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My initial reaction to the latest move in the ongoing conflict over the Western Wall resembled Jonathan’s: I thought the new platform erected at the Robinson’s Arch section of the Wall was an asinine decision which, however well-intentioned, would only upset large swathes of American Jewry. But my view changed after reading this Jerusalem Post column by Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, who serves as executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of Conservative rabbis.
What Schonfeld explained is that Religious Services Minister Naftali Bennett was trying–with some success, in her view–to address the real needs of real-life Conservative and Reform Israelis. And what she understood is something too many American Jews fail to understand: that Israel is a real-world country with real-world constraints, not a fantasyland where ideal solutions can be magically implemented overnight. Thus in trying to bridge the gap between these citizens’ real needs and the country’s real constraints, modest steps that can be implemented quickly are often better than doing nothing, even if they don’t provide an ideal solution.
Schonfeld was quite clear that the new platform wouldn’t satisfy her if that were the government’s final offer. But as an interim solution–which is how Bennett explicitly defined it–she deemed it a major step forward. Though the Sharansky plan, which involves developing the Robinson’s Arch site more fully into a coequal extension of the existing Western Wall Plaza, might be preferable, she recognizes that such a major project would take years to complete (if it happens at all). Meanwhile, there are real Israeli Jews with real needs that have to be taken care of–and Bennett was trying to address those needs within the limits of what could be done right now, in time for next week’s Rosh Hashanah holiday.
As Schonfeld explained, Masorti Jews (the Israeli branch of the Conservative movement) have been quietly holding egalitarian prayer services at Robinson’s Arch for 12 years. But until now, they had no permanent place of worship there, so holding services meant “carrying prayer books, tables and Torah scrolls in and out of the site on their backs without cover from rain or sun.” Now, they will at least have a permanent site with its own ark, Torah scrolls and prayer books, one that can accommodate a sizable number of people. As she put it, “With the government’s construction of this platform, 450 egalitarian worshippers will now be able to pray comfortably at one time in several minyanim.” That’s a real improvement for the real Masorti Jews living in Israel, and consequently, Schonfeld welcomed it, even though she still hopes for additional progress in the future.
As religious services minister, that’s exactly what Bennett is supposed to do: address the real religious needs of real Israelis as best he can within the constraints of what can realistically be done quickly at one of the world’s holiest and most sensitive sites. Perhaps he could have done a better job explaining himself to Americans. But if American Jews find a genuine effort to help real live Masorti Jews objectionable, it may be because, as I’ve written before, too many of them still have trouble accepting a flesh-and-blood state with all its inherent constraints and flaws, rather than the utopia of their dreams, which no real state could ever be.
While visiting Israel this week, Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide grudgingly admitted that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s commitment to Israeli-Palestinian talks “sounds increasingly credible.” As proof, he cited Israel’s release of 26 Palestinian murderers earlier this month. But he immediately downplayed the move’s significance: While it was a “first sign,” he said, it “wasn’t an especially big sacrifice.”
This echoes Norwegian and Swedish reactions two weeks ago after Israel’s ambassador to Sweden compared Israel’s feelings about freeing those killers to how Norwegians would feel about freeing Anders Breivik, whose 2011 shooting spree killed 69 Norwegians, mostly teenagers. Outraged Scandinavians lined up to denounce the comparison, asserting that while Breivik was a mass murderer, the Palestinians were freedom fighters. As Jonathan wrote at the time, the general sentiment seemed to be that killers of Norwegians deserve punishment, but killers of Israelis “should be released and honored.” And that seems to be Eide’s view as well: Releasing cold-blooded killers who murdered elderly Holocaust survivors or old men sitting on park benches isn’t “an especially big sacrifice,” certainly nothing like releasing Breivik would be.
But while I agree with Jonathan that this double standard is anti-Semitic, I don’t think the Scandinavians are solely to blame. If much of the world has concluded that (Jewish) Israelis’ blood is cheap, and that their killers don’t deserve the same punishment as those who kill, say, Norwegians, a large share of the blame belongs to successive Israeli governments. For by repeatedly releasing Palestinian murderers under circumstances no other government would contemplate, Israeli governments have shown that they hold the blood of Israeli citizens cheaply. And if even Israel’s government doesn’t view murdering Israelis as a crime that deserves life imprisonment, why should anyone else?
I’m not talking here about lopsided exchanges like the 1,027 Palestinian terrorists Israel freed to ransom kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit. Though I have consistently opposed such swaps on other grounds, they don’t treat Israeli life cheaply; on the contrary, they reflect just how far Israel will go to save even one life.
