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“Shouldn’t the MKs who split from Labor last month resign and give their seats back to the party?” a high-school student asked me this weekend. “After all, people voted for Labor, not those particular MKs.”
Legally, the answer is no: The law explicitly allows one-third or more of a faction to break away. But the fact that it’s legal doesn’t make it good for Israeli democracy. In an electoral system where people vote for parties rather than individuals, factional splits can legitimately make voters feel their votes have been stolen, and such complaints are in fact widely heard after every such split.
Granted, these complaints aren’t always wholly justified. The main substantive issue over which Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s Atzmaut faction split from Labor, for instance, was its view that Labor’s constant threats to quit the government if Israeli-Palestinian talks didn’t resume were counterproductive, merely encouraging the Palestinians to harden their positions. And since post-split polls show that despite Barak’s massive unpopularity, the new party would win enough votes to enter the next Knesset, some Labor voters evidently agree. The same was true of former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s decision to quit Likud and form Kadima in 2005: Many Likud voters supported Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza, which was the main reason for the split.
Nevertheless, even splits like these can give voters just cause for grievance. Barak, for instance, took a third of Labor’s MKs, but polls indicate that he represents less than a third of Labor voters: They show Aztmaut winning only about two seats in the next Knesset, compared to 8-10 seats for Labor under most of its current leadership candidates. And some splits are out-and-out vote theft: No one could honestly argue that Yi’ud, for instance, was reflecting its voters’ will when it split from the hard-right Tsomet party in 1995 to provide the final two votes needed to pass the Oslo-2 agreement.
Moreover, voters feeling as if their votes were stolen would be cause for concern even if it had no basis in reality, because this feeling does real damage to the democratic process. I’ve heard many people say in recent years that given the likelihood of their vote ultimately being used to further policies they oppose, they see no point in voting. And voter turnout data shows this is not mere idle talk.
After hovering around 80% for the first five decades of Israel’s existence, turnout fell to 68% in 2003, 64 percent in 2006 and 65 percent in 2009. Compared to turnout rates in most other Western countries, that’s still high. But the trend is worrying, because democracy cannot survive if too many voters lose faith in their ability to influence their country’s future via the ballot box.
Yet at the same time, politicians must have the ability to promote policies different than those they campaigned on if they conclude that changing circumstances make this necessary. Otherwise, they would be betraying their obligation to serve their country’s interests to the best of their ability.
There is only one way to square this circle, and that is through accountability: requiring an MK who changes his policies while in office to face the same voters in the next election, thereby risking the loss of his job if they disapprove of his choice. Voters cannot feel disenfranchised if they have the power to punish politicians who betrayed them.
But Israel’s lack of district-based constituencies means that politicians who leave their parties don’t face the same voters. Regardless of whether they join another existing party or form a new one, if their policies have changed, they are probably competing for votes from among a completely different segment of the national electorate than the one that elected them last time, so their former voters have no way to punish their betrayal by throwing them out.
Only a constituency-based system can solve this problem. But that needn’t mean scrapping Israel’s proportional representation system for an American/British winner-takes-all version; most European countries use proportional representation while still letting people vote for individuals rather than parties.
In Germany, for instance, each voter cast two ballots: one for a party, and one for a specific member of parliament to represent his district. Seats in parliament are allocated by proportional representation, meaning that if a party receives 15 percent of the ballots nationwide, it will receive 15 percent of the seats in parliament. However, its seats will be filled by those party members who were directly elected by their districts. Only if a party wins fewer seats in the district elections than it is entitled to by the national vote can it fill the remaining seats from a list of candidates drawn up in advance.
Nor is this the only possible solution. Finland, for instance, uses a completely different system to achieve the same end: multi-candidate districts. Voters cast their ballot for a particular candidate, which also counts as a ballot for his party, and seats are allocated proportionally within each district. Thus if Party A’s candidates won 20 percent of the votes in a 10-candidate district, it would win 2 of the 10 seats, but the seats would go to the two Party A candidates who won the most votes in that district.
There are valid reasons for Israelis’ reluctance to give up proportional representation. But there are no valid reasons for Israel to be virtually the only Western democracy that still forces voters to elect parties rather than individuals.
