Peace Process
Several commentators have pointed out recently that, had the West not spent decades treating terror against Jews and Israel as an “understandable” outgrowth of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it might have less of a terrorism problem today.
Liel Leibovitz of Tablet detailed links between people who perpetrated attacks on Jews and people who later perpetrated attacks on non-Jews in the same countries. His analysis suggests that, had the original attacks on Jews been investigated more thoroughly, the later attacks might have been preventable. Gil Troy argued in the Jerusalem Post that the West’s consistent response to Palestinian terror – capitulating to the terrorists’ demands and pressuring Israel to do the same – persuaded subsequent generations of Islamic terrorists that terror is an effective means of furthering their goals. But there’s a third way in which the West’s attitudes toward Israel have contributed to its terrorism problem: Its conviction – in defiance of all evidence – that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was the Mideast’s central problem led it to focus obsessively on this issue, at the expense of all the real problems that are coming back to haunt it now. And nothing better illustrates this than the seemingly trivial issue of NGO funding.
Both Europe and America, but especially the former, grant tens of millions of dollars a year to Israeli NGOs for the ostensible purpose of promoting “democracy” and “human rights” in the one Middle Eastern country that already does a reasonable job of protecting both. However, they spend far less on promoting democracy and human rights in other Mideast countries. A document obtained by the Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon, for instance, showed that in 2010, the British government gave £600,000 to Israeli NGOs; if you exclude Iraq, that’s six times as much as it gave NGOs in all other Arab countries combined. Nor does the West lavish this kind of money on NGOs in other fellow democracies: According to NGO Monitor, “No other democracy gets nearly as much foreign government funding” as Israel does.
Why this peculiar obsession with democracy and human rights in Israel, alone of all the world’s countries? The answer, of course, is that the donations aren’t primarily motivated by concern for democracy and human rights at all. They go almost exclusively to organizations dealing in some way with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – or, to be precise, organizations striving in some way to get Israel to adopt the West’s recipe for solving it: ever more concessions to the Palestinians.
After 20 years in which repeated territorial concessions have brought only more terror rather than peace, most Israelis can no longer be persuaded to buy this nostrum. So instead, these foreign-funded NGOs work to drum up anti-Israel sentiment overseas in the hope of generating international pressure and sanctions on it (see, for instance, Breaking the Silence, which travels worldwide to accuse Israel of “war crimes” but refuses to cooperate with Israeli law enforcement agencies so its allegations could actually be investigated, or B’Tselem, which eagerly cooperated in UN efforts to smear Israel as a war criminal, inter alia, by supplying inflated statistics about civilian casualties). In other words, this money goes mainly toward trying to circumvent Israeli democracy by forcing its government to do something most voters oppose.
Despicable though this is from a democratic standpoint, it’s understandable from a foreign policy standpoint. Western countries believed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was the Mideast’s main problem, so focusing their resources on it made sense.
The problem, as recent events have amply proven, is that this belief was simply false. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict had nothing to do with the Syrian civil war, which has flooded Europe with refugees and created a power vacuum that the Islamic State has now filled with its terror-exporting “caliphate.” The Palestinian-Israeli conflict had nothing to do with the Libyan civil war, which is also flooding Europe with refugees and created another power vacuum that Islamic State is similarly moving to fill. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict had nothing to do with the Iraqi government’s exclusion of its Sunni citizens, which led them to view Islamic State as a protector and provide it with the initial base from which it later expanded. In short, this conflict had nothing to do with any of the real problems now preoccupying the West.
But those problems might not be the metastasizing crises they are had the West not spent decades ignoring all the region’s other patent ills in order to obsess over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Consider, for instance, what else could have been done with the 100 million euros a year which, according to NGO Monitor, is what foreign governments give to NGOs involved in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (Israeli, Palestinian and international). What if that money had instead been going for decades to NGOs promoting democracy, human rights, and good governance in places like Syria, Libya, and Iraq? Perhaps it wouldn’t have made any difference, but maybe it would have produced enough incremental change that the current meltdown of the Arab world could have been avoided.
The past can’t be rewritten, but it’s not too late to change the future. As Leibovitz and Troy argued, that will require taking attacks on Jews seriously and ending Western appeasement of Palestinian terror. But it will also require finally abandoning the myth of Palestinian centrality and focusing instead on the Mideast’s real problems. Diverting those millions of euros from Israeli NGOs to all the countries that really do need help with democracy and human rights might be an excellent way to start.
Originally published in Commentary on December 10, 2015
The deputy prime minister of Vietnam visited Israel on Wednesday, prompting Jerusalem Post reporter Herb Keinon to delve into some fascinating trade statistics. Bilateral trade between Israel and Vietnam totaled almost $1.1 billion last year, a fivefold increase in just five years, and is now more than double Israel’s trade with Austria and four times its trade with Norway. In fact, Keinon later tweeted, Israel’s trade with Vietnam now exceeds its trade with 21 of the European Union’s 28 member states. And Vietnam is just one country; Israeli trade with other Asian countries has also burgeoned. All of which goes to show that one of Israel’s biggest Achilles’ heels – its economic dependence on an increasingly hostile Europe – is swiftly disappearing.
