If passed, the draft bill would mean the ultra-Orthodox will be rewarded for exemption, destroying recent efforts to enable their enlistment.
Though Sunday’s planned vote was postponed, the cabinet is soon expected to approve a bill that would set new rules for drafting haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men. Whether the bill can also pass the Knesset and survive a court challenge is less clear. What is certain, however, is that the proposal is outrageous.The bill would let married haredim age 22 or older and unmarried haredim age 24 or older do a one-year stint in the emergency services (police, fire department, ambulance service, etc.) instead of the three-year army service required of most other Jewish men. They would then be free to work or attend university. Alternatively, haredim could avoid service altogether by staying in yeshiva until age 28, down from 30 currently. They would then be transferred from the draft pool to the reserves, enabling them to work or attend university as well. However, it is unlikely that the army will ever call them up since they will have not received training.

In short, the bill would legally exempt haredim from army service. And that’s why the Finance Ministry is pushing it: Its argument is that the army can survive without the haredim, but the economy cannot.

Given the high haredi birthrate, which has demographers projecting that haredi population will double by 2022, the percentage of working adults will soon be insufficient to support a prosperous modern economy unless the norm in which most haredi men don’t work is reversed, the treasury argues. And the greatest barrier to haredim entering the work world is fear of being drafted if they forfeit their deferment by leaving yeshiva: Most haredi rabbis vehemently oppose army service, believing it encourages young men to abandon religion. Therefore, the only solution is to eliminate this barrier by exempting haredim from army service entirely.

Clearly, the treasury’s fear for the economy isn’t unwarranted. Nevertheless, this approach has two serious flaws.

First, the presumption that the army can do without haredim only holds if non-haredim continue serving at their present rates: Even now, the army is complaining of a manpower shortage. But non-haredi enlistment almost certainly won’t continue at its present rate if this bill passes, because it raises discrimination to an intolerable level.

The current situation, in which most haredim don’t do army service and most non-haredim do, is already highly discriminatory. What makes it marginally tolerable, however, is that haredim pay a price for this privilege which most non-haredim wouldn’t want to pay: They spend long years in yeshiva without either working or attending university, so they enter the job market only years after their non-haredi peers and without a comparable education. Thus those who choose this path generally condemn themselves to lifelong poverty.

But the new bill would let haredim and non-haredim enter university or the work force at almost the same time. A married haredi could finish his mandatory service at age 23. That compares to 21 for ordinary soldiers, 23 for hesder soldiers (who combine Torah study with army service) and 22 to 25 for soldiers who become officers or join special units that require extended service.

Thus instead of haredim being penalized for not serving, the penalty would fall on those who do serve: Not only would their service be three times as long, but they, unlike the haredim, would be risking their lives during it. Even worse, they would then face 30 days of reserve duty every year for the next two decades, while haredim would not – making army veterans less attractive to future employers than their Haredi peers. Under those circumstances, who would want to serve?

Moreover, evasion would be easy. A few years in yeshiva would suffice to qualify for the haredi track – hardly intolerable for the majority Israeli Jews who define themselves as traditional or religious. And parental pressure to do so would certainly swell.

In short, this bill could destroy the army. And without the army to defend it, there will be no Israeli future for the treasury to worry about.

But there’s another reason why this bill is appalling: It was submitted just when there is finally reason to believe that haredim can be persuaded to serve in the army.

Haredi enlistment jumped 25 percent this year compared to 2009, thanks to a raft of new programs for haredim created by a group of visionary army officers in recent years. The haredi combat unit Nahal Haredi celebrated its tenth anniversary last year, and the army now plans to set up other Haredi combat units. A program to train haredim as air force technicians resulted in a whopping 60% of the haredi recruits applying for officers’courses. A new program to induct haredim into intelligence has also been a success.

In all cases, the key was to stop demanding that haredim do all the adapting and instead make accommodations for haredi norms. Haredi soldiers get special food that meets their kashrut standards; they work in all-male environments; their day includes mandatory Talmud study; and married soldiers get generous stipends.

