Alan Baker, a former legal advisor to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, made an important point in yesterday’s Jerusalem Post: Once Fatah and Hamas finalize their planned Palestinian unity government, the Palestinian Authority will no longer be able to disclaim responsibility for what happens in Gaza. Inter alia, that means it won’t be able to disclaim responsibility for Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas in a cross-border raid five years ago.

As Baker noted, this leaves the PA with three choices. One is to secure Shalit’s release. The second is to admit direct complicity in a war crime: Even if you buy Hamas sympathizers’ claim that Shalit is a legitimate prisoner of war, holding him incommunicado for five years, without even visits by the Red Cross, is a war crime by any standard. The third is to admit that, unity government notwithstanding, the PA still doesn’t actually control Gaza–in which case it fails to meet a basic requirement for statehood under the Montevideo Convention: governmental control over the relevant territory.

Where Baker is wrong, however, is saying this makes Shalit’s fate a crucial test for the new PA government, because the PA has no reason to believe the world will care. Why should the PA worry about complicity in a war crime if the European Union and the Obama administration will nevertheless keep giving it hundreds of millions of dollars a year? Alternatively, why should it worry about lacking de-facto control over Gaza if the vast majority of the world’s countries will recognize a Palestinian state in the pre-1967 lines come September anyway?

Thus rather than being a test for the PA, this is a test for the West. Both the EU and Washington have repeatedly condemned Shalit’s ongoing captivity. Will they now put their money–and their UN votes–where their mouths are and insist that the PA release him as the price of continued funding or recognition? Or will they follow the usual pattern of refusing to penalize the PA no matter what it does?

For the EU, the answer is self-evident: There’s no chance of its ever penalizing the PA. But the Europeans ought to at least be forced to confront their own hypocrisy on human rights instead of being allowed to sweep it comfortably under the rug. The Obama administration, in contrast, might act, but only if it feels sufficient pressure.

Yet neither the EU nor Washington will feel any pressure at all unless Israel and its overseas supporters make an issue of Shalit. And many Israel supporters won’t feel comfortable pressing this issue if Israel’s government seems indifferent.

Ultimately, therefore, this is a test for Jerusalem: Will it press the PA hard over this issue and lobby Western countries to do the same? Or would it rather choose between abandoning Shalit and tamely accepting Hamas’s terms–1,000 terrorists for one kidnapped soldier?

The claim made by Israeli officials that the survival of the Jewish state depends on peace is untrue as it is dangerous. It belies the past 63 years of Israel’s existence and effectively eliminates Israel’s leverage in negotiations with the Palestinians.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is undoubtedly agonizing right now over what to say to Congress on Tuesday to mitigate the damage caused by US President Barack Obama’s bombshell last week: the unprecedented demand that Israel withdraw to the 1967 lines without getting an end to the conflict in exchange, without such key issues as the refugees or Jerusalem even being addressed. Not even Europe or the Arab League ever went that far.

I don’t know what Netanyahu should say. But I know one thing that he and other leading Israeli politicians desperately need to stop saying: that Israel’s survival depends on signing a peace agreement with the Palestinians. For nothing so badly undermines Israel’s position among all three of the relevant audiences – the Palestinians, the international community and Israelis themselves.

As Alana noted yesterday, President Barack Obama still seems to be waffling on Hamas, asserting in his AIPAC speech both that Israel can’t negotiate with a terrorist organization and that it must do so anyway. Yet really, why should he cavil at Hamas’s support for anti-Israel terror when the Palestinian Authority, to which the U.S. donates hundreds of millions of dollars a year, uses that money for the exact same purpose?

Last week, Palestinian Media Watch reported on a new PA law to grant a monthly salary plus various benefits to any Palestinian or Israeli Arab imprisoned in Israel on terrorism charges. The law was published in the official PA registry on April 13.

Lest anyone doubt that its purpose is specifically to reward people who murder Israelis, it creates a sliding scale under which prisoners serving longer sentences receive higher salaries. Since longer sentences obviously correlate to more serious crimes, that means the greater the crime, the greater the reward–a clear incentive to commit anti-Israel terror.

