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In 2007, the self-proclaimed Quartet of Middle East peace negotiators (comprising the U.S., UN, EU, and Russia) appointed former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as its envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, financing his salary, office, staff, expenses, etc. Four years later, two conclusions are inevitable. First, the Quartet has been well-served; Blair’s situation assessments are often far more accurate than anything Quartet members seem to get from their own diplomats. Second, the Quartet is wasting its money — because his advice is steadfastly ignored.
This week, for instance, Blair warned that the Arab Spring, far from making Israeli-Palestinian peace talks more urgent, makes them almost impossible. Israel no longer knows what regional threats it may face, he explained, while Palestinian leaders will have trouble making “difficult compromises which will be tough to sell, in circumstances where they don’t know the regional context into which such compromises will be played.”
That should be obvious. After decades of stable peace with Egypt and a quiet border with Syria, Israel today enjoys neither. The past month saw two mass infiltration attempts along the Syrian border, while the signs from Egypt are worrying: The Muslim Brotherhood, as the best-organized political movement, is likely to increase its influence significantly in this fall’s planned election; Egypt has already repeatedly violated one agreement with Israel; even secular, Western-oriented politicians want to “renegotiate” the peace treaty out of existence; and 54 percent of Egyptians want it abrogated altogether.
Under these circumstances, how could Israel withdraw from the West Bank — its only remaining stable front — when its two previous withdrawals, from southern Lebanon and Gaza, both resulted in terrorist organizations (Hezbollah and Hamas, respectively) taking over and using these areas as bases for launching rockets at Israel?
Moreover, how can the Palestinian Authority make concessions when it doesn’t know whether the new Egyptian government will support it or denounce it as a traitor? Just this week, for instance, Amr Moussa, widely considered Egypt’s leading presidential contender, said he favored Israeli-Palestinian peace, but “not at any price” — a sharp departure from Egypt’s previous willingness to accept any agreement the Palestinians make, and a clear warning that he may oppose Palestinian concessions.
Similarly, how can the PA concede the refugees’ “right of return” when Damascus, which has sought to distract attention from its repression of pro-democracy protests by using Palestinian refugees in Syria against Israel, would undoubtedly use them against the PA for the same purpose?
But instead of recognizing these obvious facts, France is pushing a plan to resume negotiations in Paris this fall, while the U.S. is working on its own plan for autumn talks in Washington. That both also propose a formula entirely unacceptable to Israel — requiring it to cede the entire West Bank without any Palestinian concession on the refugees in exchange, in line with Barack Obama’s May 19 speech — is mere icing on the cake.
It would be better if the Quartet actually took Blair’s advice. But since it won’t, it may as well at least stop wasting money on an unheeded envoy.
In the latest issue of the Shalem Center’s journal Azure, editor-in-chief Assaf Sagiv lambastes what he terms Israelis’ “disdain for democracy.” His chief gripe, based on how much space he devotes to it, seems to be Israel’s response to the recent Arab revolutions; that Israelis insist on worrying about the possible consequences instead of applauding the revolutionaries wholeheartedly is, to his mind, evidence of an “anti-democratic mood” rather than rational concern rooted in countless historical precedents of revolutions gone sour (for starters, recall the French, Russian and Iranian ones).
But he also cites evidence that at first glance seems far more credible, and that many Israeli intellectuals have used to level the same charge: the 2010 Israel Democracy Index, in which 60% of respondents voiced a yearning for “strong leadership” that would solve problems effectively and 55% said Israel’s situation would be better if less attention were paid to “the principles of democracy” and more to “observing the law” and “public order.”
That, however, is not a marginal point; it’s the key to the whole issue. For while bad autocracies are simply disasters (think Zimbabwe or North Korea), “good” autocracies do offer certain advantages alongside their drawbacks.
For instance, democracies are notoriously bad at long-range planning; facing reelection every few years inevitably leads politicians to focus on the short term rather than the long. In contrast, “good” autocracies often excel at long-range planning. Think Singapore, which in a few short decades transformed itself from a colonial backwater to a first-world country that consistently outperforms Israel on everything from per capita income to student test scores, or post-Mao China, which has raised hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty in recent decades. Indeed, it’s no accident that many of Israel’s most beneficial long-term investments, from the national water carrier to the universities, took place during the state’s first three decades, when the governing Mapai party had no real rival and thus didn’t worry much about reelection.