This system doesn’t just contribute to voters’ feelings of disenfranchisement. It also promotes corruption, since voters have no way to oust a corrupt MK as long as his party keeps him on its slate, and hinders parliamentary supervision of the executive, since MKs have no independent power base: Their reelection prospects depend entirely on where the party places them on its next Knesset list. For all these reasons, it’s long past time to replace it.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Israel’s much-discussed parliamentary inquiry into nongovernmental organizations’ funding seems set to go ahead, after the ruling Likud Party’s Knesset faction voted yesterday to support it. The inquiry carries real risks, as it could easily degenerate into McCarthyism. But if done right, it could serve the same valuable purpose many previous parliamentary inquiries have: providing the Knesset with the information needed to craft sensible legislation.
The inquiry’s opponents charge that since it will focus on leftist NGOs specifically, it can’t be anything but a political witch hunt. Yet there’s a valid reason for this focus that has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the reality of NGO funding in Israel.
Almost all Israeli NGOs receive funding from foreign individuals or foundations, and most would likely collapse without it. That widely known fact makes an inquiry into foreign donations in general unnecessary, because no MK would even consider curbing them: it would destroy Israel’s nonprofit sector. At most, the Knesset may (and should) promulgate regulations to increase transparency.
Hence the inquiry is focusing on one specific subset of foreign funding that gained prominence due to the Goldstone Report on the Gaza war: funding by foreign governments.
Set up by the virulently anti-Israel UN Human Rights Council, the Goldstone Committee was never intended to be anything but a tool to bludgeon Israel. Thus the fact that certain Israeli NGOs collaborated with it made many Israelis question their hitherto widely accepted claim to have Israel’s best interests at heart — especially when it later emerged that many of the anti-Israel allegations they supplied were false. Even Hamas, for instance, now admits that Israel’s army was right and Israeli NGOs wrong about the combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio.
When it also emerged that many of these groups receive funding from foreign governments, Israelis concluded that this issue needed to be addressed. But right now, that is impossible, because too much crucial information is unknown.
How many groups are funded by foreign governments? Are foreign governments a major or marginal source of these groups’ funding? Are government donations mainly made directly or channeled through foreign foundations? Without answers to such questions, it’s impossible even to decide whether legislation is really needed, much less craft sensible regulations.
One thing, however, is known: foreign governments fund left-wing NGOs exclusively. They don’t fund groups that, for instance, build Jewish housing in East Jerusalem. Hence, to investigate this issue, the Knesset has to focus on left-wing groups.
Previous parliamentary inquiries have successfully amassed information that led to legislation. A five-year inquiry into Holocaust-era assets in Israel, for instance, recently resulted in the establishment of a government company to restitute such assets. And while NGO funding is clearly a more controversial topic, legislatures elsewhere often hold inquiries on equally controversial subjects — for example, Rep. Peter King’s planned congressional hearings on radical Islam in America — for the same reason: to find out what the scope of a problem really is.
The NGO inquiry could easily go wrong. But in principle, it’s a legitimate use of legislative powers for legislative ends. And it deserves to be treated as such.
The Guardian clearly has it in for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat. Not content with lambasting the concessions they actually made, it’s now accusing them of two concessions belied by the very “Palestine Papers” it cites as proof: recognizing Israel as a Jewish state and agreeing to resettle only 10,000 refugees in Israel.
The first assertion, as J.E. Dyer noted, relies on two Erekat quotes. In 2007, he told then-Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, “If you want to call your state the Jewish state of Israel you can call it what you want.” And in 2009, he said, “I dare the Israelis to write to the UN and change their name to the ‘Great Eternal Historic State of Israel’. This is their issue, not mine.”
Yet neither of these constitutes Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, which is what Israel demands. They merely reiterate what Palestinian leaders have repeatedly said in public (here and here, for instance): that they can’t stop Israel from calling itself a Jewish state, but under no circumstances will they recognize it as such.
The refugees assertion relies on minutes of Erekat’s June 2009 meeting with the PA’s Negotiations Support Unit. One participant asked whether any Israeli government had expressed different positions than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did in a speech earlier that month. Erekat replied by detailing former prime minister Ehud Olmert’s offer, which included accepting “1000 refugees annually for the next 10 years.”
Nowhere, however, does the document say the Palestinians agreed to this. On the contrary, they refused to sign Olmert’s proffered deal. So how does the Guardian construe Palestinian acquiescence out of this? By quoting something Erekat told U.S. envoy George Mitchell four months earlier, in February 2009: “On refugees, the deal is there.”
