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It’s no secret that Israel isn’t an Olympics power: It came away from the London Games without a single medal, and since its inception, it has won only one gold and seven medals overall (making it one of very few countries with more Nobel Prizes than Olympics medals). What is less well known is that Israel does much better in the Paralympics, which begin today: There, it has won more than 300 medals overall, 113 of them gold.
First and foremost, of course, that’s a testament to Israel’s cutting-edge medical care, developed in response to the grim necessity of having to treat far too many victims of war and terror. But it’s also a testament to Israel’s priorities: Whereas athletes competing in the regular Olympics often struggle financially, since state funding for most forms of sport is minimal, Paralympics athletes benefit from a network of state-supported rehabilitation centers where sports is part of the program for those who want it. It’s not that Israel wouldn’t love having more Olympics medals; the country went wild when Gal Fridman won his gold in 2004. It’s just that caring for its wounded veterans and victims of terror takes precedence–as it should.
Nor is it Israelis alone who benefit from the country’s medical expertise. Israel has a variety of programs that offer medical help to people worldwide–not only its well-known emergency medical missions to disaster areas, but also ongoing programs like Save a Child’s Heart, which provides heart surgery to children from throughout the developing world year-round, as well as training for medical personnel from these countries. Israeli cardiologists donate their time for this purpose, and an Israeli hospital donates the space; fundraising covers other expenses, like plane tickets for patients from Africa.
For the knee-jerk anti-Israel types, of course, Israel can do no right. Regrettably, that even includes some of the people Israel helps: When Haaretz tried to interview Palestinian doctors who had been trained by Save a Child’s Heart earlier this month, for instance, every one of them refused to talk, fearing the wrath of enforcers of the Palestinian Authority’s anti-normalization campaign.
But anyone who takes the trouble to look knows the truth. As one Palestinian from Gaza whose daughter was treated by SACH told Haaretz:
“At the checkpoint I met many people from Gaza who come to Israel for medical treatment, here and at other hospitals. I am not the only one who came here. It is obvious that people come to Israel for medical treatment, regardless of the political conflict.”
And that’s a badge of honor shinier than any Olympic gold medal.
Of all the arguments against an Israeli attack on Iran, the most inane has to be the “legitimacy argument.” This argument, beloved of leftists like Haaretz columnists Sefi Rachlevsky and Ari Shavit, holds that Israel lacks either domestic or international legitimacy to attack Iran because it hasn’t done everything possible to show itself a peace-seeker. Without such legitimacy, they argue, an attack can’t succeed. Therefore, Israel must launch a far-reaching diplomatic initiative on the Palestinian front, and at the very least postpone any strike until spring, to satisfy U.S. demands for more time to try nonmilitary means of stopping Iran’s nuclear program.
This theory is so patently historically false that it’s hard to believe anyone could seriously propound it – which is precisely why most proponents eschew any attempt to provide evidence. Just consider the “proof” offered by those who do make the attempt, like Shavit: Israel, he claims, won in 1948 and 1967 because both the world and Israelis themselves “recognized the legitimacy” of its actions, but failed in 1973 because its “inflexible” policies undermined its domestic and international legitimacy.
In reality, Israel certainly didn’t enjoy international “legitimacy” in 1948, despite the recent destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust and its adoption of the UN Partition Plan (which the Arabs rejected): Its declaration of independence had so little international support that the entire world, including the U.S., slapped an arms embargo on it, even as Britain was pouring arms into the five Arab armies attacking it. Israel won a decisive victory not because of international “legitimacy,” but thanks to a global arms smuggling network run by pre-state leaders and Jewish supporters worldwide, bolstered by Czechoslovakia’s courageous decision to sell it planes despite the embargo.
Nor did Israel benefit from global “legitimacy” in 1967, despite having as yet “occupied” no territory: UN peacekeepers in Sinai tamely packed their bags and left at Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s request; the U.S. reneged on its 1956 pledge (given in return for Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai after that year’s war) to ensure that Egypt didn’t close the Straits of Tiran to Israel; France, Israel’s main arms supplier, halted all arms sales the moment the war began, refusing even to deliver planes and boats that Israel had already paid for; and most of the Communist bloc severed diplomatic relations with it. Instead, its stunning victory stemmed from a superbly executed battle plan built around a preemptive strike. And that victory over two Soviet-supplied armies (Egypt and Syria) at the height of the Cold War, rather than any global “legitimacy,” is what led to the ensuing American-Israel alliance.
