Jewish World
As long as the thugs are in control, most Arabs will continue publicly assailing Israel even if they quietly support it, just because it’s the safest thing to do
The scene recurs with monotonous regularity before every Jewish holiday: Jews seek to visit the Temple Mount on the eve of the holiday, and Arabs stage meticulously preplanned riots to prevent them. But last Wednesday, on the eve of Sukkot, it ended differently than usual. Instead of police turning away the Jews to appease the rioters, they fought the rioters and let the visits proceed.
It’s not yet clear whether this represents a new trend: On Sunday, police closed the Mount to non-Muslims again due to fear of rioting; Monday, they fought the rioters and reopened it to visitors. Yet all Israelis should hope it becomes one, because the police’s longstanding reluctance to confront Arab thugs has negative consequences that go far beyond the Temple Mount. Large swathes of Jewish Jerusalem, facing what has been dubbed a “quiet intifada,” have suffered from this reluctance for months. Israeli Arabs nationwide have suffered from it for years. And all hope for improved Jewish-Arab relations in this country remains doomed as long as it persists.
I’ve written before about the dangerous consequences of police capitulation to Arab rioters on the Mount: It denies Jews the fundamental right to pray at Judaism’s holiest site, undermines Israel’s diplomatic case for retaining Jerusalem as its united capital and encourages the Arab belief that violence pays. But while the first two are location-specific evils, the third applies throughout Israel. Hence it’s no surprise that such thuggery has spread.
In Jerusalem, Arab attacks on Jews have skyrocketed in recent months. School buses and cars have been stoned, cars and gas stations torched, houses pelted with Molotov cocktails and even shot at with live bullets – not just in predominantly Arab neighborhoods, but in veteran Jewish neighborhoods like Gilo, Pisgat Ze’ev and French Hill. The light rail has been vandalized so often that over a third of the trains are out of service. Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus has been repeatedly pelted with rocks and firebombs, and vehicles drive to and from the nearby army base in convoys, as if through a war zone.
But this violence doesn’t only harm Jerusalem’s Jews; it also harms law-abiding Arab residents of the neighborhoods whence it emanates, like Issawiya and Shuafat. Long before the violence spilled over into Jewish neighborhoods, for instance, thugs were routinely stoning Israeli ambulances that entered Arab neighborhoods. Consequently, ambulances won’t enter without a police escort, and waiting for this escort can waste precious time on life-saving calls. Moreover, in many Arab neighborhoods, the police’s refusal to confront the violence has allowed the thugs to take over completely, leading to rising crime and plummeting personal security. In Shuafat, for instance, “residents said that armed gangs wielding handguns, AK-47 semi-automatic rifles, and M-16 rifles roam the streets,” Nadav Shragai reported in Israel Hayom last month.
And this isn’t true only in East Jerusalem; it’s true of Arab towns nationwide. Because police for years treated Arab towns as no-go areas, they are now awash in illegal weapons, resulting in soaring crime rates. For instance, Arabs constitute 50% of all murder victims and 67% of perpetrators, despite constituting only 20% of Israel’s population.
In fairness, police neglected Arab towns largely because they were unwelcome there; residents often greeted them with riots and barrages of rocks. But 95% of Arabs now deem violence their community’s biggest problem, according to a recent study, and have therefore changed their attitude toward the police. That’s why Arab mayors and Knesset members have been demanding a greater police presence in their towns, and also why Arab mayors and merchants took the lead in trying to quell riots that erupted after Jewish extremists killed teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir in July: The law-abiding majority has realized that they are the main victims when police cede control to the thugs; both their security and their ability to earn a living suffers.
Yet the police’s unwillingness to confront Arab thugs doesn’t just hurt Arabs and Jews individually; it also undermines their ability to live together. Clearly, when thugs control Arab neighborhoods, Jews are afraid to visit and patronize Arab businesses. But in addition, ordinary Arabs are afraid to challenge the thugs’ anti-Israel party line.
Last month, for instance, Israel Hayom reported that an Arab teen had been forced to flee the country by the death threats he received after courageously making a video denouncing the kidnapping of three Israeli teens in June. Father Gabriel Nadaf, a Christian Arab who supports Arab service in the IDF and defended Israel last month at the UN Human Rights Council, has seen his son attacked and hospitalized because of his views. In both cases, police failed miserably to protect them from the thugs. So why would other Arabs want to follow their example?
Few people are heroes; most just want to live a quiet life. Thus as long as the thugs are in control, most Arabs will continue publicly assailing Israel even if they quietly support it, just because it’s the safest thing to do.
It’s important to note that little of this Arab thuggery is spontaneous. In last Wednesday’s incident on the Temple Mount, for instance, the rioters built barricades in advance, stockpiled rocks, firebombs, fireworks, metal pipes and concrete slabs, then slept on the Mount Tuesday night to be ready to start rioting bright and early. The “quiet intifada” in Jerusalem is similarly well-organized, Shragai reported: In each neighborhood, a Palestinian faction like Fatah, Hamas, the DFLP or the PFLP is in charge; the rioters have been trained to resist interrogation; the Palestinian Authority pays their legal fees; and someone as yet unknown is providing the thousands of shekels spent on their newest weapon of choice, fireworks.
