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Despite widespread disagreement about how Hassan Rowhani’s election as president affects the chances of a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear program, just about everyone appears to agree on one thing: The victory of a “relative moderate” came as a complete and unwelcome surprise to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. I’d been wondering whether anyone was ever going to challenge this blatantly irrational consensus, but finally, someone has. “I interpret his election in one way only: The regime wanted him to win,” said Dr. Soli Shahvar, head of Haifa University’s Ezri Center for Iran and Gulf Studies, in an interview with the Tower.
Shahvar pointed out that not only was Rowhani handpicked by the regime to be one of only eight candidates, while hundreds of others were disqualified, but the candidate list was blatantly tilted to ensure that he would place first: It pitted a single “moderate” against five conservatives (two candidates dropped out before the vote), thereby ensuring that the conservative vote would fragment. “If they had wanted one of the conservatives to win, they would have gotten four of the five conservatives to drop out of the race,” Shahvar said.
Indeed, though Shahvar didn’t mention it, that’s precisely what happened on the “moderate” side. Initially, there were two “moderates,” but former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami persuaded one, Mohammad Reza Aref, to withdraw so as not to split the moderate vote. It beggars belief that Khamenei couldn’t have engineered something similar on the conservative side had he so desired.
It’s also worth noting that throughout the campaign, Khamenei carefully avoided giving any hint as to which candidate he preferred. The widespread assumption that he preferred a conservative is unsupported by any evidence.
But the most convincing argument, to my mind, is one Shahvar didn’t make: the final vote tally. According to the official results, Rowhani clinched the contest in the first round by winning 50.7 percent of the vote. But for a regime widely suspected of committing massive electoral fraud to ensure Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection in 2009, it would have been child’s play to alter the vote count by the tiny fraction necessary to put Rowhani under 50 percent and force a second round. Moreover, it would have been perfectly safe, because none of the pre-election commentary foresaw Rowhani coming anywhere near victory. Thus had his tally been announced at, say, 49 percent instead, there would have been no suspicions of fraud; rather, everyone would have been amazed at his strong showing. And then, with conservatives pooling their forces behind a single candidate in the run-off, a narrow loss for Rowhani would have been equally unsuspicious.
It’s not hard to figure out why Khamenei would have wanted Rowhani to win: He desperately needed someone who could ease the international sanctions and stave off the threat of a military strike without actually conceding anything on the nuclear program. And Rowhani’s performance as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator in 2003-05 proved his skill in this regard. Indeed, he boasted of it: “While we were talking with the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment in parts of the [nuclear conversion] facility in Isfahan,” Rowhani said in 2004. “By creating a calm environment, we were able to complete the work there.”
In the aftermath of Rowhani’s victory, American and European officials are already talking enthusiastically about a new round of negotiations, while Israeli analysts say the election has almost certainly delayed any possibility of military action against Iran’s nuclear program until 2014. Thus Khamenei has gotten exactly what he wanted. The only question is why all the “experts” are still portraying this as a defeat for the regime.
Congratulations to the price-tag vandals and the more extreme settler rabbis: in their zeal to protect the settlements, they have undermined the very cause they claim to support.
A new poll by Ariel University, which examined how Israeli Jews inside the Green Line view the settlements, found that support for them has dropped significantly since last year’s poll, by almost every measure. The proportion of respondents that supported dismantling most or all settlements under an agreement with the Palestinians rose to 33 percent, from 22% in 2012 and 13% in 2011. The proportion that deemed settlements a waste of public funds rose from 24% last year to 39% this year. The proportion that deemed them an obstacle to peace rose from 22% to 31%. The proportion that considered them “true Zionism” fell from 64% to 52%. And the proportion that viewed them as Israel’s “safety belt” fell from 57% to 46%.
But the punch line was people’s response when asked what kept them from identifying with the settlers. The number-one factor was the “hilltop youth” – a term that to most Israelis is shorthand for extremists who engage in violence against Palestinians and/or Israeli soldiers (though in reality, of course, not all “hilltop youth” are extremists and not all extremists are “hilltop youth”). It was cited by 53%, up from 42% in 2012. The extremist views of settler rabbis, especially toward women, followed close behind, cited by 50% (up from 37% last year).
Granted, pollsters sometimes slant questions to get the results they want. But a poll commissioned for a conference on “Judea and Samaria studies” by the only Israeli university in the territories would almost certainly have preferred to find an increase in support for settlements rather than a decrease. And double-digit declines can’t be dismissed as mere statistical error.