What democracies offer in exchange is, first, freedom from fear: No Israeli who criticizes his government will be jailed for years on trumped-up charges as Chinese dissidents routinely are.
But perhaps even more importantly, democracies satisfy a deep-seated human craving for autonomy, for the ability to exercise some control over one’s own life. The bargain they offer their citizens is, essentially, this: You’ll put up with the inefficiency inherent in frequent changes of government and fractious parliaments where passing anything requires messy compromises, but in exchange, you’ll have the ability to affect what your government does, what decisions it makes, where it leads the country.
Thus a democracy where most people feel they lack that ability has betrayed its side of the bargain. And when that happens, it’s inevitable that despairing citizens will begin thinking, “in that case, maybe a ‘strong leader’ would be preferable. At least the trains would run on time.”
This isn’t a problem that can be solved by spuriously accusing Israelis of anti-democratic tendencies; it can only be solved by addressing the underlying causes of their feeling of disenfranchisement. For this feeling is not groundless; it’s rooted in a very real flaw in Israel’s democracy: an electoral system that provides no mechanism for throwing the bastards out.
The way voters influence policy in most democracies is by the threat that a politician who defies their wishes won’t be reelected. But because Israel is one of the last remaining democracies where voters still elect parties rather than individuals, Israelis lack the ability to make such threats.
It doesn’t matter how much Israelis might loath Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu or opposition leader Tzipi Livni, for instance; as long as they head their respective parties, they are guaranteed reelection. Disappointed voters can slash the number of seats a party receives, but those at the top of the list will still get in.
Similarly, it doesn’t matter how much Israelis might like an energetic back-bencher who proved a principled and effective legislator; if disappointment with those at the top of the party’s slate results in the party losing seats, those farther down the list will lose their jobs.
Thus Israeli leaders can defy their voters with impunity – and often do. Ariel Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza after campaigning explicitly on a pledge not to do so is a prime example. And this merely deepens voters’ sense that their vote is meaningless.
As a result, Israelis are increasingly choosing one of three options: not voting at all (turnout has decreased from around 80% in the state’s first half-century to under 65% in three of the last four elections), voting for fringe parties that either fail to enter the Knesset or win a few seats but exert no influence, or voting for a mainstream party while loathing everyone in it. As one voter said of his decision to vote for Livni’s Kadima party in 2009, “I think her party is atrocious, it has terrible people in it, but I had no choice”: It was the only real alternative to Likud. None of the above options are conducive to bolstering Israelis’ faith in the merits of democracy.
Israelis’ “anti-democratic mood” stems from the objective fact that Israeli democracy isn’t delivering democracy’s chief good: enabling the public to influence policy. Unless that problem is solved, no amount of scolding will reverse this mood. And there’s only one way to solve it: by reforming the electoral system so that Israelis can finally elect their MKs directly, just as voters in other democracies do.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Palestinian society has produced no shortage of people willing to die for the cause of destroying Israel. So it’s encouraging to discover that not all Palestinians relish the role of cannon fodder. A day after as many as 23 were killed in Sunday’s attempt to storm Israel’s border (if you believe Syrian government figures), thousands of angry mourners turned on their own leaders in Syria’s Yarmouk refugee camp.
The mourners reportedly attacked the headquarters of the Palestinian terrorist group PFLP-GC, accusing its leaders of endangering their lives by sending them into the line of fire. When Hamas leader Khaled Meshal came to offer condolences, they reportedly assailed him too. The result was predictable: PFLP-GC security guards opened fire on their own people, killing 14 and wounding 43.
Yet shouldn’t Yarmouk residents have known that storming Israel’s border would be dangerous? Syria’s state-controlled media may be mum on the Assad government’s violence against its own people, but they avidly covered the death of four Palestinian-Syrians in the last such attempt, just three weeks ago. The obvious conclusion is that either the terrorists controlling Yarmouk maintain an even tighter information clampdown than Assad’s government, or they gave residents little choice about getting on those buses to the border. Either way, the PFLP-GC clearly rules Yarmouk with an iron first and has no qualms about sacrificing ordinary Palestinians’ lives to delegitimize Israel.