Taken as a whole, the EU is still Israel’s largest trading partner, but its lead has been shrinking rapidly as Israeli trade with other parts of the globe expands. Moreover, many of the European countries most hostile to Israel are among its least important trading partners. Norway, Sweden, and Ireland, for instance, would star in any list of the most hostile countries, yet each of them conducts less trade with Israel than Vietnam does. In other words, the countries that are most hostile to Israel tend to be those with relatively little ability to cause it economic harm.
Israel has long since ceased to count on Europe for diplomatic support. In international forums, many European countries reflexively back even the most outrageous anti-Israel resolutions, while even Israel’s best friends in Europe rarely do more than abstain. This past May, for instance, every EU country voted for a UN resolution declaring Israel the world’s worst violator of health rights (perhaps they think Israeli hospitals should stop treating Syrian war victims or cancer patients from Hamas-run Gaza?).
Nor does Israel depend on Europe militarily. As Haaretz reporter Anshel Pfeffer pointed out after Britain threatened to suspend arms exports to Israel during last summer’s Gaza war, such threats are so old hat that Israel long ago dropped Britain as a major military supplier. Ditto for most other European countries (the two exceptions being Germany and Italy). Today, Israeli defense imports from Britain consist mostly of spare parts that it could easily obtain elsewhere if necessary.
Thus, the one stick Europe still has with which to threaten Israel is economic. And as the recent decision to impose discriminatory labeling requirements on Israel shows, the EU bureaucracy is increasingly seeking to wield this stick.
Israel obviously can and should push back against such measures, and it has already scored some successes against the labeling decision. Hungary, for instance, flatly announced it will ignore the directive; Greece has also come out against it; Germany’s ruling party has denounced it, as has the president of the German parliament; and when German department store KaDeWe hastened to apply the new directive, the resultant outcry forced it into humiliating retreat a day later. All this fits a pattern I’ve noted before: Elected politicians, whose voters expect them to produce economic growth, tend to be much less enthusiastic about economic sanctions against Israel than EU bureaucrats, who aren’t answerable to any electorate.
Nevertheless, EU bureaucrats still wield a great deal of power, and they are likely to come up with more anti-Israel measures in the future. Thus over the long term, Israel’s best defense is to sharply reduce its economic dependence on Europe. And as the trade statistics with Vietnam show, Israel is making rapid strides toward doing exactly that.
Originally published in Commentary on December 3, 2015
EU bureaucrats won’t like the comparison, but in one significant respect, the officials who approved discriminatory labeling requirements for Israeli products earlier this month bear a marked resemblance to the Palestinians who have been knifing Jews throughout Israel for weeks now. Clearly, there’s no similarity between labeling requirements and murder; the two aren’t remotely comparable. But the underlying attitude is remarkably similar: Neither the EU bureaucrats nor the Palestinian stabbers seem to care how many Palestinians they hurt as long as they can hurt a few Jews in the process.
Both the stabbings and the labeling promise to wreak havoc on the Palestinian economy – or to be more specific, on the ability of thousands of Palestinians to support themselves and their children. With regard to the violence, this ought to be self-evident. In an article earlier this month, for instance, reporter Brett Kline described the despondent mood in tourism-dependent Bethlehem now that clashes between slingshot-wielding Palestinians and Israeli soldiers have driven the tourists away. But the angriest comment, Kline reported, came from Hamadah, a construction foreman working in the Betar Ilit settlement:
He has just been informed that following the attempted stabbing of a soldier at the entrance to the settlement by a 22-year-old mother of two from Husan village across the road, work has been suspended indefinitely. And residents of Husan, home to thriving construction material depots and auto repair shops, cannot leave the village.
“What was she thinking,” he fumes, referring to the stabber. “Who the hell is she? … The woman is being fed in hospital. But how will I feed my family?
Indeed, the situation has gotten so bad that Palestinian businessmen in Hebron have begun trying to stop the violence on their own. And it could easily get worse. Last week, following a deadly attack in Tel Aviv perpetrated by a Palestinian who had just received a permit to work in Israel, the Israeli government suspended 1,200 other recently issued entry permits pending a security review. Should more permit-holders perpetrate attacks, Israel could eventually be driven to bar Palestinian laborers almost entirely, as it did during the second intifada. The impact on the Palestinian economy would be devastating: According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 92,000 Palestinians work in Israel (not including the settlements). That’s 13 percent of all employed Palestinians in the West Bank.