Starting from a base of NIS 1,400 (about $400) a month for prisoners serving up to three years, the salary gradually rises to NIS 8,000 for 20 to 25 years, NIS 10,000 for 25 to 30, and NIS 12,000 (about $3,450) for 30 years or more. Generally, only murderers get sentences of 20 years or more in Israel. Thus the reward for murdering Israelis is a salary 4.5 to 7 times higher than the average daily West Bank wage of NIS 77.

Prisoners who serve longer terms also receive greater benefits. For instance, serving at least five years–three for women–gives you free government health insurance and free university tuition when you get out. If you serve 20 years or more, all your children also get an 80% tuition discount.

As an extra fillip, the law seeks to encourage homegrown terror inside Israel by granting Israeli Arabs an additional monthly bonus of NIS 500 on top of the enticing salary. The NIS 8,000 given a 20-year prisoner is more than double Israel’s minimum wage.

But the crowning outrage was the PA’s response when asked about the new law by the Jerusalem Post. It’s nothing to get excited about, said the PA’s Ministry for Prisoner Affairs, because the PA has actually been paying salaries to convicted terrorists since 1994. All that’s changed over the past few years is that the PA, evidently flush with European and American cash, has raised these salaries several times.

In short, even as PA President Mahmoud Abbas and PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad were charming the West with their verbal opposition to terror, they were simultaneously working to encourage it by offering greater and greater financial incentives to those who commit it.

Israel ought to state clearly that it can’t possibly negotiate with an entity that pays people to murder its citizens. And its allies in Congress ought to stop financing these murders by means of American aid to the PA.

Several Contentions contributors commented yesterday on President Barack Obama’s call for a Palestinian state “based on the 1967 lines,” which they correctly identified as both radical departing from previous U.S. policy and severely undermining Israel’s negotiating position. But that was far from the worst element of Obama’s speech. Much worse was his endorsement of what Noah Pollak aptly identified this week as “moderate” Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s real goal: not a Palestinian state at peace with Israel, but a Palestinian state at war with Israel.

The key passage comes just after Obama called for a “full and phased” Israeli withdrawal on a fixed timetable (“the duration of this transition period must be agreed”) in exchange for “robust” security provisions:

I’m aware that these steps alone will not resolve the conflict, because two wrenching and emotional issues will remain:  the future of Jerusalem, and the fate of Palestinian refugees.  But moving forward now on the basis of territory and security provides a foundation to resolve those two issues in a way that is just and fair, and that respects the rights and aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians.

In other words, Israel should withdraw fully to the 1967 lines and not get peace in exchange, because the two thorniest issues, Jerusalem and the refugees, will remain to be resolved.

Moreover, having done so, Israel will be left with no bargaining chips with which to obtain Palestinian concessions on these issues. Having already ceded the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians, what is it supposed to offer them in exchange for ceding their demand that all 4.8 million refugees and their descendents relocate to Israel so as to eradicate the Jewish state demographically? And what incentive would the Palestinians have for waiving this demand? Having already obtained every inch of post-1967 Israel for nothing, why shouldn’t they think pre-1967 Israel is attainable too?

Obama didn’t even promise that America would back Israel on these issues. He adopted the Palestinians’ position on the 1967 lines, but he didn’t adopt a single Israeli position in the speech. He didn’t say the refugees would have to move to Palestine rather than Israel. He didn’t say Israel should retain Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem or Jewish holy sites. He didn’t say Israel should maintain a military presence along the Jordan River. He didn’t say Israel should keep the major settlement blocs, or even imply it: He specified “mutually agreed swaps,” meaning only those Abbas is willing to accept — and Abbas has consistently refused to agree to Israel retaining the blocs.

He didn’t even insist that the new Fatah-Hamas unity government accept the Quartet’s conditions: recognizing Israel, renouncing terror and honoring previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements. He merely demanded an unspecified “credible answer” to the question of how Israel can negotiate with a party “unwilling to recognize [its] right to exist,” thereby implying that such a “credible answer” is possible even if Hamas persists in this unwillingness.

