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After radical Islamists killed 16 soldiers at an Egyptian army outpost in Sinai this August, Egypt’s military pointed an accusing finger straight at Hamas-run Gaza, whence it said some of the terrorists came. Suiting action to words, Cairo swiftly shut the Egypt-Gaza border crossing, massed troops near Gaza, destroyed some of the cross-border smuggling tunnels and demanded that Hamas extradite three suspects.
This response highlighted a fact that had previously attracted little notice: While Israel has long complained of arms and terrorists entering Gaza from Sinai, the traffic actually goes in both directions. In fact, as a recent study showed, Gaza has played a major role in radicalizing Sinai.
IDF Soldiers in the Jordan ValleyBut that fact has an uncomfortable corollary: To some extent, Sinai’s radicalization was an unintended consequence of Israel’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza. For it was Israel’s pullback that opened the gates through which arms, extremists and radical ideology then poured. And this raises serious questions about the potential consequences for Jordan should Israel accede to international pressure to quit the Jordan Valley.
In a study published by the Washington Institute in January, veteran Israeli journalist Ehud Yaari traced the spread of radical Islam among Sinai Bedouin since the 1980s. Initially, this spread was slow, he wrote, but it exploded after the disengagement:
As Bedouin political activist Ashraf al-Anani put it, “a fireball started rolling into the peninsula.” Illegal trade and arms smuggling volumes rose to new records, and ever-larger sectors of the northern Sinai population became linked to Gaza and fell under the political and ideological influence of Hamas and its ilk … In short, despite then prime minister Ariel Sharon’s quiet hope that Cairo would assume unofficial responsibility for Gaza affairs, the Israeli withdrawal instead allowed Hamas to export its influence into Egyptian territory.
Even before 2005, the border wasn’t hermetically sealed: Despite battling the smuggling nonstop, the Israel Defense Forces never succeeded in halting it entirely. But once the IDF left, smugglers could operate unhindered. Hence, the number of smuggling tunnels soared – to about 1,200, Yaari said – and this increased capacity allowed two-way traffic to surge. Consequently, “the arms flow was often reversed, with weapons going from Gaza to the Sinai. During the revolution, for example, observers noted a huge demand for firearms in the peninsula … Today, a significant number of Hamas military operatives are permanently stationed in the Sinai, serving as recruiters, couriers, and propagators of the Hamas platform. A solid network of the group’s contact men, safe houses, and armories covers much of the peninsula.”
A former IDF officer, Jonathan Halevi, subsequently amplified Yaari’s findings by exploring the Gaza side of the equation. Under Hamas rule, Halevi wrote, many radical Islamic groups flourished in Gaza, including three that Egypt’s military suspect of involvement in August’s attack. Hamas let such groups operate freely as long as they didn’t threaten its rule. And to this end, it sometimes encouraged them to redirect their attention to Sinai.
Theoretically, of course, Egypt could have taken over the IDF’s role in suppressing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling trade. Yaari argues convincingly that Cairo simply didn’t want to, noting that it consistently sent fewer troops to the border than it could have under its agreements with Israel.
But in truth, replicating the IDF’s activity wouldn’t have been easy even if Egypt had so desired. Israel maintained a massive military presence in Gaza and fought the smuggling with every tool in its arsenal, including tanks and airborne missiles, yet still couldn’t stop it completely. In contrast, the Israeli-Egyptian treaty limits Egypt to lightly armed policemen in the part of Sinai nearest Israel. Jerusalem did accede to several Egyptian requests to augment this force, but it probably wouldn’t have approved anything comparable to the IDF presence in Gaza.
And even if it had, Cairo might well have found it politically untenable to deploy massive military force, in full cooperation with Israel, to “lock its Palestinian brethren into a giant prison.”
Nor could the Palestinian Authority substitute for the IDF. Even before Hamas booted it from Gaza in 2007, the PA never attempted to combat the smuggling. But even had it wanted to, it lacked the military capability – as shown by the ease with which Hamas defeated it in 2007. And Israel certainly wouldn’t have let the PA acquire tanks and helicopter gunships.
One might argue that all this is water under the bridge: The IDF is gone, and isn’t likely to return, and Sinai’s radicalization can’t be undone.
But the lessons must be learned to keep this process from being repeated in an even more sensitive locale – Jordan.
