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Granted, polls have repeatedly shown a majority for this proposition. The majority may be razor-thin (the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center’s latest poll put it at 51.1 percent), but it exists.
Yet those who seize on this as proof of Palestinians’ desire for peace have neglected to ask one crucial question: When Palestinians say they favor a two-state solution, what kind of two-state solution are they envisioning? And the answer, as both these same polls and past Palestinian behavior make clear, is not a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish one – the only solution that Israel could, or the world should, accept. What they want is two Palestinian states, or at best one Palestinian and one binational state.
The JMCC poll, for instance, found that 69 percent of Palestinians want all 4.4 million refugees and their descendants relocated to Israel under any agreement, dismissing alternatives such as compensation, resettlement in Palestine or a quota for relocations to Israel. Previous polls have consistently produced similar results. Yet given Israel’s current population of roughly 5.7 million Jews and 1.3 million Arabs, that is a clear recipe for eliminating the Jewish state demographically – not for living in peace with it.
Like others before it, this poll also found that 94 percent of Palestinians oppose any Israeli authority over the Temple Mount. In other words, they refuse to accept any Jewish rights in Judaism’s holiest site – and if Jews have no rights there, then by implication, they have no rights anywhere in Israel. This denial of any Jewish right to this land is incompatible with acceptance of a Jewish state. But it is perfectly consistent with a two-state solution in which the second state is Palestinian or binational.
SUCH POLLS are not merely theoretical: Israeli-Palestinian talks collapsed over precisely these issues in 2000-2001. And Palestinians wholeheartedly supported this outcome: A July 2000 poll found that 83 percent approved Yasser Arafat’s rejection of Israel’s offer at that month’s Camp David summit; only 6 percent felt he should have been more conciliatory.
And that is the principal reason for doubting that Palestinians’ true goal is statehood: People who actually want a state do not keep saying “no” when one is offered.
At Camp David, Israel offered the Palestinians approximately 90 percent of the territories, including parts of Jerusalem. Not only did they refuse; they responded with a terrorist war. In December 2000, the offer was upped to 95 percent, including the Temple Mount; Arafat refused again. At Taba the following month, Israel sweetened the offer to 97 percent; Arafat still said no. Yet Palestinian support for him, and his decisions, remained undiminished.
HAD PALESTINIANS truly desired to “end the occupation” and acquire a state, they would not have rejected these offers; they would have acted as the Jews did in 1947, when the UN partition plan offered them a state on a mere 10 percent of the territory promised by the 1922 League of Nations Mandate. The offer did not even include Jerusalem, to which Jews have prayed for over 2,000 years. In short, it was incomparably worse than Israel’s 2000-2001 offers to the Palestinians. Yet Jewish leaders accepted, believing that given their people’s sufferings, even a tiny state was better than nothing.
The Palestinians, in contrast, rejected a proffered state that fell a mere 3 percent short of their putative demands, just because it (a) involved acknowledging a Jewish connection to the Temple Mount and (b) required the refugees to resettle in Palestine rather than Israel.
In other words, they preferred continued occupation to any deal that accepted a Jewish state.
One reason for Jewish urgency in 1947 was the refugee problem created by the Holocaust. Israel, with 800,000 inhabitants in 1948, consequently absorbed 687,000 immigrants over the next three years. Palestinians, too, face a pressing refugee problem. Yet far from seeking statehood to assist their refugees, they have repeatedly refused it unless Israel absorbs the refugees in their stead. Such behavior is inexplicable if what Palestinians want is their own state. But it makes perfect sense if the goal is eradicating the Jewish state.
Even on territorial issues, Palestinians’ lack of interest in statehood is glaring. The JMCC poll, for instance, found that 82 percent oppose Israel’s retention of any settlements, even “in exchange for equal Israeli land.” In other words, faced with a theoretical deal for statehood on the equivalent of 100 percent of the territories, fully 82 percent of Palestinians would reject it solely because it would not expel some 100,000 Israelis from their homes. Is that truly the response of people who want a state? Or who want to live in peace with their neighbors? The delusion that Palestinians want a state is far from harmless. Indeed, it perpetuates the conflict by diverting Israeli and international efforts into endless vain attempts to satisfy unsatisfiable demands, instead of focusing these efforts on the true problem:
Palestinian unwillingness to accept a Jewish state in any part of this land. Even worse, it reinforces this unwillingness – because as long as the world responds to every impasse not by confronting this problem, but by pressuring Israel for more concessions, Palestinians will continue to believe that by standing firm, they can eventually secure a deal that will indeed eradicate the Jewish state. And if so, why settle for less?
The only way to truly achieve a two-state solution is for Israel, and the world, to insist that there will be no progress – no talks, and no Israeli concessions – until Palestinians are prepared to accept the Jewish state’s existence. That will not produce results quickly, and success is not guaranteed. But unlike the current process, it at least offers a chance – because only if Palestinians see no hope of getting the whole loaf will they ever agree to settle for half.
Yet current Israeli-Palestinian talks are also being built on delusions. And the results are liable to be equally devastating.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert voiced one such delusion at an October 7 cabinet meeting: “For the first time, there is a Palestinian leadership … that recognizes that Israel is a Jewish state.”
Were that true, it would indeed constitute a breakthrough. Unfortunately, neither Mahmoud Abbas nor Salam Fayad has ever recognized any such thing. Neither has ever uttered the words “Jewish state;” neither has ever abandoned the “right of return,” which would eliminate the Jewish state demographically by flooding it with 4.4 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants; neither has ever acknowledged the Jews’ historical link with this land, which is a vital component of Jewish statehood.
Indeed, Abbas has consistently opposed these ideas. After George Bush called Israel a “Jewish state” at the 2003 Aqaba summit, for instance, senior aides to Abbas were furious, declaring that such a definition was unacceptable and that Bush had “ambushed” the then prime minister. Abbas never dissociated himself from these statements.
SIMILARLY, Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was Israel’s foreign minister during the Camp David talks in 2000, later related that during preliminary talks in Stockholm, Palestinian negotiators agreed to discuss limits on how many refugees Israel would absorb. Subsequently, however, “Abu Mazen [Abbas] persuaded [Palestinian negotiator] Abu Ala not to get into any discussion of numbers, but to stick with the principle of the right of return.”
