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Finance Minister Yair Lapid rightly took flak last week for seeking to increase the 2013 deficit target from 3% to 4.9% (he subsequently retreated to a still excessive 4.65%). Yet his critics overlooked two important points. First, if leaks emerging from the Finance Ministry are correct, that wasn’t even Lapid’s worst move of the week. And second, though he is certainly responsible for his own mistakes, the blame rests at least as much, if not more, with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
The deficit fiasco alone would raise grave doubts about Lapid’s fitness for his post. A higher deficit means billions of shekels out of all our pockets, because the more the government borrows, the more interest it must pay on its loans. Even at the same interest rate, payments on, say, NIS 45 billion would be 1.5 times those on NIS 30 billion. And often, the rate rises when you borrow more, swelling the payments even further.
The sums at stake are enormous. As Israel Hayom‘s Hezi Sternlicht noted, “Israel had to pay 129 billion shekels ($36 billion) in 2012 to service its debt … Roughly speaking, this is equivalent to the combined budgets of the Defense Ministry and the National Insurance Institute.” Raising interest payments even further would thus necessitate even higher taxes or deeper cuts in other government programs.
Moreover, painful budget cuts are easiest right after a new government is formed. That’s when the government is strongest, because coalition members won’t yet risk bringing it down and calling new elections. That’s also when cuts are least politically damaging, because the economy has plenty of time to revive before the next election. Thus a government that can’t do serious cost-cutting in its first year is unlikely ever to do so: It will only be harder next year.
Nevertheless, a higher deficit could be justified if the money were used to fund serious economic reforms that would pay major dividends down the line. And the treasury had been discussing several such reforms.
But if leaked reports are true, Lapid has now scrapped most of these plans. Thus not only is he doing too little to reduce the deficit, but the steps he is taking are short-term fixes that will do nothing to improve Israel’s long-term economic health.
Under an emerging deal with Histadrut labor federation chairman Ofer Eini, Lapid has reportedly ditched plans to tax kranot hishtalmut (advanced-study funds) and enact legislation prohibiting strikes at state-owned monopolies like the airports, seaports and electric company, as many other Western countries have done. In exchange, Eini reportedly agreed to an 18-month postponement in certain payments to public-sectors workers (a previously agreed-on 1% raise plus half the annual clothing and convalescence allowances).
But postponing payments doesn’t actually cut government expenditures at all: It merely kicks them down the road, thus artificially lowering spending this year but increasing it in subsequent years.
In contrast, taxing kranot hishtalmut (which are currently tax-free) would increase revenues every year, thus improving the state’s long-term fiscal health. It would also eliminate an unfair distortion in the market: Kranot hishtalmut are just long-term investment funds to which employers and employees both contribute; there’s no good reason why some Israelis should be able to invest in the capital markets tax-free while others – those whose employers don’t provide this benefit – must pay capital gains tax.
But the concession on the anti-strike law is much worse. According to the International Labor Organization, Israel loses more time to strikes than almost any other Western country. In 1999-2007, for instance, it suffered an annual average of 390 strike days per 1,000 workers, while the corresponding figure in America was near zero.
Even worse, almost all Israeli strikes are in the public sector, where they do maximum harm to the rest of the economy. If a private company strikes, it usually affects very few other businesses. But if dockworkers or customs officers strike, it affects every importer and exporter in the country.
Moreover, their ability to do so much damage by striking has enabled public-sector workers to extort exorbitant wages and benefits, paid for by the taxpayer. That’s why electric company workers and dockworkers, for instance, earn three times the average wage. That’s why railway workers are promised NIS 100 million in “compensation” for reforms even if the reforms don’t take place. Or why port pilots are paid up to NIS 77,000 per month to sit at home and do absolutely nothing: Even after an arbitrator ruled this unacceptable, the ports company continued the payments in order to end labor sanctions that were causing even greater damage. And so forth.
In short, passing this legislation is vital even if it costs money – which it would, since it would certainly spark a public-sector strike that would require massive payoffs to settle. Instead, Lapid capitulated to the Histadrut.
But while Lapid’s fiscal irresponsibility and lack of backbone are his own fault, the blame ultimately rests with Netanyahu. This isn’t only because, as prime minister, he could overrule Lapid’s bad decisions. Primarily, it’s because he’s the one who saddled Israel with an unqualified finance minister to begin with.
