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Like Jonathan, I breathed a sigh of gratitude to France this weekend for thwarting–at least for now–a horrendous deal that would have granted Iran significant and probably irreversible sanctions relief while letting it continue making rapid progress toward a nuclear bomb. But contrary to the snide Western diplomat who accused Laurent Fabius of making trouble just to achieve “relevance,” I can think of two substantive reasons for the French foreign minister’s strong stance. One is that France has consistently taken a tougher line against Iran’s nuclear program than the Obama administration has. But another may stem from historical memory–and the clue is Fabius’s statement that “The security concerns of Israel and all the countries of the region have to be taken into account.”
At first glance, this is astounding. If any party to the talks were going to spare a thought for Israel’s concerns, one would expect it to be the U.S., or even Germany: Both are closer Israeli allies than France, which usually leads the anti-Israel camp. But France attaches great importance to averting Israeli military action against Iran; that’s precisely why it pushed for a European oil embargo on Iran (“We must do everything possible to avoid an Israeli attack on Iran, even if it means a rise in the price of oil and gasoline”). And France has a very specific historical reason for doubting the widespread view that Israel wouldn’t dare attack Iran in defiance of its major patron: It’s called the Six-Day War.
Though few people remember nowadays, in 1967, Paris occupied much the same position that Washington occupies now with respect to Israel: Not only was France Israel’s chief arms supplier and Security Council patron, but it was the only country willing to supply Israel with essential equipment such as fighter jets. Israel’s air force fought the Six-Day War with French Mirages; only the following year, in 1968, did America for the first time agree to sell it Phantom jets.
Consequently, Charles de Gaulle had every reason to think that when he spoke, Israel would listen. And the French president’s message in 1967 was unequivocal: Under no circumstances must Israel launch a preemptive strike; if it did, it could kiss French patronage goodbye. Israel heard the message loud and clear–and preempted anyway. Facing what it deemed an existential threat, it decided that even the loss of its sole military supplier was the lesser evil.
France knows that today, Israel deems Iran’s nuclear program an existential threat. France also knows that Israel would probably risk less by defying the Obama administration than it did by defying France in 1967: De Gaulle severed the military relationship completely, refusing even to deliver planes and gunboats Israel had already paid for, at a time when Israel had no assurance that Washington would fill the gap; today, given Israel’s strong support in Congress, a similarly total American arms embargo seems unlikely. As a result, France may understand what Washington seems not to: that utterly disregarding Israel’s concerns about Iran could push it to preempt despite its patron’s objections, just as it did in 1967.
This also explains why France was particularly opposed to a provision allowing Iran to continue building its heavy-water reactor in Arak. Once the reactor is finished and ready to go online, Iran could turn the switch before an attack could be mounted, so Israel is unlikely to wait until it gets to that point. Thus if the goal is to prevent an Israeli attack, halting progress at Arak is critical.
So by all means, heartfelt thanks are due the French. But a nod may also be due to the deterrent Israel has created by its proven willingness to defend itself by itself.
Secretary of State John Kerry is currently in the Mideast to try to rescue faltering Israeli-Palestinian talks. But he would do better to take a break from his shuttle diplomacy and ponder the question Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posed in a television interview this week: If the Palestinians “can’t even stand behind the agreements that we had, that we release prisoners but we continue building, then how can I see that they will actually stand by the larger issues that will require them far greater confrontation with received opinion and fixed positions in their society?”
Earlier this week, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas threatened that unless Israel halts construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, it “is likely to bring about the termination of the talks, without results” and “the situation is likely to explode.” The PA also threatened to seek action against Israel in international forums on account of this construction. But as Netanyahu correctly pointed out, Israel never promised a construction freeze as part of the deal Kerry brokered to relaunch the talks–something Kerry himself has confirmed. What Israel did promise was to free 104 Palestinian murderers in four installments, which have so far occurred on schedule.
Yet now, having pocketed that concession, the Palestinians are threatening to renege on their part of the deal–nine months of talks, plus refraining from action against Israel in international forums–on account of Israeli actions that the deal itself allowed. So what confidence can Israel have that the same wouldn’t happen with a full-fledged peace deal? What confidence can it have that after it withdraws from additional territory, the Palestinians will honor their commitments to fight terrorism, end their international sanctions campaign against Israel, stop agitating for a “right of return,” combat anti-Israel incitement, and so forth? And why should Israel take the risk of territorial withdrawals if it can’t be reasonably confident of this?
