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Max finds it incomprehensible that many Israelis are fearful, even unhappy, over the changes sweeping our region. So as an Israeli, let me explain.
Over the past two decades, Israelis have lived through numerous regional changes, each of which, we were confidently assured — by both our own leaders and the West — would benefit us greatly. And in every single case, the change only made things worse.
We were told that the 1993 Oslo Accords would bring us peace and international legitimacy. Instead, it brought our international position to an unprecedented low and terrorism to an unprecedented high: the first four years of the second intifada alone produced more Israeli victims of terror than the entire preceding 53 years.
We were told that withdrawing from Lebanon in 2000 would eliminate Beirut’s casus belli and hence bring us peace and international legitimacy. Instead, it allowed Hezbollah to take over southern Lebanon, build an arsenal far superior to anything it had before Israel left Lebanon, and launch cross-border attacks. One of those sparked the Second Lebanon War, which caused unprecedented destruction to northern Israel, more casualties than Israel averaged in six years pre-withdrawal, and massive international condemnation — of Israel, naturally.
We were told leaving Gaza in 2005 would bring peace and international legitimacy. Instead, it brought a Hamas takeover and incessant rocket fire on southern Israel. And when Israel finally struck back, in December 2008, international condemnation hit new heights, culminating in the infamous Goldstone report.
We were told Saddam Hussein’s ouster would make Israel safer. And while I fully agree with Max that nobody could lament Saddam’s demise from a moral standpoint, from a security standpoint it’s far from clear that Israel is safer with Iran as the uncontested regional power than it was with Iran and Iraq containing each other. With Iran racing toward nuclear weapons and threatening to wipe Israel off the map, it’s a bit naïve to expect Israel to deem Iran’s new status as regional superpower unimportant in the broader scheme of things.
We were told Lebanon’s 2005 Cedar Revolution would benefit Israel — and indeed, most Israelis cheered as Lebanese demonstrators drove Syria from their country. Like today’s demonstrators in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere, they seemed like an Israeli dream come true: people more interested in building their own country than in destroying ours. But it took Hezbollah only a few years to seize power. And now, instead of a peaceful, democratic Lebanon on our northern border, we have an Iranian-backed terrorist state.
Yet because the signs look “pretty positive” a mere two months into the current revolutions, Max thinks Israelis shouldn’t worry that Islamists won’t ultimately succeed in pulling a Hezbollah-style takeover? When Islamists are the best-organized opposition in all these countries, and, as Bret Stephens noted, there’s a leadership vacuum among the democratic forces? And when one of the countries in play is Egypt — the one country whose shift from cold peace to war would devastate Israel’s security?
I’ve written elsewhere that Arab democracy is Israel’s only hope for long-term peace. And if the current revolutions indeed succeed in producing it, most Israelis will cheer. But our experience is that, in this region, change can always be for the worse, and usually is. Right now, nobody can promise that this particular change won’t be the same.
Palestinian leaders love to excoriate Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in public, but in private, they must be cheering him on. For no previous Israeli prime minister has done anywhere near as much to weaken Israel’s claim to Jerusalem.
Granted, Netanyahu publicly proclaims his opposition to dividing the city, whereas two of his predecessors, former prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, publicly offered the Palestinians large chunks of it. But at least Barak and Olmert did nothing to undermine Israel’s claim to the large Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem that they intended to keep.
Netanyahu, in contrast, has become the first Israeli prime minister ever to accept the idea that Israel has no right to build anywhere in the eastern part of its capital city. At Washington’s behest, he instituted an undeclared but sweeping construction freeze in all these neighborhoods that has been in force for over a year now. In so doing, he has effectively announced that contrary to the policy of all Israeli governments since 1967, he does not view East Jerusalem as sovereign Israeli territory. For if it were truly Israeli, Israel would not need Washington’s permission to build there, any more than it does in Tel Aviv or Haifa.
Granted, Monday’s meeting came just three days after the US vetoed an anti-Israel resolution in the UN Security Council. And since President Barack Obama’s antipathy toward Israeli construction in East Jerusalem is well-known, I can see why Netanyahu would not have wanted to seem to be spitting in Obama’s face by approving more Jewish construction in East Jerusalem so soon after the Security Council vote.