But the same doesn’t hold for other prisoner releases. In 2008, for instance, Israel traded five live terrorists–including a particularly vicious killer, Samir Kuntar, whose murders included smashing a 4-year-old’s skull against a rock with a rifle butt–for two dead bodies. What other country would treat the murder of its citizens so cheaply that it would release their killers in exchange for corpses?
Israel has also freed thousands of prisoners over the years as “goodwill gestures” toward the Palestinian Authority, and though most weren’t actually murderers, they generally were involved in anti-Israel terror. Other countries free terrorists only under formal peace agreements, not as mere “goodwill gestures” to facilitate talks; thus again, this teaches the world that Israeli governments don’t consider anti-Israel terror so terrible.
But the nadir was Netanyahu’s agreement to release 104 Palestinians, almost all of them vicious killers, in four stages (the 26 freed this month were the first), solely to get Palestinian negotiators to talk with their Israeli counterparts. What other country would free murderers who killed hundreds of its citizens just to bribe another party into talks whose sole aim is to give them the land and sovereignty they claim to want?
Norway assuredly wouldn’t release Breivik under such circumstances. And that’s precisely why Norwegians view any comparison of Breivik to Palestinian killers as ridiculous: If Israelis really considered the freed Palestinians’ crimes on a par with Breivik’s, they think, then Israel wouldn’t release them, either.
Thus while there are many reasons to oppose Netanyahu’s decision, this may be the weightiest of all: By freeing those killers, Israel has once again taught the world to view Jewish blood as cheap.
It’s a sad commentary on the Middle East’s deteriorating condition that the region’s penchant for conspiracy theories actually counts as a plus these days.
There’s still no upside to delusional fantasies like Israel being behind the Egyptian coup, Muammar Gaddafi being a closet Jew, or the Mossad sending sharks to attack Egyptian tourist resorts. They promote anti-Israel (and anti-Jewish) hatred that at best stymies normal relations between Israel and its neighbors and at worst encourages murderous terror attacks. They also impede the Arab world’s own development, as I’ve argued before: blaming problems on an outside party means you consider them beyond your control, which absolves you of responsibility for solving them.
But with America in full-blown retreat from a region that’s falling apart, I’m actually grateful for one widely believed conspiracy theory: that America doesn’t care about anything in the Mideast except Israel and oil, so everything it does in the region seeks to serve one of those interests. Ironically, this belief gives Israel some protection from what would otherwise be an unmitigated disaster.
In reality, Washington has never been as unequivocally supportive of Israel as most Middle Easterners believe. For decades, it considered good relations with other regional governments to be a vital American interest, and consequently invested great efforts in courting them – not infrequently at the expense of Israel’s interests. Nevertheless, America is undeniably Israel’s best friend and patron.
Thus, while Israel has never wanted (or gotten) America to fight on its behalf, it has relied on American influence in the region for help on numerous other issues, from deflecting hostile diplomatic initiatives by Arab states to arranging cease-fires after hostilities. Such help is obviously essential in dealing with countries that don’t maintain diplomatic relations with Israel, but it’s often vital even in dealing with countries that do. When a mob besieged Israel’s embassy in Cairo in 2011, for instance, the Egyptian government refused even to take Israeli leaders’ phone calls; it finally rescued the trapped Israelis only after heavy pressure from Washington.
An American retreat from the Mideast is thus objectively bad for Israel. And such a retreat has undeniably occurred.
For two years, Washington has stood on the sidelines as Syria’s civil war dragged in all the surrounding countries – most of which are US allies – and threatened to destabilize the entire Mideast. Now, it’s even hesitating over whether to uphold President Barack Obama’s stated red line against the use of chemical weapons, since its failure to intervene earlier has left it with no good options. The Assad regime was always anti-American, and radical jihadists have come to dominate the opposition, since they provided the arms the West refused to supply. Hence Obama’s instinctive comment that responding requires UN permission – which Russia, Assad’s Security Council ally, assuredly won’t allow.
America also stood idly by in Egypt, once a linchpin of its Mideast strategy, as an elected Muslim Brotherhood government devastated the country’s economy while subverting democratic norms. Then, after the Brotherhood’s incompetence sparked a counterrevolution, it dithered ineffectually as the country slid into violence. It has thereby achieved the same impressive result as in Syria: both sides now loathe it. Today, Egypt’s de facto leader Adly Mansour reportedly won’t even take Obama’s calls.
