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David offered a persuasive analysis for why Hamas permitted yesterday’s multipronged terror attack across the Israeli-Egyptian border. But since Hamas rarely needs an excuse to attack Israel, the more interesting question is why Egypt permitted the attack. And “permit” seems to be the operative word: The attack took place in broad daylight right in front of an Egyptian army outpost (thus surprising Israel despite intelligence warnings, as it expected the attack to hit an unguarded part of the border), and even when the ensuing firefight moved into Egyptian territory, Israeli news reports offer no indication that Israeli forces ever saw any Egyptian troops in action; they merely note that Egypt later claimed its soldiers had killed two terrorists.
One possible answer, of course, is simple incompetence, which is worrying enough: If Egypt can’t maintain security in Sinai, Israel will have to vastly increase its own troop presence along the border. A more worrying possibility is that the new government, beset by growing domestic unrest, has decided to distract its citizens’ attention by permitting anti-Israel terror from Sinai – which would presumably be popular, given Egyptians’ widespread loathing for Israel (around 90% consistently view Israel as an “enemy” or a “threat”). But there’s a third, equally worrying possibility: This is a deliberate Egyptian tactic aimed at pressuring Israel to annul the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty’s central provision — the demilitarization of Sinai.
Back in March, I noted that Egypt’s opposition was virtually unanimous in wanting to renegotiate the treaty (unsurprisingly, given that 54% of Egyptians want it scrapped entirely), and especially the demilitarization provision. Since then, Cairo has successfully gotten Israel to do exactly that, negotiating two agreements to let in more troops.
The first increase occurred after three attacks (one unsuccessful) closed the Egyptian-Israeli natural gas pipeline for weeks on end between February and May, leaving Israel without gas. At that point, Cairo claimed it couldn’t protect the pipeline with existing troop levels. And even though Hosni Mubarak’s regime had managed to do so — not a single attack disrupted the supply from 2008-2011 — Israel acquiesced, allowing Egypt to station additional forces in Sinai.
But despite the additional forces, two more successful attacks occurred in July. So Cairo again demanded more troops, saying they were necessary to protect the pipeline. And Israel again acquiesced: Just last week, it let Egypt send 2,000 additional soldiers into Sinai, accompanied by tanks.
Now, yesterday’s attack gives Cairo the perfect excuse to demand even more troops: Without additional forces, it will claim, it can’t protect the border (never mind that Mubarak did it successfully for decades). And Israel may well acquiesce once again; deeming more Egyptian troops preferable to having to increase its own troop levels along the border.
This process could repeat itself ad nauseam. And unless Israel halts it, the result will be the erosion of the peace treaty’s greatest achievement, the demilitarization of Sinai. That would leave Israel right back where it was in 1967: facing military annihilation at any moment from an army much bigger than its own.
Syrian forces attacked a Palestinian refugee camp in Latakia this week, causing up to 10,000 residents to flee. UNRWA, the UN agency in charge of Palestinian refugees, said it has no idea where they went, how many were killed, or whether wounded and elderly people might still be trapped in the camp; it deemed the situation “very, very worrying.” A senior Palestinian Authority official, Yasser Abed Rabbo, went even further, terming the attack “a crime against humanity.” But one Palestinian organization had not a word to say about this assault on its brethren: Hamas.
Hamas, of course, is deeply beholden to Bashar Assad’s regime: It’s headquartered in Damascus and receives extensive military and financial aid from Assad’s patron, Iran. For the same reason, smaller Palestinian terror organizations based in Syria also kept quiet about the assault. But unlike these smaller groups, Hamas aspires to lead the Palestinians; it even won the last Palestinian election. That’s precisely why many Westerners advocate engaging with this terrorist organization: They say it authentically represents many Palestinians, and therefore can’t be ignored.
But if this “authentic Palestinian representative” can’t even be bothered to condemn a brutal assault on its own people, exactly Palestinian aspirations does it represent? Surely not the aspiration for a better life: If that were Hamas’s goal, it would condemn the assault, since being forced to flee their homes presumably makes the refugees’ lives worse.
Senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar effectively answered that question last month in an interview with DPA:
“We are not going to recognize Israel. That is very simple. And we are not going to accept Israel as the owner of one square centimeter because it is a fabricated state” … He says accepting Israel’s right to exist would “cost 10 million Palestinians their right to Palestine. Who can pay that price?”
In short, Hamas is an authentic representative of that 66% of Palestinians who still see Israel’s destruction as their ultimate goal, the 80% who agree with Hamas’s charter that “battalions from the Arab and Islamic world” should come defeat the Jews, the 73% who agree with its charter “about the need to kill Jews hiding behind stones and trees.” Or more accurately, it represents those Palestinians who consider its tactics the best way to achieve these goals: As the above poll showed, most Palestinians see a two-state solution as an effective stepping-stone to the goal of eradicating Israel; that’s why most prefer the PA’s declared support for it to Hamas’s open opposition. After all, the PA also sees a two-state solution as a tool for eradicating Israel; see, for instance, its insistent demand for a “right of return” or its denial of Jewish history in Jerusalem.
But in recent years, the PA government in the West Bank has also done something to improve its people’s daily lives. Hamas-controlled Gaza, in contrast, remains a hellhole — because, as its silence over the Syrian assault makes clear, improving Palestinian lives isn’t even on its agenda; it exists solely to destroy Israel.
Which begs one question: Is that really what advocates of engaging Hamas want to support?
Ever since the tent protests began, veteran leftists have tried to hitch a ride by arguing that only ending “the occupation” can free up the funds needed to satisfy protesters’ demands. There’s only one problem with this claim: The experience of the last 18 years proves it totally false.
In theory, of course, it makes perfect sense. Israel devotes a much higher share of its budget to defense than other Western countries do; peace would obviate the need for much of this spending, thereby indeed freeing up funds for other purposes. Hence when the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, its proponents confidently expected a “peace dividend” to follow.
Instead, annual defense spending has risen by about NIS 10 billion over the last 18 years, since every new territorial withdrawal merely produced new threats. In 2009, according to Central Bureau of Statistics data, defense spending was 25% higher than it was in 1995, in constant shekels.
Last year’s official defense budget totaled NIS 55.4 billion, or about 17% of the total budget, while actual defense spending totaled NIS 60.9 billion (according to the Bank of Israel, defense spending has exceeded the official budget in each of the last six years). By contrast, most OECD countries devote no more than 6% of their budget to defense. This year, the defense budget is once again slated to total about NIS 55 billion, so even if no supplementary funds materialize, defense will once again be the largest single item in the budget. For the last few years, it has surpassed even debt servicing, which occupied the number-one slot for decades.
Nor is this surprising: The territorial withdrawals of the last 18 years produced unprecedented terrorism. This not only precluded cuts in defense spending, but necessitated additional spending to counter it.
Some of this extra spending has gone to new technologies. The deadly suicide bombings of the second intifada, for instance, forced Israel to build the security fence, which has thus far cost more than $2.1 billion (NIS 7.45 billion at current exchange rates), and still isn’t finished. The surge in rocket fire from both post-withdrawal Gaza and post-withdrawal Lebanon forced development of the Iron Dome rocket interception system; aside from billions of shekels in development costs, each Iron Dome system costs $15 million (NIS 53 million) for the battery plus $40,000 (NIS 142,000) per missile. During the Second Lebanon War of 2006, Hezbollah fired some 4,000 missiles at Israel; intercepting them all with Iron Dome (had it been available) would thus have cost about NIS 568 million for the interception missiles alone.
Far more expensive, however, are major military operations, of which Israel has conducted three in the last decade in response to escalating terror from territories it quit: Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, to combat the wave of suicide bombings from portions of the West Bank ceded to the Palestinians under Oslo; the Second Lebanon War, in response to cross-border terror from southern Lebanon, which Israel left in 2000; and Operation Cast Lead in late 2008, to combat escalated rocket fire from Gaza, which Israel quit in 2005.
