Peace Process
Last summer’s war in Gaza ended with most Palestinians gleefully proclaiming a smashing victory and most Israelis disgruntled at how little the war achieved. Just shy of one year later, however, a truer picture has emerged: Hamas, at least, is under no illusions about who won and who lost. In fact, according to two separate reports last week, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas’s full name) recently admitted that it can’t afford another bout of “resistance” like that anytime soon.
The London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat quoted sources in Gaza as saying another war is inconceivable unless Hamas acquires anti-aircraft missiles. And while the sources neglected to say so, that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon thanks to Egypt’s crackdown on arms smuggling from Sinai into Gaza.
The sources attributed this decision to what they described as massive civilian casualties caused by Israel’s aerial bombings. Hamas, they declared, was surprised by Israel’s willingness to target members of its military wing even when they were hiding among civilians. But that’s a disingenuous explanation even if you buy Hamas’s claim of massive civilian casualties (which I don’t), because according to Hamas itself, those casualties began on the war’s very first day. Thus, had this really been its concern, it wouldn’t have rejected or violated no fewer than 11 cease-fires before finally accepting an unconditional truce on day 50. And its claim to have reached this realization only in the war’s final days could be credible only if its claim of massive civilian casualties during all the preceding weeks was false.
Consequently, I suspect the explanation senior Hamas officials gave Haaretz is more accurate. They, too, said Hamas didn’t intend to start another war unless it found a way to neutralize Israel’s aerial superiority. But they also cited the fact that the war ended up achieving nothing.
Throughout the fighting, Hamas promised its people that even though they were suffering, it would be worth it: The international community would rebuild their homes and grant massive development aid; Gaza’s borders with both Israel and Egypt would be opened wide; Gaza would get an airport and seaport. But in reality, none of this has happened.
International aid has largely failed to materialize, and as one recent poll shows, Gaza residents blame this mainly on Hamas. Reconstruction work has barely begun. The Egyptian border remains tightly sealed. No airport or seaport is on the horizon. Israel’s naval blockade remains in place. Indeed, the only positive change has been a modest easing of restrictions at the land border with Israel. And that simply isn’t enough to justify the devastation the war wreaked on Gaza.
Just how unpopular this has made the prospect of another war is evident from another finding of the poll mentioned above: Though a whopping 84 percent of Gazans support “armed struggle” against Israel in principle, an identical proportion – 83 percent – want Hamas to maintain a cease-fire with Israel in both Gaza and the West Bank. In the West Bank, where 56 percent support “armed struggle” in principle, 74 percent want Hamas to maintain a cease-fire in both areas.
Hamas, of course, insists it wasn’t defeated; it’s just switching tactics. Al-Hayat’s sources said the group will henceforth focus on terror attacks from the West Bank, but that’s hardly a major threat: Most Hamas attempts to perpetrate major attacks in the West Bank in recent years have fizzled, because, having made itself a danger to both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, its operatives there are now under relentless pressure from both. Haaretz’s sources said that Hamas’s recent diplomatic successes – its leader was recently invited to both Riyadh and Moscow – have convinced it to focus on diplomacy for now. But that could end up being a net gain for Israel: The Riyadh meeting has already sparked a crisis between Hamas and Iran, which is a far more dangerous patron from Israel’s perspective.
In short, despite these sops to Hamas’s pride, the organization that declared a great victory a year ago is now effectively acknowledging that it suffered a massive defeat. And that’s good news for Israel, the Palestinians, and anyone else who cares about preventing death and destruction on both sides.
In his post earlier today, Michael Rubin voiced concern that “the desire to ban rather than debate,” once a fringe phenomenon, is increasingly “infiltrating the mainstream.” But that shouldn’t surprise anyone, because the two primary sources free societies depend on to educate and inform them – teachers and journalists – increasingly view their own job not as educating and informing, but as censoring any information that contradicts their preferred narratives. This is particularly evident when it comes to Israel, as a few recent examples demonstrate. But as the old truism goes, what starts with the Jews never ends there.
One salient example is last month’s BBC documentary, “Children of the Gaza War,” which includes Arabic-language interviews with English subtitles. But as the Jewish Chronicle noted, reporter Lyse Doucet consistently and deliberately mistranslated the word yahud, meaning “Jew,” as “Israeli.”
Doucet defended herself by saying her Gazan translators told her “Israeli” would be more accurate, and I’m sure they did. Foreign media fixers in Gaza are all approved by Hamas, and Hamas isn’t stupid; it knows accusations against “Israelis” sound much better overseas than accusations against “Jews” would. It’s the same PR savvy Hamas showed when it ordered all Palestinian casualties of last summer’s war dubbed “civilians,” even if they were combatants.
