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In a rare moment of perception, Thomas Friedman wrote recently that if you want to be taken seriously in Israel, “there is an unspoken question in the mind of virtually every Israeli that you need to answer correctly: ‘Do you understand what neighborhood I’m living in?'”
What brought this to mind was the latest broadside by Friedman’s fellow New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, who reiterated what has become the favorite mantra not only of those who support Chuck Hagel for secretary of defense, but of liberal American Jewish groups like J Street and even the Union for Reform Judaism: that Israel’s “true friends” are those who tell it, loudly and publicly, that its policies are “self-defeating and wrong,” in an effort to stop what they perceive as its rush to self-destruction. I fully agree that friends should warn against behavior they view as self-destructive. But anyone who thinks that confronting Israel publicly is helping rather than hurting it doesn’t understand what neighborhood Israel is living in.
As even Cohen acknowledged, Israel has real enemies. He cited Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal’s eliminationist threats; one could quote identical rhetoric from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “moderate” opponents of Ahmadinejad like former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, and Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt. A good example is this clip (courtesy of MEMRI) of Egyptian cleric Mahmoud Al-Masri being interviewed on Egypt’s Al-Nas TV in November: After gleefully prophesying that the Brotherhood’s rise in Egypt and a successful conclusion to the revolution in Syria will enable Egypt and Syria to unite in a war of annihilation against Israel, Al-Masri assures his followers that this is just the beginning: “Ultimately, not a single Jew will be left on the face of the earth.”
So given that lots of people truly want to destroy Israel, how do Israel’s friends keep that from happening? The only way is through deterrence: convincing these enemies that, however much they’d like to annihilate Israel, they lack the capability to succeed. First and foremost, of course, that depends on Israel’s own military capabilities. But it also depends on perceptions of Israel’s international support.
To understand why, it’s worth reviewing that clip of Al-Masri’s, in which he blithely declares that Israel would have been annihilated in 1973 had the superpowers not intervened to stop the war. In reality, that’s nonsense: The war ended with the Israeli army threatening both Cairo and Damascus. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that millions of people all over the Middle East believe it. And they believe the same about Israel’s victories in 1948, 1956, 1967, etc.–that Israel won only thanks to nefarious international assistance.
For that reason, perceptions of Israel’s international support are crucial: The more Israel’s enemies come to believe that Israel’s traditional supporters are drawing away, the more they will believe the ultimate military victory they seek is achievable. And since Israel has no more important supporter than America–its government, its public and its Jewish community–the perception that Americans are drawing away from Israel is particularly harmful. Yet when Israel’s “true friends” in America pick very public fights with it, that’s precisely the perception they create, however unintentionally.
People like Cohen or the leaders of the URJ would be genuinely horrified if Meshaal’s eliminationist vision came to pass. But by their very public broadsides against Israel, they make it far more likely that Israel’s enemies will seriously attempt to realize this vision. Thus with the best of intentions, they are causing Israel enormous harm–just because they refuse to understand what neighborhood it’s living in.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post last month, Czech Ambassador to Israel Tomas Pojar was asked to comment on recent remarks by Israel’s then-foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who compared European countries’ oft-proclaimed commitment to Israel’s security to their commitments to Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Pojar replied, correctly, that the parallel isn’t exact; there are many differences between Israel’s situation today and Czechoslovakia’s in 1938.
Nevertheless, Pojar warned, there is one important similarity: “There are parallels about how much guarantees you can get from outside, and how much you should rely on them.”
Judging by the results of a new poll conducted by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs in late November, it seems the Israeli public has internalized this warning. When asked how the country could best ensure its security, 61 percent of Jewish Israelis (and 52 percent of all Israelis) said that defensible borders were preferable to a peace treaty – i.e., a document enshrining commitments by another country or countries. Just 26 percent preferred a peace treaty. This constitutes a noticeable shift from 2005, when only 49 percent preferred defensible borders.
Moreover, they don’t believe the world’s preferred formula for an Israeli-Palestinian deal – the 1967 lines with “minor adjustments” – provides such borders: Fully 72 percent said Israel should not agree to such a deal, even if Palestinians agreed to declare an end to the conflict in exchange, and 73 percent opposed ceding the Jordan Valley in particular. That’s a logical corollary of the fact that they don’t believe the risks of doing so could be mitigated by stationing international forces there, as various peace plans have proposed: Only 16 percent said Israel could trust international forces to ensure its security; 78 percent said security had to remain in the hands of the Israel Defense Forces.
In part, of course, this emphasis on self-reliance stems from overwhelming skepticism about Palestinians’ willingness to make peace with Israel: Fully 83 percent of Israeli Jewish respondents thought that even withdrawing to the 1967 lines wouldn’t actually end the conflict (most polls aren’t quite so lopsided, but all have shown a majority of Israeli Jews holding this view for years).
