Peace Process
It’s a vital war, it’s happening now, and many of our national leaders are helping the wrong side
Former National Security Advisor Yaakov Amidror offered an interesting analysis of last week’s incident in which Israeli Arabs nearly lynched an Israeli Jew in the Galilee town of Taibe. On one hand, he wrote, it’s worrisome that the assailants had no qualms about perpetrating such an attack “in broad daylight in the heart of their city.” On the other hand, the Jew’s life was saved by another Arab resident of Taibe, who “is not afraid to appear in public and take pride in his action, and none of his neighbors has condemned him.” What this means, Amidror concluded, is that “we are witnessing a struggle within Arab society,” between those who want to build a life together with the Jewish majority and those who want only to destroy what has been built.
Nor is the Taibe incident the only evidence of this struggle. Also last week, vandals firebombed an 18th-century synagogue in the northern town of Shfaram. Just a few months earlier, that same synagogue had been lovingly restored by young Arabs and Jews seeking to set “a model for coexistence between our two peoples.” Its very status as an emblem of coexistence made it a natural target for the destroyers.
In this struggle, the destroyers have some obvious advantages. First, as I’ve noted before, longstanding police neglect has ceded control of many Arab communities to the thugs. Second, most national-level Israeli Arab leaders, whether political or religious, are on the thugs’ side: Arab MKs routinely spew incitement from the Knesset, while clerics like the Islamic Movement’s Sheikh Raed Saleh do the same from the mosque. Third, the leaderships of both Hamas and Fatah in the territories are equally inflammatory (on incitement, the two are indistinguishable). Finally, as Amos Harel noted in Haaretz last week, pictures of the slaughter perpetrated by the Islamic State and other groups in Syria and Iraq have recently been flooding local social media networks, thereby encouraging copycat attacks.
But in one of the most encouraging developments of the past few months, a local-level Arab leadership has emerged that openly opposes the destroyers. This has been evident in numerous episodes.
During the demonstrations that followed the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir in July, for instance, some two dozen Arab and Jewish mayors in the Galilee and the Negev banded together to publicly urge calm and restraint, while in Acre, “Arab public officials and community activists stood as a barrier between the demonstrators and the police, pushing back the demonstrators in order to avoid a confrontation,” Haaretz reported. In September, Arab mayors and other community leaders protested in Jerusalem to demand that police crack down on illegal arms in Arab communities – a far cry from the one-time norm of Arab leaders stormily demanding that police stay out of their towns. In June, the Aman Center, an organization that combats violence in Arab society, ran a conference together with the national forum of Arab mayors and other groups on how to improve relations between the police and the Arab community; the center’s head, Sheikh Kamil Ahmad Rayan, said inter alia that Israeli Arabs must start treating police with respect. Last month, when Yom Kippur coincided with the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, the chief imam of Acre’s Al-Jazaar Mosque teamed up with the city’s chief rabbi to pay joint visits to both Jewish and Arab schools the week before and urge students to show respect for each other’s holiday.
In short, an emerging Arab leadership of builders is challenging the veteran Arab leadership, which has long been on the destroyers’ side. Thus Jewish leaders have an obvious interest in supporting the former while combating the latter.
Some local-level Jewish leaders, as the above examples show, are trying to do exactly that. But at the national level, Jewish leaders across the political spectrum are largely doing the opposite.
On the left, Knesset members and civil-society activists often prefer to blame all problems on the government, thereby absolving arsonists like the Arab MKs and the rioters of responsibility, while treating the arsonists as the authentic and legitimate voice of the Arab public. By so doing, they are bolstering the destroyers rather than the builders. On the right, Knesset members and religious leaders too often lash out at all Arabs indiscriminately. By so doing, they are undermining the builders, who need to be able to show their community that a constructive approach will be reciprocated by the Jewish majority.
This isn’t just bad for Israel as a whole; ironically, it’s also bad for each side’s stated political goals. The left claims to champion equality, yet anti-Arab discrimination will never be eradicated as long as many Arabs, including the community’s most visible and vocal representatives, openly oppose the Jewish state’s very existence or publicly support terror; if Israeli Arabs act like enemies, most Jews will inevitably treat them accordingly. The right claims to oppose territorial concessions, yet more territory inevitably means more Arab citizens, and the larger the Arab minority, the more important integrating it becomes.
And if all this weren’t enough, one of the few national leaders who genuinely understands the issue’s importance – President Reuven Rivlin – has managed, in his few short months in office, to so antagonize the very people who need to hear his message most that he’s become useless. True, the left adores him. But as a veteran center-right politician, he was uniquely placed to bring his message of coexistence to the right as well. Instead, judging by the complaints I’ve heard personally from friends and neighbors, he has alienated even the non-extreme right by hurling sweeping insults of the very kind he claims to condemn: Israel is a “sick society”; thuggishness has “permeated the national dialogue”; etc.
So we have a war going on for the soul of Israeli Arab society – one of the most important Israel may ever fight – and our national leadership is at best sitting on the sidelines, and at worst actively abetting the destroyers while undermining the builders. It’s a sad day for a country when its best hope is for people to simply ignore their ostensible leaders.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
The most surprising response to yesterday’s deadly attack on worshippers at a Jerusalem synagogue came from the Bahraini foreign minister. “It is forbidden to react to the crimes of the Israeli occupation against our brothers in Palestine by killing innocents in a house of prayer,” Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa reportedly wrote on his Arabic-language Twitter feed. “Those who will pay the price for the crime of killing innocents in a Jewish synagogue and for welcoming the crime are the Palestinian people.”
