Peace Process
Mudar Zahran, a Palestinian-Jordanian now living in Britain, has collected and published some truly shocking testimony from Gaza residents about Hamas’s behavior during this summer’s war with Israel. All his interviewees insisted on remaining anonymous, and it’s easy to understand why: They accuse Hamas of deliberately creating hundreds of civilian casualties by forcing civilians to stay in places Israel had warned it was going to bomb.
Here, for instance, is the testimony of S., a medical worker:
The Israeli army sends warnings to people [Gazans] to evacuate buildings before an attack. The Israelis either call or send a text message. Sometimes they call several times to make sure everyone has been evacuated. Hamas’s strict policy, though, was not to allow us to evacuate. Many people got killed, locked inside their homes by Hamas militants. Hamas’s official Al-Quds TV regularly issued warnings to Gazans not to evacuate their homes. Hamas militants would block the exits to the places residents were asked to evacuate. In the Shijaiya area, people received warnings from the Israelis and tried to evacuate the area, but Hamas militants blocked the exits and ordered people to return to their homes. Some of the people had no choice but to run towards the Israelis and ask for protection for their families. Hamas shot some of those people as they were running; the rest were forced to return to their homes and get bombed. This is how the Shijaiya massacre happened. More than 100 people were killed.
And here’s K., a graduate student at an Egyptian university who was visiting his family in Gaza this summer: “When people stopped listening to Hamas orders not to evacuate and began leaving their homes anyway, Hamas imposed a curfew: anyone walking out in the street was shot without being asked any questions. That way Hamas made sure people had to stay in their homes even if they were about to get bombed.”
And H., who lost his leg in an Israeli bombing: “My father received a text-message from the Israeli army warning him that our area was going to be bombed, and Hamas prevented us from leaving. They said there was a curfew. A curfew, can you believe that?”
T., a former (and evidently disenchanted) Hamas government official, explained the policy’s rationale:
Some people say Hamas wants civilians killed in order to gain global sympathy, but I believe this is not the main reason. I think the reason is that if all the people were allowed to evacuate their homes, they all would have ended up in a certain area in Gaza. If that happened, it would have made the rest of Gaza empty of civilians, and the Israelis would have been able to hit Hamas without worrying about civilians in all those empty areas. Hamas wanted civilians all over the place to confuse the Israelis and make their operations more difficult.
Nor is this the only crime of which Zahran’s interviewees accused Hamas. For instance, three different people–two aid workers and an imam–said Hamas stole humanitarian aid and either kept it for its own people or sold it to ordinary Gazans for exorbitant prices.
Altogether, Zahran interviewed more than 20 Gazans, all of whom had shocking things to say. That doesn’t guarantee that their stories are true. Palestinians frequently fabricate atrocity tales about Israel (see, for instance, the Jenin massacre that wasn’t, or the perennial favorite about Israel trying to turn Palestinians into drug addicts), so there’s no reason to think anti-Hamas Palestinians aren’t equally capable of fabricating atrocity tales about Hamas.
Moreover, the interviewees were clearly terrified of Hamas, so it wouldn’t be easy to get them to talk to the international media (which generally relies on either Hamas-approved fixers or local stringers), UN workers (many of whom are openly affiliated with Hamas), or human-rights organizations (which, like the media, generally rely on local investigators). Still, given how many crocodile tears the media, the UN, and human-rights groups have shed over alleged Israeli “war crimes” in Gaza, one would think they could spare some time and effort to investigate alleged Hamas war crimes against its own people.
That they haven’t merely confirms, once again, two basic truths: First, these self-proclaimed moral arbiters care very little about human rights unless Israel can be blamed. And second, they’re fundamentally lazy: They’ll always prefer the easy route of collecting “testimony” against Israel, which Gaza residents can give without fear of consequences, to the hard work of digging for information about the abuses of a terrorist government that tortures and kills anyone who dares speak against it.
Originally published in Commentary
The news that hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza drowned last week when the boats in which they were trying to reach Europe sank once again highlights the hypocrisy of the world’s attitude toward the Palestinians. After all, the “international community” has designated two-thirds of all Gaza residents as bona fide refugees, even though the vast majority of them were born in Gaza and have lived there all their lives. And as bona fide refugees, they shouldn’t have had to board rickety smugglers’ boats in a desperate attempt to reach Europe; they should have been able to apply to the UN for orderly resettlement right from their refugee camps, just as thousands of other refugees do every year. But they can’t, because Palestinians are the only refugees in the world who are denied the basic right of resettlement.
Granted, they are also the only “refugees” in the world for whom refugeehood is an inheritable status that can be passed down to one’s descendants in perpetuity, generation after generation. Under the definition used by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which deals with all the world’s refugees except Palestinians, only a few thousand elderly Gazans who were personally displaced in 1948 would be considered refugees today, rather than the 1.2 million actually on UN rolls. So if the “international community” were to argue that Gazans don’t deserve a right to resettlement because they aren’t really refugees, that would be perfectly legitimate.
