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As Boston was mourning its victims of terror yesterday, a Parisian suburb was planning a gala fete for terrorists. Among those slated to be honored at tonight’s ceremony in St. Denis are Allam Kaabi, convicted of assassinating Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Ze’evi in 2001, and Salah Hamouri, convicted of plotting to assassinate Israel’s former Sephardi chief rabbi, Ovadia Yosef. Both are members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who were released in 2011 as part of the exchange for kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit.
Though sponsored by a private organization, the ceremony is to be held in a building owned by the municipality, thus lending the town’s imprimatur to it. And, adding insult to injury, it’s slated to be graced by a representative of Amnesty International: Evidently, this self-styled human rights organization has no problem with targeted killings of Israeli civilians, though it objects vociferously to targeted killings of terrorists.
I can’t conceive of any Western city lending its aegis to a ceremony honoring, say, al-Qaeda terrorists–at least, not without sparking a major outcry from its countrymen. But as this ceremony once again demonstrates, even people who find terrorism against anyone else beyond the pale are often willing to make an exception when the victims are Israelis. And that holds true far beyond France.
Indeed, nobody better demonstrates this truth than the great lady who was buried in London today. Eulogies for Margaret Thatcher justly lauded her as a friend to the Jewish people, a friend to Israel (she was the first British premier ever to make an official visit there), and an uncompromising opponent of terror. Yet despite all this, she had no qualms about making an exception for terrorists who targeted Israelis: In 1980, Thatcher abandoned her previous insistence that the PLO renounce terror and signed onto the EEC’s Venice Declaration, which called for involving the PLO in any Israeli-Arab peace process. Thereafter, her government maintained official contact with the PLO.
This was eight years before Yasir Arafat officially renounced terror in 1988 (that he was lying, as the post-Oslo carnage later proved, is a different story). Indeed, the PLO routinely shelled communities in northern Israel from its Lebanese strongholds throughout the early 1980s, which is why Israel went to war to oust it from Lebanon in 1982; and in 1985, Palestinians hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship and murdered a wheelchair-bound American just because he was Jewish. Yet none of this caused Thatcher to change her mind: In a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, she justified engaging with a terrorist organization on the grounds that the PLO was “an important factor in the area.”
It’s hard to find a rational explanation for why so many people tolerate terror against Israelis even as they excoriate it against anyone else. But by so doing, they are undermining both the battle against terror and the universality of the most fundamental human right of all–the right to life. Because if it’s OK to murder Israelis for the sake of a cause, then it’s okay to murder anyone. All that’s left to argue about is the validity of the cause in question.
But Iyad Ag Ghali didn’t repay the favor: Instead, he joined his fellow jihadis in an effort to conquer the rest of Mali, thereby sparking international intervention. That was exactly what Algeria had hoped to avoid, fearing, as one expert put it, that intervention would “create a mess” on its southern border. A few days later, the “mess” penetrated Algeria itself, when another radical Islamist group attacked a gas field, killing 48 people, in what it termed retaliation for Algeria’s decision to let French forces use its airspace.
Algeria is far from the first country to discover that cozying up to terrorists doesn’t pay. Indeed, the news in recent months has been one long string of object lessons in this truism. Consider just a few examples:
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Pakistan for years nurtured various terrorist groups to wage a proxy war on India and bolster its position in Afghanistan. But in recent years, these groups have increasingly turned their fury on Pakistan itself, perpetrating hundreds of terror attacks that claimed thousands of victims. The situation has become so bad that even the Pakistani army, long the terrorists’ patron, has been forced to acknowledge reality: In its latest official doctrine, it for the first time lists Pakistani terrorists rather than India as the country’s greatest threat.
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Hezbollah was once wildly popular in Syria, admired for its valiant “resistance” against Israel. Two years ago, a recent article in Al-Monitor noted, “Posters of Hassan Nasrallah, the organization’s charismatic secretary general, were everywhere. To many Syrians, he was ‘The Inspirer’.” But Nasrallah didn’t return the love: When the Syrian uprising began, he sent his fighters to join President Bashar Assad’s forces in slaughtering the opposition. Now, Syrians are burning his picture, and the Free Syrian Army is threatening to attack Hezbollah bases in Lebanon.
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Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has a natural affinity for the Brotherhood’s Palestinian wing, Hamas. Thus one of its first acts after gaining power was to reopen the Gaza-Egypt border, which had been kept sealed by former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. But in August 2012, just days after the grand opening, jihadis attacked an Egyptian army outpost in Sinai, killing 16 Egyptian soldiers. Egypt charged that some of the terrorists came from Gaza via Hamas-run smuggling tunnels while Hamas turned a blind eye, and demanded the extradition of three Gazan Palestinians whom it accused of abetting the attack. Angry Egyptians denounced the government for reopening the border, which was promptly resealed. Today, Egypt is working to shut down the smuggling tunnels by flooding them with sewage – a tactic Mubarak never dreamed of.
Nor are examples from farther back in time hard to find. In the 1980s, for instance, the United States spent billions of dollars arming the mujahideen in a successful bid to oust Soviet forces from Afghanistan. But by partnering with Islamic radicals, it ended up facilitating the creation of al Qaeda. The experience and contacts a young Osama Bin Laden gained recruiting and fund-raising for the mujahideen’s war allowed him the necessary contacts and money to create al Qaeda while the civil war that erupted in Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew culminated in the Taliban seizing power and providing sanctuary to Bin Laden.
