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On many issues, J Street isn’t nearly as representative of American Jewry as it likes to think. But the anguished query posed by its communications director, Alan Elsner, last week is undoubtedly shared by a vast swath of American Jews: “Why are Israeli politicians of all stripes almost totally disregarding what we see as the main issue facing the country, the need to reinvigorate negotiations with the Palestinians toward a two-state solution?” Indeed, the former head of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, voiced similar frustration in October, saying he was “stunned” that “Israeli-Palestinian peace is no more than a peripheral issue” in the election campaign. And unlike J Street, Yoffie’s pro-Israel credentials are unimpeachable.
Most Israeli Jews would counter with one very simple question: “What exactly do you expect us to do?” Because until someone produces a credible answer to that question, Israelis see little point in wasting time and energy on it. And overwhelmingly, they view the answers produced by American Jews as non-credible.
The most popular American Jewish response was perfectly captured by America’s (non-Jewish) defense secretary, Leon Panetta: “Just get to the damn table!” To which most Israelis would reply, “We’d like nothing better, but how?” After all, despite having promised to resume negotiations immediately after the UN recognized “Palestine” as a nonmember state, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is still refusing to do so without preconditions that Israelis deem unacceptable. And there’s no way to get to the table if the other side refuses to show up.
Just last week, for instance, Abbas set three preconditions for resuming negotiations: a settlement freeze, agreement that talks would start from where they left off under former prime minister Ehud Olmert, and agreement that the final borders would be based on the 1967 lines. Now consider what one of Israel’s most dovish politicians, someone who actually has made the “peace process” her flagship campaign issue, has to say on these subjects:
At a conference of foreign diplomats last week, Tzipi Livni said it was “clear … there would not be return to 1967 borders,” and that “the only way for the conflict with the Palestinians to end is for Israel to keep” the settlement blocs. Interviewed subsequently by The Jerusalem Post, she said she wouldn’t agree to start the talks from where Olmert left off, because “The idea that the Palestinians think they can take any Israeli offer to their pocket and say ‘let’s start from this’ is completely unacceptable.” She probably would agree to something like the partial settlement freeze Israel instituted in 2009-10, but Abbas deemed that “worse than useless” and refused to negotiate. And neither she nor any other Israeli politician would acquiesce in the full freeze Abbas demands, covering even the huge Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem that everyone – Palestinians included – agree would remain Israeli under any deal.
So given that Abbas will only negotiate under preconditions all Israelis consider non-starters, how do American Jews expect Israel to “get to the damn table”? Do they believe Israel should simply forfeit its vital interests by, say, not only agreeing to the 1967 lines, but doing so upfront, without even getting any reciprocal concession? Or do they have some more feasible idea – and if so, why aren’t they sharing it?
The more realistic, like Yoffie, do recognize that negotiations are probably impossible. But their solution is equally unfeasible: returning to “unilateral action.”
Is it really necessary to remind American Jews that Israel tried unilateral withdrawals twice, from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005, and both times got nothing in return but rockets on its cities and cross-border raids that kidnapped and killed its soldiers? Very few Israelis would agree to repeat that experience in the West Bank, whence even short-range rockets could easily reach Israel’s major cities and commercial hubs. It’s no accident that Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who has advocated turning to unilateralism, recently quit politics after polls showed his party barely squeaking into the Knesset.
So do American Jews have a magic solution for how to withdraw unilaterally without creating a security nightmare, or do they simply think Israelis should be willing to live with endless rocket fire for the sake of “peace”?
Then there’s the minor matter of the nature of our “peace partner.” How can Israel make peace with people who, for instance, accuse it of “one of the most dreadful campaigns of ethnic cleansing and dispossession in modern history”; praise Hamas for launching rockets at it; and claim it infects Palestinians with AIDS – all recent statements by senior PA officials? Or who deny Jewish history, glorify terror in their official media, demand that Israel commit demographic suicide and indoctrinate their children to view Israel’s eradication as their ultimate goal?
And another minor detail: Even with all this, the PA is too moderate for most Palestinians. As The Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh noted last week, when Abbas returned to Ramallah after the UN recognized “Palestine” in the 1967 lines, “fewer than 5,000 Palestinians … turned out to greet him.” But when the head of Hamas came to Gaza and vowed “to liberate all Palestine, ‘from the river to the sea’ … because the country belonged only to Muslim and Arabs, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians showed up to welcome [Khaled] Mashaal and voice support for his plan to eliminate Israel.” So where does that leave prospects for peace?
All this explains the shocking findings of a poll commissioned by the Saban Center last month: Fully 55% of Israeli Jews don’t think “lasting peace” with the Palestinians “will ever happen.” And only 4% see peace as possible “in the next five years.”