But it doesn’t. In fact, not only has the world adopted the unique definition of refugeehood promulgated by the Palestinians’ personal refugee agency, UNRWA, but it actively supports this definition by funding UNRWA’s ever-expanding budget to keep pace with its ever-expanding number of “refugees.” And once having accepted the claim that these born-and-bred Gazans are actually refugees from an Israel they’ve never seen, the international community is morally obligated to ensure that they enjoy the same rights as all other refugees.
Instead, Palestinians are the only refugees in the world who are denied the right of resettlement. Whereas UNHCR resettles tens of thousands of refugees every year, UNRWA hasn’t resettled a single refugee in its 65 years of existence. On the contrary, the schools it runs for Palestinian refugees indoctrinate them from kindergarten on that there is one, and only one, way for them to end their refugee status: by “returning” to the towns or villages in Israel that their ancestors fled–which most of them have never seen, and some of which no longer even exist. In short, since Israel would never voluntarily accept all five million “refugees” on UNRWA’s rolls, it’s telling them that the only solution to their refugeehood is Israel’s destruction.
According to a poll taken in late August, a whopping 43 percent of Gazans would like to emigrate. Many of these would-be emigrants are presumably among the two-thirds of Gazans registered as refugees, meaning they ought to be entitled to resettlement aid. So here’s a modest proposal: Western countries, which are UNRWA’s main donors, should take a big chunk of the over $1 billion a year they give UNRWA and spend it instead on resettling those Gazans who want to leave. Not only would that help the Gazan refugees themselves, but it would save money in the long run by significantly reducing the number of refugees under UNRWA’s care.
Alternatively, they could tell UNRWA they’re no longer willing to go along with the fiction that its five million “refugees” are really refugees, and from now on will provide funds only for those refugees who actually meet UNHCR’s definition. The remaining money would go to the governments under which most of UNRWA’s registered refugees live–primarily Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, and Lebanon–to help them provide the services UNRWA now provides.
But to continue defining Palestinians as refugees while denying them the basic right to resettlement is unconscionable. And all those Westerners who claim to be so concerned over Palestinian rights should be the first to protest this hypocritical and discriminatory practice.
Originally published in Commentary
When landlords no longer want to rent to Hamas, being a terrorist starts looking less attractive
Like many Israelis, I’ve been skeptical that this summer’s war in Gaza achieved anything more than a temporary calm. So I was encouraged to read the following tweet from Jerusalem Post reporter Khaled Abu Toameh Saturday night: “Gaza landlords refusing to rent out apartments to Hamas members and their families out of fear of being targeted by Israel in future.” His subsequent news story revealed that tenants are equally unenthusiastic about having Hamas neighbors.
This development doesn’t yet constitute victory. But judging from Israel’s experience in the West Bank, it’s an important step in the right direction.
To understand why, it’s worth recalling the early days of the second intifada, when an argument raged between the IDF and the Shin Bet security service over how to handle it. Many senior IDF officers then – like many today – insisted there was no military solution, because fighting terror was like trying to empty the sea with a spoon: No matter how many terrorists you arrest or kill, there’s a limitless supply of new recruits to replace them.
But then-Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter thought otherwise. While recognizing that the potential supply of new recruits is indeed vast, he argued that the actual supply could be dried up by making terror a business that doesn’t pay.
Any rational cost-benefit analysis would have concluded that during the intifada’s first 18 months, terror paid handsomely. The odds of being killed or arrested were low, and the rewards were high: Not only did terrorist organizations pay relatively well at a time when the hostilities had destroyed many other jobs and businesses, but terrorists were lionized as heroes throughout Palestinian society.
What Dichter understood, however, was that Israel could alter this cost-benefit analysis by arresting or killing enough terrorists. First, increasing the odds of being arrested or killed would increase the costs of terrorism. But perhaps even more importantly, it would reduce the benefits, because other Palestinians wouldn’t want to associate with people who were liable to be raided by IDF troops or hit with an airstrike at any moment. Thus instead of being lionized, terrorists would find themselves ostracized – which isn’t a price most people would be willing to pay.
And indeed, West Bank terrorists who subsequently abandoned terror routinely cited social ostracism as the reason for their decision. When they went into coffeehouses, they complained, everyone else fled, and the owners would kick them out, fearful their presence would bring the IDF. Taxi drivers wouldn’t pick them up. Barbershops wouldn’t cut their hair. And worst of all, they couldn’t get married. One former terrorist, for instance, said his fiancee’s family conditioned their marriage on him abandoning terror and obtaining an amnesty from Israel. Another girl’s father said he would never let his daughter marry a terrorist, because “I want her to have a good life, without having the army coming into her house all the time to arrest her while her husband escapes into the streets.”