All this costs money, which makes the treasury unenthusiastic. But unlike the government’s bill, it holds promise of finally ending the poisonous division between those who serve and those who don’t, instead of perpetuating it: As these programs gradually prove that army service is compatible with remaining haredi, more and more haredim will be willing to enlist.

And ultimately, they may well move beyond the strictly haredi tracks, just as religious Zionists did. Once, most religious Zionists did hesder. But since only 16 months of the five-year hesder program are spent in army service, hesder soldiers can’t become officers or join special units, and young religious Zionists grew increasingly unhappy with this. So two decades ago, the first mechina opened: a one-year yeshiva program followed by three years of regular army service. Since then, mechinot have proliferated, and religious Zionists now account for 31 percent of all infantry officers.

It’s hard to imagine a better use of state money than encouraging haredim to follow a similar path. Now that the army finally seems to have found the key, the government should be throwing all its resources behind this effort instead of pushing legislation that would kill it in its cradle.

Disciplinary proceedings against racist rabbis and prejudiced judges amount to nothing if instituted by the organizations that protect them.

There was much justified outrage last week over a letter signed by dozens of rabbis employed by the state urging Jews not to rent or sell apartments to non-Jews. But the letter is symptomatic of a much larger problem: a sweeping inability and/or unwillingness to force state employees to comply with state policies.

It ought to be obvious that in a state formally committed to equal rights for all its citizens (however short of this ideal it may fall in practice), rabbis who openly preach the most blatant form of discrimination should not be on the state’s payroll. Whether anything will in fact be done about them remains to be seen; the attorney general is currently studying the issue.

But it should also be obvious that, in a state formally committed to justice for all, a judge who publicly terms the ultra-Orthodox “lice” and “parasites,” or tells a disabled lawyer he should find another job if he can’t climb stairs, has no place on the bench. After all, ultra-Orthodox and disabled litigants are liable to appear in his courtroom; how can they expect a fair hearing from someone whose prejudices are so blatant? Yet in fact, not only did Judge Oded Alyagon keep his seat, but then-Supreme Court President Aharon Barak tried repeatedly to promote him – an effort foiled only because then-Justice Minister Yossi Beilin had the rare courage to stand up to Barak and insist that nobody with such views would be promoted on his watch.

It should also be obvious that, in a state formally committed to preventing police brutality, a senior officer caught on camera urging his men to viciously assault peaceful demonstrators (“Crap, let them burn! Don’t hesitate, use water cannon and nightsticks, hit them in the lower body”) has no business in the police force. Yet not only was Negev District Commander Niso Shaham not fired over his behavior at the anti-disengagement rally in Kfar Maimon in 2005, he was even subsequently promoted – twice.

Finally, it should be obvious that any state employee who refuses to honor the authorized decisions of another state agency should lose his job. Yet far from firing state-funded rabbis who refuse to honor conversions performed by the army rabbinate or the state’s conversion administration, the government chose to punish the citizenry for the rabbis’ misbehavior: Converts whose local rabbis refuse to register their marriages will be forced to travel to another city to find a rabbi who will.

The problem, in all these cases, is that it’s very hard to impose any substantive punishment on a civil servant without indicting him. That’s why so many people – not just from the knee-jerk left, but also hard-core rightists like Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin (Likud) – called last week for criminal proceedings against the rabbis who signed the “don’t rent to Arabs” letter: Without an indictment, it’s unlikely that any action at all will be taken against them.

But indictments are no solution. Even if these particular rabbis did violate the law against incitement to racism (which is far from clear, since in deference to freedom of speech, both the attorney general and the courts have traditionally interpreted it narrowly), the other cases cited above clearly don’t lend themselves to prosecution. Nor would it be desirable to broadly criminalize speech.

Theoretically, there is a mechanism short of indictment for handling such cases: disciplinary proceedings. But disciplinary proceedings are usually in-house affairs, and it is the nature of organizations to protect their members.