So unless American Jews can credibly explain to Israelis why they’re wrong, and then present a credible plan for achieving this as-yet elusive peace, it’s ridiculous to expect Israelis to consider “peace” a major campaign issue. Politics, as Otto von Bismarck famously said, is the art of the possible. And as long as peace talks don’t appear to be within the realm of the possible, Israeli politics will quite rightly focus on issues that are.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Yesterday, I took issue with the Union for Reform Judaism for condemning planned Israeli construction in the West Bank’s E-1 region. Many liberal American Jews would doubtless respond that they don’t object to E-1 remaining Israeli under an Israeli-Palestinian agreement; they merely object to building there before such an agreement exists. That, after all, is precisely what Ehud Olmert said last week when asked how he could condemn the Netanyahu government for doing something he himself supported as prime minister.
Unfortunately, this response betrays a serious lack of understanding of how the “peace process” actually works. First, as I noted yesterday, insisting that Israeli construction is an “obstacle to peace” even in areas that every proposed agreement has assigned to Israel merely encourages Palestinian intransigence by feeding their fantasies that the world will someday pressure Israel into withdrawing to the 1967 lines. Equally important, however, is that in a world where Israeli security concerns are routinely dismissed as unimportant, construction has proven the only effective means of ensuring Israel’s retention of areas it deems vital to its security.
In theory, construction shouldn’t be necessary to stake Israel’s claim, because the world has already recognized it: UN Security Council Resolution 242, still officially the defining document of the peace process, explicitly recognized Israel’s right to obtain “secure” borders by retaining some of the territory it captured in 1967, since, as then-U.S. Ambassador to the UN Arthur Goldberg explained, “Israel’s prior frontiers had proved to be notably insecure.”
But in practice, the only parts of the West Bank that successive peace plans have envisaged Israel retaining are the ones where there are just too many Jews to easily remove. As former President George W. Bush put it in his 2004 letter to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion.”
In contrast, the world has generally dismissed Israeli demands to keep sparsely settled areas, even when they are equally vital for security. For instance, all Israeli governments have considered military control over the Jordan Valley essential for security, but even Washington hasn’t backed this demand. And the European Union is much worse: It officially views the entire West Bank as occupied Palestinian territory to which Israel has no claim whatsoever unless the Palestinians allow it.
For this reason, Israel should long since have built in E-1–an area every Israeli premier has deemed vital for security–rather than leaving it vacant at the urging of successive U.S. administrations. But the issue received new urgency after the UN overwhelmingly recognized a Palestinian state last month “on the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.” With virtually the entire world having just declared that Israel has no right to any part of the West Bank, it has become imperative for Israel to strengthen its claim via the only means that has ever proven effective: by building.
The question now is whether Israel will actually do so, or whether its government will once again sacrifice the country’s long-term security needs on the altar of global opposition.
Yet the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascension to power in Egypt seemed to cast a serious shadow over Israel’s ability to strike Iran. The Brotherhood doesn’t recognize Israel and continues to call for jihad to eradicate it; Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi can barely bring himself to say Israel’s name and still refuses to meet with Israeli officials. Thus Israel cannot discount the possibility that any offensive against another Muslim country might be seized on as an excuse to scrap the peace treaty, or even declare war. And since an attack on Iran’s nuclear program would already leave Israel facing counterstrikes from Iran, Lebanon, Gaza and maybe Syria, the risk of Egypt piling on had to give Israeli decision-makers pause.
During Operation Pillar of Defense, however, Morsi flatly refused either to scrap the treaty or to join the fighting. Indeed, according to the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, Egyptian officials even asked the terrorist group Egyptian Islamic Jihad to persuade Sinai’s Salafis not to open a second front against Israel. The very fact that such a report could be deemed credible speaks volumes. And EIJ’s denial offered Iran scant comfort: It said the Sinai Salafis sat out the war not at Cairo’s request, but because they themselves understood the folly of joining it.
Clearly, Morsi and the Brotherhood haven’t suddenly become Israel-lovers, and there’s no guarantee they will not scrap the treaty someday. But for now, they need Western aid to rebuild Egypt’s economy and consolidate their grip on power, and they know this aid depends on upholding the treaty. And if that consideration prevailed in the face of airstrikes on Hamas, a Sunni Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, it seems certain that it would prevail in the face of airstrikes on Shi’ite Iran, or of subsequent Israeli counterstrikes on Iran’s Shi’ite and Alawite allies in Lebanon and Syria.
The other question mark hanging over Israel’s ability to strike Iran is related to American support. In the aftermath of a strike, Israel would need Washington’s diplomatic clout to ensure that Iran remained under tough sanctions that could prevent its nuclear program from being rebuilt; Israel might also need emergency military resupply. Hence the conventional wisdom has been that Israel would not attack unless it were confident of getting such support – and until now, Iran might well have hoped it would not be forthcoming.