The question is doubly important because of the Palestinians’ consistent track record of not honoring previous deals. For instance, they pledged to fight terror in no fewer than five signed agreements (1993, 1994, 1995, 1997, and 1999). Yet instead, these deals resulted in terror of unprecedented dimensions: Over the past 20 years, Palestinian terrorists have killed some 1,200 Israelis, roughly double the figure in the 45 years before the 1993 Oslo Accord.
Moreover, these agreements explicitly state that “Neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.” Yet that didn’t stop Abbas from unilaterally seeking UN recognition of these territories as a Palestinian state last year.
But rather than address this problem, Kerry has been actively encouraging the Palestinians’ bad faith. On his current trip, for instance, he publicly and repeatedly denounced Israeli construction as “illegitimate” and “disturbing,” even though it doesn’t violate any Israeli commitments–including those five signed agreements, not one of which mandated a construction freeze. Yet he hasn’t said a word about PA actions that explicitly violate previous commitments, such as its ongoing campaign of incitement (barred by all its signed agreements) and push for international boycotts and sanctions against Israel. And Europe, needless to say, has been even worse.
The result is that Palestinians have concluded they can violate any agreement with impunity. And Israelis wonder why, in that case, they should ever bother signing one.
For weeks, even people who share Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s suspicions of Iran have been loudly proclaiming that his tactics are all wrong: He’s alienating the world with his negative attitude toward the Iranian charm offensive. “His bombastic style is his undoing,” proclaimed Haaretz military analyst Amos Harel. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the former head of the Union for Reform Judaism, similarly warned that Netanyahu “should lower the tone, dispense with bluster,” since “In America, Israel is losing the debate on Iran.”
Given that nobody else on the planet even comes close to Netanyahu’s record of success in generating movement on the Iranian issue, I never understood why anyone would think they knew better than he how to do it. But I hadn’t noticed how effective his recent “bombastic bluster” has been until today, when a senior Israeli official pointed out something I’d missed: “We changed the conversation in which everyone was talking about easing the existing sanctions to a conversation in which everyone is discussing the need for preventing additional sanctions,” he said.
Nothing proves this better than President Barack Obama’s decision to convene an urgent meeting with American Jewish leaders last week to ask them not to press for more sanctions (two of the four groups present laudably refused). And while much of the credit for this goes to Congress, which has refused to take the threat of new sanctions off the table, there’s no doubt Netanyahu’s pressure contributed significantly.
First, that’s because nobody can be more Catholic than the pope: If Israel, which views Iranian nukes as an existential threat, weren’t vociferously objecting to the removal of existing sanctions and demanding new ones, it would be much harder for anyone else do so–certainly for American Jewish groups, but to some degree even for Congress.
Second, Israel’s track record shows that if it feels pushed to the wall by an existential threat, the chance of it taking military action can’t be ruled out. And since the world doesn’t want an Israeli attack on Iran, it has consistently tried to keep Israeli angst below that line. Netanyahu’s current campaign was thus aimed at convincing the world that easing sanctions would risk pushing Israel over the line–and he seems to have succeeded.
This isn’t the first time Netanyahu has successfully used similar tactics. His credible threat of Israeli military action is what originally persuaded Europe to impose an oil embargo on Iran, as a French official acknowledged openly at the time: “We must do everything possible to avoid an Israeli attack on Iran, even if it means a rise in the price of oil and gasoline,” he said. This same credible threat is what bought time for negotiations by persuading Iran to curtail its 20 percent enrichment–as even the Washington Post, not usually a Netanyahu fan, acknowledged in April. And finally, it helped bring Iran to the negotiating table–something Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel acknowledged this week, but which Iran’s own Intelligence Ministry acknowledged a year ago, when it issued a report advocating diplomatic negotiations over its nuclear program to avert the threat of a “Zionist” attack.
None of this means the danger of a bad deal with Iran has passed; far from it. But the first step toward preventing a bad deal was to prevent a hasty removal of sanctions, and that, Netanyahu seems to have accomplished.
He certainly knows that threatening military action and dismissing Iranian charm offensives as meaningless won’t make him popular. But so far, it has proven effective–and as long as that remains true, he will quite rightly be prepared to dispense with being loved.
Kudos to Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz for having the courage to tell the truth when lying would have been much more convenient: Freeing Palestinian murderers, he said, is less strategically damaging than freezing construction in the settlements would be.