For a senior Arab official to publicly condemn the killing of Jews by Muslims at all–much less with such moral clarity, devoid of any attempt to create a false equivalence to Israeli “crimes–is so unusual that it cries out for explanation. And the most likely explanation lies in the violence that has swept the Middle East in recent years. In a world where Muslim innocents are being killed in houses of prayer on a regular basis by fellow Muslims, mosques in Israel and the West Bank–including Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque–remain among the safest places in the Mideast for Muslims to pray. And the Arab world’s pragmatic axis, of which Bahrain is part, has no interest in seeing that change.
In August, for instance, Shi’ite gunmen opened fire in a Sunni mosque in Iraq, killing at least 73 people. In October, a suicide bomber killed at least 18 people at a Shi’ite mosque in Iraq. Those are just two of the dozens of deadly mosque attacks in recent years that have killed thousands of Muslims in numerous countries, including Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, India, and Nigeria. Almost all the perpetrators were fellow Muslims–usually Shi’ites or Sunnis attacking each other’s institutions.
By contrast, Israel and the West Bank are safe havens. True, there have been some vandalistic attacks on mosques–though far fewer than in, say, Holland. But there hasn’t been a lethal attack on a mosque in two decades. Indeed, for all the Palestinians’ efforts to libel Jewish visits to the Temple Mount as “attacks” on Al-Aqsa, anyone who’s been paying attention realizes that mosques elsewhere in the Muslim world have been suffering far worse fates than innocuous Jewish visitors.
Granted, both the Palestinians themselves and many Westerners are too fixated on the Palestinian cause to care; recent Jewish visits to the Mount have generated far more uproar in the West than lethal mosque attacks elsewhere ever have. But the pragmatic Arab states, as I’ve written before, are quite aware that Israel is the least of their problems, and they’d rather it stay that way.
The pragmatic Arab states don’t want another Palestinian-Israeli war distracting global attention from problems they consider far more pressing, like ISIS and Iran. And they know heinous attacks like the synagogue murder–especially when compounded by the fact, as Khalifa noted, that many Palestinians are “welcoming the crime”–could easily spark one: Israel can’t continue doing nothing in the face of such attacks. There’s also the risk that such crimes could spur a lone Jewish terrorist to commit a revenge attack, like Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of Muslim worshippers in Hebron 20 years ago; that, too, would distract global–and Arab–attention from the problems pragmatic Arab states consider most pressing.
Consequently, these states have an interest in discouraging attacks like yesterday’s, and Khalifa took a two-pronged approach to doing so. First, he declared, an attack like this is morally unacceptable, even to many fellow Arab Muslims. And second, it’s counterproductive, because sparking a new conflict would ultimately hurt the Palestinians more than Israel. Or as Khalifa put it, “Those who will pay the price” for this attack “are the Palestinian people.”
Thus while figures as diverse as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and former British minister Sayeeda Warsi have implicitly justified the synagogue killing, and thereby encouraged more such crimes, by trying to paint it as morally equivalent to Jews visiting the Temple Mount the Bahraini foreign minister is trying to quench the flames by stating unequivocally that there’s never any excuse for killing worshippers at a house of prayer. For nobody understands the dangerous consequences of doing so better than Muslims elsewhere in the Middle East, who, unlike their Israeli-protected Palestinian brethren, have all too frequently been the victims of such killings.
Originally published in Commentary
The new policy won’t solve all the city’s problems, but if maintained, it might reduce the violence
Amid all the bad news from Jerusalem last week, one report offered a glimmer of hope: According to Haaretz, police have begun enforcing the law against misdemeanors like urinating in public or littering the streets with sunflower-seed shells in Arab neighborhoods of the city. Unsurprisingly, some people are crying “racist harassment.” But this tactic draws on a theory of policing that has been spectacularly successful elsewhere.
The “broken windows” theory holds that when minor offenses are allowed to proliferate, respect for the law breaks down, thereby encouraging more serious crime. When then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani famously tested it in New York two decades ago, crimes rates plummeted a whopping 39% in three years.
Could a crackdown on petty crime bring similar benefits to Jerusalem, which has many problems New York doesn’t face? Quite possibly yes – because one major cause of the city’s violence is the fact that police have long treated Arab neighborhoods as no-go areas for almost anything short of a murder probe. And when the police aren’t present, there’s nobody to stop the thugs from taking over.
Nothing better illustrates this dynamic than the Shuafat refugee camp. Last week, security officials fingered this neighborhood as the source of many of the recent terror attacks in Jerusalem. And what makes Shuafat an ideal terrorist staging ground is that it’s effectively no man’s land. Being inside Jerusalem’s municipal borders, the army doesn’t operate there. But being outside the security fence, police don’t operate there either. The result, as Nadav Shragai reported in Israel Hayom in September, is that “armed gangs wielding handguns, AK-47 semi-automatic rifles, and M-16 rifles roam the streets.”
