Uncategorized
Someone unfamiliar with Israeli politics might think the decision to free 104 Palestinian murderers became inevitable only once the cabinet approved it last week. Those more familiar with Israel’s political dynamics might date it a few weeks earlier, to whenever US Secretary of State John Kerry shamefully decided to demand that Israel do something America would never do itself.
But in truth, it has been inevitable for years – at least since October 20, 2010, which is when I first heard Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu say that Israel couldn’t “survive in the long run without a political settlement.” For once a prime minister convinces himself that the country’s very survival depends on an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, the inexorable consequence is that almost no concession is too high to pay for a deal, or even for the faintest chance of one. He’ll obviously try to get the best deal he can. But ultimately, he’ll feel justified in crawling to any Palestinian demand, even one as wildly unpopular as the prisoner release, to save Israel from the doom he foresees.
And if left unchecked, he and other adherents of this view will end up causing the very destruction they seek to avoid.
When Netanyahu first made that statement, I hoped it was mere lip service to what he perceived as the world’s demands. It was still a stupid and dangerous thing to say, but it didn’t seem to be guiding his policies; he was doing a creditable job of defending traditional Israeli red lines in the face of a hostile White House and an even more hostile Europe.
But as time passed, he began warning with growing frequency and urgency that an agreement was essential to keep Israel from becoming a bi-national state. In short, he began acting like a true believer. And because true believers in this theory necessarily consider almost any price worth paying for an agreement, every premier who has adopted this view has gradually retreated from one red line after another, just as Netanyahu did last week with the prisoner release – something he had hitherto consistently and rightly opposed.
A prisoner release has numerous harmful consequences. Inter alia, it encourages terrorism, both because 60% of freed prisoners resume terrorist activity and because it teaches others that however heinous their crimes, they needn’t fear spending long in jail if caught. It undermines public faith in the justice system by subjecting Jewish and Palestinian murderers to vastly different rules. It’s devastating for the terror victims and their families; and it encourages Palestinian intransigence in negotiations by showing they can extort concessions from Israel even without giving anything in return. In this case, a concession usually given only as part of a final peace treaty was granted just for agreeing to attend talks that are ostensibly in the Palestinians’ own interests, since only Israel can give them the state they claim to want.
But if you believe the state’s very survival is at stake, these consequences obviously look negligible in comparison. “Our survival depends on it” is a very powerful argument.
Nevertheless, this approach has one fatal flaw: it hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of working. For if Israel is really doomed without an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, then the Palestinians have every incentive in the world to refuse to sign one.
After all, why would anyone settle for a measly little state in the West Bank and Gaza if just standing pat a while longer would eventually give them Israel, too? If the situation were reversed – if Israelis were convinced that just standing pat would enable us to keep Judea and Samaria while remaining a Jewish and democratic state – we’d do exactly the same. It’s only because most Israelis have become convinced this isn’t possible that they support a two-state solution.
Palestinians, however, truly believe that Israel will disappear if they just stand pat – because senior Israeli politicians tell them so every day. That’s precisely why they’ve refused every Israeli offer to date, even ones, like former prime minister Ehud Olmert’s, that ostensibly met all their territorial demands: the 1967 lines with minor and equivalent land swaps, along with Arab neighborhoods of aast Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and even the Western Wall (the latter two under an international administration in which Israel would be outvoted by three Arab states, including Palestine). Remember how Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas responded to that offer? “The gaps were wide.”
That’s also why Palestinians have never agreed to forgo the one price no Israeli leader could pay for a deal: the “right of return,” aka an influx of millions of Palestinians who would turn the Jewish state into a Palestinian-majority one. For if the goal is to save Israel from destruction, an agreement that mandates its destruction as part of the deal is obviously pointless.
In short, if Israel is really finished without an agreement, then it’s finished, period: the Palestinians will never rescue it by signing one.
Hence the only strategy that has any hope of ensuring the state’s long-term survival is the one practiced by all Israeli leaders prior to the 1993 Oslo Accords: acting on the assumption that peace, though desirable, isn’t any more necessary for Israel’s survival than it has been for the past 65 years. That means doing everything we can, in every field – diplomacy, defense, economics, education, social policy and more – to prepare the state to survive and thrive even without peace.