In this, unfortunately, the PFLP-GC isn’t unusual. Palestinians have always been ill-served by their leadership–and that includes the West’s current darlings, Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad. Granted, their government has significantly improved the West Bank economy and law enforcement. But it has yet to resettle a single Palestinian refugee, though almost 700,000 inhabit squalid West Bank refugee camps. Nor has it attempted to get putative allies like Jordan, Syria and Lebanon to ease the often appalling conditions of Palestinian refugees there. And its recent reconciliation agreement with Hamas included no provision for resettling the 500,000 living in Hamas-run Gaza’s refugee camps. The Abbas-Fayyad government would rather condemn the refugees to ongoing misery than give up the fantasy of someday destroying the Jewish state by resettling all 4.8 million of them in Israel
For the same reason, they are now relentlessly pursuing unilateral statehood rather than accepting Israel’s repeated offers of statehood by agreement. A recent poll found that 70 percent of Palestinians expect a new intifada to erupt if negotiations reach an impasse, which they inevitably will as long as Abbas refuses even to meet with Israeli leaders while pursuing a unilateral strategy that won’t actually remove a single Israeli from the West Bank. Hundreds of Palestinians died in the first intifada and thousands in the second; a third would likely prove equally deadly. But such numbers evidently do not trouble Abbas and Fayyad as long as unilateral statehood effectively serves their campaign to delegitimize Israel.
The real question is when a critical mass of Palestinians will finally tire of serving as cannon fodder in the quest for Israel’s destruction. For only once this happens will peace become possible.
Hundreds of Palestinian residents of Syria tried to storm Israel’s border for the second time in three weeks yesterday to mark “Naksa Day,” the Arabic term for Israel’s 1967 victory over the Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian armies. The Syrian government’s interest in allowing them to reach the border, normally a closed military zone, is obvious. Bashar al-Assad hoped to distract attention from his ongoing massacre of pro-democracy protesters. But what were the Palestinians themselves trying to achieve?
To Western journalists and diplomats, the answer is equally obvious. The goal was to increase pressure on Israel to accede to a Palestinian state in the 1967 lines. But according to Dr. Sabri Saidam, a former Palestinian communications minister and self-described Internet guru, that isn’t what Palestinians themselves are saying.
Young Palestinians, he asserted in an interview with Haaretz last week, are more committed than ever before, but most of them “are not talking about the peace process or the Arab [peace] initiative or the 1967 borders.” So if they have no interest in the peace process or the 1967 borders, what exactly are they committed to?
Their commitment, Saidam enthusiastically declared, is epitomized by the young Syrian-Palestinian–one of hundreds who successfully breached Israel’s borders on May 15–who triumphantly made it all the way to Jaffa. In short, young Palestinians aren’t committed to a state in the 1967 lines; what they are seeking is a “return” to pre-1967 Israel–towns like Jaffa and Haifa and Safed. And as everyone knows, allowing 4.8 million Palestinians to “return” to pre-1967 Israel would spell the demise of the Jewish state.
That, of course, is also the official position of Israel’s Palestinian “peace partner,” as I detailed here. But even if you assume, as Western journalists and diplomats blithely do, that this is a mere bargaining chip which the Palestinian leadership plans to sacrifice for a state in the 1967 lines, how do they imagine any Palestinian leader will be able to do so when his public views “returning” to pre-1967 Israel not as a bargaining chip, but as the primary goal?
In a recent column on Naksa Day in the Syrian government newspaper Al-Baath, columnist Ahmad Hassan summarized the goal bluntly:
This is not the “Middle East conflict”; it is the Israeli-Arab conflict. It is not a border conflict . . . it is a struggle for survival. . . . Neither we nor the entire region has a natural future in the shadow of Israeli existence, and there is no place for Israel in our natural future or that of the region.
Indeed, this point is inherent in the very name “Naksa Day.” The word naksa means “setback.” And what goal was set back when the Arabs failed to defeat Israel in 1967, at a time when it controlled none of what are now termed the “occupied territories”? Clearly, the goal of eradicating pre-1967 Israel.
Not all Arabs still want to turn the clock back to the days before Israel existed. But a great many do. And that’s precisely why Palestinians have said “no” to every offer of statehood since 1947.
