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Some years ago, at the height of the second intifada, religious soldiers
were ordered aboard a bus on Shabbat and sent to dismantle an illegal
outpost. The soldiers obeyed, but afterward, they protested
vociferously. The response was immediate: The prime minister, defense
minister and chief of staff all apologized, stating unequivocally that
the order had been wrong, and promised that it wouldn’t happen again.
Army regulations allow soldiers to be asked to violate Shabbat only for
essential military operations, and dismantling an outpost doesn’t
qualify.
This story exemplifies what has been so sorely missing in the current
battle over “religion versus women” in the Israel Defense Forces: a
willingness on both sides to acknowledge that the other’s position has
some validity. The soldiers in the outpost incident understood that they
weren’t entitled to pick and choose which orders to obey, though they
could seek to prevent a recurrence of orders they deemed problematic.
The army brass and their civilian superiors understood that they weren’t
entitled to abuse their coercive power by gratuitously violating
soldiers’ religious beliefs.
Compare this to the September incident that started the current battle,
in which nine cadets in an officers’ course disobeyed a direct order by
walking out of an event featuring women vocalists. Five later apologized
and promised not to repeat the offense; four refused to do so and were
expelled from the course. But what should have been a minor incident
that blew over as quickly as that Shabbat outpost demolition instead
metastasized, because both sides entrenched themselves in maximalist
positions. Rabbis insisted that soldiers should never have to listen to
women singing, since some (though not all) rabbinic authorities deem
this religiously prohibited, and that soldiers are entitled to disobey
orders that violate their religious conscience. Army officers and
politicians insisted that women must never be “excluded” from the army,
and the IDF is therefore entitled to force religious soldiers to listen
to female vocalists, regardless of how irrelevant this is to the army’s
core military mission.
There was no appreciation on the religious side of how threatening this
incident appeared to secular Israelis, for whom women’s equality, and
freedom from religious coercion, are of cardinal importance. In contrast
to the Shabbat outpost demolition, here, it was the religious soldiers
who violated the status quo: Women singers have always performed in the
IDF, and for decades, religious soldiers never objected; what changed is
that sections of the religious Zionist community have begun adopting
certain religious stringencies formerly confined to the ultra-Orthodox.
And that is precisely what made it threatening to secular Israelis: If
religious Zionist soldiers are now demanding the end of a decades-old
religious status quo on this issue, what additional imported
ultra-Orthodox norms might they seek to impose on the army, and on
society as a whole? Will religious soldiers also start demanding, for
instance, that women be excluded from the growing range of essential
military positions (radar operators, weapons instructors, etc.) that
they now fill?
Yet there was also no appreciation on the secular side of how
threatening this incident appeared to religious Israelis: The army’s
coercive powers were being exploited not for legitimate military needs,
but to force religious soldiers to conform to secular norms. The event
these cadets walked out of was a seminar on the 2009 Gaza war,
consisting mainly of professional lectures on various aspects of the
fighting. What conceivable need was there to cap it with a vocal
performance that had nothing to do with the professional subject matter
and was bound to offend the religious sensibilities of many cadets,
given that 42
percent of the course’s participants were religious? Upholding this
as a legitimate use of the army’s power merely feeds ultra-Orthodox
conspiracy theories about the IDF being a tool to separate soldiers from
religion, which religious men should therefore shun.
Anyone who even tried to propose a compromise was laughed at.
Ultra-Orthodox MK Nissim Ze’ev, for instance, pointed
out that religious soldiers could observe the prohibition against
listening to women sing without either stalking out of ceremonies or
demanding that such performances be abolished, simply by putting in
earplugs when the singing began. But both sides heaped scorn on that
idea; they wanted total victory, not a way to paper over the tensions.
Secular politicians demanded that religious soldiers be forced to listen
to female vocalists, even if that violates their religious beliefs.
Rabbis demanded that soldiers be excused from any event featuring women
performers, even though excusing some soldiers from events that are
mandatory for others would undermine unit cohesion, or else that women
not perform at all, even if this made secular Israelis feel excluded.
Consequently, the conflict escalated. The army issued explicit orders
requiring soldiers to attend certain events featuring female vocalists; a
leading religious Zionist rabbi declared that soldiers should face a
firing squad rather than obey; the rabbi of a highly successful program
to recruit ultra-Orthodox soldiers resigned, sending shock waves through
the program; and so on.
