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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.
Reading certain papers (the New York Times and Haaretz come to mind), one could easily conclude that racism is spreading like a plague through Israeli society. So it’s worth listening to what an expert had to say on the subject this week–and according to Prof. Sammy Smooha, it’s all bunk. In fact, Smooha said, the opposite is true: Israeli Jews have grown more tolerant of Israeli Arabs even though the latter have become more extreme.
Smooha has published an annual Index of Arab-Jewish relations in Israel since 2003, in conjunction with the Israel Democracy Institute. The 2012 index came out last week, and here’s its conclusion: “In contrast to the marked toughening of Arab attitudes, there was no similar change in Jewish attitudes over the years [since 2003], but rather stability and even some moderation prevailed.” Smooha reiterated that conclusion at an IDI roundtable this week: “Whatever the media thinks, Jews have not become more extreme. The processes that have made Arabs more extreme have not affected Jewish opinions.”
Indeed, compared to 2003, the survey found that fewer Israeli Jews now object to Arab neighbors or to Arab students in Jewish schools (universities are integrated, but most Arabs prefer to send their children to Arabic-speaking primary and secondary schools). In addition, more are prepared to accept Arab parties in government coalitions, and most think Israeli Arabs should be allowed “to self-administer their religious, cultural, and educational institutions.”
Clearly, some racism still exists, as it does in every society. What the study demonstrates, however, is not just that the allegations of metastasizing racism are overblown, but that some of what outsiders deem “racism” is actually an understandable response to growing Arab extremism.
For instance, 59 percent of Arab respondents said Palestinians would be justified in launching another intifada if the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate continues, while 58 percent considered it “justified that Arab citizens in Israel begin an Intifada of their own if their situation does not improve significantly.” Lest anyone has forgotten, the last intifada was a bloody terrorist war that killed over 1,000 Israelis, most of them civilians. And while terrorist organizations perpetrated most of the attacks, sometimes, individual Arabs simply turned on the nearest Jew. Given this, one can understand why some Jews remain reluctant to have Arab neighbors or hire Arab employees: They don’t want to be convenient targets if an Israeli Arab intifada erupts.
Similarly, when 70 percent of Israeli Arabs think Israel has no right to maintain a Jewish majority, one can understand why almost half of Israeli Jews still oppose having Arab parties in the government: They don’t want a government comprised of parties that oppose fundamental elements of Zionism like the Law of Return, which has played a major role in maintaining Israel’s Jewish majority by enabling any Jew to immigrate. As Smooha noted, there’s “a deep divide over the very nature of the state.”
Thus the best way to moderate Israeli Jewish “racism” would be to moderate Israeli Arab extremism. But unfortunately, many well-meaning American Jews are doing the opposite: Via organizations like the New Israel Fund, they finance Israeli Arab groups that actively promote extremist views–like Adalah, which demands that Israel replace the Law of Return with a Palestinian “right of return” to Israel. And they are thereby distancing rather than promoting the more tolerant Israel they claim to want.
Two recent comments by Turks encapsulate everything that’s wrong with Washington’s Turkey policy. One is Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay’s astounding accusation yesterday that the “Jewish diaspora” is behind last month’s massive anti-government protests. The other is a protester’s tweet quoted by Istanbul-based journalist Claire Berlinski: “Let me take this opportunity to thank Erdoğan’s international cheerleaders for the monster they’ve co-created.”
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has many international cheerleaders, but the biggest has long been President Barack Obama, who famously declared him one of the five world leaders he trusted most. Obama repeatedly touted Erdogan as a positive force in the Middle East and an exemplar of how to combine Islam and democracy.
This was always fatuous: Anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists are neither a positive force in the Middle East nor an exemplar of democracy, and Erdogan’s government routinely spouts anti-Israel and anti-Semitic bile. But as Atalay’s comment shows, the chickens are now coming home to roost: Lest anyone has forgotten, the largest Jewish Diaspora by far is in America. In other words, Ankara’s newest conspiracy theory is primarily aimed at U.S. citizens.
This is a well-known historical pattern: Anti-Jewish animus always expands to new targets if left unchecked. Thus by giving the Erdogan government’s venom a pass and praising the premier lavishly, U.S. policymakers simply encouraged the poison to spread. Now, Erdogan is biting the very hands that fed him, turning not just on U.S. citizens–and specifically some of Obama’s strongest supporters–but on the international media (which also numbered among his cheerleaders until recently) and various unspecified foreign governments that Ankara sees as part of the conspiracy.
