Uncategorized
Advocates of judicial activism all too often overlook its significant costs – not only to society, but to the judicial system itself. Last week’s High Court of Justice ruling overturning the Tal Law, which governs draft exemptions for yeshiva students, is an object lesson in both kinds of costs.
This was a blatantly activist decision: The court overturned a law duly enacted by parliament on the grounds that it violated a right to “equality” which not only exists nowhere in Israel’s quasi-constitutional Basic Laws, but was deliberately omitted from them. Certainly, the court is correct in deeming equality one of the state’s fundamental values. But what the Basic Laws’ drafters understood is that when people from diverse religious, cultural, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds are thrown together in the pressure cooker of a tiny country permanently at war, the overriding need to enable them to somehow coexist without an explosion sometimes requires messy compromises that fall short of the rigorous standard of equality implicit in a constitutional right.
The ruling could also have profoundly negative social consequences, as last week’s Jerusalem Post editorial correctly noted. In recent years, for the first time in decades, thousands of Haredim have voluntarily left yeshiva to do army service and/or attend college. Israeli society clearly has a compelling interest in encouraging this trend; voluntary integration is preferable to either non-integration or forced integration. Yet if Haredim come to feel besieged by a hostile secular establishment, they may respond by circling the wagons and halting this trend toward integration. And the court’s ruling could easily create such a feeling.
But if the ruling’s societal harm is as yet merely potential, the harm it has done the judiciary is already clear and present. Nobody understands this better than incoming Supreme Court President Asher Grunis, whose dissent succinctly explained the problem: “This court’s repeated involvement in the issue of drafting Haredim, without any real progress being made as a result of this judicial intervention, assuredly doesn’t contribute to the court’s stature.”
The court first ruled draft deferrals for yeshiva students illegal in 1998. Four years later, the government finally responded by enacting the Tal Law, which perpetuated the deferrals in a slightly different guise. The court then heard several petitions against this law, criticizing it with escalating vehemence each time, and finally overturned it last week. But despite all these rulings, most yeshiva students still don’t serve – and that will remain true after the latest ruling as well. It’s not that most Israelis wouldn’t love to see yeshiva students drafted. But they aren’t prepared to have the police forcibly draft the Haredim, to put tens of thousands of yeshiva students in jail, or to cope with large-scale Haredi protests. And therefore, it simply won’t happen.
To say this “doesn’t contribute to the court’s stature” is an understatement. When the court issues rulings that are ignored because they can’t feasibly be enforced, it undermines the court’s stature, reducing it to the level of just another political actor – no different from any run-of-the-mill Knesset member whose pronouncements may or may not actually affect policy.
Nor is the Tal Law ruling exceptional in this regard: In recent years, the court has issued many such rulings.
Take, for instance, its 2007 ruling ordering the government to reinforce every classroom within rocket range of Gaza. The court was certainly correct that governments are obliged to protect their citizens, and that successive governments had punted on this obligation. Nevertheless, the question of how to protect Gaza-area residents has many possible answers, and reasonable people of goodwill may disagree about which is best. Perhaps instead of reinforcing every classroom in rocket range – a never-ending project, since the rockets’ range keeps expanding – we should instead reoccupy all or part of Gaza? Launch periodic smaller-scale operations like Operation Cast Lead? Threaten to kill Hamas leaders if the rocket fire doesn’t stop? These are precisely the kind of policy decisions we elect governments to make, and for the court to usurp the government’s prerogative by imposing its own preferred solution was judicial activism par excellence.
But aside from being activist, it proved patently unfeasible. Reinforcing all those classrooms would cost billions of shekels, and the government can’t produce those billions without harming other important goals. Should it, for instance, slash welfare allowances, hurting society’s worst-off? Cut training for army reservists, thereby risking a repeat of the Second Lebanon War debacle? Let the deficit balloon, imperiling Israel’s credit rating? Faced with these unpalatable choices, the government’s decision was almost inevitable: It opted to allocate its limited funds to the goals it deemed most important (after all, setting budgetary priorities is one of the government’s core responsibilities) and postpone the reinforcement.
At bottom, the court’s activism reflects a profound contempt for the often messy workings of representative government. Outgoing Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch made this clear in responding to another Grunis argument: that the court’s job is to protect minorities, not to keep the majority from giving minorities excess rights. After correctly noting that yeshiva draft exemptions have survived largely because of the constraints of coalition politics, in which parties are forced to make concessions on some issues to win their partners’ support on others they deem more important, Beinisch concluded: “Under these circumstances, it’s hard to determine what reflects the majority’s will and what is compulsion.” Translation: Policies set by the people’s elected representatives don’t actually reflect the people’s will, so she is free to replace them with her own preferred policies.