Nor has Abbas budged from this position since. In November 2004, while campaigning for the PA chairmanship, he declared: “We will not rest until our people’s right to return is granted.” In a speech this January, he again declared the right of return “nonnegotiable” and rejected “any attempt to resettle the refugees in other countries.”
On the Temple Mount, Abbas rejects even the Clinton formula of Israeli sovereignty “under the mount” and Palestinian sovereignty atop it; he refuses to acknowledge any Jewish rights there at all. Yet if Jews have no rights in Judaism’s holiest site, where do they have rights? And if Palestinians cannot accept that Jews – and hence, the Jewish state – have rights here, how is a two-state solution possible?
Indeed, this is one of the issues over which negotiations collapsed in 2000. According to Ben-Ami, he eventually proposed ceding sovereignty over the mount in exchange for Palestinian recognition that “the site is [also] sacred to the Jews.” But the Palestinians refused to sign any such statement.
There is no evidence that Abbas’s “real” positions differ from his public statements. Yet even if they do, this is meaningless as long as he refuses to say so publicly – because without a concerted effort to alter Palestinian views, public opposition would preclude any concessions on these issues. One recent poll, for instance, found that 94 percent of Palestinians opposed any Israeli authority whatsoever over the Temple Mount, while 69 percent wanted all refugees and their descendants relocated to Israel, dismissing alternatives such as compensation, resettlement in Palestine or a quota for relocations to Israel.
ONE MIGHT argue that if so, Olmert’s delusion does not matter: He and Abbas will simply fail to reach an agreement. Yet in fact, it has several negative consequences.
First, by declaring that Abbas and Fayad have recognized Israel as a Jewish state when they have not, Olmert has ensured that Israel will be blamed if the talks collapse: If the PA has indeed taken this crucial step, it can hardly be accused of intransigence.
Second, having created this bind, Olmert is under pressure to make sweeping concessions even with no quid pro quo. Indeed, he hinted as much at the October 7 cabinet meeting: “We will make decisions that aren’t easy, including some we had thought we wouldn’t need to make.”
Given how much previous governments have already conceded (most of the territories, the Temple Mount, much of east Jerusalem), the only concessions that could be described as ones “we had thought we wouldn’t need to make” are ones unacceptable to most Israelis: the refugees, the settlement blocs, Jewish areas of east Jerusalem.
Third, anything Israel concedes without a substantive return will irretrievably weaken its future bargaining position, because once made, a concession can no longer be traded for parallel Palestinian concessions. That is precisely what happened with Israel’s concessions in 2000-2001: Both the Palestinians and the world view them as mere starting points for further concessions, not as mandating a Palestinian quid pro quo.
FINALLY, there is the second half of Olmert’s delusion: His declaration, at that same cabinet meeting, that it was “clear to all” that recognizing Israel as a Jewish state was a condition for attending the Annapolis summit.
In fact, Egypt and Jordan have repeatedly and publicly rejected Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish state. Saudi Arabia, Olmert’s sought-after guest of honor, does not recognize Israel at all. And even the European Union refuses to utter the phrase “Jewish state,” to avoid offending Arab sensibilities.
This international attitude has long been a key impediment to an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, because it nourishes the Palestinians’ belief that they can make a deal without recognizing Israel as a Jewish state. Thus Israel should be insisting that all conference participants voice such recognition publicly. Instead, Olmert has simply redefined nonrecognition as recognition – thereby acquiescing in the world’s refusal to press the Palestinians on this issue.
Without Palestinian willingness to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, there will be no deal.
And unless the world makes this clear to the Palestinians, no such willingness is likely to emerge. But instead of confronting these problems, Olmert has opted to pretend they do not exist. And that is a recipe for an Oslo-style disaster.
His assessment was probably over-optimistic, since several EU members oppose recognition without UN approval. But it accurately pinpointed the flaw in the new multilateralism that has come to dominate Western thinking: It results in Western nations subordinating their own foreign policies to those of other countries, whose interests are often antithetical.
In Kosovo, for instance, EU and Russian interests differ radically: The EU wants to eliminate what it sees as a flashpoint for violence, whereas Moscow wants to preserve its influence in the Balkans. Yet by refusing to do anything on Kosovo without Security Council approval, EU states have, as the official aptly said, given Russia a veto on EU policy.
Europe has similarly subordinated its policy on Iran’s nuclear program to Russia: Last month, Britain, France and Germany agreed to defer discussion of additional sanctions against Iran until November, solely because Russia insisted on awaiting another International Atomic Energy Agency report.
In fact, France and Britain were reportedly willing to chuck Russian consent and have the EU impose its own sanctions (the US, which also attended the meeting, has already imposed all the unilateral sanctions it can). But EU sanctions would be pointless without Iran’s largest European trading partner, and Germany refused to act without Security Council approval.
Thus German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has repeatedly termed Iran’s nuclear program a top EU foreign policy issue, effectively outsourced decision-making on this issue to a non-EU country that does not consider it top priority at all. Indeed, unlike the EU – which believes that Iran’s 18 years of concealing its nuclear program, followed by five years of fruitless negotiations and flouted Security Council resolutions after the deception was uncovered in 2002, imply that Iran might be developing nuclear weapons – Russia has repeatedly rejected this conclusion.
THIS PERVERTED form of multilateralism is a new invention, a product of the post-Cold War world. Previously, multilateralism simply meant acting in concert with like-minded allies; it did not require opponents’ consent as well. Thus, for instance, the West did not seek the Soviet Union’s consent before stationing American forces in Europe; it sufficed that America and Europe agreed on this policy.
In recent years, however, the West has replaced multilateralism with what might be termed “pan-lateralism”: Agreement among allies no longer suffices; today, no action is deemed permissible unless most of the world concurs. But since individual states continue to have different foreign policy priorities, most of the world rarely even agrees on the problems, much less on the solutions. The result is that no substantive action on any issue is ever possible.
THIS IS precisely what happened with Iran’s nuclear program. Because Russia does not believe (or does not care) that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, it naturally opposes any sanctions biting enough to make Iran stop doing so. Such sanctions would not only be unnecessary, they would undermine a Russian interest: burgeoning Russian-Iranian trade.
