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Former Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch made a truly shocking comment last week. Speaking at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, she began, reasonably enough, by arguing that Israel needs a complete constitution to protect democracy and human rights. Then came the bombshell: “She said that the goal of completing a constitution could either be undertaken by the court itself through its decisions or by the Knesset through passing additional Basic Laws,” The Jerusalem Post reported.
In short, our former Supreme Court president thinks “democracy” is perfectly compatible with having unelected judges write a constitution and then impose it by fiat. In real democracies, constitutions require ratification by the people or their elected representatives. But Beinisch evidently prefers Soviet-style democracy, in which unelected officials makes the real decisions while the “elected legislature” is merely for show.
Nor is she unusual: Her predecessor, Aharon Barak, imposed Israel’s existing “constitution” by fiat. By asserting that two 1992 Basic Laws approved by a mere quarter of the Knesset (respectively, 23 and 32 out of 120 MKs) constituted a constitution even though most MKs hadn’t intended it as one, he enabled the court to overturn other legislation passed by much larger majorities.
But what made Beinisch’s comment particularly eerie was its juxtaposition with the very different conversation taking place just then in America. Discussing President Barack Obama’s newfound support for gay marriage, several commentators noted that despite comparing it to civil rights and women’s rights, Obama advocated leaving decisions on the issue to the individual states rather than having the courts impose it as a constitutional right. “Different communities are arriving at different conclusions, at different times,” he said. “And I think that’s a healthy process and a healthy debate.”
Yet why, if gay marriage is a right, should it be left to the whim of state legislatures? “What seems to loom here,” responded Anand Giridharadas in The New York Times, “is the specter of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that made abortion a federal constitutional right — but did so in a manner that interrupted an unresolved national conversation, as many supporters of abortion rights concede today, and thereby divided the country into two irreconcilable camps.”
In short, almost 40 years later, even supporters of Roe v. Wade have finally realized what Beinisch and her fellows still haven’t grasped: that imposing norms on an unwilling public by judicial fiat can do more harm than good.
Roe v. Wade was blatant judicial activism: The court first asserted a constitutional right to privacy that exists nowhere in the US constitution, famously invoking the unwritten “penumbras” of the Bill of Rights as one justification. Then it decided this right was “broad enough” to encompass abortion on demand.
Moreover, the ruling clearly contradicted majority sentiment. In 1973, abortion on demand was legal in only four of the 50 states. In most states, it was completely illegal; in the rest, it was legal only in certain specified circumstances (i.e. rape or danger to the mother’s health).
But public opinion was already shifting: According to the National Abortion Federation, “one-third of the states liberalized or repealed their criminal abortion laws” between 1967 and 1973. And had this process continued naturally, abortion might ultimately have won broad social acceptance, just as other behaviors once frowned on (divorce, out-of-wedlock pregnancy) are now socially accepted.
Instead, because it was imposed by judicial fiat, abortion became one of the most hot-button issues in American politics, and remains so even four decades later. Abortion opponents didn’t feel they had lost fairly; they felt they had been robbed of hard-won victories in state legislatures by an unelected court. Consequently, they felt a burning resentment that never healed. And instead of abortion rights gaining social acceptance, the number of Americans who label themselves “pro-choice” has declined to an all-time low.
Many Israelis similarly resent Israel’s Supreme Court for repeatedly nullifying their hard-won victories in the democratic arena. The court has asserted the right to overturn government decisions and/or legislation on virtually every important policy issue Israel faces: immigration and citizenship (from defining who is a Jew, and thereby entitled to automatic citizenship, to deciding whether Israel may deny entry to enemy nationals), budgetary priorities (it has, for instance, asserted the right to set minimum welfare payments and add treatments to the national health insurance plan), family matters (from recognizing gay couples to criminalizing spanking), even military tactics during wartime (such as targeted killings of terrorists). In its view, there’s no such thing as an issue that is properly left to the elected branches of government: “Everything is justiciable,” as Barak famously said.
Moreover, the court frequently nixes government policies not because they contradict any actual law, but because the justices deem them “unreasonable” – a decision most democracies leave to the voters – or because they violate a “right” of the court’s own invention.
Ironically, the court itself is the first victim of this overreach: Public confidence in it has been plummeting. The second victim, as Roe v. Wade shows, is social cohesion: Disputes that are resolved by judicial fiat instead of democratic give-and-take generally leave the loser angry and embittered, splitting the country “into two irreconcilable camps.”
The third victim, however, is the very democracy Beinisch claims to want to protect: When people feel they have no real influence over government policy, because most major decisions are ultimately made by a group of unelected justices, they lose faith in the democratic process. Indeed, this is already happening, as both falling voter turnout and polls measuring democratic sentiment show. And while judicial overreach isn’t the only cause of this decline (our flawed electoral system also plays a significant role), it’s a major contributing factor.
Americans, it seems, have finally realized the pernicious effects of judicial activism. But here in Israel, our judicial overlords clearly haven’t: Not content with the power they already have, they now claim the power to write the very constitution they will later interpret.
This is unconscionable, and Beinisch’s statement should serve as a wake-up call: If Israelis want to preserve their democracy, restraining the Supreme Court must be a top priority.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
In arguing last week that the new unity government’s impetus was primarily domestic, I’m in the minority: The more popular explanation is Iran. And it’s certainly true, as Charles Krauthammer noted, that unity governments are sometimes formed to create public legitimacy for military action; 1967 is the classic example. It’s also true, as other commentators have noted, that if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu wanted to bolster the government’s security credentials in light of the vehement opposition to attacking Iran voiced by respected security experts like former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and former Shin Bet security service chief Yuval Diskin, there’s nothing like having three former IDF chiefs of staff in the cabinet: Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon, and now, Kadima chairman Shaul Mofaz.