His stated opposition to Abbas’s plan to seek unilateral UN recognition a Palestinian state in September was also mere lip service. As Egypt’s UN ambassador perceptively noted, the speech will actually help Abbas win support for this move. After all, if the U.S. president has just said a Palestinian state should be created in the 1967 lines without having to make peace with Israel or abandon its plans for Israel’s destruction, why should other countries cavil at the notion?

In short, this speech destroyed any prospect of Israeli-Palestinian peace ever being achieved. If the president of the United States says peace isn’t necessary for statehood, the Palestinians certainly aren’t going to contradict him.

This week the cabinet approved a one-year extension of the advertising that powers Army Radio. But for a host of reasons, Army Radio in no way deserves the extension, and instead merits being shut down completely.
The cabinet missed a chance this week to do something it should have done long since: kill Army Radio.On Sunday, according to the Hebrew media, it approved a one-year extension of a temporary order that allows the station to broadcast certain types of commercial advertising. Station officials had warned that if this order expired, Army Radio would have to close, as ads currently cover more than 40% of its budget. So the ministers rushed to the rescue and extended the order for one year, during which time a special committee will consider permanent arrangements for the station’s financial survival.

The problem is that Army Radio deserves to be closed, for multiple reasons.
The first is simply that in a democratic country, there is no excuse for allowing the government to control every single national radio station – which is the case in Israel today. There are various privately-owned regional stations, but all the national stations belong either to Israel Radio, a branch of the state-owned Israel Broadcasting Authority, or Army Radio, a branch of the state-owned Israel Defense Forces. Each of these two bodies controls several stations apiece.

The point is not that these stations are government mouthpieces; they aren’t. They are editorially independent, and often vigorously oppose government policies.

But a democratic country ought to enable a spectrum of opinion on its airwaves. And that is unlikely to happen when they are all controlled by the same entity, regardless of what that entity is.

However hard journalists may strive to be objective, the truth is that every newspaper, radio station or television station has its own editorial slant. And that’s fine, as long as those with different views have the right to try to set up competing organs. But in the case of radio, they don’t: Privately-owned national radio stations are not permitted. Whoever controls the IBA and Army Radio controls the nation’s radio programming.

Secondly, a state with limited funds and numerous needs should not be wasting money on something the private sector would gladly pay for the right to do instead. Army Radio says that ads bring in NIS 17 million a year, out of a budget of NIS 42 million; that means the portion paid for by the government comes to about NIS 25 million. Granted, that’s peanuts compared to the total government budget, or even just the total defense budget (NIS 54.2 billion). And it would still be peanuts when you add in the additional millions the government could earn by auctioning Army Radio’s frequencies off to the private sector.

Nevertheless, those peanuts could do a great deal of good. For instance, it costs a mere NIS 200,000 a year to run an after-school facility for at-risk youth. Thus the NIS 25 million now being spent on Army Radio could fund another 125 such facilities – a crying need given that as of last year, existing facilities had space for only one out of every 10 children referred to them.

Or to take a different example, an intercept missile for the Iron Dome missile defense system costs about NIS 420,000. Thus that NIS 25 million would buy another 60 missiles, enabling the interception of another 60 rockets a year. That might well save lives. But it would almost certainly save the government hundreds of millions in compensation claims for property damage, since by law, the government pays for property damage caused by enemy action.

Finally, Army Radio is a tremendous waste of talented manpower. Most of its staff consists of young soldiers doing their compulsory army service. But those soldiers are neither contributing to the country’s defense nor contributing to any other social need that would go unmet were it not for these young volunteers: They are doing something the private sector would willingly pay people to do if given the chance.

In fact, Army Radio actually undermines Israel’s economy by depriving it of hundreds of good paid jobs: Were those frequencies auctioned off to private entrepreneurs, the buyers would have to hire people to fill the positions now being filled by unpaid conscripts.

