Monthly Archives: December 2010
In Wednesday’s post, I wrote that the European Union seems set to repeat its Cyprus error with the Palestinians. But perhaps that’s unsurprising. For in both cases, willful disregard of the evidence has subverted its policies.
In Cyprus, the EU effectively killed a peace plan by promising accession to Greek Cyprus regardless of the outcome of an April 2004 referendum, but to Turkish Cyprus only if both sides voted yes. Unsurprisingly, since Greeks had nothing to lose by holding out for more, 75 percent voted no, while Turks, having something to lose, voted yes. Indeed, Greek Cypriot President Tassos Papadopoulos openly opposed the plan, telling his countrymen they could get a better deal; so did the largest Greek Cypriot political party.
Subsequently, then-enlargement commissioner Gunter Verheugen accused Greek Cypriot leaders of “cheating” their way into the EU: they vowed support for reunification until accession was assured, then reversed course. But why did Europe deem their promises credible enough to justify sacrificing the accession card?
After all, evidence to the contrary wasn’t lacking. For instance, the Greeks refused to sign an earlier draft of the plan in December 2002 but were nevertheless offered membership later that month. They rejected another version in February 2003, yet the EU made no effort to postpone that April’s signing of the accession treaty, which made accession unstoppable. Indeed, Greek leaders repeatedly demanded more than the plan offered, while polls showed most Greeks opposing the requisite concessions.
The answer is that Europe viewed Cyprus in black and white: since Turkish Cyprus was created by Turkey’s 1974 invasion, it deemed Turkish Cypriots the villainous “occupiers” and Greek Cypriots the victims. Never mind that Turkey invaded in response to a war Greek Cypriots started by staging a coup, with backing from Athens, to create an all-Greek government and merge the island with Greece. Or that Greek Cypriots’ history of oppressing Turkish Cypriots gave the latter good reason to fear the coup and beg Ankara’s assistance, and Ankara good reason to intervene to protect them. Or that the war made thousands on both sides refugees.
Then, having assigned its roles, the EU simply assumed that the victims would “support peace” while the villains would oppose it, regardless of actual behavior. Thus in March 2004, while Papadopoulos and his Turkish Cypriot counterpart were both denouncing the plan’s latest draft, Verheugen still blamed Turkish Cyprus alone for the failed talks.
The Israeli-Palestinian parallels are obvious. Here, too, Europe ignores the fact that Israel conquered the territories in a defensive war, or that every previous Israeli withdrawal has exacerbated anti-Israel terror. It ignores repeated polls (see here and here) showing that Palestinians oppose two states if one of them remains Jewish. It ignores “moderate” Palestinian leaders’ unrelenting insistence on relocating all Palestinian “refugees” to Israel (here and here for instance), their claims that the Western Wall isn’t Jewish, their demand for judenrein territory. It even ignores their rejection of Israeli statehood offers in 2000, 2001, and 2008. Hence its growing support for recognizing “Palestine” without an agreement, thus killing any chance for negotiations.
The EU has decided that Israelis are villainous, peace-hating “occupiers” and Palestinians are peace-loving victims. And never mind the facts.
If insanity means doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then many leading European officials are certifiably insane.
A new WikiLeaks cable reveals that in January 2010, then-French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner proposed that the West promise “to recognize a Palestinian state within a defined timeline, regardless of the outcome of negotiations.” Nor is he alone. This month, 26 former senior European officials, including several former presidents and prime ministers, advocated recognizing a Palestinian state as an alternative to negotiations. And in July 2009, then-EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana proposed that the UN Security Council set a deadline for negotiations, and then, if no agreement were reached, dictate its own final-status arrangement and recognize a Palestinian state in those parameters.
But the EU has tried unilateral recognition before, in Cyprus. And it proved disastrous.