A “broken windows” policy, in contrast, requires police to be present in force. They can’t fine people for spitting sunflower seeds or urinating in public without being around to see them do it. And once police are present, it becomes much harder for armed gangs and terrorists to operate freely.
Moreover, according to that same Haaretz report, the new policing policy has been accompanied by stepped-up civil enforcement against suspected criminals. Granted, it would be better if government agencies simply enforced the law year-round against everyone. But since they don’t and never have, it makes sense to prioritize enforcement against people suspected of violence, as this bolsters deterrence.
For instance, Haaretz reported, the families of several Jerusalem residents suspected or convicted of involvement in terror recently had property confiscated to cover outstanding debts to the National Insurance Institute. Similarly, police have started giving the names of suspected stone-throwers to the Jerusalem municipality so it can check and see if their families have open files for building violations or unpaid taxes. This might well be even more of a deterrent than prosecution, since stone throwers, for instance, rarely face serious criminal penalties.
Granted, the new policies risk generating resentment. But if they enable police to significantly reduce the violence, Jerusalem’s Arab residents will be the prime beneficiaries, because they’re the ones who suffer most when daily battles with police take over their neighborhoods: People get hurt in the cross-fire; police roadblocks disrupt traffic; noisy riots prevent sleep; businesses suffer from lack of customers; infrastructure repairs are delayed; and so forth. That’s why postings on Palestinian social media, as social media analyst Orit Perlov wrote last week, show that “Most of the Palestinian public has no interest in violence, and calls are being heard to restrain the young people who are harming the entire population’s quality of life.”
Broken-windows policing does face one major challenge in Jerusalem that didn’t exist in New York: the presence of two influential parties – Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority in the West Bank – with a major interest in inflaming tensions.
A fascinating study by the Molad think tank found that over the past 15 years, there has been an inverse relationship between terror in Jerusalem and terror in the West Bank: When the West Bank is aflame, Jerusalem gets quieter; when Jerusalem is aflame, the West Bank gets quieter. Being doctrinaire leftists, the Molad researchers ignored the obvious explanation, but the past few weeks have been a textbook example of it: When Palestinian organizations are fighting Israel on their own turf, they can’t spare resources for Jerusalem. But when they want to fight Israel without embroiling their own turf, they target Jerusalem.
Thus PA President Mahmoud Abbas has worked hard recently to suppress violence in the West Bank, fearing that an eruption there would threaten his own rule. But at the same time, he has vociferously incited to violence in Jerusalem. Last month, for instance, he accused Jews of “desecrating” the Temple Mount and said they must be prevented from ascending it “in any way,” adding, “We must confront them and defend our holy sites.” Similarly, he implicitly praised last month’s attempted murder of Rabbi Yehuda Glick in Jerusalem, saying the would-be killer “will go to heaven as a martyr.”
As for Hamas, it fought a 50-day war with Israel this summer and isn’t interested in another. Yet it desperately needs to distract Gaza residents from a grim reality in which the promised reconstruction has stalled, Egypt has closed its border and talks on a long-term cease-fire have been suspended. So instead, it’s inflaming Jerusalem. As Shragai reported last month, the northern branch of Israel’s Islamic Movement, a Hamas affiliate, is paying hundreds of Hamas and Farah members to stay on the Temple Mount and provoke trouble if Jews visit. In addition, most of the city’s recent terror attacks have reportedly been perpetrated by people affiliated with Hamas, which has actively encouraged both the terror and the rioting.
The obvious conclusion is that Israel could facilitate the task of ending the violence in Jerusalem by making it clear to both Hamas and Fatah that continued efforts to inflame the city will have consequences in Gaza and the West Bank.
But whether or not this ever happens, there’s no way to end the violence without the police reclaiming Arab neighborhoods from control of the thugs. Thus even if it’s not a complete solution, a broken-windows policing policy is an excellent place to start.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
The UN chose a poor moment to unveil its latest campaign; the American media have little attention for anything outside the midterm elections this week. And that’s a pity, because this particular campaign deserves massive attention. The goal is to eliminate statelessness, a problem that affects some 10 million people worldwide, according to the UN high commissioner for refugees. But here’s the really noteworthy point: Not one of those 10 million people in UNHCR’s tally is Palestinian.
This point deserves emphasis, because even ardent Israel supporters often buy the false claim that Palestinians are the only people worldwide who lack citizenship in any country, making the Palestinian problem unique. But in truth, as UNHCR’s figure shows, even if every Palestinian in the world were stateless (which they aren’t), they would still constitute a minority of the world’s stateless population.
Nor are Palestinians overall the most miserable of the world’s stateless peoples, by a long shot. Granted, there are exceptions: Palestinians in war-torn Syria, for instance, definitely rank high on the misery scale (as do other Syrians). But many of the world’s stateless people would be thrilled to enjoy the conditions of stateless Palestinians in, say, the West Bank.
For real misery, consider the Rohingya, a Muslim community living mainly in Buddhist-majority Burma that accounts for about 1 million of UNHCR’s 10 million stateless people. The UN dubs them “one of the world’s most persecuted peoples.” For starters, most live in real refugee camps–not permanent towns like those in the West Bank, with real houses, schools, medical clinics, electricity, running water, and all the other amenities of civilized life.
