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After the High Court of Justice overturned a law last week that allowed illegal migrants to be held in detention for up to three years, The Jerusalem Post‘s editorial aptly summarized Israelis’ reactions as follows: “For the Left, the ruling was a vindication of their adherence to the universality of human rights,” while “For the Right … the decision was yet another indication that the High Court was dominated by a weak-wrist liberal consensus.”
It’s a sad commentary on the depths to which the court has sunk itself that neither side seriously considered what ought to be the default explanation of a High Court verdict: that it was rooted in relevant legislation duly enacted by the Knesset. Instead, they simply assumed the court was expressing a value judgment, and thereby taking sides in the heated debate over what Israel’s policy toward illegal migrants should be.
As it happens, I think the ruling was virtually mandated by the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom, a quasi-constitutional law that subsequent legislation is supposed to comply with (or at least, so the court decided in 1995, and the Knesset never challenged that decision). According to the Basic Law, “There shall be no deprivation or restriction of the liberty of a person by imprisonment, arrest, extradition or otherwise,” except “by a law befitting the values of the State of Israel, enacted for a proper purpose, and to an extent no greater than is required.”
The court concluded that even given the state’s justifiable interest in getting illegal migrants off the streets, throwing them in jail for three years is a disproportionate violation of the right to liberty guaranteed by the Basic Law, one too massive to be justified by the presumed benefit. I find it hard to disagree. For if a right to liberty means anything at all, it ought to mean you can’t be thrown in jail for three years when you haven’t committed any crime.
Granted, illegal entry into the country usually is a crime, albeit a minor one generally punishable by no more than three months’ imprisonment prior to being deported. But under international conventions Israel has ratified, it isn’t a crime at all if the illegal entrant is a bona fide refugee, which most of the migrants in question claim to be. That obviously doesn’t mean they actually are, and indeed, documents from other court cases clearly show that some aren’t. Yet since the state has never examined most of these migrants’ asylum requests, as required by those same international conventions, it’s impossible to know which are genuine refugees and which are just labor migrants.
Moreover, most of those jailed under the law come from Eritrea and Sudan – two countries so repressive that Israel, like other Western countries, long ago decided their nationals can’t be forcibly repatriated. Thus even if those nationals are just labor migrants, they still, through no fault of their own, can’t be deported, which is why they end up being jailed instead. But again, if a right to liberty means anything, it ought to mean you can’t be incarcerated for three years just for the misfortune of being born in a country to which you can’t be deported.
Several justices stressed that their ruling in no way precludes less draconian steps to mitigate the problems these migrants pose to Israeli society. But they rightly deemed three years in prison excessive.
So how did a commendably narrow and defensible legal decision come to be viewed by both sides as if the justices were simply imposing their own value judgments on a hotly disputed policy question, that of how Israel should deal with illegal migrants? Partly, it’s because some couldn’t resist inserting themselves into this debate. For instance, Justice Isaac Amit wrote in his concurring opinion that once these migrants “reached our borders, wounded in body and soul, we should have welcomed them … bound up their wounds of body and soul and treated them with generosity and compassion with respect to work, welfare, health and education.”
That, to be blunt, is none of the court’s business. The migrant problem is a classic case of competing values: compassion for the stranger versus concern over their impact on both Israel’s own poor and its Jewish character. But decisions about how to balance competing values and competing policy considerations are properly the province of the country’s elected representatives, not an unelected court. As an individual, Amit is entitled to have an opinion, but as a justice, his job is limited to determining whether any solution these representatives devise comports with the law.
Still, the main ruling stuck pretty closely to legitimate legal analysis, so it’s hard to see the decision as a whole as a blatant intrusion into policy. It certainly didn’t warrant its opponents’ accusations of “judicial activism,” “steamrolling” the Knesset and dealing “an almost deadly blow to Israeli democracy.”
Yet the court’s own record made those accusations a reasonable conclusion to leap to for anyone who hadn’t actually read the 120-page verdict, which most people haven’t and won’t. Because time and again, the justices have imposed their own value judgments on controversial issues, in blatant defiance of what the law actually says (for examples, see here, here, here and here).
In so doing, the court has destroyed its own credibility. Like the boy who cried wolf, it has substituted its own policy preferences for the law so often that when it finally does what it’s supposed to do – base its rulings on actual law – nobody believes it anymore. Everyone simply assumes it has handed down yet another value judgment masquerading as jurisprudence.
Even worse, however, is that by undermining its credibility in this fashion, it has undermined the key function courts are supposed to play in a democratic society: the ability to resolve disputes peacefully in a way broadly acceptable to most players. Instead, it has turned itself into just another partisan player, whose decisions merely add more fuel to any ideological controversy it rules on. And it has thereby done inestimable damage not only to itself, but to the country as a whole.