But it also reflects the lessons Israelis have learned – or relearned – in recent years about the value of international guarantees.
After the Second Lebanon War in 2006, for instance, Israel agreed to withdraw its forces from Lebanon in exchange for a beefed-up international force that was supposed to prevent Hezbollah from rearming. Instead, this UNIFIL force proved so ineffective that two years later, Hezbollah possessed three times as many rockets as it did on the eve of the war. Eventually, UNIFIL stopped even pretending to carry out its mission: Its commander formally pledged to eschew such tactics as using sniffer dogs to hunt for explosives or searching houses and yards that soldiers had reason to believe contained arms.
Similarly, after Israel withdrew every last soldier and settler from Gaza in 2005, it was assured that should it henceforth be attacked from Gaza, the world would fully support its right to defend itself. Over the next three years, Palestinians fired almost 6,000 rockets and mortars at Israel. Yet when Israel finally responded by launching a military operation in December 2008, it suffered unprecedented worldwide condemnation, culminating in the Goldstone Report’s slanderous accusations of war crimes (which even its author has since recanted). Only eight European countries voted against that report in the UN.
Then, if Israelis still had any doubts, came November’s UN vote on recognizing “Palestine” as a nonmember observer state. This violated the central commitment enshrined in all previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements: that the conflict would be resolved solely through negotiations. The 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement, for instance, explicitly stated that “Neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.” The United States, European Union, Russia, Norway, Jordan, and Egypt all signed this agreement as witnesses – 32 countries in all (since the EU comprises 27). Yet of all these, only two, the United States and the Czech Republic, voted against a UN resolution that not only recognized a Palestinian state, but unilaterally proclaimed its borders. The others saw no reason to demand that an agreement they themselves had witnessed actually be honored.
America, unsurprisingly, has been far more reliable than Europe in its support for Israel. But as the UN votes on both the Goldstone Report and recognizing “Palestine” show, it has repeatedly been unable to persuade its allies to go along with it. Indeed, it hasn’t even been able to persuade its allies to let Israel participate in a U.S.-sponsored Global Counterterrorism Forum – an issue on which Israel clearly has valuable expertise to contribute. Hence important though U.S. support is in its own right, it’s not enough to make an international guarantee worth the paper it’s printed on.
What emerges from the above is that the model of the peace process that has dominated global thinking for the last 20 years – a two-state solution on roughly the 1967 lines, with Israel’s security ostensibly assured by international guarantees and an international force – has become a nonstarter for most Israelis: Though most still favor a two-state solution, they are not going to sacrifice their security for the chimera of an international promise. This might not have been true had the international community acted differently over the past 20 years, but it’s the reality today. And anyone interested in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ignores this reality at his peril.
As I’ve written elsewhere, I don’t actually think the conflict is solvable right now; I believe the only choice is to try to manage and contain it until some change takes place that makes it resolvable, just as America did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But whether one agrees or disagrees with that conclusion, one thing ought to be clear: clinging blindly to the failed mantras of the past 20 years will be not only nonproductive, but also counterproductive. For as long as the world remains fixated on a solution that cannot work, it will never be ready to consider new ideas that might be better.
A front-page story in the New York Times this week provides a reminder of something too often forgotten: The American-Israeli alliance is not a one-way street. While Israel obviously derives numerous benefits from the alliance, it also plays an important role in furthering American interests in the Middle East. And one way it does so is through its impressive intelligence capabilities.
The Times report opens with Israeli military commanders calling the Pentagon in late November “to discuss troubling intelligence that was showing up on satellite imagery: Syrian troops appeared to be mixing chemicals at two storage sites, probably the deadly nerve gas sarin, and filling dozens of 500-pounds bombs that could be loaded on airplanes.” The Pentagon promptly notified President Barack Obama, warning that should Syrian President Bashar Assad decide to use them, the weapons could “be airborne in less than two hours — too fast for the United States to act.” Obama responded with a global diplomatic push to stop the weapons from being used, and so far, the effort has succeeded. But it never could have happened had Israel not provided that initial intelligence.
Nor is this the first time Israel has provided America with vital intelligence about Mideast weapons of mass destruction: As the Times reported in 2011, Washington knew nothing about Syria’s clandestine nuclear reactor until Israel’s intelligence chief “visited President George W. Bush’s national security adviser and dropped photographs of the reactor on his coffee table.”
If, as Obama has repeatedly asserted, preventing the use of WMDs is an American interest, then an ally who can provide timely intelligence about such weaponry clearly furthers that interest: America can’t take diplomatic action to stop WMDs if it doesn’t even know they exist, yet its global intelligence responsibilities preclude devoting the kind of concentrated attention to countries like Syria that Israel of necessity does. Without Israel, America would have to either greatly expand its own intelligence coverage of the Middle East’s bad actors, thereby wasting valuable resources better spent elsewhere, or risk discovering too late that Assad had just used chemical weapons or tested a nuclear bomb.
