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If anyone still believes President Barack Obama’s vow to keep Iran from going nuclear, today’s bombshell from the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius ought to dispel this illusion. According to Ignatius, Turkey deliberately gave Tehran the identities of up to 10 Iranians working as informants for Israel, resulting in a “significant” loss of intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan personally approved this decision, and it followed several other incidents in which Erdoğan’s handpicked spy chief gave Iran “sensitive intelligence collected by the U.S. and Israel.” Yet not only did Washington refuse to even lodge a protest with Ankara, it warmed relations with Turkey even further, to the point that “Erdoğan was among Obama’s key confidants.”
Needless to say, someone serious about stopping Iran’s nuclear program would be raging over the loss of “significant” intelligence about it, not rewarding the person responsible for this loss by elevating him to the role of key confidant. By this behavior, Obama signaled Tehran that he’s quite content to remain in ignorance about its race toward the bomb. Someone serious about stopping this program would also stop sharing “sensitive” intelligence about it with a person who known to have passed it on to Tehran, rather than continuing to treat him as a confidant.
But even without the Ignatius bombshell (which should also lead to mass resignations from the Congressional Turkey Caucus, if Congress is as serious about stopping Iran’s nuclear program as it has hitherto shown itself to be), the contrast between this week’s negotiating session with Iran and Obama’s meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu last month provided pretty clear evidence of Obama’s attitudes. According to Haaretz, Obama complained to the Israeli premier that Israeli-Palestinian talks were progressing too slowly and demanded that they be accelerated, saying otherwise, the nine-month deadline wouldn’t be met. Nothing irreversible is likely to happen that would make a deal impossible if this deadline were missed, yet even so, Obama considered the once-a-week negotiating sessions insufficient.
On Iran, in contrast, time is really of the essence: Its nuclear program is continuing apace even during the negotiations, and experts predict that at this rate, it will reach “critical capability” – the ability to produce nuclear weapons undetected – by mid-2014 at the latest. Yet on this issue, Obama seems to have all the time in the world: Following this week’s opening session in Geneva, talks between Iran and the so-called P5+1 will resume only in another three weeks’ time, on November 7. The contrast between Obama’s impatience on the non-urgent Israeli-Palestinian issue and his seemingly inexhaustible patience on the urgent Iranian one is cogent proof of which issue he really cares about and which he doesn’t.
Last month, a poll found that two-thirds of Jewish Israelis no longer believe Obama’s promise to stop Iran from getting the bomb, and after Ignatius’ revelation sinks in, I’d expect the number to climb even higher. That’s precisely why, contrary to the New York Times‘ fond delusion that Netanyahu is “increasingly alone abroad and at home,” the Israeli public is now solidly behind him: In another recent poll, fully two-thirds of Israelis said they would back a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran, a sharp reversal from the 58% who opposed it just last year. Israelis, it seems, are starting to realize that nobody will stop Iran from getting nukes if they don’t.
The recommendation by the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly that its 47 member states impose unspecified restrictions on circumcision is just the latest onslaught against Jewish life in Europe. Other recent examples include Poland’s ban on kosher slaughter, which joins existing bans Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Sweden (though the latter, bizarrely, permits the Muslim equivalent, halal slaughter); the near-passage of similar legislation in Holland; and a German court’s ruling that circumcision is illegal (though Berlin, to its credit, subsequently passed legislation reasserting circumcision’s legality).
Nowadays, attempts to ban Jewish praxis are usually justified in the name of human rights: Circumcision “violates the child’s bodily integrity;” kosher slaughter “is cruel to animals.” Yet while the pretext has changed, the targets have remained eerily constant for over 2,000 years: In previous centuries, Jewish praxis was targeted in the name of Christianity, and earlier still, under the Greeks and Romans, in the name of pagan religions. As far back as 167 BCE, Greek efforts to outlaw distinctive Jewish practices like the prohibitions on idol worship and eating pork sparked the Maccabean revolt.
The continuity of this behavior across more than two millennia explains why most Jews (and many non-Jews) don’t buy the pious protestations that there’s nothing anti-Semitic about such proposed bans on Jewish life. It also underscores the degree to which the modern-day human rights movement, like Christianity before it and paganism before that, has become a religion, one that brooks no competitors and tolerates no dissent from its precepts.
But beyond that, this anti-Jewish onslaught reveals something that is fundamental to understanding European attitudes toward Israel. To see why, it’s worth considering a seemingly unrelated story: that of Mansuk Song, the founder of Korean Christians for Shalom Israel.