Testifying at his corruption trial yesterday, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert asserted that, if only he had not been forced to resign by the multiple police investigations against him, there would already be an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
“I know how close we were and what was at stake,” Olmert told the court. “We stood on a brink that could have changed life here. But I also know that such decisions cannot be made when a black cloud is overshadowing your life.”
Olmert has propagated this myth with great success ever since leaving office in March 2009. Indeed, the standard narrative in the international media today, and in parts of Israel’s media as well, is that the sides were near agreement in autumn 2008 when Olmert’s legal woes interrupted the talks.
Even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas backed this narrative once Olmert was safely out of office and he was spared the danger of actually having to accept the prime minister’s September 2008 offer–conveniently forgetting that at the time, he never even bothered to respond to it, and later told the Washington Post‘s Jackson Diehl that this was because “the gaps were wide.”
Those “wide gaps,” incidentally, followed Olmert’s offer of the equivalent (after swaps) of 100 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, including East Jerusalem; international Muslim control of Jerusalem’s Holy Basin, even including the Western Wall; and resettlement in Israel of 20,000 Palestinian refugees–the most generous offer any Israeli leader has ever made and one unlikely ever to be bettered. In other words, there never was any chance of an agreement. Yet the myth that the sides were “on the brink” has nevertheless gained wide currency.
Of course, this is merely a new incarnation of the myth’s original version: that if only Yitzhak Rabin hadn’t been assassinated in November 1995, he would have made peace.
In reality, Rabin most likely wouldn’t even have won the following year’s election. Throughout much of 1995, polls showed him “seriously trailing” his rival, Benjamin Netanyahu. And the main reason for this was that his September 1993 Oslo Accord produced not peace, but a wave of terror. In the following two and half years, more Israelis were killed by Palestinian terror than in the entire preceding decade. In response, as Oslo architect Yair Hirschfeld admitted in a 2009 interview with Haaretz‘s Akiva Eldar, Rabin’s popularity rating plummeted from 90 percent in September 1993 to 22 percent a year later.
But the real problem with these myths is less their historical inaccuracy than the way they distort the future. The delusion that peace would have been achieved if only Rabin hadn’t been killed or Olmert indicted implies that any Israeli prime minister in fact has the power to achieve peace. And if he doesn’t, the fault is clearly Israel’s. This in turn enables its adherents to ignore the true cause of the ongoing failure to reach an agreement: Palestinian rejectionism.
And unless the world stops ignoring this root cause and begins seriously addressing it, peace will never be possible.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must be laughing his head off. As Abe noted yesterday, the latest International Atomic Energy Agency report unveiled evidence that Iran has been working on technology to arm its missiles with nuclear warheads. It also disclosed evidence of Tehran’s work “on a highly sophisticated nuclear triggering technology that experts said could be used for only one purpose: setting off a nuclear weapon.” If a smoking gun were needed, this is it.
Yet the “international community” hasn’t uttered a peep about the report. It’s too busy obsessing over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict instead.
Two days after the report’s publication, the G8 met in Deauville. Its concluding statement devoted six paragraphs to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, notable for both their specificity (“we express our strong support for the vision of Israeli-Palestinian peace outlined by President Obama on May 19, 2011”) and their urgency (“The time to resume the Peace Process is now.”)
In contrast, Iran’s nukes merited exactly one content-free paragraph:
We note with deep concern the recent report by the IAEA which underlines that Iran is not implementing a number of its obligations, that areas of concern remain regarding possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programme and that the Agency is therefore unable to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities. . . . We regret that while Iran finally met twice with China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union High Representative, following their intensive diplomatic efforts and the adoption of measures in UNSCR 1929, it was not possible to reach any substantive result, Iran having not yet entered into a genuine dialogue without preconditions. Depending on Iran’s actions, we will determine the need for additional measures in line with the dual-track approach.
Translation: At some unspecified future time, the G8 may–but then again it may not–decide on some unspecified new measures against Iran. But there’s no hurry, because it still hasn’t even concluded that Iran is pursuing nukes. The G8 is merely “unable to conclude” the opposite.
The same warped perspective characterized Obama’s May 19 speech. Granted, it predated the latest IAEA report, but Iran’s nuclear program isn’t new. Yet in a major Middle East policy address, Obama devoted exactly half a sentence to it: “Our opposition to Iran’s intolerance and Iran’s repressive measures, as well as its illicit nuclear program and its support of terror, is well known.” No hint of urgency there, or of any plans to stop the program.
