I’d like to add to Michael’s excellent reasons for why Israel shouldn’t apologize to Turkey about last year’s raid on a Turkish-sponsored flotilla to Gaza. As Michael noted, apologizing won’t restore the strategic alliance, because Turkey has made a strategic foreign-policy choice that precludes alliance with Israel. But apologizing wouldn’t merely be ineffective, it would be downright harmful – to both of Israel’s stated goals.

First, Israel wants to improve relations with Turkey. But by proving that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s bullying tactics work – that Ankara can actively undermine every Israeli interest while promoting vicious anti-Israel sentiment at home, and Israel will still come crawling -apologizing will ensure more of the same.

Erdogan openly supports Hamas, which he insists isn’t a terrorist organization; his government actively backed last year’s flotilla, and he now plans a state visit to Gaza. He worked to block  UN sanctions on Iran, then undermined them by boosting Turkey’s gasoline exports to Tehran. He reportedly promised arms to Hezbollah. He insisted that NATO’s planned missile-defense system not give Israel information on Iran. He deemed Israel’s 2009 war with Hamas in Gaza worse than the genocide in Darfur.

He also foments anti-Israel sentiment at home. An Israeli theater was forced to cancel an appearance in Turkey after Ankara said it wouldn’t stop radical Islamists from disrupting the performance. Israel cyclists were barred from an international bike race in Turkey because Syria and Iraq said their teams wouldn’t participate if Israel did. A Turkish-Israeli concert for religious tolerance was canceled after IHH, the viciously anti-Israel group behind the flotilla, insisted. As Turkish columnist Burak Bekdil noted, these and many similar incidents aren’t coincidental; they reflect “the systematic injection of Islamist sentiments about Israel into the minds of younger, ordinary Turks, especially in the past two and a half years” of Erdogan’s reign.

By apologizing, Israel would essentially say that none of the above precludes Turkey from being a valued ally. And if so, not only would Erdogan have no incentive to change his behavior, neither would any of his successors.

Yet Israel also has a second goal: sparing its soldiers facing legal action over the nine Turks killed in the raid. Its attorney general is thus reportedly pushing for an apology, bizarrely claiming this would preclude civil or criminal suits.

In reality, however, an Israeli admission of culpability – the only kind of apology Turkey would accept (it repeatedly rejected Israel’s offer to express mere “regret”) – would make legal action more likely. Absent such an admission, Israel has a strong case: A UN report  due out later this month reportedly concluded that Israel’s blockade of Gaza was legal, that it had the right to intercept the flotilla and that its soldiers opened fire in self-defense, though it also found they used excessive force. But once Israel admits culpability, it has no case. And even if Ankara promises not to pursue legal action itself, it can’t stop flotilla passengers or their relatives from doing so -which, since most belonged to IHH, they presumably would.

In short, apologizing would undermine Israel’s own interests twice over. It’s high time for Jerusalem to recognize that the clock on Turkey can’t be turned back.

With efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations having failed, both sides are now waging a global diplomatic campaign: the Palestinians to recruit support for UN recognition of a Palestinian state, and Israel to mobilize opposition to this unilateral move. But since both sides view Europe as the key battleground, it’s critical for Israel to address one of Europe’s principal discomforts with its position: its demand for recognition as a Jewish state.

This discomfort contributed significantly to the failure of last week’s Quartet meeting: Senior European diplomats told  Haaretz that the EU and Russia rejected Washington’s blueprint for negotiations in part because it called for a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one.

Granted, Europe traditionally refuses to confront Palestinians with the concessions they must make for an agreement: While repeatedly declaring Israel must withdraw to the 1967 lines and divide Jerusalem, it has never been willing to say that, for instance, Palestinian refugees can’t relocate to Israel.

But there’s also something deeper at work here. As a European diplomat once told me, Europeans are profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of a Jewish state, because to them it sounds like a “Christian state” -i.e., a religious state. And while most European countries were founded as Christian states (that’s why many still have a cross on their flags), modern-day Europeans generally have little use for religion: Just 21 percent say religion is “very important” to them, compared to 59 percent of Americans, and only 15 percent regularly attend religious services (44 percent for Americans).