In April 2004, Cyprus voted on a UN-brokered deal to reunite its Greek and Turkish halves. The deal overwhelmingly favored the Greeks: it required Turks to cede 22 percent of their territory after evicting all Turkish residents; let half the 200,000 Greek refugees return to their former homes in Turkish Cyprus; and gave Greeks a two-thirds majority on the united island’s presidential council. Yet 75 percent of Greeks rejected the deal, while 65 percent of Turks approved it.
Why? Because Greek Cyprus was promised immediate EU membership regardless of how it voted, while Turkish Cyprus was offered admission only if both Turks and Greeks approved the deal. Since the Greeks would pay no penalty for voting no, they had every incentive to hold out for an even better deal. Specifically, they wanted all their refugees returned to Turkish Cyprus, so they could outnumber and outvote Turks even in the federation’s Turkish half.
But the decision to admit Greek Cyprus regardless didn’t just scuttle the peace deal. Next, it destroyed the credibility of EU promises because Greek Cyprus, now a member, vetoed promised moves to ease the Turkish half’s economic isolation in reward for its vote. Then it scuttled accession negotiations with Turkey because Nicosia quickly vetoed further progress due to its ongoing dispute with Ankara over Turkish Cyprus — a rejection some have blamed for Turkey’s subsequent turn eastward. Finally, it effectively killed EU-NATO cooperation because NATO member Turkey won’t recognize EU member Cyprus until the Cyprus dispute is resolved, and therefore vetoes cooperative initiatives.
The EU’s Palestine plan would clearly have the same result. By promising recognition without negotiations, it would certainly scuttle any chance of peace: if Palestinians can get most of what they want without an agreement and still keep agitating for the rest, they would have no incentive to make any concessions, even on such deal breakers as the “right of return.”
But since Israelis and Palestinians, unlike Greek and Turkish Cypriots, aren’t already separated into two de facto states, it might also spark a war — thereby fomenting precisely the kind of bloodshed that Europeans claim to want to prevent. In short, the consequences could be even worse than they were in Cyprus.
Unfortunately, the EU seems incapable of learning from past mistakes. And Israelis and Palestinians will pay the price.
The Hebrew media reported last week on a Bank of Israel study showing that elementary schools in the state religious system receive the most weekly teaching hours from the state, while Arab elementary schools receive the least. Yet since official Education Ministry policy is to allocate more hours to schools that serve weaker socioeconomic population groups, Arab schools should have topped the list.
Is this yet another example of how the Jewish state discriminates against Arabs? Well, not quite – because the study found that one significant reason for the gap was supplemental teaching hours provided by national service volunteers, who are subsidized by the state.
Religious schools get the most such hours because most national service volunteers are religious girls, and not only do these girls often prefer to serve in their own community, but nonreligious schools are sometimes unenthusiastic about taking them. That’s certainly grounds for secular schools to cry discrimination, since their dearth of volunteers is not their community’s fault, but the law’s: Secular girls are drafted, whereas religious girls are allowed to choose between army and national service. Were secular girls given the same choice, many might also prefer national service.But in the Arab community, neither men nor women are drafted, so both sexes are eligible to volunteer for national service. Thus in theory, this community could be producing even more volunteers than the religious community.
Instead, it produces very few: Though the number rose from 240 in 2005 to 1,256 in 2009, that is less than 7 percent of the 19,000 Arab teens who graduate high school each year. This scarcity is not mere happenstance; it is deliberately engineered. Both the Arab community’s political leadership and many prominent Arab civil-society organizations are vehemently opposed to “serving the Zionist state,” and therefore do everything in their power to dissuade Arab teens from volunteering.
Thus when the government launched a campaign to persuade Arab teens to volunteer for national service a few years ago, not only did all the Arab political parties decry the idea, but they set up a joint task force to coordinate the battle against it. Arab newspapers editorialized against national service; youth groups campaigned against it; a popular hip-hop group even wrote a song condemning it. As MK Jamal Zahalka (Balad) put it, national service “is a political effort to increase the domination of the Arab population, and to blur their identity … the purpose is to identify with the state against the Palestinian people — or to make them more Zionist and less Palestinian.”