In contrast, the president devoted 12 full paragraphs, almost one-fifth of the speech, to detailing his vision of an Israeli-Palestinian deal, which he deemed “more urgent than ever.”
Objectively speaking, Iran is by far the more important problem. Its strategic location on the Persian Gulf enables it to shut off much of the world’s oil supply at will, and even without nukes, it has fomented terror worldwide; with nukes to deter attack, Iran would have the West at its mercy. Israel, by contrast, controls no vital natural resources; its location is strategically insignificant; and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict hasn’t spread beyond its own borders in decades.
Yet the West continues blithely pursuing its pet obsession, leaving Tehran free to laugh all the way to the bomb.
It’s far too soon to declare a trend, but three recent incidents deviated sharply from the usual Israeli activities on behalf of kidnapped soldier Gilad Schalit: Rather than trying to pressure the government to capitulate to Hamas’ demands, all sought instead to put pressure on the Palestinians.
Earlier this month, a court upheld the state’s decision to deny a Hamas prisoner family visits. Abdullah Barghouti is serving 67 life sentences for his role in numerous deadly suicide bombings, and the state cast the issue primarily in terms of security: Barghouti has repeatedly tried to foment terror from his jail cell via smuggled messages, and was liable to use his relatives as conduits for such messages.
But the Be’er Sheva District Court also acknowledged an additional justification for the decision: “To my mind, the question of reciprocity, or lack thereof, between the State of Israel and the appellant’s organization with regard to prisoners of one side held by the other is not irrelevant,” the judge wrote. In other words, the fact that Hamas has deprived Schalit of family visits for the last five years is grounds for similarly depriving Hamas prisoners of family visits.
Then, two weeks ago, Gilad’s parents wrote to US Congressional leaders – Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House John Boehner – to urge them to halt funding to the Palestinian Authority unless Gilad is freed. Since Fatah and Hamas have agreed to form a unity government, the letter argued, the PA can no longer disclaim responsibility for Gilad’s fate, and the threat of losing Washington’s annual $400 million donation might encourage it to take action.
Finally, last week, pro-Schalit activists blocked an armored truck carrying cash to the Gaza Strip, forcing it to turn around with its load undelivered. (Because the West Bank and Gaza both still use the shekel as their currency, the Bank of Israel regularly supplies Hamas-ruled Gaza with truckloads of new bills to replace worn-out ones, so that its economy can continue functioning despite Hamas’ ongoing war with Israel.) “The money won’t pass until Gilad is returned,” the activists chanted.
For the last five years, both Schalit’s parents and pro-Schalit activists have devoted virtually all their time and energy to pressing the government to simply capitulate to Hamas’ demands: the release of 1,000 terrorists, including many of the worst murders of the second intifada. By contrast, they have made almost no effort to pressure Hamas to moderate these demands.
Nor has the government made many efforts to do so, aside from one failed military operation launched immediately after Schalit’s abduction (and, to some extent, the Gaza blockade). Instead, it has spent its time and energy on “negotiations” that amounted to nothing more than serial capitulations. When former prime minister Ehud Olmert left office in March 2009, he had already agreed to free the full 1,000 prisoners, including 325 of the 450 whom Hamas specifically demanded by name. And by the time negotiations broke down again last winter, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had approved dozens more from Hamas’ list, reportedly narrowing the gap to as few as 50, 15 or even seven names.
Yet Israel has numerous levers of pressure that it has never even tried to apply. For instance, Hamas prisoners in Israel are routinely allowed family visits; this month’s ruling on Barghouti made the papers precisely because it was so exceptional. They also enjoy numerous other privileges, such as the right to purchase luxuries from the prison canteen. But neither Olmert’s government nor Netanyahu’s ever made any move to halt these privileges, and when individual MKs submitted legislation to do so, both governments repeatedly blocked it. A year ago, Netanyahu’s government finally said it would support such legislation, but since then, it has dragged its feet, with the result that the bill has yet to even pass its first reading.
Nor have the Schalit family or activists ever seriously attempted to secure such legislation. They have repeatedly mobilized massive demonstrations to demand that the government capitulate to Hamas’ demands, but have yet to call a single demonstration to demand that the government halt Hamas prisoners’ privileges.