Previous Israeli operations offered no clues to how President Obama might react, since Israel had not conducted any during his tenure. But Tehran did know Washington had frequently voiced reservations about military action against Iran, and it also presumably knew (since its Intelligence Ministry report quoted Haaretz) that many Israeli pundits expected the president’s disagreements with Netanyahu over Iran (as well as the Palestinian issue) to intensify once he was free of the constraints of running for reelection. But it turned out that these disagreements did not stop the White House from offering unstinting support for Israel’s response to escalating Hamas rocket fire. Nor, according to Israeli media reports, did Israel act only after obtaining a “green light” from Washington: Though Jerusalem informed the White House in general terms of its intent to respond, it reportedly revealed its specific plans for the campaign’s opening move (assassinating senior Hamas terrorist Ahmed Jabari) only after the fact. Thus Tehran now has to wonder whether President Obama might not respond similarly to an Israeli strike on Iran.
Attacking Iran obviously is not the same as attacking Gaza. For starters, Iran has far more power to retaliate against U.S. interests than either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Second, Washington has made its opposition to such a strike far clearer. Finally, while the Gaza operation was patently defensive, much of the world would probably view Israel as the aggressor against Iran, despite the fact that Iran has been attacking Israel for years via its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, and that given Iran’s repeated threats to annihilate the “Zionist entity,” denying Tehran the means to do so is an existential matter of self-defense for Israel.
For all these reasons, Israel cannot be certain that Washington would support a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in the same way it supported Pillar of Defense. But at the same time, Tehran cannot be certain that it would not: If America’s tradition of supporting Israel’s right to defend itself can trump policy disagreements in one case, there is always a chance it could do so in another. Moreover, Iran now has to consider the possibility that massive counterstrikes on Israel might provoke American support even if it were not initially forthcoming. These considerations have to worry Tehran.
Thus regardless of its achievements on the Gaza front, Pillar of Defense clearly bolstered Israel’s ability to mount a credible military threat against Iran. That is good news for anyone hoping to halt Iran’s nuclear program without military action. And it also explains why Netanyahu moved to end the operation so quickly, and then voiced satisfaction with its results, despite his uncertainty that the truce will hold: Gaza is not his chief concern right now.
As the prime minister himself said the day after the cease-fire took effect, “We have more important and less important enemies; we deal with them in order of importance.” And no one doubts which enemy tops the list.
Last week, Seth wrote an excellent post on the irreconcilability of European and Israeli visions for a two-state solution. What’s far more worrying, however, is that liberal American Jews appear to be on the European side of the divide. To grasp just how wide the gap yawns, compare the Union for Reform Judaism’s response to planned Israeli construction in the West Bank’s E-1 area to today’s remarks by one of Israel’s most dovish politicians, Tzipi Livni.
Last week, the URJ issued a statement condemning Israeli settlement activity, “especially in the E-1 area,” saying it “makes progress toward peace far more challenging, and is difficult to reconcile with the Government of Israel’s stated commitment to a two-state solution.” Now here’s what Livni–long the darling of liberal American Jews for her dovish views, and someone who has consistently blamed the Netanyahu government for the impasse in peace talks–told a gathering of foreign ambassadors today:
“It doesn’t matter what you think about settlements,” Livni said with uncharacteristic bluntness. “We have settlement blocs close to the Green Line and the only way for the conflict with the Palestinians to end is for Israel to keep them. Any pre-agreement by the international community to a withdrawal to 1967 borders before the talks occur, makes it difficult to negotiate. It was clear in the talks I conducted with the Palestinians that there would not be return to 1967 borders.”
Given that E-1 is the corridor that links one of those settlement blocs, Ma’aleh Adumim, to Jerusalem, it’s hard to reconcile those two views. After all, if the settlement blocs will be part of Israel under any agreement, then so will E-1–which, as Rick noted yesterday, is precisely why every peace plan every proposed, including former President Bill Clinton’s, in fact assigned E-1 to Israel. Indeed, the annexation documents for E-1 were signed by the patron saint of the peace process himself, Yitzhak Rabin, less than a year after he signed the Oslo Accords. Like everyone else who has seriously studied this issue, Rabin concluded both that it was vital for Israel’s security and–contrary to the widespread misconception today–that it would in no way preclude a viable and contiguous Palestinian state (a point Rich’s post also explains).
So if everyone knows that Israel is going to retain this area anyway, how can advancing construction within it possibly “make progress toward peace far more challenging”? In fact, as Livni noted, the opposite is true: The real impediment to negotiations is the Palestinian belief that the world will back their demand for a full withdrawal to the 1967 lines and eventually force Israel to comply. And that’s precisely the belief the URJ reinforced via its condemnation: After all, the Palestinians must be saying, if even American Jews won’t back Israel’s position, it will soon have no choice but to capitulate.