This isn’t because the costs of freeing murderers aren’t appalling; they are, and the government should never have agreed to pay such a price to resume “peace talks.” But having made the initial mistake of bowing to Washington’s dictate that it pay the Palestinians one of three outrageous bribes – agreeing in advance to a border based on the pre-1967 lines, freezing Jewish construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, or freeing 104 of the longest-serving Palestinian prisoners, whose lengthy sentences reflect their heinous crimes – Steinitz is correct that freeing prisoners was the lesser evil.
Agreeing to the pre-1967 lines is clearly a nonstarter, since that would sacrifice one of Israel’s most vital long-term interests: defensible borders. Very few security experts consider the pre-1967 lines defensible, and most Israelis agree: That’s why one recent poll found that 63% opposed withdrawing from the Jordan Valley, while another last year found that 66% (and among Jews, 76%) opposed withdrawing to the 1967 lines even in exchange for an end to the conflict. That’s also why UN Security Council Resolution 242, the foundation of the peace process, was deliberately worded to let Israel keep some of the territories captured in the 1967 Six-Day War: As Arthur Goldberg, Washington’s then-ambassador to the UN, subsequently explained, the pre-1967 lines “had proved to be notably insecure.”
But preferring a prisoner release to a settlement freeze may seem counter-intuitive. After all, a prisoner release has numerous obviously destructive consequences. It encourages terrorism, both because 60% of freed prisoners resume terrorist activity and because it teaches would-be terrorists they needn’t fear spending long in jail if caught. It undermines the justice system by turning both the law and judicial decisions into empty pronouncements: As a PA minister correctly said last week, the mass release of prisoners sentenced to life means “the Israeli concept of ‘life in prison’ has collapsed.” It devastates the victims and their families; it rewards the Palestinians’ intransigence by giving them a concession usually made only after a treaty is signed just for agreeing to hold talks; and it teaches the world to view Jewish blood as cheap.
By comparison, the consequences of a settlement freeze may seem trivial at first glance: What’s so terrible about delaying construction of a few thousand homes for nine months? That’s precisely why 63% of Israelis say they would have preferred a settlement freeze to the prisoner release. That’s also why opponents of the settlements have seized the opportunity to blame the wildly unpopular release (78% of Israelis oppose it) on the settlers and their political supporters, charging that had the latter not adamantly refused to countenance a settlement freeze, the government wouldn’t have been forced to accept a prisoner release instead.
Given this atmosphere, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his allies must surely have been tempted to keep quiet and let the settlers reap the blame for the unpopular release; to imply that Netanyahu preferred a settlement freeze, but was forced instead to accept the prisoner release by his coalition’s right flank (the Bayit Yehudi party and many members of his own Likud). But Steinitz, one of Netanyahu’s closest allies, courageously rejected that temptation: He forthrightly acknowledged that the government chose the prisoner release because it was less strategically damaging than a settlement freeze. And in that, it was absolutely correct.
Agreeing to freeze Jewish construction in east Jerusalem and the West Bank while allowing Palestinian building to continue would be tantamount to accepting the erroneous definition of these areas as “occupied Palestinian territory,” rather than disputed territory to which Israel has a valid claim. After all, building on one’s own land is perfectly legitimate; it’s only building on someone else’s land that’s forbidden. Thus if Palestinians can build in east Jerusalem and the West Bank while Israelis cannot, the land must belong to the Palestinians rather than Israel.
But if so, Israel has no valid claim to retain any of this land: By what conceivable right can a thief retain stolen goods? Freezing settlements would thus amount to tacitly conceding that the final border should by rights be based on the indefensible 1967 lines – the very condition the government correctly rejected out of hand.
Moreover, the history of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations shows that Israel can’t hope to retain areas it deems necessary for defense without large-scale construction, because Europe and Washington have both long since jettisoned the premise that shaped Resolution 242 – that Israel’s legal and historical rights to the territories, combined with its security needs, justify it retaining part of the West Bank. Even for very minor adjustments to the 1967 lines, the only justification the West now acknowledges is the sheer impracticability of expecting any Israeli government to forcibly uproot hundreds of thousands of Israelis from their homes.
That’s precisely why every Western peace plan ever proposed has included Israel retaining Jewish neighborhoods of east Jerusalem and the major settlement blocs – not because the West recognizes any Israeli rights to these areas, but because there are simply too many Jews living there to make their evacuation feasible. Hence it’s vital for Israel to also put as many Jewish residents as possible into other areas it wants to keep under a final-status deal – and that requires building houses for them.
