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A public opinion poll released two weeks ago offers an excellent lesson in how the media fosters the myth the Palestinians want peace.
Here, for instance, is how DPA and Haaretz reported the poll; here’s The Media Line’s version; here’s AFP. All correctly reported Palestinians prefer incumbent Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to Hamas’ candidate by a two-to-one margin; the first two also noted that 61 percent want the new unity government to follow Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ peace policies, while only 18 percent favor Hamas’s policies. The clear implication is most Palestinians are moderates who want peace with Israel: They prefer Fayyad to Hamas and Abbas’ stated support for a deal to Hamas’ vocal opposition.
But here’s the finding none of these media outlets bothered to report: Asked what the Palestinians’ “most vital” goals were, 40 percent chose securing “the right of return of refugees to their 1948 towns and villages” as the “second most vital Palestinian goal” and another 26 percent deemed it the “first most vital Palestinian goal.” This issue outpolled all the other options in the second-place slot, while only “end the Israeli occupation” outranked it in the first-place slot.
A “return of refugees to their 1948 towns” – i.e. to pre-1967 Israel – is clearly incompatible with a two-state solution: Relocating 4.8 million refugees and their descendants to pre-1967 Israel would, when combined with Israel’s 1.6 million existing Arab citizens, turn Israel into a second Palestinian-majority state, thereby eliminating the world’s only Jewish one. Yet Abbas cannot concede the “right of return” in negotiations when 66 percent of his people deem it one of the two “most vital Palestinian goals”; no leader anywhere could. Thus as long as most Palestinians view the “right of return” as crucial, no peace agreement will be possible.
Public opinion obviously isn’t immutable, but it often requires a concerted effort to change. On the Israeli side, this effort has been made. Both Israeli and international leaders have told Israelis for two decades they must cede the territories for peace, and it worked: Polls now show most Israelis as being willing to cede virtually all the West Bank, whereas 20 years ago, this was a minority opinion.
But no similar effort has been made on the Palestinian side. Not only has no Palestinian leader ever forthrightly told his people they will have to cede the dream of “return” for peace, but few international leaders have. President Barack Obama’s May 19 policy address, for instance, demanded an Israeli return to the 1967 lines but no Palestinian concession on the refugees; he advocated deferring this whole issue until later. The EU similarly demands an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines but only an unspecified ” just, viable and agreed solution” on the refugees. The hope seems to be ignoring the problem of the refugees will make it go away.
But Palestinian opinion can only be changed by confronting this issue openly. By sweeping it under the rug, the media is ultimately distancing the prospect of peace.
One great mystery of the Palestinian Authority’s bid for recognition as a state in September is why reputable agencies like the World Bank and the IMF would discredit themselves by declaring the PA ready for statehood. That assertion was belied once again this weekend, when Prime Minister Salam Fayyad announced PA employees will get only half their salaries this month because international donors have thus far coughed up only $330 million of the $970 million they pledged, and foreign aid accounts for fully a quarter of the PA budget.
As Omri noted here last month, one requirement for being a functioning state rather than a failed one is being able to pay the bills, so it’s hard to claim the PA is ready for statehood when it depends on donations that frequently don’t materialize. And the Arab states responsible for the current shortfall are serial defaulters on their pledges to the PA.
Indeed, Palestinians themselves don’t consider their government(s) functional, which makes it even harder to see the PA as ready for statehood. Last month, for instance, Gaza residents blocked access to UNRWA summer camps to demand the UN agency rebuild their houses, which were destroyed during the second intifada. They didn’t address this demand to Gaza’s official Hamas-run government. Nor did they address it to the PA, though Hamas and the Fatah-led PA recently signed a unity deal whose stated purposes include reconstructing Gaza. Faced with two Palestinian governments that could credibly be deemed responsible, the demonstrators dismissed them both as useless and pinned their hopes on UNRWA.
Compounding the problem is the fact that continued donations from Western countries – which generally do honor their pledges, and hence constitute the mainstay of the PA’s budget – depend largely on the presence of one man: Fayyad. This is widely recognized by Palestinians: A poll last month found they preferred Fayyad as the unity government’s prime minister by a two-to-one margin over Hamas’ candidate; the pollster attributed this to the belief Fayyad’s presence would reduce or eliminate the danger of international sanctions against the unity government. PA President Mahmoud Abbas also recognizes this. Indeed, he warned Hamas this weekend that its opposition to Fayyad endangered the statehood bid, because “we are subject to very sensitive and fateful conditions.” Translation: To continue donating, the West needs a government with a non-corrupt, non-terrorist facade, and Fayyad is the only man who can provide it.