Back in 2008, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned the Palestinians that if they weren’t prepared to concede Ma’aleh Adumim, “Then you won’t have a state!” Livni said the same thing today. But the URJ effectively told the Palestinians the opposite: It’s not the Palestinian refusal to cede Ma’aleh Adumim that’s the problem, it said, but Israel’s insistence on acting as if Ma’aleh Adumim will remain Israeli.
And when liberal American Jews can’t support a wall-to-wall Israeli consensus that encompasses even its most dovish politicians, you have to wonder whether they support the real Israel at all–or only some idealized fantasy of it that exists only in their own minds.
When the man whom voters awarded second place in their party’s primary jumps ship for another party a mere week later, it’s hard to deny that voters made a colossal mistake. Yet despite the Amir Peretz debacle, Labor’s primary, like Likud’s, produced welcome results overall. And the same is true of one of the few other parties to hold primaries, Habayit Hayehudi.
Since Labor is projected to win more than twice as many seats this election as it had in the last Knesset, many members of its slate have no parliamentary record to evaluate. Its primary was therefore less about assessing past performance than about reinforcing the important message voters sent by electing Shelly Yacimovich as party leader: They are sick and tired of politicians focusing on diplomatic issues to the exclusion of all else; they want their party to focus on solving Israel’s domestic problems.
Thus two leaders of last year’s social protests won prominent places on the slate despite being newcomers: Stav Shaffir (who placed eighth in the primary) and Itzik Shmuli (11th). But Peace Now leader Yariv Oppenheimer, a veteran Labor activist, placed only 26th – too low to have a realistic shot at entering the Knesset. Labor voters pointedly rejected his single-minded focus on halting settlement construction and negotiating with the Palestinians.
According to Israel’s self-proclaimed “best and brightest,” of course, Oppenheimer’s issues are precisely the ones Israel should be focusing on: That’s why so many of them symbolically joined Meretz’s slate. But Labor voters were wise enough to realize that Israel can no longer afford to keep putting the country’s urgent domestic problems on hold while waiting for a peace that most don’t believe is in the offing.
Ironically, this very desire to give precedence to socioeconomic issues is what produced the Peretz debacle. Though Peretz’s primary success has been widely attributed to the success of Iron Dome during the recent Gaza operation – a tribute to his decision, as defense minister, to push development of the antimissile system despite the defense establishment’s opposition – this explanation founders on one simple fact: Peretz also placed second in Labor’s leadership primary 14 months earlier, when his term as defense minister was still considered an unmitigated disaster. The only way to explain his strong showing in both primaries is his track record of promoting socioeconomic legislation like raising the minimum wage: That’s why the leadership race ended with him and Yacimovich, who has focused relentlessly on socioeconomic issues since entering the Knesset, beating out two other candidates associated more with diplomatic issues.
The voters’ mistake lay in underestimating the size of Peretz’s ego and overestimating his commitment to social issues. It takes a truly monstrous ego to think you have the right to dictate policy to the woman who beat you decisively in the leadership race – especially when polls show her policies doubling or tripling the party’s Knesset strength. And Peretz’s “commitment” to socioeconomic issues now seems like a mere ploy to stand out at a time when his party focused mainly on the peace process: Once Labor’s focus shifted to domestic issues, he promptly declared that the peace process is the real priority after all and jumped ship to Tzipi Livni, whose mantra is “all peace process, all the time.”
The primary also produced some other suboptimal choices: What, for instance, have MKs Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and Nachman Shai accomplished in past Knessets that justifies their reelection? But having complained just last week that the Knesset has too few legislators of the caliber of Likud’s Yariv Levin, I’m delighted that Labor voters awarded first place (after Yacimovich) to another of that rare breed: Isaac Herzog.
Due to his focus on diplomatic rather than socioeconomic issues, Herzog actually lost to both Yacimovich and Peretz in the leadership primary. But as a legislator, he can boast some substantial achievements – most notably, pushing through a law granting citizenship and compensation to members of the South Lebanon Army who fled here after Israel quit Lebanon in 2000. That such basic decency to Israel’s longtime allies took four years and suffered repeated defeats is disgraceful. But Herzog’s dogged and ultimately successful persistence shines all the brighter by contrast.
Perhaps the most remarkable primary result, however, was in Habayit Hayehudi. First, voters decisively ousted the veteran leadership in favor of a newcomer – a bold gambit aimed at reversing the party’s steady slide toward oblivion. Naftali Bennett certainly wasn’t the choice of the party elders; they backed MK Zevulun Orlev. But having seen their party’s Knesset strength decline for several elections now, to a mere three seats last time around, primary voters were wise enough to recognize that radical change was needed. And so far, it seems to be working: Polls predict the party will almost quadruple its strength in the upcoming election.
But the truly bold move was voters’ decision to award third place on the slate to a secular woman, Ayelet Shaked. Previously, a secular person couldn’t have dreamed of representing Habayit Hayehudi: After all, it bills itself as a religious party. But voters sent a decisive and welcome message: We’re tired of being a “niche” party reserved for people exactly like ourselves; we’ll welcome anyone who supports our core policies – bolstering Israel’s Jewish identity and opposing territorial concessions. Shaked avowedly does, and she was welcomed with open arms.