The security risk posed by indefensible borders is long-term and irreversible, whereas the risk posed by prisoner releases is shorter-term and at least partially reversible (freed prisoners can always be rearrested). Thus while the government made a terrible mistake when it adopted the self-defeating strategy of bribing the Palestinians to come back to the table, once having made this mistake, it was right to choose the only item on Washington’s menu of approved bribes with no impact on Israel’s final borders. In a choice between reversible and irreversible harm, the former is always the lesser evil.
Jonathan correctly pointed yesterday to Palestinian lionization of vicious killers as an indication of cultural attitudes that make peace impossible. But there’s another indicator that I find even more revealing–the Palestinian Authority’s deafening silence about the ongoing dispossession and slaughter of its countrymen in Syria.
As journalist Khaled Abu Toameh reported earlier this month, of the approximately 600,000 Palestinians in Syria, a whopping 250,000 have been displaced, according to no less a source than senior PA official Mohamed Shtayyeh. Additionally, over 1,600 have been killed and thousands more injured. Of the displaced, most remain in Syria, but some 93,000 have fled to neighboring countries, where they are uniquely unwelcome: Palestinians have been denied entry into both Jordan and Lebanon, and even when admitted, they face discriminatory treatment. In Jordan, for instance, they are strictly confined to camps, though other Syrian refugees are allowed to move about the country freely; in Lebanon, they are subject to numerous restrictions on employment, and often live in hiding for fear of being deported.
Ostensibly, this is an unbeatable argument for the urgency of creating a Palestinian state: Palestinians need a country to succor their refugees from Syria. Indeed, Jews used a similar argument to great effect in persuading the world of the need for a Jewish state after the Holocaust. Even today, Israelis routinely cite the world’s refusal to accept Jewish refugees, thereby abandoning them to the Nazi killing machine, as one of many arguments for why a Jewish state remains essential: There must be one country whose doors will always be open to persecuted Jews.
Yet rather than making this argument, the PA has gone to great lengths to ignore the Syrian crisis. As Abu Toameh noted, PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s UN address in September devoted a mere two sentences to the subject, without ever even mentioning Syria by name (“This year and in the last few years, Palestine refugees continue to pay – despite their neutrality – the price of conflict and instability in our region. Tens of thousands are forced to abandon their camps and to flee in another exodus searching for new places of exile”). The rest of the speech was devoted to attacking Israel. Hence Abbas deplored the 27 Palestinians killed “by the bullets of the occupation,” but never mentioned the hundreds killed in Syria during this period; he excoriated the construction of new Jewish homes in Jerusalem, but never mentioned the wholesale destruction of Palestinian homes in Syria.
Nor are these omissions accidental–because in fact, the PA leadership doesn’t want a state to succor its refugees. If it did, it wouldn’t still be demanding that any deal allow Palestinian refugees to relocate to Israel instead of Palestine, nor would senior PA officials be publicly declaring that the refugees will be denied citizenship in a future Palestinian state. It also wouldn’t still be insisting on land swaps of no more than 1.9 percent, rather than the 4 to 6 percent needed to accommodate the major settlement blocs; it would view this minor compromise, which wouldn’t even reduce the Palestinian state’s total area, as well worth making to get a state quickly and start absorbing its refugees–just as the Jews were willing to make much larger territorial concessions in the 1930s and 1940s due to the urgent need for a state to absorb their refugees.
The Syrian crisis remains absent from Palestinian talking points because Palestinians are still far more intent on destroying the Jewish state–inter alia by flooding it with millions of Palestinian refugees–than in making the compromises needed to get a state of their own and absorb those refugees themselves. And that’s also precisely why peace remains impossible.
One frequently asked question about last week’s municipal elections is why three mayors indicted for corruption were all handily reelected. Though several factors contributed to this outcome, one deserves special attention: the outrageous overreach of our self-appointed guardian of public morality, the High Court of Justice.
In the last five weeks before the elections, the court ousted three mayors due to the indictments against them: Ramat Hasharon’s Yitzhak Rochberger, Upper Nazareth’s Shimon Gapso and Bat Yam’s Shlomo Lahiani. Allowing an indicted mayor to continue serving, the court asserted, would undermine public faith in government.
Then, one week before the elections, it hurled a much bigger bombshell: Even if voters reelect these mayors in full awareness of the charges against them, it said, the court reserves the right to overturn this democratic decision and oust them again. And it hinted strongly that it probably would.