But sacrificing a lesser goal to achieve a greater one isn’t “compulsion,” it’s an essential part of representative government. Indeed, such compromises are precisely what enable all of Israel’s various subgroups, with their competing wants and needs, to somehow coexist.
The irony is that in seeking to replace the constraints of representative government with a Platonic guardianship run by themselves, the institution to which Beinisch and her fellow activists have done most harm isn’t representative government, but the court itself. For they have thereby degraded it from the ultimate arbiter of the law into just another political actor, whose pronouncements can be freely ignored.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
The Iranian regime’s reaction to the country’s Oscar victory, in which the Iranian film “A Separation” beat out Israeli contender “Footnote” for best foreign-language film, was indeed revealing, as Alana noted. But far more revealing was the fact that Israelis have been flocking to see the Iranian entry. For that one fact constitutes an eloquent rebuttal of all those who seek to paint Israel as being “undemocratic” and “anti-peace.”
Here’s how AP, after noting that “an impressive 30,000 Israeli filmgoers” have seen “A Separation” since it opened a week and a half ago, described the scene in Israel: “Ticket buyers stood in a long line on Sunday night at the Lev Smadar movie theater in Jerusalem. Omer Dilian, manager of the theater’s cafe, said ‘A Separation’ has drawn hundreds of viewers, even on weeknights … All the screenings in Lev theaters were sold out last Friday and Saturday.”
So let’s start with the obvious: “Undemocratic” countries don’t show films produced by their worst enemies in theaters throughout the country; they ban them. You won’t, for instance, be able to see “Footnote” at a movie theater in Tehran. That this even needs saying is a disgrace. But given the frequency with which Israel’s critics have been hurling the “undemocratic” label at it, it’s clear many self-proclaimed Western liberals need a refresher course in the basics of democracy.
What’s equally true, however, is that “anti-peace” regimes generally don’t want their citizens to learn about their neighbors’ culture, for very good reason: If a regime really seeks to prevent peace, dehumanization of the enemy is vital. Thus, it’s important to shield the public from anything that might cause it to view enemy nationals as people more or less like themselves. That’s precisely why, for instance, Israeli books are almost never translated into Arabic, nor are Israeli movies shown almost anywhere in the Arab world.
In contrast, a country that seeks peace is intensely interested in getting to know its neighbors’ human side, because humanization enhances the prospects for peace. That is why, for instance, you can easily find translated Arabic literature in Israel, and it’s also why “A Separation” has been such a hit. It’s not just that it’s an award-winning movie, though that obviously helps. It’s because Israelis, to quote AP again, were intrigued “by the rare glimpse it offered into the living rooms of a country they regard as a threat.”
And indeed, that was evident in the movie-goers’ responses. “You see them driving cars and going to movies and they look exactly like us,” wrote an Israeli reviewer. One audience member told AP “she was struck by Tehran’s modernity, which jarred with the image of black-clad women and religious conservatism that has become iconic of Iran”; another “said she was surprised by the humaneness of the Iranian bureaucrats portrayed in the film.”
So next time anyone you know gets confused abpit whether Israel is really democratic or peace-seeking, I recommend the following simple test: Just ask which country shows its enemies’ films and which doesn’t – and in which country the public flocks to see them.
Abe’s post about the hypocrisy of rock stars who preach morality while cozying up to dictators inevitably brings the anti-Israel cultural boycotters to mind. Take, for instance, Grammy-winning jazz singer Cassandra Wilson, who canceled a planned performance in Israel last week at the behest of pro-Palestinian activists. But somehow, she discovered her moral conscience only one day after having received full payment for the scheduled show – of which she has so far agreed to refund only part. In other words, this paragon of morality used her newfound passion for the Palestinian cause to commit robbery in broad daylight.
Or then there’s indie pop group, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, which recently canceled their planned performance in Israel. They, too, cited “political” reasons, in addition to scheduling pressures. But somehow, their moral conscience awoke only after they had managed to book a more lucrative gig in Malaysia for the same time.
If this naked greed posing as morality is the best the cultural boycotters can do, I don’t think Israel has much to worry about on the moral high ground front. But it’s time for the rest of the world, including Israel, to start calling a spade a spade. These artists don’t give a fig about either Palestinian suffering or Israeli “human-rights abuses”; if they did, they wouldn’t have booked gigs in Israel in the first place. At best, all they care about is earning some positive publicity by feigning concern for Palestinian rights. And at worst, as with Cassandra Wilson and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, their crocodile tears are merely a convenient way to earn some extra lucre.