True, Europe is fine with Arab and Muslim countries defining themselves as Islamic states, but this isn’t just hypocrisy. While Europeans won’t admit it, they do have a double standard: Non-Westerners can adhere to “primitive” beliefs and practices like religion, but Westerners are supposed to be secular like them. That’s precisely why Europeans are often uncomfortable with America’s overt religiosity. And if Israel wants to be considered a Western country (which it does), then in Europe’s view, it can’t be a “religious” state.

The problem is this view reflects a profound misunderstanding of what a “Jewish state” actually means. Judaism has never seen itself exclusively or even primarily as a religion; indeed, you won’t find the modern Hebrew word for “religion” anywhere in the first five books of the Bible. The Biblical terms for what we today call Jews are Am Yisrael – “the nation of Israel” – and Bnei Yisrael, “the children of Israel.” And that’s precisely the point: From a Jewish perspective, the Jews are first and foremost a nation.

Thus, the term “Jewish state” is in no way analogous to “Christian state.” Rather, it’s analogous to “French” or “Danish” or “German” state. Just as these are the respective homelands of the French, Danish and German peoples, a Jewish state is the homeland of the Jewish people.

Clearing up Europe’s misunderstanding of what a “Jewish state” actually means won’t suddenly make the EU pro-Israel. But it might ease European objections to this particular Israeli demand. Admittedly, this isn’t an easy concept to get across. But since recognition as a Jewish state is important to Israel, it can’t afford not to try.

Did you know most Americans would be considered fascist by a significant portion of Israel’s left? Neither did I, until a few days ago. But that’s the inescapable conclusion from the left’s reaction to a new Israeli Education Ministry directive requiring Jewish kindergartens (Arab schools would be exempt) to start the week by raising the Israeli flag and singing the national anthem, Hatikvah.

“It looks like a competition between members of the Likud [the ruling party] to see who can push us faster into the arms of fascism,” thundered Prof. Gabi Solomon of the University of Haifa.

“Part of a growing trend of inculcating nationalistic and militaristic values,” screamed an Arab nongovernmental organization.

“This directive is reminiscent of education in a totalitarian society; it gives me the shivers,” charged a lecturer at a leading teacher’s college [Hebrew only].

“It’s brainwashing,” added a kindergarten teacher.

Like millions of other Americans, I attended a public kindergarten and elementary school that raised the flag every day and had its students recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning.  I certainly never thought that made the American school system fascist, nor, I imagine, did most Americans. But by comparison, the Israeli directive is mild: It’s only once a week; it only applies to kindergartens; it a priori exempts an entire sector of society (the Arabs) that might be expected to find the practice uncomfortable; and unlike the Pledge, with its controversial reference to “one nation under God,” Hatikvah includes no mention of God at all. So if this directive makes Israel a fascist, totalitarian state, I can only conclude the America I grew up in was even more so.

Because the roots of Israel’s legal system are European rather than American, certain Israeli laws understandably make Americans uncomfortable. Like most European states, for instance, Israel allows greater restrictions on freedom of speech than America’s First Amendment would permit; hence certain statements that would be protected speech in America could be prosecutable as incitement to violence or incitement to racism in Israel. These differences make it easier for Americans to believe Israeli leftists who claim Israel is becoming an undemocratic country.

But what most Americans don’t realize is that what Israeli leftists term “anti-democratic” includes a lot of things Americans would consider perfectly legitimate. For instance, Israel’s leading civil rights organization, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, asserts that a law denying state funding to commemorations of the Nakba (literally, “catastrophe,” the Arabic term for Israel’s establishment) “crosses a red line in suppressing freedom of expression.” Yet how many Americans would feel that “freedom of expression” required their government to actually finance ceremonies mourning their country’s establishment as a catastrophe?

So next time you hear Israeli leftists talking about how Israel is turning fascist, just remember: If you don’t have a problem with schoolchildren reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, then in their eyes, so are you.