Moreover, since Burma expelled Doctors Without Borders in February, many Rohingya have had no access to medical care at all, and deaths due to the lack of such care occur almost daily, as the Washington Post reported in May. Even when local Buddhist doctors are available, many Rohingya won’t use them; after the violence they have suffered from Buddhist mobs, the distrust runs too deep.
By contrast, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have access not only to their own fairly well-developed medical systems–including a network of hospitals built, it should be noted, entirely by the “Israeli occupiers”–but also to Israel’s world-class hospitals. And needless to say, Palestinians have no fear of using Jewish doctors; even senior Hamas officials routinely send their relatives to Israel for treatment. Just last month, for instance, Ismail Haniyeh’s daughter was hospitalized in Israel, making this the third time over the last year that Israel has treated a close relative of Hamas’s leader in Gaza.
Then, of course, there are the anti-Rohingya pogroms. As Kenan Malik wrote in the New York Times in May, “Villages, schools and mosques have been attacked and burned by Buddhist mobs, often aided by security forces. Hundreds of Rohingya have been killed, and as many as 140,000 people—more than one in 10 of the Rohingya population—have been made homeless.” This doesn’t get nearly as much press as settler attacks on Palestinians, yet the latter are mainly petty vandalism–despicable and unacceptable, but not even in the same league. (And lest anyone mention Gaza, wars aren’t comparable to pogroms, either. Last I checked, the Rohingya weren’t lobbing thousands of rockets at Burma’s Buddhist citizens.)
In short, the Rohingya are yet another case in which the world’s obsession with the Palestinians has diverted attention from a much greater human-rights abuse.
Nevertheless, there is a bit of poetic justice in this story: In a rare lapse from the UN’s usual two-faced behavior, UNHCR said it couldn’t include the Palestinians in its list of stateless people because the UN General Assembly has recognized Palestine as a state. Of course, since no such state actually exists, many Palestinians really are stateless. But having demanded that the world recognize their nonexistent state, the Palestinians are discovering that even at the UN, you can’t simultaneously be a recognized state and a stateless people.
Originally published in Commentary on November 5, 2014
The inaugural session of the Abu Dhabi Strategic Debate took place last week, with scholars coming from around the world to participate in two days of discussion on a plethora of topics. Hisham Melhem, the Washington bureau chief for Al Arabiya News, subsequently published a lengthy summary of the proceedings on Al Arabiya’s website, and reading it, I was struck by the absence of certain topics one might expect to feature prominently. Egypt, Iran, oil, ISIS, Turkey, Russia, the U.S., and Islamic extremism were all there. But in 1,700 words, the Palestinians weren’t mentioned once, while Israel appeared only in the very last paragraph–which deserves to be read in full:
Finally, it was fascinating to attend a two day conference about the Middle East in times of upheaval in which Israel was mostly ignored, with the only frontal criticism of her policies delivered by an American diplomat.
And this explains a lot about the current U.S.-Israel spat. President Barack Obama entered office with the firm belief that the best way to improve America’s relations with the Muslim world was to create “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel, and for six years now, he and his staff have worked diligently to do exactly that. Nor was this an inherently unreasonable idea: Even a decade ago, Arab capitals might have cheered the sight of U.S. officials hurling childish insults at their Israeli counterparts.
The problem is that the Arab world has changed greatly in recent years, while the Obama administration–like most of Europe–remains stuck in its old paradigm. Granted, Arabs still don’t like Israel, but they have discovered that Israel and the Palestinians are very far down on their list of urgent concerns. The collapse of entire states that were formerly lynchpins of the Arab world, like Syria, Iraq, and Libya; the fear that other vital states like Egypt and Jordan could follow suit; the rise of Islamic extremist movements that threaten all the existing Arab states; the destabilizing flood of millions of refugees; the fear of U.S. disengagement from the region; the “predicament of living in the shadows of what they see as a belligerent Iran and an assertive Turkey” (to quote Melhem)–all these are far more pressing concerns.
And not only has Israel fallen off the list of pressing problems, but it has come to be viewed as capable of contributing, however modestly, to dealing with some of the new pressing problems. Last month, Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute published his impressions from a tour of the Mideast, including of Israel’s deepening strategic relationships with Egypt and Jordan. “Indeed, one of the most unusual moments of my trip was to hear certain Arab security officials effectively compete with one another for who has the better relationship with Israel,” he wrote. “In this regard, times have certainly changed.”
In fact, in this new Middle East, a U.S.-Israel spat probably generates more worry than glee in Arab capitals. Once, it was an Arab article of faith that America cared little about Arabs but greatly about Israel. Thus to the degree that Arab and Israeli concerns overlapped, as they do now on issues ranging from Iran to ISIS, America could be trusted to deal with the threat. Now, the Obama administration still appears to care little for Arab concerns; it seems hell-bent on striking a grand bargain with Iran and withdrawing from the Mideast. But the Arab world’s former ace in the hole to prevent such developments–Israel’s influence in Washington–suddenly looks more like deuce.
Yet all these shifting winds seem to have blown right by the Obama administration: It still acts as if America’s position in the Muslim world depends on showing that it hates Israel, too. And thus you reach the farce of a two-day conference in Abu Dhabi where “the only frontal criticism” of Israel’s policies was “delivered by an American diplomat.”
When it comes to Israel, the Arab world has moved on. But the Obama administration remains stuck in the last century.