Similarly, Israel’s 1993 agreement with Yasser Arafat allowed the PLO to set up self-governing enclaves in the West Bank and Gaza and import massive quantities of arms, ostensibly to crush Hamas, as then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin famously asserted. Instead, the autonomous Palestinian areas became hotbeds of anti-Israel terror. Within 30 months, Palestinians had killed more Israelis than they had in the preceding decade – and during the second intifada (2000-2005), Israel suffered more casualties from Palestinian terror than it had in the entire preceding 53 years.
That embracing a terrorist organization is like clasping a viper to one’s breast shouldn’t be surprising. People who are willing to indiscriminately murder men, women and children in support of their goals have clearly proven that the goal is more important to them than the identity of the victims; thus they aren’t likely to balk at murdering their erstwhile allies if doing so furthers these goals. And because the terrorists’ goals rarely coincide completely with those of the countries that support them, this can easily happen.
Pakistan, for instance, had an interest in fomenting violence in Kashmir as part of its longstanding rivalry with India, and this dovetailed nicely with Pakistani terrorists’ desire to slaughter infidels. But to Sunni terrorists, a Shi’ite, Ahmadi, Christian or secular Pakistani is no less an infidel than, say, an Indian Hindu. Hence the countless sectarian attacks Pakistan has endured in recent years may serve the terrorists’ goals no less than attacks on India do, even though they don’t serve Pakistan’s interests at all.
Similarly, Hezbollah’s main goal is serving Iran’s interests. That goal conformed well with Syrian popular sentiment as long as Iran’s interests consisted mainly of attacking Israel and keeping Lebanon under Syrian control. But today, Iran’s interests require keeping Assad in power, while Syrian rebels want him deposed. Thus Hezbollah’s goal is now best served by slaughtering the same Syrians who used to cheer it on.
In short, supporting terrorist organizations is a dangerous game, entailing a risk that their guns and bombs will someday be turned on you. Yet most of the world still hasn’t learned this lesson. Very few countries shun all terrorists without exception; most crack down on some terrorist organizations while maintaining good relations with others.
The European Union, for instance, declared Hamas a banned terrorist organization but so far refuses to do the same for Hezbollah, even as the latter has stepped up attacks on European soil: At most, it is considering blacklisting the organization’s military wing, a move with little practical impact, since the political wing would still be free to fund-raise and mobilize support in Europe.
Russia, despite an uncompromising war on Islamic terrorists at home, maintains warm relations with both Hezbollah and Hamas. Turkey wages war on the PKK but supports Hamas; it also supports radical Islamist groups among the Syrian opposition – a particularly dangerous gamble given that Syria is Turkey’s neighbor. Saudi Arabia has cracked down ruthlessly on al Qaeda at home, but joined with Qatar to arm the most extremist elements of the Syrian opposition.
America, to its credit, has generally been more consistent in opposing terrorists than most other countries. Yet it makes little effort to press its allies to join it in this policy: Turkey’s embrace of Hamas, for instance, hasn’t even elicited lip-service protests, while Europe’s stance on Hezbollah has provoked nothing beyond occasional rhetorical urgings that it reconsider its position.
Recent history, however, offers a good opportunity to make the case more forcefully, by making it clear that banning terrorist groups isn’t a favor to Washington, but in its allies’ own interests. As recent history amply demonstrates, those who work with terrorists may end up becoming their next victims.
Here are some of the headlines that appeared in papers worldwide earlier this week: “Israel introduces ‘Palestinians only’ bus lines, following complaints from Jewish settlers”; “Israeli buses for Palestinians spark accusations of segregation”; “‘A Palestinian Rosa Parks is needed’: Israel’s segregated buses spark outrage.” And here’s the headline that didn’t appear: “Palestinians thrilled: Finally, decent bus service for those who work in Israel!” That missing headline speaks volumes about the superficiality of global reporting on Israel–and also reveals, once again, how the Palestinians’ self-proclaimed champions often wind up making their lives worse.
Here are the facts everyone agrees on: Though Israel has barred entry to most Palestinians (for security reasons) ever since the second intifada erupted in 2000, tens of thousands have received permits to work in Israel after being vetted as low security risks. But for years, they had only two ways to get to and from work–take a shared taxi, which is expensive, or ride an Israeli bus, which is inconvenient: Israeli buses don’t serve towns controlled by the Palestinian Authority, so Palestinian workers had to commute to where they could pick up the bus.
This week, Israel finally took a first step toward solving this problem: It instituted bus service direct to central Israel from the Eyal crossing near Qalqilyah, to serve workers from that PA-controlled city and its suburbs. And as the Israeli daily Haaretz reluctantly reported–even as its editorialist denounced this “racist segregation”–most Palestinians are thrilled: “Thousands pushed onto the Tel Aviv line. There weren’t enough buses to meet the demand.” As one worker explained, the new buses will save him NIS 250 a month, more than a full day’s wages.
Moreover, as Israel’s Transportation Ministry pointed out, Palestinians who prefer to ride the old buses can still do so. De facto, because West Bank Jews and Palestinians don’t live in the same towns, most Palestinians will find the new buses more convenient, whereas Jews will prefer the old ones. But calling it “segregation” to have different buses serving Qalqilyah and Ariel makes about as much sense as saying that America has segregated bus lines because New Yorkers and Chicagoans ride different buses to get to Washington.