Yet the labeling requirement could prove almost as deadly for the West Bank economy, because for all the EU’s claims that it simply wants to “give consumers accurate information,” it’s obvious that the goal is to ultimately shut down Israeli businesses in the territories, either by making them unprofitable or simply by persuading owners that the new labeling rules are more hassle than relocating would be. Indeed, several companies have already reached that very conclusion in recent years, the most famous being SodaStream, which relocated from the West Bank to the Negev in September.
Israeli businesses in the territories, however, rely almost exclusively on Palestinian labor. Around 20,300 Palestinians are employed in the settlements, according to the PCBS; that’s almost 3 percent of the West Bank’s employed Palestinians. And other Palestinians work as suppliers to Israeli businesses. Thus every business closure or relocation throws hundreds of Palestinians out of work; the Israeli Foreign Ministry estimates that in total, 30,000 Palestinians could lose their jobs.
That price might be justifiable if Palestinians themselves considered it worth paying. But, in fact, they don’t. Just this past June, a poll commissioned by the Washington Institute found that fully 55 percent of West Bank residents wanted “to see Israeli companies offer more jobs inside” the West Bank (emphasis added).
Granted, both the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian NGOs back the EU’s move. But that’s because neither PA officials nor NGO officials have to worry about making a living; both enjoy lavish European funding.
Ordinary Palestinians, in contrast, do have to worry about how they’re going to feed their families. That’s why Shaher Saad, secretary general of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, publicly urged PA President Mahmoud Abbas to prevent the closure of Israeli industrial parks in the West Bank as long as no suitable employment alternatives exist: He was reflecting the views of the people he represents – ordinary workers.
K., a Palestinian employed by an Israeli date farm in the West Bank who says everyone in his village works for Israelis, summed up the problem succinctly in a recent newspaper interview:
“Labeling is a mistake, because workers will have a problem with it,” he said. “If products won’t be sold, where will we work? A marketing problem means a problem for us with employment.”
But for all the similarity in the economic impact of their actions, there’s one important difference between the knife-wielding Palestinians and the EU bureaucrats. The stabbers are overwhelmingly teenagers, and nobody seriously expects teenagers to think through the consequences of their actions. The EU bureaucrats, in contrast, are ostensibly responsible adults, who are supposed to know better.
Originally published in Commentary on November 25, 2015
In confronting the current onslaught of lone-wolf attacks, the tactics Israel has used successfully against terrorist organizations have so far proven ineffective. That begs the question of what it should be doing instead. I have no solutions for the short run, but there’s one obvious step Israel must take if it wishes to prevent attacks like these over the long run. That step emerges from two of the most salient features of the current violence: Permanent residents of Israel have committed a huge proportion of the attacks, but citizens of Israel have committed very few.
The permanent residents in question are mainly east Jerusalem Arabs, and they have committed more than eight times as many attacks as Arab citizens have, even though Arab citizens outnumber permanent residents by more than 4:1. This enormous gap certainly can’t be explained by the popular fallacy that terror is motivated mainly by economic concerns; as permanent residents, east Jerusalem Arabs enjoy the same access to jobs, the same freedom of movement throughout Israel and the same health and welfare benefits that citizens do. Granted, Arab citizens are generally better off, but the difference isn’t dramatic enough to explain the dramatic gap in terrorist activity.
There is, however, one difference quite dramatic enough to explain this gap: Whereas Arab citizens study the Israeli curriculum in school, most of East Jerusalem’s permanent residents study the Palestinian Authority curriculum. And that curriculum, as sweeping reports by both Palestinian Media Watch and IMPACT-SE have detailed, is filled with vile anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement.
Inter alia, as PMW’s report notes, this curriculum rejects the legitimacy of Israel’s existence (textbooks refer to “the so-called State of Israel”), justifies violence against it, defines such violence as a religious obligation and informs students that Jews and Zionists are irredeemably evil (one book, for instance, refers to “the robbing Jews”; another tells students that Israel “killed your children, split open your women’s bellies, held your revered elderly men by the beard, and led them to the death pits”). These messages are then reinforced by the “educational” programs broadcast on the PA’s official media, where Jews are described as “monkeys and pigs,” “enemies of Allah” and the “most evil of creations,” among other charming epithets.
East Jerusalem schools have been using the PA curriculum, with Israel’s consent, ever since the PA’s establishment in 1994. In other words, Israel decided two decades ago to let the PA indoctrinate a generation of East Jerusalem schoolchildren to abominate Israel – and now it’s shocked that the graduates of this indoctrination are going out and trying to murder Israelis.
The PA curriculum obviously isn’t the only problem; the PA also contributes to the climate of incitement that drives these attacks in many other ways, including statements by its senior officials, broadcasts by its official media organs and Facebook posts by its political parties. Nor can this incitement be excused as a response to despair over the frozen peace process: This is how the PA chose to “educate” its people even in the heyday of the Oslo process when most of the world believed peace was at hand.