America withdrew completely from Iraq after making only a token effort to keep some troops there, thus stripping Iraq of protection against its powerful Iranian neighbor. Of necessity, Baghdad has sided with Tehran over Washington ever since – for instance, by refusing repeated American requests to intercept Iranian arms shipments to Syria. Now, Washington is threatening to repeat this scenario in Afghanistan.
Finally, the US pursued an endless series of talks with Iran that merely enabled the latter to continue advancing its nuclear program, and is promising more of the same with new Iranian President Hassan Rohani, despite Rohani’s public pledge that he will only change Tehran’s tactics, not its goals (“Reconsidering foreign policy doesn’t mean a change in principles because principles remain unchanged,” Rohani said. “But change in the methods, performance and tactics, which are the demands of the people, must be carried out.”)
Consequently, most of America’s regional allies now doubt that it will actually stop Iran from getting nukes, and this, combined with its bystander posture toward other regional problems, has increasingly led them to disregard American interests. Saudi Arabia, for instance, sent troops into Bahrain in 2011 without even warning Washington, thereby ending American hopes of a negotiated solution to Bahrain’s uprising.
Indeed, the only regional issue America has put real diplomatic muscle into is the inconsequential one of Israeli-Palestinian talks. As one commentator wryly observed, Washington effectively decided “to search for the missing coin under the Israeli lamp post, the only place that is actually lit in the Middle East.”
All of the above is bad news for Israel. But it would be even worse if it weren’t for that good old conspiracy theory. Because to most Middle Easterners, America’s passivity as the Arab world bleeds merely confirms what they thought all along: that America cares about nothing in the region except oil and Israel. In their eyes, even Washington’s obsession with the peace process confirms this theory; they see America deeply engaged in a conflict involving Israel while ignoring intra-Arab conflicts. That many Israelis consider this engagement detrimental to their interests is irrelevant.
Consequently, many Middle Easterners don’t interpret Washington’s disengagement from the rest of the region as indicating any lessening of its willingness to support Israel. And this offers Israel real protection: it means its enemies are unlikely to see this an ideal moment to finally eradicate it once and for all, which they would if they thought America had disengaged from Israel too. And that in turn gives Israel crucial freedom of action – for instance, to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities if necessary – without fearing that its enemies might seize on any such action as an opportunity to attack it in force.
I don’t know if they’re right about Washington’s position, but I’m very glad they believe it. For in an age of American retreat, Mideast conspiracy theories may now be Israel’s best ally in keeping war at bay.
I sympathize with the frazzled Israeli diplomats who argue that halting U.S. aid to Egypt could endanger Israeli-Palestinian talks. Those talks are the only Mideast issue the Obama administration has shown any real interest in, and good salesmen always try to frame their pitch to appeal to their listeners’ interests. The argument is even correct, as far as it goes: The ousted Muslim Brotherhood government did back Hamas against the Palestinian Authority, while the current military government backs the PA against Hamas; that’s why the PA lauded the coup while Hamas denounced it.
Nevertheless, given that the talks haven’t a prayer of succeeding, backing Egypt’s military coup for their sake would be ridiculous. A much better argument, if anyone in Washington is still capable of hearing it, is the one Haaretz columnist Chemi Shalev makes today: Not backing the coup could reverse one of America’s biggest foreign policy achievements of the 1970s–flipping Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states from the Soviet to the American camp. Today, Shalev warns, Saudi Arabia is begging Washington to support the coup, and refusing might send it and America’s other Arab clients straight back into Russia’s orbit:
To help make their point, the Saudis might attach the once-unthinkable photo of the meeting held earlier this month between their own Prince Bandar and a smiling Vladimir Putin. The Russian President, after all, has a proven track record in Syria of standing by an ally, even one who massacres his opponents by the tens of thousands. If Cairo turns to Moscow, Washington would be hard put to recover from the political black eye and the regional loss of face.
Actually, almost any rational Mideast player today (Israel excepted) would rather have Moscow and Tehran as backers than Washington. Between them, Russia and Iran have supported their Syrian client with arms, diplomatic cover, money, and troops, while America has given the Syrian rebels nothing but empty rhetorical support. America has also done virtually nothing to help NATO ally Turkey, which has suffered both cross-border violence and a massive influx of Syrian refugees, even though Turkey’s prime minister is one of Obama’s favorite world leaders. Nor has it done much to help longstanding ally Jordan cope with the influx of refugees that threatens to overwhelm it.
Granted, Riyadh and its allies would be reluctant to share Russia’s patronage with Iran, which they loathe; they also remember who sent troops to protect them when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. But Washington’s current passivity is making Saudi Arabia fear that America has become a broken reed; hence its feelers to Russia, via the Bandar-Putin meeting. If Washington now abandons Egypt, that could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. And if Riyadh leaves the American camp, Egypt would swiftly follow suit.