Habayit Hayehudi’s opening to secular Jews, like Labor’s shift in focus from the “peace process” to socioeconomic issues, highlights a broader truth: Ordinary voters are often more willing than the ruling elites to embrace necessary change. Nor should this be surprising: A status quo that doesn’t serve the interests of ordinary people may serve the elites’ interests just fine. That’s precisely why so many of our elites long for the good old days when they didn’t have to worry about what the people thought – as evidenced by last month’s shocking Haaretz editorial urging a return to the days when party leaders could ignore the voters and simply dictate their Knesset slates.
That, however, is precisely why the rest of us should be giving the primary results a hearty round of applause.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Under other circumstances, I might enjoy watching “human rights” activists decry the very international justice system they lobbied so hard to establish. But not when reactions like this one, by David Harland of the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, show just how much resistance there will be to the important norms established last month by the appellate court of an international war crimes tribunal in the Hague. In a verdict ironically issued just as the world was obsessing over Palestinian civilians killed in the latest Hamas-Israel war, the court essentially upheld, in a Balkan context, all the arguments Israel routinely makes about the legitimacy of its own military operations. Consequently, the judges acquitted and freed two Croatian generals whom a trial court had convicted of war crimes and sentenced to 18 and 24 years, respectively.
The appellate court’s first important move was acknowledging the obvious fact that in wartime even the most careful army makes mistakes. The trial court had convicted the Croats of illegally shelling four towns they were trying to capture. The appeals court said the lower court’s criterion–”that any shell that landed more than 200 meters away from a military target must have been fired indiscriminately–was arbitrary and ‘devoid of any specific reasoning’,” to quote The Guardian‘s apt summary. In short, it accepted the fact that soldiers are human beings who make mistakes, and errant shells don’t necessarily mean the soldiers fired indiscriminately.
Second, it acknowledged the obvious fact that even the most careful army can’t prevent civilian casualties. Some 150 civilians died in the generals’ four-day bombing campaign. But the appeals court said these deaths didn’t constitute war crimes, because the troops had aimed at legitimate military targets. In other words, it ruled that civilian casualties aren’t ipso facto illegal; they may be unavoidable consequences of legitimate military activity–especially when military targets are located in crowded urban areas.
Third, it acknowledged that even when genuine war crimes occur, they may be the acts of errant individuals rather than deliberate policy: It concluded that acts of looting and murder following the bombing campaign occurred not on the generals’ orders, but despite them.
Finally, it acknowledged the obvious fact that fleeing a war zone is normal, so a civilian exodus isn’t necessarily proof of a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
In short, the court recognized a simple truth that “human rights” activists try hard to obscure: War is always hell, but not every act of war is a war crime.
Unfortunately, this welcome breath of sanity has been under assault from the moment it was issued. The first attack came from the court itself: The dissenting judges in the 3-2 verdict publicly termed it “grotesque” and said it lacked “any sense of justice.”
Now, activists like Harland are joining the chorus. Unlike the court, he can’t accept that civilians might spontaneously–and sensibly–flee a war zone: “If the acquitted generals were not responsible for this ethnic cleansing, then somebody was,” he declared.
Even more disturbing, he appears to think “fairness” requires convictions for all parties to a conflict even if only one side committed war crimes: “Convicting only Serbs simply doesn’t make sense in terms of justice, in terms of reality, or in terms of politics,” he wrote.
I can’t imagine a worse indictment of the “human rights” community than that: Justice be damned; convictions must be issued to both sides for the sake of “politics.” It’s precisely that monstrous idea against which the appeals court struck such a welcome blow last month.
But as reactions like Harland’s show, restoring sanity to the concept of “international human rights law” is going to be a long, hard haul.
Seth made an excellent point yesterday about the irreconcilability of Israeli and European visions of the two-state solution. I’d like to add a linguistic corollary: Israel and its supporters need to eliminate the phrase “Israel’s best friends in Europe” from their lexicon with regard to Germany, Britain, France and their ilk. This is not just a matter of semantics. Aside from the insult to Israel’s one real friend in Europe, the emotional baggage this phrase carries is seriously warping the Israeli-European relationship.
Just consider the events of the past week, following Europe’s decision to support (or at least not oppose) the Palestinians’ UN bid and Israel’s decision to move forward on planning and zoning approvals for construction in E-1, the corridor linking Jerusalem and Ma’aleh Adumim. Europeans are outraged; they feel betrayed. They thought they had an understanding with Israel that it would let the UN vote pass quietly; they felt Israel was being ungrateful for their backing during its recent Gaza operation and their imposition of stiff sanctions on Iran. Israel is also outraged; it feels betrayed. It thought it had an understanding with the Europeans that they would oppose (or at least not support) the UN bid; it felt Europe was being unappreciative of the many concessions it has made to the Palestinians, from an unprecedented 10-month settlement freeze through various measures to bolster the Palestinian Authority’s finances. In short, this isn’t a diplomatic dispute; it’s a lover’s quarrel–which is precisely why it escalated so rapidly and hysterically into threats of sanctions.
