Jewish World
The murderous terror that swept Paris on Friday is all too familiar to Israelis, and Israel has developed multiple strategies for dealing with such attacks. But the most remarkable aspect of Israel’s response to terror is not its intelligence or military capabilities, important though these undoubtedly are. It’s how the victims’ families and friends cope with their grief and pain. One might think this would vary widely from individual to individual. Yet one particular response has become so common that it has practically achieved the status of a norm: commemorating the victims by launching some concrete project to make Israel a better place.
A classic example was coincidentally highlighted by last week’s General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America. A commercial supplement produced in honor of the gathering by Haaretz detailed various federation-supported projects, including one called Nirim in the Neighborhoods that seeks to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents by means of wilderness therapy. What caught my eye was how this program got started: It was founded by a group of Israeli naval commandos to commemorate one of their comrades, Nir Krichman, who was killed during a counterterrorism operation in the West Bank in 2002. The program was subsequently adopted by the entire unit, and to this day commandos regularly accompany the teenage participants on the wilderness treks that constitute the therapy’s key element. Thirteen years later, Nirim claims that 95 percent of its 300 graduates have successfully turned their lives around and extricated themselves from poverty.
The story of Nirim’s founding is far from unique, as I’ve noted elsewhere. The Koby Mandell Foundation, for example, was established by Koby’s parents after the 13-year-old was murdered by terrorists in 2001; it runs programs to help traumatized siblings of terror victims. The Malki Roth Foundation was established by Malki’s parents after the 15-year-old was murdered by terrorists that same year; this organization, inspired by Malki’s devotion to her disabled sister, helps families care for special-needs children at home. The Benji Hillman Foundation, which assists lone soldiers, was started by Benji’s parents after he was killed fighting in the Second Lebanon War of 2006; it was inspired by his concern for lone soldiers in his own unit. And the list could go on.
Nor are social-service organizations the only form of commemoration. When Jonathan Einhorn fell in the Second Lebanon War, for instance, his parents chose to commemorate his love of the land by building a public park filled with native Israeli flora. After Gilad Shtokelman fell in the same war, his parents decided to build their small community’s first synagogue in his memory.
The projects are as diverse as the individuals they commemorate. But they all have one thing in common: the desire to honor a loved one’s life by leaving Israel a better place than they found it.
This approach differs markedly from the standard Palestinian response when loved ones are lost due to the conflict, especially if the “victim” died committing a terror attack against Israelis. All too often, the response has consisted of publicly urging fellow Palestinians to murder more Israelis – like the father of suicide bomber Sa’id Khutari, who responded to his son’s murder of 21 Israelis at a Tel Aviv nightclub in 2001 by proudly declaring that he’d be happy if all his sons became suicide bombers. For people like Khutari’s father, the evident priority is not building Palestine, but tearing down Israel.
Yet the Israeli approach also differs from the demonstrations and candlelight vigils that have become Europe’s default response to terror. Such demonstrations and vigils obviously do no harm, but neither do they do much good: Despite involving masses of people, they ultimately fade away without a trace.
The Bible famously proposes a seemingly binary choice: “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse: Therefore, choose life.” But in reality, there are two different ways of choosing death. One is to choose it actively, as the Palestinians and so much of the Arab world have: responding to grief and pain by sowing more grief and pain. But the other is to choose it passively, by not responding to grief and pain with any action at all.
Israelis, however, have repeatedly taken the third option: responding to grief and pain by actively working to make some little corner of their world a better place. And that’s precisely why Israel, against the odds, has become the thriving country it is amid a region that is falling apart. Faced with terror, Israelis have overwhelmingly chosen to build rather than destroy. And they have thereby chosen life.
Originally published in Commentary on November 16, 2015
The one saving grace about anti-Semites is that, contrary to Barack Obama’s famous claim, they generally are irrational and, therefore, they often overreach. The anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement has been doing exactly that recently. In the past month alone, it has suffered three resounding and damaging failures.
The first, of course, was its “success” in pressuring a Spanish reggae festival to disinvite American Jewish singer Matisyahu unless he issued a statement backing a Palestinian state. Matisyahu, to his credit, didn’t merely refuse; he also made sure the world knew why he wouldn’t be appearing as scheduled. The subsequent public outcry not only made the festival hurriedly backtrack and reinstate Matisyahu in his original slot, but also exposed the truth of the BDS movement’s anti-Semitism, which it has long tried to hide. After all, Matisyahu isn’t Israeli; he was asked to issue that statement, alone of all the artists at the festival, simply because he was Jewish.
Next came last week’s decision to boycott Israel by the mighty municipality of Reykjavik (population about 120,000). Having naively expected applause for this display of moral indignation, the municipality was stunned to be met instead by an outpouring of condemnation, including from Iceland’s own prime minister, and quickly reversed course. But the damage, as Haaretz journalist Asher Schechter lamented, was already done: Reykjavik had provided further proof that the BDS movement, contrary to the widespread belief that it merely targets “the occupation,” is simply anti-Israel.
Then there’s my personal favorite, which occurred this week: the BDS protest against a Pharrell Williams concert in South Africa. When I first read about the planned protest, I couldn’t believe BDS was serious. A black American singer goes to South Africa to perform for black South Africans, and BDS wants to ruin the audience’s fun? Just because Williams’ corporate sponsor is a Jewish-owned retailer (Woolworths) that already boycotts produce from “the occupied territories”? But BDS evidently couldn’t see how bad this looked. It rashly promised some 40,000 demonstrators, “the largest protest event in South African history against any musician or artist.” And it wound up with a measly 500, as many South Africans suddenly discovered that BDS might not be their best guide to international morality.