Teens who volunteered despite this pressure often found themselves branded as “traitors.” The orchestrated opposition also caused some schools to refuse to accept national service volunteers, since that too, would be a form of cooperation with the hated Zionist state.
That attitude would obviously preclude Jewish volunteers as well, but they would be less useful in any case, due to the language barrier: Arabic is the principal language of instruction in Arab schools, and few Jewish teens speak fluent Arabic.
All of the above is not to say that discrimination doesn’t exist; it definitely does. And the Arab leadership frequently cites this as justification for their opposition to national service: Arab citizens owe the state nothing, they argue, because the state isn’t fulfilling its obligations to them.
If their goal is to end discrimination, the efficacy of this tactic was always dubious. Nothing makes a majority feel more justified in discriminating than a sense that a minority is not merely different, but actively hostile. And a minority whose leadership stridently proclaims itself devoid of any desire to either identify with or contribute to the state clearly encourages the perception that it is hostile.
But what the Bank of Israel data shows is that this tactic is not merely ineffective, but downright harmful – not just to the goal of equality, but to the Arab community’s overall quality of life. It turns out that the prime victim of the Arab leadership’s opposition to “serving the state” has been neither the state nor its Jewish majority, but the Arab community itself.
The writer is a journalist and commentator
The recent wave of deadly attacks on Iraqi Christians must have cast a pall over Christmas celebrations worldwide this year. But one can’t help wondering whether it also prompted any soul-searching at the Vatican.
After all, it was just two months ago that a synod of Middle East bishops proclaimed Israel the main source of Middle East Christians’ woes. As the Jerusalem Post reported, it “blamed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for spurring the flight of Christians from the Middle East” and “laid much of the blame for the conflict squarely on Israel.” The synod’s president, Archbishop Cyrille Salim Bustros, even implied that Jews had no right to a state here at all and that Israel should be eradicated through the “return” of millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees. And though the Vatican disavowed that comment, Pope Benedict XVI also said that Middle East peace – a term usually synonymous with “Israeli-Arab peace” – was the best way to halt Christian emigration.
In reality, of course, the plight of Palestinian Christians pales beside that of their Iraqi brethren. More than half of Iraq’s Christians – hundreds of thousands in all – have fled their country since 2003, after being targeted in numerous deadly attacks. And not even Al-Qaida has tried to link these attacks to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, though it’s not shy about inventing “justifications”: For instance, it deemed October’s bloody siege at a Baghdad church retaliation for an alleged offense by Egypt’s Coptic Church.
Compare this to the booming business scene in Bethlehem, where tourism is up 60 percent over 2009 despite Israeli “oppression.” One astute Palestinian businessman attributed the boom to the Palestinian Authority’s efforts to reduce violence – a tacit (and correct) acknowledgement that what previously destroyed the PA’s economy was not Israel, but Palestinian terror. Or compare Iraq’s Christian crisis to the fivefold increase in Israel’s Christian population, from 34,000 in 1949 to 152,000 in 2009.
This month, the New York Times reported that many fleeing Iraqi Christians “evoked the mass departure of Iraq’s Jews” after Israel’s establishment in 1948.
“It’s exactly what happened to the Jews,” said Nassir Sharhoom, 47, who fled last month to the Kurdish capital, Erbil, with his family from Dora, a once mixed neighborhood in Baghdad. “They want us all to go.”
It’s eerily reminiscent of Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous statement about the Nazis: “They came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me. And by that time, there was no one left to speak for me.”
But there’s one crucial difference. The Church, as the synod statement shows, isn’t merely remaining silent; it’s actively speaking out against the Jews – and thereby collaborating with its own enemies, the radical Islamists.
It evidently hopes to thereby turn the Islamists’ wrath away from Christians. But as the recent attacks show, appeasement hasn’t worked.
So perhaps it’s time for the Church to learn from its mistakes in World War II and instead try speaking out against its true enemies – the radical Islamists who seek to cleanse the Middle East of both Jews and Christians.