Palestinians have killed two Israeli soldiers in planned attacks over the last three days; the armed wing of Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party has proudly claimed responsibility for both killings (though Israeli officials are skeptical); and the Palestinian Authority that Abbas heads–Israel’s so-called peace partner–has yet to muster even a lukewarm condemnation of the murders. In a normal universe, this might raise doubts about the prospects of the current Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. But anyone who has been following the negotiations already knows these prospects are nonexistent: Aside from all the reasons I listed three weeks ago, the constant stream of PA leaks about the talks is a dead giveaway.
Ever since negotiations resumed in late July, PA officials having been giving the media gloomy progress reports on an almost daily basis, thereby violating the explicit commitment both sides gave Secretary of State John Kerry not to talk about what happens at the negotiating sessions. That alone attests to bad faith. But what’s really remarkable is that while all the Palestinian leaks agree the talks are going nowhere, they offer blatantly contradictory reasons for this conclusion. In other words, the “facts” on which this conclusion is supposedly based can’t possibly be true.
Over the space of just a few days earlier this month, one Palestinian official said Israel had done nothing for the past six weeks but present the issues it wants to discuss; another said Israel had proposed an interim deal for a Palestinian state with temporary borders on 60 percent of the West Bank; and a third said Israel had made an unacceptable final-status offer that would give Palestinians 90 percent of the West Bank while leaving Israel in control of the border crossings with Jordan. These three statements are clearly mutually exclusive: If, for instance, Israel has done nothing but outline the issues it wants to discuss, it can’t have offered either temporary or permanent borders. Similarly, if Israel has made a final-status offer, then it hasn’t just proposed an interim deal.
In short, the Palestinian claim of “no progress” is evidently independent of whatever actually happened in the talks, and Palestinian officials don’t even care who knows it: They have no problem espousing mutually contradictory explanations. But if the “no progress” claim is unrelated to actual developments in the talks, then its obvious purpose is to prepare world opinion to blame Israel when the negotiations reach their foreordained breakdown. After months of hearing nonstop Palestinian complaints about how Israel is stymieing the talks, without Israel offering any counter-narrative (since it has thus far honored its pledge to stay mum), the world will obviously be primed to believe that Israel is at fault.
Nor need one look far to understand why the PA would plan for a breakdown a priori: The talks have zero support among ordinary Palestinians. As the Jerusalem Post‘s Khaled Abu Toameh reported back in July, not a single Palestinian faction favored resuming the negotiations, and yesterday, several Palestinian groups launched a public campaign to demand an end to the talks while also opposing any Palestinian concessions whatsoever as part of a deal.
So with no support for a deal at home, Abbas has little choice but to plan for how to blame Israel for a breakdown. The only question is whether the U.S. is willing to let him get away with it.
Martin Kramer wrote an illuminating post yesterday on why American handling of the chemical-weapons crisis in Syria has unnerved Israel by causing it to doubt that America would attack Iran’s nuclear program if necessary. While I agree with his conclusion, I think that’s only part of the story. After all, most Israelis would prefer to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis diplomatically, so one could argue–as some Israeli commentators have–that Syria sets an encouraging precedent: American threats to use military force seemingly persuaded Damascus to give up its nonconventional weapons voluntarily, which is precisely what many Israelis hope will happen in Iran.
The problem is that such an agreement only works if it’s strictly enforced, meaning any noncompliance produces massive punishment. Otherwise, even the thinnest façade of compliance will suffice to enable the signatory to maintain its nonconventional weapons program with impunity, which would be Israel’s nightmare scenario on Iran. And there are three reasons for thinking that’s precisely what the Syrian agreement will do. One is that the agreement is problematic to begin with, providing ample opportunities for evasion. The second, as Kramer explained, is that President Barack Obama’s original decision to punt the question of using force in Syria to Congress makes any military action to punish noncompliance unlikely. The third is Obama’s track record of refusing to enforce the agreements he brokers even when punishing violations wouldn’t necessitate the use of force, and would hence be much easier.
Nothing better illustrates this than an astounding interview given by the Greek ambassador to Israel last week. According to Spiros Lampridis, six months after Israel apologized to Turkey for its botched raid on a 2010 flotilla to Gaza–under an agreement personally brokered by Obama that was supposed to result in Turkey resuming normal relations with Israel–Ankara is still vetoing any NATO cooperation with Israel.
I wrote last month about Obama’s unconscionable silence after Turkey unilaterally appended two new conditions to the agreement and then used them as a pretext for not implementing its own commitments under the deal. But if you wanted to make excuses, you could at least argue that all these commitments dealt with domestic issues (returning Turkey’s ambassador to Israel, ending its show trials of senior Israeli officials, etc.), over which America’s influence is naturally more limited.
