Uncategorized
For Israeli Arabs, the legitimate grievance is discrimination, both budgetary and nonbudgetary. To some extent, this is resolvable peacefully, through the courts. And to some extent, it is their own fault: Rights cannot be disconnected from obligations, and as long as Israeli Arabs shun national service and vote en masse for MKs who openly support the country’s enemies, some types of discrimination are justified.
BUT TO the degree that equal treatment depends on government action rather than the courts, any Arab with eyes knows that even becoming model citizens would not help. How? By observing Israel’s treatment of the Druse.
Unlike other Israeli Arabs, Druse serve in the army. Moreover, they do not form separatist political parties that side with Israel’s enemies against their own country, and are hence eternally in opposition: Druse belong to most major Zionist parties, and Druse MKs have been part of most governing coalitions and several cabinets.
Yet despite this, they suffer discrimination identical to other Israeli Arabs. Their schools are similarly underfunded compared to Jewish schools; their communities are similarly starved of new housing due to lack of approved zoning plans for legal construction; they face similar discrimination in the job market. In short, good citizenship and democratic engagement have done nothing for the Druse.
Violence, in contrast, does work: After every Arab riot, however illegitimate its pretext, the knee-jerk response of many politicians, journalists and jurists is to throw more money at the community. Sometimes, the furor abates and no money actually arrives, but sometimes, it does.
A classic example is October 2000, when thousands of Arab rioters paralyzed the North for days: They shut down major traffic arteries by attacking Jewish cars, killing one Jew; they assaulted policemen, vandalized property and threatened nearby Jewish communities. Moreover, the riots erupted hours after Palestinians launched a violent war against Israel, meaning the rioters were abetting an enemy attack on their own country. Nothing could be more illegitimate.
Yet what did the ensuing commission of inquiry conclude? That Israel must assuage Arab disaffection with more state funding.
IN AN ideal world, Israeli Arabs would reject violence anyway. In reality, Israel cannot spend 60 years proving that exemplary loyalty achieves nothing, but violence produces results, and still expect Arab citizens to wholeheartedly denounce violence. Human nature does not work that way.
Among settlers, the legitimate grievance is Israel’s democratic deficit. While a democracy is entitled to cede territory in pursuit of peace, citizens must have a fair chance of fighting this decision through democratic means. Yet experience shows that settlers have no such chance.
In 1995, settlers successfully lobbied Knesset members to secure a majority against the Oslo II agreement, only to see Yitzhak Rabin nullify this achievement by buying two MKs from a far-right party and then amending the law to retroactively legalize the bribes. In the 2003 election, which revolved around Amram Mitzna’s plan to leave Gaza unilaterally, they successfully campaigned to elect his opponent, Ariel Sharon, only to see Sharon u-turn 11 months later and announce the disengagement. In 2004, Sharon called a referendum on disengagement within his own party, and settlers successfully canvassed Likud members door to door to defeat the plan. But Sharon promptly ditched his promise to honor the results. And in each case, journalists, politicians and jurists applauded the premier for flouting the democratic process.
Hence settlers know the next premier will have no qualms about doing the same, rendering any attempt to fight concessions by democratic means pointless. In contrast, violence does sometime deter demolitions and evictions, in both Arab communities and settlement outposts.
Again, ideally, settlers would denounce violence anyway. But in reality, you cannot put people’s homes at stake, nullify all democratic means of contesting the decision and still expect them to wholeheartedly oppose violence. Human nature does not work that way.
WOULD SOLVING these problems actually help? Regarding Israeli Arabs, I admit to skepticism: Opposition to the state’s very existence runs deep in the Arab community, as does the pernicious belief that they deserve full rights with no obligations. Yet since Israel must rectify its treatment of the Druse anyway if it does not want them irretrievably disaffected, nothing is lost by trying.
In contrast, most settlers support the state, and would accept territorial concessions if convinced that they reflect the majority’s will. Hence eliminating the democratic deficit almost certainly would end their disaffection.
Moreover, this is easily accomplished: All it needs is binding legislation conditioning the cession of Israeli-held territory on either a referendum, new elections or an 80-MK majority (i.e., enough to be unachievable by bribery and to prove widespread support), with the added proviso that a party that campaigns against the proposal cannot then adopt it without being subject to the same referendum/elections requirement.
Given the potentially grave consequences of ceding territory, governments should not be allowed to do so without the consent of a majority in any case. Moreover, this law would create a positive disincentive to violence: If settlers knew they would someday need the majority’s votes, they would hardly want to alienate that majority via gratuitous violence.
Yet successive governments, whether Labor, Likud or Kadima, have consistently opposed similar bills, precisely because they fear that having to convince a majority would thwart their ability to cede territory – which, of course, merely proves the settlers’ point.
Democracies have an obligation to provide their citizens with nonviolent options for redressing grievances. And until Israel does so, the disturbing tolerance for violence among both settlers and Israeli Arabs will continue.
This is partly a law-enforcement problem: Police have too often released haredi rioters without charge to “calm the situation,” and courts often exhibit undue leniency. But the Jerusalem Municipality could also do more.
Mayor Nir Barkat was actually on the right track last month when he temporarily suspended municipal services to two haredi neighborhoods where rioters had attacked municipal workers. That sparked outraged cries of “collective punishment.” But collective punishment is precisely what is called for.
Indeed, Barkat’s error was in not taking the idea far enough: He should also have refused to replace destroyed trash bins, streetlights and other municipal property in these neighborhoods until the fanatic splinter group behind the riots, the Eda Haredit (not to be confused with mainstream haredim), pay the full cost. And he should have curtailed relevant services – for instance, ordering garbage collectors to ignore any trash not in bins – until this happened.
That undoubtedly sounds harsh. But in reality, all terrorists need support from their community to operate effectively. And these rioters are terrorists: They seek to frighten the authorities into capitulating to their demands (closing the parking garage, releasing the arrested woman) via persistent violence. A terrorist needs community support for two reasons. First, he depends on his neighbors refusing to help the police find him – something haredim are famous for. But perhaps even more importantly, he draws strength from the belief that he is a hero to his community. Without that, the attraction of terrorism soon withers.
