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Since both parties claim to embody religious Zionism’s most cherished aspirations (the National Union, having been abandoned by Avigdor Lieberman’s faction, now consists mainly of MKs who broke away from the NRP over the last decade), that might seem counterintuitive. Yet not only have both failed dismally to live up to this claim, but their continued existence has prevented religious Zionists from considering better ways to achieve their political goals.
One ordinary citizen succinctly described both parties’ biggest problem in an interview with Haaretz last month: “The house is on fire … and you guys are fighting over seats!” In fact, the NRP in particular has for years done nothing but fight over jobs – while neglecting virtually every issue that it was ostensibly elected to promote.
Nothing better illustrates this than the party’s recent negotiations with the National Union. The latter accepted the NRP’s two “ideological” demands: that the campaign focus on education, welfare and Jewish identity as well as settlements, and that the joint list not rule out joining any coalition in advance. That achieved, a party that cared about its stated goals should have been satisfied. Instead, NRP Chairman Zevulun Orlev abandoned the talks for the pettiest possible reason: the National Union’s unwillingness to name him
campaign chairman.
But while such pettiness may be merely laughable in minor issues, it is devastating at the national level – as became evident after the May 1996 elections, when Israel faced several urgent tasks. These included coping with a deadly suicide bombing campaign by Hamas; reevaluating the Oslo process in light of the Palestinian Authority’s manifest failure to fight terror; and dealing with the financial crisis caused by the previous Labor government’s borrow-and-spend policies (the balance-of-payments deficit had become so staggering that even Labor MKs admitted retrenchment was necessary).
WITH ALL that on the government’s plate, one would have expected coalition members to buckle down and get to work. Instead, the NRP (the National Union did not yet exist) completely paralyzed the government for over two months while it fought with Shas for control of the Religious Affairs Ministry. Compared to the all-important issue of securing the ministry’s patronage jobs for its hacks, nothing else mattered a whit.
But perhaps nothing better illustrates the hypocrisy of both parties’ claim to care about national issues then their behavior in positions of power at the Education Ministry: For years, they shortchanged funding for Jewish education in secular schools in order to funnel more money to Orthodox schools. A party that truly cared about the state’s Jewish identity would have done exactly the opposite, since for secular children, school may well provide their only exposure to Judaism. That is presumably not the case for religious children.
Yet even if the NRP (or the National Union) should miraculously reform, their demise would still be beneficial – because small splinter parties have long since ceased to be the best way for religious Zionists to influence the national agenda. They would be far more effective acting within a major party.
THAT RELATIVELY small groups can have a major impact on large parties is obvious to anyone who follows American politics: Evangelical Christians, though a small minority of Republican voters, have had a major influence on that party, while liberal American Jews, an even smaller minority of Democratic voters, have attained significant influence within that party.
But in Israel’s parliamentary system, this influence would be greatly magnified, because the largest party is usually given first stab at forming a government. Thus by throwing their votes to, say, Likud, religious Zionist rightists – who, between the NRP and the National Union, account for an estimated seven or eight seats – would substantially increase the chances that it, rather than Kadima or Labor, would form the next government. And should Likud win, it would have to take the views of those who handed it the victory into account; to do otherwise would be suicidal.
Virtually alone among religious Zionists, two people understood this long ago: Meimad’s Rabbi Michael Melchior, who led religious doves into an alliance with Labor, and Moshe Feiglin, who formed a religious faction within Likud. But while Melchior has scored some modest successes in Labor despite his small voter base, Feiglin’s influence in Likud has thus far been negligible. That is partly because he is far to the right not only of most Likud voters, but even of most NRP and National Union voters. But it is mainly because he in practice has few votes to offer the party: Even his small group of followers, though they vote religiously in internal party elections, are widely suspected within Likud of supporting other parties in general elections.
If, in contrast, religious Zionist hawks decamped en masse to the Likud, their influence would be substantial. The ideal moment for such a move would be now: Not only has the Likud shrunk due to desertions to Kadima, thereby increasing the relative weight that a strong religious Zionist contingent would have, but Kadima has drawn off precisely those former Likudniks most hostile to this camp’s stated positions.
Unfortunately, the politics of identity make such a development unlikely as long as the NRP and the National Union exist: To many religious Zionists, these parties’ kippa-wearing MKs simply look more “like us” than do Likud MKs – who, unsurprisingly in the absence of a strong religious Zionist wing, are almost uniformly secular.
But should either party fail to enter the Knesset this time around, religious Zionists would be forced to rethink their ideas on how to achieve their political ends. And since both parties have proven themselves inadequate to this task, that could only be beneficial.
But in all this hysteria, no one has yet explained why Hamas is so much worse than Fatah – whose list, despite the lip-service denunciations of terror routinely uttered by Fatah leader and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, is also comprised mainly of prominent terrorists and terror advocates.
The No. 1 slot on the Fatah list has been awarded to Marwan Barghouti, who is currently serving five life sentences in an Israeli jail for terror attacks that killed five civilians during the current intifada. Moreover, his presence in the top slot was deemed sufficiently vital to justify breaking the rule that he himself dictated: that the national slate be reserved for new faces, while sitting PA parliamentarians such as Barghouti would have to run in the district races that will elect the other half of the PA parliament.
Barghouti is not only a practitioner of terror; he is also one of its vocal advocates. Indeed, the platform of the breakaway Fatah list that he formed last month (the two lists later reunited) stressed the importance of both negotiation and “struggle” – the Palestinian euphemism for anti-Israel terrorism.