Israel also provides another service: the ability to take action in cases where America can’t. As the Times article noted, two hours wasn’t enough time for America to mount an intervention had Assad decided to use the weapons. What the article didn’t mention, however, was that two hours probably would have been enough time for Israel to do so: Its airbases are much closer to Syria than America’s are.
Indeed, America has often had cause to be grateful to Israel for taking action that America either can’t or would rather not. President Bush didn’t want to destroy Syria’s nuclear reactor in 2007, for instance, but as I’ve written before, American policy-makers are undoubtedly glad today that Israel did so, thereby forestalling the nightmare scenario of nuclear materiel being looted and trafficked amid the chaos of Syria’s civil war. And in the 1991 Gulf War, America was certainly thankful that Israel had destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor 10 years earlier, despite having opposed the move at the time.
In an ideal world, of course, none of this would be necessary. But in the real world, the Mideast is a nasty, dangerous place for American interests. And as long as that remains true, America will benefit from having a reliable regional ally whose military and intelligence capabilities can supplement America’s own.
Writing in The Jerusalem Post on Friday, Donniel Hartman lamented the lack of “new ideas” in this election campaign. Campaigns, he proclaimed, should be a time for politicians to put forth “noble and naïve ideas,” to compete over “new ways to change the status quo;” a campaign that doesn’t do this is “dangerous for Israel and its future.”
Hartman’s plaint is a perfect snapshot of the thinking that has made Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu the unchallenged king of Israeli politics. Because for 20 years, Israelis have suffered through a succession of prime ministers who not only produced, but implemented, “noble and naïve ideas” to “change the status quo.” And what Israelis discovered is that such ideas are frequently far more “dangerous for Israel and its future” than the cautious conservatism Netanyahu epitomizes.
This isn’t to imply that Netanyahu has no ideas. He actually has quite a few, and many are even good ones. But none are of the big, radical, “noble and naïve” type. What he has consistently proposed, over two terms of office, is cautious, incremental change that will hopefully leave the country a bit better than he found it, but probably won’t effect a major revolution. And Israelis confidently expect the same from a third term.
Ironically, Netanyahu’s discomfort with big, radical ideas led him to a landslide loss in 1999, when Israelis opted for a rival who promised a host of them: unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, a final-status agreement with the Palestinians, a socioeconomic revolution that would finally “get the old woman out of the hospital corridor,” and more.
Yet that very same aversion to big, radical ideas is why he enjoys massive margins of support today. A Haaretz poll last week, for instance, asked respondents which party leader they trusted most on security, economics and diplomatic negotiations. On all three issues, Netanyahu outpolled his nearest rival by more than 2:1; on security, the margin was more than 4:1.
If you look merely at what Netanyahu has done, these numbers seem almost incomprehensible. After all, he hasn’t won any wars or thwarted any major security threat; the high cost of living and other economic problems sparked the biggest socioeconomic protests in decades last year; and not only has he failed to negotiate any major diplomatic agreements, but much of the world holds him responsible for this failure.
Yet if you look at what Netanyahu hasn’t done, his popularity becomes instantly understandable.
He didn’t sign a breakthrough “peace” agreement that created a terrorist quasi-state in the West Bank, from which Palestinian suicide bombers and gunmen proceeded to slaughter over 1,300 Israelis in a little over a decade. He didn’t unilaterally withdraw from Lebanon or Gaza, thereby abandoning them to the rule of terrorist organizations that have subsequently fired more than 16,000 rockets at Israel. He didn’t launch a grand diplomatic summit that ended up sparking a terrorist war. He didn’t conduct any failed wars, in either the military or the public-relations sense. He didn’t propose any sweeping territorial concessions that, had they been accepted, would have proven as detrimental to Israel’s security as every previous such concession has.
In short, unlike his predecessors, he produced no big ideas for changing the status quo – no “peace agreements,” no unilateral withdrawals, no sweeping final-status proposals, no failed wars “to destroy Hezbollah or Hamas once and for all” (a wildly inappropriate aim if you’re unwilling to do what’s necessary to achieve it). And Israelis, battered and shell-shocked by the disastrous consequences of all these previous big ideas, are grateful for the quiet his cautious, risk-averse policies have produced.
But it’s not just that his aversion to grandiose ideas has prevented any major new disasters. It’s that by eschewing such big ideas, he has managed to implement modest but significant improvements.
On the security front, he has a laudable track record on counterterrorism. During his first term, he reduced terrorist deaths by 70 percent, from 211 in 1993-96 to 63 in 1996-99. During his current term, he kept terror at the relatively low level inherited from his predecessor.