In short, they aren’t “cultural boycotters,” and they shouldn’t be dignified as such – because that term at least implies taking a moral stand, however warped. They are cynical poseurs who have found a way to exploit the Palestinian cause for their own gain.
The combination of the upcoming Israel Apartheid Week and the recent
boycott/divestment/ sanctions (BDS) conference at the University of
Pennsylvania has prompted much discussion about the need for a proactive
public relations strategy rather than a reactive one. I couldn’t agree
more. Disturbingly, however, even many “proactive” strategies are
largely reactive: They focus almost exclusively on portraying Israel as a
seeker of peace, in obvious reaction to the world’s tendency to blame
Israel for the conflict with the Palestinians. And by adopting this
strategy, Israel advocates are essentially adopting its enemies’
definition of it: a country defined solely by the ongoing conflict.
A column
published in these pages last week offers a perfect example of the
problem. In it, Natalie Menaged described how pro-Israel groups on 75
college campuses across North America are responding to Israel Apartheid
Week by organizing Israel Peace Week, which “revolves around a simple,
yet often understated message: Israel wants peace and has demonstrated
its willingness to make painful sacrifices for peace.”
That, of course, is true, and it’s certainly a significant element of
Israel’s identity. But it isn’t the only one, or even the most important
– nor should it be.
A campaign that views Israel primarily through the prism of its
peace-making efforts ignores most of what this country is about. And it
thereby reinforces the perception that Israel is
defined mainly by the conflict. If even its advocates treat Israel’s
efforts to solve the conflict the most noteworthy thing about it – the
thing they most want to share with their peers on campus – then why
should those peers think otherwise?
The problem with this is twofold. First, it forces Israel onto a playing
field where it can’t win. For if Israel’s sole claim to support and
sympathy is its “willingness to make painful sacrifices for peace,” then
it will inevitably face constant pressure to make more and more such
sacrifices in order to retain the world’s support and sympathy. That’s
precisely what’s happening now in the realm of international diplomacy:
After Israel withdrew from every inch of both Lebanon and Gaza and got
only rocket fire in exchange, the world didn’t turn around and tell the
Palestinians, “okay, now it’s your turn to demonstrate your bona fides”;
instead, it pressured Israel to demonstrate its bona fides by making
further concessions – a freeze on settlement construction, additional
handovers of territory to the Palestinian Authority, etc. – just to lure
PA President Mahmoud Abbas to the negotiating table.
Sometimes, Israel can acquiesce in these demands. But inevitably, the
moment will come when it must say “no” to protect its own vital
interests. The current American/European/Palestinian demand that it
agree to a border “based on” the 1967 lines is a perfect example: Israel
cannot accede to this demand, because it considers the 1967 lines
indefensible. Yet its refusal has led many Westerners to view it as
unwilling to make the requisite “sacrifices for peace” – and hence,
undeserving of support even by its own advocates’ definition.
Even more problematic, however, is that this focus on the conflict makes
people view Israel as an “abnormal” state. After all, many other
countries also have conflicts with their neighbors. Yet nobody dreams of
defining them by their willingness (or lack thereof) to make “sacrifices for peace.”
India and Pakistan, for instance, have fought three full-scale wars
since their mutual establishment in 1947, plus an ongoing, lower-level
conflict in Kashmir that has killed more than 47,000 people over the past 65 years and continues to claim hundreds
of victims each year. Yet when people think of India, the Kashmir
conflict is rarely the first thing that comes to mind. Instead, they
think of India’s thriving multicultural democracy, its booming high-tech
industry, its enduring pockets of poverty, its award-winning novelists,
its Bollywood movies, and so forth. Similarly, people don’t define
South Korea by its unresolved war with North Korea, which has thus far
lasted 62 years with no end in sight; they think instead of its
flourishing high-tech economy and vibrant democracy.
This abnormal perception of Israel helps fuel the growing discourse over
whether it – alone among the nations – has a “right” to exist. When a
country is seen in three dimensions, the very idea of it ceasing to
exist seems like an abomination: How could anyone countenance the
disappearance of, say, India, with its rich mix of people, cultures,
religions, industry, politics and arts? But when a country is reduced in
the popular mind to nothing more than an endless war with its
neighbors, then its eradication starts to sound logical rather than
appalling: If Israel has no existence beyond the conflict, and the
conflict is clearly undesirable, why not just solve the problem by eliminating Israel?
