Peace Process
Herzl believed he could alter world opinion. Many Israelis today think we must simply bow to it.
A key insight bequeathed by Zionism’s founding father is that international legitimacy matters greatly. While others focused on creating “facts on the ground” (which also matter), Theodor Herzl devoted himself to international politics: He met with world leaders to mobilize support for a Jewish national home, wrote books and articles explicating this idea and created a political movement, the Zionist Organization, to promote his efforts. So confident was he of the value of this work that after the first Zionist Congress, in Basel in 1897, he wrote in his diary, “At Basel, I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.” And indeed, 51 years later, the State of Israel was born.
But if Herzl were alive today, he would be appalled at how his legacy has been distorted. True, some Israelis at least remember that international legitimacy matters: Politicians, journalists, businessmen and academics routinely cite this principle in explaining why Israel must make peace with the Palestinians, or alternatively, cede territory unilaterally. Yet the lesson Herzl derived from this principle was very different. Herzl concluded that since global opinion matters, he must work relentlessly to alter the world’s views. His would-be heirs conclude that since global opinion matters, Israel must meekly bow to every global demand, however unfeasible or even detrimental it might be – because changing world opinion is impossible, even if Israel is right.
It’s hard to overstate how radically Herzl altered world opinion. When he began his campaign, Jewish sovereignty hadn’t existed for 1,900 years, and to most of the world, the idea of reconstituting it was inconceivable. Yet within 50 years, Herzl and his successors had changed so many minds that in 1947, the UN voted to establish a Jewish state by a two-thirds majority.
Now consider a few developments from the past week alone:
• Foreign Ministry diplomats came out against Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz’s plan for a major public diplomacy campaign to combat the threat of anti-Israel boycotts. The diplomats, Haaretz reported, think a PR offensive would merely “play into the hands of boycott activists,” because what Steinitz terms “delegitimization” is really just “legitimate criticism from foreign governments and NGOs of Israel’s policy in the territories.” In short, changing the world’s mind is impossible, so we shouldn’t bother trying.
• Former Jerusalem Report editor-in-chief Hirsh Goodman wrote in a New York Times op-ed that having grown up in apartheid South Africa, he knows nothing resembling apartheid “even remotely exists in Israel or the occupied territories. But, increasingly, in the mind of the world it does,” and there’s nothing we can do to persuade it otherwise. We can never, for instance, make the world see the “apartheid wall” (aka the West Bank security barrier) as a legitimate security measure; the propaganda war is one “Israel cannot win unless it makes peace.”
• Addressing a high-profile conference, Finance Minister Yair Lapid asserted that if Israeli-Palestinian talks fail, Israel will suffer devastating boycotts from its major trading partner, the European Union. “If there will not be a political settlement, the Israeli economy will face a dramatic withdrawal that will substantially hurt the pocket of every Israeli,” he warned. He even claimed that Europe is considering canceling the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the foundation of our economic ties (something an EU spokesman flatly denied). In short, we must either capitulate to Palestinian demands or face economic ruin, because we can’t possibly persuade the world that our own positions are justified.
• A group of Israeli businessmen called Breaking the Impasse launched an ad campaign declaring that an Israeli-Palestinian deal is essential both politically and economically, so Israel must sign one. The campaign’s slogans – “Bibi [Netanyahu], only you can”; “A strong country signs an agreement” – put the onus for making peace squarely on Israel. The previous week, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the group similarly asserted that “We must urgently reach a diplomatic settlement,” because “The world is losing patience and the threat of sanctions is growing daily.” And of course, we can’t do anything to change the world’s mind.
But what if the Palestinians, who have refused every previous Israeli offer, once again refuse? Or what if they insist on terms that would gravely endanger the country? Then apparently, Israel is screwed – because Herzl’s heirs no longer believe it’s possible to alter global opinion.