Originally published in Commentary
For anyone who thinks the lack of a Palestinian state is a primary cause of Muslim grievance, the flood of foreign fighters into Syria and Iraq in recent years poses a real problem. After all, none of the jihadi groups in those countries are fighting against Israel or for the Palestinians; indeed, as journalist Khaled Abu Toameh pointed out yesterday, ISIS ranks “liberating Jerusalem” way down on its list of goals and “did not even bother to comment” on this summer’s war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Yet while ISIS and its ilk have attracted thousands of foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq, the number of foreigners who have joined the Palestinian fight against Israel is near zero.
This certainly isn’t a problem of access. The thousands of Western Muslims now fighting in Iraq and Syria could easily and legally have reached the West Bank via either Israel or Jordan; so could those from Turkey, Jordan and Egypt. They simply never cared enough to do so.
And until last year, when Egypt cracked down on the cross-border smuggling tunnels, Gaza was accessible even to nationals of Muslim countries that lack diplomatic relations with Israel: They could enter Egypt legally and cross to Gaza via the tunnels. Hamas would surely have welcomed reinforcements, but they never cared enough to come.
In short, no matter how often Westerners like Secretary of State John Kerry say the Palestinian issue is a major source of the “street anger and agitation … humiliation and denial and absence of dignity” that helps jihadi groups recruit foreign Muslims, Muslims themselves are saying the opposite with their feet: There are causes they are willing to travel across the world to fight and die for, including the dream of an Islamic caliphate and the sectarian Sunni fight against Shi’ite- and Alawite-dominated governments in Iraq and Syria. But “Palestine” isn’t one of them.
The foreign fighters flocking to Iraq and Syria also undermine another common canard: that Israel is a “racist” or “apartheid” state. After all, a “racist, apartheid state” by definition subjects its minorities to far more “humiliation and denial and absence of dignity” than non-racist, non-apartheid Europe does, so if Israel were really such a state, one would expect its Arab citizens to head the pack of foreign recruits to ISIS and company.
Yet in fact, as journalist Yossi Melman noted yesterday, only about 30 of Israel’s 1.7 million Arab citizens have gone to fight for ISIS, a “much, much smaller” percentage than the “hundreds of French or British Muslims” who have done so. Based on his figures, a mere 0.002% of Israel’s Arab population is fighting abroad. Exact numbers for either the size of European countries’ Muslim populations or the number of fighters they have in Iraq and Syria are hard to find, but based on estimates gleaned from various press reports, my own rough calculation is that the proportion of British and French Muslims fighting abroad is at least three or four times higher.
And this isn’t because Israeli Arabs are flocking to the Palestinian fight instead: Few Israeli Arabs get involved in Palestinian terror, either.
This data reinforces a point I’ve made many times before: While Jewish-Arab relations in Israel aren’t perfect, overall, Israeli Arabs are reasonably well integrated and steadily becoming more so. Thus few have any desire to go off and join a glorious jihad.
The John Kerrys of the world rarely let facts disturb their theories. But for anyone who does care about facts, the foreign fighters flocking to Iraq and Syria offer a good clue as to what issues really inflame the Muslim world. And neither Israel nor the Palestinians are high on the list.
Originally published in Commentary
As long as the thugs are in control, most Arabs will continue publicly assailing Israel even if they quietly support it, just because it’s the safest thing to do
The scene recurs with monotonous regularity before every Jewish holiday: Jews seek to visit the Temple Mount on the eve of the holiday, and Arabs stage meticulously preplanned riots to prevent them. But last Wednesday, on the eve of Sukkot, it ended differently than usual. Instead of police turning away the Jews to appease the rioters, they fought the rioters and let the visits proceed.
It’s not yet clear whether this represents a new trend: On Sunday, police closed the Mount to non-Muslims again due to fear of rioting; Monday, they fought the rioters and reopened it to visitors. Yet all Israelis should hope it becomes one, because the police’s longstanding reluctance to confront Arab thugs has negative consequences that go far beyond the Temple Mount. Large swathes of Jewish Jerusalem, facing what has been dubbed a “quiet intifada,” have suffered from this reluctance for months. Israeli Arabs nationwide have suffered from it for years. And all hope for improved Jewish-Arab relations in this country remains doomed as long as it persists.
I’ve written before about the dangerous consequences of police capitulation to Arab rioters on the Mount: It denies Jews the fundamental right to pray at Judaism’s holiest site, undermines Israel’s diplomatic case for retaining Jerusalem as its united capital and encourages the Arab belief that violence pays. But while the first two are location-specific evils, the third applies throughout Israel. Hence it’s no surprise that such thuggery has spread.
In Jerusalem, Arab attacks on Jews have skyrocketed in recent months. School buses and cars have been stoned, cars and gas stations torched, houses pelted with Molotov cocktails and even shot at with live bullets – not just in predominantly Arab neighborhoods, but in veteran Jewish neighborhoods like Gilo, Pisgat Ze’ev and French Hill. The light rail has been vandalized so often that over a third of the trains are out of service. Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus has been repeatedly pelted with rocks and firebombs, and vehicles drive to and from the nearby army base in convoys, as if through a war zone.
