Monthly Archives: September 2013
This year, Yom Kippur didn’t end after 25 hours, as it usually does. In some newspapers, it continued right through Simhat Torah, with a continuous stream of articles commemorating the Yom Kippur War’s 40th anniversary.
Though commemorating the war is an annual ritual, what still shocked me about this year’s coverage was the casual way some interviewees recited a glaring counterfactual – Israel’s “defeat” – as if it were self-evident fact. Take, for instance, Yaakov Hasdai, an IDF officer, attorney, historian and researcher for the 1973 Agranat Commission, which investigated the war: “The failure of the Yom Kippur War hit the Israeli public like a shockwave. The conclusion was, mainly among the Left, that the defeat meant that we were not right.” Or Dr. Gideon Avital-Eppstein, who recently published a book about artistic responses to the war said: “Why is it that these three concepts â’ shell shock, the POW and the MIA â’ are so strongly associated with Yom Kippur? I think it has something to do with the perceived result of the war, to the fact that we did not win.”
When this is what younger generations have heard from their elders for 40 years, is it any wonder that in a recent poll asking who won the war, only 64% of Jewish Israeli adults correctly answered Israel? Indeed, it constitutes progress that the number was even that high.
Hasdai, Avital-Eppstein and other Israelis of their generation certainly know the truth: The war ended in an unequivocal Israeli victory, with the IDF threatening both Cairo and Damascus, and the Egyptian Third Army saved from annihilation only because Washington imposed a cease-fire. But even for someone ignorant of these details, there’s the obvious fact that Israel still exists – which it wouldn’t had it really lost the war. Israel’s annihilation was the publicly stated war aim of both Syria and Egypt, and though historians now believe neither seriously expected that outcome, there’s little doubt that both would happily have seized the chance to achieve it had the IDF not swiftly recovered from its initial setbacks. And yet, the counterfactual narrative of defeat persists undiminished.
One pernicious consequence of this, as I’ve written before, is the boost it gave the land-for-peace paradigm. For people who feel as if Israel “lost” in 1973, it makes perfect emotional sense to conclude that Israel must accept Arab dictates and retreat to the pre-1967 lines to attain peace; in war, the loser has no choice but to accept the enemy’s terms. But absent this emotional logic, retreating to borders that endanger the country’s long-term survival would be madness.
After all, the territorial buffer gained in 1967 is precisely what enabled Israel’s survival in 1973: Had the war begun from the pre-1967 lines, Israel would have been annihilated. Instead, the enemy armies were stopped in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, without ever reaching pre-1967 Israel.
And contrary to popular perception, territory is even more critical in the age of high-trajectory weapons. Israel’s standing army is smaller than those of its neighbors, so its defense doctrine depends on mobilizing the reserves. But missile fire can seriously disrupt this mobilization, meaning the reserves will need more time to reach the front. To buy this time, the army needs a territorial buffer – either space in which to retreat, or high ground like the Golan and the West Bank mountain ridge, where a smaller force can hold for days against a larger one.
Even UN Resolution 242, the foundation of all subsequent peace talks, acknowledged the vital importance of territory for defense: Recognizing that “Israel’s prior frontiers had proved to be notably insecure,” as one of its drafters, US Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, later explained, the resolution explicitly upheld Israel’s right to “secure” (i.e. defensible) borders and was deliberately worded to let it retain some of the territory captured in 1967. This recognition is also why Israeli governments for decades opposed withdrawing to the indefensible 1967 lines, and why all US governments prior to the current one supported that Israeli position.
Thus it’s heartening to see signs that the myth of the 1973 “defeat” may finally be loosening its hold on Israel’s collective consciousness.
Some of the war’s participants have begun publicly challenging it. “We, the fighters, remember the Yom Kippur War as a war that ended in a great victory,” declared Haim Danon, who fought on the Golan, in one media interview. “We stopped them, we made them withdraw, we recaptured the territories taken from us.”
After the war, he explained, most soldiers “simply wanted to return home”; they “didn’t have the strength to deal at the time with history, with the media, with what people would remember.” But now, they are starting to understand that the battle over memory must also be fought.
In addition, Israelis are beginning to recognize the war’s manifold achievements, as detailed recently by Amotz Asa-El in these pages. Inter alia, the Arabs’ inability to defeat Israel even under optimal conditions of total surprise convinced them to give up on conventional warfare: Never since has Israel suffered a conventional military attack. The war also led to Israel’s first peace treaty with an Arab nation: Convinced that regaining Sinai by force was impossible, then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat opted to try peace instead.
