Peace Process
Several commentators have already noted that foreign airlines’ suspension of flights to Israel due to Hamas rocket fire may mean Israel will “never-ever hand land to Palestinians ever again,” as Shmuel Rosner put it on Twitter; Israel can’t afford to have its sole air bridge to the world be at the mercy of a terrorist organization’s whims. But blaming Hamas alone for such a development would be unfair, because the problem isn’t just that Israel evacuated every last inch of Gaza and got 13,000 rockets (and counting) fired at its territory in exchange. It’s that after evacuating Gaza and getting 13,000 rockets in exchange, Israel discovered it still had zero support from the West for any military steps sufficient to actually suppress this rocket fire.
Western leaders seem curiously oblivious to the fact that the promise of “international legitimacy” was the trump card played by every Israeli premier who executed territorial withdrawals to refute critics who worried (correctly) that the evacuated areas would become hotbeds of anti-Israel terror. Yitzhak Rabin, in withdrawing Israeli forces from parts of the West Bank and Gaza under the Oslo Accords; Ehud Barak, in the unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon; and Ariel Sharon, in the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza all made the same simple argument: If Israel is subsequently attacked from these areas, it will then have full international legitimacy to do whatever is necessary to stop the attacks. And most Israelis believed them.
Today, no Israeli believes this anymore. Those prime ministerial promises were made in 1993, 2000, and 2005–i.e., before the Second Lebanon War of 2006, Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2008, or the current Gaza operation. And what Israel discovered in all those wars was that Western leaders, diplomats, journalists, intellectuals, and other opinion leaders indeed declared loudly that Israel has a right to defend itself–but only on condition that it not kill civilians. And since it’s impossible to avoid civilian casualties in any war, much less one against a terrorist organization that deliberately uses civilians as human shields, that effectively means Israel has no legitimacy for military action at all.
This lack of legitimacy is evident in countless ways. Virulently anti-Semitic demonstrations against the Israeli operation have swept the Western world, though no such demonstrations were ever held against the far greater slaughter in, say, Syria. The UN Human Rights Council is working on launching an inquiry into Israeli “war crimes” in Gaza–though not, needless to say, those of Hamas; a similar inquiry after the last Gaza war produced the infamous Goldstone Commission, whose report accusing Israel of “war crimes” was opposed by only eight Western countries in the UN General Assembly, despite being so libelous that even its lead author subsequently repudiated it.
Leading European intellectuals have declared on public radio that all “Zionists” should be shot and the West should arm Hamas. Ostensibly sober diplomats have made witless statements (to borrow Peter Wehner’s apt term) about how Israel is losing “moral authority” by “overdoing” its military operation, when in fact, the ground operation has been limited to a small stretch of Gaza near the Israeli border, leaving the rest of Hamas’s military infrastructure untouched. Both Washington and European capitals are demanding that Israel “do more” to prevent civilian casualties, without explaining what more it could do short of abandoning the military operation and simply letting Hamas launch its rockets undisturbed, while also demanding an “immediate” cease-fire that would leave Hamas with much of its military capability intact.
In short, Israel has learned that once it cedes territory, it’s at the mercy of any terrorist organization that chooses to attack it from that territory, because it will never have international legitimacy to conduct the kind of military operation necessary to suppress such attacks. And that’s not Hamas’s fault at all. It’s the fault of that same “enlightened West” that claims its top priority is an agreement that would get Israel out of the West Bank.
Last week, the UN refugee agency dedicated exclusively to Palestinians admitted that 20 rockets had mysteriously turned up in one of its schools in Gaza, thereby confirming a claim Israel has made for years: that UNRWA facilities are frequently utilized by terrorists. This week, the organization announced that it has turned the rockets over to “the local authorities” in Gaza, aka Hamas. In other words, a UN agency funded almost entirely by American and European taxpayers handed rockets over to a terrorist organization that is shooting them at Israel. And that isn’t even the most outrageous part of the story.
The truly outrageous part was a Western diplomat’s response, as reported by the Times of Israel:
A Western diplomat familiar with the incident said there is “absolutely no evidence” that UNRWA handed the rockets to Hamas. Rather, the diplomat suggested, the authorities who collected the rockets are under the direct authority of the Palestinian unity government, “which Hamas has left and which many in Hamas are openly hostile to. The key point is that the weapons were handed over to people who are not answerable to Hamas,” the diplomat said, referring to the fact that the unity government, not Hamas, is officially the ruling power in Gaza.