But I don’t think Netanyahu ever had a legitimacy problem over Iran, because polls consistently show the public siding with him rather than Dagan and Diskin. After Diskin charged last month that Netanyahu and Barak were “messianists” who couldn’t be trusted on Iran, for instance, a subsequent poll found that the public disagreed by a 2:1 margin. And far from concurring with Dagan that attacking Iran is “a stupid idea,” two-thirds of Israelis say that if other measures fail, attacking Iran is preferable to living with Iranian nukes.
These findings may seem surprising, because Diskin and Dagan both enjoy great public esteem for their respective performances as Shin Bet and Mossad chief. But when you consider the history of Israel’s efforts against Iran’s nuclear program, it’s not surprising at all.
First, it’s an undeniable fact that so far, the Netanyahu-Barak duo has conducted a highly responsible and effective Iran policy in comparison to former prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ariel Sharon. By loudly threatening military action – in contrast to the Olmert-Sharon policy of keeping a low profile and letting Washington take the lead – they have for the first time succeeded in getting the world to impose the kind of draconian sanctions on Iran that all Israeli governments have deemed the only hope of making military action unnecessary. Indeed, French officials openly acknowledged that the EU decided to halt Iranian oil imports only due to fear that otherwise, Israel would attack Iran.
Second, it’s equally undeniable that so far, the methods advocated by Dagan and Diskin have failed miserably. According to a cable later published by WikiLeaks, for instance, Dagan’s strategy for Iran contained five elements: “political approach,” “covert measures,” “counter-proliferation,” “sanctions” and “regime change.” Four of the five have been tried extensively.
Iran has been hit with four rounds of Security Council sanctions, plus independent US and EU sanctions. The West has negotiated with Iran repeatedly. Various efforts were made to keep Tehran from acquiring nuclear technology, reportedly including having CIA agents sell it faulty equipment. And as Mossad chief, Dagan spent eight years taking covert action against Iran; his reputed successes include the Stuxnet computer worm and the assassination of several Iranian nuclear scientists.
But despite all this, Iran’s nuclear capability has progressed dramatically. Tehran has produced enough low-enriched uranium for four nuclear bombs; further enriched some of this uranium to 20 percent, which experts say is far more difficult than going from 20 percent to the 90 percent needed for a bomb; installed thousands of additional centrifuges, including at a new underground facility in Fordow that is almost invulnerable to attack; and conducted experiments in weaponization, including technology to arm its missiles with nuclear warheads and “a highly sophisticated nuclear triggering technology that experts said could be used for only one purpose: setting off a nuclear weapon.”
As for regime change, Iran’s Green Revolution posed a real opportunity in 2009, but the world, and especially Washington, declined to support it. Now, the Iranian opposition has been brutally suppressed, making regime change highly unlikely in the limited time remaining until Iran gets the bomb.
Granted, Dagan’s strategy isn’t dead yet: The new, tougher sanctions – including the European oil embargo, a ban on doing business with Iran’s central bank and severing Iran from the SWIFT network of interbank transfers – will come fully online only later this summer; meanwhile, new negotiations with Iran are also underway. But even Dagan doesn’t seem to believe these latest measures will suffice to halt Tehran’s nuclear program: He co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed just last week declaring that still more draconian sanctions are needed.
Finally, there’s a third historical factor: the Iraq precedent. In 1981, numerous senior defense officials opposed attacking Iraq’s nuclear reactor, including the heads of the Mossad, Military Intelligence and the Atomic Energy Commission, plus a former IDF chief of staff and a former air force chief of staff. Yet the operation was an unqualified success, and Iraq remains nuke-free to this day – showing that senior defense officials aren’t necessarily better than elected politicians at weighing the costs and benefits of such a strike.
Thus the nuclear record alone suffices to justify Israelis’ faith in Netanyahu and Barak over Dagan and Diskin. But another factor may be at play as well: Both former officials have blamed the government for the ongoing Palestinian impasse. Dagan, for instance, lambasted it for not adopting the Saudi peace plan, while Diskin asserted last month that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas really wants to negotiate, and it’s Netanyahu’s fault that talks have effectively been frozen since 2009.
But Israelis are very aware of Abbas’s rejection of Olmert’s generous peace offer in 2008, his refusal to talk with Netanyahu even after the latter imposed an unprecedented settlement freeze, the ongoing Palestinian insistence on the “right of return” and denial of Jerusalem’s Jewish history, the polls showing that most Palestinians still view Israel’s destruction as their ultimate goal. In light of all this, they overwhelmingly blame the impasse on the Palestinians. And having rejected Diskin and Dagan’s judgment on this issue, it’s only natural for Israelis to question their judgment on other issues as well.
In short, Israelis already have solid grounds for trusting Netanyahu and Barak over Diskin and Dagan on Iran. For that, Netanyahu doesn’t need Mofaz in the cabinet.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
To grasp how badly the security situation in Sinai has deteriorated, one fact suffices: Israel now receives as many intelligence warnings about Sinai-based terror plots as it does about terror from Gaza.