Finally, as icing on the cake, the lawfare crowd also suffered an embarrassing defeat this month: After it painstakingly gathered the 100,000 signatures needed to force a debate in the British parliament on a motion to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, parliament unceremoniously refused to debate it anyway on the grounds that the motion itself flagrantly violated both British and international law with regard to diplomatic immunity.
But all of the above are merely the tip of the iceberg of what could be done against BDS. As Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor, has repeatedly stressed, one of the most important steps is pressuring Europe to stop funding anti-Israel hate groups by showing decision makers what their money is really being used for. This may seem like mission impossible, but as Steinberg wrote last week, the past year actually brought some significant progress:
Under the “Partnership for Peace Program”, the European Union did not renew grants for NGOs that promote BDS and lawfare, including for violent activities, marking the most significant change in over 15 years. A number of European embassies in Israel also reduced or ended grants for anti-peace NGOs. While there are still tens of millions of Euros and Pounds and Krona going to BDS, the trend is down, for the first time.
Legal action is another promising and underutilized tool. As I wrote last year, BDS has already suffered major setbacks in European courts. But the real legal game-changer, as professors Eugene Kontorovich and Avi Bell of the Kohelet Policy Forum argued recently, could be an Israeli challenge in the World Trade Organization against EU sanctions on settlement products. The EU plans to finalize a directive on labeling Israeli settlement produce next month, the latest in a series of directives targeting such produce. But as Kontorovich and Bell noted, the EU hasn’t imposed similar measures on other territories it deems occupied, such as Western Sahara or Kashmir, and WTO rules explicitly prohibit discriminatory trading policies.
The movement to Besmirch, Demonize and Slander the Jewish state is so hydra-headed and so venomous that it can often seem overwhelming. But in reality, it is big and strong enough to win only if nobody else is in the ring: As the past month’s events amply demonstrate, pushback works. Now it’s time to accelerate the pushback and put BDS where it belongs – on the defensive.
Originally published in Commentary on September 24, 2015
Israel marked the 10th anniversary of its unilateral pullout from Gaza this week with a rare consensus: The disengagement was a disaster. Even opposition leader and Labor Party chairman Isaac Herzog admitted that “from a security perspective, the disengagement was a mistake. While he still considers it “essential” demographically, he isn’t sure he would have voted for it had he known then what he knows now. And this is the man who, back in 2005, declared that, thanks to the disengagement, “for the first time in decades there is genuine hope” for “lasting peace.”
Equally remarkable was a poll of Israeli Jews earlier this month asking whether they supported or opposed the pullout at the time. An overwhelming majority of respondents – 59 percent – asserted that they had opposed it, while only 34 percent admitted to having supported it. That, of course, is far from the truth; polls at the time consistently showed solid pluralities or majorities favoring the disengagement, while only about a third of Israelis opposed it. But this revisionist history accurately reflects Israelis’ current view of the withdrawal: Many of those who once backed it are now convinced they must actually have opposed it, because they simply can’t imagine they would have supported any idea as disastrous as this one proved to be. And even among those still willing to admit they once supported it, almost one-fifth now regret doing so.
It’s not just the obvious fact that the Palestinians turned Gaza into a giant launch pad from which some 16,500 rockets and mortars have been fired at Israel over the past decade, whereas exactly zero have been fired from the Israeli-controlled West Bank over the same period. It’s not just that quitting Gaza has resulted in more Israeli soldiers being killed, and also more Palestinians, than occupying Gaza ever did. It’s not just that after Israel withdrew every last settler and soldier from Gaza, the world has sought to deny it the right to defend itself against the ensuing rocket attacks by greeting every military operation with escalating condemnation, accusations of war crimes, and attempts to prosecute it in the International Criminal Court. It’s not just that the withdrawal ended up worsening global anti-Semitism, since every military operation in Gaza has served as an excuse for a massive upsurge in anti-Semitic attacks worldwide. It’s not just that Israel received zero diplomatic credit for the pullout, with most of the world not only still insisting that Gaza is “Israeli-occupied territory,” but excoriating Israel with escalating ferocity, and even threatening sanctions, for its reluctance to repeat this disastrous experiment in the West Bank, while assigning Palestinians zero responsibility for the impasse.
All these are certainly reasons enough to consider the pullout a disaster. But there’s one final negative outcome, as reflected in another poll released last week: Due to this Israeli reluctance, born of hard experience, a majority of overseas Jews now deems Israel insufficiently committed to peace. And that, in some ways, is the worst betrayal of all. Most Israelis don’t expect much from the Palestinians or the UN or Europe. But they do expect their fellow Jews to sympathize with their fear that withdrawing from the West Bank would simply replicate the Gaza disaster on a much larger scale.
After all, none of the negative consequences that ensued in Gaza can be blamed on the popular distinction between the “moderate” Fatah, led by Mahmoud Abbas, and the “hardline” Hamas. For Gaza wasn’t handed over to Hamas, but to Abbas. He’s the one who first enabled the escalation by refusing to use his forces to stop it; consequently, there were more than four times as many rocket attacks in 2006, the first year after the disengagement, as in either of the previous two years. And he’s the one who lost Gaza to Hamas in a bloody coup in mid-2007 when the latter decided it no longer needed a fig leaf.
