Peace Process
I just returned from a few weeks in America, where the only thing from Israel that makes the news is the ongoing Palestinian violence. So it was a pleasant surprise to come home and discover that the peace process is actually progressing quite nicely. I don’t, of course, mean the one the West is fixated on, the consistently fruitless and currently nonexistent “peace process” with the Palestinians. I mean the far more important process of creeping normalization with the rest of the Arab world, which will not only improve Israel’s long-term security, but is probably essential for any progress on the Palestinian track.
As the Jerusalem Post reported last week, Israel is becoming an increasingly important player in the Arab world’s trade with Europe. Until a few years ago, the main overland route for this trade was through Syria. But with the Syrian civil war having made that impossible, a growing proportion now comes by ferry from Turkey to Haifa, then trucks across Israel to Jordan. This route is cheaper than the other main alternative, which involves shipping from Europe to Egypt.
Last year, some 13,000 trucks used the Israel route, up more than 25 percent from the previous year. And next month, a new shipping line between Turkey and Israel is slated to be inaugurated, enabling another 150 trucks per month. Israel’s Sheikh Hussein border crossing with Jordan is being expanded to handle the increase.
All this obviously benefits Israel’s economy, since Israel collects duties on every truckload. More importantly, however, it means that Israel – for virtually the first time since its establishment in 1948 – is playing a useful role in the broader regional economy rather than being largely isolated from it. And the more Israel’s Arab neighbors benefit from Israel’s stability, the more they will have an interest in trying to maintain that stability rather than disrupting it.
No less noteworthy was last week’s decision by an Egyptian parliamentarian and media personality to publicly challenge his country’s longstanding opposition to “normalization” with Israel. Though the two countries signed a peace treaty in 1979, Egyptian politicians, journalists, cultural figures and other elites have long opposed turning the cold peace into a “normal” relationship. Hence despite the exchange of ambassadors, bilateral relations have long been limited and kept largely under the radar, even as security cooperation has grown increasingly close over the last few years.
But last week, parliamentarian and television mogul Tawfik Okasha decided to shatter this taboo in the most public manner possible: He announced on live TV, on his own television show, that he had invited Israeli Ambassador Haim Koren to dinner. He even promised to take a photo of himself with Koren and send it to the media. Moreover, he announced that he had issued the invitation for an unprecedented purpose: to ask Israel to mediate between Egypt and Ethiopia in an explosive dispute over allocating water from the Nile River, on the sensible grounds that Israel has good relations with both countries.
Needless to say, an uproar ensued. Two other parliamentarians promptly demanded Okasha’s expulsion from parliament, and over 100 signed a statement rejecting normalization with Israel and demanding an investigation into his actions. (In the media world, he’s less vulnerable to repercussions, since he owns the TV station on which his show is broadcast.)
But when challenging a longstanding norm, someone always has to be first. And despite the inevitable backlash, pioneers like Okasha pave the way for others to follow.
Meanwhile, Okasha isn’t backing down. He did indeed have Koren to dinner, where he proposed various ideas for how Israel could help Egypt in the fields of water, agriculture and education – all areas where Israel excels and Egypt desperately needs to improve.
In the current Egyptian climate, Okasha’s proposal for Israeli mediation is an obvious nonstarter, and whether anything will come of his other proposals remains to be seen. But his willingness to buck the consensus in order to try is already a step forward.
Finally, there was last week’s fascinating Associated Press profile of Hossam Haick, an Israeli Arab professor at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and a global leader in the field of nanotechnology (yes, Israel has Arab professors at its top universities). In 2013, with the Technion’s cooperation, Haick launched one of the world’s first online courses in Arabic, a course in nanotechnology. Since then, he said, about 14,000 students have enrolled, from Syria, Yemen, Qatar and elsewhere. Some dropped out when they discovered that Haick is Israeli. But most didn’t care.
Haick said he sees the course as a way of building bridges between Israel and the Arab world. And he’s right; this is an online version of the Haifa-Jordan trade route. Just as that route for the first time enables the broader regional economy to benefit from Israel, Haick’s course for the first time enables the broader region to benefit from Israel’s world-class universities and high-tech expertise. And the more Israel’s neighbors benefit from its existence, the greater their interest will be in reaching an accommodation with it rather than destroying it.
All of the above may seem like baby steps. Yet the series of baby steps that have been taken over the last few years not only represents a major shift from the utter stagnation of previous decades, but is slowly adding up to significant progress, even if there’s still a long way left to go.
Ultimately, this progress is also crucial for any hope of Israeli-Palestinian peace. Barring the unexpected emergence of a Palestinian Anwar Sadat, Palestinians will need serious backing from the broader Arab world – and probably serious pressure as well – to make the kind of compromises any peace agreement with Israel would entail. So far, the Arab world hasn’t had any interest in applying such pressure. But if Arab countries become convinced that Israel’s continued existence and stability benefits them, they will finally have an interest in pressing the Palestinians to end the century-old conflict.
Originally published in Commentary on February 29, 2016
How do you build a state for people who don’t want it built? That’s the obvious question that emerges from the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Rawabi, the first new Palestinian city. It’s a flagship project that international diplomats routinely laud as a model of Palestinian state-building, but it has won no such praise from fellow Palestinians. Instead, the very people it was meant to benefit are now accusing Rawabi’s founder of collaboration with the enemy for having committed such horrendous crimes – this is not a joke – as providing residents with electricity and running water.
Rawabi was founded with the goal of providing decent, affordable housing for middle-class Palestinians – theoretically a goal that should be welcomed by the Palestinian Authority and its residents, who routinely complain to the international community about how wretched their situation is. From the start, however, the PA did its best to undermine the project; despite repeated promises of support, it refused to provide even the basic infrastructure that most governments routinely provide to new residential developments. Thus as JTA reported last week, Rawabi’s water and sewage system, streets, schools and medical clinic were all financed, like the houses themselves, by entrepreneur Bashar Masri and the Qatari government.
