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Consider two recent examples. One was the government’s decision earlier this month to
trim the budget by slashing the number of Falash Mura allowed to immigrate from Ethiopia from 300 to 150 a month – thereby reversing
last year’s pledge to double the quota, from 300 to 600.
This decision will obviously cause humanitarian distress, both for the Falash Mura waiting in overcrowded camps in Ethiopia and for the relatives awaiting them in Israel. It also contradicts the Kadima government’s alleged concern for demography – the declared reason for its proposed unilateral withdrawal from most of the West Bank: Some 20,000 immigrants of Jewish descent, who are eager to rejoin the Jewish people and willing to convert, would clearly be a demographic asset.
But what makes the decision particularly outrageous is that when the cabinet originally voted to double the quota, it asked American Jews to raise $100 million to finance the Ethiopians’ absorption. Then prime minister (and Kadima founder) Ariel Sharon even appealed personally to US Jewish leaders when he visited New York last year. And American Jewry responded: The United Jewish Communities have thus far raised $70 million for this purpose. “We suspended the rest of our activity and focused on this campaign,” a senior UJC official told the press.
Now, American Jewish donors and fundraisers are furious. The UJC even took the unusual step of publicly accusing the government of reneging on its promises.
And the negative consequences are obvious. “We’re dealing with a deep problem of trust here,” the UJC official said. “Next time we come to ask [donors] for money, they might think twice.” Left unsaid, but equally obvious, was the corollary: Next time an Israeli government requests assistance from American Jewish organizations, these groups might think twice about soliciting their donors.
Over the years, Israel has asked for – and received – American Jewry’s financial help on many vital projects. And it will undoubtedly want such help again in the future. But for the sake of an extremely short-term interest – cutting the budget without upsetting political allies – the government has squandered its credibility with American Jewish donors, thereby making it harder for Israel to tap this resource in the future.
THE SECOND example is the government’s handling of the settlers evacuated from Gaza last summer. On Monday, Haaretz published a summary of where resettlement efforts stand 13 months after the pullout, and nine months after Ehud Olmert became prime minister – not for those settlers who resisted the evacuation, but for those who acted “responsibly” and cooperated with the government. The bottom line: Construction on permanent housing has yet to begin in even one of the 18 locations earmarked for resettling evacuees.
In Nitzanim, which is slated to house hundreds of families who signed agreements with the government before the pullout, no work at all has been done. In Ashkelon, where 150 families agreed to move prior to the disengagement, the government has not even finished buying the land for their promised houses. In Mavki’im, where 24 families agreed to relocate before the withdrawal, work has not even begun on the infrastructure, let alone the houses. And these are not the worst cases: Several planned communities do not even have approved master plans for construction – a process that can take years.
This conduct is clearly immoral: Having evicted these families from their homes to serve its own policies, the government has an ethical obligation to at least keep its promises on resettlement.
But quite aside from morality, the sheer stupidity of such behavior is mind-boggling. After all, this government campaigned on a platform of kicking an additional 80,000 Jews – ten times Gaza’s number – out of their homes, and it therefore has a clear interest in encouraging cooperation rather than resistance.
Instead, by breaking its resettlement promises to the Gaza evacuees, the government has virtually guaranteed that any future evacuation will meet with far fiercer resistance than the Gaza pullout did. Because if you are going to be a homeless refugee regardless of whether you cooperate or resist, why would anyone choose to cooperate?
It would be comforting to think that such behavior is unique to the Olmert government. Unfortunately, previous governments have been no better.
Ehud Barak’s government, for instance, opted to betray our ally, the South Lebanon Army, by fleeing Lebanon overnight in May 2000 rather than risk Israeli soldiers’ lives to secure an orderly retreat. It did not even give SLA members and their families 24 hours’ notice in which to pack their belongings; they had to flee with whatever they had on hand, which left most of them penniless refugees. The government even forced them to abandon their cars at the border and enter Israel only with what they could carry. The lack of advance notice also split up families, as some fighters’ relatives were unable to reach the border before it closed. And then, to add insult to injury, successive governments (Barak’s and Sharon’s) refused to grant the SLA refugees citizenship – an omission rectified by the Knesset only four years later.
This callous betrayal was clearly immoral. But it also severely undermined Israel’s credibility as an ally, and hence its ability to recruit other allies in the future.
And there are far too many other examples – such as the decades of budgetary discrimination against the Druse, the one Israeli Arab community loyal to the state; or the abandonment of Palestinian informants during successive pullouts from the territories. In all the above cases, Israeli governments sacrificed a long-term interest – credibility with friends, allies and even its own citizens – for short-term financial or military convenience.
The days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are a time to repent past errors and vow to do better.
This destructive habit of squandering the
country’s credibility would be an excellent
place to start.
Judging by the proposed 2007 budget, the answer is no – because the budget contains not a single measure aimed at dealing with this threat. That might have been excusable some months ago, when the jury was still out on whether budgetary measures actually affect birthrates. But recent data seems to have conclusively answered this question: In Israel, unlike in Europe, money is a major factor in deciding whether to have more children.
This point was dramatically illustrated by last month’s Central Bureau of Statistics data on total fertility rates – the number of children an average woman will have in her lifetime. According to the bureau, the TFR for Israeli Muslims, which remained steady at 4.7 from 1985 to 2000, crept down to 4.5 over the next three years. But between 2003 and 2005, it plunged from 4.5 to 4.0 – a drop of half a child in only two years.
Among southern Beduin, the drop was even more dramatic: Between 2003 and 2005, the TFR fell from 9.0 to 7.6 – a decline of 1.4 children in two years.
In contrast, the Jewish TFR remained at 2.6-2.7, just as it has for the past decade.
WHAT HAPPENED in those two years to so dramatically change Muslim birthrates, while leaving Jewish birthrates unaffected? The only plausible answer is the drastic reduction in child allowances that began in June 2003.
