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When a blue-ribbon panel of Israeli legal experts issued a report this July declaring that the West Bank isn’t “occupied territory,” but territory to which Israel has a legitimate claim, and that settlements therefore cannot be considered ipso facto illegal, it raised an outcry both in Israel and overseas. A group of prominent American Jews even wrote Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to urge him against adopting the report, arguing that it would imperil both “the two-state solution, and the prestige of Israel as a democratic member of the international community,” because the latter depends on persuading the world that Israel is “committed to a two-state vision.” Many Israeli pundits voiced similar concerns.
Since the Levy Report essentially reiterates the official position of all Israeli governments, this concern seems strange. Nevertheless, its opponents are right to see it as a potential game changer. Where they err is in deeming it a negative one. In reality, the report offers Israel a golden opportunity to start regaining the diplomatic ground it has lost over the last two decades.
No honest appraisal could deny that Israel’s international standing has deteriorated since it signed the Oslo Accords in 1993. Anti-Israel boycotts, once confined to the Arab world, are now routine agenda items for universities, certain Western churches, and trade unions. Courts in several European countries have considered indicting Israeli officials for war crimes, and European polls routinely deem Israel a prime threat to world peace. References to Israel as an “apartheid state” have become commonplace, and academics and journalists openly question its very right to exist. All this would have been inconceivable 20 years ago.
This deterioration has many causes, but one is directly germane to the Levy Report: Though officially, Israel still insists on the validity of its claim to the West Bank, post-Oslo Israeli leaders have generally downplayed this claim. Instead, they have touted the Palestinians‘ “legitimate and political rights” to the territory, at times even adopting the Palestinian rhetoric of “occupation.”
Their goal was well-intentioned: to show that Israel was indeed “committed to a two-state vision,” thereby creating an atmosphere conducive to peace. But once Israel stopped asserting its own rights in the West Bank, there was nobody to counter the Palestinian claim that it is “occupied Palestinian land” to which Israel has no rights whatsoever. Consequently, the unchallenged international narrative now views Israel not as a magnanimous peace-maker willing to cede territory for peace, but as an unrepentant thief who stole land and refuses to return it.
This has devastating consequences. If Israel has a valid claim to the land, it’s obviously entitled to refuse to withdraw completely to the 1967 lines, or to condition withdrawal on various security requirements. But if this is stolen Palestinian land, Israel has no right to keep any of it, or even to set conditions for its return. Nor does it deserve international acclaim for making “painful territorial concessions”: Returning stolen land isn’t a generous gesture, as ceding one’s own territory would be, but an obligatory restitution that barely begins to atone for the suffering caused by the original theft.
Since a valid Israeli claim doesn’t preclude ceding all or part of the territory for peace, the Levy Report in no way endangers the two-state solution. But unless Israel convinces the world that it has a valid claim, it will always be viewed as a reviled thief rather than a peace-seeker willing to make “painful concessions” for peace.
Downplaying this claim in order to prove Israel’s “commitment to a two-state vision” would thus be counterproductive. And in fact, 25 years of Gallup polling support this thesis.
In Gallup’s annual survey of whether Americans sympathize more with Israel or the Palestinians, the proportion voicing pro-Israel sympathies tumbled from a Gulf War high of 64 percent in 1991 (despite Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s opposition to territorial concessions) to around 40 percent under Oslo signatory Yitzhak Rabin. It remained in those doldrums throughout the seven years after Oslo, during which four more Israeli-Palestinian agreements were signed, then began climbing after the second intifada erupted in 2000. But only in the last three years did it finally surpass 60 percent again, despite a freeze in Israeli-Palestinian talks that many world leaders and media pundits (unjustly) blamed mainly on Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Moreover, during Oslo’s heyday (1993-2000), pro-Israel sympathizers were almost always outnumbered by people who had no opinion or sympathized equally with both sides or not with either side. In contrast, pro-Israel sympathizers generally surpassed the “both/neither/no opinion” category before and after that period. And they did so by the widest margin over the last three years.
If Israel’s image really depended on belief in its “commitment to a two-state vision,” the results should have been the opposite: Support for Israel should have peaked under Rabin (1993-95), or Camp David summiteer Ehud Barak (1999-2001), rather than Shamir and Netanyahu – two premiers who (at least rhetorically) emphasized Israeli rather than Palestinian rights. Thus, forfeiting a chance to prove that Israel isn’t a thief just to bolster this belief would be foolish.
And the Levy Report provides such a chance. Precisely because much of the world now deems the West Bank “occupied Palestinian territory,” adopting a report that clashes head-on with this accepted wisdom would force the government to repeatedly and publicly explain why it’s false: that this land was earmarked for a Jewish state by the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, later affirmed in the UN Charter’s Article 80; that the 1947 UN Partition Plan was nonbinding, as all General Assembly resolutions are, and thus became null and void once the Arabs rejected it; that all sides agreed the 1949 armistice lines weren’t permanent borders; that the world never recognized Jordan’s occupation of the West Bank (1948-67), so the territory had no recognized sovereign when Israel captured it in a defensive war 1967; and that UN Security Council Resolution 242 subsequently recognized Israel’s right to retain some of the captured territory.
For regardless of whether Israel ultimately keeps or cedes this territory, this is the case it must make if it is ever to persuade the world that it is a peace-seeker rather than a thief.
To a certain segment of the Israeli public, the Tisha B’Av fast that fell last week will always recall the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, which began the following day according to the Jewish calendar. This year’s memorial events included publication of a collection of articles and responsa by the evicted settlers’ rabbis, which inter alia addresses the question of how God could have let it happen.