This strategy has absolutely no downside, because even if the assumption that peace isn’t necessary for survival proves wrong, acting on it can’t doom Israel any more certainly than acting on the opposite assumption would. And if it’s right, Israel will be much better prepared to cope with the lack of peace.
In fact, this strategy may even make peace more likely – because once the Palestinians are convinced that holding out won’t make Israel disappear, they, too, will have an incentive to compromise.
Netanyahu used to understand this very well. But perhaps he has been in office too long. For power, as we know, corrupts. And in his case, what it seems to have corrupted most of all, is his formerly clear-sighted vision.
As I noted yesterday, the coming months will be decisive with regard to Iran’s nuclear program. This is an issue on which everyone would prefer if crunch time were never reached. But if a showdown must come, the timing couldn’t be more fortuitous–because it’s impossible to imagine a better geostrategic moment for military action against Iran than now.
One of the biggest concerns that opponents of military action in both Israel and America have always raised is the havoc Iran could wreak in response an attack. For Israelis, the main fear is massive missile attacks by both Iran and its allies; for Washington, the main concern is Iran’s ability to disrupt oil trade from the Gulf and attack American allies in that region.
But thanks to the Syrian civil war, the threat of Iranian retaliation has been dramatically reduced. Partly, of course, that’s because two of Iran’s principal allies, Syria and Hezbollah, are too preoccupied with that war to be able to mount serious reprisals against anyone. But even more importantly, the tremendous importance Iran attaches to Syria gives both Israel and America a powerful lever with which to restrain any Iranian reprisals.
Iran has poured billions of dollars and thousands of crack fighters–from Hezbollah, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, and its own Revolutionary Guards Corps–into propping up Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria, because it deems Assad’s survival strategically vital. As one senior Iranian cleric explained in February, “Syria is the 35th province [of Iran] and a strategic province for us. If the enemy attacks us and wants to take either Syria or Khuzestan [in western Iran], the priority for us is to keep Syria….If we keep Syria, we can get Khuzestan back too, but if we lose Syria, we cannot keep Tehran.”
And so far, the effort seems to be working. Assad’s forces have dealt the Syrian rebels several serious blows recently; they retook the strategic town of Qusair in June and made significant gains this week in the rebel stronghold of Homs. Whether the current constellation of forces opposing Assad can reverse this tide on their own is an open question.
But there are two players who have thus far chosen to sit out the game who are definitely capable of swinging the war in the rebels’ favor: America and Israel. Both have the capacity to mount airstrikes that would destroy Assad’s air force and tanks, which have hitherto given him a huge advantage over the rebels. And both could make it clear to Iran that they would do so if its reprisals crossed any red lines.
Though America has the military might to threaten Iran directly, Syria is a much easier target, with the added bonus that any such operation would be immensely popular with its Arab allies. Hence for Washington, the ability to threaten Syria lowers the cost of deterring Iran. Israel, in contrast, lacks the military capacity to threaten Iran directly with anything bigger than a targeted operation against its military facilities. Thus for Jerusalem, the ability to threaten Syria is the difference between having almost no deterrence against Iranian reprisals and having very substantial deterrence.
That Syria’s civil war erupted when it did was pure serendipity. But knowing how to take advantage of serendipity has always been a crucial element of statesmanship.
The best argument I’ve yet seen for bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities imminently is a chilling new report from the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security saying that by the middle of next year, Iran will have reached “critical capability”–the ability to build a nuclear bomb completely undetected. In other words, by mid-2014, it will be impossible to mount a last-minute effort to stop Iran from sprinting for the bomb because, as the Jerusalem Post explains, “breakout times at critical capability would be ‘so short’ that there would not be enough time to organize an international diplomatic or military response.” This would be true even if Iran agrees to heightened scrutiny through measures such as remote monitoring and more frequent on-site inspections.
But aside from warning that time is running out, the ISIS report also undercuts some of the arguments made against military action, such as that nobody can be sure all of Iran’s nuclear facilities have been discovered, and hence an attack could easily miss some. And it particularly demolishes the main argument against a solo Israeli attack: that Israel lacks the capability to inflict enough damage on Iran’s nuclear program to set it back significantly.
That’s because the key component of critical capability is simply the number of centrifuges in operation. The more centrifuges Iran has, the faster it can enrich enough uranium for a bomb, so as soon as it has enough centrifuges, it will also have the ability to enrich enough uranium for a bomb faster than military action can be mounted to stop it. According to ISIS, the 3,000 advanced centrifuges that Iran announced plans to install earlier this year would be enough to give it this capability.