For all these reasons, Army Radio should have been dismantled long ago. It’s too bad the government missed yet another chance.

Writing in today’s Haaretz, Israel Harel offers an excellent suggestion for what Israel’s prime minister should tell Congress next week. There is no chance Benjamin Netanyahu will actually do so. But the Republican-controlled House ought to act on it anyway, because it lets Congress further two cherished goals simultaneously: cutting the budget and helping Israel. All it would take is eliminating U.S. funding for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

As Harel correctly noted, this UN agency exists for one reason only: to advance the goal of Israel’s destruction by imprisoning an ever-growing mass of “refugees”–or, more accurately, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren–in miserable conditions for decades and offering them one and only one prospect of escape: a “return” to what is now Israel, where they could combine with the country’s existing Arab residents to create an Arab majority and vote the Jewish state out of existence. Its sorry history and even sorrier present condition was the subject of Mikhail Bernstam’s important COMMENTARY article, “The Palestinian Proletariat.”

In the 62 years since its founding, UNRWA hasn’t resettled a single Palestinian refugee. Doing so would defeat its purpose. During those same 62 years, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees–which handles all refugees worldwide except Palestinians–resettled tens of millions. Even tiny Israel resettled over a million refugees on its own: Holocaust survivors and Jews forced out of Arab countries after its establishment. In contrast, Arab countries that “absorbed” Palestinian refugees denied them citizenship (with the partial exception of Jordan), confined them to squalid camps and subjected them to various onerous restrictions: Lebanon, for instance, bars Palestinians from numerous professions.

Thus the refugee problem will never be solved as long as UNRWA exists. And the more time passes, the harder it becomes to solve. Because Palestinians are the only refugees in the world whose descendants inherit refugee status in perpetuity, the original 700,000 or so have now ballooned to 4.8 million (according to UNRWA), and the number keeps growing every day.

Yet as Harel pointed out, the U.S. bears primary responsibility for the agency’s continued existence, because it is UNRWA’s largest single donor. In 2009, according to the agency, America contributed $268 million, which constituted 28% of UNRWA’s budget. Thus only the U.S. has the leverage to finally get the agency closed, by shutting off its funding.

Granted, other countries could fill the breach. But since Arab countries, for all their talk of solidarity with the Palestinians, are notoriously stingy about coughing up money to help them, the only likely candidate is the European Union. Together with its member states, the EU already funds a substantial chunk of UNRWA’s budget. The Palestinians are its favorite cause. Witness its immediate pledge of 85 million euros to compensate for Israel’s suspension of tax transfers to the Palestinian Authority following the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation agreement.

But if Europeans really want to perpetuate the Palestinian war against Israel, let them deprive their own troubled economies of the necessary funds. There is no reason whatever for the U.S. to keep subsidizing this war.

Israel’s state comptroller published a special report yesterday on Muslim excavations on the Temple Mount. The report concluded what anyone who has followed the issue already knows: The Muslim Waqf (religious trust), in whose hands Israel left day-to-day control of the site when it captured the mount in 1967, has conducted massive excavations without a permit and without the required archaeological salvage digs, often using heavy machinery. In the process, it has irreversibly destroyed an untold number of antiquities.

Yet the report nevertheless included both some new information and a timely reminder. The new information can be derived only by implication, because aside from the conclusion, the entire report was classified, “to guarantee state security and to prevent damaging Israel’s international relations.”

That classification itself is significant, however, because there’s only one way the findings could possibly damage Israel’s international relations: if it turned out that the destruction of antiquities was carried out not by a few Islamic radicals, but with the active connivance of one or both of the two Israeli “peace partners” to whom Israel has granted a say in the mount’s management: the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas, and the Kingdom of Jordan.