Yet it would be simplistic to conclude from this that violence and extremism simply don’t pay. In some situations, they pay handsomely: for instance, threats of Arab violence have kept Jews from praying on the Temple Mount for 46 years now. And though there’s no hard evidence, it seems likely that the violence accompanying outpost demolitions in recent years truly has reduced the number of demolitions, while also spurring the state to promise compensatory settlement construction when court orders make demolitions unavoidable. Last year, for instance, the government promised to build alternative housing nearby if settlers peacefully evacuated two sizable outposts, Migron and Beit El’s Ulpana neighborhood. But it might well have refused to undertake this extra trouble and expense had it not badly wanted to avoid violent clashes.
Religious extremism also serves a purpose: By erecting walls between group members and outsiders, it strengthens the group’s internal cohesion and reduces attrition.
But these benefits come at a high price – especially for groups like the settlers, whose future ultimately depends on public opinion. After all, it’s the government that will decide whether to evacuate settlements, either unilaterally or as part of a peace deal, and whether to freeze construction there in the meantime. And while public opinion isn’t the only factor affecting government decisions, it is an important one; few governments will risk a decision that they know is deeply unpopular with the electorate. It’s very unlikely, for instance, that the Knesset would have approved the disengagement from Gaza had public opinion polls not consistently shown a roughly 60% majority in favor of the plan.
Moreover, because people are emotional rather than strictly rational beings, emotional revulsion often trumps rational considerations. There’s no logical reason, for instance, why price-tag violence and rabbinic extremism should reduce the number of respondents who view the settlements as Israel’s “safety belt”; the settlements’ security function isn’t dependent on the views or behavior of their residents. Yet the poll indicates that they did.
Violence and extremism are particularly self-defeating because there are strong arguments to be made for the settlements. And as the poll shows, most Israelis would be open to hearing them were it not for this behavior.
By way of example, I’ll stick to the easiest of these arguments: security. First, settlements protect the rest of Israel by serving as the front line. It’s no accident that rocket and mortar attacks on southern Israel shot up hundreds of percent after the Gaza pullout; until then, most such attacks targeted the Gaza settlements, but post-disengagement, the Negev became the new southern front. And without the West Bank settlements, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem would be the eastern front.
Perhaps even more importantly, settlements anchor the army. Even advocates of unilateral withdrawal now say they favor evacuating West Bank settlements, but not the IDF, since the army is needed to prevent the area from becoming a rocket-launching pad like Gaza has. But without the settlements, the army wouldn’t stay. It’s no coincidence that Israel’s first unilateral withdrawal was from Lebanon, where there were no settlers, and the second from Gaza, where there were only about 8,000, while in the West Bank, with some 350,000, the IDF still operates freely. Israel is always under immense international pressure to withdraw, but redeploying soldiers is much easier than either evicting people from their homes or leaving them unprotected in the heart of Palestinian-controlled territory. Without that human brake, the army would soon quit the West Bank as well.
To many Israelis, however, an even more powerful argument is the area’s identity as the Jewish people’s religious and historical heartland. That’s why, despite the alarming decline, a majority of respondents still view the settlements as “true Zionism.”
Nevertheless, most Israelis don’t consider either vandalism or religious extremism to be “true Zionism.” Thus the more they associate such behavior with the settlements, the less they will view the settlements as a Zionist enterprise.
For this reason, the short-term gains achieved by the “hilltop youth” and extremist rabbis (like preventing house demolitions) pale beside the long-term cost. They are discrediting the entire settlement enterprise among mainstream Israelis at a time when international pressure to dismantle the settlements is intensifying. And given the important functions the settlements serve, they may thereby be imperiling not just their own cause, but all of Israel.
As Jonathan Tobin noted yesterday, the Palestinian Authority has voiced vehement opposition to Natan Sharansky’s plan to build an egalitarian prayer section at the Western Wall. But I think it’s too soon to call this an “impassable obstacle,” as he does; there’s an important step that needs to be taken first: a thorough survey of American Jews asking whether, in light of this opposition, they favor proceeding with the plan. By this, I don’t just mean a telephone poll of 500 or 1,000 random Jews; ideally, I’d like every Reform or Conservative congregation in America to discuss this question with its membership–for two reasons.
One is that the new egalitarian section seems to matter more to American Jews than to Israelis, since Israel’s Reform and Conservative movements are so much smaller (about 7 percent of all Israeli Jews). Therefore, it’s only fair to get their input before making any decision. The more important reason, however, is that this could provide a genuine teachable moment in the kind of trade-offs Israelis face every day in dealing with the Palestinians, to which liberal American Jews–i.e. the majority of the American Jewish community–have lately grown increasingly unsympathetic.