Just about everything that’s wrong with the current conception of “international humanitarian law” was encapsulated in a UN official’s response to the recent escalation between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Surprisingly, it started off well. The agency’s special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Robert Serry, condemned the rocket attacks from Gaza, saying they were “in clear violation of international humanitarian law and endanger civilians.” Then, noting Israel’s retaliatory air strikes, he even declared that Israel had “a right to self-defense.”
Had the sentence ended there, it would have been fine. But it didn’t. Israel, said Serry, has “a right to self-defense consistent with international humanitarian law” [emphasis added] — which requires it to “exercise maximum restraint and take every precaution to ensure Israeli forces do not endanger civilians in Gaza.”
And that’s where the whole concept breaks down. Because what happens when “maximum restraint” and taking “every precaution” fail to stop the rocket fire? After all, we already know they will: Israel tried precisely this kind of pinpoint strike — in which pilots are strictly forbidden to fire if there’s any chance of hitting civilians — for three years after leaving Gaza in 2005, but it had no effect whatsoever on the daily rocket fire.
That’s why Israel finally went to war two years ago. It still worked hard to avoid hurting civilians: with even Hamas now admitting that it lost some 700 combatants, it’s clear that civilians constituted only about 40 percent of fatalities — far below the 90 percent norm for modern warfare. But this certainly wasn’t an exercise in “maximum restraint.” It was a full-scale military operation.
The war produced two results. One was a dramatic reduction in rocket and mortar strikes on southern Israel, from about 4,000 in 2008 to 180 this year. The other was the Goldstone Report, which accused Israel of “war crimes” and urged its prosecution in the International Criminal Court.
In short, under the modern conception of “international humanitarian law,” countries have two choices: either use “maximum restraint” and take “every precaution” to avoid hurting enemy civilians, with the result that lethal attacks against your own civilians continue undisturbed, or take effective military action to protect your own civilians and be branded a war criminal.
This is a travesty. International humanitarian law was never meant to strip countries of the ability to protect their own citizens, nor was it meant to force countries to protect enemy civilians at the expense of their own. The statesmen who drafted the agreements from which this law ostensibly derives, like the Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions, all understood that a country’s first duty is to protect its citizens. And nothing in the actual text of these documents would prevent any country from doing so.
The West needs to return to these original texts and abandon the warped interpretation promulgated by so-called human rights organizations and international bodies like the UN. Otherwise, it will find itself defenseless against any aggressor, from al-Qaeda to North Korea. For aggressors share one common denominator: they don’t consider themselves bound by any kind of international law.
A newly released WikiLeaks cable quotes Ron Dermer, a top adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, telling a U.S. diplomat of Israelis’ frustration with the peace process. Surprisingly, however, Dermer didn’t focus primarily on Palestinian behavior. Rather, he charged, “the Israeli public is skeptical regarding the benefits of returning to negotiations” because “all the GOI [government of Israel] has received in return for its efforts [to date] was a ‘slap-down from the international community.'”
Dermer didn’t offer evidence to support his claim about Israeli frustration with the “international community,” but the data are shocking: according to the August Peace Index poll, fully 77 percent of Jewish Israelis think “it makes no difference what Israel does and how far it may go on the Palestinian issue; the world will continue to be very critical of it.” And in fact, Israelis have good reasons for this belief.
For instance, when Hezbollah continued attacking Israel even after Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, the world, far from condemning Hezbollah, excoriated Israel when it finally responded to these attacks in the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Moreover, after having certified the withdrawal as 100 percent complete in 2000, the UN Security Council then rewarded Hezbollah’s aggression in 2006 by voting to remap Lebanon’s borders, “especially in those areas where the border is disputed” by Hezbollah, with an eye toward forcing Israel to quit additional territory.
Then, when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, evacuating 25 settlements in the process, it was rewarded by daily rocket fire on its cities from the evacuated territory. Yet when it finally fought back, in 2008, it was slapped with the Goldstone Report, which accused it of “war crimes” and urged its indictment in the International Criminal Court. And far from coming to Israel’s defense, most Western countries abstained in both UN votes on the report.