The problem is that Doucet thereby opted to conceal important information from her viewers: Gaza is run by a viciously anti-Semitic organization whose founding charter explicitly calls for massacring Jews, and which propagates its anti-Semitic doctrines to children in schools and mosques throughout Gaza. Why did this information have to be censored? Because it undermines the media’s narrative that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is Israel’s fault: If people understood how widespread Palestinian anti-Semitism is, they might wonder how exactly Israel is supposed to make peace.
Or take another BBC program that aired on America’s National Public Radio last month. Discussing the Iranian nuclear deal, host Razia Iqbal told her stunned Israeli interviewee, “But you’re not under threat by Iran. Nobody in Iran has threatened you for a very long time. You’re harking back to a time when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatened Israel directly.”
In a blistering response detailing several recent Iranian threats to annihilate Israel, David Harris of the AJC questioned whether Iqbal’s astounding untruth stemmed from “ignorance or ill will, or both.” But it doesn’t actually matter whether Iqbal lied deliberately or simply refused to investigate the truth of Israel’s claims; the motive is the same: The media’s narrative is that the Iran deal is good and Israel has no justified grounds for opposing it. Thus any information that might support Israel’s arguments must be suppressed.
And the education system is no better than the media. Just last week, British Jews lodged a complaint against the country’s largest teachers union over a new “educational program” detailing “the daily struggles experienced by Palestinian children as they try to gain an education” while “living under military occupation.” The National Union of Teachers and Edukid, the charity that helped create the program, both insisted they sought to remain neutral in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But as critics pointed out, the program makes no mention of the daily struggles of Israeli children trying to gain an education while under rocket fire from Gaza.
Again, this isn’t an innocent omission; it’s deliberate censorship designed to make sure British schoolchildren imbibe the narrative that NUT – which endorses anti-Israel boycotts – wants to sell them: There isn’t a conflict with two sides here; there’s just evil Israel oppressing innocent Palestinians.
Nor is this problem confined to British educators. Just this spring, American Jews were up in arms over an “educational program” about the conflict produced by Axis of Hope, an organization affiliated with Boston University, that’s used in U.S. high schools. Inter alia, the program omits any mention of Hamas suicide bombings – which is no surprise, since Axis of Hope’s founder claims that Hamas has “chosen to support change … by more peaceful means than intifada.” Censoring information about Hamas terror is obviously essential to promoting this narrative.
Such censorship is a blatant betrayal of trust by the journalists and educators on whom free societies depend for information. But it also shows, once again, that anti-Semitism harms the surrounding society no less than it harms the Jews. Censorship about Israel has been the accepted norm among liberal elites for a long time now. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone to discover that the rot is now spreading to other topics and other segments of society as well.
Originally published in Commentary on August 5, 2015
According to a front-page story in today’s Haaretz, everything you thought you knew about the Jewish terrorists suspected of perpetrating last week’s horrific murder of a Palestinian baby is wrong. The accepted wisdom, propagated by everyone from Israeli President Reuven Rivlin to Haaretz’s own editorial pages, is that the terrorists are motivated by a “climate of incitement,” in which extremist statements by right-wing rabbis and politicians lead them to believe that anything, even murder, is permissible to achieve their goals. But Israel’s premier counterterrorism agency – which, unlike espousers of the accepted wisdom, has spent years studying the terrorists up close – doesn’t buy it.
These few dozen hardcore terrorists, the Shin Bet security service told Haaretz, heed neither rabbis nor politicians; they are “anarchist anti-Zionists” who consider even “extremist” rabbis too moderate. Moreover, their goal isn’t to promote Jewish settlement or stop territorial withdrawals or any other goal shared by the “extremist” rabbis and politicians; rather, it’s to overthrow the State of Israel itself and replace it with a religious “kingdom.” In this, they differ fundamentally even from the “price-tag” vandals, whose goal was limited to deterring house demolitions in the settlements and whose tactics – albeit completely unacceptable – were generally confined to vandalism, “with no clear intention to cause bodily harm.”
In other words, these terrorists don’t reflect a widespread “sickness” in Israeli society, as Rivlin likes to say; they are no more representative of mainstream Israel than neo-Nazi fringe groups are of mainstream modern Germany – and perhaps even less.
So how racist and extremist is mainstream Israeli society? Well, consider the following collection of news items from the last few days alone:
- The OECD just issued a report praising Israel’s efforts to increase Arab employment, though noting that much remains to be done.
- Israeli government figures show a sharp rise in the workforce participation rate among Arab women over the last 20 years, from 19 percent to 32.5 percent.
- The Economy Ministry just inaugurated special scholarships for Bedouin engineering students, the latest in a series of affirmative action programs for the Arab community. Under another program, the government funds 85 percent of research at Arab high-tech startups, compared to only 50 percent at Jewish startups.