Until then, child allowances were graduated: NIS 144 apiece for the first and second child, NIS 195 for the third, NIS 454 for the fourth and NIS 522 for each child thereafter. Thus a family of two would receive only NIS 288 a month, but a family of six would receive NIS 1,981 – at that time, about 60 percent of the minimum wage.
In 2003, however, the government decided to gradually cut child allowances to a flat NIS 140 per child by 2009. For families with one or two children – some two-thirds of all Jewish families – the change was negligible, and therefore did not affect birthrates. But for families with four or more children – i.e. most Muslim families – the financial impact was dramatic. And hence, the dramatic drop in Muslim birthrates.
Then, in September, published data indicated that the converse also holds true: Unlike elsewhere in the West – where the number of children declines as income rises – in Israel, the number of children increases as income rises. Citing Central Bureau of Statistics data, the article noted that while the average Israeli household numbers 3.7 people, in families with monthly incomes of NIS 50,000 or more, the average rises to 4.3.
Nor is this surprising: According to a survey conducted by the Jewish Agency last year, the average Jewish Israeli family would like at least three children (the averages were 3.0 for secular couples, 3.6 for traditional couples, 5.5 for religious Zionists and 8.9 for haredim). And the primary reason cited by respondents for having fewer children was lack of money.
THUS THE bottom line is that in Israel, money is a powerful tool for influencing demography. And since two-thirds of Jewish Israeli families have only one or two children, while Muslim families average four, this money should clearly be aimed at encouraging second or third births.
One way to do this would be to increase child allowances for the first and second child – which would even make some financial sense, since the first child is when a family incurs the “big-ticket” expenses (crib, high chair, stroller, etc.). Raising the allowances enough to really matter might eventually require a budget increase, but the initial step would be budget-neutral: The money saved by the ongoing reduction in allowances for large families could simply be redirected into larger allowances for the first and second child.
THE OTHER possibility is to reduce the costs associated with having children – particularly day care and education.
For low-income families, where two earners are often essential, subsidized day care is critical to encouraging the birthrate. Currently, child care for children below school age can cost thousands of shekels a month, meaning that women who earn the minimum wage (about NIS 3,450 a month) come home with almost nothing after paying for day care. Such women therefore have a strong financial incentive to avoid having more children.
Theoretically, subsidized day care would help Jewish and Muslim families equally. In practice, however, the main impact would probably be on the Jewish birthrate, since in the Muslim community the social prejudice against working women remains strong.
The second issue is schooling. By law, “free” public schools are allowed to charge significant sums each year: Last year, for instance, the legal maximum was NIS 1,493 per student for high schools. And in practice, schools often exceed this limit: According to the Education Ministry, high schools actually charged an average of NIS 3,939 per student last year.
To this must be added thousands of shekels a year for textbooks, which our “free” public schools do not provide. Nor can textbooks be recycled from child to child: Not only do they change frequently, but many are actually workbooks, meaning they can be used only once.
FINALLY, many middle-class families spend thousands of shekels a year on extracurricular schooling, since that is the only way to ensure their children a decent education.
Taken altogether, these expenses are an obvious disincentive to additional children for all but the wealthiest families. Significantly reducing these outlays – for instance, by eliminating school fees and requiring schools to provide textbooks – would make extra children much more affordable.
Again, this would theoretically affect Muslim and Jewish birthrates equally. However, given the two communities’ differing educational patterns, that might not prove true in practice.
Thus if the government truly cares about the demographic issue, there is much it could do to affect the situation. And this would be a far better use of its energies than squabbling about inquiry commissions.
Nor are these politicians disconnected from popular sentiment: In a poll last December, 40 percent of Israeli Jews said that the state should “encourage Arab citizens to emigrate.” That is still a minority (52 percent disagreed), but it is clearly approaching the tipping point – especially since 63 percent termed Israeli Arabs “a security and demographic threat to the state,” with only 13 percent disagreeing.
Unsurprisingly, this trend worries Israeli Arabs. MK Azmi Bishara (Balad) complained of a “season of incitement against Arab MKs” during the recent Lebanon war. Bakar Awada, director of the Center Against Racism, said the poll showed that “racism is becoming mainstream…. This is a worrisome development.”
Yet Israeli Arab leaders apparently still see no connection between this growing anti-Arab sentiment and their own behavior. And in fact, their behavior is the main impetus for this trend.
Last weekend, for instance, Bishara’s Balad faction traveled to Damascus, thereby violating the law prohibiting travel to enemy states. While there, he publicly praised Syria’s “struggle to free occupied Arab land” and its “resistance against occupation” – i.e., its support for anti-Israel terror. Moreover, he makes such statements frequently, as in a 2001 speech praising Hizbullah’s “guerrilla war” against Israel, the “losses” (casualties) it inflicted on Israel and its “victory” over Israel.
THUS BISHARA openly advocates terror attacks against the country in whose parliament he sits, rejoices when it suffers casualties and cheers when it loses battles (“Hizbullah won, and for the first time since 1967 we have tasted the taste of victory”). Is it surprising that such behavior provokes cries of “fifth column” and “traitor”?
Or take Balad MK Jamal Zahalka’s explanation for the trip: “We don’t see Syria as an enemy state.”
Thus not only does he contemptuously ignore laws enacted by the parliament in which he sits, he declines to view a country that is officially at war with Israel – and whose president publicly threatened just last month to resume hostilities someday – as an enemy state.
Nor is Balad an exception. In November 2000, for instance, Hadash faction chairman MK Muhammad Barakei publicly urged Israeli Arabs to participate in Palestinian violence against Israel. This past January, he declared: “I’m not loyal to the country; the country must be loyal to me.” Similarly, MK Taleb a-Sanaa, of the third Arab party, Ra’am-Ta’al, told the Nazareth-based newspaper Kul al-Arab in 2001 that the leader of Hamas, perpetrator of most anti-Israel suicide bombings, was an “exalted” figure comparable to the Dalai Lama, while Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah – who had kidnapped four Israelis, including three in a cross-border raid, the previous year, five months after Israel withdrew from Lebanon – “deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Civil society leaders are no different. Last month, for instance, Itijah, the union of Arab nongovernmental organizations in Israel, declared the Israeli government “responsible for every drop of blood spilled” in the fighting in Lebanon.
