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If that assertion seems counterintuitive, consider the following cases:
For more than seven years, the High Court of Justice has been deliberating a petition by one Jenny Baruchi, a welfare recipient who sought a university degree in order to qualify herself for the job market and get off welfare. Under existing regulations, however, university students are not entitled to welfare, meaning that Baruchi and her children would have starved during her studies. Baruchi therefore went to court, arguing that this rule is discriminatory, since yeshiva students are entitled to welfare.
The great mystery in this case is why Baruchi (who has since finished her degree thanks to donations prompted by the case’s publicity) should have had to go to court at all ?- since in fact, the government has a supreme interest in sending welfare recipients to college. Clearly, it is preferable to get people off the dole and into a job, and for anyone capable of obtaining a university degree, this is by far the most efficient way of doing so. Numerous studies have shown that unemployment drops as education rises, and Israel is no exception: In 2006, for instance, the unemployment rate was 4.0 percent for people with 16 years or more of education, 6.6 percent for those with 13 to 15 years of schooling, 11.5 percent for those with 9 to 12 years and 16 percent among those with less than nine years.
Yet since Baruchi’s petition was filed, four governments, headed by three different parties (Labor, Likud and Kadima), have successively upheld the position that university students do not deserve welfare. Why? Because the rule is that anyone able to afford luxuries does not need government handouts ?- and a university education is considered a luxury, not a national interest.
A SIMILAR attitude emerges from the cutbacks in the government’s adult education program, which offers everything from basic literacy courses to remedial high school classes leading to a high school degree. The program’s already modest budget of NIS 161 million in 2005 has thus far been slashed by almost 50 percent, and further cuts are planned for this year.
This program, too, is clearly a national interest: With the government spending tens of billions of shekels a year on unemployment and welfare benefits, it makes sense to invest a tiny fraction of this sum in educating the unemployed to make them more employable. And even at its 2005 level, the program consumed only half a percent of the total education budget ?- hardly an unmanageable amount.
But the government thinks otherwise: It views the program as a luxury. Hence it is easily cut to pay for essentials such as our four ministers without portfolio, the previously nonexistent Strategic Threats Ministry or the newly resurrected Religious Affairs Ministry.
Another example was the government’s decision, effective this past September, to cancel special English classes for students already proficient in the language. These classes aimed to produce graduates who spoke and wrote English at the same level as their American or British peers.
In a world where English is the lingua franca of business, science and diplomacy, Israelis who can speak and write native-level English are an obvious national asset. Thus these classes, too, constitute a clear national interest.
Yet to the government, they were merely a perk enjoyed by Western immigrants. Incredibly, its stated rationale for canceling the classes was that since they were not available to all students ?- other than new immigrants and their children,
few students speak English at the requisite level ?- they had no right to exist. But by that standard, the government should also cancel advanced high school math and science courses: They, too, are not available to all students, since few people are born with the requisite mathematical abilities to handle them.
In this case, a campaign by Western immigrants recently persuaded the government to reverse its decision. Yet this reversal was also presented merely as a concession to a special-interest group: According to the Education Ministry, the decision was made because the government wants to encourage continued immigration from English-speaking countries. There was no recognition of the fact that educating a cadre of fluent English speakers could benefit the country as a whole.
THE ABOVE examples affect relatively small groups of people. The importance of educating the majority ought to be even clearer: Having no natural resources, Israel’s economy depends entirely on its human capital; that means a well-educated work force is not a luxury, but a necessity.
And indeed, all governments pay lip service to the importance of education. The ongoing lack of any true reform is due not to lack of desire, they claim, but to practical difficulties: the teachers unions’ opposition, the enormous sums of money reform would require, and so forth.
There is some truth to these claims ?- which is precisely why it is instructive to examine the government’s attitude toward easy cases, like the ones above. All three of these cases involved trivial sums of money, and none involved controversial reforms: In the latter two, the government would merely have had to refrain from axing existing programs; in the first, the requisite change was easily made and would have aroused no political or union opposition. Yet in each case, successive governments opted instead for the anti-education approach.
In so doing, they showed their true colors: They do not view education as a national interest, but as an expendable perk. And until this attitude changes, no government will be willing to tackle the big, controversial and expensive reforms that our education system truly needs.
“Locating Katyusha [rockets] from the air was an almost impossible task, nor could they be neutralized solely from the air,” the report stated. “Despite this, no comprehensive ground campaign was launched until the end of the war. The IDF [thus] failed in achieving the war’s main operational goal – suppressing the Katyusha fire.”
Instead of exploiting its vastly superior size and technology, the report continued, the army adopted tactics that “played into Hizbullah’s hands”: sending in relatively small forces and confining them to a few kilometers near the border, thus enabling Hizbullah’s far smaller “army” to meet them on almost equal terms. Moreover, the IDF’s refusal to attack the “nature reserves,” or fortified areas where most Hizbullah forces were concentrated, left these forces free to strike at our soldiers – and civilians.
Two left-wing MKs signed the report with the reservation that they nevertheless opposed a major ground operation (preferring a swift cease-fire). Yet 15 Knesset members – 10 coalition and five opposition, from Labor on the left to National Union on the right – declared that such an operation should have been launched.
THIS CONCLUSION has obvious implications for the other front where Israeli civilians are under ongoing rocket fire. And the committee did not shy away from them: At a press conference on the report, Committee Chairman Tzahi Hanegbi, of the prime minister’s Kadima party, stated that while no formal vote was held on the subject, a majority of panel members favor a major ground operation in Gaza to suppress the Kassam rocket fire on Sderot.
In Gaza, the army has been trying for years to suppress this fire through a combination of aerial attacks and small ground operations near the border, with the same notable lack of success these tactics had in Lebanon: The number of missile strikes on southern Israel soared from 270 in 2005 to over 1,000 in both 2006 and 2007.
“I start from the assumption that everyone who signed this report, which states that reliance on [these tactics]… was a mistake, assumes that it is equally a mistake on another front,” Hanegbi explained.