Palestinian terrorists provide abundant evidence of this. At the height of the intifada, the army interviewed dozens of failed suicide bombers (people caught before blowing themselves up) to discover what made them tick. It found the number-one motivation was the certainty of becoming heroes: being lauded as glorious martyrs by Palestinian leaders, having streets and buildings named for them, being praised on television and radio.
But when the glory faded, so did the attraction. In a fascinating 2007 interview, several members of the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades told Haaretz why they were eager to turn in their weapons in exchange for amnesty: They wanted to get married. Initially, the terrorists were heroes; girls were theirs for the asking. But as the IDF grew better at hunting them down, forcing them to live on the run or in hiding, many girls (and their parents) concluded this was no life for a woman. Thus their appeal as marriage partners evaporated – and with it their motivation.
The haredi rioters have every reason to think they are heroes to their community: Many Eda Haredit rabbis openly laud their “demonstrations,” and very few have publicly objected. Even the rare exceptions are telling: The Eda Haredit’s Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim, for instance, opposed the riots when interviewed by Jonathan Rosenblum for the haredi weekly Mishpacha. But of the four reasons he gave, none were that he saw anything inherently wrong with stoning policemen or torching trash bins.
What primarily concerned Pappenheim – besides, to his credit, worry that such acts would drive other Jews away from Judaism – were practicalities: the harm (both emotional and physical) that young rioters might suffer in jail, and fear that a reputation for troublemaking would make haredim unwelcome in many communities, thereby exacerbating their already severe housing crisis. Such practicalities are unlikely to concern the zealots, who scorn sacrificing principle for mere convenience. But severe and readily apparent consequences undoubtedly would concern many rank-and-file Eda Haredit members.
And that is precisely why collective punishment is effective. Mainstream Israelis will never convince the Eda Haredit that stoning policemen is morally wrong, any more than Israel has ever convinced the Palestinians that murdering civilians is morally wrong. But like the Aksa Brigades, the Eda can be convinced that terrorism’s costs exceed its benefits. If, for instance, Eda Haredit members had to either endure streets overflowing with trash or personally finance new trash bins, I suspect they would quickly make it clear to the rioters that torching trash bins is unacceptable.
The haredi rioters have obvious parallels to similar thugs from two other population groups: settlers and Israeli Arabs. Not only are the tactics similar, but so is their contempt for state authority. Yet among both settlers and Israeli Arabs, state malfeasance (as my next column will explain) has contributed to the community’s reluctance to repudiate its terrorists, and must be corrected before collective punishment is justifiable. That is not possible with the Eda Haredit, which does not recognize the state at all and hence has no claims of malfeasance.
Nor do the riots’ specific pretexts offer any mitigating circumstances. Unless you believe that Hadassah-University Medical Center staffers conspired to frame a haredi mother, security videos showing her removing her son’s feeding tube and doctors’ reports of his rapid recovery since she was barred from his bedside are hard to explain away.
As for the parking garage, Barkat tried hard to accommodate Orthodox sensitivities, making it free (to avoid indulging in commerce on Shabbat) and manning it with a non-Jew (to avoid using Jewish labor on Shabbat). This satisfied the two mainstream haredi parties in his coalition, who understand that since most Jerusalem residents are either secular or non-Jewish, simply ignoring their needs, as the Eda Haredit demands, is not an option. Nor should we forget that most Orthodox Jews deem stoning policemen and torching trash bins far worse than driving on Shabbat.
No city should let a tiny minority hold the majority hostage, and especially not Israel’s capital. Jerusalem has tolerated periodic eruptions of Eda Haredit fanaticism for far too long. It is time for Barkat to make it clear that violent riots carry a price.
What is genuinely puzzling, however, is why Obama supporters appear equally deaf to the anguished cries of Israel’s left, which has long advocated precisely these policies. When the editorial staff of Haaretz, a bastion of Israel’s hard left, pens three opinion pieces criticizing Obama in the space of 10 days, it ought to be clear even to left-of-center American Jews that Obama has an Israel problem.
THE FIRST, by veteran diplomatic correspondent and columnist Aluf Benn, appeared on July 10. Titled “The left went to the beach,” it sought to explain why Israeli leftists, who vocally supported previous American demands for a settlement freeze, have not rallied behind Obama’s. Not only have there been no demonstrations, but at a Knesset debate in early July, he noted, not a single MK urged compliance with Obama’s demand.
One reason, Benn posited, is that Obama never tried “to communicate with the Israeli public.” He “spoke to Arabs and Muslims, but not Israelis. His neglect increased Israelis’ fears that we do not have a friend in the White House.”
This impression was bolstered by “the administration’s pathetic attempt to deny the existence of understandings on settlement construction” between Obama’s predecessor and Israel: “It was possible to accuse Israel of violating its promises, or to say that the policy had changed and explain why, but not to lie.”
Additionally, “Obama obtained nothing from the Palestinians and the Arab states in exchange, and his insistence on a settlement freeze only encouraged Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in his refusal to negotiate with [Binyamin] Netanyahu. Under these circumstances, it is hard for the Israeli left to blame the government for ruining the chances for peace.”
Finally, “the more time passes, the more it appears that the demand to freeze settlement construction was meant to demonstrate a distancing from Israel.” Obama has turned a settlement freeze “into a matter of honor,” and “when the argument is about who is stronger instead of the real issue, anyone who urges Netanyahu to give in to Obama will be accused of being unpatriotic. And the Israeli left does not want to be backed into that corner.”
Thus after six months in office, Obama has made even Israeli leftists, who enthusiastically supported his election, doubt his friendship with Israel, rendering them unable to support his policies without appearing unpatriotic.
And, equally grave, he has actually undermined the peace process by encouraging Abbas’s refusal to negotiate.