Granted, neither an Israeli-Palestinian agreement nor a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank is likely anytime soon. But given the unrelenting international demands for Israel to quit this territory, it could happen someday. And Jordan is, in some ways, even more vulnerable to exported Palestinian radicalism than Sinai: Whereas Sinai Bedouin had no inherent ties with Gaza’s Palestinians, Jordan’s population is two-thirds Palestinian.
There’s also one important way in which Jordan is less vulnerable: It has always policed its border with the West Bank much more effectively than Egypt did with Gaza, and its treaty with Israel doesn’t impose the kind of military restrictions the Israeli-Egyptian treaty does.
Nevertheless, Jordan currently cooperates closely with the IDF. Thus, barring the kind of draconian military measures that its Palestinian-majority population would make politically impossible, an Israeli withdrawal would leave Jordan dependent on the Palestinians to police their side of the border. And even if the Palestinian government were willing to cooperate and able to avoid a reprise of Hamas’s takeover of Gaza – both far from certain – it would still lack Israel’s military capabilities: Every serious peace plan has called for demilitarizing the Palestinian state.
This conundrum is precisely why Israeli military planners initially urged that the Gaza pullout not be complete: The IDF, they said, should remain along the Egyptian border. Israel’s government rejected that proposal. But in retrospect, Egypt might be better off if it hadn’t.
Similarly, every Israeli proposal for an Israeli-Palestinian deal has included leaving the IDF in the Jordan Valley. So far, Washington hasn’t supported this idea. But in light of the Sinai experience, it may be time for Washington to rethink its opposition.
The World Bank issued another report on the Palestinian economy yesterday, and its conclusions were utterly predictable: The Palestinian Authority faces a fiscal crisis, and desperately needs additional handouts on top of the $1.14 billion it’s already getting this year; and the crisis is mostly Israel’s fault. But while blaming Israel is always easy, the truth is the PA hasn’t a prayer of ever resolving its fiscal crisis without addressing the real elephant in the room: Gaza.
According to PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, Gaza accounts for fully 48 percent of the PA’s expenditures. But since Hamas took over the territory in 2007, revenues received from Gaza have plummeted from 28 percent to a mere 4 percent of the PA’s budget. In other words, the PA has a hole equal to 44 percent of its budget due solely to its unbalanced income and outlays on Gaza. Nothing Israel does will be able to compensate for that.
The problem is twofold. First, because Hamas controls Gaza, the PA can’t collect taxes there – and Hamas has no interest in giving the PA any of the taxes it collects. Often, Hamas doesn’t even pay the PA for services received: After the European Union stopped paying for Gaza’s electricity in 2010, for instance, the PA picked up the tab. In fact, that the PA receives any money from Gaza at all is mainly thanks to Israel, which transfers the taxes it collects on goods imported into Gaza from Israel.
Second, much of the money the PA spends in Gaza is totally wasted. Five years after Hamas took over Gaza, for instance, the PA is still paying some 60,000 former PA employees full salaries to sit at home and do absolutely nothing, just to keep them from working for the Hamas government instead. It’s hard to imagine a more unproductive use of money than that. And the sums involved aren’t trivial: Gaza accounts for 40 percent of the 150,000 people on the PA’s payroll, and payroll accounts for about half the PA’s annual budget of almost $4 billion.
Meanwhile, the party that’s de facto been picking up the tab for Gaza’s fiscal black hole is the same one that’s been under constant rocket fire from Gaza for years: The PA has solved part of its budget shortfall, which the World Bank estimates at some $400 million, by not paying its electricity bills to Israel. These unpaid bills now total $160 million – at a time when the Israel Electric Corporation is so far in debt it can no longer raise money without government guarantees, and has been seeking a 30 percent hike in Israelis’ electricity rates to solve its financial problems.
The PA’s international donors are slated to meet on September 23, and will doubtless be tempted to simply regurgitate the World Bank’s Israel-bashing. But if they really want to solve the PA’s fiscal crisis, they need to issue an ultimatum: Either the PA stops blowing half its budget on paying people not to work and subsidizing the Hamas government in Gaza, or its international donors will finally close the spigot.
The attack on the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the Egyptian government’s lame response have understandably drawn international attention. But the same isn’t true for Egypt’s other provocative moves of the last month. And given that American and European officials have been claiming for years that Mideast peace is one of their top foreign policy priorities, their deafening silence over these moves is incomprehensible.