Thus Israel has no reason whatsoever to think giving Abbas the West Bank wouldn’t produce the same result, except with even more disastrous consequences. Hitting major Israeli population centers from Gaza requires long-range rockets; from the West Bank, easily produced short-range rockets suffice. Nor should we forget suicide bombings, which, during the second intifada (2000-2005), caused more Israeli casualties in four years than all the terror attacks of the entire previous 53 years combined. Those attacks were launched almost exclusively from parts of the West Bank controlled by the Palestinian Authority, and they stopped only when the Israeli army retook control of these areas – meaning Israel’s previous experiment with ceding parts of the West Bank was even less encouraging than the Gaza experiment has been.
Most Israelis would still be willing to trade land for peace, but they’ve had enough of trading land for terror. And until overseas Jews can produce a convincing argument for why the next pullout would be any different than all the previous ones, it would be nice if they instead practiced the traditional Jewish value of giving fellow Jews the benefit of the doubt. To interpret caution born of grim experience as disinterest in peace isn’t merely unfair; it’s downright malicious.
Originally published in Commentary on July 29, 2015
If you’ve ever wondered why so many overseas Jews view democratic Israel as irredeemably racist, consider the following story: Knesset member Robert Ilatov justifiably made headlines last Thursday by declaring that Arabs who refuse to sing the national anthem, “Hatikva,” shouldn’t be appointed as judges. But several prominent English-language Israeli news sites didn’t even bother mentioning the swift, uncompromising rejection of his view by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked; you won’t, for instance, find a word of her response in Haaretz’s report, while the left-wing +972 website dismissed it as a “weak protestation” by omitting all the most significant parts of her statement.
Shaked’s response matters not only because of her position, but because she herself is no bleeding-heart liberal; she’s second-in-command of the religious Zionist Jewish Home party, the right flank of what the media routinely term a “hardline” government. And that’s precisely the point: While extremists always get headlines, the mainstream rejection of their views is ignored – even when that rejection is so sweeping that it encompasses the leadership of the most right-wing party in the governing center-right coalition.
Granted, Ilatov’s views can’t be dismissed as insignificant; the opposition back-bencher made his statement right after the Knesset chose him as one of the Judicial Appointments Committee’s nine members. But surely the contrary views of the other eight members – and especially Shaked, the panel’s chairwoman – should be considered no less significant when assessing Israel’s character.
Shaked, in her response, endorsed the compromise employed by Supreme Court Justice Salim Joubran during his own swearing-in ceremony: Arab judges should stand for the anthem, because state officials must respect the state’s symbols, but they shouldn’t be required to sing along if they can’t identify with lyrics that, after all, are about the Jewish yearning for Zion. “A judge needs to stand during the national anthem, but I won’t be looking to see if he is mouthing the words to Hatikva or not,” she said.
She also endorsed the importance of maintaining the judiciary’s professionalism: “A judge needs to be selected first and foremost according to skills and criteria,” she stressed. Finally, she underscored the importance of having Arab judges in the system: “The fact that we have Arab judges is an admirable thing in a country where 20 percent of the population are minorities.”
In other words, the second-in-command of one of Israel’s most right-wing parties, who also happens to be the justice minister, said exactly what she should have said regarding Arab sensitivities, Arab representation in state institutions and judicial professionalism. But liberals who get their news from Haaretz or +972 will never know it; reading those reports, a well-meaning liberal would legitimately conclude that anti-Arab extremists are running around Israel unopposed.
The same is true of another important news item last week: Two brothers who torched Jerusalem’s Jewish-Arab Hand in Hand School last year were sentenced to 24 and 30 months in jail, respectively (the sentence reflects the fact that the attack endangered no lives, since it occurred overnight). The arson made headlines worldwide as evidence of Israel’s “racism.” But how many international media outlets bothered reporting the fact that the perpetrators were caught, indicted and sentenced to jail?
This isn’t a minor detail. No country on earth has ever managed to eradicate hate crimes; thus the difference between a decent society and an intolerant one is not whether such crimes occur, but how society responds. Are the perpetrators lionized and allowed to walk free – as, for instance, Palestinian terrorists are? Or are they universally condemned, brought to trial and given heavy sentences?
Israel is in the latter category: Not only was the arson universally condemned at the time, but the perpetrators are now doing jail time. But because the initial attack made headlines overseas while the subsequent sentence was either ignored or merited at most a brief mention, the impression left is the opposite: that Israel is a place where hate crimes are tolerated.
Neither Israel nor its supporters can change the media coverage. But liberal Jews who care about Israel can and must try to educate their fellows about the distorted image this coverage conveys. Because criticizing Israel for its minority of extremists while never even acknowledging the majority’s efforts to fight them isn’t “tough love”; it’s sheer dishonesty.
Originally published in Commentary on July 26, 2015
Pollster Frank Luntz briefly generated shock waves this week with a survey showing the abysmal view of Israel held by Democratic opinion leaders. Inter alia, 47 percent deemed Israel racist, with only 32 percent disagreeing, and a whopping 76 percent said Israel has too much influence on U.S. foreign policy. But in truth, it shouldn’t be news to anyone by now that anti-Israel sentiment, like its kissing cousin anti-Semitism, is primarily the province of the liberal elites. I’ve written before about a German study showing that educated elites, rather than the far-right fringes, are the wellspring of anti-Semitism in that country; just last month, another study found that the same is true for anti-Israel sentiment. And the reason for this goes beyond the obvious fact that anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism are related.