But completely ending the PA’s massive incitement campaign would essentially require turning the clock back to the days before Oslo – eliminating the PA, deporting its officials, shutting down its media organs, banning its political parties and removing its curriculum from the schools. And though Israel may be driven to such drastic measures someday, it’s hard to see that happening right now.
In contrast, East Jerusalem is officially under full Israeli control even according to the Oslo Accords, so there’s no impediment to altering its school curriculum. Moreover, this is in many ways an opportune time to do so. Over the past few years, there has been a sharp rise in the number of East Jerusalem Arabs seeking to take the Israeli matriculation exam rather than the Palestinian one and a surge of interest among Jerusalem Arabs in bettering their Hebrew. Thus, the move is liable to meet less opposition than it would have a few years ago when East Jerusalem Arabs showed little interest in integration.
But opportune or not, Israel must replace the east Jerusalem curriculum if it wants to avoid future rounds of violence like the current one. It’s too late to do anything about the current generation of East Jerusalem Arabs; they’ve already been thoroughly indoctrinated to the view that Israel is evil incarnate. But it’s not too late to prevent the PA from brainwashing another generation of children.
Originally published in Commentary on November 24, 2015
I’ve been slowly wading through the 106-page magazine Haaretz put out in honor of its Israel Conference on Peace earlier this month. It contains articles by 50 Israeli, Palestinian and Western contributors, most of whom recite the same talking points veteran peace processors have used for years. But one new argument that has cropped up repeatedly underscores the degree to which the “peace industry” completely disregards historical fact: the claim that the recent wave of Palestinian attacks “proves” a Palestinian state is necessary for Israel’s security. The truth is that for all the horror of the current violence, a simple comparison with the second intifada shows that Israel suffered far more when Palestinians actually controlled their own territory.
Over the last 53 days, Palestinians have killed 20 Israelis and wounded 182. If this pace continued for a year, the number of fatalities would total 138, one of the highest annual death tolls due to terror in Israel’s history. So it’s understandable that people might think things could hardly be worse – until you consider that this projected annual total is roughly equivalent to the number of Israelis killed during a single month of the second intifada (March 2002, with 134 dead).
Altogether, Palestinians killed 452 Israelis in the worst year of that intifada (2002), along with over 200 in both the preceding and following years; thousands of other Israelis were wounded. And there’s one major reason why the death toll then was so much higher than it is now: Sizable chunks of the West Bank were under full Palestinian control as a result of the Oslo Accords. Israeli troops never entered those areas, which consequently served as safe havens where terrorist groups could plan and train for attacks, build bombs and do all the other work necessary to prepare the kind of mass-casualty attacks that were the second intifada’s hallmark.
That’s why the death toll began dropping dramatically once the Israel Defense Forces reasserted control over these areas in mid-2002: The security services spent the next several years systematically collecting intelligence about terrorist organizations and using it to degrade their capabilities, with the result that Israeli fatalities dropped by around 50 percent a year in each of the next five years – from 452 in 2002 to 208 in 2003, 117 in 2004, 56 in 2005, 30 in 2006 and 13 in 2007. And that’s also why the current violence hasn’t included any mass-casualty attacks: Since the IDF still controls the West Bank, it has been able to thwart terrorist organizations’ efforts to perpetrate them.
The current violence has thus relied mainly on lone-wolf attacks. These are harder to prevent, but they’re also less deadly.
Hence even though the current situation is poor, a return to the days of the second intifada would hardly be an improvement. And a Palestinian state would necessarily entail returning to the very situation that made the second intifada possible – an IDF withdrawal from much of the West Bank.
Elsewhere in the world, even ardent proponents of a Palestinian state seem to understand the importance of not letting terrorists control territory. Earlier this month, for instance, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen argued that in the wake of the terror attacks in Paris, the West must eliminate ISIS’s “stronghold in Syria and Iraq,” because terrorists “cannot be allowed any longer to control territory on which they are able to organize, finance, direct and plan their savagery.” But when it comes to Israel, people like Cohen somehow seem to feel this principle no longer applies.
Yet this basic truth is no less true for Palestinian terrorists, and it was inscribed on Israeli hearts in blood during the second intifada: Denying terrorists a territorial base won’t eliminate terror, but granting them a territorial base will ensure the terror escalates by orders of magnitude. Thus bad as the current situation is for Israel, the alternative of a Palestinian state would be much, much worse.
Originally published in Commentary on November 23, 2015
Back in June, Connecticut College philosophy professor Andrew Pessin proposed going on the offensive against the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement by responding to every BDS proposal with a similar proposal targeting the Palestinian Authority’s terrorism, corruption, and human rights violations. I think it’s time to expand this terrific idea to the European Union following last week’s atrocious decision to apply special labeling requirements to Israeli produce of the West Bank, Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem. As a first step, I propose a worldwide campaign to label the produce of Spanish-occupied Catalonia and the Basque Country – not merely because these occupations have been around since long before the State of Israel was born, but because in contrast to Israel’s repeated efforts to negotiate solutions to its territorial disputes, the Spanish government has refused to even consider negotiating over Catalonian and Basque demands for independence.