The EU, in contrast, believes that Iran is developing nukes, that an Iranian bomb would be disastrous, and that military action against Iran would be equally disastrous. It therefore has a vital interest in imposing economic sanctions painful enough to alter Iran’s behavior. Moreover, as Iran’s largest trading partner, accounting for almost a third of Teheran’s trade, it has the power to impose such sanctions even without Russia’s cooperation. But under the new version of multilateralism, it cannot do so. Thus Iran’s nuclear program continues apace while the EU does nothing, in the vain hope that if it waits long enough, Russia will eventually change its mind.
Nor is Iran an exception: The multilateralist fallacy has similarly stymied action on numerous other issues, from Kosovo to the genocide in Darfur (where Western insistence on Security Council approval has enabled China to veto any action).
Indeed, the new multilateralism has been so successful at outsourcing Western foreign policy that it would seem to need no assistance. Nevertheless, a new justification for outsourcing foreign policy has also gained currency recently, which might be called the democratic fallacy.
This theory, which emerged after Hamas won last year’s Palestinian elections, essentially requires nations to subordinate their foreign policies to the results of other countries’ elections. Thus since Hamas, for instance, was elected democratically, other nations must respect this result by granting it the same recognition and aid they granted its predecessor – even if they oppose Hamas’s policies.
This is so patently absurd – no nation, for instance, is obliged to give financial aid to another – that the democratic fallacy has so far gained fewer converts than the multilateralist one. Nevertheless, it has gained some: Several non-EU European countries cited it to justify recognizing the Hamas government.
And in essence, the democratic fallacy is no different from the multilateralist one. The democratic fallacy holds that instead of European (or American or Israeli) voters determining their countries’ policies toward the Palestinian Authority, this decision should be outsourced to Palestinian voters. That, clearly, is a travesty of democracy.
Yet the multilateral fallacy equally deprives European voters of the right to determine their countries’ foreign policy. The only difference is that instead of decisions being outsourced to other countries’ electorates, they are generally outsourced to undemocratic regimes such as Russia and China – hardly a major improvement.
It is past time for the West to reassert the fundamental principle that nations have the right to determine their own foreign policy and to further it in concert with like-minded allies; they need not and should not grant veto power to other countries whose foreign policy goals are antithetical to their own. For if it continues to outsource its foreign policy, the one sure result is that Western influence over world events will dissipate – leaving a vacuum that countries such as Russia, China and Iran will be only too happy to fill.
Tzohar, an organization of Orthodox Zionist rabbis, was established to improve the state rabbinate’s service. For instance, Tzohar rabbis may only officiate at one wedding per night, to prevent the all-too-frequent phenomenon of rabbis arriving an hour late because they were at another wedding, or rushing through the ceremony and then vanishing to go to another wedding. Tzohar concluded, correctly, that such behavior gives religion a bad name.
Until last week, however, Tzohar worked strictly from within the rabbinate. Now, it has finally broken with the rabbinate, over one specific issue: kashrut certification during the shmita year.
Religious law forbids Jewish farmers in Israel to cultivate their land during shmita. Decades ago, however, then chief rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook concluded that a year without cultivation would devastate the pre-state Jewish community’s fragile economy. He therefore instituted the heter mechira (“sale permit”), which allows Jewish farmers to “sell” their land to non-Jews for the year (much as Jews sell their hametz during Pessah). Then, since the land is owned by non-Jews, it can be cultivated as usual during shmita.
The heter mechira was never accepted by all religious Jews, and opposition has grown as the state’s economy has developed, on the grounds that what was vital for a struggling, largely agricultural economy is unnecessary in a thriving, largely nonagricultural one. Consequently, increasing numbers of Orthodox Jews refuse to eat produce grown with the heter; instead they import from overseas, where the laws of shmita do not apply.
HOWEVER, many religious Jews, including leading religious Zionist rabbis, still support the heter. They argue that religious law is not meant to destroy people’s livelihoods and make economic activity impossible; and that today, when agriculture is increasingly export-based, Jewish farmers could not survive a year without cultivation, even were the state to compensate them: Their markets would be lost to competitors. Moreover, most imported produce during shmita has traditionally come from Gaza, and for Israel to be financing a Hamas-run terrorist proto-state would violate the fundamental commandment of preserving life.
It is, obviously, legitimate for individuals to refuse to eat heter mechira produce, or for the private haredi kashrut organizations (such as Badatz) to refuse to certify such produce. What is not legitimate, however, is that this year, for the first time, the rabbinate – which is supposed to represent the state as a whole, including the many people who accept the heter – authorized municipal rabbis to forbid the heter within their jurisdictions. Consequently, state-funded rabbis in several major cities have threatened to deny kashrut certification to any restaurant or grocery store that uses or sells heter mechira produce.
THIS IS WHAT prompted Tzohar’s revolt. Religious Zionists had always viewed the rabbinate as embodying, however imperfectly, a religious worldview compatible with the existence of a Jewish state. But to many, this latest ruling seemed likely to kill Jewish agriculture in Israel: If buying heter mechira produce will cost businesses their kashrut certification, they will not do it; and since there is no state compensation (the heter supposedly makes it unnecessary), the loss of income could bankrupt many farmers. Tzohar therefore decided to create its own kashrut organization to certify businesses that use heter produce.
Though the certification project is ostensibly limited to the shmita year, if it succeeds, Tzohar will probably continue it. And that could finally break the rabbinate’s near-monopoly on the kashrut business – thereby benefiting all Israelis twice over.
First, competition would almost certainly lower prices for certification, as it does in every field. And since most grocery stores, and many restaurants, have rabbinate kashrut certification, all consumers would presumably benefit from these savings.
Second, all Israelis currently pay twice for kashrut certification: once through higher prices, and again via their taxes, which support the rabbinate’s enormous kashrut bureaucracy. Tzohar rabbis, however, are not part of the kashrut bureaucracy; they will be paid only by those they certify. Thus should they take over part of the rabbinate’s kashrut business, the government could reduce the rabbinate’s funding.
