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The Forward has a must-read article on pervasive anti-Semitism in the new Libya that reveals both the Arab world’s greatest problem – which isn’t anti-Semitism per se – and why the West persistently ignores it. Inter alia, reporter Andrew Engel describes how Libyan after Libyan volunteered the “information,” completely unprompted, that the hated Muammar Qaddafi was a Jew. The same theme permeated a CD he heard in a Tripoli taxi – but only in Arabic:
The first track, “Khalas ya Qaddafi” (“Finished, oh Qaddafi”), rapped in English: “Thank you Obama, thank you Jazeera, thank you Sarkozy for everything you’ve done to me.” It then moved into Arabic: “I’m sorry for Algeria because their leader is Bouteflika, who supports every Jew with his soldiers and weapons. Leave, oh Qaddafi. Every day people die, every day people suffer … Go out, you Jew!”
Another rap number, “HadHihi al-Thawra” (“This Revolution”), rapped in Arabic: “… The anger won’t die, the one who will die is Qaddafi, his supporters and the Jews.”
This is standard practice in the Arab world: Statements in English are carefully crafted to be pleasing to Western ears (“thank you Obama, thank you Sarkozy”), but statements in Arabic have no such constraints. That’s why Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas denounces terrorism in English even while lauding terrorists as heroes in Arabic (here or here, for instance).
But most Westerners don’t speak Arabic, so they take what they hear in English at face value. And even when confronted with translations by organizations like MEMRI or Palestinian Media Watch, they continue to believe what they hear in English, because that’s human nature: What you hear with your own ears carries conviction, even though people generally speak far more freely and honestly in their native tongue.
Yet the West’s ability to ignore the Arab world’s pervasive anti-Semitism means it consistently fails to understand the most basic problem facing Arab countries. As Engel perceptively noted, by deeming Qaddafi a Jew, his Libyan interlocutors “had accomplished an amazing feat of disassociation between themselves and the man who ruled them for most of their lives, as if they were saying: ‘You know, Qaddafi was not one of us. A Libyan could not have done what he did.’ It was a refusal to come to terms with Libya’s own past. Even a dictator, after all, requires popular support from some segments of society to rule for more than four decades … A country unable to come to terms with its history may find itself incapable of building the successful, inclusive democracy it has promised the world.”
Indeed, people who consistently blame an outside agency for their problems – whether it’s Jews, Western colonialism or anything else -are incapable of building any kind of decent society. You can’t fix a problem if you consider it beyond your control, and if it’s someone else’s fault, it is beyond your control. Only when people acknowledge that they have contributed to their own problems can they begin to seek solutions.
That’s why Arab anti-Semitism matters so desperately -not because of the threat it poses to Israel, though that is real, but because of the threat it poses to Arab countries’ own development. The same goes for the Arabs’ tendency to blame their troubles on Israel or the West. Evasion of responsibility for its own welfare has always been, and continues to be, the Arab world’s biggest problem.
And by pandering to it – for instance, by asserting that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is necessary for Arab development even though it patently hasn’t been necessary for Israel’s development – the West is entrenching this problem rather than helping the Arab world to confront it.
As Jonathan noted yesterday, the Palestinian Authority has embarked on a campaign to expunge Jewish history by relabeling Jewish holy sites as Muslim ones. But this battle over the religious identity of holy sites deserves more Western attention than it has gotten, because it’s a perfect example of why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has remained unsolvable for decades: The Jews are willing to share, but the Arabs aren’t.
The Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron- one of the sites that UNESCO, at the PA’s request, recently declared exclusively Islamic – is a prime example. Under Israeli control, the tomb has been simultaneously an active synagogue and an active mosque for 44 years, a situation unparalleled anywhere else in the world. Most days of the year, it’s open to worshippers of both faiths; on a handful of Jewish and Muslim holy days, it’s open only to worshippers of the celebrating faith. At no point has Israel ever sought to make the site exclusively Jewish; it has willingly shared it with Palestinian Muslims.
Contrast that with the view of the Tomb expressed last year by one of Hebron’s most prominent Muslim clerics: “It is a pure Muslim holy place and there is no right for non-Muslims to be here or to pray here, and I’m against the presence of the Jews, even in the old city,” Haj Zeid al Ja’bari, general director of Islamic Religious Authorities in Hebron, told reporters. No willingness to share there.