The paper doesn’t source this quote, nor does it explain why it thinks Erekat was signifying acceptance of Olmert’s offer. Certainly, Erekat doesn’t say so, and the timing actually makes this interpretation unlikely.
Mitchell’s February 2009 visit occurred after Israel’s election but before Netanyahu took office. Netanyahu was opposed to Mitchell’s “borders first” agenda for talks, arguing that upfront territorial concessions would deprive Israel of leverage in subsequent talks on issues like the refugees. The PA backed it for the very same reason, and thus sought to counter Netanyahu’s objection. So Erekat gave Mitchell a generic assurance that the refugees wouldn’t be a deal-breaker. But since he didn’t commit to any particular number, that assurance is meaningless.
Several CONTENTIONS contributors have noted that the publication of the Palestine Papers will make it harder for the PA to make concessions essential for a deal. But since the Guardian‘s spin has been mindlessly repeated by media outlets worldwide (including in Israel), an equally worrying possibility is that Western leaders may falsely believe it already has offered the necessary concessions, and therefore ease their already minimal pressure on the Palestinians to do so.
And since the talks’ failure to date stems mainly from the PA’s refusal to make these concessions, that would make the prospects for a deal even dimmer than they are now.
One of the most intriguing results of last week’s split in the Labor Party was the follow-up polling on whom voters would prefer to see replacing Defense Minister Ehud Barak at the party’s helm. Of the current likely candidates, the person whom polls showed bringing the party most seats was Sheli Yachimovich – a first-term MK who has devoted her brief time in office exclusively to economic and social issues.
Granted, this is partly due to the weakness of her potential rivals: MKs Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and Isaac Herzog, for instance, have repeatedly served as cabinet ministers with few achievements to show for it, while former MK Amram Mitzna led the party to a landslide defeat when he chaired it in 2003, then quit in a huff several months later. Yachimovich, by contrast, has proved an energetic and effective legislator.
But the significance of her chosen focus cannot be ignored. During two years in office, Yachimovich has barely uttered a word about the peace process, preferring to devote herself exclusively to domestic issues. Yet Labor Party voters, who largely identify themselves as members of the “peace camp,” would rather be led by her than by her rivals, all of whom claim to view the “peace process” as a top priority. What gives?
The answer is simple: Most Israeli voters, including those in Labor, agree with Yachimovich that domestic issues ought to be the top priority right now. Repeated public opinion polls bear this out.
A January 2007 Peace Index poll, for instance, found that voters’ top concern was governmental corruption, which received a weighted grade of 31.5 out of 100. That compared to 22.1 for the second-place issue, rehabilitating the Israel Defense Forces after the previous summer’s Second Lebanon War; 20.1 for reducing economic gaps; 15.4 for reducing crime; and a mere 10.8 for making peace with the Palestinians. An October 2010 Peace Index survey similarly found that only one-fifth of Jewish Israelis deemed peace with the Palestinians the country’s most pressing issue; the other four-fifths chose various domestic concerns.
And it’s worth noting that these polls may actually skew the results in favor of the peace process by omitting some of the most important domestic issues from the list of choices. The October 2010 poll, for instance, gave respondents six choices, two of which were strengthening either the state’s Jewish character or its democratic character. Unsurprisingly, these ranked last. But the choices did not include improving the state’s failing education system, though this is a key concern for many Israeli parents and has received considerable media attention in recent months. Nor did they include rising crime rates, another issue that has garnered considerable media attention.
The reason why most Israelis view domestic concerns as higher priority than the peace process is simple: They see no chance of actually reaching a peace agreement in the foreseeable future. The October 2010 poll, for instance, found that two-thirds of respondents deemed Israeli-Palestinian talks unlikely to produce an agreement “in the coming years”; that finding has been roughly constant for years, regardless of which party headed the government. That is because two-thirds of Jewish Israelis also believe that most Palestinians “have not accepted Israel’s existence and would destroy it if they could,” as the October 2007 Peace Index poll put it. And as the pollsters noted, “this finding is not exceptional; similar rates have been found in the Jewish public since the mid-1990s.”
Having concluded that Palestinian intransigence currently makes a peace agreement unobtainable, most Israelis would rather the government focus on problems it could solve – namely, domestic ones. But leading politicians of almost every party, from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of Likud to opposition leader Tzipi Livni of Kadima, have instead consistently neglected domestic issues in favor of an obsessive focus on the peace process. That is certainly true of Yachimovich’s main rivals for the Labor Party’s chairmanship.