A week later, Haaretz devoted its editorial to the Obama problem. Titled “Speak to us, too,” it began by slamming Netanyahu for “entering into an unnecessary and harmful conflict” with Obama’s administration and “rejecting Obama’s essential desire” to bring peace. Obama’s presidency, it asserted, has created “a unique opportunity” for peacemaking that “it would be a shame to miss.”
But then came the punch line: “Now, the US administration must convince the Israeli public that it has a friend in the White House, and that the administration’s positions correspond with Israel’s national interests. After talking to the Arabs, Muslims and Iranians, in speeches and on television, it is only right that Obama also address the Israeli public.”
Again, the message was clear: Even Israel’s left wants convincing that Obama will not sacrifice Israel’s interests.
THEN, LAST Friday, star columnist Yoel Marcus chimed in. For all Obama’s goodwill, he wrote, “there is something naive, not to say infuriating, about his policy of dialogue and about the whistle stops he has chosen in his travels regarding our issue. He spoke in Turkey, he spoke in Egypt, he appeared before students in Saudi Arabia, Paris, England, Ghana and Australia.
Even there the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was mentioned… The only place he hasn’t been is Israel. He has spoken about us, but not to us.”
Moreover, Obama “is behaving as though everything starts and ends with the question of whether Israel will or will not freeze construction in the settlements,” completely ignoring such crucial details as that the Oslo Accords resulted in waves of suicide bombers and the Gaza pullout in daily rocket attacks. His “obscuring of the fact that the Palestinians have not managed to overcome their passions and be worthy partners for a peace agreement” is “upsetting.”
Finally, while “Obama assumed he did a great thing when he spoke in Cairo about the Jewish people’s suffering in the Holocaust,” the “implied distortion: that we deserve a state because of the Holocaust” is “infuriating.”
“As a leader who aspires to solve the problems of the world through dialogue,” Marcus concluded, “we expect him to come to Israel and declare here courageously, before the entire world, that our connection to this land began long before the Israeli-Arab conflict and the Holocaust, and that 4,000 years ago, Jews already stood on the ground where he now stands.”
In short, Obama is placing the onus entirely on Israel, thus absolving the Palestinians of any need to amend their behavior.
Moreover, by basing Israel’s claim to statehood on the Holocaust rather than the Jews’ historic connection to this land, he has fed the Arab fantasy that Jews are colonialist interlopers with no right to be here, and that the Palestinians are being sacrificed to atone for European misdeeds – thereby fostering Arab intransigence and unwillingness to end the conflict.
When even the hard-core leftists of Haaretz‘s editorial board feel that a) Obama seems hostile to Israel and b) his policies actually undermine the peace process, his American Jewish supporters ought to take note.
Because no matter how sincerely Obama wants peace, a president who has lost even Israel’s hard left has no chance of delivering it.
The single largest item in the budget is neither defense nor transfer payments, but debt repayment. At NIS 111.4 billion, this will account for fully 31.5 percent of all government spending in 2009. That is almost double the 16.2% allotted to defense, the next largest item in the budget; almost triple the NIS 37.4b. allotted to education, including higher education; and 3.5 times the NIS 32.1b. allotted to health care.
Clearly, if we did not have to allocate such a huge percentage of the budget to debt repayment, we would have tens of billions of additional shekels every year to devote to education, health and welfare. This makes paring down debt the best long-term investment the country could make.
Unfortunately, the proposed 2009-10 budget does the opposite: It will almost triple the annual budget deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product, from 2.1% last year to 6.0% this year and 5.5% next year. In shekel terms, this will increase the total debt level by about NIS 15b. this year and another NIS 14b. in 2010. Thus in future years, the amount we will have to spend on debt repayment will increase still further, leaving even less money for health, education and welfare.
The debt level, at 78.3% of GDP in 2008, is already high by international standards: The average for OECD countries (i.e. the developed world) last year was only 57.0% of GDP. Even the US, now reeling from a financial crisis caused in part by excessive debt, has a lower debt level than Israel; its debt totaled only 73.2% of GDP last year.
But the 2009-10 budget proposal would make the situation far worse: It calls for raising the debt to 84% of GDP in 2009 and 87% in 2010, thus reversing five years of steadily declining debt levels.
And of course, that is just the opening shot: Now that the budget has moved to the Knesset, MKs are seeking to increase expenditures still further – without, needless to say, proposing any compensatory cuts or revenue-raising measures. In short, they want to increase the debt, and hence the burden on future generations, even further.
ANY ATTEMPT to alter the budget now admittedly faces two objective hurdles. First, we are already halfway through 2009, so the 2009 budget must be passed urgently, leaving no time to go through it with a fine-tooth comb looking for places to cut. Second, we are in a recession, making this the wrong moment to cut big-ticket items such as welfare or unemployment benefits.
Nevertheless, both these problems are solvable. First, the Knesset could split the 2009 and 2010 budgets and pass only the former immediately; that would give it another six months to thoroughly scrutinize the 2010 proposal.
Second, it could actually go through the 2010 budget looking for places to cut instead of places to add, because there are many places where expenditures could be cut without harming vital needs such as education and defense.
To cite just a few examples: Why is the government spending tens, if not hundreds, of millions of shekels a year to run the country’s only two national radio stations? (The actual sum is unknowable, since Army Radio falls under the defense budget, which is classified.) In a modern democracy, there is no justification for the government having a monopoly on national radio. Moreover, airwaves are valuable commodities. Hence not only could the government save money by privatizing these stations, it could earn money by auctioning them off.
Why are army officers doing purely civilian jobs – engineers and economists, for instance – allowed to retire with full pension while still in their 40s? For combat officers, an early retirement age makes sense: These officers must be in peak physical condition, and few people in their 50s and 60s retain that level of fitness. But engineers and economists in the civilian world work well into their 60s, and there is no reason why their counterparts in the defense establishment could not do the same. This would save millions, if not billions, in completely unwarranted pension expenditures (again, since the defense budget is classified, the actual sum is indeterminable).