Shaham’s punishment, for instance, was left to the police commissioner, who made do with a reprimand. Judges can be punished only by the judicial ombudsman, who is always a retired judge, or the Judicial Appointments Committee, which is dominated by sitting judges. In the rabbis’ case, since all the rabbis in question are municipal rabbis, the venue would be the relevant municipal religious councils – i.e., the rabbis’ friends and cronies.

Sometimes, disciplinary charges can be filed in an independent Civil Service Commission tribunal. But many state employees – like the municipal rabbis – are outside the commission’s purview. And even with employees who are subject to the commission, disciplinary trials have traditionally been reserved for “serious” issues like sexual harassment. Under Shmuel Hollander, who was civil service commissioner for 14 years until stepping down in October, the commission tended to view “mere words” as unimportant – even when the consequences were potentially grave, such as encouraging police brutality.

To some extent, this situation is the Knesset’s fault. Legislation could and should be passed to subject everyone on the state payroll to the Civil Service Commission, and to make it clear that some types of behavior are unacceptable for a civil servant.

For instance, legislation is urgently needed to mandate the dismissal of any rabbi on the state’s payroll who refuses to marry someone converted by a recognized state authority. Otherwise, this would probably be impossible even if municipal rabbis were subject to the commission, given their broad authority to interpret Jewish law as they see fit. It must be made clear that while every rabbi is entitled to follow his own halakhic views, he isn’t necessarily entitled to a state salary while doing so.

But legislation by itself cannot create the will to apply it. That requires a civil service commissioner deeply committed to the idea that civil servants should not be allowed to violate government policy, even if the victims – as was true in all the cases cited above (Arabs, the ultra-Orthodox, the disabled, settlers, converts) – are unpopular or politically powerless.

The government is now seeking a permanent replacement for Hollander. Finding someone willing to reverse this sorry state of affairs should be a top priority.

Originally Published in: Jerusalem Post
Original Link: http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Features/Its-time-to-start-enforcing-state-policy-on-civil-servants

The “expert” report Max cited yesterday, which declared Afghanistan unwinnable even while acknowledging progress in the war, reflects a broader problem: the claim that “there is no military solution to terror” has become virtually unchallenged dogma among Western intelligentsia. Yet as Israel’s experience in the West Bank shows, terrorist organizations can be defeated — if their opponents are willing to invest the requisite time and resources.

In March 2002, Israel was at the height of a terrorist war begun in 2000 that ultimately claimed more victims — mainly civilians — than all the terror of the preceding 53 years combined. Every day saw multiple attacks, and a day without fatalities was rare. But then Israel launched a multi-year military campaign that steadily reduced Israeli fatalities from a peak of 450 in 2002 to 13 in 2007.

Last month, Haaretz published two other statistics reflecting this success: the number of wanted terrorists in the West Bank, once in the hundreds, is now almost zero. And Israeli troop levels in the West Bank are lower than they have been since the first intifada began in 1987.

Western bon ton likes to credit these achievements to Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and his American-trained security forces. But in reality, the number of Israelis killed by West Bank terror in the year before May 2008, when Fayyad’s forces began deploying, was all of eight — virtually identical to last year’s five and this year’s six. Indeed, had the war not already been over, Israel wouldn’t have agreed to Fayyad’s plan.

What produced this victory was the grunt work of counterterrorism: intelligence, arrests, interrogations, military operations, and, above all, enough boots on the ground long enough to make this possible. That wasn’t obvious in advance: as Haaretz reported, many senior Israel Defense Forces officers accepted the dogma that terrorist organizations can’t be defeated, because they have an infinite supply of new recruits. But then-Shin Bet security service chief Avi Dichter, who insisted that “the ‘terror barrel’ had a bottom,” proved correct.

What Dichter understood was that while there may be millions of potential terrorist recruits, counterterrorism can dry up the supply of actual recruits by making terrorism a business that doesn’t pay. The more terrorists you arrest or kill, the more potential recruits decide that the likelihood of death or imprisonment has become too high to make terror an attractive proposition.