That Lapid had no knowledge of or interest in economics was no secret. But after his popularity soared so high during the coalition negotiations that he appeared to pose a real threat to Netanyahu in the next election, Netanyahu was determined to undermine his rival at any price – even that of harming the country. Thus rather than give Lapid a job where he might do well, such as the Foreign Ministry (where his fluent English, personable character and rhetorical skills would all be pluses), Netanyahu maneuvered him into a job for which he was clearly unfit by insisting that the only senior portfolio he was willing to give a coalition partner was finance. And as head of Netanyahu’s largest coalition partner, Lapid couldn’t politically afford to settle for anything less than a senior portfolio.
Netanyahu’s stratagem seems to have succeeded: Lapid has been dissipating political capital rapidly in his new post. Unfortunately, the entire country is paying the price for the prime minister’s political victory.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
The spat between New York Times columnist Roger Cohen and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad must be afflicting liberals with severe cognitive dissonance. But there’s a very important lesson to be drawn from it.
The contretemps began when Cohen published a column on Friday that included numerous direct quotes from Fayyad, many of which were highly unflattering to the Palestinian Authority’s ruling party, Fatah. “This party, Fatah, is going to break down, there is so much disenchantment,” Cohen quoted Fayyad as saying. “Our story is a story of failed leadership, from way early on. It is incredible that the fate of the Palestinian people has been in the hands of leaders so entirely casual, so guided by spur-of-the-moment decisions, without seriousness. We don’t strategize, we cut deals in a tactical way and we hold ourselves hostage to our own rhetoric.”
Fayyad promptly issued a denial. “The statements in the article are just journalist Roger Cohen’s personal impressions, and certainly not the words of Fayyad, who did not make any statements or conduct interviews for the New York Times or any other newspaper or agency since his resignation,” his statement declared. He also accused the paper of “forgery that carries political dimensions with the goal of causing damage and fomenting strife in order to serve positions that are hostile to the Palestinians and their national project at this sensitive and critical phase.”
So to put it bluntly, either the star columnist for America’s leading liberal newspaper fabricated quotes and put them in the mouth of a man he never even spoke with, or America’s favorite Palestinian leader just told a bald-faced lie.
To anyone familiar with the Palestinian scene, it’s not hard to conclude that the liar is Fayyad: He’s the one whose life is literally on the line. One Fatah legislator has already called for indicting him on charges of “crimes against the Palestinian people.” But the more serious danger is that Fatah has plenty of experienced killers with no qualms about shooting fellow Palestinians who upset them: See, for instance, the assassinations and attempted assassinations of a senior PA security officer, a Fatah legislator and a governor of Jenin, all attributed by Palestinians to a power struggle between rival Fatah groups.
But this incident ought to give pause to anyone who is quick to believe every Palestinian atrocity story about Israel. Fayyad has bodyguards; he enjoys the protection of being in the international spotlight; and international credibility is his essential stock-in-trade. Thus, if even he feels threatened enough to risk his credibility by telling bald-faced lies to protect himself, that’s all the more true of ordinary Palestinians, who lack Fayyad’s protections and don’t care about their overseas credibility.
For a Palestinian, it’s always safest to accuse Israel of brutality and abuse, even if the accusations are completely false, because Israeli soldiers won’t kill him for such libels–whereas Palestinian gunmen very well might murder him as a “collaborator” if he went on record as saying, for instance, that Israeli soldiers treated him decently.
So perhaps next time, Westerners should stop and think before uncritically accepting Palestinian atrocity tales as truth. For if Fayyad could so brazenly lie about Cohen, then other Palestinians could just as easily be lying about Israel.
Having complained frequently about the media’s failure to report anything that might detract from their preferred narrative of Israel-as-villain, I’m delighted to discover that one British paper is bucking this trend. The Telegraph ran two articles this week describing the miserable situation in Hamas-run Gaza. And as reporter Phoebe Greenwood makes clear, the culprit isn’t Israel, but the elected Hamas government.
The first describes how Hamas has introduced military training into the curriculum of Gaza high schools–after having previously excised sports from said curriculum on the grounds that there wasn’t time for it. The mandatory weekly classes include learning how to shoot a Kalashnikov rifle; students who so choose can learn more advanced skills, like throwing grenades, at optional two-week camps. The article also includes video footage of Hamas militants demonstrating their skills for the students on a school playground: They carry out a mock raid on an Israel Defense Forces outpost, killing one soldier and capturing another, then demolish the outpost with a rocket-propelled grenade.