The idea that the Palestinian Authority, rather than Hamas, is the ruling power in Gaza is risible. True, that’s the ostensible implication of the unity government it recently formed with Hamas, but in reality, the PA doesn’t have a single soldier or policeman in Gaza. When PA Health Minister Jawad Awwad tried to exercise his nominal authority by inspecting Gaza’s hospitals last week, his vehicle was stoned. PA President Mahmoud Abbas hasn’t even dared set foot in Gaza. Egypt has repeatedly said it will reopen its border crossing with Gaza only if Hamas allows the PA to resume control of the crossing–surely a superfluous demand if the PA were already in control of Gaza. And we haven’t even mentioned the glaring internal contradiction in the diplomat’s own words: If Hamas has “left” the unity government, how can the unity government even exist, much less be in control of Gaza?
Of course, the unnamed diplomat knows all this quite well; nobody who’s been conscious for the past seven years could be ignorant of who really rules Gaza. The diplomat was simply contorting the facts to avoid admitting that UNRWA gave lethal weapons to Hamas–which both America and Europe deem a terrorist organization–because financing an agency that gives arms to terrorists would violate both American and European law. In other words, admitting the truth would require them to stop funding UNRWA, which neither America nor Europe wants to do.
In reality, UNRWA should have been defunded long ago, given both its role in perpetuating the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the fact that its enormous budget comes at the expense of other refugees, like the Syrians, whose need is far greater. But by turning rockets over to Hamas, UNRWA has lost its last shred of pretense to being a “humanitarian” agency. It’s high time for Congress to pull the financial plug.
Being a pessimist means that having your predictions come true rarely brings much joy. That’s the situation I and many other Israelis and Palestinians are in right now–all those who warned that John Kerry’s insistence on restarting Israeli-Palestinian talks would likely spark a new round of Palestinian-Israeli violence, but were drowned out by those who insist that talking never does any harm. It’s already too late to spare Israelis and Palestinians the bloody consequences of Kerry’s hubris. But it’s important to understand why such initiatives so frequently result in bloodshed, so that future secretaries of state can avoid a recurrence.
First, as repeated efforts over the last 14 years have shown, Palestinians and Israelis aren’t ready to make a deal. Serious efforts were made at the Camp David talks in 2000, the Taba talks in 2001, the Livni-Qureia talks in 2007-08, the Olmert-Abbas talks in 2008, and, most recently, Kerry’s talks, but all failed because the gaps between the parties couldn’t be bridged. As Shmuel Rosner noted in a perceptive New York Times op-ed in May, that’s because many issues Westerners don’t much care about, and therefore imagine are easy to compromise on, are actually very important to the parties involved and thus impossible to compromise on. That isn’t likely to change anytime soon, and until it does, negotiations will never bring peace.
But failed peace talks inevitably make violence more likely, for two main reasons. First, they force both sides to focus on their most passionate disagreements–the so-called “core issues” that go to the heart of both Israeli and Palestinian identity–rather than on less emotional issues. On more mundane issues, Israel and the Palestinian Authority can sometimes agree–as they did on a series of economic cooperation projects last June, before Kerry’s peace talks gummed up the works. But even if they don’t, it’s hard for people on either side to get too upset when their governments squabble over, say, sewage treatment. In contrast, people on both sides do get upset when their governments argue over, say, the “right of return,” because that’s an issue where both sides view the other’s narrative as negating their own existence.
Second, failed peace talks always result in both sides feeling that they’ve lost or conceded something important without receiving a suitable quid pro quo. Palestinians, for instance, were outraged when Kerry reportedly backed Israel’s demand for recognition as a Jewish state, while Israelis were outraged by Kerry’s subsequent U-turn on the issue. Thus both sides ended up feeling as if their positions on this issue were undermined during the talks. The same goes for the Jordan Valley, where both Israelis and Palestinians felt Kerry’s proposals didn’t meet their respective needs, but now fear these proposals will serve as the starting point for additional concessions next time.
Added to this were the “gestures” Kerry demanded of both sides: that Israel free dozens of vicious killers and the PA temporarily refrain from joining international organizations. Though the price Kerry demanded of Israel was incomparably greater, neither side wanted to pay its assigned share. So when the talks collapsed, both felt they had made a sacrifice for nothing.
In short, failed peace talks exacerbate Israeli-Palestinian tensions rather than calming them. And when tensions rise, so does the likelihood of violence. That’s true in any situation, but doubly so for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because terrorist groups like Hamas are always happy to throw a match into a barrel of explosives. The unsurprising result is that spasms of violence, like the second intifada and the current war, have frequently followed failed peace talks.
So if Washington truly wants to avoid Israeli-Palestinian violence, the best thing it could do is stop trying to force both sides into talks that are doomed to fail. For contrary to the accepted wisdom, which holds that “political negotiations” are the best way to forestall violence, they’re actually the best way to make violence more likely.
The kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens by Hamas, and the subsequent murder of an Arab teen by Jewish extremists, actually underscored two fundamental differences between Israeli and Palestinian society. COMMENTARY contributor Eugene Kontorovich and the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens both addressed one difference–the societal response to such murders. But the second is no less important: Israeli police swiftly nabbed the suspected Jewish killers because Israelis are generally prepared to face facts, even when the facts point to a horrific revenge killing. Palestinians, in contrast, are so mired in conspiracy theories that many refused to even believe the kidnapping had occurred.