Moreover, another major flaw identified by the report was the inaction of successive governments as Hizbullah positioned itself along the border, constructed fortifications and massively expanded its arsenal following Israel’s pullout from Lebanon in 2000. That inaction, the report said, “reduced the army to paralysis and weakness.”
In Gaza, too, Hamas has exploited Israel’s pullout to smuggle in massive quantities of arms and construct fortifications. “An absolute majority of committee members believes that we must not repeat in Gaza the mistake we made for years in Lebanon, and that there’s no escaping a frontal operation,” Hanegbi said.
UNFORTUNATELY, the government disagrees. Instead, it is reportedly discussing another tahadiyeh (cease-fire) with Hamas – an absurd idea on two counts.
First, the last truce (which began in November 2006 and gradually disintegrated) was a total failure: While Hamas largely stopped firing rockets – except on special occasions such as Israel’s Independence Day – it allowed other groups, such as Islamic Jihad, to fire at will. Thus throughout the “cease-fire” Israel continued to suffer almost daily rocket attacks.
Second, Hamas has been explicit that all it wants is a brief lull to enable it to prepare for the next round. As one senior Hamas official told Haaretz, a tahadiyeh is “of short duration, only a few months” – and would be conditional on Israel allowing Gaza’s borders to reopen. In other words, Hamas wants a few blockade-free months in which to stockpile arms and materiel, after which the war will resume with it in a stronger position.
Yet should the cease-fire initiative fail, the government’s fallback plan is equally intolerable: simply continuing the same ineffective tactics for another 30 months or more until the missile defense system whose development it finally budgeted last month is deployable (mid-2010 at the earliest).
Beyond the obvious problem that since the system does not yet exist nobody knows if it will ever be practicable, much less when, Sderot cannot simply be left to endure daily missile attacks for another several years. Granted, the Kassams have thus far caused few casualties, but living in constant fear – never knowing when and where the next rocket will hit – is simply not tenable long-term.
IN LEBANON, a major ground operation might well have failed, given that our chief of staff at the time was a pilot who had no clue about what ground forces were for or how to use them, and that the troops were scandalously untrained in the relevant maneuvers. For the same reasons, such an operation in Gaza would have been inadvisable a year ago. However, our new chief of staff is a ground forces veteran, and has devoted the past year to intensive troop training. Thus what was unfeasible before is now a viable option.
The most basic obligation any country owes its citizens is protection. Most Israelis understand that; consequently, a solid majority supports a major operation in Gaza to suppress the Kassams (69 percent, according to last August’s Peace Index poll). Now a bipartisan Knesset panel has confirmed, following an in-depth investigation, that this is indeed the correct tactic and expressed bipartisan support for applying it in Gaza.
Upon announcing the panel’s backing for a Gaza operation, Hanegbi declared: “The government must take the committee’s position into account.” Yet the government has proven repeatedly that protecting Sderot is low on its priority list; left to its own devices, it will continue doing nothing. Hence the committee’s job now is to use its parliamentary power to force the government to act on its findings. Otherwise, it may as well start preparing its next report – on how and why the south, too, was abandoned to enemy fire.
Not all public-sector strikes are suited for arbitration, since some are wholly or partly over policy issues (privatization, reforms, etc.; the high school teachers’ strike was in this category). But many revolve purely around demands for raises, making them eminently suitable for arbitration. And in these cases, arbitration should be compulsory.
The lecturers’ strike is a classic example. Senior faculty initially demanded a 35 percent raise, claiming their salaries had been eroded by that amount in recent years; the Finance Ministry claimed the erosion totaled only 3 percent, and therefore initially offered only that amount. Both sides agreed that the lecturers deserved compensation for erosion; the argument was strictly over facts – namely, how much erosion had actually occurred. And that is the kind of question a professional, independent arbiter is eminently qualified to settle.
In this case, the treasury suggested arbitration, but the lecturers refused. Many arbitration cases have dragged on for years, they argued, and they want a raise now. Given past experience, that is a valid concern. But it is one that a compulsory arbitration law could easily resolve.
First, such a law would impose a mandatory timetable: how long the parties have to prepare their initial submissions; how long the arbiter has to review them and demand additional data; how long the parties have to submit this data; how long the arbiter has to draft his decision. Extensions would have to be possible in exceptional circumstances, but if all parties adhered to the timetable, the process should not take more than six or eight months.
Second, the law would ensure adherence to deadlines by imposing sanctions: For instance, if either side failed to submit requested data on time, the other party would win by default. An arbiter who missed deadlines would have his fee reduced.
Third, it would mandate substantial fees for arbiters. Otherwise, nobody competent would agree to put his regular work on hold and devote himself to finishing the case within the designated timeframe.
TO ENSURE that time is not wasted in choosing the arbiter, the law would mandate preparation of a list of suitable professionals willing to serve in this capacity. Both the government and the unions could propose candidates for this list to the National Labor Court, which would accept or reject them (and could also recruit its own candidates); the court would then appoint the specific arbiter for each case.
Finally, any raise awarded by an arbiter would be retroactive to when the dispute began, so that workers would not lose by the fact that even relatively speedy arbitration takes much longer than a strike.
Each arbitration would probably cost several million shekels – a trivial sum compared to the cost of the average public-sector strike. The lecturers’ strike, for instance, has thus far devoured over 10 weeks of a 14-week semester. Quite aside from the many incalculable costs – the material that students will never learn (since the “make-up” period will almost certainly be shorter), or the fact that students who depend on summer jobs to finance tuition will have to spend this summer making up classes instead of working – the sheer financial costs of extending the academic year are substantial.
And the lecturers’ strike affects only one narrow slice of the economy. A general public-sector strike, such as that in May 2003, costs from $90 million to $220 million a day (depending on whose calculations you prefer).