What that means, however, is that even if an attack doesn’t destroy every last bit of Iran’s nuclear program, as long as it destroys enough centrifuges to push Iran away from critical capability, this would suffice to prevent it from racing for the bomb undetected.
Clearly, that isn’t as good as permanently eliminating the program. But given the choice between buying a little more time and accepting the inevitability of a nuclear Iran, buying time is clearly preferable.
I’ve argued before that buying time is often more effective than commonly thought; Israel’s 1981 bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor–which set Iraq’s nuclear program back just long enough for the 1991 Gulf War to finish the job–is a case in point. But buying time would be especially effective in this case, for the simple reason that an attack would convince Iran of something it currently doesn’t believe: that either the U.S., Israel, or both will prove to be serious about preventing it from obtaining nukes, even if doing so requires military action. And once convinced of that, Iran is less likely to rush to rebuild its capabilities.
ISIS, incidentally, doesn’t argue for bombing Iran; it argues for negotiating an immediate agreement “limiting the number and type of Iran’s centrifuges at Natanz, Fordow, or a site not yet finished.” But given Iran’s past history of dragging out negotiations ad infinitum without ever reaching a deal, the chances of reaching an agreement like that in enough time to stop it from obtaining critical capability are almost nil.
In short, either military action is taken in the coming months, or a nuclear Iran will be inevitable. There is no more time to waste.
The sweeping haredi victory in last week’s Chief Rabbinate elections is being
portrayed as a devastating defeat for the religious Zionist community in
general, and for Naftali Bennett in particular as head of the Bayit Yehudi
party, which represents this community. In one sense, that’s true: In the races
for both Ashkenazi and Sephardi chief rabbis, the winning candidate received
only a plurality of the electoral panel’s votes – 68 out of 147. Thus had the
religious Zionist community been able to unite behind a single Ashkenazi
candidate instead of splitting its votes between two, that candidate might have
won. Similarly, had it chosen a Sephardi candidate with broad appeal rather than
one who repelled moderate electors because of his history of anti-Arab remarks,
such a candidate might have won the votes that went instead to the moderate haredi rabbi who placed third. And since the chief rabbis serve 10-year terms,
religious Zionists have squandered a once-in-a-decade
opportunity.Nevertheless, Bennett still holds cards that enable him to
make this loss a tactical setback rather than a strategic defeat. The question
is whether he’s willing to play them – and whether he can mobilize the requisite
support from his own party and his coalition partners.
That the new European Union directives published last week will further undermine prospects for peace talks has been amply discussed: The Palestinians obviously have no incentive to compromise with Israel if they think the EU will pressure it to make concessions for free. But in their zeal to determine Israel’s borders for it, EU bureaucrats also overlooked another tiny detail – a minor impediment called the law. This has nothing to do with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s “intransigence” or his “right-wing” government; the problem would apply equally to a left-wing government: In a democratic country governed by the rule of law, the government cannot simply pretend the law doesn’t exist, even if it wants to.
The directives bar the EU from funding or cooperating with Israeli entities that conduct activity in the West Bank, Golan Heights or east Jerusalem. They also state that any new agreement signed with Israel should “endeavor” to include a clause stipulating that these areas aren’t part of the State of Israel and therefore aren’t covered by the agreement.
With regard to the West Bank, that’s actually true. The West Bank is the Jewish people’s historic heartland, and all Israeli governments want to retain parts of it under any future peace agreement, but Israel has never officially annexed it.
Under Israeli law, however, the Golan Heights and east Jerusalem are legally part of Israel. There’s even a law on the books barring the government from ceding these areas or ending the application of Israeli law there without approval from two-thirds of the Knesset or a popular referendum. Consequently, no government could sign a document asserting that these areas aren’t part of the state; doing so would violate Israeli law. Even if the move somehow survived a court challenge (which it might; Israel’s Supreme Court is adept at finding ways to make the law say whatever our left-leaning justices want it to say), it would cause the government immense political damage, because most Israelis would still know the truth: That the government was violating the country’s own laws by treating the Golan and east Jerusalem as if they weren’t part of Israel.