This view started from the very top: Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki, for instance, said the kidnapping might be either “a childish game on Israel’s part, meant to attract attention,” or “part of a bigger game meant to turn the Israelis from aggressors into victims.” And as even Haaretz’s pro-Palestinian reporter Amira Hass acknowledged, many Palestinians agreed:
As long as the bodies hadn’t been found, a great many Palestinians believed no abduction had ever occurred. In their view, the kidnapping was fabricated to thwart the Palestinians’ national unity government, undo the achievements (from the Palestinian perspective) of the deal to free kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, and harm Hamas.
This is simply mind-blowing. For 18 days, thousands of Israeli soldiers searched for the missing boys round the clock, as did numerous civilian volunteers. Mass prayer rallies were held throughout Israel. The kidnapping dominated both politics and the media; even major geopolitical events like the Islamic State’s takeover of swathes of Iraq got second billing. Yet “a great many Palestinians” found it perfectly reasonable to think this was all part of a massive conspiracy–that Israel’s political and military leaders, media outlets, and even the boys’ own families and friends had conspired to virtually shut down the country for weeks for the sole purpose of harassing the Palestinians.
Like the glorification of murder that Stephens and Kontorovich discussed, this penchant for conspiracy theories over truth has serious implications for the prospects of Israeli-Palestinian peace. Take, for instance, the rampant Palestinian denial of any historic Jewish presence in the Land of Israel–the repeated references to the “alleged Temple,” the claim that Jesus was a Palestinian, and much more. This denial makes it psychologically almost impossible for Palestinians to accept a Jewish state’s existence. If you believe two peoples have historical rights to a land, sharing it is a reasonable proposition. But if you believe the other side has no rights at all–that it has simply stolen your land and dispossessed you–then allowing it to keep its ill-gotten gains is a shameful, virtually inconceivable concession.
Or consider the Palestinians’ claim that recognizing Israel as a Jewish state would strip Israeli Arabs of their rights. In reality, this is ridiculous: Israel has defined itself as a Jewish state since its inception, but that hasn’t stopped it from granting Arab citizens full civil rights–more rights, in fact, than their brethren in the PA have. (Israel doesn’t, for instance, jail journalists for insulting its leaders.) But in the fever swamps of Palestinian conspiracy theories, where everything–even the kidnapping of three Jewish teens–is an Israeli plot to harm Palestinians, the idea that this Israeli demand is really a plot to strip Arab citizens of their rights is perfectly believable. And once having convinced themselves of this, they obviously can’t accept such a demand.
What all this means is that anyone who truly wants peace must do the opposite of what the West has done for decades: Instead of catering to Palestinian sensibilities by, for instance, avoiding all mention of Jewish rights in Jerusalem, the West must start demanding that Palestinian leaders publicly acknowledge, and educate their children to know, some basic truths about both the historic Jewish kingdom and the modern Jewish state. For only when Palestinians replace their feverish conspiracy theories about Israel with the truth will they be capable of making peace with it.
Originally published in Commentary
Sovereignty poses tough problems, as last week amply showed; but lack of sovereignty poses worse ones.
By any standard, the past week has been terrible. We buried three kidnapped teens after 18 days of hoping against hope that they were alive. Rocket and mortar barrages from Gaza escalated to levels unseen since November 2012. An Arab teen was horrifically murdered by Jewish extremists, sparking the worst Israeli Arabs riots since October 2000. And the situation could yet deteriorate in countless ways.
Take, for instance, the Arab riots. Rumors about Jews abducting and/or killing non-Jews have sparked riots for centuries, and as recently as the first half of the last century, such riots routinely produced scores of dead Jews. Prominent examples include the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, which killed 47 Jews; the 1946 Kielce pogrom, which killed 42; and the 1929 Arab riots in British-ruled pre-state Israel, which killed 133.
Far more remarkably, however, no lethal anti-Jewish riots have occurred anywhere in recent decades – and that isn’t because the rest of the world has become so civilized; sectarian and ethnic massacres happen almost daily in the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia. Rather, it’s because there’s now a Jewish state ready to take in any Jew threatened by such violence.
Even today, when most Diaspora Jews live in “safe” countries, Israel’s role as refuge remains very much alive. Consider, for instance, this remarkable May 28 report by New York Times contributor Masha Gessen about her first visit back to Russia after emigrating to the US.