- The government recently started investing in tourism development in Arab communities; inter alia, it sponsored Ramadan events in various Arab towns this year and ran a nationwide campaign encouraging Jews to visit them. As Ron Gerlitz, co-executive director of Sikkuy – the Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality, noted, this doesn’t erase past discrimination, but “On the symbolic plane, this represents a significant step forward in government policy.”
- The Druze Arab town of Beit Jann had the highest pass rate in the country on the 2013-14 matriculation exams.
- Salah Hasarma just became the first Arab coach of a Jewish soccer team in Israel’s top league.
- While a few Israeli Arabs have joined Islamic State, they aren’t flocking to do so at the same rate as Arabs from other Western countries. This, argues Prof. Hillel Frisch of Bar-Ilan University, indicates that Israeli Arabs are less dissatisfied with their lives than Arabs in many European countries – or at least, more aware of how lucky they are not to be living in the chaotic hell across the border.
To understand why the above news items are so important, consider a Biblical analogy I heard from rabbi and journalist Yishai Fleisher last week. When the king of Moab wants the prophet Balaam to curse the Jewish people, he deliberately takes him to a place where “you will not see them all, but only the outskirts of their camp” (Numbers 23:13). Why? Because when you focus exclusively on one tiny fringe element of Israel, it’s easy to curse it. But when you see the whole of Israel in all its complexity, it’s much harder.
In this case, the tiny fringe is perpetrating horrific attacks on Arabs in an effort to overthrow the state. But the state it seeks to overthrow is investing heavily in trying to better integrate its Arab citizens and rectify past discrimination against them.
And if you’re going to choose a single part of Israel’s mosaic to represent the whole, the mainstream that promotes integration is surely a more representative piece than a lunatic fringe trying to overthrow the state.
Originally published in Commentary on August 3, 2015
Israel marked the 10th anniversary of its unilateral pullout from Gaza this week with a rare consensus: The disengagement was a disaster. Even opposition leader and Labor Party chairman Isaac Herzog admitted that “from a security perspective, the disengagement was a mistake. While he still considers it “essential” demographically, he isn’t sure he would have voted for it had he known then what he knows now. And this is the man who, back in 2005, declared that, thanks to the disengagement, “for the first time in decades there is genuine hope” for “lasting peace.”
Equally remarkable was a poll of Israeli Jews earlier this month asking whether they supported or opposed the pullout at the time. An overwhelming majority of respondents – 59 percent – asserted that they had opposed it, while only 34 percent admitted to having supported it. That, of course, is far from the truth; polls at the time consistently showed solid pluralities or majorities favoring the disengagement, while only about a third of Israelis opposed it. But this revisionist history accurately reflects Israelis’ current view of the withdrawal: Many of those who once backed it are now convinced they must actually have opposed it, because they simply can’t imagine they would have supported any idea as disastrous as this one proved to be. And even among those still willing to admit they once supported it, almost one-fifth now regret doing so.
It’s not just the obvious fact that the Palestinians turned Gaza into a giant launch pad from which some 16,500 rockets and mortars have been fired at Israel over the past decade, whereas exactly zero have been fired from the Israeli-controlled West Bank over the same period. It’s not just that quitting Gaza has resulted in more Israeli soldiers being killed, and also more Palestinians, than occupying Gaza ever did. It’s not just that after Israel withdrew every last settler and soldier from Gaza, the world has sought to deny it the right to defend itself against the ensuing rocket attacks by greeting every military operation with escalating condemnation, accusations of war crimes, and attempts to prosecute it in the International Criminal Court. It’s not just that the withdrawal ended up worsening global anti-Semitism, since every military operation in Gaza has served as an excuse for a massive upsurge in anti-Semitic attacks worldwide. It’s not just that Israel received zero diplomatic credit for the pullout, with most of the world not only still insisting that Gaza is “Israeli-occupied territory,” but excoriating Israel with escalating ferocity, and even threatening sanctions, for its reluctance to repeat this disastrous experiment in the West Bank, while assigning Palestinians zero responsibility for the impasse.
All these are certainly reasons enough to consider the pullout a disaster. But there’s one final negative outcome, as reflected in another poll released last week: Due to this Israeli reluctance, born of hard experience, a majority of overseas Jews now deems Israel insufficiently committed to peace. And that, in some ways, is the worst betrayal of all. Most Israelis don’t expect much from the Palestinians or the UN or Europe. But they do expect their fellow Jews to sympathize with their fear that withdrawing from the West Bank would simply replicate the Gaza disaster on a much larger scale.