All three of the party’s declared candidates for leadership – Herzog, Ben-Eliezer and Avishay Braverman – were members of the current government until they resigned last week, and all three held portfolios directly relevant to major domestic issues like poverty and employment: social affairs; industry, trade and labor; and minority affairs, respectively. Yet instead of tackling these issues, they spent most of their time in office threatening to quit if the government did not make progress toward an Israeli-Palestinian agreement.
Yachimovich, in contrast, did focus on domestic issues – and whether or not one agrees with her proposed solutions, she clearly got results. To take just one prominent example, her bill to reduce inequality by capping executive pay through legislation garnered enough Knesset and public support that the government was forced to respond with its own, more market-based proposals to curb excessive executive pay.
Labor voters are evidently excited at the prospect of a party leader interested in addressing burning domestic concerns rather than wasting all her time and energy pursuing an unachievable peace agreement. The question now is whether other Israeli politicians will finally get the message.
I don’t know whether the “Palestine Papers” published yesterday by Al Jazeera and the Guardian are real or, as Barry Rubin argues, a fake aimed at discrediting the Palestinian Authority’s current leadership. What is certainly false, however, is the claim, as Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland put it, that “Now we know. Israel had a peace partner.”
If the papers are true, then, as Noah pointed out, they show the PA agreeing to let Israel keep most — though not all — of the huge Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, which are home to hundreds of thousands of Israelis. The Guardian deems this concession shameful. Freedland terms it “unthinkable”; the paper’s editorial goes even further, accusing Palestinians of agreeing “to flog the family silver.”
Yet, as Rick noted, every peace plan of the past decade — starting with the Clinton Parameters in 2000, which virtually the entire world claims to view as the basis for any agreement — has proposed assigning the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem to Israel. The Guardian is entitled to fantasize about a Palestinian state “created on 1967 borders, not around them,” but no serious mediator or negotiator ever has. Even UN Security Council Resolution 242, which everyone accepts as the basis for talks, was drafted so as to allow changes to the pre-1967 armistice lines.
Indeed, far from constituting an “unthinkable” concession, the PA offer detailed in these documents didn’t even amount to the minimum that every peace plan of the past decade has deemed necessary for an agreement — because every such plan, again starting with the Clinton Parameters, has also proposed giving Israel additional parts of the West Bank (usually in exchange for equivalent territory inside Israel) so as to allow it to retain some of the major settlement blocs. And, according to these documents, the Palestinians wouldn’t agree to that.
This, of course, tallies exactly with what Israel has said for the past decade. Israel never claimed that negotiations broke down over Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, but it repeatedly claimed that talks broke down over other issues, such as borders. In 2008, for instance, Ehud Olmert offered the Palestinians 93 percent of the West Bank plus territorial swaps equivalent to the remainder, but the Palestinians refused to sign: they insisted on land swaps of only about 2 percent (see here or here).
The Palestine Papers also claim that the PA agreed to cede exclusive control over the Temple Mount in favor of management by “a body or committee.” But that, too, was in Olmert’s offer: a five-member committee composed of Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the U.S., thereby ensuring an Arab majority. And, again, the Palestinians refused to sign. Indeed, PA President Mahmoud Abbas subsequently told the Washington Post‘s Jackson Diehl that “the gaps were wide.”
The documents did, however, contain one revealing quote: chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat allegedly told an American official, “Israelis want the two state solution but they don’t trust. They want it more than you think, sometimes more than Palestinians.”
Whether or not Erekat actually said that, it’s unfortunately true. And until it changes, peace will remain a distant dream.
As Alana noted yesterday, the Turkel Committee’s investigation of Israel’s raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla last May largely confirmed what any fair-minded person already knew: that the blockade of Gaza was legal, that Israel therefore had the right to enforce it militarily, and that its soldiers fired in self-defense after being brutally attacked when they boarded the Mavi Marmara. Nevertheless, the probe did unveil one important bit of new information: that Turkey’s government bears direct responsibility for the bloodshed that ensued.
The report revealed that Ankara had initially proposed having the Turkish Red Crescent take responsibility for the flotilla. Under this proposal, the ships were to dock in Ashdod Port, after which the Turkish Red Crescent would shepherd the cargo overland to nearby Gaza. Israel (obviously) agreed. And then, at the last minute, Turkey reneged.