In short, this is organized crime. And for the sake of Jews and Arabs alike, it’s vital that police make a determined effort to stop it instead of seeking to appease the thugs by such tactics as barring Jews from the Mount or failing to enforce the law in Arab towns and neighborhoods. For only thus will Jews and Arabs alike be able to enjoy not only security, but genuine coexistence.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
Hateful graffiti targeting a minority have repeatedly been scrawled on cars and buildings, including houses of worship, yet police frequently fail to arrest the culprits. Innocent people have been viciously attacked and occasionally even murdered just because they belong to this minority. Clearly, this is a country awash in racism and prejudice that it’s making no real effort to stem, so it deserves harsh condemnation from anyone who cares about such fundamental liberal values as tolerance and nonviolence, right?
That’s certainly the conclusion many liberals leaped to about a similar wave of anti-Arab attacks in Israel. But what I actually just described is the recent wave of anti-Semitic attacks in the United States, and there has–quite properly–been no similar rush to denounce America. Since the American government and people overwhelmingly condemn such attacks, and America remains one of the best places in the world to live openly as a Jew, liberals correctly treat such incidents as exceptions rather than proof that the U.S. is irredeemably anti-Semitic. But somehow, Israel never merits a similarly nuanced analysis.
Consider just a few of the attacks I referenced in the first paragraph: This past weekend–on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year–swastikas were spray-painted on a Jewish fraternity at Emory University in Atlanta, and also on a synagogue in Spokane, Washington, on the other side of the country. In August, a Jewish couple was attacked in New York by thugs who shouted anti-Semitic slogans, threw a water bottle at the woman, and punched her skullcap-wearing husband. In July, pro-Israel demonstrators were attacked by stick-wielding thugs in Los Angeles. On August 9, an Orthodox rabbi was murdered in Miami while walking to synagogue on the Sabbath; police insist this wasn’t a hate crime, though they haven’t yet arrested any suspects, but local Jews are unconvinced, as a synagogue and a Jewish-owned car on the same street were vandalized with anti-Semitic slogans just two weeks earlier. And in April, a white supremacist killed three people at two Jewish institutions near Kansas City, Kansas.
A Martian looking at this list, devoid of any context, might well conclude that America is a deeply anti-Semitic country. And of course, he’d be wrong. Context–the fact that these incidents are exceptions to the overwhelmingly positive picture of Jewish life in America–matters greatly.
Yet that’s no less true for anti-Arab attacks in Israel. As in America, both the government and the public have almost unanimously condemned such attacks. As in America, culprits have been swiftly arrested in some cases, like the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir in July; also as in America, the failure to make arrests in other cases stems not from tolerance for such crimes, but from the simple fact that some cases are harder to solve than others.
Finally, as in America, these incidents belie the fact that overall, Israeli Arabs are better integrated and have more rights not only than any of their counterparts in the Middle East, but also than some of their counterparts in Europe. Israel, for instance, has no laws against building minarets, like Switzerland does, or against civil servants wearing headscarves, as France does. Arabs serve in the Knesset, the Supreme Court, and sometimes the cabinet; they are doctors, university department heads, judges, and high-tech workers.
Clearly, anti-Arab prejudice exists in Israel, just as anti-Jewish prejudice exists in America. But a decade-old tracking project found that it has been declining rather than growing. And successive governments have been trying hard in recent years to narrow persistent Arab-Jewish gaps: For instance, an affirmative action campaign almost quadrupled the number of Arabs in the civil service from 2007 to 2011. Indeed, as Ron Gerlitz, co-executive director of Sikkuy – The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality, argued in August, it’s precisely the Arab minority’s growing integration that has outraged the anti-Arab fringe and helped spark the recent rise in hate crimes.
So it’s past time for liberals to give Israel the same courtesy they extend America: Stop looking at hate crimes in a vacuum and start seeing them for what they are–isolated incidents that don’t and shouldn’t condemn an entire country as “racist.”
Originally published in Commentary
Rising kashrut observance among millennials is a hopeful sign for both American Jewry and Israel
The new Jewish year opened with some encouraging Jewish news: According to a Pew Research poll cited by NPR last week, more than a quarter of the so-called millennial generation of American Jews now keeps kosher, almost double the percentage among their parents’ generation. This isn’t because Orthodox Jews have more children; as the NPR report noted, many millennial kashrut observers didn’t grow up in kosher homes. Nor have they become Orthodox themselves: The Pew data shows that only half of kashrut-observant millennials observe Shabbat. But by deciding to keep kosher, they have opted for a more distinctly Jewish identity – and that’s good news for anyone who cares about either American Jewry or Israel.
For decades now, soaring intermarriage rates and growing disinterest in organized religion have raised fears regarding the future of American Jewry. Indeed, the same 2013 Pew poll that NPR quoted greatly reinforced these fears: Inter alia, it found that while 93% of Jews born in 1914-27 consider themselves “Jews by religion,” that is true for only 68% of millennials, or people born after 1980; the remaining 32% of millennials define themselves as “Jews of no religion.” And by every conceivable measure, “Jews of no religion” are bad news for both the Jewish people and Israel.