Since neither religious nor secular Israelis are likely to disappear
anytime soon, it’s essential that they learn to compromise on issues
vital to the country’s survival, like maintaining an army in which both
communities can serve. The army clearly plays a vital role in saving
Jewish lives, and it can’t currently do without either religious or
secular soldiers. Thus given the religious principle that pikuakh nefesh (saving a life) trumps
most other religious precepts, I agree with Rabbi Mosheh Lichenstein’s view
that the army is a place where maximalist religious positions don’t
belong; instead, “any legitimate leniency” in Jewish law should be
applied. Nevertheless, those “legitimate leniencies” aren’t infinite; if
religious Jews are to feel comfortable serving in the Jewish state’s
army, maximalist secular positions are equally untenable.
But any workable compromise starts with recognizing that the other side
also has legitimate needs and fears. The tragedy is that there has been
far too little of that recognition on either side of the current battle
over religion in the IDF. As a consequence, what should have been a
minor incident has become a conflict that refuses to die.
The writer is a journalist and
commentator.
How Egypt’s economic turmoil and Western positions on the peace process combine to increase the risk of another Arab-Israeli war
By Evelyn Gordon
JINSA Visiting Fellow
Last month, Victor Davis Hanson published a fascinating article on why Iran might nevertheless decide to start a war it can’t win. In it, he analyzed several cases in which countries did exactly that, including the Korean War in 1950, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1982 Falklands War and the 1991 Gulf War, and found three common factors: pressing domestic crises, belief that the West might acquiesce in their aggression, and conviction that even if it didn’t, the Western response would stop well short of regime change. In short, their leaders had something to gain (domestic distraction) and nothing irreversible to lose.
While surely relevant to Iran, Hanson’s analysis is equally relevant to another Mideast powder keg – one created by the combination of Egypt’s revolution and a troubling change in Western attitudes toward the Israeli-Arab peace process. The former left Egypt with a major economic crisis. And the latter has assured Arab states that attacking Israel carries no risk of irreversible losses: Even if a war results in Israel capturing Arab territory, the West will demand that it return every last inch.
This wasn’t always the case. UN Security Council Resolution 242, the original framework for the peace process, was deliberately crafted to ensure that Israel wouldn’t have to return all the territory captured in its defensive war of 1967. While the Arab and Soviet blocs wanted the resolution to require Israel to withdraw from “the territories” or “all the territories,” the final wording merely required an Israeli withdrawal from “territories” captured in 1967. And both sides understood that this omission was “not accidental,” as America’s then UN ambassador, Arthur Goldberg, explained: The West envisioned a “peace settlement encompassing less than a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from occupied territories, inasmuch as Israel’s prior frontiers had proved to be notably insecure,” and therefore, “the resolution speaks of withdrawal from occupied territories without defining the extent of withdrawal.”
As time passed, however, Western attitudes shifted drastically. The European Union has been demanding a full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank for years now, and last year, the U.S. joined in: President Barack Obama declared that any future Israeli-Palestinian border must be “based on the 1967 lines,” modified only by “mutually agreed swaps,” meaning Palestinians can veto any proposal encompassing less than 100 percent of the territory. That is a retreat from both President Bill Clinton’s parameters of 2000 (which called for Israel to cede 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank) and President George Bush’s position in 2004 (“it is unrealistic to expect … a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949”).
And on the Syrian front, this change occurred even earlier: Here, even the U.S. has demanded a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights for decades.
It’s sometimes argued that Israel itself set the 100-percent precedent, by returning every inch of Sinai to Egypt under their 1979 peace agreement. This, however, is a flawed comparison. Egypt was the first to breach the Arab consensus against peace with Israel, at considerable cost to its relations with its Arab neighbors (who barred it from the Arab League for 10 years). It therefore deserved a territorial bonus. But there’s no reason why others should receive a similar reward for more than three decades of continued refusal to make peace.
This Western attitude has long been an impediment to Israeli-Arab negotiations: Syria has no incentive to make peace sooner rather than later as long as the West guarantees that 100 percent of the Golan will still be on the table later, while the Palestinians have learned that rejecting repeated Israeli offers of statehood merely results in Western pressure for Israel to offer them more. Had either Syria or the Palestinians thought instead that they had something to lose by holding out – i.e., that waiting would reduce the amount the territory they could ultimately expect to obtain – they might have signed an agreement sooner.