The PA even tried to prevent Rawabi from obtaining running water, by refusing, for five long years, to convene the joint Israeli-Palestinian water committee that’s supposed to approve all new water projects. Rawabi got its water only when Israel finally lost patience and approved its connection to water mains unilaterally.
Despite this obstructionism, Masri persisted, and Rawabi finally opened its doors to new residents in August. But since then, only a trickle of people have moved in, even though Masri claims Rawabi has lower prices and better amenities than nearby Ramallah. Of the 637 apartments that are ready (out of a planned total of over 6,000), only 140 have been occupied, he told JTA.
Partly, this is due to the security situation, Masri said: The wave of Palestinian stabbing attacks against Israelis that began in October has caused an economic downturn in the PA, so people are reluctant to take out loans to buy an apartment.
But as JTA noted, another deterrent is the collaboration accusations being hurled at Masri and Rawabi by fellow Palestinians:
**The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee has accused Masri of “normalization with Israel that helps it whitewash its ongoing occupation, colonization and apartheid against the Palestinian people.” Wasel Abu Yousef, a senior Palestinian official, told Al-Monitor that “all Palestinian factions” should be boycotting Israel, “including Rawabi.” **
To be clear, Masri isn’t being accused of cooperating with the settlements; in fact, he demanded that every company involved in building Rawabi sign a contract promising not to use any settlement products. What he stands accused of is working with Israeli officials to obtain staples that most other Palestinians also get from Israel, like electricity, water and cement. As Masri pointed out, “Eighty-five percent of the cement in all of Palestine — in all of the West Bank and Gaza — is coming from Israel. In the West Bank, all of our electricity is from Israel.”
But according to the “anti-normalization” activists, it’s better for Palestinians to do without new houses, electricity and running water than to commit the crime of talking with an Israeli.
Nor is Rawabi exceptional; the “anti-normalization” activists are equally opposed to any other effort to build their state by improving Palestinian life. In 2013, for instance, these activists forced two Israeli Arab businessmen to cancel plans to open a branch of an Israeli clothing store in Ramallah. The store would have provided jobs for 150 people, but who needs jobs? In 2012, UNICEF was forced to scrap a plan to build a desalination plant in Gaza – a territory where 90 to 95 percent of the water is deemed polluted – because both the Hamas government and civil-society groups objected to its decision to invite bids from a nearby world leader in desalination technology, aka the Zionist entity. Four years later, Gaza still has no desalination plant, and its residents still drink polluted water.
Over the 21 years of its existence, the PA has been the world’s largest per capita recipient of foreign aid. But it hasn’t built a single hospital or university or rehoused a single resident of the refugee camps located in PA territory; it would rather pay salaries to terrorists and finance campaigns against Israel in international organizations. And now, not content with merely failing to build Palestine itself, it’s even trying to prevent private entrepreneurs from doing so.
Most of the Western world seems desperately eager to create a Palestinian state. But a state isn’t just a flag and a name on a map; it has to be built on the ground as well. And as the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated, no amount of outside effort can build a functioning state if a critical mass of local residents isn’t willing to cooperate.
Thus, as long as many Palestinians view ostracizing Israel as higher priority than providing their own people with basic necessities such as electricity and running water, the West’s dream of a Palestinian state will remain a pipe dream. You can’t build a state for people who would rather tear down the neighboring one than build up their own.
Originally published in Commentary on January 29, 2016
I can’t help noticing that the “siege of Gaza” has largely disappeared from the headlines. I’d like to think it’s because, having finally seen what a real siege looks like in Syria, many well-meaning folks who used to decry the “siege” of Gaza have realized that Gaza was never actually besieged at all. But for anyone who’s still confused about the difference between a real siege and a fictitious one, here are two simple tests: First, in real sieges, people die of starvation, because the besieger stops food from entering; in fake ones, the “besieger” sends in 2,500 tons of food and medicine per day even during the worst of the fighting. Second, real sieges get swept under the carpet by the UN; only the fake ones merit massive UN publicity. And if you think I’m joking, just compare the actual cases of Madaya and Gaza.
In the Syrian town of Madaya, which is besieged by the Assad regime’s forces, people were reduced to living on grass because no other food was available. Rice, a staple that costs $1.25 per kilogram in other war-ravaged Syrian towns, was so scarce in Madaya that it sold for 200 times that price – an astounding $256 per kilogram, according to a report by Roy Gutman in Foreign Policy. Women were so hungry their breast milk dried up, leaving them unable to feed their babies. At least 32 people have starved to death so far, and hundreds more are at risk of starvation. One man told Gutman everyone in his family had lost 45 pounds – and they are the lucky ones; they’re still alive.
In Gaza, in contrast, even when the “siege” was regularly making headlines, there were never any reports of people dying of hunger, living off grass or unable to feed their babies. That’s because in contrast to Syrian forces, which prevented food and other humanitarian goods from entering Madaya, Israel allowed thousands of tons of such goods into Gaza every day. Even during the 50-day war with Hamas in summer 2014, while Hamas was regularly firing rockets at the only border crossing between Israel and Gaza, Israel managed to get 122,757 tons of food, medicine and fuel into Gaza through that crossing; in normal times, the volume is much higher. Indeed, Gaza’s life expectancy exceeds the global median, surpassing that in 114 countries worldwide. In places that are really besieged, life expectancy tends to be low.
It’s true that Israel maintains a naval blockade to prevent arms smuggling, and it also restricts dual-use imports to Gaza. Cement, for instance, is in short supply there, because Hamas has a nasty habit of using it to build cross-border attack tunnels rather than schools and hospitals for its people. According to Israel Defense Forces estimates, the tunnels uncovered during the 2014 war contained enough cement to build 2,580 homes, 180 schools or 570 medical clinics; today, Hamas is working hard to rebuild those tunnels. Thus Israel allows cement into Gaza only if a reputable international partner takes responsibility for ensuring it is used for civilian rather than military purposes. But import restrictions are not, and never were, remotely comparable to a siege.