SIMILARLY, IN a 2001 interview with the Londonbased newspaper Al-Hayat, Barghouti proudly claimed credit for having orchestrated the intifada, saying that when Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in September 2000, “I saw within the situation a historic opportunity to ignite the conflict ?¦ After Sharon left, I stayed in the area for two hours with other well-known people and we spoke ?¦ of how people should react in all the towns and villages ?¦ We made contact with all the factions.”
Even Meretz chairman Yossi Beilin – who wants him released to promote “peace” – acknowledges that Barghouti advocated violence even at the height of the peace process. In a December 2004 interview with The New York Times, Beilin described a meeting with Barghouti on May 14, 2000, during the preparations for that July’s final-status negotiations at Camp David. “Barghouti told me that he wanted to continue the use of violence and that if there were no peace agreement by September, he would use violence,” Beilin recalled.
But Barghouti’s presence at the top of Fatah’s list is no mere anomaly. That is evident from the slate that Abbas composed during Fatah’s brief split, when Barghouti was heading the rival list. In the top slot, Abbas placed Muhammad Abu Ali Yatta – who is also serving a life sentence for murder in an Israeli prison.
In other words, Barghouti is not first on the list because his popularity forced a reluctant Abbas to accept him, but because Abbas deliberately decided to head the list with someone convicted of murdering Israelis. And whether he did so because he personally admires such killers or merely because he deemed this necessary to win votes makes little difference in terms of the prospects for peace: Even if Abbas personally wants to end the conflict, that is unlikely to happen if the Palestinian public prefers terrorism.
Indeed, most of the Fatah list is one long paean to terrorism. Barghouti is No. 1. Yatta is No. 2. No. 3 is Umm Jihad, whose claim to fame is being the widow of another famous terrorist, Abu Jihad. And so on and so forth. THEN, FINALLY, there is Abbas himself – who, for all his anti-terrorist rhetoric, has facilitated terror rather than fighting it.
Ever since the disengagement, for instance, Kassam rockets have been launched from Gaza into Israel almost daily. The main culprits are Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees, both of which are small organizations that lack broad popular backing, and would therefore be easy targets for the tens of thousands of armed PA security personnel in Gaza.
Yet Abbas refused to order his forces into action, allowing the launches to continue unmolested. Only last week, after Israel decided to try to protect its southern towns itself by using air force and artillery to turn popular launch sites into “no-go zones,” did Abbas finally move – not against the terrorists, but against Israel. Declaring that Israel “has no right to return [to Gaza] under any pretext, including the firing of rockets,” he began trying to mobilize international pressure against the Israeli operation.
In other words, Abbas will not lift a finger against terrorism himself – but he will do his best to stymie any Israeli countermeasures, thereby facilitating the terrorists’ operations.
Given this picture, one has to wonder why Fatah should be considered better than Hamas. Granted, Fatah does not openly call for Israel’s destruction – but that merely makes the world more willing to overlook its members’ involvement in, advocacy of and facilitation of terrorism, and to pressure Israel to do the same. That is hardly to Israel’s benefit. Yet incredibly, Israel has actively promoted a Fatah victory – even to the point of allowing Barghouti to campaign from his jail cell.
It would be far better for Israel, and the world, to finally acknowledge reality: Secular terrorists are no better than the Islamist kind – and Fatah, in its current incarnation, is no more of a peace partner than Hamas.
This is partly the fault of Likud ministers such as Silvan Shalom, Limor Livnat and Dan Naveh, who are fighting Netanyahu’s plan to withdraw the party from the government. Incredibly, these ministers appear to feel that clinging to their posts for another few weeks is more important than waging an effective campaign against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Kadima Party – something it is difficult to do as a junior partner in Sharon’s government. If further proof were needed of Shalom’s unfitness to lead any party, his inability to grasp this basic fact of political life certainly provides it.
Nevertheless, the primary blame rests with Netanyahu himself – because instead of launching a campaign against Sharon, he has declared all-out war on Moshe Feiglin.
The anti-Feiglin campaign not only undermines party unity; it also undercuts one of Likud’s strongest selling points: its repeated claim that, in contrast to Sharon’s dictatorial style, Likud respects democratic norms. Netanyahu’s treatment of Feiglin has thus far come straight out of Sharon’s playbook: If you do not like the outcome of a vote, change the rules. Fearful that Feiglin, who took third place in the leadership race with 12 percent of the vote, would give Likud an extremist image, Netanyahu decided to amend the party’s bylaws to keep Feiglin off Likud’s Knesset list.
Feiglin’s views are unarguably far to the right not only of most Israelis, but of most Likud members. Nevertheless, there is a perfectly adequate democratic response to this problem: Netanyahu could simply point out that Feiglin represents a mere 5% of Likud members (since turnout in the primary was about 45%), whereas Likud policy, as is proper in a democratic organization, will be made by the party’s elected leader in accordance with the views of the 95% majority. Indeed, that would be a far more effective response, since it reduces Likud’s “extremist” wing to its true proportions. Netanyahu’s response, in contrast, lends credence to the charge that Likud is extremist by implying that the Feiglin camp is so large and powerful that only extraordinary measures, such as changing the rules, can stop it.
Moreover, while the proposed rule change – which would bar anyone convicted of a crime and sentenced to three months or more in jail from being a Likud MK – is unexceptionable in itself, by making it clear that the change is aimed primarily at Feiglin, and only secondarily at genuine criminals, Netanyahu has not only missed a golden opportunity to portray Likud as serious about fighting corruption; he has also cynically exploited a gross miscarriage of justice.