In contrast, Israel actually went to extraordinary lengths to secure international legitimacy in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, to the point of refusing to launch a preemptive strike or even mobilize its reserves, lest it be accused of warmongering. That quest for international approval cost it dearly: Though it ultimately won a smashing victory, it came within a hairsbreadth of losing the war and suffered higher casualties than in any other war since 1948. And it got nothing in exchange: Every country in Europe still sought to block America’s emergency arms airlift, refusing to let the planes refuel on their soil or even overfly their territory (Portugal ultimately backed down and offered the Azores Islands after President Richard Nixon said that if necessary, he’d use midair refuelers instead). And due to the ensuing Arab oil embargo, Israel still lost diplomatic relations with most of the Third World.
Moreover, by the left’s standards, the 2008 Gaza war should have enjoyed unparalleled international legitimacy: It was launched in response to three years of nonstop rocket fire from territory that Israel had evacuated to the last inch, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was then conducting far-reaching peace negotiations with both the Palestinians and Syria. Instead, it produced unprecedented condemnation, culminating in the infamous Goldstone Report and its allegations of war crimes, which even some of Israel’s self-proclaimed best friends refused to oppose at the UN (though its author has since recanted it). And so on and so forth.
As for domestic legitimacy, the Israeli public has consistently judged military actions by one, and only one, criterion: whether they achieved their goals at a reasonable price. Hence Israelis deemed the Second Lebanon War of 2006 a resounding failure despite its unquestioned “legitimacy” by the leftist yardstick: Israel was responding to a cross-border attack launched after it withdrew from every inch of Lebanon, while Olmert, having just been elected on a platform of sweeping territorial withdrawal from the West Bank, was lauded as a peace-maker both overseas and by Israel’s left. The war did enjoy enormous public support initially. But the incompetent way it was waged soon turned Israelis against it.
Nor did Israelis turn on the government after the Yom Kippur War because they deemed the war in any way “illegitimate.” On the contrary, most Israelis could imagine nothing more legitimate than repelling an invasion by two Arab armies on the holiest day of the Jewish year. What outraged them, again, was solely the incompetent way it was waged.
The bottom line is that most Israelis couldn’t care less about the left’s “legitimacy” criteria; indeed, most support the government’s policy on the Palestinian issue, viewing the Palestinians as utterly uninterested in peace. Rather, they’ll back an attack on Iran if it proves successful at a reasonable cost and oppose it if it doesn’t.
As for the “international community,” it is guaranteed to condemn the attack regardless of any efforts Israel makes to appease it, just as it has every other military action Israel has ever taken. But the alliances that matter, like the American one, will survive, just as they survived spats over previous Israeli operations. Nor will a strike affect international efforts to prevent Iran from reconstituting its nuclear program (as I explain here).
Thus if waiting until spring would significantly impair Israel’s ability to launch an effective strike, the costs of doing so far outweigh the benefits. Because the one thing that is certain is that only a successful strike will have any “legitimacy” at all.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Last month, the Palestinian Authority (PA) took the rare step of publicly voicing concern over the fate of Palestinians living in Syria. About 300 (out of a population of over 500,000) have already been killed, PA officials said, and with some Palestinians supporting the Assad government while others supported the opposition, they feared the community would increasingly be targeted by both sides.
Those 300 slain Palestinians pale beside a total Syrian death toll of over 19,000. Yet the PA’s concern is clearly justified, because Palestinians find it harder than other Syrians to gain asylum in neighboring states. Some Palestinians have reportedly been turned back at the Jordanian border. Jordan denies this, but doesn’t deny that unlike other Syrians, those Palestinians who Jordan has admitted are strictly confined to the camps where they are housed. Palestinians have also been denied entry to Lebanon, and those that succeed in entering say they live in hiding for fear of being sent back.
Nor is such treatment unusual. After Saddam Hussein fell, Palestinians were targeted as Saddam collaborators by both the Iraqi government and various militias, yet were denied entry to both Jordan and Syria when they sought to flee. In 1995, Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi perpetrated a mass expulsion of Palestinians, but Palestinians were then targeted as Gadhafi collaborators during last year’s Libyan uprising – and denied entry to Egypt when they sought sanctuary. Kuwait expelled 450,000 Palestinians in 1991, due to Palestinian support for Saddam’s invasion of that country.
Clearly, all these Palestinian refugees would have benefited had a Palestinian state existed to open its gates to them. Yet that’s precisely what makes the PA’s behavior over the last 20 years so astounding – especially when contrasted with the Jews’ behavior half a century earlier.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Jews, too, faced a severe refugee crisis – and for them, too, it was just the latest in a long list. Before World War II, Jews sought desperately to flee Hitler’s Germany, yet no other country would take them. After the war, hundreds of thousands of survivors were stuck in DP camps with nowhere to go.
