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Despite having opposed Israel’s pullout from Gaza from the very beginning, I cheered when I read Jonathan’s post on why he supported it. I, too, think Israel’s overseas supporters–on both sides of the political spectrum–ought to accord more respect to Israelis’ democratic decisions than they sometimes do. But this isn’t only because, as he rightly said, Israelis are the ones who ultimately bear the consequences of those decisions. It’s because in making those decisions, Israelis often have knowledge that even the most supportive and best-informed non-Israelis lack.
By this, I don’t just mean knowledge of the facts, though that’s also an issue. During the “quiet” years following Israel’s 2009 war with Hamas in Gaza, for instance, people overseas were often shocked when I mentioned that rockets still fell regularly on southern Israel; that’s information even regular visitors to Israeli news sites could easily have missed. Yet it obviously affected Israelis’ views on territorial withdrawals.
Far more important, however, is the knowledge of what it actually means to live with such consequences. Many Westerners, because they have been raised on the value of empathy and genuinely try to practice it, truly believe they have succeeded; as an Israeli, I can’t count how many times I’ve been told, “I understand, I really do.” But the only honest answer is, “No, you don’t.”
If you’ve never lain awake night after night, unable to sleep, because you’re tensely awaiting the siren that tells you a rocket has been launched and you have only seconds to take shelter, you do not understand the physical, mental and emotional devastation of living under constant rocket fire–even if (thanks in part to such precautions) it mercifully causes few casualties. If you’ve never woken up, morning after morning, dreading the moment when you have to turn on the radio and hear how many people have been killed overnight, all while praying nobody you know will be on the list, you don’t how emotionally devastating a suicide bombing campaign can be even to those whose loved ones are mercifully spared. If you’ve never paid a shiva (condolence) call on a family that has been shattered by the loss of their bright, beautiful daughter in a terror attack, or of their soldier son in combat, you don’t know what it’s like to live constantly in the shadow of terror and war.
Reasonable people can obviously draw different conclusions from this knowledge: Author David Grossman still advocates territorial withdrawals even though his soldier son was killed in the war Hezbollah launched from Lebanon six years after Israel withdrew; columnist Rabbi Stewart Weiss opposes territorial withdrawals even though his soldier son was killed serving in the “occupied territories.” But whatever decision an Israeli reaches on these issues, he or she has made it with a bone-deep understanding of the price they will pay if the choice goes sour.
That’s an understanding non-Israelis lack, even when they’re perfectly aware of all the pros and cons on paper. And because of it, they often end up assigning different weight to the variables than Israelis do.
I don’t expect American Jews to agree with every Israeli choice. But I would like them to understand that the choices they disagree with may be driven by knowledge they lack. For without that understanding, bridging the gap between the two communities’ very different experiences will only keep getting harder.
I don’t believe Hamas began its recent escalation with Israel on orders from Tehran (as I explain here). But I can see why many people do: Intentionally or not, Hamas has undeniably given its former Iranian paymasters and their Syrian client a great boon.
As Jonathan noted yesterday, the Hamas-Israel war has diverted attention from the International Atomic Energy Agency’s latest report on Iran’s nuclear program. Even more shocking, however, is the way it has diverted attention from the ongoing–and far more massive–bloodletting in Syria.
On Monday, for instance, the lead headline in the New York Times‘s overseas edition, the International Herald Tribune, screamed “Heavy civilian toll from Israeli strikes.” This “heavy toll” consisted of one airstrike on Sunday that killed 11 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and brought the total death toll since the fighting began to “more than 50 people, many of them civilians.”
That same day, the paper relegated Syria to the bottom of page 4. The headline read “Syria criticizes 3 countries for recognizing opposition”; civilian casualties weren’t mentioned at all. Yet according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, that weekend (the IHT doesn’t publish on Sunday) saw at least 129 Syrians killed, 47 on Saturday and 82 on Sunday, including 69 civilians. In other words, more civilians were killed in Syria that weekend alone than the total number of fatalities, both combatant and noncombatant, since the latest Hamas-Israel war began. But in the overseas edition of America’s self-proclaimed paper of record, they didn’t even rate a mention. Nor is the coverage less warped in other media outlets.
The total death toll in the Syrian conflict is nearing 40,000, the majority of them civilians. An eye-popping 400,000 refugees have fled into other countries. Anywhere from 1.2 million to 2.5 million Syrians have been internally displaced, most living in appalling conditions that will only worsen as winter progresses. By any standard, it’s a humanitarian crisis of vast proportions. Yet 11 Palestinians slain by Israel are enough to completely erase it from the media map. Syrian lives, it seems, are cheap in the eyes of the international media: Each Palestinian killed by Israel is worth more ink than 4,000 slain Syrians.
Syria’s erasure from the diplomatic map has been equally complete. A flood of high-level visitors, including the UN secretary general, the French foreign minister and the Turkish prime minister, has descended on Jerusalem and/or Cairo in recent days to demand that Israel on no account launch a ground operation. Has anyone noticed any senior diplomat trying to do anything about the Syrian slaughter lately?
Syrians, of course, aren’t the only ones victimized by the international obsession over Palestinian casualties. As Alan Dershowitz eloquently explained, the foremost victims may be Palestinians themselves: As long as Hamas knows that every dead Palestinian will result in international opprobrium for Israel and diplomatic gains for itself, it has every incentive both to continue lobbing rockets at Israel, thereby sparking the retaliation that causes these civilian casualties, and to maximize such casualties by using its own civilian population as human shields.