FEIGLIN UNDENIABLY broke laws during the civil disobedience campaign he waged to protest the Oslo Accords (which mainly involved blocking roads); that is the nature of civil disobedience. As such, he could legitimately have been charged with various misdemeanors, from demonstrating without a permit to disturbing the peace.
But there was never any justification for convicting him on the serious charge of sedition, whose dictionary definition is “incitement to rebellion against a government”; civil disobedience bears scant resemblance to armed rebellion. Even the courts appear to have dimly understood this, since despite the gravity of the charge, Feiglin received only a sixmonth jail sentence. But since a key element of democracy is the right to protest without facing trumped-up sedition charges, Netanyahu’s exploitation of this unwarranted conviction to keep Feiglin off the Likud slate is inappropriate for someone who claims to champion democratic values.
Another serious problem with the anti-Feiglin campaign is that Netanyahu appears to be cowering before Kadima – which hardly improves his public image. After all, most of the charges of “extremism” hurled at Likud over Feiglin have come from Kadima members, who have a vested interest in portraying Likud as extremist. By frantically trying to purge anything Kadima slaps with this label, Netanyahu is effectively conceding Kadima’s authority to decide what constitutes extremism.
This is particularly irresponsible because Kadima views many key Likud positions as extremist – for instance, its opposition to unilateral withdrawals. Thus to woo voters, Netanyahu must prove that his commitment to these principles outweighs his fear of being labeled an “extremist” by Kadima. Granted, unilateral withdrawal is more important than Feiglin. Nevertheless, if a few cries of “extremist” over Feiglin were sufficient to make Netanyahu jettison Likud’s vaunted commitment to democratic principles, what will happen when a reelected Sharon announces the next unilateral withdrawal and launches a full-blown campaign to paint his opponents as extremists, as he did with the disengagement?
But the worst thing about Netanyahu’s war on Feiglin is that it distracts attention from the truly important war – the one against Sharon. Feiglin is a triviality: His support level, as demonstrated in the Likud primary, would not even suffice to win him a single Knesset seat; thus however extreme his views, he is powerless to wreak harm. Sharon, in contrast, seems likely to be Israel’s next prime minister. And in that position, he will have the power to do enormous harm, both to Israel’s security and to its democratic norms.
Likud’s one and only task over the next three months thus to try to regain as many votes as possible from – preferably, enough to keep Sharon from being prime ister; if not, at least enough to make Likud a viable opposi tion. However, this cannot be done by attacking Feiglin; can only be done by a clear and consistent campaign explain why Sharon is dangerous. Netanyahu should fore stop wasting his – and our – time on trivialities and down to work.
Under the November 15 Rafah Agreement, bus convoys were supposed to begin on December 15 and truck convoys on January 15. Following the suicide bombing in Netanya on December 5, however, Israel announced that it would not start the convoys unless the Palestinian Authority took action against terrorist organizations. Ever since, it has reportedly been under heavy international pressure, including from America, to reverse this stand.
At first glance, this pressure might seem justified: After all, Israel is violating a signed commitment. However, that ignores the fact that the convoys were part of a larger deal – and it requires singular hypocrisy to demand that Israel keep its end of the bargain even as the PA ignores its responsibilities.
The convoys are meant to create a “safe passage” between the West Bank and Gaza through which Palestinian people and goods can move freely, without obtaining Israel’s permission or undergoing Israeli security checks. However, this creates a clear security risk to Israel: Since Gazan terrorist cells have better weaponry and more technical expertise (no West Bank cell, for instance, has yet succeeded in making Kassam rockets), while West Bank cells have better access to Israel (which is why almost all suicide bombings inside Israel originate from there), a flow of Gazan know-how and equipment into the West Bank would significantly upgrade the terrorist threat.
That is precisely why the Rafah Agreement states, concerning the convoys: “It is understood that security is a prime and continuing concern for Israel and that appropriate arrangements to ensure security will be adopted.”
But since the point of the convoys is to shift control over Gaza-West Bank traffic from Israel to the PA, any such arrangements will ultimately depend on the PA making a genuine effort to keep arms and terrorists off the convoys. Therefore, proof that the PA will not make such an effort is sufficient to invalidate any possible arrangement.
That, however, is precisely what the Netanya bombing does prove. The problem is not that it happened; even the best preventive efforts sometimes fail. Rather, it is that, like almost every other suicide bombing this year, it was perpetrated by Islamic Jihad – yet the PA still has not taken any action against this group. And while the PA argues that it lacks the power to tackle Hamas, which enjoys the support of one-third to one-half of the Palestinian population, this excuse is clearly not valid for Islamic Jihad, a marginal group comprising at most a few hundred members.
IF THE PA is not even willing to use its 50,000 armed “policemen” against Islamic Jihad, it is clearly not willing to fight terrorism at all. And therefore, until the PA demonstrates that its attitude has changed by launching some kind of genuine anti-terrorist action, no “appropriate arrangements to ensure security” are possible.
The world’s pretense that Palestinian inaction on terrorism is somehow irrelevant to the convoy agreement is thus utterly unconscionable. But the international community has also ignored an even more explicit violation of the Rafah Agreement – namely, the stipulation that Israeli personnel “receive real-time video and data feed” from the Gazan-Egyptian border crossing, so that they can object immediately if, for instance, they spot a wanted terrorist trying to enter Gaza. Real-time feed is essential for this purpose, because once the suspect has passed the crossing and disappeared into Gaza’s terrorist underworld, it is too late.
In practice, however, Israel has received no real-time feed in the three weeks since the crossing opened. Instead, the information has arrived so belatedly as to render it useless.