During this month, Egypt first violated the cardinal principle of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty by remilitarizing the Sinai, and then announced plans to spend a significant chunk of the international aid it is seeking on state-of-the-art submarines rather than its shattered economy. Both the treaty violation and the purchase of weaponry that has no conceivable use except against Israel clearly make the prospect of another Israeli-Egyptian war more likely, which ought to be reason enough to object: Of all the times Israel has tried ceding land for peace, the deal with Egypt is the only case in which it actually worked, so if the peace with Egypt goes, even doves like Israeli cabinet minister Dan Meridor have warned that Israelis will never sign another land-for-peace deal.
But as political scientist Amiel Ungar pointed out last week, the remilitarization of Sinai may be enough to quash any future peace deal even if it doesn’t lead to war — because demilitarization has always been a crucial element of other proposed peace deals as well. So if it turns out that demilitarization can be reversed whenever the other party pleases without the world doing anything to stop it, Israelis will think long and hard about entrusting their security to any demilitarization agreement in the future.
Ungar focused specifically on the Palestinian track, given that every serious proposal for an Israeli-Palestinian deal has called for a demilitarized Palestinian state. But what he says is equally true for the Syrian track, since demilitarizing the Golan Heights has been a cardinal element of every Israeli-Syrian deal ever proposed.
Indeed, demilitarization would in some ways be even more crucial on the Palestinian and Syrian fronts than it was with Egypt. The approximately 50 tanks Egypt moved into the border region near Israel last month aren’t a threat in themselves; they are a threat only because they show that Egypt can violate the treaty with impunity, thereby giving it a green light to move more substantial military forces into Sinai in the future. But 50 tanks on either the Golan Heights or the West Bank mountain ridge would be a threat in and of themselves. From the Golan, Syrian tanks could shell much of Israel’s north — which is exactly what they did from 1948 until Israel captured the heights in 1967. And from the West Bank mountain ridge, tanks could shell the entire Israeli heartland, which is home to most of Israel’s population, most of its commercial activity and its only international airport.
Thus if the international community actually considers Arab-Israeli peace a priority, stopping the remilitarization of Sinai is essential. And on this issue, Washington can’t afford to “lead from behind” — because so far, there’s nobody to follow.
As Jonathan noted earlier, the Obama administration’s behavior to date has given Egypt every reason to think it can let a mob attack the U.S. embassy in Cairo with impunity. But there’s a very specific precedent he failed to mention: Just two weeks ago, a Cairo court sentenced 76 people indicted over last September’s mob attack on Israel’s embassy in Cairo. The net result is that not a single person is going to jail over that attack, sending the clearest possible message that mobs can attack foreign embassies in Cairo with impunity. Yet no world leader has lodged even a pro forma protest over this decision.
A brief recap: On September 9, 2011, thousands of Egyptians stormed the Israeli embassy, broke through the security wall and proceeded to loot it. No Israeli diplomats were present at the time, but six Israeli security guards were, and Israel was afraid they would be lynched: They had barricaded themselves in an interior room, but the mob was trying to break down the door. And not only did Egyptian police do nothing to stop the assault, but government officials in Cairo refused even to take calls from their frantic Israeli counterparts. Only after Washington intervened did the Egyptians finally send troops to rescue the Israelis.
The attack was denounced by leaders and diplomats worldwide, and ultimately, 76 people were put on trial for it, as well as for having stoned the nearby Saudi embassy–or, at least, so say various foreign media reports. Two Egyptian media sources, MENA and Al-Ahram, actually reported the indictments as being for attacking the Saudi embassy only, meaning those who attacked Israel’s embassy enjoyed complete immunity.
Either way, the charges were weighty, including “an assault against diplomatic missions” and “sabotage.” But the sentences handed down on August 26 were a joke: All the defendants received suspended sentences except for one who was tried in absentia. He was sentenced to five years, but according to Al-Ahram, less for the embassy attack than for “inciting violence against police” by authoring a book about police brutality and torture. And in any case, since he’s abroad, he won’t be serving any time, either.
The message couldn’t be clearer: The Egyptian legal system doesn’t view attacking embassies as a serious crime. Yet no world leader or diplomat thought this message worth protesting. Indeed, just a week after that verdict, the Obama administration announced that it was about to approve a sweeping debt forgiveness deal for Egypt, and would also back Egypt’s request for a $4.8 billion International Monetary Fund loan. Is it any wonder if official Egypt concluded that Washington doesn’t care all that much about embassy attacks?
The man on the street got the message as well: Attacking embassies is a risk-free endeavor. And today, a crowd of them applied this lesson by attacking another.