But the Palestinians made their own bed: They elected Hamas. Syrians just had the bad luck to be caught in the fallout.
As many commentators have noted, nothing could be more ridiculous than the assertion that Israel assassinated senior Hamas terrorist Ahmed Jabari last week because its prime and defense ministers sought to improve their electoral prospects. The timing of the latest escalation was clearly chosen by Hamas: It wasn’t Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak who decided to blow up a huge tunnel dug from Gaza into Israel (miraculously causing no casualties); fire an antitank missile at an army jeep inside Israel, wounding four soldiers, one critically; and launch over 120 rockets at southern Israel in two days – all of which occurred in the week before Jabari’s killing, constituting a major escalation that Israel couldn’t ignore.
But if Israel’s unexpectedly tough response really had been dictated by the upcoming election, my reaction would be, “Three cheers for democracy!” Because regardless of the motive, action against the rocket threat is long overdue. The disgrace is that successive governments refrained from such action for most of the previous seven years.
A Facebook graphic posted as part of the social media war accompanying the real one shows missiles raining on the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower and the Sydney Opera House and asks, “What would you do?” Everyone knows the answer: America, Britain, France and Australia wouldn’t tolerate missiles on their citizens for a moment. Yet when Palestinians launched over 6,000 rockets at southern Israel in the three years following its mid-2005 pullout from Gaza, successive Israeli governments remained passive. This non-response, as former US Ambassador Dan Kurtzer noted, accustomed the world to viewing rocket fire on Israel as acceptable.
In December 2008, Israel finally launched Operation Cast Lead. That significantly reduced the fire, but only temporarily: The number of rocket and mortar launches jumped from “only” 158 in 2010 (the equivalent of one roughly every other day) to 680 in 2011 and about 900 this year even before Jabari’s assassination. Yet once again, Israel’s government ignored the problem for years.
If, like most of the world, you look only at casualty figures, rocket fire may not seem so terrible: Rocket attacks killed eight people in 2010 and 2011 combined; a single suicide bombing often kills double or triple that number.
But normal life doesn’t begin and end with not being killed. Rockets that cause no casualties can still destroy a house, shattering a family’s life. They still cause repeated school closures, disrupting children’s education. And worst of all is the constant fear.
In Sderot, the town nearest Gaza, an incredible 45% of children under six suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, along with 41% of mothers and 33% of fathers. As more communities come within the rockets’ ever-expanding range, these horrifying statistics are presumably being replicated elsewhere.
The debilitating effects of such fear are hard to explain to someone who has never experienced it. How, for instance, do you quantify the degraded functioning that comes from never getting a proper night’s sleep, because night after night, you lie awake tensely awaiting the siren that warns you have only seconds to reach shelter? Or the developmental impact of children afraid to go out to play, afraid even to leave their parents’ sides? Yet these effects are shatteringly real.
Now, the government is finally trying to do something about it. The danger, however, is that it might repeat its predecessor’s mistake in Cast Lead: settling for half-measures that allow Hamas to continue the rocket fire with impunity as long as it lowers the volume to a level the government deems “tolerable” – whether or not residents of the south agree.
Killing Jabari, the head of Hamas’s military wing, was a good first step; it’s the first time Hamas’s leadership has paid a personal price for the rocket fire. But it clearly wasn’t sufficient, as the hundreds of rockets launched at Israel since amply prove.
Nor is there any point in another “in-and-out” operation like Cast Lead, which would produce no more than another temporary reduction in the fire: Hamas would just rebuild its forces and its arsenal once again. And it certainly doesn’t care about the suffering such an operation would cause Gaza’s civilian population.
Therefore, pace several leading opposition politicians, Israel should seriously consider permanently reoccupying a stretch of Gaza near the Israeli border. As its experience in the West Bank shows, a permanent IDF presence can reduce terror from a given territory to near-zero levels over time. It’s no accident that not one rocket was ever launched at Israel from the West Bank, even during the height of the intifada, while more than 12,700 rockets and mortars have been fired from Gaza since 2001: The IDF didn’t control most of Gaza even before the 2005 pullout, since it never returned to areas it quit under the 1994 Gaza-Jericho agreement. The West Bank, in contrast, was completely reoccupied in 2002.
Permanently reoccupying territory along the Gaza-Israel border would accomplish two things. First, it would push short-range rockets and mortars out of range of Israel. These weapons not only account for most of the fire, but are also the hardest to stop: Medium- and long-range rocket launchers are easier to detect and destroy, while Iron Dome, though ineffective against short-range missiles, has proven fairly successful at intercepting longer-range ones.
Second, this would create a powerful deterrent: Hamas cares greatly about maintaining control of its Gaza fiefdom, and once it knows Israel won’t hesitate to deprive it of territory, it will think twice about risking further territorial losses by continued rocket fire. Again, the model is the West Bank, where Palestinians have been deterred from launching another intifada in part by the loss of territorial control they suffered during the last one.