The truth, of course, is that Israel is vastly greater than the
conflict: It is a vibrant democracy in a despotic neighborhood, a
stimulating mix of different religions, nationalities and cultures, a
flourishing first-world economy, an endless fount of innovative products
and technologies that benefit the entire world. It is also the gripping
story of a people reconstituting itself as a state after 2,000 years of
exile, a people that picked itself up from the ashes of the Holocaust
and defiantly started anew. And once, not so long ago, this was how the
world saw it, too.
Nowadays, so much of the world does define Israel by the conflict that
its advocates neither can nor should ignore the issue, and activists
like those behind Israel Peace Week deserve full credit for their
efforts. Moreover, even those who want to shift the focus away from the
conflict find it difficult when so many prominent Israelis –
politicians, journalists and academics – still talk and act as if
Israel’s policies on the peace process were the be-all and end-all of
its existence.
Nevertheless, the focus must be changed if Israel is ever to win the
public relations war. That doesn’t mean abandoning conflict-related PR,
which remains important. But in any truly proactive campaign, the main
story shouldn’t be about what Israel isn’t – a brutal, oppressive
warmonger – but about all the wondrous, exciting things it is.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Michael Rubin offered a shocking example yesterday of the kind of warped analysis that results when a journalist “goes native” by adopting the biases of the country in which he is stationed. I agree this can be a serious problem when diplomats, journalists and other international officials spend too long in a given country, but I’m no less concerned by the opposite problem: Frequent rotations mean journalists and diplomats have no incentive to develop real expertise in any foreign country. The result is they are often parachuted in with no knowledge of the local languages, history or other information needed to actually understand what’s going on, leaving them dependent on local “fixers” – who may well be pursuing their own agendas.
This point was brought home to me last Friday, when I happened to have dinner at the home of a friend whose eldest son is doing his army service. He had recently returned from a stint in Hebron, and related the following story:
An Israeli soldier at a checkpoint had asked a Palestinian, in Hebrew, to show some identification. An observer from the Temporary International Presence in Hebron was standing nearby, along with a local Palestinian translator, as the observer speaks neither Hebrew nor Arabic. The translator duly explained, in English, that the soldier had asked the Palestinian for his ID – then added the soldier had threatened to beat him up if he didn’t produce it.
The TIPH observer had no way of knowing this “threat” was the product of the translator’s imagination rather than the truth; he was utterly dependent on his translator. Nor would it have made much difference had my friend’s son disputed the translator’s account (which he couldn’t due to army regulations aimed at avoiding confrontations with the observers): In a classic “he said, she said” situation, the overseas visitor would naturally believe his regular translator rather than an unknown Israeli soldier. So the nonexistent threat will doubtless be duly included in the observer’s report, one more in a string of lies promulgated over the years by foreigners who may be genuinely well-meaning, but are irretrievably hampered by their own ignorance.
Nor is linguistic ignorance the only problem: Historical ignorance is equally problematic. This is evident in numerous standard media tropes about Israel -like the claim the current impasse in Israeli-Palestinian talks stems from Israel’s refusal to freeze settlement construction, or that the crisis in Israeli-Turkish relations stems from Israel’s May 2010 raid on a Turkish-sponsored flotilla to Gaza. Of course, the Palestinians also refused to talk during the 10 months when Israel did freeze settlement construction, and Turkey turned against Israel long before the flotilla raid, even barring it from NATO drills in which it had participated for years. But all that happened years ago, and given the frequent rotations in media and diplomatic personnel, many genuinely don’t know. So when fed the standard line by Palestinians or Turks, they don’t even know what questions they should be asking.
If we really want our diplomats and journalists to provide useful information, we should insist they know the relevant languages and history. As long as they don’t, they are little better than conduits for whatever propaganda others choose to feed them.
Writing in Friday’s Jerusalem Post, Israel Kasnett provided figures that concretize the world’s double standard regarding Israel: A London protest against Israel’s 2009 war in Gaza, for instance, drew “tens of thousands” of people (The Guardian‘s figure), compared to a mere 150 for one against the ongoing slaughter in Syria, which has so far claimed at least five times as many victims.
Nor need you be “right-wing” to notice this discrepancy: Two Haaretz columnists, both dyed-in-the-wool left-wingers, offered similar observations last week. Bradley Burston focused on the UN Human Rights Council, which rushed to appoint a committee to investigate the Gaza war but hasn’t even considered doing the same for Syria; Carlos Strenger addressed the issue more broadly in a column titled “Israel, Syria, and the double standards of the Free World.”