This weekend, police arrested five Jewish teens on suspicion of attacking an Arab in downtown Jerusalem Thursday night and breaking his leg with a metal rod. Three weeks earlier, Jewish teens attacked another Arab in downtown Jerusalem, nearly killing their 17-year-old victim. These unprovoked assaults are just the worst of a recent spate of troubling incidents, such as last week’s vandalism of the Latrun monastery or July’s arson attack on an apartment housing migrant workers. Taken altogether, the conclusion is inescapable: A small but growing segment of Israel’s Jewish population considers any form of violence acceptable as long as the victim is non-Jewish. The classic name for this is racism.
Racism is common on the fringes of all societies, but it doesn’t usually spread beyond the margins without encouragement from mainstream opinion leaders. Unfortunately, there has been no lack of such encouragement: Examples range from a municipal rabbi who publicly urged people not to rent apartments to Arabs, yet remains on the government payroll instead of being summarily fired, to an MK from the ruling Likud party who called migrants a “cancer.”
But amid all the rabbis and politicians who have been justly fingered for contributing to this dangerous deterioration, there’s one very important group that usually gets a free pass: the so-called “human rights organizations” and their supporters in political, media and academic circles, who have taught a generation of young Israelis to view “human rights” as a dirty word.
It may seem unfair to target organizations that aren’t urging youngsters to view non-Jews as subhuman at a time when many politicians and rabbis clearly are. But there’s no way to counter racism except by inculcating the fundamental principle of human rights: that all human beings deserve respect simply because they are human – or in the religious version of the principle, because they were all created in God’s image. And you can’t possibly teach people to care about human rights if you turn the term into a synonym for anti-Israel activity. Unfortunately, however, that is precisely what has happened in recent years.
The pivotal event was the Goldstone Commission, set up by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate alleged Israeli war crimes during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2009. Several Israeli “human rights” groups submitted material to the commission in support of these allegations, thereby contributing to a report that ultimately accused Israel of numerous heinous crimes, including deliberately targeting civilians, and recommended indicting it in the International Criminal Court.
Until then, most Israelis had accepted these organizations’ claim that their goal was to improve Israeli society by pointing out abuses. That was a mission Israelis could respect, even if they often disagreed with the organizations’ definition of abuses.
But trying to reform Israel from within is very different from cooperating with one of the world’s most virulently anti-Israel organizations in an effort to get Israeli leaders indicted for war crimes. Israel had no chance of a fair hearing from the Human Rights Council, a body that has devoted 80 percent of its country-specific censures to the Jewish state and made Israel its only permanent agenda item. Thus cooperating with its investigation couldn’t possibly be interpreted as anything but an effort to vilify Israel on the world stage.
Moreover, the material these groups submitted – which contributed substantially to the report’s conclusions – was clearly libelous: Even the report’s author has since recanted many of its findings, admitting, for instance, that Israel didn’t deliberately target civilians, and that most Palestinian casualties were indeed combatants. Unfortunately, this recantation came far too late to undo the damage; much of the world still views Israel as a war criminal. And many Israelis haven’t forgiven the organizations responsible.
But if Goldstone was the turning point, numerous incidents since then have reinforced the impression that “human rights” is just a euphemism for anti-Israel activity. Take, for instance, the uproar over the “Nakba law,” which denied public funding to organizations that commemorate Israel’s establishment as a “nakba,” the Arabic word for catastrophe. Numerous “human-rights” organizations opposed this law, claiming it “crosses a red line in suppressing freedom of expression” (as the Association for Civil Rights in Israel put it). But the law doesn’t prevent anyone from expressing the view that Israel’s creation was a calamity; it merely bars them from doing so on the taxpayer’s dime.
Thus what the law’s opponents were essentially saying is that “human rights” requires the government not only to tolerate a narrative that views the state’s very existence as a “catastrophe,” but even to finance efforts to inculcate this narrative among its own citizens. And most Israelis quite sensibly say that if “human rights” means requiring the state to finance activity so clearly inimical to its own survival, they want no part of it.
Or take the absurd claim raised by many “human rights” organizations that Israel continues to be responsible for residents of Gaza even after having withdrawn from every inch of it. If “human rights” means forcing Israel to assume responsibility for the welfare and health of 1.5 million residents of an entity that it not only doesn’t control, but has been launching rockets at it nonstop, most Israelis will quite sensibly reject the conceptual framework that imposes so onerous and unreasonable a burden.