This, obviously, is of great concern to Israel. But it should also concern the international community because, unlike terror from the West Bank or Gaza, which, despite periodic Israeli counteroffensives, has never drawn other Arab countries into the conflict, Sinai-based terror could easily end up starting a war between Israel and Egypt.
Last summer, for instance, angry mobs throughout Egypt demanded retaliation after Israeli soldiers repelling a cross-border terror attack from Sinai accidentally killed Egyptian troops caught in the cross-fire. That time, sanity prevailed and the Egyptian government did not seek to escalate the situation militarily. But if cross-border attacks proliferate, more Egyptian casualties would likely ensue. Public demands for retaliatory action would then intensify – especially since Egypt’s new leadership seems to prefer whipping up anti-Israel passions to cooling them down: In a televised debate earlier this month, for instance, both leading presidential contenders termed Israel an “enemy” and an “adversary” and vowed to reconsider the peace treaty.
If public sentiment in favor of war becomes strong enough – hardly inconceivable when 61% of Egyptians already favor scrapping the treaty – the government might feel compelled to accede even if it didn’t actually want a war. And if it’s also facing public discontent over the country’s dire economic situation, it might even see war as a useful distraction.
In theory, this explosive situation has one saving grace: Both Israel and Egypt have a genuine interest in getting Sinai terror under control, meaning fruitful cooperation should be possible. Israel obviously wants to prevent attacks on its citizens. Egypt’s interest is twofold. First, most Sinai terror to date has actually targeted Egyptians: Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm has reported more than 50 attacks on Sinai police stations alone since Egypt’s revolution began in January 2011. Second, Sinai terror hurts Egypt’s economy: Tourist resorts will clearly suffer if the peninsula becomes known as a terrorist hotbed, while the natural gas pipeline, which has been a favorite terrorist target, remains an important source of foreign currency even after Egypt canceled its gas deal with Israel, since it also supplies Jordan.
In practice, however, the job of restoring order to Sinai has been impossibly complicated by Egyptian leaders’ own anti-Israel rhetoric.
Egypt has consistently said it can’t reassert control over Sinai without a major influx of new troops. And while that may once have been a mere excuse aimed at getting Israel to agree to end the demilitarization of Sinai, by now, given how badly the situation has deteriorated, it may even be true. The problem is that unless Cairo wishes to abrogate the peace treaty outright, it needs Israel’s consent to bring additional troops into the peninsula. And with Egypt’s new leaders openly vowing to reconsider the peace treaty while also fanning the flames of anti-Israel fervor, Jerusalem will be very reluctant to agree.
In the past, Israel acceded to numerous requests to allow more troops into Sinai, to the point that the peninsula now hosts two-and-a-half brigades beyond what the treaty permits. This was never uncontroversial; opponents consistently warned that it set a dangerous precedent, which could ultimately undo the peace treaty’s most important achievement – the demilitarization of Sinai. But successive governments concluded that the benefits outweighed the dangers, because the risk of cross-border terror was concrete and immediate, whereas the risk that these troops would be turned against Israel seemed nonexistent: Though the Israeli-Egyptian peace was always chilly, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had demonstrated a rock-solid commitment to maintaining it throughout his 30-year tenure.
Now, however, the situation is very different. With presidential front-runner Amr Moussa declaring the Camp David Accords “dead and buried,” and the Muslim Brotherhood, which won the parliamentary elections, urging “millions of martyrs” to “march toward Jerusalem” at a campaign rally, the risk that any troops brought into Sinai could later be turned against Israel seems very real. That confronts Israel with a genuine dilemma: refuse to let more troops in, and risk additional cross-border terror that could spark a war, or allow them in, and risk fighting any subsequent war from a vastly inferior starting position. But given Sinai’s history as Egypt’s forward staging area for repeated wars against Israel, the need to maintain the peninsula as a buffer zone will likely take precedence as long as the treaty’s continuance seems in doubt.
Ironically, this presents Egypt’s new government with a dilemma of its own, since its desire to play the anti-Israel card clashes with its goal of reestablishing control of Sinai. But so far, anti-Israel sentiment seems to be winning hands down.
Any attempt to address this problem must wait until after Egypt’s presidential elections; asking candidates to moderate their rhetoric during a campaign would likely be fruitless. But given Washington’s clear interest in averting another Israeli-Egyptian war, it must launch a full-court diplomatic press immediately after the elections (which are called for later this month, possibly followed by a run-off in mid-June) to persuade the new president to tone down the rhetoric and tone up security cooperation with Israel in Sinai. As the provider of some $1.5 billion a year in aid, America is not without leverage, and it’s hard to imagine a more critical use for it.
The obvious place to start is with the extra troops already in Sinai. Israel complains that so far, these troops have done nothing to counter Sinai terror: Attacks on the pipeline, for instance, continued despite an influx soldiers ostensibly brought in to protect it. In other words, Israel has already made substantial concessions on the principle of a demilitarized Sinai while so far getting nothing in exchange. Thus a serious counterterrorism effort by these forces would not only reduce the risk of cross-border terror igniting a war, but would also help rebuild trust in Egypt’s willingness to honor its commitments.
With Syria in flames and the Iranian nuclear crisis rapidly approaching climax, the last thing the world needs is an Israeli-Egyptian war. But absent intensive international engagement, the Sinai tinderbox is liable to spark one.