That attitude can be seen in action on the Temple Mount, where Israel, in a misguided burst of generosity, ceded de facto control to the Islamic waqf (religious trust) immediately after capturing the site in 1967: Jews and Christians are barred from praying there; they are not even allowed to read the Bible or move their lips in silent prayer. The Mount is Judaism’s holiest site, to which Jews have prayed thrice daily for millennia. But the Arabs aren’t willing to share there, either.
What’s true of the holy sites is equally true of the land as a whole. Israel has repeatedly offered to share the land with the Palestinians, from its acceptance of the UN partition plan in 1947 to Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s offer of a state in 2000 and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s even more generous offer in 2008. And every time, the Palestinians said no.
But because a comprehensive peace deal is so complex, involving so many different and contentious issues, it’s easy for Westerners to focus on the trees rather than the forest: to delude themselves that a deal could be reached if only Israel offered a little more here or demanded a little less there, rather than grasping the overall pattern of Palestinian rejectionism.
That’s why it’s worth zooming in on a single, small issue, like the Tomb of the Patriarchs. There’s no welter of competing interests here, no multiplicity of
possible trade-offs such as borders versus security, Jerusalem versus the refugees. Just proven Israeli willingness to share the site, and proven Palestinian refusal to do so.
And until that Palestinian refusal changes, peace will never be possible.
You have to give French President Nicolas Sarkozy credit: So far, he’s the only international leader to demand the world put its money where its mouth is on Iran. For weeks, world leaders have been lining up to say how disastrous an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be; indeed, as Jonathan noted last week, the Obama administration frequently seems more interested in preventing Israeli military action than in preventing Iran from getting the bomb. Yet Sarkozy is the first to take that opposition to its logical conclusion: If the world actually wants to prevent an Israeli strike, it needs to demonstrate that Iran’s nuclear program can be stopped without military action. And that means imposing truly crippling sanctions on Tehran.
The new sanctions announced by the U.S., Britain and Canada yesterday are all welcome; all will genuinely increase the pressure on Iran. But they fall well short of what Sarkozy proposed: for “the United States, Japan and Canada and other willing countries to take the decision to immediately freeze the assets of the Iranian Central Bank [and] stop purchases of Iranian oil.”
The U.S., for instance, declared Iran as “a jurisdiction of ‘primary money laundering concern’ under section 311 of the USA Patriot Act,” which will make it harder for Western financial institutions to do business with Iran. But it did not move directly against Iran’s Central Bank, which is what would really be necessary to shut down Iran’s financial lifeline. Britain ordered its financial institutions to stop doing business with Iran, but has reportedly decided against targeting Iran’s oil trade.
It could be that most Western countries genuinely consider a nuclear Iran preferable to the financial pain crippling sanctions would impose on them: Targeting Iran’s oil trade, for instance, would almost certainly raise the price of oil. But the consequences of an Israeli military strike could easily prove just as bad, and might well be worse, given that Iran has repeatedly threatened to retaliate not just against Israel, but also against the U.S. and other Western countries. And because most Israelis believe a nuclear Iran poses an existential threat to Israel, Israel isn’t likely to deem a nuclear Iran preferable to the financial and military consequences of a strike.
Thus, if world leaders really believe what they say about the negative consequences of Israeli military action, crippling sanctions, however financially painful, are the lesser of two evils. Sarkozy appears to have grasped that. The question now is whether anyone else will follow suit.
Bowing to left-wing and international pressure, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu recently quashed several bills he had previously supported. Last week, he killed a reform of the judicial appointments process; this week, he reportedly froze two bills to limit foreign governments’ contributions to non-governmental organizations. Yet while the first decision is an unequivocal loss for Israeli democracy, the second could potentially prove a boon.
The judicial appointments bill would have required Supreme Court nominees to be vetted by the Knesset Constitution Committee. Far from being “undemocratic,” as its opponents charge, this reform – as I explained in July – would have corrected a major flaw in Israel’s democratic system that no other Western democracy shares.
The NGO bills, in contrast, really were undemocratic, though their purpose was not. Netanyahu’s decision thus gives their sponsors a chance to correct their flaws.