Finally, as even Haaretz, a champion of territorial concessions, recently admitted, Israelis have discovered through hard experience that ceding land can be even more dangerous than they’ve been told for 40 years that not ceding it would be. Oslo’s territorial concessions produced a massive upsurge in terrorism, accounting for two-thirds of all Israelis killed in terror attacks since 1948. And Syria’s civil war has made most Israelis grateful that repeated efforts to cede the Golan never succeeded: To quote Haaretz‘s military correspondent, “Where would Israel be today without that strategic asset?”
After decades of Israeli opinion leaders telling the world that complete withdrawal is essential, reviving the international support that once existed for more limited withdrawals will be difficult. But Israel can’t convince the world unless it first convinces itself. And that starts with recovering from our 40-year delusion about the Yom Kippur “defeat.”
Recent news reports from Spain beautifully illustrate why nobody should take the European Union’s pretensions to moral superiority seriously–and especially not when it comes to Israel. Spain is now committing virtually every “abuse” the EU sanctimoniously accuses Israel of, without a peep of protest from its European peers.
For instance, Spain recently erected checkpoints along its border with Gibraltar that are creating real hardship. The checkpoints have lengthened travel times from 45 minutes to two hours for cross-border commuters and also increased costs, since people who used to drive now combine foot travel and taxis to reach work on time. These are precisely the complaints Europeans routinely level at Israeli checkpoints: that they undermine the Palestinian economy by increasing the time and expense of commuting to work or moving cargo.
But unlike the Spanish checkpoints–which blatantly violate the EU’s open-border rules–Israeli checkpoints are perfectly legal under international law, even if you accept the EU’s definition of the West Bank as “occupied territory” (which Israel doesn’t; it considers the area disputed territory). Under the laws of belligerent occupation, an occupying army is entitled to take reasonable military measures within the occupied territory to ensure its country’s security; it isn’t restricted to operating along the border. And Israel’s checkpoints were established to stop Palestinian suicide bombers.
Spain’s checkpoints, in contrast, are officially there to stop cigarette smuggling, though Gibraltar claims they are pure retaliation for its efforts to curb Spanish overfishing in its waters. By any standard, stopping suicide bombers is a stronger justification. Yet the same European officials who vociferously condemn Israel’s checkpoints have nothing to say about the Spanish ones.
Then there are the hundreds of thousands of Catalonians who formed a 250-mile human chain this month to demand independence from Spain. Catalonians also gave an absolute majority to pro-independence parties in last year’s provincial elections. Yet Spain adamantly refuses to let the province hold a referendum on secession.
By any standard, Israel has more justification for caution about Palestinian statehood than Spain does about Catalonian statehood. Catalonia has never threatened Spain in any way, nor is there any Catalonian terrorism. In contrast, large swathes of Palestinian society still call for Israel’s destruction, and every previous Israeli cession of land to the Palestinians has produced a security nightmare: nonstop rocket fire from Gaza, and endless suicide bombings and shooting attacks from the West Bank (until Israel reoccupied it). Indeed, of the roughly 1,800 Israelis killed by terrorists since Israel’s founding in 1948, fully two-thirds–about 1,200–were killed after Israel began ceding land to the Palestinians under the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Yet the European officials who repeatedly demand Israel’s immediate withdrawal from the West Bank haven’t said a word to support Catalonia. Apparently, Catalonians have no right to self-determination.
Then there are the Basques, whose oft-proclaimed desire for independence can’t be tested in a vote because Spain repeatedly bars pro-independence parties from running on the grounds of alleged ties to the Basque terror group ETA. That also doesn’t bother anyone in Europe, even though Europe objects vociferously when Israel refuses to talk to Palestinian parties that actively support terror, like Yasser Arafat’s PLO during the second intifada. Nor was Europe troubled when Spain severed peace talks with ETA at the very first terror attack, which killed exactly two people, though it condemned Israel viciously for halting talks with Arafat over repeated terror attacks that killed more than 1,000 people.
In short, Europe denounces Israeli actions as unacceptable even as it deems the exact same actions by Spain unexceptionable. There’s a name for such double standards, and it isn’t “human rights.” It’s known as hypocrisy.
After the High Court of Justice overturned a law last week that allowed illegal migrants to be held in detention for up to three years, The Jerusalem Post‘s editorial aptly summarized Israelis’ reactions as follows: “For the Left, the ruling was a vindication of their adherence to the universality of human rights,” while “For the Right … the decision was yet another indication that the High Court was dominated by a weak-wrist liberal consensus.”
It’s a sad commentary on the depths to which the court has sunk itself that neither side seriously considered what ought to be the default explanation of a High Court verdict: that it was rooted in relevant legislation duly enacted by the Knesset. Instead, they simply assumed the court was expressing a value judgment, and thereby taking sides in the heated debate over what Israel’s policy toward illegal migrants should be.