Given that the EU boasts of being a community “based on the rule of law,” the hypocrisy of demanding that another democratic country blatantly violate its own laws just because the EU dislikes them is breathtaking. It’s certainly a novel definition of the rule of law: The whims of EU bureaucrats ought to trump legislation enacted with due process by (non-EU) democracies and upheld by independent courts.
Even more remarkable, however, is how self-defeating this provision is, given the EU’s own stated goal of deterring Israeli settlement-building that it sees as an obstacle to peace. If this were true, then what ought to concern the bureaucrats most is settlement-building in the heart of the West Bank, in territory that everyone agrees would be part of a Palestinian state under any deal. Since any such deal would require evacuating those settlers, it’s reasonable to fear that more of them would make a deal harder.
The Golan, in contrast, is irrelevant to an Israeli-Palestinian deal: It’s claimed by Syria, not the Palestinians, and with Syria engulfed in civil war, not even the most delusional EU bureaucrat imagines an Israel-Syrian deal is currently possible. Nor do the Golan’s approximately 20,000 Jewish residents constitute any real obstacle to a future deal, if you consider that several Israeli governments have made proposals to the Palestinians that entail evacuating four times that number from the West Bank.
Nor is east Jerusalem’s Jewish population any obstacle to a deal; since even the Palestinians have agreed that the city’s huge Jewish neighborhoods will remain Israeli, any increase in their population is irrelevant. And while the EU routinely has conniptions over Jews moving into Arab neighborhoods, the number remains negligible; evacuating them under any deal would be easy.
Hence the main issue for anyone concerned with settlement-building should be the West Bank. And as noted, the West Bank isn’t legally part of Israel, so clever lawyers could undoubtedly devise some formula excluding it from EU-Israeli agreements that both sides could live with.
But if the EU insists on Israel asserting that the Golan and east Jerusalem aren’t part of the state, new agreements with Europe will become impossible; that’s something to which no Israeli government could legally agree.
This would clearly be bad for Israel, which may be what EU bureaucrats wanted all along: not a targeted hit on the settlements, as EU officials claim, but a blunt instrument to punish all of Israel for what the EU perceives as its sins.
Yet it’s arguably much worse for the people the EU claims to want to help: the Palestinians. Indeed, though the Palestinian Authority lauded the decision publicly, a senior PA official told Israel Hayom that it actually lobbied against the move privately, because it would be “disastrous economically and socially for the Palestinian community.” Or as one of the approximately 16,000 Palestinians employed in the settlements told the paper, “If they take away our livelihoods and food, exactly what kind of peace will be here?”
The West Bank’s unemployment rate is already over 20%, and Israel and the settlements together employ about a fifth of the West Bank’s working population. Thus anything that hurts the Israeli economy will devastate the Palestinian one.
A blanket freeze in EU-Israel relations would probably even hurt the EU itself. As Britain’s shadow chancellor of the exchequer Edd Balls noted just last week, there’s a reason why the EU and its member states have signed so many commercial and scientific agreements with Israel, and why many European companies are eager to do business with it: despite being an economic midget compared to the EU, Israel’s cutting-edge innovations offer real added value.
In short, this decision makes a mockery of the EU’s self-proclaimed respect for the rule of law, hurts the very Palestinians it was supposed to help, and even harms the EU itself. But evidently, all that is a small price to pay for allowing EU bureaucrats to bask in a sense of their own moral superiority.
Ever since Jerusalem was liberated in 1967, Tisha Be’Av, the day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple that falls this week, has sparked debates over whether continued mourning is appropriate when rebuilt Jerusalem is flourishing in a reestablished Jewish state. Yet the day provides a needed reminder of the degree to which, even in Israel, Jews remain in a self-imposed exile: For the first time in history, we have ceded control of our holiest site voluntarily rather than against our will.
The good news, as a new poll shows, is that Israel’s Jews are starting to grasp the inappropriateness of this abdication: Though only a minority favors rebuilding the Temple, solid majorities agree both that Israel should reassert control of the Temple Mount and that it should use this control to enable Jews as well as Muslims to pray there, just as it does at Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs (Machpela). The bad news is that we remain far from translating this realization into practice.
There was nothing voluntary about the losses Tisha B’Av commemorates: Babylon destroyed the First Temple after vanquishing the Jews in battle; Rome destroyed the second after doing the same. Nor, for millennia, was there any doubt about our desire to rectify that loss: Jews began building the Second Temple on the ruins of the first the moment the area’s then-hegemon, Persia, permitted them to return from exile and start work; when it, too, was destroyed, countless generations prayed to be able to return and rebuild it again.