FOR THIS reason, the rabbinate will presumably fight Tzohar tooth and nail. Yet Tzohar has some powerful weapons. First, since the rabbinate has tolerated private ultra-Orthodox kashrut organizations for years, it will have difficulty portraying Tzohar’s move as illegitimate.
Second, Tzohar represents the same community that the rabbinate does: religious Zionists and traditional Jews. The haredim have never accepted the rabbinate’s authority, and secular Jews do not care. Thus not only would anybody who accepts rabbinate certification also accept Tzohar certification, but the rabbinate cannot attack Tzohar without alienating both many of its own members and its most natural power base. (Paradoxically, the rabbinate also has an ultra-Orthodox power base, since despite rejecting the rabbinate’s authority, the haredim support it as a source of jobs for their own rabbis. Haredi appointees are largely responsible for the change in the rabbinate’s stance on the heter.)
BUT BEYOND the immediate, kashrut-related benefits, Tzohar’s revolt also has potentially far-reaching consequences for vital issues such as marriage, divorce and conversion.
Granted, Tzohar is unlikely to introduce competition on these issues anytime soon. First, legislation would be needed to end the rabbinate’s current legal monopoly over them. And second, precisely because these issues have national implications that kashrut lacks – marital status has financial and legal ramifications, and converts are entitled to automatic citizenship – ending the state monopoly in these fields is far more complex than ending the kashrut monopoly, which has no more justification for existence than any other economic monopoly.
Nevertheless, should Tzohar’s gambit succeed, the implicit threat will be there: Just as religious Zionists, once the kashrut monopoly’s staunchest supporters, ultimately led a successful revolt against it, they are liable to do the same in other areas unless the rabbinate shapes up. That threat could even prompt the rabbinate to reform.
But if not, it is a good bet that the revolt will someday occur.
“It’s common to claim it is impossible to defeat terrorism,” the analysis stated. But in the seven years since the intifada began, “the IDF and Shin Bet have come as close as possible to achieving victory. Since the beginning of the year, two soldiers (one each in the West Bank and Gaza) and six civilians (three in a suicide bombing in Eilat, two from Kassam rockets in Sderot and one who was stabbed to death in Gush Etzion) have been killed by terrorism. This is a very small number, considering the number of attempted attacks, and also compared to the high point of the intifada, when 450 Israelis were killed in 2002. The last suicide bombing in central Israel occurred 18 months ago, in April 2006.
“The formula that produced this achievement is known,” it continued: aggressive intelligence gathering, the security fence and “the IDF’s complete freedom of action in West Bank cities.”
If this is not victory, it is a close enough approximation that most Israelis would happily settle for it. That is why the June Peace Index poll found Jewish Israelis overwhelmingly opposed to security concessions to the Palestinian Authority, with 79 percent against arming the PA, 71 percent against removing checkpoints and 54 percent against releasing prisoners: Few Israelis want to scrap measures that have reduced Israeli fatalities from 450 to eight over the last five years.
It also helps explain the stunning reversal in Israeli attitudes toward Sderot revealed by August’s Peace Index poll. According to that poll, fully 69 percent of Jewish Israelis now support an extensive ground operation in Gaza to stop the Kassam fire at southern Israel – whereas last December, 57 percent opposed such an operation. Moreover, this support crossed party lines: Even among people who voted for the leftist Labor and Meretz parties, 64 and 67 percent, respectively, favored a major military operation in Gaza.
CLEARLY, THIS reversal occurred partly because in the interim, all other options had been exhausted. The December poll came a month after Hamas declared a cease-fire in Gaza, and while the truce had not fully taken hold, many still hoped that it would. By August, those hopes had died: Not only were rockets fired at Sderot almost daily during the “cease-fire,” but in May, Hamas trumpeted its contempt for the truce by claiming credit for over 100 Kassam launches in a single week. Additionally, in December, Mahmoud Abbas was nominally in control of Gaza, and many still hoped that he would take action to stop the rocket fire. By August, Hamas was in full control.
The fact that Israel first sought nonmilitary solutions in Gaza resembles its behavior during the first 18 months of the intifada: It signed cease-fires (which instantly collapsed), declined to respond even to major suicide bombings inside Israel (Dolphinarium and Sbarro), and generally sought to get the Palestinian security services to reassert control. But as the casualty toll, especially inside Israel, mounted, it became clear that salvation would not come from the PA. So in March 2002, Israel reconquered the West Bank in Operation Defensive Shield – and Israeli fatalities dropped dramatically, that year and every year thereafter.
HOWEVER, there is one crucial difference between the intifada’s early years and the recent Israeli quest for a nonmilitary solution in Gaza: While Israelis would always prefer to avoid risking soldiers’ lives, they now know, as they did not in 2002, that the military option works. After all, not a single Kassam has been fired at Israel from the West Bank. Hence Israelis are not awaiting leadership from above; they are backing military action even as the politicians still vehemently reject it.
Given this growing recognition among the Israeli public, it is bizarre to hear senior politicians and military officers still parroting the “no military solution to terror” mantra. But at least these officials understand that in practice, Israel’s defensive measures in the West Bank work, and therefore, ending them would be a bad idea (not to mention unpopular with the voters).
International agencies and diplomats, in contrast, have not even gotten that far. Any of them could, if they took five minutes to examine the data, realize that Israel’s military measures in the West Bank have dramatically reduced Israeli fatalities, especially inside Israel, since 2002; yet they persist in declaring that these measures are unnecessary and must be scrapped. Thus Condoleezza Rice uses her every visit to pressure Israel on this issue, while the World Bank once again demanded last week that Israel remove West Bank checkpoints, open its border with Gaza and restore freedom of movement between Gaza and the West Bank.
Or perhaps this is feigned ignorance, meant to cover a willingness to sacrifice Israeli lives in order to demonstrate “progress” in the peace process. The World Bank report, for instance, coyly stated that “the costs are subjective to each side and are beyond the scope of this report” – thereby sparing it the need to acknowledge that the likely cost is Israeli lives – but “all parties will need to expend more resources and assume more risks than they have done in the past.”
Is it really unaware of what those carefully unstated risks are?