If your only source of information is the UN, however, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking Gaza’s situation was much worse than that of Madaya – because the UN deliberately concealed Madaya’s situation, despite having known for months that the town was starving.
Gutman’s Foreign Policy report revealed that UN officials knew of Madaya’s dire straits as early as October, but kept mum until their hand was forced by “shocking images of starving infants” that began circulating on social media this month and were picked up by mainstream media. As late as January 6, a “flash update” on Madaya’s situation issued by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs was still marked “Internal, Not for Quotation.”
Moreover, even when the UN finally did go public, Gutman wrote, it insisted on downplaying Madaya’s situation by saying it was no worse than that of various towns besieged by rebel militias. Yet in contrast to Madaya, where regime forces were keeping all food out, food was entering the towns under rebel assault, making their situation far less dire.
One week after Gutman’s bombshell, BuzzFeed followed up with a report that OCHA had deliberately altered its humanitarian aid plan for Syria, including by “deleting references to ‘besieged’ areas such as Madaya where thousands of people are starving.” The plan also deleted any mention of removing landmines and unexploded ordnance and dropped all references to violations of international humanitarian law.
The changes in the aid plan, like the original decision to keep Madaya’s situation under wraps, were made at the Assad regime’s request. As BuzzFeed noted, “The UN’s Damascus office is reliant on the Assad regime for all their foreign staff visas, their security, and access to hard-to-reach areas,” which may be why it felt obligated to bow to the regime’s dictates. Nevertheless, the decision infuriated aid organizations, which accused OCHA of concealing the true scale of the horror to appease the regime.
Needless to say, no such considerations restrain OCHA when it comes to Gaza; UN agencies know they can say anything they please against Israel without risking their Gaza access. Thus, a Google search for “Gaza blockade” on OCHA’s website turns up 1,100 documents decrying it; searching for “Gaza siege” turns up another 310 (while OCHA itself generally uses the legally correct term “blockade,” many NGOs it partners with prefer “siege”). Nor is this coincidental: It’s only when a place is really besieged that access requires the besieger’s goodwill; when a “siege” exists only in media hype, legitimate aid agencies have free access.
So next time you hear people talking about the “siege of Gaza,” remember Madaya. And then tell them to stop wasting their breath on fake sieges when people are dying in real ones.
Originally published in Commentary on January 25, 2016
The global firestorm that has erupted over Israel’s “NGO transparency bill” can’t be understood without knowing one crucial fact: Israel’s leading left-wing “nongovernmental” organizations are actually wholly-owned subsidiaries of the European Union and its member states. This fact, which was incontrovertibly demonstrated by a new NGO Monitor study, explains both why the bill is so important and why it is so fiercely opposed by the organizations themselves and their European funders.
As I noted in Tuesday’s post, the study examined the financial reports filed with Israel’s registrar of nonprofit organizations by 27 prominent organizations from 2010-2014. The groups include B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, Adalah, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and many others actively engaged in trying to tarnish Israel’s name overseas. Overall, these groups raised more than 261 million shekels during those years; at current exchange rates, that comes to $66 million.
Of this total, fully 65 percent – some $43 million – came either directly or indirectly from foreign governments, primarily European ones. Foreign governments provided 20 of the 27 groups with over 50 percent of their funding, and three groups (Yesh Din, Terrestrial Jerusalem and Emek Shaveh) received over 90 percent of their funding from foreign governments. The largest donor was the EU, followed by Norway and Germany.
Moreover, this high level of European funding is absolutely unique, as demonstrated by a previous NGO Monitor report analyzing the years 2007-2010. That report found that the EU’s European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights spends more on promoting “democracy and human rights” in “Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories” than in every other country of the Mideast combined. Indeed, the EIDHR spends more in Israel alone – excluding all the grants given jointly to “Israel and the OPT” – than it does in every other Mideast country, every Asian and Pacific country, all but one African country and all but one American and Caribbean country; grants to “Israel and the OPT” together exceed those to every other country worldwide, by a very large margin.
The “transparency bill” would require any NGO that gets more than 50 percent of its funding from foreign governments to state this clearly on any report or publication it issues, and also in any written or oral contacts with public officials. The government-sponsored version would not require representatives of these groups to wear special nametags in the Knesset; that idea was raised in a private member’s bill, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said it won’t be in the final legislation.
The bill’s supporters say it is similar to America’s Foreign Agents Registration Act. The U.S. Embassy in Israel disputes this, insisting that FARA applies only when groups engage in activities “at the order, request, or under the direction or control, of a foreign principal – not simply by receiving contributions from such an entity.” That claim, however, is patently false.
FARA’s actual text says a foreign agent need not be directly controlled by a foreign principal; he can also be acting “under the direction or control” of a third party “whose activities are … financed, or subsidized in whole or in major part by a foreign principal.” In other words, he could be employed by a local NGO financed “in whole or in major part” by a foreign government. Moreover, FARA says explicitly that no formal contractual relationship between the agent and the foreign principal is necessary.
Thus receiving substantial contributions from a foreign entity actually could be enough in itself to make someone a foreign agent, as long as he also engages in one of four actions specified by the law, of which the relevant one in Israel’s case is the first: engaging “within the United States in political activities for or in the interests of such foreign principal.”
The EU and its member states make no secret of the fact that getting Israel out of the West Bank is one of their top foreign policy goals. That contradicts the Israeli government’s position, which opposes further territorial withdrawals under the current circumstances.
The 20 NGOs in question similarly make no secret of the fact that getting Israel out of the West Bank is a top policy goal. B’Tselem, for instance, unambiguously titled one of its fundraising appeals “Help End the Occupation: Support B’Tselem.” Yehuda Shaul, the foreign relations director for Breaking the Silence, explicitly defined the organization in a 2014 article as “Israeli veterans who work toward ending the Israeli occupation.” And so forth.