Modern Israel initially seemed to follow this same pattern. There was nothing voluntary about its loss of half of Jerusalem during the War of Independence, and when the Six-Day War provided an opportunity to recoup this loss, Israel seized it. Immediately afterward, the government annexed East Jerusalem, alone of all the territories captured in 1967. Thousands of Jews flocked to the Temple’s last surviving remnant, the Western Wall, to celebrate its liberation. Mordechai Gur, whose brigade liberated the Old City, announced his success in a now-iconic broadcast: “The Temple Mount is in our hands!” Like generations before him, Gur understood that the Mount was the Jewish people’s heart and soul; thus it was the Mount whose liberation he proudly proclaimed – not the Old City, the Jewish Quarter, or even the Western Wall.
But then, something unexpected happened: Secular Jews who hoped to trade most of the newly acquired territories for peace, and sought to prove their bona fides, joined forces with religious Jews who deemed the Mount too holy to profane by a Jewish presence (though oddly, not a Muslim one). Together, they voted to abandon the Mount and return de facto control to the Muslim Wakf. Consequently, to this day, Jews are forbidden even to open a prayer book or recite a Psalm on the Mount, and Jewish visitors are allowed up only in small groups, when they aren’t barred altogether.
As I’ve written before, this decision had numerous harmful consequences. First, it betrayed Israel’s fundamental obligation to protect Jewish rights: Today, Jewish policemen routinely arrest Jews for the “crime” of seeking to pray at Judaism’s holiest site.
Second, it undermined Israel’s longstanding demand to retain Jerusalem as its united capital: How is the world to believe we truly care about Jerusalem when we voluntarily ceded control of its holiest Jewish site, not even demanding anything in exchange, and obediently enforce the Wakf’s ban on Jewish prayer there while letting Muslims worship freely?
Third, it encouraged the Arab belief that violence pays, because every time they riot on the Mount, or even threaten to riot, Israel responds by closing it to Jews – sometimes for years, as in 2000-2003.
But perhaps worst of all, it encouraged our enemies’ belief that they can someday destroy us, by demonstrating that deep in our psyches, we ourselves aren’t sure of our right to a sovereign state here. For no people confident of the justice of its cause could voluntarily cede its holiest site to others.
It’s therefore encouraging that Israeli Jews are starting to understand how problematic this is. In a poll conducted last month for the Joint Forum of Temple Mount Organizations, 49% of respondents deemed it “important” or “very important” for Jews to visit the Mount, handily outnumbering the 37% who considered it unimportant. Significantly, this included a plurality of secular and traditional Jews as well as 78% of religious Zionists; only the ultra-Orthodox overwhelmingly considered it unimportant. Moreover, 55% of respondents expressed personal interest in visiting the Mount, including 60% of secular and traditional respondents (compared to 20% of the ultra-Orthodox).
Unsurprisingly, only a minority expressed interest in praying there; many Israeli Jews have no interest in praying anywhere. But fully 59% – including even a plurality of the ultra-Orthodox – thought Israel should impose an arrangement on the Mount similar to that at Machpela, where both Muslims and Jews can worship freely in separate sections of the site. This would actually be even easier on the Mount, since unlike at Machpela, Jews and Muslims don’t want to pray in the same spot: All Jewish religious authorities agree that the area containing the Mount’s mosques is currently forbidden to Jews.
A majority of respondents also want Israel to wield de facto control over the Mount – a necessary precursor to such an arrangement. Almost one-fifth of respondents incorrectly thought it already does. But of the others, 47% thought the state should be in charge, while another 11% wanted a Jewish religious authority in control.
Unfortunately, the government is way behind the public on this issue. Nevertheless, if enough of the public were to press hard enough for long enough, no democratic government could remain indifferent forever.
Forty-six years after Gur’s proclamation, the Temple Mount still isn’t in our hands. Thus this week, Jews will once again justly mourn their exile from their holiest site. But it’s vital to remember that this exile, unlike the others, is self-imposed. Hence if we are ever to realize our tradition’s promise that Tisha Be’Av will someday become a day of rejoicing rather than mourning, it’s our responsibility to work to end it.
Is the Obama administration trying to start a war between Israel and Syria? Because intentionally or not, it’s certainly doing its darnedest to provoke one.