The background to the new German study is a series of polls showing shocking levels of anti-Israel sentiment among ordinary Germans: For instance, fully 35 percent “equate Israeli policies toward the Palestinians with Nazi policies toward the Jews.” Given the vaunted “special relationship” between Germany and Israel, such findings raise obvious questions about how so many Germans developed such warped views.
So a group of German and Israeli researchers decided to analyze German textbooks to see what exactly German schools are teaching their students. They examined 1,200 history, geography and social studies textbooks from five German states, and concluded that these books portray Israel almost exclusively as a militarist, warmongering society.
Israel’s robust democracy, respect for human rights and other achievements are absent in these books. The illustrations consist of “tendentious and one-sided photographic presentations” of Israeli soldiers threatening or inflicting violence on Palestinians.
“Occupation and settlements” are depicted as the main obstacles to peace; the fact that both Israelis and Palestinians have claims to the land goes unmentioned, and Palestinian terror gets a free pass – or as the report puts it, most of the authors “find it difficult to unequivocally call Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians acts of terror.”
In short, it’s not surprising that so many Germans have such negative views of Israel, because that’s precisely what they are taught in school. True, the textbooks don’t actually compare Israel to the Nazis, but the comparison doesn’t require a big leap of logic for graduates of these schools; after all, to a German, the paradigmatic example of a militarist, warmongering society is Nazi Germany. So once you tell students that Israel, too, is a militarist, warmongering society, the Nazi analogy comes naturally.
But who writes the textbooks that give these pupils such a warped view of Israel? Hint: It’s not the neo-Nazi skinheads. It’s the liberal elites.
This brings us to the question of why liberal elites so loathe the only Mideast country that, as Julie Burchill once wrote, any of them “could bear to live under.” The answer can be found in a comment made by “a senior European diplomat” last month about a seemingly unrelated topic: the upcoming British referendum on whether to stay in the European Union.
“The nation state is a very old concept and perhaps the British have not fully recognized that it may be slightly out of date,” the diplomat declared. And that, as I’ve noted before, is the heart of the matter: In the dogma of the modern liberal elites, the nation-state is passé.
The fact that most of the world still consists of nation-states in no way challenges this dogma; after all, you can’t expect benighted regimes to have reached this level of enlightenment yet. Israel, however, is a potent challenge to the dogma: It’s a modern, Western, democratic, human-rights-respecting country that nevertheless proudly proclaims itself the nation-state of the Jewish people.
And there’s only one way for liberal elites to resolve the cognitive dissonance this causes without sacrificing their cherished dogma: by sacrificing Israel. Or, in other words, by painting it as a racist, warmongering, benighted country no different from all the other unenlightened nation-states.
Originally published in Commentary on July 10, 2015
Europe prioritizes our conflict over wars that are not only much bloodier, but also do far more harm to its own welfare
The media have recently been full of horror stories from around the globe. The terror attacks that killed over 100 people on three continents last Friday got the most press, but they were far from the worst. In Sudan, the government is deliberately bombing civilians in the Nuba Mountains. In South Sudan, a civil war has displaced more than 1.5 million people, left over half the country in danger of going hungry and produced endless atrocities, like boys who are castrated and left to bleed to death. In Myanmar, stateless Rohingya Muslims have effectively been put into concentration camps. Worldwide, the number of displaced people hit a record high of 59.5 million last year, with almost a fifth of this total coming from the Syrian civil war alone. And all this is just the tip of the iceberg.
With so many atrocities happening right this minute, it might seem hypocritical that the West’s moral outrage last week focused primarily on a very minor war in Gaza that ended 10 months ago, sent no destabilizing influx of refugees into other countries and produced total casualties equal to a mere 1% of those produced by Syria’s ongoing bloodbath. But since, for all their moralizing, Western countries usually put self-interest first, morally warped priorities aren’t necessarily surprising; they can often be explained as attempts to put a moral facade over national interests.
What is surprising, and genuinely frightening, however, is the degree to which the anti-Israel obsession can even trump national self-interest. As exhibit A, consider Europe.
Thanks to the above-mentioned horrors and many others, Europe faces a major refugee crisis, which German Chancellor Angela Merkel last week termed “the biggest challenge for the European Union that I have seen during my term in office.” Last year, 626,000 people sought asylum in the EU, an increase of almost 200,000 over 2013; this year’s influx is so far running much higher.
This refugee crisis has given a huge boost to fringe anti-immigrant parties; most recently, the Danish People’s Party placed second in Denmark’s June election. And this reflects a genuine public concern. In one recent poll, for instance, when Germans were asked to name the continent’s top 10 challenges, immigration ranked number one.
In a frantic effort to cope, the EU abandoned its normal aversion to military action and announced plans for a military operation targeting migrant smugglers at one of their main sources, war-torn Libya. But since the operation was conditioned on UN Security Council approval, it will probably never happen. It also proposed a plan to distribute refugees more fairly among its member states, since currently, they are heavily concentrated in certain countries. But following a rancorous debate that severely exacerbated the bloc’s internal tensions, the mandatory quota plan was killed last week.
Given all this, you might expect the crises producing this refugee influx to be top EU foreign-policy concerns. These include the Syrian civil war, responsible for fully 20 percent of all EU asylum seekers last year; the Libyan civil war, which has turned Libya into the main gateway for African migration to Europe by creating a governance void in which human traffickers operate freely; or the ongoing problems in the EU’s own backyard of Serbia and Kosovo, both of which made the top five on the list of countries sending the most asylum seekers to the EU.