Needless to say, educating schoolchildren to view Israelis solely through the sights of a rifle doesn’t contribute to peaceful coexistence. And as Samar Zakout of the Gaza-based human rights groups Al Mezan noted, it also willfully endangers the students: If Hamas is using schools as military training bases, they could become targets for Israeli airstrikes in a future conflict.
But Hamas also engages in more direct forms of abuse, as Greenwood’s second article makes clear. It describes the victims of Hamas’s modesty patrols. In April alone, police arrested “at least 41 men” for crimes such as wearing low-slung pants or putting gel in their hair. Most were brutally beaten; they also had their heads forcibly shaved. One victim described being dragged into a police station and seeing “a mountain of hair, it looked like it had been shaved from 300 heads.” Another described being beaten on the soles of his feet with a plastic rod “for at least five minutes. I was crying and screaming with agony. It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt.”
Yet Greenwood’s articles, unsparing though they are, still leave out one crucial point: The situation isn’t much better in the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank. There, too, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary arrest for such crimes as insulting PA President Mahmoud Abbas on Facebook. There, too, Palestinian schoolchildren are taught to view all of Israel, even in the pre-1967 lines, as “stolen” Palestinian land that must be reclaimed someday. There, too, murderers of Israelis, like the one who killed a father of five this week, are glorified as “heroes”; the PA even gave the honor of launching its UN statehood campaign to the proud mother of four sons who are serving a combined 18 life sentences for murdering Israelis. It’s no wonder that, according to a new Pew poll, Palestinians are the biggest supporters of suicide bombings in the Islamic world.
This is the reality journalists and diplomats consistently ignore, because it disrupts their comfortable theory that Israeli-Palestinian peace could be made tomorrow if Israel would just cede a little more territory. But the truth is that Israeli-Palestinian peace will never be made until Palestinian leaders do two things: stop teaching their children that killing Israelis is life’s greatest glory, and start providing their people with a decent life instead.
Israel, as I noted last week, is blessed with many staunch supporters overseas. But given its legion of detractors, it has an obvious interest in expanding this support base; the question is how to do so.
Some factors that contribute to pro-Israel sentiment aren’t in Israel’s power to influence. For instance, evangelical Christianity often correlates with support for Israel, but Christian belief is beyond Israel’s purview.
Nevertheless, one factor crops up repeatedly in stories about how people became pro-Israel: coming here and seeing the country for themselves, in all its complexity, rather than the two-dimensional caricature propagated by the media. Irish filmmaker Nicky Larkin, for instance, jettisoned his preconceived notions after coming here and talking with numerous ordinary Israelis and Palestinians. For Italian politician Fiorello Provera, the trigger was being taken up a West Bank mountaintop by settlement activists and seeing Ben-Gurion Airport in easy shooting range below, which made him realize that Israel’s security concerns were rooted in hard geographic facts, not mere pretexts to avoid ceding territory.
American Jewish organizations grasped this truth long ago. That’s why they have been bringing American opinion leaders to Israel for years – something that has undoubtedly contributed to America’s strong support for Israel. This same insight led to the founding of Taglit-Birthright, which brings young Diaspora Jews here for 10-day trips that have proven notably effective in strengthening both their Jewish identity and their attachment to Israel.
In contrast, Israel’s government has long seemed oblivious to this truth. Hence I was delighted to discover a few months ago that someone in the Foreign Ministry had finally seen the light: The ministry unveiled a plan to bring over 3,000 non-Jewish American college students who seemed likely to be future opinion leaders so they could see the country for themselves. Given the widespread perception that Israel is losing the public-relations war on American college campuses, this is clearly an important demographic to target. The ministry is also working on a similar plan for young European opinion leaders.
Nevertheless, many things could still go wrong. First, Israel has no full-time foreign minister and probably won’t for months to come, since the job is being held for Yisrael Beiteinu chairman Avigdor Lieberman until the end of his trial. Thus there’s nobody with ministerial-level clout to fight for the program and make sure it actually happens.
Compounding that problem is the budget crunch. The project’s projected budget is NIS 50 million, which is small change. But when the government is seeking to slash spending by NIS 18 billion over the next two years, finding even NIS 50 million for a brand-new program won’t be easy; most ministries will be fighting just to preserve existing programs. When you combine this budgetary pressure with the lack of a full-time minister to push for the project, the prospects look grim.