Arbitration would also significantly erode the unions’ capacity for extortion. In 2001, for instance, several public-sector unions struck to demand real wage increases. Given that at that time, gross domestic product was dropping, unemployment was rising, private-sector salaries were falling, and all public-sector workers had received a 3.6 percent raise (more than the combined inflation of the past three years) a few months earlier, any arbitrator would quickly have deemed these demands unjustified. But the government, desperate to end strikes that were strangling the economy and disrupting the public’s life, capitulated to one union after another: Dockworkers, for instance, got a 10 percent raise over three years; airport workers got 8 percent over the same period.
AND OF course, arbitration would also spare the public the recurrent misery of lengthy strikes.
Compulsory public-sector arbitration is hardly unprecedented internationally; it exists in several countries, including the United States, Canada and Japan. In those countries, strikes in key public-sector industries are forbidden altogether; that is the price workers agree to pay in exchange for the public sector’s greater job security.
Here, in contrast, the public sector accounts for more than 95 percent of all strike days every year, despite comprising only one-third of Israel’s workers. This figure alone is enough to show that public-sector strikes are out of hand. And the reason is obvious: Private-sector workers strike only as a last resort, since their pay will certainly be docked, and they could even be fired. But public-sector workers have no such qualms: Not only do they not risk dismissal, but usually, the government consents to pay them in full for the strike days as part of whatever agreement ends the strike.
Ideally, Israel would also ban strikes altogether in key sectors. But the Knesset has repeatedly rejected this idea, and probably would again. A more limited ban, requiring compulsory arbitration instead of strikes only if the dispute is mainly over money, as the lecturers’ strike is, might have a better chance. And any such proposal would certainly enjoy public support: A Labor Ministry survey in 2002 found that fully 84 percent of Israelis supported compulsory, binding arbitration in public-sector labor disputes.
For the past two decades, Israel has had one of the highest strike rates (i.e. strike days per worker) in the Western world. This has negatively affected our economy, our productivity and our quality of life. Even a limited compulsory arbitration law would significantly reduce this damage. It is therefore past time for one to be legislated.
But Luka is no ordinary Israeli Arab, raised from birth to view the state as her enemy. Her father joined the South Lebanon Army at age 17, fought alongside the Israel Defense Forces in Lebanon for years, then moved here when the IDF quit Lebanon in May 2000. She grew up viewing Israel as a friend and ally.
She makes no secret of what changed her mind. “The government turned its back on us after we came her seven and a half years ago,” she said. “We started with nothing, living in an absorption center in Tiberias. They took no account of what our family had done for Israel.”
Luka’s charges are shamefully correct. Thus Israel, by its own actions, turned a supporter into an opponent – and Luka is not alone. For 60 years, Israel has mistreated its allies while pandering to its enemies; now, it is starting to reap the bitter fruits.
Israel’s treatment of the SLA was a classic example. For 18 years, the SLA served as the front-line defense of Israel’s northern border. Yet when the IDF quit Lebanon, it fled overnight, giving its allies no advance warning, no chance to organize their own retreat. SLA families who feared vengeance from Hizbullah if they remained had no time to withdraw money from the bank and pack their belongings; they had to flee as penniless refugees. Israel even made the refugees leave their cars at the border; they were allowed in only with what they could carry. Some Lebanese even had to abandon relatives who were too far away to reach the border that day.
Then, for four and a half years, Israel refused to give them citizenship or even permanent residency, meaning they were unable to work; they had to subsist on government handouts whose continuance was never assured. Nor did the government offer any financial compensation. Thus instead of being able to start anew, they were kept in limbo, with no end in sight. The situation was so debilitating that many opted to return to Lebanon and throw themselves on Hizbullah’s mercy.
Three years ago, the Knesset finally granted them citizenship and limited financial compensation, enabling them at last to start rebuilding. That was clearly better than nothing. But for many, like Luka, it was too little, too late: The searing memory of Israel’s betrayal will never be wiped away.
Nor was Israel’s treatment of the SLA exceptional: It is committing the same betrayal, on a slower scale, against its Druse citizens.
UNLIKE OTHER Israeli Arabs, Druse are drafted into the IDF, generally vote for Zionist parties and support the Jewish state. Yet rather than rewarding their loyalty, Israel systematically discriminates against them – in government funding, land allocations, the job market and more. Consequently, they are at the bottom of Israel’s socioeconomic ladder, even below Muslim Arabs by most measures.
Indeed, the Druse have actually been penalized for their loyalty: While powerful interest groups, from leftist parties to the Supreme Court, frequently demand – and sometimes obtain – increased state funding for other Israeli Arabs in an effort to “ease their disaffection,” nobody lobbies for the Druse. Not being “disaffected,” they are ignored.
Three years ago, Sheikh Muwafak Tarif, a Druse leader, commented despairingly: “Even the Arabs constantly say, ‘the Druse give everything, yet Druse villages are in even worse shape than Arab villages’.”
Under those circumstances, how do you persuade young Druse that loyalty pays? And indeed, there are worrying signs that this loyalty may be fraying – like October’s riots in Peki’in.
The same goes for the Beduin. They are not drafted, but for years, hundreds volunteered for the IDF every year, usually serving in front-line combat units. Then they returned home to discover that not only are they discriminated against in the job market, they cannot even legally build a house in order to start a family, because their villages lack zoning plans, making legal construction impossible. Unsurprisingly, Beduin enlistment in the IDF has fallen sharply in recent years.
Even worse, the government is abandoning this community to the most hostile element of Israeli Arab society: the Islamic Movement. In 2002, for instance, the Islamic Movement reportedly raised NIS 120,000 for scholarships for Beduin students. “All the state has to do is put up a similar amount of money for veterans to help change the atmosphere,” argued Ibrahim al-Huzeil, a Beduin veteran, at the time. Given that Israel’s budget that year topped NIS 250 million, the sum was trivial. But even that proved too much for the government.