The Western missionaries who brought Christianity to Korea imbued their converts with their theology. Frequently, this included replacement theology – the belief that God rejected the Jews after the Jews rejected Jesus, and Christians replaced them as the chosen people. Replacement theology was propagated by most European denominations, including Catholicism (most of southern Europe, including France, Spain, Italy and Portugal), Lutheranism (much of northern Europe, including Germany and Scandinavia) and Calvinism (Switzerland).
That is the theology Song was raised on in Seoul, and in which he devoutly believed – until one day, a Christian friend returned from visiting Israel and asserted that Israel’s very existence refutes the claim that God rejected the Jews: Their return to their ancient land, just as God promised in the Bible, proves that His covenant with them still stands.
Song’s initial reaction was sheer fury at this theological heresy. But then, unwillingly, his mathematician’s mind began considering the evidence. And he was forced to conclude that his friend was right: The flourishing modern state of Israel, to which Jews have returned from all four corners of the earth just like the prophets promised, is incompatible with replacement theology. Hence his conversion into a Christian Zionist: As another Christian Zionist recently explained, a Christian who believes God’s covenant with the Jews remains in force will naturally tend to support the physical expression of that covenant, the reborn Jewish state.
One might ask what theology has to do with modern-day Europe, where Christian belief has plummeted, and Christianity’s influence along with it. The answer is that cultural attitudes tend to linger long after the beliefs that gave rise to them have disappeared. That’s true for all religions: In a recent poll of American Jews, for instance, 56% of respondents termed “working for justice/equality” important to their Jewish identity and 49% said the same of intellectual curiosity, though only 19% attached importance to Jewish law, the original source of both traditions.
But as the recent continent-wide push to eliminate Jewish praxis shows, one cultural attitude that has lingered in Europe is a profound discomfort with Judaism’s continued existence – a discomfort whose roots lie in replacement theology’s contention that since the Jews were rejected by God, allowing them to practice their religion in comfort, safety and pride is deeply offensive to God, and hence to His Christian subjects. This same cultural attitude underlies Europe’s profound discomfort with Israel, which goes way beyond the professed pretexts of “human rights” and “international law.”
Neither of these pretexts can explain why, for instance, Europe recently imposed financial sanctions on activity in “Israeli-occupied territory” even as it continues to fund activity in Turkish-occupied Cyprus or Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara: If “human rights” and “international law” actually mandated eschewing support for activity in occupied territory, these dictates would apply to all occupations.
But the double standard makes perfect sense once you factor in the lingering cultural attitudes of replacement theology. Neither Turkey’s occupation of Cyprus nor Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara poses any problem for Christian theology. In contrast, as Song’s experience shows, Israel’s very existence is a profound challenge to replacement theology, and even more so its post-1967 return to its ancient heartland of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria – aka “the occupation.”
Faced with this insoluble contradiction between his theology and the fact of Israel’s existence, Song chose to scrap his theology. But some Christians would prefer to eliminate the inconvenient fact. That’s why certain Christian organizations – especially in Europe (see, for instance, the Church of Scotland), but also some American denominations (like Presbyterianism) – are deeply involved in anti-Israel activity.
And that’s also why many Europeans who have long since abandoned Christianity still feel, in their heart of hearts, that there’s something profoundly wrong about Israel’s very existence, and especially its post-1967 expansion: They are the products of a cultural milieu whose attitudes they have inherited even if they no longer remember the source of those attitudes – which many don’t.
The lesson for Israel is that trying to make Europe love us is and always was a hopeless cause. It’s important to keep relations with such a major trading partner from deteriorating too far, but we shouldn’t waste time and energy trying to achieve anything beyond that. Our limited resources would be better spent seeking allies where we’re more likely to find them: among countries without a 2,000-year-old tradition of viewing our very existence as an offense against God.
As Jonathan noted Sunday, many diplomats, journalists and human rights organizations spent years loudly condemning Israel for a “humanitarian crisis in Gaza” that never existed. The truly remarkable thing, however, is how silent all these parties have fallen over the last few months, when Gaza has been suffering far worse than it ever did back when its “humanitarian crisis” was a cause célèbre. The reason, of course, is that there’s no possible way to blame the current crisis on Israel: The culprits are Egypt and the Palestinians’ own rival governments; Israel, in contrast, has been trying to alleviate the distress. And it turns out that if Palestinian distress can’t be used as a stick to bludgeon Israel, Gaza’s erstwhile champions have no interest in it whatsoever.