The initial ousters were problematic enough. First, as Justice Yoram Danziger subsequently noted in a separate case, the law doesn’t bar indicted mayors from continuing to serve; it mandates their resignation only if convicted. Thus the court had no legal authority to make these rulings: It was simply and arrogantly assigning the force of law to its own value judgments.
Second, though the court has long held that ministers or deputy ministers under indictment must resign, mayors differ fundamentally, because they are directly elected. In contrast, ministers and deputy ministers enter the Knesset through ballots cast for parties rather than individuals, and are then appointed ministers or deputies by the prime minister (sometimes but not always with Knesset approval). Thus while no law authorized the court to oust ministers and deputies either, it could at least claim it wasn’t annulling the voters’ explicit choice. In ousting mayors, the unelected court was directly annulling the voters’ decisions.
Third, the timing was unconscionable. Had the court ousted a mayor with several years left to serve, one could argue that voters didn’t know he would be indicted and might have voted differently if they had, and since they can’t alter their decision until the next election in several years’ time, the court is justified in acting on their behalf. But when it ousts three mayors just weeks before a scheduled election, it’s not acting on behalf of voters who lack the option of doing so themselves; it’s trying to preempt the voters’ decision. Effectively, the court was telling people how it expected them to vote.
But problematic as all this was, the ruling initially seemed at least to leave voters the freedom to make their own decision come Election Day. That illusion was shattered the week before the elections, when the court published the reasoning behind its decision. In it, the justices explained that since the right to run for office is a fundamental one, they couldn’t bar the mayors they ousted from seeking reelection. But should voters choose to reinstate these mayors in full knowledge of the charges against them, the court would consider itself authorized to overturn this decision by ordering the relevant city councils to oust them again.
“The question is whether, once the voter has had his say, that’s the end of the story, and the voter’s decision must be accepted without further thought,” Justice Miriam Naor wrote for the court in the 6-1 decision. “My answer to this is negative … in my view, the voter’s will is one of the considerations that must be taken into account in this situation, but the voter’s will cannot be the supreme consideration that overrides all others.”
Naor acknowledged that this could turn the election into a meaningless exercise, in which the electorate’s decision would be voided immediately after being made and the city council would replace the voters’ chosen candidate with someone they didn’t choose. But far from sounding troubled by that possibility, she advised voters none too subtly to spare themselves this humiliation by making the right choice to begin with: “Our reasons [for ousting the mayors] are being given now in consideration of the timing of the October 22 elections, in order to allow the parties, and others, to consider their steps,” she wrote.
In short, voters have no right to weigh the candidates’ pros and cons, including the indictment, and then decide for themselves; they must bow to the dictates of an unelected court even on this most fundamental of all democratic rights – the right of the governed to elect their own government.
Then, adding insult to injury, Naor and her colleagues had the gall to assert that ousting indicted mayors is necessary to uphold the “foundations of democratic rule,” even as they were emptying “democratic rule” of all content by asserting the power to reverse the outcome of free and fair elections. Granted, mayors under indictment aren’t great for democracy. But a court asserting the right to vacate the results of democratic elections is infinitely worse.
Nor is this power grab mitigated by the fact that Israelis who don’t live in the towns at issue generally supported the mayors’ ouster. A majority of those who do live there clearly thought the good these mayors had done outweighed the harm of their alleged offenses. And the people who have to live under a given government are the only ones entitled to choose it. That, at bottom, is what democracy is all about.
Moreover, “indicted” isn’t the same as “convicted”: Public officials indicted for corruption have often been acquitted. Thus voters may quite reasonably be reluctant to boot out someone they deem to have done a good job when he may well be acquitted in a few months’ time, at which point it will be too late to return him to office. In contrast, if he’s convicted, he’ll be legally required to resign in any case.
In voting as they did, residents of these towns sent the court a pointed message: Don’t tell us how to run our lives. If the justices fail to take that message to heart, the Knesset should urgently pass legislation to make them do so, and to put electoral power back where it belongs – in the voters’ hands.
The Anti-Defamation League issued its list of America’s top 10 anti-Israel groups this week. In compiling the list, the ADL used various criteria, including how active the groups are in sponsoring anti-Israel activity, how vicious their slurs against Israel are, and whether their accusations are “balanced with an acknowledgement of Israel’s repeated efforts to make peace with the Palestinians or the legitimate terrorism concerns faced by Israeli citizens,” as ADL National Director Abraham Foxman put it.