In Catalonia, which has been occupied by Spain for hundreds of years (aside from a few brief interruptions), pro-independence parties currently control a majority of the provincial parliament. Nevertheless, the Spanish government adamantly rejected their plea to negotiate over their grievances.
Last year, Catalonia sought to hold a referendum on independence, but Spain’s Constitutional Court squelched the idea; consequently, the province had to make do with a nonbinding vote. Since standing in line to cast a meaningless ballot isn’t a terribly attractive proposition, turnout was unsurprisingly low (an estimated 37 to 41 percent). But a whopping 81 percent of those who did participate in the vote backed independence, reinforcing the impression left by an astounding demonstration in 2013 in which hundreds of thousands of Catalonians formed a 400-kilometer-long human chain to demand independence.
Earlier this month, an absolute majority of the Catalonian parliament passed legislation to begin the process of breaking away from Spain. But this legislation, too, was promptly suspended by Spain’s Constitutional Court.
In short, Catalonia has repeatedly sought to obtain independence from Spain by peaceful means. Yet the Spanish government has squelched every such effort.
In the Basque Country, an absolute majority of the Basque provincial legislature approved a bill calling for self-determination back in 2003, but Spain’s national parliament wouldn’t even discuss the issue. In 2008, the Basque parliament decided to hold a referendum on self-determination, but the Spanish Constitutional Court ruled that the vote couldn’t go ahead, just as it did in Catalonia’s case.
The Basque Nationalist Party appealed this decision to the European Court of Human Rights, but that court upheld the Spanish court’s ruling. Thus, it isn’t just Spain; the EU as a whole has been complicit in squelching the Basques’ desire for self-determination. Nevertheless, the Basques haven’t abandoned this desire; they periodically stage pro-independence demonstrations, and the province’s elected premier, inspired by Catalonia’s efforts, recently said he wants to make another stab at a referendum.
Incidentally, many pro-independence parties in the Basque Country haven’t even been allowed to run for office; Batasuna in 2003, EHAK in 2008, D3M in 2009 and Sortu in 2011 were all banned by Spain’s Supreme Court on the grounds that they had links with the Basque terrorist organization ETA. Yet Spain’s (justified) refusal to tolerate ties with terrorist organizations at home has never stopped it from demanding Israeli negotiations with and concessions to the PLO, whose various factions all proudly maintain “armed wings,” aka terrorist organizations.
The contrast between Spain’s treatment of Catalonian and Basque demands for independence and Israel’s treatment of Palestinian demands for independence couldn’t be starker. Whereas Spain adamantly refuses even to negotiate on the issue and has repeatedly squelched efforts to hold referendums, Israel has repeatedly offered the Palestinians a state in most of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem; it’s the Palestinians who have rejected these offers. Israel also actually withdrew from Gaza and parts of the West Bank to further the Palestinians’ quest for independence, whereas Spain has yet to vacate an inch of Catalonia or the Basque Country
Moreover, Israel has done all this despite rampant Palestinian terror throughout the years since the “peace process” began in 1993. In contrast, the Catalonian independence movement has never engaged in terror, while ETA has killed fewer people in almost five decades of activity than Palestinian terrorists did during the second intifada of 2000-05 alone, and has carried out no attacks at all since 2011. In other words, Israel would have far more excuse for intransigence than Spain does, because a Palestinian state shows every sign of being a real security threat to Israel, whereas Catalonia and the Basque country pose no comparable threat to Spain.
Israel also negotiated repeatedly with Syria on a land-for-peace deal in the Golan Heights. It was Syria’s meltdown into civil war that ultimately ended those negotiations.
It’s no secret that the EU’s labeling decision is a piece of unmitigated anti-Israel bias. As Prof. Eugene Kontorovich concisely explained in last week’s New York Times, it blatantly contradicts the EU’s own policy on other territorial disputes worldwide, as well as World Trade Organization rules and national court rulings in various European countries.
But if the EU believes labeling is the way to go, then the obvious place to start is at home. So it’s high time to begin labeling the produce of Spanish-occupied Catalonia and the Basque Country – two areas that, based on their track records, would be far more peaceful, productive members of the international community than a Palestinian state ever would.
Originally published in Commentary on November 19, 2015
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 idea that the recent wave of Palestinian terror is an understandable (albeit reprehensible) response to Israeli actions appears to be gaining currency among liberal Jews. After Peter Beinart propounded a layman’s version of this theory last week in a Los Angeles speech, sociology professor Samuel Heilman dressed it up in academic jargon for a Haaretz op-ed this week. The theory has many problems, and Jonathan Tobin discussed several of them in his post on Tuesday. But I’d like to add one more: It completely fails to explain why other ethnic groups in comparable situations haven’t responded with periodic outbreaks of vicious violence. The fact that this Palestinian response is far from universal argues that it stems not from their “relative deprivation,” to quote Heilman’s learned phrase, but from something specific to Palestinian culture and attitudes.