No such excuse applies to NATO. Not only is America the undisputed leader of that alliance, but NATO is currently manning Patriot missile batteries along Turkey’s border with Syria, at Ankara’s request. Yet Obama has made no effort to pressure Turkey, even though its veto not only harms NATO’s relations with Israel but also its relations with other traditional American allies like Jordan, Egypt, and Morocco. As Lampridis explained, NATO doesn’t deal with these countries individually, but as part of a Mediterranean bloc that includes Israel. Hence no Israel also means no Jordan or Morocco.
Moreover, this is happening at a time when Israel has not only fulfilled its part of the bargain but is also, as Lampridis noted, “demonstrating goodwill” beyond what the deal requires: It’s preventing significant damage to Turkish businesses by letting hundreds of Turkish trucks carrying millions of dollars worth of cargo travel to Jordan (and thence the Gulf states) via Israel every week, since they can no longer travel via Syria.
This, then, is Israel’s real nightmare: not that Obama won’t attack Iran if necessary, but that he’ll sign a loophole-ridden agreement with Iran (moves in this direction have already begun) that would also prevent Israel from attacking Iran if necessary–and then fail to enforce it, just as he has with the Turkish agreement, thereby enabling Tehran to get the bomb.
Last week, I argued that Israel needs a new electoral system, but shouldn’t adopt the Anglo-American one. Instead, it should retain a fully proportional system while also giving voters a say over individual candidates – a system known as open-list proportional representation. Most European countries already use some version of this system, which has numerous variants. While the precise variant that would best suit Israel requires further study, there are two basic options: letting voters choose either single candidates or multiple candidates.
In multiple-candidate systems, each ballot, instead of merely bearing the party’s name, lists the party’s candidates. Voters then select some number of those candidates (in some systems, as many as there are seats in parliament).
Seats are divided among the parties just as they are currently: If, say, 25% of all voters cast their ballots for Likud, then Likud gets 30 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. But the occupants of those seats are determined by which candidates receive the most votes. So if 500,000 Likud voters marked Reuven Rivlin on their ballot and only 200,000 marked Danny Danon, Rivlin would place higher than Danon. The 30 highest-placed candidates would then become MKs.
A variant of this system lets voters rank the candidates, with a first-place ranking giving the candidate more points than a tenth-place ranking. The candidate’s final placement on the list depends on how many points he accumulates. Yet another variant permits casting multiple votes for the same candidate: If a voter were allowed to mark 20 names, for instance, he could choose 20 different people or cast two votes each for 10 people, thereby increasing those candidates’ chances of placing high.
In the single-seat option, each voter casts his ballot for a single candidate, which doubles as a vote for that candidate’s party. Again, seats are divided among the parties just as they are currently. In addition, parties would still submit ranked candidate slates before the election. However, those slates aren’t final: they depend on the outcome of the balloting.
Usually, a quota is set – say, 25% of all votes cast for that party. Any candidate who wins more votes than the quota is automatically bumped to the top of his party’s list, with the highest vote-receivers placing highest. Only if a party wins more seats than the number of candidates who pass the quota are the remaining seats filled from the preexisting list. Thus if 400,000 voters cast ballots for Labor, entitling it to 15 seats, and 10 candidates were chosen by more than 25% of those voters, those 10 candidates would get Labor’s first 10 seats. The other seats would go to the first five candidates on the slate who didn’t pass the quota.
Both options can also be combined with district voting, using either single-seat or multi-seat districts. Germany, for instance, uses single-seat districts, in which every voter casts one ballot for a party and one for a candidate running in his district. Seats in parliament are allocated proportionally, based on what percentage of the vote each party received in the first ballot. But the seats are filled first by candidates who won their districts. Only if a party didn’t produce enough district winners to fill all its seats can it fill the remainder from a party slate.
Open-list systems have almost endless permutations, but all share one crucial characteristic: They give every single voter some influence over who his party’s representatives in parliament will be. In Israel’s system, known as closed-list proportional representation, most voters have no such influence: Party slates are determined either by the party leadership or by party members in a primary. The vast majority of voters, who don’t belong to any party, can only vote for or against the entire slate rather than for or against individual candidates.
Open-list systems therefore give voters much more power to oust corrupt and incompetent MKs. As an example, consider Likud MK Tzachi Hanegbi, who was convicted of perjury in 2010. Hanegbi remains wildly popular among many influential Likud activists, having provided them and their relatives with dozens of government jobs during his years in office. These activists managed to recruit enough primary votes in his favor that he ranked 16th on Likud’s 2013 Knesset slate, high enough to reenter the Knesset. But Likud primary voters constitute less than a tenth of all the people who voted Likud in the 2013 election, and among this larger voting pool, few would consider Hanegbi’s skill at providing taxpayer-funded jobs for Likud hacks a plus. Had these voters been given a say, his chances of winning reelection would likely have been much lower.