The real question, however, is why it took so long to provide this service. A major part of the answer, as with everything in Israel, is bureaucratic inertia and incompetence. But equally important is that the international response to the new bus service was utterly predictable–which constitutes a powerful disincentive to launching it. If every Israeli attempt to offer better service to Palestinians is going to spark cries of “segregation” and “apartheid,” Israel has an obvious interest in refraining from such attempts.
In short, the people who suffer most from the world’s knee-jerk reflex of denouncing every Israeli action are often the Palestinians themselves. But that doesn’t bother their self-proclaimed supporters; they couldn’t care less if Palestinian laborers continue to suffer from inconvenient, overpriced transportation. All that matters to them is denouncing Israel–even if it’s for the crime of providing better bus service.
In recent years, considerable outrage has been directed at the country’s most powerful unions, and justifiably so: Workers at the ports, railroads, electric company and other government monopolies extort outrageous salaries and benefits from the public while providing mediocre service. But one government guild has inexplicably been given a pass even though its behavior is actually far less excusable – because unlike other unions, which make no pretense of any loftier aim than serving their own members, this guild not only sees itself as a moral exemplar, but insists that any criticism of its members is unacceptable. I am talking, of course, about the judges.
Last week, we discovered that Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein refused for three years to let police question a judge suspected of child abuse, since the harm from doing so might “outweigh the benefit.” Needless to say, anyone else suspected of child abuse would be interrogated forthwith, since as the courts themselves have repeatedly ruled, “the welfare of the child” takes precedence over other considerations.
But not, apparently, if you’re a judge: In that case, the legal guild will step in to protect you; your children’s welfare can go hang. The fact that he was a family court judge merely adds insult to injury: For three years, he was allowed to continue deciding other children’s fate even as he was suspected of abusing his own.
This case, however, is exceptional. The judicial guild’s routine outrages involve not child abuse, but milking the public purse.
Take, for instance, the shocking revelation just two weeks earlier that many judges deemed unfit for their posts by the judiciary’s own leadership nevertheless continue to inflict their incompetence on the public, because the judicial guild refuses to let them be dismissed without full pensions for all the years they didn’t work – something the law doesn’t currently allow. Even after declaring the problem a “ticking bomb” and acknowledging that the “public was paying a price for it,” Supreme Court President Asher Grunis still insisted that dismissal without full pension was inconceivable: Protecting incompetent judges takes precedence over protecting the public.
Ordinary people fired for incompetence routinely receive pensions only for the years they actually worked. But what’s good for the hoi polloi isn’t good enough for the judges – despite the fact that their education and experience presumably make them more employable than many other fired workers, and that even their partial pensions will be much higher than average, because they are based on a higher salary (the lowest-level judges earn about 2.5 times the average wage; most earn far more). Judges evidently consider themselves deserving of full pensions regardless of how many years they actually worked. And if taxpayers don’t agree, they’ll be punished by having to endure incompetent judges for years to come.
Last month also brought another shocking revelation: The judicial system has rewarded one of the most incompetent judges of all time, Michaela Shidlovsky-Or, with a hefty taxpayer-funded contract. Twice, the state had to compensate litigants who suffered significant financial harm due to Shidlovsky-Or’s unconscionable delays in issuing rulings – delays that respectively totaled 10 and 15 years (the latter set a record). The compensation totaled NIS 305,000; no other Israeli judge has ever cost taxpayers as much in compensation for her own delinquency. Yet despite this behavior, she was allowed to remain on the bench.
But even after she finally retired, the judicial guild continued showering benefits on her: The Courts Administration hired her as a consultant on how to get judges to use its new computer system. After all, she’s one of the gang – and the wife of a former Supreme Court justice (Theodor Or) to boot. So why shouldn’t taxpayers keep subsidizing her incompetence?
Finally, there was February’s fourth revelation: Hila Cohen’s outrageous pension. Cohen is the only judge ever to be ousted by the Judicial Appointments Committee. A disciplinary court convicted her of conduct unbecoming a judge for having fabricated stenographic records of nonexistent hearings, but decided, outrageously, to transfer her to another court rather than firing her (the guild at work again). But the court in question refused to be saddled with her, and she refused the judicial leadership’s plea that she quietly resign (which is how unsuitable judges are usually disposed of). So the appointments committee finally fired her.
Nevertheless, it treated her generously: She received NIS 200,000 in severance pay out of our tax money, even though an employee fired for misconduct isn’t entitled to any severance.
But that wasn’t enough for Cohen: She promptly sued for a pension as well. Since the state had contributed to her pension fund during all her years of employment, she wasn’t entitled to anything more. Bizarrely, however, the government agreed to arbitration, and the arbitrator, naturally, was another member of the guild: former Supreme Court Justice Tsevi Tal. He, without giving any reasons for his decision, decided that Cohen’s misconduct entitled her to a state pension of NIS 8,000 a month, retroactive to the day of her ouster.
Based on the average Israeli woman’s life expectancy, which is 83 years, this translates into a taxpayer-funded pension of NIS 3.2 million for a mere three and half years on the bench, on top of the state’s contribution to her pension fund. But after all, taxpayers are there to be milked; why shouldn’t the judicial guild protect its errant members at our expense?