The bills were meant to address a genuine problem: Foreign governments really are spending huge sums on blatantly anti-Israel activity. A document obtained by Makor Rishon, for instance, showed that Britain’s government gave £600,000 to Israeli NGOs in 2010 – six times what it gave to NGOs in all Arab countries combined (excluding Iraq). Overall, according to NGO Monitor, European governments give more to Israeli NGOs – $75 million to $100 million a year – than to NGOs in all other Middle Eastern countries combined. That Europe spends more to promote “civil society” in the region’s only democracy than it does in the entire undemocratic Arab world is a priori suspicious; European governments don’t give comparable sums to NGOs in other veteran democracies. And indeed, a look at their recipients shows they aren’t trying to support Israeli democracy, but to undermine it.
Take, for instance, the Israeli Arab advocacy organization Adalah, which gets funding from the European Union and the governments of Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and Holland. One of Adalah’s avowed goals is to eliminate the Jewish state – a goal clearly not shared by most Israelis. For instance, its proposed “Democratic Constitution” demands that Israel grant a “right of return” to millions of Palestinians, which would eradicate the Jewish state demographically and, until that happens, it demands that Arab parties be allowed to veto all government decisions, thus stripping the state of its right to self-defense (since these parties invariably oppose military action).
One can imagine how, say, America would feel if Europe funded American NGOs that openly advocated a Communist takeover. For Europe to be funding Israeli NGOs that seek an Arab takeover of the Jewish state is equally unacceptable.
Or take B’Tselem, the Israeli NGO most frequently cited by the infamous Goldstone Report (Adalah was second), whose donors include the EU and the British and Norwegian governments. B’Tselem’s original goals – monitoring alleged Israeli abuse of Palestinians and seeking to remedy it by lobbying the Israeli government and Israeli public opinion or suing in Israeli courts – were completely legitimate in a democratic state. But the organization didn’t stop there.
Instead, it gave false information (compare its casualty figures to this) to a “fact-finding mission” created by the notoriously anti-Israel UN Human Rights Council, whose sole purpose was to put Israel in the dock for its 2009 war with Hamas in Gaza. Indeed, the council didn’t even await the mission’s conclusions; the resolution that proposed the mission had already condemned Israel for what it termed “systematic destruction of Palestinian infrastructure” and “the targeting of civilians and medical facilities and staff.” The resolution also instructed the mission to investigate Israel alone, giving Hamas a pass. Unsurprisingly, the mission ultimately recommended indicting Israel for “war crimes” in the International Criminal Court (though its lead author has since repudiated this conclusion).
If Israel were funding British NGOs that sought to get British soldiers indicted in the ICC, Britain would be justifiably outraged. And Israel has every right to be the same.
In democratic states, genuine human rights groups don’t need foreign governments to fund them; they draw support from their own citizens. The American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, has some 500,000 paid members and various domestic donors; its foreign funding is negligible. But when such groups replace genuine human rights promotion with attempts to undermine their own countries, their domestic support plummets. That’s precisely why the ACLU’s Israeli counterpart, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, has recently seen its membership fall from 5,000 to less than 800. Hence the very fact that organizations like B’Tselem and Adalah are almost entirely foreign-funded is itself a warning signal.
In short, legislative action on this issue is urgently needed. Yet both the proposed bills were disastrously flawed.
The first bill sought to cap donations by foreign governments and organizations to “political” NGOs. This is clearly unenforceable, since there’s no objective way to decide whether a group is “political” or nonpolitical: I might consider B’Tselem and Adalah political, but their supporters consider them apolitical human-rights groups. This bill would thus almost certainly be declared unconstitutionally vague.
The second, in contrast, proposed a clear and easily enforceable rule:
Donations from foreign governments and organizations would be taxed at a
rate of 45 percent unless the recipient is also funded by Israel’s
government. Yet this blatantly violates freedom of speech: Essentially,
it says that if you support a cause the government favors, you can raise
money freely, but if you support a cause the government opposes, the
state will confiscate 45 percent of every dollar you raise. That
disproportionately harms speech the government opposes, and would thus
also probably be declared unconstitutional.