My own answer to that question is simple: It appears repeatedly in the Bible, most saliently in a section of Deuteronomy incorporated into the Shema prayer, which religious men recite twice daily. Because of these verses, I always found it incredible that leading rabbis assured their flocks the pullout wouldn’t happen. But one needn’t be a believing Jew for their message to resonate; it has been echoed frequently by some of the world’s greatest (non-Jewish) statesmen. And it’s a message Israelis urgently need to recall today.
Deuteronomy 11:13-21 may at first glance seem irrelevant to nonbelievers: If you obey My commandments, says God, you will have ample rain and good harvests; if you don’t, you will suffer drought and poor harvests, and “quickly perish from the good land that the Lord gives you.” Therefore, keep the commandments and teach them to your children, “that your life and the life of your children may be prolonged in the land.”
But two points are worth highlighting. First, this doesn’t refer only – or arguably even primarily – to ritual commandments such as prayer or kosher dietary laws. Biblical commandments cover a host of economic, social and political issues directly relevant to any nation’s life, from caring for the poor to unbiased courts, and prophets like Isaiah often viewed these latter issues as more important in averting national destruction.
Second, there’s a subtlety in the Hebrew that doesn’t translate into English: The “you” in Deuteronomy is plural, not singular. In other words, it doesn’t matter how righteous any given individual or community is; the Jewish people’s continued presence in its homeland depends on how the nation as a whole behaves.
That a nation’s fate stands or falls on the behavior of its people as a whole is, of course, plain common sense. Benjamin Franklin expressed the same sentiment when he warned his fellow Americans that “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately;” so did Abraham Lincoln when he warned that “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
At its most basic level, their point was that no nation can long survive if it is so disunited as to be incapable of collective action. More broadly, however, it was that for better or for worse, the majority’s behavior ultimately determines the outcome: Franklin, for instance, was warning that no one state, or group of states, could win the Revolution alone; victory would require the majority’s collective efforts.
Certainly, minorities can and often do succeed in changing the majority’s opinions. But short of a military coup, they can’t determine national policy unless the majority acquiesces.
Before dismissing this as mere truism, let’s return briefly to the disengagement. Prior to the pullout, polls consistently showed a roughly 60 percent majority in favor of the move, among both Israelis in general and Israeli Jews in particular. These findings were reaffirmed by the results of the election held seven months later: Not only did Kadima, the new party formed by those who spearheaded the disengagement, win half again as many seats as its nearest rival, but Zionist parties that supported the pullout collectively outpolled those that opposed it. Or to put it in terms religious Zionists might have used, a majority of Israeli Jews favored spurning the territorial gift God gave us in the 1967 Six-Day War.
So how, given the collective responsibility so clearly outlined in Deuteronomy, could any religious Jew have believed God would miraculously rescue us from our collective folly (as I and other disengagement opponents viewed it) for the sake of that minority of Israelis, however righteous, who inhabited Gush Katif?
“Messianic delusion,” many secularists would undoubtedly reply. Yet a great many Israelis, religious and secular alike, seem to be making exactly the same mistake today.
Regardless of whether they root collective national responsibility in the Bible or Western political tradition, all Israelis have pet subgroups whom they accuse of shirking this common responsibility (greedy tycoons and haredi draft-dodgers being two of the current favorite targets). And it’s certainly true that Israel would be better served if all its subgroups devoted a bit less energy to pursuing their own narrow interests and a bit more to worrying about the collective welfare.
Nevertheless, it’s a cheap evasion to say the problem is “the haredim” or “the settlers” or “the leftists” or any other subsector of Israeli society; ascribing such power to any minority is just the Gush Katif delusion in different guise. The truth is, no one group has the power to prevent any decision that the majority has pursued long enough and has been willing to set aside its disagreements for: Settlers couldn’t prevent the disengagement; haredim couldn’t prevent a unity government from slashing child allowances in 2003; leftists couldn’t prevent the reoccupation of the West Bank in response to the intifada.
But just as no miracle occurred to save Gush Katif once We-the-People chose to destroy it, no miracle will spare us the consequences of any other bad decision We-the-People make. And that includes a decision that we’d rather let all our problems fester than set aside our differences on some long enough to make common cause on others.
Clearly, resolving our multitudinous disagreements won’t be easy. But a good first step would be to tone down the abusive rhetoric and recognize that many of those who disagree with us care no less than we do about the Jewish state and/or the Jewish people. Otherwise, we’ll never be able to find enough common ground to fulfill our collective responsibilities on any issue.
And if we choose instead to tear ourselves apart over our differences, no miracle will save us from the consequences of that decision, either.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Some time ago, I asked a private social worker I know for advice: Another friend, a single mother with health problems, could use some extra help; should she contact the welfare authorities?
The answer shocked me. Not if she can possibly avoid it, this social worker said. They’ll put her through hell, and there’s no guarantee they’ll even give her any help.
Now, having encountered the case of N., I understand that response.
N., another single mother, has three adopted children, all with serious emotional and psychological problems. Over the past decade, she has undergone treatment for two different types of cancer. She eventually recovered (and also remarried), but during her treatment, she sought help from the welfare authorities.
Now, they are trying to take two of her children from her, claiming she’s an unfit mother.
I’m not qualified to judge that claim; I barely know N., and have never met her children. But whether she is or isn’t, the welfare authorities’ conduct in her case has been shocking.
After all, these same authorities approved N. to adopt three children. Adoptive parents are supposed to be rigorously evaluated; N. passed this evaluation three times. Moreover, the welfare bureaucracy presumably looked into how she was raising children one and two before approving adoptions two and three, and noticed no problems.
So either they were shockingly malfeasant then, in allowing “a harmful and neglectful mother devoid of any real ‘parenting ability'” (as they now call her) to adopt three children, or they are shockingly malfeasant now, in seeking to deprive a good mother of her children. There are no third options.
No less shocking, however, is what happened after they began “helping” N. Take the eldest boy, whom we’ll call A. Three years ago, he was put in an institution, with N.’s consent; given her illness and his problems, she considered this a suitable temporary solution.