Most liberal American Jews have two main demands of Israel: They want it to recognize the non-Orthodox denominations, and they want it to make peace with the Palestinians, right now. The latter demand isn’t confined to fringe anti-Israel activists; it’s routinely voiced by long-time Israel supporters like Rabbi Eric Yoffie or Leon Wieseltier. So I’d like all these Jews to seriously consider this question: When these two primary demands conflict, what do you do–capitulate to the PA in the interests of “peace” and give up on being able to pray at the Western Wall in your own fashion, or insist on your rights at the Wall at the cost of further antagonizing the Palestinians, for whom modifications of the Western Wall Plaza are no less objectionable than new outposts in the heart of the West Bank?
Dilemmas no less wrenching confront Israel every day in dealing with the Palestinians, but because they don’t affect American Jews directly, the latter are often too quick to accuse Israel of being intransigent over a trivial point it should just concede in the name of peace. They deplore Israel’s refusal to agree to a border roughly along the 1967 lines, not understanding the enormous security risks this creates; they deplore Israel’s refusal to release murderers to woo the Palestinians to the negotiating table, not understanding the major role freed prisoners have repeatedly played in fomenting new terrorism; they deplore Israel’s reluctance to redivide Jerusalem, not understanding how unlikely it is that the city would remain open afterward, or how devastating a repartition would therefore be.
American Jews won’t understand the details of these issues any better after confronting their own Palestinian dilemma over the Western Wall. But just maybe, they’ll understand that dealing with the Palestinians isn’t quite so simple as they seem to think it is. And if so, the Palestinians will have done a great service to Israel’s relationship with American Jewry.
I’ve given up expecting peace-process zealots like Secretary of State John Kerry or the European Union to pay any heed to mainstream Israelis (i.e., the 83 percent who think even withdrawing to the 1967 lines and dividing Jerusalem wouldn’t end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). But recently, even Israel’s far left has become too “right-wing” for these zealots. That begs an obvious question: Since any peace deal requires two sides, how do they expect to close one by adopting positions so extreme even Haaretz columnists won’t support them?
Two regular Haaretz contributors and long-time peace advocates wrote columns this month decrying the current approach. First, former Haaretz editor-in-chief David Landau blasted Kerry for treating veteran Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem as “settlements.” Next, psychology professor Carlo Strenger explained why the Syrian crisis makes a full West Bank withdrawal impossible.
Much of Landau’s piece restated what has long been obvious: the “indiscriminate lumping together of Jerusalem suburbs with far-flung” settlements has encouraged mainstream Israelis to do the same–and therefore oppose a construction freeze in either–and made it impossible for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to negotiate without a total freeze, because he can’t demand less than Washington does. But Landau also added a new twist: “Kerry’s ham-fisted lumping together of Ramot and Gilo with West Bank settlements” has even forced Israeli leftists to side with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against Washington (and, he might have added, the EU as well). It is “veritably forcing myriad moderate Israelis, who long for peace and the two-state solution, to bridle, with the Netanyahu camp, at the entire admonishment.”
Strenger’s piece, however, tackled a broader problem: the ongoing implosion of Syria. Peace activists have long advocated a deal with Syria, he noted, but “most Israelis now shudder when they think what would have happened if Israel had returned the Golan Heights. Al-Qaeda and other extreme Islamist groups would be at the shore of the Kinneret, creating an unbearable security risk.”
This lesson matters for the West Bank, he wrote, because despite his conviction (incidentally not shared by most Israelis) that Abbas truly wants peace, “Israelis ask a simple question: do you have the ability to prevent a takeover of Palestine by extremists?” And the obvious answer is no: Hamas remains committed to Israel’s destruction, and Abbas can’t guarantee it won’t take power following an Israeli pullout.
“After all, Hamas once won the elections in Palestine,” Strenger recalled. Hamas also routed Abbas’s forces in less than a week when it staged a military takeover of Gaza in 2007–a fact Strenger bizarrely omits, but that most Israelis haven’t forgotten. Hence the inevitable conclusion:
In the Middle East’s current situation no Israeli government will renounce security control of Palestine’s eastern border and no Israeli government will return to the 1967 borders in the foreseeable future, when there are chances that radical Jihadist elements might attack Israel from there.
But another failed push for a deal demanding exactly that won’t merely increase distrust on both sides and thereby reduce the chances of peace in the future–a point both Strenger and Landau make. It also means diplomats aren’t pursuing interim measures that could defuse the conflict and actually increase prospects for future peace–measures that, as political scientist Shlomo Avineri noted in this insightful analysis, are routinely employed in other conflicts where final-status deals aren’t immediately possible, like Cyprus or Kashmir. Thus by pushing a final-status deal now, Kerry and company are actively making things worse at the expense of steps that could make things better.