Gazan terrorists, like their West Bank counterparts during the early days of the intifada, have until now enjoyed high benefits and low costs. After all, Hamas controls Gaza, so it can and does ensure that its members get the best of everything – including by seizing aid shipments meant for the needy and distributing them to its operatives instead. At the same time, they face little risk, since Israel largely leaves Gaza alone except during periodic wars, and then, Hamas personnel can retreat to their underground bunkers for protection. Indeed, according to Israel’s own estimate, only about 1,000 of the 2,127 Gazans killed during the latest war were terrorists, meaning that Hamas, Islamic Jihad and company lost less than 5% of their combined forces.
But because Hamas commanders’ houses doubled (according to Israeli intelligence) as command and control centers for the organization’s military operations, Israel could and did target them. Such strikes rarely hit the Hamas commanders themselves, since Israel’s policy of issuing warnings before attacking any target where civilians might be present, such as a house, gave them ample time to flee. Rather, the goal was simply to disrupt Hamas’ ability to command its men by disabling its regular command posts and forcing it to relocate to improvised ones.
Yet it turns out these strikes had a side effect no less important, if not more, than their immediate military purpose: changing the cost-benefit analysis of terrorism by imposing real costs on the terrorists. Hamas commanders not only lost their homes during the war, but are having trouble finding new ones, because landlords no longer want them around: The risk of having their property destroyed by an Israeli airstrike come the next war is too high. And for most people, the prospect of being permanently homeless would be a significant deterrent.
Of course, this effect won’t last: Because Hamas controls Gaza, it can impose its will on the population and has never hesitated to do so ruthlessly, including by putting political rivals under house arrest and then shooting those who violate this decree. Thus reluctant landlords will almost certainly be presented with offers they can’t refuse, along the lines of “rent these apartments to our people or we’ll kneecap you.”
That’s why I remain skeptical about Israel’s ability to end terror from Gaza without reoccupying the territory and toppling Hamas: As long as the organization remains in power, it will probably be able to ensure enough benefits for its members (and costs for its opponents) to outweigh the costs Israel can impose by long-distance action. But I’d love to be proved wrong, and any progress toward the social ostracism of Hamas terrorists constitutes progress toward that goal.
Judging solely by the polls, one might have thought this summer’s fighting had the opposite effect: Opinion surveys indicate that the war dramatically increased support for Hamas. But what people do is far more indicative of what they really think than what they tell pollsters. And if Gazan landlords no longer want to rent to Hamas members, then the war has clearly persuaded at least some Gazans that today, the cost-benefit analysis favors keeping far away from terrorists.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
A Yale University chaplain recently resigned “on his own initiative” over a letter to the New York Times blaming Israel and the Jews for anti-Semitism. Clearly, nothing Israel does or doesn’t do justifies attacks on Jewish citizens of other countries, but even if did, Rev. Bruce Shipman’s reasoning would have been fallacious. According to Shipman, “the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel’s patrons abroad” to pressure Israel “for final-status resolution to the Palestinian question.” Yet based on the evidence, the Israeli policy change most likely to reduce anti-Semitic outbreaks isn’t ending its “continuing occupation of the West Bank,” but reoccupying evacuated Gaza.
After all, every major upsurge in anti-Semitic attacks in recent years has coincided with a war that began when terrorists attacked Israel from territory it had vacated: spring 2002, when Israel reinvaded parts of the West Bank it had left under the Oslo Accords to stop a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings; summer 2006, when Hezbollah sparked a war by launching a deadly cross-border attack from south Lebanon, which Israel had vacated six years earlier; and two ground operations in Gaza, one in winter 2008/09 and one this past July and August, both launched in response to the incessant rocket fire from that territory ever since Israel withdrew every last soldier and settler in 2005. During the intervening years, incidents of anti-Semitism were hundreds or even thousands of percent lower, despite Israel’s “continuing occupation of the West Bank.”
The latest Gaza war epitomizes this counterintuitive truth. In July, anti-Semitic attacks were up 130 percent in America, 436 percent in Europe, 600 percent in South Africa, and a whopping 1,200 percent in South America compared to July 2013. To cite one typical example, Scotland recorded more anti-Semitic attacks during the first week of August alone than in all of 2013.
In other words, what really spurs anti-Semites to come out of the woodwork isn’t “the occupation,” but Israeli-caused casualties. And while one might have though withdrawals would decrease such casualties by eliminating day-to-day friction between Palestinians (or Lebanese) and Israeli troops, in reality, the opposite has occurred: Every such withdrawal has resulted in terrorist organizations taking over the vacated territory and using it to launch attacks on Israel, which in turn has produced a sharp rise in casualties, for two reasons.
First, in territory it controls, Israel can prevent terror by routine policing. But once it has quit an area, counterterrorism operations require reinvading–and military operations are obviously far more lethal than police work. Second, in territory it controls, Israel can prevent terrorists from embedding military infrastructure like tunnels and rocket launchers amid a civilian population. But once it evacuates a territory, terrorists are free to do exactly that, and they do. Consequently, any counterterrorism operation becomes far more deadly to the terrorists’ own people.
