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The French got many things wrong with regard to last week’s terror attacks in Toulouse, starting with grossly negligent monitoring of a known jihadi sympathizer who had been to Afghanistan and Pakistan and was supposed to be under surveillance. Nevertheless, they got one thing extraordinarily right: Foreign Minister Alain Juppe’s presence at the funerals in Jerusalem.
Normally, foreign ministers attend overseas funerals only for important political leaders. But Juppe flew to Jerusalem to pay his last respects to a rabbi and three Jewish children. It was undoubtedly cold comfort to the grieving families. Yet gestures matter, and this one sent a powerful message: Official France views an anti-Semitic attack on Jewish children as an attack on itself.
This won’t affect radical Islamists like Mohamed Merah; they couldn’t care less what Western officialdom thinks. But it will affect the ordinary decent people whose acts of commission or omission can determine a terrorist’s success. A policeman who sees that his government truly cares about preventing anti-Semitic attacks may accord higher priority to tracking radicals like Merah; governmental indifference would encourage him to accord it low priority.
Similarly, a passerby who sees something suspicious will be more inclined to call the police if he knows that preventing anti-Semitic attacks is considered important, and he can therefore expect thanks rather than an impatient brush-off.
Just how great an impact a leader’s response to terror can have was proven by Israel’s real-life experiment in the mid-1990s. After Israel signed peace accords with the Palestinians and Jordan in 1993 and 1994, respectively, both accords were shaken by brutal terrorist attacks. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat responded with lip-service condemnations in English and praise in Arabic, and his security forces got the message: Over the next decade or so, Palestinian terrorists would murder more than 1,000 Israelis, while Palestinian security services turned a blind eye or even actively participated.
But Jordan’s King Hussein responded very differently. After a Jordanian soldier killed seven schoolgirls in Naharayim in 1997, Hussein took the extraordinary step of paying a shiva call on the families to ask their forgiveness. His security forces also got the message: Hussein wanted the peace kept. And the Jordanian border has been quiet to this day.
The impact that “mere words” can have on actions is universally recognized. That’s why incitement to genocide is an international crime, and has produced several convictions, especially in connection with the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
Yet too many Western politicians and journalists subtly justify attacks on Jews as “understandable” in light of Israeli “abuse” of Palestinians. That’s why Israel was rightly outraged when EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton implicitly compared Merah’s cold-blooded murders to the accidental deaths of Palestinian children during Israeli airstrikes on terrorists who use them as human shields. It’s why European Jews were outraged when U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman implicitly justified Muslim anti-Semitism as an understandable response to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Against this background, gestures like Juppe’s become all the more important, sending an unequivocal message that such attacks aren’t “understandable”; they’re beyond the pale. Similarly, Britain’s Liberal Democrats sent an important, though disgracefully belated, message by finally ousting Baroness Jenny Tonge from the party: Just as their previous refusals to do so sent the message that her vicious smears (like accusing Israel’s field hospital in Haiti of harvesting earthquake victims’ organs) were acceptable public discourse, her ouster sent the message that such slurs are unacceptable.
But much more pushback is needed – in Europe especially, but also in the U.S. In January, Adam Kirsch wrote a chilling article in Tablet detailing how the 2007 publication of Walt and Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy has turned previously unacceptable anti-Semitic and anti-Israel tropes into acceptable public discourse – to the point where a leading columnist like Thomas Friedman could unblushingly write that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Congressional ovations were “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”
International law expert Prof. Irwin Cotler made the same point last week at the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, where he detailed the various subtle and not-so-subtle tactics used to delegitimize Israel. Some are obvious, like the UN’s obsessive anti-Israel focus. But I was struck by his perceptive point about how even language we all use every day can be subtly delegitimizing. As an example, he noted how the standard description of Israel’s conflict with its neighbors has changed: from “the Arab-Israeli conflict” to “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
I’d never thought about it before, but the minute he said it, the implications were blindingly obvious. “The Arab-Israeli conflict” pits the entire Arab world against tiny Israel and implies the Arabs are the aggressors. “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict” pits an Israeli Goliath against a Palestinian David and implies that Israel is the aggressor.
Equally perceptive was a question by Atzmaut MK Einat Wilf (upholding her record as one of Israel’s most consistently on-the-ball parliamentarians): She asked whether Israel’s post-Oslo adoption of Palestinian terminology like “the occupation” had harmed Israel.
The answer is a resounding “yes,” as an analysis of 25 years of Gallup polling on American support for Israel reveals. It turns out American support was lowest when the peace process was at its height and highest when the peace process was frozen. That’s mind-boggling if one thinks American support depends on Israel’s pursuit of peace. But it makes perfect sense if one realizes that words matter: During peaks in the peace process, Israeli leaders traditionally push the Palestinian cause, while during valleys, they focus on promoting Israel’s cause.
Unfortunately, Israel and its supporters frequently seem oblivious to how much words matter, and this must change if Israel is ever to win the battle for world opinion. First and foremost, this requires being careful with their own language. But it also means calling out those, like Ashton and Gutman, who promote anti-Israel or anti-Semitic tropes, and supporting those who push back.