Thus had this been a one-time occurrence, it would have been understandable. But it wasn’t. Housing Minister Ariel Atias told the Knesset last May that on orders from the Prime Minister’s Office, no new housing had been marketed in Jerusalem since December 2009 – three months before the well-publicized spat with Washington over Israel’s approval of new construction in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood while Vice President Joe Biden was visiting.
And there is plenty of evidence to support Atias’ statement. An Israel Lands Administration tender to build 150 apartments in East Jerusalem’s Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood, for instance, closed in February 2010, but three months later, the results still hadn’t been announced, so construction could not begin. The results of an ILA tender to build 300 apartments in East Jerusalem’s Neveh Yaakov neighborhood, which closed in May, were similarly not announced. An ILA tender for construction in Har Homa was announced last spring, but its finalization was then postponed to an unspecified “later date.”
The Ramat Shlomo construction approved last March was subsequently iced by Netanyahu. And when Jerusalem’s planning committee approved a plan to expand East Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood last November, Netanyahu immediately iced that as well.
Moreover, at the same time as Israel has frozen Jewish construction in East Jerusalem, it has virtually halted the demolition of illegal Palestinian construction there – again on orders from Washington via Netanyahu. Only 15 demolitions were carried out last year, compared to 87 in 2009, and there were no demolitions at all in the first half of that year.
This is not because the courts have ceased to issue demolition orders: Unlike the Prime Minister’s Office, the courts still consider Jerusalem to be sovereign Israeli territory where Israeli law must be obeyed. But Netanyahu, by deciding that Israel can’t even enforce its own laws in Jerusalem without Washington’s approval, has effectively conceded that Israel isn’t sovereign there. After all, Israel doesn’t seek Washington’s approval before demolishing illegally built houses in Tel Aviv or Haifa.
Needless to say, this is no way to run Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. If, as Netanyahu says, he believes Israel has a right to these areas and should retain them under any peace agreement, then he ought to be reinforcing this claim by building there, as every previous prime minister has done. By failing to do so, he sends the message that even Israel’s prime minister considers the country’s claim so dubious that he dares not act on it.
But what makes his behavior even more outrageous is that thanks to publication of the Palestine Papers, we now know the Palestinians have already agreed that every one of these neighborhoods, with the sole exception of Har Homa, will in any case remain Israeli under any peace deal. So Israel’s sovereignty in these areas isn’t even controversial – or at least, shouldn’t have been. Yet Netanyahu has turned it back into a question mark by refusing to uphold Israel’s rights in East Jerusalem, thereby sending the message that he, too, believes Israel’s presence there is illegitimate.
This is diplomatic malfeasance of the highest order. By caving into Washington’s dictates on this issue, Netanyahu has undermined one of Israel’s most vital interests – its claim to its capital city. And he has not even gotten anything in exchange: The entire world still blames Israel alone for the ongoing conflict.
It is also a gross betrayal of his voters, who overwhelmingly oppose dividing Jerusalem. And as such, it confronts his Likud party with a stark choice: either oust him as its leader in the next primary or forfeit its claim to represent Israel’s “national camp” – and hence, its only raison d’etre. To give up Jerusalem, Israelis don’t need Likud. The parties to its left can do that job quite nicely on their own.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
With protesters being slaughtered in Libya and Bahrain, the saga of the Palestinian Authority elections has understandably garnered little attention. But their cancellation immediately after being called last week, due to Hamas’s refusal to participate, is worth a closer look, because it explodes one of the West’s favorite myths: that Israel’s blockade of Gaza strengthened Hamas.
If that were true, Hamas ought to jump at the prospect of elections. After all, it won the last election; now, with its increased popularity, it would surely secure an even bigger win that would force the West to finally end its boycott and acknowledge the Hamas government’s legitimacy.
Except that Hamas, unlike the West, knows that its popularity has actually plummeted: every recent poll has shown that it would be trounced by Fatah. A December poll by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, for instance, found Fatah beating Hamas 42 percent to 24 percent in the West Bank and 48 percent to 26 percent in Gaza. And since voicing support for Fatah can be dangerous in Hamastan, the real gap in Gaza might be even wider.
That’s because Palestinians, unlike the West’s useful idiots, aren’t idiots; they’re capable of understanding cause and effect: in the West Bank, where no rockets are being fired at Israel, there’s also no Israeli blockade.