The only proper way to crack down on foreign funding of problematic NGOs
is to ban all NGOs, without exception, from accepting money from
foreign governments, or from foreign organizations funded by foreign
governments. Since most foreign government money – 80 percent, according
to Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman – goes to “political” NGOs, such a
ban would hurt very few genuine charities. The government could choose
to compensate these groups by upping its own funding, but if not, this
an acceptable price to pay to protect Israel from blatant foreign
subversion.
Only a law that applies equally to all NGOs can pass the democratic
test. And that is the law the Knesset ought to pass.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Pursuant to Max’s post yesterday, I’d like to weigh in on UNESCO’s latest effort to persuade Washington to restore the funding it lost when it recognized “Palestine”: Quite aside from UNESCO’s anti-Israel animus (see, for instance, its erasure of Jewish history by declaring millennia-old Jewish holy sites to be Islamic), America shouldn’t be financing an “Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization” that thinks education, science and culture are best promoted by suppressing freedom of the press. The following Haaretz report is not a joke:
Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when a senior official at the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization called him in for a tongue-lashing on Wednesday [November 9]. The reason? A cartoon published in Haaretz.
The November 4 cartoon, a riff on the government’s anger at UNESCO’s decision to accept Palestine as a full member, showed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak sending an air force squadron to attack Iran, with Netanyahu ordering, “And on your way back, you’re gonna hit the UNESCO office in Ramallah!”
When he met with Eric Falt, UNESCO’s assistant director general for external relations and public information, Ambassador Nimrod Barkan was stunned to be handed a copy of this cartoon and an official letter of protest from UNESCO’s Director General Irina Bokova. Falt told Barkan the cartoon constituted incitement.
“A cartoon like this endangers the lives of unarmed diplomats, and you have an obligation to protect them,” Falt said, according to an Israeli source. “We understand that there is freedom of the press in Israel, but the government must prevent attacks on UNESCO.”
Barkan tried to explain that in Israel, the government doesn’t control the media, but to no avail. He might have added that if it did, Haaretz – a virulent critic of the Netanyahu government – would have been closed long since. He might further have added that Falt misunderstood the cartoon, which, far from encouraging attacks on UNESCO, was meant to heap scorn on Jerusalem’s anger at the organization: Haaretz, unlike the government, has largely supported the Palestinians’ UN bid, and it reliably opposes any and all Israeli military action. In other words, Falt’s censorship campaign was ironically aimed at one of the UN’s very few champions in Israel.
But that’s beside the point. The point is that UNESCO’s agenda, like that of many other UN agencies, is often antithetical to America’s. That isn’t what Harry Truman intended when he pushed to establish the UN in 1945; he saw it as a tool for promoting American values. But since the “one country, one vote” principle gives the UN’s anti-democratic (and anti-American) majority automatic control, many of its organs have instead become tools for promoting anti-American values – with America underwriting 22 percent of the cost.
Clearly, America shouldn’t quit the UN entirely. But at a time of fiscal austerity, it’s far from clear it ought to continue funding every last UN agency. Instead, Washington should put some of the worst offenders, like the Human Rights Council, on notice: Either shape up, or kiss your U.S. funding good-bye.
In an interview with Charlie Rose this week, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the Palestinians’ refusal to negotiate unless Israel freezes settlement construction is unjustified, because their claim settlements are stealing the land needed for a Palestinian state is pure “propaganda.” How so? Because “after 44 years, the whole Jewish settlement in the whole West Bank together doesn’t cover even two percent of the area.”
Is this mere propaganda on Barak’s part – a lie meant to downplay the devastating impact of Jewish settlement? Actually, Palestinians put the figure even lower: In an interview with the Arabic radio station As-Shams two weeks ago, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said that based on an aerial photograph provided by European sources, the settlements cover only 1.1 percent of the West Bank.
So if settlements cover only 1.1 percent of the West Bank, why does the entire West deem them the main obstacle to peace? Because admitting that settlements aren’t the main obstacle to peace would force it to confront an unpalatable truth: that the real obstacle to peace is Palestinian unwillingness to accept a Jewish state in any borders.
It’s not that evidence of this has ever been lacking. In July, for instance, a poll found that 66 percent of Palestinians view the two-state solution as a mere stepping-stone to Israel’s eradication. Last month, a whopping 89.8 percent of Palestinian respondents in another poll said they opposed waiving the “right of return” – their demand to eradicate the Jewish state demographically by flooding it with five million descendants of refugees – “even if [that means] no peace deal would be concluded.” Translation: If getting a state of their own means giving up their goal of destroying the Jewish one, they’d rather keep living under “the brutal Israeli occupation.”
