Knesset members who opposed the ransom deal for Gilad Schalit nevertheless

acceded to his family’s request to keep silent until the deal was

concluded.

On October 21, for instance, former MK Tzachi Hanegbi, of

Kadima, wrote the following in these pages:

Two days later, Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni announced

that she, too, opposed the Schalit deal, believing that it undermined Israel’s

deterrence and strengthened Hamas, but kept silent until it was concluded at the

request of Gilad’s father, Noam.

Livni and Hanegbi are almost certainly

not alone; many politicians, journalists and other public figures likely made

the same choice for the same reason. And I can understand their motives, because

I, too, received that heartrending phone call from Zvi Schalit, after publishing

a column in this paper in 2009 opposing the deal as it stood then. It’s very

hard to say “no” to a thoroughly decent man going through hell and begging you

not to add to his agony. And while I couldn’t retract what I’d already

published, I ended the conversation thinking that had he called before I wrote

the article, I might well have decided there were enough other things to write

about; I didn’t need to pour salt in the Schalit family’s wounds. Nevertheless,

Hanegbi and Livni were wrong to let their compassion overrule their judgment.

Livni herself gave the best argument for why.

“The people of Israel

forced the government to free Gilad Schalit,” she charged, correctly, when she

finally broke her silence. But did she really expect the people to do otherwise

when they were deluged, day after day, with arguments in favor of the deal,

while those who opposed it largely kept silent out of compassion for the

Schalits? You can’t win a battle of ideas by abandoning the field.

And

while private individuals have the right to eschew the fray, MKs do not, because

they have a fiduciary duty to the public: They are elected to serve the people,

and they owe those they serve their best judgment. By placing the good of one

family over what they themselves deemed to be the national interest, Livni and

Hanegbi betrayed the people who elected them.

This dereliction of duty

was compounded by the fact that they were uniquely well-poised to influence the

public debate, since their positions gave them access to information the general

public lacked. Hanegbi chaired the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee for

four and a half years of Schalit’s captivity; Livni was foreign minister during

the first three years and leader of the opposition thereafter. All three

positions grant their occupants access to information that isn’t in the public

domain.

No official statistics, for instance, have ever been published on

what percentage of freed terrorists returned to terror; the estimates I saw in

the press during the years of Schalit’s captivity ranged from 13 to 80 percent –

a variance so enormous the public couldn’t possibly assess the magnitude of the

danger the deal posed. By virtue of their positions, Hanegbi and Livni could

have demanded that the security services provide real data and then publicized

it, thereby facilitating such an assessment. Instead, they chose to keep

silent.

Six weeks ago, I wrote a column criticizing MKs who seem to think

their job begins and ends with making public statements, rather than trying to

turn their ideas into legislation. An MK who is nothing more than a pundit is

useless; punditry can be done just as well from outside the Knesset.

But

refraining entirely from public statements is no less problematic because, in a

democracy, public opinion influences governmental decisions. Hence elected

representatives have an obligation to try to shape public opinion on the burning

issues of the day. That some MKs (and again, I doubt Livni and Hanegbi were

alone) instead sat out the public debate on a deal they considered dangerous to

the country is thus deeply troubling.

Speaking against the Schalit deal

would certainly have caused the Schalits great pain. But if causing pain

is a

reason for silence, no public debate could ever be held. Did the Gazan

settlers

slated to be thrown out of their homes not feel pain when MKs lobbied

for the

disengagement? Did the victims of post-Oslo terror not feel pain when

MKs

praised Mahmoud Abbas as a “peace partner” even as Abbas lauded their

loved

ones’ murderers as heroes? Did Livni and Hanegbi ever seriously consider

not

pursuing these policies out of

consideration for one particular family’s pain?

Their silence over Schalit is yet more evidence that far too many MKs

seem not

to understand the most basic responsibilities of their office. And then

they

wonder why only one-third

of Israelis retain any trust in what ought to be

democracy’s flagship institution.

The writer is a journalist and commentator.

Yet one glance at the polls reveals how futile any such recommendations will be. Channel 10’s poll, for instance, found that 62% of Israelis believed the deal would undermine Israel’s security, but 69% supported it anyway. In other words, a sweeping majority of Israelis backed the deal despite being fully cognizant of its risks. Under such circumstances, what government would ever be able to withstand the pressure to make a similar deal, regardless of what wise rules it adopts in principle?

This recognition has led several of my colleagues to suggest reinstating the death penalty for hardcore terrorists. That would at least keep the worst killers from ever going free to kill again, thus reducing the danger posed by future such deals. I fully concur. But the benefits of this move go way beyond the lives it would assuredly save.