They also understand that the daily fire from Gaza isn’t an act of God, but a deliberate choice by Hamas: even when the organization isn’t launching rockets itself, its consistent policy has been not to use its vast security apparatus to keep other organizations from doing so — unlike in the West Bank, where PA forces do make some effort to stop anti-Israel terror.
Finally, they understand that Hamas couldn’t care less about them. Just consider what happened when, under international pressure, Israel finally eased its blockade last year: Hamas promptly imposed its own ban on most imports from Israel, because that would reduce its income from the smuggling tunnels.
Nor is this an isolated incident. There’s also the shutdown of Gaza’s major power plant last year, because Hamas didn’t want to pay for the fuel, as well as the Hamas-Fatah dispute that has kept many Gazans from getting passports. Most recently, there was last month’s critical shortage of medicines in Gaza: Hamas claimed that the PA had stopped sending them, but the PA denied this, countering that Hamas was stealing the shipments and selling the drugs to earn additional cash.
Needless to say, none of these outrages has elicited a peep from nongovernmental organizations and Western leaders; they would rather continue blaming Israel for Gaza’s “humanitarian crisis.” Evidently, they feel it’s perfectly acceptable for a Palestinian government to abuse its own people.
But if the revolts sweeping the Arab world should have taught the West anything, it’s that ordinary Arabs don’t agree. They want their own governments held accountable. And it’s high time for Western leaders and NGOs to start helping the Palestinians in this endeavor, instead of reiterating the tired canard that it’s all Israel’s fault.
Last week’s US veto of a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements once again highlighted the critical role Congress plays in the US-Israel alliance. And it’s long past time for Israel to give Congress a tangible expression of thanks for its ongoing support.
Granted, the veto decision was technically made by President Barack Obama, not by Congress. The question is why.
Obama agreed with every word of the resolution, as UN Ambassador Susan Rice told the council explicitly after the vote. He is ideologically opposed to the veto;
this was the first he has cast in over two years in office. Administration officials worried openly that the vote would damage Washington’s status in the Arab world at a time when the upheavals there have already thrown its influence into question.
And he certainly wasn’t motivated by a sudden attack of pro-Israel sentiment: According to media reports, he was prepared to sell out Israel’s most vital negotiating interests to avoid having to cast this veto. To tempt the Palestinians into withdrawing the resolution, he reportedly offered various perks, including a pledge of support for a Quartet statement that, for the first time, would back their demand for a state with borders based on the 1967 lines. That would deal a double blow to Israel’s security: by undermining its quest for defensible borders (which the 1967 lines emphatically are not), and by showing that American promises can’t be trusted. After all, such a statement would nullify the pledges former President George W. Bush gave Israel in exchange for its 2005 disengagement from Gaza: a “steadfast commitment” to “secure, defensible borders” and acknowledgment that a “full and complete return” to the 1967 lines is “unrealistic.”
So given all this, why did Obama nevertheless veto the resolution? Because Congress sent an unequivocal bipartisan message that it wouldn’t tolerate anything else. And while technically, Congress has no say over America’s UN votes, Obama wasn’t prepared to pick a fight with Congress on this matter when he will need its support on numerous vital domestic issues.
Too many Israeli prime ministers forget that Congress wields such power. They view their personal relationship with the president as the be all and end all of US-Israel relations, and are therefore prepared to concede on important issues for the sake of retaining the president’s support. Last week’s vote thus provides a timely reminder that the president and America are not synonymous: Israel can stand up to the president without sacrificing American support, because this support is based on shared interests and values rather than any specific policy.
Indeed, the vote provides particularly telling proof of that fact, because on the specific issue of settlements, most congressmen’s views are closer to Obama’s than to Israel’s. Their demand for a veto wasn’t a statement of support for Israel’s settlement policy, but for the broader principle of protecting a close ally from a one-sided UN condemnation, which this clearly was: Given the Palestinians’ refusal to negotiate during the 10 months when Israel did freeze settlement construction, along with Israel’s proven willingness, in both the disengagement and the treaty with Egypt, to uproot settlements for the sake of peace, the idea that settlements are solely to blame for the impasse in the peace process is ludicrous.
Nevertheless, there is one specific issue through which Israel could say a very tangible thank-you to Congress. And it shouldn’t be hard for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, because he invented this playbook. All he has to do is exactly what he did during his first term in office: go to Washington and propose a phased, multiyear cutback in American aid to Israel from the podium of Capitol Hill.