Economically, for all the real problems that sparked last year’s socioeconomic protests, Israel is doing well compared to the rest of the West. Its 7% unemployment rate is vastly better than the Eurozone average of 11.7%; in some Eurozone countries, like Spain and Greece, unemployment has soared to over 25%. The Eurozone has also experienced zero or negative growth for the last four quarters; Israel, by contrast, posted growth of about 3.3% this year.
And diplomatically, Netanyahu succeeded in getting the world to impose much tougher sanctions on Iran, something all his predecessors signally failed to do.
Indeed, even his most bitter opponents find themselves forced to acknowledge his achievements. Here, for instance, is what columnist Ari Shavit of the far-left Haaretz wrote in October: “Netanyahu’s government … correctly focused on the Iranian nuclear challenge and acted against it with skill and ingenuity, most of the time. It led a necessary reform of higher education and an important reform of preschool education, paved roads and built railway lines.”
And here’s Haaretz editor-in-chief Aluf Benn, writing two weeks ago: “[Netanyahu] said he’d mobilize international public opinion to escalate the sanctions against Iran and prepare the Israel Defense Forces for attack, and he did. He said he’d act to raise the Palestinians’ standard of living, and it rose. He spoke out against unilateral withdrawals, and he didn’t withdraw. He promised that Israel’s students would reach the top 10 in international exams, and their performance has improved. He wrote he would take care of the crime families, and they’ve dropped out of the public agenda.”
Like many Israelis, I think Netanyahu could and should have done far more to address Israel’s numerous domestic problems, and I’m disappointed that he didn’t. Nevertheless, one could do far worse than making some modest improvements while avoiding any major disasters. And after two decades of “noble and naïve” ideas that left the country battered and bloody, Israelis understand this quite well.
That’s why most are breathing a quiet sigh of relief at the prospect of four more years without them.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Writing in the Jerusalem Post this week, public relations expert Laura Kam argued that the ongoing controversy over Women of the Wall is particularly harmful to Israel because it’s seen as an issue of women’s rights. I agree that Israel’s current policy unacceptably violates Women of the Wall’s rights in some respects. But there’s another group of women whose rights the organization’s overseas advocates too often overlook: the thousands of women who visit the Western Wall every day not to “see and be seen,” as Women of the Wall chairwoman Anat Hoffman shockingly described her goal, but to pour out their hearts to God.
Because much of what the organization seeks to do at the Wall in no way disrupts other people’s worship, the existing ban on these activities is unjustified. A woman wearing a tallit or carrying a Torah, for instance, doesn’t impede anyone’s prayers: If you’re there to pray, your eyes should be on your prayer book, not on what other people are wearing or carrying. Even a full women’s prayer service complete with Torah reading wouldn’t necessarily be disruptive if it were quiet, as Orthodox worship often is: At many Orthodox services, you can’t even hear the Torah reading from more than a few feet away.
But that isn’t what Women of the Wall want. What they want is to make a political statement by worshiping as loudly and publicly as possible–to “see and be seen,” in Hoffman’s words. And that most definitely is disruptive to other worshipers: It’s hard to concentrate on one set of words when someone else is chanting a different set at full volume nearby.
Indeed, even the limited activity the group is allowed to conduct at the Wall today is conducted in as loud, public and disruptive manner as possible: A New York Times article last month, for instance, described the women “dancing and singing hymns in the women’s section,” which would certainly be disruptive to other women trying to pray at the site.
Jonathan’s analysis last week of why Women of the Wall’s battle has little traction in Israel was spot-on from a political standpoint. But there’s another reason that has little to do with politics: Contrary to the myth that most Israelis are secular, a majority of Israeli Jews actually put themselves someplace on the spectrum between “traditional, but not very religious” and “ultra-Orthodox.” And even among the 42 percent that define themselves as secular, many observe certain Jewish traditions and even believe in God: A recent survey found that a whopping 80 percent of Israeli Jews overall believe in God; 66 percent light candles on Friday night; 68 percent fast on Yom Kippur; 67 percent avoid leavened bread on Passover; and so forth.
In short, most Israeli Jews respect the sincerity of those thousands of women who pray at the Wall every day even if they would never do so themselves. Consequently, they see no reason why these women’s heartfelt prayers should be disrupted by other women seeking merely to make a political statement.
If Women of the Wall were more interested in praying than politics, Israelis might be more sympathetic to their cause. But as long as their main goal is to “see and be seen,” Israelis will understandably give precedence to the rights of those women who just want to pray to God without disruption.
Consider, for instance, a column published last month in Asharq Al-Awsat, a paper owned by a member of the Saudi royal family and known for its support of the Saudi monarchy. Written by the paper’s then-deputy editor-in-chief, Adel Al Toraifi, and titled “Who holds Hamas’ terrorism to account?” the column blamed not Israel, but Hamas, for Palestinian casualties during both the second intifada and the recent fighting in Gaza.