But the leaders of pre-state Israel knew exactly what the solution was: They needed a state – any state, however short of their dreams it fell – so they could open its gates to the refugees. Consequently, they said, “yes” to every proposal they were offered.
In 1937, for instance, the Peel Commission offered the Jews a mere five percent of the territory originally designated for a Jewish state under the British Mandate, or about 25 percent of what remained following Jordan’s creation in 1922. The proposed state consisted of two noncontiguous cantons, and excluded Jerusalem, the Jews’ holy city. Yet recognizing the desperate need for a state to absorb the refugees, the Jewish leadership assented. The plan was shelved because the Arabs rejected it.
This scenario recurred 10 years later, when the UN proposed its partition plan. It offered the Jews about 56 percent of the post-1922 territory (roughly 10 percent of the original mandate), in three separate cantons connected by extraterritorial roads, and still without Jerusalem. But once again, desperate for a state to absorb their refugees, the Jews said yes; it was, again, the Arabs who rejected it.
By contrast, the PA has rejected an offered Palestinian state three times in the last two decades, even though all these offers came much closer to meeting their territorial demands than the Peel Commission and the UN Partition Plan did to meeting Jewish demands. In 2000, Israel offered a state on 88 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, including parts of East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. In 2001, it offered 94 to 96 percent of the territory, and in 2008, it offered the equivalent of 100 percent (after land swaps). Yet each time, the PA refused. “The gaps were wide,” PA President Mahmoud Abbas famously said of the 2008 offer.
Now, too, despite his stated concern over the Palestinians in Syria, Abbas refuses even to negotiate with Israel in a bid to get a state that could succor them. Instead, he plans to seek UN recognition as a nonmember observer state – which not only won’t help a single Palestinian refugee enter the West Bank (since Israel will still control it), but could trigger American and Israeli sanctions that would reduce his ability even to send them aid.
This behavior raises an obvious question: Does the Palestinian leadership really want a state, and if so, what for? Because if its goal were to help its distressed countrymen, its best move would clearly be to accept an Israeli offer, however imperfect, so it could start absorbing its refugees.
Its serial refusals thus indicate that helping fellow Palestinians isn’t its main goal. Instead, it has prioritized undermining Israel.
At the 2001 Taba talks, for instance, Israel conditioned its offer of the Temple Mount on a Palestinian pledge not to excavate there, “because the site is sacred to the Jews.” The Palestinians were willing not to excavate, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami told Haaretz. But they weren’t willing to accept any wording that acknowledged the historic Jewish connection to the Mount.
Similarly, they have consistently demanded that Israel acknowledge a “right of return” for Palestinian refugees – not to a Palestinian state, but to Israel. This is a recipe for Israel’s destruction. Absorbing all five million would make Israel a Palestinian-majority state. Yet even if an agreement formally set numerical limits, Israel would be on shaky legal ground denying entry to the rest once having acknowledged their right to it.
The UN bid, too, is aimed primarily at Israel. As Abbas explained last year, he wants UN recognition not because it would remove a single Israeli soldier, but because it would enable the PA to lodge “claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Court of Justice.”
Successive American governments have tried hard to midwife a Palestinian state. But based on the record to date, such efforts will just be wasted time and money until a Palestinian leader arises who cares more about helping his people than about undermining Israel.
Among the plethora of arguments made against an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, one of the most bizarre is that the ensuing wave of international sympathy for Iran would destroy the international sanctions regime and allow Iran to race for the bomb unhindered – an argument made by both Israeli and American security experts opposed to a strike.
After all, U.S. President Barack Obama has said repeatedly that preventing a nuclear Iran is “profoundly” in America’s security interest; various other world leaders have also said a nuclear Iran threatens their own security. So why would all of them suddenly decide that a nuclear Iran no longer threatens their countries’ interests just because Israel launched an attack? And unless they changed their minds in this fashion, why would any of them suddenly stop trying to prevent Iran from going nuclear? Normal countries don’t stop pursuing their own security interests merely because they are annoyed with another country.
In fact, there’s only one conceivable reason why any country currently backing the sanctions regime should reverse its position following an Israeli strike: If it never actually cared about preventing a nuclear Iran in the first place, and backed sanctions only in an effort to prevent an Israeli attack.