This weekend, three anonymous American officials told CNN that Israel was behind an explosion in the Syrian port of Latakia on July 5. The explosion, they said, resulted from an airstrike targeting Russian-made Yakhont anti-ship missiles. If this report is true, this is the second time U.S. officials have blown Israel’s cover in Syria: They also told the media that a mysterious explosion in Syria this April was Israel’s work, even as Israel was scrupulously keeping mum–just as it did about the Latakia incident.
This isn’t a minor issue, as anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows: In a region where preserving face is considered crucial, publicly humiliating Syrian President Bashar Assad is the surest way to make him feel he has no choice but to respond, even though war with Israel is the last thing he needs while embroiled in a civil war at home.
This truth was amply demonstrated in April, after three airstrikes attributed to Israel hit Syria within a few weeks. After the first two, Israel kept mum while Assad blamed the rebels; face was preserved, and everyone was happy. But then, the Obama administration told the media that Israel was behind the second strike–and when the third strike hit two days later, Assad could no longer ignore it: He vociferously threatened retaliation should Israel dare strike again.
The Latakia attack also initially adhered to Israel’s time-tested method for avoiding retaliation: Israel kept mum, Assad blamed the rebels, face was preserved, and everyone was happy. But the Obama administration apparently couldn’t stand it–and a week later, it once again leaked claims of Israeli responsibility to the media.
At best, this means the administration simply didn’t understand the potential consequences, demonstrating an appalling ignorance of Middle East realities. A worse possibility is that it deliberately placed its own political advantage above the safety of Israeli citizens: Facing increasing criticism for its inaction in Syria, but reluctant to significantly increase its own involvement and unable even to secure congressional approval for the limited steps it has approved, perhaps it hoped revealing that at least an American ally was doing something would ease the political heat–even at the cost of provoking a Syrian retaliation that claims Israeli lives.
The worst possibility of all, however, is that the administration knows exactly what it’s doing, and is deliberately trying to spark an Israeli-Syrian war as a way out of its own dilemma: It wants Assad gone, but doesn’t want to do the work itself. Starting an Israeli-Syrian war would force Israel to destroy Assad’s air force, thereby greatly increasing the chances of a rebel victory.
Whatever the truth, these leaks damage American as well as Israeli interests, because one of Washington’s consistent demands of its ally is that Israel not surprise it with military action. Hitherto, Israel has honored that request: Though it doesn’t seek America’s permission for action it deems essential, it does scrupulously provide advance notice. But if Obama administration officials can’t be trusted to keep their mouths shut, Israel will have to rethink this policy: It can’t risk getting embroiled in a war with Syria just to ease Obama’s political problems.
The Republican foreign policy establishment, headed by luminaries such as Senator John McCain and former White House official Elliott Abrams, is urging an immediate cutoff of U.S. military aid to Egypt in response to the country’s revolution-cum-coup. The Obama administration has demurred, saying “it would not be wise to abruptly change our assistance program,” and vowed to take its time in deciding whether what happened legally mandates an aid cutoff, given the “significant consequences that go along with this determination.”
For once, official Israel is wholeheartedly on Obama’s side. Senior Israeli officials from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down spent hours on the phone with their American counterparts this weekend to argue against an aid cutoff, and Israeli diplomats in Washington have been ordered to make this case to Congress as well. Israel’s reasoning is simple: An aid cutoff will make the volatile situation on its southern border even worse–and that is bad not only for Israel, but for one of America’s major interests in the region: upholding the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.
To understand why, it’s important to realize that most Egyptians view the U.S. aid as “a kind of payment” for keeping the peace. Though the aid isn’t part of the treaty, it began immediately after the treaty was signed, and for 34 years, the only condition on its continuance has been continuation of the treaty. Thus Israel fears that ending the aid would erode Egyptian support for the treaty–and especially that of the army, which would be the main victim of the cutoff. Since the army is not only Egypt’s de facto ruler, but also the treaty’s main supporter in a country where most people would rather scrap it, that would clearly be undesirable.
What makes it downright dangerous, however, is the situation in Sinai. The army recently beefed up its forces in Sinai in an effort to suppress Islamist terror there, a move Israel obviously welcomed. Nevertheless, Sinai is low priority for the military compared to cities like Cairo and Alexandria. Thus given the perceived linkage between the aid and the treaty, an aid cutoff would likely make the army feel perfectly justified in removing those troops and ceasing its efforts to uphold its main treaty obligation: keeping peace along the border. And having already halted the aid, Washington would have no leverage to prevent this.