For starters, such operations always involve mobilizing the reserves, and while conscripts receive about NIS 600 a month for combat service, reservists are paid their full civilian salary. Hence calling up 60,000 reservists, as Israel did in the Second Lebanon War, would cost the state NIS 246 million a month even if all earned only the minimum wage, and NIS 507 million a month at the average wage – not counting the cost to the economy of their absence from their regular jobs.
More significantly, however, major military operations always involve massive quantities of ammunition, air force flying time, etc. Hence the 2006 war in Lebanon cost an estimated NIS 11 billion, while the war in Gaza in early 2009 cost an estimated NIS 5 billion.
Then there’s the fact that the government picks up the tab for all damage caused by hostile enemy action, aka suicide bombings and rocket fire. For the Lebanon war, for instance, the bill for property damage alone was expected to total some $335.4 million (about NIS 1.2 billion). And the bill for long-term medical and psychological treatment for the injured, along with financial assistance to the families of those killed, is often much higher. In the second intifada, for instance, almost 1,100 Israelis were killed and almost 7,500 wounded; the latter figure includes many who were seriously injured, and thus incurred major medical expenses.
All these extra government outlays to counter post-withdrawal terror obviously mean less money for the kind of social spending the tent protesters seek. But perhaps even more significant is the general cost to the economy of this terror. The second intifada, for instance, caused a two-year recession (2001-2002) and three years of over 10% unemployment; needless to say, recession and high unemployment make it far harder to achieve the comfortable standard of living the protesters seek.
Granted, real peace would reduce defense spending. But so far, every Israeli effort to end “the occupation” has produced not peace, but increased terror: Palestinians killed more Israelis in the first two and a half years after Oslo than in the entire preceding decade, while the first four years of the second intifada produced more Israeli casualties than the entire preceding 53 years. The Israeli casualty rate began to fall again – by about 50% a year – only after Israel reoccupied the West Bank in Operation Defensive Shield. And there’s no indication that quitting the West Bank a second time would result in anything but a repeat of the surging terror every other withdrawal of the last 18 years has produced, given that 66% of Palestinians still see statehood as a mere stepping-stone to the ultimate goal of Israel’s eradication.
Fortunately, most Israelis understand this quite well. And that’s precisely why protest leaders have so far not acceded to the Left’s plea to add “ending the occupation” to their list of demands: They realize it would cause their enormous popular support to evaporate overnight.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
In Jewish tradition, the Sabbath after Tisha B’Av is known as Shabbat Nachamu, the Sabbath of Consolation. After the three-week mourning period that culminates in Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the destruction of both Temples and the Jews’ subsequent exiles, Shabbat Nachamu marks the start of seven weeks in which the prophetic readings accompanying the Torah portion promise that someday, the Jews will return to their land.
In Israel, there is never any lack of dangers to mourn during the three weeks, and this year was no exception. Iran appears to be racing unchecked toward nuclear weapons. Egypt, once a reliable ally, is now either unable or unwilling to stop the repeated attacks on its Sinai pipeline that have devastated Israel’s gas supply; it is allowing arms smuggling into Gaza to rise to alarming proportions; and it may yet turn openly hostile after its upcoming elections. The Palestinians are seeking UN recognition as a state in September, which could lead to a third intifada and/or international sanctions against Israel. And added to all these external woes is growing economic distress at home, as reflected in the ongoing tent protests.
Yet in the spirit of Shabbat Nachamu, recent news reports have also offered grounds for consolation. For they show that ordinary Israelis, despite all the country’s real problems, remain passionately committed to the ongoing project of the Jewish state.
Last month, several papers reported on a group of Israeli college students who have launched a private effort to improve the country’s international image: They plan to send student delegations to overseas college campuses, many of which are hotbeds of anti-Israel activism, to meet their peers and explain Israel’s positions face to face. This month, the first delegation of 27 students will tour six campuses in South Africa, a country notoriously hostile to Israel; subsequent missions will target other countries, including the US and Canada.