Moreover, by encouraging these excesses, Washington alienated the many ordinary Turks who oppose their premier’s less lovable traits, and especially his growing authoritarianism: Not only does Erdogan’s government lead the world in jailing journalists; it just suppressed peaceful protests so brutally that more than 7,000 people were wounded, many seriously, along with four killed.
As the abovementioned tweet shows, most Turks believe this violence was enabled by Erdogan’s “international cheerleaders,” who led him to believe that anything he did would get a free pass. And as Berlinski noted, his Turkish victims won’t soon forgive America for this–meaning this policy has done incalculable damage to America’s long-term interests.
But while the protests forced many journalists and governments to finally recognize the truth about Erdogan, there’s been one glaring exception: America. As Berlinski noted elsewhere, other embassies in Turkey tweeted regularly about the protests, but the U.S. mission stuck to fatuous irrelevancies like “#SecKerry on #LGBT Pride Month: No matter where you are, and no matter who you love, we stand with you.” Worse, at the height of the crackdown, U.S. Ambassador Frank Ricciardone even lavished praise on Erdogan’s government, declaring, “There is no difference between us and the government of Turkey” regarding “the principles that we share of freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly” (if that were true, American citizens should worry).
The message was clear: As far as the leader of the free world is concerned, Erdogan still has a free pass: His government is free to continue using massive violence against his own citizens, and free to spout anti-Semitic conspiracy theories against American citizens.
This should be a wake-up call for American Jews: They haven’t been trying to foment protests in Turkey, but it’s high time for them to start doing so in America. By pressuring the president they helped elect to finally stop encouraging Erdogan’s excesses, they would serve the long-term interests of America, Turkey and Jews everywhere. It’s hard to think of a bigger win-win than that.
As a country faced with nonstop war and terror since its inception, Israel
naturally accords great respect to the views of its defense professionals.
politics, where their performance received more scrutiny than the shadows of the
defense establishment allow. Ehud Barak and Moshe Dayan, for instance, were both
IDF chiefs of staff, yet the former’s handling of the second intifada as prime
minister was universally panned, as was the latter’s performance as defense
minister during the Yom Kippur War. Former air force commander Ezer Weizman
opposed attacking Iraq’s nuclear reactor as defense minister, yet the 1981
airstrike succeeded brilliantly. Mossad veteran Tzipi Livni boasted of crafting
UN Security Council Resolution 1701 to end the Second Lebanon War as foreign
minister in 2006, yet this resolution enabled Hezbollah to rearm so quickly that
by 2009, it had three times as many rockets as it did before the war.
But
such failures don’t seem to have affected the reputation of serving or retired
defense officials who aren’t in politics: Their “professional assessments” of
defense-related issues are still eagerly solicited and deferentially received.
And that, as two recent examples showed, is a dangerous mistake.
One was
former Mossad chief Meir Dagan’s speech at the President’s Conference last
month, where he said the IDF needn’t remain in the Jordan Valley under a deal
with the Palestinians; it could defend the country even from the 1967 lines. Had
he asserted this without explanation, listeners might well have assumed he had
good reasons for this position. But fortunately, he explained his rationale –
and it wasn’t just lame; it was astoundingly stupid.
“The Jordan Valley
had importance in 1991,” he declared. “At that time, there was a threat from
Jordan, Syria and Iraq, but now it is of less importance.”
Dagan is
obviously correct that right now, these countries pose no real threat to Israel.
Yet the man who headed our premier intelligence agency for eight years is
evidently incapable of entertaining the possibility that this could someday
change. Such shortsightedness would be disturbing at any time – but especially
when the situation in all three countries is highly unstable.
preoccupied with its civil war, but that won’t last forever. And once it ends,
Israel may well face a heightened threat: either an Assad regime completely in
thrall to Iran, whose aid is all that’s currently keeping it alive, or a new
government dominated by Islamic extremists, whose militias constitute the
rebels’ most effective fighting forces.
sectarian violence intensifies. If this continues, Iraq’s Shi’ite-dominated
government may well seek help in crushing Sunni extremists from neighboring
Shi’ite powerhouse Iran. That would further Tehran’s goal of turning Iraq into a
wholly-owned subsidiary, which would obviously make the latter a renewed threat
to Israel.