A whopping 67%, for instance, raise their children “not Jewish,” compared to only 7% for Jews by religion, while 79% have non-Jewish spouses, more than double the 36% among Jews by religion. Fully 54% say being Jewish is of little or no importance to them, more than five times the rate among Jews by religion (10%); 55% feel little or no attachment to Israel, more than double the rate among Jews by religion (23%); and only 10% care about being part of a Jewish community, less than a third the rate among Jews by religion (33%).
In short, “Jews of no religion” are on a fast track to leaving the Jewish people altogether. Thus anyone who cares about American Jewry’s survival should be rooting for young Jews to become more attached to the Jewish religion.
And millennials who opt to keep kosher are necessarily doing exactly that, because keeping kosher requires them to recommit to Judaism every day anew: Day after day, they must decide what to eat or not eat, what to buy or not buy. Thus the fact that 27% of American Jews aged 18-29 keep kosher, up from 16% among the 50+ group, is a ray of light in the otherwise gloomy Pew data.
It’s also encouraging with regard to a related worry: that young American Jews are growing away from Israel. The Pew data unequivocally proves that the more American Jews care about Judaism, the more likely they are to care about Israel. That’s why Jews by religion deem caring about Israel “essential” to their Jewish identity at more than double the rate of Jews of no religion (49% to 23%), and why even among Jews by religion, the proportion who consider caring about Israel “essential” generally correlates closely with attachment to traditional Jewish praxis, rising from 31% among nondenominational Jews to 42% for Reform, 58% for Conservative and 79% for modern Orthodox (the ultra-Orthodox are anomalous; at 45%, they resemble Reform Jews).
This correlation was inadvertently highlighted by a front-page New York Times story last month in which rabbis who criticize Israel complained about congregational backlash. “Rabbis are just really scared because they get slammed by their right-wing congregants, who are often the ones with the purse strings,” said Conservative Rabbi Jill Jacobs. She didn’t bother analyzing that telling statement, but I will: Major synagogue donors, by definition, are people who care deeply about maintaining organized Jewish religious life. And those are precisely the people who, as the Pew data shows, tend to be most supportive of Israel, and hence most likely to object to anti-Israel sermons.
Even Peter Beinart, who has made a career out of blaming Israeli policy for “distancing” young American Jews from Israel, admitted in a surprising pre-Rosh Hashanah op-ed that the main culprit is actually their alienation from religion. “The greatest threat to Jewish life in the United States is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s religious illiteracy,” he wrote, before adding that, “the best way to ensure that American Jews stay connected to Israel is to ensure that they stay connected to Judaism … If you care deeply about Jewish tradition, you’re likely to care deeply about Israel,” whereas if you’re indifferent to the Bible and the synagogue and Jewish holidays, “you’re likely to be indifferent to Israel too.”
Thus the fact that some young American Jews are becoming more attached to Judaism offers hope for their attachment to Israel as well.
It’s also worth noting, as Mitchell Bard did last month, that decades of Gallup polling among Americans overall show a tendency for people to become more supportive of Israel as they age. In 1982, for instance, 49% of Americans aged 18-29 sympathized with Israel more than the Palestinians; today, when those same people are 55+, 74% of them support Israel. In 1996, 32% of 18- to 29-year-olds favored Israel; today, those people are aged 36-47, and 58% of them do so.
Why this happens isn’t clear, though I suspect moving from the left-wing hotbed of college campuses to the real world plays a role. But assuming American Jews resemble other Americans in this regard, one would expect millennials to become more supportive of Israel as they age regardless of their Jewish identity. When you combine this with a salient indicator of enhanced Jewish identity like increased kashrut observance, the widespread assertion that Israel is “losing” the millennial generation seems, at least, premature.
None of this justifies complacency: If we want to ensure that young Jews remain attached to the Jewish people and Israel, investing in their knowledge of and attachment to Judaism is vital. But as the upsurge of kashrut observance among millennials shows, it’s not yet too late. For far from losing interest in being Jewish, some young American Jews are clearly hungry for a Judaism with more to offer than just the latest liberal talking points.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
A Yale University chaplain recently resigned “on his own initiative” over a letter to the New York Times blaming Israel and the Jews for anti-Semitism. Clearly, nothing Israel does or doesn’t do justifies attacks on Jewish citizens of other countries, but even if did, Rev. Bruce Shipman’s reasoning would have been fallacious. According to Shipman, “the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel’s patrons abroad” to pressure Israel “for final-status resolution to the Palestinian question.” Yet based on the evidence, the Israeli policy change most likely to reduce anti-Semitic outbreaks isn’t ending its “continuing occupation of the West Bank,” but reoccupying evacuated Gaza.
After all, every major upsurge in anti-Semitic attacks in recent years has coincided with a war that began when terrorists attacked Israel from territory it had vacated: spring 2002, when Israel reinvaded parts of the West Bank it had left under the Oslo Accords to stop a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings; summer 2006, when Hezbollah sparked a war by launching a deadly cross-border attack from south Lebanon, which Israel had vacated six years earlier; and two ground operations in Gaza, one in winter 2008/09 and one this past July and August, both launched in response to the incessant rocket fire from that territory ever since Israel withdrew every last soldier and settler in 2005. During the intervening years, incidents of anti-Semitism were hundreds or even thousands of percent lower, despite Israel’s “continuing occupation of the West Bank.”