Why could an overly harsh Boycott Law pass while a more moderate one could not? Because too much of the Left refuses to accept any sanctions on anti-Israel boycotters.
The Jerusalem Post columnist Susan Hattis Rolef and I are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but I share her that one of the most perceptive comments on the “Boycott Law” enacted last week came from MK Eitan Wilf (Independence Party). Wilf lamented that what she termed “sane, state-oriented, centrist Zionism,” once the province of most Israeli politicians, was being gradually squeezed out by “the extremist right and the post-Zionist Left.” Her point was that while it’s perfectly legitimate for Israel to defend itself against anti-Israel boycotts, the current law disproportionately infringes on freedom of speech.

Yet there was no majority for a more moderate law, because too many leftist MKs refused to support any  penalties on anti-Israel boycotters, while too many rightist MKs refused to grant boycott advocates any freedom of speech.

Anti-boycott legislation is indisputably legitimate in principle. For starters, when aimed at an entire country, boycotts – better known as trade embargoes – are an internationally recognized form of hostilities. So when people advocate boycotting Israel, they are in fact advocating economic warfare against it. By using the term “boycott,” with its civil-rights connotations, rather than “embargo,” they merely seek to conceal their intent.

Second, many boycott advocates don’t even bother denying that their ultimate goal is Israel’s eradication. Thus the boycott resolution adopted by the Canadian Union of Public Employees’ Ontario chapter, for instance, stated explicitly that the boycott would continue until Israel commits demographic suicide by granting a Palestinian “right of return.”

Third, Israel is hardly the only democracy to enact anti-boycott legislation. Indeed, as the Postnoted, America’s Export Administration Act of 1979 imposed much stiffer penalties on compliance with the Arab boycott of Israel than anything in Israel’s law: It even allowed prison sentences, whereas Israel’s law includes no criminal penalties.

Finally, no state is obliged to actually subsidize those working for its destruction. Hence many of the law’s penalties – like denying tax-exempt status or the right to compete in government tenders to boycott advocates – are clearly legitimate: They don’t infringe on anyone’s freedom of speech; they merely deprive boycott advocates of state funding.

So why is the current law nevertheless problematic? First, unlike the American law – which penalized only those who actually engage in boycotts – the Israeli law also penalizes those who merely advocate boycotts: They can now be sued for damages even if the plaintiffs can’t prove actual harm, meaning they will almost certainly have to pay for exercising their right to free speech. Since freedom of expression is a fundamental democratic right, restricting speech is always more problematic than restricting action, and this provision clearly has a speech-chilling effect.

Nevertheless, given the clearly hostile nature of anti-Israel boycotts, even this might have been tolerable (albeit undesirable) had the law been restricted to those who advocate boycotting either Israel as a whole or specific institutions (like universities) solely because they are Israeli. What made it completely unacceptable was extending this provision even to those who advocate or engage in targeted boycotts of the settlements – and I say this as a longtime resident of an “ideological” settlement that absolutely nobody thinks Israel could retain under any agreement with the Palestinians.

Obviously, I personally oppose boycotting the settlements. But it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the future of the settlements is one of Israel’s leading domestic political controversies, and boycotts are an indisputably legitimate method of applying pressure in domestic political disputes. Pressing the settlers to leave by advocating boycotts of their produce is no less legitimate than pressing dairy companies to lower prices by advocating boycotts of their products: Both employ nonviolent economic pressure to achieve a domestic policy goal, and both challenge specific government policies (dairy prices have soared largely thanks to the state-sponsored dairy cartel and import restrictions) rather than Israel’s very existence.

So why didn’t the Knesset just enact a more moderate law – one that, say, deprived boycott advocates of tax exemptions and the right to compete in government tenders, but restricted the lawsuit provision to those who actually engage in boycotts and exempted boycotts of the settlements? Because, as Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin discovered after repeated efforts to broker some kind of compromise, there was no majority for it.