Reading the Hebrew media reports, two things stand out: First, all the students agreed to put up $1,000 of their own money and will be running various fund-raising activities to raise the rest. In short, this isn’t an all-expenses-paid vacation funded by some Jewish organization; they’re investing significant amounts of their own time and money in trying to help their country.
Nevertheless, everyone in the group agrees on the basics. “We all agree that Israel is a Jewish and democratic state, and we all agree that Israel is not an apartheid state,” said the group’s unofficial spokesman, Roi Wolf. “That is what we want to show the students on campus.”
The Israeli politicians, journalists and academics from whom the world normally hears often seem unable or unwilling to articulate this consensus, preferring instead to engage in demagogic attacks on their ideological rivals. That it nevertheless remains vibrant among such a diverse group of ordinary Israelis is surely grounds for consolation.
A family from the Negev is beginning a year-long tour of 27 countries this month to try to change ordinary people’s perceptions of Israel. The Zemachs conceived this idea after the condiment business they started began attracting tourists to their Kadesh Barnea home by word of mouth.
The tourists’ reactions to meeting and talking with them convinced the Zemachs that perhaps other people – those not committed enough to visit here – also needed to meet more ordinary Israelis. They consulted the Foreign Ministry, and ministry professionals enthusiastically concurred: A new focus-group study had just found that Americans view Israelis as cold people who don’t like having children and don’t welcome guests – a portrait stunning in its inaccuracy; the Zemachs’ tour could help dispel such stereotypes.
The Zemachs obviously aren’t paying for the entire tour themselves, but they certainly are devoting considerable time and effort to it: taking three children out of school for a year (the fourth, a college student, won’t be coming); living out of suitcases for the entire year; planning activities to do with those they meet (including cooking sessions and musical evenings – they all play guitar); finding contacts in every community on their itinerary who can organize meetings for them. Why bother? Because they care about their country – and “as people come to know us, to meet and talk with us, their perceptions of Israel will change,” said Chami Zemach.
Israelis constantly gripe about their country, but that’s because they take their devotion to it so much for granted that they feel it doesn’t need saying; they can afford to focus solely on all the ways they think Israel still needs improving. That’s also why there’s no contradiction between the real unhappiness fueling the tent protests and the fact that Israel ranked seventh out of 124 countries in Gallup’s latest wellbeing survey: The unhappiness is merely the surface layer of Israelis’ deep love for their country.
Still, all the griping can get depressing, which is why sometimes, it’s instructive to see Israel from an outsider’s perspective. So I’ll close with a quote from Molly Tolsky, who last month described her Birthright trip in an article for The Forward. Physical Israel left her unmoved. But not so the people:
“The Israelis from the trip [were] by far the most passionate and strong-willed people I had ever met. They were 20-somethings, most of them younger than I, with more love for their country and understanding of its history and current situation than I can possibly fathom as an American. They are not afraid to fight for Israel, and they are not afraid to admit that they are scared while doing so. And the best part is, they have fun, too.”
Israelis are indeed all that. And that is ample reason for consolation. For as long as this remains true, Israel will survive.
The mass protests
over Israel’s high cost of living increasingly seem to be aimed directlyat Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, featuring raucous chants of “Bibi, go home!” And while many of the demonstrators are clearly longstanding Netanyahu opponents, many others are traditional supporters of Netanyahu’s Likud party or its allies; that’s precisely why Netanyahu is so worried. Yet the problems demonstrators are protesting have existed for years; Netanyahu didn’t cause them, and in most cases hasn’t even exacerbated them. So is it fair for the protesters to blame him?
I think it is. But there’s another person who also deserves a sizable share of the blame: opposition leader Tzipi Livni. First, Netanyahu: As I wrote http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Features/Article.aspx?id=211293 in March, Netanyahu campaigned on a promise to address Israel’s numerous domestic ills, and that’s what his voters expected him to do.