The EU accused Israel yesterday of endangering the two-state solution, inter alia via such crimes as failing to allow more Palestinian construction in parts of the West Bank under full Israeli control. How this threatens a two-state solution is never explained, for the simple reason that it obviously doesn’t: Israel’s refusal to authorize certain Palestinian construction now in no way prevents a Palestinian government from authorizing it later if that land becomes Palestinian under a peace deal.
But focusing on such non-problems allows the EU to ignore the real threat to the two-state solution: the ongoing Palestinian refusal to talk to Israel – not only among the official leadership, but among civil society as well.
Last week, for instance, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate in the West Bank announced that any journalist who dared meet with an Israeli colleague would be expelled from the union, and perhaps even from his job, for the crime of “normalization” with Israel. Because many Israeli journalists (unlike the Israeli mainstream) vocally support the Palestinian Authority’s stated preconditions for resuming negotiations – a complete settlement freeze and an upfront Israeli agreement to a final border based on the 1967 lines – one would think Palestinians would want to encourage them. Instead, the journalists’ union has just declared that even Israelis who fully support Palestinian demands will be treated as bitter enemies. And then the “international community” wonders why mainstream Israelis fear that ceding the West Bank would result in yet another enemy state rather than a friendly, peaceful neighbor.
Nor is the union’s decision an aberration: Such boycotts are official PA policy, and are consistently aimed precisely at the most pro-Palestinian Israelis, such as authors and peace activists. In short, from the Palestinian perspective, there’s no such thing as a good Israeli; all Israelis are enemies.
Given this, is it really surprising that two-thirds of Jewish Israelis believe most Palestinians “have not accepted Israel’s existence and would destroy it if they could,” and are thus reluctant to make territorial concessions that could enable them to do so?
In the EU’s fantasy land, all the Palestinians want is a Palestinian state in the 1967 lines with Jerusalem as its capital. But as Cameron Brown of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies noted last week, three simple statements by Palestinian leaders would suffice to persuade an overwhelming majority of Israelis to agree to this: that the Palestinians renounce all claim to pre-1967 Israel, that they are willing to share custody of Jerusalem’s holy sites, and that refugees will be resettled in the Palestinian state rather than Israel. That would tell Israelis that the Palestinians’ goal really is a state alongside Israel rather than Israel’s destruction.
But Palestinian leaders have never said this, and they never will. Because the unpleasant truth, as polls consistently show, is that most Palestinians still do seek Israel’s destruction.
Back before the unity government was formed last week, I’d been planning a column about Yair Lapid’s one contribution to Israeli politics: his pledge to join the next government regardless of who formed it. Far from representing a cynical preference for ministerial perks over principles, I planned to argue, Lapid apparently understood a basic truth that always eluded former Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni: You can’t credibly blame a prime minister for capitulating to Haredi demands while simultaneously making it impossible for him to form a coalition without the Haredim. Only if the centrist parties are willing to sit together will it be possible to enact vital domestic reforms long opposed by the Haredim, such as changing the electoral system or instituting universal national service.
Since then, Lapid has proven that I gave him far too much credit: He’s busily denouncing the new coalition, formed to address precisely those issues, as a Soviet-style dictatorship. But fortunately, someone far more important has proven that he does genuinely care about domestic reform: Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Two developments over the last year made the public’s desire for a domestic agenda crystal-clear: last summer’s social protests and Shelly Yacimovich’s victory in Labor’s leadership race. But Netanyahu is no Johnny-come-lately to the cause; he actually sought to create a government capable of domestic reform from his first day in office.
Immediately after the 2009 elections, he singled out Kadima as his preferred coalition partner. Livni was the first person he invited for coalition talks, and he reportedly offered her fairly substantial enticements. But Livni was both too egotistical to play second fiddle and too obsessed with “solving the conflict” to tolerate Netanyahu’s more cautious approach to Israeli-Palestinian talks in exchange for a chance to enact domestic reform: She reportedly made demands no self-respecting premier could accept, including sole authority over Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Thus Netanyahu was forced to form a coalition with the Haredi parties instead.
He tried again partway through his term, when he sought to persuade seven Kadima MKs to quit their party and join his coalition as an independent faction. That would have given him a parliamentary majority without the Haredim, comprising his own Likud (27 MKs), Yisrael Beiteinu (15), Labor (13, since that was before it split), and the seven breakaways. That attempt reportedly came close to succeeding, but ultimately failed.
That he did succeed on his third try is no thanks to Livni’s successor: Shaul Mofaz refused to join the coalition after being elected Kadima chairman in March, and changed his mind only to save his political skin (polls showed Kadima losing almost two-thirds of its seats) after Netanyahu called new elections for September. But Netanyahu quickly seized the opportunity.
Now that he finally has the coalition he always wanted, he has promised to use it to tackle some big domestic issues. At a press conference last Monday, he said the new coalition had four goals, three of which are domestic: changing the system of government, instituting universal national service, and economic legislation to increase competition and raise living standards while maintaining fiscal stability. All three are vital objectives.
Nevertheless, he faces three potentially enormous pitfalls.
The first is lack of time. US President Barack Obama may well be reelected on November 6, and if so, he reportedly plans to resume intensive efforts to create a Palestinian state. That would force Netanyahu to spend most of his time and energy fending off pressure for dangerous concessions and coping with constant crises in U.S.-Israeli relations, just as he did during the early part of his term, and would thus deprive him of the time and energy needed to push through controversial domestic reforms.
In short, he may have only a six-month window of opportunity to enact reforms. And of those six months, the Knesset will be in session for less than four, due to the lengthy summer recess.