Early reports from teachers and social workers, as detailed in court papers filed by the welfare authorities, describe A. as talking frequently about “his home, his brothers, and a great deal about his mother.” “It’s clear that the connection between A. and his mother is important to them both,” one social worker wrote.
Later reports, however, show him hurling abuse at N., and eventually declaring repeatedly that he wants nothing to do with her.
These reports also describe “daily” outbursts in which he “claims it’s bad for him at the school.” Left unanswered is why his complaints about his mother are deemed serious enough to justify depriving her of custody while his complaints about the school are dismissed: The welfare authorities advocate leaving him there for another five years, until age 14.
What does seem clear, however, is that the authorities actively undermined his relationship with his mother. According to their own reports, she was allowed to visit him “once every three weeks for an hour,” and only with a social worker and psychiatrist present. How could a child who sees his mother for only an hour every three weeks not feel abandoned, hurt and angry?
Indeed, the authorities often appear to have made N. a scapegoat. Take, for instance, one incident they cite to demonstrate her alleged parental unfitness: a “stormy meeting” between A. and N. which, their report states, ended in such a severe outburst that A. was sent for temporary psychiatric hospitalization. That same report, however, noted that this incident followed “a severe escalation in his behavior for more than a month, with A.’s anger attacks growing in intensity and frequency;” that another outburst occurred three days after he left the hospital, in which he demanded to leave the school and said he “would only obey his mother;” and that subsequently, “a change in his medications was recommended.”
In other words, a month-long deterioration that was ultimately diagnosed as stemming from poorly adjusted medications was blamed on N. and used to justify taking her child away. That’s outrageous. And it’s obviously worse if you believe N.’s claim that the staff provoked A.’s outburst by cutting her visit short to punish him for earlier misbehavior.
Indeed, one can’t help concluding that the welfare bureaucracy was always more interested in taking the children away than in helping N. raise them herself – in blatant violation of the Youth Law, which deems taking a child from his parents a last resort, to be used only “if the court sees there’s no other way to ensure [the child’s] care and supervision,” and usually only if efforts to help him remain at home have failed.
Consider, for instance, the resources made available to the foster family now caring for N.’s second child, whom we’ll call B.: psychological treatment, hydrotherapy, parental and family counseling, and more, according to the documents. Yet no such help was ever offered to N. If it had been, argues her lawyer with some justice, might that not have enabled her to keep him at home?
N.’s lawyer claims the welfare bureaucracy has a financial incentive to take children away, creating a clear conflict of interest: The institution where A. now lives, for instance, gets paid about NIS 100,000 a year per child – and many of the negative evaluations of N. came from people on its payroll. Similarly, associations that arrange foster homes compile parental evaluations while also receiving money for children in their care.
But regardless of the merits of this claim, the lawyer is clearly right in saying institutionalization should be a last resort: It’s inherently unhealthy for a child to be raised in an environment comprised solely of other children with serious problems, and it’s also very expensive – which, since the government’s total welfare budget is fixed, means that each institutionalized child slashes the funding available for other important programs. Yet in this case, no other option seems to have been considered.
Whether the welfare authorities are right or wrong about N.’s parental fitness is of concern only to her and her family. But the questions her case raises about their fitness to have such absolute control over the lives of parents and children alike ought to concern all of us.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
On May 31, Israel delivered 91 bodies to the Palestinian Authority. The PA gave them full military funerals, complete with coffins draped in Palestinian flags and a 21-gun salute. While PA President Mahmoud Abbas didn’t speak, he laid wreaths on the coffins and presided over the ceremony. The secretary-general of his office, Tayeb Abd Al-Rahim, and the PA’s state-appointed mufti, Muhammad Hussein, both gave eulogies, in which they declared that the souls of the dead were urging other Palestinians to “follow in their path.”
It could have been any state ceremony for fallen heroes anywhere – except that many of the “heroes” whose path Palestinians were being urged to follow were vicious terrorists who collectively killed more than 100 Israeli civilians. But this blatant state-sponsored incitement elicited no protests from either Israel, the U.S. or the European Union.
Nor is this exceptional: The monitoring organization Palestinian Media Watch documents almost daily incidents in which PA officials, the PA-controlled media, or PA-funded organizations glorify anti-Israel terrorism, reject Israel’s right to exist, or deny the Jews’ historic connection to the Land of Israel. Yet even Israel rarely protests, while America and Europe almost never do. Nor have the U.S. and Europe ever conditioned the hundreds of millions of dollars a year they give the PA on curtailing such incitement. For decades, the accepted wisdom has been that what matters is preventing violence and promoting a two-state solution; as long as the PA remains officially committed to the both, why upset the applecart over secondary issues?
But if there’s one thing developments in Egypt over the last year should have made clear, it’s that incitement is anything but a secondary issue. For without a serious effort to end incitement and educate for peace, even a signed treaty may prove to be worth no more than the paper it’s printed on.
Under former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, anti-Israel incitement by both government officials and the state-controlled media was relentless. The Egyptian army, for instance, continued to deem Israel its principal enemy and devote most of its training to preparing to fight it. Egyptian state television broadcast a 41-part series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A government plan to translate Israeli literature into Arabic was lambasted by the media for furthering “cultural normalization,” and the culture minister defended himself by declaring that the government opposes normalization, would work only with the authors’ foreign publishers rather than their Israeli ones, and intended the project solely as a way to “know your enemy.” An Egyptian governor suggested that the Mossad was behind deadly shark attacks on Sinai beaches. And the list could go on.
Yet neither Jerusalem nor Washington ever protested, because for both, the most important issue was keeping the Israeli-Egyptian border quiet. As long as Mubarak did that, neither wanted to pick a fight that might endanger this achievement.