The result, as I explained here last month, is that Palestinian casualties have soared since Israel’s 2005 pullout from Gaza. In the current war, for instance, the UN claims 2,131 Palestinians were killed. That’s more than the 1,727 fatalities Gaza suffered during the second intifada of 2000-2005. In other words, Gaza just lost more people in 50 days than it did during the bloodiest five years of the period when Israel controlled the territory.
Mark Gardner of CST, which monitors anti-Semitism in Britain, pithily explained the problem last month: During wartime, “The British public is constantly exposed to pictures of wounded or dead Palestinian children, and the effect is apparent.” And because such wars have been occurring every two to four years, “the issue is ignited almost continually. The Jewish community gets hit again and again, without reprieve, and the situation is not given a chance to return to relative normalcy.”
So if anyone really thinks Israeli policy should be blamed for global anti-Semitism, the data shows there’s only one policy change that might actually be effective: reoccupying Gaza. Somehow, I doubt that’s what the Bruce Shipmans of the world really want.
Originally published in Commentary
When courts can’t punish killers, societies lose their ability to divert revenge into legal channels
With the Gaza war finally over, attention is returning to a problem the fighting temporarily pushed aside: the worrying surge in anti-Arab violence, whose worst but by no means only manifestation was July’s horrific revenge killing of teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir by Jews. Education Minister Shay Piron has ordered schools to devote class time to coexistence and combating racism. President Reuven Rivlin is working on his own program to combat violence. Police are cracking down on anti-Arab incitement. All these are worthy initiatives.
Yet if Israel is serious about combating anti-Arab violence, there’s something else it has to do: stop giving Arab terrorists a get-out-of-jail-free card. Clearly, wholesale releases of Arab prisoners who murdered Jews don’t justify Jewish attacks on Arabs. But they do make such violence harder to prevent.
To understand why, I’d like to borrow an insight from Times of Israel blogger Gil Reich on a seemingly unrelated topic: the Torah’s prescriptions for dealing with the sotah, a woman suspected by her husband of adultery, and the eshet yefat toar, an enemy woman desired by a soldier during wartime.
The sotah’s husband is told to put her through a humiliating ritual that culminates in drinking a liquid which will supposedly kill her if she’s guilty, but help her become pregnant if she’s innocent. The soldier is told to put his female captive through a humiliating ritual that entails spending a month making herself ugly. In both cases, Reich noted, this outrages our moral sense: Instead of humiliating these women, we want the Torah to “just say no” – to tell the jealous husband he can’t abuse or kill his suspect wife and the soldier he can’t rape his captive. But in fact, the Torah already has: It clearly prohibits murder, assault and rape. So why does it also prescribe these rituals?
The answer, Reich argues, is that sometimes, in the face of a very powerful emotion – the rage and suspicion of a jealous husband, the lust of a soldier at war – just saying no isn’t enough: The emotion will overcome the legal prohibition unless it is channeled instead into some safer outlet. So the Torah prescribes detailed legal procedures into which the husband or soldier can channel his rage or lust, thereby giving the white-hot emotions time to cool. And in practice, it seems to work: In Jewish society, the product of this millennia-old tradition, “honor killings” and military rape are both relatively rare by comparison with many other societies.
Revenge is an equally powerful emotion that also needs a channel. And in most societies, this channel is the legal system, which seeks to replace revenge killings with courtroom proceedings.
That’s precisely why blood feuds are common mainly in places where the legal system is weak or distrusted. In 19th-century America, for instance, the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feud claimed dozens of lives. But feuds like that don’t happen in today’s America, except perhaps in inner-city gang wars – places where the law’s writ still doesn’t run. Elsewhere, as the justice system gradually penetrated the frontier and backwoods areas, blood feuds gave way to criminal trials.
Israelis, too, have long channeled the natural human desire for revenge into legal proceedings. I witnessed this process firsthand at a shiva call following a 2002 suicide bombing. The victim’s brother furiously announced that he wanted to avenge her by killing Arabs – a normal response for a grief-stricken teenager. But his father and the other men present insisted it was the wrong response: We have a state and an army, they said; her killers will be caught, and they’ll spend the rest of their lives behind bars. And it worked.
The problem is that it no longer works, because only the first half of that equation remains true. The security services still excel at hunting down terrorists who murder Israelis; I have no doubt, for instance, that the terrorists who kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teens this June will eventually be caught. But how could anyone still believe that these men, once caught, will actually spend their lives behind bars?
It was bad enough when Israel was only freeing terrorists in exchange for kidnapped soldiers. Since abductions are mercifully rare, this at least allowed hope – however delusional it often proved – that killers would remain in jail.
But in July 2013, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu destroyed even that faint hope by agreeing to free 104 murderers (in four batches) not in exchange for kidnapped Israelis, but merely for the privilege of holding negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. Unlike kidnappings, talks with the PA or efforts to restart them aren’t rare occurrences; one or the other is almost always happening. So by agreeing to pay for them in the currency of freed terrorists, Netanyahu raised the specter of prisoner releases becoming chronic. True, he swore never to do it again, but he’s broken too many previous promises not to release terrorists for this one to be believable.