It’s hard to see how the PA can be deemed ready for statehood if its financial viability depends on the continued tenure of one individual. After all, Fayyad isn’t immortal; what happens if he dies? And it’s especially hard when one partner in the unity government is adamantly demanding his ouster.
In sum, we have a would-be state whose viability depends on unreliable donations plus a single individual whom half his government wants to oust, and whose own citizens don’t see as capable of addressing basic needs. In what conceivable sense does that constitute readiness for statehood?
In last week’s column, I discussed a key reason for the growing disrepute of Israeli intellectuals: that so many openly strive to undermine the Zionist project. This, I noted, has tarred even their pro-Zionist colleagues, due to the latter’s strident defense of the anti-Zionists. But another factor has also badly damaged the credibility of Zionist intellectuals: that their support for the Jewish state too often seems to conditional on its adoption of their policies.
A shocking column by Ari Shavit in Haaretz last month provides a good example. Shavit unquestionably supports the existence of a Jewish state. Yet he nevertheless asserted that the Zionist Left would be willing to fight in Israel’s defense only if Israel adopted the Left’s policies on the peace process.
The clear implication is that had it not been for then-prime minister Ehud Barak’s offer of a Palestinian state at Camp David, the Zionist Left wouldn’t have supported military efforts to stop the second intifada’s deadly terror, and had it not been for then-prime minister Ehud Olmert’s offer of the same at Annapolis, the Zionist Left wouldn’t have supported military efforts to stop the rocket fire on Israel from Gaza – even though both intifada and rocket fire emanated from territory Israel had vacated in obedience to the Left’s policies. Moreover, the article continued, should another war erupt this autumn, the Zionist Left won’t support it, because Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu hasn’t made the requisite diplomatic moves.
I strongly doubt Shavit represents ordinary leftist Zionists; if he did, the number of people refusing to serve in the army for ideological reasons would be far higher than the minuscule figure it actually is. Most ordinary leftists would probably side instead with Major Yoav Te’eni, a 30-year-old reservist who, while serving in Gaza in 2003, argued passionately in a media interview that Israel should evacuate the Gaza settlement of Netzarim, but stressed that despite his personal views, “I feel a duty to serve wherever the state sends me, because that’s the basis of democracy.”
But Shavit definitely does represent a prominent slice of the leftist elite, which often seems willing to honor the state’s democratic decisions only if it approves them. In his book Law and Culture in Israel at the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century, for instance, Prof. Menachem Mautner reported on his study of all petitions submitted to the High Court of Justice by Knesset members from 1977-2005. He found that rightist, religious and Arab MKs generally petitioned over personal grievances. But leftist MKs generally petitioned over policy. In other words, while the Left likes to preach the virtues of democracy, its respect for democracy disappears the moment it loses on the democratic playing field: At that point, it asks the unelected court to overrule the elected legislature’s decisions.
Indeed, much of the leftist elite seems to feel that anyone who dares disagree with it simply doesn’t count as a real Israeli. Hence after then-Labor Party chairman Amram Mitzna was trounced in the 2003 election, his wife Aliza shockingly asserted in a media interview that he lost because “There are a lot of people who are still not flesh of the state’s flesh.” In other words, those who don’t support the Left aren’t really part of the state. Then-Labor Party chairman Shimon Peres, today Israel’s president, voiced the same sentiment in a media interview after losing the 1996 election. Asked what had happened, Peres replied: “We lost … We, that is the Israelis.” And who won? “All those who do not have an Israeli mentality.”
That is also the message of Shavit’s article. “The willingness in the last decade to divide the country has united the nation,” he wrote. It “healed a torn, divided people … It united society and strengthened the state.” And what about those tens of thousands of Israelis who opposed the Oslo Accords, who opposed the Barak and Olmert proposals, who opposed the withdrawal from Gaza, who felt that all these moves were tearing the country apart? In Shavit’s world, they evidently don’t count. Only if government policy alienates the Left is Israel is “torn” and “divided”; policies that alienate the Right “unite the nation” – because to Shavit, non-leftists aren’t actually part of the nation.