At times, this blind-eye policy reached surreal levels, as in 2009, when Farouk Hosni sought to become UNESCO’s director-general. Hosni, then Egypt’s culture minister, had notoriously declared he would like to “burn Israeli books in Egyptian libraries” – a wildly inappropriate sentiment from anyone seeking to head an “educational, scientific and cultural organization,” but especially from a minister in a supposedly friendly government. Thus initially, Israel opposed his bid. Incredibly, however, it later withdrew its objections, at Mubarak’s request. To preserve the “peace,” Israel agreed to acquiesce in the candidacy of someone who advocated burning Israeli books.
Today, however, it has become clear that ignoring such incitement undermined the peace rather than preserving it. Fully 92% of Egyptians now view Israel as an enemy, while 80% think “Palestinians’ rights cannot be taken care of if Israel exists” – because that is what their government and its media mouthpieces taught them to think. Moreover, having been taught to see peace as something that benefited only the Israeli enemy rather than themselves, 61% now favor scrapping the treaty. And while public opinion didn’t matter much under Mubarak, it matters greatly post-revolution: In response to it, virtually every party and presidential candidate in Egypt has vowed to reconsider the treaty.
Perhaps the most shocking part of this is the widespread view that Egypt itself has nothing to gain by keeping the peace, and has done so only because Washington paid it protection money: As The New York Times reported in February, most Egyptians view the $1.55 billion in annual American aid as “a kind of payment for preserving the peace despite the popular resentment of Israel.”
Egypt has indeed benefited less than Israel, since Mubarak didn’t follow Israel’s lead in using those decades of peace to invest in domestic prosperity. Yet Israelis have never deemed prosperity the primary benefit of peace; more important to them by far is all the Israeli lives it has saved. And from that perspective, Egypt was no less a beneficiary, since in every war they fought, Egypt’s casualties vastly outnumbered Israel’s: Its estimated fatalities (exact numbers don’t exist) were six to 17 times higher than Israel’s in 1956, 10 to 20 times higher in 1967, two to 20 times higher in the War of Attrition (1967-70) and two to six times higher in 1973.
Thus if it has done nothing else, peace has assuredly saved tens of thousands of Egyptian lives. Yet this superlative achievement has been all but forgotten, drowned out by decades of anti-Israeli incitement. And the result is that public sentiment overwhelmingly favors throwing it away.
It’s far too late to do anything about the situation in Egypt. Its newly elected leaders will have to accommodate the views of a virulently anti-Israel public, and changing those views will be a long, hard slog. But it’s not too late to learn the lesson with regard to the Palestinians, and also to Jordan – another country where anti-Israel incitement is rampant despite a formal peace.
Far from being a secondary issue, it turns out that ending incitement is the sine qua non of a lasting peace. And if the Arab-Israeli peace process is to have any future, Israel, the U.S. and Europe must start treating it as such.
The warped view of reality promoted by many “human rights” organizations is nowhere more evident than in the various global indexes they produce. I’ve written previously about the moral obtuseness of, say, a religious freedom index that ranks Israel and India – two countries where multiple faiths live and worship freely – as no better than Saudi Arabia, where non-Muslim worship is legally banned. The new 2012 Global Peace Index provides another stellar example.
Unsurprisingly, the Arab Spring caused the entire Middle East/North Africa region to plummet in the rankings. But within this region, the country that scored second-lowest, just above Iraq, is the only one that has suffered no unrest whatsoever during the past year: Israel.
At 150, Israel ranks three places below Syria – a country where some 14,000 people have been killed the last year, mainly by their own government. Yet Israel, whose citizens aren’t being slaughtered by anyone (even terrorists have so far killed only two Israelis this year), is deemed the less peaceful country.
Ordinary people, untroubled by the lofty concerns that motivate so-called human rights groups, are voting the opposite with their feet: Tourism to Israel is at record heights, while tourism to Syria is nonexistent. But the folks at GPI clearly don’t let common sense intrude on their metrics.
Israel also ranks a whopping 28 places below Eritrea. This would undoubtedly surprise the tens of thousands of Eritreans who have sought asylum in Israel in recent years, and been granted group protection because the UN deems their country too dangerous for forced repatriation. Needless to say, there has been no migration in the opposite direction, nor does the UN deem Israel sufficiently dangerous to entitle its emigrants to group protection. But once again, the verdict that ordinary people are passing with their feet is beneath GPI’s lofty concerns.
So what are those concerns? Well, according to GPI, a strong military is anti-peace. Among the 23 factors it ranks, almost one-third relate to military strength: “military expenditure,” “armed services personnel,” “heavy weapons.” “weapons exports,” “weapons imports,” “military capability” and “access to weapons” (high in a country of citizen-soldiers like Israel, where most men serve for three years and many do annual reserve duty for years afterward).
Yet if you live in a lousy neighborhood like the Middle East, a strong military is actually essential to preserve peace. Indeed, Israel’s military is a large part of why tourists still flock to the country even as they shun neighboring Syria and Egypt: Not only has it kept terrorism low, but it has also helped keep the unrest in neighboring countries from spilling over. Hezbollah, for instance, might well have attacked Israel in an effort to divert world attention from Syria if it didn’t know a devastating response would swiftly follow.
Many people naively take what human rights groups say at face value. But in fact, as the Global Peace Index once again shows, these organizations frequently offer a highly distorted view of reality.
Unless, of course, you really would prefer to spend your next vacation in the charnel houses of Houla or Al Heffa rather than in peaceful Jerusalem.
Kudos to Minister Without Portfolio Benny Begin for having the guts to speak the truth. The botched raid on a Turkish-sponsored flotilla to Gaza in 2010, he told the Knesset State Control Committee last week, was due first and foremost to poor planning by the Israel Defense Forces.