The problem is that once the phrase “human rights” has become affiliated with such a patently unreasonable set of dogmas, it becomes impossible to teach people to respect real human rights – even ones as fundamental and seemingly obvious as the right to walk down a street without being jumped by thugs: People hear the phrase “human rights” and simply tune out. And that means anyone who opposes such thuggery has no tools with which to counter the racists in the marketplace of ideas. For how do you counter racism without talking about human rights?
Thus in the long run, there’s no way to win the battle against racism without reclaiming the concept of human rights from those who have so egregiously distorted it. And as recent events make clear, this is a battle we can no longer afford to postpone.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
When the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate won Egypt’s presidential elections, the comforting theory pronounced by diplomats and pundits worldwide was that power would force the Brotherhood to moderate its views: Once in power, its first priority would have to be rescuing Egypt’s shattered economy, and this would force it to avoid radical steps liable to antagonize Western donors.
That power isn’t moderating the Brotherhood is crystal clear already: Within two months of taking office, President Mohamed Morsi had already blatantly violated the cardinal principle of the peace treaty with Israel–the demilitarization of Sinai–by sending tanks into the area near the Israeli border without first obtaining Israel’s permission. But now it turns out the Brotherhood also doesn’t care about the economy. It’s only Morsi’s third month in office, and he is already negotiating to spend hundreds of millions of dollars he doesn’t have on something that won’t help the economy one whit: two state-of-the-art submarines from Germany.
The price tag for a new German submarine is about $510 million, meaning two would cost over $1 billion. Thus Morsi is planning to waste more than a fifth of the $4.8 billion loan he just requested from the International Monetary Fund not on helping Egypt’s economy–the ostensible purpose for which he sought the money–but on acquiring expensive military equipment for which Egypt has no conceivable need: It isn’t currently facing a maritime threat from any country or terrorist organization, nor is there reason to think it will in the future.
Or to put it another way, Morsi plans to blow the entirety of the $1 billion debt relief package he is now negotiating with Washington on military hardware rather than helping Egypt’s economy.
The first obvious conclusion from this fact is that neither Washington nor the IMF should approve the requested aid. There might be valid reasons for giving Egypt aid to rebuild its economy. But there are none at all for giving it money to purchase state-of-the-art submarines.
Far more worrying, however, is the issue of why Egypt even wants these subs–because the only possible purpose they could serve is for use against Israel.
Granted, the two countries are officially at peace. But Egypt’s army has continued to view Israel as its principal enemy, and to train accordingly, throughout the decades since the treaty was signed in 1979. Moreover, Israel is the only country in the region that has a state-of-the-art submarine force itself: It recently took possession of its fourth German-built sub, and has two more on order. Taken together, those two facts make it hard to envision any other purpose an Egyptian submarine fleet could rationally serve.
And when you add in Morsi’s move to remilitarize Sinai, the final conclusion from the submarine deal becomes inescapable: Morsi’s top priority isn’t rehabilitating Egypt’s economy, but preparing for war with Israel.
The treaty strictly limits both the number of troops and the type of weaponry Egypt can deploy in Sinai. Any exception to these limits requires Israel’s consent. But Israel has repeatedly granted such consent to facilitate Egyptian counterterrorism efforts, including after jihadis killed 16 soldiers at an Egyptian army outpost in Sinai on August 5. Thus many commentators expected that attack to foster improved Israeli-Egyptian security cooperation in Sinai.
Morsi, however, saw the attack not as grounds for increased cooperation, but as a golden opportunity to eviscerate the treaty. Ten days later, he began pouring troops into Sinai far in excess of the addition Israel had approved. And when Israel stayed mum, he escalated, sending tanks into the border region near Israel in blatant violation of the treaty, which allows only lightly armed policemen in that area (tanks are allowed only on the other side of Sinai, near the Suez Canal). Consequently, Egypt now has more forces in Sinai than it has since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the last few days, a dozen Egyptian tanks were observed departing Sinai leaving some 40 still there and still in violation of the treaty.
Had Egypt asked, Israel might well have consented: As former Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin noted, Israel also uses tanks against terrorists; it’s common sense to exploit superior firepower if you have it.
But Morsi didn’t ask. And the “international community” didn’t utter a peep.
Both Jerusalem and Washington reportedly lodged quiet protests, but publicly, Israeli officials said nothing, aside from denying reports that Egypt had also moved anti-aircraft batteries into Sinai. The Multinational Force and Observers in Sinai, which is ostensibly there to monitor treaty violations, also kept silent. And the State Department’s only public comment when asked about the treaty violations was to laud Egypt for fighting terror – which doubtless contributed to Jerusalem’s unhappy conclusion that Washington wouldn’t “throw its entire weight behind” pressing Egypt to honor the treaty.