Yet even if the project somehow gets off the ground, there’s a third danger: The trips could be so poorly designed as to be ineffective, or even counterproductive. After all, plenty of people come here and leave just as anti-Israel as they came; see, for instance, most of the foreign press corps. And given how ineffectual Israel’s official public-relations operation has been over the years, the chances of government bureaucrats designing an effective public-relations exercise this time around don’t seem promising.
On the plus side is an element of the plan that originally struck me as bizarre: The Foreign Ministry said it planned to recruit overseas Jewish donors to help fund the trips. Since NIS 50 million, as noted, is small change for a country whose budget totaled NIS 366 billion last year, the government could easily afford to finance the entire venture itself; and given the project’s importance, its unwillingness to do so seems incomprehensible.
But on second thought, someone at the Foreign Ministry may have been brilliant. If American Jewish donors were involved, they would constitute a powerful pressure group pushing the project’s implementation. They would also make sure the trips’ designers don’t arrogantly neglect to seek advice from Taglit-Birthright and other Jewish organizations with experience in running trips of this kind.
Regardless of the specific itinerary, one principle is crucial: The trips should focus more on meeting ordinary Israelis than on meeting senior government officials.
Though government officials can and should give the visitors needed information, even the most talented have limited ability to change people’s minds. Partly, that’s because their audience knows they have an agenda, and consequently listens skeptically. But perhaps even more important is that government officials, like business leaders, senior journalists and academics, generally move in the same limited circle, where the similarities far outweigh the occasional political differences. Staying inside this circle (known as the branja in Israeli slang) gives visitors no sense of the real Israel, in all its diversity; that’s one reason why foreign journalists and government officials – who spend almost all their time here within that narrow circle – usually go home with their views of Israel unchanged. People who, like Larkin and Provera, venture beyond this echo chamber are the ones more likely to come back with their views altered.
Moreover, these trips are aimed specifically at campus opinion leaders, meaning the same demographic that Taglit-Birthright targets. And Taglit-Birthright participants consistently rate their interaction with Israeli soldiers – i.e, ordinary Israelis their own age – as the portion of the trip that had the most impact on them. Taglit-Birthright achieves this by having a group of soldiers join every trip for a few days; something similar could be considered for the campus leader trips.
Responsibility for Israel’s foreign affairs currently rests with three people: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is nominally foreign minister as well; Deputy Foreign Minister Zeev Elkin; and International Relations Minister Yuval Steinitz. Between them, they must make sure the Foreign Ministry’s plan goes forward instead of gathering dust in some drawer, and they must make sure it is done right. Ensuring that a new generation of supporters is always ready to replace the old is vital to Israel’s future. This plan is an excellent way to make that more likely.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
The Islamic world’s rampant Jew-hatred, as I noted last week, is often simply ignored by the journalists and academics who should be bringing it to public attention. But no less troubling is the fact that on the rare occasions when they do report it, they frequently try to explain it away. These “explanations” offer little insight into the actual sources of Muslim Jew-hatred. But they offer a very disturbing insight into opinion leaders’ motives in concealing this hatred.
A good example is an article published by the New York Times in January that described two cases in which Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi made virulently anti-Semitic remarks. In one, he said Egyptians should “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists; in another, he described Zionists as “these bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”
Both of these statements, wrote reporter David Kirkpatrick, “date back to 2010, when anti-Israeli sentiment was running high after a three-week conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza the previous year.”
The obvious implication for readers who don’t have the dates of every Mideast war at their fingertips is that the conflict probably took place in late 2009, while Morsi’s comments were made in early 2010; hence these were anguished outbursts made in the first raw throes of grief–a time when nobody should be judged too harshly for violent language. Kirkpatrick even strengthened that impression by erroneously dating both speeches to “early 2010,” when in fact, as a subsequent correction noted, one was made in September of that year.
But even without this error, the implication is ridiculous, because the aforementioned conflict ended in January 2009–which Kirkpatrick, as the Times‘s Cairo bureau chief, should certainly have known. In other words, these speeches were made at least a full year after the war ended, and in one case, almost two years later. Thus, far from reflecting the first raw throes of grief, they were the deliberate product of more than a year’s reflection. As such, either they genuinely represented the deepest beliefs of the man who is now Egypt’s president, or they were cynically calculated to appeal to Morsi’s audience–an equally disturbing possibility.