A new kind of conversational shorthand has appeared in Moscow: “What’s your month?” people ask one another. They mean the month for which you are signed up for an interview at the Israeli embassy to receive initial immigration documents. The nearest available slot for people booking an appointment now reportedly is in November, but most of my friends have appointments in August or September. Even getting an appointment is an ordeal: The embassy’s phone lines are so overburdened that getting through to the right department can take hours. And according to a recent, leaked picture, inside the embassy, it is a mob scene reminiscent of 1990-91, the peak years of the Soviet Jewish exodus.
This was at the height of the Ukraine crisis; if it dies down, most of those Jews will likely remain in Russia. But they want the reassurance of having somewhere to flee if necessary. And only Israel can give them that.
No country can promise 100 percent security all the time. America couldn’t prevent a neo-Nazi from murdering three people at Jewish sites in Kansas City in April; Belgium couldn’t prevent a jihadist from murdering four at Brussels’ Jewish Museum in May; France couldn’t prevent a jihadist from murdering a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012; and Israel couldn’t prevent Hamas from kidnapping and killing the three teens. Throughout Jewish history, some people have sought to murder Jews just because they are Jews, and as long as such people exist, sometimes, they’ll succeed.
We may wait far too long to exercise this option, or make a mess of it once we do; both are true of successive governments’ responses to the rocket fire. But these are our choices, which means we can change them. And even our abysmally inadequate response to date, consisting mainly of civil defense measures, is an improvement over millennia of powerlessness: Such measures have decreased rocket casualties by an estimated 86%; as a result, very few Jews are either fleeing or dying in southern Israel.
That Israel still falls so short of our aspirations isn’t surprising; 66 years old is young for a country. America at that age was rent by a bitter divide over slavery that ultimately produced a devastating civil war; Germany and Italy were under Fascist rule and preparing to launch World War II; Yugoslavia just seven years away from a civil war that tore it into five separate countries.
For the first time in 2,000 years, we have the ability to exercise self-defense and provide a haven for endangered Jews worldwide. True, sovereignty has brought a whole new set of challenges: Jewish hate crimes, terrorists launching rockets from amid civilian populations, international condemnations. But we should never forget how privileged we are to have these challenges rather than those of previous generations. They’re vastly superior to the choice between fleeing and dying.
That – not settlements or Jerusalem – is Palestinians’ top priority, a new poll shows
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy released a stunning new Palestinian opinion poll last week. The headline finding was that 60% of all Palestinians, including majorities in both the West Bank and Gaza, now openly say their goal isn’t a two-state solution, but “reclaiming all of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea” – aka eradicating Israel. Yet that isn’t actually news for anyone who’s been paying attention: A 2011 poll, for instance, found that even among ostensible supporters of two states, 66% didn’t consider this a permanent solution, but only a step toward the ultimate goal of a single Palestinian state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea (a finding the new poll replicates). In short, Palestinians are now merely saying aloud what they believed all along.
Asked what they considered “the one thing Israel could do to convince Palestinians that it really wants peace and a two-state solution,” fully 45% said Israel “should release more Palestinian prisoners.” That’s more than twice the proportion who chose either a settlement freeze beyond the security fence (19.7%) or willingness to share Jerusalem (17.3%); indeed, it’s significantly more than both combined. The last-place choice (13.8%) was increasing Palestinian freedom of movement and cracking down on settler attacks – two other issues the world deems high priority.
Yet this order of priorities makes perfect sense if the goal is “reclaiming all of historic Palestine.” Once you’re aspiring to remove millions of Jews from Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem, a few hundred new houses in isolated settlements are irrelevant. But freeing Palestinian terrorists is crucial.
No less important, however, is the psychological impact: By releasing terrorists, Israel is effectively saying Jews can be killed with impunity, and thereby returning Jews to the status of dhimmis – second-class citizens – that they occupied in the Mideast for centuries. To quote Matti Friedman’s incisive June essay in Mosaic, “Israel is an intolerable affront to so many of its neighbors … not because Jews are foreign here but in large part because they are not foreign—they are a familiar local minority that has inverted the order of things by winning wars and becoming sovereign.” Thus the first step toward reversing this affront is to make Jews revert to feeling like helpless victims, just as they were before Israel’s establishment.
This also explains another surprising finding of the poll: While a narrow majority of Palestinians supports boycotting Israel, a larger majority wants Israeli companies to provide more jobs in the territories and over 80% want more Palestinians to be allowed to work in Israel. The Washington Institute interprets this (not unreasonably) as “pragmatism.” But it also reflects the Palestinian view that the Jews’ proper role is to serve their Palestinian masters: It’s their duty to provide Palestinians with a living, but Palestinians have no obligation to provide anything in return; they should be free to boycott those who feed them – and to kill them with impunity.
Nevertheless, the “international community” remains obsessed with settlement construction as the major obstacle to peace. This would be absurd even if Palestinians actually wanted peace, since as Elliott Abrams and Uri Sadot recently demonstrated, the overwhelming majority of settlement construction occurs in areas that every deal ever proposed has allotted to Israel, and consequently doesn’t undermine prospects for an agreement at all. But it’s even more absurd given that no obstacle to peace could possibly outweigh one party’s unaltered desire to annihilate the other.