Once, American politicians on both sides of the aisle understood that America has interests as well as values, and that sometimes, the only choices are between two evils. As an example, Shalev aptly cites America’s alliance with the Soviets during World War II. And currently, as Jonathan has argued repeatedly, Egypt’s army is the lesser evil compared to the radical Islamists of the Brotherhood.
But today, leading Republican foreign-policy voices like John McCain and Lindsey Graham are joining leading Democrats to demand that Obama jettison American interests in favor of a “clean hands” policy: We don’t care what becomes of the Middle East as long as we can dissociate ourselves from the violence.
If Obama succumbs to these demands, he will set America’s position in the Mideast back 40 years–to a time when it had no allies at all among countries that remain vital to global energy supplies.
Hard as it is to believe, releasing 26 vicious murderers for the dubious privilege of resuming “peace” talks may not have been the worst outrage our government perpetrated last week. Equally appalling was the sudden announcement, after months of an undeclared freeze on planning and construction in Jerusalem and the major settlement blocs, of plans for almost 2,100 new homes in these areas. In other words, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told the world he considers Israeli construction in its capital city so illegitimate that he dare not do it unless accompanied by an egregious concession like freeing Palestinian murderers.
Last Sunday, the Housing Ministry announced plans to issue tenders for 793 homes in Jewish neighborhoods of east Jerusalem and 394 in the settlement blocs. Last Monday, the Interior Ministry gave final approval to plans for 900 homes in East Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood. And last Tuesday, 26 killers went home to heroes’ welcomes in the Palestinian Authority. The connection would be glaringly obvious even to someone who didn’t know that construction in Jerusalem had hitherto been frozen since the start of the year, as Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Avigdor Lieberman publicly admitted in June. The Gilo plan, for instance, had been ready since December, but the Interior Ministry postponed approving it under pressure from Netanyahu’s office.
Worse, even after this egregious prisoner release, it’s far from clear that any of these units will ever be built. Israel’s cumbersome planning process involves numerous steps before construction can start, and by Netanyahu’s orders, every project in Jerusalem or the settlements requires his approval at every step. But he has a long history of loudly announcing building plans and then quietly freezing them at the next stage, as I noted over two years ago: Plans to issue tenders are announced, but the tenders never materialize. Tenders are issued, but the winners aren’t announced. And so forth.
The reason Netanyahu has effectively frozen construction in Jerusalem for years is his fear of the anti-Israel delegitimization campaign. As American columnist Jeffrey Goldberg reported last week, US Secretary of State John Kerry thinks this campaign is the one thing Netanyahu fears as much as Iran’s nuclear program (and he deftly exploited this fear to extract concessions like the prisoners’ release).
Netanyahu’s concern about delegitimization is obviously justified. But if the goal is to fight delegitimization, the worst thing any Israeli premier could do is act as if he agreed that Israeli construction in Jerusalem – the city to which Jews prayed to return throughout 2,000 years of exile – is illegitimate.
After all, no country hesitates to build on its legitimate sovereign territory, just as Israel doesn’t hesitate to build in Tel Aviv of Haifa. Even Netanyahu’s predecessors, who offered large chunks of east Jerusalem to the Palestinians, continued building in the parts they intended to keep. Thus by fearing to build in Jerusalem, Netanyahu is effectively broadcasting doubts about Israel’s right to the city.
But if Israel has no right to Jerusalem, then it’s nothing but a thief occupying someone else’s land. And a thief who refuses to disgorge his ill-gotten gains can never hope to placate the world’s opprobrium by gestures like freezing construction or freeing murderers: Nothing less than vacating east Jerusalem and evicting its 200,000 Jewish residents will do.
Netanyahu’s behavior also undermines Israel’s claim to Jerusalem on a purely practical level. As Nadav Shragai reported in Israel Hayom last week, Jerusalem needs about 4,500 new homes a year to keep pace with demand. But for the last several years, under Netanyahu, only about 1,000 to 1,500 a year have been built. This housing shortage is a major driver of the ongoing exodus of Jews from Jerusalem: Every year, according to Shragai, some 18,000 Jews leave the city, causing its Jewish majority to shrink – from about 74% in 1967 to 64% in 2010, according to the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. This obviously undermines Israel’s ability to retain Jerusalem as its united capital.