This isn’t to say that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak don’t richly deserve the coals of fire heaped on their heads by last week’s state comptroller’s report on the flotilla. The first rule of government is “don’t believe everything your generals tell you,” and their failure to heed that rule led directly to the raid’s bloody consequences: nine naval commandos wounded and nine of their Turkish assailants killed.
Nevertheless, the most shocking failure revealed by the report was that of someone whom the media seems largely to have ignored: then-IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi.
According to the report, Ashkenazi repeatedly warned government officials that the commandos would be met by violence when they boarded, including at a meeting of the “Septet” of senior cabinet ministers five days before the raid. “I think it’s an illusion to think that if 20 people descend onto a ship with 400 people aboard they will be met with applause,” he told that meeting. “They will fight them.”
Intelligence Minister Dan Meridor then asked the obvious question: “Do you have enough men?” To which Ashkenazi replied: “There will not be [enough men] in the beginning…gradually there will be.”
In other words, Ashkenazi predicted exactly what ultimately happened: The commandos would board the ship, be attacked, and be badly outnumbered. Such a scenario made it inevitable that some commandos would be wounded or even killed, and also that they would be forced to open fire in self-defense, since only superior weaponry could compensate for their vastly inferior numbers. Yet he still submitted this plan to the cabinet as his operational recommendation.
In short, he knowingly submitted a plan whose only possible outcome was the very disaster that in fact occurred. And despite this, he assured the Septet that everything would be okay: “I want to clarify that it isn’t easy but we will do it,” he said. “Gradually there will be” enough men.
Clearly, Ashkenazi’s testimony to the Septet should have sounded warning bells to all the ministers present. By blindly accepting his plan, Netanyahu and Barak were guilty of precisely the same failure that ultimately toppled their respective predecessors, Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz: During the Second Lebanon War, Olmert and Peretz blithely accepted then-Chief of Staff Dan Halutz’s assurances that aerial bombardment alone would defeat Hezbollah, when in reality, it not only failed to keep the organization from launching some 4,000 rockets at Israel and killing 163 Israelis, but also did so little damage that Hezbollah has since tripled its arsenal and taken over all of Lebanon to boot. Then, too, evidence existed that should have made them suspicious of Halutz’s promises: After all, both men were MKs during the 1991 Gulf War, when six weeks of aerial bombardment by the U.S.-led coalition failed so utterly to defeat Saddam Hussein that ground forces finally had to be sent in; why should they have imagined Israel’s far smaller air force could achieve better results?
Nevertheless, the fact remains that most prime ministers aren’t experts in the nitty-gritty of military planning, and shouldn’t have to be: They should be able to rely on the people whose job this actually is – the IDF’s top brass – to present them with feasible options. Halutz’s failure to do so could have been dismissed as an aberration. But when two successive chiefs of staff present the government with such delusional plans for important operations, one can’t help suspecting that the IDF’s problems go far deeper than a single bad commander.
This, however, is precisely why Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss was right to emphasize the importance of building up the National Security Council as a counterweight to the IDF: A prime minister can’t make good decisions if he lacks options to choose among. In this case, because he was offered no other military options, Netanyahu’s choices (once diplomatic efforts had failed) boiled down to either approving the IDF’s delusional plan or letting the ships proceed unmolested, which would effectively have ended the blockade of Gaza. Had a strong NSC with the resources to devise its own operational proposals existed, Netanyahu might have had some better choices.
To understand just how important this is, consider America’s experience in the Iraq War. By 2006, the war was universally acknowledged to be going badly, and most experts thought the US should cut its losses: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, for instance, opposed a significant troop increase. But President George W. Bush collected proposals from a wide range of sources, both inside and outside the government, and ultimately opted for a maverick proposal – sending more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq – over the consensus position. At the time, the move was widely derided. Today, however, the overwhelming consensus is that the surge worked.
Israel’s governments, too, desperately need to end their exclusive dependence on the IDF for ideas. Inter alia, they should start regularly consulting experts and think tanks outside the government: The country’s vast reservoir of people with military expertise is a resource that ought to be exploited. But it’s also important to have a source of alternative ideas within the government – a body whose proposals the cabinet will have to hear, just as it has to hear those of the IDF – as a bulwark against prime ministers too slothful to search out different options on their own initiative. That’s the role the NSC is supposed to fill.
By starving the NSC of resources and keeping it out the loop, thereby depriving it of the ability to offer alternative proposals, successive prime ministers have not only hurt the country; they have also hurt themselves. For as both Olmert and now Netanyahu have discovered, if they pin their faith exclusively on the IDF and its plans don’t work, they are the ones who will ultimately be blamed.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Fifty international organizations issued a public appeal yesterday for an immediate end to the blockade of Gaza, which they deemed a “violation of international law.” The signatories were the usual suspects: human rights groups like Amnesty International, aid organizations like Oxfam, and six UN agencies.
As Haaretz Palestinian affairs correspondent Avi Issacharoff points out, this appeal is sheer nonsense. Israel ended restrictions on civilian imports to Gaza two years ago, and today, the only civilian product not available “in abundance” is fuel – which isn’t Israel’s fault:
The source of that problem stems from the Hamas government’s refusal to pay the high price for a liter of fuel (like every Israeli citizen pays) and its insistence on receiving smuggled fuel from the Egyptian side at a cheap price, facing off against the Egyptian regime’s complete refusal to allow the continued smuggling of fuel into Gaza (also in light of the serious fuel crisis in Egypt itself).
And while Israel does maintain a naval blockade of Gaza, that blockade was deemed legal by no less an authority than the UN itself, in last year’s Palmer Report.
So why are these agencies suddenly trying to resurrect a nonexistent issue? Granted, most of them need no excuse to attack Israel, but there’s a more urgent motivation – a need to divert attention from the real culprit before the world, and the Palestinians themselves, cop onto the truth: Gaza’s real problem is that the Palestinians’ own elected government couldn’t care less about its people’s welfare.