But while double standards certainly exist, the past few months’ spate of rankings purporting to measure various human rights has convinced me there’s a broader problem: Many organizations seem to be so enthralled by their own metrics that reality is relegated to a distant second place. When the metrics don’t jibe with real-world experience, these organizations would rather ignore the facts than consider that their metrics might be flawed.
Take, for instance, the annual religious freedom index published in December by CIRI, the Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights Dataset (named for the two American professors who devised it). Unsurprisingly, countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, China and Afghanistan all received the lowest ranking, zero on a scale of 0-2. Shockingly, however, so did countries like Israel, India and Mexico.
Certainly, Israel has some religious restrictions (like the Orthodox monopoly on marriage). But that’s a far cry from, say, Iran, which persecutes members of the Baha’i faith so viciously that the religion, founded in Iran, maintains its world headquarters in Israel. According to CIRI, however, there’s no difference between the country that drove the Baha’is out and the country that took them in: Both rate a “zero” on the religious freedom scale. Similarly, CIRI sees no difference between India – where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Christians, Jews and countless others all live and worship freely – and Saudi Arabia, where non-Muslim worship is legally banned.
Any normal person would conclude there’s something badly wrong with a religious-freedom metric that equates Israel and India with Saudi Arabia and Iran. But not the academics who created CIRI: They refuse to let the facts disturb their formulas.
Then there’s the economic freedom index published last month by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal, in which Jordan and Botswana (32 and 33) creamed Norway (40) and Israel (48). That wouldn’t be surprising if the index’s publishers were anti-capitalists. But since both organizations proudly assert that economic freedom produces prosperity, it’s bizarre to find flourishing economies like Norway (per-capita GDP $96,600, unemployment 3.4%) and Israel (per-capita GDP $32,300, unemployment 5.6%) ranking well behind comparative basket-cases like Jordan (per-capita GDP $4,500, unemployment 12.9%). You might expect such results to cause a rethink of either the metrics or the thesis. But if so, you’d be disappointed.
Finally, there’s the press freedom rankings published last month by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), where Israel (excluding the territories), at 92, ranked well below countries like Bulgaria and Chile (both at 80) and Hungary (40).Yet here’s how RSF itself described the situation in those countries: “Targeted attacks and death threats against journalists marked the past year in Bulgaria, where concerns about print media pluralism grew”; Hungary “fell 17 rungs to 40th place after adopting a law giving the ruling party direct control over the media”; and in Chile, “violence against journalists included beatings, cyber-attacks and attacks on editorial staffs. Many of these assaults, often accompanied by heavy-handed arrests and destruction of equipment, were carried out by abusive armed police who were rarely called to account.”
So why is Israel, despite enjoying “real media pluralism,” ranked so much lower than these others? Aside from the existence of military censorship (marginal but nevertheless real), one major factor was a bill to “drastically increase the amount of damages that can be awarded in defamation cases,” which passed the first of three required readings. In other words, according to RSF, for parliament to consider – but not yet enact – a bill increasing damages in libel suits is a full 52 places worse than actually enacting a law that gives “the ruling party direct control over the media.” To any normal person – and even, I suspect, most journalists – this sounds bizarre. But not, apparently, to RSF.
Another major factor was Anat Kamm, whom RSF deems an “imprisoned netizen” – just like those bloggers jailed in Egypt or China for daring to express an opinion. In reality, of course, a criminal court jailed Kamm for “systematically” betraying her oath as a soldier by stealing 2,085 documents over the course of her army service, including “plans for military operations, information on troop deployments, summaries of various internal discussions, military targets and intelligence assessments,” and giving them to a journalist. This is the same crime for which American Pfc. Bradley Manning, suspected of giving US diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, now faces life in prison. But Manning was somehow omitted from RSF’s list of “imprisoned netizens.”
Thus in RSF’s world, press freedom is more endangered by jailing a soldier who commits systematic document theft than by either “targeted attacks and death threats against journalists” or “beatings … attacks on editorial staffs … heavy-handed arrests and destruction of equipment,” often “by abusive armed police who were rarely called to account.” Once again, I doubt most ordinary people, or even most journalists, would agree.
The truth is that real life – for instance, trying to avoid civilian casualties when fighting terrorists who launch rockets from urban population centers – is rarely as simple as many human-rights organizations seem to think it is. But when you ignore such real-world complexities and instead judge every situation by simplistic, black-and-white standards, you wind up with absurdities like the ones cited above.
And until that changes, reports by “human-rights organizations” will to continue to present a deeply distorted view of the world.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
There are so many disturbing aspects to the story of Leyada high school’s visit to Hebron last week that it’s hard to know where to start. But I’ll focus on two: blatant politicization of the education system, and police officers setting policy in the government’s stead.