Second, there’s a very real danger of passing ill-conceived reforms that end up making the situation worse rather than better. A classic example is Israel’s last experiment with electoral reform: the institution of direct elections for prime minister in 1992.
While the reform’s drafters had also intended MKs to be directly elected, the Knesset nixed that idea, deciding only the premier should be elected directly. The result was a “reform” that did nothing to increase MKs’ accountability to the voters but significantly increased political instability: The major parties shrunk once people no longer had to vote for a candidate’s party to ensure his election as premier, so prime ministers ended up even more dependent on small coalition partners than they were before.
Finally, there’s a risk of failing to balance essential reforms with minorities’ concerns. For instance, vocal constituencies will undoubtedly press the unity government to use its power not merely to institute universal national service, but to impose a secular core curriculum on Haredi schools, end stipends for yeshiva students and otherwise radically alter the Haredi lifestyle. Yet an angry, embittered minority that feels persecuted by the majority is ultimately unhealthy for Israel. Thus it would be wiser to seek a compromise that trades secular concessions on some of these issues for Haredi concessions on the primary goal, universal service (a subsequent column will discuss what such a compromise might look like).
Granted, the Haredi parties may refuse any compromise acceptable to the majority. But it’s also possible that their intransigence to date has stemmed mainly from the fact that no politician worth his salt will accept half a loaf when he can get the whole thing – which the Haredim could as long as they were political kingmakers. Faced with a choice between half a loaf and nothing at all, they may be more amenable to compromise.
Netanyahu has now staked his political future on his ability to enact the reforms he promised last week. If he fails to use his grand coalition to effect significant change, Israelis will not quickly forgive him for squandering the opportunity. But if he succeeds, he will have done an enormous service to the country – and almost certainly secured his own reelection to boot.
The writer is journalist and commentator.
Though Benjamin Netanyahu’s opponents were quick to dub his latest political move a cynical ploy, the Israeli prime minister’s surprise formation of a unity government with Kadima, just days after announcing that early elections would be called in September, was neither cynical nor a ploy. Without Kadima, he truly had no choice but to call new elections. With Kadima, new elections are a costly waste of time.
Netanyahu faced two critical issues his government couldn’t resolve in its existing composition. One was the need to pass new legislation on drafting ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students by August 1, when the Supreme Court’s invalidation of a law exempting them from service takes effect. There is no solution to this problem that would be acceptable to both of Netanyahu’s main coalition partners: Yisrael Beiteinu wouldn’t accept anything that continues the exemptions, while the ultra-Orthodox Shas party wouldn’t accept anything that doesn’t. Yet if either of them quit, Netanyahu would lose his parliamentary majority.
The other issue, as economic analyst Nehemia Shtrasler noted, is the 2013 budget, which must be passed by December 31. Though Israel is still doing well by Western standards, its export-driven economy has inevitably been hurt by the global crisis, and particularly the downturn in Europe, its largest export market. It therefore faces a larger-than-expected deficit that necessitates budget cuts.
But when elections seem imminent – as they did, due to the crisis over the draft issue – it’s impossible to get Knesset members to agree to cuts; in fact, it’s usually impossible even to keep them from legislating hefty new expenditures. Hence, the only solution was new elections: A new government, with years yet to serve, could afford to make the necessary cuts.
With Kadima on board, however, both these issues become solvable. Netanyahu now has a solid majority even without Shas, enabling him to tackle the draft exemptions issue. And the government is now stable enough to survive the remaining 18 months of its term, so passing a responsible budget becomes feasible.
The unity government is clearly a better option than new elections, which not only cost a lot of money, but would largely put the government on hold during a potentially critical period: The Knesset would be dissolved, and MKs and ministers would be devoting most of their time and energy to campaigning. It’s possible that Netanyahu was hoping for this outcome all along.
Yet it was only the credible threat of new elections that persuaded Kadima to join him: With polls showing it would lose almost two-thirds of its Knesset seats if elections were held today, the party desperately needed more time to rehabilitate itself. New party chairman Shaul Mofaz had hoped to do so as leader of the opposition. But by announcing new elections, Netanyahu essentially gave him an ultimatum: If you want more time, you’ll have to join my government.
That may have been smart politics, but it was no cynical ploy: Had Mofaz not blinked, new elections would indeed have been held in September. And they would have been necessary.
I thought I’d heard all the arguments for why American immigrants to Israel shouldn’t vote in US elections, but Elliot Jager managed to come up with a new one: Voting, he wrote, would be “a betrayal of my Zionist bona fides,” because “answering the Zionist call for the ingathering of the Jewish people in the land of Israel necessitates, perforce, abdication of involvement in the political affairs of one’s former homeland.”
That one really stunned me. How can something that is good for both Israel and its closest ally possibly be a betrayal of Zionism?
It goes without saying that the American alliance is critical to Israel. America provides crucial diplomatic support on numerous issues, and no other country is currently willing and able to replace it in this role. Thus if there’s any “betrayal of Zionism” here, it would seem to lie in not voting: An immigrant who has the power to strengthen this alliance with his vote but chooses not to do so is in effect deliberately choosing not to help his new country.
That, however, leads directly to the more common objection to absentee voting, which Jager also mentions: If your real concern is Israel rather than America, isn’t it “exploitative” to vote?