Two articles, in 2007 and 2008, reveal how this dynamic works: Palestinian terrorists, once lionized, were now unmarriageable, because the near-certainty of Israeli retribution made marriage to a wanted man no life. As one father explained: “I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one. I want her to have a good life, without having the army coming into her house all the time to arrest her while her husband escapes into the streets.” And therefore, the terrorists were quitting.

Most terrorists aren’t die-hard fanatics, and non-fanatics respond to cost-benefit incentives. When terrorist organizations rule the roost, recruits will flock to their banner. But when the costs start outweighing the benefits, they will desert in droves. And then the “unwinnable” war is won.

I wouldn’t expect the Obama administration to take advice from ideological rivals on how to restart Israeli-Palestinian talks. But it’s puzzling that it remains equally deaf to advice from two prominent Israeli and Palestinian peace activists.

In a moderated conversation published this month, Amos Oz and Sari Nusseibeh were in complete accord:

OZ: … [T]he first issue we need to deal with is the refugee issue, because this one is really urgent. Jerusalem is not urgent, it can wait. It can go unresolved for another generation, it can be unresolved for three generations. The refugees are hundreds of thousands of people decomposing in dehumanizing conditions in refugee camps. Israel cannot take these refugees back or it would not be Israel. There would be two Palestinian states, and there would be no Israel. But Israel can do something, along with the Arab world, along with the entire world, to take those people out of the camps, into homes and jobs. Peace or no peace, as long as the refugees are rotting in the camps Israel will have no security.

NUSSEIBEH: I agree. Whether there is or isn’t a solution, the refugee problem is a human problem and it needs to be resolved. It cannot just be shelved day after day after day in the hope that something will happen. The human dimension is far more important in this whole conflict than the territorial.

Yet Obama’s team remains fixated on “borders first.” That’s ridiculous on several counts. First, since territory is all that Israel has to trade, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be foolish to make all his territorial concessions up front, leaving him without leverage to extract crucial Palestinian concessions on other issues, like the refugees.

Second, since two previous Israeli leaders, Ehud Barak (at Taba) and Ehud Olmert, were that foolish, the entire world ought to know by now that Israel twice offered the equivalent of 100 percent of the territories (with land swaps). Those offers went nowhere because the Palestinians refused to make reciprocal concessions on other issues — especially the refugees.

Specifically, the Palestinians insist that Israel absorb millions of refugees and their descendants under any deal, thereby eradicating the Jewish state by demography. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat reiterated this in the Guardian just last week; the governing body of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s “moderate” Fatah party did so last month.

Until this changes, any territorial concessions Netanyahu offers will be meaningless, because no Israeli government will sign a deal that effectively spells the Jewish state’s death warrant. But if the refugee issue were resolved, Netanyahu would either make a generous territorial offer or face certain ouster in the next election. Thus, if Washington actually wants a deal, this is the place to start.

Finally, as Oz and Nusseibeh noted, this is a human tragedy that has already been left to fester far too long. That Palestinian leaders have held the refugees hostage to their maximalist demands for over six decades shows just how little they really care about their own people. And for all its fine talk of human rights, the “enlightened West” is evidently no better.

Halting donations to the JNF undoubtedly ranks high on the list of unhelpful responses to Israel’s Carmel fire. But it pales beside that of Israel’s own prime minister: using the fact that Turkey was one of 18 nations that helped extinguish the blaze as an excuse to “mend relations” with Ankara by apologizing and paying compensation for May’s raid on a Turkish-sponsored flotilla to Gaza.

The deal may yet fall through, since Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan still insists that Israel “apologize” for the raid, in which nine Turks were killed, while Benjamin Netanyahu wants merely to “regret” the deaths. But Israel has already reportedly agreed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation to the killed and wounded “activists.”

Netanyahu claims that this will be “humanitarian” compensation, not an admission of fault. That’s tommyrot. When you apologize and pay compensation, you’re admitting fault, whether you say so explicitly or not. That means Israel is tacitly implying either that it was wrong to enforce its naval blockade of Gaza — established to keep Hamas from shipping in boatloads of arms with which to attack it — or that its soldiers were wrong to fire in self-defense when brutally assaulted by the flotilla’s passengers.