But this violence doesn’t only harm Jerusalem’s Jews; it also harms law-abiding Arab residents of the neighborhoods whence it emanates, like Issawiya and Shuafat. Long before the violence spilled over into Jewish neighborhoods, for instance, thugs were routinely stoning Israeli ambulances that entered Arab neighborhoods. Consequently, ambulances won’t enter without a police escort, and waiting for this escort can waste precious time on life-saving calls. Moreover, in many Arab neighborhoods, the police’s refusal to confront the violence has allowed the thugs to take over completely, leading to rising crime and plummeting personal security. In Shuafat, for instance, “residents said that armed gangs wielding handguns, AK-47 semi-automatic rifles, and M-16 rifles roam the streets,” Nadav Shragai reported in Israel Hayom last month.
And this isn’t true only in East Jerusalem; it’s true of Arab towns nationwide. Because police for years treated Arab towns as no-go areas, they are now awash in illegal weapons, resulting in soaring crime rates. For instance, Arabs constitute 50% of all murder victims and 67% of perpetrators, despite constituting only 20% of Israel’s population.
In fairness, police neglected Arab towns largely because they were unwelcome there; residents often greeted them with riots and barrages of rocks. But 95% of Arabs now deem violence their community’s biggest problem, according to a recent study, and have therefore changed their attitude toward the police. That’s why Arab mayors and Knesset members have been demanding a greater police presence in their towns, and also why Arab mayors and merchants took the lead in trying to quell riots that erupted after Jewish extremists killed teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir in July: The law-abiding majority has realized that they are the main victims when police cede control to the thugs; both their security and their ability to earn a living suffers.
Yet the police’s unwillingness to confront Arab thugs doesn’t just hurt Arabs and Jews individually; it also undermines their ability to live together. Clearly, when thugs control Arab neighborhoods, Jews are afraid to visit and patronize Arab businesses. But in addition, ordinary Arabs are afraid to challenge the thugs’ anti-Israel party line.
Last month, for instance, Israel Hayom reported that an Arab teen had been forced to flee the country by the death threats he received after courageously making a video denouncing the kidnapping of three Israeli teens in June. Father Gabriel Nadaf, a Christian Arab who supports Arab service in the IDF and defended Israel last month at the UN Human Rights Council, has seen his son attacked and hospitalized because of his views. In both cases, police failed miserably to protect them from the thugs. So why would other Arabs want to follow their example?
Few people are heroes; most just want to live a quiet life. Thus as long as the thugs are in control, most Arabs will continue publicly assailing Israel even if they quietly support it, just because it’s the safest thing to do.
It’s important to note that little of this Arab thuggery is spontaneous. In last Wednesday’s incident on the Temple Mount, for instance, the rioters built barricades in advance, stockpiled rocks, firebombs, fireworks, metal pipes and concrete slabs, then slept on the Mount Tuesday night to be ready to start rioting bright and early. The “quiet intifada” in Jerusalem is similarly well-organized, Shragai reported: In each neighborhood, a Palestinian faction like Fatah, Hamas, the DFLP or the PFLP is in charge; the rioters have been trained to resist interrogation; the Palestinian Authority pays their legal fees; and someone as yet unknown is providing the thousands of shekels spent on their newest weapon of choice, fireworks.
In short, this is organized crime. And for the sake of Jews and Arabs alike, it’s vital that police make a determined effort to stop it instead of seeking to appease the thugs by such tactics as barring Jews from the Mount or failing to enforce the law in Arab towns and neighborhoods. For only thus will Jews and Arabs alike be able to enjoy not only security, but genuine coexistence.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
Hateful graffiti targeting a minority have repeatedly been scrawled on cars and buildings, including houses of worship, yet police frequently fail to arrest the culprits. Innocent people have been viciously attacked and occasionally even murdered just because they belong to this minority. Clearly, this is a country awash in racism and prejudice that it’s making no real effort to stem, so it deserves harsh condemnation from anyone who cares about such fundamental liberal values as tolerance and nonviolence, right?
That’s certainly the conclusion many liberals leaped to about a similar wave of anti-Arab attacks in Israel. But what I actually just described is the recent wave of anti-Semitic attacks in the United States, and there has–quite properly–been no similar rush to denounce America. Since the American government and people overwhelmingly condemn such attacks, and America remains one of the best places in the world to live openly as a Jew, liberals correctly treat such incidents as exceptions rather than proof that the U.S. is irredeemably anti-Semitic. But somehow, Israel never merits a similarly nuanced analysis.
Consider just a few of the attacks I referenced in the first paragraph: This past weekend–on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year–swastikas were spray-painted on a Jewish fraternity at Emory University in Atlanta, and also on a synagogue in Spokane, Washington, on the other side of the country. In August, a Jewish couple was attacked in New York by thugs who shouted anti-Semitic slogans, threw a water bottle at the woman, and punched her skullcap-wearing husband. In July, pro-Israel demonstrators were attacked by stick-wielding thugs in Los Angeles. On August 9, an Orthodox rabbi was murdered in Miami while walking to synagogue on the Sabbath; police insist this wasn’t a hate crime, though they haven’t yet arrested any suspects, but local Jews are unconvinced, as a synagogue and a Jewish-owned car on the same street were vandalized with anti-Semitic slogans just two weeks earlier. And in April, a white supremacist killed three people at two Jewish institutions near Kansas City, Kansas.