According to Shin Bet security service chief Yoram Cohen, 60% of freed terrorists return to terror. Terrorists released in previous deals have killed hundreds of Israelis, and those freed last week will undoubtedly kill many more. But as long as terror is contained below a certain level, it isn’t a strategic threat: Israel has suffered nonstop terror since its inception, and that hasn’t prevented it from growing and thriving.

The deal’s strategic danger lies in reinforcing the belief that Israel, as Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah famously put it, is a “spider-web” society, so frail that sufficient force will eventually cause it to collapse. If a single kidnapped soldier can produce such national trauma and such near-total capitulation to Hamas’s demands – more prisoners than Israel had ever exchanged for a single soldier before; hundreds of murderers whom it had refused to release even to its ostensible peace partner (having rightly insisted that mass murderers aren’t “prisoners of war,” but criminals who should spend their lives behind bars); and even Israeli Arabs, whom Israel had previously declared off-limits – why shouldn’t enough such pressure produce total collapse?

And as long as the Arabs believe this, they have every incentive to keep applying violent pressure and no incentive whatsoever to make peace: Why settle for half the country if continued war will eventually give them all of it? That’s precisely why previous peace deals have only been achieved when Arabs despaired of destroying Israel. Jordan’s King Hussein, for instance, despaired after the 1967 Six-Day War, ushering in a quarter-century of de facto peace that was ultimately formalized in 1994. Anwar Sadat despaired after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty was signed six years later. Even Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accord only because his fortunes were at low ebb: He was languishing in exile in Tunis, and the first intifada had been suppressed without producing any real gains.

Hence reversing the belief that Hamas just won a great victory is vital. And reinstating the death penalty would do exactly that, by turning Hamas’s victory into a Pyrrhic one.

Had Hamas’s demands been more moderate, this decision would say, the old practice of periodic ransom deals might have continued ad infinitum, allowing terrorists to commit attacks in full confidence of someday being freed. But by its greed, Hamas has ensured that no high-level terrorist will ever again return home. The conclusion would be inescapable: Excessive violence doesn’t pay – and the “spider-web” society, far from collapsing under pressure, will strike back if pushed too far.

Moreover, as I’ve explained in greater detail elsewhere, most potential terrorists aren’t diehard zealots indifferent to cost-benefit calculations; hence as the likelihood of being killed or spending long years in jail rises, the number of people willing to become terrorists drops. That’s precisely how Israel defeated the second intifada.

The Schalit deal greatly reduced the “cost” of terrorism by convincing potential terrorists that they will likely spend at most a few years in jail before being released in the next ransom deal. It thereby increased the incentive for new recruits to enter the terror business. The death penalty, however, would raise this cost again, by making it clear that killers will never again go free. That would make it harder to recruit new terrorists over the long run, further undermining Hamas’s “victory.”

Finally, the death penalty would weaken one of the region’s top terrorist training programs. As defense officials noted before last week’s swap, Israeli prisons are notorious “schools for terror,” where low-level terrorists serving short sentences learn new skills that make them far more dangerous after their release. The Prison Service’s inability to prevent this is outrageous. But the death penalty would prevent it: If highly skilled terrorists were executed instead of jailed, our “schools for terror” would lose their best “teachers,” and would thus produce less proficient graduates.

Contrary to popular belief, the death penalty for terrorists actually

exists on the books; the problem is that courts never apply it. To solve

this problem, legislation must be passed making capital punishment

mandatory for certain types of attacks, just as a life sentence is

mandatory for murder. In addition, a massive public relations campaign

is necessary to convince the public – and, ultimately, the judges – that

Israel’s traditional revulsion at the death penalty is misplaced in

this case.

Having just paid the most generous ransom in Israel’s history, in

defiance of all his stated principles, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu

is uniquely qualified to explain to the Knesset, and the nation, why

the death penalty is essential to prevent such a deal from ever

recurring. In so doing, he would take a vital step toward restoring

Israel’s lost deterrence.

Otherwise, he will be nothing more than Exhibit A in Nasrallah’s lectures on how to defeat the spider-web society.

The writer is a journalist and commentator.

We’ll leave aside the fact that price-tag assaults – so called because they are meant to deter house demolitions in the settlements by exacting a “price” in the form of reprisals (usually vandalistic) against Palestinians and/or Israeli soldiers – are blatantly immoral under both Jewish and secular ethics; I doubt morality worries the vandals overmuch. But they do claim to want to protect the settlements – and on that level, their attacks are downright self-destructive.