Granted, a permanent reoccupation would put our soldiers at risk. But armies are supposed to protect civilians, not vice versa. For seven years, Israel has let civilians bear the brunt of Hamas terror while keeping its soldiers safe from harm; it’s past time for that to be reversed. For if a Jewish state and a Jewish army can’t keep Jewish children from being target practice, there’s frankly not much point in having either.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
The latest escalation along the Israel-Gaza border – which saw Palestinians fire more than 250 rockets at Israel since Wednesday after Israel, responding to days of only slightly less intensive rocket fire, assassinated a senior Hamas terrorist and destroyed most of Hamas’s long-range missiles on Wednesday – may yet be interrupted by another temporary cease-fire, of which there have been many in recent years. But that’s unlikely to change the trajectory: Israel and Hamas appear to be heading for another full-scale war, one more devastating than the one they fought in January 2009. In large part, this is thanks to the “Arab Spring,” which eroded the deterrent effect of that earlier war by strengthening Hamas’ position and weakening Israel’s.
Hamas’s newfound confidence was evident not only from the rise in the volume and frequency of rocket attacks from Gaza – prior to Wednesday’s escalation, Palestinians had fired more than 900 rockets and mortars at Israel this year, up from 680 in 2011 and 158 in 2010 – but even more from the fact that recently, for the first time in years, it began openly claiming responsibility for many of these attacks. After the 2009 war, Hamas generally left rocket launches to smaller terrorist groups that it claimed it couldn’t control. This effort at deniability was a transparent ruse; Hamas openly supported most of these groups. Nevertheless, it showed that Hamas wanted to avoid goading Israel into attacking it directly. By brazenly claiming credit for attacks, it showed it no longer feared doing so.
As JINSA Visiting Fellow Yaakov Lappin noted earlier this week, one major factor in Hamas’ new confidence was the rise to power of its Egyptian parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. The new regime hasn’t fulfilled Hamas’ fondest hopes; it rejected Hamas’ request for an Egypt-Gaza free trade zone and has repeatedly accused it of sheltering Islamic extremists who attacked Egyptian forces in Sinai. Nevertheless, Hamas remained confident that the Muslim Brotherhood couldn’t acquiesce in a major Israeli operation in Gaza like former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak did. It therefore believed Israel would fear to launch such an operation lest it endanger the peace treaty with Egypt – and presumably still hopes Egypt’s clear displeasure will force Israel to back down quickly.
Perhaps equally significant, however, was the Sunni-led uprising in Syria, which unexpectedly benefited Sunni Hamas by forcing it to break with its Alawite and Shi’ite patrons in Damascus and Tehran.
This is what finally ended Hamas’ diplomatic isolation: The emir of Qatar, a major backer of the Syrian opposition, became Hamas’ first state visitor in October, and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, another key backer of Syria’s opposition, plans to follow suit. The Qatari emir also brought a $400 million gift – which, aside from its intrinsic value, boosted Hamas’ stock among its Palestinian constituents: With the rival Palestinian Authority facing chronic budget deficits due to dwindling foreign donations, Hamas’s ability to secure such a windfall was clearly a coup.
Moreover, this gave Hamas a voice in Washington, something it lacked when its main patrons were Iran and Syria. Unlike those countries, Qatar and Turkey are American allies; Erdogan in particular is one of the leaders President Barack Obama consults most frequently. That may have led Hamas to hope Israel would face more American pressure to avoid war than it did in 2009.
A third critical development was Egypt’s post-revolution loss of control over Sinai. This gave Hamas vital strategic depth: It maintains bases and arms factories in Sinai that are immune from Israeli attack due to the Israeli-Egyptian treaty. Additionally, however, the rise in cross-border attacks on Israel from Sinai provided Hamas with a perfect excuse for escalating its own anti-Israel activity: Because Israel can’t target terrorists in Sinai due to the treaty, the only way it can forestall such attacks is through operations in Gaza, which often supplies personnel, weaponry, training, planning and organizing for Sinai-based attacks. Consequently, the volume of Israeli strikes on Gaza rose significantly over the past year. This allowed Hamas to tell both its own people and its Arab backers that it was merely responding to Israeli “aggression,” when in reality, Gaza was the one attacking Israel – both via Sinai and through hundreds of rockets launched long before Sinai-based terror became an issue.
But despite the undoubted improvement in its position, Hamas appears to have overlooked one thing: Israel’s government simply couldn’t sit with folded hands while its citizens were under constant rocket fire. In a transparent effort to mobilize international support for tougher action against Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained this bluntly to a group of foreign ambassadors he brought to the southern town of Ashkelon on Monday. “A million Israelis, including many little children … are targeted on a daily basis,” he said. “I don’t know of any of your governments who could accept such a thing. I don’t know of any of the citizens of your cities, who could find that acceptable.”
Israel’s first step has been an extensive air campaign. But if that doesn’t work, the next step will almost certainly be a major ground offensive.
Two months ago, Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned that Israel might even reoccupy parts of Gaza in a future conflict. And indeed, should the rocket and mortar fire persist, Israel may well seriously consider creating a territorial buffer against the short-range weapons that are responsible for the bulk of it. Long-term control of territory has proven its ability to prevent terror in the West Bank, reducing Israeli fatalities from more than 400 in 2002 to nine in 2011 while ensuring that not a single rocket has ever been fired from there, compared to more than 8,000 fired from Gaza. And reoccupying even a relatively small strip of Gaza near the Israeli border would push short-range weapons out of range of Israeli communities. These are weapons the Iron Dome antimissile system can’t handle, though it has proven relatively effective against longer-range weapons.