Ever since the Egyptian military overthrew the elected Muslim Brotherhood government this summer, it has cracked down ruthlessly on Gaza, accusing that territory’s Hamas government of complicity in jihadist terror in Sinai and of conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood to attack police stations and prisons. As journalist Khaled Abu Toameh wrote recently, this crackdown is hurting Hamas far worse than Israel’s military offensives in Gaza ever did. Here are just a few of the steps Egypt has taken:
- It has destroyed an estimated 90% of the tunnels from Sinai into Gaza. This move is entirely Hamas’s own fault: Its purpose is to stop is the extensive two-way traffic in arms and terrorists that Hamas presided over for years, and which has fueled much of the terror in Sinai. But since the tunnels were also a source of cheap Egyptian goods, their demolition has caused real hardship for impoverished Gazans.
To compensate, Israel has increased its own shipments of food and other supplies to Gaza, but Israeli goods are more expensive than their heavily subsidized Egyptian counterparts. Moreover, Hamas rejected an Israeli-Egyptian offer to send one particularly critical product previously brought in through the tunnels – cheap Egyptian fuel – via Israel instead, leading to serious shortages.
- Egypt has shut down the Rafah border crossing almost entirely, turning Gaza, for the first time, into the open-air prison its erstwhile champions used to falsely proclaim it. As long as Rafah was open, Palestinians were never imprisoned; they could travel to and from Gaza via Egypt. Now, however, they truly lack any way to enter and leave.
But here’s the kicker: Sympathetic to their distress, Israel offered to reopen its own crossing with Gaza, on condition that the Palestinian Authority handle security on the Palestinian side. That would solve the problem that originally led to the crossing’s closure: Since Hamas refuses to recognize Israel, security can’t be coordinated with it. But Hamas rejected this offer – and if it hadn’t, the PA almost certainly would have, given its rejection of a similar Egyptian proposal to enable the reopening of Rafah.
- Egypt has razed houses along the Gaza border to create a buffer zone and shot at Palestinian fishing boats seeking to evade Israel’s naval blockade of the Hamas-run government. Needless to say, both are steps the world denounced when Israel took them in the past.
These and other measures have produced a crisis of unprecedented severity in Gaza. But since there’s no way to blame Israel for it, Gaza’s erstwhile champions have gone AWOL. One can only pity any Palestinians naive enough to have thought the world actually cared about their suffering.
As I noted yesterday, the idea that ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could help stabilize the Middle East is fatuous. Yet many world leaders continue to espouse it. In his UN address last month, for instance, President Barack Obama proclaimed that while this conflict is “not the cause of all the region’s problems,” it has been “a major source of instability for far too long,” and resolving it would help lay “a foundation for a broader peace.” In August, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius termed the conflict “one of the issues, perhaps the central one, for the region.”
Given that the events of the past few years would seem to have decisively disproved this theory–nobody would seriously argue, for instance, that ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would ease the sectarian bloodletting in Syria or Iraq or the feud between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, while the Syrian conflict alone has been far more destabilizing to the region than the Israeli-Palestinian one has–the question is why so many world leaders still cling to it. A good place to look for answers is Saudi Arabia’s unprecedented decision not to address the UN General Assembly last week.
Riyadh billed this decision as a protest against the UN’s position “on Arab and Islamic issues, particularly the issue of Palestine that the UN has not been able to solve in more than 60 years, as well as the Syrian crisis.” If you took that at face value, you’d naturally assume that what upsets Riyadh most is the Israeli-Palestinian issue: The bulk of its statement was devoted to this issue, with Syria seemingly thrown in as an afterthought. The problem is that objectively, this makes no sense: After all, by Riyadh’s own admission, the conflict has gone on for 60 years now, yet it never boycotted the UN before. So why now of all times–precisely when Washington has finally succeeded in restarting Israeli-Palestinian talks after a five-year freeze?
Regarding Syria, however, the UN did just do something that upset Riyadh greatly: At Russia’s initiative, it passed a resolution on disarming the Assad regime of its chemical weapons that not only killed American plans for imminent airstrikes, but essentially guaranteed Assad immunity from Western intervention for the foreseeable future and legitimized him as a partner, thereby effectively reversing two years of Western demands that he step down. For Saudi Arabia, which has backed Syria’s rebels heavily with both money and arms, this was a major blow.
Indeed, anyone tracking Riyadh’s actions rather than its words can easily see which issues it cares about and which it doesn’t: In contrast to its massive support for the Syrian rebels, or the $5 billion it pledged to Egypt’s military government after July’s coup, its financial support for the Palestinians is meager. UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, gets almost all its funding from the West; Saudi Arabia gave it a mere $12 million last year–less than half the sum provided by Holland alone. Western states are also the Palestinian Authority’s main financial backers; Arab countries not only pledge less to begin with, but serially default on their pledges.