It’s ironic that Amos Yadlin expounded his proposal for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from much of the West Bank just one day before the bodies of three kidnapped Israeli teens were found there. Yadlin is one of Israel’s most respected former senior defense officials; aside from his record as a senior air force officer and head of Military Intelligence, he has scrupulously eschewed hyperbolic partisan attacks on Israel’s political leadership of the kind that have disenchanted mainstream Israelis with many of his colleagues. Yet he appears to share another of his colleagues’ fatal flaws–a complete inability to imagine that the security status quo could ever change.
Yadlin’s proposal has many problems; David M. Weinberg of the Begin-Sadat Center ably analyzed several of them yesterday’s Israel Hayom. But the one I found most astounding was one Weinberg didn’t address: Yadlin’s assertion that, having defeated terror, Israel could now afford to quit much of the West Bank.
It’s certainly true that Israel defeated the second intifada (2000-05), and some of the tactics it used, like the security barrier, would remain in place under a partial pullout like Yadlin proposes. But Israel’s most important counterterrorism tactic was boots on the ground: In 2002, the Israel Defense Forces effectively reoccupied most of the areas vacated over the previous decade under the Oslo Accords, and they never really left again. This enabled Israel to do the daily grunt work of counterterrorism: arresting suspects, interrogating them for leads, seizing weapons stockpiles, and so forth. As I’ve explained before, this ongoing effort is what ultimately dried up a supply of recruits that once looked limitless: Only when the likelihood of being arrested or killed became too high did terror become an unattractive proposition to most Palestinians.
Thus the minute the IDF departs, so will the crucial factor that has restrained terror over the last decade. And terrorist organizations will respond by escalating their activity. After all, as the Palestinians’ enthusiastic support for the teens’ abduction amply shows, their motivation to commit attacks hasn’t declined; what has declined is only their ability to do so.
But once Israel has withdrawn fully from the territory–not a mere troop redeployment as in the 1990s, but a full-scale evacuation, including the dismantling of settlements–it will be powerless to launch the kind of prolonged counterterrorism operations needed to suppress renewed terror: Anything more than brief incursions will become politically untenable, just as it has in evacuated Gaza.
Yet Yadlin appears incapable of imagining a recurrence of the second intifada’s deadly terror, which killed more than 1,000 Israelis, most of them civilians. As far as he’s concerned, we’ve defeated terror; now it’s safe to withdraw.
This echoes former Mossad chief Meir Dagan’s assertion in January that since “there is no eastern front” right now, Israel can safely withdraw from the Jordan Valley. The eastern front, as I noted last week, is now back in spades, revived by the Islamic State’s takeover of large swathes of Iraq. Dagan’s mistake was that he couldn’t imagine the possibility of such a change: As far as he was concerned, the eastern front was gone, so it would stay gone.
Both men exemplify a problem common to many defense professionals: They understand military tactics and capabilities, but they’re no better than anyone else–and often worse–at predicting political developments. Dagan was blind to the possibility that Syria’s civil war and the jihadi groups it spawned could affect Iraq’s stability, and perhaps even Jordan’s, while Yadlin seems blind to the possibility that an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank could spark a resurgence of terror.
That’s why defense officials’ policy recommendations should always be treated skeptically. Making good policy requires an ability to imagine the likely consequences of both your own actions and those of other players. And defense professionals, at least in Israel, seem to be sadly lacking in that ability.
If Israeli-Palestinian peace talks weren’t already dead, the Iraqi army’s collapse in the face of the radical Sunni group ISIS might well have killed them. After all, one of the key disagreements that emerged during the nine months of talks was over Israel’s military presence in the Jordan Valley, which Israel insisted on retaining and the Palestinians adamantly opposed.
The Obama administration’s proposed solution was to let Israeli troops remain for a few years and then replace them with U.S.-trained Palestinian forces, perhaps bolstered by international troops. But as Israeli officials bluntly told officials in Washington earlier this week, if U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers weren’t willing to fight ISIS to protect their own country, why should anyone think U.S.-trained Palestinian soldiers in the Jordan Valley would be willing to fight fellow Arabs to protect Israel? And with a well-armed, well-funded jihadist army having taken over large swathes of Syria and Iraq and now even threatening Jordan (ISIS seized the main Iraq-Jordan border crossing just this week), how can anyone confidently assert such fighting won’t be necessary?