Israel has legitimate gripes about French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conduct and policies. But by sending Juppe to last week’s funerals, he took an unequivocal stand against anti-Semitic violence. And for that, he deserves the Jewish people’s thanks.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
If you’re looking for insight into the Palestinians’ mindset, a new poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research offers some fascinating glimpses into their views on everything from killing Jews to fiscal responsibility.
The poll found “a significant decline” in Hamas’s popularity in the Gaza Strip and “a decrease in the positive evaluation” of Gaza’s Hamas government. Only 27% of Gazans said they would vote Hamas if elections were held today, down from 35% three months ago, while only 36% approved of the Hamas government’s performance, down from 41%. Sounds encouraging, right?
But here’s the kicker: The poll was taken immediately after Islamic Jihad’s recent rocket assault on Israel, and the pollsters said the drop in Hamas’s support was “probably due [partly] to Hamas’ behavior, standing on the sideline, during Gaza’s rocket war with Israel.” In other words, according to a leading Palestinian pollster, the way to win the Palestinian public’s affection is by indiscriminate rocket fire on Israeli cities, and Hamas’s popularity suffered because it sat this round out. And we’re supposed to believe a Palestinian state would live in peace with Israel?
No less enlightening, however, were the questions about the Palestinian Authority’s financial crisis. The PA has a $1.1 billion hole in its $3.5 billion budget for 2012, mainly due to a drop in international donations. Yet when it tried to solve the problem with a mix of tax increases and spending cuts, a public outcry forced it to retreat. So the poll asked how Palestinians thought the problem should be solved.
It turns out that only a minority (38%) favor any kind of self-help measure: 9% back tax increases, while 29% support cutting expenditures by putting civil servants on early retirement. The majority, 52%, prefer “returning to negotiations with Israel in order to obtain greater international financial support.”
At first glance, this doesn’t seem all bad. True, it raises questions about Palestinians’ readiness to run their own state, since they clearly prefer living off international handouts to taking responsibility for their own budget. But at least they understand that the price of international support is talking with Israel, and favor doing so, right?
Well, not quite, the pollsters acknowledged: “It is worth noting that about half of those who favor return to negotiations oppose unconditional return that does not insure an Israeli settlement freeze and an acceptance of the 1967 borders.” So not only do the Palestinians want to continue living off international handouts, but they aren’t even willing to make any concessions in exchange for the money. Instead, they think Israel should pay for the privilege of having international donors fund them by making major concessions even before negotiations begin. And we’re supposed to believe a people this unwilling to take responsibility for itself is ready for statehood?
Finally, here’s a nugget for Westerners who extol the PA’s “democratic reforms” or Hamas’s “democratic election:” Only 22% of Gazans, and 30% of West Bankers, say they “can criticize the authorities” in their respective locales “without fear.” In short, far from being democratic, both halves of the Palestinian polity are classic “fear societies,” in which people dare not criticize their governments.
So to sum up, we have an undemocratic polity whose residents reward indiscriminate rocket fire on civilians and refuse to take any financial responsibility for themselves. And then people wonder why Israelis are leery about having a Palestinian state for a neighbor.
The Iron Dome anti-missile system has been popularly dubbed the hero of the recent violence out of Gaza, and in some ways, rightly so. It prevented casualties and property damage. It spared countless Israelis the anguish of having a loved one injured or killed or a house destroyed. It saved significant amounts of money: Despite costing far more than the Palestinians’ Qassam and Grad rockets, an Iron Dome missile costs less than rebuilding a home or factory or treating severe injuries – expenses the government would otherwise have to cover, since by law, it must compensate its citizens for all terrorism-related damage.
Finally, Iron Dome gave the government diplomatic and military maneuvering room. There’s a reasonable argument to be made that now, when Israel has finally managed to focus international attention on Iran, and Syrian President Bashar Assad has focused it on Iran’s ally in Damascus, is not the moment to divert the world’s attention back to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, such a diversion was likely what the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad sought when it seized on Israel’s killing of a senior official from another organization, the Popular Resistance Committees, as an excuse for massive rocket fire on the south.
Nevertheless, Iron Dome could easily become the villain of the story, by making the government consider onslaughts like last week’s “tolerable.”
In reality, what happened last week was in no way tolerable. Hundreds of thousands of children kept home from school for a week (since the rocket fire continued even after a “cease-fire” was announced) isn’t “tolerable” – especially when this scenario can be repeated over and over, whenever the terrorists feel like it. Tens of thousands of parents forced by school closures to either skip work to take care of their children or leave them alone with their rocket-induced fears isn’t “tolerable.” One million citizens living in dread (since they know Iron Dome can’t provide hermetic protection) isn’t “tolerable.”
Thousands of children and adults with post-traumatic stress syndrome – which repeated rocket strikes can cause even in the absence of casualties – isn’t “tolerable.”