Trying to resolve the issue quietly first may make sense. But if quiet diplomacy doesn’t work swiftly – and so far, it hasn’t – Washington must ratchet up the pressure. For if Morsi sees he can violate the treaty with impunity, he has every incentive to keep doing so: Remilitarizing Sinai enjoys wall-to-wall support in Egypt. In Morsi’s own words, “Egypt is practicing its very normal role on its soil and does not threaten anyone and there should not be any kind of international or regional concerns at all from the presence of Egyptian security forces.” In other words, they’re not leaving; get used to it.
The onus falls on Washington, which witnessed the treaty, because Israel has no real leverage over Egypt. Granted, America’s $1.55 billion in annual aid to Egypt also offers limited leverage: Since most of it is military aid, it does little for Egypt’s shattered economy while strengthening Morsi’s main rival. Thus he may well be prepared to forgo it.
But the U.S. wields substantial influence in agencies like the International Monetary Fund, whose aid Morsi desperately needs to rescue his economy. Recently, Egypt requested a $4.8 billion IMF loan. Washington should insist that its approval be conditioned on full compliance with the treaty. Disturbingly, however, it instead seems poised to approve a sweeping aid package – including not only the IMF loan, but also a U.S. debt forgiveness deal – with no such strings attached.
Washington could also seek help from Riyadh, where Morsi paid his first official visit after being elected in a quest for Saudi aid. Since Saudi Arabia itself doesn’t recognize Israel, asking it to use its influence to preserve the treaty may seem odd. But Riyadh has made clear that its top foreign policy priority is halting Iran’s nuclear program (“Cut off the head of the snake,” King Abdullah urged). Thus the last thing it wants is a flare-up on the Israeli-Egyptian border that would distract international, and especially American, attention from Iran.
In fact, Riyadh may not want Israeli attention distracted from Iran: An Israeli strike currently looks much likelier than an American one, and while Abdullah hasn’t publicly said he prefers an Israeli attack to a nuclear Iran, some of his Gulf allies have. Indeed, Riyadh has reportedly even offered to cooperate.
That Egypt cares about avoiding American penalties is evident from its reaction after media reports of the violations proliferated. First, unnamed Egyptian officials insisted the tanks were deployed in coordination with Israel – an assertion no Israeli or American official would confirm. Then, perhaps realizing this was too incredible to be swallowed, they said they were discussing the issue with Israel and had made “significant progress.” Later, they even said Egypt’s defense minister had called his Israeli counterpart to discuss the deployment and reaffirm Egypt’s commitment to the treaty – a report Israel flatly denied. Finally, Morsi himself publicly reiterated his commitment to the treaty, even as he repeated the lie that the deployment complied with it.
In short, even while perpetrating the most serious violation of the treaty since its inception, Egypt is paying it lip service in an effort to soothe Washington. And so far, Washington seems willing to be satisfied with that.
An Egyptian remilitarization of the Sinai obviously isn’t in the same league as Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland – it will spark neither a world war nor another Holocaust- but it could spark another Israel-Egypt war, and that would be bad enough.
Clearly, that isn’t an outcome Washington wants. But unless it takes decisive action to stop Sinai from being remilitarized, it is by far the most likely one.
The school year has begun, and with it, the annual demands that haredi schools start teaching the core curriculum – spearheaded this year by no less a personage than Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar. In theory, this makes sense: Israelis want haredim to join the work force, so they want haredi schools to teach subjects needed in the modern workplace, like English and math. There are only two problems: There’s no evidence that the core curriculum is actually necessary for this purpose, and considerable reason to think this demand actually undermines efforts at integration.
Ten years ago, before any evidence to the contrary had accumulated, this demand was perfectly understandable. But in the interim, several haredi colleges and army programs have been opened for men educated on the Talmud-intensive haredi curriculum rather than the secular one. And all have proven markedly successful.
Indeed, the media have been filled for years with testimonials from army officers and college lecturers who work with these men, and all say the same thing: The haredim may not know English or math, but they know how to learn – how to spend long hours poring over difficult material until they have mastered it. And consequently, remedial crash courses enable them to make up the gaps in their knowledge.
Ranan Hartman, the head of Ono Academic College, for instance, readily acknowledged in a 2010 interview that haredim come to his college “lacking even a basic knowledge of English and mathematics,” and raising them to the level of non-haredi students via a one-year preparatory course isn’t easy. “But there is something in the haredi educational system that makes people want to study,” he said. “That thirst jump-starts this process and narrows gaps.”