Far more disturbing than what this says about Egyptian prejudices, however, is what it says about those of Kirkpatrick and his editors at the Times–because neither he nor they evidently saw any problem in “explaining” Morsi’s vile anti-Semitism on the grounds that he was still overset by grief (“anti-Israel sentiment was running high”) over a war that ended more than a year earlier. In short, like too many other journalists, Kirkpatrick and his editors are convinced the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root of all evil in the Middle East, and push that theory on their readers.
Unfortunately, this theory isn’t supported by the facts: As one Egyptian cleric helpfully explained, Jews “aren’t our enemies because they occupy Palestine; they would be our enemies even if they had not occupied anything.” And if readers were made aware of the true extent of Islamic Jew-hatred, they might well figure that out for themselves.
One can’t help suspecting that this is precisely why many journalists prefer to let this hatred go unreported: Facts that don’t fit their pet theory of Israel’s guilt are better left unmentioned.
Western opinion leaders too often ignore the Islamic world’s rampant Jew-hatred, argues a new book reviewed recently in The Jerusalem Report. It’s unfortunate that Tibor Krausz’s review is behind a paywall, since it’s a must-read for anyone who doesn’t plan to read the full book: In example after chilling example, it demonstrates the depth and extent of this Jew-hatred, while also showing that it has nothing to do with Israel’s “occupation of Palestine.” In a televised sermon in 2009, for instance, Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Ya’qub said, “If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not … The Jews are infidels not because I say so but because Allah does… They aren’t our enemies because they occupy Palestine; they would be our enemies even if they had not occupied anything.”
But what moved Neil Kressel, a professor of psychology at William Patterson University, to write The Sons of Pigs and Apes wasn’t merely the existence of this hatred; rather, Krausz noted, it was his dismay over “what he sees as a blind spot — ‘a conspiracy of silence’ — among Western academics, policymakers and journalists about the extent of Muslim anti-Semitism.” Policymakers may not actually belong in this list; I suspect many are genuinely ignorant about this hatred. But if they are, it’s because of this “conspiracy of silence”: The journalists and academics whose job it is to inform them consistently fail to do so.
A salient example occurred in January, when MEMRI released a video of a 2010 television interview given by Mohamed Morsi, today the president of Egypt. In it, Morsi referred to “Zionists” (a term, as the continuation of the interview made clear, that he considers interchangeable with “Jews”) as “descendants of apes and pigs.” This bombshell was ignored by the mainstream media until one courageous Forbes journalist launched a crusade: He contacted numerous leading news outlets to ask why they didn’t consider it newsworthy that a recipient of billions in American aid was spouting anti-Semitic incitement, then published a story documenting their nonresponse. Only then did the New York Times finally run the story, after which other major media outlets followed suit (the Times claimed its story had nothing to do with Richard Behar’s crusade; I confess to skepticism).
But even once the story ran, it left readers ignorant of the scope of the problem. Granted, they now knew that one individual had made anti-Semitic slurs, but every country has such individuals. What they didn’t know is that Morsi is the Egyptian norm rather than the exception. They didn’t know, for instance, that just days after this story broke, a senior Morsi aide called the Holocaust a “myth” that America “invented” to justify World War II, and claimed the six million Jews Hitler slaughtered really just moved to the U.S. Or that two months earlier, the head of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood movement, Mohammed Badie, called for jihad against Israel, after having previously called Israel’s creation “the worst catastrophe ever to befall the peoples of the world.” Or about Ya’qub’s televised sermon. And so on.
Nor did they know that such incitement is routine throughout the Islamic world, even in “moderate” U.S. allies like Turkey or Jordan.
For people to know, it would have to be reported on a regular basis. But it isn’t. So policymakers remain blithely ignorant of a defining fact of Middle Eastern life. And then we wonder why they so often get the Middle East wrong.
When the news broke last week that Israel had prevented Gazan runners from participating in the West Bank’s first marathon, my initial reaction was to wonder why Israel had done something so stupid. Granted, Gaza is an enemy quasi-state that routinely launches rockets at Israel, and most countries don’t let enemy nationals enter or transit their territory; hence Israel’s refusal to allow Gazans to do so (aside from humanitarian cases like the many Gazans treated in Israeli hospitals) is usually perfectly justified. But exceptions are routinely made for international sporting events; that’s why Israel rightly objects when its own athletes are barred from international tournaments in Arab countries. Hence this ban, which was reported worldwide, could only hurt Israel’s image.