While some Israelis do still view the “peace process” as the country’s top priority, Netanyahu’s voters aren’t among them: They belong to that majority of Israelis who, as repeated polls have shown, give top billing to domestic concerns. Last October’s Peace Index Poll, for instance, found http://www.idi.org.il/ResearchAndPrograms/peace_index/Documents/October_2010/The%20Peace%20Index%20Data%20-%20October%202010.pdf that only one-fifth of Jewish Israelis listed the peace process as their top concern; the other four-fifths chose various domestic issues.
Moreover, as someone who prides himself on being Israel’s “Mr. Economy,” Netanyahu cannot credibly claim to be either ignorant of the causes of Israel’s high cost of living or incapable of addressing them. Indeed, the remedies are largely those he has advocated for years: lower taxes (currently, for instance, taxes more than double the price of a car) and
increased competition (for instance, major food manufacturers shouldn’t also be the chief food importers, leaving them with no incentive to sell imports more cheaply than their own products).
Yet since taking office, he has done virtually nothing to address these issues; indeed, his government even raised some taxes. Instead, he has devoted the bulk of his time and attention to diplomatic issues. As a result, while last month’s Peace Index poll http://www.peaceindex.org/files/Peace%20Index-June11.pdf found that 52% of Israeli Jews were dissatisfied with the government’s foreign policy, its rating on socioeconomic issues was worse: 62% deemed its handling of socioeconomic policy “poor,” while 80% voiced “concern” over socioeconomic issues.
Moreover, the foreign-policy dissatisfaction came primarily from opposition voters. Coalition supporters, including 70% of Likud voters, generally approved the government’s handling of foreign policy. In contrast, though the poll provided no party breakdown for the socioeconomic results, the larger overall number presumably indicates a larger share of dissatisfied Netanyahu voters. Thus while Netanyahu didn’t create Israel’s economic problems, he betrayed his own voters by failing to do more to solve them. And he thereby fully earned the blame he is now reaping.
Nevertheless, Netanyahu faces one objective difficulty in enacting reforms: His own economic policies are diametrically opposed to those of several major coalition partners, including Shas, United Torah Judaism and Independence. All these parties favor more government control over the economy and more government largess. As a result, vital reforms like forcing the Israel Lands Administration to release more land for construction – thereby easing the land shortage that is a major cause of soaring housing prices – have been stuck in the Knesset for over two years.
And that’s where Livni comes in.
The party whose economic views are closest to Netanyahu’s is Livni’s Kadima, and that also goes for many other domestic issues (for instance, reforming the system of government). Consequently, Kadima was the first party Netanyahu invited to join his coalition: He needed it to enact the domestic reforms he craved. And by the usual standards of Israeli coalition negotiations, he was prepared to pay generously. But Livni posed two completely unprecedented demands. First, according to Hebrew media reports, she demanded a rotation deal for the premiership. Netanyahu’s center-right bloc trounced Livni’s center-left bloc 65 seats to 44, and Israel has never had a rotating premiership when one party was capable of forming a government without its main rival. All previous rotation deals arose because neither major party could form a government without the other. Yet Livni essentially demanded that he overturn the election results and hand her the job Israeli voters had denied her.Perhaps even worse, however, she demanded full authority over negotiations with the Palestinians even while Netanyahu was serving as premier. And no prime minister could reasonably cede control of one of Israel’s most crucial foreign-policy issues. Thus Netanyahu was left with no choice but to cobble together his current coalition.
Moreover, having chosen to stay in opposition, Livni largely refused to let her party support Netanyahu from outside the government even on proposals that Kadima had backed while it was in power. Had she offered to support certain key bills, it might have been possible to pass them despite the objections of some coalition members.
Finally, Livni pulled the same trick on diplomatic issues, relentlessly attacking Netanyahu as “anti-peace” even though many of his negotiating positions – which the Palestinian Authority has repeatedly and unequivocally rejected – are identical to those she herself espoused as foreign minister in 2006-09: Israel must retain the settlement blocs, Palestinian refugees must be resettled outside Israel and the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state. This greatly increased international pressure on Netanyahu, since Western powers would have found it harder to keep demanding that he soften these positions had the opposition leader made it clear they reflect an Israeli consensus. And that in turn forced Netanyahu to devote more time and energy to diplomatic damage control, leaving less time and attention for domestic issues.