That would almost certainly lead to increased terror along Israel’s border. But the real danger, as I’ve explained before, is that cross-border attacks could easily spark an Israeli-Egyptian war that nobody wants–including the U.S. Since the Israeli army will naturally try to stop such attacks, there’s always a risk of Egyptians being accidentally killed in the cross-fire, which in turn would spur angry mobs in Egypt to demand revenge–exactly as happened in August 2011. That attack was an isolated incident, so sanity prevailed. But the more cross-border attacks there are, the more likely it is that one will inadvertently trigger a war.
This is especially true because, as Lee Smith argued last week, a war against Israel would be the one sure way to unite a dangerously divided Egyptian nation: The only thing most Egyptians agree on is that Israel is an “enemy” and a “threat.”
Continuing the aid is thus a small price to pay for preventing another Mideast war. And that’s something all Americans should be able to understand.
Though Secretary of State John Kerry’s next trip to the Mideast may be delayed by his wife’s illness, he fully intends to continue his shuttle diplomacy between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. There are many reasons why this effort is misguided, including the one Jonathan noted yesterday–the PA’s nonstop indoctrination of its people in vicious anti-Semitic hatred. But here’s another: the untreated West Bank sewage contaminating groundwater and streams on both sides of the Green Line.
What, you may ask, does untreated sewage have to do with Israeli-Palestinian peace talks? The following Haaretz report provides an answer:
Attempts at Israeli-Palestinian cooperation on this issue have largely gone nowhere, mainly because the Palestinian Authority refuses to cooperate with the settlements. Thus it refused to connect Palestinian towns in the northern West Bank to an Israeli sewage line because the line also serves several settlements. It also nixed a proposed treatment plant that would serve both Palestinian towns and the settlement of Ariel.
In other words, the PA would rather let its own waterways be polluted–including the mountain aquifer, a major source of drinking water for both Palestinians and Israelis–than do something as simple as connect to an Israeli sewage line or cooperate on a treatment plant. But how can peace be possible when the PA would rather risk its own citizens’ health than cooperate with its ostensible “peace partner” to solve the problem?
Nor is this a fluke: The PA opposes even the most innocuous forms of cooperation with Israel. In May, for instance, its ruling Fatah party denounced a soccer game for Israeli and Palestinian teens organized with EU support, while Fatah activists posted threatening messages on the Internet against both players and organizers. But how can peace be possible if the PA won’t even let its children play soccer with Israelis?
Or consider the PA’s recent campaign against Israeli journalists. As anyone familiar with Israel knows, Israeli journalists are far more likely than most Israelis to believe peace is achievable, blame their own government for its non-achievement and support Palestinian demands for more Israeli concessions. Yet now, as the Washington Post reported in May, Israeli journalists are being thrown out of PA press conferences and harassed by PA security personnel; Palestinian journalists who have ties with Israeli colleagues are being labeled “collaborators”; and “Organizations that once brought Palestinian and Israeli journalists together for professional conferences no longer sponsor such events, because Palestinian reporters say it will hurt their careers to participate.”
Needless to say, this would seem self-defeating, as it alienates some of the PA’s most influential Israeli supporters. But the more serious problem is this: If Palestinians will no longer talk with even the most pro-Palestinian Israelis, which Israelis will they talk to?
Under these circumstances, peace talks don’t stand a chance. So I’d like to propose that Kerry attempt a more modest achievement: persuade the PA to connect its cities to Israeli sewage lines. That might actually be doable. And unlike the pie-in-the-sky diplomacy he’s pursuing now, it would genuinely improve both Palestinian and Israeli lives.
There’s nothing Israel can do about the fragile situation in Egypt except beef up its forces in the south and be prepared to contain any spillover violence. But since it has no interest in yet another failed state on its borders, there’s something very important it should be urging its Western allies to do: worry less about a new constitution and inclusive democratic processes and more about urgently reviving Egypt’s economy. For without economic improvement, the best constitution in the world won’t be able to stabilize the country.