After all, none of the negative consequences that ensued in Gaza can be blamed on the popular distinction between the “moderate” Fatah, led by Mahmoud Abbas, and the “hardline” Hamas. For Gaza wasn’t handed over to Hamas, but to Abbas. He’s the one who first enabled the escalation by refusing to use his forces to stop it; consequently, there were more than four times as many rocket attacks in 2006, the first year after the disengagement, as in either of the previous two years. And he’s the one who lost Gaza to Hamas in a bloody coup in mid-2007 when the latter decided it no longer needed a fig leaf.
Thus Israel has no reason whatsoever to think giving Abbas the West Bank wouldn’t produce the same result, except with even more disastrous consequences. Hitting major Israeli population centers from Gaza requires long-range rockets; from the West Bank, easily produced short-range rockets suffice. Nor should we forget suicide bombings, which, during the second intifada (2000-2005), caused more Israeli casualties in four years than all the terror attacks of the entire previous 53 years combined. Those attacks were launched almost exclusively from parts of the West Bank controlled by the Palestinian Authority, and they stopped only when the Israeli army retook control of these areas – meaning Israel’s previous experiment with ceding parts of the West Bank was even less encouraging than the Gaza experiment has been.
Most Israelis would still be willing to trade land for peace, but they’ve had enough of trading land for terror. And until overseas Jews can produce a convincing argument for why the next pullout would be any different than all the previous ones, it would be nice if they instead practiced the traditional Jewish value of giving fellow Jews the benefit of the doubt. To interpret caution born of grim experience as disinterest in peace isn’t merely unfair; it’s downright malicious.
Originally published in Commentary on July 29, 2015
Responding to today’s Times of Israel interview with Fatou Bensouda, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, legal expert Eugene Kontorovich tweeted, “you got to ask #Bensaouda questions & didnt ask about an inquiry into settlements in Cypru[s]?” But Bensouda could actually offer a reasonable response to this challenge about double standards. The people who couldn’t – and who should therefore be hounded about it at every conceivable opportunity – are senior European Union officials who insist that any facilitation of Israeli activity in the “occupied West Bank” is illegal, yet happily facilitate Turkish activity in occupied Northern Cyprus, Moroccan activity in occupied Western Sahara, Chinese activity in occupied Tibet, and much more.
Just today, Reuters revealed that an influential European think tank is urging the EU to go beyond its current drive to label Israeli settlement products and impose numerous additional sanctions, from restricting interaction between European banks and Israeli banks that do business in the settlements (i.e. all of them) to refusing to recognize degrees from Israeli educational institutions in the West Bank. The European Council of Foreign Relations is technically an independent organization, but, as Reuters correctly noted, its “proposals frequently inform EU policy-making.” In 2013, the council proposed five different measures against Israeli activity in the West Bank; two years later, three of the five have been largely adopted, either by the EU itself or by individual member states: excluding settlement produce from EU-Israel trade agreements, severing contact with Ariel University (which is barred from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research program) and advising European companies against doing business in the settlements.
But as Kontorovich has pointed out repeatedly, the EU has no qualms about facilitating activity in other territories that it deems occupied. For instance, the EU has an entire program to direct funding to Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus; inter alia, the program finances infrastructure projects, scholarships for students and grants to businesses. And lest one think this is equivalent to EU projects to help Palestinians, think again: Turkish settlers, who constitute anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of the population (depending on whose estimates you believe), are eligible; nor is the program barred from funding projects that directly or indirectly benefit these settlers. That’s in sharp contrast to the West Bank, where European countries refuse to fund any project that might benefit Israeli settlers, even if it benefits the Palestinians far more.
Similarly, Kontorovich noted, the EU reached an agreement with Morocco in which it actually pays Morocco for access to fisheries in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. In short, the EU is paying the occupier for the right to deplete the occupied territory’s natural resources.
And, of course, numerous European companies and organizations do business in such territories; from French conglomerates like Total and Michelin to British universities.
Nor can the EU argue that Palestinians are unique in objecting to such activity. Indeed, the PLO’s Western Saharan counterpart, the Frente Polisario, is currently suing in the Court of Justice of the European Union over the Morocco fisheries agreement, yet the EU is vigorously defending the deal.
Moreover, Israel has a far stronger legal claim to the West Bank than do any of the “occupiers” the EU has no problem doing business with. The League of Nations awarded this land to a “Jewish national home,” and that international mandate was preserved by the UN Charter’s Article 80; the territory had no other recognized sovereign when Israel captured it from an illegal occupier (Jordan) in a defensive war; and UN Security Council Resolution 242 explicitly reaffirmed Israel’s right to keep at least part of the captured territory. Thus if the EU were going to discriminate among “occupied territories,” it should by rights discriminate in Israel’s favor rather than against it.
Bensouda could reasonably respond that a prosecutor has no business commenting on hypotheticals; she can only address actual cases that arrive on her doorstep. But the EU can’t use the excuse that the issue is hypothetical; it’s already neck-deep in discriminatory treatment.