Even worse, Israel would thereby absolve the real culprits: the Turkish organization IHH, whose “activists” deliberately laid an ambush, and the Turkish government, which, according to information that emerged after the raid, was involved in the flotilla at the highest levels. None of the numerous other flotillas to Gaza has produced any casualties, because their passengers didn’t attack Israeli soldiers. The Turkish flotilla would have been similarly casualty-free had its “activists” not launched a violent assault.

Indeed, since IHH sent most noncombatants below deck before beginning its assault, the passengers Israel would be compensating were almost certainly active participants in the attack. As Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman correctly said (via his aides), this is “surrendering to terror,” pure and simple.

But it gets even worse — because Israel would also thereby whitewash Turkey’s turn toward Islamic extremism under Erdogan, when it should be leading the effort to get the West to acknowledge this about-face and respond appropriately.

By crawling to Erdogan in this fashion — after six months of correctly insisting that Israel would neither apologize nor pay compensation — Netanyahu implies that Turkey is still a valued ally, both for Israel and, by implication, for other Western countries. Yet in reality, Ankara openly works against Israeli interests in every possible forum (for instance, regarding NATO’s missile defense system); it had halted joint military exercises even before the flotilla; and Jerusalem no longer trusts it not to share Israeli secrets with Iran. Thanks to WikiLeaks, we now know that even America’s ambassador to Turkey concluded that “Erdogan simply hates Israel.” So what could Israel possibly gain by “mending ties” with it?

Thus, on every possible front, Netanyahu’s overture to Turkey sends exactly the wrong message. This is gross diplomatic malfeasance. And Israel’s friends should make that clear to him before it’s too late.

J.E. Dyer’s excellent post yesterday correctly noted that this week’s talks with Iran, like the previous rounds, will merely buy Tehran more time to advance its nuclear program. That the West would commit such folly shows it has yet to learn a crucial lesson of the Vietnam War: though it sees compromise as the ultimate solution to any conflict, its opponents’ aim is often total victory.

Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and then secretary of state during Vietnam, expounded on this difference at a State Department conference this fall. As Haaretz reported:

The Americans sought a compromise; the North Vietnamese a victory, to replace the regime in the south and to unite the two halves of Vietnam under their rule. When they became stronger militarily, they attacked; when they were blocked, they agreed to bargain; when they signed an agreement, they waited for an opportunity to break it and win.

That same disconnect between the parties’ goals exists today over Iran’s nuclear program. The West repeatedly says its goal is compromise. Even as the UN approved new sanctions against Tehran in June, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said her ultimate aim was to get Iran “back at the negotiating table.” And when the EU discussed additional sanctions in July, its high representative for foreign policy, Catherine Ashton, insisted that “The purpose of all this is to say, ‘We’re serious, we need to talk.’ … Nothing would dissuade me from the fact that talks should happen.”

Iran, however, isn’t seeking compromise; it’s playing to win. And that explains all its diplomatic twists and turns, like scrapping last year’s deal to send some of its low-enriched uranium abroad immediately after signing it.

Diplomats and journalists, convinced that Iran, too, wants compromise, have espoused strained explanations, like disagreements between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his chief backer, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. But once you realize that Iran’s goal is victory, it’s clear that Tehran never intended to give up its uranium. It merely wanted time to develop its nuclear program further before new sanctions were imposed. The scrapped deal bought it a year: first the months of talks; then more time wasted in efforts to lure Iran back to the deal it walked out of; and finally, months spent negotiating the new sanctions, which weren’t discussed previously for fear of scuttling the chances of a deal.

Now Tehran again feels pressured, so, like Hanoi, it’s agreeing to bargain. It’s no accident that after months of preliminary jockeying, Iran finally set a date for the talks immediately after the WikiLeaks cables made worldwide headlines. The cables’ revelation of an Arab consensus for military action against Tehran gives new ammunition to an incoming Congress already inclined to be tougher on Iran and also facilitates a potential Israeli military strike: who now would believe the inevitable Arab denunciations afterward?