Moreover, Netanyahu hasn’t even gotten anything in exchange for undermining Israel’s rights. Had he publicly declared that despite Israel’s legal, moral and historical rights to Jerusalem, he was freezing construction to facilitate peace talks, he would at least have earned Israel a few temporary international plaudits. Not that I’m recommending such a move. Allowing the Palestinians to veto Israeli construction in Jerusalem would effectively acknowledge their claim to the city as legitimate and thus undermine Israel’s own claim; it would lead the world to expect this as a permanent concession, and the plaudits would soon evaporate, just as those earned by previous Israeli concessions did. But undermining Israel’s claim to its capital while also being lambasted worldwide for “sabotaging the talks” by making ostentatious (and possibly empty) building announcements is hardly an improvement.
Then, as if all this weren’t enough, Netanyahu’s senior coalition partner made things even worse: In a comment gleefully reported worldwide, Finance Minister Yair Lapid termed the building announcements a “double mistake,” charging that not only did they undermine the peace process, but “Solutions for the problem of housing should be founded in the areas of need.” In other words, he accused Netanyahu of announcing housing plans in areas where there’s not even any demand for it, thereby implying that these announcements were pure provocations rather than responses to the country’s real needs.
As noted above, that’s patently false; there’s a crying demand for housing in Jerusalem, and the same goes for the settlement blocs. But since most people overseas can’t imagine a finance minister being so ignorant of his country’s basic economic realities, they’ll naturally assume that Israelis really don’t want to live in these areas, and hence that Israel is simply playing dog in the manger, denying the Palestinians land it doesn’t even want itself.
For years, I’ve supported Netanyahu as the least bad of the available alternatives. But the past week has made it abundantly clear that this is no longer true. To free Palestinian murderers and delegitimize Israel’s claim to its capital city, Israel doesn’t need a Likud prime minister. For that, we could just as well elect Mahmoud Abbas.
To the many reasons why the current Israeli-Palestinian “peace talks” are a nonstarter, we can now add another: the situation in Egypt. The problem isn’t just that the chaos on Israel’s previously stable southern border decreases its willingness to take “risks for peace” that could replicate this situation in the West Bank. It’s also what the situation says about the Obama administration’s judgment.
As the Hudson Institute’s Samuel Tadros reminds us, when the Egyptian revolution broke out two years ago, the administration sought guidance in historical precedents:
According to the New York Times, President Obama asked his staff to study transitions in more than 50 countries around the world in order to understand and predict where Egypt and other countries in the Middle East might be heading. After extensive study, his staffers predicted “that Egypt is analogous to South Korea, the Philippines and Chile.” Months later, the administration was still confident in its assessment. While aware of the obstacles that were on the way during the desired transition to democracy, Benjamin Rhodes, a deputy national security advisor was adamant that, “The trajectory of change is in the right direction.”
Needless to say, Egypt turned out nothing like South Korea, the Philippines, or Chile. The Muslim Brotherhood took power, only to prove both so incompetent and so anti-democratic that a year later, the military ousted it by popular demand (anti-Brotherhood demonstrations drew an incredible 14 million people into the streets). The Brotherhood didn’t go quietly, and now there’s a risk that this week’s carnage in Cairo will spark a civil war.
None of this was unpredictable. Indeed, from the very beginning, Israeli officials warned unanimously that nothing good would come of Egypt’s revolution, and most Israeli commentators (myself included) agreed–for which we were roundly condemned by members of America’s foreign-policy establishment. Nor is it really surprising that Israel’s assessments proved more accurate than America’s: What happens in Israel’s immediate neighborhood has far more impact on Israelis’ lives than it does on Americans, and therefore Israelis invest more time and effort in trying to understand it.
Yet now the same people who got Egypt so badly wrong are demanding that Israelis trust them to referee an Israeli-Palestinian deal. The administration even sent a senior general, former U.S. commander in Afghanistan John Allen, “to define Israel’s security requirements” for it–and woe betide Israel if it begs to differ. But actually, President Barack Obama didn’t bother waiting for Allen’s conclusions; he asserted two years ago that the border must be “based on the 1967 lines,” and that this is perfectly compatible with Israel’s security needs. Never mind that no Israeli map of defensible borders has ever agreed.
In other words, the administration has already made clear that it won’t support Israel’s security demands; it expects Israel to bow to its judgment. But the people who thought Egypt’s revolution was going to resemble Chile or South Korea aren’t people whose judgment Israel can possibly rely on to assure its vital security needs. Under this situation, reaching a deal that satisfies Israel’s minimum security needs would be impossible even if all the other issues were somehow magically resolved.