Either way, however, this willful blindness perpetuates the conflict by ensuring that a key obstacle to resolving it – Palestinian terror – remains unaddressed. In 1993, many Israelis hoped that a peace agreement would end terror. Fourteen years later, after having suffered more fatalities from Palestinian terror post-Oslo than during the entire preceding 45 years, most Israelis have concluded that the allegedly nonexistent military solution does a much better job of protecting their lives. And until there is concrete evidence of Palestinian willingness and ability to do the job as well or better, there will be no Israeli majority for any deal with the PA.
Romania, like Israel, is one of the last places in the democratic world where voters still cast ballots for party slates rather than for individual candidates. But according to opinion polls, some 80 percent of Romanians are fed up with this system, which gives them little say over who ends up in parliament. Romanian politicians have therefore decided to bow to the popular will and switch to a German-style system in which half the candidates would be elected directly, by regional constituencies, while the other half would still be elected by party slate.
Israel has not yet reached Romania’s level of consensus. Yet here, too, a solid majority would like to elect its representatives directly. According to one poll commissioned by a public committee on government reform, published in February, 61 percent of Israelis want to elect their Knesset members directly; a subsequent poll commissioned by the grassroots Citizens Empowerment Public Action Campaign put the figure at 64 percent.
UNLIKE IN Romania, however, our political parties appear to have no intention of bowing to the popular will. As Knesset Constitution Committee Chairman Menachem Ben-Sasson, who personally favors direct elections, bluntly told the Post earlier this month: “After talking to almost all 120 MKs, I think it is safe to say it has no chance of passing.”
Ben-Sasson is consequently seeking to enact a much more modest reform package: raising the electoral threshold from 2 to 2.5 percent; passing the so-called Norwegian Law, which requires ministers to resign from the Knesset and be replaced by the next person on their party’s list; and giving the head of the largest party the first shot at forming a government (currently, the president consults all parties and gives the nod to whichever party leader is favored by more MKs overall).
All of these are good ideas in themselves. The Norwegian Law, for instance, would improve the Knesset’s work by ensuring that there are always 120 active MKs; currently, as many as one-third of all MKs serve as ministers and deputy ministers, forcing the remainder to juggle an impossible four or five committee seats apiece. Giving the head of the largest party the first shot at forming a government would encourage people to vote for big parties rather than small ones, which would reduce the big parties’ dependence on a myriad small coalition partners. And while the proposed rise in the electoral threshold is too small to make much difference, it at least preserves the momentum created by several similarly modest increases in recent years, which, if continued, would eventually eliminate three- to five-person factions.
YET THIS package fails to address the root of the problem, which is that the current electoral system leaves MKs completely unaccountable to the public. A directly-elected MK must face the voters periodically and will not be reelected unless they are satisfied with his performance. But the party slate system means that an MK’s chances of reelection depend not on pleasing the public, but on pleasing the party bosses: It is they who will determine whether an MK is placed high on the party’s next Knesset slate, thereby guaranteeing him a seat, or far down the list, thereby ensuring that he will not get in.
This lack of accountability is responsible for multiple ills. It is, for instance, a major factor in the poor quality of our MKs. Whereas a directly-elected MK has to do a good job in order to convince voters to reelect him, an MK whose reelection depends on the party bosses is naturally more focused on their welfare than on the public’s. It is also a factor in the Knesset’s lame supervision of the executive: It is hard to effectively supervise cabinet members when they control your political future.
In contrast, directly-elected MKs have power bases independent of the party bosses, and could therefore afford to challenge the executive. Finally, it is why Ehud Olmert heads the most stable government in recent memory despite the lowest approval ratings in Israeli history: MKs who had to answer to the voters would not dare risk their wrath by leaving him in office, but MKs who answer to party bosses dare not unseat him as long as those bosses, in all five coalition parties, favor keeping him in power.
ONE CAN understand why small parties nevertheless favor the current system: Direct regional elections would almost certainly reduce their representation in the Knesset. The three large parties, however, would benefit from direct elections, which would presumably increase their Knesset representation. And together, they have enough Knesset seats to pass this reform even over the smaller parties’ objections.
Yet even in those three parties, only a handful of MKs actively support changing the system – people such as Ben-Sasson (Kadima), Gideon Sa’ar and Michael Eitan (Likud) and Ophir Pines-Paz (Labor). And while none of them are back-benchers, neither are any in the top ranks of their party’s leadership. The leaders of all three parties have either remained shamefully silent or openly opposed a switch to direct elections.
Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, is a time to repent the old year’s errors and vow to do better henceforth. Yet as anyone who has ever made a New Year’s resolution knows, setting overly ambitious goals is a recipe for failure.
So I would not dream of expecting our politicians to match the culture of personal accountability that characterizes, say, Britain or Japan.
But is it really too much to ask that they show as much respect for the popular will as their counterparts in a fledgling democracy like Romania?
Livni, after all, drafted the plan that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is now implementing: negotiating an agreement on final-status principles with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, but delaying implementation until the PA meets key commitments such as fighting terror. Yet Livni has reportedly urged both US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and PA Prime Minister Salaam Fayad to lower expectations for these talks, as well as for the upcoming US-sponsored peace conference.
Currently, she warned, expectations are dangerously high: “I don’t believe in holding a fire sale of Israel’s assets,” she reportedly explained.
You also know it is time to worry when Olmert’s Kadima faction, which supported him through a disastrous war in Lebanon, the Winograd Committee’s subsequent scathing critique, the collapse of the party’s raison d’etre (unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank) and multiple criminal investigations, threatens revolt over his talks with Abbas.
Kadima MKs and ministers do not know what Olmert is actually offering Abbas; like other Israelis, they must rely on media reports. But those reports, which Olmert has not denied, detail far-reaching Israeli concessions that many Kadima members consider unacceptable.
One Kadima MK even reportedly warned that the “agreement of principles” could split the party in two, just as the disengagement split Likud.
FINALLY, you know it is time to worry when Olmert’s rationale for a deal with Abbas starts sounding, as Haaretz‘s Aluf Benn aptly noted last Friday, exactly like Ehud Barak’s rationale for the disastrous Camp David summit with Yasser Arafat: He was elected on a promise of territorial withdrawal that he has been unable to keep; the American president is nearing the end of his second term; he himself may soon be ousted unless he produces dramatic developments; and if the peace process does not advance, “everything is liable to fall apart.”