Judges constantly complain about politicians who criticize the courts, charging that this undermines respect for the judiciary and the rule of law. I agree that respect for the judicial system is vital for a functioning democracy. But respect can’t be imposed by fiat. If the judicial guild wants to be spared criticism, its members’ actions have to be above reproach.
Instead, it has chosen act like the dockworkers’ union and protect its members at any cost, the public be damned. And if so, that’s precisely how it ought to be treated. The public should demand that the judges’ guild stop looting the state’s coffers on behalf of its most incompetent members – and we should criticize it relentlessly until that happens.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Now, an opportunity has finally arisen to finish what the Cedar Revolution began – and also to seriously weaken an organization that some U.S. officials have dubbed “the greatest threat to American national security.” Hezbollah’s dominance depends on a constant supply of arms and money. But the collapse of Syria’s Assad regime could significantly reduce the first, while European Union (EU) designation of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization – now a real possibility thanks to both Bulgaria’s recent announcement that Hezbollah was behind last July’s terror attack in Burgas and the trial of a self-confessed Hezbollah operative in Cyprus – could significantly reduce the second.
Yet without American help, both developments may fail to materialize.
Granted, most of Syria looks likely to fall to the Sunni rebels even without American aid. And the rebels are highly unlikely to continue Assad’s role as the main conduit of Iranian arms to Hezbollah: They loathe the Lebanese Shi’ite organization, which has been fighting alongside Assad’s troops. Thus in theory, this development would shut off Hezbollah’s main source of arms.
But, as the Washington Post reported this month, Iran has made contingency plans for this possibility by building a Syrian version of Hezbollah – a well-armed, well-trained, well-funded militia with as many as 50,000 members. For now, these militiamen are supporting Assad. But Plan B is for them to withdraw to an enclave along the coast where most of Syria’s Shi’ites and Alawites live. Such an enclave would be far easier to defend than Syria as a whole: Being smaller, it would have shorter defensive lines; its Shi’ite-Alawite population would be largely supportive, unlike Syria’s hostile Sunni majority; it would “still have the most powerful [armed] unit inside Syria,” as Paul Salem, director of the Beirut-based Middle East Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the Post; and it could be constantly resupplied with Iranian arms via its seaports, and perhaps also an airport.
In short, given the rebels’ current capabilities, such an enclave could well survive even if they take the rest of Syria. And if so, Hezbollah’s arms conduit would also survive: The coastal enclave would border Lebanon, enabling Iranian arms to continue flowing into that country.
Thus if Washington wants to prevent this, it, too, must begin contingency planning.
Admittedly, the issue is not simple: For instance, while giving the rebels more sophisticated arms could alter the balance of power, such arms could also be used to massacre Shi’ites and Alawites. Moreover, America is not interested in helping Syria fall into the lap of radical Sunnis, who could well prove as destabilizing to Lebanon as the Assad regime was – and even more so to Jordan, Iraq and Israel.
Yet, by specifically arming more moderate rebel forces, Washington could alter the Sunni-Shi’ite balance of power while also marginally improving the odds against a radical Sunni takeover. Radical Sunnis are in the ascendant now mainly because they are far better armed than the moderates. Such aid might also improve relations a bit with Syria’s Sunnis, who currently resent America bitterly for having done nothing but “stand by and watch” as Assad’s forces slaughtered them.
This policy would have been far more effective a year ago. But even today, it could slightly improve the chances of a better outcome in Syria while also helping to bring down Hezbollah. In contrast, doing nothing will likely result in both Hezbollah’s survival and a radical Sunni regime in Syria.
But if the military issue is complex, the financial one is a no-brainer. Hezbollah raises substantial sums of money in Europe, which the EU could halt by designating it as a terrorist organization. Indeed, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah himself said such a designation “would dry up the sources of finance” and “end moral, political and material support” for Hezbollah. And with Hezbollah operatives having been incriminated for a deadly terror attack on EU soil, and now on trial for plotting another in Cyprus, the time would seem ripe.
Nevertheless, several key EU countries strongly oppose designation. France and Germany reportedly tried to keep the issue from even arising by lobbying Bulgaria to refrain from blaming Hezbollah; France also warned that EU designation could endanger French peacekeepers in Lebanon. The attitude was epitomized by the EU’s top counterterrorism official, Gilles de Kerchove. Even if Hezbollah perpetrated the Burgas bombing, he said, “you need to ask yourself: ‘Is this [designation] the right thing to do?’ … Given the situation in Lebanon, which is a highly fragile, highly fragmented country, is listing it going to help you achieve what you want? … There is no automatic listing just because you have been behind a terrorist attack. It’s not only the legal requirement that you have to take into consideration, it’s also a political assessment of the context and the timing.”
Thus to obtain EU action, Washington may need to engage in massive diplomatic arm-twisting. Fortunately, it currently has exceptional leverage over Paris, the leading opponent of designation, because France still needs American help (intelligence, transport, midair refueling aircraft, etc.) for its ongoing military operation in Mali. Washington should not hesitate to exploit this leverage.
It should also consider assuaging French concerns over its peacekeepers in Lebanon by moving to end UNIFIL’s mandate. The UN peacekeeping force neither prevented Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel nor kept it from rearming afterward; thus if a trade-off is needed, UNIFIL does far less to keep the peace than would an EU designation that could substantially weaken Hezbollah – which, after all, is Lebanon’s main source of both internal instability and tension with Israel.