This would also have a major deterrent effect: Just as West Bank Palestinians have been reluctant to resume terror in part because the second intifada cost them control of significant chunks of territory (Israeli forces still haven’t withdrawn to the September 2000 lines), Hamas, even if it remained in power, would be much less likely to launch a future war if it knew the price would be loss of territory.
In truth, even the smaller quantity of missiles aimed at Israel before the recent escalation ought to have been intolerable for any self-respecting government. But the current volume certainly is. Hence unless Hamas unexpectedly backs down, a full-scale Israel-Hamas war now looks inevitable.
If Washington is serious about stopping Iran’s nuclear program, the report it really ought to pay attention to isn’t the International Atomic Energy Agency’s latest, important though its information on Iran’s progress is. Rather, it’s the one issued last week by Iran’s own Intelligence Ministry, which advocates diplomatic negotiations to avert the threat of a “Zionist” attack.
As Haaretz Arab affairs analyst Zvi Bar’el wrote, this report is noteworthy for several reasons. One is that Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi is close to Iran’s supreme leader and decision-maker, Ali Khamenei, who even forced President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to retain Moslehi when the president wanted to fire him last year. Another is that Khamenei posted the report on his own website and has shown it to Western leaders. In other words, there’s good reason to think this report reflects Khamenei’s own thinking.
That makes it worth paying attention to what it says–which is equally noteworthy. First, as Bar’el pointed out, the report advocates negotiations, not in response to economic sanctions, but due to the threat of military action. Second, this threat doesn’t come from America: The report doesn’t even mention the prospect of American military action, and in fact concludes that Washington doesn’t consider Iran’s nuclear program a threat. What concerns the ministry is the threat of Israeli military action.
Several conclusions follow from these points. First, just as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed all along, the only way it might be possible to get Iran to give up its nuclear program is via a credible military threat.
Second, despite President Barack Obama’s lip service about keeping the military option on the table and his cheerleaders’ insistence that he isn’t bluffing and really will take military action against Iran if necessary, the Iranians themselves don’t believe it–and they’re the ones who matter.
Third, despite the enormous effort the administration has invested in trying to deter Israeli military action against Iran, the Iranians still think Israel might defy Washington and attack, and they also believe Israel is capable of inflicting enough damage that they’ve decided adopting “a political-diplomatic policy” and exploiting “the potential of international organizations” is a “necessary course of action” to avoid it. That’s an enormous achievement for Netanyahu: He has kept the Israeli military option credible in Iranian eyes despite the administration’s best efforts to undermine it.
Finally, however, there’s no indication that Iran is willing to actually make concessions on its nuclear program, as opposed to merely engaging in empty negotiations for the sake of forestalling a military attack. And that fact (which should be a warning to anyone who embarks on negotiations with it) may well be related to the fact that the regime considers an Israeli attack damaging but survivable.
Thus, while I’m all in favor of tougher sanctions, like those Congress is now considering, what the Iranian report shows is that if Washington really wants to end Iran’s nuclear program, the thing it needs most is a credible military option. For only if Tehran felt threatened by America’s far superior military might it actually consider abandoning this program.
Given how important the American-Israeli relationship is to Israel, it’s not surprising that last week’s US presidential election garnered massive media and political attention. But even with a news event of such magnitude as competition, it’s shocking that what ought to have been an earth-shaking scandal received no more than passing notice.
Last week, Channel 2 television reported that in fall 2010, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered the army to its highest level of alert, known as P-plus, in preparation for a possible strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But the order was never carried out – and therein lies the scandal. For depending on whose version of events you believe, either our top defense officials effectively carried out a coup against the elected civilian government by refusing to obey it, or they betrayed their primary responsibility by failing to prepare the army for war.
What all the players agree on is that Gabi Ashkenazi, then the Israel Defense Forces’ chief of staff, opposed the order, as did then-Mossad director Meir Dagan.
“This is not something you do unless you’re certain you want to see it through,” Channel 2 quoted Ashkenazi as saying. It also quoted “sources close to Ashkenazi” as explaining that he objected because he thought P-plus status would create “facts on the ground” that would inevitably lead to war.
Dagan, the station added, considered the order downright “illegal,” since it hadn’t been approved by the cabinet; he accused Netanyahu and Barak of “trying to steal a war.”
What happened next is disputed. If you believe Barak, Ashkenazi said the IDF also lacked the operational capacity to execute the order, leaving him no choice but to rescind it.
Yet every senior defense official has known for years that Iran’s nuclear program tops Israel’s security agenda, and that if nonmilitary means failed, the army would probably be ordered to stop it militarily. Thus if Ashkenazi indeed neglected to prepare the army for such an eventuality, that is malfeasance of the highest order. Nor would it be less grave if the problem were lack of preparedness for war in general rather than for an Iranian strike in particular: A chief of staff’s number-one responsibility is to ensure that the army is always ready for war – especially in a country like Israel, where war can erupt at a moment’s notice.
Ashkenazi, however, vehemently denies Barak’s charge: He says he did prepare the IDF both for war in general and for an Iran strike in particular; he merely thought the order was a strategic mistake. In other words, he simply refused to execute a legal order by the elected government. Effectively, therefore, he carried out a military coup, abetted by Dagan – who, as Mossad chief, wasn’t even in the military chain of command, and thus had no business whatsoever intervening.
For this order, pace Dagan, was indubitably legal. It’s true that actually carrying out the strike would require the diplomatic-security cabinet’s approval. But P-plus status isn’t an order to start the planes rolling; it’s an order to make all necessary preparations to do so at a moment’s notice. Hence it doesn’t require the same level of approval.