In other words, these organizations are conducting political activity in Israel aimed at pressuring the elected government to adopt a key European policy goal, all while being financed “in major part” by European governments. That’s precisely the situation FARA’s provisions are meant to cover, and for good reason: When certain donors provide more than half an NGO’s funding, no explicit contract is needed to ensure the NGO’s compliance with its donors’ wishes; the threat of losing funding is sufficient.
But lest there be any doubt, even the explicit contractual relationship sometimes exists. Just this month, for instance, an EU-sponsored organization gave B’Tselem €30,000 to lobby the Knesset against the NGO transparency bill, which the EU openly opposes. In other words, it paid B’Tselem to lobby the Knesset to enact the EU’s preferred policies.
There’s also no doubt that these European donors are hostile to Israel. Norway – the largest individual government donor – is remarkably honest about this; its Foreign Ministry says explicitly, for instance, that it funds UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, because it is “a guarantor that the rights of Palestine refugees, including the right to return, are not forgotten.” The “right of return,” needless to say, is Palestinian code for eliminating the Jewish state demographically by flooding it with millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees.
But the rest of Europe isn’t much more subtle. For instance, the EU recently adopted discriminatory labeling requirements that apply only to “Israeli-occupied” territory, but not to territory occupied by any other country. It gives higher priority to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than it does to other conflicts that are not only far bloodier, but have swamped it with an unprecedented refugee crisis. And the funding it pours into Israeli NGOs – more, as noted, than it gives the rest of the Mideast combined – isn’t because it thinks a 67-year-old democracy actually needs more help with democracy promotion than the world’s dozens of dictatorships; it’s because this money isn’t aimed at promoting “democracy and human rights” at all, but at subverting the policies of Israel’s democratically elected government.
By now, I doubt there’s anyone in Israel who doesn’t know these NGOs are wholly-owned subsidiaries of European governments; indeed, the main reason they conduct so much of their activity overseas these days is that they have little credibility left in Israel. But abroad, these groups are still viewed as Israeli organizations representing an authentic Israeli perspective, and they also benefit from the NGO “halo effect.”
That is why the transparency bill is so critical, and also why both the organizations and European governments are fighting so hard to kill it: Once these groups are required to state openly, on everything they do, that they’re primarily funded by European governments, it will be possible to expose them for what they really are – not independent Israeli NGOs with Israel’s best interests at heart, but agents of a hostile foreign power that is obsessed by Israel, discriminates against it and wishes it nothing but ill.
Originally published in Commentary on January 22, 2016
NGO Monitor has just published an important study of the funding of Israel’s premier left-wing “nongovernmental” organizations. The first fact that arises from the study is no surprise to anyone who has been following the issue: Far from being “nongovernmental,” these groups are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the European Union and its member states. But the second fact did surprise me: The New Israel Fund, which has become the bête noire of pro-Israel activists both in Israel and abroad in recent years, is actually a comparatively minor donor to these groups. If it closed up shop tomorrow, its grantees would still manage just fine.
The study examined the funding of 27 organizations from 2010 to 2014, using the financial reports the groups filed with Israel’s registrar of nonprofit organizations. It also compiled a complete database of all donations to these groups during those years. The groups in question are the usual suspects, including B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, Adalah, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and many others whose main activity nowadays seems to be trying to tarnish Israel’s name overseas.
Overall, the report said, these groups raised more than 261 million shekels in 2010-2014; at current exchange rates, that comes to $66 million (all dollar conversions are my own). Of this, a whopping 65 percent – some $43 million – came from foreign governments (primarily European), either directly or indirectly.
Twenty of the 27 groups received more than 50 percent of their funding from foreign governments, and three of them – Yesh Din, Terrestrial Jerusalem, and Emek Shaveh – received over 90 percent of their funding from these governments. The largest governmental donor was the EU, followed by Norway and Germany.
In contrast, the NIF accounted for only 12 percent of these organizations’ total funding, less than a fifth of what they received from their governmental sponsors. Indeed, the EU alone – not including its member states – provided more than two and a half times as much as the NIF did. The NIF isn’t even the largest private-sector donor. That honor, unsurprisingly, goes to a European group: the Sigrid Rausing Trust, a London-based foundation started by a Swedish philanthropist, which provided the groups in question with 14 percent of their funding.
Based on the very small selection of NIF supporters I know personally, I’ve always suspected that most NIF donors are well-meaning, pro-Israel Jews who genuinely seek to make Israel a better place according to their own lights. I dislike many NIF grantees and many NIF officials, and I wish those well-meaning Jews would find a more constructive channel for their donations, but they clearly have as much right to donate to their preferred Israeli causes as Jews of any other political persuasion have to donate to theirs.
Yet even if I’m wrong in my assessment of the NIF’s supporters, it’s hard to argue with the numbers. And those numbers lead to an unavoidable conclusion: Pro-Israel activists have been busy picking fights with fellow Jews when the real enemies are hostile foreign governments. By focusing so much of our ire on the NIF, we have effectively been giving the real culprits a pass. And it’s long past time for us to correct this error and start focusing our ire where it belongs – on the EU and its member states.
Originally published in Commentary on January 19, 2016
I once thought the ongoing Mideast meltdown would make it obvious to all that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the least of the region’s problems. As the years went by, I began to despair of this notion; both Obama Administration officials and their European counterparts remained fixated on Israel, seemingly undaunted by the new reality. But two remarkably frank avowals of error by two very different people over the past week have restored my faith that eventually, truth will prevail.
The first is former CIA director and four-star general David Petraeus, who made headlines back in 2010 by telling Congress that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict impedes America’s “ability to advance our interests” in the Mideast. Last week, he gave a wide-ranging interview to Haaretz in which he was asked how important solving the conflict was to overall Mideast stability. His response was unequivocal:
I think it is increasingly clear that the old notion that the path to peace and stability in the Middle East runs through a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is mistaken. (And I acknowledge that I was one of those who shared that notion until a few years ago.) There are multiple interlocking conflicts unfolding across the region right now – and to be blunt, the Israeli-Palestinian issue is peripheral to all of them. Those who suggest that, if peace were to break out tomorrow between Israelis and Palestinians, such a development would stabilize, say, Syria or Libya or Iraq, are simply detached from reality.