American aid is clearly important to Israel’s security, in two ways. First, Israel’s lousy neighborhood has always necessitated outsized security expenditures, and the current regional unrest means they are likely to grow rather than shrink. America’s help in financing these expenses makes it easier for Israel to retain its qualitative military edge.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, American aid is a tangible expression of the alliance, telling the world in unambiguous terms that Israel is not alone and friendless. It is for precisely this reason that even now, when America faces a severe budgetary crisis, Congressional opposition to cutting aid to Israel is overwhelming: Congress does not want to send the message that its support for Israel is faltering.
But if Netanyahu proposed the cut himself, no waning of American support for Israel would be implied. On the contrary, that would strengthen the alliance, by showing that Israel is ready and willing to contribute to the current Congressional goal of cutting expenditures.
By Western standards, Israel is not yet a wealthy country: Its GDP per capita last year was $28,600, less than half of, say, Norway’s $58,000. But neither is it the impoverished country it was when American aid began decades ago, as its recent admission to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) demonstrates. Its budget for the coming year is NIS 348.1 billion, or about $96 billion; it could certainly afford a phased cutback that would reduce American aid from the current $3 billion a year to, say, $1.5 billion over a period of 10 to 15 years.
Netanyahu should have headed to Washington with this offer the minute the new Congress took office. But it’s never too late to say thank-you. And now would be a particularly appropriate moment.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
While most of the world is avidly following events in Iran, Bahrain, and Yemen, Israeli leftists are preoccupied with Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar’s plan to promote school field trips to the Tomb of the Patriarchs (Machpela) in Hebron. Such trips, they charge, would constitute “brainwashing” and “ideological coercion”; they would educate against “tolerance and peace” and “intensify nationalist feelings, faith in power and blindness to the injustices of the occupation.” These claims are downright Orwellian.
First, as Sa’ar noted, Machpela is a foundational site in Jewish history. The Bible describes Abraham’s purchase of it as a burial site for his wife, and the subsequent burial there of six of the Jewish people’s seven founding patriarchs and matriarchs. Later, Hebron was the capital of David’s kingdom before he relocated to Jerusalem. Excising Hebron from Jewish history simply isn’t possible.
Thus, if leftists truly believe they can promote their land-for-peace program only by keeping children ignorant of this history — that letting children learn about the site’s importance would “intensify nationalist feelings” and turn them against “peace” — they may as well give up. No viable political program can be based on a Stalinist rewrite of history. And the only “brainwashing” and “ideological coercion” in this story is the left’s attempt to dictate such a rewrite to advance its political goals.
Equally outrageous, however, is the claim that visiting Machpela educates against tolerance and coexistence. Admittedly, Jewish-Arab tensions run high in Hebron, though “the occupation” is hardly the sole culprit: even before Israel was founded, Arab Hebronites periodically massacred their Jewish neighbors (see, for instance, 1929 and 1936).
But Machpela itself is an unparalleled example of coexistence: the only holy site in the world that is simultaneously an active synagogue and an active mosque. Usually, it’s open to Jewish and Muslim worshippers alike; on a handful of Jewish and Muslim holidays, it’s reserved for members of the celebrating faith. True, there is no intermingling; Jews and Muslims are kept separate for their mutual protection. Yet both can worship freely at their shared holy site.
Contrast this with the situation on the Temple Mount, where Israel abdicated control to the Muslim religious authorities. Jews and Christians are strictly forbidden to pray on the Mount; they can’t even open a Bible or move their lips in silent prayer. If they do, they are immediately thrown out. Nor can Jews even visit freely: only a few at a time are allowed in.
And perhaps that’s why the left is so upset: visiting Machpela might give students the idea that while Jewish control protects both Jewish and Muslim freedom of worship, Muslim control protects only the latter. Worse, it might give them the idea that leftists care only about Muslim rights, not Jewish ones: after all, they applaud the ban on Jewish worship on the Mount, yet are outraged by the Israeli-enforced freedom of worship at Machpela.
Clearly, neither realization would advance the left’s political program. But if leftists really want to promote peace, lobbying their Palestinian partners to start respecting Jewish religious rights would be far more productive than trying to outlaw history.
For weeks, the media have been filled with commentary about the revolution in Egypt, and most of it seems to fall squarely into two camps. One camp says it’s a disaster for Israel, a process bound to end with a hostile, radicalized neighbor on our southern border. The other camp is certain democracy will take root next door and be a boon to peace and regional stability: After all, don’t we know democracies don’t make war on each other? Yet both these black-and-white views strike me as simplistic.