None of this excuses Netanyahu. He is the prime minister, not Livni, and it was his responsibility to push through the necessary domestic reforms despite the diplomatic distractions. But faced with the choice of facilitating this process or throwing a spoke in the wheel, Livni has repeatedly chosen the latter. And for that, she, too, deserves a full measure of blame.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Last week, the Palestinian Authority sought an urgent Arab League meeting to discuss its financial crisis: PA employees received only half their salaries in July, because donor states had delivered only one-third of their promised $970 million in aid. The delinquents were mainly Arab states, not Western ones, and UN development economist Raja Khalidi offered an instructive explanation for this fact in an interview with Haaretz this week:
“Even two generations after 1948, no Western donor, especially European and American, can be oblivious to their historic responsibility [for the Palestinians’ plight], and to the immediate security and political interests that the continuation of this conflict implies. Hence anything needed to keep a lid on things is to be expected, and indeed comes without asking the cost. As for Arab donors, they do not feel at all the historic responsibility for this situation.”
For those with any historical knowledge, this statement is mind-boggling – because Arab states certainly should feel historic responsibility. Had they not rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan, a Palestinian state would have arisen in 1948. Had five Arab armies not invaded the nascent Israel that year, there would have been no Palestinian refugees. Had Jordan and Egypt so chosen, they could have created a Palestinian state anytime from 1948 to 1967, when they controlled the West Bank and Gaza, respectively. Had three Arab states not declared war on Israel in 1967, Israel wouldn’t have captured these territories. And had the Arabs accepted any of Israel’s numerous peace offers since then, a Palestinian state could have arisen long ago.
Western states, in contrast, have no historical responsibility whatsoever: They supported a Palestinian state back in 1947 and have tried hard to midwife one ever since.
Unless, of course, you believe the problem isn’t the lack of a Palestinian state, but the very existence of a Jewish one. For that, the West does bear some responsibility. Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration made it the first major power to support establishing a Jewish “national home”; the Western-dominated League of Nations approved this goal in 1922; Britain’s control of Mandatory Palestine (1917-48) advanced Jewish preparations for statehood, despite London’s later efforts to thwart Israel’s birth (including closing the gates to Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe and arming the Arab states that invaded Israel in 1948); Western and Western-backed states provided the UN majority that approved Israel’s creation in 1947; and Western arms sales have since been vital to Israel’s defense.
Unfortunately, much of the Arab world still does view Israel’s existence as the fundamental problem. That’s precisely why two-thirds of Palestinians still say their ultimate goal is Israel’s eradication, and why Palestinian and other Arab leaders adamantly demand a Palestinian “right of return,” aka Israel’s eradication by demography. That’s also the main reason why the conflict remains unresolved.
But Khalidi’s insight has another important ramification: Because the Arabs, Palestinians included, still deny all responsibility for creating the Palestinian problem, they feel no obligation to compromise in order to solve it. After all, why should innocent victims have to accommodate their oppressor’s demands?
And that’s precisely why the “forget history, let’s just move forward” approach favored by the West and Israel’s left keeps failing. In this conflict, the historical facts are vital. Only if the Arabs acknowledge their responsibility for the problem will they be willing to compromise to resolve it.
Shaken by the domestic and international uproar over the so-called boycott law, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu decided to put his foot down over the next “anti-democratic” proposal. Unfortunately, he chose exactly the wrong bill to quash. For unlike the boycott law, which indeed had some undemocratic elements, a bill to change the way Supreme Court justices are appointed would have made Israel more democratic. And the court itself would have been one of the chief beneficiaries.
The bill, by Likud MKs Ze’ev Elkin and Yariv Levin, would have required potential appointees to attend a public hearing before the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, which would then have the right to veto any candidate it deemed problematic. Opponents charged that this would undermine the court’s status, and thereby Israeli democracy itself, and Netanyahu quickly capitulated: He announced that he “unequivocally opposes the bill,” and that his government “will respect and defend the High Court.”
