing in those extra 20 embassies would be as self-evident as investing in those fighter jets. So would investing in Meir’s sensible plan to finance visits to Israel every year for some 3,000 non-Jews influential on American college campuses – a plan that’s still languishing on some Foreign Ministry desk despite its minuscule annual price tag of $12 million. Indeed, that’s precisely why the PA does spend such an enormous part of its budget on foreign relations: Unlike Israel, it understands very well that it’s fighting a diplomatic war.
The question of what Israel’s diplomatic strategy should be is admittedly one on which reasonable people could disagree (I’ll outline my own ideas in a future column). But no reasonable person would disagree that the road to formulating such a strategy starts with recognizing two facts: Israel is engaged in a real war, and it’s currently abandoning the field to the enemy. The shocking data on Israel’s underinvestment in diplomacy that were unveiled at last week’s conference should have been a springboard for bringing this issue to public attention.
Instead, the news was swiftly buried in a spate of meaningless stories about the latest political maneuvering. And when the next diplomatic defeat inevitably arrives, Israelis will be left wondering, once again, how they lost a battle they didn’t even know they weren’t fighting.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
PM keeps asking other governments to do more to combat anti-Israel incitement, but his own does nothing
Scarcely a day has gone by recently without Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several other ministers decrying anti-Israel incitement. Netanyahu also routinely lambastes the “international community” for refusing to take action against such incitement. But while he’s clearly right about the importance of combating incitement, he’s on much shakier ground in blaming the world. After all, his own government has done nothing against leading purveyors of anti-Israel incitement. And how can he expect foreign governments to do what Israel won’t?
Granted, Israel has little leverage over some major inciters, like the Islamic State. But even when it does have leverage, it refuses to use it.
Take, for instance, the recent outrageous behavior of our ostensibly ally, Jordan. After Palestinian terrorists slaughtered four worshippers at a Jerusalem synagogue last week, the Jordanian parliament held a moment of silence in the terrorists’ honor and read a prayer from the Koran to “glorify their pure souls.” Jordan’s prime minister then wrote the terrorists’ families a condolence letter beseeching God to grant the killers “abundant mercy and satisfaction.” Adding insult to injury, all this happened just a week after Netanyahu, at the Jordanian king’s special request, had fully reopened the Temple Mount to Muslim worshippers despite the ongoing anti-Israel riots in Jerusalem.
One can imagine Washington’s response had the German parliament held a moment of silence to honor the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack, or London’s response had the French premier sent a condolence letter to families of slain Islamic State fighters after the organization executed a British aid worker. But Israel’s government? It hasn’t done a thing.
Yet there are many things Israel could do to punish such behavior. For starters, it could tell Amman that Jordanian demands regarding arrangements at the Temple Mount, which Israel has slavishly obeyed for years, will be ignored as long as such incitement continues.
It could also curtail material aid to Jordan. Last year, for instance, Israel agreed to provide additional water, beyond the amount mandated in the peace treaty, to help its water-starved neighbor cope with an influx of Syrian refugees. Yet it hasn’t demanded even the most minimal quid pro quo in exchange – that Jordan’s executive and legislative branches cease openly lauding the murder of Jews.
Similarly, with Syria in flames, Israel has become Jordan’s key land bridge for trade with the West. Thousands of trucks that used to travel between Jordan and Turkey via Syria now go through Israel to Haifa port, then by boat to Turkey, or vice versa. Israel gains nothing from this except a minimal amount in transit fees, so its economy would suffer no great loss if it ceased. For Jordan, however, it’s a lifeline, and it also greatly benefits Turkey, another serial anti-Israel inciter. Yet again, Israel hasn’t demanded even the barest minimum in exchange – an end to governmental incitement.
Needless to say, Israel has even greater leverage over a far worse inciter, the Palestinian Authority. PA President Mahmoud Abbas, other senior PA officials, Abbas’ Fatah party and the official PA media all spew vile anti-Israel incitement on a daily basis. On Saturday, for instance, Abbas accused Israel of setting wild boars to destroy Palestinian crops. Last month, he accused Jews of “desecrating” the Temple Mount, said they must be prevented from ascending it “in any way” and praised the attempted assassin of Rabbi Yehuda Glick as a “martyr” who would “go to heaven.” And though he condemned the synagogue killings under heavy U.S. pressure, a senior aide, the Fatah parliamentary faction and Fatah’s Facebook page all praised them.