Finally, Jordan has experienced repeated unrest over the last
three years, and there’s no guarantee this unrest won’t someday lead to King
Abdullah’s overthrow. That would almost certainly result in a government hostile
to Israel: Jordan’s population, which is two-thirds Palestinian, is
overwhelmingly anti-Israel, and so is the main opposition party – the Muslim
Brotherhood.
In short, there’s a real possibility that one or more of
these countries could again become a threat – not just in some distant future,
but in the next few years. Yet Dagan advocates completely ignoring this
possibility and setting long-term security arrangements as if the current
security situation will prevail forever.
Command Nitzan Alon’s assertion last month that the Palestinian Authority has
supported Washington’s efforts to restart negotiations by cutting off funds for
a Palestinian group that foments anti-Israel riots.
“The PA, for example,
almost stopped financing a group that dealt with some riots and protests against
Israel, and they halted the funds of this group in the last couple of months,”
Alon told diplomats and journalists during a briefing at the Jerusalem Center
for Public Affairs. “They weren’t looking for diplomatic recognition for the
move but rather for the territory to quiet down.”
It doesn’t take an
Einstein to realize that if PA President Mahmoud Abbas is currently tamping down
anti-Israel violence by halting funding to a group that foments it, then until
now, he has been encouraging such violence by funding this group. And if he’s
encouraging anti-Israel violence whenever it suits his purpose, then he’s no
more committed to peace than his predecessor, Yasser Arafat.
realization evidently escaped Alon: Instead of calling out Abbas for fomenting
violence, he lauded the PA leader for temporarily ceasing to do so. Nor does he
seem bothered that the PA, whose continued funding he once deemed essential to
Israel’s security, is instead using this funding to undermine Israel’s
security.
Clearly, there are questions that defense professionals are
uniquely qualified to answer – technocratic ones requiring highly specialized
knowledge. If you wanted to plan an intelligence-gathering operation in Iran,
you’d consult Dagan, not me. And if you wanted to know how many tank divisions
are needed to keep a given army from crossing the Jordan River, you’d ask Alon,
not me.
debate rarely fall into that category. Instead, they are primarily political
assessments: Could Syria’s civil war result in a government even more hostile to
Israel? What does Abbas’ stop-and-start funding of violent anti-Israel groups
say about his intentions? Would a beefed-up UNIFIL force be willing to clash
with Hezbollah to prevent its rearmament? How would Baghdad and other world
capitals react if Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor?
professionals’ training enables them to make such political assessments better
than other people. If anything, the opposite is true: Because defense
organizations are hierarchical, defense professionals have less experience than
do politicians in identifying and weighing competing interests and assessing the
likely outcome.
So by all means, let’s make use of our defense
professionals’ specialized knowledge. But it’s past time to realize they’re no
better than anyone else at interpreting the data they amass, and deserve no
special deference when doing so.
Today’s Israel Hayom has an important article about an Israeli Greek Orthodox priest that every Christian in the West should read. Father Gabriel Nadaf and his family are suffering harassment and even death threats from their fellow Arabs for arguing that Israeli Arab Christians should serve in the Israel Defense Forces. On Tuesday, he was even summoned to a disciplinary hearing by the local Greek Orthodox patriarch, Theophilus III, which ended with Theophilus keeping Nadaf in office but asking him to lower his profile. The account of the hearing given by one of Nadaf’s close associates, Shady Halul, is revealing:
“The patriarch told Father Nadaf that he is not an opponent of the state of Israel,” he said. “On the contrary, he is very appreciative of the security enjoyed by Christians in Israel. He did ask Nadaf to tone down his statements concerning his work with the forum so as to ensure the safety of Christians in the Palestinian Authority and the Arab states.”
It has become a truism among some Christian groups that Israel is primarily to blame for the suffering of Middle East Christians. In 2010, for instance, a synod of Catholic bishops from the Middle East blamed the Christian exodus from the region on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thus it’s worth listening to what these Israeli Christians have to say: that Israel is actually the one place in the region where Arab Christians enjoy security; elsewhere, they are oppressed by their fellow Arab Muslims.