First, the facts: The Education Ministry recently began promoting school trips to Hebron, due to the city’s significant role in Jewish history. Leyada, a high school affiliated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, didn’t want its students visit Hebron unless they were also exposed to what the school’s administration views as Israel’s unacceptable treatment of the city’s Palestinians. Incredibly, the ministry then agreed that in addition to touring Hebron’s historic Jewish sites, Leyada could take its students on a political indoctrination tour led by a radical left-wing nongovernmental organization, Breaking the Silence, whose specialty is collecting anonymous (and hence unverifiable) testimony from soldiers about their own or their comrades’ “abuse” of Palestinians and disseminating it abroad to generate international pressure on Israel.
But when the students actually reached Hebron, police unilaterally abrogated the ministry’s decision and barred the NGO’s staffers from the tour. The official reason was a technicality: Breaking the Silence hadn’t coordinated the visit with the security services in advance. The unofficial reason was fear of settler violence, which is what makes such advance coordination necessary.
Nevertheless, students did get a dose of political indoctrination – from the opposite side: Several far-right political activists, including Itamar Ben-Gvir and Baruch Marzel, crashed the tour despite the school’s objections, and police reportedly did nothing to remove them.
Regardless of how one envisions Hebron’s political future, there’s no denying its vital role in the Jewish people’s past. Hebron is where six of the seven patriarchs and matriarchs are buried; it was the first capital of the Davidic kingdom; it boasted a continuous Jewish presence for 2,000 years after the destruction of the Second Temple, until the Jews were finally driven out by the Arab pogroms of 1929 and 1936. That’s why the tours are an appropriate educational endeavor.
Indeed, what leftist opponents of the tours are demanding is no less than a Stalinist rewrite of history: that students not be exposed to Hebron’s central role in Jewish history, lest it “intensify nationalist feelings, faith in power and blindness to the injustices of the occupation,” as the left-wing daily Haaretz fretted in an editorial. No self-respecting education system could acquiesce in that. The education system’s job is to give students the historical facts; it’s up to parents and politicians to sell students on their vision of Hebron’s political future.
That’s why it’s so appalling that the ministry is instead allowing these tours to become political indoctrination sessions – for either side. Neither a politicized NGO like Breaking the Silence nor veteran political activists like Ben-Gvir and Marzel have any business accompanying a school trip to Hebron; such trips should be run strictly by government-licensed tour guides trained to show the relevant historical sites and explain their significance. Parents of every political stripe should feel confident that a school trip is an educational event, not a political one; those who want their children exposed to Hebron’s modern-day politics should be told the solution is to arrange their own tour, outside of school hours, with the political group of their choice.
Nevertheless, once the ministry had made the outrageous decision to allow Breaking the Silence to escort the trip, it’s equally disturbing that the police, on their own initiative, countermanded this decision. Nor is this unusual: Police routinely countermand government decisions, and even court orders, on the pretext that implementing them would risk sparking violence. Jewish groups seeking to visit the Temple Mount on Jewish holidays, for instance, have routinely been barred despite repeated High Court of Justice rulings upholding the visits; police simply assert on the day of the visit that “new intelligence” indicates a near certainty of violence, and courts are understandably reluctant to second-guess their judgment.
The first problem with this is that government policy is essentially being outsourced to the police – who always have an incentive to say no. Protecting any politically charged event in a volatile area, like Jewish visits to the Temple Mount or Breaking the Silence tours of Hebron, necessarily requires the already understaffed force to allocate extra manpower to the task; thus it’s always easier for police to simply nix the controversial event and spare itself the need to mobilize extra troops. But from a democratic standpoint, this is simply unacceptable: Policy should be set by the elected government, not unelected police officers.
Alternatively, governments may be deliberately exploiting this dodge to avoid having to make such politically-charged decisions: Perhaps, for instance, the ministry didn’t really want the Breaking the Silence tour to proceed, but letting the police ban it at the last minute was simpler than saying “no” itself and taking the flak. This, however, is no less unacceptable. The only proper mode of governance in a democracy is for governments to decide openly what to allow and what to prohibit, defend those decisions to the voters, and then force the police to carry them out, regardless of how much extra manpower it takes.
But perhaps even more disturbing is the message this conduct sends about the utility of violence: that it in fact pays handsomely. By threatening violence, Arabs can keep Jews from visiting the Temple Mount. By threatening violence, settlers can keep school groups from touring Hebron with Breaking the Silence. And if violence works, then why shouldn’t other subsets of Israeli society adopt it as a tool to promote their aims as well?