A Martian looking at this list, devoid of any context, might well conclude that America is a deeply anti-Semitic country. And of course, he’d be wrong. Context–the fact that these incidents are exceptions to the overwhelmingly positive picture of Jewish life in America–matters greatly.
Yet that’s no less true for anti-Arab attacks in Israel. As in America, both the government and the public have almost unanimously condemned such attacks. As in America, culprits have been swiftly arrested in some cases, like the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir in July; also as in America, the failure to make arrests in other cases stems not from tolerance for such crimes, but from the simple fact that some cases are harder to solve than others.
Finally, as in America, these incidents belie the fact that overall, Israeli Arabs are better integrated and have more rights not only than any of their counterparts in the Middle East, but also than some of their counterparts in Europe. Israel, for instance, has no laws against building minarets, like Switzerland does, or against civil servants wearing headscarves, as France does. Arabs serve in the Knesset, the Supreme Court, and sometimes the cabinet; they are doctors, university department heads, judges, and high-tech workers.
Clearly, anti-Arab prejudice exists in Israel, just as anti-Jewish prejudice exists in America. But a decade-old tracking project found that it has been declining rather than growing. And successive governments have been trying hard in recent years to narrow persistent Arab-Jewish gaps: For instance, an affirmative action campaign almost quadrupled the number of Arabs in the civil service from 2007 to 2011. Indeed, as Ron Gerlitz, co-executive director of Sikkuy – The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality, argued in August, it’s precisely the Arab minority’s growing integration that has outraged the anti-Arab fringe and helped spark the recent rise in hate crimes.
So it’s past time for liberals to give Israel the same courtesy they extend America: Stop looking at hate crimes in a vacuum and start seeing them for what they are–isolated incidents that don’t and shouldn’t condemn an entire country as “racist.”
Originally published in Commentary
If the world hasn’t yet grasped that Palestinians aren’t interested in peace, it’s certainly not because Palestinians haven’t been working hard to make it clear. Mahmoud Abbas’s “genocide” speech at the UN last week did get momentary attention, being too public to ignore completely. But an even more telling incident has been almost completely overlooked: the expulsion of Haaretz reporter Amira Hass–a woman who has spent decades promoting the Palestinian cause–from a conference at Birzeit University near Ramallah, solely because she is an Israeli Jew.
Nobody, in Israel or outside it, is more pro-Palestinian than Hass. To the best of my knowledge, she’s the only Israeli reporter so dedicated to the Palestinians that she has made her home among them for decades, first in Gaza and then in Ramallah. She reports relentlessly on Palestinian suffering under the “occupation regime” and is a tireless apologist for unattractive Palestinian habits such as stone-throwing. Her latest op-ed, for instance, was an apologia for Abbas’s genocide speech, and her report on her expulsion from Birzeit was similarly forgiving of the bigoted policy that bans all Israeli Jews–though not Israeli Arabs–from the campus simply because they are Israeli Jews. So if students and faculty at Birzeit, the Palestinians’ flagship university, can’t even tolerate having Hass on their campus, what does that say about Palestinian readiness to make peace with the Israeli majority, which doesn’t share her belief that their own country is evil and all justice is on the Palestinians’ side?
After all, universities are where the next generation of leaders is nurtured; this makes Birzeit’s position far more important than that of the 79-year-old Abbas, now in the tenth year of his four-year term. Abbas will soon be gone. But Birzeit’s students and graduates will be an influential force in Palestinian society for decades to come.
So how is peace possible when Birzeit is educating these future Palestinian leaders to believe all Israeli Jews should be shunned simply because they are Israeli Jews? And how is peace possible when these future leaders won’t even listen to any view of the conflict that contradicts their own, such as an Israeli Jew (though not Hass) might provide?
Needless to say, this is the polar opposite of how Israeli universities act: Their faculties overwhelmingly favor a two-state solution and educate accordingly, and Palestinian students are welcome regardless of their views. Even Omar Barghouti, leader of the BDS movement, famously (and hypocritically) obtained his master’s degree from Tel Aviv University and is now pursuing his doctorate there in between trips abroad to urge others to boycott the institution.
Under pressure from her many influential fans–including Germany’s Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which sponsored the conference she was expelled from–Birzeit later said it would make an exception to its rule for “supporters of the Palestinian struggle” like Hass. But that doesn’t fundamentally alter either its bigoted policy or its unwillingness to listen to anyone who might challenge the Palestinian narrative.
Nor is Birzeit exceptional in this regard. In June, for instance, Prof. Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi was forced to resign from another leading Palestinian institution, Al-Quds University, for having dared to take some of his students to Auschwitz to teach them about the Holocaust. If a leading Palestinian university won’t even let its students learn about the Holocaust because it might increase their empathy for Israeli Jews, what does that say about prospects for peace?
As Haaretz blogger Matthew Kalman perceptively noted, peace isn’t the only victim of Birzeit’s behavior: Palestinian universities’ unwillingness to confront students with any perspective that might challenge their preexisting views has also hindered Palestinian economic development, because students aren’t developing the critical thinking skills necessary for success in today’s high-tech economy. But that’s the Palestinians’ problem.
Birzeit’s education to hatred and prejudice, in contrast, ought to be the problem of anyone who claims to care about Israeli-Palestinian peace. Unfortunately, most of the world would rather look the other way.