Objectively speaking, this is arrant nonsense. Even if you believe Israel is an illegal occupier, plenty of other illegal occupations have existed for as long or even longer – think China’s occupation of Tibet, India’s occupation of Kashmir, Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus, etc. And Israel has done far more than these countries to try to resolve the problem, including repeated offers of Palestinian statehood and the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Yet these countries aren’t threatened with boycotts and sanctions; indeed, as Prof. Eugene Kontorovich has noted, the same EU that claims “international law” bars it from economic activity in the “occupied” West Bank actively promotes such activity in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus and Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. Thus it’s clearly possible to be embroiled in a long-running conflict without drawing international boycotts.
But not if you don’t even try to persuade the world of the justice of your claims. And Israel stopped trying long ago. Instead, its diplomats, journalists, businessmen and politicians all insist that changing the world’s mind is impossible, so our only choice is capitulating to its demands.
It’s a shocking betrayal of Herzl’s conviction that “If you will it, it is no dream.” Herzl showed that with enough effort, and belief in the justice of your cause, you can sell the world even a proposition as radical as reconstituting Jewish sovereignty after 2,000 years. By comparison, the propositions Israel must sell today are far more modest: that it has legitimate rights in its ancient heartland, and that, like other long-running conflicts worldwide, the Israeli-Palestinian one isn’t currently resolvable.
But many Israelis, it seems, have forgotten how to will anything. They know only how to bow to the will of others.
If you want to understand the difference between people who are actually pro-Palestinian and those who routinely but falsely claim that label, it’s worth reading the Forward’s interview with SodaStream CEO Daniel Birnbaum. The headline, of course, was Birnbaum’s admission that having a plant in a West Bank settlement is “a pain in the ass,” and he would “never” locate there today. But the most striking comment was his answer to the question of why, in that case, he doesn’t shut the West Bank plant and transfer its operations to SodaStream’s new facility in the Negev, which has ample capacity:
The reason for staying is loyalty to approximately 500 Palestinians who are among the plant’s 1,300 employees, Birnbaum claimed. While other employees could relocate on the other side of the Green Line if the plant moved, the West Bank Palestinian workers could not, and would suffer financially, he argued.
“We will not throw our employees under the bus to promote anyone’s political agenda,” he said, adding that he “just can’t see how it would help the cause of the Palestinians if we fired them.”
In other words, Birnbaum is concerned about real live Palestinians whose families need to eat. That’s a concern noticeably absent among the usual “pro-Palestinian” types, who couldn’t care less about ordinary Palestinians’ welfare unless it happens to serve their primary goal of attacking Israel: See, for instance, the shocking indifference by “pro-Palestinian” groups to the literal starvation of Palestinians in Syria (since Israel can’t be blamed for it), or the Dutch and German governments’ efforts to halt sewage treatment and landfill projects that would primarily benefit Palestinians because Jewish settlers would also benefit. But it’s a concern ardently shared by ordinary Palestinians themselves, as a 2010 poll showed: By an overwhelming majority of 60 percent to 38 percent, Palestinians opposed the idea that they themselves should refuse to work in the settlements. Real Palestinians care about feeding their families, and they don’t want to be barred from jobs that enable them to do so.
Yet that’s exactly what boycotting companies like SodaStream would primarily accomplish. Though SodaStream says it won’t leave, other Israeli companies have decided they don’t need the hassle and relocated inside the Green Line, throwing their erstwhile Palestinian employees out of work. Countless others choose not to locate in the West Bank to begin with, as Birnbaum admits he would do today.
Currently, 20,000 Palestinians work in the settlements. Eliminating their jobs would cause the number of unemployed people in the West Bank to jump 14 percent–hardly a helpful proposition for an economy already suffering 19 percent unemployment.
This same disregard for actual Palestinians also characterizes other forms of anti-Israel boycotts. Take, for instance, the effort to impose an academic boycott on Israel. As one Palestinian pharmacy professor, who understandably feared to give his name, told the New York Times this month, “more than 50 Palestinian professors were engaged in joint research projects with Israeli universities, funded by international agencies,” and “without those grants, Palestinian academic research would collapse because ‘not a single dollar’ was available from other places.”
Boycott proponents claim that by reducing Israelis’ academic freedom, they seek to “enlarge” Palestinians’ academic freedom. Yet in fact, as this Palestinian professor admitted, Israeli academia is the lifeline keeping its Palestinian counterpart alive. So how would killing off academic research in Palestinian universities “enlarge” Palestinians’ academic freedom? It wouldn’t, of course–but the “pro-Palestinian” crowd doesn’t care about that.