During the intifada, wrote Al Toraifi, “Only a small number of Palestinians died in the first weeks.” But then, “Hamas and other factions decided to militarize the intifada through the use of suicide attacks, costing the Palestinians nearly 2,000 lives in less than two years.”
Similarly, when smaller factions began “sabotaging the truce in Gaza,” Hamas “did not condemn their attacks, rather its leaders talked about the victory that was achieved through the missile fire.” Consequently, “a hundred Palestinians have died and what remains of the dilapidated infrastructure there has been destroyed.”
Now contrast this with the reaction of Israel’s “peace partner,” Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas. In his speech to the UN last month, Abbas accused Israel of committing “barbaric and horrific” crimes in Gaza in retaliation for … his UN bid! The thousands of missiles launched at Israel weren’t even mentioned, much less condemned. And other senior PA officials openly praised the missile fire. Moreover, the two Arab states with which Israel has peace treaties, Egypt and Jordan, similarly accused Israel of unprovoked aggression while refusing to condemn the rocket fire.
In short, all told their people that Israel is simply an evil country that kills innocent Arabs for no good reason. And why would anyone make peace with a country like that?
Al Toraifi, in contrast, told his readers that Israel isn’t inherently evil; it was just responding to being attacked. He also told his readers that Palestinians aren’t wholly innocent; their behavior, too, will have to change for peace to be possible. These are obviously messages far more conducive to peace.
An even more remarkable column appeared in October in another Saudi-funded paper, Arab News. Written by a former commodore in the Saudi navy, it posed a heretical question: “whether Israel is the real enemy of the Arab world and the Arab people.” Abdulateef Al-Mulhim’s answer was unequivocal:
“The Arab world wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and lost tens of thousands of innocent lives fighting Israel,” he wrote. “The Arab world has many enemies and Israel should have been at the bottom of the list. The real enemies of the Arab world are corruption, lack of good education, lack of good health care, lack of freedom, lack of respect for the human lives and finally, the Arab world had many dictators who used the Arab-Israeli conflict to suppress their own people. These dictators’ atrocities against their own people are far worse than all the full-scale Arab-Israeli wars.”
He also noted, correctly, that Arab states created the Palestinian refugee problem by launching wars against Israel in 1948 and 1967, and that even Palestinians “living under Israeli occupation … enjoy more political and social rights” and a “better situation than their Arab brothers who fought to liberate them from the Israelis.”
Again, the message couldn’t be clearer: Israel isn’t evil, nor is it solely responsible for the conflict: Arabs need to change their own attitudes and behavior.
Yet here, too, the contrast with Israel’s “peace partner” is stark. In Abbas’s UN speech, the Arab assault on Israel in 1948 never happened: Israel simply embarked, unprovoked, on “one of the most dreadful campaigns of ethnic cleansing and dispossession in modern history” (a mind-boggling claim in itself, considering the competition). And ever since, Israel has perpetrated a litany of abuses (ethnic cleansing, apartheid, etc.) against innocent Palestinians, whose conduct was always in “harmony and conformity” with “international law” and “moral values.” There was no Palestinian terror, no serial rejection of peace offers. Israel is simply evil incarnate, and Palestinians bear no responsibility whatsoever for their suffering. It is hardly a message conducive to peace.
Granted, Al Toraifi and Al-Mulhim are still outliers. But Riyadh clearly has no problem with their views: Al Toraifi was just promoted to editor-in-chief of his paper; Al-Mulhim remains a regular columnist at his. Considering that in Egypt, Jordan and the PA, journalists unions prohibit and penalize “normalization” with Israel despite the existence of peace treaties, that is certainly nontrivial.
None of this means the Saudis have become Zionists. Rather, it reflects the fact that Riyadh currently views Iran as its greatest enemy. Hence Iranian allies like Hamas are out of favor, while Israel benefits from a form of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Nevertheless, as I’ve explained before, the Arab world’s virulently anti-Israel rhetoric is a major impediment to Israeli-Arab peace – because as long as most Arabs view Israel as an irredeemably evil country that kills and dispossesses innocent Palestinians for no reason, they will understandably view peace with Israel as beyond the pale.
Thus true peace will arise only when ordinary Arabs realize that both halves of this thesis are false: Israel isn’t all black, and the Arabs aren’t all white. That’s precisely why the world ought to care far more than it does that Israel’s “peace partners” are the very ones promoting this canard most energetically: Scarcely a day passes without PA officials and PA media outlets glorifying anti-Israel terrorism, rejecting Israel’s right to exist or denying Jews’ historic connection to the Land of Israel.