There are various reasons why Arabs feel the need to cloak their real concerns behind a façade of verbiage about the Palestinians. The truly puzzling question is why the West hasn’t yet learned to look behind this verbiage to the telltale actions–what Arabs care enough to spend money on, or, as I’ve written before, to put their lives on the line for. But until it does, it will keep right on believing that fatuous claim of Israeli-Palestinian centrality.
Speaking to J Street’s annual conference last week, Vice President Joe Biden said he is often asked why his government has made Israeli-Palestinian peace a priority at a time when that conflict is relatively calm, while the rest of the Middle East is exploding. His response was that it offers the best chance of introducing stability into the region.
Even disregarding the absurd assumption that Israeli-Palestinian peace would do anything to ease the bloodletting in, say, Syria or Egypt, this statement is fatuous. Because the evidence shows that far from engendering stability, the administration’s peace push has been rapidly destabilizing what had hitherto been the Mideast’s quietest region.
Since the talks resumed in late July, the deterioration has been swift. According to the Shin Bet security service, the number of actual and attempted Palestinian terror attacks almost doubled over the space of just one month, from 68 in August to 133 in September. September’s attacks also resulted in two Israeli fatalities–a low number by historical standards, but still double the total for the entire preceding eight months. And October opened grimly, with terrorists shooting a 9-year-old Israeli girl in the chest as she stood on her balcony.
But if a new poll is accurate, worse is yet to come: According to a survey published by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion last week, 58 percent of Palestinians expect a third intifada to erupt if the current negotiations fail to produce an agreement. Given that 70 percent of Palestinians and 80 percent of Israelis expect the talks to fail, the chances of a new intifada are looking good.
This is especially true because, under the U.S.-brokered deal that restarted the negotiations, Israel must release 104 veteran Palestinian terrorists over the course of the talks, all of whom are serving lengthy jail terms for involvement in deadly attacks. History shows that large-scale terrorist releases are an excellent predictor of future violence: The 1,150 terrorists Israel released in a 1985 prisoner exchange, for instance, played a major role in starting the first intifada two years later, while the thousands of terrorists released under the 1993 Oslo Accord played a major role in launching the second intifada in 2000. Thus these new releases, coming on top of the 1,027 terrorists Israel released in a 2011 swap for kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, will provide Palestinians with plenty of experienced leadership to organize a new wave of deadly terror.
Former Labor MK Einat Wilf–not exactly a hawk–wrote in August that she dreaded the resumed talks, because “For more than 20 years, peace talks meant more terrorism and more death,” whereas “During the last few years without negotiations, the number of Israelis and Palestinians killed as a result of violent conflict between them has been the lowest in decades.” If a final-status agreement were actually achievable, the risk would be justified. But it’s irresponsible to endanger this fragile state of non-war by launching talks that almost nobody on either side thinks will succeed, she argued, because on this issue, trying and failing is much worse than not trying at all.
Many people on both sides told U.S. officials the same thing. But the Obama administration, in its hubris, was determined to end a conflict that it claimed had been “a major source of instability for far too long.” And it has thereby destabilized the Middle East’s last oasis of stability with its own two hands.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal‘s Bret Stephens accused Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of blowing his chance to attack Iran’s nuclear program, noting that it would have been easier when the reviled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was Iran’s president than it would be now, with the world swooning over the “moderate” Hassan Rohani. “Here’s a line I never thought I’d write: I wish Ehud Olmert were Israel’s prime minister,” continued Stephens, a former Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief. Olmert “had a demonstrated capacity to act. It isn’t clear that Mr. Netanyahu does.”
Though many Israelis share Stephens’ doubts about whether Netanyahu would attack if necessary, the Olmert comparison is unfair. Whereas Olmert had the defense establishment’s full support for bombing Syria’s nuclear reactor, senior defense officials opposed attacking Iran’s nuclear program so vehemently that then-IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, backed by then-Mossad chief Meir Dagan, reportedly disobeyed a direct order to ready the army for such a strike in 2010.
The defense establishment’s objection to attacking Iran was two-fold. First, it thought a strike wasn’t urgent: there was still plenty of time. Second, it hoped America would eventually attack instead. Neither pretext for delay was possible in Syria’s case: The reactor was about to go hot, and President George W. Bush, to his credit, eschewed soothing platitudes like “all options are on the table”; he told Olmert plainly that America wouldn’t attack.