As it happens, I think the ruling was virtually mandated by the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom, a quasi-constitutional law that subsequent legislation is supposed to comply with (or at least, so the court decided in 1995, and the Knesset never challenged that decision). According to the Basic Law, “There shall be no deprivation or restriction of the liberty of a person by imprisonment, arrest, extradition or otherwise,” except “by a law befitting the values of the State of Israel, enacted for a proper purpose, and to an extent no greater than is required.”
The court concluded that even given the state’s justifiable interest in getting illegal migrants off the streets, throwing them in jail for three years is a disproportionate violation of the right to liberty guaranteed by the Basic Law, one too massive to be justified by the presumed benefit. I find it hard to disagree. For if a right to liberty means anything at all, it ought to mean you can’t be thrown in jail for three years when you haven’t committed any crime.
Granted, illegal entry into the country usually is a crime, albeit a minor one generally punishable by no more than three months’ imprisonment prior to being deported. But under international conventions Israel has ratified, it isn’t a crime at all if the illegal entrant is a bona fide refugee, which most of the migrants in question claim to be. That obviously doesn’t mean they actually are, and indeed, documents from other court cases clearly show that some aren’t. Yet since the state has never examined most of these migrants’ asylum requests, as required by those same international conventions, it’s impossible to know which are genuine refugees and which are just labor migrants.
Moreover, most of those jailed under the law come from Eritrea and Sudan – two countries so repressive that Israel, like other Western countries, long ago decided their nationals can’t be forcibly repatriated. Thus even if those nationals are just labor migrants, they still, through no fault of their own, can’t be deported, which is why they end up being jailed instead. But again, if a right to liberty means anything, it ought to mean you can’t be incarcerated for three years just for the misfortune of being born in a country to which you can’t be deported.
Several justices stressed that their ruling in no way precludes less draconian steps to mitigate the problems these migrants pose to Israeli society. But they rightly deemed three years in prison excessive.
So how did a commendably narrow and defensible legal decision come to be viewed by both sides as if the justices were simply imposing their own value judgments on a hotly disputed policy question, that of how Israel should deal with illegal migrants? Partly, it’s because some couldn’t resist inserting themselves into this debate. For instance, Justice Isaac Amit wrote in his concurring opinion that once these migrants “reached our borders, wounded in body and soul, we should have welcomed them … bound up their wounds of body and soul and treated them with generosity and compassion with respect to work, welfare, health and education.”
That, to be blunt, is none of the court’s business. The migrant problem is a classic case of competing values: compassion for the stranger versus concern over their impact on both Israel’s own poor and its Jewish character. But decisions about how to balance competing values and competing policy considerations are properly the province of the country’s elected representatives, not an unelected court. As an individual, Amit is entitled to have an opinion, but as a justice, his job is limited to determining whether any solution these representatives devise comports with the law.
Still, the main ruling stuck pretty closely to legitimate legal analysis, so it’s hard to see the decision as a whole as a blatant intrusion into policy. It certainly didn’t warrant its opponents’ accusations of “judicial activism,” “steamrolling” the Knesset and dealing “an almost deadly blow to Israeli democracy.”
Yet the court’s own record made those accusations a reasonable conclusion to leap to for anyone who hadn’t actually read the 120-page verdict, which most people haven’t and won’t. Because time and again, the justices have imposed their own value judgments on controversial issues, in blatant defiance of what the law actually says (for examples, see here, here, here and here).
In so doing, the court has destroyed its own credibility. Like the boy who cried wolf, it has substituted its own policy preferences for the law so often that when it finally does what it’s supposed to do – base its rulings on actual law – nobody believes it anymore. Everyone simply assumes it has handed down yet another value judgment masquerading as jurisprudence.
Even worse, however, is that by undermining its credibility in this fashion, it has undermined the key function courts are supposed to play in a democratic society: the ability to resolve disputes peacefully in a way broadly acceptable to most players. Instead, it has turned itself into just another partisan player, whose decisions merely add more fuel to any ideological controversy it rules on. And it has thereby done inestimable damage not only to itself, but to the country as a whole.
Palestinians have killed two Israeli soldiers in planned attacks over the last three days; the armed wing of Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party has proudly claimed responsibility for both killings (though Israeli officials are skeptical); and the Palestinian Authority that Abbas heads–Israel’s so-called peace partner–has yet to muster even a lukewarm condemnation of the murders. In a normal universe, this might raise doubts about the prospects of the current Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. But anyone who has been following the negotiations already knows these prospects are nonexistent: Aside from all the reasons I listed three weeks ago, the constant stream of PA leaks about the talks is a dead giveaway.
Ever since negotiations resumed in late July, PA officials having been giving the media gloomy progress reports on an almost daily basis, thereby violating the explicit commitment both sides gave Secretary of State John Kerry not to talk about what happens at the negotiating sessions. That alone attests to bad faith. But what’s really remarkable is that while all the Palestinian leaks agree the talks are going nowhere, they offer blatantly contradictory reasons for this conclusion. In other words, the “facts” on which this conclusion is supposedly based can’t possibly be true.