Nevertheless, Israel continues massively subsidizing the PA – for instance, by giving it free electricity. Though the PA is technically supposed to pay, it rarely does; it currently owes the Israel Electric Corporation NIS 1.7 billion.
Israeli-Palestinian agreements allow Israel to deduct this debt from the taxes it collects on the PA’s behalf and transfers to Ramallah. Instead, Israel’s government has saddled its own citizens with the bill, contributing to the past few years’ soaring electricity rates. Yet in exchange for this generosity, it hasn’t even demanded the minimal quid pro quo of an end to anti-Israel incitement.
Additionally, about a fifth of all employed Palestinians work in Israel or the settlements. Israel has no treaty obligation to permit such employment; it could close its gates to Palestinian workers tomorrow if it wanted. That would devastate the Palestinian economy, and consequently the PA’s tax base. Yet Israel has never conditioned work permits for Palestinians on an end to incitement by the PA.
Another possibility is passing legislation that would make it easier for terror victims to sue the PA for incitement and/or material support for terror, while allowing any court-ordered damages to be deducted from Israel’s tax transfers to the PA. A particularly blatant example of such material support is the PA’s payment of salaries to convicted terrorists serving sentences in Israel. Even the lowest of these salaries far exceeds the average Palestinian wage, and they increase with the heinousness of the crime: Mass murderers, for instance, receive a monthly paycheck almost 10 times higher than those convicted of minor offenses. And these payments clearly incentivize terror. Just last week, Haaretz’s Hebrew edition reported on a Palestinian convicted of shooting at civilian buses who openly admitted that his main goal was money: Having run out of funds while building his house, he decided the simplest solution was getting himself arrested for anti-Israel terror, thereby guaranteeing himself a fat PA paycheck.
Israeli tax transfers to the PA total about $115 million a month, constituting an estimated 36 to 44 percent of the PA’s annual budget. Suitable legislation targeting incitement and material support for terror could easily enable this entire sum to be devoured by damage payments, forcing the PA to choose between mending its ways and bankruptcy.
The above are just a sampling of the varied tactics Israel could use to pressure its neighbors to end incitement. But the government refuses to utilize any of them. Instead, it makes do with empty condemnations, coupled with demands that other countries take the kind of forceful action it refuses to take itself.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
The inaugural session of the Abu Dhabi Strategic Debate took place last week, with scholars coming from around the world to participate in two days of discussion on a plethora of topics. Hisham Melhem, the Washington bureau chief for Al Arabiya News, subsequently published a lengthy summary of the proceedings on Al Arabiya’s website, and reading it, I was struck by the absence of certain topics one might expect to feature prominently. Egypt, Iran, oil, ISIS, Turkey, Russia, the U.S., and Islamic extremism were all there. But in 1,700 words, the Palestinians weren’t mentioned once, while Israel appeared only in the very last paragraph–which deserves to be read in full:
Finally, it was fascinating to attend a two day conference about the Middle East in times of upheaval in which Israel was mostly ignored, with the only frontal criticism of her policies delivered by an American diplomat.
And this explains a lot about the current U.S.-Israel spat. President Barack Obama entered office with the firm belief that the best way to improve America’s relations with the Muslim world was to create “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel, and for six years now, he and his staff have worked diligently to do exactly that. Nor was this an inherently unreasonable idea: Even a decade ago, Arab capitals might have cheered the sight of U.S. officials hurling childish insults at their Israeli counterparts.
The problem is that the Arab world has changed greatly in recent years, while the Obama administration–like most of Europe–remains stuck in its old paradigm. Granted, Arabs still don’t like Israel, but they have discovered that Israel and the Palestinians are very far down on their list of urgent concerns. The collapse of entire states that were formerly lynchpins of the Arab world, like Syria, Iraq, and Libya; the fear that other vital states like Egypt and Jordan could follow suit; the rise of Islamic extremist movements that threaten all the existing Arab states; the destabilizing flood of millions of refugees; the fear of U.S. disengagement from the region; the “predicament of living in the shadows of what they see as a belligerent Iran and an assertive Turkey” (to quote Melhem)–all these are far more pressing concerns.