Instead, Europe’s top foreign-policy priority appears to be a conflict that doesn’t even make the top 30 on this list, and whose solution would do nothing to ameliorate any of those other crises.
The consensus position of the EU’s foreign policy elite, as enunciated in an open letter from 19 European elder statesmen in May, is that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict “remains high on the list of the world’s worst crises” – and never mind that so many others are producing so many more deaths, displacements and atrocities. A senior French diplomat even declared recently that “inertia is deadly,” because it might lead ISIS to adopt the Palestinian cause. Has he somehow not noticed that ISIS is already perpetrating Mideast mayhem?
The EU’s big three – France, Germany and Britain – have consequently been working for months, at France’s initiative, to draft a UN Security Council resolution dictating the outline of a final-status solution to the conflict and setting a deadline for its achievement (or more accurately, dictating what concessions the EU wants Israel to make; the drafts have been remarkably coy about any Palestinian concessions). Similarly, 16 European foreign ministers demanded in April that the EU adopt binding guidelines on labeling settlement produce.
But the EU’s obsession with Israel doesn’t just trump other foreign-policy concerns; it even trumps domestic problems, as Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek inadvertently revealed in early June. In a diatribe threatening Israel with various harsh consequences if it didn’t immediately take steps to create a Palestinian state (while also, naturally, proclaiming his deep love for Israel), Zaoralek inter alia demanded Israeli action to fix the “catastrophe” he observed in Gaza.
“I met young people with no future and no hope,” he said in an interview with Walla, a Hebrew-language news site. “The youth unemployment rate there is inconceivable. It reminded me of meetings with young people in Greece.”
Greece, lest anyone has forgotten, is still an EU member state. Thus one might think solving the disaster in Greece – where hospital budgets have fallen by 93% and surgeons are working 20-hour days for weeks on end – is slightly more important to Europe’s well-being than solving Gaza’s problems. But despite endless negotiations that finally collapsed entirely this weekend, there’s been no discernible improvement in Greece’s situation for years.
In short, the EU is quite content to ignore foreign-policy crises that flood it with refugees and foment domestic unrest, and it’s even prepared to let one of its own member states go bankrupt. But it’s hell-bent on resolving an unimportant little foreign conflict that isn’t affecting it at all.
You can’t explain that by rational self-interest, or by any conceivable standard of morality. And the only explanation left isn’t a pretty one. The old-fashioned word for it is anti-Semitism.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on July 1, 2015
Jews have long been able to thrive while under threat. Today’s Israelis, living in the face of a nuclear Iran, are the latest example
Note: This piece is a response to an essay by Edward Grossman
“Worried and Happy”: that was the title on the advance copy of Edward Grossman’s essay sent to me by Mosaic’s editors. Reading it, however, I couldn’t help feeling that for Grossman, Israel’s current mood is mainly worry and very little happiness. After all, about 90 percent of the essay focuses on a single major worry: Iran’s nuclear program. And Israel has no lack of other worries as well: Hamas, Hizballah, the Palestinian Authority, international isolation, the cost of living, Arab and ḥaredi integration, and on and on.
Nevertheless, I think the mood balance is actually the exact opposite. As Grossman himself notes, we in Israel don’t spend our days sitting around fretting about Iranian nukes falling on us; we’re too busy living, loving, creating, innovating, and otherwise building our modern miracle on the Mediterranean. That’s why Israel keeps scoring anomalously high on global happiness surveys; just this month, the OECD ranked it the fifth happiest country in the world, despite noting with some puzzlement that “by many measures, Israel is an outlier” in this group. Nor does this paradoxical insistence on being happy despite multiple threats stem from either masochism or oblivion; it’s rooted in some specific truths about the Iranian threat, but even more so in a general truth about the Jewish and Israeli experience.
For to be a Jew, of necessity, is to be capable of finding meaning and happiness even while living on a knife’s edge. Throughout history, Jews have experienced only intermittent periods of tranquility amid a multiplicity of threats. In biblical times, even great victories produced no more than “peace in the land for 40 years,” and most lulls were considerably briefer than that. In exile, the occasional golden ages were mere interruptions in an endless procession of expulsions and pogroms, in country after country. And in modern-day Israel, war has erupted roughly once a decade when it hasn’t come sooner. Thus, while threats obviously have to be prepared for and dealt with, Jews can’t afford to worry about them overmuch; if they did, they would have time to do little else.
Consequently, Jews have perforce perfected the art of thriving under threat. Amid wars, persecution, and expulsions, they produced the Bible and the Talmud, the great medieval commentaries and dazzling works of Jewish philosophy. Contemporary Israel has continued this tradition: amid wars, terror attacks, and threats of all sorts, it has absorbed immigrants and grown its economy, produced cutting-edge research and technological innovations. And all this is no less essential than preparing for the threats, because if Israel were ever to stop behaving in this way, it would shrivel and die of its own accord; no Iranian bomb would be needed to finish the job.
In short, despite being fully aware of the existential threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program, Israelis instinctively understand that worrying about it more than necessary is counterproductive. And most Israelis have little need to worry about it at all.