Not at all – because Israelis have a vested interest in a strong, thriving America. The reason the US is such a critical ally is precisely because of its superpower status: An ally with little influence in the world would be much less valuable. Thus any Israeli who cares about the alliance must also care about America’s well-being, if only out of pure national self-interest.
Most immigrants, however, also have a personal interest in America’s well-being, because they leave relatives and friends behind when they come. Since any citizen’s well-being is inextricably tied to the well-being of his country, if you care about the welfare of your family and friends, you can’t help but care about America’s welfare.
Granted, the entire argument breaks down if you subscribe to the theory that the American-Israeli alliance is bad for America. But if, like a majority of Americans, you believe the alliance is good for America – whether because you believe America is better served by allying with those who share its values, or because of the strategic benefits Israel provides (a former secretary of state once called it “the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security”), or even for religious reasons (“I will bless those that bless you,” God promises Abraham in Genesis 12:3) – then voting to strengthen the alliance cannot be seen as detrimental to American interests.
There may, of course, be times when the candidate who seems best for the American-Israel alliance isn’t the one who seems best on, say, economic or social issues. Personally, I’ve found such cases to be few and far between in 25 years as an absentee voter, but they do exist. Yet in this, an overseas voter is no different from a domestic voter who must choose which of two competing values to accord higher priority. As long as you believe both values are an American interest, either is a legitimate choice.
Finally, there’s the undeniable fact that successive American governments, Democratic and Republican alike, explicitly chose to grant the vote even to people who have left America for good – something they presumably wouldn’t have done if they deemed this contrary to America’s interests. There is even a special federal ballot for such citizens, which allows them to vote for president, senators and congressmen but not for state and local offices.
Granted, this is a somewhat unusual choice. Many countries, Israel included, do not allow expatriates to vote, whether because they fear expatriates do not have their former country’s best interests at heart or simply because they find it objectionable for expatriates to have a say in the country’s policies when they won’t have to live with the consequences of those policies.
But from an American perspective, there are perfectly valid reasons for this choice: Because America has chosen to make all its citizens, even those living abroad, liable for US taxes, denying overseas residents the vote would effectively constitute taxation without representation. This is the very issue over which the American Revolution began, and the principle of “no taxation without representation” remains deeply embedded in the American ethos. Thus it’s certainly reasonable to conclude that the importance of upholding this ethos outweighs the downsides of allowing permanent overseas residents to vote.
I find it easier to understand why Israeli immigrants from Europe, for instance, might object to voting in their former countries. They may feel a real conflict of interests, because given the hostility many European countries display toward Israel, these countries’ well-being isn’t necessarily congruent with Israel’s own from a diplomatic standpoint – though it is from an economic one, since Europe is Israel’s largest export market.
Even here, however, I think the arguments for voting are decisive if one candidate is more or less pro-Israel than the other. The country itself has clearly decided that expatriate votes serve its interests, and a pro-Israel candidate clearly serves Israel’s interests. And there’s no conflict of interests as long as you believe, as I do, that Europe would be better off supporting the one Middle Eastern country that shares the West’s values rather than all the ones that don’t. This, it should be noted, is also the view of some very prominent Europeans: See, for instance, the Friends of Israel Initiative, whose founders include former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and former Czech President Vaclav Havel.
But for immigrants from America, whose interests are so closely aligned with Israel’s, I can’t even see why there should be a question: An absentee vote serves Israel and the US alike. And it’s not too late to get your ballot for November.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
“Credible experts,” wrote New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in March, “overwhelmingly” view an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities as “a catastrophically bad idea,” deeming the benefits uncertain and the consequences dire: An effective strike would require multiple “sorties over many days,” and an attack on that scale could inflame the Muslim world, spark a regional war and disrupt global oil supplies.
While “overwhelmingly” may be a stretch, many analysts certainly do hold this view. Yet their doomsday scenarios rest largely on a fallacy: the belief that an Israeli strike would necessarily employ the kind of massive force America would employ if it attacked Iran.
U.S. defense officials told The New York Times in February that any strike would require “at least 100 planes,” including bombers, fighters, midair refuelers and electronic warfare planes, and would probably involve combat with Iran’s aerial defense forces. If so, war would indeed be a likely outcome: An attack by over 100 planes culminating in dogfights over its territory isn’t something any country could ignore; Iran would have to respond massively.
But an assault that massive, at such long distances, would stretch Israel’s capabilities to the limit and perhaps even exceed them. Former CIA director Michael Hayden, for instance, told the Times he considers such an operation “beyond [Israel’s] capacity.” And for that very reason, Israel isn’t likely to launch such a massive attack. Unlike American planners, who naturally think in terms of exploiting their country’s overwhelming firepower, Israel’s more limited resources force it to seek creative, lower-profile ways to get the job done.
Israel’s 2007 attack on Syria’s nuclear reactor is a case in point. In justifying Washington’s reluctance to intervene in the ongoing Syrian uprising, U.S. officials have repeatedly explained that intervention would require a major military operation, involving airstrikes over “an extended period of time and a great number of aircraft,” to take out Syria’s “plentiful and sophisticated” air defenses. But when Israel attacked Syria’s reactor, it didn’t take out a single air defense position; the only bombs it dropped were on the reactor itself. Instead, it managed to fly in and out without activating those defenses at all. In short, it found a creative solution to the air defense problem that didn’t involve employing massive force, thus enabling Damascus to ignore the attack rather than feeling compelled to retaliate.