In other words, Turkey recognized that the flotilla presented a potentially dangerous problem — that, unlike other flotillas before and since, this one, sponsored by an organization with well-known terrorist links, could not be trusted to divert peacefully to Israel or Egypt. So it proposed a solution and secured Israel’s agreement. And then, at the last minute, it decided instead to let the problem go ahead and explode. Consequently, nine Turks died.
Unfortunately, that has become the norm in Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey: Ankara’s stated policy of “zero problems” with its neighbors, for all the paeans it has won in places like the New York Times, somehow never extends to Israel. On the contrary, Turkey often seems to go out of its way to create problems with Israel — as it did in this case by reneging on the flotilla deal.
Indeed, Erdogan appears to have made a strategic decision that anti-Israel incitement serves his purposes. The flotilla was obviously a gold mine in this department, but there have been many other equally telling incidents.
Take, for instance, the viciously anti-Semitic television series Valley of the Wolves, which featured such gems as Israeli soldiers murdering children at point-blank range and Israeli intelligence agents kidnapping babies to convert them to Judaism. When Israel complained, Turkey responded that freedom of the press precluded it from intervening.
That would be fair enough — except that Turkey has no qualms about intervening in television productions that don’t suit its purposes. Just this month, Bloomberg reported that “Turkey’s television regulator threatened to yank a new television series for failing to respect the privacy of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, who ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1520 until his death in 1566.” In other words, insufficient deference to a long dead sultan is off-limits, but vicious incitement against live Israelis is fine.
That, in a nutshell, defines Erdogan’s Turkey. And last May, nine Turks died for it.
The Israel Defense Forces has finally published the conclusion of its inquiry into the death of Jawaher Abu Rahmah, the woman allegedly killed by Israeli tear gas while protesting the security fence in the West Bank town of Bili’in last month. The official conclusion of the inquiry, based on Abu Rahmah’s hospital records, is medical error: a misdiagnosis leading to inappropriate treatment. But if that conclusion is correct, then what really killed Abu Rahmah is not mere error but the Palestinians’ own anti-Israel incitement.
The inquiry concluded that “doctors believed Abu Rahmah was sickened by phosphorous fertilizer and nerve gas. She was therefore treated with atropine and fluids, without Palestinian doctors realizing that she had in fact inhaled tear gas.”
Atropine is the standard treatment for poisonous gas. But it can be deadly if given in large doses to someone who hasn’t inhaled poison gas.
And this is where incitement comes in. Anyone who knows anything about Israel would know that the IDF doesn’t even use nerve gas against combatants armed with sophisticated weapons, much less against rock-throwing demonstrators.
But wild allegations of preposterous Israeli crimes are standard fare among Palestinians, and indeed throughout the Arab world. Israel has been accused of everything from poisoning Palestinian wells with depleted uranium to sending sharks to attack Egypt’s Red Sea resorts in order to undermine that country’s tourist industry. And one staple of this genre is the claim that Israel uses poison gas against Palestinians. Indeed, the claim was publicly made by no less a person than Yasir Arafat’s wife in a 1999 meeting with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton: Suha Arafat charged that “intensive daily use of poison gas by Israeli forces” was causing cancer among Palestinians.
Had it not been for the fact that such preposterous claims are so routinely reported as fact that they have become widely believed, Abu Rahmah’s doctors would never have entertained the possibility that her symptoms were caused by poison gas. They would instead have focused on plausible causes of her complaint, and thereby avoided the fatal misdiagnosis.
Palestinian incitement has cost Israel thousands of dead and wounded and contributed to the blackening of its image overseas. But the Abu Rahmah case underscores the fact that the ultimate victim of such lies is the society that perpetrates them. For when the distinction between truth and falsehood loses all meaning, a society becomes dysfunctional.
You can’t run a functioning legal system if rampant conspiracy theories mean key verdicts will be widely disbelieved, as may well be the case with the inquiry into former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination. You can’t run an army if you fall so captive to your own propaganda that you misread both your own and the enemy’s capabilities — a fact that contributed to the Arabs states’ disastrous loss to Israel in 1967. And it turns out you can’t save lives if you let propaganda warp your diagnoses.
In my column last week, I discussed one widely ignored challenge facing Israel’s education system. But there’s another, even greater challenge that is also frequently overlooked by those waxing nostalgic for Israel’s educational achievements of days gone by: the fact that learning is no longer a key Israeli value.