And yet, there should have been. There were Wilf’s Independence Party faction and Likud dissenters like Rivlin, all of whom ultimately refused to vote for the law; there were other center-right MKs who would have supported a compromise, but decided the law as it stood was better than no law at all; and there were many Kadima MKs who initially supported even a far more draconian bill but voted against the final version under pressure from the party leadership, and should thus have been happy to support a compromise that would let them vote for it.

But Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni refused to throw her weight behind any form of sanctions, as did Labor and Meretz. And without support from the Left, there was no possibility of securing a majority for compromise. Thus the center-right had only two options: supporting the more extreme provisions backed by harder-line MKs or seeing the bill fail altogether.

Moreover, without support from the Left for a more moderate law, the maximalists had no incentive to compromise. There are certainly MKs who, even though they favored harsher penalties, would have accepted a less stringent law in exchange for widespread backing, because a united Israeli front against boycotts clearly has public-relations value that a partisan bill lacks. But if the entire Left was going to brand the law fascist and anti-democratic in any case, why should they settle for less than the maximum they could pass?

An Israel that vigorously defends itself while also vigorously protecting civil rights is impossible without support from both sides of the political spectrum. By refusing to support even moderate legislation to defend the state’s interests, the Left undermines conservatives like Rivlin, who care deeply about civil rights, and bolsters the more extreme faction that doesn’t. And it thereby promotes precisely the kind of anti-democratic measures it claims to want to prevent.

Earlier, I cited a new poll showing two-thirds of Palestinians reject any two-state solution that entails recognizing Israel as the Jewish homeland, while the same majority sees a two-state solution as a mere stepping-stone toward Israel’s eradication. It also showed 72 percent deny Jewish history in Jerusalem, 53 percent support educating schoolchildren to hate Jews, and 73 percent support the Hamas charter’s call for killing Jews behind every “rock and tree.”

But perhaps even scarier than the poll itself was the delusional response of Israeli leaders when briefed on it by pollster Stanley Greenberg and Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi of The Israel Project, which commissioned it. According to the Jerusalem Post, Israeli leaders said “they were encouraged by Palestinian support for talks.” Indeed, 65 percent of respondents preferred talks to violence as a tactic for achieving their goals. But what good is that if there’s nothing to talk about – which there isn’t as long as Palestinians deny the Jewish state’s right to exist?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sounded much more sensible in an interview with author Etgar Keret last month: He said forthrightly the conflict is “not about territory,” but about the Jewish state’s right to exist, and will therefore remain unsolvable until Palestinians recognize “Israel as a Jewish state.” Keret then asked what, if so, could be done to further peace:

Netanyahu told me right away that the practical plan for advancing the peace process is to reiterate this at every opportunity.

“You have to see the effect it has on people,” he said, smiling. “You say it and they just remain slack-jawed.”

Just that day, he said, during a conversation with local politicians, he saw it happening before his eyes. Another writer at the table pointed out that we’ve said it more than once and it hasn’t convinced most countries. Netanyahu nodded and said the Palestinians have been spreading their lies for more than 40 years, and lies that have become so deeply entrenched cannot be uprooted quickly.

 

Netanyahu is dead right: The only way to make progress is for Israel to keep explaining the conflict’s real cause until the world finally internalizes it and begins addressing it. For Palestinians will never accept a Jewish state unless convinced it’s necessary, and the only way to so convince them is for the world to make clear that it won’t support Palestinian statehood absent such acceptance.

For that reason, Netanyahu was also right when he told Bulgaria’s foreign minister a few days later peace would come faster if Europe stopped treating Palestinians “like a spoiled child” and instead began to “tell the Palestinians the truth” about the concessions they will need to make for any agreement – like recognizing Israel as a Jewish state and dropping their demand to resettle Palestinian refugees in Israel – instead of only spelling out the concessions it wants Israel to make. For again, as long as the international community refuses to say otherwise, Palestinian will keep thinking they can secure Israel’s retreat from the territories without having to give up their quest for its destruction.

The problem is even Netanyahu himself rarely follows his own advice. Instead, he and other Israelis leaders endlessly declare the Palestinians really want peace, and thereby allow the world to maintain this fiction. Indeed, had Israel not actively assisted the Palestinians in spreading this lie, it never would have “become so deeply entrenched.”