The current confluence of events provides a unique opportunity to finally end Hezbollah’s grip on Lebanon. But Washington must seize the moment. If it misses this opportunity, the next one may be a long time coming.
In recent months, a new consensus has emerged: For the first time in millennia, Judaism has lost its title as the world’s most persecuted religion; today, that dubious honor goes to Christianity. “Christians are targeted more than any other body of believers,” wrote Rupert Shortt in a 54-page report for the London-based Civitas institute in December, which meticulously documented their persecution on a country-by-country basis. Even politicians have begun grasping this fact: German Chancellor Angela Merkel publicly deemed Christianity “the most persecuted religion in the world” in November. In short, as one commentator put it last week, Christians have become the new Jews.
There are two reasons why Christianity has displaced Judaism as the world’s most persecuted religion. One, obviously, is increased persecution of Christians, which stems largely from the rise of radical Islam: Though non-Islamic countries like China also repress Christians, only radical Islamists kill them wholesale. The other is that today, Jews face less persecution than ever before in history. And that is entirely due to the existence of the State of Israel.
Were hundreds of thousands of Jews still scattered throughout the Islamic world, as was true a century ago, they would assuredly face persecution no less severe than Christians do. But they aren’t, because most have relocated to Israel. In fact, for the last 64 years, any Jew anywhere who felt sufficiently threatened to want to leave his country has been able to find sanctuary in Israel, and Israel has repeatedly gone to great lengths to try to rescue those who want to leave but can’t.
Many Christians, too, might like to leave places like Egypt or Iraq. But unlike the Jews, they have nowhere to go: No country on earth will automatically open its doors for them–with no questions asked and no numerical limitations–the way Israel does for Jews. And still less would any country do so for Jews if Israel didn’t exist.
A decade ago, at the height of the intifada, a fellow Israeli complained to me that Israel had failed in its mission to be a safe haven for Jews. On the contrary, she charged, Israel today is the most dangerous place on earth for Jews to live.
Technically, she’s correct: A Jew in Israel is far more likely to be killed just because he is Jewish than a Jew in Europe or North America. What she failed to grasp is that this is precisely the measure of Israel’s success: Israel today is the most dangerous place to be a Jew because any Jew living someplace more dangerous can relocate to Israel instead–and almost all of them have. In short, the fact that almost no Jews today live someplace more dangerous than Israel is proof positive of Israel’s success as a haven.
Though there are many reasons why Israel, for all its flaws, deserves support from all decent people, and especially all Jews, this is the most basic of all: If Israel didn’t exist, Judaism would still top the list of the world’s most persecuted religions, and Jews would be slaughtered throughout the Islamic world just as their Christian brethren are today. And nobody who cares about the Jewish people–or about saving human lives in general–could truly think that alternative is preferable.
The pro-Netanyahu daily Israel Hayom and the anti-Netanyahu Haaretz have finally found something to agree on: Bayit Yehudi chairman Naftali Bennett is destroying himself and his party by refusing to crawl into Binyamin Netanyahu’s government on any terms. Doesn’t he understand, the papers’ pundits ask, that his voters’ only interests are the settlements and religious Zionist institutions, interests whose furtherance requires being in the coalition?
Many Likud politicians echo this view. How, they demand, can Bayit Yehudi be the one to “prevent the formation of a Likud government?”
Netanyahu is doubtless reading it all and rubbing his hands with glee. It’s too bad nobody in his party seems willing to tell him the truth: The party and political career he is really destroying are his own.
That was glaringly evident from a shocking poll published on Friday, exactly one month after the election. It shows that were new elections held today, Likud-Beyteinu would be trounced: It would win just 22 seats, down from 31 today, while Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid would rise from 19 to 30. Bayit Yehudi would also post a 25% gain, from 12 seats to 15.
Equally damning were respondents’ replies when asked to name Netanyahu’s main consideration in forming a coalition. Only 24% said “the good of the country,” while 59% said “personal issues.” The rest were simply baffled (“no idea”).
But to anyone who knows anything about Likud voters, the poll merely confirmed the obvious. This article focuses on my own community – educated religious Zionist professionals on the cusp between Likud and Bayit Yehudi. But the same desire for a broader domestic agenda drives voters on the cusp between Likud and Yesh Atid.
We’re a group that reliably voted Likud for years. Some are Likud members, but we belong to Netanyahu’s camp, not Moshe Feiglin’s. Many of us once experimented with Bayit Yehudi’s predecessor, the National Religious Party, and all who did (I’ve yet to meet an exception) had the same reaction: Never again! We were appalled to discover we had backed a party interested only in narrow sectoral concerns rather than the good of the country as a whole. Likud, for all its faults, occasionally tried to address broader issues, and that’s what we wanted.
This year, however, we were torn. We were attracted by Bennett’s efforts to recast religious Zionism as a movement that did care about the national welfare. He campaigned on a broad civic agenda, even declaring that protecting the settlements isn’t “the sole flag we’re flying, nor is it the primary flag.” As one friend told me, “for the first time, I felt like there’s someone who represents us.”
Ultimately, we split: Some stuck with Likud; others – about seven seats worth – went for Bennett. The math is simple: Bayit Yehudi and National Union together had seven seats last time around. This time, half of National Union joined Bayit Yehudi; the other half ran as Otzma Leyisrael. The latter retained about two seats’ worth of votes, insufficient to pass the electoral threshold (2.4 seats). Bayit Yehudi retained the other five. Its remaining seven seats came from Likud Yisrael Beiteinu, which lost 11 (including some to Yesh Atid).