Even more noteworthy, however, is that since the Arab Spring erupted, the “forum” to which Halul referred in the above quote–the Forum for the Enlistment of the Christian Community, founded by a group of Christian IDF veterans–has seen a marked increase in the number of Christians seeking to enlist, though they still represent a minority of the Arab Christian community. Previously, many Arab Christians bought into pan-Arab ideology, and thus believed their interests lay with their fellow Arabs. But the Arab Spring shattered this ideology: In country after country, Arab Islamists have turned on fellow Arabs who fail to toe their religious line, and this, naturally, includes Christians. By comparison, Israel is a haven.
“We feel secure in the state of Israel,” Nadaf explained, “and we see ourselves as citizens of the state with all the attendant rights as well as obligations.”
Indeed, the shift is so marked that the forum even lobbied (successfully) to get Arab Christians integrated into Jewish units rather than into Bedouin units (Bedouin are the only Muslims who serve in the IDF in significant numbers), thereby opting to forgo the comfort of serving with other Arabic-speakers.
As I’ve written before, a similar sea change is occurring among the Druze of the Golan Heights: Since the Syrian civil war erupted, the number seeking Israeli citizenship has soared by hundreds of percent, after decades in which most preferred to retain Syrian citizenship. As one explained, “People see murdered children and refugees fleeing to Jordan and Turkey, lacking everything, and ask themselves: Where do I want to raise my children. The answer is clear-in Israel and not Syria.”
All this leaves only one question: When are those western Christian groups that reflexively view Israel as the root of all evil going to reach the same realization that Nadaf and his followers have?
When an acclaimed historian says he sees a terrifying historical pattern repeating itself, he deserves to be taken seriously. And Benny Morris is assuredly one of Israel’s most famous historians. Unfortunately, his warning is unlikely to be seen by many, since it’s buried at the end of a somewhat tedious book review. And it’s liable to be ignored by those who need to hear it most.
Morris reviewed Patrick Tyler’s Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country–and Why They Can’t Make Peace for the summer issue of the Jewish Review of Books. Most of the almost 5,000-word review was devoted to detailing Tyler’s numerous egregious errors and showing how they undermine his conclusions. But by itself, Morris wrote, Tyler’s spurious history would be insignificant. What makes it noteworthy is that it’s part of a much larger trend:
Fortress Israel is just the latest in a spate of venomous perversions of the record that have appeared in the past few years in the United States and Britain, all clearly designed to subvert Israel’s standing in the world. Deliberately or not, such books and articles are paving the way for a future abandonment of the Jewish state.
I am reminded of the spate of books and articles that appeared in Western Europe in 1936 through 1938 repudiating the legitimacy of the newly formed Czechoslovakia before its sacrifice to the Nazi wolves. In 1934, the Conservative weekly Truth hailed Czechoslovakia as “the sole successful experiment in liberal democracy that has emerged from the post-War settlement.” By the end of 1936, The Observer was writing it off as “a diplomatic creation with no sufficient national basis either in geography or race.” By March 1938 The New Statesman, in the past a great friend to central Europe’s only democracy, was writing: “We should urge the Czechs to cede the German-speaking part of their territory to Hitler without more ado.” Of course, as all understood, this meant leaving Czechoslovakia defenseless. Hitler conquered the rump of the country a few months later without a shot. The appeasement of the Arab-Islamist world at Israel’s expense is in the air and Tyler is one of its (very, very) minor harbingers.
Reasonable people can disagree about how we should deal with this dangerous trend. But the first step is to recognize that it exists: that we’ve seen this historical pattern before, and it has deadly real-world consequences.
Unfortunately, Morris today is persona non grata with many of the people who most need to hear this warning. For years, he was a hero of the self-described “peace camp,” due both to his role as a leading “new historian” who challenged accepted Israeli historiography (he catapulted to fame in 1988 when he published The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949) and to his outspoken left-wing politics: He favored a Palestinian state before it was fashionable and was jailed for refusing to do military service in the territories.
But after the second intifada broke out, he became convinced that what the Palestinians wanted wasn’t peace, but “to extinguish the Jewish national project and to inherit all of Palestine.” That made him anathema to many well-meaning and genuinely pro-Israel people who can’t abide that conclusion–and they are also the people who find it hardest to accepting the delegitimizers as enemies who must be fought at all costs. Instead, they often favor “dialogue” and “an inclusive big tent.”
But Morris is a historian, not a politician, and his politics shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the validity of his historical analysis. The Czechoslovakian analogy he sees is frightening–and we ignore it at Israel’s peril.