The latest Gaza war epitomizes this counterintuitive truth. In July, anti-Semitic attacks were up 130 percent in America, 436 percent in Europe, 600 percent in South Africa, and a whopping 1,200 percent in South America compared to July 2013. To cite one typical example, Scotland recorded more anti-Semitic attacks during the first week of August alone than in all of 2013.
In other words, what really spurs anti-Semites to come out of the woodwork isn’t “the occupation,” but Israeli-caused casualties. And while one might have though withdrawals would decrease such casualties by eliminating day-to-day friction between Palestinians (or Lebanese) and Israeli troops, in reality, the opposite has occurred: Every such withdrawal has resulted in terrorist organizations taking over the vacated territory and using it to launch attacks on Israel, which in turn has produced a sharp rise in casualties, for two reasons.
First, in territory it controls, Israel can prevent terror by routine policing. But once it has quit an area, counterterrorism operations require reinvading–and military operations are obviously far more lethal than police work. Second, in territory it controls, Israel can prevent terrorists from embedding military infrastructure like tunnels and rocket launchers amid a civilian population. But once it evacuates a territory, terrorists are free to do exactly that, and they do. Consequently, any counterterrorism operation becomes far more deadly to the terrorists’ own people.
The result, as I explained here last month, is that Palestinian casualties have soared since Israel’s 2005 pullout from Gaza. In the current war, for instance, the UN claims 2,131 Palestinians were killed. That’s more than the 1,727 fatalities Gaza suffered during the second intifada of 2000-2005. In other words, Gaza just lost more people in 50 days than it did during the bloodiest five years of the period when Israel controlled the territory.
Mark Gardner of CST, which monitors anti-Semitism in Britain, pithily explained the problem last month: During wartime, “The British public is constantly exposed to pictures of wounded or dead Palestinian children, and the effect is apparent.” And because such wars have been occurring every two to four years, “the issue is ignited almost continually. The Jewish community gets hit again and again, without reprieve, and the situation is not given a chance to return to relative normalcy.”
So if anyone really thinks Israeli policy should be blamed for global anti-Semitism, the data shows there’s only one policy change that might actually be effective: reoccupying Gaza. Somehow, I doubt that’s what the Bruce Shipmans of the world really want.
Originally published in Commentary
Carlo Strenger, an Israeli psychology professor, regular Haaretz columnist, and dedicated leftist, offered some useful advice yesterday to all the Diaspora Jewish liberals now bemoaning the end of their love affair with Israel: Grow up. Or as he put it, “only adolescents demand ideal objects for their loves.”
“Jewish liberals … need to realize that the time has come to stop mourning Israel’s idealized image,” Strenger wrote. “Israel is an impressive achievement in many ways, but it was never an ideal society.” Rather, it’s a real country with real problems, just like any other country, and deserves to be treated that way.
American Jewish liberals, for instance, didn’t stop loving America because they loathed George Bush, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, “So how come we Jews have such problems with the fact that in Israel we have our own Limbaughs, Palins and Cheneys?” Nor did they stop loving America because it has yet to achieve perfect racial harmony (as witness the recent police shooting of an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Missouri), so “How come we cannot accept that Israel is a multiethnic society that still hasn’t worked out a modus vivendi” among its numerous religious and ethnic subgroups?
In short, if you care about a country, you can obviously criticize its shortcomings and work to ameliorate them. But you don’t wash your hands of it just because it fails to meet the “completely unrealistic” expectation that “our state must be a beacon of light unto the nations”–an expectation, he noted wryly, that exists in the first place because liberal Diaspora Jews “never quite got rid of” what most would publicly dismiss as a highly illiberal notion: “that Jews are chosen.”
Diaspora Jewish liberals’ expectations are all the more unrealistic, Strenger noted, because they completely disregard the real-world problems Israel faces:
The Arab world’s initial rejection of Israel’s existence, and the scars of war and the constant security threats from groups like Hamas, have left an indelible mark on Israel’s mentality, one that will take many decades to mitigate. The profound rifts between its ethnicities, its religious conflicts, its inability to integrate its Arab citizens, have shaped Israel’s political culture, and are unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
Moreover, in their disappointment at Israel’s failure to live up to their ideal, they are ignoring the fact that “there is much to love and admire about Israel for Jewish liberals, even if we profoundly dislike, and sometimes hate, other aspects of it.”
While Strenger didn’t elaborate, another Israeli professor and dedicated leftist, Michael Gross, did exactly that in a guest column for Haaretz two days earlier. Rhetorically asking what standard Diaspora Jewish liberals use to evaluate Israel’s liberalism or lack thereof, he continued, “Do they mean a well-functioning public health care system, expansive reproductive rights, gun control, a ban on the death penalty or inexpensive higher education?”
Gross obviously knows the big issue for most liberal Diaspora Jews is “the occupation.” His point is that like any real country, Israel is multi-faceted. And if you examine the real Israel in all its complexity, rather than treating it as a cartoon character with no existence beyond the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, then on many trademark issues to which liberal Jews accord great weight in their own countries, Israel is actually closer to the liberal ideal than America is.