In fact, the only thing these self-proclaimed “pro-Palestinians” do care about is undermining Israel–which is why it’s high time to stop dignifying them with the name “pro-Palestinian.” They are anti-Israel, pure and simple. And that’s what they should be called.
The required quid pro quo would be ruinous to security, and without security, no economy can function.
The European Union is offended: After offering a package of “extraordinary” economic benefits last month if Israel would only sign a final-status deal with the Palestinians, it hasn’t even received an official response. Germany, France and Britain have all reportedly informed Jerusalem of their disappointment at this silence; French Ambassador Patrick Maisonnave even did so publicly, via an op-ed in Haaretz.
Since the offer was explicitly conditioned on an Israel-Palestinian accord that almost nobody on either side considers achievable, Jerusalem probably doesn’t consider the issue high priority: Proposals that haven’t a chance of being realized rarely are. But there’s also a substantive reason for Israel’s non-response, which Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon voiced, unofficially, during a meeting with Israeli business leaders last month.
The EU offer was meant to encourage Israel to accept the framework agreement now being drafted by US Secretary of State John Kerry. But this framework, Ya’alon warned, “will destroy the economy … If we lose freedom of military action, the West Bank will turn into Hamastan, missiles will be fired at Tel Aviv and the economy will be destroyed.” In other words, the “extraordinary” package the EU offered requires concessions on security whose economic harm will far outweigh the putative benefits.
This isn’t mere speculation on Ya’alon’s part; he was speaking from personal experience of the very recent past. Barely a decade ago, the second intifada’s suicide bombing campaign in Israel’s major cities sparked a deep recession: two years of negative growth, 11 percent unemployment, a debt-to-GDP ratio of 103%. And the combination of terror and recession made international markets so downbeat on Israel that it could no longer borrow overseas to finance its mammoth debt, raising the specter of imminent default – a disaster averted only thanks to $9 billion in US loan guarantees.
The guarantees were offered for ten years, but Israel needed them only for two: By 2005, it was able to borrow independently again. Not coincidentally, 2005 is also when it became clear the intifada had been beaten: Thanks to a counter-terrorism offensive launched in March 2002, bolstered by construction of the West Bank security barrier, Israeli deaths from Palestinian terror fell by roughly 50% a year in 2002-05, from a peak of about 450 to 51.
Major economic reforms also contributed significantly to the recovery, but alone, they wouldn’t have sufficed. It’s simply not possible to maintain a flourishing economy when locals are afraid to leave their houses and tourists and investors are afraid to come.
That lesson was relearned following the 2005 disengagement from Gaza. Over the next three years, Palestinians launched 6,000 rockets at southern Israel, sending the south into an economic tailspin that government aid failed to halt. But in late 2008, a major military operation significantly reduced the rocket fire. Within a year, housing prices in communities near Gaza had jumped by 20% to 50% due to surging demand: With security restored, the economy revived.
Nor is this pattern unique to Israel: The same thing happened during the US war in Iraq. For years after the 2003 invasion, America tried to reduce the violence by investing in Iraq’s economy, thinking that if young men had jobs, they would lay down their arms. But the bloodletting just kept getting worse – Iraqi casualties peaked at 29,000 in 2006 – and the economy languished accordingly, with negative real growth of 3% in 2005 and positive growth of just 2.4% in 2006. In 2007, however, Washington reversed course, announcing a troop surge whose goal was to significantly reduce the violence. Casualties plummeted, and over the next five years, real growth averaged 5.8% a year.
Granted, security concerns are irrelevant if you buy the fantasy that Palestinian terror will end the day an Israeli-Palestinian deal is signed. But after 20 years of territorial withdrawals, few Israelis believe that anymore. In the two and a half years after the 1993 Oslo Accord was signed, Palestinians killed more Israelis than in the entire preceding decade, mainly via attacks from territory Israel vacated pursuant to that accord. In the 20 years since Oslo, Palestinians have killed some 1,200 Israelis – fully two-thirds of all the Israelis killed by Palestinian terror in Israel’s 65 years of existence. These attacks, too, came mainly from territory Israel vacated under Oslo’s successor agreements. And the disengagement produced an almost seven-fold increase in rocket launches from Gaza, from 424 in 2002-04 to 2,916 in 2006-08.