But that issue pales beside the danger posed by the new situation in Egypt. The revolution left Egypt an economic basket case. Tourism, the country’s second-largest revenue source, was down 35 percent in the first nine months of last year, while third-quarter unemployment stood at 12 percent, up from 9 percent a year earlier. Foreign exchange reserves plunged 50 percent in 2011 – a disaster for a country that imports half its food – and last month, a government bond issue flopped, with investors buying less than a third despite yields of almost 16 percent. The chances that Egypt’s new government can produce the economic miracle needed to reverse this decline seem slim, and if it doesn’t, demonstrators are likely to return to Tahrir Square to demand its ouster, just as they did with Hosni Mubarak.
Hence Egypt’s new rulers may soon find themselves in desperate need of something to distract the public from its economic distress. And in a country where 90% of the population views Israel as an “enemy” and a “threat,” they might well see war with Israel as the ideal distraction.
This makes it vital for Western leaders to make it clear that Egypt does have something irreversible to lose by starting another war – namely, that if it loses Sinai to Israel again, the West won’t back Egyptian demands for its full return. But there’s no way to make such a threat credible while the West is simultaneously demanding that Israel return every inch of land captured in an earlier defensive war: Egypt’s leaders will know they just have to wait a few years for the furor to die down, and the West will similarly demand 100 percent restitution for them.
It’s therefore high time for Western leaders to send the following message to both Syria and the Palestinians: You went to war, you lost, and you refused to make peace for 45 years; our patience is exhausted. We will no longer back your demands for restoring the status quo ante; aggression and intransigence have a price.
For only by ensuring that aggression does entail a territorial price can the West deter future aggressors from trying it.
When I first read Jonathan’s post yesterday, I thought he was blaming President Barack Obama unfairly: The Palestinians don’t need Obama to produce excuses for shunning negotiations; they’ve produced plenty all by themselves (about which more in a separate post). But when I read the New York Times article he referenced, I was shocked – not by the Palestinians’ position, but by reporter Ethan Bronner’s. For when a Palestinian official asserted that Israel’s demand to retain the major settlement blocs “abandons … the framework we have been focused on for the past 20 years,” Bronner, who as a veteran Israeli correspondent should surely have known better, parroted this without a word of demurral – thereby erasing 20 years of history in which every single proposal ever discussed had Israel keeping the settlement blocs.
President Bill Clinton’s parameters of 2000, long considered the blueprint for any final-status agreement, assigned the settlement blocs to Israel. President George W. Bush asserted in a 2004 letter that “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion.” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s offer of 2008 – which Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, after rejecting at the time, suddenly embraced last year, once Olmert was gone and it was off the table – also had Israel retaining the settlement blocs.
In short, Israeli retention of the settlement blocs is precisely “the framework we have been focused on for the past 20 years.”
But along came Obama, with his assertion last May that the starting point for talks should be the 1967 lines rather than two decades of previous negotiations, and suddenly, 20 years of history have been erased: The Palestinians can unblushingly assert that Israel’s demand to retain the settlement blocs is a new demand, and a veteran New York Times reporter can unblushingly parrot that assertion. In effect, the starting point for talks has just been moved.
This would indeed be a serious obstacle to negotiations if they ever resumed, because in 20 years of conceding one “red line” after another, one of the few things successive Israeli governments have never wavered on is their insistence on retaining the settlement blocs. Yet the Palestinians can’t be more Catholic than the Pope: If the U.S. president deems the settlement blocs illegitimate, Palestinians can hardly do otherwise. That’s precisely why previous U.S. presidents were always careful to provide cover for Palestinian negotiators by making it clear that in their view, the settlement blocs should remain Israeli.
But Obama has practically single-handedly created a new narrative, in which Israeli retention of the settlement blocs is not a given, and his allies in the media are eagerly disseminating it. And that mistake, as Jonathan aptly said, will haunt Israeli-Palestinian talks for a long time to come.