Since the PA’s role is much more active, it is the more likely culprit. And it would certainly be hard for the government to explain why Israelis should consider Abbas a “peace partner” if his administration were busy destroying archaeological evidence of the Jews’ ancient presence in the Holy Land. After all, such destruction hardly accords with acceptance of the Jews’ right to a state in this land; rather, it smacks suspiciously of trying to assert that they are interlopers with no rights here at all – as do Abbas’ written falsifications of history and his insistence, reiterated again just this week, on eliminating the Jewish state via a “right of return” for millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees.

But it might be equally hard to sell Israelis on the value of “peace” if Jordan turned out to be the culprit. If, 17 years after signing a peace treaty, Jordan were still so unreconciled to Israel’s existence that it felt a need to destroy all trace of the ancient Jewish presence in Jerusalem, what would that say about the likelihood of reconciliation with the even more virulently anti-Israel Palestinians?

Valuable as this new information is, however, the report’s most significant conclusion is an old but still timely one. The Temple Mount, where both Temples were located, is Judaism’s holiest site; it also presumably contains unique archaeological findings of unparalleled religious, cultural and historical significance. Protecting these findings, the comptroller stressed, is thus “a public duty of the highest order.”

Since doing so would almost certainly involve a clash with the Waqf that could spark widespread violence, the government’s reluctance is understandable. Nevertheless, it is disastrously misplaced. For if Israel’s government cares so little about Jewish rights in this land that it will stand idly by while this unique trove is destroyed, how can it expect the rest of the world to take these rights seriously?

Syrian President Bashar Assad must be crowing about the success of his Nakba Day distraction. Yesterday, thousands of Palestinian residents of Syria marked the day by mobbing the border with Israel and breaking through, forcing Israel to open fire to stop the invasion. Four people were killed and 40 wounded; the others were peacefully returned to Syria later that day.

The same scene was repeated on the Lebanese border. There 10 people were killed (though Israel says they were shot by Lebanese soldiers).

The idea that these demonstrations were spontaneous is ludicrous. Syria is currently under martial law, in the midst of a brutal government crackdown on its own people. The army is out in force all over the country. Under these conditions, there is no chance whatever that thousands of people could get all the way to and past the heavily guarded border with Israel unless the Syrian army–i.e. the government–had approved the incursion.

The same is true for Lebanon, whose south–meaning the entirety of its border with Israel–is ruthlessly and totally controlled by Syria’s loyal ally, Hezbollah. Nothing happens in south Lebanon without Hezbollah’s consent; that is why there are virtually no Palestinian attacks across that border. Hezbollah zealously enforces its monopoly on such attacks. There is thus no chance that thousands of Palestinian protesters could descend on Israel’s border without Hezbollah’s approval.

It’s not hard to figure out why Assad and his Lebanese ally would encourage these invasions. The Syrian president desperately needs a distraction from the uprising in his own country and his brutal suppression of it. His own countrymen did not take the bait; the anti-regime demonstrations continued unabated. Nevertheless, Assad knew that he could rely on the West’s useful idiots to take the bait. As Omri pointed out yesterday, journalists like the New York Times‘s Nicholas Kristof fell obediently into line, sending inane tweets like “Pres. Assad must be so relieved that Israel shot Syrians at the border, distracting from his own shootings of Syrians.”

In a rational world, the media might take note of two important distinctions. First, Israel was repelling a hostile mob trying to invade its borders, while Assad is shooting his own people in an effort to suppress their demands for democracy. Second, while the border incident was a one-time event, Assad has been mowing down demonstrators every day for eight weeks, with the result that the UN now puts the death toll as high as 850. Then, having noted these distinctions, the media might reach the rational conclusion: what Assad is doing is far more serious.

But in the real world, the media prefers to obsess over Israel. Assad can relax, confident that his Nakba Day diversion accomplished its purpose, and go on slaughtering his people while the West yawns.

Nakba Day protests, as Omri correctly noted yesterday, are effectively a demand for Israel’s eradication. Thus it’s important to realize that these were not spontaneous demonstrations; they were deliberately organized–first and foremost by Israel’s very own “peace partner,” the PLO headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

Last week, Haaretz reported that Ramallah was plastered with posters urging residents to take part in Sunday’s Nakba Day demonstrations. The posters bore the text of a mock letter from a Palestinian refugee to the city of Haifa, which is in pre-1967 Israel. “My beloved Haifa, I’ll be with you soon,” it read. The posters were signed by the PLO’s refugee department.