Moreover, even though two Israeli offers (in 2000 and 2008) to give the Palestinians the equivalent of 100 percent of the West Bank have been unmatched by any parallel Palestinian concessions, the West continues to demand ever more concessions from Israel while refusing to publicly demand anything of the Palestinians — even on issues like the “right of return,” where Palestinian concessions are clearly essential for any deal. For instance, a European Union statement earlier this month demanded several explicit Israeli concessions, including withdrawal to the “pre-1967 borders” and Jerusalem as the “capital of two states,” but made no similarly explicit demands of the Palestinians. It merely called for an “agreed, just, fair and realistic solution to the refugee question,” without specifying that such a solution cannot include resettling the refugees in Israel.
All this has made Israelis believe that no matter what they give, the world will still find new reasons to condemn it. And if the West actually wants a peace deal, that ought to concern it deeply, because Israelis thought a deal was supposed to give them two benefits: peace with the Arabs and support from the West. Instead, Israel discovered that concession after concession has brought neither. And if so, what’s the point of continuing to make them?
Though Sunday’s planned vote was postponed, the cabinet is soon expected to approve a bill that would set new rules for drafting haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men. Whether the bill can also pass the Knesset and survive a court challenge is less clear. What is certain, however, is that the proposal is outrageous.The bill would let married haredim age 22 or older and unmarried haredim age 24 or older do a one-year stint in the emergency services (police, fire department, ambulance service, etc.) instead of the three-year army service required of most other Jewish men. They would then be free to work or attend university. Alternatively, haredim could avoid service altogether by staying in yeshiva until age 28, down from 30 currently. They would then be transferred from the draft pool to the reserves, enabling them to work or attend university as well. However, it is unlikely that the army will ever call them up since they will have not received training.
In short, the bill would legally exempt haredim from army service. And that’s why the Finance Ministry is pushing it: Its argument is that the army can survive without the haredim, but the economy cannot.
Given the high haredi birthrate, which has demographers projecting that haredi population will double by 2022, the percentage of working adults will soon be insufficient to support a prosperous modern economy unless the norm in which most haredi men don’t work is reversed, the treasury argues. And the greatest barrier to haredim entering the work world is fear of being drafted if they forfeit their deferment by leaving yeshiva: Most haredi rabbis vehemently oppose army service, believing it encourages young men to abandon religion. Therefore, the only solution is to eliminate this barrier by exempting haredim from army service entirely.
Clearly, the treasury’s fear for the economy isn’t unwarranted. Nevertheless, this approach has two serious flaws.
First, the presumption that the army can do without haredim only holds if non-haredim continue serving at their present rates: Even now, the army is complaining of a manpower shortage. But non-haredi enlistment almost certainly won’t continue at its present rate if this bill passes, because it raises discrimination to an intolerable level.
The current situation, in which most haredim don’t do army service and most non-haredim do, is already highly discriminatory. What makes it marginally tolerable, however, is that haredim pay a price for this privilege which most non-haredim wouldn’t want to pay: They spend long years in yeshiva without either working or attending university, so they enter the job market only years after their non-haredi peers and without a comparable education. Thus those who choose this path generally condemn themselves to lifelong poverty.
But the new bill would let haredim and non-haredim enter university or the work force at almost the same time. A married haredi could finish his mandatory service at age 23. That compares to 21 for ordinary soldiers, 23 for hesder soldiers (who combine Torah study with army service) and 22 to 25 for soldiers who become officers or join special units that require extended service.
Thus instead of haredim being penalized for not serving, the penalty would fall on those who do serve: Not only would their service be three times as long, but they, unlike the haredim, would be risking their lives during it. Even worse, they would then face 30 days of reserve duty every year for the next two decades, while haredim would not – making army veterans less attractive to future employers than their Haredi peers. Under those circumstances, who would want to serve?