Ahmad Saad, editor of a leading Israeli Arab newspaper, Al-Ittihad, concurred: “I blame only the Israeli government.”
ONE CAN certainly argue that war was the wrong response to Hizbullah’s cross-border raid on July 12. But that Hizbullah was blameless? That violating the international border, killing three Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two – six years after Israel left Lebanon – were completely legitimate acts? Is it surprising that such statements spur anti-Arab sentiment?
Finally, there are the ordinary citizens. Since most Israeli Arabs vote consistently for the three Arab parties, it is hard to argue that they do not share these parties’ views – especially given the Israeli Arab consensus that their MKs are useless on issues such as jobs and housing. In short, voters are not disregarding political rhetoric for the sake of bread-and-butter issues; they are disregarding bread-and-butter issues for the sake of the rhetoric.
Nor is other evidence lacking – like the many Israeli Arabs who called Hizbullah’s Al-Manar television station during the Lebanon war to urge continued missile launches at Israel. Or the harassment and ostracism of those rare families whose sons volunteer for the IDF.
A year after his son was killed in uniform in 2004, for instance, Talal Abu Lil reported suffering “threats, harassment, shooting and even attempts to open his grave…. People simply turned their back on us.” Yusuf Jahjah, whose son was killed in the same incident, agreed: “I feel ostracized, people in the village keep their distance from me… I’m always afraid someone will try to damage his grave.” Samir Shehada, whose son also died in that incident, said: “I’m thinking of moving to a Jewish community in the area. I can no longer live in this atmosphere. I live near the mosque, and after prayer services, people don’t talk to me or shake my hand.”
The three also reported efforts to deny their sons burial in Muslim cemeteries. And all three live in different towns – indicating how widespread these attitudes are.
Put bluntly, many Israeli Arabs cheer armed attacks against Israel, and view the minority who serve in their country’s armed forces as traitors.
Indeed, the community’s official representative, the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, explicitly urges Israeli Arabs not to serve in the IDF, while pointedly refusing to condemn Palestinian terror.
Is it surprising that many Israelis thus view them as a “fifth column”?
Israeli Arabs have some legitimate grievances. But these grievances in no way excuse such virulent hostility toward the state, of which the above examples are merely a sampling. And unless this attitude changes, Jewish support for Eitam’s view of the Israeli Arab community will only continue to grow.
There is, of course, no conceivable justification for such generosity, which could easily run to millions of shekels. The IDF has a sizable legal department; if senior officers prefer advice from the private sector, they should foot the bill themselves.
But it is eminently typical of the way the IDF works: It would rather skimp on military essentials such as reservists’ training and emergency stocks – and then plead poverty – than undertake the unpleasant task of eliminating the fat from its budget in order to free up necessary funds.
While the IDF has no chance of getting the full NIS 30b., the Finance Ministry has already agreed to an extra NIS 6b. in 2006-7. Yet the truth is that the army does not need an extra cent: Its budget, far from shrinking in recent years, is higher now than it was in 2000, and defense is the largest item in the overall government budget after debt servicing. What the IDF does need is to use the funds it has more effectively, by diverting money from unnecessary frills to core functions such as training.
Following, therefore, are a few suggestions for how the IDF could slash expenditures.
• Pensions. This may be the biggest unjustified expenditure in the defense budget. For years, the IDF allowed all employees to retire with full pension at age 45 – fully 20 years earlier than the norm in the civilian world. This is logical for combat soldiers, who need to be in peak physical condition, but makes no sense at all for non-combat soldiers, who in fact constitute the vast majority: In a modern army, the ratio of non-combat to combat troops can be as high as 10:1.
In 2004, the IDF finally bowed to pressure and instituted a reform: Non-combat soldiers would only be able to retire with full pension at 55, while civilian IDF employees would have to wait until 60. At about the same time, however, the retirement age in the rest of the economy was raised to 67 (for men; 62 for women). Thus even after this grand reform, IDF employees with jobs identical to those in the civilian sector can retire with full pension seven to 12 years before their civilian counterparts! Since the IDF’s manpower and budget figures are classified, there is no way of knowing exactly how much this unconscionable perk costs. But judging from pension expenditures in the rest of the public sector, it is clear that the figure runs into the billions.
• Army Radio. This is another money-guzzler. Again, since the figures are classified, there is no way of knowing its exact price tag. But a radio station does not come cheap, even when costs are cut by the use of conscript labor: It requires expensive hi-tech equipment, and Army Radio also employs several stars who earn hefty salaries.
In a modern democracy, there is no conceivable justification for the army to be running one of only two national radio stations (an evil compounded by the fact that the other is run by the government). But this is especially true given that Army Radio is completely civilian in nature: Its mix of news, talk shows and music is identical to that found on non-army stations.
Moreover, abolishing Army Radio would not just save money; it would make money: Airwave frequencies are valuable commodities in the modern world, and Army Radio controls two. These could be auctioned off, and the money used to fund genuine military needs.
• “Sending messages.” This has long been a favorite Israeli “anti-terrorist” tactic: shelling empty fields and bombing empty buildings in order to “send a message” to terrorists about what the IDF could do to them if it so chose. To cite just one example: Between April 20 and July 20 the IDF fired 11,280 artillery shells into “open, uninhabited areas,” according to a letter sent by Defense Minister Amir Peretz to MK Zahava Gal-On (Haaretz, August 28). The letter also noted that each shell costs NIS 2,900. Thus during those three months, the IDF spent NIS 32.7 million just to shell empty fields! This, as Peretz correctly noted, is cheap compared to the cost of sending fighter jets to launch guided missiles. But Israel frequently does that, too – as in its nighttime bombing of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh’s office this July. Nighttime was chosen deliberately so that the office would be empty; Israel simply wanted to “send a message” that it could get Haniyeh if it so desired.