Primarily, that’s because Iran is one of those rare issues where the general public neither can nor should have anything to say. There’s nothing Israelis can do, or ever could have done, to stop President Barack Obama from signing a bad deal with Iran; given how desperately he wants an agreement, the idea that a unity government in Jerusalem could somehow have persuaded him to plug holes in the deal that Tehran wants left open is wishful thinking. Barring a miracle, Israel’s decision will therefore ultimately boil down to whether or not to use military force against Iran. And since most Israelis lack the requisite highly classified knowledge of where Iran’s nuclear program really stands and what Israel’s military capabilities really are, the only individuals capable of deciding if and when Israel should bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities are the handful of senior government officials who do have this knowledge.
Of course, if the government weren’t paying due attention to the problem, ordinary Israelis would have to make it pay attention; that’s precisely why 400,000 Israelis came out in 2011 to demonstrate over a different problem: the cost of living. But there’s no cause to hold similar demonstrations over the Iranian issue, because nobody—not even Benjamin Netanyahu’s diehard opponents—thinks the prime minister isn’t paying attention to Iran.
Moreover, the Iranian problem hasn’t yet approached crunch time. Even if Israel has to take military action eventually, right now, with negotiations entering the home stretch, clearly isn’t the moment. And though a final deal is supposed to be signed by June 30, the nuclear negotiators haven’t met a single previous deadline and probably won’t meet this one, either. So unless there are signs of an imminent Iranian breakout, the issue is currently effectively on hold.
But if the above helps explain why Israelis aren’t losing sleep over Iran per se, it doesn’t yet explain their indifference to Grossman’s central concern. After all, the very fact that they have entrusted such a fateful decision to their government would seemingly constitute a strong argument for wanting that government to be a unity government. Nevertheless, there are two reasons why Grossman’s concern over this issue is misplaced.
First, while Israelis are notoriously bad at dealing with problems before they hit crisis stage, they have an excellent track record of uniting to deal with crises once they become too big to ignore. Grossman himself cites one example: the unity government formed on the eve of the Six-Day War. But he neglects to mention two other salient examples: the unity government that produced the economic stabilization plan of 1985, which pulled Israel back from the brink of economic collapse by ending hyperinflation of 445 percent and paved the way for today’s healthy economy, and the one that defeated the second intifada of 2001-05, a terrorist war that at its height had effectively shut down the country.
In none of these cases was a unity government formed until disaster was actually staring Israel in the face. And since the Iranian issue hasn’t yet reached that point, one wouldn’t expect a unity government to be formed to deal with it yet, even if one ultimately is.
Second, however, Grossman makes a crucial error by conflating “unity” with “unity government.” As evidence, consider last summer’s war with Hamas in Gaza, which generated unprecedented unity despite the absence of a unity government. Similarly, Israel destroyed both the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981 and the Syrian nuclear program in 2007 without benefit of a unity government. Though an attack on Iran would clearly be several orders of magnitude riskier and more complex, the same basic fact that made those earlier strikes possible without a unity government makes it possible to attack Iran without one as well.
Quite simply, Israelis have a healthy order of priorities when it comes to military threats. First we win the war; only afterward do we tear ourselves apart over who was to blame. So even assuming that Iran, unlike Iraq and Syria, would retaliate for such a strike—perhaps directly, but more likely by activating its Lebanese and Gazan proxies—Israelis’ first response will be to unite to repulse that threat. Only afterward will the infighting erupt over whether the strike was justified.
At bottom, Grossman’s concern over the lack of a unity government is merely a symptom of his greater fear: that Israel simply won’t be up to meeting the Iranian challenge. That’s clearly a much more serious concern, but there’s a powerful reason why many Israelis don’t share it—one that goes to the heart of the Jewish state’s raison d’être.
The quintessential goal of Zionism was to enable Jews to reclaim responsibility for their own fate rather than being at the mercy of others. So while it would have been nice to have the world take care of Iran’s nuclear program for us, the Jewish state exists precisely to deal with situations like this one, in which our concerns appear to be low on the international community’s list of priorities. That’s precisely why, over its 67 years of existence, Israel has repeatedly defied world opinion to take actions it has deemed necessary to protect its people, and it has paid the price in blood, treasure, and global condemnation willingly, if never happily.
So even if, as Edward Grossman suggests, we today aren’t quite the giants our grandparents were, if necessary we will do the same in this case, too. Because if we aren’t willing to protect ourselves by ourselves, there’s really no reason to have a Jewish state at all.
Originally published in Mosaic on June 22, 2015
Israel’s abortion policy is an all-too-rare example of a compromise that gives both sides something important
I don’t think something should be news just because the New York Times tries to make it so by publishing an accusatory op-ed. But if you want to write about a topic that almost never makes headlines in Israel, you have to seize any opportunity. And Israel’s abortion policy is worth writing about, because it’s an all-too-rare example of a compromise that gives something important to both sides in a case where Jewish and liberal values clearly conflict.
I admit I once thought otherwise. Raised on America’s abortion wars, in which both sides take absolutist positions, I initially scorned Israel’s policy as institutionalized hypocrisy. And in some ways, it is: Whereas the letter of the law declares abortion legal only in exceptional cases, its application in practice makes abortions available to virtually anyone who wants one. But that tension between theory and practice – or hypocrisy, if you will – is precisely what makes the policy one both sides can live with.
By law, abortions require the approval of a committee comprised of two doctors and a social worker. These committees (which all hospitals have) can approve abortions only in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy; after that, a special exceptions committee must authorize the procedure. And at any stage, approval is possible only if one of the following criteria applies: the woman is under 18 or over 40; the pregnancy stems from rape, incest or an extramarital affair; the baby is liable to be physically or mentally impaired; or the pregnancy endangers the woman’s physical or mental health.