Indeed, given Israel’s culture of leaks, the only responsible way to order an attack on Iran would be exactly what Netanyahu and Barak apparently tried to do: first have the army make all necessary preparations for the strike, then convene the cabinet to approve it, and finally order the planes to take off immediately after the vote, before anyone could leak it to the media and thereby impair the chances of success.
Only if a P-plus alert really would lead inevitably to war would Dagan’s demand for prior cabinet approval be justified. That, however, is sheer nonsense: A military operation can always be aborted, right up until it is launched. Indeed, the first strike Israel ever planned on a nuclear facility was aborted at the last minute; the successful attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor took place three weeks later.
One might say all this is water under the bridge: Dagan retired in December 2010 and Ashkenazi in February 2011, so both are now out of office. And the fact that their departures were already imminent in fall 2010 may excuse what would otherwise be a shocking failure by two men still in office, Netanyahu and Barak: The few extra weeks that would have been gained by summarily dismissing them probably wouldn’t have been worth the media uproar and court challenges that would certainly have followed.
Nevertheless, this incident matters greatly, for two reasons. The less important one is that Ashkenazi is openly eyeing a political career, abetted by his media cheerleaders. Yet someone who, after being entrusted with the nation’s highest military office, either grossly failed to carry out his most vital responsibilities, or grossly abused his power by disobeying a legitimate order from the elected government, is patently unfit to play any role in the country’s governance.
Far more important, however, is that military subordination to the civilian government is a sine qua non of democracy. As Barak correctly told Channel 2, the chief of staff is obliged to offer his professional opinion, but the government has the right to overrule him. And the fact that this is the second case in as many years of insubordination to a legitimate government decision on a very important issue shows that this norm is rapidly eroding.
Nor is the problem confined to Ashkenazi: Though he was the prime culprit in the earlier case, too, his disregard of a government order to bolster the IDF’s presence along the Egyptian border was continued by the current chief of staff, Benny Gantz.
Media pundits, civil-society groups and even foreign officials have bloviated repeatedly in recent years about Israel’s “endangered democracy,” almost always on spurious pretexts. But defense officials refusing to obey the elected government’s legitimate orders isn’t a spurious threat to democracy; it’s a very real one.
Yet about this, our self-appointed guardians of democracy seem to have nothing to say. And that may be the most frightening thing of all.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
As Syria’s civil war drags on, it is increasingly destabilizing its neighbors. First, hundreds of thousands of refugees poured over their borders; now, violence has as well. Turkey and Syria have repeatedly exchanged deadly cross-border fire; in Jordan, a soldier was killed in clashes with militants heading for Syria to join the fighting; in Lebanon, the assassination of a senior intelligence official considered close to the Syrian opposition sparked violent clashes in Beirut. Ironically, in fact, Syria’s quietest border nowadays is with Israel – the one neighbor it’s officially at war with. Despite occasional accidents (tanks straying into the demilitarized zone during the ongoing civil war, errant bullets and mortars), there has been no intentional violence across this border, and no casualties.
Yet in reality, this shouldn’t be surprising; it’s the logical outgrowth of a basic fact about the Middle East that is too often overlooked: Contrary to the popular perception that the region revolves around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the truth is that Israel is irrelevant to most of the region most of the time, because it isn’t a player in the nonstop jockeying for power among the Mideast’s various Muslim sects and countries.
Syria, for instance, is currently the locus of two major intra-Muslim power struggles: that between Shi’ites and Sunnis, and that between Iran and Saudi Arabia (which is closely related but not identical: two years ago, for instance, Sunni Hamas was aligned with Shi’ite Iran, while its Gaza fiefdom was under blockade by Saudi-aligned Sunni Egypt). And with the exception of Israel, all of Syria’s neighbors have taken sides in one or both of these struggles.
Sunni Turkey, though basically neutral in the Saudi-Iranian fight, is openly aiding Sunni Islamists among the Syrian opposition. Sunni Jordan, though wary of Sunni Islamists (who are also the greatest threat to its own regime), is being used by smugglers as a conduit for arms to the Syrian opposition, and its ally in Riyadh would like it to allow such traffic officially. Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shi’ite group, is openly fighting alongside the Iranian-backed Syrian regime, while Lebanese Sunnis back the Syrian opposition. And Shi’ite Iraq lets Iran send arms to the Assad regime through its territory.
Israel, however, has no horse in this race, because both sides dislike it equally: Iran is currently its greatest enemy, yet Sunni Islamists, whose prominence in the Syrian opposition is growing, also pose a major threat. And since Israel isn’t aiding either side, neither government nor opposition forces have any incentive to waste men and munitions on attacking it.
Yet, as recent Mideast history amply shows, Israel’s irrelevance to the conflict now embroiling the rest of the region isn’t exceptional, but the norm. Think back to the last time a Mideast conflict involved as many countries as Syria’s now does, and one fact leaps out: Israel wasn’t a party to it.
Israel has conducted three major military operations over the last decade: against Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank in 2002, against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, and against Hamas in Gaza in 2009. Yet none of these prompted any involvement beyond the rhetorical from any other Mideast country, with the partial exception of Iran, which resupplied Hamas and Hezbollah afterward.