But it is also why, by providing a venue for Arabs to finally start telling their countrymen the truth, Saudi papers may well be doing more to advance the cause of peace than all the Israeli-Palestinian talks ever held.
Whatever government arises after next month’s election, there’s one issue it absolutely must address: the findings of the annual survey on social resilience, published last week. The poll found that most Israelis are still proud of their country and consider it the best possible place to live, but this majority has shrunk steadily in recent years. And the reason is clear: Only a quarter strongly agreed that Israel “promises a better future for your children.”
Respondents were deeply worried by corruption, violence, poverty and the growing gap between rich and poor. In particular, many worried about their own ability to support their children, save for the future and grow old with dignity. And when asked what primarily determines a person’s financial status, the top response, at 24 percent, was “being born to the right family”; in second place, at 17% apiece, were “having the right connections” and “God.” In short, this is becoming a country where people who lack “the right family” or “the right connections” doubt their ability to give their children a better future.
And when you consider events of the past two weeks alone, it’s hard to argue that they’re wrong.
Just last week, for instance, it was reported that the Finance Ministry has agreed to give 140 maintenance workers at the notoriously nepotistic Ashdod Port raises of NIS 3,500 to NIS 5,000 a month, in exchange for vaguely defined reforms aimed at improving the port’s productivity. Dockworkers are already among the country’s highest paid workers; their average monthly salary, NIS 24,000, is more than 2.5 times the economy-wide average (about NIS 9,000). And this new raise alone is worth as much as many Israelis’ total paychecks: The minimum wage is NIS 4,300 a month.
Is all this because the dockworkers are super-productive? Clearly not, or the treasury wouldn’t be offering lavish bribes in an effort to coax a bit more productivity out of them. Indeed, last year’s Trajtenberg Committee Report on socioeconomic reform concluded that “poor service and low output at Israel’s ports” costs the economy “hundreds of millions of shekels a year” directly, alongside indirect damage stemming from “labor disruptions and delays in developing new port infrastructure.” Nor are such payments recompense for specialized skills that require long years of education, as with cardiac surgeons or top engineers.
These exorbitant raises stem solely from dockworkers’ ability to shut down Israel’s main gateway for trade at will: With no competition and no law barring employees of public-sector monopolies from striking, dockworkers have the country by the throat. And they have no compunction about using their power to extort money from the rest of us. There’s one law for the well-connected, and one for everyone else.
Or take last week’s disgraceful bailout of Channel 10 television – the fourth in less than a decade. Channel 10 hasn’t turned a profit since it opened in 2002; it has serially violated the terms of its license; and its debts to the state (for royalties, taxes and license fees) currently total NIS 65 million, not counting NIS 45 million in interest. Even if one thinks the license terms were excessively onerous, the businessmen who acquired the franchise accepted them; if they considered the terms unviable, they shouldn’t have bid.
Any private-sector business in such straits would have been shut down long since, and government agencies would be hounding it to repay its debts. Instead, the Knesset was convened in special session to pass legislation that extends the current owners’ franchise by two years, grants the station a NIS 65 million government loan and cancels its obligation to pay royalties. So rather than auctioning off the frequency to someone who might run it better, the government is letting the station continue operating under the same failed management and putting taxpayers on the hook for its debts.
Is this because no new station could possibly arise to replace Channel 10? Of course not. It’s because as a media outlet, Channel 10 enjoys the unreserved backing of its fellow journalists, who filled the press and airwaves with spurious claims that denying it a government bailout would “endanger Israel’s democracy.” With elections one month away, the government couldn’t afford to antagonize the entire media; nor could it afford the international fallout: Israel’s thriving democracy is a vital asset in the Western world, and Western officials have proven distressingly eager to swallow any nonsense about this democracy being “endangered.” So the government had no choice but to capitulate to extortion. There’s one law for the well-connected, and one for everyone else.
Then there’s my personal favorite: a deal signed two weeks ago that gives Israel Railways workers a 25% raise plus bonuses of NIS 42,000-NIS 52,000 apiece, in exchange for agreeing to structural reforms and signing a three-year no-strike pledge. The bonuses alone are worth roughly what minimum-wage workers earn in a year – and railway workers weren’t underpaid to start with. But the crowning glory is that even though the money is ostensibly in exchange for reforms, workers were collectively guaranteed about NIS 100 million even if the reforms don’t occur.
Needless to say, private-sector workers don’t get exorbitant raises and bonuses whenever their employer implements reforms. But they don’t belong to a union with the power to shut down a vital transportation network and no qualms about using it to extort money from the rest of us. There’s one law for the well-connected, and one for everyone else.
Israel currently faces numerous serious external threats. But the internal threat is no less grave. This is a country that demands enormous commitment from its citizens in both tangible matters (like military service) and intangibles (like enduring constant international opprobrium); such commitment can’t be maintained if ordinary citizens feel their children’s future is being sacrificed on the altar of outrageous perks for the well-connected.