So Iran, cognizant of the West’s weakness, has taken out the perfect insurance policy: as long as it’s talking, feeding the West’s hope for compromise, Western leaders will oppose both new sanctions and military action. And Tehran will be able to continue its march toward victory unimpeded.

One cable from the WikiLeaks trove raises a disturbing possibility: the Obama administration’s obsession with Israeli settlements could end up undermining America’s own war on terror.

Shortly before Israel announced a 10-month freeze on settlement construction last year, Germany urged Washington to threaten that absent such a moratorium, the U.S. would refuse to block a UN Security Council vote on the Goldstone Report, which accused Israel of war crimes in Gaza. U.S. officials correctly responded that this would be “counterproductive” but agreed to tell Israel “that their policy on settlements was making it difficult for their friends to hold the line in the UNSC” — thus implying that Washington might so threaten in the future. And last month, the U.S. indeed implicitly conditioned future efforts to block Goldstone on another settlement freeze.

Yet America has a vital interest of its own in burying Goldstone: facing many of the same military problems in its war on terror that Israel does, it has increasingly adopted many of the same tactics.

Last month, for example, the New York Times reported that in Afghanistan’s Kandahar region, “American forces are encountering empty homes and farm buildings left so heavily booby-trapped by Taliban insurgents that the Americans have been systematically destroying hundreds of them” in order “to reduce civilian and military casualties.” They even destroyed houses that weren’t booby-trapped because “searching empty houses was often too dangerous.” And as an Afghan official correctly noted, “It’s the insurgents and the enemy of the country that are to blame for this destruction, because they have planted mines in civilian houses and main roads everywhere.”

This is precisely what Israel did in its 2008-09 Gaza war, for the same reason: it found hundreds of booby-trapped houses, schools, even a zoo. But Goldstone, like the so-called human rights organizations, pooh-poohed this claim, accusing Israel of wantonly destroying civilian property in a deliberate effort to target civilians. Far from blaming Hamas for booby-trapping houses, they blamed Israel for destroying the traps.

The same goes for drone strikes on wanted terrorists — not just in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan and Yemen. Israel has used this tactic for years, also for the same reason: sometimes, it’s the only way to neutralize a dangerous terrorist short of a major ground operation with massive casualties on both sides. But aerial strikes can also produce unintended civilian casualties.

The U.S. recently defended this tactic to the UN Human Rights Council, stressing that targeted killings are “lawful, they constitute neither extrajudicial killing nor political assassination.”

But human rights organizations have repeatedly denounced similar Israeli strikes as “extrajudicial executions” even when there have been no civilian casualties. And the outcry has been much worse when there were. Just last year, for instance, a Spanish court considered indicting several senior Israeli officials over a 2002 strike on Hamas mastermind Salah Shehadeh that, due to flawed intelligence, also killed 14 other people. (The case was halted after Spain moved to amend its universal-jurisdiction law.)

In short, America’s own self-interest demands that it thwart legal assaults on Israeli counterterrorism tactics. Otherwise, it’s liable to find itself in the dock next.

As Jennifer noted yesterday, the latest WikiLeaks revelations definitively refute Barack Obama’s “linkage” theory: that Israeli concessions to the Palestinians were necessary to persuade Arab states to oppose Iran’s nuclear program. But what the documents reveal about the profound strategic misconception behind this theory is frightening.

The list of Arab states urging America to bomb Iran, and the forcefulness with which they urged it, is astonishing. It includes Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates; virtually the only exception was Qatar. Clearly, no Israeli concessions were needed to persuade these countries that strong action against Iran was desirable.

But both Obama and his predecessor George W. Bush insisted that this behind-the-scenes urging wasn’t enough; they needed Arab states to go public with it. As CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid told UAE officials in 2007, “we need our friends to say that they stand with the Americans.”

If Bush had any strategy for achieving this goal, it doesn’t emerge from the reports I’ve seen. But Obama did: linkage. If America showed that it’s on the Arabs’ side by extracting Israeli concessions, the theory went, then Arab states would no longer be reluctant to stand publicly beside the U.S.