In contrast, several Arab countries actively aided the opposition during last year’s Libyan civil war, while Saudi Arabia sent troops into Bahrain in 2011 to support the Sunni government against a Shi’ite opposition it viewed as Iranian-backed. And in the 1991 Gulf War, almost every country in the region joined an American-led alliance to reverse Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
Saddam Hussein, like many Mideast rulers, frequently proclaimed his desire to annihilate Israel. But the two countries he actually tried to annihilate were Iran, via an inconclusive war in 1980-88, and Kuwait. The reason was simple: Saddam wasn’t a fanatic ideologue committed to waging holy war on behalf of a cause, but a run-of-the-mill dictator whose main interest was augmenting his own power, and who therefore aspired to dominate the region. And to do that, Saddam needed to vanquish not Israel – which doesn’t care who dominates the rest of the region as long as it is left alone, and thus rarely takes sides in regional power plays – but his rivals for regional domination.
The revolutionary Shi’ite government that seized power in Iran in 1979 was a clear rival to Saddam, and particularly threatening to his Sunni-minority rule of Shi’ite-majority Iraq. Kuwait, though no threat in itself, had lucrative oil fields that would bolster Iraq financially (and thus militarily) in its bid for regional dominance, and due to its close alliance with another aspirant for regional dominance, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait’s conquest would also undermine Riyadh’s prestige.
This power struggle also explains why most Mideast countries joined the effort to oust Saddam from Kuwait: They wanted to prevent him from achieving regional dominance.
And Israel? The man who launched two full-scale wars against his Muslim neighbors launched a token 40 Scuds at Israel in 1991, and even that mainly in hopes of disrupting the American-led alliance; most of his opponents have never attacked Israel directly at all. For all their talk, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict simply isn’t that important to them.
Iran’s nuclear program offers further evidence against the theory of Palestinian centrality. Virtually every Arab leader has urged Washington to take military action against Iran. Some even openly support Israeli military action; others are thought to do so quietly (hence the persistent rumors of Israeli-Saudi cooperation on this issue). Yet Israel’s reputed nuclear arsenal provokes no similar hysteria among Arab regimes. Why? Because they know Israel isn’t interested in regional domination; its putative nuclear arsenal is only for self-defense. Iran, in contrast, openly seeks regional domination and wants nuclear weapons partly to further that goal. Hence Israel’s weapons aren’t a threat, but Iran’s are.
Clearly, ideology can be a very powerful motivator. Israel, founded after a war that saw Hitler diverting desperately needed resources from the war front to the cause of slaughtering Jews until the bitter end, knows this better than most. That’s why it takes the genocidal rhetoric emanating from Iran’s leaders – men fanatic enough to send hordes of children to clear minefields with their bodies during the Iran-Iraq War – with utmost seriousness, especially when coupled with Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.
But most Mideast leaders aren’t ideological zealots; they’re ordinary rulers concerned primarily with their own interests. They pay lip service to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because pro-Palestinian rhetoric serves as public diplomacy in their regional power game: It paints the speaker as concerned with “oppressed fellow Muslims” and opposed to “Western colonialism” (i.e. non-Muslim Israel), and hence suited for regional leadership. But it’s a great mistake to confuse such rhetoric with reality.
What chiefly concerns most of these countries is the regional balance of power between rival Muslim sects and states. And in this, neither Israel nor its conflict with the Palestinians is a player.
In fact, far from being the axis around which the region revolves, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – as the Syrian crisis once again shows – barely rates as a sideshow.
Now that the elections are over and President Barack Obama is returning to business, one person he should pay some serious attention to is the new head of Israel’s Labor Party, Shelly Yacimovich. All polls show Labor becoming the second-largest party by a large margin after Israel’s January 22 election. Thus, if Obama is hoping for an alternative to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, she’s the only serious possibility.
So here, according to Israeli embassy reports on her meetings with French officials in July, is what she thinks on diplomatic issues: She thinks the Palestinians should negotiate without preconditions – just like Netanyahu. She thinks they must recognize Israel as a Jewish state – again like Netanyahu. She thinks Israel should retain the major settlement blocs, and shouldn’t withdraw to the 1967 lines – yet again like Netanyahu.
And, from an interview last year: While she thinks most settlements will have to go under any deal with the Palestinians, she, like Netanyahu, doesn’t consider them “a sin and a crime.” Moreover, again like Netanyahu, she doesn’t think the “peace process” should top Israel’s agenda (though she disagrees with him over what should). In fact, as she herself said just last week, she is “fighting for” the cause of “ending the dichotomy between left and right in foreign affairs. There are no longer two blocs … it’s all a fixation.”
In short, contrary to the media’s persistent portrayal of Netanyahu as a “hardline right-winger” heading a “far right” coalition, his positions on the Palestinian issue are shared by almost all Israelis – not only supporters of his coalition, but also supporters of what is likely to be the main opposition party come January, assuming Netanyahu (as expected) forms the next government. What will probably keep Yacimovich out of his coalition aren’t her diplomatic views, but his economic ones.
Hence if Obama is hoping for an Israeli leader whose positions on the “peace process” will be closer to his own than Netanyahu’s, he should think again: There isn’t one.
It’s not that they don’t exist in theory: Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni both deem an agreement with the Palestinians top priority, fall somewhere to the left of Netanyahu and Yacimovich on specific final-status issues, and are reportedly considering running. There’s only one problem: They have virtually no support. Between them, they have held almost every senior cabinet portfolio, whereas Yacimovich is a second-term MK with no cabinet experience whatsoever. Yet when pollsters asked Israelis last week who should lead the center-left bloc, Yacimovich got more votes than Olmert and Livni combined.