Moreover, evasion would be easy. A few years in yeshiva would suffice to qualify for the haredi track – hardly intolerable for the majority Israeli Jews who define themselves as traditional or religious. And parental pressure to do so would certainly swell.
In short, this bill could destroy the army. And without the army to defend it, there will be no Israeli future for the treasury to worry about.
But there’s another reason why this bill is appalling: It was submitted just when there is finally reason to believe that haredim can be persuaded to serve in the army.
Haredi enlistment jumped 25 percent this year compared to 2009, thanks to a raft of new programs for haredim created by a group of visionary army officers in recent years. The haredi combat unit Nahal Haredi celebrated its tenth anniversary last year, and the army now plans to set up other Haredi combat units. A program to train haredim as air force technicians resulted in a whopping 60% of the haredi recruits applying for officers’courses. A new program to induct haredim into intelligence has also been a success.
In all cases, the key was to stop demanding that haredim do all the adapting and instead make accommodations for haredi norms. Haredi soldiers get special food that meets their kashrut standards; they work in all-male environments; their day includes mandatory Talmud study; and married soldiers get generous stipends.
All this costs money, which makes the treasury unenthusiastic. But unlike the government’s bill, it holds promise of finally ending the poisonous division between those who serve and those who don’t, instead of perpetuating it: As these programs gradually prove that army service is compatible with remaining haredi, more and more haredim will be willing to enlist.
And ultimately, they may well move beyond the strictly haredi tracks, just as religious Zionists did. Once, most religious Zionists did hesder. But since only 16 months of the five-year hesder program are spent in army service, hesder soldiers can’t become officers or join special units, and young religious Zionists grew increasingly unhappy with this. So two decades ago, the first mechina opened: a one-year yeshiva program followed by three years of regular army service. Since then, mechinot have proliferated, and religious Zionists now account for 31 percent of all infantry officers.
It’s hard to imagine a better use of state money than encouraging haredim to follow a similar path. Now that the army finally seems to have found the key, the government should be throwing all its resources behind this effort instead of pushing legislation that would kill it in its cradle.
There was much justified outrage last week over a letter signed by dozens of rabbis employed by the state urging Jews not to rent or sell apartments to non-Jews. But the letter is symptomatic of a much larger problem: a sweeping inability and/or unwillingness to force state employees to comply with state policies.
It ought to be obvious that in a state formally committed to equal rights for all its citizens (however short of this ideal it may fall in practice), rabbis who openly preach the most blatant form of discrimination should not be on the state’s payroll. Whether anything will in fact be done about them remains to be seen; the attorney general is currently studying the issue.
But it should also be obvious that, in a state formally committed to justice for all, a judge who publicly terms the ultra-Orthodox “lice” and “parasites,” or tells a disabled lawyer he should find another job if he can’t climb stairs, has no place on the bench. After all, ultra-Orthodox and disabled litigants are liable to appear in his courtroom; how can they expect a fair hearing from someone whose prejudices are so blatant? Yet in fact, not only did Judge Oded Alyagon keep his seat, but then-Supreme Court President Aharon Barak tried repeatedly to promote him – an effort foiled only because then-Justice Minister Yossi Beilin had the rare courage to stand up to Barak and insist that nobody with such views would be promoted on his watch.
It should also be obvious that, in a state formally committed to preventing police brutality, a senior officer caught on camera urging his men to viciously assault peaceful demonstrators (“Crap, let them burn! Don’t hesitate, use water cannon and nightsticks, hit them in the lower body”) has no business in the police force. Yet not only was Negev District Commander Niso Shaham not fired over his behavior at the anti-disengagement rally in Kfar Maimon in 2005, he was even subsequently promoted – twice.
Finally, it should be obvious that any state employee who refuses to honor the authorized decisions of another state agency should lose his job. Yet far from firing state-funded rabbis who refuse to honor conversions performed by the army rabbinate or the state’s conversion administration, the government chose to punish the citizenry for the rabbis’ misbehavior: Converts whose local rabbis refuse to register their marriages will be forced to travel to another city to find a rabbi who will.