But you don’t need to read the polls; Palestinian negotiating tactics also demonstrate their utter disinterest in reaching a deal. In a lecture last month, George Mitchell, the Obama administration’s former envoy to the peace process, described what happened when Israel declared a 10-month moratorium on settlement construction in November 2009:
The Palestinians opposed it on the grounds, in their words, that it was worse than useless. So they refused to enter into the negotiations until nine months of the ten had elapsed. Once they entered, they then said it was indispensable. What had been worse than useless a few months before then became indispensable and they said they would not remain in the talks unless that indispensable element were extended.
In short, the freeze issue was just a giant excuse to avoid actually having to negotiate: It was “useless” while it existed but “indispensable” once it didn’t. Yet the Obama administration never called the Palestinians out on this at the time. Instead, it put intense pressure on Israel to extend the freeze, as did other Western countries – because admitting the Palestinians simply don’t want to negotiate would mean acknowledging that the conflict is currently insoluble.
Granted, that isn’t a very pleasant thing to acknowledge. But isn’t it about time for the West to finally face up to the truth?
In an effort to get the West to ratchet up pressure on Israel to resume tax transfers to the Palestinian Authority, the PA warned yesterday that the lack of funds could cause its collapse. That move came after Israel rebuffed demands from Washington, Berlin and Quartet Envoy Tony Blair to restore the payments, which it suspended after UNESCO accepted “Palestine” as a full member last month.
Israel may eventually capitulate, as it has in the past. But it shouldn’t – because the demand that it resume these payments epitomizes one of the biggest flaws in Western handling of the “peace process.”
The West argues that Israel has no right to suspend the payments, because they are mandatory under Israel’s signed agreements with the Palestinians. That argument overlooks one minor detail: The PA just abrogated those agreements by seeking statehood at the UN. The 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement enjoins either side from taking “any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations,” yet the PA is now asking the world to recognize these territories as a state -a drastic change in status – without even conducting permanent-status negotiations, much less concluding them. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu correctly noted, the PA has thereby “reneged on a central tenet” of the peace process: its pledge to resolve all outstanding issues through negotiations.
And while UNESCO membership isn’t full UN recognition as a state, the PA indeed plans to use its new status to press its claims through channels other than negotiations:
“Now that we have joined UNESCO, we will take Israel to court for systematically destroying and forging Arab and Islamic culture in Jerusalem,” said Hatem Abdel Qader, former PA minister for Jerusalem affairs. “We are also seeking to file lawsuits against Israel in international courts and bodies for stealing Arab and Islamic antiquities and assaulting Islamic and Christian holy sites….”
PA Minister of Tourism Khuloud Daibes confirmed that the Palestinians planned to file lawsuits against Israel for alleged theft of antiquities.
So the PA has just blatantly violated a central tenet of all previous agreements, and the world’s response is–Israel must honor these agreements anyway.
Clearly, this violates a fundamental principle of both law and international diplomacy, which is that if one side tears up an agreement, it ceases to bind the other side. But it’s also counterproductive, twice over.
First, if the world insists that Israel uphold agreements regardless of whether or not the PA does, Palestinians have no incentive to abide by these agreements. That’s counterproductive at any time, but it’s particularly bizarre at a time when the world is frantically trying to persuade PA President Mahmoud Abbas to honor these agreements by resuming negotiations. Why should Abbas comply with this request when the world is trying equally frantically to ensure that he suffers no financial penalty for refusing?
Second, this attitude makes signing new agreements far too risky for Israel, because it turns every such agreement into a unilateral concession rather than a trade: The PA can refuse at any moment to provide the stipulated quid pro quo, but the world will still demand that Israel cough up what it promised.
Thus, by demanding Israel resume the tax transfers, the world has effectively given both sides strong incentives to avoid negotiations. With management like that, is it any wonder that the “peace process” keeps flopping?