The settlements’ continued existence rests on two pillars. One is the IDF: Few settlers would be willing to remain without the army to protect them against Palestinian terror. The other is public support. The real reason successive governments haven’t yet evacuated most settlements, or even most illegal outposts, despite massive international pressure is because most Israelis don’t like the idea of throwing other ordinary decent Israelis out of their homes. Hence they will countenance large-scale evictions only if the country will thereby attain some major strategic benefit: a durable peace agreement, or at least enhanced security (as Ariel Sharon falsely promised the Gaza disengagement would produce).

The price-tag attacks undermine both pillars simultaneously.

First, the IDF: The vast majority of law-abiding settlers recognize their debt to the army and strive to show their gratitude (usually, being Jewish, by plying soldiers with food). But price-tag vandals have increasingly targeted the army. First, it was just “heat-of-the-moment” attacks: hurling insults, hitting soldiers or vandalizing army vehicles during confrontations over house demolitions. Then, last month, came the first deliberate attack on an IDF base: Anonymous vandals broke in, damaged several vehicles and spray-painted price-tag graffiti.

Last week brought another escalation: A routine army patrol reported being deliberately ambushed and attacked by settlers near Shiloh. According to the soldiers, they ran into a settler-manned roadblock. When they tried to turn their jeep around to avoid a confrontation, they discovered that more settlers had blocked the road behind them. The settlers then surrounded the vehicle and punched one soldier in the face. A melee inevitably ensued.

Clearly, such incidents greatly reduce soldiers’ motivation to protect the settlers: As one officer reportedly told an IDF inquiry into the incident, it’s hard to now tell these soldiers to go back and protect their assailants.

Moreover, if the IDF has to protect its troops from settlers as well as Palestinians, that will inevitably affect its deployment, to the settlements’ detriment. For instance, soldiers are routinely sent to guard settlements and outposts. But after some incidents in which soldiers said they were threatened by outpost residents, the IDF is now reportedly considering curtailing the length of these deployments such that no soldier will spend more than a couple of days at an outpost. That means they will have no time to get acquainted with the territory, which will impair their ability to defend it.

Perhaps even worse, however, is the effect price-tag attacks have on the general public. As noted, most Israelis currently oppose evacuating settlements, but that stems from their belief that most settlers are ordinary, decent people like themselves. In contrast, few Israelis have qualms about, say, demolishing a Palestinian terrorist’s house. That’s precisely why a certain subset of the left has striven – so far unsuccessfully – to paint all settlers as thugs: They understand that public sympathy is the settlers’ greatest asset.

But the price-tag vandals may yet succeed where anti-settler leftists have failed. Low-level vandalism might not have attracted much attention, but torching Palestinian mosques is a different matter: Most Israelis can easily draw the comparison to torched synagogues. And that’s already happened a few times.

Last week’s events – the torching of a mosque in Tuba Zanghariya, in northern Israel, and the spray-painting of offensive graffiti (like “Death to Arabs” and “price tag”) in Muslim and Christian cemeteries in Jaffa – were even worse from this standpoint. Many Israelis view Palestinian areas of the West Bank as another planet, and Palestinians as an enemy nation. But these latest attacks targeted fellow citizens – and in Tuba Zanghariya’s case, citizens who have been allied with the Jewish majority since before the state’s establishment.

But worst of all, from the perspective of public reaction, are obviously attacks on the IDF. Many Israeli Jews have little contact with Israeli Arabs, but most do have friends or relatives in the army. Hence attacks on soldiers are taken very personally.

Clearly, not all attacks attributed to price-tag vandals are necessarily their work. The one suspect arrested in the Tuba Zanghariya attack indeed studied at the yeshiva in Yitzhar, which is considered a center of price-tag activity, but he has yet to be indicted, much less convicted. And police aren’t convinced the cemetery vandalism was a price-tag attack at all. But even if some incidents are copycat attacks – or even, as right-wing conspiracy theorists like to claim, deliberate efforts to smear the settlers – it’s the original price-tag vandals who make the accusations credible. 

It’s also true that the media outrageously downplays identical attacks on Jewish targets, as Yisrael Medad superbly explained in these pages, leading to justified double-standard charges. But that in no way mitigates the price-tag vandals’ crimes.

Unfortunately, the vandals seem incapable of grasping the

self-destructive nature of their actions, while the police, with

characteristic haplessness, have thus far proven incapable of catching

the criminals. Nor are most settlers in a position to help: The ordinary

law-abiding majority has no more contact with these criminals than

other law-abiding Israelis do with criminals in their hometowns.

So altogether, it looks like it’s going to be a great year for the

anti-settler left, if for no one else. I hope the vandals are happy with

their achievement.