After six years of fighting, however, such messages are pointless. Israel has already killed several Hamas leaders; if this has not convinced other terrorists that they, too, are vulnerable, bombing empty buildings will not help. Similarly, the Palestinians know that Israel has the technology to declare rocket-launching zones “no-go areas” where anyone who enters is shot on sight; the only relevant question is whether Israel is willing to do so – a question that shelling empty fields at best fails to answer, and may even answer in the negative.
Lack of space prevents me from offering several other suggestions. Nevertheless, the list would not be complete without one final proposal: firing every senior economist and accountant in the IDF and the Defense Ministry. Given their apparent inability to come up with these and many similar ideas themselves, they are clearly not worth the salaries that we, the taxpayers, are paying them.
CORRECTION: In last week’s column, after correctly identifying Judge Ron Sokol in the first paragraph, I proceeded to misname him throughout the rest of the piece. My editor and I apologize for the error.
Like most Israeli universities, Haifa has fewer dorm rooms than students, so it allocates the rooms via a point system. Students receive points for various factors: academic achievement, how far from the university they live, their financial situation, physical disabilities, family size, military or civilian national service, and more. The students with the highest totals get the dorms.
Three Arab students and Adalah, an Arab advocacy organization, sued the university over these criteria, arguing that including national service on the list discriminates against Arab students, who usually eschew such service.
The university responded that it was not, heaven forbid, trying to express gratitude or appreciation for those who serve; it was merely trying to compensate for a cold economic fact: People who spend two to three years in unpaid national service are at a financial disadvantage compared to people who could have spent those years working and saving money.
True, the law grants demobilized soldiers certain economic benefits, but those benefits are worth less than even a minimum-wage job would pay over an equivalent period. Thus an 18-year-old Arab high school graduate and a 21-yearold ex-soldier with identical parental incomes are not financially equal; the exsoldier is economically worse off.
Leshem, however, dismissed this argument. If the point of the service criterion is economic, he said, then it should not exist, because service has no inherent connection to financial need. The lost years of earning – i.e. the fact that the 18-year-old Arab and the 21-year-old ex-soldier are not financially equivalent – do not concern him; what does concern him is that even well-off students receive points for military service, thereby, in his eyes, contradicting the financial need criteria. Yet these applicants, too, have sacrificed three years of working life that can never be recovered.
LEST ANYONE have any doubt, Leshem stressed that he would also have deemed the “moral” argument untenable. While governments do have a legitimate interest in encouraging service by offering tangible expressions of appreciation, he wrote, university dorms are not the place to do so (just why universities are the wrong place to inculcate a service ethic is left unexplained). Yet even if they were, he continued, limiting the criteria to “national” service, military or civilian, would be unacceptable, since this would discriminate against applicants who contribute to society in unspecified “other ways.”
Leshem also accepted Adalah’s argument that the law already specifies the full range of financial benefits to which ex-soldiers are entitled, and the university has no right to add to this list. This, as the university noted, is a strange argument: The law also grants various economic benefits to, for instance, the poor and the handicapped, yet no one would argue that these benefits are exhaustive, and that state-funded universities should therefore be barred from considering financial need or physical disability when allocating dorm space. It is hard to explain why demobilized soldiers should be the only legal category subject to this restriction. BUT THE most outrageous part of the ruling was Leshem’s finding that even absent all these other issues, the service criterion would still be illegal, because it discriminates against Arabs.
Had the criterion been limited to military service, this judgment would have been understandable: The army is not open to most Arabs, and penalizing people for failing to do something that they have no legal way of doing would indeed be discriminatory.
However, as Leshem himself noted, civilian national service is open to Arabs, and “more than a few” choose to participate in it. Nevertheless, he wrote, this criterion is discriminatory, because “the lion’s share of the Arab public does not participate in either military service or national service.”
In other words, because the bulk of the Arab public freely chooses not to contribute to the state via national service, state-funded institutions such as Haifa University may not reward Arabs and Jews who do contribute in this manner!
But the ruling is even worse than that – because not only does the Arab public largely avoid national service, it has fought tooth and nail against repeated government initiatives to eliminate this “discrimination.”
Currently, while military service is compulsory for those subject to the draft, civilian national service is voluntary. Moreover, since most volunteers have traditionally been religious Zionist women, most national service programs are aimed at this group; space in other programs is limited, and acceptance is not guaranteed. (Someone who applied and was rejected would thus obviously have solid grounds for claiming discrimination; however, the plaintiffs never applied.)
To resolve this problem, successive governments have discussed instituting either mandatory national service for everyone not subject to the draft, or an expanded voluntary program with sufficient space for everyone exempt from the army. Yet every time this idea arose, it was scrapped due to vehement opposition from Israeli Arab leaders.
Thus Leshem’s verdict, far from eliminating discrimination, actually creates a far worse type of discrimination: By declaring that service and non-service deserve equal benefits, it effectively replaces “discrimination” against those who do not serve with discrimination against those who do. And it thereby actively rewards communal shirking.
In an ideal world, this travesty of a verdict would be overturned on appeal. However, given the Supreme Court’s track record, that seems highly unlikely. Therefore, the Knesset must act to rectify this outrage: It should immediately pass legislation explicitly authorizing state-funded institutions to grant preferential treatment to those who serve.
Otherwise, Brigade 551 will have every right to feel that not just Leshem, but the entire government is spitting in its face.
But the problem goes far beyond Hizbullah. Oil revenues finance virtually every physical threat that Israel faces, from Palestinian suicide bombers (Teheran sends money to all the Palestinian terror groups) to Syrian missiles to Iran’s nuclear program. Clearly, these threats would not disappear if the oil money dried up; fanatics throughout history have proven willing to pursue their goals even at enormous financial sacrifice. But success is much less likely when money is scarce.