THEN THERE is Jordan, which signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994 and has faithfully observed it ever since. Yet for 13 years, Israel consistently refused its pleas to repatriate a few dozen Jordanian criminals imprisoned in Israel – even as it released thousands of terrorists to Hizbullah and the Palestinians, both of which were, and still are, actively killing Israelis. Once again, being Israel’s enemy paid better than being its friend.
Sheikh Ali Fellah, honorary president of the Druse Zionist Movement (yes, there is such a thing), put the problem succinctly in a 2005 interview. “You have to remember that an oppressed Druse is oxygen for Israel’s enemies,” he said.
Fellah is right – because when Israel mistreats its allies, it does three things: It drives fence-sitters into its enemies’ camp; it drives away the allies themselves; and it assures its enemies that they have chosen the wiser course, thereby distancing prospects for peace.
It is probably too late to win back Luka, but it is still not too late to start addressing the Druse community’s pressing needs or to invest in helping Beduin veterans. However, the window of opportunity appears to be closing. If Israel does not act swiftly to demonstrate that loyalty to the Jewish state pays, it will soon have no allies left to lose.
The assumption behind such assessments is that the details are unimportant and easily resolved. Yet in this case, it turns out that the details are the core issues – and the disputes over these “details” reveal that in fact, nothing has been agreed at all.
The Haaretz report, for instance, quoted several “dramatic” points of agreement from a summary of the Taba talks prepared by negotiator Gilad Sher after they collapsed. The parties agreed to “adjustments” of the 1967 border “to meet Israel’s demographic needs,” a division of Jerusalem to make it the capital of both states, and a “balanced solution” for the refugees, with the Palestinians “prepared to show sensitivity” on this issue. That indeed looks likes progress – until you examine the details of the Sher document.
It turns out that while the Palestinians agreed to territorial exchanges in principle, they refused to concede any specific territory that Israel wanted. They objected to Israel keeping the settlement blocs – one of Israel’s main reasons for wanting territorial exchanges – and generally insisted that any swaps total no more than 2.3 percent of the West Bank, well short of the 6 to 8 percent needed for the blocs. They refused to let Israel keep Latrun, which dominates the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway – a crucial issue for Israel, since gunfire from Latrun can and, pre-1967, often did shut down the entire highway. And they insisted that the “safe passage” connecting Gaza and the West Bank be under Palestinian sovereignty, thereby effectively severing Israel in two (Israel proposed Israeli sovereignty but Palestinian control). In short, there was no agreement on any actual border-related issue; there was merely a lofty declaration of principles.
THE SAME was true of Jerusalem: There was a lofty declaration about dividing the city, but no agreement on how to do so. Israel wanted territorial contiguity among the city’s Jewish neighborhoods, which would turn Palestinian neighborhoods into enclaves; the Palestinians wanted Palestinian territorial contiguity and Jewish enclaves. Nor was agreement reached on how to secure this patchwork nightmare. In the Old City, both sides claimed the Armenian Quarter (though they agreed on the other quarters). Finally, there was no agreement on the Temple Mount: Israel wanted either “ambiguous” or shared sovereignty and some form of joint administration; the Palestinians insisted that the mount be entirely theirs, with Israel having no rights whatsoever in Judaism’s holiest site.
As for the refugees, it turns out that Palestinian “sensitivity” did not include forfeiting “the right of return,” a clear Israeli red line; they demanded recognition of the “right” of all refugees and their descendants to relocate to Israel. Nor did their “sensitivity” encompass the question of responsibility: While Israel agreed to accept partial responsibility for the refugee problem, the Palestinians insisted that it accept sole responsibility – a clear distortion of the historical facts, since there would have been no refugee crisis had five Arab armies, backed by Palestinian irregulars, not attacked the nascent state of Israel in 1948. In short, there was no agreement at all on this issue.
Nor was there any agreement on perhaps the most essential issue of all: Palestinian recognition of the Jewish people’s right to a state in this land, parallel to Israel’s recognition of the Palestinians’ right to statehood. The Palestinians adamantly refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish nation-state. This refusal is not mere rhetoric; it implies that instead of living in peace with the Jewish state, the Palestinians intend to continue seeking its eradication via other means: inciting and financing activity against Israel’s Jewish identity by Israeli Arabs, delegitimizing it in international forums, and so forth.
NEEDLESS TO say, these Palestinian positions have changed not one iota since 2001. Prior to last month’s Annapolis conference, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reiterated that land swaps must not exceed 2.3 percent of the West Bank. He also reiterated the Palestinians’ refusal to acknowledge any Jewish rights on the Temple Mount. And even at Annapolis itself – that alleged dawn of a bright new era of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation – he did not make do with general statements about solving the refugee problem; he insisted in his speech that any solution be based on UN Resolution 194, which Palestinians interpret as recognizing the “right of return.”
As for the Jewish state issue, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat made Abbas’s position crystal clear at a Hadash Party convention on December 7. “Abu Mazen [Abbas] told me that the moment Israel demands that we recognize two states for two peoples, I should get up and leave the talks,” he said. “And that is what I did.”
In short, not only is there no agreement on what a deal looks like, there is no agreement even on the fundamental premise that must underlie any deal – namely, the establishment of two states for two peoples.
Given all this, an uninformed observer might be puzzled by the persistence of the myth that “everyone knows what a deal looks like.” Yet anyone familiar with the conflict knows that on this issue, the wish is all too often father to the thought: Because the international community and the Israeli Left both want so desperately to believe that a deal is achievable, they prefer to overlook all evidence to the contrary.
Unfortunately, however, this is a recipe for ensuring that the conflict never ends – because until these real problems are resolved, there will be no deal. And resolving any problem starts with recognizing its existence.
A good example was the 10-letter exchange between journalists Akiva Eldar of Haaretz and Salameh Nematt of Al-Hayat, sponsored by Search for Common Ground, for which they won the organization’s Eliav-Sartawi award this month. Eldar represents the far-Left fringe of Israel’s Jewish public: Last Wednesday, for instance, he wrote a column lambasting the demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, which most Israelis support. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Eldar’s positions throughout the exchange bore no resemblance to those of mainstream Israelis.