If it weren’t for one flaw, I’d agree completely with Daniel Gordis’ column in this paper last Friday. He’s right that the endless debate over the peace process has sucked all the air out of the international Jewish conversation “for far too long,” leaving no room for crucial topics like “why the Jews need a state and the values on which it ought to be based.” He’s right that we can’t afford to keep ignoring these issues. And he’s right that the impossibility of an Israeli-Palestinian deal in the foreseeable future creates space to finally start addressing them. Indeed, that’s precisely what happened in the last Israeli election, which, for the first time in decades, revolved around domestic issues – i.e., what kind of state Israel should be – rather than the peace process.
Yet these important arguments are undercut by the flaw hidden in one seemingly innocuous statement: “Reasonable minds can differ as to whether saying publicly that the two-state solution is dead is healthy for Israel’s standing in the international community.”
Actually, where Gordis stands on that question seems pretty clear: Just last July, he signed an open letter urging Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu not to adopt the Levy Report, lest it “place the two-state solution and the prestige of Israel as a democratic member of the international community, in peril”; he then wrote an op-ed in Haaretz explaining his objections in more detail. Yet all the Levy Report said is what every Israeli government has said for decades: that the West Bank isn’t “occupied Palestinian territory,” but disputed territory to which Israel has a valid claim – which in no way negates Israel’s ability or willingness to cede part or all of it for peace. If Gordis views even that as too dangerous to say publicly lest it paint Israel as a peace rejectionist, I can’t imagine him not objecting to a blunt public statement that “the two-state solution is dead.”
And therein lies the flaw. For if prominent Israelis, and especially Israeli leaders, aren’t willing to say this publicly and repeatedly, the “peace process” will keep right on monopolizing the conversation, and we’ll never have time and space for those other topics that Gordis rightly considers vital.
First, this is because nobody can be more Catholic than the pope: Neither American Jews nor world leaders can declare the two-state solution dead as long as Israeli leaders insist ad nauseam that it’s achievable.
Moreover, the benefits of peace as envisioned by the optimists are enormous: no more terror, an economic boom, reduced defense spending that frees up funds for other purposes, unassailable international legitimacy instead of creeping delegitimization. Most Israelis by now consider this “peace dividend” a mirage: 83% think even withdrawing to the 1967 lines and dividing Jerusalem wouldn’t end the conflict, meaning that terror, high defense spending, the economic hindrance of being in a “war zone” and delegitimization of Israel’s efforts to defend itself would all continue. But people who still believe a deal is possible generally also believe it really would produce those benefits.
Thus as long as Israeli leaders encourage the fallacy that an agreement is possible, overseas Jews will naturally think this should take precedence over the issues Gordis rightly wants to discuss. For unless you think Israel would forfeit its heart by ceding its historic heartland – which two-state enthusiasts don’t – then whatever kind of state you want Israel to be, the above-mentioned benefits would make it easier to achieve.
The biggest problem, however, is that Israeli leaders don’t just say peace is possible; whether out of genuine belief or merely to prove their peacemaking bona fides, they also repeatedly declare it essential for Israel’s very survival: “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses … the State of Israel is finished” (former prime minister Ehud Olmert); “it’s impossible to survive in the long run without a political settlement” (Netanyahu); without a Palestinian state, “Israel will not be the Jewish nation-state” (Justice Minister Tzipi Livni).
When Israel’s own leaders – to whom Israelis routinely demand that Diaspora Jews defer on vital security issues – deem a two-state solution the most vital security issue of all, necessary for Israel’s very survival, how can overseas Jews be expected to care about anything else? If Israel truly will expire without a two-state solution, then there’s no point in discussing either why we need it or what kind of state it should be; all such questions are irrelevant until we first ensure its survival by implementing such a solution.
Thus if the conversation is ever to change, Israelis must first explain to the world why the two-state solution is indeed dead, and why Israel can nevertheless survive and even thrive without it, just as it has for the past 65 years.
In fact, explaining this is absolutely vital – because Israel can’t survive and thrive without peace unless we invest in building a state capable of doing so, and that entails a lot of very hard work. We have to reform our economy and education system, promote our case overseas, foster social solidarity, better integrate our minorities, and much, much more. Yet none of this can happen if Israel continues wasting vast amounts of political time and energy on the peace process – which it must keep doing as long as world leaders and overseas Jewry keep insisting on it. And they will keep insisting until Israeli leaders persuade them of what most Israelis already know: that it’s a lost cause.