Essentially, both men were making the same argument: If liberal Diaspora Jews would look at Israel as a real country, rather than as a projection of their fantasies, they would see it was neither as perfectly good as they once imagined it nor as irredeemably evil as they imagine it today. Like any other country, it has real problems, and like any other country, it deals with some problems better than others, but its positive qualities are no less real than its flaws.
And if Diaspora Jewish liberals are incapable of seeing the real Israel through the cloud of their adolescent fantasies, then that isn’t Israel’s fault. It’s their own.
Originally published in Commentary
Sovereignty poses tough problems, as last week amply showed; but lack of sovereignty poses worse ones.
By any standard, the past week has been terrible. We buried three kidnapped teens after 18 days of hoping against hope that they were alive. Rocket and mortar barrages from Gaza escalated to levels unseen since November 2012. An Arab teen was horrifically murdered by Jewish extremists, sparking the worst Israeli Arabs riots since October 2000. And the situation could yet deteriorate in countless ways.
Take, for instance, the Arab riots. Rumors about Jews abducting and/or killing non-Jews have sparked riots for centuries, and as recently as the first half of the last century, such riots routinely produced scores of dead Jews. Prominent examples include the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, which killed 47 Jews; the 1946 Kielce pogrom, which killed 42; and the 1929 Arab riots in British-ruled pre-state Israel, which killed 133.
Far more remarkably, however, no lethal anti-Jewish riots have occurred anywhere in recent decades – and that isn’t because the rest of the world has become so civilized; sectarian and ethnic massacres happen almost daily in the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia. Rather, it’s because there’s now a Jewish state ready to take in any Jew threatened by such violence.
Even today, when most Diaspora Jews live in “safe” countries, Israel’s role as refuge remains very much alive. Consider, for instance, this remarkable May 28 report by New York Times contributor Masha Gessen about her first visit back to Russia after emigrating to the US.
A new kind of conversational shorthand has appeared in Moscow: “What’s your month?” people ask one another. They mean the month for which you are signed up for an interview at the Israeli embassy to receive initial immigration documents. The nearest available slot for people booking an appointment now reportedly is in November, but most of my friends have appointments in August or September. Even getting an appointment is an ordeal: The embassy’s phone lines are so overburdened that getting through to the right department can take hours. And according to a recent, leaked picture, inside the embassy, it is a mob scene reminiscent of 1990-91, the peak years of the Soviet Jewish exodus.
This was at the height of the Ukraine crisis; if it dies down, most of those Jews will likely remain in Russia. But they want the reassurance of having somewhere to flee if necessary. And only Israel can give them that.
No country can promise 100 percent security all the time. America couldn’t prevent a neo-Nazi from murdering three people at Jewish sites in Kansas City in April; Belgium couldn’t prevent a jihadist from murdering four at Brussels’ Jewish Museum in May; France couldn’t prevent a jihadist from murdering a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012; and Israel couldn’t prevent Hamas from kidnapping and killing the three teens. Throughout Jewish history, some people have sought to murder Jews just because they are Jews, and as long as such people exist, sometimes, they’ll succeed.
We may wait far too long to exercise this option, or make a mess of it once we do; both are true of successive governments’ responses to the rocket fire. But these are our choices, which means we can change them. And even our abysmally inadequate response to date, consisting mainly of civil defense measures, is an improvement over millennia of powerlessness: Such measures have decreased rocket casualties by an estimated 86%; as a result, very few Jews are either fleeing or dying in southern Israel.
That Israel still falls so short of our aspirations isn’t surprising; 66 years old is young for a country. America at that age was rent by a bitter divide over slavery that ultimately produced a devastating civil war; Germany and Italy were under Fascist rule and preparing to launch World War II; Yugoslavia just seven years away from a civil war that tore it into five separate countries.
For the first time in 2,000 years, we have the ability to exercise self-defense and provide a haven for endangered Jews worldwide. True, sovereignty has brought a whole new set of challenges: Jewish hate crimes, terrorists launching rockets from amid civilian populations, international condemnations. But we should never forget how privileged we are to have these challenges rather than those of previous generations. They’re vastly superior to the choice between fleeing and dying.
Last week’s incident in which two Palestinians were killed in the West Bank–allegedly by Israel Defense Forces soldiers who opened fire without provocation–is still under investigation. But the IDF continues to maintain that the video footage purporting to back this allegation was doctored.
As Jonathan Tobin noted on Wednesday, this isn’t inconceivable; such things have happened before. Even Amnesty researcher Donatella Rovera recently admitted that Palestinians have been known to falsify evidence (though it doesn’t seem to stop her organization from treating every Palestinian claim as gospel truth). Nevertheless, the IDF’s claim would undeniably be more credible if it could produce its own footage showing what really happened.
But of course, it can’t–because one of the most technologically sophisticated armies in the world has somehow proven incapable of equipping its soldiers with the kind of simple cameras found on every cell phone. And so, day after day, week after week, it’s confronted with Palestinian allegations to which the only response it can offer is its soldiers’ unsupported testimony.