The problem, in all these cases, is that it’s very hard to impose any substantive punishment on a civil servant without indicting him. That’s why so many people – not just from the knee-jerk left, but also hard-core rightists like Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin (Likud) – called last week for criminal proceedings against the rabbis who signed the “don’t rent to Arabs” letter: Without an indictment, it’s unlikely that any action at all will be taken against them.
But indictments are no solution. Even if these particular rabbis did violate the law against incitement to racism (which is far from clear, since in deference to freedom of speech, both the attorney general and the courts have traditionally interpreted it narrowly), the other cases cited above clearly don’t lend themselves to prosecution. Nor would it be desirable to broadly criminalize speech.
Theoretically, there is a mechanism short of indictment for handling such cases: disciplinary proceedings. But disciplinary proceedings are usually in-house affairs, and it is the nature of organizations to protect their members.
Shaham’s punishment, for instance, was left to the police commissioner, who made do with a reprimand. Judges can be punished only by the judicial ombudsman, who is always a retired judge, or the Judicial Appointments Committee, which is dominated by sitting judges. In the rabbis’ case, since all the rabbis in question are municipal rabbis, the venue would be the relevant municipal religious councils – i.e., the rabbis’ friends and cronies.
Sometimes, disciplinary charges can be filed in an independent Civil Service Commission tribunal. But many state employees – like the municipal rabbis – are outside the commission’s purview. And even with employees who are subject to the commission, disciplinary trials have traditionally been reserved for “serious” issues like sexual harassment. Under Shmuel Hollander, who was civil service commissioner for 14 years until stepping down in October, the commission tended to view “mere words” as unimportant – even when the consequences were potentially grave, such as encouraging police brutality.
To some extent, this situation is the Knesset’s fault. Legislation could and should be passed to subject everyone on the state payroll to the Civil Service Commission, and to make it clear that some types of behavior are unacceptable for a civil servant.
For instance, legislation is urgently needed to mandate the dismissal of any rabbi on the state’s payroll who refuses to marry someone converted by a recognized state authority. Otherwise, this would probably be impossible even if municipal rabbis were subject to the commission, given their broad authority to interpret Jewish law as they see fit. It must be made clear that while every rabbi is entitled to follow his own halakhic views, he isn’t necessarily entitled to a state salary while doing so.
But legislation by itself cannot create the will to apply it. That requires a civil service commissioner deeply committed to the idea that civil servants should not be allowed to violate government policy, even if the victims – as was true in all the cases cited above (Arabs, the ultra-Orthodox, the disabled, settlers, converts) – are unpopular or politically powerless.
The government is now seeking a permanent replacement for Hollander. Finding someone willing to reverse this sorry state of affairs should be a top priority.
The “expert” report Max cited yesterday, which declared Afghanistan unwinnable even while acknowledging progress in the war, reflects a broader problem: the claim that “there is no military solution to terror” has become virtually unchallenged dogma among Western intelligentsia. Yet as Israel’s experience in the West Bank shows, terrorist organizations can be defeated — if their opponents are willing to invest the requisite time and resources.
In March 2002, Israel was at the height of a terrorist war begun in 2000 that ultimately claimed more victims — mainly civilians — than all the terror of the preceding 53 years combined. Every day saw multiple attacks, and a day without fatalities was rare. But then Israel launched a multi-year military campaign that steadily reduced Israeli fatalities from a peak of 450 in 2002 to 13 in 2007.
Last month, Haaretz published two other statistics reflecting this success: the number of wanted terrorists in the West Bank, once in the hundreds, is now almost zero. And Israeli troop levels in the West Bank are lower than they have been since the first intifada began in 1987.
Western bon ton likes to credit these achievements to Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and his American-trained security forces. But in reality, the number of Israelis killed by West Bank terror in the year before May 2008, when Fayyad’s forces began deploying, was all of eight — virtually identical to last year’s five and this year’s six. Indeed, had the war not already been over, Israel wouldn’t have agreed to Fayyad’s plan.