Those who foresee catastrophe clearly have grounds for concern. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu often cites the precedent of Iran’s 1979 revolution, which was started by secular democrats but then hijacked by Islamic extremists after it succeeded, largely because they were by far the best-organized opposition group. Since the Muslim Brotherhood is similarly the only organized opposition in Egypt, it could presumably replicate Iran’s experience if it so desired.
But the bigger danger, to my mind, is the Lebanese precedent. The Muslim Brotherhood has already announced that it will neither run a presidential candidate nor try to capture a parliamentary majority. That indicates that its model is Hizbullah – which also controls neither the Lebanese presidency nor a parliamentary majority, but nevertheless effectively controls both the government and the country.
Hizbullah has wreaked havoc in Israel with military capabilities that are negligible compared to Egypt’s; the thought of what the incomparably bigger and better-equipped Egyptian army could do if unleashed is terrifying. But a hostile government in Cairo wouldn’t even need to launch all-out war: A steady flow of sophisticated arms to Hamas in Gaza, combined with regular terrorist infiltrations along the huge, wide-open Israel-Egypt border, could wreak havoc enough.
Yet this justified fear over former president Hosni Mubarak’s fall in itself proves the other side’s point: If Israel is ever to know a stable, long-term peace, in which a new government isn’t cause for panic, only democracy can provide it. It usually takes a revolution to oust an autocrat, and revolutions often throw out the old regime’s policies wholesale; that’s precisely why Egypt’s peace with Israel now seems at risk. Democratic governments, in contrast, generally honor their predecessors’ agreements.
Moreover, all tyrants keep power in part by diverting public outrage toward an outside enemy, and Mubarak was no exception: His government and his state-controlled media kept up a relentless drumbeat of the most vicious anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement, and dissenters from this line faced severe sanctions. Yet even under these conditions, a few bold individuals spoke out in favor of normalization with Israel. A democratic Egypt with a free press would presumably enable more such voices to be heard, and thus reduce anti-Israel sentiment in the long run.
Finally, democratic governments must be at least somewhat responsive to the people’s needs, and most people’s top priorities are bread-and-butter issues like jobs and housing. Iranians, for instance, were infuriated when their president pledged $450 million to Hizbullah in October, saying the money ought to be spent on urgent domestic needs. In a democratic Egypt, even an anti-Israel one, voters are likely to view investing in the domestic economy as higher priority than sending high-tech arms to Hamas.
As Natan Sharansky has repeatedly pointed out, elections alone do not a democracy make, so if the West really wants to see democracy take root in Egypt, it needs to invest in preparing the institutional groundwork properly – something too many of his fellow enthusiasts tend to forget. But if real democracy could take root, then for all the above reasons, say the optimists, it would clearly be good for Israel.
And indeed it might. But then again, maybe not: Democracy, after all, is no guarantee of pro-Israel sentiment. Just look at Europe – a flourishing democracy with a completely free press that is often no less viciously anti-Israel and anti-Semitic than Mubarak’s was. The Independent in Britain, for instance, famously ran a cartoon depicting then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon eating a baby, and Britain’s Political Cartoon Society subsequently voted it best cartoon of the year.
Moreover, public opinion polls repeatedly show overwhelming anti-Israel sentiment. A poll in Germany last year, for instance, found that 57% of respondents thought Israel was waging “a war of annihilation” against the Palestinians, 40% thought Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians was “basically no different from what the Nazis did with the Jews,” and 38% thought Israel’s politics made it “easy to see why one would have something against Jews.”
Granted, despite all this anti-Israel sentiment, there’s no constituency in Europe for going to war against Israel. But then, there’s no constituency in Europe for going to war against anyone: Even in places where Europe is fighting, like Afghanistan, governments have generally sent troops despite overwhelming public opposition. That’s because modern-day Europe has a very strong strain of ideological pacifism.
But no comparable commitment to pacifism exists anywhere in the Arab world. Thus it’s far from certain that a democratic Egypt wouldn’t go to war against Israel if anti-Israel sentiment there ran as high as it does in Europe. I certainly wouldn’t recommend betting the country’s future on it.