But in fact, Secretary of State John Kerry has made it clear he wants to deal with borders and security first. And that means the blow-up won’t be long in coming.
As Jonathan correctly noted yesterday, one of the many reasons why 84 percent of Israeli Jews oppose today’s planned release of 26 Palestinian prisoners is that it will actually undermine prospects for peace. Watching the Palestinian government and public lionize these vicious killers of elderly Holocaust survivors, do-gooders seeking to promote Palestinian business development, old men on park benches and innocent bus passengers does nothing to persuade Israelis that Palestinians want peace; neither do the Palestinian Authority’s predictable complaints about the inadequacy of this concession, or its public assertion that these prisoners are all “political prisoners“–i.e., that deliberately murdering innocent civilians is a legitimate political tactic to which Israel has no right to object.
But while the prisoner release is uniquely counterproductive, the truth is that most Israeli Jews would have opposed any concession aimed merely at getting Palestinians to the table–fully 69 percent, according to one June poll. This fact reflects a much broader problem with the “peace process”: Israelis are tired of a process that consists solely of an endless stream of Israeli concessions, with Palestinians never being asked to give anything in exchange.
The current talks are a case in point. To launch them, Israel agreed to release 104 vicious murderers in four stages–an incredibly painful concession. And what did the Palestinians give in exchange? They certainly haven’t ceased anti-Israel incitement, which leading human rights expert Prof. Irwin Cotler described just last week as “far worse than checkpoints”; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu detailed numerous recent examples of such incitement in a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday. Nor did they agree to let Israel continue building in areas that every peace plan ever proposed has concluded will remain Israeli; they’re threatening to boycott tomorrow’s planned negotiating session over Israeli plans for 1,200 desperately needed new housing units in huge Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem and the major settlement blocs.
In fact, Palestinians made exactly one “concession” in exchange for the talks: They agreed to show up without an Israeli commitment to accept all their territorial demands before negotiations even began (though they claim the U.S. did promise to support those demands). In other words, their one “concession” was agreeing to negotiate at all. Given that Palestinians claim to want a state on lands only Israel can give them, it’s hard to understand why Israel should be expected to bribe them merely to embark on talks aimed at satisfying that desire. Yet that has been the norm ever since the “peace process” began in 1993.
Over the last 20 years, Israel has released thousands of Palestinian terrorists, withdrawn from all of Gaza and parts of the West Bank, dismantled dozens of settlements, and thrown thousands of Jewish families out of their homes. In exchange, it has gotten nonstop rocket fire from Gaza, vicious terrorism from the West Bank (the second intifada) that caused more Israeli casualties in four years than all the terrorism of the preceding 53 years combined, and an intensifying campaign of international delegitimization.
A process in which one side does all the giving and the other all the taking has little chance of ever producing peace. Israelis intuitively understand this, even if their leaders seem unable to resist international pressure to continue this travesty. The question is when the rest of the world will finally grasp this obvious truth.
After years of dismissing leftists’ hyperbolic claims that Israeli democracy is under threat, I’ve decided they may be right after all. What they’re wrong about is the source of the threat. It isn’t our “anti-democratic” elected representatives (whose “anti-democratic” bills usually aren’t anything of the sort, while the few that are routinely fail); rather, it’s our unelected legal establishment.
After all, citizens elect governments primarily to implement specified policies. Thus if unelected legal officials routinely prevent governments from doing so, even on the most important issues of the day, what’s the point of having elections? And as two incidents of the past two weeks make clear, that’s increasingly becoming the case.
The first was the National Labor Court’s shocking ruling on July 30 ordering the government to freeze two tenders for constructing private ports and instead negotiate with the port unions for permission – thereby potentially killing the most important reform on the government’s economic agenda.
A 2009 study by the Antitrust Authority found that Israel’s ports are 30% less efficient than similar-sized ports elsewhere, costing the economy some NIS 5 billion a year. The 2011 Trajtenberg Committee on socioeconomic reform similarly concluded that “inferior service and low production in Israel’s ports cost the economy, which depends heavily on the ports, hundreds of millions of shekels a year. This is before taking into consideration the indirect damage, stemming from the business uncertainty imposed on the economy by the disruptions [in the ports’ work] and delays in developing new port infrastructures.”
Nobody disputes that the ports’ inefficiency and high costs stem primarily from their monopoly status. This enables their unions to extort excess wages (the average dockworker earns 2.5 times the economy’s average wage), dictate outrageous perks such as paying “on-call” port pilots full salary to sit at home and do nothing, and shut down the ports on any trivial pretext, including demands for additional meal vouchers, a desire to dictate the identity of the port CEO’s personal assistant, or even a union member’s wedding. Nor does anyone dispute that numerous past attempts to bribe the unions into better behavior have produced nothing but higher government wage bills.