It’s certainly possible that many countries fall into this category. But if so, that’s an argument in favor of an Israeli strike – because if world leaders aren’t actually committed to stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, there’s no chance the sanctions regime will be maintained long enough and strictly enough to do so.
Indeed, the opposite is the case: If the world’s only interest in sanctions is preventing Israeli military action against Iran, those sanctions are sure to be eased once Iran has entered the “zone of immunity,” meaning its nuclear facilities are sufficiently protected that Israel no longer has the ability even to significantly delay its quest for the bomb. After all, most of the countries now participating in sanctions, especially in Europe, conducted a thriving trade with Iran until recently, and reviving that trade would benefit their own faltering economies. Thus the incentive to lift the sanctions would be overwhelming once the danger of an Israeli attack had passed.
In short, if other countries don’t truly believe it’s in their own interest to keep Iran from going nuclear, the sanctions effort will soon lapse regardless of whether or not Israel attacks – meaning Israel’s best play is to attack now and achieve whatever delay it can. That, as I’ve written before, isn’t an ideal solution, but it’s better than the certainty of Iran getting the bomb: Just as Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor bought just enough time for Saddam Hussein to provoke international intervention by invading Kuwait, an attack on Iran now could buy time for, say, a successful Iranian revolution, or an Iranian blunder (like closing the Straits of Hormuz) that would provoke international military action.
And if other countries do believe that preventing a nuclear Iran is in their own interests, they’ll continue working toward that end regardless of whether or not Israel attacks.
An Iranian op-ed writer recently urged his country to emulate Israel. Of course the “Zionist regime” is illegitimate, wrote Seyed Ammar Kalantari, but the fact that “this small group of around seven million people who only about 60 years ago moved to this small spot from all sorts of different cultures and nationalities” has managed to survive, despite repeated attacks by Palestinians and various Arab armies, shows it must be doing something right. That something, Kalantari argued, is Israel’s willingness to criticize its leaders.
What makes this remarkable isn’t just that Israel is being touted as a shining example in the very country whose leader regularly pledges to annihilate it as “a cancerous tumor.” It’s that the article appeared on a website closely affiliated with Mohsen Rezaee, a former Revolutionary Guards commander who now serves as secretary of Iran’s Expediency Council, a key organ of the regime. It’s one of numerous recent reminders that most Iranians are vastly more open-minded than the thugs who run their country.
Just this week, a leading Iranian opposition cleric publicly urged the regime to “do everything to prevent a Zionist attack on Iran, because if that happens, Iran will be severely damaged, even if the Zionist regime is damaged even more.” The regime “must not act as warmongers,” warned Ayatollah Yousef Sanei: “The country is currently facing a unique situation, and the most important thing to do is to shut the mouth of the Zionist regime with our thoughts, our pens and an effort to take the right actions.” While Sanei didn’t specify said “right actions,” the meaning seems clear: steps to allay international, and especially Israeli, concerns about Iran’s nuclear program.
In fact, an online poll published in June found that a decisive majority of Iranians – 63 percent – favor giving up uranium enrichment in exchange for an end to sanctions. And another poll, published in May, found that Iranians are much more supportive of basic liberal values than, say, Egyptians, Jordanians and Moroccans, or even residents of some Asian and eastern European democracies. Fully 94% of respondents, for instance, deemed “freedom to choose” an important value, and 71% deemed tolerance important.
All this shows what an incredible opportunity was wasted when U.S. President Barack Obama failed to support the Green Revolution in 2009, preferring instead to pursue negotiations with the mullahs: In Iran – unlike, say, Egypt – a successful revolution might well have produced a better government rather than a worse one, because most Iranians would genuinely rather build a decent society at home than foment mayhem abroad.
Today, however, this very decency is frequently used as an argument against attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities: An attack, we are told, will cause ordinary Iranians to rally round the mullahs, thereby setting the prospect of regime change back decades.
Personally, I think the data indicates that any such effect would be short-lived. People who value freedom of choice and tolerance aren’t likely to become permanent mullah-lovers, nor will opposition leaders long laud the regime for provoking the very attack they warned against.
But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has an additional argument: the Ugandan precedent. Yoweri Museveni, who became Uganda’s president after Idi Amin’s downfall, told him that Israel’s 1976 Entebbe raid “strengthened Amin’s rivals because it revealed how vulnerable his regime was,” Netanyahu related this month.
There’s no way to know for sure who’s right. But we do know the Green Revolution failed primarily because the regime’s brute-force tactics eventually convinced the demonstrators it was too strong to be toppled. Thus showing that the regime isn’t as powerful as it seems may actually be the very spark needed to finally send the mullahs toppling.