Now contrast this with the response of dozens of non-European countries that also supported the UN bid and oppose settlement construction. Has anyone heard any sanctions threats coming from China or India, for instance? Of course not. And that’s precisely because Israel’s bilateral relations with those countries are based on interest, not an imagined friendship. The mutual interests (mainly economic) are extensive, and both sides are eager to pursue them. But it’s strictly a business relationship; neither side expects anything of the other beyond that. Israel knows China and India will vote against it in every possible forum; China and India know Israel won’t take their views into account when determining its foreign and defense policies. And since neither side expects anything more, they don’t get upset over it.
But the term “friendship” immediately creates expectations. You expect your friends to take your wishes and interests into account, and you feel upset and betrayed when they don’t. And precisely because Israel and its supporters have been referring to Britain, Germany, France and co. for so long as “Israel’s best friends in Europe,” they get upset when they feel Israel isn’t treating them that way, and Israel gets upset when they don’t act that way.
So it’s time to eliminate the emotional baggage. Britain, France and Germany are much better than, say, Ireland and Norway, but they aren’t friends. Like China and India, they’re countries with whom Israel has many mutual interests worth pursuing, but both sides need to accept that they will often disagree–and they need to start doing it like adults.
And if anyone feels an emotional need for a “best friend in Europe,” Israel actually has a real one, with a consistent, decades-old record: the sole European country to vote with Israel at the UN last week, which was also the sole country to buck a worldwide arms embargo 64 years ago and supply Israel with desperately needed planes during its War of Independence. So could we please stop insulting the Czech Republic by lumping it in the same semantic category as Germany, France and Britain?
To all those pundits who have been bemoaning the primary losses of Likud’s “most respectable and presentable ministers,” as one put it, I’d like to pose one simple question: Can anyone point to anything substantive that Dan Meridor, Benny Begin and Michael Eitan actually accomplished during all their decades in the Knesset? A signature piece of legislation? An important ministerial policy?
Because offhand, I can’t – and I probably follow politics more closely than most voters. Yet I can easily list some substantive achievements for most of the younger politicians who beat them out on this year’s Likud slate.
Granted, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu reportedly values Begin and Meridor’s input at various ministerial forums, but you don’t need to be a minister to offer advice: Prime ministers routinely consult experts from outside the government. Additionally, the conduct of all three men indisputably lends dignity to the Knesset; considering the cringe-inducing behavior of many MKs, that isn’t nothing. But at some point, don’t voters have a right to demand more of their representatives than merely offering advice and avoiding embarrassment?
And in fact, they have. Take, for instance, MK Yariv Levin, whom many pundits like to malign as a foaming-at-the-mouth radical. In reality, Levin, who placed ninth in the primary, is one of the Knesset’s most serious and effective legislators. One of his signature accomplishments of the last term was pushing through a law requiring any cession of sovereign Israeli territory to be approved by either a two-thirds Knesset majority or a referendum. I’ve explained elsewhere why I think this law is vitally important. But the legislative skill and tenacity required to pass it were equally noteworthy.
After all, it’s no great achievement to pass a law of the “let’s throw money at widows/orphans/stray cats” variety; those laws enjoy automatic bipartisan majorities. Pushing through a controversial piece of legislation opposed by successive prime ministers is a very different matter. It took Levin years, and he suffered repeated defeats. But instead of giving up, he did what serious legislators do: patiently recruited supporters, made changes to assuage his colleagues’ concerns, and eventually succeeded. The Knesset has far too few legislators of this caliber.
Indeed, the contrast with Eitan couldn’t be starker. Eitan (to his credit) is one of Likud’s earliest and most articulate critics of both judicial activism and the judicial appointments process. So why do the same leftists who denounce Levin as a dangerous opponent of the Supreme Court now laud Eitan as a court supporter? Because Eitan never did anything but talk, so court supporters have correctly concluded that he’s no threat. Levin, in contrast, has proposed a serious bill to reform the judicial appointments process. I’ve explained previously why (contrary to The Jerusalem Post’s editorialist), I strongly support this bill. More importantly, however, his record shows that he won’t give up just because Netanyahu quashed it once. That makes him a real threat to supporters of the status quo.
But given a choice between an MK who’s just hot air and one who seriously tries to solve problems via legislation, shouldn’t we prefer the latter?