Thus canceling such events may indeed prevent violence in the short run. But in the long run, it creates much more violence, by convincing people that violence is an effective way to advance their goals.
In sum, the government’s atrocious handling of this trip managed to simultaneously politicize the education system, subvert democracy and encourage violence. That’s quite an achievement for one insignificant school trip – and reason enough for Israelis of every political stripe to be outraged.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
As Jonathan noted, the New York Times seems determined to downplay Iran’s verbal threats against Israel, first eliminating them from its report on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s speech last week and then dismissing them as mere “posturing and saber-rattling.” And I can understand why: Israel is the only country to be openly weighing military action against Tehran’s nuclear program. So dismiss the validity of the threat Iran poses to Israel, and you’ve also seemingly dismissed any need for military action.
The only problem with this approach is that far from being the only country seriously threatened by Iran, Israel may well not even be at the top of the list. To understand why this is so, it suffices to recall Saddam Hussein. Saddam also threatened night and day to destroy Israel. Yet the country he actually tried to wipe off the map wasn’t Israel, but Kuwait.
Nor is this surprising: Saddam’s Iraq, like today’s Iran, aspired to dominate the region. And for that purpose, taking over neighboring Kuwait was far more useful than attacking Israel, both to acquire Kuwait’s bountiful oil fields and to undermine another contender for regional dominance, Kuwaiti ally Saudi Arabia.
Because Israel is isolated from the rest of the Middle East, it is completely irrelevant to the internal jockeying for supremacy among the region’s various Muslim powers. Hence, if Iran’s goal is regional hegemony, then attacking Israel would be a sideshow, just as it was for Saddam – who, while launching a full-scale invasion of Kuwait, made do with lobbing a token 40 Scuds at Israel. The most important targets would be Iran’s regional rivals, first and foremost Saudi Arabia and its allies.
That is why, as Wikileaks revealed two years ago, Arab countries have consistently demanded more forceful American action against Iran. Saudi Arabia, for instance, delivered “frequent exhortations to the U.S. to attack Iran,” demanding it “cut off the head of the snake.” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi warned that “[Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad is Hitler.” King Hamad of Bahrain said Iran’s nuclear program “must be stopped,” because “the danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it.” Lebanon’s Saad Hariri urged military action by saying, “Iraq was unnecessary. Iran is necessary.” A senior Jordanian official said even though bombing Iran would have “catastrophic” consequences, “he nonetheless thought preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons would pay enough dividends to make it worth the risks.”
What all these countries know is that they, rather than Israel, might well be Iran’s first targets – but unlike Israel, they lack the military capability even to credibly threaten to attack Iran themselves. And because these countries include some of the world’s major oil producers, that should be of great concern to the West.
None of this means the Iranian threat to Israel isn’t real: Even if a nuclear Iran never attacked Israel directly, it could still wreak havoc via satellite groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. But Israel is far from being the only country threatened by Iran. And it’s about time Western pundits and policymakers woke up to that fact.
Here, in one sentence, is the gist of Frank Jacob’s 1,500-word op-ed in the New York Times this week: Divided cities are bad, and we should strive to reunite them – except for Jerusalem, which we should instead strive to redivide, even though it will likely mean building a wall through its heart. “In a place where there’s no middle ground,where you’re either from one side or the other, it’s hard to see how a case can be made that both parts of the city belong together, and should grow together,” he pontificated. “Even [former West Berlin Mayor and German Chancellor] Willy Brandt would agree.”
I have no doubt Brandt would agree if he were still alive; most Europeans do. But here’s who wouldn’t agree: a sizable minority, and quite possibly a majority, of those East Jerusalem Palestinians whom Jacobs and his fellow pundits so blithely advocate tearing away from Israel.
In a November 2010 poll which 1,039 East Jerusalem Palestinians conducted via face-to-face interviews, fully 35 percent said they would prefer remaining Israeli if a two-state solution emerged, compared to only 30 percent who preferred Palestinian citizenship. The remainder declined to answer or said they didn’t know.
Since a Palestinian who openly prefers Israel would be deemed treasonous by most of his compatriots, the fact that a majority of those who actually answered the question nevertheless chose Israel is stunning – especially because the interviews were conducted by Palestinian pollsters (the poll was officially conducted by Pechter Middle East Polls and the Council on Foreign Relations, but they hired a West Bank firm, Dr. Nabil Kukali’s Palestinian Center for Public Opinion, to do the actual interviews). That makes it likely that among those who declined to answer, an even larger majority would have chosen Israel.