But it’s now clear Ashkenazi, Dagan and company were wrong on both counts. Following America’s U-turn on attacking Syria this summer, even defense officials have started to realize that it’s unlikely to attack Iran’s nuclear program: As former Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin, a longtime Iran dove, recently admitted, when the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff paints Syrian air defenses as an almost insuperable obstacle, it’s hard to imagine America attacking the far more formidable Iran. And time may have just run out: An Israeli strike while Western powers are negotiating with the “moderate” Rohani would cause immense, perhaps irreparable, damage to its most important alliances. And the same will be true if the West signs a deal that allows Iran’s nuclear program to continue progressing – which it well might.
In short, Ashkenazi and Dagan may have forced the government to forfeit Israel’s only chance to stop Iran from going nuclear – not because they misunderstood the military issues, but because they failed to foresee political developments in either Washington or Tehran.
Nor is this the first time defense officials’ political misjudgments have endangered the country. Negotiations to cede the Golan Heights to Syria for peace provide another salient example. This idea “had the vociferous support of the IDF” right up until the Syrian uprising began in March 2011, Haaretz reported last month. Yet the Golan has proven crucial in insulating Israel from Syria’s civil war: Had it been ceded to Syria, Qaida-affiliated jihadists would now be able to bombard the Galilee at will. Hence even Haaretz (another vociferous deal supporter) acknowledged, “Where would Israel be today without that strategic asset?”
Again, what the IDF misread were the political tea leaves: It failed to consider the possibility that Assad’s seemingly stable regime might collapse into bloody chaos.
The 2005 disengagement from Gaza is yet another example. As Haaretz reported in August, “Contrary to what the Shin Bet [security service] and Military Intelligence had expected, after the disengagement Gaza began exporting terror to Sinai rather than the other way around. ‘We thought Sinai was the source of all evil for Gaza, but it turned out that things were exactly the opposite,’ a senior intelligence official said.”
Veteran journalist Ehud Yaari provided a similar description of the disengagement’s effect on Sinai last year:
As Beduin political activist Ashraf al-Anani put it, “a fireball started rolling into the peninsula.” Illegal trade and arms smuggling volumes rose to new records, and ever-larger sectors of the northern Sinai population became linked to Gaza and fell under the political and ideological influence of Hamas and its ilk … the arms flow was often reversed, with weapons going from Gaza to the Sinai … Today, a significant number of Hamas military operatives are permanently stationed in the Sinai, serving as recruiters, couriers, and propagators of the Hamas platform. A solid network of the group’s contact men, safe houses, and armories covers much of the peninsula.
The result is that Sinai, a peaceful border for over 30 years, is now a terrorist threat so great that the Shin Bet created a whole new unit to deal with it, whose “resources and manpower,” Haaretz said, are “on a par with those devoted to thwarting attacks north of Ramallah in the West Bank – and some sources say they are even greater.” Here, too, what the defense establishment misunderstood was the politics of the Gaza-Sinai relationship. Therefore, it failed to predict the disengagement’s disastrous impact on Sinai.
That generals frequently misread the political tea leaves is no surprise; politics isn’t their profession, so they can’t be expected to have any special expertise in it. But that’s precisely why the democratic norm of subordinating the military to the elected government also makes practical sense: As the above examples show, correct military decisions often depend on getting the politics right. And professional politicians usually have a better grasp of politics than professional soldiers.
Unfortunately, this norm has badly eroded in Israel. The Ashkenazi-Dagan insubordination over Iran is just one of many examples. For another, see the IDF’s disregard of a government order to expand its forces around Sinai – until a deadly terror attack once again showed that the government had read the situation better than the generals.
The only way to restore this vital norm is to strengthen governmental control over the defense establishment by making it easier to oust a recalcitrant head of the IDF, Mossad or Shin Bet. Therefore, legislation must be passed stipulating that all these officials serve at the government’s pleasure and can be dismissed at any time, for any reason.
Granted, that isn’t ideal; fixed terms provide stability and facilitate long-term planning. But as the above examples show, reestablishing political control over the defense establishment is currently more important. Israel’s very survival may depend on it.
Kudos to the ADL’s Abe Foxman for having the guts to say the obvious. After a Pew Research poll released earlier this week found that only 38 percent of American Jews think Israel “is making a sincere effort to establish peace with the Palestinians,” the Jewish Daily Forward concluded that American Jewish organizations have a problem: Since “American Jews are far more critical of Israel than the Jewish establishment,” shouldn’t the establishment change its positions to better reflect those of its constituency?
Most Jewish leaders the Forward interviewed rejected that position. But Foxman demolished it in two short sentences. “You know who the Jewish establishment represents?” he said. “Those who care.”