It was reassuring to hear Defense Minister Ehud Barak finally state the obvious last week: Any decision on whether to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, he told Israel Radio, will be made by the elected government, not the army. Since the army’s subordination to the elected civilian government is a sine qua non of democracy, this shouldn’t even have needed saying. But it did. For as anyone who has followed the media in recent weeks would realize, many senior army officers seem to think their job isn’t to obey the elected government, but to impose their own policies on it. And so far, the government has done nothing to reassert its authority.
The nonstop media reports claiming that the Israel Defense Forces, Mossad and Shin Bet security service all oppose military action against Iran, though clearly an attempt to pressure the government to bow to this opinion, can’t necessarily be blamed on the security services: Their views have undoubtedly, and properly, been shared with cabinet ministers, and the leaks may have come from ministers who oppose attacking Iran.
But the same cannot be said of the Palestinian issue, where IDF officers have openly used the media in an attempt to impose their will on the elected government.
On October 24, for instance, Haaretz ran a front-page story detailing the “gestures” the army wantedIsraelto make to bolster Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas against Hamas, whichhad been strengthened by the Schalit deal. These included freeing additional Palestinian prisoners and transferring more of the West Bank to PA control.
Personally, I find it disturbing that after Abbas blatantly violated signed agreements by pursuing unilateral statehood at the UN, openly announced his intention to use this statehood to pursue Israel in international legal forums, adamantly refused to recognize the Jewish state’s right to exist, repeatedly lauded terrorists as heroes, and actively encouraged Palestinians to believe they have a right even to pre-1967 Israel, our army thinks the proper response is to appease him via dangerous concessions like prisoner releases and territorial withdrawals. Nevertheless, if that’s truly what senior officers believe, they have not only the right, but the duty, to so advise the government.
Except that isn’t what happened. Instead, army officers leaked the proposals to Haaretz even before submitting them to the cabinet, which they planned to do only the following month. Moreover, they did so knowing the government was likely to reject them: It had rejected similar proposals just a monthearlier, in the run-up to Abbas’ application to the UN, and its negative view of Abbas’s behavior hadn’t changed since. In short, this was nothing but a blatant attempt to generate domestic and international pressure to force the elected government to implementthe army’s preferred policies rather than its own.
But while lobbying the Israeli public against the government is bad enough, the army didn’t stop there: It even lobbied the international community against the elected government.
A month ago, the outgoing commander of IDF forces in the West Bank, Brig. Gen. Nitzan Alon, gave an interview to The New York Times in which he publicly urged Congress not to cut US funding to the PA in response to Abbas’s statehood bid. At that time, the government hadn’t yet formulatedan official position on the issue, but several prominent ministers, such as Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, were known to support an aid cut-off.Hence this was a bare-faced attempt to influence Congress, both directly and via American public opinion, to adopt the IDF’s position regardless of what the elected government ultimately decided.
Perhaps even more outrageously, Alon allowed his interviewer to infer that he rejected the government’s view that additional West Bank pullouts were too dangerous. This, too, was a blatant attempt to drum up international pressure on the government to accept the army’s judgment rather than its own.
Yet not only wasn’t Alon dismissed, his superiors actually promoted him – a promotion that seems to owe more to his politics than his competence (this is, after all,someone who spent two years as IDF commander in the West Bank doing nothing to suppress “price-tag” terror, then became a media darling by giving a press conference decrying his own inaction).
And the list of similar incidents could go on. On September 20, for instance, The Jerusalem Post reported that army officers recommended offering the PA a series of “goodwill gestures” in the run-up to its application for statehood, claiming such gestures would reduce the chance of violence. Two weeks later, unnamed defense officials asserted that the government was indeed considering giving additional territory to the PA and reiterated their claim that such handovers would reduce the chance of violence. These, too, were attempts to generate domestic and international pressure on the elected government to adopt policies it opposed.
Most disturbing of all, however, is the Israeli left’s support of this
attempt to transfer policy-making to the IDF’s hands. Opposition leader
Tzipi Livni, for instance, used her first address of the Knesset’s winter session to
urge Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to “listen to the heads of
Israel’s security services; listen to them in every sphere,” and
especially the Palestinian, Turkish and Iranian ones – as if it were
perfectly proper fora democratically elected government to take orders
from the army on major policy issues. Similarly, the left-wing Haaretz ran an editorial on October 25 entitled (in Hebrew) “Netanyahu, listen to the IDF.”