Over the space of just a few days earlier this month, one Palestinian official said Israel had done nothing for the past six weeks but present the issues it wants to discuss; another said Israel had proposed an interim deal for a Palestinian state with temporary borders on 60 percent of the West Bank; and a third said Israel had made an unacceptable final-status offer that would give Palestinians 90 percent of the West Bank while leaving Israel in control of the border crossings with Jordan. These three statements are clearly mutually exclusive: If, for instance, Israel has done nothing but outline the issues it wants to discuss, it can’t have offered either temporary or permanent borders. Similarly, if Israel has made a final-status offer, then it hasn’t just proposed an interim deal.
In short, the Palestinian claim of “no progress” is evidently independent of whatever actually happened in the talks, and Palestinian officials don’t even care who knows it: They have no problem espousing mutually contradictory explanations. But if the “no progress” claim is unrelated to actual developments in the talks, then its obvious purpose is to prepare world opinion to blame Israel when the negotiations reach their foreordained breakdown. After months of hearing nonstop Palestinian complaints about how Israel is stymieing the talks, without Israel offering any counter-narrative (since it has thus far honored its pledge to stay mum), the world will obviously be primed to believe that Israel is at fault.
Nor need one look far to understand why the PA would plan for a breakdown a priori: The talks have zero support among ordinary Palestinians. As the Jerusalem Post‘s Khaled Abu Toameh reported back in July, not a single Palestinian faction favored resuming the negotiations, and yesterday, several Palestinian groups launched a public campaign to demand an end to the talks while also opposing any Palestinian concessions whatsoever as part of a deal.
So with no support for a deal at home, Abbas has little choice but to plan for how to blame Israel for a breakdown. The only question is whether the U.S. is willing to let him get away with it.
Martin Kramer wrote an illuminating post yesterday on why American handling of the chemical-weapons crisis in Syria has unnerved Israel by causing it to doubt that America would attack Iran’s nuclear program if necessary. While I agree with his conclusion, I think that’s only part of the story. After all, most Israelis would prefer to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis diplomatically, so one could argue–as some Israeli commentators have–that Syria sets an encouraging precedent: American threats to use military force seemingly persuaded Damascus to give up its nonconventional weapons voluntarily, which is precisely what many Israelis hope will happen in Iran.
The problem is that such an agreement only works if it’s strictly enforced, meaning any noncompliance produces massive punishment. Otherwise, even the thinnest façade of compliance will suffice to enable the signatory to maintain its nonconventional weapons program with impunity, which would be Israel’s nightmare scenario on Iran. And there are three reasons for thinking that’s precisely what the Syrian agreement will do. One is that the agreement is problematic to begin with, providing ample opportunities for evasion. The second, as Kramer explained, is that President Barack Obama’s original decision to punt the question of using force in Syria to Congress makes any military action to punish noncompliance unlikely. The third is Obama’s track record of refusing to enforce the agreements he brokers even when punishing violations wouldn’t necessitate the use of force, and would hence be much easier.
Nothing better illustrates this than an astounding interview given by the Greek ambassador to Israel last week. According to Spiros Lampridis, six months after Israel apologized to Turkey for its botched raid on a 2010 flotilla to Gaza–under an agreement personally brokered by Obama that was supposed to result in Turkey resuming normal relations with Israel–Ankara is still vetoing any NATO cooperation with Israel.
I wrote last month about Obama’s unconscionable silence after Turkey unilaterally appended two new conditions to the agreement and then used them as a pretext for not implementing its own commitments under the deal. But if you wanted to make excuses, you could at least argue that all these commitments dealt with domestic issues (returning Turkey’s ambassador to Israel, ending its show trials of senior Israeli officials, etc.), over which America’s influence is naturally more limited.
No such excuse applies to NATO. Not only is America the undisputed leader of that alliance, but NATO is currently manning Patriot missile batteries along Turkey’s border with Syria, at Ankara’s request. Yet Obama has made no effort to pressure Turkey, even though its veto not only harms NATO’s relations with Israel but also its relations with other traditional American allies like Jordan, Egypt, and Morocco. As Lampridis explained, NATO doesn’t deal with these countries individually, but as part of a Mediterranean bloc that includes Israel. Hence no Israel also means no Jordan or Morocco.
Moreover, this is happening at a time when Israel has not only fulfilled its part of the bargain but is also, as Lampridis noted, “demonstrating goodwill” beyond what the deal requires: It’s preventing significant damage to Turkish businesses by letting hundreds of Turkish trucks carrying millions of dollars worth of cargo travel to Jordan (and thence the Gulf states) via Israel every week, since they can no longer travel via Syria.