Thus today, the legal process is no longer a credible substitute for revenge; it’s too obvious that any arrested terrorist will eventually be freed in some deal or another. And once this realization sunk in, all it took was the spark provided by the three teens’ abduction: Absent a credible legal outlet for the grief and anger all Israelis shared, a minority of hotheads, mostly teenagers, channeled it instead into random, vicious attacks on Arabs.
In short, it’s no accident that the worst anti-Arab violence in decades erupted this summer: Three prisoner releases in nine months, solely to keep the PA at the negotiating table, were the straw that broke the legal system’s back. And without a credible legal system capable of channeling the desire for revenge, the primitive rule of the blood feud has returned.
Teaching children that anti-Arab violence is unacceptable is obviously important. So is arresting people who engage in such violence. But against a powerful emotion like revenge, education and enforcement alone will never suffice. Israel also needs a credible legal process into which this emotion can be channeled – one in which murderers, once put behind bars, actually stay there.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
Ireland is one of the most consistently anti-Israel countries in Europe. So it was interesting to read in Ireland’s Sunday Independent yesterday that Israeli troops were instrumental in saving the lives of Irish peacekeepers on the Golan Heights last week. Citing “senior sources,” the newspaper reported that after the peacekeepers were attacked by a Syrian rebel group, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, “Irish soldiers would have been killed or taken hostage by Islamist extremists if it wasn’t for the military intervention of the Israeli army … The Israeli assistance was described as ‘decisive’ in the success of the mission.”
Specifically, the Israel Defense Forces used its precise intelligence about the area to guide the troops to safety along a route that avoided Nusra fighters. Additionally, there were “unconfirmed reports that the Israelis directed fire at the Islamists to stop them from attacking the Filipino and Irish soldiers.”
There’s nothing surprising about the IDF’s intervention. After all, Israel has consistently intervened to save Syrian lives even though it’s formally at war with Syria, providing food and other humanitarian assistance to besieged Syrian villages and offering medical care to everyone from wounded fighters to mothers in labor. (Safed’s Rebecca Sieff Hospital delivered its seventh Syrian baby earlier this month.) So intervening to save the nationals of a country it’s not at war with is a no-brainer.
What is surprising, however, is what this says about Ireland, and by extension, about Europe as a whole. For here you have the difference between Israel and its enemies in the starkest form: on one hand, radical jihadists who sought to kill or kidnap Irish soldiers; on the other, a stable country that intervened to save their lives. The choice between the two would seem self-evident. But in fact, Ireland has consistently chosen the jihadists.
Last year, for instance, Ireland led the opposition within the European Union to blacklisting Hezbollah’s military wing as a terrorist organization. This is the same Hezbollah that kidnapped European nationals for years; that murdered innocent tourists on European soil in 2012; and that’s currently helping the Assad regime in Syria slaughter its own citizens. True, Hezbollah is Shi’ite and the Nusra Front is Sunni, but beyond that, there isn’t much to choose between them.
Ireland also looks out for Hamas’s interests. It vociferously opposes Israel’s partial blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza, despite the obvious fact that lifting the blockade would let Hamas import vast quantities of arms without hindrance, and it even denies Israel’s right to intercept blockade-running flotillas–a right a UN inquiry commission upheld in 2011.
In contrast, Dublin is always at the head of the pack in attacking Israel. Before assuming the EU’s rotating presidency in 2013, for instance, it announced that it supports an EU-wide ban on imports from Israeli settlements, but had regretfully concluded it was unachievable, since too many other EU members were opposed.
Yet Ireland is merely an extreme case of a pan-European phenomenon: Rather than seeking to empower Israel against the jihadists, the EU consistently seeks to empower the jihadists against Israel. Indeed, the EU often appears obsessed with making Israel give up strategic territory along its borders, despite the fact that every previous Israeli withdrawal has merely further empowered jihadist groups (Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza), and that additional withdrawals are all too likely to do the same.
Not coincidentally, the Golan is included in the list of “Israeli-occupied territories” that the EU wants Israel to quit. One wonders whether Dublin appreciates the irony that had Israel complied with this demand, IDF troops wouldn’t have been on hand last week to rescue its peacekeepers.
But that, of course, is precisely the problem with seeking to empower your enemies rather than your allies: If you succeed, your allies will no longer be able to help you when you need them.
Originally published in Commentary
I realize it’s been a busy week, what with ISIS beheading journalists, Russia invading Ukraine, and deadliest of all (to quote the inimitable Sultan Knish), Israel threatening to build new houses. But it’s nevertheless shocking that one UN announcement last week should have attracted so little international attention: Last Friday, the number of registered Syrian refugees topped the 3 million mark. And those are just the ones who have made it out of Syria and registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The agency estimates that another 6.5 million are internally displaced, bringing the total number of displaced Syrians to almost half the country’s population.