Clearly, some on the Right are equally quick to dismiss anyone who disagrees with them as “anti-Zionist” or “un-Jewish,” and this is no less unacceptable. But since most Israeli intellectuals are affiliated with the Left, it is the attitude of the leftist elite that shapes ordinary Israelis’ view of the intelligentsia.
The problem is that the Israeli majority often doesn’t accept the Left’s policy prescriptions. After all, this majority voted for Netanyahu over Peres in 1996 precisely because it was unhappy with the Oslo process – specifically, with the fact that dividing the land caused terrorism to soar. This same majority voted for former prime minister Ariel Sharon over Mitzna in 2003 because it was unhappy with Barak’s Camp David offer and the terrorist war it sparked, and it held Barak’s Labor Party responsible. It then put Netanyahu rather than Tzipi Livni in power in 2009 because it was unhappy with Olmert’s far-reaching peace offer, and held his Kadima party responsible. And this same majority, according to opinion polls, largely supports Netanyahu’s diplomatic policy even today.
Most people will not respect someone who is contemptuously dismissive of them, and consequently, they will have no interest in anything that person might say. Thus if the Israeli intelligentsia is ever to regain credibility among the public, it must stop treating large swathes of that public as non-people who don’t even deserve to be considered part of Israel. And that means it must stop threatening to abandon the Zionist project any time the “non-people” refuse to adopt its policies.
Hillary Clinton’s latest comments on Syria are not only a travesty, but a tragedy. The travesty is self-evident. Bashar al-Assad’s regime has killed more than 1,400 of its own citizens, detained more than 10,000 and displaced tens of thousands; it has laid brutal siege to its own cities, depriving them of water and electricity for days on end; it has hideously tortured 13-year-old boys – and all the secretary of state can find to say is Assad is “running out of time” to start “a serious political process”? What further brutality does the Syrian regime have to commit for Barack Obama’s government to acknowledge it can’t be reformed, it can only be replaced?
The tragedy is that this pusillanimity actually reduces the likelihood of Assad’s regime being replaced with something better. Last month, Haaretz‘s Arab affairs analyst reported the Syrian opposition’s main goal was to get the West, and especially Washington, to come out clearly against Assad, because it believed a U.S. demand for Assad’s departure would encourage Syrian army officers to switch sides. And without the army’s support, Assad couldn’t survive.
Whether opposition activists are right in this assessment of Washington’s influence is unclear. But since they know the Syrian regime better than any Westerner does, it can hardly be dismissed out of hand.
Nor are Syrian activists alone in thinking the U.S. president can make a difference via his bully pulpit: During the mass demonstrations by Iran’s Green Movement in 2009, demonstrators reportedly chanted, “Obama: either with the murderers or with us.” Then too, those on the front lines clearly thought his public support would help them. Again, nobody knows if they were right. But we do know Obama refused; he never openly backed the demonstrators. And we also know the revolution subsequently failed.
In contrast, Obama did explicitly demand Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation quite early into Egypt’s revolution. And that revolution succeeded; Mubarak was ousted (though whether Egypt will now be a better place remains an open question).
What makes this behavior so bizarre is that Mubarak, for all his faults, was an American ally, whereas Syria’s government, like Iran’s, is an implacable American enemy. Damascus is Tehran’s most loyal ally; it gave free passage to terrorists entering Iraq to fight American troops, and by lavishly arming Hezbollah in Lebanon, it enabled Hezbollah to overthrow Saad Hariri’s U.S.-backed government. Thus, by demanding Mubarak’s ouster, Obama risked alienating an ally if the revolution failed. But siding with the Syrian or Iranian opposition would risk nothing. Both countries’ existing governments work tirelessly to thwart U.S. interests anyway, so things could hardly get worse.
Often, America must choose between its interests and its values. But in Syria, the two are perfectly aligned. Obama is opting to be on the wrong side of both.
If you want to know the real obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace, take a look at what Israel’s “peace partner” is doing in the Balata refugee camp near Nablus. Taysir Nasrallah, a senior member of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party who is currently director-general of the Nablus governor’s office, gave Haaretzreporter Avi Issacharoff a tour of Balata’s seven-year-old community center this week. And while the term “community center” evokes images of peaceful, wholesome activity, what’s actually going on there, by Nasrallah’s own proud account, is anything but:
“We give the kids courses on the right of return and teach them that the Israelis stole their lands. We’ve sent hundreds of camp children into Israel to see the villages and towns that were taken from us. We took them to Jaffa, Ramle.