Consequently, the government concluded that the only solution is to introduce competition by building new, private ports that the existing unions won’t control. This has become a top priority for three senior ministers: Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett and Finance Minister Yair Lapid. Moreover, it’s clearly within the government’s prerogative: On what conceivable grounds should the government need the unions’ permission to build a new port, or any other vital bit of public infrastructure? After all, it’s the government – not the unions – that’s responsible for meeting the country’s infrastructure needs, and for coming up with the necessary funds.
But the labor court thought otherwise: It ordered the government to negotiate with the Histadrut labor federation. And that decision, if not overturned (Katz vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court), will sound the death knell for the government’s flagship economic policy. Even if the court’s interference doesn’t scare off the eight foreign companies that have expressed interest in the tenders, the new ports will be pointless if they require the Histadrut’s consent. The labor federation has already said it will agree only if these ports, too, are under the unions’ thumb.
The second incident was Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein’s equally shocking ruling last week ordering the Knesset to finish enacting new legislation on drafting Haredim by August 20. This legislation, which passed its first Knesset reading only on July 23, is one of the most important bills the current parliament is likely to consider. A good law could spur Haredi integration into the army and workforce; a bad one could set this goal back decades.
Consequently, the committee charged with preparing the bill scheduled multiple hearings at which outside experts and interested parties could present arguments pro and con and propose changes. Moreover, several MKs are demanding major revisions – which in fact are sorely needed, as David Weinberg aptly explained in this paper last week. But Weinstein’s ruling, by allotting a mere four weeks for these discussions, would make this impossible. Knesset committees typically spend months on major legislation when it requires significant changes; bills can be rushed through only when they’re left virtually unchanged.
To his credit, Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein bluntly told Weinstein that parliament’s legislative timetable is none of his business. Indeed, as Edelstein’s letter correctly noted, the Knesset would be neglecting its duty if it didn’t give such an important bill thorough consideration: “The job of the Knesset and its committees is to examine bills the government submits, hold a public discussion and listen to the people involved in the matter, including those the government did not hear, and use its judgment.”
But given the Supreme Court’s long-standing position that the attorney general’s legal opinions are binding on the executive, Weinstein has enormous power to extort Knesset compliance by pressuring the executive even if he lacks the power to dictate directly to parliament (which, incidentally, isn’t guaranteed; the court has never fully addressed this issue). In this case, for instance, existing law technically mandates drafting some 60,000 Haredim immediately. The government deemed this untenable, so the defense minister issued deferrals until the new law (which ostensibly stipulates a gradual phase-in) passes. But court petitions have been filed against these deferrals. Hence Weinstein could simply threaten to issue a legal opinion backing the petitioners unless the Knesset meets his legislative timetable.
Thus we have a labor court seeking to stymie one of the government’s flagship reforms, and an attorney general seeking to prevent MKs from influencing one of the term’s flagship pieces of legislation. And in both cases, they may yet succeed.
Under these circumstances, why should citizens even bother voting? And why should anyone with a desire to effect change want to run for office? After all, you don’t need any kind of elected government – much less one staffed by talented people with good ideas – merely to rubber-stamp the whims of unelected legal officials. For that, an automatic stamping machine would suffice.
As Jonathan noted yesterday, Israeli pessimism about renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks stems from certain important facts that Americans like to ignore but Israelis find impossible to forget. I’d like to add another fact to his list. You might call it the Turkey problem–specifically, President Barack Obama’s blithe disregard of Turkey’s violation of a deal with Israel that he himself brokered.
Any Israeli-Palestinian agreement would presumably involve certain American guarantees, particularly on security. Washington even assigned a very prominent retired general, former commander in Afghanistan John Allen, “to consult with the Israelis about how the United States can help them meet security challenges posed by a Palestinian state,” as the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius put it. But America can’t offer this kind of guarantee anymore, because under Obama, U.S. promises to Israel have repeatedly proven worthless. The Turkish deal is a classic example.
While visiting Israel in March, Obama personally twisted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arm to get him to apologize and pay compensation for Israel’s 2010 raid on a Turkish-sponsored flotilla to Gaza. Since the flotilla sought to break a blockade that even the UN recognizes as legal, and since the Turkish casualties occurred only because an “organized and violent” group of Turks attacked Israel’s boarding party with “iron bars, staves, chains, and slingshots” (to quote the UN’s report on the incident), wounding several soldiers and capturing and abusing three, most Israelis considered an apology unwarranted: The soldiers opened fire only in self-defense. Nevertheless, Netanyahu agreed, even making the telephoned apology in Obama’s presence.