Take, for instance, his response to Nematt’s opening salvo, which essentially restated the Arab position that the conflict is Israel’s fault. “You know how much influence Israel, the superpower of the Middle East, can exercise over America, the world’s superpower,” Nematt wrote. “And you know that Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestinian and Arab lands has been a key factor in igniting and perpetuating a regional conflict that has spread beyond the region and is now drawing us to a clash of civilizations. You know very well that Israel, in defiance of international law, has deliberately and consistently worked to undermine and abort every local, regional or international peace plan that has ever been tabled. The aborting of these plans was also achieved with the help of Palestinian and Arab militants, but isn’t it Israel’s policies that have undermined Palestinian and Arab moderates?”
Most Israelis would retort that the lack of an agreement stems primarily from two factors. First is the fact that every Israeli peace initiative has produced only increased terrorism: Palestinian terror has killed more Israelis in the 14 years since Oslo than in the entire preceding 45 years of Israel’s existence. Second is Yasser Arafat’s rejection of Israel’s 2000-2001 offer of a Palestinian state on some 97 percent of the territories, including parts of east Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.
Eldar, however, cited neither. Incredibly, his sole reference to Palestinian terror was the following: “Our politicians cynically use the terror attacks and the propaganda led by Arab fanatics as a black smokescreen.”
In other words, terror attacks themselves are not a problem; the problem is our politicians’ “cynical use” of them.
Nor did he mention Israel’s 2000-2001 offers and Arafat’s rejection of them. Instead, he agreed that “Israeli governments have been indifferent, or even hostile, to peace programs based on UN resolutions, the Clinton parameters, the ‘road map,’ or the Arab League’s Beirut resolution.”
ONLY ONCE did he hint that Palestinians, too, bore some responsibility, but even then, he assigned Israel the greater guilt: “Unfortunately, the light which shone over Oslo is dwindling, in great part because of our leaders, who missed countless opportunities , but also because of indolent Palestinian leaders” (emphasis added).
Eldar similarly acquiesced in Nematt’s later assertion that UN Resolution 242 mandates withdrawal to the 1967 lines. Eldar surely knows that what Nematt dismissively termed Israel’s “unique interpretation” – that 242 stipulates a withdrawal from “territories,” not “all the territories” – is in fact correct. Israel fought to get the words “all the” removed from the original draft, and the resolution’s sponsors later confirmed that the change authorized Israel to retain some of the territories.
Lord Caradon, the British UN ambassador who drafted 242, 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.”
America’s UN ambassador at the time, Arthur Goldberg, similarly said the omissions “were not accidental …. The resolution speaks of withdrawal from occupied territories without defining the extent of withdrawal.”
Most Israelis still want to retain parts of the West Bank (primarily, the settlement blocs), to ensure defensible borders. But since Eldar favors withdrawing to the 1967 lines, he saw no need to challenge Nematt’s error.
Only once in five letters did Eldar articulate a mainstream Israeli position, when he lambasted Arab handling of the Palestinian refugees: “Instead of dealing with this terrible humanitarian problem, they prefer to perpetuate it so that they can accuse Israel,” he wrote. Then, responding to Nematt’s question about whether Israel should first make peace with the Palestinians or “peripheral Arab states,” he added: “I suggest that first we find a solution to the refugee problem. That will pave the way for all the tracks. What do you think?”
Indeed, to most Israelis, Palestinian insistence on the refugees’ “right of return” is a deal-breaker. Yet Nematt simply ignored Eldar’s question – and Eldar, rather than explaining the issue’s importance and pressing him, never mentioned the refugees again.
Clearly, such exchanges do not help Palestinians understand mainstream Israelis, whose support is crucial for any agreement. But far from merely being pointless, they do active harm – because they lead Palestinians to believe that fringe views such as Eldar’s are those of the majority, and therefore, they have no need to modify their own views.
This exchange, for instance, received wide exposure; it was reprinted in the popular Palestinian daily Al-Quds. And few Palestinian readers would realize that “a senior columnist for Haaretz” does not represent mainstream Israel. They would therefore receive the following false impressions:
In reality, however, peace will never be attained without Palestinian movement on issues such as terror and the refugees. Thus by leading Palestinians to believe that no modification of their own positions is necessary, dialogues such as the Eldar-Nematt exchange, far from fostering peace, actually help perpetuate the conflict.
Since Israeli law has applied on the mount for 40 years already, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed its applicability to the very issue Majadele was addressing (the lax enforcement of Israel’s Antiquities Law there), his initial assertion demonstrated appalling ignorance. But since ministerial ignorance is unfortunately all too common, that alone could have been overlooked.
What cannot be overlooked is Majadele’s assertion that his “religion and nationality” take precedence over “the considerations of a minister,” such as what the law says. While democracy has a place for civil disobedience, meaning putting one’s conscience above the law, that place is not around the cabinet table. A minister’s first obligation is to uphold the law; if that offends his conscience, his only legitimate recourse is to resign.
The minute Majadele declared himself unwilling to countenance Israeli law on the mount, he forfeited his right to be a minister. And since he did not resign, any self-respecting cabinet should have fired him immediately. Our cabinet, however, did not even consider doing so. And it thereby tacitly approved Majadele’s refusal to uphold the law.
IT IS HARD to imagine a greater travesty than an entire government openly demonstrating its contempt for the law in this fashion. Even more disturbing, however, is what Majadele’s statements imply about Israeli Arabs’ willingness to integrate into a Jewish state.
For an Israeli Arab to declare that his “religion and nationality” – i.e. his Muslim and Palestinian identities – take precedence over the law is, sadly, nothing new. Several Arab Knesset members do so routinely.