Yet Israel’s response ensured that this scenario will be repeated over and over. Precisely because it felt Iron Dome had made restraint possible by preventing Israeli casualties, the government, eager to avoid an escalation, made do with exacting a minuscule price from the terrorists. Altogether, Israel killed 26 Palestinians, almost all of them terrorists. But aside from that one senior PRC official, these terrorists were all low-level operatives, members of rocket-launching crews killed in the act. That’s a trivial price for Islamic Jihad to pay: Since when have terrorist organizations not been willing to sacrifice a few low-level operatives?
So here’s what Islamic Jihad and its fellow terrorists have learned from this episode: They can launch some 300 rockets at Israel in four days and pay almost no price for doing so. I can’t put it better than a senior official from another Palestinian faction, Fatah, did in an interview with a Hebrew paper: “Islamic Jihad is able to send one-third of Israel’s population into bomb shelters … [and] threw Israel into a panic without paying a very steep price. Did you assassinate its senior figures? Did you undermine the organization? Hardly.”
Moreover, even those benefits Iron Dome did provide would evaporate in a larger-scale rocket attack, which Hamas and Hezbollah are both capable of mounting, and especially one from Lebanon and Gaza simultaneously. Israel doesn’t have enough Iron Dome batteries to handle a large-scale assault, nor will it in the foreseeable future.
Yet despite all this, the government and army seem to be preparing us for the idea that endless repeats of last week are the best we can hope for. As Yaakov Katz chillingly reported in The Jerusalem Post on Friday, there’s an “understanding within the defense establishment that there is currently no clear and decisive military solution to the Gaza-based terror threat,” and therefore, “what Israel is facing is a sequence of rounds of violence, like the one that started [the previous Friday]. Judging by the past year, which included similar rounds in April, August, October, the next round will probably be in the next two to five months, or sooner.”
This is simply mind-boggling. As Katz’s report opened by noting, this month marks the tenth anniversary of Operation Defensive Shield, when the Israel Defense Forces reoccupied Palestinian-controlled portions of the West Bank in what proved to be a winning counterterrorism formula: “While terror attacks still take place, the frequency and number of casualties has reached an all-time low. In 2011, for example, the IDF Central Command recorded nine shooting attacks in the entire West Bank … In 2002, there were 2,878 such attacks, and up until 2006 the annual number was over 1,000.”
And Katz neglected to add that not one single rocket has ever been fired at Israel from the IDF-controlled West Bank, compared with over 8,000 fired from Gaza since the IDF left in 2005, and approximately 500 fired before then from the large swathes of Gaza ceded to the Palestinians in 1994.
Some will doubtless seek to attribute the West Bank quiet to the Palestinian Authority. But in reality, it had been achieved even before PA forces began redeploying in West Bank cities in 2008 (otherwise, Israel would never have countenanced their deployment). And it has been maintained largely because Israel reserved, and frequently exercises, the right to reenter these cities anytime it sees the need – as the PA’s perennial complaints about these incursions amply attest.
In short, there is a “clear and decisive military solution to the Gaza-based terror threat,” and it’s the same one applied so successfully in the West Bank: long-term military control of the entire territory. That is the only way both to thoroughly uproot the terrorist infrastructure and to convince the Palestinian public that terrorism doesn’t pay.
This may be the wrong time to implement that solution. But it must be implemented someday if southern Israel is ever to know peace. Thus if Iron Dome provides an excuse for the government to refrain from doing so, it will ultimately do more harm than good.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
If there’s one article I’d like every international diplomat to read today, it’s Carlo Strenger’s post on the Haaretz website. Strenger, a professor of psychology, is a lifelong leftist and dedicated advocate of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But unlike many of his fellows, he refuses to shut his eyes to reality. Here’s his comment on the latest violence out of Gaza:
Most commentators assume that neither Hamas nor Israel is interested in further escalation of the hostilities that have been initiated by Islamic Jihad this time, ostensibly to jockey for position vis-à-vis Hamas … [But] Israelis, for very understandable reasons no longer care who is responsible for the violence. All they know is that, in the end, there will always be a Palestinian group that will initiate violence. As a result they say “why should we take the risk of retreating to the 1967 borders? Why should we rely on Palestinians to keep the peace? All we’ll get is rockets on Tel Aviv, Raanana and Kfar Saba. So the world won’t like us for the occupation; we can live with that, but not with rockets on our population centers.”
Strenger’s conclusion is that however sincerely committed to peace Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas may be (and he credits Abbas with far more sincerity than most Israelis do), Israel won’t sign any agreement as long as major Palestinian players remain committed to violence: The risk of a pro-violence faction gaining control of the Palestinian state, whether through elections or by force, is too high. And he’s smart enough to realize that the kind of dodges now being mooted by parts of the Israeli left and the international community – like a Palestinian unity government in which Hamas authorizes Abbas to continue negotiating but refuses to recognize Israel itself, or Hamas’s offer of a “long-term truce” rather than full peace – won’t do:
Israelis will not move towards peace as long as Hamas, a central player and crucial part of Palestinian society will not endorse peace explicitly. No amount of playing games will do; nothing less than full recognition of Israel’s right to exist in safety and abolishing the [Hamas] Charter and excising its anti-Semitism as it stands completely; nothing less will do.
Strenger is certainly right as far as he goes, and anyone who supports a two-state solution should take his words to heart.