While I have no quarrel with either the ADL’s criteria or its choices, the list inspires an obvious question: How can you blame fringe groups like Jewish Voice for Peace for doing exactly what Israel’s so-called “peace partner”–a man feted in capitals the world over, including Washington–does every single day?
The Palestinian Authority and its president, Mahmoud Abbas, are world leaders in sponsoring anti-Israel activity and promoting boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns. Just this week, for instance, Abbas toured European capitals to urge the EU to step up sanctions against Israel, while the PA took the bizarre step of asking the French government to strip French nationals living in Israeli settlements of their citizenship. A few weeks ago, Palestinian legislators asked the Inter-Parliamentary Union to approve a motion urging national parliaments to boycott Israel. Last month, the PA sent letters to 50 countries urging them to impose commercial boycotts on Israel. And all this anti-Israel activity is taking place while Israeli-Palestinian talks are ostensibly at their height, with negotiators meeting several times a week.
Nor can you beat Abbas and the PA for hurling vicious slurs at Israel. Earlier this month, for instance, the PA’s culture minister granted an award to the author of a poem describing “my enemy, Zion” as “Satan with a tail,” and the PA’s official television station has repeatedly shown children reciting this charming poem. PA officials regularly accuse Israel of disseminating drugs to encourage Palestinian addiction and plotting to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque; indeed, in his UN address last month, Abbas accused Israel of “near-daily attacks” on Al-Aqsa and other religious sites in Jerusalem (in reality, since a 1969 arson attack on the mosque, the only attacks at Al-Aqsa have been Palestinians stoning Jews–see here, here or here, for instance). And this year’s UN speech was tame compared to last year’s, in which he accused Israel of “one of the most dreadful campaigns of ethnic cleansing and dispossession in modern history,” as well as of launching a military operation in Gaza solely to punish the Palestinians’ bid for UN recognition.
Abbas also excels at denying Israel’s “legitimate terrorism concerns.” In last month’s UN speech, for instance, he accused Israel of “relying on exaggerated security pretexts and obsessions in order to consecrate occupation.” The 1,200 Israelis killed in terrorist attacks following Israel’s partial withdrawal from the territories under the 1993 Oslo Accords, like the years of daily rocket launches at Israel after it left Gaza entirely in 2005, are evidently figments of its imagination: Far from being legitimate grounds for concern about security under a final-status agreement, they are mere “pretexts” to “consecrate occupation.”
In short, by the ADL’s own criteria, any list of anti-Israel bodies ought to be headed by Abbas and his Palestinian Authority. The only question that remains is why both Israel and the world are instead dignifying them with the undeserved title of “peace partners.”
A minor sports tournament held in Dubai and Qatar over the last two weeks offers an unusually clear glimpse of the corrosive effects of the world’s casual tolerance of anti-Israel prejudice. Needless to say, both hosts of this leg of the FINA Swimming World Cup blatantly violated the rule requiring all participants to be treated equally regardless of nationality: The Israeli flag wasn’t flown (a fact Qatar’s foreign minister boasted of in a joint press conference with Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday); the word “Israel” never appeared; and to avoid having to utter it, announcers in Dubai even referred to Israeli competitors as the swimmers “from ISR.” But as swimmer Gal Nevo explained upon his return to Israel this week, the organizers’ petty spite also produced a lot of non-Israeli collateral victims:
“In order that our national flag and name wouldn’t appear, the results of every race we competed in were not publicized … Competitors swim with us in the heats in the morning, and expect to see the results on the scoreboard in order to know whether they’ve qualified for the final. But on the screen they’re already broadcasting the next race, without mentioning the names and times from the previous heat.”
In short, the entire tournament was disrupted, with competitors forced to run around madly trying to find out whether or not they had advanced to the final. Swimmers from other countries complained about the disorganization, and Nevo said they were stunned when their Israeli colleagues explained that this “disorganization” was actually carefully orchestrated from above.
What makes this so shocking is precisely the fact that the event is so trivial: This was prejudice devoid of any purpose. Anti-Israel prejudice is often excused on the grounds that it furthers a goal many people support. When, for instance, the EU imposes sanctions on activity in “Israeli-occupied territory” while actively funding activity in Turkish-occupied Cyprus and Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, this double standard is excused because it serves the goal of pressuring Israel to withdraw from this territory.
But a petty refusal to post race results does absolutely nothing to pressure Israel or advance the Palestinian cause; it didn’t even prevent an Israeli swimmer from winning medals in both Doha and Dubai. All it did was make life miserable for a lot of non-Israeli swimmers, while making a mockery of the equal treatment rules that FINA, like other international sporting organizations, claims to uphold.