Nobody will defend Israel’s interests if Israel’s own leaders don’t. Thus, until they start telling the truth, consistently and unanimously, the world will keep upholding the convenient fiction that peace is achievable if only Israel would concede a little bit more. And peace itself will remain an unattainable dream.

Here’s a poll you will not see covered in your daily paper, because it throws the real cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into uncomfortably stark relief: Asked whether they agreed with President Barack Obama’s statement that “there should be two states: Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people and Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people,” only 34  percent said yes; 61 percent disagreed. Moreover, a whopping 66 percent said the Palestinians’ goal should not be a permanent two-state solution, but a two-state solution as an interim stage en route to the ultimate goal of a single Palestinian state in all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – a goal that amply explains their opposition to recognizing Israel as the Jewish homeland.

This was a serious poll, conducted by American pollster Stanley Greenberg and the Beit Sahour-based Palestinian Center for Public Opinion by means of face-to-face interviews in Arabic with 1,010 adults in the West Bank and Gaza. And the findings only get worse. As the Jerusalem Post reported:

Asked about the fate of Jerusalem, 92 percent said it should be the capital of Palestine, 1 percent said the capital of Israel, 3 percent the capital of both, and 4 percent a neutral international city.

Seventy-two percent backed denying the thousands of years of Jewish history in Jerusalem, 62 percent supported kidnapping IDF soldiers and holding them hostage, and 53 percent were in favor or teaching songs about hating Jews in Palestinian schools.

When given a quote from the Hamas Charter about the need for battalions from the Arab and Islamic world to defeat the Jews, 80 percent agreed. Seventy-three percent agreed with a quote from the charter (and a hadith, or tradition ascribed to the prophet Muhammad) about the need to kill Jews hiding behind stones and trees.

All these findings contradict the accepted wisdom that the root of the problem is Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza, so if Israel would just raze
the settlements, peace would break out tomorrow. Withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza won’t help if Palestinians don’t accept the existence of a Jewish
state in any borders and see the two-state solution as a mere stepping-stone toward the ultimate goal of Israel’s eradication – exactly as prescribed by the PLO’s famous Phased Plan of 1974, which called  for establishing a “Palestinian national authority” in any territory available and then using it as a base for “completing the liberation of all Palestinian territory.” It seems for most Palestinians, almost 20 years of peace talks haven’t changed this ultimate goal one whit.

This is the root of the conflict and has been ever since Britain first backed a “national home for the Jewish people” in the 1917 Balfour Declaration. It’s why no
Palestinian leader has ever been able to say “yes” to any Israeli offer – and never will be able to, no matter how much the offer is improved, unless this  changes. Until the international community recognizes this and starts working to change Palestinian public opinion, the “peace process” will continue to be mere wasted effort.

As Omri noted yesterday, Washington is backing Beirut against Jerusalem in their dispute over the Israel-Lebanon maritime border. But by doing so, it isn’t merely cozying up to Hezbollah. It’s actively rewarding aggression – and encouraging war.

Israel and Lebanon never had an agreed upon maritime border. But Lebanon did reach an as-yet unratified agreement with Cyprus in 2007, and Jerusalem and Nicosia later negotiated their own maritime border based on this Lebanon-Cyprus agreement. Last year, however, after Israel announced lucrative gas finds in the Mediterranean Sea, Lebanon gave the UN a new map asserting a border well south of the line demarcated in its agreement with Cyprus. By moving the border south, Lebanon also intruded into territory that Israel claims as its Exclusive Economic Zone.

This sequence of events makes it clear Lebanon is trying to grab territory it never previously considered its own solely to horn in on Israel’s newly discovered gas reserves. As such, the U.S. should have rejected it out of hand. Instead, it reportedly endorsed the new Lebanese map without  even seeking Israel’s response, then told Israel it should either accept the fait accompli or agree to mediation by the notoriously anti-Israel UN, in order to avoid creating an “underwater Shaba Farms.”