This experience is compounded by real concern that Israel’s negotiating partner, Mahmoud Abbas’ government, won’t long survive an Israeli withdrawal. Hamas, which adamantly rejects any peace with Israel, ousted Abbas’ government from Gaza in a bloody coup less than two years after the IDF left. And as Ya’alon noted last week, that scenario could easily repeat following an IDF withdrawal from the West Bank.
Whether Abbas would sign a deal with Israel under any circumstances is doubtful. But he certainly won’t sign one without Israeli concessions that Israel considers untenable from a security perspective (withdrawing to the 1967 lines, dividing Jerusalem, quitting the Jordan Valley, etc.), since Europe and America both support him on these issues. Hence the “extraordinary” benefits Europe offered Israel were conditioned on steps that Israel considers devastating to its own security – and therefore, to its economy as well.
As Ya’alon put it on another occasion last month, if an Israeli-Palestinian agreement
would lead to rockets on Ben-Gurion Airport, “I would rather have a European boycott.” For devastating though a European boycott would be, Israel would at least still have other trading partners. But nobody will do business with a country whose only international airport and major economic centers are under constant threat of rocket fire.
This is the truth that Europe, facing no comparable threat to its economic centers, willfully refuses to see: All the economic incentives in the world can’t compensate for loss of security, because security is the necessary precondition for any modern economy to flourish. And that’s why Jerusalem has tactfully remained silent on the EU’s “extraordinary” offer: Because the only answer any responsible Israeli government could give is “thanks, but no thanks – the price is just too high.”
After the Israeli defense minister’s undiplomatic skepticism about the peace process prompted a diplomatic flap earlier this week, Secretary of State John Kerry announced yesterday that he is “undeterred,” explaining, “I believe strongly in the prospects for peace.” In that, Kerry isn’t alone: An entire industry has arisen around the belief that Israeli-Palestinian peace is imminently attainable, and it is consistently “undeterred” by the facts. For a classic example, consider the joint Israeli-Palestinian poll released in late December under the unequivocal headline, “The majority of Israelis (63%) and of Palestinians (53%) support the two states solution.”
That sounds very promising, until you read the fine print. And then it turns out that most Palestinians don’t support the two-state solution at all–or at least, not the one whose terms “everyone knows.” In fact, when presented with the elements of that “everyone knows” package, defined by the researchers as based on the Clinton parameters and the Geneva Initiative, 53 percent of Palestinians opposed it, while only 46 percent supported it.
Moreover, several specific clauses were rejected by both Palestinians and Israelis, though Israelis supported the overall package by 54 percent to 37 percent.
For instance, Palestinians opposed the “everyone knows” plan for dividing Jerusalem (Israel retains Jewish neighborhoods, including the Old City’s Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall, while Palestinians get Palestinian neighborhoods, including the rest of the Old City and the Temple Mount) by a whopping 68 percent to 32 percent. That’s consistent with their longstanding refusal to recognize any Jewish connection whatsoever to Jerusalem. But Israelis also rejected it overwhelmingly, 56 percent to 37 percent, consistent with their longstanding opposition to ceding Judaism’s holy site, the Temple Mount. The shared opposition also reflects both sides’ understanding of the proposal’s sheer impracticality (as I explained here).
By an even larger majority, 71 percent to 28 percent, Palestinians opposed the idea of a demilitarized Palestinian state (Israelis, unsurprisingly, supported it). Yet this has long been recognized by international mediators as an essential security element of any deal.
On refugees, the researchers managed to craft a proposal that both parties rejected. Palestinians opposed it by a relatively narrow margin, 52 percent to 46 percent, which initially surprised me: Most polls show much stronger Palestinian opposition to abandoning their dream of eliminating the Jewish state by resettling millions of Palestinians there. But after reading the fine print, I understood why: On this issue, the researchers ditched the Clinton parameters in favor of the Geneva Initiative, which no Israeli government ever has accepted or will accept.