Foxman, of course, is exactly right. The 38 percent who believe in Israel’s peacemaking bona fides is statistically indistinguishable (since the poll’s margin of error is 3 percent in either direction) from the 43 percent who deem “caring about Israel” an “essential part of what being Jewish means to them,” and actually exceeds the mere 28 percent who consider “being part of a Jewish community” essential to their Jewish identity. Belonging to a Jewish community, incidentally, was outranked in American Jews’ list of Jewish essentials not only by “remembering Holocaust” (the chart-topper at 73 percent), “leading ethical/moral life” (69 percent) or “working for justice/equality” (56 percent), but even by “having good sense of humor” (42 percent) and “being intellectually curious” (49 percent). Only “observing Jewish law” and “eating traditional Jewish foods” came in lower.
But organized Jewry can’t plausibly represent people with good senses of humor or intellectual curiosity, or who “work for justice/equality,” since the vast majority of Americans in these categories aren’t Jews. Indeed, no organization can claim to represent anyone who has no interest in belonging to an organized community. Hence the only people Jewish organizations can reasonably claim to represent are that alarmingly small minority who care about “being part of a Jewish community.” They are the people who provide these organizations with the cash and volunteer hours needed to run them, and they are the people whose views these organizations exist to represent.
But they are also the people most likely to care about Israel, and as the American Jewish Committee’s Steve Bayme noted, they “are also [the] most knowledgeable” about it. Thus they are less likely to believe simplistic narratives of the conflict such as that settlements are the main obstacle to peace. Indeed, even the Forward‘s reporter admitted that the 22 percent of self-identified Jews who said they had “no religion”–who are far less Jewishly committed than other Jews by every criterion Pew measured, including such basics as raising Jewish children–are also “far less likely to believe that the Israelis are sincere in their peace efforts than those who said that their religion is Judaism.”
Left-wing critics of Israel like Peter Beinart have recently been pushing the narrative that Israel’s behavior, and the Jewish establishment’s failure to criticize it sufficiently, are driving young Jews away from Jewish life. That was the implicit point of the Forward article as well. But what the Pew poll shows is that the opposite is true: The problem isn’t that Israel is driving Jews away from Jewish life; it’s that Jews for whom “being Jewish” means nothing but the Holocaust and a sense of humor are inevitably less pro-Israel. In contrast, those who care about Jewish communal life are far more supportive. And as Foxman said, Jewish organizations represent the latter group–”those who care.”
Thus contrary to Beinart, J Street, and their ilk, the problem committed American Jews ought to be losing sleep over isn’t how to increase pressure on Israel. Rather, it’s how to produce more Jews who actually care about being part of the Jewish community.
Israel is being widely portrayed as the lone holdout against the global love affair with Iran’s new president. Certainly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been the most outspoken critic. But several other countries are arguably even more worried by the American-Iranian rapprochement than Israel is–namely, America’s Arab allies.
Last month, a senior United Arab Emirates official said in a media interview that “If Israel were to strike Iran to stop it from getting a nuclear bomb, we wouldn’t object at all.” For a senior Arab official to publicly invite the hated Zionist enemy to launch a military strike on fellow Muslims is unprecedented. While Arab states have been urging America to attack Iran for years, they have hitherto opposed an Israeli strike. Moreover, even their pleas to America were strictly behind the scenes; they became public knowledge only due to WikiLeaks. Thus for Arab officials to be willing to publicly support an Israeli strike attests to a desperate fear that the American defense umbrella they have relied on for decades may no longer exist.
Nor is this the only indication. At the UN General Assembly last week, a Saudi diplomat consulted with his counterpart from Israel–a country Riyadh doesn’t officially recognize–over the Iranian charm offensive. A few days earlier, at an International Peace Institute dinner whose guests included officials from both Israel and several Arab states that don’t recognize its existence, “No Arab minister attacked Israel, and not one stood up and left the room when he found out that a high-ranking representative of the Israeli government was sitting beside him,” Haaretz reported: They were too busy discussing their main mutual concern, Iran.
This isn’t the start of an Arab-Israeli romance; most of these countries still hate Israel, and many are deeply anti-Semitic. Rather, it reflects the fear engendered by America’s gradual withdrawal from the Middle East. Despite years of purchasing top-quality American arms, many Arab states have no real military capabilities, especially against a much larger, more technologically sophisticated country that happens to be located right next door, in easy invasion distance (in contrast, several Arab countries lie between Iran and Israel). Thus they have always counted on America being there to defend them–and now, suddenly, they’re no longer sure they can. In that situation, even Israel is better than nobody.
The problem, of course, is that Israel can’t and won’t supply the same defense umbrella America has. Arabs states can plausibly hope Israel will deal with Iran’s nuclear program, because it views Iranian nukes as a direct threat to itself. But Israel would never intervene to, for instance, rescue Kuwait from Iraqi invasion, as America did in 1991. Hence America is currently indispensable. As one UAE academic put it, “We don’t have any other insurance company, and we live in a dangerous area.”