Moreover, oil accounts for a substantial portion of Arab/Iranian diplomatic clout. Again, this clout would not disappear if oil did; sheer numbers give the Muslim world influence independent of economic power, and Muslim extremists’ willingness to launch terror attacks against countries that defy their demands significantly magnifies this influence. Nevertheless, Arab/Iranian clout depends partly on their control of a vital economic resource. Absent the oil weapon, Israel would have a much better chance of winning diplomatic support from rising powers such as China and India, which have no inherent quarrel with it and considerable interest in technological cooperation, but currently subordinate most other considerations to their urgent need for oil to fuel their growing economies.
THERE IS, of course, one obvious explanation for Israel’s neglect of the oil problem: However desirable reducing global oil consumption might be, Israel has little power over this issue. Granted, it could reduce its own oil consumption, and ought to do so for purely economic reasons: This would free up valuable funds for other purposes. But even a radical Israeli cutback in consumption would barely be felt on global markets. Israel is simply too small.
Nevertheless, Israel can do two things that might make a genuine difference.
First, while Israel is not a population powerhouse, it is a research and development powerhouse. It leads the world in the number of start-ups and scientific papers per capita, and ranks third in the number of patents per capita. And it already has a history of contributions to alternative energy development: Luz, for instance, was a pioneer in the field of solar power, and Ormat is a world leader in geothermal energy.
Nevertheless, the government could do more to encourage innovative research in this field. It could, for instance, announce that promising initiatives in alternative energy will be given first priority in its annual allocation of R&D grants to the private sector. It could offer a hefty cash prize to the person who comes up with the most promising development in this field within a given time period. It could devote some of its own research budget to alternative energy. And it could also launch a campaign to explain the importance of such research, with the goal of persuading more bright young Israelis to devote their talents to this field.
Second, Israel is in a unique position to influence the world’s leading oil guzzler – the United States.
Obviously, this is not a topic for state-to-state relations. Jerusalem has no business telling Washington how to manage domestic policy, and oil, for all its enormous foreign policy implications, is primarily a domestic issue in America.
However, Israel could urge the American Jewish community to lobby for measures that would reduce oil consumption and/or encourage alternative energy research. Thanks to its funding and organization, American Jewry punches far above its numerical weight in the lobbying business. Moreover, it is overwhelmingly liberal – which means that alternative energy is a cause that could be enthusiastically embraced even by parts of the community that shun more traditional pro-Israel lobbying.
INDEED, SUCH an initiative might have the added benefit of helping Israel to reconnect with segments of American Jewry that have been alienated by Jerusalem’s anti-terror policies. These policies have sharply reduced Israeli casualties over the past four years, and Israel neither can nor should placate liberal American Jews by scrapping measures that save Israeli lives. However, neither should it stand idly by as American Jews’ connection to Zionism slowly withers. A pro-Israel cause that liberal Jews could embrace could be useful in bridging the gap.
For this reason, Israel should not ask politically unidentified organizations such as AIPAC, which are needed for support on other issues, to lead this campaign. Instead, it should turn to overtly liberal organizations such as the Reform and Conservative movements. Both movements’ leaders genuinely care about Israel, yet their liberal views sometimes make them uncomfortable backing it, while rallying support for Israel among their equally liberal but less committed memberships is often even more difficult. Thus a pro-Israel cause that their members could support might come as a welcome gift.
And the time to make such an overture is now – before the across-the-board support that American Jews gave Israel during its war with Hizbullah has completely dissipated. Indeed, this initiative could justly be described as a political effort to reduce the chances of another such war in the future.
The war achieved almost nothing militarily, and its alleged diplomatic gains are already collapsing: Not only are there few volunteers for the proposed international force in Lebanon, but the UN, the Lebanese Army and all potential contributors to this force have already explicitly vowed not to try to disarm Hizbullah. This may be a last chance to nevertheless salvage something from the fiasco. The government would be wise to seize it.
This is not, as some claimed, because Israel had no right to go to war. Hizbullah is openly committed to Israel’s destruction. It spent the last six years, as organization leader Hassan Nasrallah told a press conference on July 12, arming itself to the teeth for the sole purpose of fighting Israel. And it did so despite Israel’s UN-certified withdrawal from every inch of Lebanese territory in 2000. Under these circumstances, there is no way to interpret Hizbullah’s deadly cross-border raid on July 12 except as an act of war. And Israel had every right to respond by trying to eradicate this deadly threat now, rather than waiting until Hizbullah was even more entrenched, better armed and harder to defeat.
Nor, as others claimed, is it because any act that Israel committed – or even all of them put together – was unjustified. All were legitimate military actions that any army would deem essential in wartime. Aerial and naval blockades, for instance, are standard military practice, aimed at disrupting the enemy’s arms supply. So is bombing the enemy’s command headquarters, as Israel did with Hizbullah’s headquarters in Beirut’s Dahiya quarter. So is bombing individual trucks thought to be carrying weapons – even if civilian trucks are sometimes mistakenly hit instead. And so is trying to bomb the launchers that daily fired hundreds of rockets at Israel – even if, again, some bombs accidentally hit civilian targets instead.
However, all these acts are legitimate only in service of a legitimate military aim. And it turns out that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert never had any military aims – or, more accurately, he never had any intention of doing what was necessary to achieve them.
NO SANE person, for instance, would say that stopping deadly rocket fire on civilian population centers is an illegitimate military goal. And early on, it became clear that aerial bombardment alone could not achieve this, as Olmert and IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz had foolishly hoped. From that point, military planners were unanimous about what was needed: a major ground operation to push Hizbullah’s short-range rockets out of range of Israel (according to the army, long-range rockets actually can be dealt with largely from the air). Scarcely a day passed without some senior officer explaining this to the press; not one ever proposed an alternative solution.