Moreover, he said, his new understanding of the situation led to an obvious conclusion:
In my view, at a time when civilization itself is under siege from forces that wish to tear down the world we have helped to build, we would be wise to take a step back and focus on the big picture. The simple reality is that Israel and the United States are long-standing friends and allies in an increasingly dangerous world – and we ought to treat each other as such.
From an American perspective, Israel has proven itself to be an exceptionally capable, resourceful and valuable ally to the United States in a very important and treacherous region. We share many fundamental interests, and we face enemies that wish to do both countries harm.
Just as importantly, we share core values and we therefore wrestle with many of the same questions – about how to keep our people safe from the forces of terrorism that seek our destruction while preserving our respective democratic freedoms, rule of law, and respect for fundamental and eternal human rights, which define who we are.
A few days later, the man who heads both the Cypriot parliament’s Foreign and European Affairs Committee and the country’s center-right ruling party made a similar avowal of error, and drew similar conclusions, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post. Cyprus, said Averof Neophytou, was once one of Israel’s harshest critics in Europe, viewing it as an aggressor against the Palestinians. But now, it realizes that Israel is “a country of eight million fighting a struggle for survival and having to face hundreds of millions of Muslims and Arabs, part of whom don’t even recognize the right of the existence of a Jewish state. So which side is strong, and which side is weak? Which side is fighting for survival?”
Moreover, he continued, “For decades Israel was blamed for creating the instability in the region, but can anyone credibly blame Israel for the instability in Syria, the threat of Islamic State, the Arab Spring that turned into an Arab winter, or the chaos in Libya and Iraq?”
The result is that whereas Cypriots once viewed Israel with hostility – “There were times decades ago, even in the 90s, when if during the public procurement process there was a consortium that included Jewish or Israeli participation, that would be a reason to exclude it,” Neophytou acknowledged – today, the “vast majority” of Cypriots consider Israel “a credible partner,” he asserted.
Clearly, there are still plenty of people who ignore reality in order to cling to the myth of Palestinian centrality. For instance, as veteran U.S. diplomat Dennis Ross pointed out last month, the theory that Washington’s relationship with Arab states would be improved by drawing away from Israel and harmed by cooperating with it has been disproven time and again, yet it remains accepted wisdom in American policy circles.
Some people will even rewrite history to salvage their belief in Palestinian centrality – like Oded Eran, a former top Israeli diplomat now serving as a senior fellow at a leading Israeli think tank. In an interview with the Times of Israel last month, he supported his theory that progress in the peace process is essential for improving Israel’s ties with the international community by claiming that the Oslo Accord and the peace with Jordan led to the establishment of relations with India and China. But in real life, Israel established relations with India and China in 1992, predating both Oslo (1993) and the Jordanian peace (1994). As with dozens of other countries that established ties with Israel in 1991-92, this rapprochement was driven not by anything to do with the peace process, but by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the consequent collapse of the anti-Israel line previously followed by both the Soviet bloc and the Non-Aligned Movement (which, despite its name, usually tilted toward the Soviets on foreign policy). And Eran, as a former top diplomat, should certainly have known all this. But his need to declare the Palestinian-Israeli conflict the axis around which the world revolves evidently trumps reality. And whether due to ignorance or similar commitment to this proposition, neither the reporter nor his editors called him on it.
Nobody likes admitting error, so perhaps it’s not surprising that it has taken so long for the current Mideast chaos to change anyone’s mind. But as Petraeus and Neophytou demonstrate, slowly but surely, that change is happening. It’s a small ray of light in what has otherwise been a gloomy start to 2016.
Originally published in Commentary on January 14, 2016
During the Hamas-Israel war of 2014, both Obama Administration officials and their European counterparts repeatedly accused Israel of excessive force over the “massive” destruction of civilian property in Gaza. But if those officials retain even a shred of intellectual integrity, the recent devastation of Ramadi during a joint Western/Iraqi effort to retake the city leaves them only two options: either hand themselves over to the International Criminal Court as suspected war criminals, or publicly apologize to Israel for all the slurs they hurled at it over far less extensive damage.
As the New York Times reported last week, the successful recapture of Ramadi from the Islamic State left the city “in ruins.” Reporter Ben Hubbard described one neighborhood as “a panorama of wreckage so vast that it was unclear where the original buildings had stood.” The city has no electricity or running water, and “Many streets had been erased or remained covered in rubble or blocked by trenches used in the fighting.” When Hubbard asked an Iraqi officer how residents would return to their homes, the officer replied, “Homes? There are no homes.”
Indeed, a different Iraqi officer told the Associated Press “that more than half of the city’s buildings have been destroyed, including government offices, markets, and houses.”
This is devastation orders of magnitude greater than what Gaza suffered. According to UN figures, 9,465 homes in Gaza were completely destroyed and another 9,644 badly damaged, out of a total of roughly 319,000 (the latter figure is my own calculation based on official Palestinian statistics: Dividing Gaza’s total population of 1.82 million by its average household size of 5.7 people gives you 319,000 households). Thus even according to the UN – which traditionally exaggerates Palestinian casualties and damage – only about 6 percent of Gaza’s homes were destroyed or badly damaged. That’s a far cry from “more than half of the city” in Ramadi.
But the reasons for the destruction, in both places, are no less significant than its scope. One, as Hubbard noted, is the inherent difficulty “of dislodging a group that stitches itself into the urban fabric of communities it seizes by occupying homes, digging tunnels, and laying extensive explosives.” In Ramadi, he reported, Islamic State built tunnels under the streets and planted explosives in roads and buildings. Indeed, “Entire areas are considered no-go zones because they have yet to be searched for booby traps left by the jihadists.”