Clearly, Iran’s nuclear program poses a more complex problem than either Syria’s or Iraq’s, given the greater distance and the greater number of facilities that must be hit. Nevertheless, the last thing Israel wants is a full-scale war with Iran. Indeed, as Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israeli reporter Ronen Bergman in January, one of the questions to which Israel would require “affirmative responses” before deciding to attack Iran is whether it “can withstand the inevitable counterattack.” In other words, Israel won’t attack unless it believes Iran’s response will be limited enough to be tolerable – meaning any attack must be low-profile enough to avoid provoking massive retaliation.
According to Bergman, “at least some of Israel’s most powerful leaders” currently do consider this possible. But if so, why isn’t this possibility obvious to U.S. officials as well? First, precisely because America has enough firepower to overwhelm any opponent, its planners have no reason to consider lower-profile alternatives, which necessarily entail a greater risk of failure. And second, as one senior U.S. defense official acknowledged to the Times, Washington lacks “perfect visibility” into Israel’s capabilities despite supplying most of its military equipment: Israel is well-known both for modifying its equipment after purchase (many Israeli modifications of the F-16, for example, are now routinely installed in all new planes by its American manufacturer) and for making creative use of this equipment.
In 1981, for instance, U.S. officials were convinced “that the F-16 aircraft they had provided to Israel had neither the range nor the ordnance to attack Iraq successfully,” according to former head of Israeli military intelligence Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin. Yet in fact, Israel successfully demolished the Osirak reactor, inter alia by such simple tactics as bombing from very low altitude to compensate for its lack of precision-guided bombs and using external fuel tanks that could be jettisoned mid-flight to increase the planes’ range.
Israeli planners have presumably devised similarly creative ways to extend the capabilities of the country’s existing equipment. And they are likely exploring several other avenues as well in their effort to devise a low-profile attack.
First, even relatively sophisticated air defenses aren’t always perfect, as the 2007 attack on Syria’s reactor showed. U.S. intelligence presumably hasn’t devoted much effort to finding gaps in Iran’s defenses, because it has no need: If America ever attacks Iran, it can overwhelm those defenses with sheer brute force. But Israeli intelligence has undoubtedly devoted significant resources to searching for exploitable flaws in Iran’s air defense network.
Second, Israel is widely thought to have been involved in making the Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2010. Whether a cyber attack could do similar damage to Iran’s air defense systems is an open question. But it would be surprising if some of Israel’s best computer brains weren’t working on the problem.
Third, Israel is also thought to be behind a series of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists over the last year. If so, that means it has either managed to recruit Iranian agents or made common cause with Iranian regime opponents. Could these agents (or allies) also be capable of sabotaging Iran’s air defenses at the critical moment, or creating a timely diversion? While Israel wouldn’t rely solely on an outside party for a step as critical as bringing down Iran’s air defenses, well-placed agents could play supporting roles that would enable Israel to lower its own profile.
Since Israel’s exact capabilities are known only to a handful of senior Israeli officials, it’s impossible to predict exactly what an Israeli strike would look like. But based on past experience, one can confidently predict that it won’t resemble the American blueprint. The combination of limited resources and the need to avoid provoking massive retaliation will force Israel to keep any attack as low profile as possible.
Former opposition leader Tzipi Livni’s resignation from the Knesset today offers a good opportunity to reflect on just how unreliable mainstream media reporting about Israel often is.
Just two months ago, Newsweek and The Daily Beast put Livni on their lists of “150 women who shake the world,” describing her as “one of the most powerful women in the country.” Yet while that was undoubtedly true a few years ago, by the time the Newsweek list came out in March 2012, Livni was almost universally regarded as a has-been even by her erstwhile supporters.
In an editorial published later that month, for instance, Haaretz mourned that in the three years since her “praiseworthy” decision not to join Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in 2009, “she has not missed a single opportunity to make a mistake: She did not function as an opposition leader, she did not offer an alternative to the government’s policies and she did not lead her party wisely and set clear policy.” In a poll published just four days after the Newsweek list, the public ranked Livni dead last among 16 leading Israeli political figures, behind even such nonentities as Histadrut labor federation chairman Ofer Eini. And three weeks later, Livni’s own party unceremoniously dumped her: She lost Kadima’s leadership race by a landslide 25-point margin. Now, her political career in ruins, she is even quitting the Knesset.
That Livni was a has-been by March 2012 was obvious to anyone who had even cursory familiarity with Israel. Thus, either Newsweek and The Daily Beast were completely ignorant of the Israeli reality, or they deliberately disregarded the facts in order to promote their own agenda: Livni, after all, is a darling of the international media, because as Newsweek said in its profile, she is “a steadfast proponent of the peace process” who has led final-status talks with the Palestinians and supported the 2005 pullout from Gaza. Regardless of which explanation is true, the bottom line is the same: Their reporting on Israel can’t be trusted.
Nor is this problem unique to Newsweek. Indeed, Jonathan cited another example just yesterday: The New York Times’s decision to play up former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s verbal attack on Netanyahu earlier this week as something that “may add to recent pressure on Mr. Netanyahu to tack to the left.” Anyone with any knowledge of Israel knows that Olmert has virtually no political support, being widely viewed as both corrupt and incompetent. By treating him as someone whose opinions actually matter in Israel, the Times was either demonstrating cosmic ignorance or pushing its own political agenda at the expense of the facts.
