Analysis from Israel

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.

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Why Israel Needs a Better Political Class

Note: This piece is a response to an essay by Haviv Rettig Gur, which can be found here

Israel’s current political crisis exemplifies the maxim that hard cases make bad law. This case is desperate. Six months after the coronavirus erupted and nine months after the fiscal year began, Israel still lacks both a functioning contact-tracing system and an approved 2020 budget, mainly because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is more worried about politics than the domestic problems that Israel now confronts. The government’s failure to perform these basic tasks obviously invites the conclusion that civil servants’ far-reaching powers must not only be preserved, but perhaps even increased.

This would be the wrong conclusion. Bureaucrats, especially when they have great power, are vulnerable to the same ills as elected politicians. But unlike politicians, they are completely unaccountable to the public.

That doesn’t mean Haviv Rettig Gur is wrong to deem them indispensable. They provide institutional memory, flesh out elected officials’ policies, and supply information the politicians may not know and options they may not have considered. Yet the current crisis shows in several ways why they neither can nor should substitute for elected politicians.

First, bureaucrats are no less prone to poor judgment than politicians. As evidence, consider Siegal Sadetzki, part of the Netanyahu-led triumvirate that ran Israel’s initial response to the coronavirus. It’s unsurprising that Gur never mentioned Sadetzki even as he lauded the triumvirate’s third member, former Health Ministry Director General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov; she and her fellow Health Ministry staffers are a major reason why Israel still lacks a functional test-and-trace system.

Sadetzki, an epidemiologist, was the ministry’s director of public-health services and the only member of the triumvirate with professional expertise in epidemics (Bar Siman-Tov is an economist). As such, her input was crucial. Yet she adamantly opposed expanding virus testing, even publicly asserting that “Too much testing will increase complacence.” She opposed letting organizations outside the public-health system do lab work for coronavirus tests, even though the system was overwhelmed. She opposed sewage monitoring to track the spread of the virus. And on, and on.

Moreover, even after acknowledging that test-and-trace was necessary, ministry bureaucrats insisted for months that their ministry do the tracing despite its glaringly inadequate manpower. Only in August was the job finally given to the army, which does have the requisite personnel. And the system still isn’t fully operational.

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