U.S. officials responded by setting up a straw man: They passionately defended General John Allen, the man responsible for both security training in Iraq and drafting U.S. security proposals for Israeli-Palestinian talks, as if Israel’s main concern were Allen’s competence. But Allen’s competence is irrelevant. The real issue is that no matter how competent the trainer is, no amount of training can produce a functional army if soldiers lack the will to fight. U.S.-trained Iraqi Sunnis aren’t willing to fight ISIS to protect their Shi’ite-dominated government. U.S.-trained Palestinian Authority forces weren’t willing to fight Hamas to retain control of Gaza in 2007. And international troops have repeatedly proven unwilling to fight to protect anyone else’s country.
This isn’t exactly news. Prior to the 1967 Six-Day War, when Egypt demanded that UN peacekeepers leave Sinai so Egyptian troops could mass on Israel’s border unimpeded, the UN tamely complied. UN peacekeepers stationed in south Lebanon since 1978 have never lifted a finger to stop Hezbollah’s cross-border attacks. Nor is this problem unique to Israel. As the Washington Post reported in January, the UN has sent record numbers of peacekeepers to Africa in recent years, and African regional groups have contributed additional thousands, yet these troops “have failed to prevent fresh spasms of violence.” Indeed, they are frequently ordered explicitly not to fight unless they themselves are attacked–rendering them useless at protecting the people they’re ostensibly there to protect.
But even without such orders, how many soldiers really want to die in a far-off country in a quarrel that isn’t theirs? I can’t blame a Fijian for being unwilling to die to prevent rocket fire from Lebanon on Kiryat Shmona; why should he consider that worth his life? And for the same reason, it’s hard to imagine any non-Israeli force in the Jordan Valley thinking it’s worth their lives to stop, say, ISIS from marching on Tel Aviv. Only Israeli troops would consider that worth fighting and dying for. And that’s without even considering the fact that ISIS already has a Palestinian contingent, so any attempt to attack Israel through the territory of a Palestinian state could count on enthusiastic local support.
As even left-wing Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit admitted this week, it was one thing to propose leaving the Jordan Valley back when the eastern front appeared to pose no threat. But it’s quite another now, when ISIS poses a serious threat.
In a region as volatile as the Middle East is today, the idea that Israel should abandon defensible borders in exchange for “peace” with a state that could collapse as suddenly as Syria and Iraq both have is folly. And anyone who thinks U.S.-trained or international forces can replace defensible borders should take a long, hard look at the Iraqi army’s collapse.
It’s possible to boost the Jewish birthrate without discriminating against Arabs. Here’s how and why
As I noted last week, there are three ways to alter demographic balances: immigration, emigration and natural increase. One might ask why Israel should even bother with the third: The Jewish birthrate has been rising steadily while Israeli Arab and Palestinian birthrates are falling, and Israeli Jews already have the highest fertility rate in the Western world – 2.99 children per woman, and 2.6 even excluding the Haredim. So why mess with success?
Yet a Bank of Israel study published in April provides grounds for concern. It found that young families, even middle-class working ones, often struggle to make ends meet, but the government gives such families very little assistance compared to other developed countries. And if this continues, rising fertility could easily reverse: Parents want to be able to provide for their children, so if they feel they can’t do so adequately, they’re likely to have fewer of them.
This isn’t mere speculation; it has been proven repeatedly. When Israel slashed child allowances for large families in 2003, for instance, birthrates fell in the two communities most likely to have large families – Muslims (dramatically) and Haredim (modestly). Conversely, countries like France and England have successfully boosted birthrates by increasing aid to families with children.
Clearly, financial aid won’t boost birthrates unless parents want more children to begin with. But for parents who do want another child, making it more affordable increases the chances of their having one. That’s precisely why in Israel, unlike most other countries, “upward socioeconomic mobility has been linked to a relatively higher number of children,” as one study put it: Israeli Jews generally say they want three to four children, so when they feel they can afford it, that’s what they have. And that holds even for secular Jews: Some years ago, for instance, a colleague from upscale north Tel Aviv told me that having a fourth child was the new “in thing” in her neighborhood.
Yet many Jewish families still have only one or two children. Thus the question is how to make them feel they can afford three or four.
One solution is bringing down the overall cost of living. Prices of food, housing and other necessities have soared in recent years, and that hits young families particularly hard. For instance, they are less likely to own their own home than older couples are, making them more vulnerable to rising housing prices.
But the high cost of living is a complex problem with no easy solutions. Efforts to lower housing prices, for instance, have often backfired, and even successful policies can take years to have an impact. Thus while the government must eventually address this problem, a simpler way to boost the Jewish birthrate is to aid young families directly.
Unfortunately, most Israelis reject this idea out of hand, because both approaches tried in the past have been justly discredited. First, Israel simply paid child allowances to Jews but not Arabs – an obviously discriminatory policy that the High Court of Justice ultimately nixed.