But if America decides to close up shop, the Arabs will perforce find another insurance company, just like anyone else whose insurer goes out of business. Who it will be remains to be seen: Russia is one obvious possibility; they could even decide they have no choice but to join Iran’s orbit. But either way, the result be the same: For the first time in decades, America will be left with no allies whatsoever in a region that remains crucial to the global oil supply, and hence to America’s own economic well-being.
This year, Yom Kippur didn’t end after 25 hours, as it usually does. In some newspapers, it continued right through Simhat Torah, with a continuous stream of articles commemorating the Yom Kippur War’s 40th anniversary.
Though commemorating the war is an annual ritual, what still shocked me about this year’s coverage was the casual way some interviewees recited a glaring counterfactual – Israel’s “defeat” – as if it were self-evident fact. Take, for instance, Yaakov Hasdai, an IDF officer, attorney, historian and researcher for the 1973 Agranat Commission, which investigated the war: “The failure of the Yom Kippur War hit the Israeli public like a shockwave. The conclusion was, mainly among the Left, that the defeat meant that we were not right.” Or Dr. Gideon Avital-Eppstein, who recently published a book about artistic responses to the war said: “Why is it that these three concepts â’ shell shock, the POW and the MIA â’ are so strongly associated with Yom Kippur? I think it has something to do with the perceived result of the war, to the fact that we did not win.”
When this is what younger generations have heard from their elders for 40 years, is it any wonder that in a recent poll asking who won the war, only 64% of Jewish Israeli adults correctly answered Israel? Indeed, it constitutes progress that the number was even that high.
Hasdai, Avital-Eppstein and other Israelis of their generation certainly know the truth: The war ended in an unequivocal Israeli victory, with the IDF threatening both Cairo and Damascus, and the Egyptian Third Army saved from annihilation only because Washington imposed a cease-fire. But even for someone ignorant of these details, there’s the obvious fact that Israel still exists – which it wouldn’t had it really lost the war. Israel’s annihilation was the publicly stated war aim of both Syria and Egypt, and though historians now believe neither seriously expected that outcome, there’s little doubt that both would happily have seized the chance to achieve it had the IDF not swiftly recovered from its initial setbacks. And yet, the counterfactual narrative of defeat persists undiminished.
One pernicious consequence of this, as I’ve written before, is the boost it gave the land-for-peace paradigm. For people who feel as if Israel “lost” in 1973, it makes perfect emotional sense to conclude that Israel must accept Arab dictates and retreat to the pre-1967 lines to attain peace; in war, the loser has no choice but to accept the enemy’s terms. But absent this emotional logic, retreating to borders that endanger the country’s long-term survival would be madness.
After all, the territorial buffer gained in 1967 is precisely what enabled Israel’s survival in 1973: Had the war begun from the pre-1967 lines, Israel would have been annihilated. Instead, the enemy armies were stopped in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, without ever reaching pre-1967 Israel.
And contrary to popular perception, territory is even more critical in the age of high-trajectory weapons. Israel’s standing army is smaller than those of its neighbors, so its defense doctrine depends on mobilizing the reserves. But missile fire can seriously disrupt this mobilization, meaning the reserves will need more time to reach the front. To buy this time, the army needs a territorial buffer – either space in which to retreat, or high ground like the Golan and the West Bank mountain ridge, where a smaller force can hold for days against a larger one.
Even UN Resolution 242, the foundation of all subsequent peace talks, acknowledged the vital importance of territory for defense: Recognizing that “Israel’s prior frontiers had proved to be notably insecure,” as one of its drafters, US Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, later explained, the resolution explicitly upheld Israel’s right to “secure” (i.e. defensible) borders and was deliberately worded to let it retain some of the territory captured in 1967. This recognition is also why Israeli governments for decades opposed withdrawing to the indefensible 1967 lines, and why all US governments prior to the current one supported that Israeli position.
Thus it’s heartening to see signs that the myth of the 1973 “defeat” may finally be loosening its hold on Israel’s collective consciousness.
Some of the war’s participants have begun publicly challenging it. “We, the fighters, remember the Yom Kippur War as a war that ended in a great victory,” declared Haim Danon, who fought on the Golan, in one media interview. “We stopped them, we made them withdraw, we recaptured the territories taken from us.”
After the war, he explained, most soldiers “simply wanted to return home”; they “didn’t have the strength to deal at the time with history, with the media, with what people would remember.” But now, they are starting to understand that the battle over memory must also be fought.