According to Haaretz, American officials blame this on technical glitches rather than Palestinian malfeasance and say that the US is trying to purchase special equipment to correct the problem. That explanation strains credulity: Real-time video and data feed is hardly cutting-edge technology, and the necessary equipment is available off the shelf. But even if it were true, the fact remains that the PA is not yet implementing a key provision of the Rafah Agreement. And while any such lapse would constitute grounds for Israel to delay implementing its obligations, the fact that this lapse involves noncompliance with an essential security provision makes it particularly unreasonable to demand that Israel nevertheless trust the PA with the far more vital issue of convoy security.
PERHAPS THE height of international hypocrisy, however, was reached by Quartet envoy and former World Bank president James Wolfensohn, who told Haaretz that Israel has no right to impede traffic to and from Gaza in response to attacks unconnected to Gaza.
Needless to say, the convoys also involve traffic to and from the West Bank, whence the Netanya attack originated. But beyond that, the convoys’ raison d’etre is the world’s insistence that Gaza and the West Bank constitute a single political unit: If they were two independent entities, Israel would no more be expected to allow Gaza-West Bank traffic through its territory than Syria is to allow Israeli traffic to Turkey through its territory.
But if Gaza and the West Bank are a single political unit, the idea that Israel has no right to “penalize” Gaza for West Bank terror attacks is ludicrous: Israel is not penalizing Gaza, but the PA, which supposedly controls both territories. Thus Wolfensohn’s complaint essentially boils down to the astonishing theory that whether the territories are a single unit or two separate entities depends on which definition better serves Palestinian interests at any given moment.
Expecting the world to recognize the legitimacy of Israel’s position on the convoys may be pointless. Nevertheless, for the sake of its security, Israel must stand firm on this issue.
To run for the leadership of one party and then switch to another because you lost, as Peres did – or because you are clearly going to lose, as Mofaz did – is genuinely contemptible. If you do not support a party’s goals and ideals, you should not be in it to begin with, much less running for its chairmanship. And if you do, you should not switch to another party just because the voters declined to give you the No. 1 slot.
Nevertheless, Peres at least never actively undermined Labor while still a member. During the leadership campaign, he touted the party’s virtues, and after he lost, he kept silent until he joined Kadima.
Mofaz and Hanegbi, in contrast, both exploited their senior positions in Likud – Mofaz as a candidate for its leadership and Hanegbi as its acting chairman – to actively undermine the party in the weeks before they jumped ship to Kadima. They may not have intended to serve as a fifth column for Kadima, but that is what they did: Likud has been plummeting in the polls for two main reasons, and both are largely the work of Mofaz and Hanegbi.
One reason is that Likud is the only major party that has not yet even started campaigning, because it still has not chosen its prime ministerial candidate. Without a leader, the party lacks a rallying point and a unified message. Moreover, the lengthy primary campaign has meant that rather than directing their fire at Labor and Kadima, leading Likud members have been launching vitriolic attacks on each other. It is hard for voters to get excited about Likud when senior Likudniks are telling them not about the party’s merits, but about why other senior Likudniks are reprehensible.
YET THIS entire situation is due largely to Mofaz and Hanegbi. When Ariel Sharon first left Likud to found Kadima, the three original leadership candidates – Binyamin Netanyahu, Uzi Landau and Moshe Feiglin – all urged that the primary be held as soon as possible so that the party could focus on the real campaign. But three other candidates who joined the race only after Sharon’s departure – Mofaz, Silvan Shalom and Yisrael Katz – demanded a much later date, charging that otherwise, they would not have time to campaign. And Hanegbi, the acting chairman, used his authority to force a compromise. As a result, the leadership primary will be held only on December 19, and Likud will have spent the crucial first month of the campaign season leaderless and rudderless.
Mofaz was also largely responsible for the primary’s vitriolic character. Netanyahu, to his credit, largely refrained from attacking his rivals, focusing instead on his own achievements. But Mofaz, along with Shalom, attacked the other candidates incessantly – as when he famously declared that Netanyahu was “born with a silver spoon in his mouth” and therefore indifferent to the poor.
The second problem dogging Likud has been its stigmatization as a party of right-wing extremists. That, of course, is precisely the image that Kadima would like it to have, but the harping on this theme by Kadima officials is obvious campaign rhetoric, so most voters would normally discount it.
The accusation seems far more credible, however, when it comes from senior members of Likud itself, who presumably have the party’s best interests at heart and are not just out to smear it. And Mofaz and Hanegbi both leveled this charge relentlessly.
Mofaz, in fact, made this the centerpiece of his primary campaign: His consistent message was that Likud had become a party of extremists, and only by making him chairman could it recapture the center. But Hanegbi’s anti-Likud rhetoric was perhaps even more outrageous: He repeatedly termed the Likud “rebels” – MKs who opposed the disengagement – “extremists” who “destroyed” the party by “expelling” Sharon. In other words, not only is it “extremist” to honor the wishes of party members – who voted 60-40 against disengagement in a referendum – but the entire party is worthless without Sharon!
The truth is that Likud is far from extremist; it is, as it has always been, slightly right of center. Granted, the party’s membership opposed the disengagement, as did leadership candidates Landau and, to some extent, Netanyahu. But according to repeated polls, so did 35 to 40 percent of the Jewish public (the exact figure fluctuated). A position adopted by close to 40% of the Jewish public is hardly marginal or extremist.