Why is the state funding haredi schools that refuse to teach core curriculum subjects such as English, science and math? There is no reason for the government to subsidize schools that, by failing to prepare students for the modern job market, encourage lifetime dependency on government handouts – and, even worse, teach their students to view such dependency as the ideal. Parents could still send their children to such schools, just not on the taxpayer’s dime. This, too, would save tens or even hundreds of millions of shekels in completely unjustified outlays.
Clearly, this job should have been done by those who prepared the budget; that it was not is greatly to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s discredit. But with the government having punted, only the Knesset remains.
Knesset members frequently complain about the legislature’s dismal image; it is the branch of government for which the population consistently expresses the most disdain.
That, however, is precisely because MKs so often prefer engaging in headline-grabbing, irresponsible rhetoric to doing the job they are paid to do: crafting serious, responsible legislation.
If instead of constantly demanding more spending with no thought for how to finance it, MKs were to start dealing seriously with the country’s threatening debt, this would do much to rehabilitate the Knesset’s image.
In short, this is Knesset members’ golden opportunity. Unfortunately, I would not bet on their seizing it.
Meeting in Luxembourg last Monday, European foreign ministers said conditions such as this were unacceptable. Former US president Jimmy Carter echoed this comment. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak declared that “nobody in Egypt or anywhere else… can recognize Israel as the state of the Jews”; pro-government papers in Jordan and Saudi Arabia published similar statements. The Palestinians said they will never accept this demand. Even some Israelis objected: Peres Center for Peace president Uri Savir termed it “unnecessary” in this paper on Friday; columnist Yoel Marcus labeled it “idiotic” in Friday’s Haaretz; Yonatan Touval of the Geneva Initiative called it “absurd” and “deeply harmful” in The New York Times last month.
Opponents raise three main objections. First, Israel never demanded recognition as a Jewish state in its peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, so this is clearly not essential for peace. Second, the Palestinians will never accept it, so not only is it unnecessary, it is an obstacle to peace. And third, the Palestinians should not accept it, because it would undermine the rights of Israel’s Arab minority.
THE FLAW in the first two arguments is that they overlook a crucial distinction: Neither Egypt nor Jordan ever sought to eradicate Israel’s Jewish character via their peace treaties; their demands were confined to mundane issues such as territory and water rights. The Palestinians, in contrast, are actively seeking to eradicate Israel’s Jewish character via a peace treaty.
Specifically, they demand the right to relocate 4.6 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants (UNRWA’s figure) to Israel – a demand from which they have never budged in 16 years of negotiations. This influx, combined with the 1.5 million Arab citizens, would make its 5.6 million Jews a minority in their own country, effectively eradicating the Jewish state.
Thus it is the Palestinians, not Israel, who have placed its Jewish character on the negotiating table. Netanyahu, far from raising new and irrelevant demands, is merely responding to theirs.
Moreover, far from being an obstacle to peace, Netanyahu’s demand is indeed essential to it – because the Jewish state will never agree to abolish itself via a peace treaty. Hence until the Palestinians stop demanding that it do so, no treaty will be possible.
The third argument, in contrast, is simply ridiculous. Since this already is a Jewish state, Palestinian recognition of this fact would in no way worsen Israeli Arabs’ existing situation. Nor would it preclude them from using democratic means to try to change its Jewish character from within: They are not citizens of Palestine, so Palestinian commitments do not bind them.
Indeed, the only effect Palestinian recognition of Israel’s Jewish character could have on Israeli Arabs is forcing them to abandon the delusion of someday eliminating it via mass Palestinian immigration. But since not even the most sweeping definition of democratic rights includes allowing national minorities to take over their country by importing millions of their fellow nationals, depriving Israeli Arabs of this delusion in no way violates their rights.
STILL, ALL of the above begs two questions. First, if Israel’s main concern is preventing millions of Palestinians from flooding the country, why muddy the waters by demanding recognition as a Jewish state? Why not simply reiterate its long-standing position – which most of the West accepts – that the refugees and their descendants must be resettled elsewhere? And second, why should recognition of its Jewish character be a precondition for negotiations, as Netanyahu initially demanded – though he has since shamefully backtracked? To answer these questions, it is necessary to ask a third one: If Palestinian recognition of Israel’s Jewish character is so important, why did it not raise this demand in 1993, when talks began? The answer is that then, it assumed both sides were negotiating in good faith, making it unnecessary to spell out the obvious endgame of two states, one Jewish and one Palestinian. And indeed, the original Oslo Accord mentions neither a Jewish state nor a Palestinian one.
Sixteen years later, however, this assumption has proven only half-true: Successive Israeli governments have committed explicitly to the goal of a Palestinian state, but the Palestinians have yet to abandon their demand for the demographic elimination of the Jewish one. It has thus become increasingly clear that the real problem is not the refugees, but Palestinian unwillingness to accept the very existence of a Jewish state. And since Israel will not agree to commit suicide, further talks will be pointless unless this unwillingness changes.
Yet the justice of making recognition a precondition for talks goes far deeper than that, as a Palestinian parallel ironically demonstrates. Prior to his speech last Sunday, Netanyahu had refused to commit to the goal of a Palestinian state. The Palestinians refused to resume negotiations unless he did, and the world, rightly, backed them. Essentially, the Palestinian position was “we will not agree to negotiate about whether we have a right to exist; we are only prepared to discuss the details.”
But the Jewish state is also not prepared to negotiate about whether it has a right to exist. It, too, is only prepared to discuss the details: borders, water rights, compensating the refugees, etc. And despite its initial belief in Palestinian good faith, it never should have allowed the “right of return” onto the table: No sane country would agree to make its very existence a subject of negotiations.
Netanyahu, however inconsistently, is belatedly trying to correct this fatal error, and he deserves the world’s wholehearted support. And this is not merely because, practically speaking, no peace deal will be possible unless the Palestinians accept the Jewish state’s existence.
Primarily, it is because the Jewish state cannot be the only state in the world whose very right to exist is subject to negotiations. And the Jewish people cannot be the only people in the world whose right to a nation-state of its own is deemed negotiable.