YET OLMERT refused to order such an operation. Instead, he approved only small-scale operations near the border – which, incidentally, increased Israel’s casualties by effectively negating the IDF’s numerical advantage over Hizbullah. Thus we witnessed the incredible sight of Defense Minister Amir Peretz telling the Knesset on August 7 – 26 days after the war began – that “if, within the coming days, the diplomatic process does not reach a conclusion, Israeli forces will carry out the operations necessary to take control of Katyusha rocket launching sites in every location.”
In other words, Peretz openly admitted that until then, Israel had not been doing what was needed to achieve this. So what exactly were its military operations meant to achieve?
Similarly, no sane person would argue that hitting Hizbullah hard enough to ensure that it can no longer threaten Israel is an illegitimate military aim – particularly as there was virtually unanimous recognition, both in Israel and abroad, that neither the Lebanese Army nor any international force would be willing to undertake this task. And here, too, once the initial fighting had amply disproved Halutz’s fantasy that this was doable by air power alone, military planners were unanimous: Israeli troops had to advance to the Litani River, seal off south Lebanon and begin a slow search-and-destroy mission of the area in order to eliminate Hizbullah’s bunkers, arms caches, communications centers and fighting force.
However, Olmert refused to order such an operation – until, bizarrely, this past Friday, when the UN Security Council was already finalizing the cease-fire that took effect Monday morning. By that time, the move had no chance of success: Military planners said it would take at least three days to reach the Litani and two weeks to conduct the search-and-destroy mission, and the course of the fighting until then indicated that both figures were likely to prove underestimates. And indeed, few units managed to reach the Litani before the cease-fire, while the army had no time at all for search-and-destroy missions.
SO WHAT exactly were the military goals that justified all the death and destruction on both sides? Granted, one goal was ostensibly achieved: an agreement to deploy the Lebanese Army and a beefed-up international force in south Lebanon. However, that was supposed to happen after Israel had sufficiently degraded Hizbullah’s capabilities to enable these forces to assume control. Instead, Hizbullah’s capabilities are still largely intact – and since, as noted above, everyone admits that these forces are neither willing nor able to disarm Hizbullah themselves, it is hard to see how this constitutes an achievement. On the contrary: It will only make it harder for Israel to take military action when Hizbullah launches the inevitable next war.
And then there is what Olmert repeatedly termed the “strategic surprise” of the war: the Israeli public’s willingness to absorb hundreds of rockets a day without folding. But to demonstrate Israel’s ability to endure civilian casualties, it was not necessary to kill a single Lebanese, drop a single bomb or send a single soldier into Lebanon. For that, Ariel Sharon’s famous comment that “restraint is strength” would have sufficed.
For a country that many still seek to erase from the map, war will unfortunately sometimes be necessary. This was one of those times, and Olmert’s decision to go to war was in principle justified. But thanks to his refusal to actually fight the war once he declared it, 159 Israelis and hundreds of Lebanese ended up dying for nothing. And that is unforgivable.
At the time, our fatalities in Lebanon averaged 20 to 25 soldiers a year. In the four weeks since the current fighting began, Israel has suffered 102 fatalities – the equivalent of four to five years worth of fighting in Lebanon before the withdrawal. Granted, only 63 of these casualties have been soldiers; the rest have been civilians. But that hardly seems an improvement.
Moreover, unlike our 18-year occupation of south Lebanon, this war has been fought largely on the home front, with consequently enormous economic and human costs. The north’s economy has been virtually shut down for four weeks (and counting). Many small businesses have been so damaged that they will never reopen. Some 1.5 million residents of the north have either become internal refugees or been forced to spend four miserable weeks in bomb shelters. And some have lost their homes entirely in rocket strikes.
By comparison, the costs of staying in south Lebanon no longer look so steep. And in fact, they never would have, had they been calculated correctly. Unfortunately, the decision to withdraw from Lebanon suffered from the same flaws that afflict far too many Israeli foreign policy decisions: failure to take the other side’s motives and perceptions into account, and an obsession with preventing short-term casualties.
THE THEORY behind the Lebanon pullout was that once Israel withdrew, Lebanon would have no further quarrel with Israel, so hostilities would cease. Unfortunately, this theory ignored several salient and well-known facts. First, Hizbullah was armed and financed – and therefore heavily influenced – by Iran and Syria, neither of which concealed their continued hostility to Israel. Second, Hizbullah itself declared periodically that hostilities were justified as long as Israel occupied any Arab land – and it defined all of Israel as “occupied territory.”
Third, Lebanon was controlled by Syria, and was therefore powerless to suppress Hizbullah against Syria’s will even had most Lebanese wanted to do so (at that time, no one envisioned Syria’s later ouster). Fourth, Lebanon was still traumatized by the 15-year civil war that had ended only 10 years earlier, and was therefore unlikely to risk another by trying to forcibly disarm Hizbullah even if it regained its independence.
Given all this, the outcome was predictable: As Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah told a news conference on July 12, the organization began preparing for war against Israel from the moment Israel left Lebanon. With the Israel Defense Forces no longer there to disrupt its supply lines, it massively expanded its arsenal, acquiring sophisticated antitank missiles and 12,000 to 14,000 rockets from Syria and Iran.
Absent the IDF, it was also able to deploy its rockets near the border, thereby bringing much more of Israel into range than had been the case previously. Haifa, for instance, suffered not a single rocket strike during Israel’s 18 years in Lebanon – but over the last month, it has been battered repeatedly. Additionally, Hizbullah built a network of fortified bunkers near the border, which have greatly increased IDF casualties in the current fighting.
Israel also forfeited two other assets by leaving Lebanon. One was the South Lebanon Army, whose soldiers fought alongside the IDF for 18 years. Today, having abandoned the SLA to Hizbullah’s tender mercies, Israel is fighting alone. The second was its intelligence network, which shrunk drastically following the withdrawal – both because Israel could no longer offer Lebanese agents either the benefits or the protection that it could when the IDF was present, and because much intelligence had come from the now defunct SLA.