Prior to his appointment as Supreme Court president, Justice Asher Dan Grunis was widely billed as an opponent of the court’s judicial activism. Last week, he finally justified that reputation: In one single ruling, he did more to stem the tide of so-called public petitions than any individual or group since former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak opened the gates to such petitions more than three decades ago.
Until the 1980s, Israel’s justice system followed the same rules as other Western democracies: To petition the Supreme Court in its role as High Court of Justice, the petitioner had to have a direct personal interest in the case. But after joining the court in 1978, Barak soon persuaded his fellow justices to abolish that rule, known as “standing.” Instead, the court began allowing anyone at all to petition it on any issue. Thus was born the “public petition”: a petition filed by a nongovernmental organization that wants the court to overturn government policy, without any need to show that any specific individual has been harmed by that policy.
Over the ensuing decades, the court used such public petitions to overturn government policy on numerous issues. This had two pernicious effects: First, it undermined democracy, since unelected justices were now regularly nixing policies set by elected governments. Second, it clogged the court with a flood of public petitions. Consequently, people seeking redress in ordinary civil and criminal cases often had to wait years for a ruling.
To grasp just how excessive the court’s caseload is, consider the following: Israel’s Supreme Court received 9,775 new cases last year. That’s more than the 7,857 submitted to the US Supreme Court in 2010, though America’s population is 40 times larger, and 17 times as many as the 569 filed in Canada’s Supreme Court in 2011, though Canada’s population is 4.4 times larger. Granted, most of the Israeli cases are mandatory civil and criminal appeals over which the court has no discretion. But there were 1,684 new High Court petitions alone in 2011, or 0.2 per 1,000 citizens – about 10 times the total Supreme Court caseload per 1,000 people in either the US (0.03) or Canada (0.02).
Last week, however, Grunis finally took a stand. It was, necessarily, a limited one: Since most justices remain confirmed activists, he lacks support to challenge public petitioners’ right to file such petitions. Instead, he used the laws of economics: After rejecting a public petition (against the government’s decision to get a private organization to finance construction of a public hospital by letting it offer some private treatments there), his panel ordered the three NGOs that filed it to pay unprecedentedly high court costs of NIS 45,000. That creates a financial incentive for all public petitioners to think twice about filing such petitions.
Though ordinary people who lose a case are frequently charged court costs, the norm for decades has been that public petitioners are almost never charged. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, for instance, said last week that the group had been charged court costs only once in 30 years – and then it was representing a private individual rather than acting as a public petitioner.
The reason for such generosity is obvious: Even the most activist justice can’t intervene in government policy until someone brings a case. Thus the court, which for decades has been staffed mainly by activist justices, wanted to ensure a steady stream of such petitions. And that required making it cheap and easy for NGOs to file them.
Recently, however, some justices have started pushing back. Last month, for instance, the court charged the Ometz NGO NIS 15,000 in court costs after rejecting a public petition asking it to order a criminal investigation into an incident already being probed by the state comptroller (it agreed with the attorney general’s decision to await the comptroller’s report before deciding whether a criminal probe was warranted). This is far more than it has ever been charged before, Ometz chairman Aryeh Avneri told Haaretz last week, and it “makes us think several times whether we can petition for the public again.”
“Such high expenses on public petitioners, most of whom rely on donations, can curtail the movement’s legal activity,” agreed attorney Mika Kohner Kerten of another frequent public petitioner, the Movement for Quality Government in Israel.
Of course, even NIS 45,000 is small change for an NGO like ACRI, whose annual income exceeds NIS 10 million. Nevertheless, ACRI spends almost every shekel it receives. Thus if enough cases start resulting in fees of this magnitude, it will have to think twice about filing them, because doing so will mean curtailing outlays on other activities.
Clearly, not all justices support high fees. In a 2-1 ruling earlier this month, for instance, the court slashed the NIS 25,000 fee a lower court imposed on the Gisha NGO by more than half. But an NGO never knows in advance which justices will hear its case. Thus even if only some justices impose relatively steep costs, that’s enough to have a deterrent effect.
This is far from being an ideal solution to the public petition problem. The real solution is for the Knesset to enact legislation reinstating the rules of standing that existed in the pre-Barak era, and still exist today in many other Western democracies. In a democracy, policy decisions are supposed to be made by the elected government; it’s blatantly undemocratic to allow NGOs whose policy positions were rejected by the cabinet or Knesset to ask the High Court to impose these positions on the government by judicial fiat – and even more undemocratic when the court accedes to this request, as it all too often does.