While the Knesset has many hard-working, dedicated MKs who genuinely try to make Israel a better place according to their own lights, it also has many whose activity consists chiefly of making provocative and offensive remarks that earn them disproportionate media coverage. The Hebrew-language Open Knesset website, which ranks MKs by parameters such as attendance at committee sessions and votes, reveals some MKs who diligently attend almost every scheduled committee session and others who deign to attend only one or two per month; some who diligently show up for votes on bills and others who rarely do. Some of the Knesset no-shows are hard-working ministers. But others are doing almost nothing to earn their generous taxpayer-funded salaries.
These freeloaders are often veteran MKs with excellent connections to party leaders and activists, so under the current system, they’re unlikely ever to be ousted: They’ll consistently place high enough on their party’s slates to win reelection. But if ordinary voters were given a say, they would likely prefer MKs who actually work for their paychecks.
Scrapping proportional representation altogether would be a mistake, as I explained last week. But there’s no reason why Israel should continue being one of the last democracies in the world to use a closed-list system. Most other countries that use proportional representation have switched to open-list systems, out of an understanding that giving voters a say on individual candidates ultimately produces parliaments more accountable to the electorate. It’s long past time for Israel to do the same.
One of the most pernicious and lasting effects of the Oslo Accords, whose 20th anniversary will be marked this Friday, was to warp the prism through which most non-Israelis view Israel: From a country with the same broad spectrum of concerns as all other countries, it became, in the world’s eyes, a single-issue country, where nothing but the “peace process” could possibly matter. This attitude is epitomized by a 1998 conversation between President Bill Clinton and his Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak, whose transcript was published in Haaretz two weeks ago. Though the main topic was an impending military operation in Iraq, Clinton also briefed Mubarak on the peace process:
I think the Israeli public is coming along [in regard to the Oslo process]. The problem is, when they have elections there, Israeli society is becoming more complicated, and a lot of people get elected to the Knesset for reasons that don’t have much to do with the peace process. Then we have trouble getting a solid majority to do the right thing.”
One can practically hear the outrage in his voice: How dare those Israelis elect legislators who care about the same issues American voters do–jobs, cost of living, education, crime, etc.–rather than exclusively about the peace process? The fact that Israelis actually have to live in their country–and therefore must care about those issues, which are vital to any country’s well-being–appears to have escaped him entirely.
Having presided over Oslo’s signing, Clinton was perhaps uniquely invested in the Oslo process. Yet his attitude is far from unique. After Israel’s new government took office in March, for instance, a Hungarian journalist called me with a burning question: How could Yair Lapid’s center-left Yesh Atid party possibly sit in the same government as Naftali Bennett’s right-of-center Bayit Yehudi? I explained that despite their differences on the peace process, Lapid and Bennett have similar views on many domestic issues, and since the peace process had at that point been frozen for four years and showed no signs of thawing, the election was mainly about Israel’s many serious domestic problems. To which he replied, “But how can they sit together when they disagree about the peace process?” After several iterations of this, we both gave up in despair.
A comedy writer could probably make a good sketch of the scene, but there’s nothing funny about it. The failure to grasp that Israelis have concerns other than the peace process is a major reason why so many diplomats and pundits consistently misread Israel. Even worse, this attitude has undermined pro-Israel sentiment worldwide by reducing Israel from a complicated, multifaceted country to a one-dimensional caricature. For who can have sympathy or affection for a caricature?
The truth is that Israel can live without peace if necessary; it’s done so successfully for 65 years now. But it can’t live without a functioning economy, decent schools, adequate health care and all the other things that distinguish successful states from failed ones. And Israelis, because they live here, never have the luxury of forgetting that for long.
Non-Israelis, in contrast, won’t suffer if Israel has failing schools or high unemployment, so it’s easy to overlook these issues. But nobody who cares about Israel should do so. For by treating Israel as a single-issue country, they are helping to reduce it to a caricature that’s all too easy to hate.
The run-up to Friday’s 20th anniversary of the Oslo Accords is a good time to consider not only what went wrong with the “peace process” they launched, but what a viable process would look like. You needn’t look far for answers to either question. As I noted last week, the past month alone has brought numerous examples of the problem that doomed the Oslo process from its inception: the Palestinian leadership’s utter lack of interest in making peace. As for what a viable process might look like, a good example is the new Palestinian city now arising near Ramallah.