But buried about halfway through the announcement is a sentence that goes a long way toward explaining the international apathy: “Syrians are now the world’s largest refugee population under UNHCR care, second only in number to the decades-long Palestinian crisis.” In other words, even as it tries to solicit aid for distressed Syrians, the UN itself is telling people that another refugee crisis is even greater, and hence presumably more deserving of their money and attention. And it has peddled this nonsensical claim so successfully, for so long, that it now finds itself unable to meet the needs of a real crisis: The $2 billion it’s desperately seeking to keep Syrian refugees alive through the upcoming winter has already been squandered on five million faux refugees, most of whom don’t need it at all.
Of course, there are real Palestinian refugees–primarily the 500,000 in Syria, whose plight, like that of other Syrians, is dire. Moreover, though most of the Palestinians temporarily displaced by the Hamas-Israel war are now returning home, Gaza will need reconstruction aid.
But of the 5 million Palestinians registered as “refugees” with their own private UN agency, UNRWA, most aren’t displaced in any fashion: They have lived in the same places for decades, and have houses, jobs, extended families, friends, schools, health care, and all the other accoutrements of normal life. Moreover, most live in places that, by Mideast standards, are exceptionally safe and stable, including 2.1 million in Jordan and 750,000 in the West Bank.
Nevertheless, UNRWA’s staff and budget dwarfs that of UNHCR. It has 30,000 employees to deal with 5 million “refugees,” while UNHCR has 8,600 to handle 10.5 million refugees plus more than twice as many other “people of concern,” including 17.7 million internally displaced. UNRWA’s regular budget is $1 billion a year, bolstered by periodic emergency appeals ($300 million in 2013); UNHCR had a regular budget of $4 billion plus $1.3 billion in emergency appeals as of mid-2013, but for a population seven times as large–35.8 million “people of concern.”
Thus UNRWA has one staffer for every 167 Palestinians while UNHCR has one for every 4,163 non-Palestinians, and UNRWA has $260 for every Palestinian while UNHCR has $148 for every non-Palestinian. Yet the needs of the people UNHCR cares for–who have lost their homes, their jobs and their entire lives–are incomparably greater than those of the Palestinians, most of whom lead completely normal lives.
Much has been written, correctly, about how UNRWA helps perpetuate the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But to my mind, the greater outrage is the degree to which UNRWA diverts international money and attention from those who need it desperately–like the Syrian refugees–to those who don’t need it at all, like the many Palestinian “refugees” who became Jordanian citizens decades ago.
And unlike the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, this is a problem the West can easily solve. Western nations provide most of UNRWA’s budget, so all they have to do is reallocate this money–some to UNHCR, and some, at least initially, to Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, and perhaps Lebanon, to cushion the shock of suddenly having to provide health, education, and welfare services to millions of people who currently receive those services from UNRWA.
Then, with five million faux refugees out of the picture, perhaps the real ones will finally get the attention they deserve.
Originally published in Commentary
The only way to end the Hamas threat is one Israelis aren’t yet ready for – reoccupying Gaza
Judging by the polls, Israelis aren’t happy with the results of the war that (perhaps) ended last Tuesday. Only a third think Israel beat Hamas; most expect hostilities to resume within a year; a majority opposed the cease-fire; and a whopping 60 percent feel less secure than they did before the war.
These assessments may be unduly pessimistic. Whether the war achieves its stated aim of long-term quiet depends largely on how quickly Hamas can rebuild its arsenal, and with Egypt’s current government far more serious than its predecessors about preventing arms smuggling from Sinai, this will likely take longer than it did after previous wars.
Nevertheless, Hamas remains firmly in control of Gaza, and its desire to destroy Israel is undiminished. Even without resupply, it has enough rockets and mortars left for another war: about 3,000, according to IDF estimates. And in time, it probably will be able to replenish its arsenal: Egyptian border guards have frequently proven corruptible; the current Egyptian government may not last; and Western pressure, which has repeatedly led Israel to ease restrictions on Gaza over the past several years, will likely do so again once the war’s impact fades.
Thus, even if this war buys a longer period of quiet than the last one did (a mere 20 months), another war seems inevitable. And next time, the circumstances might be considerably less convenient than they were this summer, when many Arab countries offered Israel unprecedented support while enemies like Hezbollah and Syria were preoccupied with their own problems.
All this begs the question of why the government from the outset limited its goals to restoring the status quo ante in Gaza, rather than seizing what seemed like a golden opportunity to permanently end the Hamas threat. There are three answers to this question.
One, as I’ve noted before, is the Obama Administration: Since Israel depends on America for both diplomatic support and arms supplies; the kind of extensive operation needed to decisively defeat Hamas wasn’t feasible with an administration this hostile.
The second is Iran, which has long (and rightly) been Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s primary concern. The West’s nuclear negotiations with Tehran, which were recently extended until November, still look unlikely to produce an acceptable deal. Thus Israel may soon have to choose between bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities or letting it go nuclear. And if so, it can’t afford to have its army bogged down in Gaza.