As I noted earlier, one area in which Palestinians need no help from anyone is finding excuses to shun negotiations. Currently, of course, they are claiming Israel’s position on borders leaves no room for progress. But if you want to see the real reason talks are stalemated, take a look at what happened last week, when Israel tried to present its position on security arrangements at a negotiating session in Amman: Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat refused to even let the Israeli official speak, saying he had no “mandate to negotiate security arrangements” until Israel presented “detailed documents” with its position on borders.
Everyone involved in the peace process has always understood that borders and security are intimately connected, because how much territory Israel is willing to cede will depend on the robustness of the compensatory security arrangements. That’s why even President Barack Obama, in his May 2011 speech calling for a “borders first” approach that would defer issues like Jerusalem and the refugees until later, didn’t propose deferring security; he suggested that talks focus first on “territory and security.” Thus, if the Palestinians aren’t even willing to listen to Israel’s positions on security arrangements, they clearly aren’t interested in conducting serious negotiations at all. As Israel’s chief negotiator aptly told Erekat, “If you do not have the mandate to discuss this, maybe you should leave and bring someone in your place who does have the mandate.”
But that isn’t the only evidence; equally telling is the ever-growing list of “gestures” the Palestinians are demanding from Israel in exchange for deigning to sit in the same room with Israeli officials. For months, they said the condition for continued talks was a freeze on settlement construction. But now, even this isn’t enough: Nimer Hammad, an aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said earlier this month the PA also demands a release of Palestinian terrorists imprisoned in Israel, the dismantling of Israeli security checkpoints in the West Bank and the transfer of additional chunks of West Bank territory to PA control – or in other words, that Israel cede territory prior to negotiations instead of as a result of negotiations.
Even worse, the “international community” is pressuring Israel to agree to these demands, seemingly incapable of seeing the obvious: If the Palestinians had any interest in holding genuine negotiations, they wouldn’t need to be bribed with lavish Israeli concessions just to get them to enter the room.
And that, of course, brings us to the other obvious corollary that the “international community” willfully refuses to see: If the Palestinians had any real interest in obtaining a state, they wouldn’t need to be bribed, cajoled and arm-twisted just to get them to hold talks with the only party that can actually give them one -Israel.
But to admit that is to admit the entire peace process is a fraud and a failure, and that is too painful. It’s much more comfortable to keep pretending that peace could be achieved if Israel would just give a little more.
The run-up to International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Friday has produced some excellent articles drawing parallels between the Holocaust and the threat posed by an Iranian nuclear bomb. But there’s another parallel that’s equally disturbing: the world’s indifference to the relentless incitement to genocide of both Hitler and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The Holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad never misses an opportunity to call for “wiping Israel off the map.” Since there’s no way to eradicate Israel without also slaughtering a large number of its 7.8 million inhabitants, that is a blatant call for mass murder. Yet he has never, for instance, been declared persona non grata by the EU or investigated for incitement to genocide by the International Criminal Court; indeed, he has been feted in many parts of the “enlightened” West, from lecture invitations at Columbia University to joint press conferences with a fawning Swiss foreign minister, Micheline Calmy-Rey.
But as Prof. Shlomo Avineri pointed out this month, even more troubling is the silence of world Jewry on this issue – a stark contrast to its activism over, say, Soviet Jews.
“Through demonstrations outside Soviet embassies, embarrassing questions about freedom of emigration at all news conferences of Soviet leaders in the West, and in dozens of other ways,” Avineri noted, Jewish activists turned the Soviets’ refusal to let Jews emigrate into a burden on the regime. But they haven’t done the same with Iran, even though there’s “no reason why demonstrations should not be held outside Iranian embassies in any place in the world, why Iranian ambassadors should not be accompanied at every appearance or trip by demonstrators carrying placards with ‘Holocaust deniers – out!'”
Partly, this may be due to a widespread sentiment that words matter less than deeds – which explains why Jewish groups have been active in trying to persuade Western governments to take stronger steps against Iran’s nuclear program. Yet ignoring Ahmadinejad’s calls for genocide is a grave mistake, for two reasons.
First, history amply proves that when tyrants declare their intention to slaughter the Jews, they often mean exactly what they say. Hitler, who made his intentions crystal clear in Mein Kampf 14 years before World War II began, is only the most famous example. Nor is this unique to Jews: Most genocides begin with incitement; that’s precisely why incitement to genocide is a prosecutable international crime that has already produced several convictions, especially in connection with the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
But beyond that, Jews worldwide should be concerned with the desensitization effect: By consistently advocating genocide without eliciting any serious condemnatory response, Ahmadinejad is gradually turning “kill the Jews” into acceptable public discourse.