And not only has Israel fallen off the list of pressing problems, but it has come to be viewed as capable of contributing, however modestly, to dealing with some of the new pressing problems. Last month, Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute published his impressions from a tour of the Mideast, including of Israel’s deepening strategic relationships with Egypt and Jordan. “Indeed, one of the most unusual moments of my trip was to hear certain Arab security officials effectively compete with one another for who has the better relationship with Israel,” he wrote. “In this regard, times have certainly changed.”
In fact, in this new Middle East, a U.S.-Israel spat probably generates more worry than glee in Arab capitals. Once, it was an Arab article of faith that America cared little about Arabs but greatly about Israel. Thus to the degree that Arab and Israeli concerns overlapped, as they do now on issues ranging from Iran to ISIS, America could be trusted to deal with the threat. Now, the Obama administration still appears to care little for Arab concerns; it seems hell-bent on striking a grand bargain with Iran and withdrawing from the Mideast. But the Arab world’s former ace in the hole to prevent such developments–Israel’s influence in Washington–suddenly looks more like deuce.
Yet all these shifting winds seem to have blown right by the Obama administration: It still acts as if America’s position in the Muslim world depends on showing that it hates Israel, too. And thus you reach the farce of a two-day conference in Abu Dhabi where “the only frontal criticism” of Israel’s policies was “delivered by an American diplomat.”
When it comes to Israel, the Arab world has moved on. But the Obama administration remains stuck in the last century.
Originally published in Commentary
Writing in Foreign Affairs last week, Rory Miller made the classic mistake of using accurate facts to jump to an erroneous conclusion. He gleefully pronounced the failure of Israel’s effort to convert burgeoning economic ties with India and China into diplomatic capital, asserting that while Israel had expected these ties to “help secure greater international support” for its positions, in reality, China and India have both maintained staunchly pro-Palestinian policies. But though Miller is right about the Asian powers’ policies, he’s utterly wrong about the diplomatic gains Israel hoped to reap from these relationships.
For instance, Miller makes much of the fact that China still votes against Israel on every conceivable issue at the UN. But you’d have to be an idiot–which most senior Israeli politicians aren’t–to expect it to do otherwise.
Flipping China into the pro-Israel camp might be possible if and when it democratizes, since it’s one of the few countries where public opinion actually leans pro-Israel. Indeed, as the Australian paper Business Spectator noted this month, China was among the few places worldwide where Israel was actually winning the social media war during the summer’s fighting in Gaza. And it certainly makes sense for Israel to cultivate this public support in preparation for the day when democratization occurs. But right now, China remains a Communist dictatorship that sees America as its chief foreign-policy rival. Thus as long as Washington (thankfully) remains Israel’s main patron at the UN, Beijing will naturally take the anti-Israel side–not because it cares so passionately about the Palestinian cause (which, unlike Miller, I don’t believe it does), but because it cares about the anti-American cause.
India, despite growing ties with Washington, also has a long tradition of anti-Americanism, as well as a large Muslim minority. Thus New Delhi was never a likely candidate for UN support, either.
And in fact, Miller doesn’t cite any Israeli politician who actually espoused such unrealistic expectations. He simply assumes, on the basis of vague bromides like Naftali Bennett’s “diplomacy can follow economy,” that they must have held such expectations.
But in reality, Israel is seeking a very different foreign-policy benefit from its trade ties with India and China–one it has never spelled out explicitly, for very good reason: What it wants is an economic insurance policy against European countries that it still officially labels as allies.
The EU currently accounts for about one-third of Israel’s exports. This constitutes a dangerous vulnerability, because Europe is the one place worldwide where Israel faces a real danger of economic boycotts and sanctions. Granted, few European leaders actually want this; they consider the economic relationship with Israel mutually beneficial. But European leaders are generally far more pro-Israel than their publics, and since European countries are democracies, public opinion matters.
To date, the public’s anti-Israel sentiment has produced only marginal sanctions, like those on Israeli exports from the West Bank (a minuscule percentage of Israel’s total exports). But Israel can’t rule out the possibility that public pressure will eventually produce more stringent sanctions if Jerusalem continues refusing to capitulate to EU demands on the Palestinian issue that are antithetical to its security. In short, Israel could someday face a devastating choice between its economic needs and its security needs–unless it can diversify its trade enough to be able to weather EU sanctions if and when they occur.