Shaba Farms is the territory Hezbollah claimed as Lebanese following Israel’s pullout from Lebanon in order to create a pretext for its continued attacks on Israel. The UN Security Council certified that withdrawal as complete to the last inch in 2000, as UN mapping experts concluded Shaba wasn’t Lebanese.

But after Hezbollah proved in 2006 it was willing to go to war to back its claim, the Security Council rewarded its aggression: Instead of upholding its previous decision, it adopted Resolution 1701, which ordered the UN to demarcate Lebanon’s border wherever it is “disputed or uncertain,” including in Shaba, and created a new mapping commission to do so. The Bush administration subsequently pressured Israel (unsuccessfully) to cede Shaba, bizarrely arguing that rewarding Hezbollah’s aggression would weaken the organization rather than strengthen it.

Beirut clearly learned the lesson: Aggression pays. So now, it’s repeating the tactic. And the Obama administration has adopted its predecessor’s bizarre theory that appeasement will end Lebanon’s aggression rather than encouraging it.

This is particularly irresponsible given the flammable regional context. Hezbollah, which controls Lebanon, has already threatened to go to war with Israel to relieve Western pressure on the Assad regime; Washington has now given it the ideal pretext by assuring it of America’s  backing on this issue.

Moreover, terrorists have just blown up the Egyptian-Israeli gas pipeline for the fourth time in six months. With only 20 percent to 30 percent of the contracted gas from Egypt actually arriving, Israel has had to purchase much more expensive substitutes and now faces an economically brutal 20 percent hike in electricity rates to cover these costs. Israel’s own maritime gas reserves have therefore become critical to its economy, meaning it will presumably fight to defend them.

Thus, by rewarding Lebanon’s aggression, Washington has made war more likely. Can anyone say “smart diplomacy”?

As a longstanding critic of Israel’s legal system, I share many of the concerns voiced at last week’s demonstrations in support of Rabbis Dov Lior and Ya’acov Yosef. So why don’t I support the demonstrations?
At a demonstration last week to protest the police’s detention of two rabbis for questioning over their endorsement of the controversial halachic tract Torat Hamelech, one theme kept recurring: The legal system is biased against religious and right-of-center Jews. Therefore, the rabbis were justified in ignoring a police summons to show up for questioning, and police were wrong to respond by arresting them.

Rabbi Ya’acov Yosef, one of the detained rabbis, asserted bluntly that the Talmudic ruling requiring Jews to obey state law (dina d’malchuta dina) applies only “if everyone is equal under the law,” and that isn’t the case in Israel. Rabbi Haim Druckman was cheered when he called for “setting the prosecution to rights,” adding: “They say everyone is equal before the law. If only that were so.”

Readers familiar with my work will know I’m a longstanding critic of Israel’s legal system. I think the Attorney General’s Office and the courts intervene far too much in political and social issues that are none of their business, and often in a politically biased fashion; I think the judicial appointments system – which gives sitting Supreme Court justices a dominant role in choosing not only their own successors, but all the country’s judges – has created a dangerously monolithic judiciary where dissenting views are rarely heard; and I think the prosecution indeed sometimes demonstrates political and religious bias. Moreover, I favor legislation to change the judicial appointments system and restrict the Supreme Court’s ability to intervene in political issues. So I should be sympathetic to the demonstrators, right?

Wrong. Because while the demonstrators and their rabbis might genuinely think they’re only trying to reform the legal system, in reality, they are trying to destroy it.

Any legal system depends on most people abiding by it voluntarily, leaving the police and courts free to deal with the minority that doesn’t. If the scofflaw faction becomes too big, the legal system will lack the manpower to cope and the system will break down. That’s the whole point of mass civil disobedience: to create the critical mass of lawbreakers needed to make the system collapse.

But such a collapse has grave consequences, because a system struggling to contain a growing mass of ideological lawbreakers must divert scarce resources from dealing with ordinary crimes and civil suits, to the detriment of the general public. Consequently, it should always be a last resort. For blacks in the American south or Gandhi’s followers in colonial India, it was: Shut out of their respective countries’ power structures, they had no possibility of effecting change from within.