It may be the world isn’t yet ready to hear this from the very top (even assuming Netanyahu were capable of saying it, which I doubt). But it never will be ready unless other Israelis start laying the groundwork. Thus even if more diplomatic phrasing might be preferable, second-tier politicians like Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett and Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon are performing an essential service by stating this truth.
The more Israelis are willing to join them in saying this publicly, the more likely overseas Jews are to finally start believing it. And only then will we be able to have the conversation Gordis (and I) so badly want to have.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
There’s a popular saying in Israel that if you really want to know what’s going on, you should talk to the taxi drivers. That’s the Israeli version of a worldwide truth: Ordinary people sometimes have a better grasp of reality than intellectuals. A classic example of this truth played out in Western cultural milieus this week, when representatives of both highbrow and lowbrow culture coincidentally weighed in on the Israel issue.
On the highbrow end, we had American literary lion Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple. She has just published a new book, and as Jonathan Tobin detailed here yesterday, it is so vile that even the Anti-Defamation League was moved to denounce its “vitriolic and hateful rhetoric” as blatantly anti-Semitic. As Jonathan noted, Walker also has a long history of anti-Israel activism: Last year, she famously refused to let The Color Purple be translated into Hebrew, to protest what she termed Israel’s “apartheid.”
Across the ocean, over in BDS Central (aka Great Britain), we had the lowbrow riposte, when boycott, divestment and sanctions activists tried to persuade the electronic pop duo Pet Shop Boys to cancel their planned appearance in Israel this weekend. That the group, considered “the most successful duo in UK music history,” rejected the activists’ demand isn’t in itself anything extraordinary: For all the publicity BDS activists receive whenever they do manage to get some performer to cancel an Israel gig, the vast majority of artists refuse.
What was extraordinary, however, was the reason the duo gave. Usually, performers offer some perfectly valid but neutral explanation, such as that boycotts are antithetical to art, or that boycotts impede efforts for peace. But Pet Shop Boys’ vocalist, Neil Tennant, chose instead to challenge the “apartheid” canard head-on. In a statement posted on the group’s website, he wrote:
I don’t agree with this comparison of Israel to apartheid-era South Africa. It’s a caricature. Israel has (in my opinion) some crude and cruel policies based on defence; it also has universal suffrage and equality of rights for all its citizens both Jewish and Arab. In apartheid-era South Africa, artists could only play to segregated audiences; in Israel anyone who buys a ticket can attend a concert.
I might quibble with the “crude and cruel,” but other than that, you couldn’t find a clearer and more succinct explanation of the essential difference between democratic Israel and apartheid-era South Africa.
As George Orwell once wrote of a previous intellectual fad, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Unfortunately, the “Israeli apartheid” canard appears set to become yet another example of this truth: It is increasingly becoming the bon ton among the global intelligentsia.
That makes it all the more important for the “ordinary man” to speak out against it. And Pet Shop Boys has just provided a welcome example of how to do so.
Ever since Hassan Rowhani’s election as Iran’s new president last Friday, many Westerners have been enthusing over the prospects of a negotiated solution to Tehran’s nuclear program. But these enthusiasts should take a long, hard look at what Rowhani actually said at his very first press conference: Asked whether direct talks with Washington were possible, he replied, “First of all, the Americans have to say… that they will never interfere in Iran’s internal affairs. Second, they have to recognize all of the Iranian nation’s due rights including nuclear rights. And third, they have to put aside oppressive… policies towards Iran.”
In other words, the U.S. must first promise to let the nuclear program proceed unhindered, lift all sanctions and recognize the mullahs’ regime as legitimate. Only then, once there’s nothing left to talk about because America has already capitulated fully to Iran’s demands, can negotiations begin.
If this sounds familiar, it should: It’s the exact same tactic Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has been using to evade negotiations with Israel for four years now. As his Fatah party’s central committee reiterated for the umpteenth time yesterday, the PA won’t agree to talks unless Israel first freezes all settlement construction (by which the PA means even huge Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem that everyone knows would remain Israeli under any deal), accepts the 1967 lines (including in Jerusalem) as the basis for the final border and releases Palestinian terrorists from Israeli jails. In other words, it will agree to negotiate only after there’s nothing left to talk about, since Israel has already capitulated fully to its demands on several key final-status issues: borders, Jerusalem, settlements and prisoners.