And we all know where Camp David led: far-reaching Israeli concessions with no Palestinian quid pro quo, which then became the starting point for the next round of talks, plus a terrorist war that has killed 1,133 Israelis since September 2000.
ADMITTEDLY, Olmert could be offering less than the media claim; the media have been wrong before. Yet even were this true, the other half of the problem would remain: Abbas, as Livni correctly stated, cannot currently “provide a single concession” in exchange. A recent poll by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center, a respected Palestinian institute, suffices to show why.
According to the poll, almost 70 percent of Palestinians demand that all refugees and their descendants be allowed to relocate to Israel under a peace agreement; they rejected every alternative JMCC proposed, such as compensation, resettlement in Palestine or a quota for relocations to Israel. A politically weak leader like Abbas cannot buck such a solid consensus.
Yet for Israel, this is a deal-breaker: No Israeli government would ever allow 4.4 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants to relocate to Israel.
The poll also found that 82 percent of Palestinians oppose Israel’s retention of the settlement blocs. Yet every Israeli government has insisted on keeping these blocs, both for security reasons (distancing the new Palestinian state from Israel’s major population centers) and to make the deal more manageable for Israel (relocating the roughly 80,000 settlers who live outside the blocs is clearly easier than relocating all 260,000).
The result: another impasse.
FINALLY, THE poll found that fully 94 percent of Palestinians oppose any form of Israeli control over the Temple Mount – even the Clinton formula of Israeli sovereignty “under the mount” and Palestinian sovereignty atop it, which Olmert reportedly accepts. Sovereignty “under the mount” is utterly meaningless; if Palestinians control the mount’s surface, Israelis can neither access the “underneath” area in order to exercise their sovereignty, nor stop the Palestinians from doing as they please with it.
But this formula at least forces Palestinians to acknowledge a Jewish connection to the Temple Mount – something every Israeli government has deemed essential, in the understanding that peace is impossible unless the Palestinians recognize that Jews, too, have rights in this land. How can Abbas make a deal when such an overwhelming majority opposes even this grudging concession?
Abbas could, of course, defy public opinion and make the necessary concessions anyway. Yet even if he did (which is highly unlikely), the complete lack of public support would render them worthless. Thus what would Israel have gained?
These unyielding Palestinian positions are also responsible for Livni’s concern about a “fire sale of Israel’s assets” – because in a situation where Abbas is incapable of offering any quid pro quo, no agreement could be anything but a fire sale: Whatever Olmert offers, he will get nothing in return; it is hard to sell more cheaply than that.
Alternatively, the talks could end with no agreement, as Camp David did. But in that case, the results would probably be the same as well: Like Barak, Olmert has led Palestinians to expect an agreement; and if one fails to materialize, these frustrated expectations are liable to spark an upsurge in Palestinian terror.
GIVEN THE complete lack of movement in Palestinian positions over the last 14 years, Livni’s proposal for an “agreement of principles” on final-status issues could, unfortunately, never have produced any results but these: a “fire sale of Israel’s assets” or a “breakdown” (her term) followed by increased terrorism. And now that Olmert and Rice are running with the ball she set rolling, it is probably too late to avoid one of the two.
Israel can, however, choose the lesser of the two evils – and that is “breakdown.” The reason is simple: If an agreement is signed, Palestinians will expect rapid implementation, whereas Israel, given the ongoing Palestinian terror, will insist on delay. That will ultimately lead to the same consequences as no agreement: frustrated Palestinian expectations and increased terror.
And if we are going to have increased terror in any case, we might as well at least avoid the fire sale.
Consider, for instance, former Supreme Court justice Dalia Dorner’s address to a conference at Jerusalem’s Van Leer Institute last week. “A constitutional coup is occurring in which the government is seizing control of the judiciary,” she proclaimed.
Another former justice, Yitzhak Zamir, added specifics. “The justice minister began unilaterally, without consulting [the justices],” he complained. And: “[Judicial] independence requires the minister to waive his powers to appoint [court] presidents and deputy presidents; Minister Friedmann must withdraw his proposal to appoint search committees [for these appointments].”
Given that thus far, Friedmann has succeeded in effecting exactly one minor change – term limits for court presidents – quite how the government is “seizing control of the judiciary” is unclear. Even more outrageous, however, is the claim that when ministers and legislators actually do their constitutionally mandated jobs, this constitutes a “constitutional coup.”
THE BASIC Law: The Judiciary, for instance, lists various issues on which the Knesset must enact legislation – including the appointment of court presidents. Thus when the Knesset enacted Friedmann’s term limits proposal into law, it was exercising an authority mandated by the Basic Law, which the Supreme Court itself considers constitutional legislation.
Nor did Friedmann exceed his authority by proposing the bill: The cabinet is authorized to propose legislation on any issue. Yet in Dorner’s Orwellian universe, these exercises of constitutionally mandated authority constitute a “constitutional coup.”
Similarly, by law, only the justice minister can appoint court presidents (after consulting with the Supreme Court president); Friedmann’s search committees are meant to help him exercise this legally mandated authority more wisely. Moreover, the court itself has ruled repeatedly that a minister may not abdicate responsibility for decisions entrusted to him by law.
Yet in Zamir’s Orwellian universe, what Friedmann ought to do is violate the law – as previous justice ministers did – by ceding his legally mandated responsibility to the Supreme Court president.
Likewise, under existing constitutional law, the one branch of government with no role in the legislative process is the judiciary. Thus by refusing to consult the justices about legislation, Friedmann was honoring the constitutionally mandated separation of powers between the branches of government. Yet in the justices’ Orwellian universe, proper behavior means disregarding such constitutional niceties.
THE ABOVE examples, however, are only the tip of the hypocrisy iceberg – because, as MK Reuven Rivlin correctly told the conference, a constitutional coup actually has occurred. And it was perpetrated not by Friedmann, but by the Supreme Court.
In 1949, shortly after Israel’s establishment, elections were held for a body that would serve as both a constitutional convention and the first Knesset. In 1950, that body decided that the constitution should be enacted piecemeal, with each subsequent Knesset retaining the original’s constitution-making powers; that decision was never revoked.