So is there any bottom line that can be drawn from all this? At this stage, no one honestly knows how Egypt will turn out; the only thing certain is that the change holds genuine potential for both good and evil. For policy-makers to close their eyes to either possibility would therefore be a grave mistake.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Western Europe has long been hostile territory for Israel. Polls showing that Europeans deem Israel the greatest threat to world peace, judges issuing arrest warrants against Israeli officials for “war crimes,” unions launching anti-Israel boycotts, and Israel-obsessed officials like EU foreign-policy chief Catherine Ashton are just some of the symptoms. But lately, there have been some encouraging hints of change.
Perhaps most notable was the Dutch parliament’s passage of a resolution this month urging its government to “encourage the European Union to resist the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state.” That is a rousing vote of support for Israel’s position over that of the Palestinian Authority, which recently launched a worldwide campaign to gain backing for such a declaration.
From the U.S. Congress, this would be unsurprising. But for a European parliament to side with Israel against the PA is virtually unheard of. What European bodies usually pass are anti-Israel resolutions — like the European Parliament’s endorsement of the Goldstone report.
Then, over in Germany, the conservative daily Die Welt — normally a backer of Angela Merkel’s conservative government — published a scathing front-page commentary this week criticizing her policies toward Israel. Written by the paper’s political editor, Torsten Krauel, the piece blasted Merkel for acting as if Israeli settlements were “the only remaining obstacle on the track to a quick Middle East peace,” when, in reality, Israel withdrew from both Lebanon and Gaza and got nothing in return but rocket fire from radical Islamists who promptly took over both areas. Merkel’s fixation on settlements, Krauel wrote, merely encourages Arab extremists to shun necessary compromises.
As the Jerusalem Post noted, Krauel’s piece remains an “anomaly within the mainstream German media.” But that’s precisely why it’s significant. European publics are hostile to Israel in part because European media rarely even let them hear Israel’s side of the story. Now, if Krauel continues this line, readers of one of Germany’s leading papers may finally get that chance.
Finally, there was British Defense Secretary Liam Fox’s speech at Israel’s Herzliya Conference this week. After reciting the de rigueur pap about how an Israeli-Palestinian peace could bolster efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear program, Fox said something remarkable: that the British-Israeli defense relationship “is a relationship that enables our operations, and in some cases, keeps British troops alive in Afghanistan.”
It’s true that Israeli technologies and counterterrorism techniques are being used in Afghanistan. But it’s rare for Western officials to acknowledge that; the bon ton these days is accusing Israel of costing soldiers’ lives on the spurious grounds that the Taliban or al-Qaeda in Iraq are motivated by rage over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The acknowledgment is especially remarkable coming from Britain, which has repeatedly slapped arms embargoes on Israel in recent years, and from a government hitherto far more anti-Israel than its predecessors. That implies that the pro-Israel sentiment is filtering up from troops in the field.
It’s far too soon to tell whether these are mere isolated incidents or signs of a larger trend. But it does imply that Israel’s supporters on the Continent shouldn’t give up the fight quite yet.
When the Egyptian uprising began, many commentators hoped it would finally put paid to the theory that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root cause of the region’s ills. John made that point here; Herb Keinon did it in The Jerusalem Post; even The New York Times‘s Roger Cohen, formerly an advocate of this theory, wrote a column titled “Exit the Israel Alibi.”
But these hopes were soon dashed. This weekend, the Quartet proclaimed Israeli-Palestinian talks essential; Quartet member Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign-policy czar, even declared that events in Egypt mustn’t “distract us” from this goal.
Heaven help us. One of the Middle East’s most important countries, the lynchpin of the entire Israeli-Arab peace process, is in turmoil — something even UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon admits has “serious implications” for the process — and the EU’s top foreign-policy official thinks that “shouldn’t distract us” from Israeli-Palestinian talks?
And yesterday, Barack Obama’s former national security adviser, James Jones, similarly asserted that regardless of what Egyptian protesters say is driving them, what really “drives nearly everything, everything else that threatens us, everything that happens in this region” is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
To understand why these presumably intelligent people can’t see that the unrest sweeping the Arab world isn’t about Israel, consider a completely unrelated article: Peter Baker’s New York Times magazine piece last month about Obama’s economic policy.
In late 2009, Baker wrote, Obama’s team thought the recession was ending. “Then came a string of episodes that [Rahm Emanuel] and others believe sidetracked the economy: the European financial crisis triggered by Greece, the gulf oil spill, conflict over Gaza and the concurrent gyrations in the stock market.”