Kudos to French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government for finally breaking a European taboo. At a press conference in Madrid last week, Foreign Minister Alain Juppe publicly declared that “there will be no solution to the conflict in the Middle East without recognition of two nation-states for two peoples. The nation-state of Israel for the Jewish people, and the nation-state of Palestine for the Palestinian people.” Then, lest anyone overlook the statement’s significance or think it a mere slip of the tongue, his ministry yesterday circulated copies of it.
This is truly groundbreaking. Until now, no EU country has been willing to state publicly that an Israeli-Palestinian agreement must recognize Israel as the Jews’ nation-state, though the EU routinely details the concessions it expects Israel to make.
Partly, this stems from the EU’s desire to maintain a facade of European consensus. And on this issue, no consensus exists. According to Israeli officials, EU foreign policy czar Catherine Ashton adamantly opposes any mention of Israel as a Jewish state, as do Spain, Portugal, Britain, Ireland, Belgium, Slovenia, Austria and Luxembourg. In contrast, such language is favored by Germany, Denmark, Holland, Italy, Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic.
Interestingly, the officials who gave the Jerusalem Post this assessment, just days before Juppe’s Madrid press conference, listed France as on the fence, but leaning toward the Ashton camp.
The second reason, as an Israeli diplomat serving at the UN told Haaretz this week, is that even countries sympathetic to Israel’s position in private are reluctant to say so publicly, because they perceive the Palestinian Authority as the weaker side in the conflict, and are therefore “uncomfortable” making demands of it: They feel demands should be directed at the stronger side. And since the PA adamantly opposes recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, supporting such recognition means demanding a Palestinian concession.
So what made Sarkozy get off the fence and approve Juppe’s public declaration of support for a Jewish state? It’s not that he suddenly joined the Zionist movement; neither have most of the countries favoring such language. Rather, they have finally grasped that no agreement is possible without satisfying Israel’s minimum requirements. No Israeli government will ever sign a deal that mandates full withdrawal to the 1967 lines, lacks adequate security provisions or doesn’t acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state. The major Israeli parties differ on precisely where the border should run and precisely what security arrangements are required, but they all agree on these basics.
Sarkozy, however, has now gone one step further: He’s realized since Israel won’t sign a deal without such provisions, Europe does need to start publicly demanding these concessions of the Palestinians. Otherwise, they will keep deluding themselves the world will eventually force a complete Israeli capitulation.
In so doing, he’s thrown down a gauntlet to his fellow European realists: Will they, too, finally support a Jewish state publicly? For if they cravenly sit on the sidelines, allowing the PA to dismiss him as an isolated voice it can safely ignore, his bold effort to advance the cause of peace will die aborning.
Last week’s terror attack in Norway prompted various commentators to try to draw analogies between right-wing and Islamic terror (here, for instance). There are two problems with this. One is the sheer falsity of the analogy, beyond the obvious fact that both are appalling and inexcusable. The other is that right-wing terror has a real analog – namely, left-wing terror. And by omitting this from the discussion, and instead treating terror as the exclusive province of one political camp, it becomes all too easy to use attacks like last week’s as fodder for cheap political point-scoring rather than trying to address a real problem.
While many people tend to associate terror with the right rather than the left, it’s important to realize this is false. Indeed, as the International Herald Tribune reported this week, European police were more concerned about left-wing than right-wing terror as recently as April, and for good reason: Right-wingers didn’t commit a single terror attack in 2010, according to Europol, whereas left-wing and anarchist groups perpetrated 45, up 12 percent from 2009.
So why do people nevertheless think of terror as the right’s exclusive domain? My guess is this is a legacy of the Nazis, whose crimes were horrendous enough that, in the West’s consciousness, they completely overshadowed the mass murders perpetrated by Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and China, thus creating an association between the right and ideological murder that persists to this day. Yet this association might have surprised most Westerners in the decades preceding World War I, when left-wing anarchists perpetrated a spate of bombings and assassinations throughout Europe and the U.S.