But it turns out Israel was perfectly justified in barring the Gaza athletes–because the marathon’s Palestinian organizers had barred Israeli participants. Clearly, no country should be expected to facilitate an “international” event that bars its own athletes from participating. That this justification was absent from last week’s news reports thus speaks volumes about both the incompetence of Israel’s public relations and the biases of international reporting on Israel.
The Palestinians’ hypocrisy on the issue was hardly subtle. Samia al-Wazir, spokeswoman for the Palestinian Olympic Committee, protested the ban on Gaza athletes by declaring, “The Israelis should look at this purely as a sporting event. It has nothing to do with politics.” Yet Palestinian Olympic Committee member Itidal Abdul-Ghani subsequently told an Israeli paper that “Israelis weren’t welcome to join the marathon while their military occupies Palestinian lands.” Needless to say, it can’t be “purely a sporting event” where Gazan athletes are concerned but a political protest where Israeli athletes are concerned; it’s one or the other. And once the Palestinians chose to make it political by barring Israeli athletes, Israel was completely justified in returning the favor by barring Gazan athletes.
Yet instead of making this point, which any fair-minded person could understand, Israeli spokesmen simply repeated the usual platitudes: that Gaza is ruled by a terrorist organization, and Gazans are therefore permitted to enter or transit Israel “only in exceptional humanitarian cases.” As noted, that’s a perfectly valid argument in most cases–but not in the case of an international sporting event, and not when a much more compelling argument was available.
Israel’s incompetence, however, doesn’t excuse the international media’s decision to report only the ban on Gazans, and not the ban on Israelis. By any objective standard, the latter was actually more newsworthy. After all, Hamas-run Gaza is openly at war with Israel, but the Palestinian Authority is supposedly Israel’s “peace partner.” Shunning one’s “peace partner” is surely more noteworthy than shunning an enemy. Yet only the Israeli media deemed it worth mentioning.
Perhaps the problem was that reporting the ban on Israelis would have spoiled the neat “Israel as villain” plotline. After all, the race’s main sponsor was a Danish nonprofit. And it’s hard to paint Israel as the Grinch who stole the marathon from would-be runners when enlightened Europeans were complicit in the same crime–with far less justification.
To be Israeli is to be hated, every moment of every day, by millions of people around the globe, many of whom have never set foot in Israel and never met an Israeli, or even a Jew. My favorite example is a South Korean who used to send viciously anti-Israel letters to an Israeli newspaper from Seoul every few weeks. It never ceased to amaze me: Couldn’t he find anything closer to home – say, the North Korean gulags – to fulminate over?
But this panoply of hatred – expressed through and endless stream of demonstrations, articles and speeches (not to mention bombs and rockets) – often blinds us to an equally astonishing fact: To be Israeli is also to be loved by millions of people around the globe, many of whom have also never set foot here and never met an Israeli, or even a Jew.
The most obvious example is America. We’re so used to America’s friendship that we often forget how remarkable it really is. After all, Israel has never fought side-by-side with America in wartime, as American allies like Britain, Canada and France repeatedly have, nor does it provide generous funding for America’s global initiatives, as allies like Germany and Japan do. And while it does contribute substantially in fields such as intelligence, counterterrorism and military technology, these contributions, by their nature, aren’t usually well-known to the broader public.
Granted, by any objective standard, our shared democratic values and Judeo-Christian heritage ought to make such friendship a foregone conclusion. Yet they haven’t evoked similar feelings in many other Judeo-Christian democracies: In Europe, Israel is widely loathed. Only in America is popular support for Israel so strong that, for instance, 79 out of 100 U.S. senators cosponsored a resolution last week pledging “diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence” should Israel feel compelled to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Moreover, supporting Israel isn’t cost-free. Americans are routinely told that their country’s support for Israel inflames global antipathy toward America. Canada, another member of the select club of Israel’s best friends, is widely thought to have lost its bid for a UN Security Council seat because of its pro-Israel positions. The Czech Republic, the troika’s third member, took flak from the rest of the EU for being the sole European country to vote against the Palestinians’ unilateral statehood bid at the UN last November. It’s no small thing that, year in and year out, a few brave countries choose to risk global opprobrium to support Israel – just because it’s the right thing to do.