Are they joking???
First, the Israel-Hamas “conflict over Gaza” didn’t happen in late 2009, but a year earlier, ending before Obama even took office. Yet even if the date had been correct, the idea of that war affecting the U.S. economy is ludicrous. The European crisis, sure: Europe is America’s biggest trading partner. But the U.S. has no trade with Gaza, while its trade with Israel, at $28 billion in 2009, is negligible compared to its total trade of $3.4 trillion. Nor was oil production affected: Other Middle Eastern countries weren’t involved in the war at all.
In fact, even Israel’s economy was virtually unaffected: while the 2008-09 financial crisis sparked recession throughout the West, Israel’s GDP fell by far less than that of its two major trading partners, the EU and U.S., during both quarters affected by the war (Q4 2008 and Q1 2009). So we’re supposed to believe a war that barely affected even the country that fought it caused an economic crisis in a superpower half a world away?
Only a pathological obsession with Israel could lead administration officials to blame America’s economic woes of late 2009 on a minor war fought by a marginal trading partner a full year earlier. And curing such pathology lies more in the realm of medical science than political science.
Nevertheless, it’s vital to understand just how deeply it runs. For it is shaping, or rather misshaping, the West’s foreign policy every day.
The soap opera of appointing the next Israel Defense Forces chief of staff contained many troubling elements, but one in particular has received far too little attention: The decision as to who will fill one of the country’s most important jobs, a choice with a major potential impact on Israel’s future, was effectively made not by the elected government, but by an unelected state comptroller, an unelected attorney general and an unelected High Court of Justice.
The elected government thought the best man for the job was Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant. I’m not qualified to judge whether he was in fact superior to the other contenders, but he was clearly a reasonable choice. As GOC Southern Command, he played a major role in drafting the plans for Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza two years ago and training the troops who fought it. And that war, unlike the Second Lebanon War in 2006, is generally considered a military success: It fully accomplished the limited goal the government set – significantly reducing the rocket fire from Gaza – with minimal Israeli casualties.
But after the government announced its choice, environmental groups petitioned the High Court against it, saying Galant’s alleged takeover of state lands near his home disqualified him for the job. Then, while this case was still pending, state comptroller and retired judge Micha Lindenstrauss began his own probe.
We don’t know exactly what Lindenstrauss discovered, since his full report wasn’t made public. But we know he concluded that Galant was less than truthful in two documents: an affidavit filed by his lawyers to the court, and an earlier letter to the Israel Lands Administration. Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein then decided that because of these untruths, he could not defend Galant’s appointment in court. And since the government knew the court wouldn’t approve an appointment the attorney general opposed – even though his reason for opposing it (the alleged untruths) had nothing to do with the reason for the petition (the alleged land grab) – it bowed to the inevitable and rescinded the appointment.
We also know three other things. First, whatever Galant’s alleged untruths were, they don’t amount to criminal offenses. Nobody is talking about indicting him for perjury; yet lying to a court on a substantive matter that could affect the outcome of a case is very definitely a criminal offense. This implies that at least the alleged affidavit lie was a fairly minor one.
More importantly, however, it means we are talking about an ethical rather than a legal violation. And neither the comptroller, the attorney general nor the court ought to be deciding whether someone is morally unfit for a certain post; their job is to determine legal unfitness.
Second, it’s very easy to make mistakes, especially about incidents that occurred years ago, as Galant’s alleged land grab did. This is particularly true of minor details, but repeated studies have shown that it can be equally true of major ones.
In the famous gorilla suit experiment, for instance, half the people present would have vehemently denied afterward that someone in a gorilla suit had walked across the basketball court, nor would they have been deliberately lying: They simply had no recollection of having seen such a thing. Memory plays funny tricks on everyone. Thus while it’s obviously possible that Galant lied deliberately, it’s also possible that his memory was simply at fault.
Finally, legal professionals aren’t always the best judges of whether something is a deliberate lie or an honest mistake, even though theoretically, that is their job. A classic example is then-Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman’s indictment for perjury in 1996. The indictment was approved at the highest professional level, by then-State Attorney (and now Supreme Court Justice) Edna Arbel. Yet it was thrown of court without Neeman even being asked to present his defense.