ALL OF the above meant that when hostilities did resume – as Hizbullah’s known goals and allegiances made it inevitable that they would – they exacted a far higher price than they had before the withdrawal.
Even worse, however, was Israel’s disregard for how the rest of the Arab world would perceive a unilateral withdrawal. This perception was no secret, since numerous Arab spokesmen, newspapers and opinion polls proclaimed it: that Israel could be defeated by inflicting enough casualties over a long enough time. But Israeli proponents of withdrawal insisted that Arab perceptions did not matter.
Unfortunately, they do matter – as became evident just four months later, when the intifada erupted. Palestinian terrorists and their supporters said openly that Israel’s retreat from Lebanon encouraged them to believe that Hizbullah’s tactics would work for them as well. The result was a six-year terrorist war that left over 1,000 Israelis dead, most of them civilians – the equivalent of 40 years worth of casualties in south Lebanon.
But this costly misreading of Arab motives and perceptions did not emerge in a vacuum. Rather, it was encouraged by an obsessive preoccupation with short-term casualties. The message of pro-withdrawal movements such as Four Mothers – which ultimately convinced most Israelis to support the pullout – was “leave Lebanon now, so that your son will not die there tomorrow.” That is a message of unarguable emotional power. And it made people want to believe that withdrawing would have no negative long-term consequences, despite the evidence to the contrary.
This same pattern repeated itself five years later in Gaza: Obsessed with a desire to end the casualties in Gaza now, Israelis supported disengagement despite the fact that Palestinian spokesmen and opinion polls trumpeted it as proof that terrorism works, and that organizations like Hamas openly proclaimed Israel’s eradication as their goal. And the results have been similar: Kassam rocket fire on Israel from Gaza intensified, and according to Israeli intelligence, more lethal weaponry is pouring into Gaza at a furious rate.
This combination – an obsessive focus on preventing short-term casualties, coupled with disregard of the enemy’s motives and perceptions – will always produce disastrous long-term consequences. It is therefore past time for Israelis to face up to the unpleasant truth: There is nothing good about losing 25 soldiers a year. But if the alternative is far greater losses in the future, it is nevertheless a price worth paying.
So let me restate it: In war, mistakes are not merely possible, they are inevitable. They are an inseparable part of the price of going to war. And they do not make a justified war any less legitimate.
Mistakes happen because wars, despite all the fancy hi-tech equipment, are still fought by human beings. And human beings are not infallible. “Precision” bombing, for instance, depends for its precision on accurate information about the target. And that information is usually obtained, analyzed and transmitted by human beings.
By any reasonable standard Israel’s intelligence agencies are outstanding. They manage, for instance, to obtain accurate advance information about an overwhelming majority of suicide bombing attempts, thereby enabling the security services to foil some 90 percent of all such attempts. No other country facing a similar campaign of suicide bombings has come close to matching this record.
Nevertheless, “outstanding” is not the same as “perfect.” Perfection is not an attainable standard in a business that depends on human beings. Agents can only pass on what they know and, being human, they do not know everything.
Moreover, being human, they have no foolproof mechanism for differentiating fact from fiction – which means that even the best agents are sometimes fooled by the enemy’s efforts at disinformation and concealment, and pass on false information in the belief that it is true.
When possible, information is cross-checked against other sources. But sometimes there are no other sources. And sometimes the other sources have also been fooled.
Therefore, mistakes happen. Buildings are identified as arms caches when, in fact, the arms are elsewhere. Trucks thought to be carrying weapons turn out to be carrying food. And buildings where civilians are sheltering from aerial bombardment in the basement are reported as being empty.
By any reasonable standard, Israel’s air force is also laudable. It has flown tens of thousands of missions, with a high rate of success. But for all the hi-tech gadgetry in a modern fighter jet, pilots also matter: That is why planes still have them.
And pilots are human beings. They get tired; they suffer momentary lapses of concentration; they misunderstand orders. This is especially true when they are exhausted from flying thousands of sorties in just under three weeks, as has been the case in the current fighting in Lebanon. And so, they sometimes make mistakes.
THE KANA bombing, whether due to flawed intelligence or pilot error, was a terrible mistake. Not only were there many civilians in the building, the building apparently had no connection with Hizbullah. But the fact that this particular mistake had tragic consequences does not mean there is something “wrong” with either our intelligence services or our air force, as many Israelis charged this week.
Too many mistakes would indeed indicate a problem. But some number of mistakes, however tragic, is inevitable in any enterprise involving human beings.
There has never been an error-free war in the history of the universe, and there never will be. If war is permissible only if it can be waged with zero errors, then this is the equivalent of saying that war is never permissible at all.
Thus the idea that the Kana bombing somehow affects the justice of Israel’s war on Hizbullah is ridiculous. If a war is justified at all, it is justified not on the assumption that there will be no mistakes, but because the goals of the war are sufficiently important to warrant the price of waging it – including the inevitable mistakes.
Some of those mistakes, as has already happened several times in Lebanon, will kill our own soldiers, either through “friendly fire” or through accidents. And some will result in the unplanned and undesired deaths of enemy civilians. Incidentally, wars are also almost always disproportionate – because that is how they are won.
If both sides simply exchange carefully calibrated tit-for-tat blows, a conflict can go on forever. Wars are won when one side applies enough force to make the other yield – which means that the loser usually (though not always) suffers greater casualties, greater destruction of physical infrastructure, and greater economic harm.
Thus to say that a war must be “proportionate” is to say that it is forbidden ever to win – which, in turn, is a surefire recipe for prolonging the conflict ad infinitum.
Given that mistakes and disproportionality are inevitable, is Israel nevertheless justified in fighting Hizbullah? If you believe that nations ever have the right to wage war in defense of their citizens, the answer is unquestionably yes.
It is not just that Hizbullah started this war, launching a deadly cross-border raid with no provocation and no conceivable justification, given Israel’s UN-certified withdrawal from every last inch of Lebanese land six years earlier.