And if that’s what even Israel’s far left is saying, isn’t it time for international diplomats to start listening?
Two recent developments show the extent to which the mainstreaming of rabid anti-Israel sentiment in Europe is harming Europe itself. One, a new exhibit glorifying Palestinian suicide bombers at one of France’s most famous museums, undermines France’s security. The other, a British union’s decision to effectively bar members from contact with another British workers’ group because the latter opposes boycotting Israel, undermines Britons’ civil liberties.
The exhibit at the Jeu de Paume Museum, which is funded by the French government, features 68 photos of Palestinian “martyrs” who “lost their lives fighting against the occupation.” For instance, there’s Osama Buchkar, who “committed a martyr mission in Netanya”–aka a 2002 suicide bombing in an open-air market that killed three people and wounded 59.
The danger here is that fame and glory are powerful motivators for terrorists. Indeed, one Israeli study based on interviews with failed suicide bombers (people caught before blowing themselves up) concluded that it was the leading motivator. But the Jeu de Paume is far more important to Frenchmen–even marginalized ones–than to Palestinians. Thus being lionized by one of France’s most famous cultural institutions is primarily an inducement to its own citizens.
Granted, the museum only intended this accolade for people who killed Israelis. But Islamic terrorists have proven remarkably impervious to the European view that killing Israelis and Jews (Islamists rarely distinguish between the two) is more acceptable than killing other people. Take, for instance, France’s own Mohammed Merah, who murdered three (non-Jewish) French soldiers in two separate attacks before going on a shooting spree at a Jewish day school in Toulouse. Thus by glorifying anti-Israel terrorism, France is inadvertently encouraging the homegrown variety.
But the decision by GMB, one of Britain’s largest unions, may be even more chilling: Last week, it voted to bar its chapters from visiting Israel on any trip organized by Trade Union Friends of Israel, a British group that supports cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian workers, or addressing any TUFI event. Nor was this just the decision of a few radical activists at the top. GMB’s leadership actually opposed the motion, but the union’s annual congress adopted it anyway.
Just consider how many different civil liberties this one resolution undermines: It restricts freedom of speech, as GMB members can no longer speak wherever they please. It limits freedom of association, since they can’t associate with TUFI. And perhaps above all, it constrains freedom of information: Union delegations can’t participate in trips to Israel that risk exposing them to information that might contradict GMB’s anti-Israel narrative. GMB chapters can still join trips organized by, say, the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign; they just can’t join trips organized by TUFI.
A GMB spokesman insisted that the ban didn’t apply to individuals, which appears to be technically true: A GMB chapter couldn’t send people on a TUFI trip, but an individual could theoretically join one on his own, as long as his chapter didn’t help in any way. Yet how many ordinary union members would risk doing so, knowing they would thereby incur the wrath of union leaders for flouting GMB’s ambition to “take a lead” in the anti-Israel boycott?
One has to wonder when Europeans will finally realize that their anti-Israel zealotry is exacting too high a price at home. Judging by the latest developments, it should have happened long ago.
Last week’s anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War recalled a question that has long puzzled me, and whose implications go far beyond mere historical interest: Why is that war considered a miraculous victory while the 1973 Yom Kippur War is remembered as a terrible disaster? After all, both ended with the enemy resoundingly defeated and the Israel Defense Forces threatening Cairo and Damascus.
Certainly, the 1973 war produced ample reasons for dismay: It killed 3.5 times as many Israelis as 1967 did, took Israel by surprise due to severe intelligence blunders and revealed serious dysfunction in the IDF. Nevertheless, the end result of both wars was identical – and 1973 was arguably a far more miraculous victory.
In 1967, Israel enjoyed the benefit of complete surprise (via a preemptive strike), a creative battle plan and a well-trained army that executed it superbly. And at no point after the fighting began was it seriously threatened with defeat.
In 1973, the enemy enjoyed the benefit of complete surprise, while Israel had a dysfunctional military leadership, a lousy battle plan (the Bar-Lev line of outposts in Sinai proved as useless as France’s Maginot Line did in 1940), and a poorly trained and maintained army. In his semi-autobiographical novel Adjusting Sights, author Haim Sabato, who served in a tank during the Yom Kippur War, described an exercise not long beforehand in which the tanks repeatedly broke down, and soldiers joked about what would happen if that occurred during a real war. It was no laughing matter when it actually occurred in 1973.