But since the Knesset has so far failed utterly to enact such legislation, we are at the mercy of the High Court’s own discretion as to how activist or restrained it chooses to be. By creating financial disincentives for public petitions, Grunis and a few like-minded colleagues have taken a modest step toward making the court less activist. And for that, anyone who cares about Israeli democracy should be grateful.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
If you want to understand why much of the Arab world is a basket case, it’s worth considering Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi’s address to an Islamic Solidarity Conference in Mecca this week. Morsi came out in favor of regime change in Syria. But the most urgent problem facing the Muslim world today, he said, is the Palestinian issue.
Now consider a few simple statistics: Since the Syrian uprising began 17 months ago, more than 19,000 people have been killed, including more than 2,750 in July alone, according to the Syrian opposition. The number of Palestinians killed by Israel during those 17 months is around150, according to B’Tselem – less than 1 percent of the Syrian total. In fact, according to Palestinian casualty data compiled by the University of Uppsala, the Syrian death toll over the last 17 months is greater than the total number of Palestinians killed by Israel over the entire 64 years of its existence.
So by any objective standard, the Syrian problem would look incomparably more urgent: Solving it would save far more Muslim Arab lives than solving the Palestinian problem would. But for Morsi, and for all too many others in the Arab world, securing the well-being of his fellow Muslim Arabs is evidently less important than undermining the well-being of the hated Jewish state. The Syrian crisis being a purely intra-Arab conflict, solving it doesn’t contribute one iota to the latter goal. But an obsessive focus on the Palestinian problem does.
Of course, it’s also possible that Morsi doesn’t actually believe in the primacy of the Palestinian cause, but is merely playing the time-honored game that Arab opinion leaders – politicians, journalists, artists and intellectuals – have been playing for decades: Let’s divert attention from the internal problems of Arab society by focusing on an outside enemy. But either way, the message is the same: What really matters isn’t what the Arabs do to themselves, but what the Jews do to them, even if what Arabs are doing to themselves (or each other) is far worse. And therefore, the focus of Arab activity must be Israel, not the Arab world’s internal problems – even if focusing on the latter would do more to actually improve the lot of ordinary Arabs.
More than half a century ago, former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously said that “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” Sadly, that’s still true. But it’s equally true that as long as Arab leaders accord higher priority to their campaign against Israel than they do to the welfare of their own people, the Arab world will continue to lag far behind the West by almost any standard of human well-being.
In fact, the Arab world has paid a far higher price for its Israel obsession than Israel ever has. The Jewish state has grown and thrived despite being continuously at war. But ordinary Arabs can still be slaughtered by their own government while their Arab brethren look on and yawn – and continue prating about Israel.
Maybe the Messianic era really is at hand. Ordinary Egyptians are for once not buying anti-Israel conspiracy theories, directing their ire instead at radical Islamists in Sinai and Gaza. The US State Department (!) is protesting the ban on Jewish worship on the Temple Mount. And here in Israel, change is even beginning to creep into our ossified civil service.
One year ago, a new collective wage agreement was signed with public-sector doctors. I can’t remember a signed agreement ever generating as much opposition from union members as this one did. But according to data published by the Israel Medical Association last week, the deal has been a whopping success – if your yardstick is the welfare of the health system as a whole rather than that of a few senior doctors.
The agreement was controversial for several reasons. What made it unique, however, was that instead of giving all union members the same raise in percentage terms, it awarded differential raises: Doctors working in either specialties or geographic regions that were suffering a shortage received the highest increments. And it turns out that medicine is no exception to the laws of economics; doctors respond to financial incentives just like anyone else.
In just one year, outlying areas of the country recruited 184 new doctors, the IMA reported. For some hospitals, the increase was dramatic: The number of residents at Safed’s Rebecca Sieff Hospital rose 39 percent; Poriya Hospital in Tiberias saw a 61 percent jump.
The differential raises also attracted 430 new doctors to specialties with shortages. There’s still a shortage of anesthesiologists, the IMA warned. But Beersheba’s Soroka Medical Center was able to reopen an internal medicine ward it had closed for lack of internists, and several hospitals filled vacant neonatology slots.
All this was possible thanks to a rare willingness on the part of three people to sacrifice short-term personal interests for the long-term greater good. Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had to endure being lambasted by the media and the public throughout a five-month doctors’ strike, the longest in Israel’s history. And IMA President Dr. Leonid Eidelman had to endure opposition and vilification from both senior doctors at hospitals in the center of the country and young residents at those same hospitals, all outraged that, having secured jobs in the choicest locations, they wouldn’t also be getting the highest raises.