This, then, is Israel’s real nightmare: not that Obama won’t attack Iran if necessary, but that he’ll sign a loophole-ridden agreement with Iran (moves in this direction have already begun) that would also prevent Israel from attacking Iran if necessary–and then fail to enforce it, just as he has with the Turkish agreement, thereby enabling Tehran to get the bomb.
Last week, I argued that Israel needs a new electoral system, but shouldn’t adopt the Anglo-American one. Instead, it should retain a fully proportional system while also giving voters a say over individual candidates – a system known as open-list proportional representation. Most European countries already use some version of this system, which has numerous variants. While the precise variant that would best suit Israel requires further study, there are two basic options: letting voters choose either single candidates or multiple candidates.
In multiple-candidate systems, each ballot, instead of merely bearing the party’s name, lists the party’s candidates. Voters then select some number of those candidates (in some systems, as many as there are seats in parliament).
Seats are divided among the parties just as they are currently: If, say, 25% of all voters cast their ballots for Likud, then Likud gets 30 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. But the occupants of those seats are determined by which candidates receive the most votes. So if 500,000 Likud voters marked Reuven Rivlin on their ballot and only 200,000 marked Danny Danon, Rivlin would place higher than Danon. The 30 highest-placed candidates would then become MKs.
A variant of this system lets voters rank the candidates, with a first-place ranking giving the candidate more points than a tenth-place ranking. The candidate’s final placement on the list depends on how many points he accumulates. Yet another variant permits casting multiple votes for the same candidate: If a voter were allowed to mark 20 names, for instance, he could choose 20 different people or cast two votes each for 10 people, thereby increasing those candidates’ chances of placing high.
In the single-seat option, each voter casts his ballot for a single candidate, which doubles as a vote for that candidate’s party. Again, seats are divided among the parties just as they are currently. In addition, parties would still submit ranked candidate slates before the election. However, those slates aren’t final: they depend on the outcome of the balloting.
Usually, a quota is set – say, 25% of all votes cast for that party. Any candidate who wins more votes than the quota is automatically bumped to the top of his party’s list, with the highest vote-receivers placing highest. Only if a party wins more seats than the number of candidates who pass the quota are the remaining seats filled from the preexisting list. Thus if 400,000 voters cast ballots for Labor, entitling it to 15 seats, and 10 candidates were chosen by more than 25% of those voters, those 10 candidates would get Labor’s first 10 seats. The other seats would go to the first five candidates on the slate who didn’t pass the quota.
Both options can also be combined with district voting, using either single-seat or multi-seat districts. Germany, for instance, uses single-seat districts, in which every voter casts one ballot for a party and one for a candidate running in his district. Seats in parliament are allocated proportionally, based on what percentage of the vote each party received in the first ballot. But the seats are filled first by candidates who won their districts. Only if a party didn’t produce enough district winners to fill all its seats can it fill the remainder from a party slate.
Open-list systems have almost endless permutations, but all share one crucial characteristic: They give every single voter some influence over who his party’s representatives in parliament will be. In Israel’s system, known as closed-list proportional representation, most voters have no such influence: Party slates are determined either by the party leadership or by party members in a primary. The vast majority of voters, who don’t belong to any party, can only vote for or against the entire slate rather than for or against individual candidates.
Open-list systems therefore give voters much more power to oust corrupt and incompetent MKs. As an example, consider Likud MK Tzachi Hanegbi, who was convicted of perjury in 2010. Hanegbi remains wildly popular among many influential Likud activists, having provided them and their relatives with dozens of government jobs during his years in office. These activists managed to recruit enough primary votes in his favor that he ranked 16th on Likud’s 2013 Knesset slate, high enough to reenter the Knesset. But Likud primary voters constitute less than a tenth of all the people who voted Likud in the 2013 election, and among this larger voting pool, few would consider Hanegbi’s skill at providing taxpayer-funded jobs for Likud hacks a plus. Had these voters been given a say, his chances of winning reelection would likely have been much lower.
While the Knesset has many hard-working, dedicated MKs who genuinely try to make Israel a better place according to their own lights, it also has many whose activity consists chiefly of making provocative and offensive remarks that earn them disproportionate media coverage. The Hebrew-language Open Knesset website, which ranks MKs by parameters such as attendance at committee sessions and votes, reveals some MKs who diligently attend almost every scheduled committee session and others who deign to attend only one or two per month; some who diligently show up for votes on bills and others who rarely do. Some of the Knesset no-shows are hard-working ministers. But others are doing almost nothing to earn their generous taxpayer-funded salaries.