The writer is a journalist and commentator.

Nevertheless, the report has one gaping lacuna: It ignores the powerful public-sector unions. Currently, these unions control many of the economy’s most vital products and services, including banks, ports, airports, railroads, electricity and water. And they exploit this control to extort outrageous salaries and benefits, which the public must finance through higher tariffs and fees, while also providing service that is poor at best and downright abusive at worst.

Sunday’s Jerusalem Post editorial detailed one salient example: Last month, railroad workers protesting a plan to outsource the maintenance of railway cars simply stopped their trains in the middle of the track, locked the windows and turned off the air conditioning, thereby imprisoning the passengers in airless boxes on a burning summer’s day. Eventually, passengers escaped by breaking the windows, climbing out and embarking on a dangerous hike down the tracks. And all this occurred in defiance of a court order barring the workers from striking

Moreover, the government had already tendered a written guarantee that existing maintenance workers’ jobs would be safe for at least 20 years, while their salaries and benefits would be safe until they retired. In other words, workers weren’t striking to protect their jobs or benefits; they were striking out of pure pique that management had made a decision (outsourcing the work) without first securing their approval. Because as far as they are concerned, they are Israel Railways’ true owners; the fact that the company is formally owned by the government is unimportant.

Nor is this behavior exceptional. Just last week, the airport union staged a two-hour “New Year’s toast” – aka strike – with no warning, meaning illegally. Passengers were stranded inside one plane for two hours because it had just finished boarding but wasn’t allowed to take off; another plane was being towed to the takeoff point when the tractor driver simply abandoned his vehicle, and the plane, in the middle of the tarmac. And this abusive strike took place even as management was convening to approve a new collective agreement that gave employees an average raise of 11.25% – the kind of raise most private-sector employees can only dream of.

Similarly, Haifa Port called two illegal strikes in three days last month over such weighty issues as – no joke – the job title given to one particular worker. And Ashdod Port closed for an entire evening that same month so the whole staff could attend a union official’s wedding. Indeed, the ports routinely shut down while staffers attend private parties hosted by union officials. A private-sector company would insist that some people stay at work to keep essential services running, because each such closure causes hundreds of thousands of shekels worth of damage. But the unions don’t care, because they aren’t docked a penny of their pay: Instead, the cost is borne by the ports’ clients and the taxpayers.

Moreover, public-sector unions perpetrate these abuses despite being among the country’s best-paid workers. Indeed, according to the Finance Ministry’s most recent report on public-sector wages (which was released last October and covers 2009), these unions’ members earn almost three times the average Israeli wage. The average Israeli salary that year was NIS 7,974 a month; this compared to average salaries of, for example, NIS 23,000 at Haifa Port, NIS 22,500 at Ashdod Port and NIS 20,200 at the Israel Electric Corporation.

The best solution to the problem would be to pass legislation banning or severely limiting public-sector strikes. This is hardly an unreasonable trade-off for the lifelong job security these workers receive (a benefit private-sector workers can only dream of), and many democracies have enacted such laws. Some, like the United States, bar public-sector strikes entirely; others limit them such that certain workers designated as providing essential services must keeping working even during a strike. In Canada, for instance, police, firefighters and hospital employees are barred from striking entirely, while railways, ports, banks and telecommunications are deemed essential services that must keep operating even if their unions strike.

At the very least, however, unions and their members must be made to pay a stiff price for illegal, abusive acts like those described above. Currently, unions have no incentive to refrain from such actions, because they know they can get away with it: Public-sector companies rarely even dock workers’ pay for an illegal strike, lest they spark another; and when they do, the pay is almost always returned as part of whatever agreement ends the strike.

Israel Railways is a laudable exception in this regard. It started disciplinary proceedings against union leaders over last month’s illegal strike and is suing them personally for damages over another illegal strike in May.

Incredibly, however, it isn’t getting support from the courts: Even

though both strikes violated an explicit court order, National Labor

Court President Nili Arad proposed last week that the company freeze

both the disciplinary proceedings and the lawsuit in exchange for the

union deigning to begin negotiations over the outsourcing contract. In

effect, she wanted to reward the union for breaking the law and

violating court orders.
To their credit, Israel Railways and the Finance Ministry both flatly

refused, and Arad backed down. But the fact that they had to face down

the National Labor Court president to take the elementary step of

punishing an illegal strike shows just how broken the system is.
It’s a pity the Trajtenberg Committee was silent on this issue. But if

the government is serious about lowering prices and improving service to

the public, it cannot afford to hide behind the panel’s silence. It

must finally tackle the problem of power-mad public-sector unions.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.