One year later, many of these doctors are still griping. But the country as a whole has clearly benefited.
Nor is medicine the only entrenched bureaucracy to get a shake-up lately. Though Ariel University Center hasn’t yet become a full university, it has already forced some new thinking into the higher education bureaucracy.
Ariel’s salutary impact was largely thanks to an accident of geography: Because it is located in the West Bank, it isn’t subject to the Council for Higher Education like all other Israeli colleges are. Instead, it’s subject to a parallel body known as the Council for Higher Education in Judea and Samaria.
Five years ago, when the college first applied for university status, the CHE was vehemently opposed: It is dominated by the existing universities, who always oppose new competition. But because the CHE-JS is independent, it didn’t have to accept that answer. Instead, it created a completely new category – the university center, which is more than a college but less than a university – and conferred that status on Ariel for five years, along with a promise that if the college met certain benchmarks, it would then be upgraded to a full university.
At the time, the academic establishment was openly contemptuous: Who ever heard of a “university center”? But within a few years, the CHE had become so enamored of the idea that it commissioned an outside consultant, New York University’s Institute for Higher Education Policy, to help it create a new funding model that would enable the establishment of many university centers. It now aims to inaugurate the new model in 2013.
The CHE concluded that under the old, two-tier model, applied research was falling through the cracks, since colleges focused on teaching and universities on theoretical research. But industry, government and the defense establishment all need applied research. And that despised new creature, the “university center,” could fill the gap nicely, it decided.
Once again, it turns out that government bureaucracies are no exception to the laws of economics: The moment you create competition, you allow new ideas to enter the system – which is precisely why Ariel ought to be granted the upgraded status a blue-ribbon academic advisory panel has decided it deserves.
These two principles – competition and differential pay – desperately need to be introduced in the rest of the civil service as well. School principals, for instance, should be given much more autonomy, enabling them to try out innovative educational strategies that, if successful, could be adopted by other schools. This necessarily includes authority to hire and fire teachers, since no innovation is possible if the staff balks. And teachers themselves should be offered higher pay for teaching in distressed neighborhoods or towns, to encourage some of the best and the brightest to tackle this challenge.
The ports, where an initiative to create competition by allowing privately-owned wharfs alongside state-owned ones has long been stalled, are another prime example. The first private port, Israel Shipyards, was finally granted a license in 2007, and four years later, its market share had jumped to 20 percent, putting it ahead of its state-owned rival, Haifa Port. It achieved this result by offering flexible hours and lower prices – the kind of benefits that enable importers and exporters to lower prices to the consumer (assuming they aren’t themselves cartels). But proposals to introduce competition at Ashdod Port, the country’s largest, have so far gone nowhere.
Turning competition and differential pay into public-sector norms won’t be easy; the Histadrut labor federation has been fighting such reforms with all its might. But the long-term benefits to the country are worth the short-term price of massive strikes. All that’s needed is a government with the courage the wage the fight.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
As I noted yesterday, the Muslim Brotherhood is busily propagating conspiracy theories about Israeli guilt for Sunday’s terror attack in Sinai, which killed 16 Egyptian soldiers. But there’s a bright side to this story: For the first time ever, many Egyptians aren’t buying it.
True, dozens of demonstrators converged on the Israeli ambassador’s house Monday to demand his expulsion, asserting that Israel was to blame. But the real mob scene occurred at the slain soldiers’ funerals – where crowds chanted slogans denouncing not Israel, but the Muslim Brotherhood, and physically attacked a representative of the Brotherhood-led government, Prime Minister Hesham Kandil.
Nor did the media blindly regurgitate the usual conspiracy theories of Israeli guilt: They duly reported the Egyptian military’s assertion that the attack was perpetrated by terrorists from Sinai aided by Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. Prominent Egyptian commentators even criticized the army for ignoring the intelligence warning Israel had shared, and President Mohammed Morsi for pardoning thousands of radical Islamists and freeing them from jail. And both in television interviews and on social media sites, many ordinary Egyptians blamed the attack not on Israel, but on Morsi, for having reopened the Gaza-Egypt border.
Moreover, the outrage shifted the balance of power between the army and the Brotherhood in the cabinet, enabling the army’s representative, Defense Minister Hussein Tantawi, to force Morsi to seal the Egypt-Gaza border “indefinitely,” just days after having triumphantly reopened it. The army also poured troops accompanied by bulldozers into the Gaza border region to begin sealing the Gaza-Sinai smuggling tunnels – a step Israel had long pleaded for in vain. It even launched its first-ever air strikes on suspected terrorists in Sinai.