Since the IDF’s advice hasn’t always been stellar (see, for
instance,Chief of Staff Dan Halutz’s insistence that aerial bombing
alone could defeat Hezbollah in the Second Lebanon War), blindly
adopting its recommendations would seem to be a bad idea even on its
merits. But that’s secondary to the main point – which is that in a
democracy, policy is set by the elected government, not the security
services.
If the government is serious about preserving Israel’s democracy, it
needs to make clear that insubordination by the armed forces won’t be
tolerated, just as former US president Harry Truman did by firing Gen.
Douglas MacArthur 60 years ago. Firing Nitzan Alon might be a good place
to start.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
You know a theory is becoming accepted wisdom when it’s spouted by everyone from the editorial board of Israel’s far-left daily Haaretz to the highly intelligent American foreign policy scholar Walter Russell Mead. The theory in question holds that ruling Gaza, and the consequent need to ensure the welfare of its residents, has forced Hamas to moderate to the extent of being ripe for pragmatic agreements with Israel on this subject. Specifically, argue Mead and Haaretz, Hamas has an interest in further easing Israel’s blockade of Gaza, and its ability to conclude the Shalit deal -under which Israel traded 1,027 Palestinian terrorists for one kidnapped soldier – proves it can negotiate other mutually beneficial deals with Israel as well.
If this theory of Hamas’ pragmatism is correct, it obviously has important implications for other Islamist parties that have won, or are poised to win, elections in the Arab Spring countries, first and foremost Egypt. So it’s worth reading what Gershon Baskin, who played a key role in brokering the Shalit deal, has to say on the subject:
In the early days of the official negotiations I was asked to inform Hamas that once Shalit was no longer in Gaza Israel would allow major economic development and infrastructure projects to be implemented there. Some in Israel believed this could serve as an incentive to the Hamas leaders to advance the deal. It was not. To the contrary: that proposal was essentially ignored. At no point in those talks did my Hamas interlocutors express any real interest in pursuing that discussion. My hunch – that economic issues would not excite Hamas leaders to make compromises – proved to be correct.
In other words, Hamas couldn’t care less about improving ordinary Palestinians’ lives by easing the blockade of Gaza. Indeed, it was so indifferent to this goal it completely ignored an Israeli offer to do so. Instead, it focused solely on trying to get Israel to release the maximum number of the most murderous terrorists it possibly could -for instance, the men who orchestrated deadly suicide bombings on a Passover seder in Netanya, a Jerusalem pizzeria and buses in Jerusalem and Haifa (those four attacks alone killed 73 Israelis). In short, faced with a choice between improving its people’s lives and improving its ability to murder Israelis by freeing the most accomplished killers, it unhesitatingly chose the latter.
Nor is there any shortage of other evidence regarding Hamas’ utter indifference to its people’s welfare. It has barred aid shipments from entering Gaza; it banned Israeli imports after Israel eased the blockade last year, hence ensuring Gaza remained deprived; it shut down Gaza’s major power plant rather than pay for the fuel; it barred high school students from using the scholarships they won for study abroad; and the list could go on and on.
Hence, the idea Hamas will suddenly decide to change course and cooperate with Israel on easing the blockade is ludicrous. And the idea other Islamist governments will moderate once they gain power is liable to prove equally so.
After the U.S. halted funding to UNESCO last week in response to the agency’s
acceptance of “Palestine” as a full member, many pundits argued that Washington
would thereby undermine its international influence. But Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI),
whose party strongly supports U.S. engagement with the UN, had a
counterargument: Doing exactly what America had threatened to do would actually
bolster its influence, he said, by showing that its views could not be ignored
with impunity.
Nor did it take long for his prediction to come true: Last
Thursday – just two days after the Palestinian Authority had announced plans to
seek membership in 16 additional UN organizations – PA Foreign Minister Riyal
al-Maliki announced that these plans had been shelved. Faced with the
realization that Washington really would stop paying its 22% share of UN
agencies’ budgets, it seems the same “international community” that
overwhelmingly voted to accept “Palestine” into UNESCO began pressing the PA to
not repeat the gambit.