Nevertheless, he doesn’t go far enough. For as he himself wrote, even when Hamas isn’t interested in escalation, there’s always some “Palestinian group that will initiate violence” instead. And that means reforming Hamas, while necessary, isn’t sufficient: Pro-violence Palestinians will simply migrate to other groups, like Islamic Jihad.
What is needed, therefore, is a change in attitude among the Palestinian public. And that will never happen as long as even the “pro-peace” camp, aka Abbas and the PA, engages in relentless, vicious incitement against Israel: denying historic Jewish ties to Jerusalem; teaching children that pre-1967 Israel was “stolen” from the Palestinians, who will someday get it back; consistently promoting a vision of a world without Israel; and lionizing murderers.
Combatting Palestinian incitement and educating for peace is slow, unglamorous work; international peace conferences are much more exciting. But as Strenger noted, peace isn’t possible as long as “there will always be a Palestinian group that will initiate violence.” And only a fundamental change in Palestinian culture can change that.
Here’s a fact about the latest Israeli-Palestinian flare-up you probably won’t read in your local paper, as it contradicts the preferred narrative about the conflict: Even as every school in southern Israel was closed for four days, keeping tens of thousands of students home, children in the Gaza Strip continued going to school as usual.
The preferred narrative, of course, is that Israel uses “indiscriminate and excessive force” against Palestinian civilians. But it turns out real live Palestinians know better: They know Israel actually makes great efforts to avoid hitting civilian targets, and therefore, it’s perfectly safe to send their children to school. In contrast, Israelis can’t safely send their children to school, because Palestinian terrorists really do use indiscriminate force, making a school full of children an invitation to a mass-casualty incident. Indeed, a rocket hit an (empty) school in Beersheba on Sunday, and rockets have also struck (empty) schools during previous rounds.
And here’s something else you probably won’t read in your local paper: Palestinian terrorists take cynical advantage of Israel’s efforts to avoid hitting civilians by launching their rockets from heavily populated civilian areas. For them, it’s a win-win situation: If Israel refrains from shooting back for fear of hitting civilians, they live to launch again another day, and if Israel does shoot back, it risks civilian casualties that provide the terrorists with wonderful propaganda. After all, they know neither the international media nor the “human-rights organizations” will bother asking why terrorists were launching rockets from civilian areas to begin with.
But don’t take my word for this: Just read what a genuine human rights activist from Gaza, Mahmoud Abu Rahma, wrote in an article posted on two Palestinian websites in December. After describing various incidents in which Palestinian civilians were killed or wounded in Israeli counterstrikes on terrorists who had ignored the civilians’ pleas not to fire rockets near their homes, he demanded: “Who will protect the citizen from the harm caused to him by the government or the muqawama [armed resistance]?”
“There are many instances of citizens falling victim to the muqawama‘s lack of consideration for them and their lives,” Abu Rahma continued. “And what’s more, there is nobody who is accountable for the muqawama‘s intolerable activities.”
Abu Rahma suffered the predictable penalty for his truth-telling: He was viciously attacked by masked men who stabbed him repeatedly. But don’t expect to see international journalists or human rights activists lining up to join his crusade against the muqawama: They prefer the old familiar narrative that it’s all Israel’s fault.
And of course, the muqawama has plenty of fans in Gaza. Asked why Palestinians support the rocket fire despite knowing Israel will retaliate, a Palestinian “friend” told Haaretz reporter Amira Hass: “The mission of the rockets is not to liberate Palestine or win the battle, but to hurt, to cause the Israelis suffering.”
Causing Israelis suffering, it seems, is a goal worth any number of Palestinian casualties. But don’t expect to read that in your local paper, either: It might spoil the narrative of innocent, peace-seeking Palestinians being wantonly attacked by Israel.
State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss has done the Israeli public a great service. And in so doing, he has highlighted the glaring failure of Israel’s other self-proclaimed watchdog of democracy – the media.
Last week, Lindenstrauss published a draft report on the dysfunctional relationship between two men who headed Israel’s defense establishment for years: Defense Minister Ehud Barak and former IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi. The report wasn’t made public, but media leaks reveal that Lindenstrauss didn’t assign blame equally. Barak, he found, sometimes treated Ashkenazi badly (no surprise; his abysmal interpersonal skills are notorious). But it was Ashkenazi whose staff, with his knowledge and consent, actively dug for dirt about Barak. It was Ashkenazi who for months concealed an explosive document from his civilian superiors, despite believing it revealed a genuine effort to subvert the choice of his successor (it later proved a forgery). And it was Ashkenazi who, after the document came to light, was less than candid with both the public and the police about his relationship with suspected forger Boaz Harpaz, an ex-army officer with a checkered past.
It’s obviously deeply disturbing that the chief of staff, who ought to be devoting himself night and day to Israel’s defense, was instead busy digging for dirt about the defense minister. But it’s equally disturbing that if it weren’t for Lindenstrauss, the public would never have known: Years of media reports about our dysfunctional defense duo put all the blame on Barak, portraying Ashkenazi as simon-pure.