Nor is Levin alone. For another example, take Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who placed first in the primary: In one short term, he’s pushed through numerous reforms that experts have advocated for years. He persuaded the high school teachers’ union to sign onto a program (launched by his predecessors) that offers higher pay in exchange for increased classroom hours; he boosted funding for higher education after years of cuts; he launched the “centers of excellence” program to lure talented Israeli academics working overseas back home.
It’s too early to tell how successful these moves will be; most have only just begun to be implemented. But one more modest initiative has already borne welcome fruit: Sa’ar succeeded in more than doubling the number of schoolchildren visiting Jerusalem, our capital city and a cradle of Jewish history. If you believe, as I do, that it’s important both for children to see their capital and to learn about their nation’s history, this alone would constitute a signal achievement.
Or take Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, who placed fourth in the primary. I confess I’m not unbiased here; I benefit from Katz’s tenure every time I drive to Jerusalem: A badly deteriorating highway has been repaved, and a particularly dangerous stretch where accidents used to occur routinely now has a crash barrier. But it seems I’m not the only one: A recent survey by the Federation of Israeli Chambers of Commerce found that businessmen rated Katz’s ministry as the easiest government agency to do business with, by a substantial margin. The Transportation Ministry scored 7.36 out of 10; the runner-up scored 6.899.
As the survey noted, Katz didn’t inherit this status; his ministry’s first-place finish is due to a sustained effort to reduce red tape that has led it to improve its score in each of the last three quarters. Isn’t that precisely the kind of ministerial competence we ought to be rewarding?
Granted, there are a few unfortunate exceptions to this rosy picture, which is why there are only two cheers in the title of this piece. Miri Regev and Tzachi Hanegbi, for instance, both finished in the top 20 despite being high on my list of people nobody should tolerate in their parliament. The former is a cheap demagogue and serial incompetent (just compare the PR disaster of the Second Lebanon War, when she headed the IDF Spokesman’s Office, to the army’s much more successful PR efforts during the recent Gaza operation). The latter is a corrupt opportunist who jumped from Likud to Kadima in 2006 because it would clearly be the ruling party and has now returned to Likud for the same reason, but still has fans due to his history of providing “jobs for the boys” (ironically, Hanegbi is also beloved of leftist pundits, due to his opportunistic “moderation”).
Overall, however, primary voters opted to reward achievement and punish its absence. Which just goes to show, once again, that voters often have more sense than the pundits who decry them.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Just in case there were any doubts, last week provided conclusive proof: Yes, Palestinian violence pays. And the so-called “enlightened” countries–those Western states who claim to deplore violence and favor the peaceful resolution of conflicts–are the very ones who will reward violence the most. That’s precisely what happened with the Palestinians’ successful bid for UN recognition as a nonmember observer state.
Most European countries understood that this move would at best not advance the peace process, and at worst hinder it. So some had planned to vote no, while others planned to abstain. But then Hamas dramatically escalated its rocket fire on Israel, forcing Israel to respond; Hamas thus became the center of world attention while the Palestinian Authority was sidelined. So in an effort to give the PA a boost, European governments switched their votes at the last minute: Those who had planned to vote no abstained, and those who had planned to abstain voted yes. In other words, they agreed to support something they had previously considered “unhelpful” just because Hamas fired lots of rockets at Israel.
But the hypocrisy doesn’t end there. These same European countries are now furious at Israel’s response: They thought they had an understanding with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel would let the UN vote pass quietly. And in fact, they did. The only minor detail they’re overlooking is that Netanyahu agreed not to retaliate for the UN vote in exchange for what he thought was a European commitment to either vote against or abstain. In short, the Europeans reneged on their side of the unwritten deal, but are furious that Israel isn’t upholding its side anyway.
That is a microcosm of what’s wrong with the peace process as a whole: As far as most of the world is concerned, bilateral Israeli agreements are binding on one side only: Israel. Thus it’s perfectly fine with the Europeans for the PA to violate one of its cardinal commitments under the peace process: that all disputes will be resolved through negotiations rather than unilaterally–or as the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement put it, “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.” But it’s an outrage, completely beyond the pale, for Israel to respond by doing something that no signed agreement actually bars it from doing: In no agreement did Israel ever promise to halt construction in the West Bank or East Jerusalem.
So here’s what we’ve learned from the past week’s events: Palestinians should keep shooting rockets at Israel, because Europe will reward them for it by punishing Israel. And Israel should never again make any agreement with the Palestinians, because the Palestinians won’t be bound by it at all, whereas Israel will be bound not only by what the deal actually says, but by what the Palestinians and their Europeans allies think it should have said.
You’d think countries that claim to abhor violence and favor diplomacy could find better lessons to be teaching, wouldn’t you?
Let’s be blunt: Last week’s cease-fire agreement is a terrible deal for Israel. Yet even so, the government wasn’t necessarily wrong to accept it. The crucial question is whether it caved because it got cold feet, or whether it sensibly sacrificed a lesser gain now for a greater one later.