“Our message is that without a doubt they will return to the places from which they were driven out,” he says.
Jaffa and Ramle aren’t West Bank settlements; they are towns in pre-1967 Israel. And these are the locales Israel’s “peace partner” is teaching Palestinian children to consider their own. Indeed, Issacharoff reported, Nasrallah’s “dream is to have the [community] center move to Jaffa when the day comes”; hence its name: the Jaffa Center. Moreover, children are regularly assigned presentations involving a map of Israel, but “for them it has always been and remains the map of Palestine.”
Then there’s the fact the children are being taught “Israelis stole their lands” – in other words, that Jews have no right to a state in any portion of what is today Israel; they are thieves who must be stripped of their ill-gotten gains. That’s hardly a message conducive to peaceful coexistence.
Nor is the effort to indoctrinate them into demanding a “right of return” – a euphemism for flooding pre-1967 Israel with 4.8 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants who, together with Israel’s 1.6 million Arab citizens, would outnumber its 5.8 million Jews and turn the Jewish state into a second Palestinian one (the first being the judenrein Palestinian state slated for the West Bank and Gaza).
And remember, this isn’t Hamas conducting these indoctrination sessions: It’s Israel’s “peace partner,” the “moderate” Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. Moreover, the PA is targeting precisely those youths it sees as future leaders. Just this week, Issacharoff reported, 35 children completed a leadership course at the center.
It ought to be obvious peace will never be possible as long as even Palestinian “moderates” insist Jews have no right to statehood in any part of this land, that Palestinians should seek to obtain pre-1967 Israel as well as the West Bank and Gaza, and that pre-1967 Israel should become another Arab-majority state instead of a Jewish one. Indeed, this is obvious to most Israelis; that’s why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu keeps reiterating that Palestinian recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is the key to peace.
Unfortunately, most Westerners still don’t seem to get it, and that’s precisely why all their efforts to broker a deal keep failing. To solve any problem, you first have to acknowledge its existence.
All those Westerners who deem Israel “the greatest threat to world peace” ought to read a fascinating story in the Guardian yesterday: A senior Saudi official informed the paper that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia will be forced to follow suit.
“We cannot live in a situation where Iran has nuclear weapons and we don’t. It’s as simple as that,” the official said. “If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, that will be unacceptable to us and we will have to follow suit.”
Why is this noteworthy? Because Israel is widely thought to have had nuclear weapons for almost 50 years now. Yet Riyadh never felt that Israel’s alleged nukes were threatening enough to necessitate acquiring its own nuclear deterrent, even though it has been formally at war with the Jewish state since Israel’s creation and has no diplomatic relations with it. Iran, in contrast, is a fellow Muslim state with which Riyadh has full diplomatic relations; they also share membership in groups like OPEC and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Yet Saudi Arabia deems Tehran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons so threatening as to require an immediate response in kind.
The reason for this seeming paradox is simple: Because they live in the region, Saudi officials know what too many Westerners seem to have forgotten: Israel has never once attacked anyone that didn’t attack it first. And since Saudi Arabia, for all its anti-Israel rhetoric, has not actually participated in anti-Israel hostilities since 1948, it knows it’s perfectly safe from whatever military capabilities Israel has. Iran, in contrast, has a record of unprovoked military meddling outside its borders even without the immunity nuclear weapons would bring. For instance, it offers extensive military support to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and Shi’ite militias in Iraq – all three of which have fomented civil wars in their respective territories, while the first two have fomented cross-border wars as well. Thus, a nuclear-armed Iran would be a real threat.
Why do so many Westerners seem ignorant of what Saudi officials know about Israel’s nonaggression? For this, Western media bear much of the blame. Consider just one typical example – Ethan Bronner’s New York Times piece this week on Gaza’s agricultural revival, in which former World Bank President James Wolfensohn recalled his dashed hopes for a thriving agriculture business in Gaza following Israel’s 2005 withdrawal:
But between the looting, security delays and corruption of border guards — both Israeli and Palestinian, he noted — and then after Israel’s three-week offensive in 2008-9 and the naval blockade, the economy fell apart.
Note what’s missing in this description of Bronner’s: the roughly 6,000 rockets and mortars Palestinians fired at southern Israel from Gaza in the three years following the withdrawal. This rocket fire was the reason for both the military offensive and the blockade. But an uninformed reader would never know it: He would conclude from this piece that Israel was guilty of unprovoked aggression, having launched a military offensive and imposed a naval blockade (which is also an act of war) for no reason at all.