Heilman defines “relative deprivation” as “the discontent or deprivation people feel when they compare their positions to others around and like them and realize that in comparison to them they have less of what they believe themselves to be entitled than those around them,” and says it “perfectly describe[s] Palestinians under occupation.” Thus far, his argument is uncontroversial. Palestinians undoubtedly do compare themselves to Israel, and this comparison is undoubtedly frustrating. By almost any yardstick – national sovereignty, civil liberties, democracy, economic welfare – Israelis have a better life than Palestinians do.
Where the argument breaks down is his assertion that this frustration naturally leads them to “explode and strike at anything that walks down the Jewish street.” Or as Beinart put it, that “today’s Palestinian terrorism is a monstrous, demented response to Israel’s denial of basic Palestinian rights.” For if that is true, comparable situations elsewhere in the world should have produced comparable outbreaks of violence. And they haven’t.
Take, for instance, Tibet, which has been occupied by China since 1951 – longer than Israel has controlled the West Bank. The occupation certainly hasn’t brought prosperity to Tibet, which has the highest poverty rate in China. Moreover, Beijing has sought to eradicate Tibetan culture and religion, a process that reached its climax when the government asserted the right to choose the next Panchen Lama, the second-highest post in Tibetan Buddhism’s religious hierarchy. Israel, by contrast, scrupulously respects Palestinians’ religious freedom. Finally, there has been such an influx of Han Chinese settlers into Tibet that ethnic Tibetans are now a minority in “greater Tibet,” whereas Palestinians, despite Israel’s much-hyped settlement activity, remain an overwhelming majority in the West Bank.
So by the Heilman/Beinart standard, one would expect Tibetans to respond to their relative deprivation by launching periodic waves of vicious violence against the Chinese. And yet, that hasn’t happened. Instead, there has been a wave of self-immolations, and even those have been few and far between. According to the International Campaign for Tibet, 143 Tibetans have set themselves on fire as an act of protest since February 2009 – a shocking figure, but spread out over almost seven years. By comparison, there have been 65 Palestinian stabbing attacks in the last six weeks alone.
In short, something in Tibet’s culture or leadership caused Tibetans to respond very differently to “relative deprivation” than Palestinians have.
Alternatively, consider the American civil rights movement. American blacks in the mid-20th century undoubtedly suffered relative deprivation. Despite being American citizens, southern blacks were often denied basic rights like the right to vote and subjected to segregated buses, schools, parks and water fountains, and of course, they were also far poorer than whites. Thus by the Heilman/Beinart standard, one would have expected them to respond with periodic waves of vicious violence against American whites.
Yet that didn’t happen. There were occasional violent riots, but there were no mass waves of stabbings, shootings or suicide bombings by blacks. Instead, the civil rights movement opted for nonviolent civil disobedience. Something in mid-20th century American black culture or leadership caused American blacks to respond very differently than Palestinians have.
Nor is it hard to figure out what this “something” is. The Tibetans’ revered spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, tirelessly preaches nonviolence. Black civil rights leaders, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., also tirelessly preached nonviolence. And these messages were reinforced by other civil-society institutions, first and foremost Tibetan monasteries and black churches.
In contrast, Palestinian culture is steeped in support for violence and loathing for Jews and Israelis, as Daniel Polisar pointed out in a sweeping analysis of Palestinian opinion polls for Mosaic Magazine this month. Palestinian clerics, political officials and media outlets routinely denigrate Jews as “apes and pigs,” glorify terror attacks (see, for instance, here, here and here) and actively incite to violence (see, for instance, here or here). And that’s in the “moderate” Palestinian Authority. Hamas, needless to say, is even worse (like the Gaza cleric who urged young Palestinians to “cut Jews into body parts”).
Relative deprivation may goad people to react, but whether they react constructively or destructively is entirely their own choice. Palestinians could have chosen to emulate U.S. civil rights leaders and respond constructively to their relative deprivation – for instance, by accepting one of Israel’s repeated offers of statehood. That they have chosen instead to respond with repeated outbursts of vicious violence has nothing whatsoever to do with anything Israel has done, and everything to do with their own culture and leadership.
Originally published in Commentary on November 11, 2015
It’s hard to find any silver lining in a situation where Palestinians are perpetrating multiple stabbing attacks against Jews every day, and most of the “international community” is siding with the perpetrators. Yet this dismal situation may finally have produced something Israel desperately needs: An Israeli Arab political leader who represents his community’s sane majority. The 65 percent who are proud to be Israeli, the 55 percent who identify with the Israeli flag, the ones who genuinely want to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors.