Last week, Adam Kirsch wrote a chilling analysis for Tablet of how “Jews control America” rhetoric has moved from the fringes to the respectable mainstream of American discourse in just a few short years. It takes longer to mainstream calls for mass murder. But if left unchallenged, Ahmadinejad’s calls for genocide will eventually become mainstream as well.
Judging by the degree to which he has not become a pariah, his rhetoric is already acceptable to far too many “enlightened” Westerners.
Writing about the significance of the fact that an Israeli university, the Technion, recently won a global competition in partnership with Cornell to establish New York’s planned NYCTech campus, David Suissa and Mitch and Elliot Julis eloquently captured the “cruel paradox” that defines Israel: “a country that is forced to use its wits to defend itself but would much prefer using its wits to save the world.” Yet in truth, these two halves of the paradox aren’t always at odds; Israel often succeeds in performing a kind of alchemy that converts the painful lessons learned from being perennially under attack into ways of benefiting humanity as a whole. Nothing illustrates this better than one of the most heartwarming stories I’ve read in a long time: the tale of how an Israeli-developed therapy technique utilizing a sad-faced stuffed dog named Hibuki (Hebrew for “huggy”) was used to treat children traumatized by last year’s tsunami in Japan.
The technique, originally developed to treat Israeli children traumatized by rocket fire during the Second Lebanon War of 2006, enables children who would be reluctant to explain why they themselves are sad to instead tell parents and teachers why Hibuki is sad. Additionally, having the children “take care of” Hibuki helps them heal by diverting them from their own trauma.
After the tsunami hit, an Israeli therapist who frequently accompanies the country’s medical missions abroad realized the technique might be well-suited to Japan, with its long tradition of puppetry. She proposed the idea to a Japanese colleague, who invited an Israeli team to come and explain the technique to the Japanese Puppet Therapy Association. The association was wowed, and the next day, the Israelis were asked to accompany Japanese colleagues to the stricken coast to begin the treatment. As Haaretz‘s report related, “Japanese law prohibits anyone who didn’t study medicine in Japan from providing medical aid to a local resident,” but an exception was made for the Israeli delegation, “because of its experience in treating victims of mass trauma.”
Now the therapy is spreading to other countries as well, the report said: Cambodia has expressed interest, and “word of the Israeli project has even reached Tehran: The website Tehran Newsletter published an article describing the principles of Hibuki therapy and called on the Islamic Republic of Iran to adopt them as a means to help the country’s children.
But this is more than a heartwarming story of how Israel is helping to make the world a better place – even for its bitterest enemies. It also embodies Israel’s greatest strength: its adherence to the Biblical injunction, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing, therefore choose life.”
All too often, its enemies choose death, even boasting of it: As Hamas parliamentarian Fathi Hammad once put it: “We desire death like you desire life.” But Israel, faced with death on a daily basis, invariably chooses life – for itself and for the world. And by so doing, a country at war since the day it was born has not merely survived, but grown and thrived.
If anyone remains unconvinced that something is badly wrong with Israel’s judicial system, the reactions to this month’s High Court of Justice ruling on the amended Citizenship Law should provide ample proof.
In a 6-5 decision, the court upheld a controversial amendment that imposes strict limits on the right of Palestinians married to Israelis to immigrate to Israel. While the right to marry is a basic right, the majority said, it doesn’t include the right to live with one’s spouse in Israel specifically; the state is entitled to restrict marriage-based immigration to protect important interests like security (the amendment was enacted after several Palestinians who obtained citizenship through marriage exploited their residency rights to commit terror attacks).
Leftist jurists, who usually denounce all criticism of the court as “anti-democratic,” responded with a blistering attack on Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch, blaming her for what they deemed an unconscionable ruling even though she herself dissented from it. Why? Because she personally selected the panel members who created the 6-5 majority – and did so knowing full well that her choices would produce that particular outcome.
This is a truly shocking charge: that the Supreme Court president can singlehandedly determine the outcome of any case merely by selecting the panel that hears it. Unfortunately, it happens to be completely true. Supreme Court cases aren’t heard by the entire court, nor are justices assigned randomly or in strict rotation. Every panel is chosen by the court president, who thereby has the power to shape the outcome.