But in practice, as Yair Rosenberg wrote in Tablet last week, 98 percent of all abortion requests are approved; these criteria – especially the one about the woman’s mental health – are flexible enough that some committee can always be found to say yes. Moreover, he noted, since abortions that meet the criteria can be approved anytime, they end up being easier to obtain here than in many liberal European countries, where limits on later-term abortions are much stricter.
The result is that while neither the liberal nor the Jewish side gets everything it wants, both get something important. Liberals get the fact that almost anyone who wants an abortion can get one, even in cases where Jewish law wouldn’t permit it; but they don’t get a legal “right” to an abortion, nor is the fetus deemed merely part of a woman’s body, subject to her full control. Religious Jews get a law which sends a clear message that destroying a potential life is justified only in exceptional circumstances; but in practice, they must accept many abortions that don’t meet that standard.
What Mairav Zonszein decried in her New York Times op-ed was the Jewish side of this compromise. Her own abortion was approved instantly. But because she sees abortion as “pertaining strictly to my own body,” she finds the very idea of needing approval objectionable. And that view is precisely what the law is meant to counter. By requiring women to obtain approval, it effectively says: “You may have an abortion if you want it, but you may not pretend that destroying a potential life is no different than removing a wart from your finger – something ‘pertaining strictly to your own body,’ to be done solely at your own discretion.”
And for most Israelis, the compromise clearly works; that’s why abortion is such a non-issue in Israel. It works for those who want abortions because they can get them. And it works for those who oppose abortions because its message about the value of life seems to be effective. At 117 abortions per 1,000 live births, Israel’s abortion rate in 2013 was lower than in any European country except Croatia. And its fertility rate, even excluding the Haredim, is the highest in the developed world; it’s the only Western country with a birthrate above replacement rate.
The compromise is possible because Jewish law doesn’t believe life begins at conception, and therefore doesn’t consider abortion murder. It’s hard to compromise over murder. But in Jewish law, a fetus is only a potential life – one that shouldn’t be destroyed without cause, but lacks the status of an actual life. Thus Jewish law actually mandates abortion if the mother’s life is endangered; an existing life takes precedence over a potential one. And some rabbis permit abortion if pregnancy endangers the mother’s mental or emotional health.
But similar compromises are possible in other areas where liberal and Jewish values clash, and we should be striving to find them. One possible example is the recent Shabus project to provide bus service on Shabbat in Jerusalem.
As an Orthodox Jew, I’d prefer no buses on Shabbat. Nevertheless, the Shabus project is as respectful of Orthodox sensitivities as any service that violates Shabbat could possibly be. It’s a private organization, so the state isn’t lending its imprimatur to violating Shabbat. It’s a co-op in which people purchase membership and then ride for free, so no money changes hands on Shabbat. And it employs non-Jewish drivers, so Jews aren’t working on Shabbat.
Granted, the organizers spoiled the picture by declaring that they hope to eventually eliminate all these restrictions. But as it stands, it’s precisely the kind of compromise that, like the abortion law, concedes something important to both liberal and Jewish values. For the liberal side, there’s transportation on Shabbat for those who want it, albeit not state-sponsored and more limited than the weekday bus service. For the Jewish side, there’s the effort to minimize Shabbat violations, and more importantly, the fact that Shabbat legally remains a day of rest rather than just another workday.
Both religious and liberal Jews would rather Israel conform fully to their very different visions. But since we have to live together in the same state, finding practical compromises that both sides can tolerate is infinitely preferable to fighting endless culture wars that never resolve anything. The abortion law is a model of what such a compromise should be, and shows just how much tension such compromises can alleviate. Our legislators should strive to imitate it on other issues.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on June 22, 2015
Even as President Barack Obama was arguing that Iranian anti-Semitism would never trump the country’s interests (as he defines them), an interesting case study in that theory was playing out in a very different venue: Europe. True, the European version doesn’t involve the classic anti-Semite’s obsession with individual Jews, but only the “new” anti-Semitism’s obsession with the Jewish state. Nevertheless, the results aren’t encouraging. In the past week alone, in the name of that obsession, one European country has gutted its own constitution and a second has endangered several of its leading commercial companies.
The first case involved a report by the Swedish parliament’s Committee on the Constitution, which concluded that Prime Minister Stefan Loefvan’s government violated proper legal procedure in its recognition of “Palestine” last year. The report said the government announced the decision and even instructed Swedish embassies worldwide to put it into practice without consulting parliament’s Advisory Council on Foreign Affairs, as required, and without taking other necessary preparatory steps, such as consulting with the European Union. The report was issued unanimously; even members of Loefvan’s own party signed it.
And then, having unequivocally declared the decision to be in procedural violation of Swedish constitutional law, the committee said the recognition of “Palestine” should nevertheless stand, because that’s a “political” issue on which the panel can’t intervene. In other words, it declared that not only can Loefvan violate Swedish law with impunity, but the illegal decision he made won’t be overturned.
Thus for the sake of catering to Sweden’s pervasive anti-Israel sentiment, Swedish parliamentarians have created a precedent that future premiers will be able to use to justify violating constitutional procedure in other cases. After all, if this unconstitutional move was allowed to stand, why shouldn’t others be? And letting a constitution to be violated with impunity is the surest way to destroy it.
That’s a very high price to pay for indulging anti-Israel animus, but Sweden is evidently willing to pay it.