The answer, of course, is that those few thousand people are not the point. What is at stake here is a principle – reciprocity, meaning no concessions without getting something concrete in exchange. And bitter past experience with forgoing cash on the barrel is precisely why it is refusing to do so now.
That experience began with UN Security Council Resolution 242, the basis for every subsequent land-for-peace proposal. This resolution required Israel to withdraw from “territories” captured in the 1967 war – not “the territories” or “all the territories.” According to the resolution’s drafter, Britain’s UN ambassador Lord Caradon, this wording was deliberately chosen to let Israel retain some captured territory, because the 1949 armistice lines were not defensible. As he later explained, “It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial.”
Arthur Goldberg, then America’s UN ambassador, concurred: “The notable omissions – which were not accidental – in regard to withdrawal are the words ‘the’ or ‘all’… the resolution speaks of withdrawal… without defining the extent of withdrawal.”
Israel accepted 242, believing that by agreeing to concede some land, it had gained international support for retaining other areas needed to create defensible borders. And in 1982, it in fact quit 90 percent of the territory captured in 1967. But the reciprocity quickly evaporated: Today, no country, including the US, acknowledges Israel’s right to retain any territory. Only its obligations remain on the table.
FAST FORWARD to the 1993 Oslo Accord, under which Israel left most of Gaza plus six major West Bank cities, and promised further withdrawals, in exchange for Palestinian promises to end terror. Instead, Palestinians killed more Israelis in the next 30 months than during the entire preceding decade. Yet rather than pressing the Palestinians to fulfill their promises, the world demanded more Israeli concessions. And Israel caved in: It quit Hebron (1997), signed the Wye Agreement (1999) and finally offered the Palestinians more than 90 percent of the territories, including parts of Jerusalem, at Camp David in 2000. Thus it again discovered that its commitments are binding, but reciprocal commitments swiftly evaporate.
Two months after Camp David, the intifada began. Over the next five years, Palestinians killed more Israelis than during the entire preceding 52 years, using land ceded to them as bases. Since Bill Clinton, the Camp David mediator, had blamed the talks’ failure on the Palestinians, and since Palestinians began the violence, Israel naturally expected the world to finally demand that the Palestinians honor their commitments.
Instead, the world again demanded more Israeli concessions (which it received, at Washington and Taba in 2000-2001), while condemning every effort at self-defense, from checkpoints to arrests to targeted killings. Moreover, the country’s international standing plummeted: In one 2003 poll, for instance, Europeans termed it the number one threat to world peace. Hence the promised recompense for the Camp David concessions, international support, again disappeared the moment it was needed. But the concessions remained, becoming the mandatory starting point for all subsequent talks.
Next came the disengagement. In 2005, 25 settlements in Gaza and the West Bank were uprooted and the IDF left Gaza. In exchange, Jerusalem was promised both international support and the reinstatement, via George W. Bush’s letter of April 2004, of America’s broken 1967 pledge to support adjustments to the 1949 lines.
But again, both “payments” soon evaporated. When the disengagement produced daily rocket barrages from Gaza, the world responded by condemning Israel for its efforts at self-defense. It is Israel, not Hamas, that the UN is investigating for war crimes, and IDF officers, not Hamas leaders, who risk arrest in Europe.
Moreover, US President Barack Obama swiftly abrogated Bush’s letter, as his demand for a total settlement freeze demonstrates: If he supported retention of certain settlements, there would be no reason to oppose construction within those settlements, as opposed to outside them.
IN SHORT, whenever Israel has made concrete concessions in exchange for promises, those promises have proved kited checks when it tried to cash them – leaving it worse off, in terms of both security and international relations, than it was before making these concessions. This bitter experience is precisely why Netanyahu, whose motto was “if they give, they’ll get; if not, they won’t,” was elected. And a settlement freeze is a real concession. First, precisely because the world opposes adjustments to the 1949 lines, the only hope of keeping areas deemed important is by moving enough people there that uprooting them becomes impractical. In that sense, those few thousand extra settlers do matter.
Second, a freeze sends the message that even Israel deems these areas negotiable, and defensible borders are not a red line.
Finally, a freeze would spark traumatic confrontations with settlers. As the disengagement proved, Israel does not fear such confrontations if it expects some compensatory benefit. But no society would court such trauma for no benefit at all.
And Obama has offered no benefit, aside from empty rhetoric about how a freeze would “facilitate” pressure on Iran and Arab progress toward normalization. No specifics on what kind of pressure or progress, nor any guarantee that they will actually materialize.
If Obama offered something concrete – say, a public Arab pledge of specific normalization measures within a specified time, or a public Security Council pledge of specific action on Iran by a specified date – along with an understanding that the settlement freeze would end if these promises were broken, Netanyahu would almost certainly agree. But Obama has made no such proposal, and Israel has had enough of making concessions in exchange for empty promises.
Unfortunately, Netanyahu has not yet even tried to explain this to the world. One can only hope that he uses his speech on Sunday to finally do so.
The case began when the Absorption Ministry decided to fund private conversion programs, but only if they prepare people for Orthodox conversion. The Reform Movement petitioned the court, charging discrimination.
The state argued that a crucial difference exists between Orthodox and non-Orthodox conversion: The former is legally recognized by the state; the latter is not. Regardless of whether this should be the case, the fact remains that under current law, it is. People converted by either state rabbinical courts or special state-run conversion courts, as graduates of Orthodox programs are, can legally marry a Jew in Israel or be buried in a Jewish cemetery. People converted by non-Orthodox rabbinical courts, as graduates of non-Orthodox programs are, cannot.
The court, however, dismissed this argument, ruling that a conversion’s “legal validity” cannot justify a funding distinction. In short, it ordered the state to regard Israeli law as irrelevant to funding decisions: to treat programs that culminate in certification legally valid in Israel as identical to programs that do not.