These freeloaders are often veteran MKs with excellent connections to party leaders and activists, so under the current system, they’re unlikely ever to be ousted: They’ll consistently place high enough on their party’s slates to win reelection. But if ordinary voters were given a say, they would likely prefer MKs who actually work for their paychecks.
Scrapping proportional representation altogether would be a mistake, as I explained last week. But there’s no reason why Israel should continue being one of the last democracies in the world to use a closed-list system. Most other countries that use proportional representation have switched to open-list systems, out of an understanding that giving voters a say on individual candidates ultimately produces parliaments more accountable to the electorate. It’s long past time for Israel to do the same.
One of the most pernicious and lasting effects of the Oslo Accords, whose 20th anniversary will be marked this Friday, was to warp the prism through which most non-Israelis view Israel: From a country with the same broad spectrum of concerns as all other countries, it became, in the world’s eyes, a single-issue country, where nothing but the “peace process” could possibly matter. This attitude is epitomized by a 1998 conversation between President Bill Clinton and his Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak, whose transcript was published in Haaretz two weeks ago. Though the main topic was an impending military operation in Iraq, Clinton also briefed Mubarak on the peace process:
I think the Israeli public is coming along [in regard to the Oslo process]. The problem is, when they have elections there, Israeli society is becoming more complicated, and a lot of people get elected to the Knesset for reasons that don’t have much to do with the peace process. Then we have trouble getting a solid majority to do the right thing.”
One can practically hear the outrage in his voice: How dare those Israelis elect legislators who care about the same issues American voters do–jobs, cost of living, education, crime, etc.–rather than exclusively about the peace process? The fact that Israelis actually have to live in their country–and therefore must care about those issues, which are vital to any country’s well-being–appears to have escaped him entirely.
Having presided over Oslo’s signing, Clinton was perhaps uniquely invested in the Oslo process. Yet his attitude is far from unique. After Israel’s new government took office in March, for instance, a Hungarian journalist called me with a burning question: How could Yair Lapid’s center-left Yesh Atid party possibly sit in the same government as Naftali Bennett’s right-of-center Bayit Yehudi? I explained that despite their differences on the peace process, Lapid and Bennett have similar views on many domestic issues, and since the peace process had at that point been frozen for four years and showed no signs of thawing, the election was mainly about Israel’s many serious domestic problems. To which he replied, “But how can they sit together when they disagree about the peace process?” After several iterations of this, we both gave up in despair.
A comedy writer could probably make a good sketch of the scene, but there’s nothing funny about it. The failure to grasp that Israelis have concerns other than the peace process is a major reason why so many diplomats and pundits consistently misread Israel. Even worse, this attitude has undermined pro-Israel sentiment worldwide by reducing Israel from a complicated, multifaceted country to a one-dimensional caricature. For who can have sympathy or affection for a caricature?
The truth is that Israel can live without peace if necessary; it’s done so successfully for 65 years now. But it can’t live without a functioning economy, decent schools, adequate health care and all the other things that distinguish successful states from failed ones. And Israelis, because they live here, never have the luxury of forgetting that for long.
Non-Israelis, in contrast, won’t suffer if Israel has failing schools or high unemployment, so it’s easy to overlook these issues. But nobody who cares about Israel should do so. For by treating Israel as a single-issue country, they are helping to reduce it to a caricature that’s all too easy to hate.
The run-up to Friday’s 20th anniversary of the Oslo Accords is a good time to consider not only what went wrong with the “peace process” they launched, but what a viable process would look like. You needn’t look far for answers to either question. As I noted last week, the past month alone has brought numerous examples of the problem that doomed the Oslo process from its inception: the Palestinian leadership’s utter lack of interest in making peace. As for what a viable process might look like, a good example is the new Palestinian city now arising near Ramallah.
The city of Rawabi is entirely the initiative of a private businessman: As the New York Times reported last month, the Palestinian Authority promised financial help but never delivered. And it offers a remarkable contrast to the official PA on two crucial counts. First, it’s actually seeking to improve Palestinian lives–in this case, by providing comfortable middle-class housing and quality municipal services. That’s something the PA has refused to do throughout the 19 years of its existence, despite being the world’s top recipient of international aid per capita. Second, the city’s very name (which means “hills” in Arabic) was deliberately chosen to eschew anti-Israel incitement: Its developers held a competition to name it, the Times reported, but rejected the numerous proposals that glorified anti-Israel terror, like “Arafat City” or “Jihad City.” The PA, in contrast, engages in such incitement on a daily basis.