Under this plan, Israel cedes its right to determine how many Palestinians to let into its territory, committing instead to accept the average number accepted by third-party states–some of which, like Jordan, have granted citizenship to millions of Palestinians. Hence it garnered less Palestinian opposition than the standard version, which lets Israel decide how many Palestinians to accept. But, unsurprisingly, Israelis rejected it decisively (50 percent to 39 percent).
Finally, there’s the most important clause of all: Even “after the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and the settlement of all issues in dispute,” Palestinians still rejected “mutual recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and Palestine as the state of the Palestinian people,” by a majority of 56 percent to 43 percent. In short, even after all other issues are “resolved,” Palestinians still refuse to recognize the Jewish people’s right to a state of their own.
So what exactly does it mean that Palestinians “support a two-state solution”? The same thing it has always meant, as an unusually honest 2011 poll revealed: not two states living side by side in peace and security, but two states as a stepping-stone to Israel’s ultimate eradication. That’s why they insist on resettling millions of Palestinians in Israel; that’s why they reject any Jewish connection to Jerusalem; and that’s why they can’t recognize Israel as “the state of the Jewish people.”
And as long as that remains true, Kerry’s belief in “the prospects for peace” really is “messianic”–however unwise it was of Moshe Ya’alon to say so.
As an explanation for Israel’s global unpopularity, this thesis simply doesn’t fit the facts.
When a theory unsupported even by minimal evidence becomes accepted as truth, it’s time to worry. And you know it’s happened when it’s cited as unchallenged fact even by people outside its political home base. That’s why I was appalled by Gil Troy’s Jerusalem Postcolumn last week, in which he attributed Israel’s unpopularity overseas partly to “Likud’s rise and Labor’s decline” and the existence of “ideological” settlements deep in the West Bank.
Troy is no radical leftist; he’s a political centrist, ardent Zionist and tireless defender of Israel. He’s also a professor of history at McGill University, which makes his lack of historical memory doubly distressing.
Take, for instance, his claim that “millions toasted” Israel’s victory in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, but subsequently, “The Likud’s rise and Labor’s decline made Israel less popular in Europe and with Social Democrats,” a trend exacerbated by “escalating the settlement project.”
Can Troy really have forgotten that during the Yom Kippur War, when Israel came perilously near annihilation due to lack of arms with which to continue fighting, not one European country would even allow American planes bearing these vital supplies to land in its territory for refueling? Nothing Europe has done to Israel in the 40 years since – including the recent economic boycott efforts – even comes close to this collective complicity in Israel’s attempted eradication. Yet back then, Labor was still the unchallenged ruling party (Likud took power only in 1977) and “ideological” settlement hadn’t yet begun. As then-Prime Minister Golda Meir complained bitterly at the next Socialist International meeting, the “good” old Labor-led Israel won no support from European social democrats, either.
Then there’s Europe’s longstanding relationship with the PLO, which dates to the “Euro-Arab Dialogue” of 1975 – long before the PLO officially (if insincerely) renounced “armed struggle” in 1988, and just a year after it adopted its famous “phased plan” for Israel’s ultimate eradication. France, Italy, Luxembourg and Ireland supported making the PLO a full partner in the newly launched dialogue. Other European Community members weren’t quite ready for that, but they did agree to the PLO’s inclusion in a pan-Arab delegation.
In short, far from cheering Israel’s survival in 1973, Europe promptly sought to undermine that survival by recognizing an organization whose 1968 charter made no secret of its genocidal goals. And this, again, happened while Labor was still firmly in power and no “ideological” settlements had yet been built.
Nor should we forget the UN’s infamous “Zionism is Racism” resolution of 1975. As delegitimization goes, it’s hard to beat having two-thirds of the world’s countries declare that while self-determination is laudable for other people, it’s “racist” when practiced by Jewish people.
Troy does mention this resolution, but fails to note that it, too, was adopted when Labor still reigned supreme and no ideological settlements yet existed. Indeed, as Yossi Klein Haleviperceptively noted, the first such settlement, Sebastia, was authorized three weeks after this resolution passed – and might not have been had many Israelis not been so revolted by the resolution that they saw Sebastia as a fitting “Zionist answer.”