And that’s precisely what Israel seeks from China and India, two countries with a history of not allowing policy disagreements to interfere with business: If it can build up its Asian trade enough to reduce its economic dependence on Europe, it will be better placed to withstand European pressure to adopt policies inimical to its survival.
Whether Israel will succeed in this goal remains to be seen. But if it does, that will be a diplomatic gain of unparalleled importance–even if it never wins Chinese or Indian support in a single UN vote.
Originally published in Commentary
Mudar Zahran, a Palestinian-Jordanian now living in Britain, has collected and published some truly shocking testimony from Gaza residents about Hamas’s behavior during this summer’s war with Israel. All his interviewees insisted on remaining anonymous, and it’s easy to understand why: They accuse Hamas of deliberately creating hundreds of civilian casualties by forcing civilians to stay in places Israel had warned it was going to bomb.
Here, for instance, is the testimony of S., a medical worker:
The Israeli army sends warnings to people [Gazans] to evacuate buildings before an attack. The Israelis either call or send a text message. Sometimes they call several times to make sure everyone has been evacuated. Hamas’s strict policy, though, was not to allow us to evacuate. Many people got killed, locked inside their homes by Hamas militants. Hamas’s official Al-Quds TV regularly issued warnings to Gazans not to evacuate their homes. Hamas militants would block the exits to the places residents were asked to evacuate. In the Shijaiya area, people received warnings from the Israelis and tried to evacuate the area, but Hamas militants blocked the exits and ordered people to return to their homes. Some of the people had no choice but to run towards the Israelis and ask for protection for their families. Hamas shot some of those people as they were running; the rest were forced to return to their homes and get bombed. This is how the Shijaiya massacre happened. More than 100 people were killed.
And here’s K., a graduate student at an Egyptian university who was visiting his family in Gaza this summer: “When people stopped listening to Hamas orders not to evacuate and began leaving their homes anyway, Hamas imposed a curfew: anyone walking out in the street was shot without being asked any questions. That way Hamas made sure people had to stay in their homes even if they were about to get bombed.”
And H., who lost his leg in an Israeli bombing: “My father received a text-message from the Israeli army warning him that our area was going to be bombed, and Hamas prevented us from leaving. They said there was a curfew. A curfew, can you believe that?”
T., a former (and evidently disenchanted) Hamas government official, explained the policy’s rationale:
Some people say Hamas wants civilians killed in order to gain global sympathy, but I believe this is not the main reason. I think the reason is that if all the people were allowed to evacuate their homes, they all would have ended up in a certain area in Gaza. If that happened, it would have made the rest of Gaza empty of civilians, and the Israelis would have been able to hit Hamas without worrying about civilians in all those empty areas. Hamas wanted civilians all over the place to confuse the Israelis and make their operations more difficult.
Nor is this the only crime of which Zahran’s interviewees accused Hamas. For instance, three different people–two aid workers and an imam–said Hamas stole humanitarian aid and either kept it for its own people or sold it to ordinary Gazans for exorbitant prices.
Altogether, Zahran interviewed more than 20 Gazans, all of whom had shocking things to say. That doesn’t guarantee that their stories are true. Palestinians frequently fabricate atrocity tales about Israel (see, for instance, the Jenin massacre that wasn’t, or the perennial favorite about Israel trying to turn Palestinians into drug addicts), so there’s no reason to think anti-Hamas Palestinians aren’t equally capable of fabricating atrocity tales about Hamas.
Moreover, the interviewees were clearly terrified of Hamas, so it wouldn’t be easy to get them to talk to the international media (which generally relies on either Hamas-approved fixers or local stringers), UN workers (many of whom are openly affiliated with Hamas), or human-rights organizations (which, like the media, generally rely on local investigators). Still, given how many crocodile tears the media, the UN, and human-rights groups have shed over alleged Israeli “war crimes” in Gaza, one would think they could spare some time and effort to investigate alleged Hamas war crimes against its own people.
That they haven’t merely confirms, once again, two basic truths: First, these self-proclaimed moral arbiters care very little about human rights unless Israel can be blamed. And second, they’re fundamentally lazy: They’ll always prefer the easy route of collecting “testimony” against Israel, which Gaza residents can give without fear of consequences, to the hard work of digging for information about the abuses of a terrorist government that tortures and kills anyone who dares speak against it.
Originally published in Commentary