Indeed, Arab states routinely violate these rules–see, for instance, Dubai’s refusal to let Israel’s Shahar Peer participate in a tennis tournament there in 2009, or Libya’s refusal to grant visas to Israeli chess players to attend the 2004 World Chess Championships. Yet no matter how often this happens, they keep being allowed to host international tournaments. So it’s not surprising they have become so contemptuous of the rules that they no longer hesitate to make non-Israelis collateral victims.
And that is precisely the point: Like any other kind of prejudice, the anti-Israel kind ultimately ends up claiming victims far beyond its intended targets. And the consequences–from vandalized factories and a weakened rule of law in Britain through the loss of valuable expertise on water purification in South Africa to laid-off Palestinian workers in the West Bank–are usually far more destructive than a mere disorganized swimming tournament.
I’m sure I’m not the only Israeli who cheered when former Jerusalem police chief Nisso Shaham was indicted last week. This is justice long overdue: The police should have ousted him eight years ago on grounds of brutality. And if it had, some of the incidents for which he now faces trial might never have happened.
Unfortunately, Shaham is anything but unique in this regard: For far too long, our law enforcement agencies have ignored police misconduct of every sort, from brutality to lying to gross negligence. The question is whether this case will finally make them realize that such leniency doesn’t pay and prompt a broad crackdown on all misconduct, or whether the “lesson” will be limited to a crackdown on the specific abuses behind last week’s indictment.
Shaham is charged with sexually assaulting and harassing eight policewomen. Some were his direct subordinates; all were very much his junior in both age and rank. In some cases, he allegedly exploited his power over important career moves, such as promotions or paid study, to obtain their sexual favors.
He is also charged with fraud and breach of trust for having given some of his sexual favorites jobs they were unqualified for, thereby degrading the force’s ability to do its work. In one case, he allegedly pressured a subordinate to accept a policewoman to Jerusalem’s Central Unit even though she failed the entrance exams; in another, he assigned a policewoman to the district’s special operations unit despite performance reviews saying she didn’t do her work and was unsuited to the job.
But Shaham originally made headlines back in 2005, as Negev District commander, when he was caught on camera ordering subordinates to viciously assault tens of thousands of demonstrators in Kfar Maimon who were peacefully protesting the upcoming disengagement from Gaza. “Beat them with truncheons, low down … Let them burn, shit on them,” he said.
In any self-respecting democracy, a senior police officer caught ordering an assault on peaceful protesters would be summarily dismissed. Police brutality is always unacceptable, but it’s especially unacceptable when used to suppress peaceful protest, a fundamental democratic right. But Shaham, far from being dismissed, was promoted: Two years later, he was named Jerusalem’s deputy police chief, in which capacity he allegedly committed some of the crimes he’s now on trial for. Then he became the capital’s chief of police. Only after the sexual harassment allegations surfaced last year was he finally forced to resign.
Yet Shaham is far from unique: Media reports of police misconduct appear with monotonous regularity, but few policemen ever face penalties for such behavior. Hence it’s hardly surprising that only 21% of Israelis say they trust police “to a large extent.” Consider just a few recent incidents:
• Earlier this month, a court dismissed charges against a man accused of assaulting a police officer. The man had claimed the officer actually assaulted him; the judge found it unconscionable that the authorities indicted him without ever investigating his own complaint of assault, or even questioning a taxi driver who witnessed the altercation.
Justifying brutality by falsely claiming their victims assaulted them is unfortunately a common police tactic. In one well-known 2005 case, for instance, a border policeman who shot a Palestinian demonstrator with a rubber bullet claimed he did so after being attacked, and three of his colleagues backed his story in court. But video footage of the demonstration revealed that he opened fire unprovoked.
• Last month, a taxi driver whose license was suspended for reckless driving won a retrial after his cellphone log (procured by the Public Defender’s Office) showed he had been in Rosh Ha’ayin when the alleged offense was committed in Holon. Shockingly, police hadn’t even bothered examining the cellphone log, nor had they questioned any of the 12 other taxi drivers whose license plates bore the partial string of numbers jotted down by a witness.
• Two months ago, video footage showed police repeatedly shocking Boaz Albert with a Taser as he lay on the floor begging them to stop. Albert wasn’t violently resisting arrest; when the cops arrived at his house, he ran inside and lay down on the floor. But instead of simply dragging him out, they shocked him repeatedly.