In this war, Israel faced a real threat of destruction. At one point, a tiny force led by Avigdor Kahalani held off a far superior Syrian force on the Golan Heights just long enough for reinforcements to arrive. Had the Syrians broken through, they would have had a clear path to Israel’s heartland.
The same was true in the south. In his autobiography, the IDF’s first chief rabbi, Shlomo Goren, recalled visiting Sinai early in the war, before the reserves arrived. The defensive line was stretched paper-thin, he wrote, and there was nothing behind them; had the Egyptians broken through, the path to Israel’s heartland lay wide open.
Yet despite this dismal start, Israel proceeded to win a stunning victory. The war ended with the IDF shelling the outskirts of Damascus in the north and poised to destroy the Egyptian Third Army on Egypt’s side of the Suez Canal in the south.
In Israel’s collective memory, however, this victory is recalled as an unmitigated disaster. And that distorted memory has shaped Israeli policy ever since.
First, it became the emotional cornerstone of the land-for-peace paradigm. The war proved that territory offers no protection, the argument went: Just six years after acquiring a huge territorial buffer in 1967, Israel was once again attacked, came within a hair’s-breadth of defeat and suffered heavy casualties. Therefore, only trading land for peace could ensure the country’s survival.
In reality, however, 1973 proved the vital importance of territory: that territorial buffer is what gave Israel time to mobilize its reserves and counterattack. Had Egypt and Syria achieved similar early gains starting from the 1967 lines, Israel would have been destroyed. And territory is no less important today.
Second, 1973 was a formative experience for most recent Israeli leaders. Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, Binyamin Netanyahu and Tzipi Livni ranged in age from 31 to 15 during that war, and it’s no accident that all repeatedly voice existential fears for Israel’s future of a kind never publicly heard from the previous generation of leaders: “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses … the State of Israel is finished” (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” (Livni). In short, Israel’s very survival depends on its enemies’ willingness to make peace.
This existential terror can’t be explained by facts alone, because the threat these leaders cite – Israel’s demographic situation – has, just like its military situation, actually improved substantially since 1948. Then, Jews comprised just 33% of the total population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea (and 58% in the area the UN allotted for a Jewish state). Today, depending on whose calculations you believe, Jews comprise somewhere between 50% and 58%, including Gaza, and up to 66% excluding it.
Yet this fear has several pernicious consequences: it undermines Israel’s morale, creates pressure for dangerous territorial concessions, and sabotages the very two-state solution these leaders claim to want. After all, if Israel itself says the Palestinians can destroy it just by refusing to sign an agreement, why should they save it by signing? And indeed, they haven’t: after rejecting three Israeli offers of statehood (in 2000, 2001 and 2008), they now refuse to negotiate at all.
Israel’s traumatized reaction to 1973 wasn’t inevitable. Just consider another country’s very different response to a genuine military defeat: in 1940, the German army trounced French and British forces and trapped them against the sea at Dunkirk. The one bright spot was the ensuing rescue, in which hundreds of ordinary Englishmen, often using their own boats, evacuated over 330,000 soldiers.
But Winston Churchill focused on the success rather than the failure: He used that heroic rescue to rally his people to fight on alone against the Nazis. And ultimately, the Nazis were defeated.
The Yom Kippur War could have inspired a similar lesson: that despite serious problems, Israel had the strength and resilience to overcome immensely difficult opening conditions. Instead, the lesson derived was that Israel is so fragile its very survival depends on its enemies’ willingness to rescue it by making peace.
In reality, Israel has survived and thrived without peace for 65 years now, and if necessary, it can continue doing so. But no less important, as the Palestinian example shows, is that our enemies won’t make peace until they are convinced they can’t destroy us. And we will never convince them of that unless we first convince ourselves.
Pro-Israel activists in Norway, where anti-Israel sentiment is rampant, assuredly don’t have it easy. So it was fascinating to read David Weinberg’s account of the issue they’ve found most successful in making Israel’s case–which, surprisingly, is one American activists generally ignore: the story of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
Norwegian activist Odd Myrland terms this tale, which most Norwegians have never heard, a “knockout punch” that “evens out the playing field, and forces people to think about justice for Israel.” As Weinberg explained, it reframes the conversation: Instead of being about Palestinian rights versus Israeli security–a nonstarter with many Westerners, for whom rights easily trump security–it “becomes a debate about a balance of rights: about Israeli/Jewish rights and Palestinian/Arab rights.”