In this case, for instance, the critics claim that initially, a 6-5 majority favored overturning the law. But because Beinisch didn’t push to get the verdict written before Justice Ayala Procaccia reached the mandatory retirement age, Procaccia had to be replaced. And then, instead of replacing her with someone who could also be expected to oppose the law, like Uzi Vogelman or Isaac Amit, the critics charged, Beinisch replaced her with Neal Hendel, whom she knew would uphold it. In short, they accused Beinisch of repeated decisions calculated to produce a ruling upholding the law, because she feared the Knesset’s reaction if it was overturned.
That the Supreme Court president can determine a case’s outcome by choosing the panel is clearly unacceptable, but it’s a problem that’s easily solved: Just assign justices in strict rotation, or by computerized random selection.
Far more interesting, therefore, is how this story explodes the myth of an “apolitical” Supreme Court. For if even the leftist jurists who are the myth’s chief promulgators now admit the justices’ worldviews are so well-known that Beinisch could have predicted how each of them would rule, it’s pretty hard to argue that the court is “apolitical.”
Contrary to popular perception, there’s nothing wrong with justices having political opinions. Indeed, anyone who could live for decades without developing such opinions would have to be so ignorant, unintelligent or detached from reality as to be totally unfit to serve on the nation’s highest court.
Nor is there anything wrong with the fact that justices’ political opinions influence their rulings. Complex legal questions frequently lack a clear-cut answer; in the current case, for instance, where one strikes the balance between a couple’s right to live together in Israel and the state’s right to protect vital public interests like security is inevitably a value judgment, one on which reasonable people of goodwill can disagree. And the more the court intervenes in controversial political, social and moral issues, the truer this is, since these are precisely the types of issues that lack any single “right” answer. Thus to say that justices’ worldviews shouldn’t influence their rulings is to demand the impossible.
What is problematic, however, is attempting to maintain the fiction that justices don’t have opinions, or that they can somehow avoid letting these opinions influence their rulings.
This attempt is increasingly discrediting the entire legal system, because people aren’t stupid. It’s not hard for ordinary Israelis to figure out that when six justices say security justifies restricting Palestinian immigration while five say the “right to marry” trumps security concerns, the disagreement stems mainly from the justices’ different political and moral judgments. It’s also not hard for them to conclude, by extension, that the justices’ worldviews affect other controversial decisions as well. Thus when self-proclaimed defenders of “the rule of law” – including the justices themselves and senior legal officials like the attorney general – keep insisting that the court is and should be “apolitical,” they merely paint themselves as liars and hypocrites. And how can anyone respect a legal system staffed by liars and hypocrites?
Even more importantly, however, the more Israelis realize that the justices’ opinions indeed affect their rulings, the more those Israelis whose views are unrepresented or underrepresented on the court will feel resentful and discriminated against. And that undermines their trust not only in the legal system, but in democracy as a whole. For if a Supreme Court on which their views are permanently underrepresented can, and often does, overturn the elected government’s decisions, then it doesn’t matter how many electoral victories they win; they have no chance of ever getting their policies enacted.
Unfortunately, that is indeed the case under the current judicial appointments system. As I explained
in detail, this system is virtually unique among democracies in that
justices effectively choose their own successors. And, being human, they
inevitably prefer those who share their own views, producing a court
that is unusually ideologically homogeneous.
This problem can
only be solved by changing the appointments process to bring it into
line with the rest of the democratic world – which means transferring
control of the process from unelected legal officials to the people’s
elected representatives. That would ensure a spectrum of opinion on the
court, because governments change regularly, and each new government
would inevitably seek to fill vacancies on the court with justices
sympathetic to its own worldview.
Unfortunately, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu quashed a
bill to do exactly that just six months ago. For the court’s own sake,
he should remove this bill from the freezer and finally enact it.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Would the world be a better place right now if Syrian President Bashar Assad had nuclear weapons? Most reasonable people would say “no.” One of Western policymakers’ enduring nightmares is that unrest in a nuclear power like Pakistan might result in nuclear materiel being looted and trafficked, just as Libyan arms looted during that country’s civil war are now being trafficked worldwide. If Syria had nuclear weapons today, its developing civil war could easily result in precisely that nightmare proliferation scenario.