Applying this principle to other fields makes its absurdity readily apparent. For instance, should the state subsidize programs that prepare students for foreign bar exams, just as it subsidizes university departments that prepare students for the Israeli bar? After all, they have an “identical purpose” – enabling graduates to work as lawyers – just as, according to the court, Orthodox and non-Orthodox conversion programs have an “identical purpose”: the “cultural and spiritual integration” of non-Jewish immigrants into Israeli society. And freedom of occupation, which includes the right to practice one’s profession where one pleases, is guaranteed by a Basic Law, so it is surely no less important than freedom of religion, on which the court based its ruling (and which, incidentally, is not guaranteed by any law at all). In fact, there is only one substantive difference between the programs: One prepares its students to obtain certification that is legally valid in Israel; the other does not. And it should be obvious that the state has a greater interest in the former than in the latter.
Of course, this difference means these programs do not really have an identical purpose – and neither do Orthodox and non-Orthodox conversion programs. Both certainly aim at “cultural and spiritual integration” into Israeli Jewish society, but Orthodox programs also aim at legal integration: securing the convert all the legal rights of an Israeli Jew, such as the right to marry another Jew in Israel. That is something non-Orthodox programs cannot currently offer.
The convert may not care: If he did, as Beinisch noted, he would presumably choose an Orthodox program. But the state, precisely because its goal is integration, has a clear interest in legally valid conversion: Integration will obviously be impaired if, for instance, the convert cannot legally marry another Jew. Yet the court willfully ignored this interest.
ITS OTHER ARGUMENT, that equal funding is mandated by the state’s commitment to freedom of religion and pluralism, is equally fallacious. According to the court, this commitment cannot be merely passive; it must be active – meaning if the state funds programs by one religious movement, it must fund similar programs by others. But “freedom” means exactly that: the freedom to do (or not do) something. It does not translate into a right to receive state funding. Again, this becomes obvious if you apply this principle to other realms. For instance, freedom of expression is no less fundamental a right than freedom of religion. So by the court’s logic, just as the government must finance non-Orthodox conversion programs because it finances Orthodox ones, the government should finance privately-owned television stations, since it finances the state-owned Channel 1. Similarly, since it subsidizes some forms of cultural expression (for instance, symphony orchestras), it must subsidize all forms.
In reality, however, government budgets are not unlimited, so states cannot fund every exercise of a given right. They must make choices, based on which exercises serve state interests. For instance, like many democracies, Israel views public broadcasting as a public interest that justifies the television funding distinction. Similarly, Israel does not fund Christian missionary work, though Jewish converts to Christianity are exercising their freedom of religion no less than non-Jewish converts to Judaism: The state has an interest in the latter (the converts’ integration into Israeli society) that it lacks in the former.
In this case, there is a compelling state interest in Orthodox conversion that does not exist in non-Orthodox conversion: the interest in a process that is legally valid under Israel’s own laws. This interest will exist unless and until the law is changed. And it is one that the court recognizes in other walks of life: It does not, for instance, require the government to fund academic programs not accredited by the state, professional training programs whose certifications are not accepted by the state or absorption benefits for immigrants not recognized by the state as eligible under the Law of Return.
So why did the court dismiss this distinction in this case? Its two stated reasons, as noted, are nonsense. But the verdict makes the unstated reason quite clear: Quite simply, the justices disapprove of this legal situation.
As private individuals, that is their right, and many Israelis would undoubtedly agree. But as justices, they are obligated to uphold the law, whether they like it or not. Instead, they ordered the state to treat the law as irrelevant, as a factor that deserves no consideration in its funding decisions. That is a gross violation of their duty. And it sends a deeply disturbing message to the Israeli public – because if even the Supreme Court does not deem the law a relevant factor in decision-making, who will?
A good opposition leader constantly walks a tightrope: On one hand, he must challenge government policy and present alternatives, but on the other, he must ensure that his attacks on the government do not undermine the country. Hence the British concept of “the loyal opposition”: It opposes the government, but is still supposed to be loyal to the nation.
Israeli politicians, however, too often forget the second half of this equation. In their eagerness to undermine the government, they wind up undermining the country as a whole.
One common manifestation of this problem is MKs conducting their own foreign policy. In 2006, for instance, then Meretz chairman Yossi Beilin drafted a plan for final-status negotiations with the Palestinians and marketed it round the world – including to then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, EU foreign policy czar Javier Solana and a senior State Department official – before even showing it to the prime minister. In 2007, then Meretz MKs Avshalom Vilan and Zehava Gal-On approached several foreign diplomats about their plan to turn Gaza over to the Arab League before even discussing it with their own government. A particularly egregious case occurred in 1987, when then foreign minister Shimon Peres negotiated an agreement with Jordan’s King Hussein behind the back of his own prime minister – who, because Labor and Likud were in a unity government, also headed the rival Likud party.
SUCH BEHAVIOR damages the country twice over. First, it contributes to the growing demonization of Israel worldwide by sending the message that even senior Israeli politicians deem it, rather than its enemies, responsible for the ongoing conflict. The conflict could be solved if only our proposals replaced the government’s, these freelance diplomats say; hence by implication, it is Israel’s fault that the conflict is not being solved.
Moreover, this behavior invites foreign pressure: If the conflict could indeed be solved by the country adopting “correct” policies, pressuring it to do so makes sense. Clearly, Israel as a whole suffers from such pressure. Needed defense equipment is not delivered, economic ties are impaired, etc. Even worse, however, foreign pressure can push premiers into misguided concessions that cost lives.
But opposition MKs need not engage in freelance foreign policy to undermine their country. It is enough to publicly term the government an “enemy of peace” – as leftist MKs routinely do to Likud governments. This, too, encourages the world to believe that Israel, rather than its enemies, is at fault for the ongoing conflict, and therefore invites international pressure from which the entire country suffers.
Unlike freelance foreign policy, which has never yet won its practitioners an election, this tactic has often been politically successful. Every Labor victory of the past two decades was achieved by portraying an incumbent Likud government as “anti-peace.” But these victories came at a devastating national cost – because though leftist parties have been no more successful at solving the conflict than Likud has, they have been successful in convincing the world that this failure is Israel’s fault. Consequently, it has increasingly become a pariah – its army officers investigated overseas for war crimes, its very right to exist attacked without protest in the UN – even under leftist governments.