Case number two involved the statement by a French cellphone company’s CEO that he would like to stop doing business in Israel in order to appease anti-Israel boycotters. Some French government officials promptly leapt to his defense: French Ambassador to the U.S. Gerard Araud, for instance, argued that Orange’s Israeli franchisee operates in the settlements and, under the Fourth Geneva Convention, “settlement policy in occupied territories is illegal. It is illegal to contribute to it in any way.” In other words, Orange’s Israeli operations violate international law.
Nor is Araud exceptional: Many European officials are increasingly pushing this view. In 2013, for instance, the Dutch water company Vitens canceled a deal with Israeli company Mekorot after the Dutch government warned of potential legal problems stemming from Mekorot’s operations in the settlements.
As law professor Eugene Kontorovich pointed out, this happens to be false: Even if you consider the West Bank occupied territory, neither international law nor European law bans private companies from doing business in occupied territory.
But Kontorovich also noted that many leading European companies do business in other occupied territories, including French oil company Total in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara and French tire giant Michelin in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus. So if any European country actually succeeds in declaring private business in “Israeli-occupied territory” illegal, activists in places like Western Sahara and Northern Cyprus will pounce on that precedent to sue European businesses operating in their territories.
Araud, for one, clearly doesn’t get this. When Kontorovich pointed it out to him on Twitter, he offered the following astonishing response: “I speak of one occupied territory. I am answered on other territories.”
But if something is the law for one occupied territory, then it’s the law for all occupied territories; as Kontorovich noted, law by definition is “a rule that applies to similar situations.” Thus by pushing the line that business activity in “Israeli-occupied territory” is illegal, European officials are making their own companies vulnerable to lawsuits from occupied territories ’round the world.
Again, that seems like a high price to pay for indulging anti-Israel animus, but many European officials are evidently willing to pay it.
I’ve written before about cases of European officials undermining cherished values and interests for the sake of indulging anti-Israel animus, but such cases used to be exceptional. Now, if the past week is any indication, they are rapidly becoming the norm. A growing number of Europeans are evidently willing to sacrifice both their democracies and their economies on the altar of their obsession with Israel.
But not to worry – Obama says anti-Semites are rational. And why let the facts interfere with a good story?
Originally published in Commentary on June 5, 2015
Note: This piece is part of a symposium on “The Spirit of Jewish Conservatism” published in Mosaic magazine. The symposium kicked off with an essay by Eric Cohen, to which other contributors responded.
While I laud Eric Cohen’s effort to articulate a program for a Jewish conservatism, one key feature of his program worries me greatly. This feature isn’t any of its specific components (all of which I support), but rather the fact that, as Yuval Levin perceptively notes, Cohen’s proposal essentially seeks to map the three main strands of American conservatism onto Judaism. We already know what happens when we try to bolster Jewish identity by linking it to a Western political ideology, because, as Cohen himself observes, we’re currently witnessing the disastrous fruits of a decades-long effort to do precisely that with liberalism.
Granted, much of American conservatism—like family values and the emphasis on the nation-state—is very compatible with Judaism. But so are many aspects of liberalism, like its concern for the poor or its aspirations to perfect the world. And because Judaism has aspects of both liberalism and conservatism, it can never be fully compatible with either.
Thus if Jewish conservatism is posited as merely a Jewish version of American conservatism, at some point Jewish conservatives will be forced to choose between their Judaism and their conservatism, just as Jewish liberals have been forced to choose between Judaism and liberalism. And they are liable to make the same choice many Jewish liberals have made, allowing their political ideology to trump Judaism because their political ideology has become their Judaism.
For a Jewish conservatism to be viable, it must be built from the start on Jewish rather than Western roots. And that means it can’t be fully congruent with American conservatism: It must exclude some things American conservatism contains and include some things American conservatism lacks. This would have the additional benefit of enabling Jews to make a unique contribution to American conservatism, just as Catholics have done by drawing on their unique religious tradition.
To give one example: a Jewish conservatism ought to focus far more on obligations and duties than on rights . Unfortunately, American conservatism, like liberalism, has become increasingly focused on rights. The particular rights it emphasizes often differ (religious freedom, for instance, is now championed more by conservatives than by liberals), but the rights-based discourse is the same. Consequently, almost any cause liberals can successfully cast as a “right” soon makes inroads among conservatives; see, for instance, the increasing conservative support for gay marriage. Duties, meanwhile, are increasingly falling by the wayside: conservatives are no more eager than liberals to revive the duty to defend one’s country once embodied in the universal draft.
True, the very notion of human rights derives from the Bible’s revolutionary statement that all men are created in God’s image. Yet the Bible itself doesn’t talk about rights at all; what it talks about are obligations: man’s obligations to God, man’s obligations to his fellow man, even God’s obligations to man. And that’s because, at bottom, duty is a cornerstone of a good society. It’s impossible, for instance, to sustain strong families without parents believing they have obligations to their children that trump their own right to freedom or self-fulfillment. And it’s impossible to sustain a nation-state without citizens believing they have obligations to their country that sometimes, as in war, trump their right to freedom or even life.
Like Yoram Hazony and Meir Soloveichik, I question whether any Jewish conservatism could ultimately survive without God, the Bible, and Jewish law at its core. At the very least, these sources must be mined to create a Jewish conservatism, because no other source of unique Jewish content exists. And if Jewish conservatism is simply a replica of the American version, it is guaranteed to fail.
Originally published in Mosaic on June 1, 2015