But actions, they say, speak louder than words. And the vast difference in Riyadh’s response to Iranian versus Israeli nukes speaks volumes about the true threat to peace in the Middle East.
Writing in these pages last week, Emmanuel Navon dissected a lengthy lament by Israeli intellectuals that appeared in Haaretz earlier this month, in which they mourned “the decline in the intellectual’s public value” and sought to explain it. Some of their explanations were simply nonsensical: Far from needing to conform lest a “vengeful” public “hit him in the pocket,” for instance, the average tenured Israeli academic enjoys far more financial security than many great intellectuals of previous centuries. Others, like the claim that television’s sound-bite culture has reduced public interest in sustained intellectual argument, have some validity, but as Navon noted, these don’t explain why intellectuals in other countries (he cited France’s Bernard-Henri Levy as an example) do still seem to command public attention.
Navon correctly identified one important factor that Haaretz‘s interviewees studiously ignored: their disregard of reality. As he noted, mantras like “the occupation is the source of all evil” and “the advent of peace depends on Israel alone” might have seemed daring and intriguing two decades ago, but few Israelis find them even remotely persuasive now, after the Palestinians have rejected three separate offers of a state in virtually all the territories; after Israel’s serial withdrawals – from large parts of West Bank in 1994-95, from Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005 – produced not peace, but, respectively, the second intifada, the Second Lebanon War and years of rocket fire on southern Israel; and after even the most “moderate” Palestinians have repeatedly refused to recognize the Jewish state or give up their dream of destroying it demographically via a mass influx of Palestinian refugees.
Jewish peoplehood racked up a small victory last week, when IDF Chief of Gen. Staff Benny Gantz ruled that the memorial prayer for fallen soldiers recited at Israel’s official memorial ceremonies will be the traditional Yizkor prayer recited in synagogues worldwide for millennia, rather than a modified Israeli version written in the last century.The decision, unsurprisingly, has radical secularists up in arms, because while the Israeli version begins “May the people of Israel remember” (Yizkor Am Yisrael), the traditional version reads “May God remember” (Yizkor Elokim). The left-wing newspaper Haaretz, for instance, thundered in an editorial that this is part and parcel of Israel’s transformation “from a secular country into a theocracy.” Haaretz columnist Nehemia Shtrasler similarly bemoaned it as reflecting “the deep change the state has undergone in its 63 years,” from “a secular state” to “a state where the rabbis rule.”
This, clearly, is ridiculous. Yizkor Elokim is simply the traditional Jewish memorial prayer, the one even secular Jews recite in memory of their loved ones if, for instance, they attend synagogue on Yom Kippur. They do so not because they believe in God, but because they see themselves as part of the Jewish people, and Yizkor is the traditional way for Jews to remember their dead. That is also why most secular Jews recite the Kaddish prayer – whose opening line is “Magnified and sanctified be His [God’s] great name” – at a relative’s funeral: not because they believe in God and want to sanctify His name, but because they are Jews, and this is part of the traditional Jewish burial ceremony.
Indeed, if you accept the logic that any state appropriation of Jewish tradition amounts to theocracy, you would have to decree, for instance, that Jewish festivals such as Passover and Sukkot should no longer be national holidays and Saturday should cease to be Israel’s weekly day of rest. After all, the only reason these particular days became part of Jewish tradition is because God so commanded the Jewish people in the Torah. Yet Israel’s secular founding fathers clearly did not view adoption of these holidays as tantamount to acknowledging God’s existence and the validity of His commandments; they merely viewed it as a way to root the new state in Jewish history and to create the emotional ties with Diaspora Jewry mandated by their view of Israel as the Jewish people’s national home. Adopting the traditional Jewish memorial prayer as the state’s own is no different.
But opponents also have what at first glance seems a more serious argument. As the Haaretz editorial put it, “Most of the young people who fell in battle did not go to war in the name of God; many of them don’t even believe in God. They went to war to defend their homeland, their nation and their families, not because of religious conviction, and they want the nation of Israel – not God – to remember them.” Indeed, the whole point of the state memorial ceremony is that Israel’s citizens should remember those who gave their lives in Israel’s defense. So isn’t the formulation Yizkor Am Yisrael actually more appropriate?