LIVNI, HOWEVER, has so far taken a refreshingly different approach.
Last month, for instance, the EU’s external relations commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, said the EU would ice a planned upgrade of ties because of the new government’s policy on the conflict. For Livni the politician, this was a golden opportunity: She could have proclaimed that Binyamin Netanyahu’s “anti-peace” policy was damaging the economy, whereas if she, the “pro-peace” candidate, were premier, this would never have happened.
Instead, she sent a letter of protest to senior EU officials, saying there was no justification for this step. She neither criticized nor defended Netanyahu’s foreign policy; she simply argued that most Israelis are strongly committed to peace, and that the EU would promote peace more by strengthening ties than by weakening them. Such advocacy carries particular weight because Livni is viewed in Europe as a committed dove.
She took a similar approach in February, at her final meeting as foreign minister with US envoy George Mitchell. She already knew she was heading for the opposition, so this would have been a perfect opportunity to reap political capital by pushing the far-reaching concessions that the US favors but Netanyahu opposes, thereby positioning herself as Washington’s “good Israeli,” in contrast to the “bad Israeli” now in office.
Instead, she reportedly used the meeting to push one policy on which she and Netanyahu agree: requiring Arab states to contribute to the peace process by making reciprocal “gestures,” instead of Israel being the only party expected to make concessions. Specifically, she suggested that Arab leaders voice public support for peace, isolate Hamas, encourage Palestinian concessions rather than Palestinian intransigence and start establishing diplomatic relations with Israel. One could argue about the specifics, but the principle is critical – and Washington is reportedly considering adopting it.
By putting the country’s welfare ahead of short-term political gain, Livni is following in the footsteps of her predecessor as opposition leader. Netanyahu unstintingly lent his media skills to the former government to defend the wars in Lebanon and Gaza overseas, despite Likud’s serious reservations about both their conduct and the arrangements that ended them. But too many opposition MKs have instead chosen party over country.
As time goes by, the temptation for Livni to do the same will be great. But if she manages to resist it, people may start demanding similar behavior from all opposition politicians. She could make no greater contribution to the country in the coming years than by ending the destructive pattern whereby the opposition sabotages the country for the sake of sabotaging the government.
That may sound counterintuitive. After all, the world relentlessly demands more pullouts and lauds each one that occurs; hence the Oslo Accords, the withdrawal from Lebanon and the disengagement from Gaza all initially boosted our international popularity. In each case, however, the boost proved temporary, and the subsequent decline left the country worse off that it was before the pullout.
Indeed, the situation has gotten so bad that The New York Times ran a front-page article on the subject on March 19, titled “After Gaza, Israel grapples with crisis of isolation.” Israel, the article declared, “is facing its worst diplomatic crisis in two decades. Examples abound. Its sports teams have met hostility and violent protests in Sweden, Spain and Turkey. Mauritania has closed Israel’s embassy. Relations with Turkey, an important Muslim ally, have suffered severely. A group of top international judges and human rights investigators recently called for an inquiry into Israel’s actions in Gaza. ‘Israel Apartheid Week’ drew participants in 54 cities around the world this month, twice the number of last year, according to its organizers.”
And one could add many other examples, such as the tens of thousands who flocked to anti-Israel demonstrations worldwide during the recent Gaza operation, often chanting anti-Semitic slogans (like “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas,” featured at one Dutch rally).
Equally important, anti-Semitic incidents, especially in Europe, have risen in parallel to anti-Israel sentiment, with the worst spikes in both being recorded during major military campaigns: Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank (April 2002), the Second Lebanon War (July-August 2006) and Operation Cast Lead in Gaza (January 2009).
The reason for this is simple: In a world where pictures of bleeding victims are recycled on television and computer screens 24/7, nothing undermines a country’s international image more quickly than bloodshed. And it turns out that our territorial pullouts have not merely increased our casualties, they have also increased Arab casualties.
STATISTICS ON PALESTINIAN fatalities compiled by B’Tselem show this clearly. During the first intifada, when we controlled the territories, our forces killed 1,070 Palestinians over the course of six years (1987-93). That is equal to the number killed during a single year (September 2001-August 2002) of the post-Oslo second intifada and fewer than the 1,324 killed (according to the Palestinian Authority Health Ministry) in a mere three weeks in post-disengagement Gaza (Operation Cast Lead).
Moreover, Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank plummeted after we reoccupied it in mid-2002. After climbing from 281 in the intifada’s first year to 667 in the second year (September 2001-August 2002), they fell by almost two-thirds in the third year, to 242, then to 199 in the fourth, to between 105 and 125 in each of the next three, and finally to 52 in the year that ended in September 2008. That is a mere quarter of the 211 killed in a single month at the intifada’s height, in April 2002.
In Gaza, by contrast, Palestinian fatalities have risen since our mid-2005 withdrawal. In fact, the year that ended in September 2008, which produced the lowest number of West Bank fatalities since the intifada began, produced the highest number of Gazan fatalities – 532, almost 100 more than the previous worst year. And this year is already far worse: The 1,324 Gazans killed in Cast Lead is more than eight times the 162 killed in the single worst month in Gaza until then.
THE REASON for these trends is also simple: If the IDF controls a given territory, it does not need to wage war to halt terror; it can rely on intelligence and policing operations. Suspected terrorists can usually be arrested rather than killed; fatalities (including civilians caught in the crossfire) occur mainly when suspects resist arrest rather than coming quietly.
When the IDF does not control territory, however, police action is impossible: We cannot arrest suspects in territory formally ceded to Palestinian control. Therefore, the only way to fight terror is by military means – namely, killing the terrorists.
Moreover, there are only two forms such military operations can take. One is aerial assaults, which, being long-distance, naturally entail a risk of collateral civilian casualties. The other is full-scale invasion, which usually produces even greater casualties, even when it is managed properly: Defensive Shield, for instance, produced only about one-sixth as many enemy fatalities as either the Second Lebanon War or Cast Lead, while achieving far better results than either. But it was still the single worst month of the intifada for West Bank Palestinians, with a fatality level 50 percent higher than the second worst month.