What produced this victory was the grunt work of counterterrorism: intelligence, arrests, interrogations, military operations, and, above all, enough boots on the ground long enough to make this possible. That wasn’t obvious in advance: as Haaretz reported, many senior Israel Defense Forces officers accepted the dogma that terrorist organizations can’t be defeated, because they have an infinite supply of new recruits. But then-Shin Bet security service chief Avi Dichter, who insisted that “the ‘terror barrel’ had a bottom,” proved correct.
What Dichter understood was that while there may be millions of potential terrorist recruits, counterterrorism can dry up the supply of actual recruits by making terrorism a business that doesn’t pay. The more terrorists you arrest or kill, the more potential recruits decide that the likelihood of death or imprisonment has become too high to make terror an attractive proposition.
Two articles, in 2007 and 2008, reveal how this dynamic works: Palestinian terrorists, once lionized, were now unmarriageable, because the near-certainty of Israeli retribution made marriage to a wanted man no life. As one father explained: “I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one. I want her to have a good life, without having the army coming into her house all the time to arrest her while her husband escapes into the streets.” And therefore, the terrorists were quitting.
Most terrorists aren’t die-hard fanatics, and non-fanatics respond to cost-benefit incentives. When terrorist organizations rule the roost, recruits will flock to their banner. But when the costs start outweighing the benefits, they will desert in droves. And then the “unwinnable” war is won.
I wouldn’t expect the Obama administration to take advice from ideological rivals on how to restart Israeli-Palestinian talks. But it’s puzzling that it remains equally deaf to advice from two prominent Israeli and Palestinian peace activists.
In a moderated conversation published this month, Amos Oz and Sari Nusseibeh were in complete accord:
OZ: … [T]he first issue we need to deal with is the refugee issue, because this one is really urgent. Jerusalem is not urgent, it can wait. It can go unresolved for another generation, it can be unresolved for three generations. The refugees are hundreds of thousands of people decomposing in dehumanizing conditions in refugee camps. Israel cannot take these refugees back or it would not be Israel. There would be two Palestinian states, and there would be no Israel. But Israel can do something, along with the Arab world, along with the entire world, to take those people out of the camps, into homes and jobs. Peace or no peace, as long as the refugees are rotting in the camps Israel will have no security.
NUSSEIBEH: I agree. Whether there is or isn’t a solution, the refugee problem is a human problem and it needs to be resolved. It cannot just be shelved day after day after day in the hope that something will happen. The human dimension is far more important in this whole conflict than the territorial.
Yet Obama’s team remains fixated on “borders first.” That’s ridiculous on several counts. First, since territory is all that Israel has to trade, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be foolish to make all his territorial concessions up front, leaving him without leverage to extract crucial Palestinian concessions on other issues, like the refugees.
Second, since two previous Israeli leaders, Ehud Barak (at Taba) and Ehud Olmert, were that foolish, the entire world ought to know by now that Israel twice offered the equivalent of 100 percent of the territories (with land swaps). Those offers went nowhere because the Palestinians refused to make reciprocal concessions on other issues — especially the refugees.
Specifically, the Palestinians insist that Israel absorb millions of refugees and their descendants under any deal, thereby eradicating the Jewish state by demography. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat reiterated this in the Guardian just last week; the governing body of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s “moderate” Fatah party did so last month.
Until this changes, any territorial concessions Netanyahu offers will be meaningless, because no Israeli government will sign a deal that effectively spells the Jewish state’s death warrant. But if the refugee issue were resolved, Netanyahu would either make a generous territorial offer or face certain ouster in the next election. Thus, if Washington actually wants a deal, this is the place to start.
Finally, as Oz and Nusseibeh noted, this is a human tragedy that has already been left to fester far too long. That Palestinian leaders have held the refugees hostage to their maximalist demands for over six decades shows just how little they really care about their own people. And for all its fine talk of human rights, the “enlightened West” is evidently no better.