What brought the question to mind was the unnamed intelligence official quoted in Mark Perry’s latest anti-Israel slur at Foreign Policy, who said that while Israel is “supposed to be a strategic asset … There are a lot of people now, important people, who just don’t think that’s true.” For unless you think the world would be a better place if Syria had nukes right now, it’s pretty hard to argue Israel isn’t a strategic asset for America – not only because Israel is the one that destroyed Syria’s reactor in 2007, but because, as the New York Times reported last month, Washington didn’t even know the North Korean-built reactor existed “until Meir Dagan, then the head of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, visited President George W. Bush’s national security adviser and dropped photographs of the reactor on his coffee table.” Only then did U.S. intelligence conduct its own investigation and confirm it.
That the Mossad scooped the CIA on the Syrian reactor is no insult to the latter: Israel has good reason to devote far greater intelligence resources to Syria, a hostile next-door neighbor, than America does; it can also afford to concentrate primarily on its own neighborhood, whereas U.S. intelligence of necessity spans the globe. Hence, it makes sense for U.S. intelligence to devote fewer resources to Syria and rely on Israel to fill in the gaps.
But if Israel didn’t exist, America would have to devote extensive additional resources to Syria, and to all the other Middle Eastern countries on which Israel currently shares intelligence with it – or else risk waking up one day to discover that a U.S.-designated state sponsor of terrorism, a key Iranian ally that served as a conduit for jihadists fighting U.S. forces in Iraq, had suddenly developed nuclear weapons.
Nor is intelligence the only contribution Israel makes to U.S. interests in the region: Precisely because it is more immediately threatened by its neighbors, Jerusalem is often willing to take action Washington would rather not take, but that serves American interests. Its 1981 bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor is a case in point: Washington opposed it at the time, but was grateful 10 years later, when its vital interest in keeping oil flowing through the Gulf led it to declare war on Iraq over the latter’s invasion of Kuwait.
Similarly, Bush didn’t want to take action against Syria’s reactor in 2007, being reluctant to open a front against a third Muslim country while already fighting
in Iraq and Afghanistan. But I suspect many American policymakers are sleeping easier today because that reactor is gone.
Foreign Policy has produced a slander so outrageous that Israel broke with its strict policy of never confirming or denying covert operations to issue a flat denial – and surprisingly, given Israel’s notoriously poor public relations, it’s a convincing one. On Friday, the magazine published an article by Mark Perry, a military and intelligence analyst who once served as an advisor to Yasser Arafat, that accused Mossad agents of posing as CIA agents to recruit Pakistani terrorists to commit sabotage and assassinations inside Iran. The alleged operation infuriated two successive presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Perry wrote, because it endangered American lives, undermined America’s relationship with Pakistan and painted America as engaged in terrorist activity. Additionally, Perry said, it convinced many senior American officials that Israel was a liability rather than a strategic asset.
Israel termed the report “absolute nonsense,” explaining that had it been true, then-Mossad chief Meir Dagan would have been declared persona non grata in Washington rather than being a welcome visitor. Nor is that idle speculation: Those same two presidents forced the ouster of three other senior Israeli defense officials over other issues; why would they have given Dagan a pass?
Just last year, Uzi Arad was forced to resign as chairman of Israel’s National Security Council due to Washington’s anger over leaked information from U.S.-Israeli talks on nuclear issues. And in 2005, two senior Defense Ministry officials – director general Amos Yaron and chief of security Yehiel Horev – were forced out due to Washington’s anger over Israel’s agreement to upgrade Harpy drones for China, following a year in which the Pentagon boycotted Yaron entirely. Thus, had Dagan committed an offense as egregious as Perry claimed, it’s inconceivable that he would have continued for years to be not only a welcome guest, but even one of Washington’s preferred Israeli interlocutors.
This isn’t the first time Perry has produced a false but extremely damaging anti-Israel slur. In 2010, he alleged that then-general (and now CIA chief) David Petraeus had claimed the Arab-Israeli conflict was endangering American lives; Petraeus himself later termed the report “just flat wrong.” Unfortunately, Foreign Policy seems perfectly willing to keep giving Perry a platform for such canards – which says something rather troubling about this prestigious magazine.