But the third reason is no less important: Even though polls repeatedly showed that Israelis supported a broader operation, they would not have supported the only kind of operation that could actually end the Hamas threat – a complete, long-term reoccupation of Gaza.
To understand why this would be necessary, a closer look at the IDF’s successful defeat of the second intifada is in order. Popular Israeli mythology attributes this victory largely to a single operation, Defensive Shield, which lasted about six weeks. But in reality, as I explained in detail in these pages five years ago, Defensive Shield was just the beginning.
The operation was launched in March 2002, midway through the second year of the intifada. Yet in the intifada’s third year (September 2002-September 2003), Palestinian terrorists still killed 240 Israelis – an impressive 47% drop from the previous year, but nonetheless one of the highest annual death tolls from terror in Israel’s history. It took several more years of intensive effort (during which fatalities continued falling by about 50% a year) to bring West Bank terror down to the low levels of recent years.
Moreover, though the IDF initially withdrew from major Palestinian cities after Defensive Shield, the consequent sharp uptick in terror – June 2002 was the second-deadliest month of the entire intifada – quickly persuaded the government to send it back in again. And this time, it never really left: To this day, the IDF maintains full security control over the West Bank. True, it no longer sits inside Palestinian cities but it controls the surrounding areas and reenters these cities whenever it deems necessary. And this continued presence is essential, because absent a force willing and able to do the ongoing work of gathering intelligence, making arrests and combating arms smuggling, terrorist organizations will quickly regroup.
In Gaza, Hamas is obviously unwilling, while the Palestinian Authority shows no signs of being able. Thus to eliminate the Hamas threat, the IDF would have to retake control of Gaza permanently – or at least for the foreseeable future.
Most Israelis aren’t yet ready for that, because in contrast to the second intifada, which killed hundreds of people and paralyzed normal life throughout the country, this summer’s war had little impact on daily life outside the South. True, the greater Tel Aviv area suffered two to three rocket alerts a day, more than ever before, but the disruption was still comparatively minor. And almost all Israeli fatalities occurred either in Gaza or in nearby communities. That’s why a centrist like Yossi Klein Halevi could write last week that “despite all that’s happened since, which validated the apocalyptic warnings of the right,” he continues to have “no regrets” about the 2005 pullout from Gaza. Or why a right-of-center friend who has consistently opposed West Bank withdrawals could still ask me, “Why on earth would we want to reoccupy Gaza?”
In sum, Hamas hasn’t yet caused enough Israelis enough pain for a critical mass to be willing to reoccupy Gaza. And nothing short of that would accomplish much more than what this summer’s war did: a temporary lull.
Over the past nine years, Hamas has launched three wars, and each has been more damaging than the last. If this escalation continues, Israel will eventually have no choice but to reoccupy Gaza, because there is no other way to permanently end the Hamas threat. But as long as most of the country considers the damage caused by these periodic wars to be tolerable, successive governments will keep doing exactly what Netanyahu did: employ just enough military pressure to restore the status quo ante, and then start the countdown to the next war.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
Martin Indyk’s interview with Foreign Policy this week contained many interesting nuggets, but one statement in particular shocked me: “It’s very hard to make the argument that America now has a strategic interest in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Indyk said. “It’s just one of many conflicts and it’s not the most important and it’s not the most difficult.” What’s shocking about this statement isn’t that it’s false; indeed, it’s admirably clear-eyed. But it bears no relationship to the policy actually followed either by Indyk himself or the administration he served.
Until he resigned this spring, Indyk was Secretary of State John Kerry’s special envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian talks. In other words, he spent nine months devoting all his time and energy to a problem he himself says America has no “strategic interest” in solving. Moreover, he wasn’t doing so to free up his boss for more strategically important issues; Kerry also devoted more time and energy to this issue – by a large margin – than to anything else on Washington’s foreign policy agenda.
In fact, President Barack Obama and other administration officials repeatedly cited the issue as a top foreign policy priority. In his address to the UN General Assembly last September, for instance, Obama named the Arab-Israeli conflict as one of “two particular issues” American policy in the Middle East and North Africa would focus on, declaring that while it isn’t “the cause of all the region’s problems,” it has “been a major source of instability for far too long,” and resolving it could “help serve as a foundation for a broader peace.” Back in 2010, he went even further, terming Israeli-Palestinian peace “a vital national security interest of the United States.” Susan Rice, then UN ambassador and now Obama’s national security adviser, also termed Israeli-Palestinian peace “a vital U.S. interest,” while Vice President Joe Biden deemed it “fundamentally in the national security interest of the United States.” Kerry himself hyperbolically declared it the most important issue in the world, asserting that no matter what country he traveled to, it was always the first thing he was asked about.
Such statements were always ludicrous. As I wrote more than a year ago, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict wasn’t even the most important in the Middle East; that title belonged to Syria’s civil war – a fact some Westerners belatedly woke up to after ISIS emerged from Syria to gobble up large swathes of Iraq. Since then, a few other unimportant little conflicts have erupted as well, like Russia’s invasion of Crimea and now, apparently, eastern Ukraine.