Even more remarkable, however, are the individuals who have chosen to champion Israel’s cause in countries where it’s unpopular: They must contend with the daily opprobrium of their own countrymen.
Take, for instance, Irish filmmaker Nicky Larkin. Hailing as he does from a viciously anti-Israel country, he considered it only natural to come to Israel to make an anti-Israel film. But once here, he discovered that the truth wasn’t as simple as he’d been taught. He returned an outspoken supporter of Israel, a stance that has cost him both friends and jobs. Yet he refuses to stop speaking the truth he discovered here.
Or consider Jose Maria Aznar and David Trimble. Aznar is a former prime minister of Spain (another virulently anti-Israel country), Trimble a former prime minister of Northern Ireland and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Both could have devoted their retirements to some uncontroversial cause and been feted around the world. Instead, they chose the highly unpopular cause of combating their continent’s anti-Israel prejudice.
Aznar launched the Friends of Israel initiative, whose goal is to “counter the growing efforts to delegitimize the State of Israel and its right to live in peace within safe and defensible borders.” Trimble, alongside joining him in that initiative, regularly defends Israel in international forums. Just last month, he addressed the UN Human Rights Council to denounce its “investigation” of Israeli settlements; in 2010, he served as an external observer on Israel’s Turkel Commission, which probed the botched raid on a Turkish flotilla to Gaza, thereby lending it international credence that undoubtedly contributed to a UN panel’s surprising exoneration of Israel the following year.
Then there’s the handful of Norwegian journalists and parliamentarians who are waging a crusade against their country’s financial support for the generous salaries the Palestinian Authority pays to jailed Palestinian terrorists. The information was brought to their attention by an Israeli organization, Palestinian Media Watch. But in other countries, journalists and parliamentarians exposed to PMW’s information have preferred to accept the PA’s glib denials. That would also have been the easier path in Norway – yet another country whose anti-Israel animus is legendary. But this group has refused to let the issue drop: They’ve already forced their government to admit that the PA’s denials were “imprecise,” and are now demanding action.
I could name other examples: journalists like Julie Burchill in England or Pilar Rahola in Spain; politicians like Fiorello Provera in Italy or the late Kaare Kristiansen in Norway; army officers like Britain’s Col. Richard Kemp; evangelical Christians like Pastor John Hagee of Christians United for Israel or the folks at the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem. But there are far more whose names I don’t know, and may never know: hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who continue to support Israel in defiance of the world’s vociferous “accepted wisdom.”
That Israel, despite the hatred that surrounds it, has survived and thrived for 65 years is due primarily to its own efforts and those of its Jewish brethren round the world. But it also owes a debt to all the non-Jews worldwide who have worked, and are still working, to help us repel this tide of hatred.
For all of them, the fact that Israel has flourished against all odds is reward enough. But in the aftermath of last week’s 65th anniversary celebrations, it’s worth taking the time to say “thank you” – if only to remind ourselves that, however much our enemies wish otherwise, “the people that dwells alone” isn’t quite so alone as we often think.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
This week’s publication of a report effectively urging U.S. appeasement of Iran, signed by many leading lights of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, clearly undermines administration efforts to press Tehran to abandon its nuclear program. But despite the Iran Project report’s negative impact, which Jonathan aptly explained yesterday, this has been a good week overall on the Iran deterrence front, thanks mainly to the U.S. Senate.
On Tuesday, the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee passed a resolution pledging the following: “If the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in legitimate self defense against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the United States Government should stand with Israel and provide, in accordance with United States law and the constitutional responsibility of Congress to authorize the use of military force, diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence.” The resolution hasn’t yet passed the full Senate, but with a whopping 79 out of 100 senators co-sponsoring it, that august body’s views aren’t in much doubt.
This matters because, contrary to the Iran Project, most experts think Iran won’t negotiate an end to its nuclear program unless it’s convinced that refusing to deal will result in devastating military strikes. And though President Obama has consistently said all options are on the table, in practice, senior administration officials have repeatedly warned that an attack on Iran would be disastrous, with the result that Iran’s leaders don’t take the U.S. threat seriously. Consequently, the only credible military threat against Iran currently comes from Israel–a fact confirmed by no less a source than Iran’s own Intelligence Ministry, which in November issued a report that dismissed the possibility of a U.S. strike but urged negotiations to avert a “Zionist” attack.