We’ll start with the deal’s flaws. First, it bars all Israeli operations against Gaza while allowing Gaza to continue attacking Israel. How so? The deal requires Israel to “stop all hostilities in the Gaza Strip land, sea and air,” whereas Palestinians must only stop “all hostilities from the Gaza Strip against Israel.” In other words, it doesn’t bar Palestinian attacks on Israel from Sinai, which have become increasingly frequent. But it does bar Israel from preempting such attacks: It can no longer target terrorists inside Gaza, having pledged to stop all attacks there, but it also can’t target them once they cross the border into Sinai, as that would violate its treaty with Egypt.
Second, though all Palestinian groups are supposed to halt attacks, the agreement doesn’t require Hamas to enforce their compliance. Thus Hamas is being allowed to rule Gaza without being held responsible for what happens there.
Third, the agreement promises that the issue of lifting restrictions on the movement of people and goods to and from Gaza will be “dealt with.” Israel presumably interprets this phrase to mean “discussed.” But Hamas and Egypt may well interpret it as requiring an end to these restrictions – up to and including the naval blockade. Hence Israel could find itself accused of violating the cease-fire if it balks, which it obviously will. And since most of the world dislikes the blockade to begin with, that accusation will surely garner international support.
Fourth, Israel received no reciprocal promise that its main concern, arms smuggling, will also be “dealt with.” It’s entitled to raise the issue, but there’s no guarantee it will actually be addressed.
Fifth, the deal essentially makes Egypt the referee of violations. But Cairo, whatever it thinks of Hamas’s conduct in private, will never publicly blame anyone but Israel, just as it did during the actual fighting. And with Israel itself having nominated Egypt as referee, much of the world will buy that verdict.
Finally, the deal was clearly premature. As columnist Nadav Shragai aptly wrote, “If the armed Islamist groups, after 1,400 sorties over the Gaza Strip, can still reach Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beersheba, Jerusalem and Rishon Lezion, disrupt our lives and paralyze half the country, then they are far from being defeated.” That calls the deterrent value of the entire operation into question.
Yet for all these flaws, there are potential gains that could justify the deal. One is Washington’s goodwill – a prize Jerusalem was clearly angling for. That’s why it rejected a truce proposal last Tuesday only to accept a virtually identical deal 24 hours later, once US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had arrived to take the credit. That’s also why both Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama issued statements saying that Netanyahu accepted the cease-fire on Obama’s recommendation.
Granted, goodwill is a nebulous asset. But there are two concrete expressions of it that, if forthcoming, would be worth the price Israel paid. The first is US support for a major ground operation in Gaza should the truce break down. Invading with US support would obviously be preferable, and that’s the rationale one senior official cited last week: “Israel gained valuable legitimacy to take further military action in the future if necessary.”
The second is US support for attacking Iran’s nuclear program, should Israel decide to do so. Israel will need America’s help in handling the diplomatic fallout from such a strike, and Washington will also be critical to ensuring that sanctions remain in place to prevent Iran from rebuilding its program.
Yet both these benefits could easily prove chimerical. On Iran, Washington has repeatedly made its opposition to Israeli military action clear, and it’s hard to see it reversing itself on an issue this major (it thinks an attack on Iran would be “incredibly destabilizing“) in exchange for Israeli concessions on a comparatively minor issue like Gaza.
Future support for tougher action on Gaza is more plausible, but only if Hamas were stupid enough to commit massive cease-fire violations immediately – which it isn’t. Almost certainly, Hamas will do just what it did after the last war, in 2009: re-escalate slowly and cautiously to avoid major retaliation before it has rebuilt its arsenal. First, it will let smaller organizations launch very occasional short-range rockets, knowing Israel won’t go to war over that. Then it will pick up the pace, but slowly enough that the increase never seems to justify war – to the world, or even to most Israelis: We’re invading Gaza because rocket launches have risen from an average of six per week to eight? Or because of a larger barrage that ended two days later?
By the time Israel simply can’t ignore the escalation any longer, there might well be new governments in both Washington and Jerusalem. And presidential promises, as Obama himself taught us, aren’t always honored by new administrations.
Still, even if neither of these benefits materializes, there’s another factor that could justify the agreement: With Iran’s nuclear program fast approaching crisis point, Israel simply can’t afford to have either the IDF or the world distracted by a long-term ground operation in Gaza. And as I wrote last week, a mere in-and-out operation would be pointless.
Netanyahu clearly hinted at this consideration last week, saying, “We have more important and less important enemies; we deal with them in order of importance.” A Likud MK close to him was even more explicit, saying this was the wrong moment for a long-term ground operation because “important decisions await us in the spring.”
If Israel does attack Iran this spring or summer – or if it eventually launches a ground operation in Gaza with full US backing – then the cease-fire will be justified. But if not, the government’s failure to deal with the rocket fire once and for all will retroactively prove inexcusable.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.