Why? Because the indictment stemmed from minor errors in Neeman’s testimony on a certain issue – for instance, he cited one event as occurring in 1992 rather than 1991 – that he himself discovered and reported to both the police and the High Court. The trial judge sensibly concluded that indicting people for trying to correct honest errors in their testimony would gravely impair the legal system’s ability to discover the truth. Yet where the judge saw an honest effort to correct honest mistakes (and I suspect most people would agree), an equally senior legal professional like Arbel saw grave and deliberate lies.
So were Galant’s untruths mistakes or deliberate lies? Were they major ethical violations of the kind that outweigh his decades of dedicated and successful military service, or where they minor ones of the kind that all people make occasionally, precisely because they are human beings rather than angels?
Without the facts, we have no way of judging for ourselves. Nor is there any one right answer; reasonable people of goodwill could easily disagree. Indeed, even the jurists aren’t unanimous: Several senior jurists, including the man who drafted the IDF’s code of ethics, wrote Weinstein last week to argue that Galant’s alleged untruths shouldn’t disqualify him.
But here’s what we do know: The people we elected to make precisely these kinds of judgment calls were denied the right to do so. The decision was made instead by an unelected comptroller and an unelected attorney general, thanks to an unelected court that has repeatedly ruled the attorney general’s moral judgments binding on the elected government. That isn’t a victory for democracy, as one prominent commentator Orwellianly claimed, but a travesty of it.
For if the decision goes sour – if, say, the second-choice candidate botches a vital military operation – it is the elected government that will get the blame, not those unelected officials. The latter thus have that most dangerous of all commodities, power without responsibility. And the government is left with the worst of all worlds: responsibility without power.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Amnon Rubinstein, a former Knesset member and minister from Israel’s left-wing Meretz Party, made an important point in today’s Jerusalem Post. The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt took the West by surprise, he wrote, because Westerners know almost nothing about what goes on in undemocratic societies. And this ignorance stems largely from the fact that the bodies it relies on to provide information — the media and nongovernmental organizations — devote most of their energy to the low-hanging fruit, exposing real or imagined failings by democracies, instead of focusing on dictatorships, where getting information is much harder.
The openly pro-Palestinian reporter Amira Hass provided an excellent example in Monday’s Haaretz. At a Ramallah store where everyone was watching Al Jazeera, an employee asked if she had caught what a Tunisian protester just said: that “the Palestinians’ situation is better than that of the Tunisians, that they [the Palestinians] have food.”
I told him this was the same impression members of Egyptian solidarity delegations had upon visiting the Gaza Strip after Operation Cast Lead [Israel’s 2009 war with Hamas]. They were amazed at the abundance of food, especially fruits and vegetables, they were able to find in Gaza. And I heard that not from the Israeli Civil Administration spokesmen but from Egyptians and Palestinians.
But nobody would know this from media or NGO reports. Can anyone remember reading a news story about food shortages in Egypt or Tunisia in recent years? Yet hundreds of articles have been published about alleged humanitarian distress in Gaza, including many that claimed Israel’s blockade was causing starvation.
Indeed, the UN has run an annual humanitarian-aid appeal for the West Bank and Gaza since 2003; this year, it’s seeking $567 million, making it the organization’s fifth-largest “emergency campaign.” Can anyone remember the last UN appeal for aid to Egypt or Tunisia?
The same goes for NGOs. On Amnesty International’s website, the “features” page has nothing about either Egypt or Tunisia. Yet Israel merits two condemnatory features (the only country so honored), including the top-billed story — which, naturally, alleges food shortages in Gaza due to Israel’s blockade.
Then there’s the UN Human Rights Council — which, as Rubinstein noted, actually praised the human-rights situation in both Egypt and Tunisia, even as it issued 27 separate resolutions slamming Israel.
Thus most Westerners were utterly clueless about the economic distress and oppression that fueled the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. Indeed, based on the available information, the reasonable assumption would have been that Gaza, not Egypt or Tunisia, was the place most likely to explode.
Human Rights Watch founder Robert Bernstein decried his own organization in 2009 for betraying its “original mission to pry open closed societies” — to shed light precisely on those dark corners where information isn’t easily available — in favor of a focus on open societies, especially Israel. That, as I’ve argued repeatedly, leaves the world’s most oppressed people voiceless.
But it turns out the obsessive media/NGO focus on Israel also has another price: depriving the West of the information it needs to make sound judgments and set wise policy.