At first glance, this seems bizarre. After all, what does Israel’s absorption of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab lands have to do with the issues anti-Israel activists usually target: “the occupation” and the settlements? But a clue emerges from an unrelated interview with Dr. Qanta Ahmed, a British-born Muslim who practices extensively in Arab lands.
Ahmed, who made her first visit to Israel last month, noted that throughout the Muslim world, she hears nonstop that “because of Israel, the Palestinians were dispossessed from their property and land.” That, of course, is also what many Westerners hear.
But Ahmed, whose parents became refugees when the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan sent 10 to 12 million people fleeing in both directions (the Ahmeds fled to Pakistan), isn’t quite so sympathetic. Though she understands how wrenching refugeehood can be, she’s seen her own parents create new lives–and “I also see how people came to Israel, some of them barely surviving the Holocaust, to a land where they were not used to the climate and where they had no family, and yet somehow managed to build this extraordinary, complicated nation.”
While she never says it explicitly, the implication is clear: The Palestinians’ current plight is due less to Israel’s creation than to their own insistence on living in the past, and Arab countries’ insistence on keeping them there. Instead of building new lives for themselves as other refugees have done, they clung to the dream of eradicating Israel and “returning” to its territory–a dream that has precluded peace for 65 years now, and shows no sign of dying. In 2011, for instance, the PLO’s ambassador to Lebanon asserted that a Palestinian state would still deny citizenship to all Palestinian refugees, even those already living there, in order to preserve the demand for their “return” to Israel.
Moreover, as Weinberg noted, this issue shows Israel to be “a just and moral actor,” in sharp contrast to Arab states: While it absorbed the Jewish refugees and allowed them to build new lives, Arab states refused to absorb Palestinians: They denied them citizenship and kept them in squalid camps to preserve them as a weapon against Israel.
Finally, it sheds new light even on “the occupation.” Ahmed, for instance, considers it unjustified, but admitted there’s no obvious alternative: “How do you relinquish control when there’s a virulent Jihadist ideology and many Muslin leaders outside the region who say that not only shouldn’t Israel be recognized, but it shouldn’t be there at all?” That’s a problem too few Westerners are willing to acknowledge. Yet the refugee issue highlights this ongoing desire to eradicate Israel.
Disgracefully, Israel seems to have abandoned this issue: Nobody in the current government is continuing the work of former Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who labored to bring it to global attention via everything from conferences to YouTube campaigns.
But American and European Jewish groups could step into the breach. Congress has already introduced bipartisan legislation to include the issue of the Jewish refugees in any Mideast peace effort, but most of the world remains ignorant of their existence. And as the Norway experience shows, that ignorance urgently needs to be rectified.
Justice Minister Tzipi Livni has successfully marketed herself as a champion of liberal values. But liberal values evidently come a distant second to personal pique: Otherwise, she wouldn’t be vetoing a bill to liberalize one of the most illiberal bastions of Israeli society – at the expense not of the party she is mad at, but of her own constituents.
The bill in question, sponsored by the Bayit Yehudi party, would significantly reduce the haredi (ultra-Orthodox)-dominated rabbinate’s ability to torment couples seeking to wed. Current law requires couples to register in the city where one of them lives, meaning they can at best choose between two municipal chief rabbis, and sometimes have no choice whatsoever. Some municipal rabbis have exploited this monopolistic power to make life miserable for applicants – especially, though not exclusively, converts (some haredi rabbis don’t recognize the state-sponsored conversion system) and immigrants from the former Soviet Union (who often have trouble producing sufficient proof of their Jewishness to satisfy more stringent rabbis).
Bayit Yehudi’s bill seeks to solve this problem by introducing competition: It would let couples register with any municipal rabbi in Israel, thereby allowing them to patronize those who offer the best service. Moreover, forcing municipal rabbis to compete for these couples’ businesses (and the attendant fees) would create an incentive for all of them to become more user-friendly.
But last week, Livni vetoed this bill in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation – solely because she was mad at Bayit Yehudi for blocking a bill her Hatnua party had sponsored.
There’s nothing wrong with playing hardball politics, nor is there anything wrong with insisting on a horse trade: Conditioning support for another party’s bill on its support for yours is standard political tactics. But smart politicians usually threaten to veto bills that primarily interest the other party, rather than their own constituents or the general public. That maximizes their leverage, since they have little to lose politically if the other party won’t play ball.
Livni, in contrast, chose to veto a bill that primarily benefits secular Israelis – i.e., the very people her party ostensibly represents. After all, they’re the ones most likely to have trouble registering a marriage. The religious Zionists who comprise Bayit Yehudi’s base are much less likely to have their Jewishness questioned by the rabbinate to begin with, and usually know a rabbi who can help if they run into problems. Thus instead of punishing Bayit Yehudi’s electorate, she is punishing her own, and the broader Israeli public.