This issue should, therefore, be raised with every EU official at every possible opportunity – by Israeli officials, journalists, and American Jewish leaders. It might not influence EU policy, but at least it would lay bare to the world what actually lies behind it. There’s a name for treating Jews differently than all other peoples. It’s called anti-Semitism.
Originally published in Commentary on July 22, 2015
Any legal case has two main components – the facts and the law. In my last post, I analyzed the International Criminal Court’s disregard of salient facts in its ruling on Thursday overturning the chief prosecutor’s decision not to investigate Israel’s botched raid on a 2010 flotilla to Gaza. But the ruling was equally contemptuous of several fundamental legal principles.
The first of these is that judicial decisions should be dictated by law, not politics. The majority judges threw this principle out the window when they asserted that whether the alleged crime was sufficiently grave to merit ICC attention should depend not on what actually happened, but on the amount of “attention and concern that these events attracted” from the international community, as reflected in “several fact-finding efforts on behalf of States and the United Nations.” In other words, the ICC’s choice of cases will depend not on their objective legal merits, but on how many resolutions the dictators who dominate the U.N. Human Rights Council decide to devote to it.
As legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich aptly noted, the ICC is thereby “saying ‘drop dead’ to victims U.N. not interested in,” which is a travesty in and of itself: It means the court will spend its scarce resources investigating 10 people killed while attacking soldiers intercepting a blockade-busting flotilla, but ignore – to cite just one example – the tens of thousands of Syrian civilians killed by their own government’s barrel bombs.
No less appalling, however, is that this is a standard of justice used only in the most benighted regimes: Prosecutions will be based on neither facts nor law, but solely on whether they serve the interests of the politicians in power.
The second fundamental legal principle the decision guts is that the same person shouldn’t be prosecutor, judge and jury. Since a prosecutor is obviously invested in his own case, he cannot be an impartial judge.
But the ICC judges, sitting as a “pre-trial chamber,” decided to actively force the prosecutor to pursue an investigation she considered unjustified (technically, they only ordered her to “reconsider” her decision, but in practice, that order leaves her little choice). Thus the court is no longer an impartial arbiter between prosecution and defense; it is now actively invested in the success of the case.
This blurring of boundaries is justifiable only in extraordinary circumstances. That is why, as Judge Peter Kovacs noted in his dissent, “the Pre-Trial Chamber’s role is merely to make sure that the Prosecutor has not abused her discretion” – or at least, it ought to be. Instead, the majority decided to leave her no discretion at all.
Finally, the court ignored the law itself. As Kovacs also noted in his dissent, customary international law explicitly allows countries to enforce a lawful blockade, including by force if necessary. The blockade of Gaza is legal according to one of the very U.N. fact-finding committees the majority cited in its decision. And force was necessary in this case, since the ship refused repeated orders to halt and then attacked the Israeli boarding party with “fists, knives, chains, wooden clubs, iron rods, and slingshots with metal and glass projectiles.” Thus the casualties “were apparently incidental to lawful action taken in conjunction with protection of the blockade,” and as such, it’s likely that “most if not all of those acts will not qualify as war crimes.”
Yet the majority judges’ opinion doesn’t even mention the laws of blockade much less discuss their application to this case. Evidently, they consider customary international law irrelevant to their decisions.
In my earlier post, I compared the majority ruling to something out of Alice in Wonderland. And in fact, the three elements cited above are precisely the elements that make the Queen of Hearts’ courtroom so arbitrary: The law is irrelevant; judgment depends solely on the whim of the rulers; and the same person is prosecutor, judge and jury.
But the Queen of Hearts is actually preferable, because at least she’s honest about the arbitrary nature of her decisions: “Sentence first – verdict afterwards.” The ICC maintains an expensive taxpayer-funded legal bureaucracy in an effort to disguise it.
Originally published in Commentary on July 20, 2015
If the International Criminal Court ever had any pretensions of being a serious legal institution, they were effectively demolished by yesterday’s ruling overturning Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s decision not to investigate Israel’s botched raid on a 2010 flotilla to Gaza. Reading the ruling feels like falling down the rabbit hole straight into the Queen of Hearts’ courtroom, for many reasons. But here’s the one I found most astonishing: In a 27-page document devoted almost entirely to discussing whether the alleged Israeli crimes were grave enough to merit the court’s attention, not once did the majority judges mention one of the most salient facts of the case: that flotilla passengers had attacked the Israeli soldiers with “fists, knives, chains, wooden clubs, iron rods, and slingshots with metal and glass projectiles,” causing nine soldiers serious injuries.
That fact appeared only in Judge Peter Kovacs’ dissent. Anyone reading the majority decision would conclude that the soldiers opened fire for no reason whatsoever.