In short, voters who care only about the settlements or religious Zionist institutions are a minority of Bennett’s voters. The majority are ex-Likudniks – who certainly share these concerns, but also care about a broader civic agenda. That’s why everyone I know who voted Bennett is happy today. They agree completely with his speech to Bayit Yehudi’s convention last Wednesday: “The only question is what this government’s path will be: buying political time, or truly coping with fundamental problems? If the new government is interested in tackling the nation of Israel’s real problems, we’re in. But if the goal is to buy more time, we won’t be.”
Those of us who voted Likud, by contrast, are miserable.
We made excuses for Netanyahu’s failure to enact domestic reforms last term. We understood that he had no government without the haredim, given then-Kadima leader Tzipi Livni’s unacceptable conditions
for a unity government, and we saw how the Haredim – whom we had hitherto truly considered our “natural partners” – repeatedly quashed proposals for domestic change.
But this time, no excuse exists: Together with Lapid and Bennett, he could form a stable government focused on domestic reform. Instead, he’s made it clear he prefers another do-nothing government dependent on the haredim – a government incapable of addressing any of Israel’s pressing domestic problems.
How will he slash spending to reduce a NIS 39 billion budget deficit when the haredim won’t let him touch the government handouts on which they depend? How will he create affordable middle-class housing when the haredim will once again insist on drafting criteria that mainly benefit haredi families? How will he reform the Chief Rabbinate and solve the conversion crisis – some 300,000 non-Jewish immigrants who are part of Jewish society, but can’t convert due to the rabbinate’s ultra-stringent approach, thus creating a looming intermarriage crisis – when the haredim control all the relevant ministries and appointment committees? How will he bring more haredim into the army and workforce if the haredi parties can veto any such move? And the list goes on.
Then, to top it off, he trashed his foreign-policy principles as well, granting the serially incompetent Livni what he correctly refused her last time: complete authority over talks with the Palestinians, the most sensitive issue in the government’s diplomatic portfolio. Anything to avoid a Lapid-Bennett government.
Bennett and Lapid have everything to gain by holding firm: Either Netanyahu will capitulate (since he still has no viable government without them), or they’ll reap the spoils from Likud’s inevitable collapse. And caving would sign their own death warrants: Voters wouldn’t forgive either of them for enabling yet another do-nothing government.
But neither will voters forgive Netanyahu for violating all his campaign promises when he could feasibly have kept them. Thus unless he swiftly reverses course, two things will be as certain as death and taxes: his party’s collapse at the polls, and his own defeat to any semi-credible challenger in the next Likud leadership primary.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
You couldn’t make this up: The Palestinian Authority is furious that Israel and Hamas are reportedly holding indirect talks in Cairo to firm up their cease-fire, because “only the PLO was authorized to conduct such negotiations in its capacity as the ‘sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.'” Never mind that the PLO, aka the PA (both are headed by the same man, Mahmoud Abbas, and dominated by the same party, Fatah) has refused to hold talks with Israel for four years now; if Hamas had to wait for the PLO to discuss its pressing concerns with Israel, it might still be waiting when the Messiah comes. In the PA’s world, ordinary Palestinians’ real problems–of which residents of Hamas-run Gaza have plenty–always come a distant second to its own prestige. If it doesn’t feel like talking with Israel, then Gazans should just wait patiently until it does.
But this story also highlights just how irrelevant the PA’s refusal to talk with Israel is making it. Hamas would prefer going through Egypt rather than the PA for many reasons, but one is the simple fact that Egypt can deliver the goods. Egyptian officials are still willing to talk with Israel; that’s how they brokered the Israel-Hamas cease-fire in November, and why they can mediate between the parties now. In contrast, Abbas can’t.
Once upon a time, he could and did. That’s why, for instance, PA officials are still stationed at the Gaza-Israel border crossings: Unwilling to recognize Israel or talk with it directly, Hamas nevertheless needs to deal with Israel to run those crossings; PA officials were the mutually agreed-upon mediators. But that arrangement was hammered out at a time when the PA was still willing to talk with Israel. Now, it isn’t.
In that sense, there’s even a twisted logic to the PA’s accusation that the “secret talks in Cairo” are why the latest Fatah-Hamas reconciliation effort failed. Clearly, neither side really wants to reconcile; that’s why every such effort has failed for years. But for Hamas, Abbas’s refusal to talk with Israel means the PA can no longer provide the one service Hamas actually needs from it. Meanwhile, Egypt has proven an effective substitute. Thus its incentive to make a deal, never high, has declined even further.
Ironically, Hamas recently taught Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan an identical lesson. When the Hamas-Israel conflict erupted in November, Erdogan lavished rhetorical support on Hamas, but having refused for years to talk with Israel, he was unable to do anything more constructive. It was Egypt that brokered the cease-fire Hamas needed, thereby receiving worldwide kudos for successful diplomacy. Erdogan was reduced to pathetically trying to share the credit by proclaiming that his spy chief, too, met an Israeli official in Cairo during the cease-fire talks–an effort that convinced nobody (except, perhaps, his hardcore supporters in Turkey).
So far, neither Erdogan nor Abbas has been willing to climb down from his tree. But Erdogan can afford it: As the leader of a Middle Eastern powerhouse and one of President Barack Obama’s closest confidants, he has other venues in which to prove his relevance. Abbas, the leader of a perpetually bankrupt entity whose conflict with Israel is the world’s sole reason for being interested in him, may discover that he doesn’t have the same luxury.