In exchange, Turkey was supposed to return its ambassador to Israel, end its show-trials (in absentia) of senior Israeli officials, and otherwise restore normal relations. Five months later, not only has none of this happened, but Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc made clear last month that it never will, because Turkey has appended two new conditions that weren’t part of the deal: Israel must agree that it committed a “wrongful act” (in the original apology, whose wording was carefully negotiated, Israel acknowledged operational errors but not legal wrongdoing), and it must end the Gaza blockade.
Yet Obama hasn’t breathed a word of criticism for this new Turkish stance, much less exerted any pressure on his good friend Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to keep his side of the bargain. So Israel made concessions upfront, the other side pocketed them and then reneged on the promised quid pro quo, and Obama didn’t utter a peep. That hardly encourages Israel to do the same on the Palestinian front.
Clearly, this isn’t the first time Obama has broken a promise to Israel. He reneged on his predecessor’s oral agreement to let Israel continue building in the settlement blocs, outraging even leftists like Haaretz editor Aluf Benn by denying the agreement’s very existence; he reneged on his predecessor’s written promise that any Israeli-Palestinian deal must leave Israel with the settlement blocs and “defensible borders”–a promise Israel paid for by vacating every last inch of Gaza and evicting every last settler–instead publicly declaring that the border must be based on the indefensible 1967 lines; and he reneged on UN Resolution 242, which also promised Israel both defensible borders and the right to keep some of the territory captured in 1967, thereby abandoning the position of every U.S. government since 1967. All this taught Israelis that his successors might similarly scrap any promises he makes Israel today.
But in the Turkey case, he’s shown that he won’t even uphold his own promises to Israel. And that makes the conclusion inescapable: Any cession of real security assets like territory in exchange for American guarantees is a losing proposition for Israel.
“Follow the money” has become a catchphrase in both journalism and politics, seemingly applicable to almost any subject. But if you want to understand what really matters to Middle Eastern Muslims, a better rule might be “follow the violence.”
A case in point is the still widespread delusion that what Muslims care about most is “Western aggression”–firstly Israel’s “occupation” of the Palestinians, and secondly America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Based on Muslim rhetoric, that’s a plausible conclusion. But if you look at what Muslims care enough to put their lives on the line for–a far better indication of concern than mere talk–a very different conclusion emerges.
Two recent developments made this blindingly evident. The first was a religious ruling by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most influential clerics in the Sunni Muslim world, whose weekly television show on Al Jazeera attracts tens of millions of viewers. As Thomas Hegghammer and Aaron Y. Zelin reported in the July 7 issue of Foreign Affairs, on May 31, Qaradawi said that any Sunni “trained to fight … has to go” join the war in Syria. What makes this noteworthy, the report said, is that Qaradawi hasn’t issued similar rulings in other cases: “In 2009, he wrote a book titled Jurisprudence of Jihad, in which he dismissed the individual duty argument for the jihad in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan.”
Though Qaradawi deemed all those cases “legitimate jihad,” meaning any Muslim who wished to fight there was permitted to do so, only in Syria’s case did he say that Muslims able to do so must join the fight. Thus he clearly views the Syrian war as more important than those in “Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan,” even though the latter all pitted Muslims against either Israel or America, while the former is a strictly intra-Muslim affair pitting Sunnis against Shi’ites, with no Israeli or American involvement whatsoever.
In short, important parts of the Sunni Muslim world view the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict as more important than the battle against either Israeli or American “aggression.”
The same conclusion emerges from last week’s New York Times report on the rising number of Western Muslims joining the war in Syria–about 600 so far. “More Westerners are now fighting in Syria than fought in conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia or Yemen,” the report says. Western Muslims have also largely sat out the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (a 2003 suicide bombing in Tel Aviv perpetrated by two British Muslims made headlines precisely because it was so anomalous). And the same goes for non-Western Muslims: Altogether, the Times reported, some 6,000 non-Syrian Muslims are now fighting in Syria; by contrast, only a handful of non-Palestinian Muslims have fought in the West Bank and Gaza in recent decades.
Again, the implication is clear: To many Muslims, the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict is much more important than the conflict with either Israel or America.
Unfortunately, Western governments don’t seem to have gotten the message: Stuck in their time warp, America and Europe are still obsessing over the Israeli-Palestinian sideshow rather than focusing on the conflict Muslims actually care about.