This is not a minor detail; it was central to Bensouda’s decision to close the case. She noted that the soldiers opened fire, ultimately killing 10 passengers, aboard only one of the flotilla’s seven ships – the one where passengers attacked them. That strongly indicates there was no deliberate plan to kill civilians; rather, the soldiers intended to peacefully intercept all the vessels, and the killings were the unpremeditated result of a chaotic combat situation that unexpectedly developed aboard one ship. Or in her words, “none of the information available suggests […] the intended object of the attack was the civilian passengers on board these vessels.”
The majority judges, however, dismiss that conclusion, asserting that the lack of casualties aboard the other ships doesn’t preclude the possibility that soldiers intended from the outset to kill the Mavi Marmara’s passengers. They then offer a string of wild suppositions to explain why soldiers might have wanted to perpetrate a massacre aboard that ship but not the others. Perhaps, they suggest gravely, it’s because the Mavi Marmara carried the most passengers. Or, perhaps because it carried no humanitarian aid. In any event, the soldiers clearly used more violence against the Mavi Marmara than against other ships that also refused their orders to halt, so “It is reasonable to consider these circumstances as possibly explaining that the Mavi Marmara was treated by the IDF differently from the other vessels of the flotilla from the outset.”
But of course, the only way to make that unsupported speculation remotely plausible is by ignoring the fact that the Mavi Marmara was the only ship whose passengers brutally attacked the soldiers. Once you acknowledge this fact, it’s obvious that it’s a far more likely explanation for the ship’s different treatment than any of the majority judges’ outlandish theories.
So how do they get around this problem? Very simply: by refusing to admit the fact’s existence. At no point in those 27 pages do they ever acknowledge that the passengers attacked the soldiers. And then, having obliterated the actual reason why the soldiers opened fire from the record, they can accuse Bensouda of having erred by not considering their alternate-universe theory that the soldiers opened fire out of malice aforethought.
In the Queen of Hearts’ courtroom, the rule is “Sentence first – verdict afterwards.” The ICC judges, in contrast, are perfectly willing to let the verdict precede the sentence; they merely insist that said verdict exclude any evidence which might contradict their preconceived conclusions.
And, in that case, the Queen of Hearts’ approach actually makes much more sense. If you already know what the verdict is going to be, it’s much more efficient to move straight to the sentence. At least that way you don’t waste taxpayers’ time and money on lengthy legal proceedings.
Originally published in Commentary on July 17, 2015
Pollster Frank Luntz briefly generated shock waves this week with a survey showing the abysmal view of Israel held by Democratic opinion leaders. Inter alia, 47 percent deemed Israel racist, with only 32 percent disagreeing, and a whopping 76 percent said Israel has too much influence on U.S. foreign policy. But in truth, it shouldn’t be news to anyone by now that anti-Israel sentiment, like its kissing cousin anti-Semitism, is primarily the province of the liberal elites. I’ve written before about a German study showing that educated elites, rather than the far-right fringes, are the wellspring of anti-Semitism in that country; just last month, another study found that the same is true for anti-Israel sentiment. And the reason for this goes beyond the obvious fact that anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism are related.
The background to the new German study is a series of polls showing shocking levels of anti-Israel sentiment among ordinary Germans: For instance, fully 35 percent “equate Israeli policies toward the Palestinians with Nazi policies toward the Jews.” Given the vaunted “special relationship” between Germany and Israel, such findings raise obvious questions about how so many Germans developed such warped views.
So a group of German and Israeli researchers decided to analyze German textbooks to see what exactly German schools are teaching their students. They examined 1,200 history, geography and social studies textbooks from five German states, and concluded that these books portray Israel almost exclusively as a militarist, warmongering society.
Israel’s robust democracy, respect for human rights and other achievements are absent in these books. The illustrations consist of “tendentious and one-sided photographic presentations” of Israeli soldiers threatening or inflicting violence on Palestinians.
“Occupation and settlements” are depicted as the main obstacles to peace; the fact that both Israelis and Palestinians have claims to the land goes unmentioned, and Palestinian terror gets a free pass – or as the report puts it, most of the authors “find it difficult to unequivocally call Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians acts of terror.”
In short, it’s not surprising that so many Germans have such negative views of Israel, because that’s precisely what they are taught in school. True, the textbooks don’t actually compare Israel to the Nazis, but the comparison doesn’t require a big leap of logic for graduates of these schools; after all, to a German, the paradigmatic example of a militarist, warmongering society is Nazi Germany. So once you tell students that Israel, too, is a militarist, warmongering society, the Nazi analogy comes naturally.
But who writes the textbooks that give these pupils such a warped view of Israel? Hint: It’s not the neo-Nazi skinheads. It’s the liberal elites.