But for right-of-center religious Jews (of which I’m one) to make such a claim is ridiculous. Far from being shut out of the power structure, parties representing most of these demonstrators sit in the governing coalition. Thus what they should be doing is working to enact legislation to reform the system – which requires convincing both Knesset members and the public not only that such reforms are necessary, but that they aren’t, as their opponents frequently claim, anti-democratic.

Instead, the demonstrators undermined the cause of reform by lending credence to the anti-democratic charge. After all, they and their rabbis openly declared that they aren’t bound by the democratically enacted law of the land; see Yosef’s assertion above, or protesters’ chant at another demonstration the previous day: “We don’t believe in the rule of the infidels, we take no heed of their laws.” It’s hard to persuade ordinary Israelis that legal reform would make the country more democratic – which it would – when the loudest voices demanding it are openly anti-democratic.

The case is particularly egregious because police were clearly in the right here. No legal system can survive if certain groups are allowed to flout it with impunity; thus the minute Yosef and Rabbi Dov Lior declared that as rabbis, they were exempt from obeying a police summons, police had no choice but to prove that rabbis aren’t above the law. And that’s true even if the initial summonses were unwarranted.

Moreover, as long as the anti-incitement law exists, police must enforce it. And since the law deems inflammatory speech criminal only if it’s likely to lead to actual violence, the question of whether the speaker has followers likely to act on his words is critical. Hence Lior and Yosef, with thousands of followers willing to take to the streets on their behalf, are more justified targets for an inquiry than, say, the Ben-Gurion University professor who last monthurged people to break right-wing activists’ necks, but has no similarly devoted group of followers. And because the police aren’t experts in halacha, they may genuinely have needed to question the rabbis to determine whether this constituted criminal speech: whether the book really advocates killing Arabs, or whether their followers would view their endorsement of it as a call to do so.

But there’s a final, even more disturbing point about this affair, which lies in the protesters’ chant equating Israel’s legal system with “the rule of the infidels.” The implication – and it’s one increasingly heard on the right-wing fringe – is that the Jewish state as it stands now is no better than the non-Jewish states that oppressed Jews for centuries.

That, frankly, is ridiculous. For all the problems with Israel’s legal system, it’s light-years more supportive of Jewish interests than any non-Jewish system. To take just one example: The International Court of Justice, comprising 15 judges from various countries, ruled 14-1 that Israel had no right to build the security fence to protect its citizens from Palestinian suicide bombers. Indeed, it effectively ruled that Israel had no right of self-defense at all. In contrast, while Israel’s Supreme Court has meddled far too much in the fence’s route, it unequivocally upheld Israel’s right to build it, and consistently upholds Israel’s right to self-defense in other cases, too.

For all its flaws, the Jewish state is a great blessing. We should certainly always strive to improve it, but we must also take great care to preserve it. And by failing to make this crystal clear to their followers, the rabbis concerned have failed the entire Jewish people.

In his takedown of the UN report on Israel’s handling of a mass infiltration attempt from Lebanon on Nakba Day (May 15), Max correctly argued that Israel’s priority should be reestablishing deterrence. But in that regard, Israel’s handling of this incident marked a milestone – not only in the narrow sense of being effective (the Lebanese border stayed quiet on Naksa Day three weeks later), but in a far more important sense: For the first time in years, Israel openly declared its willingness to defend its borders.

Under two successive prime ministers in the last decade,Israel effectively gave up on defending its borders. First came Ehud Barak’s refusal to respond to Hezbollah’s cross-border kidnapping of three soldiers in October 2000, just five months afterIsrael’s UN-certified unilateral withdrawal from every inch of Lebanon.  Granted, the second intifada had erupted a week earlier, so the army had its hands full. Nevertheless, this sent a dangerous message: Israelwas either so scared of Hezbollah, or so tired of war, that having left Lebanon with its tail between its legs, it now wouldn’t even defend the internationally recognized border to which it had withdrawn.