Col. Asher Fogler, who helped created the haredi unit of Military Intelligence, concurred: His soldiers’ years in yeshiva, he said, “inculcated them with the ability for higher learning.”
Granted, the gap might be less bridgeable were state schools doing a better job of educating their students. But as Israel’s dismal results on the last PISA exam make clear, they aren’t: Out of 64 countries, Israel placed 36th in reading and 41st in math and science. That, too, has been the subject of numerous laments by academics in recent years: In the same 2010 interview, for instance, Hartman noted that 35 percent of his college’s law students “have degrees from other universities and their command of English is catastrophic.”
As long as the secular education system is failing even on its own terms, whereas the haredi system is succeeding on its own terms while seemingly doing little worse in secular terms, it’s hard to justify demands that haredim replace their own curriculum with the state’s. As one leading haredi rabbi, Aharon Leib Steinman, said in 2010, how can the state “have the gumption to give us recommendations on education” when “they know that the secular education system has not succeeded?”
And precisely because there’s no good justification for it, the persistence of this demand makes many haredim suspect the real motive isn’t to help them integrate, but to make them stop being haredim – which is a major threat to the integration effort.
Haredi colleges and army programs have succeeded precisely because they allow the haredim to remain haredim: They offer separate-sex classes or work areas, food that meets haredi kashrut standards, daily Torah study, etc. As one officer in the haredi air force program correctly noted, “the greatest threat to the project would be if they leave the army as non-haredim” – because then, others wouldn’t enlist.
It’s true that as yet, only a minority of haredi men either serves in the army or attends college. But progress has been dramatic: haredi college enrollment has more than quadrupled over the last decade, while Shahar, the army’s flagship haredi program, jumped from 38 enlistees when it started in 2007 to 530 in 2010. Yet if haredim come to view integration efforts as a conspiracy aimed at making them abandon their own religious lifestyle, their response will be to circle the wagons, and this progress will be reversed.
But there’s another reason why demands for a secular core curriculum are particularly problematic for haredim: haredi society’s supreme goal is to produce great Torah scholars. And it’s hard to become a great Torah scholar without a strong early grounding in Talmud – the kind that can’t be achieved when 75 percent of the school day is devoted to secular subjects.
Many Israelis tend to dismiss this concern because the other half of the haredi formula for great Torah scholarship – that it requires being a full-time, lifelong yeshiva student – is so patently historically false. Many great Torah scholars throughout history were extremely well educated secularly and had full-time secular professions: Rambam and Ramban were both doctors, Rashi was a vintner, Kehati was a bank teller, etc.
But it’s harder to find examples of great Torah scholars who didn’t have a strong early grounding in Talmud. Over the past several centuries, most great Torah scholars emerged from the heder system, which, like today’s haredi curriculum, was Talmud-intensive. And while two of the greatest scholars of the Talmud, Rabbi Akiva and Resh Lakish, began Torah study as adults with no background, they are very clearly identified as exceptions rather than the rule.
Ultimately, it will be impossible to integrate the haredi community if the haredim themselves don’t cooperate. And such cooperation will be unachievable if non-haredim expect the haredim to make all the concessions: The rest of us have to be willing to concede something, too.
We can’t compromise on either army service or work; the haredi population is growing too fast to make doing without them feasible in either endeavor over the long run. But we can compromise on primary and secondary education: The haredim have proven that their curriculum isn’t incompatible with subsequent integration into the army and the work force, and it’s of vital importance to their own goal of producing great Torah scholars.
At some point, haredim and non-haredim will have to strike a grand bargain. The core curriculum is the concession the rest of us should be prepared to offer.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Earlier this year, a leftist Israeli think tank surveyed Israelis’ opinion of the left. The results were shocking: 63 percent viewed it unfavorably, 48 percent deemed it elitist, only 33 percent said it shared their values, only 31 percent deemed it capable of governing effectively, and only 28 percent thought it had good solutions for national security challenges.
Clearly, this stems primarily from the disastrous outcome of the left’s territorial withdrawal policy. But leftists who profess themselves bewildered by these results would also be well-advised to study the recent spate of leftist pundits (here and here, for instance) claiming that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s main, if not only, reason for weighing an attack on Iran this fall is to harm President Barack Obama’s reelection bid.