The same preference emerged from a different question: Would you relocate to Israel (or Palestine) if your neighborhood of Jerusalem ended up in the other? Fully 40 percent of respondents said they would move to remain in Israel, while only 27 percent said they would move to become part of Palestine. Again, the likelihood is that those who declined to answer would break even more strongly for Israel.
In September 2011, two weeks before the Palestinians formally applied for statehood at the UN, Pechter and the Washington Institute conducted a follow-up poll, again using Kukali’s firm for the actual interviews. This time, 39 percent said they preferred Israeli citizenship and 53 percent preferred Palestinian, seemingly indicating, as the pollsters wrote, that “views have shifted toward this option among the one-third who previously voiced uncertainty or refused to answer.”
But it could equally reflect the fact that amid all the hoopla over the imminent statehood bid, more Palestinians felt acutely uncomfortable publicly stating a preference for Israel, regardless of what they actually thought. This possibility is bolstered by the fact that while 42 percent said they would move to Israel if their neighborhood became Palestinian, only 44 percent said they would move to Palestine if their neighborhood remained Israeli. In other words, all those who publicly preferred Israeli citizenship were willing to move to obtain it. But among those who publicly preferred Palestinian citizenship, many fewer were willing to move to obtain it.
Clearly, none of this makes East Jerusalem Palestinians into Zionists; those who preferred Israeli citizenship mainly cited practical reasons: “freedom of movement in Israel, higher income and better job opportunities, and Israeli health insurance.” But that doesn’t make their preferences less worthy of consideration.
So before Westerners blithely assert that dividing Jerusalem is what’s best for its Palestinian residents, perhaps they ought to pay a little more attention to what those residents actually say.
“Five Broken Cameras” didn’t win the World Documentary competition at last week’s Sundance Film Festival, losing out to another anti-Israel film. But it has garnered plenty of international attention, including two awards at Amsterdam’s International Documentary Film Festival and a glowing write-up in the New York Times. The film, according to the Sundance synopsis, documents what happened after the West Bank village of Bil’in “famously chose nonviolent resistance” against Israel’s security fence: “an escalating struggle as olive trees are bulldozed, lives are lost, and a wall is built to segregate burgeoning Israeli settlements,” in which a child’s “loss of innocence and the destruction of each camera are potent metaphors.” In short, another tale of good Palestinians versus evil Israelis.
You have to persevere to the end of the Times piece to find another angle to Palestinian filmmaker Emad Burnat’s story:
“In late 2008, he accidently drove a truck into the separation barrier and was badly injured. A Palestinian ambulance arrived at the same time as Israeli soldiers, who saw what bad shape he was in and took him to an Israeli hospital.
“‘If I had been taken to a Palestinian hospital,’ Mr. Burnat said, “’I probably wouldn’t have survived.’ He was unconscious for 20 days. Three months later he was back filming.”
In short, Burnat is alive today to win prizes for a film about evil Israeli soldiers suppressing “nonviolent resistance” in Bil’in because those same evil Israeli soldiers saved his life four years earlier. And this is not an irrelevancy; it epitomizes the flaw in the “good Palestinians versus evil Israelis” trope: As anyone who makes any effort to discover the facts quickly learns, Israelis all too often refuse to play the part assigned to them.
And for that matter, so do Palestinians – with Bil’in being a classic example. For contrary to the prevailing wisdom encapsulated in that Sundance synopsis, Bil’in residents certainly weren’t practicing “nonviolent resistance.” Here, for instance, is Haaretz’s report on a major demonstration in Bil’in to mark five years of protests against the fence:
“The activists maintain that their demonstrations are peaceful. However, youths were preparing slingshots, and took up positions in front of an IDF checkpoint on the other side of the fence, throwing stones. IDF statistics claim that since the start of the demonstrations 110 members of the security forces suffered injuries, and one officer lost an eye as a result of projectiles fired with slingshots.”
Slingshots have been lethal weapons since biblical times (remember David and Goliath?). And it’s hardly unusual for soldiers attacked with lethal weapons to respond with deadly force. What’s unusual about Bil’in is that the Israelis generally didn’t: While Palestinians have been killed, most of the deaths were accidental. Burnat’s friend Phil, for instance, was killed when a tear gas canister – not usually a lethal weapon – happened to hit him in the chest.
Reasonable people of goodwill can certainly disagree about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But no reasonable person of goodwill can view it as a “good Palestinians versus evil Israelis” morality play. And anyone tempted to think otherwise should remember Emad Burnat.