Majadele, however, represents the moderate fringe of the Israeli Arab community. While the overwhelming majority of Israeli Arabs vote for sectoral Arab parties, he belongs to Labor, a self-proclaimed Zionist party. Moreover, as Israel’s first non-Druse Arab minister, he has become the poster boy for Arab integration – the proof that even the highest offices are open to Arabs willing to accept the Jewish state rather than deny its right to exist.
So if even he puts his Muslim-Palestinian identity ahead of the obligations of Israeli citizenship, what kind of future does Jewish-Arab coexistence in this country have? Furthermore, this occurred in a case where the ostensible conflict was minimal. True, Israeli law technically applies to the Temple Mount, but all Israeli governments since 1967 have allowed the Muslim Wakf to control the mount de facto. At the Wakf’s insistence, Jews and Christians are forbidden to pray there, and Israeli police enforce this dictum. At times, Jews have even been barred from setting foot there. Indeed, Israeli law on the mount is often enforced only against Jews: The Antiquities Law, for instance, has been used to ban Jewish archaeological excavations there, but the Wakf has repeatedly been permitted to undertake massive construction projects without conducting the legally required salvage digs. And the courts have consistently upheld this double standard.
YET EVEN with Israel showing such exaggerated deference to Muslim rights that it systematically prevents the exercise of Jewish rights, the very fact of Israeli sovereignty over Judaism’s holiest site is unacceptable to Majadele. And if even this most moderate of Israeli Arabs believes that at a site sacred to both, Muslim rights trump Jewish rights absolutely, what chance does coexistence have?
Israeli Arabs are outraged by Avigdor Lieberman’s proposal to transfer many of them to a Palestinian state under any peace deal. Yet if this community indeed feels that in any conflict between their Muslim-Palestinian identity and the basic obligations of citizenship, like upholding the law, the former wins, it is hard to imagine any other solution being viable over the long term. No state could long tolerate a 20 percent minority whose first loyalty lies elsewhere.
Jewish Israelis, most of whom find Lieberman’s proposal appalling, have for years dodged the dilemma by denying that any conflict of loyalties exists. Given that the vast majority of Israeli Arabs consistently vote for MKs who openly support Palestinian terror, denounce any and all Israeli efforts at self-defense, reject Israel’s Jewish identity, defend and even promote violent confrontations between their constituents and the police, and assert that Israeli Arabs have only rights, not obligations (and should therefore, for instance, eschew even civilian national service in their own communities), this denial has increasingly looked delusional.
But now that even the community’s poster boy for moderation has publicly declared his Muslim-Palestinian identity superior to the obligations of Israeli citizenship, is further proof of the trend really needed? If Arab Israelis do not want Lieberman’s plan to become reality, they must start seriously rethinking their attitudes toward citizenship.
Yet Jewish Israelis who wish to forestall the Lieberman solution must rethink their attitudes no less seriously – because it is they who have led Israeli Arabs to believe that placing their Palestinian-Muslim identity above their Israeli one entails no consequences. Indeed, as the government showed last week, it does not even disqualify one from a cabinet post. And neither the opposition nor the broader public seriously protested this decision.
By treating this order of priorities as acceptable and natural, the Jewish majority has encouraged Israeli Arabs to adopt it. Yet the more Israeli Arabs give their Palestinian-Muslim identity precedence over their Israeli one, the more impossible it will become to envision any solution but Lieberman’s.
If there is still any hope of reversing the trend, we must begin now. And a good starting point would be the cabinet’s dismissal of Majadele.
A minister who openly declares that his Palestinian-Muslim identity supersedes Israeli law has no business in Israel’s cabinet. And that this even needs saying is a measure of just how far the situation has deteriorated.
The road map states that as the Palestinians progress on counterterrorism (arresting terrorists, confiscating weapons, reforming their security services, etc.), Israel must dismantle its own counterterrorism measures: For instance, it must remove checkpoints and withdraw the IDF to the September 28, 2000 lines. Clearly, taking these steps before the Palestinian Authority is both willing and able to prevent attacks would leave Israel vulnerable to the same relentless terrorism that characterized the first years of the intifada, before these measures were in place. Thus a premature determination that the PA is in fact willing and able to take over is a recipe for renewed suicide bombings in Israel’s heartland.
The crucial question, therefore, is whether the US can be trusted to make this determination in Israel’s stead. Since America has long been Israel’s staunchest ally, entrusting it with this task might seem unobjectionable. However, there are two reasons why the US cannot be trusted to protect Israel’s security needs in this case: Keith Dayton and Condoleezza Rice.
LIEUTENANT General Dayton is the official US security coordinator for the “peace process.” His mission includes helping the PA reform its security services and monitoring Palestinian progress on counterterrorism. As Washington’s point man for security-related issues, he would naturally be the one to decide whether the PA had in fact fulfilled its counterterrorism responsibilities sufficiently to mandate reciprocal Israeli measures.
Unfortunately, Dayton has proven himself an utterly incompetent judge. This past June, when Hamas launched its takeover of the Gaza Strip, it crushed Fatah’s forces in a mere five days. Yet during weeks of preliminary skirmishes, Dayton – virtually alone among journalistic and diplomatic observers – had insisted that Fatah was fighting much better than anyone gave it credit for and would win a decisive clash if one came.
Why Washington did not recall him after this fiasco remains a mystery. What is certain, however, is that a man who so badly overestimated Fatah’s will and ability to fight Hamas in Gaza cannot be trusted to correctly estimate its will and ability to fight Hamas in the West Bank. Yet that is precisely what Olmert is trusting him to do: By accepting the US as an arbitrator, Olmert has effectively pledged to withdraw the IDF from much of the West Bank the moment Dayton declares the PA both willing and able to fight terror – even if his judgment is as delusional as it was last summer.
THE SECOND problem is Dayton’s boss, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Since she will be responsible for making Israel obey Dayton’s decisions, Israel could theoretically appeal to her should it consider these decisions flawed. In practice, however, there is no chance of her accepting such an appeal – because if there is one thing Rice has proved definitively over the past two years, it is that she has no interest whatsoever in Israel’s security concerns.