Moreover, even among the “rebels,” a primary objection to the plan was Sharon’s refusal to obtain a genuine public mandate for it, via either a referendum or new elections, after having won office by campaigning explicitly against unilateral withdrawal. And on that score, Likud clearly occupies the center: Even among the plan’s supporters, roughly half consistently expressed unease over Sharon’s undemocratic behavior and would have preferred a clear public mandate.
But instead of focusing on issues like Sharon’s undemocratic style, which would heighten Likud’s appeal, Mofaz and Hanegbi preferred to depict the party as irresponsible and extremist. And with two of the party’s leading members consistently painting it in the worst possible light instead of explaining why voters should support it, it is hardly surprising that voters abandoned it in droves.
Mofaz and Hanegbi certainly deserve a rich reward from Kadima: They served the party magnificently. But for any voter who believes that politics should involve at least a modicum of decency, the fact that they chose to serve Kadima from senior positions in Likud should put them beyond the pale.
Since the bullet was never found, the indictment relies mainly on witnesses’ testimony; the court will decide whether contradictions in this testimony (for instance, one witness claims that the shooter wore a white kippa while another says he wore a black hat); and various flaws in police procedure (for instance, police did not conduct a line-up or measure distances and firing angles) suffice to undermine the evidence against him (for instance, that all three witnesses say the shooter used an Uzi, while prosecution and defense agree that the two other armed men present carried M-16s).
What is incontrovertible, however, is that instead of being treated as innocent until proven guilty, Pinner – like thousands of other indicted Israelis – is being treated as guilty until proven innocent: He has thus far spent over five months in jail for a crime that he has not yet been, and may never be, convicted of committing.
If he is ultimately convicted and sentenced to more jail time than he has already served, no injustice will have been done. But if he is acquitted – or even convicted but sentenced to less time than he has already served, as sometimes happens – it will retroactively turn out that he has been imprisoned unjustly. And unfortunately, that is not uncommon: Though suspects cannot be remanded unless there is prima facie evidence against them, such evidence often proves inadequate for conviction.
Two recent cases illustrate the point. One is that of Captain R., who was charged with “confirming the kill” of a teenaged girl in Gaza. The indictment, based mainly on testimony from two of his soldiers, seemed solid: No one could have predicted that both men would confess in court to having fabricated their testimony in order to get rid of a captain they disliked. But the fact remains that R., who was ultimately acquitted, spent almost four months under arrest on his base until these mid-trial admissions caused the judge to release him.
The second is that of Noam Federman, who was arrested in April 2002 and charged with belonging to a Jewish terror cell. He spent 46 days in jail by court order, a year under administrative house arrest and over eight months in administrative detention before the prosecution withdrew the indictment in May 2004 (the state claims that the 20 months of administrative incarceration were unconnected to the indictment, but since they began soon after the courts decided against remanding Federman and ended abruptly when the indictment was withdrawn, this claim strains credulity). Here, too, the prosecution could not have foreseen that its key witness would so discredit himself with contradictory testimony in other trials that it would be left without a case. But meanwhile, Federman spent two years incarcerated for a crime of which he was ultimately cleared.
SUCH ACQUITTALS are precisely why defendants should be remanded until the end of proceedings only in exceptional cases. Yet in Israel, remands are relatively common, even when there would seem to be alternative solutions.
Pinner, for instance, has never before been accused of a weapons offense, though he has owned a gun for about five years. That in itself would seem to indicate that he is hardly a public menace. But even if one assumes that he is a threat, jail is not the only solution: The courts could confiscate his gun and restrict him to some community where he would not encounter Palestinians, or even put him under house arrest. Either would infringe on his freedom far less than throwing him in jail.
Moreover, little effort is made to minimize remanded defendants’ time in jail by trying them expeditiously. In Pinner’s case, for instance, there have been only five hearings over the past five months; a sixth and supposedly final hearing is scheduled for December 15. In other words, a trial that should have taken a week was instead dragged out for more than six months.
Supreme Court Justice Edna Arbel, in her recent rejection of Pinner’s application for release from jail, described this as a “reasonable pace.” And by Israeli standards, it is: Many trials last far longer. But by any objective standard, there is nothing reasonable about keeping someone who might yet be acquitted – someone who is supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty – in jail for six months for a trial that could be finished in a week. Granted, if Pinner is guilty, no harm has been done. But if he is acquitted, the difference between six months and six days in jail is enormous.
What makes such foot-dragging particularly outrageous is that expeditious trials are available for the well-connected, who need them less. Just last week, Tel Aviv District Court President Uri Goren offered to hear the case of former judge Osnat Alon-Laufer, who is charged with illegally obtaining her husband’s phone records and harassing his suspected girlfriend, every day until it is finished. Yet Alon-Laufer is neither in jail nor under any lesser form of restriction. Thus the harm that she would suffer from a drawn-out trial is far less than that suffered by defendants who have been remanded.
The Israeli court system pays lip service to the presumption of innocence, but in practice, it frequently treats defendants as if they were presumed guilty: People are remanded until the end of proceedings even when less restrictive measures would do, and their trials are conducted lackadaisically, on the assumption that the jail time does not matter, because it will eventually be deducted from their sentences. The result is that innocent people often spend months in jail – not due to unavoidable mistakes, but out of callous disregard for the possibility that they might be innocent. And that is something that no self-respecting legal system ought to tolerate.
And this is precisely what makes the prospect of a Sharon victory so frightening: By rewarding Sharon’s dishonesty rather than penalizing it, Israeli voters would send the message that not only do they not object to being told lies, they actually want and expect their leaders to lie to them.