A year ago, I thought the penny had finally dropped: The IDF announced with great fanfare that it had finally decided to train soldiers to film operations in the field. But it now turns out this vaunted project comprises all of 24 cameramen–24 people to provide round-the-clock coverage of the entire West Bank plus the Gaza border. It’s a joke. And not a very funny one.
There’s no reason why every single soldier couldn’t be equipped with a small, wearable camera that would operate automatically. This would have the additional benefit of cutting down on real abuses, from which no army is completely immune. Indeed, several Western countries have experimented with policemen wearing such cameras, and they have generally led to reductions in both real brutality and false claims of brutality.
But what seems like a no-brainer to me evidently isn’t so obvious to Israel’s chronically public-diplomacy-challenged government and army. Otherwise, they would have done something about it by now.
Consequently, this is an issue on which American Jewish help is badly needed. Jewish groups and individuals frequently meet with Israeli officials, both in the U.S. and in Israel, but it probably never occurs to them to raise a minor issue like IDF cameras at those meetings. If they thought of it at all, it would doubtless seem too obvious to need saying.
Unfortunately, it isn’t. And therefore, U.S. Jews would be doing Israel a big service if they started raising this issue at every single meeting with Israeli government officials or army officers. If Israeli leaders keep hearing about it from American Jews, maybe they’ll finally realize how important it is.
Or maybe they still won’t. But it’s worth a try–because waiting for them to figure it out on their own certainly isn’t working.
Attacks on mosques and churches rightly outrage Israelis. But why don’t attacks on Jewish sites?
Kudos to the Religious Zionists of America for choosing this particular moment – when Israel is in an uproar over a recent wave of anti-Arab hate crimes whose targets have included mosques and churches – to point out that attacks no less heinous are regularly committed against Israel’s Jewish holy sites. I doubt the organization’s petition, signed by over 100 Orthodox rabbis, will get much attention here, but it should. For there’s something morally perverse about the idea that in the Jewish state, of all places, Judaism should be the one religion whose holy sites can be vandalized without sparking a public outcry.
The anti-Arab vandalism, which has involved slashing car tires, spray-painting graffiti and even occasional arson, is unequivocally reprehensible, and the public uproar is fully warranted. But attacks on Jewish sites have been going on much longer and have frequently been more severe, without eliciting a fraction of the political and media attention recently devoted to the vandalism of Christian and Muslim sites. So are anti-Jewish attacks somehow less reprehensible?
Consider, for instance, the subject of the RZA’s petition: Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives Cemetery. This is the world’s oldest Jewish cemetery, containing the graves of three Biblical prophets, Talmudic and medieval sages, prominent Zionist leaders and generations of ordinary Jews. Yet for years, its graves have been vandalized repeatedly (like these back-to-back incidents in 2011), and visitors have been repeatedly attacked. In one well-publicized 2012 incident, for instance, a baseball-sized rock was thrown at two visiting Jewish congressmen.
At a Knesset Interior Committee meeting last November, police reported that Palestinian rock-throwers had attacked 24 people at or near the cemetery in the previous month alone – a frequency far outpacing that of the recent anti-Arab attacks (33 nationwide since the start of the year). Moreover, unlike slashed tires and spray-painted graffiti, rock-throwing can wound or even kill. Stone-throwers have killed several Israelis – see for instance, Asher and Yonatan Palmer or Yehuda Shoham. And though nobody has yet been killed at the Mount of Olives, a yeshiva student was hospitalized by a rock-throwing attack near the site just a day before the committee meeting. In contrast, the anti-Arab vandalism hasn’t produced any casualties, and most of the attacks (the handful of arson cases excepted) aren’t even potentially life-threatening.
Thus by any objective criterion – the number of attacks, their severity and how long they have been occurring – the anti-Jewish hate crimes at the Mount of Olives are worse than the recent anti-Arab crimes. Yet they have received only a fraction of the public, political and media attention.
The Mount of Olives attacks haven’t merited front-page headlines like those given anti-Arab crimes. There have been no cabinet meetings on the subject, the suspected perpetrators haven’t been declared an illegal organization, ministers haven’t demanded that suspects be treated as terrorists or put in administrative detention (demands the cabinet has so far sensibly rejected; vandals aren’t suicide bombers), and police haven’t created a special unit to combat these crimes – all things that have happened with regard to anti-Arab crimes. Indeed, as the Knesset meeting revealed, police haven’t even honored their promise to keep the station near the cemetery open round the clock.
The point isn’t that anti-Arab hate crimes don’t merit all this attention; they do. But why do anti-Jewish hate crimes not merit the same attention? Why, in a Jewish state, is protecting the world’s oldest Jewish cemetery and ensuring that Jews can visit their loved ones’ graves without being stoned not equally as important as preventing vandalism to mosques and churches?
Or take another site that the RZA letter didn’t mention: the Temple Mount, which is not only Judaism’s holiest site, but contains priceless Jewish relics dating back to the First Temple. The Muslim Wakf, which governs the site, has repeatedly carried out construction with relic-destroying mechanical equipment – in defiance of Israel Antiquities Authority directives – and tossed the excavated dirt into garbage dumps (where volunteers have patiently sifted it for artifacts ever since). Dr. Gabi Barkai, an expert on Temple-era excavations, termed this behavior “a crime” and “first-rate barbarity,” since it destroys irreplaceable archaeological artifacts. It’s also a crime literally, since it violates Israel’s antiquities laws.