The city of Rawabi is entirely the initiative of a private businessman: As the New York Times reported last month, the Palestinian Authority promised financial help but never delivered. And it offers a remarkable contrast to the official PA on two crucial counts. First, it’s actually seeking to improve Palestinian lives–in this case, by providing comfortable middle-class housing and quality municipal services. That’s something the PA has refused to do throughout the 19 years of its existence, despite being the world’s top recipient of international aid per capita. Second, the city’s very name (which means “hills” in Arabic) was deliberately chosen to eschew anti-Israel incitement: Its developers held a competition to name it, the Times reported, but rejected the numerous proposals that glorified anti-Israel terror, like “Arafat City” or “Jihad City.” The PA, in contrast, engages in such incitement on a daily basis.
Ordinary Palestinians feel they’ve gotten nothing from the peace process, and they’re right. That, however, is because the PA deliberately chose to give them nothing. It never used its massive infusions of aid to build, say, better housing for Palestinian refugees living in squalid West Bank camps; on the contrary, it publicly vowed that even if a Palestinian state someday arises, the refugees won’t be given citizenship. Nor did it use foreign aid to upgrade its hospitals: Patients who need state-of-the-art treatment are still routinely sent to Israel. It refuses to cooperate with Israel on mundane issues like sewage treatment that would improve Palestinian lives, and allows anti-normalization thugs from the ruling Fatah party to drive away Israeli businesses that would provide Palestinians with jobs. In short, rather than trying to help its people, the PA has done everything possible to keep them in a state of perpetual misery.
As for anti-Israel incitement, even a cursory glance at the archives of Palestinian Media Watch reveals how rampant it is. To give just a few recent examples: Fatah’s Facebook page yearns for famous female terrorists to return and teach current Palestinian women about the need for “sacrifice and blood”; organizations from dance troupes to youth groups are named after terrorists, who are held up as role models; PA officials and the PA-controlled media routinely hurl libelous accusations at Israel, such as that it’s deliberately addicting Palestinians to drugs or trying to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque; they also urge children to engage in anti-Israel violence and promise that Israel will someday cease to exist.
If a Palestinian leadership ever arises that prefers helping its people to perpetuating their misery and teaches its children coexistence rather than anti-Israel hatred, peace might be possible. But until then, any “peace process” will at best be a farce–and at worst a bloody tragedy like Oslo was.
State Comptroller Joseph Shapira and State Attorney Moshe Lador held an illuminating public debate two weeks ago over whether prosecutors should seek to bar municipal office-holders indicted for corruption from running for reelection. Shapira was opposed, arguing that “the public should be the one who judges them.” Fine in theory, Lador retorted, but in practice, “the public has a very limited ability to express its criticism of the conduct of public officials.”
The truth is that both are right. Shapira is right that evaluating a candidate’s fitness for public office – in this case, whether criminal suspicions against him outweigh a record of past achievement – is properly the province of the electorate, not the unelected legal system. Lador is right that in practice, this is often impossible, because aside from mayors, few officials at any level are directly elected. Instead, voters elect party slates whose composition they have almost no say over. Thus the only way to vote against a corrupt individual is by voting against his entire party – something voters who otherwise support that party are rarely willing to do.
In short, Israel’s electoral system forces voters to choose between Shapira’s Scylla and Lador’s Charybdis: either abdicate a cardinal democratic right to unelected legal officials by letting them determine when criminal suspicions should trump a candidate’s record, or accept the impossibility of ousting corrupt officials as long as they retain the backing of the handful of people who determine their party’s slate. In parties without primaries, those people are the party leaders; in parties with primaries, they’re the “vote contractors” – union bosses, clan leaders, influential politicians and others whose voting recommendations are followed by thousands of primary voters.
One solution frequently suggested to this problem, at least on the national level, is replacing the current electoral system of proportional representation with district-based elections, thereby making individual representatives directly accountable to their constituencies. In theory, this would allow voters to oust a corrupt individual without significantly damaging his party as a whole, since worthier candidates from that party could still be elected in other districts.
Yet this proposal has a very serious drawback in a country with as many divisions as Israel has: district-based elections hugely disadvantage small parties. In most districts, adherents of small parties will be in the minority, and in those districts, their votes will be wasted. Thus these parties will at best win fewer seats than they do under the current system, and perhaps not even enough to cross the electoral threshold.
To proponents of district-based elections, that’s a plus rather than a minus: coalitions would no longer comprise numerous small parties, producing more stable governments.
But as Shany Mor, a former member of Israel’s National Security Council, pointed out in an insightful article last year, eliminating smaller parties would eliminate an important safety valve that keeps minorities inside the democratic system rather than outside trying to achieve their goals by violence.
“A society as deeply divided as Israel is – across race, religion, ideology – with such a high tolerance for violence and such a broad familiarity with weapons, should have by all comparative measures long ago descended into civil war,” Mor wrote. “Nearly every other newly independent post-1945 state certainly did.”