Last week, Gaza’s only power plant shut down because armed gangs in Sinai hijacked a fuel convoy, and there were no fuel reserves to cover the shortfall. Given the ongoing security chaos in Sinai, that is likely to recur with increasing frequency if Hamas continues to insist on relying exclusively on smuggled fuel.
But the alternative, importing fuel legally via Israel, is unacceptable to Hamas – not only for financial reasons (legal imports both cost more and deprive Hamas of the taxes it collects from the smuggling tunnels), but as a matter of principle: It would rather see its own people suffer than cooperate with Israel.
Consider, for instance, what happened in February, when another shortage of smuggled fuel shut down the power plant. Egypt promptly offered to send an emergency shipment via Israel, beause the Egypt-Gaza border terminal isn’t equipped to handle large cargo shipments. But Hamas refused, saying it would only accept the shipment if it came through Sinai. In other words, it preferred leaving its people without power during one of the coldest months of the year to accepting a shipment via Israel.
Nor is this exceptional: As I noted last week, it would also rather have its people drink polluted water than let Israeli firms help build a desalination plant.
But if the world woke up to the fact that the party that actually won the last Palestinian election was more interested in hurting Israel than in helping its own people, it might question the Palestinians’ readiness for statehood. And that, of course, would undermine one of these agencies’ most sacred dogmas. So instead, they’ve decided to flak for Hamas: to cover its own sins by redirecting international anger at Israel.
In short, organizations founded to defend the little people against oppressive rulers are now instead defending the government that oppresses them. It’s a sad commentary on how low these groups have fallen.
On May 10, the official Israel Defense Forces blog posted an article titled “The 2012 Terror Attacks Against Israel You Never Heard About.” The title is somewhat misleading, since in fact, none of these attacks actually took place: They were thwarted by the IDF’s unsung but daily counterterrorism operations in the West Bank.
While one or two items on the list seem questionable, most could undoubtedly have been deadly attacks. There are no innocent reasons for carting bombs around.
On April 11, for instance, soldiers caught a Palestinian at a checkpoint near Nablus “carrying improvised explosive devices, three knives and 50 bullets.” On April 21, two Palestinian teens were caught near Tapuach Junction with five pipe bombs, a gun and ammunition. On April 24, soldiers found four improvised bombs in the bags of two Palestinians crossing a checkpoint near Jericho. On April 28, two Palestinians were caught trying to smuggle four pipe bombs through yet another West Bank checkpoint. On May 7, soldiers caught a Palestinian teen with three pipe bombs near Tapuach Junction. On May 10, two other Palestinians were caught near Tapuach Junction “carrying 2 explosive devices and 3 prepped firebombs.”
It’s not surprising that this activity goes largely unreported; soldiers doing their job shouldn’t be unusual enough to be newsworthy. But this low profile could become a real security hazard for Israel in light of Egypt’s presidential elections, whose final round is scheduled for mid-June.
Why? Because front-runner Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood party has threatened to rethink the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, as have most other Egyptian parties. And their main excuse for so doing is the claim that Israel has violated the treaty by not resolving its conflict with the Palestinians.
Thus, once the elections are over Israel is liable to face heavy international pressure to “support Egypt’s new democracy” and shore up the treaty by making further concessions to the Palestinians. And one of the concessions the Palestinian Authority (PA) has consistently demanded is to restore the West Bank security situation to what it was before the second intifada erupted in September 2000. Specifically, it wants the IDF to withdraw completely from Area A, the part of the West Bank assigned to full Palestinian control by the Oslo Accords, and thereafter desist from any incursions into it.
Precisely because the IDF’s operations have been kept so low-profile, much of the world deems this demand risk-free for Israel: It has become accepted wisdom that the relative rarity of deadly terror in recent years is thanks entirely to the PA’s own counterterrorism efforts. Yet in reality, despite the genuine improvement in the PA security forces under PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, the bulk of the work is still done by the IDF itself.
While parts of Area A (which Israel reoccupied in response to the intifada) have been restored to PA security control, most of it is still controlled by the IDF. Moreover, even in cities the IDF has vacated, it still conducts frequent night raids to thwart planned attacks. That’s an ongoing sore point for the PA, but the IDF insists these raids are vital: In March, for instance, Israeli soldiers arrested a nine-man terrorist cell from Ramallah that had tried repeatedly to kidnap Israeli civilians. Thus restoring the status quo ante, which would require the IDF both to quit Area A entirely and to end these raids, would pose significant risk.
Amplifying the risk is the fact that despite the West’s glowing image of the new PA security forces, even Palestinian officials now admit that they remain riddled with corruption and violence. For years, as a senior PA officer acknowledged to reporter Khaled Abu Toameh, the PA turned a blind eye to these problems. But since May 1, when a Palestinian governor died of heart failure after an attempted assassination, Palestinian security forces have arrested dozens of police officers for “various crimes – including murder, extortion, abductions, sexual harassment and armed robberies.”
Nor is this situation surprising: As Abu Toameh noted, PA officials openly acknowledge that the “new” PA security forces were formed in large part by recruiting former terrorists and gangsters. And terrorists and gangsters rarely make ideal policemen.
Moreover, there’s a real concern that these terrorists might revert to their former profession should the IDF abandon Area A. They originally turned in their guns (under a PA amnesty program approved by Israel) only to halt a relentless IDF pursuit that made them unwelcome everywhere, from taxis to cafes, and especially as prospective husbands. But no such pursuit would be possible if Israel pledged to keep its troops out of Area A.