Still, Israel isn’t the only one that ought to be outraged by the latest report; the Obama administration should be, too. For according to Perry, not only has Obama flatly refused to engage in “covert actions targeting Iran’s infrastructure or political or military leadership,” but he even “drastically scaled back joint U.S.-Israel intelligence programs targeting Iran” in anger over the Mossad’s alleged misdeeds, forcing the CIA “to shut down ‘some key intelligence-gathering operations'” in that country. In other words, not only does Obama prefer clean hands to covert action that might slow Iran’s nuclear program, but he even sacrificed “key intelligence-gathering” about Iran to anti-Israel pique.
For an administration that claims to be both a friend of Israel and committed to halting Iran’s nuclear program, those are pretty damning accusations. Washington can’t realistically deny them publicly. But Congress might want to make sure they’re false.
Anyone who still thinks more Israel territorial withdrawals are a good idea should carefully study Ehud Yaari’s chilling new report for The Washington Institute on “Sinai: A New Front.” To anyone who has been following the situation, Yaari’s bottom line – that Sinai-based terrorism “could break a fragile bilateral peace [with Egypt] that is already challenged by growing post-Mubarak demands to abrogate, review, or amend the treaty” – isn’t new; I’ve been warning of this for months. Where the veteran Israeli journalist and Arabist makes a real contribution is his analysis of how Israel’s 2005 pullout from Gaza contributed to Sinai’s radicalization. And while he doesn’t say so, the implication of his research is obvious: An Israeli pullout from the West Bank could similarly radicalize and destabilize Jordan.
Clearly, radicalization doesn’t happen overnight, and Yaari indeed describes a slow spread of radical Islam among the Sinai Bedouin since the 1980s, along with a consequent rise in arms trafficking and terror. But Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, “and subsequent removal of troops from the Sinai-Gaza border,” catalyzed the process:
As Bedouin political activist Ashraf al-Anani put it, “a fireball started rolling into the peninsula.” Illegal trade and arms smuggling volumes rose to new records, and ever-larger sectors of the northern Sinai population became linked to Gaza and fell under the political and ideological influence of Hamas and its ilk. Sympathy and support for the Palestinian battle against Israel grew; according to al-Anani, the closer one got to the Gaza border, “the more people are inclined toward Hamas.” In short, despite then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s quiet hope that Cairo would assume unofficial responsibility for Gaza affairs, the Israeli withdrawal instead allowed Hamas to export its influence into Egyptian territory.
Facilitated by the dramatic increase in the number of tunnels–which numbered no less than 1,200 at their peak–the expansion of Hamas and other Palestinian activities in the Sinai was unprecedented. In fact, the arms flow was often reversed, with weapons going from Gaza to the Sinai. During the revolution, for example, observers noted a huge demand for firearms in the peninsula. And even in late 2010, well before Mubarak’s ouster, Hamas was already in the process of transferring heavy long-range missiles to secret storage places in the Sinai, including Grad rockets and extended-range Qassams…
Today, a significant number of Hamas military operatives are permanently stationed in the Sinai, serving as recruiters, couriers, and propagators of the Hamas platform. A solid network of the group’s contact men, safe houses, and armories covers much of the peninsula … In addition, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other factions have been moving some of their explosives workshops–which produce homemade missiles, rockets, mortars, improvised explosive devices, and so forth–from Gaza to the Sinai in recent months. In many ways, the Sinai has already become a sort of hinterland for Hamas military forces in Gaza. Dual-purpose materials used for the production of explosives are regularly transferred to the peninsula, allowing the group to place a significant part of its military industry beyond Israel’s reach.
As in Gaza, an Israeli pullout from the West Bank could easily end in a Hamas takeover. True, the Palestinian Authority is protected by American-trained troops, but the same U.S. general, Keith Dayton, trained the PA forces in Gaza, and Hamas routed them in a week during its 2007 coup.
Moreover, like Sinai, Jordan already has both a homegrown Islamist movement and some serious stability issues. Additionally, Jordan is roughly two-thirds Palestinian, and its Palestinian citizens have close ties of kinship and friendship with West Bank Palestinians. Thus, radicalization on the West Bank would likely spread to Jordan quickly if Israeli troops were no longer serving as a buffer between the two.
So if Western leaders think a radicalized, destabilized Jordan is a good idea, they should by all means keep pushing an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. But if not, they should be praying that Israel stays put.