If that assessment seems harsh, consider her behavior over the Agreement on Movement and Access, which she brokered following the August 2005 disengagement.
The agreement was meant to ensure the free flow of goods and people to and from Gaza, including between Gaza and the West Bank. Israel’s consent, however, was predicated on the assumption that Fatah, then in sole control of the PA, would work to suppress Gaza-based terror. Instead, rocket fire on southern Israel from Gaza not only continued, but intensified: In 2006, the first full year post-disengagement, the number of rockets launched from Gaza at Israel more than tripled compared to 2004, the last full year pre-disengagement. And Fatah forces made no effort whatsoever to stop this fire.
Israel thus refused to allow regular convoys between Gaza and the West Bank unless and until the PA, which would be responsible for security on these convoys, took serious action against the rocket threat. That was an obviously vital security measure: Because the West Bank, unlike Gaza, is in rocket range of all of Israel’s major cities, rocket technology must be kept out; yet with the PA demonstrably unwilling or unable to fight the rocket plague in Gaza, it clearly could not be trusted to ensure that Gaza-West Bank convoys were not used to transfer this technology.
Rice, however, did not see it that way: She demanded that Israel honor its commitments regardless of whether the Palestinians were honoring theirs. Indeed, she continued pushing this issue up until Hamas kicked Fatah out of Gaza in June. As late as May, she was still promoting Dayton’s “benchmark” plan, which called for starting Gaza-West Bank convoys on July 1, even though it required the PA to deploy a revamped security service in Gaza – i.e. one willing and able to fight Gaza-based terror – only by the end of 2007.
In other words, Rice thought Israel should enable convoys to the West Bank six months before PA forces were even in position to keep them from transporting rocket technology, much less demonstrably doing so. The message could not have been clearer: She considered rocket fire on Tel Aviv an acceptable price to pay for Palestinian freedom of movement.
TO HIS credit, Olmert resisted her on this issue. But now, in his desperation to demonstrate “progress” at Annapolis, he has pledged to dismantle Israel’s entire security network in the West Bank merely on Dayton’s and Rice’s say-so. He has thereby created an impossible trap: Either Israel will indeed have to dismantle its security measures prematurely, leaving the country vulnerable to a new wave of suicide bombings, or it will have to mortally insult its closest ally by refusing to accept its decisions even after having promised to do so.
If that is the measure of Olmert’s judgment in the pre-Annapolis talks, none of us should be sleeping well at night.
And while some commentators seem bewildered by the decline, leftists often have a stock culprit: “the occupation.” In Kimche’s words, “it has corrupted our morals, undermined our values, divided our society, encouraged violence, and drained away billions of dollars.” Unfortunately, this explanation presents a problem: “The occupation” is 40 years old, whereas the ills that Kimche and Marcus cite are relatively new. In the late 1980s, for instance, Israel still had an exceptionally low crime rate, relatively modest income gaps and functioning schools, even though a whole generation had by then grown up with “the occupation.” Teens who had never known Israel without “the occupation” still felt no need to carry “knives in their pockets”; young soldiers who served three years in the territories nevertheless became upstanding citizens.
Indeed, the deterioration has occurred mainly over the last 15 years, when Israel has been desperately trying to end the occupation.
Nor is this surprising – because human beings do not have unlimited energies; they can focus on only one or two big issues at a time. And since 1993, the energies of both successive governments and the public have been devoted almost entirely to two issues: trying to solve a conflict that (as I argued two weeks ago) is currently unsolvable, and coping with the disastrous consequences of these efforts.
Yitzhak Rabin, for instance, was elected largely due to domestic problems (a recession) and initially focused on them. But after the Oslo Accord was signed in 1993, domestic issues went by the wayside: His government was fully occupied in negotiating new Israeli-Palestinian agreements (one each in 1994 and 1995), trying to muster Knesset majorities for them, countering massive public opposition and combating the soaring post-Oslo terrorism. The public was similarly preoccupied with these issues, which dominated the 1996 election.
Binyamin Netanyahu’s term was perforce devoted to dealing with Oslo’s fallout: terrorism, which killed more Israelis in the two and a half years after Oslo than during the entire preceding decade, and an economic crisis (a $6 billion current account deficit) that the Rabin-Peres government had ignored in its obsession with the “peace process.”
Moreover, pressure from both the US administration and the Israeli media forced him to invest considerable energy in negotiating further Israeli-Palestinian pacts (1997 and 1999) and suppressing consequent opposition from his own coalition partners. He had no time or energy to spare for major domestic initiatives.
NETANYAHU’S success in reducing terrorism enabled Ehud Barak to win in 1999 by pledging to address domestic problems. Once in office, however, he ignored these issues, focusing instead on the “peace process”: withdrawing from Lebanon, negotiating with Syria and the Palestinians. Instead of peace, these efforts produced a terrorist war (and, eventually, the Second Lebanon War as well). But they devoured both the government’s and the public’s attention and dominated the 2001 election.
Ariel Sharon of necessity spent his first years in office dealing with the terror war and the consequent recession. By late 2003, enough progress had been made to enable other initiatives – but instead of domestic reforms, he launched the disengagement. For the next two years, both the government and the country were convulsed over this issue. His government’s one significant domestic initiative, the Dovrat educational reform, languished for lack of attention.
AND NOW, we have Ehud Olmert, who has also neglected domestic issues to focus on the conflict: first his unilateral withdrawal plan, now the Annapolis conference.
The “peace process” has also had other negative domestic consequences. One is money: Because terrorism soared, so did the defense budget, leaving less for other priorities. Indeed, defense is the largest 2008 budget item, for the first time outstripping even debt servicing. And the disengagement diverted billions of shekels from other needs into relocating army bases and compensating evacuated settlers.