This threat has been ignored by successive governments for far too long, and it’s vital that the next government finally start tackling it. The divide between the well-connected and the rest of us just keeps growing. And ultimately, as Abraham Lincoln once warned, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
The UN General Assembly, as Elliott Abrams noted yesterday, just passed nine resolutions in a single day condemning Israel, mainly for its treatment of the Palestinians, while completely ignoring the real disaster that befell the Palestinians this week: the Assad regime’s bombing of the Yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus, which reportedly killed dozens of Palestinians and caused about 100,000 to flee. But the situation becomes even more surreal when one examines the actual content of the resolutions-because it turns out that while the UN is voting to condemn Israel, its alleged victims are voting the opposite with their feet.
One resolution, for instance, slams Israel’s 1981 annexation of the “occupied Syrian Golan” and demands that Israel “rescind forthwith its decision.” Given what’s happening across the border in Syria, where the ongoing civil war has killed over 44,000 people and created over 500,000 refugees, I suspect most of the 20,000 Syrian Druze on the Golan are thanking their lucky stars to be living safely under Israel’s “occupation.” But you needn’t take my word for it: According to the Hebrew daily Maariv, whose report was subsequently picked up the Winnipeg Jewish Review, Israeli government statistics show that the number of Golan Druze applying for Israeli citizenship (for which the annexation made them eligible) has risen by hundreds of percent since the Syrian civil war erupted, after 30 years in which very few did so.
“More and more people comprehend that this [Israel] is a well-managed country and it’s possible to live and raise children here,” one Druze who acquired Israeli citizenship explained. “In Syria there is mass murder, and if [the Druze are] under Syrian control they would likely be turned into the victims of these atrocities. People see murdered children and refugees fleeing to Jordan and Turkey, lacking everything, and ask themselves: Where do I want to raise my children. The answer is clear-in Israel and not Syria.”
But what the Golan’s own residents want, of course, is of no interest to the UN: It would rather Israel return the area, and its Druze, to the Syrian hellhole “forthwith.”
Then there was the resolution condemning Israel for violating “the human rights of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.” But in East Jerusalem, too, the number of Palestinians requesting Israeli citizenship has risen sharply in recent years (West Bank and Gazan Palestinians aren’t eligible for citizenship, since Israel hasn’t annexed those areas). And while the number of Palestinians actually receiving citizenship remains small, Haaretz reports, “everyone involved agrees” it would be higher if Israel’s notoriously slow Interior Ministry would just process the applications faster.
The number of East Jerusalem Palestinians registering for the Israeli matriculation exam rather than the Palestinian one has also recently risen by dozens of percent, meaning these young Palestinians aspire to study at an Israeli university and work in Israel rather than studying and working in the Arab world. This, too, is a sea change: For years, Palestinians refused to allow their children to study the Israeli curriculum; now, private preparatory schools are springing up to enable these children to pass the Israeli exams.
Moreover, repeated polls have shown that if Jerusalem were redivided, many Palestinians-at least a sizable minority, and possibly a majority-would want to remain in Israel. But again, what East Jerusalem residents want is of no interest to the UN.
All of which just goes to show, if anyone had any doubts, that the UN and its member states have no interest whatsoever in the actual wellbeing of those under Israeli “occupation.” All they’re interested in is bashing Israel.
In what is becoming a standard trope for Israeli leftists, Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit today decries the “savagery” of Israel’s “rising political forces,” who are “alien to the new West’s values.” To which my response is, “thank God”–because the “new West’s values” are antithetical to the very existence of a Jewish state. And if that sounds far-fetched, just consider European Commission President Manuel Barroso’s speech last week when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on the European Union’s behalf.
Quoting the commission’s first president, Walter Hallstein, Barroso declared that 20th-century history showed “The system of sovereign nation-states has failed,” because “through two world wars it has proved itself unable to preserve peace.” Therefore, Barroso said, “nations needed to think beyond the nation-state” and create “supranational institutions.” Later, he reiterated this point by quoting one of the EU’s founding fathers, Jean Monnet: “The sovereign nations of the past can no longer solve the problems of the present,” Monnet said, and even the EU itself “is only a stage on the way to the organized world of the future.”
Nor is Barroso alone. Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland echoed this idea in his presentation speech. “After the two world wars in the last century, the world had to turn away from nationalism,” he declared. And though Europe is currently experiencing a crisis, “the solution now as then is not for the countries to act on their own at the expense of others.”