Worse, this wasn’t innocent human error: It was a deliberate choice driven by the media’s ideological agenda.
Put bluntly, Israel journalists don’t like either Barak or his boss, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. They loathe Netanyahu for refusing to make far-reaching concessions to the Palestinians; they loathe Barak for joining Netanyahu’s government and then splitting the Labor Party to remain there; and they loathe both men for their hawkish line on Iran. So anyone who opposes Netanyahu and Barak is guaranteed a sympathetic media ear, especially if he portrays himself as being victimized for his “moderate” political views.
And that’s precisely what the politically savvy Ashkenazi did: He told the media Barak hated him because he opposed a rash attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. And since this fit neatly into the media’s preconceived narrative, journalists lapped it up and sought no further.
Fortunately, Lindenstrauss did: He interviewed hundreds of people and listened to thousands of hours of tapes from Ashkenazi’s office (where all conversations were routinely recorded). And he concluded that the feud had nothing to do with Iran, and everything to do with Ashkenazi’s personal ambition: his desire to expand his own power and unwillingness to submit to his civilian superior.
This egregious media failure is frightening for several reasons. First, Ashkenazi’s political ambitions were no secret. And if it weren’t for Lindenstrauss, he might well have swept into office in another few years on a wave of media adulation. Out of sheer ignorance, Israelis might have elected a power-hungry officer who disdains civilian control over the military and wastes his time and energy on the lowest form of petty politicking.
Second, it precluded any real investigation of the IDF’s capabilities: Having adopted Ashkenazi as its white knight, the media could hardly risk undermining his image by seriously examining his job performance. Hence, for instance, we were assured that he had “rehabilitated” the army after the Second Lebanon War, without any real evidence: Its 2009 success against Hamas in Gaza says nothing about its ability to defeat Hezbollah, a far tougher foe.
Third, the media’s bias condemned Israel to years of an incredibly dangerous situation – one in which its two top defense officials were barely on speaking terms – by depriving Barak of the usual democratic remedy: He couldn’t simply fire Ashkenazi and appoint a new chief of staff, because the media would have crucified him. In other democracies, firing insubordinate officers is standard practice: See, for instance, US President Barack Obama’s dismissal of Gen. Stanley McChrystal in 2010. But by portraying Ashkenazi as a saint rather than the insubordinate officer he was, the media made his dismissal politically untenable, even if it were legally possible (an open question, given the Supreme Court’s 1996 ruling that “apolitical” civil servants can’t be fired without good reason: Who knows whether the court, absent Lindenstrauss’ findings, would have deemed the dysfunctional Barak-Ashkenazi relationship sufficient reason?).
And finally, it raises a deeply disturbing question: What else are we not being informed of due to the media’s ideological bias?
In an unwittingly revealing op-ed last week, Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit wrote that Ashkenazi considered his insubordination legitimate because he was “subordinate to four elected officials that the public considered illegitimate – prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu, and defense ministers Amir Peretz and Barak.” I have no idea whether Ashkenazi actually thought this. But Shavit clearly does, and so do many of his colleagues.
Yet with regard to Netanyahu (unlike Olmert and Peretz, who indeed hemorrhaged public support after the Second Lebanon War), this assertion is simply untenable. Not only was he elected prime minister in the legally prescribed manner (by assembling a coalition), but almost every poll taken over the last three years has shown that he will also likely form the next government, and that the public continues to deem him better qualified to run the country than any of his rivals. So on what grounds does Shavit conclude that the public considers Netanyahu “illegitimate”?
There’s only one possible answer: What Shavit means is that the media considers Netanyahu illegitimate. It dislikes his positions and doesn’t want him as premier. And therefore, all’s fair in the effort to undermine his government – even undermining Israel’s security by idolizing an insubordinate officer consumed with petty politics, and thereby precluding his dismissal.
As long as this remains true, the public has no hope of getting honest information from the media about any government action, any more than it did on the Barak-Ashkenazi feud. That’s a devastating indictment of Israel’s media – and far more dangerous to the country’s long-term health than any spat at the top of the defense establishment.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
When Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu talks about the Iranian nuclear
crisis, he frequently uses analogies drawn from World War II. But as he
returns home to consider his next moves in light of what he heard from
US President Barack Obama on Monday, I suspect he will be pondering
events much closer in time and space: the experiences of his two
immediate predecessors, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert.
It was on Sharon’s watch, as Ronen Bergman related in The New York Times
in January, that Iran’s clandestine uranium enrichment operation at
Natanz was first discovered, thanks to “cooperation between American,
British and Israeli intelligence services.” Some Israeli officials
wanted the site “bombed at once.” But Sharon opted for a different plan:
“Instead, information about the site was leaked to a dissident Iranian
group, the National Resistance Council, which announced that Iran was
building a centrifuge installation at Natanz.”
The outcome is well known: The news, quickly confirmed by International
Atomic Energy inspectors, produced much talk but little action. Over the
next 10 years, several rounds of sanctions were imposed, but these
sanctions utterly failed to halt Iran’s nuclear program, which continued
to progress apace. Since 2002, Tehran has produced enough low-enriched
uranium for four nuclear bombs; further enriched some of this uranium to 20 percent, a step experts say
is far more difficult to master than the subsequent stage of going from
20 to 90 percent (which is what is needed for a bomb); installed thousands
of additional centrifuges, including at a new underground facility in
Fordow that would be almost impossible 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.”