Next, it tried a truly bizarre tactic: paying small allowances for the first two children, somewhat more for the third and fourth and almost quadruple for the fifth child onward. Thus a family with six children would receive almost seven times as much as a family with two (NIS 1,981 versus NIS 288 per month), despite having only three times as many children. But since most Israelis didn’t want five or more children, this policy proved demographically counterproductive: It encouraged fertility mainly among Muslims and Haredim.
At that point, the government gave up. Now, it simply pays everyone NIS 140 a month per child – a sum too small to encourage anyone to have more children.
Yet it’s possible to encourage Jewish fertility in a nondiscriminatory way simply by giving more money to all young families, thereby making it easier for them to afford another child. This could be done by increasing the per-child allowance for all children, or even just for the first one or two (a justifiable distinction, since first children require outlays on items like cribs and strollers that can be reused for subsequent children). Alternatively, as the Bank of Israel report suggested, child tax credits could be made available to either parent instead of only to mothers. Currently, this credit often goes unused, because women are more likely to work in part-time or low-wage jobs and thus not to earn enough to be liable for taxes.
But wouldn’t higher benefits to both Jews and Arabs increase Jewish and Arab birthrates equally, thereby leaving the demographic balance unchanged? Surprisingly, probably not – because no amount of extra money will make parents have another child if they don’t actually want one.
Israeli Jews clearly do want more children; that’s why the Jewish birthrate has increased steadily in recent years despite the soaring cost of living and meager child benefits. Thus if children became more affordable, they would probably have more.
The question is why the Arab birthrate has fallen. If it’s because Arabs, who generally earn less than Jews, were more affected by rising prices, then bigger benefits might indeed boost their birthrate. But it’s more likely that Israeli Arabs are simply following the same pattern as the rest of the planet: As communities become more urbanized and women become more educated, they start wanting fewer children, so birthrates drop. And in this case, extra money has limited impact: In Britain and France, for instance, fertility rates remain below replacement level (2.1 children per women) despite the increase sparked by higher child benefits.
The fact that well-educated, urbanized Israeli Jews want larger families is a global anomaly: Birthrates have been plummeting throughout the West, the Far East and the Muslim world, often to below replacement level, confronting these countries with the problem of how shrinking work forces can support a growing elderly population. Thus Israel’s fertility is not only a demographic boon, but an enormous economic advantage. And we ought to be exploiting it to the fullest by making sure Israelis can afford the families they want, rather than forfeiting our demographic edge by starving young families of support.
The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East
By Caroline B. Glick
Crown Forum, 352 pages
Devotees of the two-state solution will surely dismiss Caroline Glick’s The Israeli Solution out of hand. They shouldn’t. Whether or not one agrees with Glick’s conclusions, it’s hard to dispute her premise: The two-state solution has failed repeatedly for more than 80 years, starting with serial British partition plans in the 1930s. Each time, it has foundered on the same obstacle: Arab rejection of the Jewish state’s right to exist within any borders. And there’s no reason to think this will change anytime soon. So anyone who truly considers the status quo unsustainable needs to explore alternative solutions.
Glick, a longtime columnist for the Jerusalem Post, spends almost half the book detailing the two-state solution’s repeated failures, in her trademark take-no-prisoners style. Then she presents her solution: Israel should apply Israeli law to Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and grant its Palestinian inhabitants permanent residency, with the right to become citizens if they so desire.
Many of her arguments in support of this plan were once widely accepted both in Israel and the West: Judea and Samaria are the Jewish people’s religious and historical heartland. Israel has a better legal claim to them than anyone else does, Palestinians included. These areas are essential for defense against both terrorism and invasion. And, for those who care about Palestinian self-determination (which Glick doesn’t much), there’s also the fact that a Palestinian-majority state already exists in 80 percent of the original Palestine Mandate; it’s called Jordan. Since Israel has shamefully allowed these arguments to be forgotten during two decades of peace-processing, Glick’s recap is necessary and important, but not groundbreaking.
The crux of the book, therefore, is to refute the two main objections to a one-state solution: the demographic and the diplomatic.
Glick relies on the work of the American-Israel Demographic Research Group, which concluded that the West Bank and Gaza contain about 1.3 million fewer Palestinians than the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics claims. If the group’s methodology is sound—and leading American demographers have approved of it—then Jews make up two-thirds of all inhabitants of Israel, Judea, and Samaria, and 59 percent if you include Gaza.
Like Glick, I find AIDRG’s work persuasive, not least because its opponents’ predictions of demographic doom have persistently proven to be wrong for decades. AIDRG also discovered some errors so glaring that even its die-hard opponents were forced to admit them, such as the double-counting of 200,000 East Jerusalem Arabs. Nevertheless, Israelis would probably be reluctant to bet their country’s future on any single study, given that annexing Judea and Samaria could erase Israel’s Jewish majority if AIDRG were wrong.