As Alan Baker, a former legal advisor to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, explained in detail on Tuesday, these preconditions are completely groundless.
“Nowhere in the history of the peace process negotiations is there any commitment to the ‘1967 borders’,” he wrote. “The opposite is in fact the case. All the agreements between Israel and the PLO, as well as the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, base themselves in their preambular paragraphs on the call by the international community, in UN Security Council resolution 242 of 1967, for ‘secure and recognized boundaries.'”
And though Baker didn’t mention it, not only doesn’t that resolution demand a withdrawal to the 1967 lines, but it was explicitly worded to allow Israel to retain some of the territory it captured in 1967.
Baker also noted that “Israel has never, in any of its agreements with the Palestinians, undertaken to freeze settlement activity in territory it continues to administer pursuant to the agreements with the Palestinians.” Indeed, he wrote, the Oslo Accords explicitly permitted Israel to keep building in the part of the West Bank known as Area C, and designated the settlements as “one of the agreed-upon final-status negotiation issues, together with borders, refugees, water, Jerusalem and security.”
While Baker doesn’t address the prisoner issue, that, too, is a classic final-status one. In Northern Ireland, for instance–a precedent Westerners love to cite–the prisoners were freed only after the Good Friday Agreement was signed, not before negotiations even began.
Thus the PA’s insistence that Israel agree on all these final-status issues before talks even start effectively ensures that the talks never will start–and that is equally true of Rowhani’s preconditions.
But Rowhani has assuredly noticed that this tactic has worked beautifully for the Palestinians: Much of the world continues to insist that the absence of talks is Israel’s fault, for not accepting the PA’s preconditions. So who can blame him for hoping it will work equally well for Iran?
One surprising side effect of Syria’s civil war is that it’s causing a few people in the Arab world to question their society’s accepted view of Israel as evil incarnate. These people are still very much a minority: The majority’s attitude is exemplified by the Syrian rebel commander who, without batting an eyelash, last month espoused the delusional theory that “Iran and Hezbollah are cooperating with Israel” to support Syrian President Bashar Assad. Nevertheless, two notable examples of a rethink have surfaced recently.
One involved a seriously wounded Syrian treated at an Israeli hospital this month. He isn’t the first Syrian to be treated in Israel, but he was the first to arrive with a note from the Syrian doctor who treated him initially. “To the honorable doctor, hello,” it began, before launching into a description of his symptoms, his treatment to date and suggestions for further treatment. “Please do what you think needs to be done,” it concluded. “Thanks in advance.”
The Syrian doctor who wrote that note clearly didn’t view Israelis as enemies, but as colleagues who could be trusted to give his patient the care he himself couldn’t provide. It indicates that word has filtered out to at least parts of Syria: Good medical care is available in Israel, and patients who need it can safely be sent there.
Perhaps even more remarkable, however, was a Friday sermon given earlier this month by a cleric in Qatif, a Shi’ite-majority city in Saudi Arabia. Discussing the conflict in Syria, Sheikh Abdullah Ahmed al-Youssef informed his congregants that more Muslims have been killed by fellow Muslims than were ever killed by Israel.
That isn’t news to anyone familiar with the facts. As I noted last month, the Syrian conflict alone has killed more than five times as many people in just two years as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has in all of Israel’s 65 years of existence. And that’s without even mentioning the ongoing Muslim-on-Muslim carnage in places like Iraq (almost 2,000 killed in the last three months) or Pakistan, much less historical events like the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, which killed more than one million people.
But most Arabs aren’t familiar with the facts, having been fed delusional atrocity tales about Israel for decades by their media and their political, religious, cultural and intellectual leaders. Thus for a cleric to stand up in the mosque and tell his congregants this home truth borders on the revolutionary.
If this attitude spreads, it would benefit not just Israel, or even the elusive quest for Mideast peace, but above all, the Arabs themselves. This isn’t merely because Israel has much to offer Arab countries on a practical level (like water management technologies essential for agriculture in a drought-stricken region), but mainly because Arab society’s biggest problem has always been its habit of blaming outsiders–Israel and the West–for all its ills. By so doing, they not only absolve themselves of responsibility, but also nourish the belief that these ills are beyond their control, and hence beyond their own power to fix.
By recognizing that Israel is not the monster of their own imagining, Arabs can begin the process of recognizing that their problems are of their own making rather than the product of malign outside intervention. And only then can they begin the long, hard work of fixing them.