Thus as long as territorial withdrawals lead to terror, they leave this country with only two options: It can let its citizens be attacked with impunity, which is hardly a tenable long-term response, or it can respond militarily, which will inevitably produce large-scale enemy casualties and therefore an upsurge in anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment. Indeed, it is noteworthy that while Defensive Shield, the Second Lebanon War and Cast Lead all drew tens of thousands of protesters worldwide, protests against the ongoing occupation of the West Bank draw far smaller crowds – precisely because the occupation has kept Palestinian fatalities too low to generate massive outrage.
Clearly, this problem would not arise if we could cede territory without it becoming a base for anti-Israel terror. But every piece of territory we have ceded to the Palestinians thus far has become a terrorist base. And that means the best thing the country could do for its international reputation may be the most counterintuitive of all: halt territorial concessions and reoccupy Gaza. Because as long as the terror continues, that is the only way to reduce Palestinian fatalities to a level that will cease generating international outrage.
Though Friedmann outspokenly advocates judicial reform, his two years in office achieved exactly nothing. Not one substantive reform was enacted, and his aggressive, confrontational manner alienated even many supporters. This failure had multiple causes, but foremost was the fact that Friedmann, a brilliant legal scholar, proved a lousy politician. He did not know how to muster support, forge compromises and conduct horse trades to get his proposals passed.
His expected successor, Yaakov Ne’eman, also advocates judicial reform. But unlike Friedmann, Ne’eman is a skilled and experienced political operator. Aside from his experience as finance minister in 1997-98, he has successfully brokered numerous coalition agreements; he also chaired a public commission that forged a groundbreaking compromise on conversion among Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Jews (though haredi rabbinical courts have since effectively killed it). In short, he is a skilled negotiator and forger of compromises and is widely respected by all political factions. Thus he is much more likely than Friedmann to actually enact significant reforms.
BUT WHY SHOULD people like Meridor and Begin, who oppose curtailing the court’s powers, hope the next justice minister succeeds in doing so? Because hostility to the court has grown so dramatically that unless moderate reforms are enacted soon, the backlash is liable to produce immoderate reforms in the future.
Repeated polls have shown the Supreme Court’s once unassailable status plummeting. One published this month by Prof. Arye Rattner of the University of Haifa, for instance, found that only 53 percent of Israeli Jews had faith in the court in 2009, down from 80% in 2000, while only 35% had faith in the court system in general, down from 61% in 2000.
Friedmann’s critics often blame him for this drop in support. Rattner dismisses this as nonsense, noting that the process began years before Friedmann took office. Indeed, in his 2007 poll, conducted shortly after Friedmann’s appointment, only 51% of Israeli Jews expressed faith in the Supreme Court – meaning the main decline occurred before Friedmann entered office and actually halted during his tenure. Other surveys show similar results: The Peace Index poll, for instance, found that support for the court among Israeli Jews dropped from 85% in 2000 to 48% in August 2006, which is six months before Friedmann took office.
And while Friedmann did help to erode the taboo against public criticism of the court, his attacks were probably less effective in this regard than Dorit Beinisch’s responses: The sight of the Supreme Court president hurling invective and lobbying ministers and MKs like any politician severely undermined the claim that the court should be above criticism.
THE REAL REASON for the court’s declining status is not Friedmann, but its ongoing interference in controversial political issues. It has either overturned government decisions or threatened to do so on issues as varied as the route of the security fence, IDF operations in wartime, the level of health, education and welfare spending, the acquisition of citizenship (for both Arabs and Jews), ministerial and civil service appointments and more. This has two inevitable consequences.
First, it is hard to convince people that the court is apolitical when it demands the final word on every major political decision. And second, since overruling the government often means contradicting the views of that majority of Israelis who elected it, this majority then resents the court for thwarting its preferred policies.
Hence people who understand that an independent and respected judiciary is vital to any democracy are increasingly concluding that sensible reforms – ones that curb the court’s excesses without impairing its independence – are essential to stave off harsher measures that could undermine this independence. A good example is former Labor MK and minister Shimon Shetreet, chairman of a subcommittee whose proposals for reforming the Supreme Court were included in the Magidor Commission’s report on reforming the system of government in 2007.
In his report to the commission, Shetreet lavishes praise on many of the court’s most outrageously activist decisions, leading the reader to wonder why he favors reform at all. But then he explains: Given “the fierce opposition the Supreme Court has aroused via its judicial activism, a rethinking of fundamental issues related to the judicial system is needed. As long as the public gave the court extensive credit… it was justified in using this credit to ensure proper administration, ethical behavior, the rule of law and broad societal values,” but “once the court’s credit has been eroded,” continuing down this path is dangerous.
The court, however, refuses to change direction on its own. Thus unless moderate curbs are enacted now, “a situation is liable to arise in which the legislature succeeds in passing aggressive legislation against the Supreme Court.”
SHETREET’S PROPOSALS are actually too moderate. He would not restrict justiciability, meaning the court could still rule on any issue whatsoever, whereas in a properly functioning democracy, major policy issues should be decided by the elected government rather than an unelected court. Nor would he restrict use of the reasonability standard, under which the court declares any policy it deems “extremely unreasonable” ipso facto illegal, hence effectively substituting its own policy judgments for those of the elected government.
Nevertheless, he does propose two critical changes: He would restrict standing to those with a direct, personal interest in the case, thereby eliminating the current situation whereby anyone can petition the court about anything, and would replace the court’s ability to void Knesset legislation with the British model, under which the court can declare a law incompatible with the constitution, but the parliament decides whether to amend it, repeal it or leave it in place.
And ultimately, this is the choice facing the court’s supporters: modest but substantive Shetreet-style reforms now, or far more radical reforms further down the line. Which is precisely why Meridor, Begin and their ilk should be rooting for Ne’eman’s success.