During the first decades of the state’s existence, most Israelis were products of a Diaspora Jewish society that viewed scholarship as the height of achievement: The religious half of this society revered great rabbis because they were scholars and teachers, and the secular half simply transferred this reverence for scholarship to secular subjects. Hence the new, impoverished country, facing critical security challenges, nevertheless prized education and invested massively in it: The number of senior university faculty per capita, for instance, rose twelve-fold from 1950-1973. And thanks to this attitude, teachers could count on respect from students and parents alike, even if they were poorly paid or taught in classrooms short of equipment.
Today, however, that is no longer the case. In fact, learning has become so devalued by Israeli society that even many education professionals no longer view imparting knowledge as their primary goal. In one 2008 poll, for instance, only one-fifth of principals said their main goal was raising students’ academic achievements. The rest preferred goals like “inculcating a feeling of belonging and significance among all those who come to school,” or even more distressingly, “reducing violence.” Similarly, when the Education Ministry published a list of goals in 2009, “advancing educational achievement” – i.e., increasing students’ knowledge – ranked only twelfth.This contempt for the value of learning leads almost inevitably to one of the Israeli education system’s most well-known problems: classroom environments that make learning almost impossible, thanks to disruptive students and parents who refuse to back teachers’ efforts to impose discipline. For if neither students nor parents value learning, they have no reason to respect a teacher qua teacher, as a disseminator of knowledge.
Why has Israeli society failed to maintain its founders’ respect for education? One possible answer is that the secular Jewish reverence for scholarship was born of a religious tradition from which Israel’s early residents were generally at most one generation removed. But with time, as Israelis grew more distant from the religious roots of the traditional Jewish love of learning, this love grew harder to sustain.
But there is also another factor that’s impossible to ignore. And that is the degree to which the value of scholarship has been discredited precisely by the two segments of Israeli society that still claim to prize it above all: the haredim (ultra-Orthodox) and academics.
For haredim, learning is beyond doubt the supreme value. This is a society that encourages most of its male members to study in yeshiva all their lives, or at least for as many years as possible, and where the best scholars are the community’s most respected members.
But it is also a society where most men shirk army duty, leaving the burden of the state’s defense to non-haredim, and where most men don’t work, relying for their sustenance on state-funded stipends and subsidies financed by the taxes of non-haredim. If everyone adopted the haredi lifestyle, Israel would be unable either to defend itself militarily or support itself economically – and given its many enemies, its demise would follow swiftly. This inevitably leads other Israelis to look at haredi society and say, “if elevating scholarship to a supreme value means creating a society incapable of surviving, we want no part of this value.”
The situation in academia is a bit more complicated, because while there are academics who actively work to undermine the state – whether by roaming the world urging anti-Israel boycotts or by publishing virulently anti-Israel slanders – they constitute only a small, albeit vocal, minority. Yet in the name of promoting “excellence in scholarship,” their colleagues grant them sweeping support.
The boycott issue is a particularly salient example. Few academics actively promote anti-Israel boycotts, and many actively work against them. Yet almost without exception, the academic world has lined up to insist that because excellence in scholarship is impossible without academic freedom, academics must even have the freedom to urge a boycott of the very state that pays their salaries (since most Israeli universities are state-funded) without fearing for their jobs.
In short, though any business would instantly fire an employee who publicly called for boycotting it, the supreme value of scholarship means the state has no such privilege: It must continue financing even academics who actively seek to bring it to its knees via international boycotts. And that inevitably leads other Israelis to look at academic society and say, “if elevating scholarship to a supreme value requires the state not merely to tolerate, but to actually finance campaigns for its own destruction, we want no part of this value.
There are no easy answers to how to reinstate learning as a value in a society that has come to associate this value with self-destructive behavior. But without addressing this fundamental problem, even the soundest educational reforms may well prove insufficient.
Internal party politics aren’t normally the stuff of groundbreaking revolutions. But the Israeli Labor Party’s split this morning could prove to be exactly that.
Like most such splits, this one stemmed partly from personal animosities. But it also had a substantive reason: as one member of the breakaway faction explained, the government will now be able to conduct peace talks “without a stopwatch,” instead of under constant threat that a key coalition faction would quit if Israel didn’t capitulate to Palestinian demands.
For weeks, various Labor ministers have threatened that the party would leave the government if Israeli-Palestinian talks didn’t resume soon. At yesterday’s cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at these threats, saying they merely encouraged the Palestinians to up their demands and refuse to negotiate unless they are met.