Originally published in Commentary
Palestinians aren’t ready for a two-state solution. But meanwhile, both sides need to live
If there’s one person I wish world leaders would listen to in the new year that began last week, it’s an anonymous physician from Gaza identified only by his initial. “I wish Israel never existed, but as it does not seem to be going away, I would rather be working in Israel like I used to before the first Intifada, not fighting it,” F. told Mudar Zahran, a Palestinian-Jordanian living in Britain, earlier this month.
F. isn’t alone. In a poll of Palestinian attitudes conducted by the Washington Institute in June, shortly before the Gaza war began, over 80% of respondents said they “definitely” or “probably” wanted more Palestinians to be allowed to work in Israel, while a smaller but still decisive majority wanted Israeli companies to provide more jobs in the West Bank and Gaza. And in a rare moment of honesty this July, even senior Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzouk acknowledged his people’s hunger for work, saying he would prefer an Israeli reoccupation to Gaza’s current situation, because “occupation means providing electricity, water and jobs.”
None of this means the Palestinians have stopped hating Israel. Indeed, fully 60% of respondents forthrightly told that same Washington Institute poll that “the main Palestinian goal for the next five years” shouldn’t be a two-state solution, but “to work toward reclaiming all of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea” – aka eradicating Israel. And 64% said that even if a two-state agreement were signed, it wouldn’t end the conflict; instead, “resistance should continue until all of historic Palestine is liberated.”
Yet meanwhile, they want to live – or at least, most of them do. Though Palestinians overwhelmingly applaud the “martyrs” who die while trying to kill Israelis, most don’t want to die such a death themselves; they would prefer to earn decent livings for their families and not be killed in constant wars.
And this is where international leaders, diplomats and journalists make their big mistake: Starting from the correct premise that most Palestinians would like to lead normal lives, they erroneously conclude that Palestinians are ready for a two-state agreement, which would help them to do so. And they simply ignore what Palestinians keep telling them, in poll after poll, failed negotiation after failed negotiation: They don’t want normal lives at the price of giving up their dream of destroying Israel. They aren’t ready to abandon their hope of “reclaiming all of historic Palestine.” They aren’t ready to waive the “right of return,” aka their demand to eliminate the Jewish state demographically by settling millions of descendants of refugees in it. They aren’t ready to end the conflict. And even if a two-state solution were reached, they would see it as nothing but an interim step toward the goal of Israel’s ultimate destruction.
Compounding this error is the fact that diplomats and politicians naturally hunger for high-profile agreements that will win them newspaper headlines and perhaps even Nobel prizes; there’s little glory in simply managing a conflict in a way that makes life a bit better for all sides. So over and over, they push the parties into fruitless negotiations that inevitably collapse, and in the process (for reasons I explained here) frequently spark a new outbreak of violence.
Yet “managing the conflict” is precisely what most people on both sides actually want. Israelis would like peace, but most don’t consider it achievable right now. Palestinians would like to destroy Israel, but most don’t consider that achievable right now. So meanwhile, both would like to live as well as possible – i.e., with minimal violence and maximum opportunities to earn a decent living – until some change in the situation makes one or the other of their mutually incompatible goals achievable.
This, basically, is what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu advocated years ago when he spoke of “economic peace” with the Palestinians. Although he was derided worldwide for thinking economic improvement could replace a diplomatic agreement, Netanyahu never intended this as a substitute for ending the conflict. His goal was merely to improve life on both sides until such time as ending the conflict actually became possible.
Though Israeli-Palestinian economic cooperation was sharply reduced by the wave of Palestinian terror that followed the 1993 Oslo Accords, it still exists in many fields, from Palestinian construction workers who build houses in Israel to Israeli high-tech firms that outsource programming to Palestinian companies. And expanding it again could benefit both sides: Israel could provide jobs, which Palestinians desperately need and want; Palestinians could fill Israeli labor shortages in fields like construction and agriculture; Israeli firms could outsource work to the territories; and so forth.
Yet expanded cooperation clearly isn’t possible while Palestinians are actively waging war on Israel, either militarily or diplomatically. And this is where Western leaders come in. For while Hamas’ military war may be beyond their control, they have actively abetted the Palestinian Authority’s diplomatic war – by demanding Israeli concessions just for the privilege of holding talks with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, by threatening Israel with boycotts and imposed solutions; and above all, by financing Abbas’ war with the billions of dollars a year they give the PA.
Ostensibly, their goal is to encourage an Israeli-Palestinian deal by “bolstering” Abbas while pressuring Israel. But no such deal is achievable as long as Palestinians don’t want it. And meanwhile, by fanning the flames of Israeli-Palestinian animosity, these Western moves preclude the kind of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation that could improve lives right now.
So if the West truly wants to improve the Palestinians’ situation, the best thing it could do is promote Netanyahu’s derided “economic peace.” There would be no signed agreements, just informal arrangements: Western countries would use their financial leverage to make Abbas scale back his diplomatic war and would stop supporting this war themselves; in exchange, Israel would take significant steps to bolster the West Bank economy. Although Gaza would have to be excluded as long as Hamas remains in power, helping some Palestinians is surely better than helping none at all.
Granted, it wouldn’t win Western leaders any Nobel prizes. But many ordinary Palestinians like F. might thank them for it.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post