To understand why, it’s first important to understand what last week’s popular revolution-cum-coup was really about. It wasn’t an uprising by would-be liberal democrats infuriated at the Muslim Brotherhood’s authoritarian, anti-democratic behavior in power: Though this behavior undoubtedly angered many Egyptians and played a role in driving them into the streets last week, for many, it was a secondary motive. Nor was this a coup by anti-democratic forces seeking to gain by force what they couldn’t gain at the ballot box, though this motive, too, surely animated some of the estimated 14 million demonstrators. But for most, the motive was something much simpler: economic desperation.
That comes through clearly in the reportage of journalists who bothered to interview ordinary demonstrators rather the Cairo elite. A small boat owner who used to earn his living taking tourists on Nile cruises, for instance, said he could no longer feed his children because tourist traffic had fallen so sharply. An unemployed engineer groused that “There’s no construction in Egypt and no company is hiring workers.” A Cairo street vendor who voted for the Brotherhood last year summarized the situation succinctly: “The city is dead. Dead. No work. No food.”
People with no work and no food can’t afford to wait for the next regularly scheduled election, no matter how perfect their constitution and how inclusive their democratic processes. True, the constitution the Muslim Brotherhood rammed through was far from perfect, and the government it led was far from inclusive. But had the economy been improving, both problems could have been solved through normal democratic processes: In a few years’ time, new elections could have swept new forces into office, and they could have drafted and passed a new constitution.
Instead, the economy was tanking – both by objective standards (unemployment, foreign reserves, etc.) and by subjective ones: In an Egyptian poll taken last week, 63% of respondents said their standard of living had worsened over the last year, while only 13% reported an improvement. And in a country where nearly half the population lived under or just above the $2-a-day poverty line on the eve of the 2011 revolution, the standard of living couldn’t fall very far without people becoming desperate.
Thus to stabilize the country, the first step is arranging a massive infusion of economic aid. Fortunately, the Brotherhood’s ouster makes this a reasonable goal: The countries most likely to be able to provide aid quickly are oil-rich Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, and all these countries (except Qatar) loathed the Muslim Brotherhood. But they have long had close ties with the Egyptian military, which is now de facto running the country.
The next step, however, is much harder: carrying out a long-range economic reform program that can ease some of the country’s chronic problems. That means figuring out what needs to be done, rounding up donors both to finance the reforms and to provide aid that can cushion their effects on the population until the economy starts improving, and brow-beating the Egyptian government into actually implementing them.
All this may be impossible under any circumstances. But it will certainly be impossible if influential Western actors, especially in Washington, are more focused on a new constitution and inclusive democratic processes than they are on fixing the economy – or too squeamish about “supporting a coup” to mobilize the necessary resources. The West only has so much influence, and it can’t afford to squander it on secondary issues.
One could argue that inclusive democratic processes would help promote economic reform – and sometimes, that’s true. But sometimes, democracy can actually hinder economic reform. Indeed, one reason the Muslim Brotherhood government refused to take steps that virtually every economist deemed essential, like eliminating the subsidies on staple products that eat up more than 28% of the government’s budget, is that these steps were widely unpopular.
And democracy certainly isn’t necessary for economic reform. China’s highly undemocratic governments, for instance, slashed the country’s extreme poverty rate from 60% in 1990 to 12% in 2010. South Korea rose from the ruins of the Korean War to become the world’s 15th-largest economy under a series of undemocratic strongmen; it democratized only in the late 1980s.
Indeed, economic growth has frequently proven a necessary precursor to democratization, and the latest iteration of the Egyptian revolution shows why: Democracy is impossible if people can’t afford to wait for the next election to secure a change in policy. But without a modicum of economic security, too many people feel they can’t wait that long.
None of the above is meant to minimize the importance of democracy; it’s a much better system than the alternatives. If Egypt could have both democracy and economic growth, that would clearly be preferable, and this should be the West’s ultimate goal.
But right now, the economy is much higher priority, so that’s where most of the effort must be directed. And if it comes to a choice, then yes, in Egypt right now, democracy should be sacrificed in favor of economic stabilization. For once the economy has stabilized, democracy is likely to follow in time, as it has in numerous countries round the world (think Korea, Taiwan, Chile and Brazil). But if the economy doesn’t stabilize, no democracy has a prayer of lasting, and the dictatorship that follows could well be much worse than the military government now in place.
After all, history has a precedent for that, too: Just remember what followed the economic meltdown of the Weimar Republic.