These are the same tactics Hamas used in Gaza: Tunnels, booby traps, and weapons stockpiles were placed in and under civilian buildings on a massive scale. On July 30, 2014, for instance, three Israeli soldiers were killed by “an explosion at a booby-trapped UNRWA health clinic that housed a tunnel entry shaft,” the Times of Israel reported. At the same press briefing where those deaths were announced, an Israeli officer said Hamas had thus far detonated more than 1,000 bombs, destroying “thousands of buildings” in Gaza. As an example, he cited a street the army searched the previous night in which 19 out of 28 buildings were booby-trapped.
But in Gaza, both the Obama administration and European officials blamed Israel for the ensuing destruction. In Ramadi, in contrast, both American and Iraqi officials quite sensibly “placed blame for the city’s destruction on the jihadists, who mined roads and buildings.”
The other factor in Ramadi’s devastation was airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition. As AP reported, these strikes “smashed large parts of the city into rubble.” Nor is that surprising: When a target area is extensively booby-trapped, even precision airstrikes often cause greater-than-expected damage, because the attacking force can’t know which buildings are wired with explosives, and hitting a wired building will set off massive secondary explosions. Yet airstrikes are unavoidable when fighting militants entrenched in a sea of tunnels and booby-trapped buildings, because using ground troops alone would result in unacceptably high losses for the attacking force.
Consequently, a Pentagon spokesman correctly blamed Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) for the damage to Ramadi: “One hundred percent of this is on ISIL because no one would be dropping any bombs if ISIL hadn’t gone in there,” Colonel Steven H. Warren told Hubbard.
Yet in Gaza, both the Obama Administration and European officials largely blamed the damage on Israel rather than Hamas, even though Israeli airstrikes were employed for the exact same reason, sometimes caused greater-than-expected damage for the exact same reason, and obviously wouldn’t have been launched at all had Hamas not attacked Israel to begin with. Indeed, Israel’s airstrikes were arguably far more justified than America’s were: Islamic State wasn’t firing missiles at America from Ramadi or digging attack tunnels into American territory from Ramadi. In contrast, Hamas had fired thousands of rockets at Israel from Gaza over the previous decade and dug dozens of cross-border attack tunnels, including one that notoriously emerged right next to a kindergarten.
Ramadi, incidentally, is far from the only example of the way the Obama Administration and Europe hold Israel to a double standard. On Monday, the Elder of Ziyon blog highlighted another one: According to the Herald Scotland, “The British government is refusing to accept evidence of civilian fatalities in UK air strikes from human rights groups monitoring the results of bombing raids” in Syria and Iraq; instead, it relies exclusively on “evidence from its own internal surveillance.” But that same government uncritically accepted NGO reports saying that almost 70 percent of Palestinian casualties in Gaza were civilian, even though Israel scrupulously investigated those reports and found that in reality, about half the casualties were documented members of either Hamas’ military wing or smaller terrorist organizations like Islamic Jihad.
I don’t really expect any Obama Administration or European official to admit to having unjustly criticized Israel during the Gaza war. But any fair-minded person comparing the devastation of Ramadi to that in Gaza should reach the same conclusion a group of high-ranking Western military experts did in a comprehensive report issued last month: that during the Gaza war, Israel “met and in some respects exceeded the highest standards we set for our own nations’ militaries.”
Originally published in Commentary on January 13, 2016
Ever since an arson attack apparently perpetrated by Jewish extremists killed three members of a Palestinian family last July, the left has used it to launch a sweeping assault on religious Zionists in general and religious settlers in particular. The perpetrators weren’t mere “wild weeds,” leftists asserted, but a product of systematic racism and incitement in the religious community. And as long as the perpetrators remained unknown, this claim was hard to refute: Without knowing who they were, it was impossible to know their motives. But with the suspects having finally been indicted this week, it’s now clear this assertion is bunk. Nor is that my verdict alone: It’s the verdict of none other than the reporter covering the case for the far-left daily Haaretz – a paper that can’t be accused of any sympathy for either settlers or the religious community.
Last week, when reporters already knew who the suspects were but the rest of us were still in the dark due to a gag order, Haaretz ran a front-page analysis by settlement reporter Chaim Levinson titled “Jewish Terror Doesn’t Happen Because of Radical Rabbis, but in Spite of Them.” It’s worth reading in full, but here’s the gist:
Today’s Jewish terror doesn’t happen because of the rabbis. It is a protest against the rabbis, staged by young Jewish extremists … They regard the rabbis as too moderate and willing to compromise. They consider rabbis Dov Lior and Yitzchak Ginsburgh – whose names are whispered in the television studios as the arch-terrorists of our generation – as moderates because they don’t back violence.
The problem with the Jewish extremists of today is not the places they study, but the fact that they don’t study. If they were students in Lior’s much-maligned Nir Yeshiva in Kiryat Arba instead of wandering the hilltops of the West Bank, probably they wouldn’t have gone out and set fire to a family home in the dark of night.
The proof is crystal clear: None of Lior’s students are involved in the current terror activities. If he were to teach this, his students would probably follow his teachings. But that is not his way…
Yosef Haim Ben-David, who burned Mohammed Abu Khdeir to death in July 2014, did not grow up in the religious Zionist movement. Nor did the minor who stabbed several Palestinians in Dimona last October. Neither did Shlomo Pinto, who mistakenly stabbed a Jewish man in Kiryat Ata that same month.
Ginsburgh and Lior’s students, who imbibe their racism with gusto, may share their worldview but understand that burning and killing Arabs is not the way.
This week, after the gag order was finally lifted, Levinson published a profile of the main suspect, Amiram Ben-Uliel. And the profile proves his point. Ben-Uliel actually is the son of a mainstream religious Zionist rabbi and grew up in a settlement. But he dropped out of school as a teenager, left his family’s home, and largely severed contact with them. In fact, he largely severed contact with the entire mainstream religious community, as evidenced by what I personally consider the profile’s most telling detail: When he married a fellow extremist two years ago, the only guests at the wedding were the couple’s parents.