Neither AIDRG nor Glick addresses another relevant demographic matter: how many Israeli Jews would back this sizable Palestinian minority’s demands to eliminate Israel’s Jewish character. The radical leftists who would do so gleefully are relatively few in number, but their claim that Israel’s Jewish character is “discriminatory,” “undemocratic,” and “contrary to human rights” has already infected parts of the Zionist left. And that worrying trend would probably accelerate if left-wing organizations intensified their existing campaign on the issue, which they surely would under a one-state solution. Finally, Glick’s proposal excludes Gaza. That’s clearly reasonable for now: Hamas won’t cede power voluntarily, and Israel won’t invade. But it may not be tenable long-term.
None of this makes a one-state solution inherently demographically unfeasible—especially since no demographer disputes that Jewish birthrates are rising while Palestinian birthrates are falling. But it does mean further research is needed.
A related question is whether, even if the math works out, Israel could assimilate such a large Palestinian minority. States with large, hostile national minorities don’t have good track records. Here, Glick’s answer is eye-opening. Israeli Arabs and East Jerusalem Palestinians, she notes, overwhelmingly reject Israel’s right to exist. Yet very few become terrorists, and polls consistently find that most want to remain Israeli. Indeed, Israeli Arabs overwhelmingly oppose becoming citizens of a Palestinian state even if territorial swaps would allow them do so without leaving their homes. In short, much as they dislike the Jewish state in principle, Israeli Arabs seem to prefer it to a Palestinian one in practice. Thus, given the same option, Glick argued, Palestinians might well reach the same conclusion.
Her response to the diplomatic objection is also thought-provoking, but ultimately, less convincing. Essentially, she argues that though Israel would suffer a short-term diplomatic hit by annexing Judea and Samaria, in the long run, this would bolster its diplomatic position. She is certainly correct that Israel’s pursuit of the two-state solution has been diplomatically devastating (a subject I explored in a 2010 Commentary article, “The Deadly Price of Pursuing Peace”), and more of the same will only worsen the damage. She’s also right that annexation would have some diplomatic benefits. For instance, it’s hard to make the case for Israel’s legal rights to Judea and Samaria while saying these areas should be a Palestinian state; thus annexation would actually help Israel fight the pernicious libel that it stole the Palestinians’ land. Letting Palestinians become Israeli citizens, moreover, would eliminate the argument that Israel’s “occupation” is uniquely evil, because Palestinians are stateless, whereas Tibetans and Kashmiris, say, are at least Chinese or Indian citizens.
Nevertheless, long-term gains are valuable only if you survive to reap them. I think Glick underestimates the short-term diplomatic consequences. Though she recognizes that Europe might impose economic sanctions, she believes Israel can survive them, thanks to its new natural-gas wealth and burgeoning trade with rising Asian powers. Someday, perhaps, that might be true. But right now, Europe still accounts for a third of Israeli exports. Israel’s export-dependent economy would have trouble absorbing a loss of that size.
The bigger problem, however, is America. Glick recognizes that America’s diplomatic backing is indispensable but argues that unilateral annexation wouldn’t cost Israel this backing because America, too, would benefit from ending its futile pursuit of the two-state solution. She may be right about the benefits to America, but there remains the minor problem of persuading Americans of this.
As she herself admits, America’s decades-long commitment to the two-state solution is bipartisan and deeply entrenched. That’s true not only for the foreign-policy establishment, but also for the American people, including American Jews. Thus gambling that Israel could retain American support while unilaterally jettisoning this solution seems wildly irresponsible, unless it’s preceded by a massive (and successful) diplomatic campaign to erode the two-state consensus. I suspect Glick realizes this, and intends her powerful book to be the opening shot in such a campaign rather than a blueprint for immediate action.
But the diplomatic unfeasibility of her plan (at least for now) doesn’t negate the importance of her demographic arguments. For as she correctly noted, Palestinians have spent two decades successfully using their self-created demographic data “to coerce Israel to bend to [their] political will.” Fear that Israel will soon become South Africa, with a Jewish minority ruling over a Palestinian majority, has spurred successive Israeli premiers—all of whom previously opposed a Palestinian state—to offer ever more egregious concessions in a desperate bid to persuade the Palestinians to accept one.
Yet as two decades of failure have amply proven, there’s no way Israel can negotiate successfully from such a position: As long as Palestinians, Western leaders, and Israelis themselves all believe “that Israel needs a Palestinian state…even more than the Palestinians do” (as Glick put it), the Palestinians have every incentive to continue holding out for even more concessions, while Israel will face ever increasing pressure to concede even its most vital interests.
Consequently, Israel has a supreme interest in doing the additional research necessary to determine whether Glick is right about a one-state solution’s demographic feasibility. For if she is, that would be a real game-changer—because an Israel no longer vulnerable to demographic extortion would be much better placed to protect its essential interests in any negotiation. And that’s something even (pro-Israel) advocates of a two-state solution ought to welcome.