The thesis that Likud and the settlements are responsible for Israel’s unpopularity has an equally counter-factual corollary: If Israel would just elect left-wing governments and evacuate settlements, its popularity would increase. Troy trots out that fallacy as well, declaring that the 2005 disengagement from Gaza “helped staunch” the “exorbitant military and diplomatic price Israel was paying for staying in Gaza.”
Really? Has he forgotten that three years and 6,000 rockets later, when Israel finally took military action to end Gaza’s nonstop bombardment of the Negev, it was slapped with the Goldstone Report accusing it of war crimes (including deliberately targeting civilians) and recommending its indictment in the International Criminal Court? That slanderous document, ultimately repudiated even by its lead author, won overwhelming backing not only in the UN Human Rights Council and General Assembly, but also in Europe: Only eight European countries voted against it.
Thus when a prime minister considered a super-dove – Ehud Olmert, the man responsible for Israel’s most far-reaching peace offer ever – launched a three-week incursion to stop rocket fire from territory Israel had fully evacuated three years earlier, Israel’s reward was the Goldstone Report. Yet nothing comparable occurred in 2002, when a premier then considered an uber-hawk (Ariel Sharon) permanently reoccupied much of the West Bank to stop the intifada. In short, far from being staunched by Israel’s pullout from Gaza and election of a left-wing premier, the diplomatic bleeding only got worse.
As even leftist Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit subsequently admitted in a moment of candor, “When Ehud Olmert’s Israel turns out to be less legitimate than [hardline Likud premier] Yitzhak Shamir’s Israel, there is no true incentive to continue to give in.” And there’s no intellectually honest way to keep blaming Likud and the settlements for Israel’s unpopularity.
One can certainly understand why leftists keep doing so anyway: Propagating the myth that Likud and the settlements are to blame furthers their goal of persuading Israelis to abandon both. One can even understand why many non-leftists buy this myth: Quite aside from the fact that anything people hear often enough starts sounding plausible, the delusion that it’s “only” Likud and the settlements the world hates – that if we just got rid of both, the world would love us again – is much less unpleasant than acknowledging that much of the world will hate us no matter what. Yet the evidence simply doesn’t support this theory.
The good news is that most Israelis seem to grasp this intuitively: In a 2010 poll, 77% of Israeli Jews agreed that “no matter what Israel does or how far it goes towards resolving the conflict with the Palestinians, the world will continue to criticize Israel.” The bad news is that this myth nevertheless continues to dominate the public discourse, thanks to the silent majority’s failure to challenge it publicly and consistently.
So next time someone tells you Likud and the settlements are to blame, challenge them to explain how this thesis fits the facts. Europe’s behavior in 1973 might be a good place to start.
Settlers and Haredim are wrong to view denouncing their own thugs as a trap
About 10 days ago, a Haredi rabbi from Beit Shemesh published an impassioned rebuttal of the demand that mainstream Haredim denounce the fringe elements of their community that have been harassing women and children there and elsewhere. No normative Haredi condones such behavior, he wrote, but when a Haredi condemns the thugs as a Haredi, “he helps perpetrate the fiction that he and those like him are part of that group (the perpetrators), since whoever is NOT part of that group of malefactors is not asked to condemn them.” This encourages the false idea “that the aberrant behavior somehow stems from the core values of the entire group.”
I’ve heard similar arguments against the demand that mainstream settlers denounce the fringe elements of their community that have been attacking Palestinians and IDF soldiers. And since much of the media really would like nothing better than to tar all settlers and all Haredim as violent, benighted and immoral, I can understand the argument’s appeal.
Nevertheless, I think it’s wrong. And despite all the very important differences – first and foremost, petty hooliganism isn’t remotely comparable to mass murder – the best way to understand why is to look at Palestinian terrorists.