So why didn’t Israel? A key factor, Mor argued, is its proportional representation system, which allows almost any group of like-minded people a reasonable shot at winning enough votes to enter the Knesset, and perhaps even the cabinet, and thereby influencing policy from the inside. As long as that hope remains viable, the impetus to resort to violence is low. It’s only when people despair of being able to influence policy by ordinary political means that violence begins looking like an attractive option.
This, incidentally, is also a strong argument against the current effort to raise the electoral threshold from 2 to 4 percent: by making it much harder for small parties to enter the Knesset, this legislation could drive certain small but highly ideological groups to despair of being able to affect policy from the inside and resort to violence instead. Indeed, as I’ve argued before, this is already happening among fringe groups like the extremist settlers known as “hilltop youth.” Having twice seen exemplary democratic efforts to affect policy thwarted by undemocratic means, they no longer believe it’s possible to influence policy through the political process, and are therefore trying instead to deter settlement evacuations by violence.
But not only could district-based elections do real damage to Israel’s fragile democratic fabric, it’s also not clear they would be effective as a corruption-fighting measure. This, too, stems from Israelis’ deep divisions. If one candidate, for instance, favors unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank while another opposes it, or one favors free-market reforms while another advocates more government spending and higher deficits, people with strong opinions on these issues aren’t likely to vote for the other candidate just because their own is corrupt. Instead, they’ll hold their noses and vote for the corrupt candidate who shares their views on the issue they deem most important.
Fortunately, district-based elections aren’t the only alternative to the existing system. Many European democracies have adopted electoral systems that preserve the advantages of Israel’s current proportional representation system while also allowing voters to oust individuals who are corrupt, incompetent or otherwise undeserving of reelection. I’ll discuss how such a system might work in a subsequent article.
Yet for some reason, the Anglo-American district-based system is usually presented as the main alternative to the current one, and that has done the cause of electoral reform great harm. For with all its flaws, proportional representation has enabled Israel to survive and thrive for 65 years now. Thus even Israelis who don’t consciously grasp its safety-valve function are understandably leery of jettisoning it.
Nevertheless, Israelis are also becoming increasingly worried about public corruption. It’s therefore time for all those who want to step up the fight against corruption but don’t want to abdicate their democratic rights to the courts to realize that the current system has outlived its usefulness – and then to start exploring alternatives other than the Anglo-American model.
After a Forbes article on Israeli-Palestinian cooperation in high-tech industries drew horrified responses from the Palestinian companies featured, Jonathan correctly cited this as yet more evidence that Israeli-Palestinian peace is currently unattainable: When Palestinians fear being viewed as collaborators for working with Israelis to build the Palestinians’ own economy, and when the very idea that such cooperation could advance peace is considered treasonable, peace clearly isn’t in the offing. But Palestinian businessmen at least have an excuse for this reaction: They genuinely fear their own anti-normalization thugs. What’s harder to explain is why Europe also opposes cooperation with Israel even when it would clearly benefit the Palestinians.
Haaretz recently reported two salient examples: The Dutch government is pressuring a Dutch company to withdraw from a sewage treatment project run by Jerusalem’s municipal water corporation, and Germany’s state-owned development bank KfW is seeking to bar Jewish settlements from burying their trash at a new landfill it’s planning in the West Bank. In both cases, the primary victims will be Palestinians–but in both, European governments have decided that eschewing cooperation with Israel is more important than helping Palestinians.
The Dutch company, Royal Haskoning DHV, won a contract to build a sewage treatment plant in the West Bank to reduce pollution in the Kidron stream. As Haaretz explains, the Kidron “runs from the Mount of Olives and the village of Silwan in eastern Jerusalem toward Ma’ale Adumim and the Dead Sea.” Silwan is a large Palestinian neighborhood of Jerusalem while Ma’ale Adumim is a Jewish settlement, so the project would help both Jews and Arabs. But Palestinians would benefit more: Not only does Silwan have a larger population than Ma’ale Adumim, but the Kidron runs entirely through land that, in Europe’s view, should belong to a future Palestinian state.
Royal Haskoning’s withdrawal from the project would at best significantly delay it, and might even result in it being canceled altogether. Meanwhile, Palestinians would continue to suffer from a polluted waterway nearby, and the future Palestinian state would suffer additional environmental damage. But in the Dutch government’s view, increased Palestinian suffering is preferable to any cooperation with Israel in “occupied territory.”
KfW’s project is a landfill to replace the one that used to serve both the Palestinian town of El Bireh and nearby Jewish settlements. The old landfill was recently closed because it had become a severe environmental hazard, so the new one is needed urgently. But KfW has demanded that it only serve Palestinians, not the settlements.