Finally, the myth of the PA’s counterterrorism successes ignores the fact that Israel didn’t return any territory to Palestinian control until the terrorist infrastructure had been decimated by the IDF’s own efforts, which reduced Israel’s total terror-related fatalities from 450 in 2002 to 13 in 2007. The first city, Jenin, was restored to PA control only in May 2008. In the 12 preceding months, exactly eight Israelis had been killed by West Bank terror, and the fatality level stayed roughly constant in subsequent years: five in 2009, eight in 2010, nine in 2011.
In short, the PA stepped in only after the hardest work had already been done, and has since merely preserved the relative quiet it inherited – and even that, only with a hefty assist from the IDF. Hence, its ability to cope with any upsurge in terrorism once the IDF leaves remains an open question.
For all these reasons, even Israelis who favor unilaterally evacuating settlements don’t support unilaterally evacuating Israeli troops: The IDF’s presence is vital to Israel’s security. The horrors of the second intifada, when Area A served as a safe haven for suicide bombers, and the nonstop rocket fire from evacuated Gaza have together made this crystal clear to Israelis.
Unfortunately, what is obvious to most Israelis is largely unknown to the rest of the world. Thus, unless Israel begins explaining this truth, it may end up being pressured into concessions that would threaten the hard-won security of the last few years.
However much I disagree, I can understand why the Haredim oppose moves to end their draft exemptions. What I can’t understand is why, in their effort to retain these exemptions, they have chosen a line of argument that risks undermining what would seem a priceless asset even from their own perspective: a nearly wall-to-wall consensus among Jewish Israelis that Torah study has intrinsic value to the Jewish state, and therefore, the state should support it.
To understand just how broad this consensus is, consider one simple fact: Virtually every proposal submitted to the Keshev Committee, which is considering alternatives to the Haredi draft exemption, stipulates that a sizable number of the best Torah students should continue to be exempt. And many also advocate having the state fully fund these students.
The details differ: Committee chairman MK Yohanan Plesner (Kadima), for instance, proposes exempting 1,000 students; Labor Party leader Shelly Yacimovich and Labor MK Isaac Herzog both advocate 4,000; former director general of the Prime Minister’s Office Eyal Gabai suggests 20 percent of each yeshiva’s student body. But all agree on the principle: Torah study is a value the Jewish state must support, so the best and the brightest should get draft exemptions and scholarships.
This principle is also reflected in the thousands of Torah study institutions that receive state funding: regular yeshivas (both Haredi and non-Haredi), pre-army yeshivas, yeshiva high schools and more.
Yet the argument Haredi spokesmen are now pushing seems tailor-made to undermine this consensus.
Last month, for instance, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger told Army Radio that there’s a direct correlation between the number of Torah students and the IDF’s performance in wartime: “The more Jews that learn Torah, the stronger our military will be,” he proclaimed. And while I’d initially hoped Metzger’s statement was an aberration, that hope was dashed when it was subsequently echoed by The Jerusalem Post‘s Haredi columnist, Jonathan Rosenblum – someone I deeply respect, and who would certainly not have used an argument he himself admitted most readers won’t believe had it not been widespread enough in Haredi circles to make him feel compelled to try to justify it.
As an Orthodox Jew, I’m likely more open to that kind of argument than secular Israelis. Yet my gut reaction was, “if so, they’re clearly not doing their job; let’s draft them all immediately.” After all, Israel won stunning victories in 1948, 1967 and 1973, defeating vastly more powerful armies each time. Yet back then, the number of full-time Torah students was minuscule compared to what it was in 2006, when Israel was ignominiously fought to a standstill by Hezbollah’s vastly less powerful army. If that’s the kind of “victory” tens of thousands of full-time Torah students produce, who needs them?
Or consider the thriving yeshiva world of pre-World War II Europe. That’s the world Haredim hold up as a model, and they originally sought the draft exemption for the sake of trying to rebuild it. Yet the magnificent Torah study in those yeshivas did nothing to keep the Nazis from slaughtering six million Jews.
Obviously, Torah students aren’t responsible for either the Holocaust or the Second Lebanon War. But unless Haredi spokesmen are brazen enough to claim credit for Jewish victories while disclaiming all responsibility for defeats, that’s where their logic inevitably leads.
Nonetheless, were they merely making what I consider a silly argument, I would say that’s their privilege. What upsets me is that in pushing this argument, they’re sidelining the real reasons why Torah study is vital. And should they ever manage to persuade secular Israelis that this is indeed the main justification for Torah study, that wall-to-wall consensus I mentioned earlier might crumble.
The principal argument for the importance of Torah study is that while it may have a questionable track record of saving Jewish lives, it has an unsurpassed track record of preserving the Jewish people. Dozens, if not hundreds, of the nations that peopled the ancient world no longer exist: Sumerians, Phoenicians, Philistines, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes, Romans, and many more. Each in turn fell to invaders, and in defeat, lost their distinctive identities.
Of them all, the Jews alone managed to preserve their unique identity despite the destruction of their kingdom and 2,000 years of exile. And for that, as even most secular Jews acknowledge, we have the Torah to thank: Its study and practice is what preserved the Jews as a nation for two millennia.
But there’s a secondary argument that also resonates with many Israelis: The Torah is the core of our cultural heritage. Just as being an educated citizen of Britain requires some acquaintance with Shakespeare, or being an educated citizen of America requires familiarity with the Constitution, being an educated citizen of a Jewish state requires some knowledge of Judaism’s foundational documents: Torah, Mishnah, Gemara, etc. And in recent years, growing recognition of that fact has sparked a resurgence of interest in Jewish studies among secular Jews.
Yet no cultural heritage can be preserved solely by laymen; experts familiar with all its intricacies are also needed. And in a Jewish state, as most Israelis recognize, that means serious Torah scholars.
One would hope Israelis are too sensible to forget the real arguments for Torah study just because Haredi leaders and spokesmen spout nonsensical ones. Nevertheless, I’m appalled that Haredim would risk of making Torah study an object of contempt to their fellow Jews by advancing such shoddy arguments in its defense.