One can understand why Sharon decided as he did. Natanz was discovered
at the height of the second intifada, when the army was fully occupied
in combating the Palestinian terrorists who were slaughtering civilians
in cities throughout Israel. Under these circumstances, the idea of
opening a second front against Iran must have seemed daunting.
But by not doing so, he allowed a relatively small problem to
metastasize. Iran now has far more nuclear facilities, far better
defenses, and above all, far more technological know-how than it did in
2002. Thus today, Iran’s nuclear program is both much harder to destroy
and much easier to rebuild than it would have been when it was first
discovered.
This lesson wasn’t lost on Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, when he
faced a similar situation five years later: Israeli intelligence had
confirmed that Syria was building a nuclear reactor, and that it was
likely to become operational in another few months.
Olmert first presented the evidence to then-President George W. Bush and
asked him to bomb the reactor. But the Bush administration was divided:
While Vice President Dick Cheney supported Olmert’s request, Defense
Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rich preferred
the diplomatic option – getting the IAEA to declare Syria in violation
of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and asking the Security Council
to impose sanctions. Ultimately, Bush sided with Gates and Rice: In his
memoirs, he wrote
that he proposed sending Rice to Israel immediately so she and Olmert
could give a press conference disclosing the reactor’s existence.
But to his great credit (and it’s one of the very few decisions he made
as premier that I consider to his credit), Olmert rejected this proposal
out of hand. It couldn’t have been an easy decision: Syria has
thousands of missiles capable of striking anywhere in Israel, and
chemical warheads to load them with; the threat of massive retaliation
was very real. But he had seen firsthand, as a senior minister in
Sharon’s government, how ineffective the diplomatic option proved with
Iran, and he wasn’t prepared to let that failure be replicated on
Israel’s northern border. Given the mischief a non-nuclear Syria was
already making as the patron of anti-Israel terrorist organizations in
both Lebanon and Gaza, the threat of a nuclear Syria – whose
mischief-making potential would be vastly greater, because it would no
longer be restrained by fear of provoking an Israeli attack on Damascus –
was too deadly to be tolerated.
The decision Netanyahu faces is incomparably harder. The chances of an
attack on Iran being successful are unquestionably lower, given the much
greater distances, the greater number of targets that must be struck,
and Iran’s stronger defenses. It may well buy less time than the five
years and counting bought by the Syrian strike, since the technological
knowhow Iran has gained over the last 10 years will make rebuilding
easier. The likelihood of retaliation is greater, because while the
Syrian attack was a stealth operation that Damascus could and did decide
to ignore, any attack on Iran will be the culmination of a very public
confrontation, making it harder for Tehran to refrain from retaliation
without losing face. And finally, while Olmert was confident that Bush,
despite his initial opposition, would give Israel full backing after the
fact (as indeed happened), Netanyahu can have no such confidence about
Obama.
But all these risks will have to be balanced against one inescapable
fact: Sanctions and diplomacy have never yet succeeded in halting any
country’s nuclear program. They didn’t succeed in North Korea, as
detailed in a devastating blow-by-blow account
in PJ Media last month; they didn’t succeed in Pakistan; and they
aren’t succeeding in Iran – unless you define 10 years of steady
progress toward nuclear weapons as “success.” In contrast, military
action has succeeded the only two times it has been tried, in Iraq in
1981 and Syria in 2007: Neither country ever successfully reconstituted
its nuclear program.
I don’t know what decision Netanyahu will ultimately make, and I don’t
envy him the responsibility of making it. But one thing I’m certain of:
To persuade this very history-conscious prime minister to ignore the
history of the last 10 years, Obama will have to come up with something a
great deal more convincing than “trust me.”
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
As Israel Apartheid Week circumnavigates the globe this month, a Jordan-based Palestinian journalist has offered an eloquent rebuttal that every Israel supporter should memorize and quote. If Israel is really an “apartheid state,” asks Ramzi Abu Hadid, “Why has it become the dream of many Arab Christians and Muslims to emigrate to the ‘apartheid state’? Is it possible that all these people are uninformed? Or do they really know the truth about Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East?”
Specifically, he noted, “thousands of the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip … try to infiltrate into Israel every morning in search of work and a better life,” while “tens of thousands of Arabs and Muslims have put their lives at risk by crossing the border into Israel from Egypt, where border guards often open fire at women and children.” In addition, “many Christian families from Bethlehem and even the Gaza Strip have moved to live in Israel because they feel safer in the ‘apartheid state’ than they do among their Muslim ‘brothers.'”
Abu Hadid doesn’t provide hard numbers, but the data amply prove his claims. During the first 11 months of last year alone, for instance, 13,851 illegal migrants entered Israel from Sinai; the biggest contingents were Muslim refugees from Sudan and Eritrea. And the risk of being shot by Egyptian guards is just one of the dangers they braved to reach “the apartheid state”: Migrants also face horrific abuse from the Sinai Bedouin who smuggle them over the border.