Similarly, neither the government nor the Schalit family ever tried to put financial pressure on Hamas by urging Congress to cut funding for United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The organization effectively subsidizes the Hamas government by providing numerous services, including schools and health care, which relieves Hamas of the need to provide them itself. And since America is UNRWA’s largest donor, a Congressional decision to cut the organization’s funding could have a significant impact.
There are also those truckloads of cash to Gaza, and Israeli tax transfers to the PA. The latter are used in part to pay public-sector salaries in Gaza, thereby again subsidizing the Hamas government.
Granted, pressuring Israel’s democratic government is much easier than pressuring Hamas’ dictatorship. But even Hamas requires some measure of public support to maintain its grip on power. Thus if Schalit’s continued captivity were causing genuine pain, it would feel pressure to soften its demands.
It’s also true that every possible lever of pressure has potential downsides that must be carefully weighed. But the idea that Israel is incapable of using any of them beggars belief.
There’s something terribly unhealthy about a country whose government prefers capitulating to a terrorist organization, and whose public prefers pressuring its government to do so, rather than even attempting to pressure the terrorists to moderate their demands. Effectively, Israel has been acting as if it alone, and not Hamas as well, bore responsibility for the problem, and as if it alone, and not Hamas as well, had exploitable weaknesses. In fact, that is still the dominant narrative; the three healthier responses cited above are far too little, too late.
But if Israel is ever to be capable of meeting the challenges that surround it, this narrative must be reversed. For a country that perceives itself as both uniquely responsible and uniquely vulnerable has small chance of surviving in an increasingly hostile world.
The
writer is a journalist and commentator.
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This weekend, Egypt reopened its Rafah border crossing with Gaza after four years of almost total closure. Amid much talk about the move’s meaning for Gaza’s quality of life, for Israel’s security, and for the character of Egypt’s new government, perhaps its most significant element has been overlooked. A binding international agreement, brokered by the U.S. and signed by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, has just effectively been torn up.
The 2005 agreement laid down detailed provisions for how Gaza’s border crossings would be run following Israel’s withdrawal from the territory earlier that year. From a security standpoint, Israel won’t mourn its demise, as the European monitors stationed at Rafah quickly proved useless at preventing the passage of terrorists and contraband.
But at a time when the world is demanding that Israel make far more dangerous territorial concessions in the West Bank in exchange for yet another piece of paper containing “robust” security provisions (to quote President Barack Obama), it’s worth noting just how flimsy such pieces of paper are. In a mere six years, Hamas has replaced the PA as Gaza’s landlord and declined to honor the latter’s promises, while Egypt’s new government has scrapped former President Hosni Mubarak’s policy of upholding the agreement even though he wasn’t a formal signatory. And presto! there goes the agreement.
Nor is this the only international agreement Israel has recently seen torn up. The 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement, as 60 prominent jurists recently noted in a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, states explicitly 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.” The PA has publicly announced its intention to violate that one by asking the UN General Assembly to recognize those territories as a Palestinian state in September.
And then there’s UN Security Council Resolution 242, which explicitly required an Israeli withdrawal only from “territories” captured in 1967, not “the territories” or “all the territories.” As Lord Caradon, the British UN ambassador who drafted it, explained, “It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial.” America’s UN ambassador at the time, Arthur Goldberg, similarly said the two omitted words “were not accidental . . . the resolution speaks of withdrawal from occupied territories without defining the extent of withdrawal.” Yet the entire world has now adopted the 1967 lines as the basis for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement.
That same world has offered no protest at the Rafah agreement’s demise. The European Union, for instance, “welcomed” the crossing’s agreement-breaking reopening. And most of the world also plans to back the PA’s agreement-breaking quest for statehood in September.
Which leaves only one question. When the world is so patently unwilling to insist that previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements be honored, why does it still think Israel should entrust its security to yet another one?
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as Jonathan noted, single-handedly prevented last week’s G-8 summit from explicitly endorsing the 1967 lines as a starting point for Israeli-Palestinian talks. What made this remarkable, however, was not merely that Harper once again provided the lone pro-Israel voice in an international forum. It’s that Harper, rather than the U.S. president, was the one Israel’s prime minister telephoned for help — because Barack Obama has blatantly abandoned a longstanding American tradition of insisting that international forums meet minimal standards of even-handedness.