Clearly, the fact left-wing terror also exists doesn’t make right-wing terror any better. But if both sides could frankly acknowledge they have problems of roughly equal magnitude on their respective fringes, then instead of using terror attacks to try to score political points off each other, they might be able to focus on the real threat – Islamic terror – which in magnitude is greater than either.
Neither left-wing nor right-wing terrorism benefits from state sponsors; neither controls territory in its own right; neither is backed by a global fundraising network that includes international charities and religious institutions; and neither operates a worldwide network of schools to indoctrinate children with its terrorist philosophies.
Islamic terror, in contrast, has all of the above: state sponsors (Iran, Syria, Pakistan, etc.), terrorist groups that control territory in their own right (Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, etc.), a global fundraising network comprised of charities and mosques, and madrassas worldwide where children are indoctrinated in Islamic fundamentalism. All of this gives Islamic terrorists far greater capabilities than either right-wing or left-wing terrorists have – which is precisely why the vast majority of attacks worldwide in recent years have been perpetrated by Islamists.
Islamic terror is the real global threat nowadays. That doesn’t mean either right-wing or left-wing terror should be ignored. But excessive focus on a minor threat at the expense of a major one is the best possible way to assure more deadly attacks in the future.
Yesterday, Jonathan discussed Israeli concerns the Palestinian Authority’s bid for UN recognition as a state in September might spark a third intifada. But while the PA’s indifference to Israel’s fears might be understandable, its blatant disregard of its own people’s concerns ought to trouble the West.
Last week, The Israel Project released further results of its in-depth survey of Palestinian opinion, conducted by American pollster Stanley Greenberg and the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion via face-to-face interviews with 1,010 Palestinians. The poll’s first section, which focused on Palestinians’ long-term goals, found that 66 percent view a two-state solution as a mere stepping-stone to their ultimate goal of Israel’s eradication. The current section, which focused on near-term goals, found that fully 80 percent of Palestinians listed job creation as one of their two top priorities, far outstripping the second-place choice (healthcare, at 36 percent). By contrast, only 4 percent deemed UN recognition of a Palestinian state a top priority, while only 1percent viewed mass protests against Israel as a priority.
But the problem isn’t just that Palestinians don’t view UN recognition as a priority. It’s that the bid for UN recognition directly undermines the goal they do consider top priority: job creation.
First, the statehood bid easily could lead to renewed violence – which would devastate the Palestinian economy just as the second intifada did – because it creates expectations that can’t be met. UN recognition of a Palestinian state won’t bring statehood any closer in practice; Israeli troops and settlements won’t suddenly disappear. The ensuing frustration might well spark renewed Palestinian terror, or else mass protests that could quickly degenerate into violence especially if terrorists utilize their favorite trick of stationing snipers in the crowds to force Israeli soldiers to return fire).
This is especially likely because some Palestinian leaders are irresponsibly calling for precisely that. Just last week, Marwan Barghouti, the Fatah leader who is
widely considered the second intifada’s architect, called for mass protests in September from the Israeli jail where he is serving five life sentences for murder. And Barghouti remains wildly popular among Palestinians: Indeed, polls show he would beat Hamas’s candidate by a larger margin than current PA President Mahmoud Abbas would.
But even if violence doesn’t materialize, Israel will presumably penalize the PA somehow for blatantly violating yet another signed agreement – in this case, the 1995 Interim Agreement, which states 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.” And any Israeli response is likely to hurt the PA’s economy: Israel is the PA’s largest trading partner; Israelis employed 11 percent of all working Palestinians last year; and under the very same Oslo Accords that the UN bid violates, Israel collects and transfers up to $1.4 billion a year in taxes for the PA, which comprise two-thirds of the PA budget.
Hence, the PA’s UN bid undermines its own people’s top priority. And that ought to make Western countries think twice about supporting it.