Lying to the electorate has been the Israeli political norm for the last 13 years, ever since Yitzhak Rabin’s victory in 1992. Rabin campaigned on a pledge to try to make peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors, but consistently stressed two red lines: He would not negotiate with the PLO, and he would not cede the Golan Heights. And many centrists voted for him precisely because of these promises. Yet little more than a year after taking office, he signed the Oslo Accord with the PLO. And not long after that, he offered the entire Golan to Syria – an offer that failed only due to Hafez Assad’s intransigence.
Then, as if this were not enough, he introduced an even greater corruption of the democratic process: To secure Knesset approval of the Oslo-2 accord in 1995, he bribed two MKs elected on the right-wing Tsomet ticket to give him the two final votes that he needed. He did this by offering them a ministry and deputy ministry – complete with attendant financial perks, from higher salary and pension to free mail and telephone service – even though this was illegal at the time. To get around that problem, he retroactively amended the law that prohibited such political bribery.
In short, Rabin viewed chicanery and bribery as perfectly acceptable means of implementing one’s political program. But thanks to Yigal Amir, nobody will ever know whether the electorate agreed: By assassinating Rabin, Amir effectively denied Israelis the chance to express their opinion of Rabin’s behavior at the polls.
Ehud Barak also violated one of his key campaign pledges. Like Rabin, he campaigned on a promise to make peace, but also like Rabin, he had a red line that he reiterated over and over: He would not divide Jerusalem. And, again like Rabin, he received many votes from centrists who were reassured by this promise. Yet a little over a year after being elected, he, too, blithely violated his pledge, offering Yasser Arafat half of Jerusalem, including much of the Old City and the Temple Mount. Only Arafat’s intransigence kept this offer from being implemented. But nobody will ever know what Israelis really thought of Barak’s deceit either: The recently launched intifada overshadowed everything else in the 2001 campaign.
THEN, FINALLY, there was Sharon. The central issue of the 2003 campaign was Amram Mitzna’s proposal for a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Sharon campaigned vigorously against this idea, and the public rewarded him with a landslide victory. Yet less than a year later, Sharon turned around and adopted the very program that he devoted his campaign to trashing.
Then, adding insult to injury, he submitted the disengagement to a referendum of Likud members (i.e. the people who made him a prime ministerial candidate) and promised to abide by the results. Yet when the party membership decisively rejected the plan, he promptly reneged on that promise as well.
Sharon’s broken promises over disengagement inevitably undermined his credibility. But now, in a display of true political genius, he is trying to turn this lack of credibility from a liability into an asset. Essentially, he is winking at the voters and saying: Vote for me because you know that I am lying. Vote for me because you know that I will do the opposite of what I say – but by not saying it, I can also steal votes from the credulous, and thereby win more seats than I could by telling the truth. And so far, this approach seems to be working: Initial polls show Sharon’s new party getting more seats than either Likud or Labor, thereby positioning him to form the next government.
Four months are an eternity in Israeli political life, so by election day some urgent new development may well have made this issue irrelevant, just as Palestinian violence erased all other concerns in 2001. But for now, it looks as if the upcoming election will primarily be a referendum on Sharon’s performance as prime minister. Thus voters are faced with a simple choice: They can say, loudly and clearly, that they are tired of being fed lies; that they want politicians to tell the truth about their intentions and thereby allow them to make a real choice about the country’s future. Or, by reelecting Sharon, they can declare that not only is being lied to perfectly fine, but they actually prefer it to being told the truth.
In that case, two things are certain. First, no Israeli politician will ever again consider honesty a viable policy; anyone who values integrity will understand that he does not belong in politics and quit.
As a result, Israeli politics will become even more dishonest, corrupt and debased than they already are.
And second, Israelis will deserve every bit of it.
The writer, a regular Israel-based contributor, is a veteran observer of the political scene.
As chairman of the Histadrut labor federation, for instance, Peretz, far from fighting for the p oor, has consistently fought to obtain further perks for some of the country’s best-paid workers – at the expense of the truly needy. A case in point was the agreement signed last week by the state, Bank Leumi and the Leumi workers’ union, under which the government will offer Leumi workers stock options in the bank at a steep discount. The union obtained this perk, which will cost the state some NIS 350 million, by implementing a series of strikes and sanctions that threatened to torpedo Leumi’s privatiz ation and vowing to continue until their demand for protection money was met.
Bank workers are hardly impoverished: According to Central Bureau of Statistics data, the average bank worker earned about NIS 13,600 a month this year. That is almost double t he average wage in the economy (currently some NIS 7,300 a month) and more than four times the minimum wage (about NIS 3,300). And while some bank workers obviously earn much less than this average, they will not be the main beneficiaries of the payoff: The options, as well as a NIS 120m. bonus that was included in the deal (but which will be funded by the bank rather than the state), will be divvied up according to the workers’ salaries. In other words, those with the highest salaries will get the most; those with the lowest salaries will get the least.
And it was Peretz, in his capacity as Histadrut chairman, who personally approved this successful extortion attempt: Not only did the strikes and sanctions require Histadrut authorization, but Histadrut officials participated in the negotiations. In other words, Peretz personally oversaw a campaign that culminated in NIS 350m. worth of state funds being funneled to some of the economy’s best-paid workers. And as a result, this money will not be available to help the truly needy.
NOR WAS this a one-time aberration: Earlier this year, Peretz orchestrated an identical extortion campaign at Israel Discount Bank, which ended with those workers being “compensated” for the bank’s privatization to the tune of N IS 250m. Peretz also led the Histadrut’s successful fight – waged, as always, via the threat of strikes and sanctions – against government efforts to make civil servants contribute fairly to their own pensions. Private-sector workers must pay 7 percent of their gross salaries into a pension fund. Yet civil servants, even high-level officials earning some NIS 30,000 a month, pay only 1%. Their pensions are funded mainly by the taxpayer – a benefit that costs the government billions of shekels a year.