This has three possible consequences. First, Israel might build a second landfill for the settlements, thereby rendering additional land in the future Palestinian state environmentally unfit for any other use. Second, the settlements might be left without an authorized landfill, forcing them to resort to pirate dumps, which would significantly increase the environmental harm to both Palestinians living in the area and the future Palestinian state. Third, Israel could reject KfW’s proposal on the reasonable grounds that a landfill serving only some of the area’s residents is economically and environmentally inefficient and seek a new developer. That would significantly delay the landfill’s construction and increase the already enormous suffering of El Bireh residents, who are drowning in garbage.
All three options would primarily hurt the Palestinians. But the German government, too, evidently views increased Palestinian suffering as preferable to cooperating with Israel in “occupied territory.”
Europeans don’t have the excuse of being vulnerable to threats by Palestinian anti-normalization thugs; this is pure spite. And when that’s the example set by “enlightened,” “peace-seeking” Europe, is it any wonder that Palestinians see nothing objectionable about doing the same?
As the new year begins this week, Israel has plenty of reasons to worry. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to let the storm clouds obscure some of the past year’s encouraging developments.
First, our enemies are more disunited than ever before. With Hezbollah seeking to arrest Hamas operatives in Lebanon and al-Qaida threatening to attack Hezbollah, with Sunni jihadists battling Hezbollah in Syria and Egyptians who oppose the peace with Israel nevertheless backing their army’s crackdown on arms smuggling to Gaza, terrorists groups are less able to target Israel.
Second, an Israeli field hospital on the Golan Heights has thus far treated hundreds of wounded Syrians, either on site or by transferring them to regular Israeli hospitals. Some patients say they wouldn’t dare tell anyone where they’ve been, but others are obviously talking, because Syrians keep bringing their wounded to the border. Word has evidently gotten out that the hated Zionist enemy, whom Syrians have been taught to view as evil incarnate, can be trusted to provide first-class medical care.
Since all those patients have friends and relatives, Israel touches dozens of Syrian lives with every person it treats. And some of those people are now questioning the anti-Israel propaganda they have heard all their lives. In a country of 21 million people, this is obviously a drop in the bucket, but big changes always start small. And a real change in ordinary Syrians’ hearts and minds would do more to promote peace than all the peace talks ever held.
Third, the Syrian bloodbath has persuaded some of Israel’s own minorities to rethink their attitude toward the Jewish state. So far, the change is confined to two groups on the margins of Israel’s Arab community: Golan Heights Druze and Arab Christians. Nevertheless, both have hitherto aligned solidly with the mainstream Israeli Arab leadership, which decries Israel as a “racist,” “fascist,” “apartheid” state and consistently supports Israel’s enemies.
Since Syria’s uprising began, the number of Golan Druze seeking Israeli citizenship has risen dramatically. As one new citizen explained, “In Syria there is mass murder, and if [the Druze are] under Syrian control they would likely be turned into the victims of these atrocities. People see murdered children and refugees fleeing to Jordan and Turkey, lacking everything, and ask themselves: Where do I want to raise my children. The answer is clear – in Israel and not Syria.”
Moreover, the number of Christian Arabs serving in the IDF has tripled (even though most still don’t serve), and pro-Israel Arab Christians recently launched their own political party. “We feel secure in the state of Israel,” explained Father Gabriel Nadaf, the pro-Israel camp’s spiritual patron – whereas in Iraq, Syria and now Egypt, their co-religionists are being slaughtered.
Finally, here’s a positive development completely unrelated to Syria: moderate haredim have at long last started challenging their community’s extremists.
After extremists stoned buses in Beit Shemesh last month, for instance, the moderate haredi Tov party plastered the city with posters offering a rare mea culpa.
“The time has come to say enough,” the posters said. “[The extremists] controlled the public thoroughfares and we were quiet. They insulted and embarrassed people in buses and we were quiet…. They brought a bad name to our town and desecrated God’s name, and we were quiet…. The time has come to stop the bullying and show responsibility for our city [and] to show responsibility for our community.”
Granted, Tov is the moderate fringe of the haredi community: it represents the so-called “new haredim,” who work and even serve in the army, whereas the mainstream advocates full-time Torah study for everyone. But as Tov activists noted, many mainstream haredim also loathe the thugs; the problem is that the thugs have cowed them into silence. Thus by breaking the fear barrier, Tov may persuade other haredim to speak out, too.
Almost simultaneously, a leading haredi journal, Mishpacha, published three columns by regular columnist Jonathan Rosenblum (who also writes for The Jerusalem Post) that used different angles to make the same point: mainstream haredim can’t just complain that “non-haredim hate us”; they need to change some of the behavior that generates this hatred – such as hurling insults at non-haredi opponents (“Nazis,” “Amalek”) and refusing to condemn the extremists’ thuggish behavior. Those articles wouldn’t have been published had Rosenblum and his editors not been convinced that leading haredi rabbis supported this message.