It’s hard to overstate the significance of this shift. For decades, when Israel wanted help defending its case in an international forum, it dialed Washington. It didn’t matter whether Democrats or Republicans occupied the White House; Washington was always the address.
That’s because successive U.S. presidents all adopted a simple policy: You can’t target Israel while giving the Palestinians a free pass. You can’t condemn Israeli military operations without also condemning the rocket fire or suicide bombings that prompted them; you can’t demand Israeli concessions at the negotiating table without also demanding Palestinian concessions. As then-UN Ambassador John Danforth explained in a masterful exposition of this policy in 2004, that is how America defines “even-handedness,” and it won’t accept anything less.
But it’s precisely this policy that Obama has abandoned – and that Harper has stepped in to defend. As the latter told reporters after the summit, he doesn’t share Israel’s opposition to mentioning the 1967 lines in principle. What he objected to was the G-8’s attempt to make demands of Israel without also mentioning the concessions Palestinians will have to make for a two-state solution.
“You can’t cherry pick elements of that speech,” Harper said, referring to Obama’s May 19 Middle East policy address. “I think if you’re going to get into other elements, obviously I would like to see reference to elements that were also in President Obama’s speech. Such as, for instance, the fact that one of the states must be a Jewish state. The fact that the Palestinian state must be demilitarized.”
Not so long ago, it would have been the U.S. president insisting on that basic modicum of even-handedness. It’s a measure of how far Obama has undercut the American-Israeli alliance that Jerusalem is now forced to dial Ottawa instead.
The New York Times is certain it knows exactly what Israelis think of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s U.S. visit: “Israelis see Netanyahu trip as diplomatic failure,” it proclaimed in a headline yesterday. The story asserted “a nearly unanimous assessment among Israelis that despite his forceful defense of Israel’s security interests, hopes were dashed that his visit might advance peace negotiations with the Palestinians.”
One can easily see how correspondent Ethan Bronner reached this conclusion: As he correctly reported, Israeli “newspapers and airwaves were filled with similar commentary.”
But it’s utterly refuted by the lead story in today’s Haaretz, the Times‘s very own Israeli partner, which details the unequivocal verdict of a new poll: Ordinary Israelis–as opposed to the exclusive club of journalists, academics and leftist politicians who dominate the newspapers and airwaves–considered the visit a rousing success.
Of respondents who followed the trip closely enough to express an opinion, those who deemed it a success outnumbered those who deemed it a failure by a whopping 37 points (47% to 10%). Of respondents who thought the visit would affect U.S.-Israeli relations, twice as many foresaw improvement as foresaw deterioration. And Netanyahu’s overall approval rating rose by an incredible 30 points, from minus 15 five weeks ago (38% favorable, 53% unfavorable) to plus 15 today (51% favorable, 36% unfavorable).
Moreover, the claim that the visit dashed hopes of advancing peace talks is ludicrous, because outside the small circle Bronner quotes, most Israelis entertained no such hopes. Every poll for years has shown that roughly two-thirds of Israelis see no chance of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement in the coming years (i.e. this one from October 2010), because they believe the Palestinians “have not accepted Israel’s existence and would destroy it if they could.”
But why does it matter if the Times got it wrong? Because most people, including policy makers, rely heavily on the media for their understanding of foreign countries. Thus when journalists misinterpret elite opinion as the majority view, policy makers wind up making egregious errors.
A prime example is the “Arab Spring.” The media had proclaimed for years that ordinary Arabs were concerned above all with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Western governments set policy accordingly. They devoted enormous efforts to the “peace process” and virtually none to pressing Arab autocrats to democratize. And then they were taken by surprise when it turned out that what ordinary Arabs really cared about was their tyrannical, corrupt governments.
Similarly, President Barack Obama has been repeatedly surprised by Netanyahu’s ability to defy him successfully, because Israeli elites, via the media and diplomatic corps, had assured him Israelis would turn on any premier who risked a fight with an American president. In reality, most Israelis will back their prime minister if they perceive him as defending core Israeli interests, which has been the case in every Obama-Netanyahu spat.
Ideally, foreign correspondents would explore the world beyond their comfortable circle of like-minded elites. But since they don’t, readers need to take their reports with a large grain of salt.