This brings us to the question of why liberal elites so loathe the only Mideast country that, as Julie Burchill once wrote, any of them “could bear to live under.” The answer can be found in a comment made by “a senior European diplomat” last month about a seemingly unrelated topic: the upcoming British referendum on whether to stay in the European Union.
“The nation state is a very old concept and perhaps the British have not fully recognized that it may be slightly out of date,” the diplomat declared. And that, as I’ve noted before, is the heart of the matter: In the dogma of the modern liberal elites, the nation-state is passé.
The fact that most of the world still consists of nation-states in no way challenges this dogma; after all, you can’t expect benighted regimes to have reached this level of enlightenment yet. Israel, however, is a potent challenge to the dogma: It’s a modern, Western, democratic, human-rights-respecting country that nevertheless proudly proclaims itself the nation-state of the Jewish people.
And there’s only one way for liberal elites to resolve the cognitive dissonance this causes without sacrificing their cherished dogma: by sacrificing Israel. Or, in other words, by painting it as a racist, warmongering, benighted country no different from all the other unenlightened nation-states.
Originally published in Commentary on July 10, 2015
The hypocrisy of the claim that flotillas to Gaza are a “humanitarian” endeavor has now been fully exposed: As Jonathan Tobin noted last week, the latest proved to be carrying a mere two cardboard boxes worth of aid. But pro-Palestinian activists are also guilty of an even more egregious form of hypocrisy: They proclaim all anti-Israel U.N. decisions to be binding international law, but openly flout U.N. decisions that happen to be in Israel’s favor. The Gaza flotillas are a perfect example.
According to the flotilla activists, their goal was “to break the illegal blockade on Gaza.” But a blue-ribbon international commission appointed by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in 2010 concluded that the blockade is in fact a “legitimate security measure” that fully complies with international law. So the same activists who lambaste Israel for noncompliance with anti-Israel U.N. resolutions – like those against the settlements, or the one ostensibly granting Palestinian refugees a “right of return” to Israel – feel it’s perfectly fine for them to ignore U.N. decisions that don’t serve their cause.
Nor is the Gaza blockade the worst example. Far more egregious is the way pro-Palestinian activists – and indeed, every country in the world except Israel – simply ignores U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, despite it being hands-down the most frequently cited resolution relating to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
That resolution was deliberately worded to allow Israel to retain some of the territory it captured in 1967. This isn’t mere speculation; the American and British ambassadors to the U.N. at the time, who drafted the resolution, both said explicitly that this was the purpose of its wording. And as legal expert Eugene Kontorovich noted in a terrific analysis in December, the same conclusion emerges from a comparison of 242 to 18 other U.N. resolutions demanding territorial withdrawals. He discovered that 242’s demand for a withdrawal from unspecified “territories,” rather than from “the territories” or “all the territories” or “the whole territory” or to the status quo ante, is unique. And this reinforces the conclusion that the drafters indeed intended to allow Israel to retain some of the territory rather than ceding it all.
Yet today, both America and Britain – along with the entire rest of the world – simply ignore this resolution and insist that Israel must retreat to the pre-1967 lines.
To be clear, I would have no problem with ignoring the U.N. altogether; it’s an organization dominated by dictators that no self-respecting democracy should legitimize, so a principled refusal to honor any of its decisions would be eminently understandable. I’d also have no problem with a position rooted in genuine international law, which is that U.N. decisions are binding and enforceable only when adopted by the U.N. Security Council under Chapter VII. That’s what’s actually written in the U.N. Charter, and what U.N. member states agreed to when they signed the charter, and therefore, no state ever made a legal commitment to obey any other U.N. decision.
But pro-Palestinian activists selectively treat U.N. decisions that favor their cause as “binding international law” while simply ignoring decisions that don’t favor their cause. And that position makes a travesty of the most fundamental principle of any kind of law: that it must apply equally to all parties in all cases, regardless of whether it helps or hurts a particular cause.
Thus, anyone who claims to support international law should be the first to denounce this abuse of U.N. decisions. And the fact that so many self-proclaimed advocates of international law instead lend tacit support to this travesty is precisely why no self-respecting person should accept their interpretation of anything.
Originally published in Commentary on July 5, 2015
Europe prioritizes our conflict over wars that are not only much bloodier, but also do far more harm to its own welfare
The media have recently been full of horror stories from around the globe. The terror attacks that killed over 100 people on three continents last Friday got the most press, but they were far from the worst. In Sudan, the government is deliberately bombing civilians in the Nuba Mountains. In South Sudan, a civil war has displaced more than 1.5 million people, left over half the country in danger of going hungry and produced endless atrocities, like boys who are castrated and left to bleed to death. In Myanmar, stateless Rohingya Muslims have effectively been put into concentration camps. Worldwide, the number of displaced people hit a record high of 59.5 million last year, with almost a fifth of this total coming from the Syrian civil war alone. And all this is just the tip of the iceberg.