To this day, therefore, the Knesset is the only body authorized to enact constitutional legislation.
Yet in 1992, then Supreme Court president Aharon Barak proclaimed a “constitutional revolution.” Two newly enacted Basic Laws, he declared, were not only constitutional legislation; but for the first time, they empowered the court to overturn ordinary Knesset legislation.
Given that the laws passed by votes of 23-0 and 32-21, respectively, their constitutional status is dubious: No other democracy has a “constitution” approved by a mere quarter of the legislature. Moreover, not only did neither law explicitly empower the court to overturn legislation, but an article that would have done so was removed during the Knesset’s deliberations – leading many MKs who voted for the laws to conclude that they did not confer this power.
Thus Barak’s “constitutional revolution” was essentially a judicial rewrite of the existing constitution, with no mandate from the only body authorized to make such amendments: the Knesset.
BUT NOT content with this, the court has since usurped an even more basic Knesset function: the power to enact constitutional legislation. Since 1948, for instance, the Knesset has considered – and rejected – no fewer than 15 proposed Basic Laws on “social rights,” such as employment or welfare. One such bill was voted down at the very same time as the 1992 Basic Laws were enacted; four others have been proposed and rejected since. Thus clearly, the Knesset (a) does not believe that the 1992 Basic Laws encompassed social rights, and (b) does not want to confer such rights.
Yet in 2004, the court ruled that one of the 1992 laws, Human Dignity and Liberty, did grant constitutional status to social rights, such as the “right” to a court-ordered minimum welfare allowance. In short, it not only created a new constitutional “right” without Knesset authorization, it created one that the Knesset had explicitly rejected. It thus effectively declared that the Knesset has no role in the constitutional process at all: It is not needed to enact constitutional legislation, and may not even prevent the court from doing so.
NOR WAS this a one-time aberration. In 2006, for instance, a majority of the court added two more “rights” – equality and the right to marry – to Human Dignity and Liberty, even though the Knesset, due to lack of consensus, had deliberately excluded these rights from the law. In short, to quote Rivlin, “the judge has replaced the legislature and made it superfluous.”
Rivlin also correctly identified the proper remedy: The Knesset must enact a Basic Law “that delimits clear boundaries to the powers of each branch [of government] and [determines] when the Supreme Court may interpret the constitution, the limits to court intervention and when legislation must be enacted by the sole representative of Israel’s sovereign [citizenry] – namely, the Knesset.”
And that, in a nutshell, is the real problem with Friedmann’s initiatives: Despite much grandiose talk about doing precisely that, in practice, he has moved forward only on trivial issues such as search committees and term limits for court presidents. And he has thereby allowed the real constitutional coup – the judicial one – to continue unchecked.
When Olmert announced in late June that, henceforth, African migrants who infiltrated from Egypt would be sent back there, he explicitly declared that refugees from Darfur, but only Darfur, would be exempted from this policy. That enraged people such as Jerusalem Post columnist Larry Derfner, who argued that Israel should also take in other Africans, like the southern Sudanese.
Yet, in fact, the policy as stated made an eminently proper distinction between refugees in genuine need of asylum and economic migrants. The genocide in Darfur, which has thus far killed anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 people (estimates vary widely) and displaced more than 2 million, shows no signs of abating; Darfurians cannot safely return to their own country and are thus textbook examples of genuine refugees.
In contrast, the civil war between northern and southern Sudan ended in January 2005, and refugees have since been returning to the south: According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, some 157,000 southern Sudanese refugees have thus far been voluntarily repatriated, and there have been no reports of them suffering violence or persecution.
CERTAINLY, the southern Sudanese suffered terribly during the 22-year civil war, which killed some two million people; one can therefore understand why many fear that the fragile peace will not hold, or are reluctant to return to devastated villages. But the fact remains that, so far, the peace has held and refugees are being successfully repatriated. Thus there are no grounds for viewing the southern Sudanese as genuine asylum-seekers.
Given that Israel’s capacity to absorb refugees is not unlimited, anyone who truly cares about human rights should support a policy of reserving this capacity for those in genuine need, like the Darfurians, rather than squandering it on those, like the southern Sudanese, who have the option of returning home.
Granted, Israel is nowhere near the limits of its absorption capacity now, but the pace of infiltrations has recently increased dramatically, from several dozen a month to several dozen a day; at this rate, some 15,000 Africans would enter from Egypt every year. Thus if Israel does not start making distinctions now, it is liable to find itself turning away genuine refugees later because it has already absorbed too many non-refugees – and once accepted, these non-refugees cannot then be forced to leave.
OLMERT’S DECLARED policy of accepting Darfurians only therefore made sense. There was only one problem: It turns out that he did not mean a word of it. On Sunday, Israel returned its first 48 infiltrators to Egypt. And according to the IDF, most were Darfurians.
Then, in response to the outcry by local human rights organizations, Olmert’s office explained that his pledge to accept Darfur refugees applied only to the approximately 500 who were already here. All new arrivals from Darfur would be promptly returned to Egypt.
This is unconscionable by any standard.
First, the Darfurians are indisputably genuine refugees. Second, there are serious reasons to doubt their safety in Egypt. Not only did IDF cameras film Egyptian security forces gunning down Sudanese migrants near the border earlier this month, there have been persistent reports about Egypt deporting Darfurians back to Sudan, where they are clearly in danger. Just this Sunday, for instance, Egyptian police told the Associated Press that the Darfurians Israel expelled would be returned to Sudan.
THIRD, WHILE reasonable people can certainly disagree about where the limit of our refugee absorption capacity lies, no reasonable person could set it at a measly 500 people, as Olmert has. Israel employs some 100,000 legal foreign workers and at least about another 100,000 illegals; many of these workers also have spouses and children. Thus it could clearly absorb tens of thousands of refugees just by using them as replacements for foreign workers.
Granted, not every foreign worker could be replaced with a refugee; some have specialized skills that the refugees lack. But there are 29,000 legal foreign workers in agriculture alone; these could certainly be replaced with Darfurians, most of whom were farmers back in Sudan. A pilot program to employ Sudanese refugees in Eilat hotels also proved successful; refugees could thus replace foreign workers in other hotels as well.