Ever y year, similar Histadrut campaigns force the government to give billions of shekels to the wealthiest workers in order to avoid crippling strikes – money that could otherwise be used for vital education, health and welfare projects to help the neediest I sraelis. And this protection racket has been orchestrated by none other than that “champion of the poor,” Amir Peretz.
PERETZ’S RESPECT for the rule of law is similarly selective. For instance, when disengagement opponents blocked roads this summer in an effort to pressure the Knesset to cancel the pullout, the Labor Party inveighed against it night and day, arguing that disrupting the country in order to bully the Knesset into changing its mind constituted an attack on the rule of law. Yet when the Knes set enacted a pension reform in May 2003, the Peretz-led Histadrut used the very same tactic that he deplored in the anti-disengagement protests two years later: It organized demonstrations throughout the country in which pensioners blocked roads, grindin g traffic to a halt, in an effort to browbeat the Knesset into repealing the law. These demonstrations took place several times a week for most of that summer.
And, lest anyone think that he experienced a genuine change of heart, Peretz’s Histadrut appro ved a strike just two weeks ago that was aimed at thwarting another piece of Knesset legislation: a law passed this summer that requires the banks to sell their mutual and provident funds. Discount Bank, in obedience to the law, put its funds on the block earlier this month – whereupon Discount’s union promptly launched sanctions in an effort to stymie the sale. This, too, constitutes an attempt to torpedo legislation by disrupting the country: After all, it is the public that suffers when a major bank go es on strike.
Thus in Peretz’s view, tactics that are unacceptable when used against a law he supports are perfectly admissible against a law he opposes. And that subverts the very essence of the rule of law – which is that the rules apply equally to everyone, regardless of one’s political persuasion.
Finally, there is Peretz’s newly minted stance as a “moderate” leftist. In an address to the Labor Party’s central committee on Sunday, he resoundingly declared that Jerusalem should be Israel’s undivided capital. Yet in 2000-2001, when Ehud Barak proposed giving the Palestinians half of Jerusalem – including the Temple Mount and most of the Old City – MK Peretz enthusiastically backed this proposal. At that time, he had not a word to say about the importa nce of united Jerusalem.
In short, nothing in Peretz’s record supports any of the poses he is currently adopting for electoral purposes. And that record is likely to be a far better guide to his future actions than any campaign rhetoric.i
That, of course, is patently ridiculous: As one judge commented to Haaretzthis week, “How can you expect a senior jurist, some 60 years old, not to have opinions about the court’s role?” But it is particularly egregious coming from a man who has systematically made the court a vehicle for his own agenda during 27 years on the bench.
Barak has an extremely well-developed view of the court’s proper function. In a nutshell, it is that the court should be the arbiter of every major political and social issue. As he explained in a 1992 article, “in my eyes, the world is filled with law. Every human behavior is subject to a legal norm. Even when a certain type of activity – such as friendship or subjective thoughts – is ruled by the autonomy of the individual will, this autonomy exists because it is recognized by the law… There are no areas in life which are outside the law.”
Moreover, as he wrote in another article, the court must decide such issues “according to the views of the enlightened community in Israel” – where the justices, of course, are the arbiters of what qualifies as “enlightened.” In other words, Supreme Court justices are the modern equivalent of Plato’s philosopher king: Their job is to impose their own “enlightened” views on the nation.
To put this agenda into practice, Barak persuaded his colleagues on the bench to eliminate two procedural barriers to judicial intervention that had been in place since the court’s establishment, and are still in place in most other Western countries.
One, the doctrine of “standing,” held that only someone with a direct, personal interest in a case could petition the court on that issue. Barak decided instead that anyone could petition the court on any issue, thereby ensuring that someone could always be found to bring every major issue to the court’s doorstep. The second, the doctrine of “justiciability,” held that the court should not rule on certain issues because they are properly the purview of the legislature or executive. Barak held instead that since “no areas in life… are outside the law,” no issue can be beyond the court’s purview.
HAVING SUCCESSFULLY eliminated these procedural barriers, Barak then abolished the one remaining check on the court’s power: the Knesset’s ability to overrule the court through legislation. He did this by declaring that two 1992 Basic Laws supported by a mere quarter of the 120-member Knesset – Human Dignity and Liberty (which was approved 32-21) and Freedom of Occupation (23-0) – comprised a constitution, and therefore entitled the court to overturn subsequent legislation passed by far larger majorities if, in the court’s view, it conflicted with these two laws.
The fact that no other country in the world has ever adopted a constitution by minority vote troubled Barak not at all. Neither did the fact that most MKs did not intend these laws as constitutional legislation (as Barak himself admitted, Israel’s “constitution” came into being “almost secretly”). Asserting constitutional status for these laws was essential to his program – especially since they are worded so vaguely that virtually anything a justice opposes can be held to contradict their principles – and he therefore insisted that they indeed authorized the court to overrule the Knesset.
AND, JUST as Barak intended, the court is indeed now deciding virtually every major issue. It is determining the route of the separation fence, which may well define Israel’s future borders; dictating immigration and citizenship policies (both by defining who is a Jew, and thereby entitled to automatic citizenship, and via various cases dealing with naturalization); setting budgetary priorities (in one pending case, it has already asserted the right to set a minimum level for government welfare payments; in another, it asserted the right to expand national health insurance coverage); intervening in sensitive family matters (from recognition of gay couples to criminalizing spanking); and even dictating wartime military tactics (with regard to both specific operations, such as one in Rafah in May 2004, and general policies, as in a pending petition against targeted killings of terrorists).