This is where the issue of peoplehood comes in. For if you view Israel as a state that belongs exclusively to its own citizens, one with no special ties to the broader Jewish people, then there’s no reason for it not to have a unique memorial prayer aimed exclusively at those citizens, instead of the one recited in every Jewish synagogue of every denomination the world over. But if you see it as the nation-state of the Jewish people, a country that retains vibrant ties with world Jewry in addition to serving its own citizens, then Israel cannot sever itself from Jewish tradition in this fashion – for it is precisely Jewish tradition that maintains these ties.
It is only the fact that Israelis and Diaspora Jews observe the same holidays, maintain the same life-cycle traditions (circumcision, bar-mitzvah, etc.), bury their dead in the same way and, yes, recite the same prayers at those moments where prayer is called for that enables Diaspora Jews to look at Israel and say, “even when I disagree with its policies, I have a connection to this country that I lack with any other country.” You could satisfy every Diaspora Jewish policy wish tomorrow – sign a peace treaty with every Arab country, create a model welfare state – and still not create such a link, because none of that would make Israel unique in the eyes of Diaspora Jews. After all, most Western countries also have peace with their neighbors and generous welfare states. It is only our common bond as Jews that can possibly maintain this link – and our shared Jewish traditions are the tangible expression of this bond.
Thus adopting the traditional formulation of Yizkor is not a way of imposing God on those who don’t believe in Him, but of restoring Israel to its rightful place as part of the broader Jewish people. Because of this bond, there are synagogues worldwide, of every denomination, that recite a special Yizkor prayer for Israeli soldiers at every service where memorial prayers are said. Now, at last, that prayer will be the same as the one recited at official Israeli ceremonies. And if we are indeed all one people, that is how it should be.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly, head of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, announced yesterday Israeli missile defense systems will be integrated into a planned U.S. regional defense array, where they will help protect U.S. forces in the Middle East and, perhaps, also Arab allies of America that don’t even have diplomatic relations with Israel. These systems – the Arrow for defense against ballistic missiles, Iron Dome and Magic Wand for shorter-range rockets – are a product of the close American-Israeli alliance: They were developed with generous American funding and in cooperation with American companies, but the technology is primarily Israeli. Now, that technology will be used to save American lives.
Last week, Col. Richard Kemp of the British army related that Israeli know-how is also saving British lives. In 2003, Kemp commanded the British forces in Afghanistan, which were confronting a weapon they had never faced before: suicide bombers. So he called Israel for help. Two days later, an Israeli brigadier general was in London giving him a four-hour briefing on everything Israel had learned from its years of dealing with suicide bombers. “It was from that meeting that my policy for countering suicide bombers in Afghanistan was devised – a policy that was subsequently adopted by all British forces, and has saved lives,” Kemp concluded.
There are, of course, dozens of similar examples. Israeli technologies helped protect U.S. forces in Iraq against Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). An Israel Defense Forces laboratory for analyzing IEDs has shared its expertise with numerous countries fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the U.S., Britain, Germany and Italy. Nor, of course, is Israel’s benefit to the West limited to military issues: Israeli technology is found in most computers and cell phones, for instance, while Israeli companies have created tens of thousands of jobs in America.
All this should not even need to be said: After all, that’s how allies are supposed to act. But at a time when most of Europe openly views Israel as a principal obstacle to world peace, and even respected voices in America’s foreign policy establishment (mainly of the “realist” school) assert the alliance with Israel provides few strategic benefits compared to its costs, it’s worth recalling the truth: Israel and the West are fighting a common enemy – radical Islam. But due to its location, Israel has been on the front lines of this battle for longer than other Western countries, and thus has painfully acquired expertise from which its allies derive enormous benefit every day.
If you believe Islamist terror would magically disappear if Israel did – that the London Underground, Indonesian nightclubs, Pakistani hospitals and American naval ships would never again be bombed if it weren’t for Israel – then of course, Israel’s contribution to this war is meaningless. But anyone who grasps the ludicrousness of that belief ought to recognize Israel’s vital role in helping the West minimize its casualties in what seems likely to be a long war.
A police representative announced in court last month that Jerusalem’s Mea She’arim neighborhood has become a no-go zone for the men in blue. Every time police enter, the official explained, they encounter violence from ultra-Orthodox extremists. And that is why they failed to arrest a criminal suspect for over a month despite knowing exactly where in the neighborhood he was.