Some years ago, at the height of the second intifada, the Shin Bet security service interviewed dozens of failed suicide bombers (people caught before they could blow themselves up, or whose bombs failed to explode) in an effort to find out what made them tick. Its conclusion may at first seem surprising: The number-one motive driving these terrorists was a craving for their own society’s admiration. The knowledge that they would be lionized as heroes – that streets and squares would be named for them, that religious and political leaders would sing their praises, that the media would publish glowing obituaries, that schoolchildren would study them as role models – created a powerful incentive for young Palestinians to blow themselves up.
This finding was reinforced some years later by media interviews with wanted Fatah terrorists who, under a deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, agreed to lay down their arms in exchange for an Israeli amnesty. Asked why they agreed, all offered roughly the same answer: Whereas once, they were heroes, welcomed everywhere, Israel’s increasingly successful counterterrorism efforts had turned them into pariahs.
When some of them strolled into a Tul Karm coffeehouse, all the customers fled, fearing an Israeli strike, and the owner ordered them out. Taxi drivers refused to pick them up; barbers refused to cut their hair. And, worst of all, they couldn’t get married. As one Palestinian explained, he didn’t want his daughter marrying 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.” Amnestied terrorist Mahdi Abu Ghazale said his fiancee’s family explicitly conditioned the engagement on him obtaining the amnesty.
In truth, however, this finding shouldn’t be surprising, because strange though it may seem, most terrorists aren’t psychopaths. True psychopaths, who genuinely don’t care what others think of them, are very rare. The vast majority of human beings care greatly about the good opinion of their reference group, and this is perhaps especially true of “ideological” criminals: The good opinion of their reference group is essential to maintaining their illusion that they are doing something brave and noble to advance the group’s shared cause.
Palestinian terrorism is a classic example of ideological crime. The terrorists were convinced their murderous acts would advance their society’s shared goal of defeating the hated Zionist enemy, and this conviction was reinforced by their society’s admiration. But it shattered once society started treating them as pariahs instead. And at that point, many opted to quit.
While Haredi and settler thugs are much less violent, they are no less ideologically driven. Settler thugs believe their attacks on Palestinians and soldiers further their community’s shared cause of preserving and expanding the settlement enterprise. Haredi thugs believe their abusive behavior toward “immodest” females (even eight-year-olds) furthers their community’s shared cause of creating a modest society. Both groups therefore see themselves as their community’s heroes: people who dare to take bold steps that others in their community fear to take, but which are necessary to achieve their common goal.
Because this illusion is so important to their self-esteem, they easily interpret their community’s silence not as the revulsion it often is, but as silent gratitude from people too timid to defy hostile outsiders by speaking their admiration aloud. And that interpretation is facilitated by the fact that so many of the voices they do hear are raised in their defense.
In my own community, the settlers, I frequently hear statements justifying the thugs’ attacks as an understandable response to outpost demolitions, along the lines of: “What do you expect when our evil government is destroying settlements?” Or as one acquaintance told me when I criticized the thugs: “You’re blaming the victims.” I’m less familiar with the Haredi community, but I strongly suspect extremists there also hear plenty of statements like: “What do you expect when half-naked women insist on invading our streets and our buses?” And in both communities, many people implicitly defend the thugs by instead condemning the media and/or leftist “provocateurs” for “blowing the incidents out of proportion” or even “inventing” them wholesale.
In reality, far from helping their community, Palestinian terrorists produced thousands of Palestinian dead and wounded, an economic decline from which the PA still hasn’t recovered, and an Israeli reoccupation of areas previously ceded to the Palestinians. Settler and Haredi thugs are similarly damaging their communities, as I’ve explained before (here and here). But until they feel as thoroughly ostracized by their peers as those terrorists who couldn’t get a wife or even a taxi, their thuggish behavior is unlikely to stop.
That is why it’s vital for mainstream settlers and Haredim to publicly denounce them – even if, as that Haredi rabbi wrote, it means “walking right into the trap set” by a hostile media. For these communities have the most to lose if the thuggery continues.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on January 16, 2012
The UN’s relentless anti-Israel bias, so aptly described by Anne Bayefsky in these pages last Friday, sometimes appears as inevitable as death and taxes. Yet a survey of the Security Council’s voting record over the last 15 years reveals that there has in fact been a slight, but potentially significant, improvement. And that improvement is largely thanks to a new policy adopted by U.S. President George Bush.