With so many atrocities happening right this minute, it might seem hypocritical that the West’s moral outrage last week focused primarily on a very minor war in Gaza that ended 10 months ago, sent no destabilizing influx of refugees into other countries and produced total casualties equal to a mere 1% of those produced by Syria’s ongoing bloodbath. But since, for all their moralizing, Western countries usually put self-interest first, morally warped priorities aren’t necessarily surprising; they can often be explained as attempts to put a moral facade over national interests.
What is surprising, and genuinely frightening, however, is the degree to which the anti-Israel obsession can even trump national self-interest. As exhibit A, consider Europe.
Thanks to the above-mentioned horrors and many others, Europe faces a major refugee crisis, which German Chancellor Angela Merkel last week termed “the biggest challenge for the European Union that I have seen during my term in office.” Last year, 626,000 people sought asylum in the EU, an increase of almost 200,000 over 2013; this year’s influx is so far running much higher.
This refugee crisis has given a huge boost to fringe anti-immigrant parties; most recently, the Danish People’s Party placed second in Denmark’s June election. And this reflects a genuine public concern. In one recent poll, for instance, when Germans were asked to name the continent’s top 10 challenges, immigration ranked number one.
In a frantic effort to cope, the EU abandoned its normal aversion to military action and announced plans for a military operation targeting migrant smugglers at one of their main sources, war-torn Libya. But since the operation was conditioned on UN Security Council approval, it will probably never happen. It also proposed a plan to distribute refugees more fairly among its member states, since currently, they are heavily concentrated in certain countries. But following a rancorous debate that severely exacerbated the bloc’s internal tensions, the mandatory quota plan was killed last week.
Given all this, you might expect the crises producing this refugee influx to be top EU foreign-policy concerns. These include the Syrian civil war, responsible for fully 20 percent of all EU asylum seekers last year; the Libyan civil war, which has turned Libya into the main gateway for African migration to Europe by creating a governance void in which human traffickers operate freely; or the ongoing problems in the EU’s own backyard of Serbia and Kosovo, both of which made the top five on the list of countries sending the most asylum seekers to the EU.
Instead, Europe’s top foreign-policy priority appears to be a conflict that doesn’t even make the top 30 on this list, and whose solution would do nothing to ameliorate any of those other crises.
The consensus position of the EU’s foreign policy elite, as enunciated in an open letter from 19 European elder statesmen in May, is that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict “remains high on the list of the world’s worst crises” – and never mind that so many others are producing so many more deaths, displacements and atrocities. A senior French diplomat even declared recently that “inertia is deadly,” because it might lead ISIS to adopt the Palestinian cause. Has he somehow not noticed that ISIS is already perpetrating Mideast mayhem?
The EU’s big three – France, Germany and Britain – have consequently been working for months, at France’s initiative, to draft a UN Security Council resolution dictating the outline of a final-status solution to the conflict and setting a deadline for its achievement (or more accurately, dictating what concessions the EU wants Israel to make; the drafts have been remarkably coy about any Palestinian concessions). Similarly, 16 European foreign ministers demanded in April that the EU adopt binding guidelines on labeling settlement produce.
But the EU’s obsession with Israel doesn’t just trump other foreign-policy concerns; it even trumps domestic problems, as Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek inadvertently revealed in early June. In a diatribe threatening Israel with various harsh consequences if it didn’t immediately take steps to create a Palestinian state (while also, naturally, proclaiming his deep love for Israel), Zaoralek inter alia demanded Israeli action to fix the “catastrophe” he observed in Gaza.
“I met young people with no future and no hope,” he said in an interview with Walla, a Hebrew-language news site. “The youth unemployment rate there is inconceivable. It reminded me of meetings with young people in Greece.”
Greece, lest anyone has forgotten, is still an EU member state. Thus one might think solving the disaster in Greece – where hospital budgets have fallen by 93% and surgeons are working 20-hour days for weeks on end – is slightly more important to Europe’s well-being than solving Gaza’s problems. But despite endless negotiations that finally collapsed entirely this weekend, there’s been no discernible improvement in Greece’s situation for years.
In short, the EU is quite content to ignore foreign-policy crises that flood it with refugees and foment domestic unrest, and it’s even prepared to let one of its own member states go bankrupt. But it’s hell-bent on resolving an unimportant little foreign conflict that isn’t affecting it at all.
You can’t explain that by rational self-interest, or by any conceivable standard of morality. And the only explanation left isn’t a pretty one. The old-fashioned word for it is anti-Semitism.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on July 1, 2015