Thus what really bothers Barak is not the existence of an “agenda,” but the existence of a different agenda – namely, Gavison’s belief that such major public issues should be decided by the people’s elected representatives rather than the court. He even admitted as much later in his speech, charging: “Her agenda is not good for the Supreme Court.”
That, however, is a highly debatable proposition. Indeed, traditional democratic theory sides with Gavison: It holds that major issues are supposed to be decided by the people, via their elected representatives, rather than by an unelected court. By usurping the legislature’s role in making such decisions, the court has made normal democratic politics – which centers on trying to elect people who share your views – largely irrelevant. It has thereby gutted our political culture, increased alienation and undermined belief in the value of democracy. And ultimately, it is liable to undermine the court itself – because the court, like any other dictator, will increasingly become the focus of popular resentment.
The choice between Barak’s approach and Gavison’s is one that every democracy must make, as it fundamentally affects the shape of society. As such, it deserves to be debated openly and thoroughly. Barak’s attempt to quash this debate by hypocritically declaring all “agendas” hors concours is merely the latest salvo in a decades-long effort to subordinate Israel to one particular agenda – his own.
While most Israelis concur that higher education should be affordable to all, this is not the case today. One recent study found that only about 14 percent of students from communities at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder go on to higher education, compared to 59% of those from wealthier communities – and while tuition costs are certainly not the only reason for this gap, they undoubtedly play a role.
Five years ago, in a misguided effort to solve this problem, the government wound up making things much worse: Under pressure from students and their supporters, it agreed to cut annual tuition at state-supported schools in half, from NIS 10,400 to NIS 5,200, over a five-year period. Like many government decisions, this one is not being implemented on schedule, but tuition has gradually been cut, and currently stands at about NIS 8,400 a year.
Needless to say, an across-the-board tuition reduction is a lousy way of helping the poor, since it primarily subsidizes the upper- and middle-class students who make up the bulk of the university population. Such families could easily afford annual tuition of around NIS 10,000, which comes to a mere NIS 833 a month. Yet for the genuinely poor, even tuition of NIS 5,200 a year is beyond reach.
Moreover, tuition cuts of this magnitude would create a serious budgetary crisis. According to the Winograd Committee, which recommended the reduction, the full cut would reduce the universities’ income by some NIS 800 million a year. Slashing that sum from the already cash-strapped universities’ budgets would make it difficult for them to offer the quality education that is essential if Israelis are to remain competitive in an increasingly well-educated world. Yet neither can the government afford to pick up the tab: A country whose public debt, at 102% of gross domestic product, is already enormous by Western standards cannot simply increase its budget still further; nor could such a huge outlay be easily offset by cutting other parts of the budget.
TAMIR’S PROPOSAL elegantly addresses both of these problems: It directs aid to those who truly need it, rather than subsidizing the rich, while at the same time avoiding the budgetary crisis that the Winograd program would engender. Under her proposal, the government would establish a student loan corporation that would offer low-interest loans to all college students to cover their tuition. The corporation would raise the necessary funds by issuing bonds. To discourage the program from being exploited by those who do not need it, however, students who pay tuition up front instead of taking out a loan would end up saving money: While regular tuition would be set at NIS 10,000 a year, those who utilize the government loans would pay the equivalent of about NIS 12,500 a year (tuition plus interest).
By restoring tuition to its 2000 level instead of slashing it in half, this proposal eliminates the budgetary hole with which the Winograd proposal would saddle the universities. Yet at the same time, the easy loan repayment terms make tuition truly affordable for even the poorest student. Payments would begin only after the student has not only graduated, but has found a job paying at least the average wage (currently about NIS 7,000 a month). Moreover, the payments would total only 3.5 percent of his monthly salary. For a student earning the average wage, that would come to some NIS 245 a month – hardly an unaffordable sum. At that level, repayment would take 12.75 years; those with higher salaries would settle their debt in less time.
The big question is how much the government would lose each year due to defaults on these loans. Dr. Efrat Tolkowsky of Tel Aviv University, who examined this question for Tamir, predicted that defaults would cost the state a maximum of NIS 250m. a year. That is less than a third of what the government would pay if it picked up the full tab for the Winograd cuts, but it is still a nontrivial sum. Moreover, the program would clearly involve sizable administrative costs.
Yet if Tolkowsky’s prediction is reasonably accurate, the state could probably finance the program without exceeding its existing budget for higher education at all: It currently earmarks some NIS 300m. a year for tuition grants to needy students, and this program could be eliminated if student loans were instituted.
Tamir’s proposal is thus a win-win situation: It would help needy students obtain a college degree without either gutting university budgets or substantially increasing government expenditures. Moreover, it is the first proposal on the subject that has won support from both interested parties – university managements and student unions – thereby increasing the chances that it could pass the Knesset.
Nevertheless, the establishment of a multibillion-shekel-a-year student loan corporation is too massive an undertaking to be feasible without enthusiastic government backing. And though Education Minister Limor Livnat was commendably prompt in announcing her support for the idea, a government as dysfunctional as this one currently appears is unlikely to be capable of instituting such a revolutionary change.
Yet even if it has to wait until after the next election, this idea should not be allowed to die. Tamir will undoubtedly keep pushing it – but she needs and deserves the support of all those who care about making higher education truly affordable for all Israelis.