Kicking out foreign workers to make room for refugees is not cost-free: Most foreign workers come from friendly countries such as Thailand and the Philippines, and expelling them would clearly strain these bilateral relationships. That is not something the government should do lightly, which is another reason why a “genuine refugees only” policy makes sense. Expelling economic migrants from friendly countries merely to absorb economic migrants from hostile countries, such as the southern Sudanese, would be sheer insanity.
But deporting genuine refugees to Egypt might well have even worse diplomatic consequences: Such callousness tarnishes the country’s image throughout the democratic world, and also among the international Jewish community, which, to its credit, has been at the forefront of efforts to help the Darfur refugees.
EVEN WERE there no pragmatic arguments in favor of absorbing refugees, the Jewish state – homeland of a people that knows only too well what it is like to flee genocide and find every door closed – cannot ignore the moral imperative of saving lives. But the fact that this is one of those rare occasions when self-interest and morality go hand in hand makes Olmert’s decision to absorb a mere 500 Darfurians doubly unconscionable.
Fortunately, other Israelis seem to understand this. Just three weeks ago, for instance, a resolution demanding that Darfurians not be deported received rare across-the-board support in the Knesset. It was signed by 63 MKs, an absolute majority, representing every political party in the legislature. Thus there are grounds for hope that public pressure could force Olmert to reverse his disgraceful decision.
However, that will only happen if such pressure is applied strongly and consistently. The 63 MKs who signed the petition must now prove that they stand behind their words, and start turning up the heat.
Consider, for instance, an item on mapmaking that appeared in the International Herald Tribune two weeks ago. In it, the owner of an Italian company that makes globes discussed issues such as whether Cyprus should be drawn divided or united (most countries do not recognize the island’s de-facto division) and whether the gulf between Iran and Saudi Arabia should be named the Arabian or the Persian Gulf.
Then, in one throwaway sentence, the article hit on the real cause of our conflict: “And in much of the Arab world, Israel is nonexistent.” Arab governments and educational institutions insist that their maps and globes eschew all mention of a country called Israel, and mapmakers obediently comply.
IT IS HARD to think of another interstate conflict in which one country refuses even to acknowledge the other’s existence. Indian and Pakistani maps, for instance, show their disputed border in different places, but both include an entity called “India” or “Pakistan.”
Neither American nor Soviet maps ever failed to depict the rival superpower during the Cold War. Israel’s maps show Syria, a country with which it has been at war since its birth, as well as Iran, whose president routinely vows to wipe it off the rest of the world’s maps as well.
But in the Arab world, even a depiction of Israel within its pre-1967 armistice lines is anathema.
Fifty-nine years after Israel’s establishment, the Arab world is still not prepared to accept the Jewish state’s existence. It continues to dream that Israel will somehow disappear, and that dream is transmitted to successive generations through its maps.
After all, a map reflects what its maker or commissioner deems the “correct” picture of the world. And the “correct” Arab picture of the world is still one where the Zionist entity does not exist.
THIS SAME truth was offhandedly acknowledged in a recent New York Times article on another unrelated subject: the possibility of partitioning Iraq. The article cited a column that ran last year in the Dubai-based Gulf News, entitled “Partitioning Iraq: No Starter.” In it, author George Hishmeh, a former writer for the US Information Agency, explained that one reason the idea is a nonstarter is that the very word “partition” has “an ugly ring in Arab ears, especially after what happened in Palestine in 1948” – i.e., the UN partition plan that paved the way for Israel’s establishment.
In other words, 59 years after Israel’s creation, the idea of partition is still so taboo in the Arab world that it cannot even be considered in the completely unrelated context of Iraq. How likely is it, then, that the Arab world is ready to accept the “original sin” – partition of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea into two states, one of which would be Jewish?
Diplomats tend to dismiss such indications of Arab sentiment as unimportant, insisting that the “real” Arab position is reflected in documents like the Arab peace initiative adopted by the Arab League in 2002 and reaffirmed by an Arab League summit this year. Yet in fact, the Arab peace initiative is completely consistent with the vision shown on Arab maps; diplomats simply prefer to overlook this inconvenient truth.
THE DOCUMENT states explicitly that one condition for peace is “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194.” And the Arab world’s consistent interpretation of this resolution, ever since its adoption in 1948, has been that it mandates a “right of return” for all refugees and their descendants – currently some 4.3 million people, according to UNRWA – to pre-1967 Israel.
Nor does the resolution’s text preclude this interpretation (though it also admits other interpretations): It states that “refugees wishing to return to their homes… should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”
Currently, Israel’s population of about 7.1 million includes 1.4 million Arabs and 5.4 million Jews. It is not hard to realize that the addition of 4.3 million refugees and their descendants – or even a sizable fraction thereof – would turn Israel from a Jewish-majority state to an Arab-majority or binational state. In other words, the Jewish state would cease to exist, even if the name “Israel” remained on international maps.
Here, too, the standard diplomatic response is simply to pretend that the problem does not exist: that this does not reflect the “real” Arab position; it is merely a negotiating tactic.
Unfortunately, such assumptions have proven unfounded in the past – as they did at the Camp David summit in 2000 and the subsequent Washington and Taba talks in 2001. Then, too, the working assumption was that Yasser Arafat’s stated positions, such as his insistence on the “right of return” and his refusal to acknowledge any Jewish link to the Temple Mount, were mere negotiating tactics. Yet in practice, according to then foreign minister and chief Israeli negotiator Shlomo Ben-Ami, the Palestinians – not only Arafat, but also the current “great white hope” of the peace process, Mahmoud Abbas – proved unwilling to budge from these positions.
PEACE, ACCORDING to the cliché, is made with enemies. But it cannot be made with an enemy that refuses to acknowledge your right to exist. That is the real root of the conflict, and until it is resolved, no amount of territorial concessions will make any difference.
Yet it will never be resolved as long as the international community insists on sweeping it under the rug. Thus if the world truly wants the Arab-Israeli conflict settled, it must begin challenging the Arab refusal to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist wherever and whenever it comes up – from the public refusal by heads of state to abandon their demand for a “right of return” to the lowly globes that are teaching a whole new generation of Arab schoolchildren that the Jewish state does not, should not and, if God is kind, someday will not exist.