One of the Left’s favorite tropes is that what Israel needs isn’t better public relations, but better policies. No amount of PR, it argues, can compensate for bad policy, whereas good policy needs no PR.
The “Prisoner X” affair is a case study in the fatuousness of this claim. In this case, Israel’s policy was unexceptionable – yet due to abysmal PR, it let itself be painted worldwide as a benighted regime that “disappears” its own citizens.
Here’s how the story was reported overseas when it broke last week: An unnamed prisoner, who “was not allowed visitors or a lawyer,” was found dead in a secret cell in 2010, “a suicide — or was it a murder? — never officially reported,” to quote The New York Times‘ version. Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr voiced outrage that Canberra was never notified of the Australian-Israeli’s arrest. Human Rights Watch accused Israel of “disappearing people,” a charge in a Haaretz editorial. A Jerusalem Post columnist drew parallels to The Man in the Iron Mask.
Yet rather than rebutting these allegations, Israel’s government responded with a gag order so sweeping that Israeli journalists couldn’t even quote the foreign media reports. I doubt I was the only horrified Israeli wondering that night if these terrible accusations could possibly be true: Otherwise, what conceivable reason could the government have for failing to deny them? And to the many people overseas who are always happy to believe the worst of Israel, it must have seemed a certainty.
But in reality, every one of these allegations was false. Ben Zygier’s family had been duly informed of his arrest and was in regular contact with him. So were lawyers of his own choosing, who saw him as recently as the day before his death. The Australian embassy was also informed, but neglected to pass the information on – a screw-up for which Israel obviously isn’t responsible (and which Canberra is now investigating). Zygier’s arrest and remand were approved by Israel’s ordinary civilian court system, where he was also subsequently indicted (though his trial was on hold at the time of his death while he considered signing a plea bargain). He was incarcerated in an ordinary civilian prison. And far from going “officially unreported,” his death was not only duly reported to his family, but also probed by an investigating judge, who concluded that he indeed committed suicide. The only people who actually were kept uninformed were the media – who had no legal right to be informed.
Moreover, Israel apparently had good reason to keep the arrest under wraps. If it’s true, as foreign reports say, that Zygier was a Mossad agent operating in hostile countries like Iran and Syria, then the media blackout was essential to protect the lives of his contacts there. Now that his picture and the names on his various passports have been published, these countries’ intelligence services will surely be scouring their records to see who Zygier met with, endangering these people’s lives; that’s precisely what Israel sought to prevent by its two-year blackout.
The fact that neither his Israeli wife nor his Australian parents complained to either the press or the courts in the more than two years since his death further confirms that the government behaved properly. That’s what Israelis normally do when they think their government maltreated a loved one, especially once he’s dead and can’t be harmed by the complaint. And even if conspiracy theorists want to claim that his wife feared government reprisals, this certainly wouldn’t apply to his Australian parents.
Questions remain about whether official negligence contributed to Zygier’s suicide, and the government must answer them. But the idea that Israel “disappeared” him is demonstrable nonsense. Yet that’s the narrative Israel allowed to spread worldwide, unchallenged, during those first crucial 24 hours. And what people hear first is what they remember: Subsequent corrections often go unseen and unheard, and make less of an impression even when they don’t.
Moreover, even this belated correction might never have emerged if three MKs hadn’t used their parliamentary immunity to press the government on the issue. They’re being attacked for it now, but they actually deserve thanks for finally forcing the government to engage in damage control.
Israel’s PR problem clearly goes way beyond its sluggish response to particular incidents. As Martin Sherman correctly observed in Friday’s Jerusalem Post, what really matters is changing the prism through which events are seen, because the same incident will be interpreted differently depending on whether Israel is perceived “as a beleaguered democracy, a bastion of civil liberties and democratic governance, valiantly defending itself against a sea of tyranny and theocracy, or as an avaricious expansionist rogue state.”
Nevertheless, particular incidents can sometimes greatly affect people’s perceptions of Israel. That’s why even many adherents of the “beleaguered democracy” paradigm were initially horrified by Israel’s botched raid on a 2010 flotilla to Gaza – because opening fire on peaceful demonstrators is something democracies simply don’t do. Yet this was the version of events that Israel allowed to circulate worldwide, unchallenged, for those crucial first 12 hours, before belatedly releasing footage proving that its soldiers only opened fire after being brutally attacked by a mob “armed with iron bars, staves, chains, and slingshots” (as a UN inquiry later found).
The same is true for this case – because another thing democracies simply don’t do is “disappear” people. Yet Israel allowed that narrative to circulate unchallenged for 24 crucial hours before finally releasing evidence that proved otherwise.
Much of what needs to be done to solve Israel’s PR problem is genuinely hard. For instance, leftists are correct in saying it will require replacing bad policies – though they fail to acknowledge that the one most in need of replacement (as I’ve explained before) is the very “peace process” they keep pushing.
But responding promptly and properly to an incident like Prisoner X ought to be simple. If our government can’t even handle that, Israel’s PR problem is even worse than we thought. And thus we contribute with our own hands to our enemies’ efforts to “disappear” the entire Jewish state.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Ever since Election Day, public attention has focused on whether the new government will finally end the anomaly whereby most haredi men neither work nor do army service. But the spotlight on the haredim has obscured the equally significant crossroads now facing another community: Will religious Zionism finally emerge from the haredi world’s shadow?