This isn’t the only reason for Palestinian intransigence, but it’s certainly a contributory factor. Why should the Palestinians negotiate when they can let Israel’s Labor Party do the work for them? And that’s basically what Labor has been doing: demanding that Netanyahu offer ever more concessions to tempt the Palestinians back to the table, on pain of having his government collapse if he refuses. Most Labor MKs never blamed the Palestinians for the impasse or demanded any concessions of them; they put the onus entirely on Netanyahu.
The same is true of Israel’s main opposition party, Kadima. It, too, blamed the impasse entirely on the government, giving the Palestinians a pass, and demanded more concessions only of Israel, not the Palestinians.
This behavior didn’t just increase Palestinian intransigence; it also increased international pressure on and opprobrium for Israel. After all, if even members of Israel’s government deemed Israel the guilty party, why should non-Israelis doubt it?
But finally, a contingent of Israel’s left has said “enough”: As Israelis, it’s our job to negotiate the best deal for Israel, not the Palestinians. And it’s our job to promote Israel‘s positions overseas, not to besmirch our own country by promoting the Palestinian narrative.
Right now, it’s a small contingent — five of Labor’s 13 MKs — spearheaded by a widely disliked leader, Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Thus its capacity for growth is unclear. But it does give the government stability, as these five are enough to ensure its majority (especially since many of the others never voted with it anyway). So at least the government is now better positioned to fight the diplomatic battles ahead.
More important, however, five MKs from the heart of the left have openly challenged the leftist parties’ destructive behavior. And if their challenge catches on, it could revolutionize Israel’s diplomatic position. For while many of the reasons for Israel’s growing pariah status have nothing to do with Israel, the chorus of Israelis blaming the ongoing conflict entirely on Israel clearly plays a role. If additional swathes of the left started advocating for their own country rather than its adversaries, Israel could fight back much more effectively.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Barak and his allies. But in this effort, they deserve support from everyone who cares about Israel.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is clearly doing her best to defuse the bombshell dropped last week by Israel’s outgoing Mossad chief, Meir Dagan. During a visit to the Gulf states yesterday, she stressed that Dagan’s assertion that Iran will not go nuclear before 2015 is no excuse for not keeping up the pressure on Tehran.
In their posts last week, Jonathan Tobin and J.E. Dyer both offered good reasons not to be reassured by Dagan’s prediction. But Clinton also alluded to a very different reason. “We don’t want anyone to be misled by anyone’s intelligence analysis,” she said.
That’s a diplomatic way of saying what two respected Israeli military analysts said openly that same day: Dagan’s public assessment must be evaluated in the light of its clear political purpose — to thwart any possibility of an Israeli military strike on Iran, which he is known to oppose.
As Haaretz columnist Amir Oren put it, “Dagan didn’t provide a pure intelligence assessment, but rather a political statement designed to influence government policy.” And Haaretz military correspondent Amos Harel, noting that Dagan avoided the media like the plague for the previous eight years of his tenure, termed the decision to go public with this assessment “a Bibi-bypass maneuver” — a way of constraining Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu by publicly asserting that military action against Iran is unnecessary.
Nobody is suggesting that Dagan deliberately falsified the evidence to reach this conclusion. But when intelligence is evaluated with a particular desired outcome in mind, it is human nature to magnify the importance of information that supports this outcome and downplay the importance of information that contradicts it.
That is precisely what happened with the now widely discredited 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate. The professionals who prepared it certainly didn’t deliberately falsify information; but they did want a result that would make it impossible, from a public-opinion standpoint, for then-President George W. Bush to go to war against another Muslim country. As a result, the report downplayed all the indications that Iran was continuing its nuclear program in order to reach its now-infamous conclusion: that Iran had halted its drive to obtain a nuclear bomb in 2003 and had yet to restart it.
It’s also important to remember, as Oren noted, that “in a marketplace of opinions based on the same intelligence data, his [Dagan’s] opinion is not superior to a contrary one held by other senior officials.” Some intelligence professionals have already reached different conclusions; others, including military intelligence staffers and the incoming Mossad chief, will certainly be reviewing the data, and may do so as well.
Precisely because Dagan is known to have vehemently opposed military action against Iran, his confident assertion that Iran won’t have the bomb before 2015 should be taken with a large grain of salt. Dagan is both a dedicated patriot and a consummate professional, but even patriotic professionals are still human. And it is only human nature to read the tea leaves in a way that supports what you would most like to believe.