This misplaced emphasis on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict carried real costs. Not only did it harm Israelis and Palestinians themselves (as I’ve explained before), but any administration has only so much time, energy and diplomatic capital to spend. So if it wastes a large chunk of that time, energy and diplomatic capital on unimportant issues, it will inevitably short-change more important ones – some of which will then explode in ways extremely detrimental to America. That’s precisely what happened in Syria, which the administration ignored for years while devoting all its efforts to fruitless Israeli-Palestinian talks, only to suddenly discover that the Syrian civil war had spawned an “apocalyptic” terrorist group that poses an “imminent threat” to America.
It’s worth asking why this administration – and others before it – wasted so much time and energy for so long on an issue in which, as Indyk acknowledged, America has no “strategic interest.” It’s also worth asking whether, since Indyk is still advising Kerry on the Middle East, his statement means the administration has finally wised up to its mistake, or only that he himself has sobered up.
But the most important question is when this realization will finally become accepted foreign-policy wisdom. For until it does, each subsequent administration, like all the previous ones, will keep wasting time, energy and diplomatic capital on an unimportant conflict at the expense of the ones that really matter.
Originally published in Commentary
It’s not every day that an organization feels compelled to insist it’s truly nothing like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Why Hamas leader Khaled Meshal felt this need is a mystery: He’s in no danger from the global anti-Israel crowd, which takes great care to avoid any information that might challenge its preconceived notions, whereas anyone who knows anything about Hamas knows the disclaimer is ridiculous. Still, since he raised the subject, it’s worth examining some of the common fallacies Meshal’s distinction relies on.
ISIS seeks a global caliphate, while Hamas just wants to end the Israeli “occupation.” Actually, Hamas also seeks a global caliphate, as its own interior minister, Fathi Hammad, reiterated on Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV last November:
We shall liberate our Al-Aqsa Mosque, and our cities and villages, as a prelude to the establishment of the future Islamic Caliphate … we are at the threshold of a global Islamic civilization era. The fuel and spearhead of this era will be Gaza.”
Indeed, Hamas’s charter explicitly terms the movement a “universal” one and declares that Islam must ultimately regain “all lands conquered by Islam by force” in the past. It’s just that every global caliphate has to start somewhere, and Hamas started with Israel, whereas ISIS chose Syria and Iraq. This might prove that ISIS is shrewder; starting with a weaker enemy enabled it to progress much faster. But it doesn’t change the fact that the goal is the same.
ISIS kills “anyone who gets in their way: Sunnis, Shia Muslims, Christians, Yazidis, Iraqis, Syrians,” while Hamas only kills Israelis. Actually, Hamas also kills anyone who gets in its way. That includes Palestinian civilians who dare to protest its decisions or belong to its main rival, Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party; its more memorable murder methods include throwing Fatah members off rooftops. It also includes Egyptians: According to Cairo, Hamas has cooperated with local terrorists on several attacks in Sinai; Egypt even sought to extradite three senior Hamas operatives for involvement in an August 2012 attack that killed 16 Egyptian soldiers.
Granted, ISIS has greater opportunities: It controls a huge territory seized from two collapsed states, Iraq and Syria, whereas Hamas is boxed in by two functioning states, Israel and Egypt. But within the limits of its opportunities, Hamas has been no less enthusiastic about killing “anyone who gets in their way.”
ISIS is exceptionally brutal; witness the snuff film it disseminated after executing journalist James Foley. I particularly like this claim, given that Hamas promptly followed suit with its own snuff films showing the executions of no fewer than 25 fellow Palestinians, including two women. A few weeks earlier, Hamas executed over 30 fellow Palestinians. Of course, Hamas claims all were collaborators with Israel, but it offered no evidence. Thus as the pro-Palestinian Amira Hass delicately put it in Haaretz, these executions primarily appeared to be a warning to the Gazan public “to be careful in anything it says and does” that might upset Hamas, because “The definition of ‘informing’ and ‘collaboration’ can become very murky in times of war.”
But Hamas brutality doesn’t stop at executions. How depraved do you have to be, for instance, to shell a border crossing while your own wounded civilians are passing through it, as Hamas did on Sunday, hitting four Arabs waiting on the Israeli side to drive them to the hospital? Meshal risibly claimed on Saturday that if Hamas had more accurate weapons, it would aim them exclusively at military targets. But Hamas has deployed the extremely accurate smart bombs known as suicide bombers for years, and it used them almost exclusively to kill civilians–from elderly people at a Passover seder to buses full of schoolchildren.
In short, there’s only one significant difference between Hamas and ISIS: Hamas has infinitely less power than ISIS to wreak global havoc, because Israel has managed to keep its capabilities in check. And for that service, needless to say, Israel has reaped nothing but global condemnation.
Originally published in Commentary