The media’s job is supposed to be informing the public. But when it comes to Israel, it often seems to prefer misinforming the public. By portraying has-beens like Livni and Olmert as important and influential politicians, media outlets make it impossible for readers to understand the real Israel – the one that elected Netanyahu in 2009 and seems likely to reelect him this fall. And it thereby betrays its own calling.
The most chilling comment I’ve seen on the mid-March surge of violence from Gaza, when terrorists fired 300 rockets at Israel in four days, was made almost three weeks earlier. The rocket fire had been steadily increasing, indicating that the deterrent effect of Israel’s 2009 war in Gaza was fading, and Israel Defense Forces officers were discussing whether another large-scale operation in Gaza was needed. “The debate within the IDF,” The Jerusalem Post reported, “is whether it needs to wait for a successful attack by Gaza terrorists – be it a rocket attack that causes casualties or a successful cross border attack – or if the sporadic rocket fire is enough of a justification to launch an operation today.”
Think about that: Palestinian terrorists have fired more than 8,000 rockets at Israel since its mid-2005 pullout from Gaza, along with thousands of mortar shells; even in 2011, a “quiet” year, there were 680 rocket and mortar launches, almost two a day. A million residents of Israel’s south live in permanent fear, punctuated every few months by more intensive bouts of violence that, like the one in mid-March, close schools for days and empty workplaces of parents, who must stay home with their kids. In Sderot, the town closest to Gaza, an incredible 45% of children under six have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, as have 41% of mothers and 33% of fathers; these statistics will presumably be replicated elsewhere as the rockets’ increasing range brings ever more locales under regular fire.
In any other country, such relentless shelling would unquestionably be a casus belli. But Israel’s army was seriously debating whether this alone justified military action, or whether it had to wait until the rockets caused a mass-casualty incident.
This is the rotten fruit of a government policy that for years dismissed the rockets as a minor nuisance for reasons of petty politics: For the Kadima party, in power from 2005-2009, admitting the rockets were a problem meant admitting that its flagship policy, the Gaza pullout, was a disaster. Thus former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s chief advisor, Dov Weissglas, famously dismissed them as mere “flying objects,” while then-Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres accused southerners of “stoking hysteria” about the rockets and demanded: “What’s the big deal?”
Consequently, the international community also came to view the rockets as unimportant. Initially, as former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Kurtzer told The Jerusalem Post, Washington expected “a very serious Israeli response to the first act of [post-pullout] violence coming out of Gaza” and “was very surprised there was no reaction to the first rocket, second rocket and 15th rocket.” But Sharon insisted the rockets were “not really that bad.” Thus “all of a sudden,” Kurtzer said, “people got acclimated to the idea that there can be rocket fire.”
If the rockets aren’t so terrible, however, then a major military operation isn’t justified. That’s precisely why Israel’s 2009 war in Gaza provoked such an unprecedented international outcry, culminating in the infamous Goldstone Report (which even its author later recanted). According to IDF statistics, the war killed 1,166 Palestinians, including 295 civilians; it also caused extensive property damage. That’s a very low rate of casualties, both civilian and overall, if the war was justified to begin with – i.e., if one deems the daily shelling of a million civilians for over three years intolerable, as one should. But it’s a wildly disproportionate casualty rate if the rocket fire isn’t “really that bad.”
Yet unless the government is prepared to tolerate this situation forever – thereby flagrantly violating its foremost responsibility, protecting its citizens – another large-scale operation will be necessary, despite the Iron Dome anti-missile system’s 85% interception rate: Since it can’t provide hermetic protection, Iron Dome doesn’t prevent the precautionary school closures, the work absences, the fear or the PTSD. Moreover, the next operation will have to be of much greater scope and duration than the last if the threat is to be eradicated.
The model is the West Bank, where the IDF has effectively eradicated terror: Israeli fatalities originating from the West Bank fell from over 400 in 2002 to 9 in 2011; shooting attacks fell from 2,878 to 9; and not one rocket has ever been launched from there. But this was achieved only by reoccupying all Palestinian-controlled territory in 2002 and not leaving.
In contrast, Israel ceded most of Gaza to the Palestinians in 1994 and never reentered those areas afterward, enabling Gaza to develop a rocket industry even before the 2005 disengagement, and then greatly expand it afterward. It turns out a long-term military presence is necessary to destroy the terrorist infrastructure, prevent its reconstruction and persuade the populace that terror doesn’t pay.
But Israel can’t launch such an operation in Gaza as long as the world deems the rockets a mere nuisance. Hence it must launch a campaign to change world opinion on this issue, just as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu successfully did with Iran’s nuclear program.
This obviously entails explaining the enormous damage rocket fire inflicts, like Sderot’s unconscionable PTSD rate. But it also entails exploiting the lesson learned from Netanyahu’s Iran campaign: What most of the world cares about isn’t preventing harm to Israel, but preventing Israeli military action. It was only the threat of such action that, as French officials acknowledged, finally spurred Europe to impose serious sanctions on Iran.
Thus Israel should begin warning relentlessly that if the rocket fire doesn’t stop completely – as opposed to the current “norm” of one or two launches a day – it will be forced to reoccupy Gaza. That might actually galvanize constructive international action, such as pressure on Egypt to crack down on arms smuggling to Gaza and terrorist bases in Sinai.
But if not, it would at least underscore how seriously Israel takes the rocket threat, since most Israelis have no more desire to reoccupy Gaza than they do to start a war with Iran. And it would thereby prepare world opinion for the operation if and when it ultimately takes place.