Nor is Mea She’arim the only place where police face such problems. Many Arab towns and neighborhoods have similarly been declared no-go zones because police operations there routinely spark violence. Jewish extremists in the West Bank seem to be trying to gain the settlements such status as well: They regularly attack soldiers and policemen enforcing the planning and building laws.
But the police’s decision to deal with this problem by simply throwing up their hands and staying away is unconscionable. First, it’s a betrayal of the very people they are sworn to protect – the decent, law-abiding citizens who comprise the vast majority of residents in all of these locales. As Kalansua Mayor Mahmoud Hadija complained in October after his brother was killed, criminals “know that whatever they do, the police won’t investigate,” leaving ordinary citizens defenseless against them.
Moreover, by proving that violence works, this response merely encourages other groups of extremists to adopt the same tactic. As a result, more and more of the country is becoming a no-go zone.
Nor can police credibly claim to have no alternative. In fact, despite certain obvious differences, there’s an applicable model that has racked up stunning success right here in Israel over the last decade: the Shin Bet security service’s approach to the second intifada.
When the intifada erupted in 2000, there was a fierce debate between the army and the Shin Bet over how to deal with it. The army essentially accepted the dogma that it makes no difference how many terrorists you kill or put behind bars, because the supply of replacements is endless. In the popular phrase of those days, it’s like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.
But then-Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter insisted otherwise. He argued that the more terrorists you capture or kill, the more potential recruits will decide that the risks outweigh the rewards and that terrorism doesn’t pay. Thus arresting or killing terrorists not only reduces the number of current terrorists; it also dries up the supply of replacements.
Every Israeli knows who won this argument: Terror-related fatalities fell from a peak of 450 in 2002 to just 13 by 2007. It turns out you really can empty that ocean.
Police, of course, don’t have the option of killing the violent extremists who have turned places like Mea She’arim into no-go zones. But killing actually played a minor role in Israel’s counterterrorism strategy. At most, around 3,000 terrorists were killed during the intifada (not counting civilian deaths). In contrast, the Palestinian Authority claims that 70,000 Palestinians were arrested at some point during those years (Israel publishes no statistics on this issue). And even if that number is exaggerated, the true figure is certainly in the tens of thousands.
Today, 11 years after the intifada began, Israeli jails still hold an estimated 6,000 to 7,000 Palestinian prisoners. Yet most of those arrested have already been freed: They were either briefly detained for questioning or convicted of crimes carrying relatively short sentences that have long since expired.
Widespread arrests clearly are within the police’s capability; all it takes is enough boots on the ground to make it happen. And here, too, the intifada provides the model. When Israel launched its counterterrorism offensive in March 2002, it flooded the West Bank with troops. But by last year, Israeli troop levels in the West Bank were at their lowest point since the first intifada began in 1987. With the terrorist ocean having largely been emptied, high troop levels are no longer needed.
Thus instead of declaring places like Mea She’arim no-go zones, what police ought to be doing is entering with massive force – enough not only to protect themselves, but to make widespread arrests of those responsible. They then need to prosecute significant numbers of those arrested (bringing cameramen to document the violence might help).
Initially, widespread arrests and prosecutions might well inflame tempers and lead to even more violence. But if police persist with this method of massive troop levels, large-scale arrests and multiple prosecutions, would-be extremists will eventually conclude that violence doesn’t pay, just as Palestinians in the West Bank did. And then, it will possible to bring manpower levels in these areas back to normal. In contrast, if those arrested are simply let go, the extremists will conclude that violence carries no price, giving them an incentive to escalate it in the hopes of getting the police to back off.
Moreover, such an effort would reduce the risk of other Israeli groups adopting similar tactics. Most of those who use violence against policemen, whether in Arab towns, settlement outposts or ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, don’t do so because they are addicted to violence or because they are martyrs willing to be jailed for their cause, but because they have seen that it effectively deters the police from demolishing illegal homes, arresting neighborhood residents, conducting autopsies or whatever the cause de jour without the perpetrators paying any serious price. If people instead see that not only aren’t the police deterred, but the perpetrators end up going to jail, the number of Israelis willing to consider using violence to achieve their goals will rapidly decline.
Clearly, however, a policy that entails massive manpower levels, a short-term rise in violence and large-scale arrests cannot be implemented without political backing. Thus ultimately, solving the problem of these no-go zones is the government’s responsibility. And given how little interest most Israeli politicians have shown in law-and-order issues, it’s likely to be a long wait.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.