Far worse, however, was Ariel Sharon’s repeat of this behavior following Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from every inch of Gaza in 2005. By then, the intifada was largely under control, so military action was certainly feasible. Thus as Dan Kurtzer, then America’s ambassador to Israel, told  the Jerusalem Post last month, he expected “a very serious Israeli response to the first act of violence” from Gaza and told Washington to “be ready to support it,” since the pullout had removed the justification for cross-border violence. Yet Sharon never responded to the ensuing rocket fire from Gaza, and Kurtzer, despite being a vocal dove, was “very surprised” – because this sent a dangerous message:

“All of a sudden people got acclimated to the idea that there can be rocket fire,” he said. “From there it was just a matter of degree: from one rocket a week, to one a day; from one a day, to one and hour – so it escalated.”

Once again, Israel had effectively proclaimed that it was so scared of Hamas, or so tired of war, that it wouldn’t even defend the internationally recognized border to which it had withdrawn.

Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, finally started reversing this trend: He responded to a cross-border raid in 2006 by launching the Second Lebanon War. But even then, as Britain’s Rabbi Jonathan Sacks perceptively noted last month, Israel’s PR focused on the three soldiers Hezbollah had kidnapped rather than “the battle for the country’s existence” – i.e. the need to defend the internationally recognized border to which it had withdrawn. Israel still felt uncomfortable asserting its right to defend its borders.

But on Nakba Day, Israel finally said openly it was ready to defend its borders by force – and proceeded to do so. And it thereby took an important step on the road to restoring its deterrence.

 

With diplomatic efforts to stop this year’s flotilla to Gaza a seeming success, a new myth has arisen: The success of this year’s effort proves Israel could also have stopped last year’s flotilla without bloodshed had it only been a bit smarter. Max implied as much here; Haaretz said it openly. But the sorry truth is Israel’s diplomatic efforts succeeded this time only because of its willingness to use deadly force last year.

Since Israel’s diplomatic efforts failed so utterly last year, they garnered no international attention. But in fact, Israel tried desperately to stop the flotilla peacefully right up until its commandos boarded the ships. It negotiated frantically with Turkey, whose nationals comprised the bulk of the passengers, and even reached an agreement under which the flotilla would dock in Israel and the Turkish Red Crescent would then transfer the cargo to Gaza; but Ankara reneged at the last minute. It begged the countries whence the ships were sailing (Turkey, Greece and Ireland) not to let them depart and urged other Western countries, especially the U.S., to employ their diplomatic leverage. But all to no avail: The unanimous response was democracies can’t bar peaceful demonstrators from sailing the high seas.

So why was it suddenly okay for democratic countries to intervene this year? Because this year, they had an excuse: The intervention was meant to prevent bloodshed. Indeed, officials worldwide said this explicitly. Greek Foreign Minister Stavros Lambrinidis said Greece was barring the ships from departing to prevent the “humanitarian disaster” that might ensue from a confrontation with Israel’s navy. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland explained Washington’s opposition to the flotilla similarly: By seeking to break the naval blockade of Gaza, the ships “are taking irresponsible and provocative actions that risk the safety of their passengers.”

It was also last year’s bloodshed, though for different reasons, that led Ankara to pressure the Turkish organization IHH to withdraw from this year’s flotilla shortly before it was due to sail. IHH, which has close links to Turkey’s government, was the driving force behind last year’s violence; its activists brutally assaulted the Israeli soldiers, forcing them to open fire in self-defense. The problem for Ankara is that a UN panel investigating last year’s flotilla is due to present its findings shortly, and astoundingly, it reportedly concluded that Turkey also bore some responsibility for the deadly outcome. Ankara is now frantically trying to get Israel to agree to soften the wording (both countries are on the panel), so the last thing it needed was for IHH to spark another round of bloodshed.

Like Max, I still think Israel mishandled last year’s interception. Yet it now turns out last year’s violence was necessary to achieve this year’s peaceful resolution. That’s certainly a pity. But it also proves, once again, that “soft power” works best when backed by hard power – and the willingness to use it.