By any objective criterion, the vandalism at the Temple Mount is far worse than the recent anti-Arab attacks: Graffiti, however offensive, can be removed, and even a torched mosque can be repaired or rebuilt, but millennia-old archaeological relics, once destroyed, can never be replaced. Yet neither the police nor successive governments have lifted a finger to stop this blatant destruction of a Jewish holy site, while the media rarely mentions the issue. Incredibly, at the government’s request, the Knesset even barred publication of a 2010 State Comptroller’s Report on the ongoing devastation, in a (successful) effort to minimize public and media pressure to halt it. So why, in a Jewish state, is preventing the irreversible destruction of priceless relics of the Jewish Temples not equally as important as preventing vandalism to mosques and churches?
The new fad among Israeli leftists is asserting that the ongoing failure to solve most of these anti-Arab crimes “proves” that Israel’s police, government and public are racist. But the police and successive governments have failed for years to do anything about anti-Jewish hate crimes beyond occasional lip-service denunciations, and neither the public nor the media seemed to care. So why would anyone expect them to treat anti-Arab crimes differently?
That both the police and the government have now finally decided to make combating anti-Arab hate crimes high priority seems to stem less from moral outrage than from fear of the practical consequences: Such attacks undermine Israel’s image overseas and could spark Arab violence. Since neither consequence applies to anti-Jewish crimes, they are unlikely ever to receive similar priority. The ironic result is that Jewish sites in Israel are being treated as less deserving of protection than Christian and Arab sites.
I firmly believe the latter deserve full protection; but Jewish sites deserve no less. The Jewish state should not be yet another country where Jewish sites can be vandalized without anyone seeming to care.
Alan Dershowitz has a blistering column in Haaretz today explaining why no self-respecting pro-Israel liberal should support J Street. Yet many genuinely pro-Israel liberals will likely continue doing so, for the same reason they continue giving to the New Israel Fund despite its track record of funding political warfare against Israel: They want an outlet for pro-Israel sentiment that also allows them to try to alter Israeli policies, whether foreign or domestic, with which they disagree. And absent a genuine outlet, it’s human nature to cling instead to groups that falsely purport to fill this niche, ignoring all evidence to the contrary. Hence an alternative model for pro-Israel liberalism is desperately needed.
The good news is that such a model exists. The bad news is that few people know about it–which is why Haaretz’s profile of philanthropist Robert Price earlier this month ought to be required reading for pro-Israel liberals. Price, who self-identifies as “toward the J Street side of things,” is a major donor to Israel, but on principle, he refuses to give to any Jewish Israeli institution: He focuses exclusively on the most disadvantaged fifth of Israeli society–the Arab community. Yet unlike, say, the NIF, Price doesn’t seek to “empower” Israeli Arabs by financing their leadership’s political war on Israel. Instead, he tries to promote Israeli Arabs’ integration, by focusing on educational initiatives that will ultimately improve their job prospects and earning power: early-childhood community centers in Arab towns and, more recently, an Arabic-language version of PJ Library. As he put it, “Arabs represent 20 percent of the population and have an opportunity, we think, to be productive citizens and to actually enrich the fabric of life in Israel if provided reasonable opportunities.”
This is a radical contrast to the NIF, which claims to promote integration but actually promotes Arab separatism. For instance, it’s a major funder of Adalah, an Israeli Arab NGO that actively promotes boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, terms Israel an “apartheid state,” and demands a “right of return” for millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees. It was also a major funder of Mada al-Carmel, another Israeli Arab NGO, whose flagship project was the infamous Haifa Declaration. This document, compiled by dozens of Israeli Arab intellectuals, terms Zionism a “colonial-settler project” that, “in concert with world imperialism,” succeeded in 1948 “in occupying our homeland and transforming it into a state for the Jews,” partly by committing “massacres.” Israel, it adds, can atone for this sin only by transforming itself into a binational state with an Arab majority (via an influx of millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees).
Needless to say, such activities by Israeli Arab NGOs not only undermine Israel, but also worsen Jewish-Arab tensions and exacerbate anti-Arab discrimination: Why would any Israeli Jew want to help or even associate with a community whose leadership actively seeks the Jewish state’s annihilation? Thus by funding such activities, NIF hurts both Israel and the Arab minority it ostensibly seeks to help.
By promoting integration, in contrast, Price is helping both Israel and its Arab minority, and working to reduce discrimination–which is precisely what one would expect a pro-Israel liberal to want to do.
There are numerous ways to promote liberal goals while also genuinely helping Israel. Examples include programs that help ultra-Orthodox Jews acquire secular educations and enter the workplace, or that promote the integration of Ethiopian-Israelis, or that foster Israeli-Palestinian cooperation. But by clinging instead to groups like J Street and NIF, while turning a blind eye to their reality, liberals aren’t just harming Israel. They’re also missing precious opportunities to genuinely make Israel a better, more equal, and more just society.