In addition, Israelis are beginning to recognize the war’s manifold achievements, as detailed recently by Amotz Asa-El in these pages. Inter alia, the Arabs’ inability to defeat Israel even under optimal conditions of total surprise convinced them to give up on conventional warfare: Never since has Israel suffered a conventional military attack. The war also led to Israel’s first peace treaty with an Arab nation: Convinced that regaining Sinai by force was impossible, then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat opted to try peace instead.
Finally, as even Haaretz, a champion of territorial concessions, recently admitted, Israelis have discovered through hard experience that ceding land can be even more dangerous than they’ve been told for 40 years that not ceding it would be. Oslo’s territorial concessions produced a massive upsurge in terrorism, accounting for two-thirds of all Israelis killed in terror attacks since 1948. And Syria’s civil war has made most Israelis grateful that repeated efforts to cede the Golan never succeeded: To quote Haaretz‘s military correspondent, “Where would Israel be today without that strategic asset?”
After decades of Israeli opinion leaders telling the world that complete withdrawal is essential, reviving the international support that once existed for more limited withdrawals will be difficult. But Israel can’t convince the world unless it first convinces itself. And that starts with recovering from our 40-year delusion about the Yom Kippur “defeat.”
Recent news reports from Spain beautifully illustrate why nobody should take the European Union’s pretensions to moral superiority seriously–and especially not when it comes to Israel. Spain is now committing virtually every “abuse” the EU sanctimoniously accuses Israel of, without a peep of protest from its European peers.
For instance, Spain recently erected checkpoints along its border with Gibraltar that are creating real hardship. The checkpoints have lengthened travel times from 45 minutes to two hours for cross-border commuters and also increased costs, since people who used to drive now combine foot travel and taxis to reach work on time. These are precisely the complaints Europeans routinely level at Israeli checkpoints: that they undermine the Palestinian economy by increasing the time and expense of commuting to work or moving cargo.
But unlike the Spanish checkpoints–which blatantly violate the EU’s open-border rules–Israeli checkpoints are perfectly legal under international law, even if you accept the EU’s definition of the West Bank as “occupied territory” (which Israel doesn’t; it considers the area disputed territory). Under the laws of belligerent occupation, an occupying army is entitled to take reasonable military measures within the occupied territory to ensure its country’s security; it isn’t restricted to operating along the border. And Israel’s checkpoints were established to stop Palestinian suicide bombers.
Spain’s checkpoints, in contrast, are officially there to stop cigarette smuggling, though Gibraltar claims they are pure retaliation for its efforts to curb Spanish overfishing in its waters. By any standard, stopping suicide bombers is a stronger justification. Yet the same European officials who vociferously condemn Israel’s checkpoints have nothing to say about the Spanish ones.
Then there are the hundreds of thousands of Catalonians who formed a 250-mile human chain this month to demand independence from Spain. Catalonians also gave an absolute majority to pro-independence parties in last year’s provincial elections. Yet Spain adamantly refuses to let the province hold a referendum on secession.
By any standard, Israel has more justification for caution about Palestinian statehood than Spain does about Catalonian statehood. Catalonia has never threatened Spain in any way, nor is there any Catalonian terrorism. In contrast, large swathes of Palestinian society still call for Israel’s destruction, and every previous Israeli cession of land to the Palestinians has produced a security nightmare: nonstop rocket fire from Gaza, and endless suicide bombings and shooting attacks from the West Bank (until Israel reoccupied it). Indeed, of the roughly 1,800 Israelis killed by terrorists since Israel’s founding in 1948, fully two-thirds–about 1,200–were killed after Israel began ceding land to the Palestinians under the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Yet the European officials who repeatedly demand Israel’s immediate withdrawal from the West Bank haven’t said a word to support Catalonia. Apparently, Catalonians have no right to self-determination.
Then there are the Basques, whose oft-proclaimed desire for independence can’t be tested in a vote because Spain repeatedly bars pro-independence parties from running on the grounds of alleged ties to the Basque terror group ETA. That also doesn’t bother anyone in Europe, even though Europe objects vociferously when Israel refuses to talk to Palestinian parties that actively support terror, like Yasser Arafat’s PLO during the second intifada. Nor was Europe troubled when Spain severed peace talks with ETA at the very first terror attack, which killed exactly two people, though it condemned Israel viciously for halting talks with Arafat over repeated terror attacks that killed more than 1,000 people.
In short, Europe denounces Israeli actions as unacceptable even as it deems the exact same actions by Spain unexceptionable. There’s a name for such double standards, and it isn’t “human rights.” It’s known as hypocrisy.