That might not sound shocking to American ears, since private weddings aren’t unheard of in America. But Orthodox Jewish weddings are massive community affairs. Guest lists typically number in the hundreds, and it’s considered a mitzvah to attend and help the bride and groom rejoice. Nor does community involvement end there: A traditional Orthodox wedding is followed by seven nights of parties, the sheva brachot, at which the newlyweds are the guests of honor. Each is typically hosted by a different relative or friend, and each must include at least one guest who didn’t attend the wedding or any of the earlier parties.
In short, in Jewish tradition, weddings aren’t private affairs; they are communal events deliberately designed to welcome the young couple into the community. Thus, by having a private wedding, Ben-Uliel and his bride were explicitly and pointedly turning their backs on their community and its religious traditions.
Other alleged members of this hardcore radical group have similar profiles. Mordechai Meyer, for instance, also grew up in a mainstream religious home in a mainstream settlement. But like Ben-Uliel, he dropped out of school and abandoned his family home as a teenager.
Indeed, these radicals are the antithesis of mainstream religious Zionists and settlers, who view the Israeli state as “the beginning of the flowering of our redemption” (to quote the prayer for the state), and therefore as something to be cherished. The radicals, in contrast, view the Israeli state as “The Kingdom of Evil” – the title of a tract written by one, Moshe Orbach, which details their methodology: using terror to sow such chaos and create such deep internal rifts that it will eventually destroy the state, clearing the way for them to build a religious kingdom in its stead. It’s the methodology embraced by every terrorist organization in history. But it has nothing to do with either the tactics or the goals of mainstream religious Zionism.
In fact, “inciting rabbis” have never had anything to do with Jewish terror. As Levinson correctly noted, this “is a cliché that took root in the 1990s after the assassination of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.” What he didn’t note is that it was wrong then, too. Michael Ben-Yair, the attorney general at the time, investigated the matter thoroughly and concluded that assassin Yigal Amir wasn’t influenced by any rabbi or by any broader “climate of incitement.” And like Haaretz, Ben-Yair can hardly be suspected of rightist sympathies; he’s a radical leftist who accuses Israel of “apartheid” and urged the European Union to recognize a Palestinian state even without an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty.
As Levinson aptly concluded, “The way to deal with terror is to stop terrorist activity. Investigating rabbis might make Meretz chairwoman MK Zehava Galon happy, but it is not connected to today’s reality.”
Yet unjustly smearing an entire community isn’t simply irrelevant; it’s downright counterproductive. The only thing it will ever achieve is to further deepen Israel’s internal divides. And that’s exactly the outcome the Jewish terrorists are seeking.
Originally published in Commentary on January 7, 2016
Many well-meaning people still believe that “pro-Palestinian activists” are exactly what the term sounds like – people anxious to better the Palestinians’ lot by ending “the occupation” and creating a Palestinian state. But Haaretz journalist Amira Hass provided a window onto these activists’ true nature in a column this week: They are people for whom even Hass – a self-described non-Zionist who deems Jewish immigration to Israel a “crime” and Palestinian violence against Israel a “right” – is a “Zionist,” and therefore beyond the pale. In short, they are people whose world has no place for any Israeli Jew of any political persuasion, and for whom the only “pro-Palestinian” future worth contemplating is one where Israel ceases to exist.
To understand just how extreme a worldview is required to label Hass too “pro-Israel,” some background is in order. Hass is Haaretz’s longtime Palestinian affairs analyst, but she’s unique among the Israeli journalists covering this beat in that she doesn’t live in Israel; she has lived for over two decades among the Palestinians, first in Gaza and then in Ramallah. This isn’t merely out of journalistic dedication; it’s where her avowed sympathies lie.
She states explicitly that she isn’t a Zionist. As she put it in the abovementioned column, during a panel she moderated at last week’s Haaretz conference in New York, “The newspaper’s representatives made it clear that Haaretz is a Zionist publication, that its opposition to the occupation stems from Zionist principles. I found it appropriate to distinguish myself from this stance.”
In this same column, she wrote that overseas Jews who move to Israel “would be choosing to participate in another crime,” a message she said she has delivered at forums ranging from the Haaretz conference to meetings with South African Jews. As she correctly noted, this is the antithesis of Zionism, which “preaches in favor of the immigration of Diaspora Jews to Israel.” In contrast, she appears to favor letting Palestinians immigrate to Israel; at any rate, she devoted several paragraphs to decrying Israel’s refusal to let them to do so.
Moreover, she believes Palestinians have a “right” to kill Israelis; in a now-infamous column in 2013, she wrote, “Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule.” That those stones are lethal weapons whose victims are primarily innocent civilians – the list of Israelis killed by Palestinian stone-throwers ranges from infants through toddlers to senior citizens – evidently doesn’t cause her any moral qualms.
So what could Hass possibly have done to enrage those “pro-Palestinian activists” to the point of accusing her of the worst crime in their book – Zionism? In her own words, “The thing that apparently angered them most was that I dared claim that the use of weapons does not advance the Palestinians’ cause today.”
This claim was not, heaven forbid, advanced “because of my Israeli identity” – i.e. out of any squeamishness about the murder of her countrymen. It’s just that in any armed conflict between the Palestinians and the vastly better-equipped Israeli army, the Palestinians are inevitably going to lose. Or to put it in her own, more pejorative, terms, the Israelis’ “capacity for destructive revenge is bigger.”
This, incidentally, is also the stated position of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. He, too, has repeatedly said that while he considers “armed struggle” legitimate in principle, he believes it has proven counterproductive in practice and should therefore be eschewed. So in the eyes of these “pro-Palestinian activists,” Abbas would also apparently qualify as a despised “Zionist.” And since he did, once upon a time, win election on this platform (though he’s now in the 11th year of his four-year term), all the Palestinians who once voted for him are presumably also “Zionists,” and therefore similarly beyond the pale for these “pro-Palestinian” purists.
Granted, the activists in question were South African, and the South African branch of BDS has long been even more pro-violence and more virulently anti-Semitic than the rest of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. But the difference is one of degree rather than kind; “pro-Palestinian” activists elsewhere are also often both pro-violence and anti-Semitic.