• The month before that, audiotapes of an interrogation revealed that cops had threatened a juvenile Palestinian witness into identifying someone in a photograph as the defendant, though the witness initially identified the person in the picture as someone else.
At a Knesset hearing earlier this month, Police Commissioner Yohanan Danino said that 88 policemen were dismissed last year for brutality. If true, that’s a welcome improvement; traditionally, police misconduct has resulted in no penalties whatsoever – as with Shaham’s behavior at Kfar Maimon.
But dismissing the occasional beat cop isn’t enough, because low-level policemen take their cues from their superiors’ behavior. Hence when they see someone like Shaham being rewarded with promotion after ordering a violent assault on peaceful demonstrators, they naturally conclude that this is how they are expected to behave. Only once the police and the Justice Ministry, which investigates police misconduct, stop tolerating abuses at the top will proper norms filter down to the lower ranks.
To facilitate this process, the Knesset should swiftly pass a bill by MK Zahava Gal-On (Meretz) that would require cops to wear miniature cameras on their uniforms. The benefits are obvious: Police are less likely to employ unjustified force if they know video footage will prove they did so, or to falsely accuse citizens of assault if they know the footage will disprove their claim, while citizens are less likely to file false complaints against policemen if they know the footage will disprove their accusations. Indeed, within a year after a similar program was introduced in California, policemen’s use of force dropped almost 60% and complaints against policemen fell by 88%.
Granted, this won’t solve the more complicated problem of gross negligence. But in the long and vital process of rebuilding Israelis’ trust in law enforcement, policemen who at least refrain from abusing the citizens they’re supposed to protect would be a good place to start.
Of all the popular idiocies perennially spouted about the Middle East, the one I find most outrageous is the idea that Israeli-Palestinian peace would foment change in Arab societies by removing the “distraction” of Israel’s “oppression of the Palestinians.” Or as the New York Times‘ columnist Roger Cohen put it this week, “If Arabs could see in Israel not a Zionist oppressor but the region’s most successful economy, a modern state built in 65 years, they would pose themselves the right questions about openness, innovation and progress.”
Like many Middle Eastern tropes, this one is simultaneously too insulting and too forgiving. It’s too insulting because it deems Arabs incapable of posing “the right questions” on their own, treating their ability to do so as wholly dependent on Israel’s actions. And it’s too forgiving because it views anger at the “Zionist oppressor” as a valid reason for their inability to pose these questions, ignoring the obvious historical fact that numerous non-Arab nations have proven quite capable of posing these questions despite similar or even greater obstacles.
Taiwan, for instance, was founded by refugees driven from their homeland after losing a civil war that erupted immediately after the end of one of the most brutal occupations in recent history – Japan’s occupation of China. Since mainland China never stopped wanting to regain its errant province, the Taiwanese lived in constant fear of invasion. And they had the anguish of watching helplessly as their countrymen on the mainland suffered under Mao’s brutal dictatorship, which killed over 45 million Chinese. Yet none of this stopped the Taiwanese from building a flourishing economy and, later, a flourishing democracy.
Similarly, Rwanda has rebuilt itself into one of Africa’s most successful countries less than two decades after a devastating genocide killed an estimated 800,000 people.
Israel, of course, was established just three years after the Holocaust, and absorbed hundreds of thousands of refugees. During its first 25 years of existence, Arab countries launched three wars aimed at wiping it off the map, and it has suffered nonstop terrorism since its establishment. Yet none of this stopped it from building a flourishing democracy and a flourishing economy.
No less relevant, however, is the way Diaspora Jewry responded to the Holocaust and the subsequent existential threats to Israel – not by impotent rage, but by helping to create today’s flourishing country by building hospitals and schools throughout Israel and funding numerous educational and social programs. That’s something wealthy Arab states and individuals could easily do on behalf of their “oppressed brethren” in Palestine, and it would benefit Palestinians far more than spewing verbal venom at Israel would.
But of course, they haven’t. Western countries primarily fund both the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA, the agency that deals with Palestinian refugees. Wealthy Arab donors haven’t built state-of-the-art hospitals in Palestine like Hadassah or Laniado in Israel; Palestinians seeking top-notch medical care still go to Israel for it. They haven’t founded schools like the ORT network or daycare centers like the WIZO network, which still serve thousands of Israelis today.
And if Arabs haven’t done this in 65 years, when so many other peoples have, there’s no reason to think a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would suddenly make them start. This failure is entirely a product of their own culture. And therefore, change can only come from within.