Ordinary Palestinians feel they’ve gotten nothing from the peace process, and they’re right. That, however, is because the PA deliberately chose to give them nothing. It never used its massive infusions of aid to build, say, better housing for Palestinian refugees living in squalid West Bank camps; on the contrary, it publicly vowed that even if a Palestinian state someday arises, the refugees won’t be given citizenship. Nor did it use foreign aid to upgrade its hospitals: Patients who need state-of-the-art treatment are still routinely sent to Israel. It refuses to cooperate with Israel on mundane issues like sewage treatment that would improve Palestinian lives, and allows anti-normalization thugs from the ruling Fatah party to drive away Israeli businesses that would provide Palestinians with jobs. In short, rather than trying to help its people, the PA has done everything possible to keep them in a state of perpetual misery.
As for anti-Israel incitement, even a cursory glance at the archives of Palestinian Media Watch reveals how rampant it is. To give just a few recent examples: Fatah’s Facebook page yearns for famous female terrorists to return and teach current Palestinian women about the need for “sacrifice and blood”; organizations from dance troupes to youth groups are named after terrorists, who are held up as role models; PA officials and the PA-controlled media routinely hurl libelous accusations at Israel, such as that it’s deliberately addicting Palestinians to drugs or trying to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque; they also urge children to engage in anti-Israel violence and promise that Israel will someday cease to exist.
If a Palestinian leadership ever arises that prefers helping its people to perpetuating their misery and teaches its children coexistence rather than anti-Israel hatred, peace might be possible. But until then, any “peace process” will at best be a farce–and at worst a bloody tragedy like Oslo was.
State Comptroller Joseph Shapira and State Attorney Moshe Lador held an illuminating public debate two weeks ago over whether prosecutors should seek to bar municipal office-holders indicted for corruption from running for reelection. Shapira was opposed, arguing that “the public should be the one who judges them.” Fine in theory, Lador retorted, but in practice, “the public has a very limited ability to express its criticism of the conduct of public officials.”
The truth is that both are right. Shapira is right that evaluating a candidate’s fitness for public office – in this case, whether criminal suspicions against him outweigh a record of past achievement – is properly the province of the electorate, not the unelected legal system. Lador is right that in practice, this is often impossible, because aside from mayors, few officials at any level are directly elected. Instead, voters elect party slates whose composition they have almost no say over. Thus the only way to vote against a corrupt individual is by voting against his entire party – something voters who otherwise support that party are rarely willing to do.
In short, Israel’s electoral system forces voters to choose between Shapira’s Scylla and Lador’s Charybdis: either abdicate a cardinal democratic right to unelected legal officials by letting them determine when criminal suspicions should trump a candidate’s record, or accept the impossibility of ousting corrupt officials as long as they retain the backing of the handful of people who determine their party’s slate. In parties without primaries, those people are the party leaders; in parties with primaries, they’re the “vote contractors” – union bosses, clan leaders, influential politicians and others whose voting recommendations are followed by thousands of primary voters.
One solution frequently suggested to this problem, at least on the national level, is replacing the current electoral system of proportional representation with district-based elections, thereby making individual representatives directly accountable to their constituencies. In theory, this would allow voters to oust a corrupt individual without significantly damaging his party as a whole, since worthier candidates from that party could still be elected in other districts.
Yet this proposal has a very serious drawback in a country with as many divisions as Israel has: district-based elections hugely disadvantage small parties. In most districts, adherents of small parties will be in the minority, and in those districts, their votes will be wasted. Thus these parties will at best win fewer seats than they do under the current system, and perhaps not even enough to cross the electoral threshold.
To proponents of district-based elections, that’s a plus rather than a minus: coalitions would no longer comprise numerous small parties, producing more stable governments.
But as Shany Mor, a former member of Israel’s National Security Council, pointed out in an insightful article last year, eliminating smaller parties would eliminate an important safety valve that keeps minorities inside the democratic system rather than outside trying to achieve their goals by violence.
“A society as deeply divided as Israel is – across race, religion, ideology – with such a high tolerance for violence and such a broad familiarity with weapons, should have by all comparative measures long ago descended into civil war,” Mor wrote. “Nearly every other newly independent post-1945 state certainly did.”
So why didn’t Israel? A key factor, Mor argued, is its proportional representation system, which allows almost any group of like-minded people a reasonable shot at winning enough votes to enter the Knesset, and perhaps even the cabinet, and thereby influencing policy from the inside. As long as that hope remains viable, the impetus to resort to violence is low. It’s only when people despair of being able to influence policy by ordinary political means that violence begins looking like an attractive option.
This, incidentally, is also a strong argument against the current effort to raise the electoral threshold from 2 to 4 percent: by making it much harder for small parties to enter the Knesset, this legislation could drive certain small but highly ideological groups to despair of being able to affect policy from the inside and resort to violence instead. Indeed, as I’ve argued before, this is already happening among fringe groups like the extremist settlers known as “hilltop youth.” Having twice seen exemplary democratic efforts to affect policy thwarted by undemocratic means, they no longer believe it’s possible to influence policy through the political process, and are therefore trying instead to deter settlement evacuations by violence.