Judging by her column, Hass learned nothing from the fact that even she was ostracized as too “Zionist” by these activists. But other well-meaning liberals ought to do so. “Pro-Palestinian activists” who have no place even for Amira Hass in their world have no place for anyone who seeks anything other than Israel’s violent demise. Thus by cooperating with such activists, liberals are not promoting a peaceful two-state solution; they’re promoting the activists’ goal of a world without Israel.
Originally published in Commentary on December 23, 2015
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared Hamas to the Islamic State after the Paris attacks, he was widely scorned. But as several recent news reports make clear, the analogy was quite well-founded. Hamas, like ISIS, glories in its own brutality and boasts of it to the world. It actively arms, funds, and trains Islamic State’s Sinai affiliate. One of its senior officials has vowed that as soon as it gets rid of the pesky Zionist state, it will set its sights on the rest of the West. And the West seems determined to eliminate the one remaining difference between the two groups.
Hamas’s glorification of its own brutality was on display this week, when the group celebrated the 28th anniversary of its founding. In honor of this event, the Israeli daily Israel Hayom reported, Hamas posted a video on its website featuring highlights of its greatest terror attacks and listing all its other achievements, which were as follows: It has fired 16,377 rockets and mortars at Israel, reaching as far north as Haifa, and now manufactures most of its rockets locally. It has perpetrated 86 suicide bombings, 250 shootings, 36 stabbings, and over 500 cross-border raids. And it has kidnapped 26 Israelis, “both dead and alive.”
Note what’s missing from this list: any effort to improve the lives of the Palestinians it has ruled in Gaza since 2007. That, of course, is because there weren’t any. But the reason there weren’t any is because, like ISIS, Hamas has no interest in actually improving the lives of the people it rules; what interests Hamas is killing infidels. This order of priorities is why it builds tunnels to attack Israel but no bomb shelters to protect its civilians from Israeli counterstrikes, or why it keeps its people imprisoned in Gaza rather than accede to Cairo’s conditions for opening its border with Egypt. And it’s also why Hamas’s promotional video highlights its brutal murders of Israelis, just as Islamic State’s promotional videos highlight its brutal murders of Westerners.
Then there’s the actual cooperation with Islamic State’s Sinai affiliate, Wilayat Sinai, detailed by both Ehud Yaari for the Washington Institute and Alex Fishman for the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth. Hamas provides logistical support to the Sinai group, ranging from training to medical care, and Wilayat Sinai’s top military commander has visited Gaza to further this cooperation. But the main joint activity is arms purchases.
Hamas is the one with the money, provided by Iran, Qatar, and Turkey. Ostensibly, the latter two only fund civilian projects, but Hamas takes a generous cut for military purposes; for example, about a third of the cement imported for Qatari-sponsored construction projects in Gaza was diverted to Hamas’s tunnel-building enterprise. Wilayat Sinai, in contrast, is the one with physical access to the arms; it procures them from Iran and Libya and delivers them to Gaza in exchange for either cash or a cut of the shipment.
Finally, there’s the issue of Hamas’s stated ambitions. As researcher Pinhas Inbari noted last month, Hamas parliamentarian and cleric Dr. Yusuf al-Astal has declared for years that once Israel is defeated, Hamas will move on to the rest of the world. As he put it in one 2008 speech, “We will conquer Rome, and from there continue to conquer the two Americas and even Eastern Europe.”
Al-Astal is no fringe figure. He regularly writes articles for the Hamas journal Al-Risala, is interviewed by Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV, gives sermons in Hamas-controlled mosques and universities, and was included on Hamas’s parliamentary slate. Nor is Hamas-run Gaza a democracy with free speech for all; if Hamas disapproved of Al-Astal’s message, it wouldn’t let him promulgate it in Hamas-controlled institutions.
These boastful ambitions might sound laughable. There’s no reason to think Hamas could achieve them, and so far, it hasn’t ever really tried. ISIS, by contrast, controls large parts of Syria and Iraq and perpetrated the deadly Paris attacks, while even Wilayat Sinai has killed hundreds of Egyptians and recently bombed a Russian passenger plane.
Yet there’s a reason why Hamas is training Wilayat Sinai rather than the other way around; Hamas has far more experience and, in many ways, better tradecraft. Indeed, the Paris attacks themselves underscored Hamas’s skills: Though the gunmen were well-trained and deadly, the three suicide bombers collectively managed to kill exactly one person. By contrast, Hamas suicide bombers routinely produced double-digit fatalities until Israel figured out how to arrest most of them before they struck. In short, a Hamas free to focus on the West would be no laughing matter.
Fortunately for the West, Hamas isn’t free to do so, because the pesky Zionist state is still in the way. ISIS is what happens when a terrorist organization encounters a power vacuum it can fill – i.e. when there’s no strong, stable state like Israel to contain it. Hamas is what happens when a terrorist organization does run up against a state like Israel: Its ability to harm the rest of the world is minimal.
Yet instead of leaving well enough alone, much of the West is ardently trying to create a new Mideast power vacuum tailor-made for Hamas to fill: a Palestinian state. Obviously, a Hamas-run state isn’t the goal. But the last time the Palestinians held anything approaching free and fair elections, in 2006, Hamas won. And according to a new poll published this week, the same would happen if elections were ever held again, which shouldn’t surprise anyone: The poll also found that two-thirds of Palestinians support murdering Israelis, while sizable majorities oppose both the “two-state solution” and the “one-state solution in which Arabs and Jews enjoy equal rights,” meaning the only “solution” they’d accept is Israel’s eradication. So obviously they’d prefer the party that consistently espouses both goals to the one – Fatah – that does so only in Arabic while saying the opposite in English.
Last month, veteran peace processer Aaron David Miller shattered peace process Orthodoxy by asking whether another weak, failing state is really what the Mideast needs right now. Given the similarities between Hamas and ISIS, anyone who doesn’t want a second ISIS in the region ought to answer “no.”
Originally published in Commentary on December 16, 2015