That’s no accident, any more than the fact that Labor – the party that signed the Oslo Accords and has traditionally headed Israel’s self-described “peace camp” – overwhelmingly voted to be led by a woman who deems socioeconomic issues more important than peace talks (“Before we … engage in a struggle for peace, we need to have a state,” as she put it). As I’ve written before, this has been the mainstream Israeli view for years. It just took a while to produce mainstream party leaders who agreed.
Today, Israel has two: Netanyahu and Yacimovich. One of them will be running Israel for the next four years. And the sooner Obama comes to terms with that fact, the better.
A group of Israeli Arab activists is currently working to establish a new political party very different from the existing ones: Instead of focusing almost exclusively on the Palestinian issue, its focus would be on bread-and-butter issues of concern to all Israeli Arabs: housing, employment, crime, etc.
“[Current] Arab MKs are interested only in matters pertaining to the Palestinians and events in Arab countries,” one of the activists told Israel Hayom. “[They] are more often found outside the country than in the streets of Arab villages and cities in Israel, and it’s time we changed that.”
Judging by a study published last month, Israeli Arabs may be ripe for such a party. The survey found that only 12 percent of Israeli Arabs deemed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict their most pressing concern; the rest cited domestic issues, particularly education (24 percent), poverty and unemployment (24 percent), and crime (16 percent).
Yet the survey’s other results provide grounds for skepticism – because while it’s clear Israeli Arabs want more political attention paid to such problems, it’s not at all clear they understand that the existing Arab parties are the number-one reason why it isn’t.
The survey’s goal was to determine why Israeli Arabs vote in much lower numbers than Israeli Jews, and how their participation could be increased. In the 2009 election, for instance, Arab turnout was only 53 percent, while total turnout was 64.7 percent and Jewish turnout around 68 percent.
A sizable minority of respondents (17 percent) said they boycott elections out of ideological opposition to the Jewish state. But the study found that a much larger percentage simply sees no point in voting, because they don’t believe their vote has any impact on government decision-making.
In that, they are undeniably correct: Israeli Arabs vote overwhelmingly for Arab parties, which have never been part of any governing coalition and thus have little impact on decision-making.
Yet this isn’t a matter of anti-Arab discrimination: Arab MKs from mainstream parties like Labor and Likud – mainly Druze, but sometimes non-Druze Arabs as well – have served as ministers and deputy ministers in several cabinets. Rather, it’s due to the Arab parties’ views and conduct, which make them unacceptable partners for any Israeli government, and always will.
How, for instance, could Balad be part of any Israeli government when one of its MKs proudly participated in a 2010 attempt to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza – a legal blockade supported by every major party – and then spread blatant lies about the incident in an effort to smear Israel overseas, insisting that her fellow flotilla passengers used no violence even in the face of video footage that showed them viciously assaulting Israeli soldiers with (as a UN report concluded) iron bars, staves, chains, slingshots and possibly knives? Or when its former leader publicly urged both Israeli Arabs and Arab states to emulate Hezbollah’s terror war against Israel?
Similarly, how could Hadash or United Arab List be part of any Israeli government when Hadash chairman MK Mohammed Barakeh publicly called for Israeli Arabs to join the Palestinian violence against Israel that erupted in September 2000, while UAL MK Taleb A-Sana publicly praised a Tel Aviv shooting attack that wounded 10 people, mainly soldiers, as a “legitimate struggle” for which “there can be no guilt feelings”? Or when MKs from all three Arab parties routinely deem Israeli ministers “fascists,” “terrorists,” “murderers” and other such epithets every time they approve military action in Israel’s defense?
It ought to be clear that there can be no common ground between parties that justify and encourage anti-Israel terror and parties that deplore it, between parties that uphold Israel’s right to self-defense and parties that reject it. Hence as long as Israeli Arabs keep electing MKs who hold such radical views, Arab parties will continue to be excluded from all governments and devoid of influence.
Yet judging by the poll results, it’s far from clear that Israeli Arabs understand this basic fact. For instance, 59 percent of respondents said they would be more likely to vote if the Arab parties united – as if a single Arab party with the same radical views would somehow be less of a pariah. Similarly, 56 percent said they would be more likely to vote if an Arab were guaranteed at least one ministerial position. That means they either see no problem with granting a cabinet post to someone who lauds anti-Israel terror while publicly reviling his fellow ministers as “murderers,” or they see no problem with expecting mainstream parties to magically produce Arab ministers from their own ranks even though the overwhelming majority of Arab Israelis neither join them nor vote for them.
Equally troubling was that 49 percent said they would be more likely to vote if Israeli Arabs were guaranteed Knesset representation equal to their proportion in the population. Needless to say, that doesn’t require special guarantees; it merely requires Arab Israelis to vote in the same numbers that Jewish Israelis do. Yet these respondents evidently consider it reasonable to be guaranteed representation even if they don’t bother to vote.
In short, many Israeli Arabs appear to want rights with no attendant responsibilities: Knesset representation with no need to actually vote, cabinet representation with no need to stop advocating terror against their fellow citizens. And that is a fantasy that will never come true.