Moreover, Hatnuah’s bill was also aimed at liberalizing the haredi-dominated rabbinate: It called for expanding the panel that chooses the chief rabbis from 150 to 200 people and requiring 20 percent of them to be women, with the goal of adding new, non-haredi members to what is currently a Haredi-dominated panel. That’s certainly a worthy aim, and Livni is justified in fighting for it. But if liberalizing the rabbinate is her party’s goal, vetoing another bill that also furthers this goal is like cutting off her nose to spite her face.
Equally egregious was her failure to attempt negotiations before resorting to hardball, even though a reasonable compromise was almost certainly achievable. First, Bayit Yehudi explicitly promised to support Hatnua’s bill if an agreement could be reached on how to appoint the new members. Second, though nine of its 12 MKs voted against the bill in the Knesset, party chairman Naftali Bennett actually voted in favor, indicating that he would be a willing partner in finding such a compromise. Third, one of the bill’s main goals is to increase the chances of electing a religious Zionist as the next Ashkenazi chief rabbi, thereby ending decades of haredi domination; that’s a goal Bayit Yehudi shares.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, Bayit Yehudi has demonstrated a sincere desire to liberalize and improve the rabbinate: Just over two months have passed since the government took office, and it has already proposed two important reforms. One was the marriage registration bill. The other, unveiled last week, would gradually abolish the position of state-appointed neighborhood rabbi and instead give communities government funds to hire rabbis of their own choice.
This proposal won headlines mainly because it would for the first time let non-Orthodox communities obtain funding for their rabbis as well. But the implications are much broader than that; as with the marriage registration bill, the goal is to significantly improve service to the public by introducing competition. Before, neighborhood rabbis were appointed by the rabbinate bureaucracy and were paid regardless of whether or not they did anything useful for the communities they supposedly served. Now, they will be appointed by the communities themselves – meaning they will have to provide good service in order to get and keep their jobs.
Given Bayit Yehudi’s proven commitment to liberalizing the rabbinate, it shouldn’t be impossible to agree on a revised selection process for the chief rabbis that would further this goal, assuming Livni were willing to engage in good-faith negotiations. After all, she likes to think of herself as a master negotiator; indeed, her last election campaign revolved entirely around her self-declared ability to negotiate a final-status deal with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. But apparently, negotiating with a fellow Israeli politician is beneath her. Instead, she has chosen to punish all Israelis by vetoing a bill aimed at improving marriage registration for everyone.
With the Religious Services Ministry controlled for the first time in decades by a party that has shown real interest in reforming our ossified religious bureaucracy, it would be tragic if this opportunity were lost due to one woman’s petty spite. Unfortunately, the man who ought to be calling her to order – Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – appears to have gone AWOL, due largely to his personal loathing for Bennett. Having already sacrificed a golden opportunity for economic reform in order to undermine Yair Lapid, it seems that on this issue, too, Netanyahu would rather accomplish nothing than let a political rival claim an achievement.
Thus Livni’s small-mindedness may actually be serving Netanyahu’s interests. But it’s doing the rest of us a great disservice.
Secretary of State John Kerry is still trying to restart Israeli-Palestinian talks, with another visit to the region expected “within days,” according to Jordan’s foreign minister. But nothing better illustrates the folly of this effort than last week’s comments by Israel’s ostensible “peace partner,” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
At an event marking the 49th anniversary of the PLO’s founding, Abbas (according to a translation by the Palestinian news agency Ma’an) declared that PLO founder Ahmad Shuqueiri “was asked to figure out what the Palestinians wanted, and he returned with the convention for the PLO.” In other words, according to Abbas, the PLO’s founding document is an accurate reflection of what Palestinians want. And lest anyone has forgotten the contents of that 1964 document, still available on the website of the PLO’s UN mission, here are a few choice quotes:
- “The partitioning of Palestine, which took place in 1947, and the establishment of Israel are illegal and null and void, regardless of the loss of time…” (Article 17)
- “The claims of historic and spiritual ties between Jews and Palestine are not in agreement with the facts of history … Judaism, because it is a divine religion, is not a nationality with independent existence. Furthermore, the Jews are not one people with an independent personality…” (Article 18)
- “Zionism is a colonialist movement in its inception, aggressive and expansionist in its goal, racist in its configurations, and fascist in its means and aims. Israel, in its capacity as the spearhead of this destructive movement and as the pillar of colonialism, is a permanent source of tension and turmoil in the Middle East…” (Article 19)
- “The causes of peace and security and the requirements of right and justice demand from all nations … that they consider Zionism an illegal movement and outlaw its presence and activities” (Article 20)
The 1964 version is actually tame compared to the amended version adopted in 1968, but as the above quotes show, it’s more than sufficient to preclude any chance of peace. How can Israel possibly make peace with people who consider its very existence “illegal and null and void”; deny that Jews are a nation with any right to “independent existence”; deny any Jewish connection to the land of Israel; consider Zionism, the national movement of the Jewish people, to be “colonialist,” “racist,” “fascist” and “illegal”; and believe that only by eliminating Zionism can “peace and security” and “right and justice” be achieved?