Originally published in Commentary on March 28, 2014
In craving something it can never obtain, Israel endangers both its democracy and its survival
To make the case that their preferred policies are essential to Israel’s future, both Israeli and American Jewish liberals frequently argue that Israel’s current policies – even if justified – are costing it Western and American Jewish support. Last week’s op-ed by Haaretz columnist and award-winning author Ari Shavit is a classic example: Though Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is right about Iran’s nuclear program, right about Palestinian recognition of the Jewish state and right about the essential justice of Israel’s cause, Shavit wrote, this is “yesterday’s message,” which young Americans, especially Jewish ones, don’t want to hear. Thus to avoid losing the future, Israel must remake itself into a country more attractive to these young Americans, whose “liberal” and “pacifist” worldview “utterly rejects the occupation, the use of force and human rights violations.”
Just consider the practical implications of Shavit’s prescription. Since these young Americans abhor “the occupation,” winning their love would presumably require withdrawing from the West Bank. But what if the West Bank then becomes a base for suicide bombings against Israel, as it did when Israel withdrew from parts of it in the mid-1990s? Or a base for launching rockets at Israel, as Gaza did after Israel left in 2005? Shavit certainly knows that’s possible; he’s not one of those fantasists who think territorial withdrawals will bring peace.
Yet by his own admission, these young Americans also abhor “the use of force and human rights violations.” Thus if Israel responds to such a terrorist onslaught militarily, they will immediately hate it again – especially since counterterrorism operations in urban areas inevitably produce civilian casualties, and liberal pacifists generally view all civilian casualties, however unavoidable, as “human rights violations.” Nor is this mere speculation: It’s how Western liberals in fact responded to Israeli counterterror operations in the West Bank in 2002-04 and Gaza in early 2009.
Thus Israel could retain the liberals’ love only by meekly absorbing suicide bombings and rocket attacks without responding. Such unchecked terror, as the past two decades amply showed, would also destroy the economy. And deprived of both personal and economic security, Israelis would flee in droves.
Or consider Iran. Shavit has written repeatedly that Iranian nukes would be an existential threat to Israel. But what happens if all else fails, and only Israeli military action can prevent a nuclear Iran? Those liberal, pacifist Westerners whose love he seeks “reject the use of force”; they would never countenance a preemptive strike. Indeed, they overwhelmingly believe an Israeli attack would be worse than Iranian nukes, which they don’t actually consider much of a threat.
In short, liberal pacifist love can be bought only at a price most Israelis believe would endanger their very existence: letting Iran go nuclear, withdrawing to the 1967 lines even without a peace treaty and abandoning efforts to combat Palestinian terror. That’s hardly a convincing survival strategy.
Moreover, precisely because it requires overriding Israelis’ own policy preferences – as repeatedly expressed through both opinion polls and elections – it’s also anti-democratic. One recent poll, for instance, found that only four percent of Israelis favor withdrawing unilaterally from the West Bank. Another found that while 45% would support removing settlements if the IDF remained – which wouldn’t satisfy liberal pacifists, since it wouldn’t end “the occupation” – only 9% supported withdrawing the IDF as well. Polls also show majorities against withdrawing to the 1967 lines, even with a peace deal, and pluralities or majorities for bombing Iran if other efforts to keep it from going nuclear fail. And of course, in both 2009 and 2013, Israelis elected governments whose stated positions aligned with these preferences.
So courting the liberal pacifists would require Israel to eviscerate one of the most fundamental liberal values – democracy – by substituting the policy preferences of non-citizens for those of its own citizens. Granted, this might not bother many Western liberals, who seem to have little use for democracy when it doesn’t produce their preferred outcomes. But it ought to bother anyone who actually cares about liberal values.
Moreover, gutting Israel’s democracy in itself endangers Israel’s survival, because that survival has always demanded extraordinary commitment from Israel’s citizens. For instance, most Israelis devote three years of their lives to the army and do annual reserve duty for years afterward; without that willingness to defend their country, Israel wouldn’t long survive in a hostile region.
But most people would fight more willingly in defense of policies they – or at least their fellow citizens – chose democratically than for policies imposed by non-citizens who don’t bear the costs of their own choices. Similarly, they’ll pay taxes more willingly to finance democratically chosen policies than policies chosen by non-citizens who don’t bear the costs of their choices.
If Israelis are deprived of the chance to try to make this the kind of country they want, whatever that happens to be, then many might head for the exit. For what makes the price of living here worth paying is precisely the privilege of influencing the nature of the first Jewish state in 2,000 years. If instead, the nature of that state is to be dictated from abroad, why wouldn’t Israelis prefer to move overseas themselves, to countries with higher standards of living and no compulsory military service?
And if Israelis lose the will to maintain their own state, who will take their place – those young American Jewish liberals whose affection Shavit so craves, most of whom wouldn’t even consider Israel’s destruction a personal tragedy?
Yes, Israel needs supporters overseas. But above all, it needs the support of its own people. Thus its overseas supporters must be sought among people who share Israelis’ core values – not among liberal pacifists uncomfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state, and who reject the use of force even in self-defense. The chimerical pursuit of liberal pacifist love is nothing but a recipe for Israel’s destruction.