As for Palestinians, those who “try to infiltrate into Israel every morning” are only part of the story. To that, add the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have moved to Jerusalem in recent years rather than remain on the Palestinian side of Israel’s West Bank security barrier. Then add the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have sought and obtained Israeli citizenship by marrying Israeli Arabs.
Altogether, some 350,000 Palestinians have acquired citizenship through “family reunification” since Israel’s founding in 1948, according to veteran journalist Nadav Shragai. But the numbers surged following the 1993 Oslo Accord – i.e., precisely when Palestinian statehood for the first time looked like a real possibility: In 1994-2002, fully 137,000 Palestinians acquired Israeli citizenship through marriage. The numbers have since dropped drastically, but that isn’t because Palestinian demand has fallen: It’s because in 2003, Israel enacted new restrictions on family reunification in response to the second intifada.
Abu Hadid’s argument also has a flip side, as he himself noted: Unlike Israel, many of its Arab neighbors do engage in legalized discrimination against Palestinians. In Jordan, for instance, “the government has been trying to strip thousands of us Palestinians of our Jordanian citizenship – a move Israel never made against its Christians and Muslims.” He might also have mentioned a long list of other discriminatory practices: Until recently, for instance, Jordan barred Palestinians from Gaza from owning property or working in any job except manual labor and farming, while Lebanon also bars Palestinians from owning property or working in a long list of professions.
In short, the simplest response to the “apartheid” charge is the one Americans once used to counter Soviet propaganda: Just look at the direction of the population flow. It turns out Arabs and Muslims are voting with their feet in favor of the “apartheid state.”
The annual AIPAC conference now taking place in Washington is the year’s flagship display of American support for Israel, so it’s an appropriate time to consider the roots of this support. To that end, a recent Gallup poll offers some strikingly counterintuitive data: In contrast to the conventional wisdom, which holds that support for Israel depends on its willingness to pursue peace with the Palestinians, it turns out that support for Israel has historically been lowest precisely when it pursues peace most vigorously.
The Gallup data includes a graph displaying 25 years of responses, from 1988 through 2012, to the question of whether Americans’ sympathies lie more with Israel or the Palestinians. It turns out the all-time peak for pro-Israel sympathies, 64 percent, was hit in 1991 – two years before the Oslo Accord was signed. Granted, that was the year of the Gulf War, when Palestinians outraged Americans by backing Saddam Hussein. But it was also the era of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who flatly refused to talk to the PLO or even consider territorial concessions, and expanded settlements at a pace no subsequent government has approached. If pursuit of peace were the defining factor in mobilizing American support for Israel, pro-Israel sentiment should have soared after Yitzhak Rabin signed Oslo. Instead, it remained 20 to 25 points below the peak throughout Rabin’s term, and only during the last three years – with peace talks frozen and much of the world blaming Israel – has it once again surpassed 60 percent.
Even more stunning is a comparison of the pro-Israel trend line with the “both/neither/no opinion” line. For 25 years, pro-Israel sympathies consistently exceeded pro-Palestinian ones. But they didn’t consistently exceed the “both/neither/no opinion” category. In fact, pro-Israel sentiment was consistently below “both/neither/no opinion” throughout the Oslo period (1993-2000), aside from a brief flicker in 1999. This was true at all the high points of the peace process: the Oslo Accord itself (1993), the Gaza-Jericho agreement that created the Palestinian Authority (1994), the interim agreement that expanded the PA from Gaza into the West Bank (1995), and the Camp David final-status talks (2000).
In contrast, pro-Israel sentiment was higher than “both/neither/no opinion” throughout the pre-Oslo years of 1989-93, as well as all the years after the second intifada erupted in 2000, during which not a single Israeli-Palestinian agreement was signed. In short, it turns out that Americans were least pro-Israel during moments of greatest progress in the peace process and most pro-Israel during periods of impasse.
This may seem counterintuitive, but it actually shouldn’t surprise anyone. The Oslo years were when Israel most enthusiastically endorsed the Palestinians’ narrative that they, not Israel, are the ones with a “right” to the territories. Because the Palestinians, not being public-relations morons, never reciprocated the favor, what Americans essentially heard from both sides was that Israel is a thief, depriving Palestinians of the land and statehood they deserve. Unsurprisingly, that caused pro-Israel sympathy to decline.
Certainly, Americans care about peace. But they care even more about justice. So if Israel is to maintain America’s sympathies, it must resume pushing the justice of its cause – from its historic and legal claim to the territories to the international guarantees of defensible borders it has received over the years – rather than that of the Palestinians. As the Gallup data shows, downplaying its own rights for the sake of “peace” turns out to be the worst strategy Israel can pursue.
Amid the din of debate over a possible Israeli strike on Iran, perhaps it is unsurprising that Israeli Intelligence Minister Dan Meridor’s press conference on February 20 attracted so little international attention. But in a world that claims to view an Israeli-Palestinian deal as a top priority, it should have sounded alarm bells. Israelis, warned Meridor, may never again sign another land-for-peace deal if Egypt unilaterally alters or abrogates its treaty with Israel.