But the idea that “soft power” could solve a quintessentially hard-power problem is a profound misconception, because the issue wasn’t the Arabs’ view of Washington as too pro-Israel; that never stopped them from supporting America if it served their interests before.

The real issue was their fear, given the visible reluctance to attack Iran displayed by both Bush and Obama, that if they publicly urged America to bomb Iran, and then America didn’t do it — they would be left alone to face the wrath of a nuclear-armed neighbor. And no amount of arm-twisting directed at Israel could possibly assuage that fear.

Indeed, only one thing could have done so: a clear American determination to attack Iran. You needn’t look far to find the model; it’s the one used by the first President George Bush in the Gulf War.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Arab states also initially refused to publicly back American action against Iraq. The day after the invasion, the Arab League even passed a resolution warning against outside intervention in the conflict.

But Bush, ignoring the verbiage, took swift action to assure Iraq’s neighbors that America wouldn’t leave them to face Iraq alone. Within a week, two naval battle groups had deployed to the area and more than 80 fighter jets had begun patrolling Saudi Arabia’s border. More forces arrived subsequently.

Only then did he start forming his coalition to invade Iraq. And with their protection assured, nine Arab states ultimately joined it.

Today, too, Arab states won’t publicly support attacking Iran without the surety that America will follow through. Nor can you blame them: they’re the ones who will have to live with a vengeful nuclear neighbor if America punts.

But you can certainly blame Washington for the delusion that gestures on an unrelated issue would suffice to allay a well-grounded existential fear — and be deeply worried that American leaders could misread the situation that profoundly.

Israel was a sideshow in the latest WikiLeaks document dump, but the leaked cables did include one noteworthy nugget from Jerusalem: in January 2007, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who today is leader of the opposition, told two U.S. senators that following some exploratory talks with the Palestinians, she didn’t believe a final-status agreement could be reached with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

This is significant because publicly, Livni always says a peace deal is achievable and lambastes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his failure to produce one. Even yesterday, confronted with the WikiLeaks cable, she continued this line, insisting that a deal wasn’t achievable in 2007, but in 2010 “a peace agreement is possible and it needs to done.”

She didn’t explain this about-face, for the very good reason that no convincing explanation exists: Abbas is no more willing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, agree to defensible borders, or cede the “right of return” than he ever was. But this mantra has paid off for her politically, making her the West’s favorite Israeli.

A politician being hypocritical for political gain is nothing new. But in this case, Livni’s personal gain has come at the price of grave damage to her country. If a leading Israeli politician — the woman whose party won the most seats in the last election — claims that Abbas is ready to make a deal, that obviously carries weight overseas. But if Abbas is indeed ready to deal, then it’s clearly Israel’s fault that no deal has ever been signed. And so Israel is painted worldwide as the obstacle to peace, with all the opprobrium that entails.

Livni’s hypocrisy, however, is merely one facet of a much larger problem: virtually the entire Israeli governing class adopts the same tactic. Despite privately believing that Abbas isn’t ready for peace, it publicly insists that he is — and thereby implicitly paints Israel as the party responsible for the ongoing lack of peace. And it does so not only for political gain but also at its own political cost.

Netanyahu, for instance, repeatedly claims that Abbas is his “partner for peace,” with whom he could reach a deal in a year (if only Abbas would agree to negotiate with him). But having insisted that Abbas isn’t the obstacle, the obvious conclusion is that Netanyahu himself must be the problem. After all, some obstacle must exist, since peace clearly hasn’t broken out.

The Palestinians suffer no such pathology: Palestinian leaders blame Israel nonstop for the lack of peace. And since Israel never offers a competing narrative — namely, that Palestinian rejectionism is the real reason for the absence of peace — the Palestinian narrative has inevitably gained worldwide currency.

Thus if Israel is ever to extricate itself from the global dock, its leaders must start telling the truth: that Palestinians aren’t ready to make the compromises peace requires, that they still don’t accept the Jewish state’s right to exist, and that this is why they have rejected every single Israeli offer to date. You can’t win a public relations war by refusing to fight it.