The PLO is Israel’s official peace partner. All Israeli-Palestinian agreements have been signed with the PLO, not the Palestinian Authority. Indeed, Abbas has stressed this point recently in an effort to persuade the world that his agreement to form a unity government with Hamas doesn’t preclude negotiations. It’s no problem, he asserted, because the unity government will only run the PA, while talks with Israel are conducted by the PLO (which he also heads).

But it turns out that 18 years after the Oslo Accord was signed, Israel’s “peace partner” is still telling its people that the “two-state solution” will consist not of a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish one, but of two Palestinian states: a state judenrein in the West Bank and Gaza alongside an “Israel” that has been transformed into a Palestinian-majority state by dint of an influx of several million descendants of refugees.

Ismail Haniyeh, the Gazan Hamas leader often described by the media as “moderate” or “pragmatic,” gave a Nakba Day speech yesterday in which he declared: “Palestinians mark the occasion this year with great hope of bringing to an end [to] the Zionist project in Palestine. . . . Palestinians have the right to resist Israeli occupation and will one day return to property they lost in 1948.”

That message is indistinguishable from the one sent by the PLO’s posters, except for one important detail. Haniyeh states the implication of his goal openly: he wants a “return to property lost in 1948” precisely because it would spell “an end to the Zionist project.” The PLO, in contrast, merely calls for a “return” to pre-1967 Israel and hopes the world won’t notice the corollary that Haniyeh crassly made explicit.

And so far it’s working. The entire world continues to deem the PLO a “peace partner” and blames Israel for the impasse in negotiations.

It’s high time to end this farce and tell the truth. There will never be peace as long as Israel’s “peace partner” keeps telling its people that the only acceptable agreement is one that ends with Israel’s eradication. And since you can’t expect the world to be more Catholic than the pope, that truth-telling has to start with Israel’s government. As long as it maintains the pretense that the PLO is a peace partner, the world will be only too happy to fall in line.

I don’t know if I’ve ever heard any of their songs, but I’ve just become a Deep Purple fan. You have to respect any rock band that can achieve such moral clarity on the anti-Israel cultural boycott. Artists who boycott Israel, declared drummer Ian Paice this week, are “real wimps.”

Paice, who was speaking ahead of the group’s third Israel tour, is exactly right. None of the artists who have canceled performances in Israel in recent years in response to pressure from pro-Palestinian activists actually thinks the boycott is justified as a matter of principle. If they did, they wouldn’t have booked engagements in Israel to begin with. They simply couldn’t withstand the pressure from their left-wing cultural milieu.

Rather, it’s the artists who don’t cancel Israel engagements who actually have the courage of their convictions. Often, these convictions have nothing to do with Israel: Deep Purple, for instance, simply believes strongly that “artists should not take sides in political conflicts.” But that makes them no less valid.

So perhaps it’s time for pro-Israel activists to try a new tack in combating the cultural boycott. Arguments about why Israel doesn’t deserve to be boycotted–its thriving democracy, its decades of striving for peace–are perfectly valid, but are likely of little interest to the average Israel-bound performer besieged by pro-Palestinian activists. Most such performers are far more concerned with their art (and their revenues) than with the rights and wrongs of the conflict.

Moreover, conducting the argument on those terms allows both the boycotting artist and the Palestinians to claim the moral high ground: The artist has concluded that boycotting Israel is the “right thing to do.”

Thus it might be more effective to simply confront such artists with the Deep Purple test: Do you actually have the courage of your convictions about the artist’s proper role in the world–the convictions that led you to book your Israel engagement in the first place? Or do you want to be just another “real wimp”?

For a wimp who lacks the courage of his convictions can’t claim anything but the moral low ground. And that is exactly where Israel boycotters belong.