Another negative consequence is social cohesion. While Israel has always had left-right disputes, those of the past 15 years have been especially bitter, due mainly to the democratic deficit that has characterized the “peace process”: Rabin passed Oslo-II by buying the votes of two Knesset members from a right-wing party; Barak went to Washington and Taba after having lost his Knesset majority; Sharon unilaterally withdrew from Gaza after both being elected on an explicit pledge not to do so and losing a referendum that he himself called. The consequent decline in social solidarity has inevitably increased crime and violence.
Moreover, because governments now revolve entirely around the “peace process,” coalition partners often disagree vehemently on domestic issues, meaning that few governments could enact domestic reforms even if they so desired. Nor can parties that disagree on the conflict unite around common domestic interests (say, Labor and Likud on electoral reform), because they dare not alienate smaller coalition partners.
Nevertheless, the biggest problem remains the human incapacity to focus on more than one or two big issues at a time. As long as successive governments, and therefore the public, remain obsessed with (a) trying to solve the conflict and (b) picking up the pieces afterward, domestic issues will continue to be neglected, and the problems will only worsen.
Only by reversing our order of priorities and giving domestic problems top billing can these problems be solved – which means accepting that for now, the conflict will only be contained, not ended. But if leftists like Kimche and Marcus persist in seeing “solving the conflict” as the top priority, the deterioration of the past 15 years will inevitably continue.
There is little doubt about the reason for this erosion; it is cited by virtually every leading advocate of division, from Vice Premier Haim Ramon on the government’s left flank to Yisrael Beiteinu Chairman Avigdor Lieberman on its right. That reason is demography: Israel’s 1.3 million Arabs already constitute almost 20 percent of the country’s population, and since their birthrate is higher than the Jewish one, they could well become an even larger percentage of the population down the line. Getting rid of some 200,000 east Jerusalem residents would ease this danger, proponents of division argue. And unlike other Israeli Arabs, east Jerusalem residents are not Israeli citizens; hence the problems inherent in depriving someone of citizenship would seemingly not exist.
But what the new JIIS report, compiled by former Foreign Ministry legal adviser Robbie Sabel and doctoral student Gilad Noam, reveals is that in fact, these problems do exist – because east Jerusalem Arabs are permanent residents, and under Israeli law, permanent residents have almost all the same rights as citizens.
Thus while Israel can cede east Jerusalem neighborhoods, it cannot cede east Jerusalem residents, the report says: They would have to be offered the option of moving elsewhere in Israel. And it requires no great intelligence to realize that most of them would exercise that option – not because they love Israel, but because Israel has jobs, and the Palestinian Authority does not.
The power of this motive can be seen in Palestinian migration patterns since 2000. Because Israel virtually ceased granting work permits to Palestinians after the intifada began, those who work here now are generally doing so illegally. As illegals, they live in constant fear of arrest, and they are frequently brutally exploited, since they cannot complain to the authorities for fear of deportation. Moreover, they literally risk their lives to get here: Every year, some Palestinian job-seekers are shot while crossing the border because the security forces mistook them for terrorists.
Clearly, nobody who was not desperate would come here under such circumstances. Yet in fact, some 100,000 Palestinians are thought to be working illegally in Israel, and the security services say that dozens, and sometimes even hundreds, of Palestinians attempt the border crossing every day.
GIVEN THIS reality, it is inconceivable that 200,000 east Jerusalem Arabs would give up the right to do legally what tens of thousands of their brethren risk their lives to do illegally – namely, work in Israel. Almost certainly, most would opt to remain.
But not only would dividing the city do nothing to improve Israel’s demographic balance, it would significantly worsen Israel’s financial balance: Since permanent residents and citizens have almost identical rights, the report said, residents of any neighborhoods Israel cedes would be entitled to compensation, whether they choose to go or stay.
Those who choose to remain Israeli residents will, like the Gaza settlers, have been forced to leave their homes by a government decision to withdraw from the areas in question. They could thus presumably demand the same compensation: for their homes, for moving expenses and, in the case of those who would be giving up local jobs or businesses, for loss of income as well. Those who opt to remain in their homes and give up their Israeli residency, in contrast, will lose valuable benefits such as Israeli health insurance and social security. And since that loss, again, will have resulted from Israel’s decision to abandon these areas, they, too, would be entitled to compensation, JIIS argues.
In short, dividing Jerusalem would more than triple the amount of compensation Israel would have to pay its own residents under any agreement. Hitherto, most Israelis have assumed that at most some 80,000 settlers (those outside the settlement blocs) would have to be evacuated and compensated. But if JIIS is correct, dividing Jerusalem would raise the number of Israeli residents entitled to compensation to some 280,000.
DIVIDING THE capital would also have serious security implications. These are not addressed in the JIIS report, which focuses on legal issues, but they should be obvious to anyone who remembers the daily gunfire on Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood during the early months of the intifada. Gilo was the only Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem to suffer in this fashion because it was the only one within rifle range of Palestinian-controlled territory – namely, the village of Beit Jalla. And once the Israel Defense Forces reasserted control over Beit Jalla, the shooting stopped.
Were parts of east Jerusalem handed over to the Palestinians, however, numerous other Jewish neighborhoods would become as vulnerable to Palestinian gunfire as Gilo. That would obviously be true of those east Jerusalem neighborhoods built after 1967, such as Pisgat Ze’ev, Neveh Ya’akov and French Hill, but it would also be true of many west Jerusalem neighborhoods, such as Malha and Talpiot – former border neighborhoods that have grown beyond recognition since 1967 (think, for instance, of Malha’s mall, Biblical Zoo and Teddy Stadium).
The bottom line is that dividing Jerusalem would have ruinous economic and security consequences without improving Israel’s demographic situation a whit. And the JIIS report has done a valuable service by bringing these facts to the public’s attention. But that service will be wasted unless the public, the media and, above all, opposition MKs begin demanding that the government either find solutions to these problems or drop the whole idea of division.