To these pundits, it’s inconceivable that Netanyahu could be motivated by objective concerns, such as the latest International Atomic Energy Agency report, which shows that Iran has doubled the number of centrifuges at its underground Fordow facility. At this rate, given Israel’s limited military capabilities, Iran’s nuclear program may well be invulnerable to an Israeli strike by spring (if it isn’t already), meaning Israel’s only choices may be strike now or accept a nuclear Iran. But many leftists can’t credit a center-right politician with genuine concern for Israel’s wellbeing; they can only see him as driven by petty personal hatreds.
Similarly, these pundits can’t accept that Netanyahu might reasonably deem the sanctions/diplomacy track dead. After 120 nations sent senior officials to the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Tehran this week–where all, including the UN secretary-general, listened without demurral as Iran’s supreme leader reiterated his threats to annihilate Israel–many non-leftist commentators concluded that contrary to the Obama administration’s assertions, Iran is far from isolated, and will thus easily find allies to help it evade Western sanctions. But many leftists seem unable to imagine a reasonable person of goodwill evaluating the evidence differently than they do.
Nor is it conceivable to them that Netanyahu might have sensible geostrategic considerations. As participants at a recent Gatestone roundtable noted, this is a uniquely propitious moment for an Israeli strike. Hamas has abandoned Iran’s orbit over the latter’s support for Syrian President Bashar Assad. Assad’s regime is so embattled that he has neither men nor equipment to spare for joining any Iranian counterstrike on Israel. And Hezbollah is not only under increasing pressure from its Lebanese rivals, but it fears losing its main conduit for arms supplies, since Syria’s Sunni opposition might well block arms shipments to the Shi’ite group if it took power. Thus even Hezbollah will think twice about emptying its arsenal to support an Iranian counterstrike. None of this may still be true come spring. But many leftists seem unable to credit a center-right politician with rational thought.
Yet this petty inability to credit a rival with any positive motives is only the lesser half of what most Israelis find off-putting. Far worse is that in their desperate quest to deny that Netanyahu could possibly have valid reasons for his behavior, many leftists have closed their eyes to reality itself: They have become incapable of admitting that any of the factors cited above even exists, because doing so would undercut their narrative that Netanyahu is motivated solely by spite.
No, it really isn’t about Obama–it’s about the Iranian bomb. And as long as the left is incapable of understanding that, it will never regain Israelis’ trust.
If I were UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, or any of the 120 countries that sent delegates to the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Iran this week, I’d be more than a little embarrassed to discover that Hamas, a terrorist organization that thinks nothing of slaughtering innocent men, women and children in buses, restaurants and hotels, actually has a more developed sense of morality than I do.
While Hamas was invited to attend the NAM summit by Iran, it ultimately declined. This decision followed a public threat by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that if Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh went, he would stay home. But senior Hamas officials say the desire to prevent an open rift with Abbas was only a secondary consideration. Their number-one reason for staying home was that they didn’t want to be seen as supporting Iran at a time when Iran is openly supporting Syrian President Bashar Assad’s slaughter of his own people by supplying him with arms and even troops.
Clearly, no such qualms troubled Ban or any of the other high-profile delegates, most of whom are very senior officials of their own countries. By attending the summit, they sent the clearest possible message: Assad is free to continue slaughtering his people (the death toll has already topped 19,000, with no end in sight). And Iran is free to continue helping him do so without suffering any consequences whatsoever: It will still be treated as an honored and valued member of the international community.
So now we know that even Hamas has a red line: Murdering 19,000 fellow Sunni Muslims is beyond the pale. But for Ban and the other 120 delegates, there are no red lines: Mass murder is fine and dandy.
Actually, this shouldn’t come as a surprise; both the UN and the Non-Aligned Movement have shown many times before that they have no moral red lines. But here’s what is surprising: that so many Western countries–including all of Europe and, under Barack Obama, the U.S. as well–nevertheless continue to treat the UN as a source of moral authority, without whose imprimatur no international action is justified.
After all, these are countries that do think murdering 19,000 of your own citizens is beyond the pale. So why do they accord moral authority to the UN when both its secretary-general and its automatic voting majority (NAM comprises a majority of UN members, and frequently votes as a bloc) have shown so blatantly that they don’t?
If you outsource moral authority to a tarnished agency, you can’t help being tarnished yourself. And that’s precisely where the West stands today: Having declared that no action on Syria is possible without UN approval, it is now viewed by many Syrians as no less indifferent to their plight than the UN itself.
But if even Hamas can renounce its former paymaster in Tehran on moral grounds, is it really too much to ask that the West muster the courage to do the same to the UN?