Religious Zionism has long suffered from an inferiority complex toward the haredim. On numerous religious issues that affect the functioning of the state, from conversion to shmita (the rules governing agriculture during the sabbatical year), religious Zionist rabbis have been afraid to confront their haredi counterparts head-on and boldly push their own halachic interpretations. Instead, the community has repeatedly sat back and let the secular High Court of Justice decide such issues. This was a declaration of religious bankruptcy: We can’t compete on the religious field, it said; we can prevail only in a nonreligious arena.
This subservience has been compounded by the rise of the hardal movement. The Hebrew acronym, which stands for “haredi national religious,” describes Orthodox Jews who remain committed to the Zionist project, including army service and productive labor, but have adopted haredi religious norms. This refers not just to specific issues, such as stringent separation of the sexes, but to acceptance of rabbinic dictates in every walk of life. Thus while mainstream religious Zionists believe, for instance, that rabbis have no special expertise in politics, hardalim, like haredim, think politicians should take orders from their rabbis.
But November’s primary in the religious Zionist Bayit Yehudi party now appears to have heralded a far deeper change than Naftali Bennett’s name at the top of the list: Mainstream religious Zionists are finally fighting back.
Take, for instance, the refreshing response by freshman MK Rabbi Eliyahu Ben-Dahan, after Shas urged religious Zionist rabbis to order Bayit Yehudi MKs “not to dare harm the Torah world” by ending draft exemptions for yeshiva students. “The Torah world is beloved to us no less than to Shas,” Ben-Dahan retorted. “I studied in yeshiva for more years than [Shas leaders] Arye Deri, Eli Yishai and Ariel Attias combined … They’re not going to teach me what Torah is and what Torah study is.”
The religious Zionist world has always boasted some impressive Torah scholars. But a religious Zionist rabbi willing to stand up publicly and say that his community’s Torah scholarship isn’t inferior to the haredi brand is rare indeed.
Or take the equally refreshing response by Bayit Yehudi activists when one religious Zionist rabbi, Tzefania Drori, tried to intimidate Bennett into haredi-style rabbinic subservience. Bayit Yehudi, he warned, must not make a deal on drafting yeshiva students without obtaining rabbinic authorization; “if Bennett makes these kinds of decisions alone, it will be the end of him politically.”
In response, ten of the party’s deputy mayors – i.e., its key local activists – published a stunning open letter demanding that the rabbis stay out of politics and the politicians keep them out. “Please let the politicians do their job,” they told their rabbis. “Hundreds of thousands of voters voted for them for this very purpose.”
Indeed, the signs of a revolt against rabbinic dictates were already evident in the party primary. One leading hardal rabbi, Zvi Tau, was reportedly so incensed by the inclusion of a secular Jew on its slate that he told his students to vote for any party but Bayit Yehudi. But Tau’s views clearly weren’t shared by the tens of thousands of primary voters who catapulted Ayelet Shaked to fifth place on the list. These voters wanted the party to actually start fulfilling its self-declared mission of being a bridge between the religious and secular worlds – and understood that building bridges isn’t compatible with shunning secular Jews who share many of its core values.
But the new Bayit Yehudi isn’t the only sign of a brewing religious Zionist revolution: Equally significant is the fact that Rabbi David Stav – chairman of Tzohar, an organization of moderate religious Zionist rabbis – recently announced his candidacy for the post of Ashkenazi chief rabbi, in a bid to wrest the rabbinate from decades of haredi control. Tzohar is best known for conducting free, couple-friendly weddings that still comply with the rabbinate’s religious rules. But Stav has much more ambitious reforms in mind, on issues ranging from divorce – where he wants to institutionalize prenuptial agreements – to kashrut, where he favors promoting competition by privatizing kashrut supervision and reducing the rabbinate to a regulatory role.
A sane, self-confident religious Zionism, committed to finding and implementing halachic solutions to problems such as conversion and divorce, is vital to preserving the Jewish state. A Judaism that can’t provide solutions to such problems will eventually lead Israelis to conclude that the state can survive only by divorcing itself from Judaism. Yet an Israel devoid of Jewish content at the national level would have little to offer its citizens: America and Canada also offer flourishing Judaism at the individual and community levels, without army service or terrorism. Encouraging this budding revolution should thus be of vital interest to all Israelis.
Yet the revolution remains fragile, and could well die aborning if Bayit Yehudi is relegated to the opposition: Should the haredi parties retain their outsize influence over the government while Bayit Yehudi has none, not only will it be unable to effect any positive changes, but many religious Zionists may take this as proof that Bennett erred, and the hardalim who demanded complete rabbinic subservience were right after all.
Unfortunately, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has so far proven incapable of rising to the occasion: Obsessed with his personal dislike of Bennett, he has shunned Bayit Yehudi, preferring to cling to his veteran haredi allies. And though potential kingmaker Yair Lapid, the man hailed as the “secular mainstream’s” representative, does seem to sense the moment, a sufficient offer from Netanyahu would clearly tempt him to abandon the alliance he has reportedly forged with Bennett.
Thus the fate of the religious Zionist revolution could well rest on the decisions Netanyahu and Lapid make in the coming weeks. For Israel’s sake, let’s hope they make the right ones.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.