Meridor is not the first Israeli to issue this warning in recent months, but he is one of the most prominent. Moreover, despite serving in a government usually dismissed overseas as “hard-line” or “right-wing,” he is a politician far more popular on the left than on the right, an outspoken advocate of an Israeli-Palestinian treaty who even supports freezing construction in the settlements (outside the major settlement blocs). When someone like that warns that the entire land-for-peace paradigm is in danger, it is worth paying attention.
Meridor was responding specifically to threats by Muslim Brotherhood leaders to “review” the treaty if America cuts aid to Egypt over Cairo’s harassment of American-backed nonprofits. But this is hardly the first time Egypt’s new ruling party has issued such threats. In December, for instance, a senior Brotherhood official declared that parliament should reconsider the treaty. In January, another senior official advocated putting the treaty to a popular referendum – where it would almost certainly be rejected. Indeed, the treaty is one of the few things virtually all Egyptians agree on. The secular opposition group Kefaya and the head of the liberal Ghad party, Ayman Nour, also advocate either scrapping it or at least substantially revising it. The result is that for the first time in almost 35 years, Israelis no longer see war with Egypt as unthinkable.
It is hard to overstate the significance of this, because for decades, the treaty with Egypt has been the sole pillar propping up the land-for-peace paradigm. Every subsequent experiment in ceding land proved a dismal failure.
Territorial handovers to the Palestinians under the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, for instance, produced not peace, but a massive increase in terror. In the first two and a half years after Oslo was signed in1993, Palestinians killed more Israelis than in the entire preceding decade, while the first four years of the second intifada (2000-2004) produced more terror-related casualties than the entire preceding 53 years.
In May 2000, Israelis expected their UN-certified pullout from every inch of Lebanon to eliminate Hezbollah’s motivation for war. Instead, Hezbollah escalated, committing its first ever cross-border kidnapping just five months later. In 2006, another such kidnapping sparked the Second Lebanon War.
Similarly, Israel’s unilateral pullout from Gaza in mid-2005 produced nothing but a dramatic escalation in rocket and mortar fire on southern Israel. Rocket launches alone jumped from 475 in 2001-04 to 5,765 in 2006-10, or from about 120 a year to about 1,150 a year – an almost tenfold increase.
And while the peace with Jordan has held, that treaty was not a land-for-peace deal. Since Jordan had previously relinquished all claim to the West Bank, it entailed no Israeli territorial concessions. Rather, it merely formalized a de facto peace that had existed for two decades already.
But through all this, the treaty with Egypt served as the shining counterexample – the proof that land for peace could work, given the right partners and the right conditions. Though never more than a cold peace, it consistently provided Israel with the one great good it promised, a secure southern border. And it survived despite repeated tensions, including two Palestinian intifadas and two Israeli-Lebanese wars.
Now, however, it looks increasingly likely that what made the Egyptian peace succeed was not any intrinsic merit in the land-for-peace paradigm, but merely the remarkable longevity in office of one man, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, whose 30-year tenure encompassed most of the treaty’s lifespan.
And that in turn is leading a growing number of Israelis who previously supported land-for-peace to wonder whether it may not be an inherently unworkable paradigm, due to the fatal flaw encapsulated in its very name. In any land-for-peace deal, only one party actually considers “peace” a value worth trading for. What interests the other party is not peace, but gaining strategic assets such as land.
This fact is not exactly a secret. The New York Times, for instance, explained the Muslim Brotherhood’s threat to “review” the treaty if U.S. aid were cut by baldly admitting that “Egyptians have long considered American aid as a kind of payment for preserving the peace despite the popular resentment of Israel.” In other words, unlike Israelis, Egyptians do not see “peace” as a good in itself; they merely see it as a profitable protection racket – a way to wrest the Sinai from Israel and $1.3 billion a year from America. So if the payments dry up, “peace” has no more value.
The obvious problem with this from Israel’s perspective is that the land traded in exchange for peace is unrecoverable, even if the peace proves ephemeral. Israel did not reoccupy Lebanon or Gaza when those withdrawals went sour, and it will not reoccupy Sinai if Egypt abrogates the treaty. It will merely be left facing the next war in a far worse defensive position, without the generous territorial buffer that Sinai once provided between the Egyptian army and the Israeli heartland. Hence if the peace can not be counted on to last, land-for-peace is a terrible deal for Israel.
Given this, it is mind-boggling that Western leaders are still obsessing over bilateral Israeli-Palestinian issues, like settlement construction or reviving the stalled Jordanian-sponsored peace talks, while simply ignoring the looming Egyptian threat. Another few hundred houses in the settlements will not preclude a land-for-peace deal in the future; neither will the failure of yet another round of Israeli-Palestinian talks. But the collapse of the Israeli-Egyptian treaty would doom any land-for-peace deal for generations to come.
Perhaps, given its inherently problematic nature, the land-for-peace paradigm deserves to die. But if Western leaders are serious about wanting to preserve it, they need to realize that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is a sideshow. Preserving the Israeli-Egyptian peace is far more important.