For years, the U.S. has vetoed resolutions that it deemed too biased against Israel. But during the late 1980s and 1990s, Washington was unable to sway any other council member to its side: With monotonous regularity, such resolutions failed by a vote of 14-1.
Over the last four years, however, there has been a shift: While no country has yet joined the U.S. in voting “no,” there have consistently been two to four abstentions – usually from Europe, occasionally from Africa as well. Since Security Council resolutions need nine votes to pass, this means that the council has been inching toward a situation in which anti-Israel resolutions could be defeated even without an American veto.
Bush achieved this shift by setting a clear, consistent standard for what constitutes bias: Condemnations of Israel are biased unless the resolution also condemns anti-Israel terror. And, more importantly, vague condemnations of “all violence against civilians” do not qualify: The resolution must explicitly condemn Palestinian perpetrators such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
That is such a simple and reasonable demand that some countries have found it impossible to ignore. Yet the Palestinians, and hence the Arab countries that sponsor Security Council resolutions on their behalf, have never once been willing to agree. The result is that a handful of nations that once voted consistently against Israel – England, Germany, Norway, Romania, Bulgaria and Cameroon – turned into frequent abstainers.
John Danforth, Washington’s current ambassador to the UN, provided an eloquent example of how the new system works during last week’s debate on the latest anti-Israel resolution, which would have condemned Israel’s current military operation in Gaza and demanded that it cease immediately.
Danforth did not say that the U.S. was unwilling in principle to condemn the operation, which began after Hamas killed two Israeli children in Sderot with a Qassam rocket launched from Gaza on September 29. That would have been unacceptable to every other Security Council member, and therefore counterproductive. Instead, he explained in detail why the resolution was unbalanced as it stood and what would have to be added to make it acceptable to the U.S.
The resolution, he said in addresses to the council on Monday and Tuesday, “tends to put the blame on Israel and absolves terrorists in the Middle East – people who shoot rockets into civilian areas, people who are responsible for killing children, Hamas. Nothing was said in this resolution about that problem.”
Specifically, he said, “it does not mention even one of the 450 Qassam rocket attacks launched against Israel over the past two years … It does not mention the two Israeli children who were outside playing last week when a rocket suddenly crashed into their young bodies. It does not mention the undisputed fact that Qassam rockets have no military purpose – that they are crude, imprecise devices of terror designed to kill civilians. It does not mention that Hamas took ‘credit’ for killing these Israeli children and maiming many other Israeli civilians … It does not mention that the terrorists hide among Palestinian civilians, provoking their deaths, and then use those deaths as fodder for their hatred, lawlessness, and efforts to derail the peace process. It does not mention the complete failure of the Palestinian authority to meet its commitments to establish security among its people. It does not mention any of these facts, nor does it acknowledge the legitimate need for Israel to defend itself.”
Bluntly accusing the council of acting “as the adversary of the Israelis and cheerleader to the Palestinians,” he charged that the resolution “would be a very terrible statement for the Security Council to make,” because it effectively acquiesced in terror against Israelis by failing to condemn it. “Silence indicates consent,” he said. “The silence here today is deafening.”
In essence, all Danforth asked was that the resolution not implicitly condone terrorism by failing even to mention the specific terrorist act that sparked the Gaza operation. That is a demand that would be difficult for any civilized nation to reject – and Britain, Germany and Romania, acknowledging its justice, therefore decided to abstain.
There are, as Saul Singer noted in these pages on Friday, other steps that the U.S. could and should be taking in an effort to reshape the UN’s attitude toward terror – and not only with regard to terror against Israel. Indeed, one need only look at the list of countries that had no qualms about voting “yes” on last week’s resolution to realize just how much remains to be done: They included two key European nations, France and Spain; two countries, Russia and the Philippines, that have themselves suffered devastating terror attacks, and could therefore be expected to understand how much is at stake; and two Latin American countries, Brazil and Chile, that, as democracies, could also have been expected to uphold basic standards of decency.
Nevertheless, Bush has made an important start with his new policy on anti-Israel resolutions. And for that, he deserves full credit.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on October 12, 2004