Even more noteworthy was last month’s denunciation of another group of haredi thugs by two of the haredi world’s leading rabbis, Chaim Kanievsky and Nissim Karelitz. The extremist Atra Kadisha group had been rioting to prevent construction at a Beit Shemesh site that it claimed contained ancient Jewish graves, although several leading Haredi rabbis had ruled otherwise. After the extremists criticized that ruling, Haredi neighborhoods were plastered with posters in which Kanievsky and Karelitz decried the “worthless people” who “opened their mouths against one of the great Torah sages of our generation.”
Granted, Atra Kadisha’s riots were hurting the haredi community itself: The construction was meant to alleviate the community’s own desperate housing shortage, and Haredi couples who had bought the as-yet unbuilt apartments suffered significant financial losses from the two-year delay Atra Kadisha caused. But in truth, haredi thugs always hurt their own community: Fear of having extremists like the Beit Shemesh rioters move in, for instance, has led many secular Israelis to fight to keep haredim out of their neighborhoods. If opinion leaders in the haredi community are finally starting to recognize this fact and fight back, that’s good news for all Israelis.
Some of the above developments, like the Hezbollah-Hamas rift, are completely beyond Israel’s control. But others, like the shift in attitudes toward Israel among some Israeli Arabs and the moderate haredi revolt against haredi extremists, depend greatly on the government’s response. They could spread if the government has the wisdom to nurture this progress, but could easily be reversed if it doesn’t.
So for our national New Year’s resolution, I’d like to propose this: Amid coping with all the looming threats, let’s not forget to also make good use of these precious opportunities.
Under pressure from his own party’s opposition to “normalization” with Israel, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas yesterday canceled a meeting with Israeli Knesset members who had formed a caucus to support the recently revived peace talks. Normally, this would call the whole point of peace talks into question: Someone too scared of the anti-normalization thugs to host a meaningless gabfest with Israeli MKs isn’t likely to have the guts to sign a final-status agreement containing real Palestinian concessions. But in this case, anyone paying attention to Palestinian behavior since the talks began already knew they were nothing but a farce.
The following are just a few of the steps Palestinians have taken over the last month to prove their lack of desire for peace:
- The PA sent a letter to governments worldwide asserting that Israelis–all Israelis–are “terrorists” and “criminals,” whereas Palestinians who bomb school buses and Passover seders and murder elderly Holocaust survivors are “political prisoners” and “freedom fighters” who fight “in accordance to international law.” To say the least, that’s a novel interpretation of international law’s prohibition on deliberately targeting civilians.
- The PA has already threatened to violate its promise not to pursue action against Israel in international forums while talks are continuing–the main promise it made in exchange for Israel’s phased release of 104 Palestinian prisoners. So what heinous Israeli “war crimes” and “anti-human racist acts” (to quote the PLO’s Executive Committee) sparked this threat? Announcing new construction plans in East Jerusalem neighborhoods and major settlement blocs that everyone knows will remain Israeli under any peace deal anyway–and which, as even Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged, violates no Israeli promises.
- This week, Abbas clarified that he won’t do any such thing until all 104 prisoners have been released. But once that irreversible concession has been pocketed, he promised to immediately resume UN action against Israel. In short, the talks are simply a vehicle for wringing more unilateral concessions from Israel.
- After four years of refusing to talk to Israel at all, Abbas is now complaining that progress is impossible because the parties aren’t meeting often enough, and because he hasn’t yet met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu–the very man whose repeated pleas for a meeting he steadfastly rejected during those four years. And also, of course, because America actually wants the sides to conduct bilateral negotiations: The Palestinians want trilateral negotiations, warning that talks are doomed if America doesn’t “play a direct role” and “assert itself in the peace process”–Palestinian-speak for forcing Israel to capitulate wholesale to Palestinian demands.
- During a “peace mission” by the FC Barcelona soccer team, Palestinians vetoed Barca’s idea of playing an exhibition match against a joint Israeli-Palestinian team. They also refused to allow Israelis to attend Barca’s exhibition in Ramallah, even though Israel invited Palestinians to Barca’s exhibition in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. As one Israeli official noted, such behavior hardly promotes a spirit of “peace and reconciliation.”
- Pressure from anti-normalization activists also forced two Arab businessmen to scrap plans to open a branch of an Israeli clothing chain in Ramallah. The PA made no effort to counteract this pressure, even though the store would have employed almost 150 Palestinians.
I could go on, but the point seems clear: The PA has no interest whatsoever in making peace. So isn’t it about time for the world to stop pretending that it does?