But I’m also dismayed for another reason: I sincerely believe Haredim have much to contribute to Israeli society, starting with their passionate commitment to education, Jewish identity and helping others. And they can’t contribute anything if they can’t communicate with the rest of us.
If the claim that Torah study wins wars is the best argument Haredi scholars can produce after years of full-time Torah immersion, Haredi scholarship badly needs a leavening of real-world experience. It might even improve their Torah study. But it would certainly improve their ability to talk to their fellow Israelis.
And since we all have to live together, that would benefit Haredim and non-Haredim alike.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Last week, the Israel Festival featured one of the most gripping productions I’ve ever seen. “Defiant Requiem” tells the story of the Terezin concentration camp, where in the midst of death, Jewish inmates clung to their humanity through an outpouring of artistic endeavor, including a full choral production of Verdi’s “Requiem.”
So weak they could barely stand, so hungry they could barely concentrate, 150 inmates nevertheless rehearsed night after night, learning an extremely complex musical score by rote (since they only had one copy), and performed it to such a standard that the Nazis favored a visiting Red Cross delegation with a command performance. And after conductor Rafael Schachter’s first choir was deported to Auschwitz, he trained a second. And then a third. It was an incredible testament to the human spirit.
But there’s a flip side to this story, as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu noted in an eloquent taped introduction: All their dedication and creative passion, their awe-inspiring retention of their humanity in the face of the greatest dehumanization machine in history, still wasn’t enough to save these Jews’ lives. Most of Terezin’s inmates died, either there or in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
For to save life, spirit alone doesn’t suffice: You also need power, in its rawest, ugliest form. When Schachter’s choir sang the Requiem’s plea for deliverance from eternal death, it was salvation from the eternal death of Terezin for which they prayed. But it took an army and a brutal war to answer that prayer.
This is a truth most Israelis understand deep in their bones. But it’s one a growing number of American Jews seem increasingly uncomfortable with. And this has been a crucial factor in making many of them increasingly uncomfortable with Israel as well.
The reason for their discomfort is obvious: Military power may save lives, but it can’t be wielded without violating other cherished moral principles. It’s unquestionably wrong to kill an innocent person, yet war inevitably produces civilian casualties, however hard armies may try to minimize them. It’s unquestionably wrong to punish the innocent for the sins of the guilty, yet checkpoints set up to catch the few bent on sowing deadly terror inevitably cause hardship to thousands of innocents. And the list could go on.
There’s no happy medium whereby power can somehow be wielded without these negative consequences; it’s a head-on collision of values that forces everyone to choose sides. And increasingly, Israeli and American Jews are choosing opposite sides.
Growing numbers of American Jews no longer believe the security benefits of military operations like Cast Lead in Gaza three years ago can justify the civilian casualties they cause. And they are even less convinced that security considerations can justify the hardships “the occupation” causes many innocent Palestinians, from restrictions on the movement of people and goods to arrest operations that sometimes end in casualties. To put it more starkly, they are uncomfortable with the image of Jews as “perpetrators” rather than victims: If power cannot be wielded without wronging others, they believe, then Jews should choose morality over power.
Israelis, too, are uncomfortable with many of the consequences of wielding power. That’s one reason why polls consistently show that most favor a two-state solution: They would happily be rid of the “occupation” tomorrow, provided they could do so without endangering Israeli lives. That’s also why their army makes extraordinary efforts – more “than any other army in the history of warfare,” according to British Col. Richard Kemp – to prevent civilian casualties.
But to Israelis, saving Jewish lives is also a moral imperative. While it’s a gross distortion to view Israel as nothing more than a response to the Holocaust, it’s an equally gross distortion to view it solely as a vehicle for the flourishing of the Jewish spirit: “Never again” was and remains one of Israel’s raisons d’etre. And the very applications of power most deplored by many American Jews are precisely those that consistently save Israeli lives.
Ugly as the “occupation” is, for instance, the consequences of withdrawal have thus far proved even uglier. Israel tried it three times: from parts of the West Bank under the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s, from south Lebanon in 2000, and from Gaza in 2005. The results, respectively, were the second intifada (which caused more Israeli casualties than all the terror attacks of the previous 53 years), the Second Lebanon War, and 8,000 rockets launched at southern Israel. That’s why today, even Israelis who favor further withdrawals often say that for now, only settlers should leave; the army should remain.
Similarly, while smaller-scale military operations did nothing to reduce the rocket fire, the far more extensive Cast Lead slashed rocket launches by 75 percent, from 3,278 in 2008 to 774 in 2009. And even now, when the West Bank is relatively quiet, checkpoints routinely thwart terror attacks.
To understand just how deeply this Israeli consensus runs, consider something published two years ago by the man who is now editor-in-chief of Israel’s far-left newspaper, Haaretz. Describing his army service in Lebanon years ago, Aluf Benn wrote: “We learned one lesson: Regardless of politics, it’s better to be the guard than the prisoner. Even those who dream of a permanent settlement and a Palestinian state and want to see the settlements gone prefer to tie on the cuffs than be cuffed … The occupation did not transform us into law-breaking criminals, it only taught us that it’s best to be on the stronger side.”
In Israel, even the Left understands this stark truth: Power may be ugly, but powerlessness is worse.
However hard you try to minimize the dirt, there’s no way to keep your hands clean while wielding power. Dirt stains even the most justified conceivable uses of force: The fighting that followed the D-Day landings in World War II, for instance, exacted a horrific toll in civilian lives.
But American Jews repelled by this uncomfortable truth should remember one thing: The alternative to Jewish power isn’t the shining Jewish spirit so movingly captured by “Defiant Requiem.” It’s the gas chambers where most of those Jews ended their lives.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.