Nor has anything much changed in 49 years, as anyone who follows Palestinian Media Watch would know. Just last month, for instance, another senior PA official widely considered a “moderate” in the West, Jibril Rajoub, told a television interviewer, “We as yet don’t have a nuke, but I swear that if we had a nuke, we’d have used it [against Israel] this very morning.” PA officials and the official PA media still consistently deny the Jews’ historical connection to the land of Israel, teach their people that the ultimate goal is a world without Israel, and glorify those who murder Jews. And most Palestinians still think “the rights and needs of the Palestinian people cannot be taken care of as long as the state of Israel exists.”
Shuqueiri’s 1964 charter indeed reflects “what the Palestinians wanted”–and what they still want. And as long as that’s true, any “peace process” will be so much wasted time and effort.
As I noted yesterday, many world leaders seem to be stuck in a time warp, in which any new information that contradicts paradigms conceived decades ago is simply filtered out. But in their defense, the same is often true of two of the main sources they rely on for information: think tanks and the media.
A salient example is a study recently published the Rand Corporation, one of America’s most prestigious think tanks and a frequent consultant to U.S. governments. In it, author Alireza Nader concludes that containing a nuclear Iran is feasible, because Iran’s nukes wouldn’t threaten either America or its Middle Eastern allies; Tehran wants them mainly for defensive purposes. “Iran does not have territorial ambitions and does not seek to invade, conquer, or occupy other nations,” Nader asserted.
That might have been a tenable theory 25 years ago, when Iran was still licking its wounds from an eight-year war with Iraq that the latter started. Since then, however, Iran has effectively taken over Lebanon and is now seeking to do the same with Syria. And it isn’t using peaceful suasion, but force of arms.
The takeover of Lebanon was completed in 2008, when Iran’s wholly-owned Lebanese subsidiary, Hezbollah, staged an armed occupation of Beirut to reverse two government decisions (the government had planned to dismantle Hezbollah’s independent telecommunications network and dismiss an airport security official who facilitated Iranian arms shipments to the organization). Hezbollah removed its troops only after the government signed a power-sharing deal that effectively gave the organization a veto over all government decisions.
Now, Iran is trying to annex Syria. As Lee Smith noted in the Weekly Standard, not only is it arming and training President Bashar Assad’s forces, both regular and irregular, but it has also sent Hezbollah, Iranian-backed Iraqi militias and units of its own Revolutionary Guards Corps to join his fight against the Sunni rebels. Add in the billions of dollars it has given Assad to prop up his regime, and it’s clear that if he survives, Syria will be another wholly-owned Iranian subsidiary.
Nor does Iran hide that this is its goal. As one senior Iranian cleric helpfully explained in February, “Syria is the 35th province [of Iran] and a strategic province for us. If the enemy attacks us and wants to take either Syria or Khuzestan [in western Iran], the priority for us is to keep Syria….If we keep Syria, we can get Khuzestan back too, but if we lose Syria, we cannot keep Tehran.”
Yet Rand’s analyst simply ignored all these developments, blithely asserting that Iran “does not seek to invade, conquer, or occupy other nations” even as it has already effected an armed conquest of Lebanon and is pouring in troops in an effort to do the same in Syria.
The Rand paper is a particularly egregious example of an all-too-common phenomenon. Media reports, for instance, still frequently assert that Hezbollah’s main mission is fighting Israel, making its role in the Syrian civil war a surprising departure. Fifteen years ago, that was a reasonable theory. Yet by now, it should be obvious that Hezbollah’s main mission is furthering its Iranian master’s interests–which often means fighting Israel, but currently means fighting Syrian Sunnis. Seen from that perspective, Hezbollah’s role in Syria isn’t the least surprising.
Scholars and journalists are supposed to help leaders understand world events. But by clinging to outdated paradigms, they often end up obfuscating events instead.