But not only could district-based elections do real damage to Israel’s fragile democratic fabric, it’s also not clear they would be effective as a corruption-fighting measure. This, too, stems from Israelis’ deep divisions. If one candidate, for instance, favors unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank while another opposes it, or one favors free-market reforms while another advocates more government spending and higher deficits, people with strong opinions on these issues aren’t likely to vote for the other candidate just because their own is corrupt. Instead, they’ll hold their noses and vote for the corrupt candidate who shares their views on the issue they deem most important.
Fortunately, district-based elections aren’t the only alternative to the existing system. Many European democracies have adopted electoral systems that preserve the advantages of Israel’s current proportional representation system while also allowing voters to oust individuals who are corrupt, incompetent or otherwise undeserving of reelection. I’ll discuss how such a system might work in a subsequent article.
Yet for some reason, the Anglo-American district-based system is usually presented as the main alternative to the current one, and that has done the cause of electoral reform great harm. For with all its flaws, proportional representation has enabled Israel to survive and thrive for 65 years now. Thus even Israelis who don’t consciously grasp its safety-valve function are understandably leery of jettisoning it.
Nevertheless, Israelis are also becoming increasingly worried about public corruption. It’s therefore time for all those who want to step up the fight against corruption but don’t want to abdicate their democratic rights to the courts to realize that the current system has outlived its usefulness – and then to start exploring alternatives other than the Anglo-American model.
After a Forbes article on Israeli-Palestinian cooperation in high-tech industries drew horrified responses from the Palestinian companies featured, Jonathan correctly cited this as yet more evidence that Israeli-Palestinian peace is currently unattainable: When Palestinians fear being viewed as collaborators for working with Israelis to build the Palestinians’ own economy, and when the very idea that such cooperation could advance peace is considered treasonable, peace clearly isn’t in the offing. But Palestinian businessmen at least have an excuse for this reaction: They genuinely fear their own anti-normalization thugs. What’s harder to explain is why Europe also opposes cooperation with Israel even when it would clearly benefit the Palestinians.
Haaretz recently reported two salient examples: The Dutch government is pressuring a Dutch company to withdraw from a sewage treatment project run by Jerusalem’s municipal water corporation, and Germany’s state-owned development bank KfW is seeking to bar Jewish settlements from burying their trash at a new landfill it’s planning in the West Bank. In both cases, the primary victims will be Palestinians–but in both, European governments have decided that eschewing cooperation with Israel is more important than helping Palestinians.
The Dutch company, Royal Haskoning DHV, won a contract to build a sewage treatment plant in the West Bank to reduce pollution in the Kidron stream. As Haaretz explains, the Kidron “runs from the Mount of Olives and the village of Silwan in eastern Jerusalem toward Ma’ale Adumim and the Dead Sea.” Silwan is a large Palestinian neighborhood of Jerusalem while Ma’ale Adumim is a Jewish settlement, so the project would help both Jews and Arabs. But Palestinians would benefit more: Not only does Silwan have a larger population than Ma’ale Adumim, but the Kidron runs entirely through land that, in Europe’s view, should belong to a future Palestinian state.
Royal Haskoning’s withdrawal from the project would at best significantly delay it, and might even result in it being canceled altogether. Meanwhile, Palestinians would continue to suffer from a polluted waterway nearby, and the future Palestinian state would suffer additional environmental damage. But in the Dutch government’s view, increased Palestinian suffering is preferable to any cooperation with Israel in “occupied territory.”
KfW’s project is a landfill to replace the one that used to serve both the Palestinian town of El Bireh and nearby Jewish settlements. The old landfill was recently closed because it had become a severe environmental hazard, so the new one is needed urgently. But KfW has demanded that it only serve Palestinians, not the settlements.
This has three possible consequences. First, Israel might build a second landfill for the settlements, thereby rendering additional land in the future Palestinian state environmentally unfit for any other use. Second, the settlements might be left without an authorized landfill, forcing them to resort to pirate dumps, which would significantly increase the environmental harm to both Palestinians living in the area and the future Palestinian state. Third, Israel could reject KfW’s proposal on the reasonable grounds that a landfill serving only some of the area’s residents is economically and environmentally inefficient and seek a new developer. That would significantly delay the landfill’s construction and increase the already enormous suffering of El Bireh residents, who are drowning in garbage.
All three options would primarily hurt the Palestinians. But the German government, too, evidently views increased Palestinian suffering as preferable to cooperating with Israel in “occupied territory.”
Europeans don’t have the excuse of being vulnerable to threats by Palestinian anti-normalization thugs; this is pure spite. And when that’s the example set by “enlightened,” “peace-seeking” Europe, is it any wonder that Palestinians see nothing objectionable about doing the same?