For decades, Israeli Arab leadership at the national level has been an unmitigated disaster. The community’s current Knesset members, elected on a joint ticket called the Joint Arab List, span the gamut from the “moderate” Ayman Odeh to the “firebrand” Hanin Zoabi, to borrow the media’s favorite misnomers. The former merely refuses to condemn Palestinian terror, saying, “I cannot tell the nation how to struggle … I do not put red lines on the Arab Palestinian nation.” The latter may face criminal investigation for actively inciting it, having allegedly told a Hamas publication that the current terror needs more “national support,” because “If individual attacks continue without national support, they will be extinguished within the next several days, and therefore hundreds of thousands are needed to start a real intifada.” In between are MKs who spew a wide variety of anti-Israel libels; my personal favorite was Ahmed Tibi’s 2014 op-ed in The Hill claiming that Israeli Arabs are subject to Jim Crow treatment – signed, without a trace of irony, by his then-title of deputy speaker of the Knesset.
Clearly, this is terrible for Jewish-Arab relations, and the Arab community suffers doubly: Not only do their MKs spend most of their time and effort promoting such libels rather than trying to solve their community’s real problems, the antagonism they generate among the Jewish majority actively hinders solutions. First, it’s hard to lobby the government for, say, better bus service while simultaneously accusing it of apartheid and genocide. Even worse, such rhetoric encourages many Jews to view all Israeli Arabs as enemies to be shunned: After all, Israeli Arabs have overwhelmingly voted to reelect these same MKs for decades, giving this conclusion an obvious logic.
But in recent years, this logic has increasingly been contradicted by other polling data, like the figures I cited in the first paragraph. Particularly telling was a poll published in February regarding Arab attitudes toward their own MKs. It showed that 70 percent wanted their MKs to focus on their own community’s socioeconomic problems instead of the Palestinian cause. Additionally, 61 percent wanted their MKs to join the government, where they would have more influence over such issues, and almost half that figure favored joining regardless of who became prime minister (the Joint Arab List, by contrast, vowed before the election not to join any government). Unsurprisingly, therefore, almost half the respondents weren’t happy with their own MKs.
So why do they keep reelecting them? It’s classic minority identity politics. Whereas the well-integrated Druze vote for, and serve as MKs from, parties across the political spectrum, Israeli Arab integration is still nascent. Consequently, however much they loathe their own MKs, most Arabs don’t feel comfortable voting for a non-Arab party; they’re skeptical that Jews could understand or really care about their community’s special problems.
What’s desperately needed, therefore, is home-grown Arab leadership that not only wants to represent the sane Arab majority and advance its integration, but also has the guts and the political power to take on the existing Arab parties. And despite a growing cadre of local leaders who indeed favor coexistence over confrontation, none had been willing to publicly challenge the national leadership – until Nazareth Mayor Ali Salem erupted on the stage this week.
Last March, Salem ousted Nazareth’s long-time mayor in a landslide, winning 61.5 percent of the vote in an election with record turnout of 83.8 percent. The former mayor, a Christian, belonged to the abovementioned Ayman Odeh’s party and toed its anti-Israel line. Salem, a Muslim, also began his political career in that party, but later quit in disgust and ran for mayor as an independent. The fact that he was both willing and able to challenge the Arab political establishment proved a harbinger of things to come.
This week, when Odeh visited Nazareth, Salem confronted his inflammatory behavior head-on – and on live TV. “Get out of here! Go back to Haifa, and stop destroying our city,” Salem yelled. “Jews don’t come here anymore because of you! … You’re burning the world down. … Shut up and get out!”
When Odeh, embarrassed, demanded that the television crew stop filming, Salem promptly demanded the opposite; he wanted his remarks to be widely heard. And lest there be any doubt, he gave several follow-up interviews reiterating his views.
“I blame the [Israeli Arab] leaders,” he told Army Radio. “They are destroying our future, they are destroying coexistence. We need to find a way to live together. We cannot fight like this. We are damaging ourselves.”
And in a conversation with reporters, he explained, “It infuriates me that Arab politicians come here, incite violence, and leave us to clean up their mess … We invest a great deal in coexistence and tourism. We want to develop our city. I want peace and quiet. … We used to have thousands of Jews and tourists visit Nazareth over the weekends. They don’t visit anymore. This seriously hurts our image and our livelihood, and we won’t allow it.”
Other prominent Arab Israelis are also speaking out. Television presenter Lucy Aharish, for instance, gave a must-see interview with Channel 2 television in which she demolished the idea that the terror had any conceivable justification and accused Israeli Arab political and religious leaders of fanning the flames: “You are inciting thousands of young people to go the streets. You are destroying their future with your own hands!” She and other Israeli Arab notables have also signed a petition denouncing terror and promoting coexistence.
But a real turnabout in Jewish-Arab relations will require a different Israeli Arab political leadership. And Salem offers hope that such a leadership might finally be emerging.