Israel, however, has yet to grasp the deterrent
value of a credible threat. Instead, it has virtually destroyed its deterrence
by six years of empty threats over the nonstop rocket fire from Gaza. Last week,
for instance, the entire south was shut down for days as terrorists fired some
40 rockets. On Sunday, a day after the barrage began, Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu told the cabinet that Israel would defend its citizens “determinedly,
aggressively and effectively,” and that if the rocket fire continued, the
terrorist organizations would pay a “far higher” price than they had hitherto.
He and Defense Minister Ehud Barak both warned the terrorists not to “test”
Israel’s resolve and capabilities.
But when the terrorist organizations
called their bluff by continuing the rocket fire, no harsh response ensued.
Instead, the government agreed to continue doing nothing while Egypt sought to
broker a truce – even as Jerusalem publicly insisted it doesn’t do truces with
terrorist organizations.
On Tuesday, with rockets still raining down, an
army official declared that the Israel Defense Forces had been authorized to
take “all necessary steps” to halt the rocket fire, including a ground
operation. But he promptly vitiated this threat by explaining that actually, the
army wasn’t authorized to do whatever was needed to stop the attacks; it was
only authorized to take steps commensurate with the attacks’ “severity.” In
other words, it was authorized to make pinpoint strikes on launching-rocket
crews, which would be every bit as ineffective at stopping the rocket fire as
thousands of similar strikes over the last six years have been.
Needless
to say, all these empty threats had the terrorist organizations quaking in their
boots – so much so that they held their fire for all of two days before renewing
it over the weekend. As Islamic Jihad spokesman Abu Ahmed scornfully said, the
terrorists aren’t worried that Israel will launch a full-scale war, “because it
does not have the courage and ability to do so and because its soldiers are
afraid of being taken captive like Gilad Schalit.”
Abu Ahmed has good
reasons for this confidence. In the three years after Ariel Sharon’s unilateral
withdrawal from Gaza in September 2005, Israel suffered some 6,000 rocket
strikes from the evacuated territory. Yet only in December 2008, thousands of
empty threats later, did it launch its first major incursion into the Strip –
and that war was pursued so half-heartedly that it ended not only with a
terrorist group (Hamas) still firmly in control of Gaza, but with all the
terrorist groups so undamaged that over the ensuing three years, they were able
to dramatically increase the quantity and quality of their arsenals.
Nor did the
war produce more than a brief interlude in the missile fire: From the start of
2010 through September 2011, Israel absorbed more than 900 rocket and mortar
strikes from Gaza. Yet its response was confined to still more ineffective
pinpoint strikes on smuggling tunnels and rocket-launching crews.
In an
interview with The Jerusalem Post earlier this year, former U.S. Ambassador to
Israel and avowed dove Dan Kurtzer explained the dire consequences of Israel’s
restraint: The world had become “acclimated to the idea” that rocket fire on
Israel is unexceptionable rather than unacceptable. That reality encouraged the
terrorists to escalate, since they had no need to fear a painful Israeli
response, while making the international community less understanding of even
the limited military action Israel did take – a fact proven once again last
week, when both the US and the EU issued responses that effectively blamed
Israel and Islamic Jihad equally for the violence.
Hamas, which controls
Gaza, is capable of stopping smaller groups like Islamic Jihad from launching
rockets when it so chooses. In the lead-up to last month’s ransom deal for Gilad
Schalit, for instance, it enforced a total clampdown to avoid disrupting the
deal. If it thought the ongoing rocket fire risked an Israeli response that
would threaten its rule, it would have made sure the fire stopped, even at the
price of clashes with the smaller groups.
But after six years and thousands of
empty threats from Israel, it has no so such fear, so why should it
bother?
Granted, there was one bright spot in last week’s gloomy picture: Two
prominent
supporters of the disengagement – Kadima MK Avi Dichter,
who headed the Shin Bet
security service under Sharon, and Uzi Dayan,
who was Sharon’s national security
advisor – publicly admitted that the rocket fire can only be stopped by
reoccupying part or all of Gaza and therefore urged the government to do
so.
Unfortunately, neither has any influence in the current government, and
Netanyahu appears to be just as wedded to empty threats as his
predecessors
were.
Israeli leaders talk constantly about the need to bolster Israel’s
deterrence. But as Levin pithily explained last week, there’s only one
way to
actually do so: You need to prove that your threats are credible. The
question
is when, if ever, Israel’s leaders will finally grasp that this maxim
also
applies in Gaza.