Hizbullah is also unabashedly dedicated to Israel’s destruction. It is armed and financed by the Iranians, who openly call for Israel’s eradication.
And in the six years since Israel withdrew from Lebanon, it has built up a network of border fortifications, sophisticated command and control centers and a huge arsenal, including 12,000 to 14,000 rockets, all for the exclusive purpose of being used against Israel.
As Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah openly told a news conference on July 12, his organization started preparing for war against Israel from the moment Israel quit Lebanon.
These days, of course, many “enlightened” Westerners argue that war is never justified. If a country is attacked, they believe, it must either refrain from responding altogether, or confine its response to an attack of equal magnitude, leaving the enemy’s offensive capabilities unimpaired. Then it must meekly await the next attack.
But anyone who believes that countries have a right and duty to protect their citizens must learn to live with the following truths: Eliminating a threat usually requires a “disproportionate” response. And the execution will never be error-free.
According to Haaretz, the proposal calls for an immediate, unconditional cease-fire, followed later by implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which mandates Hizbullah’s disarmament and the deployment of the Lebanese army along the Israel-Lebanon border.
However, there are two catches: Resolution 1559 would be implemented only via negotiations among the various Lebanese factions, and only if Israel agrees to withdraw from a small piece of land called Shaba Farms.
Conditioning the resolution’s implementation on the agreement of all Lebanese factions, including Hizbullah, virtually guarantees that it will never be implemented at all.
These factions have already been conducting a so-called “national dialogue” on this issue for a year, yet far from producing progress toward Hizbullah’s disarmament, Hizbullah’s arsenal has grown steadily during this period.
There is no reason to believe that another round of “national dialogue” would end any differently: Not only would Hizbullah certainly veto its own disarmament; the other Lebanese factions seem unlikely even to press very hard, given their unanimous public defense over the last two weeks of Hizbullah’s “right” to attack Israel.
EVEN MORE serious, however, is the proposal that Hizbullah’s disarmament be conditioned on an Israeli withdrawal from Shaba Farms, thereby rendering meaningless the UN’s own certification, just six years ago, that Israel had withdrawn from every last inch of Lebanese territory.
This certification, unanimously issued by the UN Security Council following Israel’s pullout from Lebanon in May 2000, was based on the recommendation of UN experts who carefully studied old maps of the border and compared them to Israel’s withdrawal line.
However, Hizbullah rejected the UN’s determination, claiming that an additional bit of land, Shaba Farms, was also Lebanese (the UN experts deemed this land Syrian). Therefore, it announced, it had every right to continue attacking Israel in order to “liberate” Shaba Farms.
SUCCESSIVE Lebanese governments – both the former Syrian-controlled government and the new government elected following Syria’s ouster from Lebanon – promptly backed this claim, and the international media followed suit: Within months, the UN determination that Shaba Farms was not Lebanese had virtually disappeared from coverage of the region; instead, the area was referred to as “disputed territory.”
Now the Saudi-Lebanese-French proposal seeks to reverse the UN’s finding entirely: By declaring that Israel must withdraw from additional territory before Beirut is obliged to take the steps needed to stop attacks against Israel from Lebanon, it essentially implies that Israel is still occupying part of Lebanon, and therefore continued attacks against it are justified.
Moreover, the UN itself appears to be backing this proposal: While UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has not (as of this writing) formally thrown his weight behind it, the UN delegation that he sent to the region last week to draft recommendations on ending the fighting reportedly told him that the Shaba Farms issue must be resolved as part of any deal, since otherwise Hizbullah would continue using it as a pretext to attack Israel.
IF THE international community gives into this Hizbullah blackmail it will decisively preclude peace in the Middle East for decades to come – because it will ensure that no deal is actually final. Instead, each agreement will merely be the starting point for a new round of territorial claims.
Clearly, Israel would have no incentive to withdraw from additional territory under these circumstances.
The point of withdrawing fully to a recognized international border is to (a) eliminate the other country’s reasons for hostilities and (b) ensure the international community’s backing should the other country nevertheless continue hostilities. If instead, the international community decides that continued attacks against Israel are grounds for redrawing the recognized international border in the aggressor’s favor, such withdrawals are not only pointless from Israel’s standpoint, they are actually counterproductive, simply inviting further territorial losses, salami-style.
Even more importantly, a Hizbullah victory over Shaba Farms would completely eliminate the incentive for other countries to ensure that radical organizations within their borders keep the peace with Israel.
Why should they, if a mere six years of laying claim to a new bit of territory, accompanied by sporadic guerrilla and/or terror attacks against Israel, are sufficient to get the international community to back the new claim?
This is particularly true given that even in countries that have signed treaties with Israel, hatred for Israel remains intense.
A Pew Global Research poll from June 2003, for instance, found that 85 percent of Jordanians, 80% of Palestinians and 90% of Moroccans believe that “the rights and needs of Palestinians” cannot be met unless Israel is eradicated. (This poll did not include Egypt, but other polls show similar anti-Israel sentiment in that country.)
Thus if Hizbullah’s tactic proves successful, it will be a win-win proposition for every government in the Middle East: They can simultaneously satisfy their populations by allowing hostilities with Israel to continue, retain international backing and support by pleading inability to control the radicals, and expand their borders at Israel’s expense into the bargain by claiming that additional Israeli concessions are needed to persuade the radicals to stop fighting.
WHEN ISRAEL left Lebanon in 2000 it obtained the most binding international certification possible that it had withdrawn fully. By declaring that Israel must nevertheless make further territorial concessions in order to end cross-border aggression from Lebanon, the Saudi-French-Lebanese proposal effectively overturns the longstanding UN principle that acquiring territory through force is unacceptable and legitimizes such cross-border aggression as a means of achieving territorial goals.
Thus unless the rest of the international community decisively rejects the idea of conditioning Hizbullah’s disarmament and the Lebanese army’s redeployment on an Israeli withdrawal from Shaba Farms, the Lebanese cease-fire deal will prove the death knell of Middle East peace for many years to come.