Originally published in Commentary on October 16, 2015
John Kerry’s speech at Harvard University on Wednesday and the State Department’s subsequent series of walk-backs left me with one clear conclusion: Israel ought to start building massively in the settlements and change the status quo on the Temple Mount. Because if it’s going to be blamed for doing both even when it is, in fact, doing neither, it should at least get the very real benefits that taking those steps would entail.
First, a word on those benefits: On the Mount, the status quo grossly violates Jewish rights. Jews are forbidden to pray at Judaism’s holiest site, and even acts as simple as shedding a tear are deemed “praying.” They also suffer nonstop harassment when visiting without praying. That the Jewish state discriminates against Jews in this way is simply a travesty.
As for settlement construction, Israel is suffering a severe housing crisis; an average apartment currently costs 146 average monthly salaries, up from just 43 in 2008. The primary shortages are in greater Tel Aviv, where little land is available for new housing, and Jerusalem, whose main land reserves are in the eastern section. Indeed, the capital loses about 18,000 Jews every year, and those leaving cite the housing shortage as their primary reason. But the settlement blocs that would remain Israeli under any conceivable agreement are all within reasonable commute of either Tel Aviv or Jerusalem; hence massive building in those blocs, along with Jewish neighborhoods of east Jerusalem, could significantly alleviate the housing crisis. Moreover, given the international community’s refusal to support Israel’s claims to any area not so heavily populated that evacuation is impractical, bolstering the population of areas Israel wants to keep would strengthen its position in future negotiations.
Thus unless restricting settlement construction and maintaining the status quo on the Mount genuinely contribute to Israel’s security or international support, there’s no upside to doing either. Which brings us to Kerry.
In his Harvard address, Kerry said, “there’s been a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years, and now you have this violence because there’s a frustration that is growing.” The statement would be outrageous even had this “massive increase” actually occurred, given the implication that building houses in contested areas is sufficient justification for a spree of Palestinian stabbing attacks against Israeli civilians. And someone at State evidently realized that, because spokesman John Kirby quickly tried to retract it.
“The secretary wasn’t saying, well now you have the settlement activity as the cause for the effect we’re seeing,” he asserted. “Is it a source of frustration for Palestinians? You bet it is, and the secretary observed that. But this isn’t about affixing blame on either side here for the violence.”
Yet Kirby didn’t retract Kerry’s claim of “massive” settlement activity, which is a blatant lie. As I detailed here last year, settlement construction under Benjamin Netanyahu has been lower than under any previous prime minister. And the very day of Kerry’s speech, the far-left Israeli daily Haaretz – not a paper suspected of any sympathy for the settlements – published a news report confirming this fact.
“Since Netanyahu became prime minister in 2009, there has been less construction activity in the settlements than under any other prime minister since 1995,” Haaretz declared, and then gave the figures to prove it: From 2009-2014, an average of 1,554 homes a year were built in the settlements, compared to 1,774 under Ehud Olmert, 1,881 under Ariel Sharon, about 5,000 under Ehud Barak, and almost 3,000 during Netanyahu’s first term in 1996-9. In fact, Haaretz reported, fully 74 percent of the growth in the number of settlers under Netanyahu stemmed solely from natural increase (births minus deaths). The only way to stop that would be to institute a Chinese-style forced abortion policy – presumably not something State would espouse.
But despite this restraint, which has outraged Netanyahu’s base, he is still routinely accused by mainstream media and governments worldwide of “massive” settlement construction that justifies Palestinian terror. And even Kirby’s attempted walk-back reinforced this message: Despite saying that settlement activity isn’t the “cause” of the violence, he still refused to blame “either side” for its eruption; the clear implication was that Palestinians can’t be blamed for stabbing sprees against Israelis because they suffer from justified “frustration” over settlement activity.
Then, as if this poor excuse for a retraction weren’t bad enough, Kirby introduced several new smears against Israel. Inter alia, he accused it of “what many would consider excessive use of force”; naturally, American police would never shoot a knife-wielding terrorist in mid-rampage. The most astounding, however, was his claim that Israel had violated the status quo on the Temple Mount.
“Certainly, the status quo has not been observed, which has led to a lot of the violence,” he said. In short, he endorsed the Palestinian narrative that the stabbings are due to justified grievance over Jewish “violations” of the status quo.
Later, he tweeted a “clarification from today’s briefing: I did not intend to suggest that status quo at Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif has been broken.” But the very fact that he initially said it makes it clear that many American officials buy this Palestinian narrative. This conclusion is bolstered by the fact that Washington has never objected to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s propagation of this inflammatory falsehood, inter alia in his UN address last month and a speech Wednesday night.
Thus even though Israel has curtailed settlement construction and upheld the status quo on the Mount, much of the world – including the U.S. administration – is accusing it of doing the opposite, and then treating Palestinian terror as an understandable, justifiable response to these alleged crimes. In other words, Israel is reaping no diplomatic benefits for taking these steps. And in that case, why on earth should it continue incurring the costs?
Originally published in Commentary on October 15, 2015 under the headline “Israel’s Diminishing Returns”