Yet anyone following the debate in Israel knows that Israel’s biggest concern about attacking Iran–even bigger than the fear of Iranian counterstrikes–is fear that U.S. support won’t be forthcoming the day after. Israel would need such support on numerous fronts: diplomatic support against the inevitable world outcry, perhaps emergency military resupply to repulse a counterattack, and above all, leadership in mobilizing the international community to maintain the sanctions regime and prevent Iran from rebuilding its nuclear program. As several Israeli experts have noted, the worst-case scenario would be to bomb Iran and then have it obtain nukes anyway because the collapse of the sanctions regime enabled it to rebuild swiftly.
With this resolution, however, the Senate has effectively told Iran that isn’t going to happen: Should Israel reach the point where it believes it has no choice but to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, America will give it full “diplomatic, military, and economic support” afterward.
Then, as icing on the cake, came Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz’s blunt statement that same day: “The IDF has the capability of attacking the nuclear installations [in Iran] by itself,” Gantz declared.
A year ago, American experts were already claiming that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was at the outer limits of Israel’s capability, and since then, the job has only gotten harder, since the underground Fordow facility is now in operation. This has fed speculation that Iran’s nuclear program is already too big and too hardened for Israel to take out on its own. Now, Gantz has refuted this speculation–and the fact that he is considered a dove on the Iranian issue gives his refutation redoubled force.
In short, Israel has reaffirmed its ability to attack, and the U.S. has pledged to support it if it does. This has to make Iran’s rulers uneasy. And that should make the rest of us sleep better at night.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees is threatening to end relief operations for Syrian refugees, who currently number 1.3 million and counting, if it doesn’t receive the necessary funds soon. The agency says it has received only a third of the $1 billion it needs through June, and only $400 million of the $1.5 billion donors pledged earlier this year. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned explicitly that absent more funds, UNHCR will have to stop distributing food to refugees in Lebanon next month. And Jordan, which has the largest population of Syrian refugees, is threatening to close its borders to new entrants unless more aid is forthcoming urgently.
Meanwhile, another UN agency enjoys comfortable funding of about $1 billion a year to help a very different group of refugees–refugees who generally live in permanent homes rather than flimsy tents in makeshift camps; who have never faced the trauma of flight and dislocation, having lived all their lives in the place where they were born; who often have jobs that provide an income on top of their refugee benefits; and who enjoy regular access to schooling, healthcare and all the other benefits of non-refugee life. In short, these “refugees” are infinitely better off than their Syrian brethren–yet their generous funding continues undisturbed even as Syrian refugees are facing the imminent loss of such basics as food and fresh water. I am talking, of course, about UNRWA.
It has long been clear that UNRWA–which deals solely with Palestinian refugees, while UNHCR bears responsibility for all other refugees on the planet–is a major obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace. Since, unlike UNHCR, it grants refugee status to the original refugees’ descendants in perpetuity, the number of Palestinian refugees has ballooned from under 700,000 in 1949 to over five million today, even as the world’s non-Palestinian refugee population has shrunk from over 100 million to under 30 million. Moreover, while UNHCR’s primary goal is to resettle refugees, UNRWA hasn’t resettled a single refugee in its history: By its definition, refugees remain refugees even after acquiring citizenship in another country. It has thereby perpetuated and exacerbated the Palestinian refugee problem to the point where it has become the single greatest obstacle to an Israeli-Palestinian agreement: Israel cannot absorb five million Palestinian refugees (though it could easily absorb the fewer than 50,000 original refugees who still remain alive), yet under UNRWA’s rules, refugee status can’t be ended except by resettlement in Israel.
But an even more basic reason for abolishing UNRWA is the harm it does to the world’s most vulnerable people–real refugees like the Syrians. Were the Palestinians handled by UNHCR like all other refugees are, UNHCR would have the budgetary flexibility to temporarily divert aid from the Palestinians, who need it far less, to people who need it more, like the Syrians today. Instead, it is forced to watch helplessly as Syrian refugees go roofless and hungry while $1 billion in aid is squandered on Palestinians with homes, jobs, and all the comforts of settled life.
Thus, anyone who claims to have a shred of genuine humanitarian concern ought to be agitating for UNRWA’s abolition and the Palestinians’ transfer to UNHCR’s auspices. Unfortunately for the Syrians, it seems that many of the world’s self-proclaimed humanitarians prefer harming Israel to helping those who need it most.