But an Arab party dedicated primarily to improving housing, education and employment opportunities for the Arab community could easily be part of any Israeli coalition, just as haredi parties concerned primarily with addressing their community’s needs are. Unlike, say, the demand that Israel refrain from defending itself against Palestinian terror, demands for better education and employment opportunities are completely legitimate, and most Israelis recognize them as such.
The question is whether Israeli Arabs, for all their stated concern about these goals, are willing to give up their rhetorical assaults on the Jewish state in order to advance them. If the planned new party indeed runs, Israel may finally get an answer to this question.
And for the sake of Arab and Jewish Israelis alike, it must be hoped the answer will be yes.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
One of the most frightening things I’ve read in a long time was an interview with Home Front Defense Minister Avi Dichter last week in which he asserted that Israel would need American help for any military strike against Iran’s nuclear program. “We have the capabilities of a state. But the US has the capabilities of a superpower,” he explained. “Iran is a regional Muslim power from both a military standpoint as well as from the standpoint of its scientific and technological capabilities.”
Actually, my first reaction wasn’t fear, but outrage. For while Iran today is indeed a regional power, a few decades ago, so was Egypt. In fact, by almost any measure, the balance of power between Israel and Egypt then was far more lopsided in Egypt’s favor than today’s balance of power is with Iran. Nevertheless, Israel managed to win three solo wars against Egypt from 1948-1973. So why should it be incapable of doing today what it clearly was capable of doing back then?
Consider, for instance, the difference between today’s situation and 1967. Back then, America refused to sell most types of weaponry to Israel; today, Israel is generously supplied with top-of-the-line American arms. Back then, Egypt fought in alliance with Syria and Jordan, both of which fielded powerful armies of their own; Iran’s likely allies boil down to Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whose capabilities, while non-negligible, pale beside those of Syria and Jordan. Back then, Egypt and Syria were both clients of a superpower (the Soviet Union), whereas Israel lacked superpower backing; today, it’s Israel that has superpower backing, while Iran makes do with lukewarm support from lesser military powers like Russia and China. Finally, Israel today has three times the population and twice the GDP that it did in 1967, giving it far more men to put under arms and money with which to equip them.
In short, back in 1967, a smaller, poorer, worse-armed Israel with no superpower backing could nevertheless defeat a regional power with formidable allies and superpower backing all by itself. But today, according to Dichter, a much bigger, richer, better-armed Israel with superpower backing is incapable of fighting unaided against a regional power with no state allies and no superpower backing. Objectively speaking, it sounds ridiculous; hence my outrage at hearing a top defense official spout it.
But it didn’t take long for fear to set in – because regardless of the objective balance of power, an army that believes itself incapable of winning almost certainly will be. And while it’s possible that Dichter doesn’t represent the defense establishment’s consensus view, judging by his record, he is one of this establishment’s least defeatist senior officials: As Shin Bet security service director from 2000-2005, not only was he a major architect of the counterterrorism strategy that defeated the second intifada, but he pushed this strategy in the teeth of objections from Israel Defense Forces officers who insisted – wrongly – that “there is no military solution to terror.”
In contrast, many senior IDF officers argued against a major military operation in West Bank refugee camps (where terrorist groups were largely based), issuing panicked warnings that it would result in hundreds of dead soldiers. In reality, Israel lost 30 soldiers in Operation Defensive Shield in 2002 – less than a quarter of the 132 Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists in a single month before the operation.
Senior army officers similarly warned that a major military operation against Hamas in Gaza would result in hundreds of dead soldiers; in reality, Israel lost exactly 10 soldiers in Operation Cast Lead in 2009, four of them to friendly fire. And today, senior IDF officers still insist there is “no military solution” to terror from Gaza, even though the IDF itself decisively disproved this theory in the West Bank just a few years ago.
I’m all in favor of senior defense officials eschewing reckless overconfidence; the Second Lebanon War of 2006 amply showed how dangerous that can be. Even against a third-rate opponent like Hezbollah, victory is impossible if defense officials neglect the basics: a sound battle plan, proper training and good logistics.
But at the same time, there’s no point in having an army at all if you’re afraid to use it when truly necessary. And it’s hard to think of a greater necessity than stopping Iran’s nuclear program: Defense Minister Ehud Barak exaggerated only slightly when he said “The [Iranian] sword hanging over our neck today is a lot sharper than the sword that hung over our neck before the [1967] Six-Day War.”
The danger posed by defeatism is a recurring theme in Jewish history (though in fairness, so is the danger of overconfidence). The first example, as Israel Harel noted in Haaretz a few weeks ago, dates back to right after the exodus from Egypt: Spies sent to Canaan in advance of a planned Israelite conquest returned to say the Jews couldn’t possibly win, because the people of the land were “giants; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” God finally solved that problem by making the Israelites wander in the desert for 40 years until the entire generation had died, after which a new, less defeatist generation accomplished the conquest fairly easily.
Today, however, Israel can’t afford to wait 40 years. Barring unforeseen developments, Iran’s nuclear program could hit the point of no return as early as this spring, requiring Israel to choose between military action and a nuclear Iran. And as I explained in this column three weeks ago, should military action be necessary, Israel will almost certainly have to do it without American help.
From a strictly military standpoint, Israel probably has the capacity to do the job. The question is whether our political and military leaders can find the courage to use this capacity if necessary. For if the grasshopper mentality prevails instead, the result is liable to be a nuclear Iran.
And however intimidating Iran is as a nonnuclear regional power today, it will be far more dangerous as a nuclear one.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.