Finally, the public outrage seems to have emboldened Egyptian liberals: Former parliamentarian Mohammed Abu Hamed, for instance, launched a blistering attack on Morsi in which he even took the courageous step of defending the peace with Israel.
“The president bears responsibility for this [Sunday’s attack], which was caused by actions his government has taken recently, such as opening the crossings and giving amnesty for Islamist detainees,” Abu Hamed told his followers via Facebook.
“These exceptional measures, which allowed the opening of the Rafah crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip without any security measures, allowed the entry of a large number of extremist religious groups from al-Qaeda and others to Sinai in addition to the elements of Hamas,” Abu Hamed charged. “It is known that these groups have beliefs and ideas of jihadists who are seeking to involve Egypt in a new conflict with Israel. This is in addition to the president-elect’s decision to release a number of extremists, some of them facing death sentences… which is spreading extremist ideas again in breach of the peace agreement, something that is not in the public interest.”
There’s no guarantee any of this will last: Anti-Israel incitement has been the norm in Egypt for decades, and anti-Israel sentiment runs deep. But if Sunday’s attack proves the start of a process that leads ordinary Egyptians to reevaluate who their real enemies are, that would be an enormous boon not only for Israel, but for the prospects of a lasting Middle East peace.
If anyone still harbored illusions that power would moderate the Muslim Brotherhood, Sunday’s attack in Sinai should have shattered it. Heavily armed jihadis stormed an Egyptian army outpost, slaughtered 16 Egyptian solders, stole two APCs and raced toward the Israeli border, where the Israeli army finally stopped them. As Jonathan optimistically wrote yesterday, this is one crime “that cannot be blamed on Israel.”
Except, of course, the Muslim Brotherhood proceeded to do exactly that: As the Jerusalem Post reported, “Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood said on its website that the attack ‘can be attributed to Mossad’ and was an attempt to thwart” Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, the Brotherhood’s man in Cairo.
According to the Brotherhood statement, the Mossad “has been seeking to abort the revolution since its inception and the proof of this is that it gave instructions to its Zionist citizens in Sinai to depart immediately a few days ago.” The group added: “(It) also draws our attention to the fact that our forces in Sinai are not enough to protect it and our borders, which makes it imperative to review clauses in the signed agreement between us and the Zionist entity.”
But it gets even worse. Israel had advance intelligence of the attack – hence its warning that Israelis should leave Sinai, and the heightened alert along the border that enabled it to stop the terrorists with no Israeli casualties. And like a good neighbor, it shared some of this intelligence with the Egyptian army.
Egypt, however, evidently ignored the information: There’s no sign that it beefed up security along the border or placed its soldiers on heightened alert.
In short, the new Egypt is so unwilling to cooperate with Israel that it wouldn’t even act on Israeli intelligence about a threat to its own security. And given the Brotherhood’s subsequent statement, one can see why: It doubtless viewed the warning as a devious Mossad plot aimed at weakening Egypt in some unknown fashion.
All this confirms the impression left by last week’s fiasco, when Morsi replied to Israeli President Shimon Peres’s Ramadan greeting. The reply was faxed from the Egyptian embassy in Tel Aviv with a cover note on embassy letterhead. But when the eternally optimistic Peres publicized it, deeming it a “hopeful” sign, both Morsi’s spokesman and his top aide flatly denied that any letter was ever sent. His spokesman even termed the media reports a “slander.”
In short, Morsi is willing to throw occasional bones like the Peres letter, so that Western countries whose money he needs to rescue Egypt’s economy can keep deluding themselves of his moderation. But back home, where it counts, accusing him of any contact with Israel – even something as banal as acknowledging a Ramadan greeting – constitutes “slander.”
There’s a clear lesson for Israel in all this: If, as expected, Egypt seeks to bring more troops into Sinai (which requires Israel’s permission under the peace treaty), Jerusalem should say no. Because given the Morsi government’s attitude to date, those troops won’t cooperate with Israel; they’ll at best stand idly by whenever the jihadis attack Israeli targets, and at worst may target Israel themselves.
Israel already has enough problems in Sinai; it doesn’t need even more Egyptian troops standing around and doing nothing to solve them. That just means more soldiers who could get caught in the cross-fire – thereby increasing the risk of an Israeli-Egyptian war.