Barroso and Jagland obviously don’t speak for every European, but they do represent the dominant worldview of the European elite. And a worldview that believes “The system of sovereign nation-states has failed” clearly has no use for a country that defiantly proclaims itself a Jewish nation-state and insists on pursuing vital interests–like protecting its citizens from rocket fire–even “at the expense of” the Palestinians who are launching the rockets. Nor, incidentally, does this worldview have much use for an America that similarly insists on preserving its sovereignty and refuses to sacrifices its interests to the global collective’s whims. The Barroso-Jagland worldview thus goes a long way toward explaining European hostility to both Israel and America.
Nor does the growing popularity of European separatist movements contradict this worldview. Even in Scotland and Catalonia, where pro-independence parties recently won clear majorities, most voters’ support for “independence” is conditional on their new country receiving automatic EU membership. In other words, they want “independence” only on condition that they not actually have to exist for even a day as a fully independent country. The unavoidable conclusion is that even among ordinary Europeans, this worldview remains alive and well.
Hence for the foreseeable future, understanding it will remain vital for understanding Europe. To that end, I recommend two important essays published by Yoram Hazony in 2010. The first, drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, explains the paradigm shift that created this worldview and its implications for Israel. The second uses Immanuel Kant’s philosophy to explain why this view doesn’t contradict Europe’s ardent support for, say, a Palestinian nation-state (here’s the two-sentence, vastly dumbed-down version: European post-nationalists view the nation-state as a stage primitive peoples must go through en route to enlightened supra-nationalism, so for tribal Arab societies, becoming nation-states would be a step forward. But it’s unconscionable for Israel, having achieved this stage, to want to stay there instead of moving on to the next).
The bottom line, however, is clear: Israel’s survival as a Jewish state depends on its very willingness to reject “the new West’s values.” And European antipathy is the unavoidable price it will have to pay for that choice.
One of the saddest comments I’ve ever heard was Gaza resident Ziad Ashour’s statement to the New York Times last week. Ever since the first intifada erupted in 1987, the 43-year-old butcher said, “things have steadily declined in Gaza.”
Think about that for a moment: After 25 years of fighting Israel in every possible way–”popular resistance,” suicide bombings, rockets, diplomatic warfare, boycott/divestment/sanctions efforts–all the Palestinians have to show for it is 25 years of steady decline. Indeed, the facts bear out Ashour’s assessment: Despite massive international aid, Gaza’s per capita GDP has remained virtually flat, totaling $817 in 1987 and $876 in 2010. Unemployment, which was generally under 5 percent in the 1980s, had soared to 45 percent by the end of 2010. And to add insult to injury, neither the terror nor the diplomatic warfare succeeded in preventing Israel from flourishing over those 25 years.
But the sadder part of the story is that none of this has managed to persuade the Palestinians that such tactics are self-defeating. As Steven Erlanger’s report shows, Hamas is riding high in Gaza; even a desperately poor woman who describes her life as one of “depression and deprivation” proclaims pride in Hamas’s ability to launch rockets at Israel. And Gazan political science professor Mkhaimar Abusada tells Erlanger this is a never-ending story:
He remembered a similar burst of Hamas popularity in October 2011, after the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, whom Hamas held for five years and exchanged for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. “But a month later the Palestinians woke up to the same problems: poverty, mismanagement, siege, unemployment, little freedom of movement,” Mr. Abusada said.
Yet if Palestinians are primarily to blame for their addiction to such counterproductive tactics, the international community has played a crucial role as enabler. First of all, the massive international aid–more than four times as much per capita as any other nation receives–has cushioned them from the consequences of their bad decisions. Gaza’s situation may not be rosy, but it’s better than that of many other countries: As Michael Rubin noted, Gaza outranks more than 110 countries worldwide in terms of both life expectancy and infant mortality. And as long as international aid is keeping them relatively comfortable, Palestinians feel little incentive to change their tactics.
Far worse, however, is that by offering the Palestinians almost unstinting diplomatic support while relentlessly criticizing Israel, the world feeds Palestinian fantasies that these tactics will someday succeed–that eventually, the world will force Israel to its knees. The recent farce at the UN was a classic example: 138 countries voted to recognize “Palestine” as a state in gross violation of the Palestinians’ own signed commitments, even though it meets none of the criteria for statehood. But the world then went into a frenzy of condemnation when Israel responded by advancing planning processes–not even actual construction–in an area that every peace plan ever proposed has assigned to Israel in any case. So why would Palestinians conclude that they are the ones who need to change their behavior?
A few sober-minded Palestinians do know better. “Gaining the support of the Israeli authorities in West Jerusalem for a Palestinian state is more important than the support of 138 countries that voted for Palestine at the UN,” Ibrahim Inbawi, a Fatah activist from East Jerusalem, told the Jerusalem Report last week.
Unfortunately, the world seems unwilling to tell his countrymen the same thing. For all its vaunted concern for the Palestinians, it seems the international community would rather let them suffer another 25 years of steady decline than try to wean them from their failed strategies.